Matthew Crossin The Soviet Union: A Regime of Capitalist Development 13 April 2023

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The Relations of Production

In the Soviet Union, property was owned juridically through the State. This is often taken as an open and shut case as to why the relations of production within Soviet enterprises can not be compared to that of a typical capitalist country. Looking to Marx, however, we find that he repeatedly emphasises the need to understand capitalism as a set of social relations, and that ‘capitalists’ are simply the personification of capital, or the dynamics of capitalist production.

In our own developed capitalist countries we frequently encounter bosses and managers who do not literally ‘own’ their means of production. They are, nevertheless, still clearly members of the capitalist ruling class. In Marx’s terms, these are ‘functional capitalists’, or “functionaries of capital”; a concept best outlined in Volume III of Capital. Marx distinguishes the so-called ‘work’ of supervising the labour process – of extracting surplus value – as fundamentally different to the labour of the working class, which produces surplus value. This is to say that, with the owner of capital “shifted outside the actual process of exploitation”, the income of the functional capitalist only appears as the “wages of management”, or administration. Despite their structural position within the relations of production, the functionary of capital – the supervisor and legal director of the labour process – comes to believe,

that his profit of enterprise - very far from forming any antithesis with wage-labour and being only the unpaid labour of others - is rather itself a wage, 'wages of superintendence of labour ', a higher wage than that of the ordinary wage-labourer, (1) because it is complex labour, and (2) because he himself pays the wages. That his function as a capitalist consists in producing surplus value, i.e. unpaid labour, and in the most economical conditions at that, is completely forgotten…[7]

And so it is with the Soviet enterprise manager, or the government official. For them, the ‘owner’ of the means of production is the State – a neat legal fiction which ‘shifts the owner of capital ‘outside’ the actual process of exploitation’; in this case into the realm of legal abstraction.

The social relations of control – and the ends to which control of production were directed – became obscured in the Soviet system. Like Marx, however, we should look past this obfuscation, and consider these individuals as personifications. In the Soviet Union, party bureaucrats and enterprise managers were functionaries of an underlying class system, wherein the property relations were that of a dispossessed class compelled to work under, and for, a de facto possessing class.

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  • BOMBS@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Yeah, I think that’s pretty obvious. In essence, it’s about who has power as one of the main tenets of the Marxist lens is that politics and economy cannot be separated. The person that controls production controls politics. If someone has power over you, then you are not free, regardless if the normative label is capitalist, manager, boss, supervisor, communist, anarchist, bourgeoisie, proletariat, representative,…whatever. What matters is if someone can control another person or not. In the USSR, there were unbalanced power relations since there was a hierarchy based on employment and political positions in the Soviet system.

    I disagree with Marx’s idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat. A dictatorship is a dictatorship regardless of who is/are the dictator/s. Lenin takes that to another level by coming out with his vanguard party idea. The Bolsheviks take control of the revolution, and instill state capitalism with a centralized control over the means of production (aka centralized control over power). Personally, I would rather see an equitable power distribution through a federation of democratic workers unions and permeable nations using a constitution that protects human rights through a lens of power and economics.

    🏴No gods🏴No masters🏴No dictatorships🏴

    • Mambabasa@slrpnk.netEnglish
      1·
      1 year ago

      I hate to be the “well actually” guy but well actually how Marx conceived of the DOTP was the agency of the entire working class suppressing bourgeois and capitalist social relations. A really authentic DOTP would be akin to anarchist statelessness like in Makhno’s Ukraine or anarchist Aragon or Catalonia. This is best understood in Marx’s “Conspectus” on Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy.

      I’m saying this as an anarchist who has read and understood Marx without becoming a Marxist. Generally Marx’s thoughts and theorizations on the DOTP came to light far too late to be appreciated. So when Lenin came along the “dictatorship” part was what he focused on and not the “proletariat” part.

    • SmokeInFog@midwest.socialOPEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      Yeah, I think that’s pretty obvious.

      I probably should’ve quoted this part of the article as well just to underscore your point here:

      Lenin himself had called the early Soviet system ‘state capitalist’, and repeatedly justified the development of state capitalism as an advancement towards socialism.[2] Other Marxists, however, would take much longer to adopt the term as part of a critical explanatory theory. Furthermore, with few notable exceptions, they also tended to adopt Lenin’s framing of state capitalism as an advanced and progressive form of capitalist production, serving only as a basis for the transition to socialism.[3]

      I disagree with Marx’s idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat.

      Agreed. I think this is really one of the main dividers between authoritarian MLs and anarchists. It’s why the anarchist critique posits the dissolution of the actual soviet councils as the demise of real socialism in the USSR. The Leninist justifications for such a thing just fall flat and sound like ad hoc rationalisations for the kind of power grab usually defined as “reactionary” by tankies but overlooked by the same because it’s their historical strong man power figure saying the words.