OscailtIn Defense of the Anarchist Use of Marx’s Economic TheoryAnarchist Views of Marx's Critique of Political Economy2015-08-25T13:40:11+08:00Anarkismoanarkismoeditors@lists.riseup.nethttp://www.anarkismo.net/atomfullposts?story_id=28438http://www.anarkismo.net/graphics/feedlogo.gifCommunication on Statist Capitalismhttp://www.anarkismo.net/article/28438#comment159952015-08-25T13:40:11+08:00Wayne PriceI received the following comment on this essay from Walter Daum, a theorist of M...I received the following comment on this essay from Walter Daum, a theorist of Marxist economic theory:<br />
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*Interesting. But I do have a bone to pick. <br />
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You say: <br />
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“Most theorists of state capitalism did not understand the countervailing tendency of capitral to split into many smaller capitals — in Engels’ words, of statified capitalism to eventually “break down” and “topple over.” This caused almost all of them to fail to foresee that the Soviet Union and similar states would eventually break down into traditional, overtly-market-based, forms of capitalism.” <br />
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The tendency to split into smaller capitals did not really apply in the USSR, except insofar as particular firms had to operate beneath the “plan” and therefore independently. There the splitting occurred all at once, after the regimes fell. What caused state capitalism to fail was different: namely that it did not allow for the elimination (via sale, bankruptcy etc) of the most obsolete capitals. That failure was in part due to the interests of local or ministerial bureaucrats and officials, in part to the corrupted socialist legacy and the need to avoid social unrest. <br />
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In China the breakdown was kept under control and the economy is still partly state-run, more than in traditional capitalism. In Russia the breakdown was pretty thorough, but once Putin took power he re-gathered a lot of control under the state. Of course, those too can fail, and as of this moment they’re not doing so well. <br />
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For fuller explanation of this analysis, see my book “The Life and Death of Stalinism,” accessible at <a href="http://lrp-cofi.org/book/index.html" title="http://lrp-cofi.org/book/index.html">http://lrp-cofi.org/book/index.html</a>, especially Chapters 5 and 8; and my article “Theories of Stalinist Collapse,” at <a href="http://lrp-cofi.org/PR/StalinismPR65.html" title="http://lrp-cofi.org/PR/StalinismPR65.html">http://lrp-cofi.org/PR/StalinismPR65.html</a>. <br />
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I responded:<br />
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*I do not disagree with your analysis, which focuses on the "excessive" centralization of the SU's system (excessive for a capitalism), in which government bureaucracy got in the way of "needed" market changes--although the power of local officials to stymie the overall (central) needs of the society might be counted as part of the tendency to split into smaller capitals. Be that as it may, the tendency to split existed as fractures in the seemingly solid system, which were vulnerable to an overall "splitting all at once" when pressures reached a certain level. <br />
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