ALB wrote:Isn’t this dealt
Well I’ve mentioned and quoted from the above book in one or two of my responses to Cockshott in this ongoing debate on the Revleft forum – “the economic nature of the Soviet Union” – and it would be quite useful if more WSMers could climb on board on contribute to the debate as well. It is quite instructive and heartening to lean that 42 % of Revlefters polled think the Soviet Union was state capitalist or capitalist. Here is the linkhttp://www.revleft.com/vb/economic-nature-soviet-t169000/index11.html The gist of Cockshott’s case is that internal relationships of the Soviet Union were not capitalist and that the buying and selling of means of production between state enterprises were not real sales but merely internal “transfers” of resources between enterprises. In short that it made no sense for the state to sell to itself and that therefore these exchange transations were fictional. or merely for “accounting purposes” (“accounting” for what , though?) This, of course, is based on the assumption that the Soviet Union was in effect one single gigantic enterprise subject to a single planning process. It is that assumption that I have been hammering away at – taking the line that the Soviet Union was compelled to reproduce a situation of “many competing capitals” to faciliate the flow of surplus value into the coffers of the central state and that the relationship between state enterprises were not equivalent to the relationship between, say ,different branches of a western cooperation. There are a number of commentators who seem to take up this position too – including Bettelheim, Sapir, Chattopadhyay and Fernandez . My favourite is Chattopadhyay who seems to be a real scourge of the Leninist Left and has made some devastingly powerful and impressive critiques of the whole Bolshevik scene – another is Simon Pirani – and I wonder if the Party has made any contact with Chattopadhyay. He could prove a very useful ally. That apart, I wonder if anyone has any useful links that deal specifically with this argument of Cockshotts about state enterprises being like just branches of a single giant enterprise. That was the view also held by Tony Cliff, incidentally but, in Cliff’s case, this led him to the conclusion that the Soviet Union was necessarily capitalist because of its embeddedness in the wider global capitalist economy. Foreign trade, in short, including ironically trade with other pseudo socialist countries, was the tail that wagged the dog and turned it into a capitalist rottweiler. In my latest post – this morning – I wondered why Cockshott had not himself reached the same conclusion