Class Theory and History: Capitalism and Communism in the USSR by Stephen A. Resnick & Richard D. Wolff

Author:Stephen A. Resnick & Richard D. Wolff [Resnick, Stephen A. & Wolff, Richard D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Politics, Marxism, Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, USSR, Social Class, Class Theory, Class
ISBN: 9780415933179
Google: 6kX0swEACAAJ
Amazon: 0415933188
Goodreads: 4915887
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2002-07-14T23:00:00+00:00

Notes

1. Since the social distributions of property and power were greatly changed by the 1917 revolution, labeling those changes “socialism” and “communism” makes sense in and for theories that marginalize, disregard, or deny the relevance of the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus.

2. A further difference between our theory and those of others concerns essentialism. Where they tend to make the state an essential cause of Soviet development, we make neither the state nor class an essential cause. We focus on class because it is largely absent from the existing literature, not because it is any sort of essential historical determinant. Class processes in the USSR were as much effects of other, nonclass social processes as they were causes helping to constitute them (Resnick and Wolff 1987, ch. 1 and 2).

3. The word “equation” does not signal any necessity that state revenues equal expenditures. The equation merely highlights the elements that will determine whether an inequality or an equality exists between left and right sides. As we will show, equalities will have different consequences from inequalities.

4. They provided all sorts of managerial activities—political (e.g., discipline), economic (e.g., purchasing inputs and selling outputs), and cultural (e.g., persuading productive laborers that their wages were appropriate). Managers did not themselves either produce or appropriate surplus labor. They provided conditions of existence for the capitalist fundamental class process occurring inside state enterprises and involving productive labor there by others. To secure such management, the czar allocated one portion of the surplus appropriated in those enterprises to pay the managers’ salaries and provide their budgets for managing.

5. Alternatively, the czar’s subsumed class distributions out of his appopriated surplus might fund a repressive apparatus that coerced—rather than persuaded—state employees to perform surplus labor. Of course, both kinds of distributions could and often did occur together.

6. Detailed investigations could disaggregate categories of state expenditure such as, say, law enforcement, to determine how much should be allocated to sustaining capitalist—X(C)—and how much to other class structures coexisting in Russia—X(A), X(F), and so on. Given the larger historical focus of this book, such investigations were not undertaken.

7. If these were cash levies, the household would have to transform its feudal surplus labor (or surplus product) into money. For example, the surplus labor of the feudal wife/serf could be embodied in products to be sold in local markets. Alternatively, the wife’s surplus labor time might provide products directly consumed by the feudal husband in the reproduction of the labor power that he sold to his employer. This would free an equivalent portion of his wages—now no longer needed to purchase such products—to be used to pay the tax on the household.

8. A state deficit is depicted by the following inequality between revenues and expenditures:

SV(C) + SSCR(C+A+F) + NCR1 SSCP (C) + X(C+A+F) + Y1

Two new terms (NCR1 and Y1) stand, respectively, for the nonclass revenues derived from taxes placed on individuals who are not surplus appropriators and for the expenditures directed to sustain such revenues. Introducing a second kind of

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