Revolutionary Studies by Paul Le Blanc

Author:Paul Le Blanc
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC
Published: 2018-02-12T05:00:00+00:00

State Capitalism

What Cliff and his co-thinkers came up with seems to avoid that problem. They asserted that the USSR under Stalin had evolved into a new variety of capitalism: state capitalism. Cliff and his followers have been among the most influential proponents of the “state capitalism” analysis (though van der Linden also discusses the version of this analysis advanced by other proponents such as the council communists as well as C. L. R. James and Raya Dunayevskaya).

As noted earlier, criticisms of the “state capitalist” theory have argued that that central dynamics that define capitalism and the capital accumulation process—that of economic competition and profit maximization—were absent in Soviet Russia. The state capitalist theorists have defended their conception by claiming (as van der Linden summarizes Cliff’s thesis) “that the USSR should be defined as one big capital [or capitalist firm], which operated within the world market and in so doing competed with the West, above all through the arms race” (160).

One might question the analytical value of expanding the meaning of capitalism in this way. But, as was also the case with the bureaucratic-collectivism concept, it served the function of drawing the sharpest line of demarcation between revolutionary socialism and the bogus “socialism” of Stalin and his successors. It also helped prevent, among its adherents, the demoralization and disorientation brought on by the collapse of communism that afflicted so much of the left in the 1990s.

On the other hand, van der Linden points out that Cliff and his supporters “had originally assumed that state capitalism represented a higher stage of development than Western capitalism” (258) and, being ill-prepared for the crisis and impending collapse that became evident in the 1980s, were compelled to make dramatic if unacknowledged analytical shifts in their later theorizations. For that matter, even more mainstream Trotskyists—including such capable and brilliant figures as Ernest Mandel—were inclined to credit the USSR’s “nationalized, planned economy” with much greater efficiency than later proved justified.

It was maverick theorist Hillel Ticktin who in the 1970s broke important new ground by noting that bureaucratic “planning”—by denying democracy—was increasingly inefficient and wasteful, a point that Trotsky himself had made more than once. This alleged planned economy was “really no more than a bargaining process at best and a police process at worst.” Ticktin added that “the more intensive and more complex is the economy, the longer the chain of command and the less intelligible is industry to the administrators and so the greater the distortions and their proportionate importance” (242, 243).

Ticktin’s view was that this represented neither a variety of capitalism nor a transitional phase leading to socialism nor a durable new form of society. His insights, in fact, influenced competing views, as van der Linden observes:

Increasingly dominant in all currents of thought became the idea that the Soviet Union embodied a model of economic growth which, although it had initially been successful using extensive methods of industrialization and extra economic coercion, could not maintain its economic and military position in the competition with globalizing

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