Phillip Gioan on the economy and the foreign policy of the defunct Soviet Union : Certainly, as communists we want world revolution, and not just socialism in a single country. A fundamental part of the communist critique is against the idea of a nation-state, and the way the Soviet Union adopted non-sense about the Soviet Fatherland has nothing to do with my project. But it is disingenuous to claim that the only problem was that. Why? Because it wasnt completely true. Although, the world revolution failed early on in Germany, France, and Britain, and thus left the U.S.S.R. relatively isolated. And certainly the U.S.S.R. had to recover from the devastation of a civil war where 14 imperialist countries tried to crush the revolution and destroyed much of the productive forces which caused major setbacks. However, the U.S.S.R. eventually had dozens of satellite countries, after the revolution in China it briefly had a friend there, and then Cuba was in good standing as well. Geographically, this socialism covered almost half the world. So, it was not merely that it existed in one country, because it actually didnt. That the early Soviet Union faced the setback of the fact that revolution didnt precipitate as planned cant be doubted. However instead of then trying to foster world revolution, the U.S.S.R. pursued peace-promoting interference in the business of imperialism. Instead of aiming to overthrow the states whose hostility it was confronted with, the leaders in the U.S.S.R. decided to embark on the never-ending task of trying to exert a “moderating” and “easing” influence on the leaders of the enemy states. Like Fu Lin-Lin pointed out, the bigger problem was that the U.S.S.R., although it abolished private property, did not actually enact a planned economy, in which the necessary deployment of labor is properly planned and the procurement and use of the means of production that makes work easiest are organized. The U.S.S.R. relied upon economic levers that were borrowed from capitalism. Instead, it reshuffled the contradictory duties it imposed as economic goals on its state-owned firms and working population. The Soviet state constantly demanded a livelier circulation of exchange-values (commodities considered as the proportions in which they exchange for other commodities) — as a means for improving, more or less automatically, the production and distribution of use-values (commodities considered in terms of their useful physical properties). It paid tribute to the fetish “profit” as if profitability were the same thing as more output with less expenditure of work — although it itself abolished private property, the basis for the rule of profit over society’s production. It believed with new determination in the “law of value” that Marx criticized capitalism for, as if he had actually wanted to recommend it to communists for them to emulate and improve upon. So, then one ended up getting all this talk about Socialist wages, Socialist profit, Socialist credit, and Socialist prices.
Posted on: Wed, 15 Jan 2014 22:01:09 +0000
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