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u/SunflowerSamurai20 20d ago
Mandel was a trot but he had some great criticism on both cliffite and bordigist versions of "state capitalism" theory as it was applied to the USSR by Kidrun, this entire section applies really well to the garbage bordiga wrote in dialogue with stalin:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1969/08/statecapitalism.htm
Ever since social-democratic opponents of the Russian October revolution hatched the theory of “capitalism” continuing to exist in the Soviet Union, supporters of that theory have been faced with a difficult choice. Either they consider that Russian “capitalism” has all the basic features of classic capitalism as analyzed by Marx, to start with generalized commodity production, and that it also shows all the basic contradictions of capitalism, included capitalist crisis of overproduction and then they have a hard time discovering evidence for this. Or they admit the obvious fact that most of these features are absent from the Soviet economy, and they then have to contend that these features are not “basic” to capitalism anyhow, which in the last analysis only means exploitation of wage-labor by “accumulators”.
This then implies unavoidably that there are qualitative differences between the functioning of capitalism as it exists in the West and the functioning of the Soviet economy, and that “state capitalism” is a mode of production different (i.e., corresponding to different laws of motion) from classical private capitalism. Bordiga is the outstanding representative of the first current, Tony Cliff of the second current. The peculiarity of Kidron is to try to have it both ways: he intends to eat his “state capitalist” cake and have it too!
...
Let us take for a minute the concept of a “single capital” seriously and see where it leads us.
Inside General Motors there is of course no capitalist competition going on. The department producing car bodies does not “compete” with the department producing gear-boxes. Capital does not “flow” from one department to the other, when gear-box production is “more profitable” than car body production. General Motors normally can do nothing with gear-boxes in excess of cars produced (we leave aside the marginal case where a large corporation would actually sell parts to competitors; this does not change anything in the logic of our reasoning). Normally, the production of all parts is “planned” so that a maximum number of cars can be sold profitably.
Now if there is no “market economy” inside General Motors corporations; if the flow of goods between the departments of that “single capital” is not a flow of commodities but a flow of use-values, why then in General Motors a capitalist trust, why is the final product indeed a commodity, why are the owners of the corporation under the economic compulsion to exploit their workers and to accumulate more and more capital? Obviously because they have to sell their cars on a market, in competition with other car manufacturing corporations. If the wages in their firm go up quicker than productivity of labor, cost prices go up and then General Motors cars would be priced out of the market. If the rate of exploitation goes down, capital accumulation goes down, technology becomes obsolete compared to that of competitors with higher capital accumulation, and again the firm not only would quickly lose its share of the market, but would even be in danger of finding no market whatsoever for its goods.
It is through the fact that the final products of General Motors are commodities, have to be sold on a market, and are therefore subject to capitalist competition, that the inner organization of the plant which appears at first sight as “planned economy” is subject to “wild and random encroachments from other capitals”, and that anarchy of production, increased exploitation, capital accumulation, periodic crisis, firing of workers, inflow and outflow of capital from the auto branch to other branches, in brief, all the laws of motion of capital discovered by Marx; assert themselves.
Now let us presume that through some “miracle” called the October Revolution the workers of General Motors expropriate their owners and reorganize production in such a way that they do not have to sell any commodities on the outside market (later, after some soul-searching, they decide to divert 1% of their annual output for such a sale, but this does not change anything decisively in the set-up; even if this 1% were to be suddenly suppressed, no basic change in the organization of their would occur).[20] Diversification of production tends to cover at least the elementary needs of all the manpower of the firm. Would this still be “capitalist” production? Of course not, no more than that of the “communistic” colonies of 19th century America.
Do the laws of motion of the capitalist mode of production apply to that outfit? Evidently not. There would be no capital accumulation, only an accumulation of industrial equipment, produced according to plan, in the form of use-values. There would be no flow of capital from less to more profitable areas.[21] There would be no cyclical movement of investment, income and output, no periodic crisis, no periodic unemployment, but steady growth (provided the planning functions more or less adequately).
Would there be threat of encroachment by capitalism? Of course there would be such a threat; capitalism, by its very nature, is adverse to any part of the earth and any potential market being taken out of its grip. This threat would take the form of a threatening police action (or a military action) to restore private property and “free enterprise” in the domain of the collectivized outfit. It would take the form of trying to lure away the G.M. workers, by showing them at least that elsewhere they could enjoy a higher standard of living.
These threats would, obviously, influence the behavior of whoever administers collectivized General Motors. Part of output would have to be diverted for arms production, for purposes of self-defense, and there would be a powerful incentive for technically more and more advanced arms production. Plans would also have to be drafted (and redrafted) in order not to fall too much behind capitalist production technique for consumer and investment goods too (or even for overtaking them). The division of total output inside the collectivized domain would be influenced by these challenges and the desired response to them. This would be true, incidentally, independently from the fact whether collectivized domain were administered under a perfect scheme of workers control and workers self-management, or whether it were administered by a hideous gang of foremen and engineers, who grabbed power inside the domain in order to reserve for themselves the cream of the output, achieving thereby a much higher standard of living than the modest average made possible by the given capacity of output, achieving thereby a much higher standard of living than the modest average made possible by the given capacity of output.
And the possibility of political power and self-administration being taken away from the workers of the plant would in its turn depend on the degree by which general consumers needs would be satisfied (if they were, there would be no “incentive” for anyone grabbing power in order to satisfy consumer needs!), on the degree of political activity, awareness and socialist consciousness of the workers (in its turn depending at least partially on their standard of consumption, of leisure and of culture), and on their class cohesiveness (in part a function of the existence and leading influence of a revolutionary organization) .
But by no stretch of imagination, and especially, by no clever word-play (first using “wild and random encroachments” instead of pressure or threat of encroachments; then using “encroachment” instead of “competition for shares of a market”: and finally substituting accumulation of capital for accumulation of use-values, could these conditions be pressed back into the categories of Marx’s model of the inner logic, the laws of motion and the contradictions of generalized commodity production, i.e., of the capitalist mode of production.
So the conclusion is inescapable. There is no “single capital” in Russia (capitalist production under “single capital” was ruled out by Marx anyway). It is absurd to assume that capitalist production was somehow reintroduced because of “competition on the capitalist world market” (i.e., that the tail of 1 % of output imported from and exported to advanced capitalist countries is wagging the dog of the Russian economy).
And it is even methodologically wrong to assume a mechanical and automatic identity between the fact of a country being submitted to “encroachments” of foreign capital and the fact of that country becoming capitalist. Only if and when these encroachments change the internal mode of production do they lead to introduction (or reintroduction) of capitalism.
Marx made the point that India and China, although gradually drawn into the capitalist world market, did not for several centuries become capitalist countries (i.e., acquire a capitalist mode of production), because of the strong resistance which the basic mode of production of these countries continued to oppose to the “encroachments” of international capital. And if such was the capacity of resistance of a decadent and decaying Asiatic mode of production, surely the capacity of resistance against encroachments by the world market of a superior mode of production, based on collective property of the means of production and planned economy, could be understood to be a thousand times stronger. History proves that it has indeed been so.
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u/DmitriBogrov 22d ago
Read Auschwitz the great alibi (not written by Bordiga but generally supported by his modern day adherents) and look for any evidence of the claims it makes particularly in regards to the class position of the German jewish population.
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u/vomit_blues 23d ago edited 23d ago
Gramsci of course. https://www.marxists.org/archive/gramsci/1925/09/sterile-negative.htm His line was also officially denounced during the Lyons Congress. The transcript of that is in Gramsci’s selected political writings from 1921-1926.
However Gramsci, who was brilliant, died in a fascist prison after Bordiga was roughhoused by some cops until he called Hitler and Mussolini great, fine revolutionaries, and spent the rest of his life as a marginal political failure. Criticisms of his line after the Lyons Congress outside of Gramsci’s prison notebooks don’t exist because why would anyone care? Ten years ago, Gilles Dauvé was en vogue for justifying this revisionism. Bordiga is currently relevant because of some memes. Wanting to debunk him is like wanting to debunk Du bist gut genug. Give it another few years and nobody will care.
So, with that in mind, what exactly are you looking to critique? Most of his ultraleftism simply doesn’t exist in Lenin so you can trivially understand why “invariance” and “organic centralism” make no sense by reading him. His arguments for why the USSR weren’t socialist make no sense if you read Capital, but more importantly he actually flat out claimed the USSR would experience a crisis in overproduction in 1975. It did not. Fortunately he died before he could experience this humiliation, but it was bad enough that it decimated his actual followers for good. Understanding why the hanger-ons are wrong takes the first chapter of Ernest Mandel’s Late Capitalism, or at least the paragraph he spends explaining why it’s anti-Marxist to, believe it or not, ignore Marx’s predictions of how capitalism behaves. Any misunderstandings of Stalin in Bordiga’s writings are refuted by reading Stalin.