[Marxism] [ Marxism] Inflation Delivers a Blow to Vietnamâ?Ts Spirits

[Shane Mage]

On Aug 26, 2008, at 7:13 PM, Marvin Gandall wrote:

> Louis writes:
>
>> Marvin:
>>> I don't know. Would you describe the NEP and similar openings to  
>>> private
>>> and
>>> foreign capital by states where the bourgeoisie was expropriated as
>>> contributing to the advance of socialism - and, by extension, to
>>> "socialist
>>> relations".
>>
>> The NEP was necessary, but it is wrong to speak of it advancing
>> socialism. It was a retreat dictated by a disastrous civil war...

NEP was a "retreat" only from the siege economy called "war communism"  
and from the illusions grasped at by many Bolsheviks (Bukharin and  
Preobrazhensky foremost among them) that this siege economy  
represented the beginning of a communist society.  When Lenin and  
Trotsky used the word "retreat" they used it in this sense and to  
cushion the blow to those illusions caused by the precipitate turn  
(forced by the Kronstadt mutiny) to a policy that should have been  
begun (as Trotsky proposed) a year earlier.	

It should never be forgotten that in 1918, before civil war erupted  
and destroyed the Russian economy,  Lenin had declared "for us, state  
capitalism would be a step forward."  Nor that when the NEP, that is,  
state capitalism, had been established Lenin always insisted that it  
was an advance toward socialism (declarations that Stalin perverted  
into justifications for the antiMarxist policy of "socialism in a  
single backward country").

But Lenin was right.  State capitalism, under Soviet (proletarian)  
power, was in Russia a step toward socialism.  That it became utterly  
monstrous once  Stalinism had destroyed the Soviets and the Bolshevik  
party, converting the Russian state from a proletarian to a  
(bureaucratic) capitalist one, only shows the ambivalent character of  
state capitalism as an economic form whose historic character is  
determined by the class nature (capitalist or proletarian) of the  
state-capitalist state in question.  Accordingly,  one should view the  
description of Vietnam, China, Cuba, or Russia as state-capitalist  
today as not in itself answering the question of the historical nature  
of each, questions that can only be answered concretely based on of  
the experiences of proletarian struggles.

Shane Mage

"Thunderbolt steers all things...it consents and does not consent to  
be called Zeus."

Herakleitos of Ephesos