The CPGB’s USSR

“What about the Soviet Union being an example of state capitalism, as variously argued by Karl Kautsky, Amadeo Bordiga, Paul Mattick and Tony Cliff?***  Yes there was international competition, draconian labour laws and slave labour. But no money, no wage labour, no capital. What this school does therefore is not only fail to explain the Soviet Union. It fails to grasp the basics of capitalism….Clearly we must reject guilty evasion, apologetic excuses and the twisting of facts to fit the label. Marxists have an obligation to come up with a coherent, scientific, fully theorised explanation of the Soviet Union.”

 

 

Uh-huh…let us re-define the rouble as not being money, let us re-define wage-labour to not mean working for roubles and surrendering our surplus-labour, let us re-define capital not to mean the primitive accumulation of it by the State through collectivisation or taxation of enterprises to fill the coffers of the government  bank with roubles so the State can borrow capital to invest. Let's re-define capitalism!!

 

***I take the omission  to mention the SPGB as deliberate. 

 

I came across this link but cannot down-load the torrent. Perhaps some one can  and post a link of the text. 

 

 

“Cook's informative booklet The Bank Structure of the U.S.S.R. (1991) which describes a conventional and necessarily solvent banking system under a regime of absolute state capitalism that existed in Soviet Union. Marxian ideology has nothing to do with it as the principles, methods, techniques and even terms are all from the book of capitalism. For example: central bank, gold reserves, note issue, cash balances, working capital, long and short-term credit for industry and agriculture, savings, surplus, profit and loss. Almost you might think you were reading an elementary text on banking in a system of free private enterprise banking; and in fact the only technical difference is that here the state is everything. It owns the bank, all the cash balances, all the reserves, all the working capital. Industry belongs to the state-bank. All profits go to the state-bank. When there is borrowing and lending at interest, it is the state borrowing from itself and lending to itself. The author further makes a comparison of the Soviet "labor" monetizing money system, to that of the U.S. commercial banks "assets and taxes" monetizing money and banking system. Not generally recognized, that in the United States, the Federal Reserve supplies the national government with money (directly and indirectly) by monetizing (at high interest cost) government debt (bonds) and its taxing powers. Therefore, the socio-economic benefits, that the U.S. Government can afford to extend to the people, are limited by its taxing capability.”