Another World Was Possible
Posted by Kevin Carson on Nov 19, 2009 in Commentary • 7 commentsIn keeping with recent celebrations of the twentieth anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall, let’s consider just how far the actual results fell short of their promise.
To take just one example: the West systematically suppressed all economic alternatives to neoliberalism in the countries of the former Soviet bloc after the fall of communism.
In Russia, neoliberal intellectuals like Jeffrey Sachs eagerly supported derailment under Yeltin of Gorbachev’s market socialist agenda for mutualizing state-owned factories as worker cooperatives. (The latter “land to the tillers” and “factories to the workers” policy, by the way, was exactly the model of post-Soviet privatization Rothbard proposed: treating state property as unowned and letting it be homesteaded by the work force.)
In Poland, Lech Walesa was pressured to throw Solidarity under the bus, and to sacrifice their vision of placing the former state economy under workers’ control.
It’s interesting, by the way, how workers’ resistance against pro-Soviet regimes was used by the West for all it was worth, and then cut loose and discarded. In virtually every anti-Soviet uprising of the post-WWII period, the resistance was libertarian socialist in character. In East Germany in 1953, Hungary 1956, Czechoslovakia 1967, and Poland 1981, the resistance organized workers’ councils in the factories and saw themselves as fighting against a bureaucratic ruling class that had supplanted the capitalists. Come to think of it, as another example of history’s tendency to rhyme if not repeat, this sounds a bit like events in the Soviet Union before the Bolshevik party machine hijacked the sovyets and Lenin suppressed the workers’ committees and placed the factories under one-man management.
In South Africa, Nelson Mandela was persuaded to gut the ANC’s agenda for land reform, and to abandon any attempt at reparations, worker control, or otherwise addressing the issue of unjust acquisition in the mining industry (which had been built by slave labor).
Both Walesa and Mandela were coopted as brand-name logos, like Vlaclav Havel: The Triumph of Democracy (TM), or The Walls Came Tumbling Down (TM). Walensa and Mandela were eviscerated of everything substantive they’d fought for, and reduced to little more than patronizing “good guy” icons in Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror” video. If Gandhi’s national liberation struggle had happened today, the folks in the State Department and IMF would probably have reduced him to the same kind of superficial icon, taking away the spinning wheel and all the talk of industrial swadeshi. Come to think of it, that sounds an awful lot like the domesticated and non-threatening Martin Luther King, Jr. (who was allowed to keep the “I Have a Dream Speech” but had to lose the poor people’s movement).
And since then, there’s been a global Democracy (TM) industry, composed of such bodies as the Soros Foundation, the National Endowment for Democracy, and the International Republican Institute, busily at work replacing post-Soviet kleptocracies with telegenic suits willing to take orders from Washington and the World Bank.
The first order of business of such regimes, as in Poland and South Africa, and the new “democracy” in Iraq, is to accede to the WIPO treaty and the Urugay Round of GATT, and organize the sale of state industry with all deliberate speed to international finance capital (on terms entirely favorable to the latter, of course).
The fall of communism and subsequent neoliberal revolution amounted, in practice, to the collapse of a wall encircling the Soviet bloc, and its replacement by a set of corporate walls surrounding the entire planet.
In the midst of all the hoopla around the Berlin Wall, let’s stop to reflect on what might have been.
Shouldn’t it be “Walesa”, and not “Walensa”?
Thanks!
Great article. Every radical movement must be on guard against co-option by authority.
I think the corporate walls are less bad than Bolshevik walls though. Certainly the East Germans are better off at least. I don’t see where state communism was any gentler in foreign expansion than the corporate types either.
1) Soviet socialism _was_ the “alternative to neo-liberalism,” and it wasn’t suppressed in Belarus – too bad for its people.
2) Soviet factories weren’t economically viable, no matter who owned them. Soviet manufacturing was a value-subtracting process. Thomas Reed tells the story of one such factory that tried to convert from military production (tanks) to commercial. It had a big supply of titanium which it had previously used for tank armor. They decided to make them into shovels for export to the West. They were very popular in the West, where they were snapped up immediately, then melted down to be made into things that were actually worth having titanium in them.
3) Land was already owned by the “tiller” in Poland, which had been feeding Russia since WWII.
4) Shares in state-owned corporations were issued to all citizens in many of the former Warsaw Pact countries as part of their privatization. Most were quickly sold to foreign investors.
5) The anti-Soviet protests were only “socialist” in the sense of having to challenge Soviet socialism on its own terms, as the only freedom of expression allowed was within the Party oligarchies ruling those countries.
5) South Africa should be thankful that it didn’t follow in Mugabe’s footsteps, as you advocate, with land reform destroying its agricultural productivity. South Africa’s mining industry could have been destroyed just as easily by “reparations” to the “slaves” that built it (many of which “slaves” moved to South Africa from other countries to work in the mines – including the blacks). That industry was far more valuable to the average South African person as a profitable going concern than as compensation.
Tim Starr wrote “Soviet manufacturing was a value-subtracting process. Thomas Reed tells the story of one such factory that tried to convert from military production (tanks) to commercial. It had a big supply of titanium which it had previously used for tank armor. They decided to make them into shovels for export to the West. They were very popular in the West, where they were snapped up immediately, then melted down to be made into things that were actually worth having titanium in them.”
There are some misreadings here:-
- it was not a value-subtracting process, except in the sense that buying food and eating it is. It was a conversion process, to get to specific products on the back of cheap inputs. That could have been done far more cost effectively with other methods, but that was not the object of the exercise or the test of the system. For the system, it was not required that those be profit centres.
- Shovels do not require hard wearing materials of that sort, as they only have a scooping action. They were almost certainly making spades, not shovels.
- You do not work titanium by melting it down (I understand that this is a metaphor). It is heated, rolled, forged, machined, etc. – but melting isn’t the way to go.
‘Land was already owned by the “tiller” in Poland’.
This is not precisely the case. It had been, unlike other Soviet Bloc countries where large estates had been more common. This presented a difficulty for collectivisation there, as doing that simplistically would have involved seizing land from peasants rather than landlords (which presented fewer political obstacles). But the rulers still found a way to do it: they “bought” peasants out, turning them into urban workers who “owned” their flats. This gave them nominal compensation but tied it up, since the flats were deliberately given a high nominal value and they weren’t allowed to realise it by selling those until they got official permission in the controlled housing market, e.g. to tie it up all over again if they moved elsewhere. This meant that a lot of Polish land was indeed collectivised, although it was done gradually and it never got as far along as elsewhere.
Tim, the central point of my piece was that Soviet state socialism vs. neoliberalism wasn’t the only choice, and that there was no ONE alternative to Soviet socialism.
Soviet manufacturing was a process of subtracting exchange value, to the extent that its outputs and their prices were not determined by autonomous market demand or a market pricing system. But its outputs did have some use-value: the refrigerators were useful to some extent for cooling food, etc., and better than having nothing at all. The lack of a market price system simply rendered unknowable the question of whether any particular good was the most efficient use of resources. In any case, the producer goods in the factories–lathes, stamping presses, etc.–were capable of changing their output in response to consumer demand.
“Privatization” programs based on issuing shares in everything to everyone meant that the shares quickly disappeared down kleptocratic ratholes, concentrated in the hands of whoever–for whatever reasons–had the liquid wealth to soak them up.
I fail to see the practical benefits of framing the workers’ opposition in Marxist terms, if they were using Marxist language to denounce the Party leadership as a new bureaucratic ruling class that should be overthrown. I can just see some guy standing in front of a Soviet tank in Budapest saying “But we used Marxist language and everything!”
There’s no necessary reason a land to the tiller program should destroy agricultural productivity along the lines of Mugabe’s “land reform” in Zimbabwe, or that mines couldn’t be transformed into stakeholder cooperatives while providing some continuity of existing management.
Kevin Carson wrote “Soviet manufacturing was a process of subtracting exchange value, to the extent that its outputs and their prices were not determined by autonomous market demand or a market pricing system. But its outputs did have some use-value…”
I think we are getting at the same thing here, although I don’t think it’s correct to put subtracting exchange value but rather failing to minimise opportunity cost. With a single command economy factory buying inputs on a free market, or able to sell them there rather than working with them, that would be correct and in fact the best way to assess costs. However, with those inputs themselves coming from sources under the same system with their own non-signalling prices and not materially connected to outside economies, it becomes meaningless – the way the Trabant made sense for drivers, with cheap fuel and limited maintenance, or the way Russians fed bread rather than slops or even grain to their pigs. The assessment can no longer be made on a factory by factory basis but only at a system level – and that shows it up as deficient.
‘There’s no necessary reason a land to the tiller program should destroy agricultural productivity along the lines of Mugabe’s “land reform” in Zimbabwe, or that mines couldn’t be transformed into stakeholder cooperatives while providing some continuity of existing management’.
Well… there is, if there is also a (perhaps unstated or unexamined) requirement to do it abruptly. Just as with the privatisation method cited, or with the U.S. allotment movement parcelling out Indian lands to individuals, it can lead to a stage in which people can’t yet cope and are set up to be ripped off – and are. For this reason I prefer handing immediate ownership over to current managers, however undeserving, but also placing encumbrances on them (bonds, say) to pay stake holders over the medium term, also giving the latter buy out options they could take up gradually as things came right. You couldn’t simply reverse the enclosures (say) by giving people (rights over) their ancestors’ lands without preparing them.