In what sense was the USSR socialist

this is the second of a series of videos based on our book towards the new socials and it's dealing with in what sense the ussr was socialist it's dealing with that because that's an introduction to the book why did we have to deal with that because at the time we were writing everyone was saying socialism has been tried and failed 70 years after the bolshevik revolution they said history's verdict is in and it's failed and all those still inclined to call themselves socialists after the are obliged to offer some response to this widely held view there are two bad answers i think one from the social democrats was to say that the failure of soviet socialism didn't undermine the liberty of scandinavian style social democracy but in fact we know that the fall of the ussr actually led to a treat of social democracy across europe including in sweden then there are our idealist socialists who held that the ussr was never really socialist so its collapse was irrelevant problem is this position is with nothing to say about real socialist economic policies they have nothing to say about the problems the socialist economies actually faced and their attempts at solutions social democrats may accept that the soviet system was indeed marxist but reject marxism and the idealist marxists cling to their theory a very superficial theory while claiming it's not being put into practice now we think that social democracy sells short their story aspirations of socialism and is an insufficiently radical response to the ills of capitalist society we also reject the idealist view which seeks to preserve the purity of socialist ideals at the cost of disconnecting them from historical reality we recognize that the ussr was in a significant sense socialist socialism as a social scientific concept from the slogan labels a form of social organization with a specific way of organizing production social isn't a dreamed up by people and it's unscientific to build whatever features of society that you would most like into the very definition of socialism in marx's view the basic difference between different modes of social organization was the manner in which they extract a surplus product from the direct producers this is what he said the specific economic forum in which unpaid surplus labor is pumped out of direct producers determines the relationship of rulers and world as it grows directly out of production itself and in turn reacts upon it as a determining element upon this however is found in the entire formation of the economic community which grows out of the production relations themselves and thereby simultaneously specific political form now what is the surplus well the surplus is that portion of social output used to maintain non-producing members of society plus that portion devoted to the next expansion of the stock of means of production and any society supporting non-producing members including for example the old the military anyone doing research must have some mechanisms for inducing the direct producers to produce more than is needed simply to maintain themselves now under feudalism it's quite clear how this happened the mode of extraction of the surplus was plainly visible typical method was that the peasants would work three days on their own land three days on the lord's land or they would actually have to pay rent in kind here's a wretched peasant handing in his his chickens to his lord and you can see his servile position against the gaze of his lord it meant the direct producers had to be formed held in some form of subordination or servitude and it meant that political legal equality was out of the question and it required religious mystification to keep it going so the surplus extraction determines the political and ideological levels candle surplus is different the mechanism is invisible it appears to be a contract between equals when a worker sells labour power to their employer the parties to the contract to legal equals each bringing their property to the market and conducting a voluntary transaction this implies that equal citizenship is not only possible but probably required and the dominant ideology is not religion with the law of contract now so just extraction is quite different from this and this is something that wasn't realized until actual socialist economies existed so new and non-countless motors so extracting a surplus because under soviet planning the division between the necessary and surplus portions of the social product was as a result of central political decisions the plan dictated how many workers were employed producing necessities how many were producing investment goods how many producing armaments how many were producing rockets to put up sputniks etc so the division between necessary labor time surplus labor time was directly allocated this meant that money had a very subordinate role if a factory made monetary losses that didn't matter moreover possession of money was no guarantee that the factory managers would be able to get hold of real goods since the real goods were allocated under a plan furthermore the resources going into the production consumer goods were centrally set so if workers won higher wages it doesn't achieve anything since the flow of consumer goods was not responsive to monetary consumer spending higher wages would simply mean choosing the shops since no more labor was being allocated to the production of consumer goods now if the rate of production of the surplus was fixed when the plan allocated investment goods and consumer goods this is obviously quite different from capitalism where the wage contract does affect the level of exploitation it does affect the level of weight of surpluses produced now the plan set the ratio of surplus to necessarily every time but for the whole thing to work the plan had to be realized there was no unemployment capitalism depends on unemployment to force people to work hard since there's no unemployment in the ussr and jobs were most guaranteed the threat of laying people off didn't work and hence you had a mixture of ideological incentives stack of staccano by bonus pay the practice of storming at the end of the month and social stimulation to fulfill the plaque by the way this is the old stakanov sitting in front of a mine now the consequence of this is the dominance of the ideological level in soviet social needs since the surplus arises from collective effort and not private contract civil law is unimportant as part of the ideological superstructure on the contrary ideology and politics are central hence the importance of the unifying party and symbolic leaders as mark says upon this is founded the entire formation of the economic community which grows up out of the production relations themselves and thereby simultaneously its specific political form you can get the book from kindle a kindle version from amazon they also sell a print version or if you want to save money you can get a free download from alan cottrell's website

Channel: Paul Cockshott

Views: 2,673

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Length: 9min 44sec (584 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 13 2020