Modern communist principles

I'm continuing with my series of talks that I'm prepared for the day school I'm running in Brussels later in March this is the first of three parts that I'm devoting to modern calmness principles as applied to put the political economy of communism unless otherwise stated statistics and graphs that I use in this presentation have been prepared by me and they're drawn from a forthcoming book how the world works which should be coming out in a year or so from monthly review I'm going back to 1847 to start out with when Angles wrote the principles of communism in that he said that calmness aligned with Democratic socialists people who later came to be called Social Democrats because Democratic socialists favor the same measures that the Communist advocate not as part of the transition to communism but as measures which they believe will be sufficient to abolish the misery and evils of present-day society so what were these common principles shared by socialism and communism they're now gone to where communist and socialist principles diverge Engles principles of communism in 1847 were the following the limitation of private property through progressive taxation and heavy inheritance taxes gradual expropriation of the catalyst class partly through compensation in the form of bonds and partly through competition by more with more efficient state industry employment in publicly owned land factories and workshops an equal obligation on all members of society to work the centralization of money and credit in the hands of the state through a National Bank with state capital and the suppression of all private banks the gradual increase in the number of factories workshops railroads and ships that are owned by the state the education of all children in state boarding schools construction of public on public lands of great palaces as communal dwellings for associated groups of citizens engaged in both industry and agriculture and combining in their way of life the advantages of urban and rural conditions now some of those the ones I've shown in black have been shared by Social Democrats and to a greater or lesser extent the Social Democrats have attempted to achieve these the ones that are in red go beyond what the Social Democrats have achieved and the last two points have not been carried out even by any of the communist governments unless you say that the communes in China were a first step towards the construction on public lands of great palaces as communal dwellings the great palaces were not built now the the key economic goals of the Democratic Socialist and the Communists had a big overlap a hundred years later in the 1940s the Labour Party in Britain was putting most of the black policies into practice the only ones that the social did the ones that the Social Democrats have only partially met were the full socialization of child care and development of communal palace garden dwellings and as I say even communist governments held back on these let's move on a century not social democracy but to where communist governments were in power in 1949 102 years after Angles Stalin set down what he saw the essential principles of socialism were the dictatorship of the proletariat and a workers and peasants state socialized property of the main instruments and means of production expropriation of all the large factories and their management by the state nationalization of all capitalist banks and the merging of them into a single state bank and the strict regulation of the is functioning by the state the scientific and planned conduct of the national economy from a single Center from each according to his capacity to each according to his work distribution of the material good depending on the quality and quantity of work done by each person obligatory domination of marxist-leninist ideology armed forces that allow the defense of the revolution and ruthless suppression of counter revolutionaries the red points go beyond Engles common principles and are specifically new communist measures you will not have got any social democratic government agreeing to this what was the context of Stalin listing these it was in the context of discussions with the Chinese Communists who are proposing association with Chinese characteristics as it's now called and he was saying no there are no national characteristics of socialism these are the universal characteristics but note that Stalin is saying these are characteristics of socialism he's not saying these are characteristics of communism but when you look at them they actually go beyond what angles listed as characteristics of socialism in the rest of this talk and the next two talks I'm going to fill focus on what the red lines were and in particular I'm going to focus on the scientific and plan conduct of the national economy from a single Center and the principal are from each according to his capacity to each according to his work and how those can be achieved in the 21st century we have to learn from history prior to the actual establishment of socialist economies the economic principles on which they would operate could only be thought of in terms that people familiar with capitalist economy could relate to so angles demands were all concrete measures that were understandable in the 19th century experience of 30 years of revolution enabled stone to go further there is no mention of centralized planning by angles that was an innovation that came about through the actual experience of running associate economy but learning from history cuts both ways from the 1950s limitations of the the Soviet concept to communism began to show the Communist Party in the Soviet Union had originally been the Russian social democratic Labor Party and Soviet Communism retained a number of conceptual hangovers from social democracy from the Democratic Socialist that angles was talking about one of them was on the question of money and there is another one which is less evident but was on the question of communism being seen just in terms of abundance this is a characteristic trait of democratic socialism or social democracy that achieving abundance is by itself seen as a key now there are critical problems with that which I'll go into if we look at the difference between the two existing socialism and capitalism and these are the actual features of them not the speculations that people had prior to these systems coming into existence key feature of capitalism was the commodity production of all goods socialism had a commodity form of consumer goods but not all goods careful ISM had private ownership socialism had public ownership both had wage labor but capitalism and manic market anarchy whereas socialism had planning now there are common features here and there are contradictory features common feature there was wage labor every other line here there is a difference now the section I quoted from Stalin related to socialism but Stalin in his economic problems of socialism which was written a few years later set forward what he saw the relationship to be between socialism and communism and it's worth comparing the view of it that Soviet orthodoxy starting from Stalin had and the view that's actually given by Marx they're not the same both agree that you start off from capitalism after that Marx talks of a first stage of communism in which there's no commodities or money there's no private owners this payment in labor tokens according to physical work done and there's a tax on labor incomes this is set out in the critique of the Gotha program the model that the Soviet Union had was that after cattle azam you have socialism and this is mistakenly identified with Marx's first stage of communism and this is a sliding together of the two things which has its origins in the Soviet Communist Party originally having been a social democratic party and the Social Democrats tended to elide the difference between socialism and communism in this commodities and monies are kept you have state plus cooperative ownership and say you don't have entirely a co-op ownership is a form of semi private ownership you have payment in money wages not payment by labor tokens according to work done and also according to status so that male jobs were paid more than female jobs and public services instead of being met by tax on labor incomes which mark saw was called for were met by a sales tax this may seem a minor point but I'll show that this actually led to critical distortions in the economy monks that then said there's a second stage of communism when you get payment according to need and that large families get higher incomes because they have greater needs and that people who are disabled get additional payments because they're greater needs what does Stalin say he says ok commodity production will be abolished and replaced by what is translated in the English edition of economic problems of socialism as a product exchange speaking to a Russian friend he said that the same word is used for barter in Russian as the word that is translated as product exchange in the English edition of economic problems of socialism so he's saying come on tea production will be replaced by barter free distribution of many goods and full state ownership now this has many properties in common with Marx's first stage of communism but it doesn't have the system of labour tokens or calculation in labour time which is a key feature in Marx's economic theory we then let's say why didn't the USSR actually reach the communism that I was aiming for if we look at the 1960 program of the CPSU it it is very centered around this principle of abundance the material and technical basis of communism will be built up by the end of the second decade that's say 1971 to 1982 ensure an abundance of material and cultural values for the whole population Soviet society will come close to the stage where it can introduce the principle of distribution according to needs and they'll be gradually a transition to one form of ownership public ownership the circum honest society will in the main be built in the USSR and the construction of communist society will be fully completed in the subsequent period meaning after 1980 it's a very optimistic timetable they were hoping to overtake the USA by 1980 and many key aims is actually achieved but it's important to note that the the transition is seen solely in terms of quantity of output not in terms of change social relations following Lenin it gives great emphasis this program on electrification it says electrification was which is the pivot of the economic construction of communist society plays a key role in the development of all economic branches and in the effecting of all modern technological progress it is therefore important to ensure the priority of the development of electric power output this is following Lenin where he says : ISM is Soviet power plus electrification in the whole country so how did it actually succeed with this I have here figures I've computed for the amount of gigawatt hours produced in different countries in different times I've taken the USSR in 1990 it produced one seven two eight zero zero zero gigawatt hours of electricity now this is clearly not as much as China US or the EU produce now but these countries have larger populations or these Federation's have larger populations and you can normalize it into how much human labour equivalent per head was it because electricity can substitute the human energy for human labour and we can say how many human worker equivalents was a per head of population in the form of electricity in these countries and you can see that do you USSR in 1991 sis was not as advanced as the USA it only produced about half as much power per head was actually already ahead of where the EU is now where China is now China has now caught up with the EU and it was ahead of slightly ahead of Great Britain in in 19 2014 just for contrast I've put in where Great Britain was at the start of the 20th century and that is the total amount of artificial power including steam engines not just eletricity available in in Britain at the time now look at food production if we compare the Soviet Union with Brazil the United Kingdom and the USSR and look at the the key elements of high-protein food we can see that it it comfortably out produced the two capitalist countries in eggs in milk and in meat why do I choose the UK and the USSR I choose the UK because it was the leading Catholics country at the time the Soviet Union was formed and I choose Brazil because it was a capitalist country at the same level of development as a Soviet Union when the Soviet Union was formed now clearly the lots of food was being produced if communism was a matter of our abundance here we have the Soviet Union producing more electricity and more food than the leading capitalist countries was that enough food for communism the problem in many ways with the Christian program was it projected forward the exponential growth rates which the Soviet Union had been in achieving during the 1940s and 50s and predicted these forward right to 1980 and this didn't actually happen it assumed you'd have an exponential growth like this in fact for any industry that you look at in in the society its growth takes an air s-curve shape in the early years it looks as if it's exponential and then it levels off it's what's known as a logistic curve and his model of communism downplayed social change he does say that there will be no classes socio-economic and cultural distinctions and living conditions for in town countryside will disappear the countryside will raise to the level of development of the town in productive forces in the nature of work the forms of production relations and living conditions and well-being of the population so to an extent they talk about social relations they talk about social relations in that the cooperatives in the countryside were going to be replaced by state farms but the concrete program gave no measures to abolish classes or abolish money and commodities when the impossibility of continued 10% growth began to be felt began made itself felt this was seen within the USSR as a failure of communist since communism had been predicated on the continuation of this exponential growth if society was not moving forward it failed tomorrow morally inspire people and by the late 1980s ten years after communism was supposed to have been achieved communists could not resist the pressures from capitalist ideology because they were no longer achieving vastly greater rates of economic growth than the catalyst West this was then seen as a fundamental failure there are a set of contradictions within late Soviet society one was the problem of economic calculation and other was the failure to apply the law value Ono's the corrupting effect of money and the black economy and I'll go into discussing those in my next talk

Channel: Paul Cockshott

Views: 12,200

Rating: 4.8807158 out of 5

Keywords: communism, engels, Marxism

Id: ZgkWnODtS6g

Length: 23min 10sec (1390 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 03 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/iridaniotter]

Very interesting video. I've watched this person's videos on democratic socialist strategy before and found it much more exciting than the social democratic manifesto of the current Labour party.

Anyway, here are the links to the other parts since they're not clearly numbered by the creator:

Part 2: Going Beyond Money

Part 3: Getting Down to Details