The capitalist basis of Soviet success
Last night (Monday), went to a reading and discussion of the first part of Chapter 11 of Andrew Bernstein's The Capitalist Manifesto which discusses the contribution of Western corporations to the Soviet economy from the end of "War Communism" and the beginning of the New Economic Policy to the first of Stalin's Five Year Plans.
I had read bits and pieces on this, but the extent to which major Soviet manufacturing and extraction "achievements" were actually done by Western corporations was startling. The work of the corporations was essentially financed by theft: looting art works, removing icon and gold from Orthodox churches (with much arresting and shooting of priests, monks and nuns who protested, an opportunity Lenin relished) and extracting grain from peasants. The Soviet economy from 1921 to about 1932 (or perhaps later) was not really much of a production system, more a structure of power extracting wealth in one direction to pay for Western corporations to do much of the organising in the other.
Since, at both the beginning and the end of the period, there were massive collectivisation famines, the Soviet state would literally take grain from starving peasants for export while Western food aid grain was being imported in the other direction. Lenin, of course, though the Westerners were doubly stupid: first for "selling us the rope with which we will hang them" and secondly for ameliorating a famine they "should" have been using to discredit the Soviet system.
There can be no better display of how, despite grandiose ideological pretensions, revolutionary socialism is really a system of predatory rule. A group seizes (and monopolises) power, suppressing all dissent, taking property as it pleases, using that power and property for purposes it determines. Since the object of social transformation requires such massive centralisation of control, it ends up creating an intensely hierarchical structure which rapidly becomes a quasi-hereditary structure of privilege. Leading, in the case of North Korea and Cuba, to hereditary succession.
Hence, as I have noted before, the Soviet Union following Ibn Khaldun's patterns of predatary rule. First, a group bound by common feeling (asabiyyah) seizes power (Lenin), then the ruler separate himself from the original group to entrench his own power (Stalin), then the system slowly decays as group solidarity fades and corruption erodes social resilience and regime power (Khruschev to Chernyenko) until it finally collapses (Gorbachev).
The main contemporary resonance of all this is you got the same split in the Western Left back then as you do now. On one hand, those who thought the most important thing about the Soviet regime/anti-Western capitalist actor was what it actually did and those who thought that its concerns and intentions should be treated with due concern while serious criticism of it/concern about it were betraying the anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist cause.
I had read bits and pieces on this, but the extent to which major Soviet manufacturing and extraction "achievements" were actually done by Western corporations was startling. The work of the corporations was essentially financed by theft: looting art works, removing icon and gold from Orthodox churches (with much arresting and shooting of priests, monks and nuns who protested, an opportunity Lenin relished) and extracting grain from peasants. The Soviet economy from 1921 to about 1932 (or perhaps later) was not really much of a production system, more a structure of power extracting wealth in one direction to pay for Western corporations to do much of the organising in the other.
Since, at both the beginning and the end of the period, there were massive collectivisation famines, the Soviet state would literally take grain from starving peasants for export while Western food aid grain was being imported in the other direction. Lenin, of course, though the Westerners were doubly stupid: first for "selling us the rope with which we will hang them" and secondly for ameliorating a famine they "should" have been using to discredit the Soviet system.
There can be no better display of how, despite grandiose ideological pretensions, revolutionary socialism is really a system of predatory rule. A group seizes (and monopolises) power, suppressing all dissent, taking property as it pleases, using that power and property for purposes it determines. Since the object of social transformation requires such massive centralisation of control, it ends up creating an intensely hierarchical structure which rapidly becomes a quasi-hereditary structure of privilege. Leading, in the case of North Korea and Cuba, to hereditary succession.
Hence, as I have noted before, the Soviet Union following Ibn Khaldun's patterns of predatary rule. First, a group bound by common feeling (asabiyyah) seizes power (Lenin), then the ruler separate himself from the original group to entrench his own power (Stalin), then the system slowly decays as group solidarity fades and corruption erodes social resilience and regime power (Khruschev to Chernyenko) until it finally collapses (Gorbachev).
The main contemporary resonance of all this is you got the same split in the Western Left back then as you do now. On one hand, those who thought the most important thing about the Soviet regime/anti-Western capitalist actor was what it actually did and those who thought that its concerns and intentions should be treated with due concern while serious criticism of it/concern about it were betraying the anti-capitalist/anti-imperialist cause.