3.1 The sociology of "class struggle" and case formal bourgeois
The illusion of state socialism made its reappearance in exemplary Lenin, who pointed to as a prototype dell'aurorale Soviet economy , the state plans of the German Empire with its economy of war, if only this had become a tool for a completely different kind of social force. It 's still his famous eulogy of the German post office as a model organization for a transformation of society in a socialist pages State and Revolution, written in the late summer of 1917:
Around 1870 a witty German Social-regarded mail as a social enterprise model. Absolutely right. Mail is currently a company organized on the model of the monopoly capitalist State. Gradually imperialism transforms any trust in organizations of this type. The "simple" workers, workload and hungry, remain subject to the same bourgeois bureaucracy. But the mechanism of social management is ready. Once killed the capitalists, broken by the iron hand of the workers, the armed resistance of these exploiters, demolished the existing bureaucratic machinery of the state, we have before us a mechanism admirably equipped in terms of technical, got rid of the "parasite" and that workers can themselves together very well run ... (Lenin 1917).
Lenin, pressed by events, is another step in an article in May 1918, Sull'infantilismo left and the petty-bourgeois spirit , Where the goal is not to liberate the "state capitalism" this mysterious "mechanism of social management of the economy" is completely undetermined at a formal level, but simply to directly manipulate the state capitalism as such:
(...)
Statements of this type characterized not only wonderfully Lenin and the Bolsheviks but also the labor movement of the period as a whole (thus including the West) not to speak of "left-wing extremists," the Lenin's opponents in the controversy mentioned above. The theoretical basis and ideological This thought should always be sought in an understanding of socialization and social groups, historical-style purely sociologist. Marx's theory, having been popularized in a unilateral way to its transformation into "Marxism", was robbed of her decisive formal criticism to modern breeding bourgeois critique of commodity-form - that Marx had taken to its extreme consequences using the concept of fetishism - was dismissed and banished to Hades, a theorist and historian, discredited as incomprehensible or degraded to a purely subjective phenomenon of consciousness. As alleged
ultimate foundation of social life, instead of the concept of "form" of the system producer of goods with its historical conditions, succeeded by a reduced concept of "class antagonism"; the constitutum became the constituens ; the secondary phenomenon of the social classes became an essence that could no longer be subject to further investigation. But in this way to be subjected to criticism was no longer the capital, but rather the "capitalist" as personal subjects within a social relationship, one based on the goods, in fact totally devoid of purpose. Classes, meta-mystified as social actors, thus acquiring a character strikingly familiar, like that of the ancient gods who exhibited in their conduct a purely earthly personality.
In this way a social analytic category, namely the "working class", was converted into a person with a collective identity immediate concrete can "act" in a quasi-historical, independent of empirical real people. The class identity is legitimized in a false ontology of work, conceived not as an element and an integral part of the fetishistic commodity, but as an eternal essence of man in a strictly biblical (specifically "Protestant") that could suffer, but only outwardly, the abuses of the subject "pimp" ie the capitalists.
The reverse process, ie the alleged liberation from capitalist relation, was understood only as "deposing" the capitalists or, in extreme cases, as they wound up with methods Jacobins; this area, the position of "left-wing extremists", critics of Lenin , showed a more bourgeois-Jacobin character: as an alternative to the supposed "state capitalism" they candidly suggested the "total extermination of the bourgeoisie."
In the understanding of the ancient workers' movement Lenin's argument must have sounded quite convincing. If the job, despite the socio-historical determination of its form, stated as a positive foundation of every "socialism" to conceive, the same thing, ultimately, was to apply for all other categories of basic goods-producing system. In Lenin (and not just him) is entirely absent from the abstract idea that the work represents a form of capitalism. Instead, the work always emerges as a reflection positive, as in a formulation strangely vague, confused and aconcettuale, in expressions such as "economic accounting" or "mechanism of social management of the economy", in close connection with the 'last word of the technique of big capital "(!) and" modern science " and finally simply as "planned state organization."
Behind these calculations lies a conceptual design of all innocent and helpless of the capitalist logic that the current language could be defined as social-mold technology. A metaphor for current, and not just among the Bolsheviks, he compared the company of the October Revolution to a "gigantic laboratory. The alleged socialism appeared as an organizational titanic but purely external, that had to be made by the person "right" instead of the wrong "aristocratic-imperialist" but in the same manner and with the same means. However, even with the best intentions you could give birth immediately mystified the subject of "working class": the excitement and enthusiasm of the "working masses" in the Soviets and their openness to the action began to run out to the same extent that such masses were seized as "arms" for the expenditure of labor power, but this procedure was not only coercive absolutely unavoidable in the long term, given the weak productivity growth, but also represented a stage that had to be imposed on the inertial mass of the massive production of subsistence farming. So the party became the embodiment of the subject class of metaphysics, demystification of modernization as a machine that bourgeois was ideologically intolerable is also explained as the murderous terror against the Stalinist old guard Bolshevik (whose exponents, and Trotsky in particular, they would all have become a Stalin). The party, amalgamating with the structures of a war economy bureaucratic state-in-part pre-existing, partly constituted by it - as a working-class vicar on earth could justify almost any action it is also the most senseless and bloody repression. The party "is always right" thus created in accordance with its self-consciousness, a new socialist society that however, was nothing if not forced recruitment and to aim for "recovery" of a modern working class, under the direction of the state.
However, even the skeptics and critics, socialists or Marxists - who were physically liquidated in Stalinist Soviet Union from the apparatus in a way kind of Jacobin-aping the French Revolution had to offer any alternative history, nor were able conceptual grasp of the social process that was taking place under their eyes. The Trotskyist orientation towards the "proletarian revolution in the West," justified by the impossibility of 'socialism in one country " especially in Russia "underdeveloped" - and based on the idea that in Europe alone would be fully present as subjective as the objective conditions for such a revolution - was in fact an illusion. Indeed, even in the West
development of productive forces was far from having reached its critical threshold. Western revolutions and mass movements that followed the end of the Great War, belonged, like the war itself and the October Revolution, the history of the statement of the goods-producing system, certainly not at the stage of maturity that would lead to its internal crisis and its overcoming. In each However, even if the protagonists of these developments were, however, modern men, made by capitalism, and although their conflicts were already marked by the contradictions of the system of producer goods, but these contradictions were insurmountable for that period. Even in the West during these social upheavals dissolved and evaporated all the debris and waste, social structures and relations of dependency, legal forms, reports, etc.. type of corporate, pre-or protocapitalistici, fixed and immutable throughout the era of world wars still belonged to the history of global deployment of capital that had to evolve in the world system immediately, fully mature and identical to itself after 1945.
At that time there were on the agenda instead of the German Empire and the fall of the Habsburg monarchy, the abolition of the Prussian three-class suffrage, extension, later, the right to vote to women, even Western countries and not exceeding the goods-producing system that even a Trotskyist or a "radical left" could ever make in theory (apart from some obscure thematizations abstract and conceptually) for this very reason, this apparent radicalism remained trapped in mystification of the working class.
This situation of course refers to the stage of maturity of all outstanding amounts socialization capitalist world. We could apply to Marxism, what Marx wrote in 1859 in order to critique the political economy :
Statements of this type characterized not only wonderfully Lenin and the Bolsheviks but also the labor movement of the period as a whole (thus including the West) not to speak of "left-wing extremists," the Lenin's opponents in the controversy mentioned above. The theoretical basis and ideological This thought should always be sought in an understanding of socialization and social groups, historical-style purely sociologist. Marx's theory, having been popularized in a unilateral way to its transformation into "Marxism", was robbed of her decisive formal criticism to modern breeding bourgeois critique of commodity-form - that Marx had taken to its extreme consequences using the concept of fetishism - was dismissed and banished to Hades, a theorist and historian, discredited as incomprehensible or degraded to a purely subjective phenomenon of consciousness. As alleged
ultimate foundation of social life, instead of the concept of "form" of the system producer of goods with its historical conditions, succeeded by a reduced concept of "class antagonism"; the constitutum became the constituens ; the secondary phenomenon of the social classes became an essence that could no longer be subject to further investigation. But in this way to be subjected to criticism was no longer the capital, but rather the "capitalist" as personal subjects within a social relationship, one based on the goods, in fact totally devoid of purpose. Classes, meta-mystified as social actors, thus acquiring a character strikingly familiar, like that of the ancient gods who exhibited in their conduct a purely earthly personality.
In this way a social analytic category, namely the "working class", was converted into a person with a collective identity immediate concrete can "act" in a quasi-historical, independent of empirical real people. The class identity is legitimized in a false ontology of work, conceived not as an element and an integral part of the fetishistic commodity, but as an eternal essence of man in a strictly biblical (specifically "Protestant") that could suffer, but only outwardly, the abuses of the subject "pimp" ie the capitalists.
The reverse process, ie the alleged liberation from capitalist relation, was understood only as "deposing" the capitalists or, in extreme cases, as they wound up with methods Jacobins; this area, the position of "left-wing extremists", critics of Lenin , showed a more bourgeois-Jacobin character: as an alternative to the supposed "state capitalism" they candidly suggested the "total extermination of the bourgeoisie."
In the understanding of the ancient workers' movement Lenin's argument must have sounded quite convincing. If the job, despite the socio-historical determination of its form, stated as a positive foundation of every "socialism" to conceive, the same thing, ultimately, was to apply for all other categories of basic goods-producing system. In Lenin (and not just him) is entirely absent from the abstract idea that the work represents a form of capitalism. Instead, the work always emerges as a reflection positive, as in a formulation strangely vague, confused and aconcettuale, in expressions such as "economic accounting" or "mechanism of social management of the economy", in close connection with the 'last word of the technique of big capital "(!) and" modern science " and finally simply as "planned state organization."
Behind these calculations lies a conceptual design of all innocent and helpless of the capitalist logic that the current language could be defined as social-mold technology. A metaphor for current, and not just among the Bolsheviks, he compared the company of the October Revolution to a "gigantic laboratory. The alleged socialism appeared as an organizational titanic but purely external, that had to be made by the person "right" instead of the wrong "aristocratic-imperialist" but in the same manner and with the same means. However, even with the best intentions you could give birth immediately mystified the subject of "working class": the excitement and enthusiasm of the "working masses" in the Soviets and their openness to the action began to run out to the same extent that such masses were seized as "arms" for the expenditure of labor power, but this procedure was not only coercive absolutely unavoidable in the long term, given the weak productivity growth, but also represented a stage that had to be imposed on the inertial mass of the massive production of subsistence farming. So the party became the embodiment of the subject class of metaphysics, demystification of modernization as a machine that bourgeois was ideologically intolerable is also explained as the murderous terror against the Stalinist old guard Bolshevik (whose exponents, and Trotsky in particular, they would all have become a Stalin). The party, amalgamating with the structures of a war economy bureaucratic state-in-part pre-existing, partly constituted by it - as a working-class vicar on earth could justify almost any action it is also the most senseless and bloody repression. The party "is always right" thus created in accordance with its self-consciousness, a new socialist society that however, was nothing if not forced recruitment and to aim for "recovery" of a modern working class, under the direction of the state.
However, even the skeptics and critics, socialists or Marxists - who were physically liquidated in Stalinist Soviet Union from the apparatus in a way kind of Jacobin-aping the French Revolution had to offer any alternative history, nor were able conceptual grasp of the social process that was taking place under their eyes. The Trotskyist orientation towards the "proletarian revolution in the West," justified by the impossibility of 'socialism in one country " especially in Russia "underdeveloped" - and based on the idea that in Europe alone would be fully present as subjective as the objective conditions for such a revolution - was in fact an illusion. Indeed, even in the West
development of productive forces was far from having reached its critical threshold. Western revolutions and mass movements that followed the end of the Great War, belonged, like the war itself and the October Revolution, the history of the statement of the goods-producing system, certainly not at the stage of maturity that would lead to its internal crisis and its overcoming. In each However, even if the protagonists of these developments were, however, modern men, made by capitalism, and although their conflicts were already marked by the contradictions of the system of producer goods, but these contradictions were insurmountable for that period. Even in the West during these social upheavals dissolved and evaporated all the debris and waste, social structures and relations of dependency, legal forms, reports, etc.. type of corporate, pre-or protocapitalistici, fixed and immutable throughout the era of world wars still belonged to the history of global deployment of capital that had to evolve in the world system immediately, fully mature and identical to itself after 1945.
At that time there were on the agenda instead of the German Empire and the fall of the Habsburg monarchy, the abolition of the Prussian three-class suffrage, extension, later, the right to vote to women, even Western countries and not exceeding the goods-producing system that even a Trotskyist or a "radical left" could ever make in theory (apart from some obscure thematizations abstract and conceptually) for this very reason, this apparent radicalism remained trapped in mystification of the working class.
This situation of course refers to the stage of maturity of all outstanding amounts socialization capitalist world. We could apply to Marxism, what Marx wrote in 1859 in order to critique the political economy :
(...) At the end of the First World War had not yet come forward to overcome system of producer goods rather than its further advanced. In the West did not exist anywhere productive forces which would make possible the abolition of the working class that is a decoupling of the social reproduction system based on the abstract and massive expenditure of labor. The only alternative would have been the only recourse to forms of agricultural type, characterized poverty of needs and a pre-modern brutality. Thus, the same radical leftist critics were unable to imagine a revolutionary society that is not reduced to a "self-government of the working class" and ipergiacobino radical: an inherent contradiction and a logical impossibility since the opportunity by society to take independent decisions on use values \u200b\u200bor content of needs and its existence as a mechanism based on the work force, are two instances that are mutually exclusive.
The celebrated phrase of Lenin that communism would be nothing if not "Soviet power plus electrification" in addition to reflecting a exterior design and technology of social emancipation, also manifests an irresolvable contradiction at the time: "workers" as they had no chance to "rule" for this purpose because they did not have any share of social time, in order to "govern" should first stop "working" but if this were possible then there would be no need for any "government" that would be totally superfluous in a social sense. The "Government of the working class", whatever its ideological mark, could only ever become a dictatorship of modernization and bourgeois Jacobin. For irony history and contrary to all the legends of extremism on the left, the proletarian revolution would never have happened in the West because the Western development was completed some time ago and there was no way the need for a revolution to arrive at next stage of bourgeois modernization.
Communists ("Leninists") and Western social democrats, brothers in arms of the old labor movement were not only sharing the same basic understanding of society, trapped in his "character of labor society, but they were also identical in their function historical forces of modernization of that very bourgeois society. But while in the West for this task was sufficient social democracy and its policy, the state of relative backwardness of Russia demanded far more radical measures. That schism as well as today's pathetic "reunification" of the "social democratic movement" in its entirety, finally come to take possession of his true identity, be explained solely by the fact that this paradigm has become historically devoid of purpose since the history of modernization Bourgeois entered the stage of crisis.
In a sense they were right Mensheviks, the Social Democrats when he alluded to the character "objectively bourgeois" of the ongoing revolution in Russia - and certainly more than they themselves do not have an inkling - but only on a conceptual level, not on the historical and empirical. In Russia the cost of essential bourgeois modernization, so to speak, could not be supported by its bearer more appropriate, or the "liberal bourgeoisie" in sociological terms - in the history of the Russian Revolution played only a marginal role. In these conditions only a radical party of workers, fiercely hostile to Western capitalism was able to create from nothing a recovery of capitalist development. So although the Bolsheviks
reason in the "practice", they had to deceive themselves about the actual content of their revolution and made it through Leninist illusion of the "primacy of politics". The political party was to replace an excess of abstract labor, impossible in practice. In this way, the internal identity of "capital" and "work" that is the interchangeability of their social and institutional holders, namely the "masks of character" (Marx) of the goods-producing system that compares only to the surface of market, is systematically concealed. So the ideology of communism was only legittimatoria "proletarian" modernization recovery forced the bourgeois. Indeed
hagiographers Lenin, of any trend, ignoring the historical essence of the October Revolution as they fall victim themselves Leninist illusion and project alternatives in the past as if it simply depended on the resolution "right" or "wrong" of the agent. Freedom from the coercive laws of commodity-form that is passing a blind and outer packaging than subjects is in turn subject to the condition. Until now this problem has been formulated incorrectly by the "perfecting of the story" of left and radical-democratic. Those who claim in the abstract "spontaneity", "self" "Grassroots democracy" and so on. Enlightenment in the sense of an ahistorical, without touching the basic structure of the fetishistic commodity producing system, simply wants to oppose the ideals of the heavenly bourgeoisie, freedoms, equality and fraternity, the reality bourgeois. This evergreen bourgeois illusion on the subject has lost none of its magic from the days of the French Revolution, and so we stubbornly unwilling to tolerate even to this day.
3.2 The problem of Orientalism
not much better than those late-Enlightenment bourgeois or radical leftist berated stolidly under modernizer Bolshevik not have achieved the ideal middle-class just as he had not made the bourgeoisie itself, prove those critics who, in a complementary way, trying to bring back the Bolshevik statism to the "traditional Asian, Asian elements, despotic, tsarism and its social legacy (Dutschke 1974, 1977 Bahro et al.). But this way the roots and the elements statist and dictatorial, his Enlightenment and of democratic thought and its social foundations, are removed and hidden, and the historical traces of the western system of producer goods are lost, though perhaps unintentionally.
Just a thought that is fostered by superficial similarities may confuse the despotism Asia with a regime dedicated to modernizing the economy of war, borrowed from the West and not inspired at all to Ivan the Terrible but to the German post office. Of course it is all too easy to encapsulate all the phenomena of despotism appeared in the course of world history, within a single sovraconcetto formal and empty, so you could easily establish a comparison between the Bolsheviks and the empire of the Pharaohs, as did For example, the noble anarchist, critic of the productive forces, which is the ideological background to the myth of the machine by Lewis Mumford (Mumford 1974). But it becomes impossible to understand the real individual and social formations in history practical application of their constitution and terms under which they were born. The social foundations of despotism Asia are quite different from those of commodity-producing system of modernity and absolutely incompatible with it. The agricultural production of subsistence and his "exploitation" by a people hegemonic despotic centralized irrigation cultures with their natural economy, the "hydraulic civilization" (Wittfogel 1957) with an administrative bureaucracy despotic rule, no as the nexus of basic social goods and money. Instead the modern state, despite obvious similarities with the formal Oriental despotism in certain life stages of producing system commodity, the individual is a constitutive element abstractly free, molded on the commodity-form, whose real internal heteronomy does not depend from the 'will of the bureaucracy, "but by the law enforcement and are not subject to the commodity-form and money.
behind such phenomena as the resurgence of statism mercantilist era and the revolution in proto war economies of the German and other imperialist states of the system of producer goods, and in the economies of war during the Second World War - in a naturally different shape and a more advanced level of development - the "bureaucratic capitalism" and the "world managed ", so deplored by critics of the liberal left as a negative mark structural, not hidden at all a native bureaucracy as a legacy of despotism, but merely the result of democratic freedom that is the same administration dell'automovimento money with its objective character of coercion, enforcement of judgments that are issued (perhaps with regret) from the normative nature of this "second nature".
The despotic statism of the Soviet society auroral lashes out against his the social and economic foundations of Oriental despotism, the legacy of the Tsarist Empire: Lenin's statements, repeated at every turn that it was necessary to learn the culture, science, middle-class by the West to assume the forms, combine perfectly with not only the bourgeois modernizing function of the October Revolution but also its statist forms. Like what did the proto statism in the West against the waste of feudal society, the residues of Orientalism were swept away and reshaped by the modern tools of socialization statist formed on the commodity-form:
This statement by Lenin L ' infantilism of the left and the spirit of petty-bourgeois reflects much better than it really wants, the very essence of the October Revolution. If before the French Revolution, the principles and absolute monarchs had accelerated the destruction of the feudal mode of production and deposing of the nobility, a development that eventually would have fallen victim themselves, even the Czar "modernizers" and dismissing beheading the boyars, had already set in motion dynamics that were precisely the opposite direction to Orientalism, and the French Revolution took hold of the mercantilist statism, leading to further developments and in the same way also the October Revolution took existing elements, whose origin is not was not the Oriental despotism, but the proto statism, which had as its objective the expansion of commodity production, industrialization projects already outlined in the tsarist era. Just a thought trapped within the horizon of "classes" and in sociology, I can not see this identity in the process of the forms of modernity, which unfolds through different stages of development, "systems of domination, forms of the state and" class struggles ".
Reference to Oriental despotism is nothing but a subterfuge designed to disperse the bloody remains of Western democracy. The extraordinary violence of bourgeois Soviet modernization can also be explained by the fact that it is condensed into a very narrow time interval, a time bisecolare: Mercantilism and the French Revolution, industrialization and imperialist war economy into one. No wonder that this company was widely militarized and that he had idealized in an instrumental not only the "state capitalism" of the German war economy but also the Prussian military virtues - discipline and obedience - in the guise legittimatoria ideology of "proletarian" only apparently contradictory.
3.3 The capitalist character of the 'accumulation original socialist
The temporary introduction of the death penalty during the Stalinist regime for those arriving late at work, in order to speed up the training to factory discipline of Russian peasants who were fasting, it was only the continuation consistent "militarization of the economy" Trotskyist period of civil war and a reflection of the brutal face of modernizing process original accumulation of capital that Marx had described the same way for the modernization of English. Attempts to legitimacy, incredibly convoluted and awkward, with which even the alleged Marxist critics (both in the Soviet Union as in the West) tried to justify this collection of dead labor, set in motion spasmodically, as if it were really an alternative to "socialist", our eyes are awesome and grotesque.
course the "success" was charged only to the fact that the post-bourgeois transcendence was not related to the basic forms of social reproduction, but the appearance on the scene of a "proletariat" mystified. Already Preobrazenskji, later sentenced to death and executed as "Trotskyite" was coined at that time the term "socialist primitive accumulation" completely incongruous on a logical level (Preobrazenskji 1926).
Even many years after the end of World War II all the monstrous forms of repression put into place during this primitive accumulation of capital was justified, even by Western Marxists dissidents in the name of the proletariat against the empirical metaphysical:
( ...)
This observation of the German Communist Heinrich Brandler (Chairman of the KPD in the early '20s, as an opponent sent off a few years later), such as those of others, shows how the thought of the labor movement, enmeshed fetish in the capital, it should add to the West in the tradition of the bourgeois state, beginning with the proto. For these spirits "socialism" is the same in all respects with the "good state" collectivist Fichte. But there was so reversing the Marxian critique of political economy. In this ideological climate rooted in tradition - and Germany suffered particularly the influence of Lassalle - the Protestant ethos, as popular with the force, could be celebrated as an ideal future, while any measure of terrorism in the service of primitive accumulation in the Soviet Union could alleged need to be defended as anticapitalist.
The problems of modernizing capitalist bourgeois were simply redefined as "problems of real socialism, until today's collapse of this illusion of history. Read correctly and stripped of any ideological mystification, the essential mission of the Soviet Union was formulated in a clear and unequivocal by Stalin in the infamous manual History of the CPSU (B) :
(...)
If we put in brackets the 'building of socialism "and speaks of a building of late capitalism, then Stalin was quite right. At least part of the funding for the original historical collection in Western colonial expansion was achieved through from the sixteenth century (just think of the immense amount of gold removed from South America). But surely the Soviet Union in this way was barred. So the must-monetary capital could be found only within the country, but this meant that their "human material" had to be crushed without mercy, and turned into strictly producer of abstract wealth, money and capital gains.
to strengthen internal pressure of accumulation was not only a lack of resources from outside but also the character "recovery" of the entire process that required substantial initial resources more than the accumulation original historical West. Needless to say, in this particular constellation, statism played a role far more important than what he had in his time in the West. The "rational state" bourgeois observers had mistaken for an element of socialism, but it had been theorized many years earlier by Fichte, was to become reality. Again the words of Stalin are unequivocal:
If we put in brackets the 'building of socialism "and speaks of a building of late capitalism, then Stalin was quite right. At least part of the funding for the original historical collection in Western colonial expansion was achieved through from the sixteenth century (just think of the immense amount of gold removed from South America). But surely the Soviet Union in this way was barred. So the must-monetary capital could be found only within the country, but this meant that their "human material" had to be crushed without mercy, and turned into strictly producer of abstract wealth, money and capital gains.
to strengthen internal pressure of accumulation was not only a lack of resources from outside but also the character "recovery" of the entire process that required substantial initial resources more than the accumulation original historical West. Needless to say, in this particular constellation, statism played a role far more important than what he had in his time in the West. The "rational state" bourgeois observers had mistaken for an element of socialism, but it had been theorized many years earlier by Fichte, was to become reality. Again the words of Stalin are unequivocal:
(...)
Stalin, with all its innocence and its theoretical simplicity, in this passage describes the logic of the accumulation of goods-producing system producing "gains" abstract, embodied in money, independent of needs and quality sensitive. "A little money" is transformed into "more money" through his own self-movement, mediated by the process of being used in corporate form, but since all this happens under the direction of the state (after the expropriation of the old "parasitic class" of "capitalist ") then this would no longer capitalism. The "state capitalism", defined by Lenin so conceptually confused and that "socialism" was loosely defined, is confused with the concept of socialism of the old workers' movement in the existence of a real-statist regime of accumulation.
3.4 The freezing of statism and the militarization of society
In the changed preconditions of the early twentieth century, statism modernizer Bolshevik had substantially different from all the phenomena similar to it that had followed each other in the history of Europe Western Europe and mainly in a point: the cycle statist could not give way to a new monetary cycle, the Soviet Union the oscillatory movement of the contradictory process of bourgeois modernity, which we outlined earlier, ended up crashing. The unique character of "recovery" of this fundamental process of capitalism required a system that was more absolutist absolutism and a war economy that can not be more than war. The ideology of "Protestant" based on the ethos of work, the militarization of society and the state command economy in the form of "planned market" is petrified, the paint laid on social reproduction dries up and turned into a shroud that would make impossible any further development in the long term.
The age of the birth and the rise to world power was the Soviet Union, even in the West, a period of splendor for the state: the war economies of the two world wars (which had been the model of "New economy" Bolshevik), state interventions, and unprecedented, "normal" capitalist reproduction during the global economic crisis, the planned economy of German fascism in the '30s, the triumphal march of Keynesian economic doctrine in the Journal and Constitution ideological paradigm of the welfare state, they think of contemporary statism particularly strict and thus the Soviet Union was only the spearhead of a universal process and decisive global society.
However, in the history of modernity, the statist trend, whatever its social and ideological sign, was never conceived as an integral part of the capitalist process but always like its rival pole or in some cases as a factor capable of working to overcome. At that time appeared to be high time for this should be exceeded, even in the eyes of those who are not enthusiastic about showing some development of this kind. While all orthodox Marxists, from Lenin to Hilferding, in spite of their political schism, saw unanimously statist trend in the "immediate preparation of socialism," critics of the bureaucracy and the "totalitarianism" as Horkheimer and Adorno, judged this developing a "bad overcoming capitalist contradictions" on the ground of capitalism itself. However, the "authoritarian state" total (Horkheimer 1972) seemed to be the general trend in which modernity as a whole was intended to crystallize.
But this view, on the one hand remains entranced by the immediacy of the historical phenomenon while the other was affected, positively or negatively influenced by the tradition of bourgeois thought imminent, starting with the "State commercial closed Fichte. In fact statism could never be the last word in modernity, even in the twentieth century it was merely a transitional stage in the process of capitalist contradictions, unbeatable on the basis of its very foundations. In fact the war economy and the other phenomena of the modern state could never take root so deep in the West as they did in the Soviet Union. In the West, the autonomy of market processes were never completely subjugated to the command state, the relationship between market and state was never completely frozen. Already during the interwar state intervention came loose again and the Keynesian paradigm specifically designed using the state as merely regulating the market, not as its subject-invasive control.
It was expected that the recognition of the money in the West, now a habit, and its structure of self-movement to lead a new era. After the Second World War II began the rise of monetarist paradigm, during various stages, from the standpoint of economic theory a long roll back neo-liberalism. From Ludwig Erhard, risen with his "social market economy" to the symbolic figure of the "economic miracle" based on the market and competition, to get to the philosophy of crisis, militant and openly anti-social, the monetarism of the day, molded on socio-political doctrines and practices of Thatcherism and Reaganomics , even the tendency to die purely statist Keynesian, he became increasingly frail and helpless.
The new twist is, however, the monetarist totally unable to overcome the internal contradictions of capital in its global movement pushing for the crisis, just as it was once the "authoritarian state". This new twist in the process of bourgeois modernity is just a reaction to new crises in which statism in the regressive phase was no longer able to keep at bay, but to the extent that the new global crisis will worsen and monetary trends will inevitably show its inadequacy in the specific control of the situation, it will run out at the same time giving rise to a statist levied. As the absolute limits of the abstract work of modern society are approximated, both economically and on the ecological, this swing will become more desperate and rapid and therefore the waves of statism and monetarism become increasingly ephemeral. But this flexibility
discontinuous forms of social reaction, this ability to change the position of irreconcilable contradiction in the capitalist process can delay the end, to prolong the life of the capital and produce a course of the crisis with temporary control elements. However, the capital, subdued so only external economies of war petrified of socialism, can not rely on this possibility. The creation of the "rational state" bourgeois mercantile economy of war Perpetual had to transform itself from machine to develop "recovery" in a pile of wreckage, unable to react to stagnation. The crisis of society based on the expenditure of labor strikes ruthlessly abstract and even more vehement on those parts of the world system of producer goods, frozen in their aggregate and statism.
The crash took an even more tragic in the western outskirts of the Soviet Union and in particular in eastern Germany, since in these regions, the total nationalization of capital could not even rely on the a priori rationality of historical development toward a modern late bourgeois society, at least the Germany and Czechoslovakia (but to a lesser extent Hungary and Poland) had met previously, in whole or in part, and at this stage to a level sufficient for the process of capitalist modernization in these areas could continue on the basis their assumptions. The forced annexation of these companies in the sphere of the Soviet state was from the beginning a process historically reactionary and counterproductive: he was eloquent testimony to the long series of popular uprisings and mass movements in the 50s in the GDR .8
Especially this statism import and neomercantilista and economics of war, could rely to an undoubted native tradition. As the German company as part of Western development had been, to some extent, the "catch up" against other modern bourgeois society, the state primary in Germany's capital was made in a much more tough. No accident that the war economy of the German Empire was the most exemplary of all, finishing with attract the sympathies of the Bolsheviks, as well as the fact that it was not random, between the economies of Western countries, the German planned economy Fascist era was the one that comes closest to the "market planning" of the "rational state" Fichte. In Germany, the Bolshevik-style regime, established by force, an offshoot of the socialization process bourgeois "recovery" encountered in inner tracks, albeit faded, a tradition similar proto-style. For
a resounding irony of history, this system "typically German" obtuse bureaucrats to work, set up outside, in the pay of a protecting power and uncomfortably seated on their bayonets, could refer to elements, traditions and thought patterns related only in their own society by mobilizing their own benefit, in spite of a progressive and revolutionary rhetoric woody, improbable and mechanically repeated, all aspects reactionary Prussian imperial (and in some places even fascist) of his past: the goose-step of Nationale Volksarmee symbolized something more than just a military legacy. Here
Bolshevik statism and the Prussian, two creatures of the same capitalist development "recovery" even if born in different years, can infiltrate widely since it penetrate the company merged into a conglomerate particularly nauseating. Stood as a mixture of German post, permanent camp boy scouts from the cradle to the grave and militarized command economy. If the economy of the USSR was the most militarized of authentic war economy, the GDR was the most Soviet of the Soviet and therefore more Prussian Prussia. In the GDR, socialist economy to goose-step and the barracks gave rise to an aberration in the evolution of capitalist modernization that biologists would call perhaps as a "Darwinian nightmare."
The prospect of reunification of Germany proves an even more frightening, not only because it might wake up a national superstatalismo but mostly because the two parties are no longer compatible with each other and therefore their merger, light of historical distance between their current state, can only take the form of the crisis. The Petrified capitalist economy of war in 1916, with its fossilized structures Wilhelmine era, clashes with a company of late-capitalist world market and monadizzata. Two antagonistic forms of the crisis in commodity-producing system collide with each other. This process should be defined more appropriately as a historical accident in the terminal phase della'epoca modern rather than an extravagant wedding at the threshold of a new era of progress.
Notes 1. The Bolsheviks (and Lenin in particular) not only put emphasis on their bourgeois character-Jacobin (which of course involved the attribution of a character Girondin Mensheviks to their opponents) but always proudly claimed. Even if they were simply a flattering historical comparison, since their revolution competed a completely different class content, "this fact is only the illusion of their ironic play on a meta level. The concept of "adversary", less personalistic and sociologist in the sense that the Bolsheviks did seem logical to cut heads to solve problems, decipher their form of Jacobinism, like the reissue of a bourgeois revolution essentially conditions of early twentieth century.
2. Just take a look at the immense catalog of works of Lenin to conclude that there is even a hint of theming the concept of economic value and the Marxian critique of fetishism and the fact that the same Western Marxism becomes the victim of this theoretical ingenuity to this day, apart from a few attempts dark, "isolated" and that they never really gave fruit, shows its dependence on historical conditions.
3. In the meantime, this option is seriously considered presentable and worthy of being discussed in the salons, by "critical of the productive forces" inspired by the environmentalist fundamentalism, of course, as ideological production by four soldiers. The only explanation can be found in the enormous historical distance that separates us from these reports, which appear to us today as then wrapped in a mystical light. The labor movement and the Bolsheviks in 1917, who still had those reports before their eyes, could not - and rightly - wasting a single thought to this option idiotic, reactionary and deeply antiemancipatoria.
4. At present, this social democratic reunification has the appearance of a humiliating "Return of the Prodigal Son" Communist-Leninist: everywhere in Eastern Europe the red stars, the emblems with the hammer and sickle and so on. are thrown to the winds and the Socialist barracks hastily assume the name "socialist" or "social democrats"; The most grotesque is the SED (German Socialist Unity Party), the result of the historical alliance between forced SPD (Social Democrats) and KPD (Communist) and as a PDS (Party of Democratic Socialism) would like to get married love, through a somersault ideological subject. This spectrum is dileguerà As, in the West, the propaganda function modernizing the social integration of social democracy will come in their final crisis. For example, while many naive ex-Leninists cleaned consider the "Swedish model" as a perspective, this "model" in his homeland as a terminally ill patient is in agony.
5. This attitude in respect of the history that results in a rebuke to the past in which, for mysterious reasons, he did badly what could have been done much better, is a typical feature of the Enlightenment just as the evaluation of the past on the basis abstract rational principles of the constitution which never becomes the subject of historical reflection. This way of thinking always presupposes a bourgeois subject, projected backward in historical events, at least limited to the modern age, regardless of the fact that their modernity as a whole is the history of the constitution of this form of subjectivity.
6. Wittfogel also tries to make his analysis of "Hydraulic civilization" of Oriental despotism in a critique of Bolshevism and the Soviet society, but his approach is inadequate just like any other, as also builds on the same unquestioned assumptions, western and democratic system of producer goods .
7. - Accumulation of what? - Would be worth the bother now. But the capital of course! And without that for this reason, apparently, the Marxists have suffered some stomach pain. The character of an expression nonsensical as "socialist primitive accumulation of capital" can only be explained as follows: the "capital", ie fetishistic form and objectified in the process of replacement with nature, is regarded as something neutral and not specific to a particular social formation, which can reference both the "capitalists" as the "proletariat," from time to time in an opposite , at least hypothetically.
8. From this point of view, the Western Marxism - critical but only in appearance - has not produced, at least in most cases, nothing but apologetic see eg sterile emphasis of the 'anti-fascism "that would have marked repressive social orders statist and authoritarian regimes, whose superficiality is revealed today at last in all its ignominy. It was generally an "anti-fascism" only nominal and silly now after the Second World War, but had to serve as a container aconcettuale for a variety of phenomena and developments misunderstood and removed.
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