So, we'll always have October. It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three or four or four hundred little sects don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that. We'll always have October. We'll always have the lesson of October-- that social revolutions can take place in countries where capitalism really hasn't completely taken hold; does not operate as the model in a book that was never meant to be a textbook.
That's the lesson. That social revolutions take place where capitalism has not reorganized the relations of land, labor, and landed labor specifically in the countryside in its own imagined perfect reflection, as capital, with land and machinery existing only as values to aggrandize value and value having no other existence save that it presumes, takes on, takes over from labor power expressed as wage-labor; and, where Lenin to the contrary not withstanding, the capitalist development of agriculture has not, is not, cannot, proceed apace.
And in these economies, nonetheless, enclaves of capitalism have been "transplanted" or grafted, or extruded from the international root to the local branch, with of course a corresponding working class. So then, these economies are integrated into the overall worldwide dominance of capital and react to the pressures transmitted through world markets-- i.e. experience, suffer, transmit the results of overproduction in particular in grain, agricultural, and certain key industrial products.
Given the archaic property relations in which capitalism finds itself enmeshed, the bourgeoisie are politically weak at best, a weakness that corresponds to the pre-capitalist relations that dominate the countryside, or the bourgeoisie are creations, implants, of that international domination. Doesn't mean that bourgeoisie is not brutal. On the contrary, the brutality is very essence of the constraint, the limit, to accumulation and reproduction.
Then, the working class revolution, in some shape, alone maintains enough cohesion to abolish the pre-capitalist relations in the countryside, while, in isolation from the advanced countries, that revolution cannot gain enough strength to accelerate agricultural or industrial productivity to a level equal to that of the advanced capitalist countries. Unable to sustain growth over the long term, shortages arise, production stagnates. These economies are compelled to turn more and more frequently to the world markets; to hard currency earnings; to the assumption of debt. Then the state bureaucracy, formed originally in the rupture between city and countryside, in the very backwardness of agricultural production, begins to function as an analogue to capital and capitalism; analogue in the biological, organic, evolutionary sense-- as in, different origin serving a similar function.
In this case that function becomes, and from the getgo, to administer, mediate, the impulse to capitalist restoration. Sometimes the state is more successful in mediating that impulse, like say China, imposing some "order" on the process which nevertheless involves a)bankruptcy, forced, enforced and market-driven, on state enterprises b)dispossession of workers from the "social wage"-- i.e. pensions, health care, education c)privatization of land and landed property through financial structuring-- turning land into assets for financialization and then using the resulting revenue streams to finance further capitalist enterprise, debilitating the rural households, sweeping away the individual pools of money, assets, accumulated over decades, in and by the financial torrents...
Sometimes the process gets out of control; the state rotted away from the inside, collapses and the plunder, literally, goes ahead without mediation-- say Russia.
What's the lesson?: that neither "state capitalism" nor "degenerate (d) (ing) workers' state" have any real relevance to the actual processes of reproduction and decomposition coursing through country, countries, market, markets.
Here's looking at you......
S.Artesian
November 10, 2017
