State Capitalism: The Wages System Under New Management

Description

According to conventional wisdom, since the Russian Revolution of 1917 the globe has been divided into two ‘worlds’ - the ‘capitalist’ or ‘free’ world and the ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ world. The principal characteristic of the ‘capitalist’ or ‘free’ world is that free market forces are supposed to shape its economies, while in the ‘socialist’ or ‘communist’ world the economies of the various countries are said to be planned. Our book challenges this conventional wisdom. It argues that, given the nature of both capitalism and socialism, their coexistence is an impossibility. In the conditions of the twentieth century, what both capitalism and socialism have in common is their all-or-nothing quality. In other words, modern capitalism is necessarily a worldwide system of commodity production based on wage labour, and the level of production in all parts of the world is ultimately determined by the need of productive enterprises (no matter whether they are owned by individual entrepreneurs, are joint-stock companies or are statemanaged concerns) to compete with rivals on the world market. Conversely, socialism could only come into existence by replacing capitalism throughout the world, so as to abolish the world market and institute a global system of production for use and not for sale. We argue that no matter how sweeping the political changes which occur within national frontiers, as long as world capitalism and nation-states persist, those who make decisions about production are compelled to respond to the forces of competition which are integral to the world market. This applies even in a country where all individual entrepreneurs have been eliminated and where all the means of production have been taken over by the state. Whatever the political coloration of the leadership in such a country, the state still has to act as a capitalist, owing to the pressures exerted by the world market system on that country’s productive forces. Indeed, even in countries such as Britain, where private enterprise still operates, those same pressures exerted by the world market system have forced the state to take an active role in decisions which affect production. Thus even in avowedly ‘capitalist’ countries, the state has increasingly come to the fore, while in supposedly ‘socialist’ countries the state actually becomes the capitalist, so that they are most accurately described as ‘state capitalism’.