Gilles Dauvé, otherwise known by his pen name Jean Barrot, has a long history of writing lucid, insightful texts that grapple with the very deepest questions the movement towards communism has to confront; his work “Fascism and Anti-Fascism” prompted a hearty debate with the author in the pages of Aufheben, while “Capitalism and Communism” has been called one of the best introductions to the communist movement ever written.
Today Libcom.org posted Dauvé’s “In This World, But Not Of This World”, which Dauvé penned for some Lithuanian comrades republishing “Capitalism and Communism.” I haven’t read it all yet, but I can already tell it’s a good one by this simple but elegant rebuttal to the nearly century-old lie that the Soviet Union was a socialist society that appears early in the essay:
Capitalism is not just a system of domination whereby a minority forces the people to work for its own benefit. In 1950, in Vilnius as in Pittsburgh, money was buying labour, which was put to work to valorize sums of money accumulated in poles of value called companies or corporations. These firms could not go on unless they accumulated value at a socially acceptable rate. This rate was certainly not the same in Vilnius as in Pittsburgh. Like Pittsburgh-based firms, Lithuanian firms were managed as separate units, but (unlike in Pittsburgh) no private owners could sell or buy them at will. Still, a Lithuanian company manufacturing shoes did not just produce shoes as objects supposed to fulfil a function: it had to make the best profitable use of all the money that had been invested to produce the shoes. “Value formation” mattered as much in Vilnius as in Pittsburgh. Those shoes weren’t given free to the Pittsburgh or Vilnius pedestrian who would then have put them on and walked away. In both towns, the pedestrian paid for his shoes or went barefoot.
Of course, the Lithuanian State could decide to subsidize shoes and sell them at a low price, i.e. below production cost. But in each country, value had to be finally realized on the market. Russian, East German and Lithuanian planners kept bending the rules of profitability, but they could not play that game for ever. These rules asserted themselves in the end, through poor quality, shortages, black market, purging of managers, etc. The State protected the Vilnius company against bankruptcy. But that was artificial. No-one can fiddle the logic of valorization for too long. One firm, ten firms, a thousand could be saved from closure, until one day it was the whole society that went bankrupt. If the British, Belgian or French State had kept bailing out every unprofitable company from the early days of industrialization, capitalism would now be defunct in Britain, Belgium or France. In short, the “law of value” functioned in very different ways in “bureaucratic” and in “market” capitalism, but it did apply to both systems.
Good stuff. Well worth a read.