The socialist mode of production Date: December 3, 2024 <https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2024/12/03/the-socialist-mode-of-production/> Author: Paul Cockshott <https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/author/paulcockshott/> 2 Comments <https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2024/12/03/the-socialist-mode-of-production/#comments>
*Concept of mode of production and social formation* All historical social formations have been characterized by a combination of economic modes of production. We conventionally speak of these modes of production being structured into dominant and subordinate modes, so that we speak of whole periods in which a particular mode of production is dominant. Thus we talk of capitalist societies or slave societies, even though slavery and capitalism may co-exist within a given society. How does one decide which mode of production dominates a society? One answer would be to look at the state, which social class dominates. One might on these grounds say that for most of the ante-bellum period the USA was dominated by the slave mode of production, in the sense that the representatives of the slave owners dominated the political system. But behind such political dominance stands wealth. A class can control the state if the economic system they represent provides them with the resources to do so. The shift of political control over the US from slavers to industrialists echoed economic development. To control the state, a class must control the greater part of a society’s surplus product. Underlying political dominance is control over surplus labour. What differentiate the contesting forms of economy are two things: 1. The specific mode in which the social division of labour is organised. 2. The particular way in which a surplus product is extracted1 <https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2024/12/03/the-socialist-mode-of-production/#sdfootnote1sym> . For a mode of production to rise to dominance, it must be able to reproduce its form of the division of labour and its form of surplus extraction on an expanded scale. This expansion can, in the end, only be protected by political power. Competing modes of production must, finally, resolve their rivalry by force or the threat of force. The argument over competing expansions by slavery and capitalism onto new lands to the west falls in the end by the *ultimo ratio Regis*, the voice of the cannon. The competing expansions of the communist and capitalist modes of production on a world scale are resolved in favour of the latter by Star Wars and the threat of nuclear annihilation. But to win, the victor must have out mobilised and out-produced the vanquished. It must have commanded more labour and more productive labour; it must have had a greater freely disposable surplus to squander on the demands of total war. We are to talk about possible futures, ones in which the communist system again comprises a part. We can not consider their social structure without talking about the struggle, economic, political and military between the capitalism and communism. Following the fall of communism, there has been a temptation for western socialists to concentrate on coming up with schemes to address apparent failings of the communist system in the supply of consumer goods. Roemer and others have implied that the adoption of some form of market reforms would have improved consumer goods supply and averted the crisis. This is often associated with the advocacy of political reforms towards free elections. We believe that reforms of this sort could only have accelerated the triumph of capital. It is a mistake, to which we ourselves have fallen prey, to concentrate too much attention on issues like shortages of consumer goods under socialism, or lower living standards relative to the US. These were not decisive issues. Were living standards the key, it would have been the USA and not the USSR that would have fallen. In 1989, real wages in the US were lower than they had been in 1973, whilst those in the USSR had risen even during what was called the ‘period of stagnation’ under Breshnev. It was stagnation only in comparison to the much more rapid growth of the Stalin and Kruschev years2 <https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2024/12/03/the-socialist-mode-of-production/#sdfootnote2sym>. If a failure to deliver rising living standards explained the fall of the Soviet system, the survival of the subsequent Yeltsin regime during which real wages have fallen by an extent unprecedented in peacetime history can only be miraculous. We see other causes of crisis arising from: 1. the form of appropriation of the surplus product, 2. the scale and disposition of this product, 3. the specific forms of class antagonism engendered by the communist mode of production 4. the constitutional forms of the socialist states Note that (we) follow Marx in talking only of the capitalist and communist modes of production3 <https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2024/12/03/the-socialist-mode-of-production/#sdfootnote3sym>, eschewing the Soviet orthodoxy which, basing itself on the language of German social democracy, introduced a third mode of production: socialism. We follow Mao in seeing socialism as a form of class society dominated by the struggle between capitalist and communist ‘roads’,i.e., modes of production. We see the self-described socialist countries as having been social formations defined by an articulated combination of capitalist and communist modes of production. This articulation is both internal, in the relationship between economic forms by which reproduction occurred, externally defined by the politico-military struggle with the capitalist block. Our purpose in this paper is: 5. to characterise the fundamental features of the communist mode of production and 6. Discuss how a future communism could structure its social institutions the better to emerge as victor in the next cold war. Full at https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2024/12/03/the-socialist-mode-of-production/ -- JAI -- JAI -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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