State Capitalism, Contentious Politics and Large-Scale Social Change by Vincent Kelly Pollard (review)

The concept of “state capitalism,” the theme of this collection of essays, is one worthy of book length treatment. In the decades following the Russian Revolution, many on the left recoiled from the horrors of Stalinism but found themselves tied in theoretical knots, attempting to reconcile an appalling system of totalitarianism with the notions of freedom and liberation which are the essence of any meaningful socialist project. Several theorists on the left cut through this knot deploying the theory of “state capitalism” as a framework by which to understand Stalinism and the social system it represented. It is a valuable project to make visible to a new generation the achievements of the most prominent of these theorists – Raya Dunayevskaya, C.L.R. James and Ygael Gluckstein (Tony Cliff) in particular – all of whom owed a debt to Leon Trotsky. Further, the book’s editor Vincent Kelly Pollard was not content simply with the archaeology of old debates and controversies. A more interesting challenge was taken up, deploying the state capitalism concept to analyze political developments subsequent to the Russian Revolution, in China, India, and the Philippines as well as in Russia. The resulting text is uneven, with some notable strengths but also some real limitations.

First of all the strengths, in particular the chapters by Michael Haynes and D. Parthasarathy, the former focusing on class struggle in contemporary Russia, the latter on capital accumulation strategies in post-independence India. These, and the three chapters devoted to events in China, demonstrate what is possible when we develop an analysis seeing “the state as capital,” to quote Colin Barker [“The State as Capital,” International Socialism 2, no. 1 (Summer 1978): 16–42], allowing analysts to peer through the communist veneer often painted onto states and policies, and consequently more clearly highlight class struggle and problems of capital accumulation. The chapter by Rumy Hasan very helpfully highlights the role of military competition as enforcing the law of value inside state capitalist China, arguing that “intense, military competition and concomitant development of the heavy industrial sectors dictate the path taken by the whole political economy.” (151) This is a necessary corrective to the chapter by Martin Oppenheimer, whose survey of the Russian question and the US left ignores this crucial aspect of any meaningful theory of state capitalism.

More importantly, it is a corrective to two long chapters collectively written by Satya Gabriel, Stephen Resnick, and Richard D. Wolff. Their particular version of state capitalist theory is rooted in structural Marxism, and attempts to deduce the class nature of China and Russia without any reference to the way in which the two polities are rooted in the world economy. This leads them to the quite strange conclusion that the society that emerged in China before Mao’s death could be called “state feudalism.” It then leads them to the even stranger suggestion that “features associated with socialism” (120) were implemented 2000 years ago in China. Class analysis cannot be based on a static snapshot of unequal relations within a society, but must be deeply embedded in the dynamics of political economy – in the modern era, a global political economy. Without such an analysis, the very terms feudalism, capitalism, and socialism cease to have any conceptual value.

Pollard, the editor, has a synthetic introductory chapter, and a concluding chapter focusing on the Philippines. The latter surveys the political strategies adopted by the left in the Philippines during the political revolution of the 1980s. This, however, introduces a plane of analysis quite different from that of the rest of the collection: the question of left strategy during moments of popular mobilization. The implication of the chapter is that the “state capitalist” theoretical underpinning of the Communist Party of the Philippines (cpp) was directly linked to its failed two-stage strategy of revolution. This is an interesting and necessary discussion, but feels quite out of place in a book otherwise devoted to an examination of the policies of state capitalist...