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| Title | What has become of the Russian Revolution |
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| Contributor (Local) |
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| Publisher | International Review |
| Place of Creation (TGN) |
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| Date | 1937 |
| Subject.Topical (LCSH) |
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| Subject.Topical (Local) |
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| Subject.Geographic (TGN) |
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| Genre (AAT) |
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| Language | English |
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| Original Item Extent | 63 pages; 22 cm |
| Original Item Location | HN523.Y8613 1937 |
| Original Item URL | http://library.uh.edu/record=b8304536~S11 |
| Original Collection | Socialist and Communist Pamphlets |
| Digital Collection | Socialist and Communist Pamphlets |
| Digital Collection URL | http://digital.lib.uh.edu/collection/scpamp |
| Repository | Special Collections, University of Houston Libraries |
| Repository URL | http://libraries.uh.edu/branches/special-collections |
| Use and Reproduction | In Copyright: This item is protected by copyright. Copyright to this resource is held by the creator or current rights holder, and the resource is provided here for educational purposes. It may not be reproduced or distributed in any format without permission of the copyright owner. Users assume full responsibility for any infringement of copyright or related rights. |
| File Name | index.cpd |
| Title | Image 9 |
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| File Name | uhlib_2209396_008.jpg |
| Transcript | Methodically, using simple language, he describes the conditions under which the Russian worker acts as a political person, rests and eats, labors. His account is not built on suppositions and wishes. He supports his firsthand observation with evidence drawn from incontrovertible official Soviet sources. Yet this lucid record is not merely the record of things observed and the restatement of official statistics. Yvon is ever asking himself: "What of the workers' immediate and future interests?" His interpretation appears to challenge us on one point. "The workers," he writes, "do not necessarily have a world to gain and their chains to lose. There are heavier chains they can forge for themselves. The end of capitalism can quite easily give birth to an economy that is directed by a new class living on profit. It does not necessarily have to lead to the free association of workers. . . . The Russian Revolution has shown us the possibility of such a society. It has produced the embryo of a society that we must oppose." It is really of secondary importance to the workers' movement for socialism if, in the case of Soviet Russia, we are not dealing with the "classic" capitalist economy (typified by 19th century capitalism) but with an economy that seems more akin to the "industrial feudalism" sketched by Hilferding as the General Cartel in his Finance Capital. Whether capitalism has been abolished in Russia and replaced with a new, non-capitalist, exploitation economy is another question. Basing ourselves on Marx's analysis of the capitalism of his day, we recognize the following as the "classic" conditions of capitalist economy: 1. Commodity production. 2. Monopoly by non-producers of the means of production. 3. The existence of a class which owns no means of production and is, therefore, obliged to sell its labor power to the non-producers in control of the means of production. 4. The production by wage workers of a surplus value, over and above the value of their wages. This surplus value appears usually in the form of industrial and commercial profits, dividends, interest, ground rent, State taxes, royalties, "wages of superintendence" (paid as salaries to directors and managers), the salaries of all those employed at occupations that are not productive of use-values, the salaries of the members of the army and police, the salaries of public officials, church employees, publicists, commercial aids, etc. Any one of these forms of surplus value may become more important than the rest. Any one of them may disappear altogether as a method of appropriating the surplus product of the workers. It is only on the apparent absence of the first condition that the apologists for the Soviet exploitation economy can hope to base their claim that capitalism has been abolished in Russia. "Competition is dead within the USSR. There is no class of individual capitalists selling and buying from each other, competing with one another, within the confines of the Soviet Union." This incantation, intoned by the Soviet "Marxist" priests as |