First, in his article "Capitalism, Socialism and Crisis," comrade Patnaik (of India) engages in a long, but moderately interesting discussion of aggregate demand (total demand for goods and services and minimum or maximum market prices) and antagonistic class relations and their connection to cycles and crises. He draws a somewhat sweeping conclusion from this that that speculation and thus bubbles and crashes are endemic, and incurable, under "capitalism."
I suspect that "capitalism" for comrade Patnaik is a "system" that has innate unchanging attributes, those attributes are "fundamental," and that they remain true and controlling until "socialism." These are essentially Hegelian IDEAL categories and expressions as he uses them. "A socialist economy, being both free of antagonism [of classes] (so that real wages can be raised) and free of anarchy (so that some firms’ profits can be diverted to cover others’ losses), has thus a mode of functioning that makes it in principle immune to crises, caused by the deficiency of aggregate demand, which afflict capitalism..." Patnaik's model of such a socialist country is the USSR, where, he says, during the 1930's, it remained immune to the world wide depression.
This is where comrade Patnaik's apparent confusion of real capitalism and socialism with a dogmatic and doctrinal "definition" lead to absurdity and falsification. The Soviet economy engaged in very little international trade or financing during the 1930's, largely due to boycotts by the capitalist powers, and REPORTED only growth during the 1930. (Much could be questioned about the value of Soviet surveys and reporting in that era.)
The Stalin era succeeded in a massive industrialization of the country, creating a technological infrastructure for a modern society. However, great suffering and sacrifice were endured by the Soviet peoples for much of this period – only to have much that was built destroyed in World War II. The command-style system demonstrated, that it might be appropriate for leading a backward nation into modernity. But the dictatorship it spawned was capable of only extensive development – big construction, military, space etc. It fails at intensive development – the application of science and technology to constantly update the means of production, and retrain and reassign workforces to optimize advances in productivity. Not to mention the unacceptable corruption and abuses of power that cause both the Stalin and Mao dictatorships to be forever stained.
It is time to discard the Hegelian, idealist nonsense – some of which is found in Marx as well! Whatever one wants to call the socialism of the Stalin era, it was not the socialism that leads to communist society. And it is time to place the foundations of economic categories, like classes, on a sound economic-technological footing. I use the hyphen to underscore the intimate, inseparable connection between the two.
When the means of production change, relations of production change. Take the terms "capitalist," "socialist," "proletariat," "working class," "general crisis," "petty-bourgeois" for example. If you could go to England from 1848-1875, where Marx devoted most of his research that led to Capital, and make a list of all the people and institutions, each placed in the appropriate category – and then you did the same thing for the past 30 years in England – the divergences in economic attributes, occupations and interests will be profound – so profound that one needs to think carefully about their real value.
I think Stalin's destruction of the NEP needs to be designated the place where communist thinking about socialist economics took a sharp turn toward dogma, and away from facts. "Facts!, Facts!, Facts! – Not Dogma!" (Deng Chou Peng)
