Did countries like the USSR fail because it was too early for communism?

I don't think it was if you accept the interpretation common to Marxist circles that an advanced country like the US or Britain could move immediately to communism. I don't know if I accept that but by the time WWII broke out the USSR had just risen to become the second largest economy.

A little-known fact is they actually out-produced the Germans in military equipment during WWII and that US equipment was much less essential than it was made out to be.

But the fifties they certainly had a very developed economy and I think it could've made the transition to a higher-stage of socialism/communism, even if full-communism wasn't quite in reach yet. They had a massive population for labor power, they had the technical base, and they could've upgraded their factories more and shared out more of the work now that the living standard was close to that of the advanced developed nations.

Unfortunately, the turn back towards the profit motive laid the ground for the open restoration of capitalism and the Russian oligarchy of the present day.

Saying that capitalists will choose not to use automation and artificial intelligence, just to keep people working, is a pretty fucking bold claim when history suggests that the opposite has been done.

Never said that it wouldn't be used, only that it's used would be limited to working within the current system and not as a liberatory technology.

people are getting liberated from their jobs whether they like it or not nowadays, imo

The first robot-run farm opened this year:

theguardian.com/environment/2016/feb/01/japanese-firm-to-open-worlds-first-robot-run-farm

They literally do though.

The US has a unique position as the controller of the world's main reserve country which few countries have or have ever attained. Currency markets and the scheme of private central banking inherited from the middle ages are a nice break that keeps even the US government from doing absolutely anything it wants to.

The US spends so much on its military not only because it acts as a nice veiled government stimulus package on the economy (particularly the war-profiteers in the private sector) as a whole but also because the US needs a large military to protect its investments in the rest of the world.

American capitalists not only profit from the military but also expect the military to protect their profits. That's why American capitalists don't print their money and put it elsewhere because they don't deem it to be as profitable as the military.

The US also serves as the gendarme for the whole Western world, so they shoulder less of the military burden themselves and can run more equitable and (theoretically) more dynamic economies if they had to take on that burden themselves. The rest of the West allows American capitalists to profit and trade relatively freely in their own sphere of influence and in their domestic economies for this reason.

Other forms of planning and social investment that go beyond a direct profit incentive for private capital are adopted because they reduce the costs of the economy as a whole and make capitalism more efficient. They allow capitalists to reap a greater profit whether in rate or mass. The fact that they might have a benign and stabilizing effect on a capitalist economy is irrelevant to the fact that they are only adopted where they have a certain synergy with the profit motive; the recognition that certain kinds of public expenditure and regulation are better then mad max-style private capitalism is an unconscious realization by capitalist economists that capitalism itself is not necessary but they never follow that logic to its conclusion.

Even relatively benign programs like food stamps and various kinds of welfare serve as subsidiary wage for large monopoly-corporations that is paid by society (particularly the working and middle classes) as a whole.

Technological funding for public universities and R&D typically gets channeled back into the private sector where they reap the rewards of the research that the public paid for. Should we be surprised that under capitalism this knowledge is not given to the public directly for free use?
gowans.wordpress.com/2012/12/21/do-publicly-owned-planned-economies-work/

artificialintelligenceonline.com/4638/robots-expected-to-fill-half-of-jobs-in-japan-by-2035/

oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/downloads/academic/The_Future_of_Employment.pdf

We're getting there.

If you're hoping that capitalism will destroy itself through the technological innovation happening within the system of capitalism, financed by capitalists and ultimately to serve capitalism then you haven't been paying attention. Capitalism has seen worse crisis then this and it ended up coming out stronger then ever from it. If you're waiting for capitalism to kill itself then you're waiting for humanity to kill itself, because like a cancer it will only kill itself by killing the host.

Well, you need to somehow avoid getting exterminated by the bourgeoisie over the course of the gradual obsolescence of human labor.

When has capitalism ever faced a crisis as big as AI?

These are both contingent on the premise that the current system will allow for the proliferation of this technology to the point where it threatens to destroy the current system, a premise that I'm disputing as false.

The capitalists will be eager to use automation to lay off workers. Like the tragedy of the commons, they will lay off their own employees while looking at only their own profit in vacuum. Even the bougies are worried:

forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2016/11/10/93-of-investors-say-ai-will-destroy-jobs-governments-not-prepared/
cnbc.com/2016/11/04/elon-musk-robots-will-take-your-jobs-government-will-have-to-pay-your-wage.html

I think the tipping point will be when the 7 million trucking related jobs in the US are lost in 5-10 years.

These two things do not imply post-scarcity, they imply imporvements in logistics and the capabilities of materials science and possibly energy tech. They don't however mean we will suddenly have the means to organize supply chains to properly feed and house everyone, prevent conflicts over natural resources, solve environmental crisis that will severely damage our remaining supplies of arable land and fresh water and of course allow us to overcome the massive glorious uprising that is about to happen between the right and left in the next 50 years that may or may not lead to nuclear holocaust

No one said it implies infinite energy. Post-scarcity simply refers to the drastic reduction of required labour time.

It's gonna be a massive problem no doubt I'd say never underestimate porky's capacity to invent what David Graeber calls "bullshit jobs".

Although he's a liberal, Steven Hill's book Raw Deal: How the "uber economy" and runaway capitalism are screwing American workers lays out a pretty good picture of what the silicon oligarchs are planning for us in the near-term future.

...

Well, even they know that when you start laying people off en-masse that's when the pitch forks come out. Still won't stop them from doing it in order to make a buck, at best that consideration will merely slow them down.

Read.

THE CAPITALISTS WILL NEVER WILLFULLY GIVE UP THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION

Your reading comprehension skills are bad

I said:
post scarcity means that we are working on an abundance principle in economics which would mean that we are able to give away resources for free to the masses at no cost to our ability to sustain ourselves. Abundance is what post-scarcity implies.

My later points were meant to convey that the massive social unrest, violence and environmental destruction that will occur this century is so great that it would negate a large portion of the advances in standards of living and technological capabilities allowed by complex self-writing neural nets and highly integrated/consolidated smart cities, factories, airports, farms, storefronts etc. This idea that we are going to potentially be able to save everyone because of AI is not sane, it is out of touch with the facts. We will not be working with an abundance principle, it will still be a scarcity based economy. The need for rare metals and gases for these more advanced neural nets, hydrogen cells and hyper loop mag lev super trains (which is going to be a thing along with space planes) are going to be extremely scarce and will cause massive social and economic crisis. Fighting over rare minerals, fresh water and access to deslination devices, advanced wells or water filters will become the equivalent of today's oil wars and warlord's stealing vaccines and antibiotics. We're not even close to post-scarcity. If we'd retained the environmental impact of pre-contact Global civilization and then very carefully developed sustainable advanced computerized technologies then we may have reached post-scarcity (resources are abundant, we are always running a surplus of everything which is what that term means in reality). I'm sorry i don't know if you're referencing some academic definition of that term but it absolutely does not mean what you're implying. Theoretical nonsense musings about 3d printers and cheap vaccines and evolved plant crops feeding everyone isn't the same thing as having to deal with ecology and socio-political events.

1) USSR did not fail, since Capitalist nations fail harder every day - and we do not call that clusterfuck a failure, until things really get out of hand.

2) In the practical sense - in the way this argument is commonly used - no. Soviets did not - and could not - fail because of Communism, since they were not running Communism in the first place. They were running Soviet Socialism (and - no; they did not fail because of that either).

For what? To grant extremely poor, extremely religious and uneducated Russia that devastated by war unseen by US - and not once, but three times - power to magically overpower any resistance and defeat all Capitalist nations?

Wrong.

Are you retarded?

STOP LYING

Ugh. This is such an absurd argument I don't even know where to begin. It's as if people on here don't know the basic mechanics of a capitalist economy.

I did. And?

At least cite something to counter what he's saying instead of just

Get real. This is a fucking imageboard. My posts about Cybernetics don't live long enough here.

My last post on Cybernetics survives only on /marx/: >>>/marx/5005

:^)

Oh. You are the troll. Apologies.

Reported.

Get rekt

Stay butthurt tripfag

no u

That's not what it means at all. Post-scarcity has never implied that we will literally have an infinite amount of materials. AI will indeed massively reduce the minimum amount of labour time required to sustain ourselves regardless of your other irrelevant points. Your utopic definition of post-scarcity will never be realized and is hence useless.

Read the citations. This is the standard definition. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post-scarcity_economy

Calm down, lad, I thought you said that about the Soviet view of cybernetics but it might not have been you. I thought you made a post on Holla Forums saying that the Soviets were against cybernetics because it claimed to make Marxism invalid and put the class struggle in the background etc.

Re-read and you'll see I didn't attribute the part about Khrushchev or anything else to you, I know you don't follow the common anti-revisionist line about the restoration of capitalism.

As for Lysenkoism I wasn't subscribing to the Western narrative about it I was just countering the assertion that it had anything to do with the problems of Soviet/Chinese agriculture.

Which is what abundance means, which means your semantics don't relieve you of having to demonstrate HOW this situation would come about when there is an anthopocene ecocide about to occur and on top of that the right and left wing's of the early 20th century are now back at the same time that Porky is reaching the end of its ability to extract profit from these diminishing vital resources. This combined with the race for valuable minerals, metals and gases in the Arctic and on Asteroids will mean that huge amounts of time and resources are going to be diverted to securing these new parts of the supply chain. You're just restating what you already state (post scarcity doesn't mean anything other than being past the realm of scarcity). If you are fighting wars and dealing with social collapse because your farmland is desert and you need metal from outerspace to run your megasuperautomatedsupplychainofpeace you are not fucking post scarcity, you are actually in the death grips of maximum slavery to capital and production and the need to mindlessly march forward technologically.

Nah Xijn made a big post about the Soviets being against cybernetics because at the time it was trash, which it was. He backed it up with the direct source material.

Additionally the tech sector and the governments who own/are owned by that industry are notorious porky low lives who prefer restricting access to newly available resources like information and health care and cheap energy. There is no reason at all to assume that corporations who create AI which is developed in part by the military industrial complex and the NSA/GCHQ etc is going to lead to anything like post scarcity. The almost immediate usage of this new form of intelligence would be warfare and intelligence/counterintelligence

Okay, I'm still half-asleep, but:
1) Lysenkoism never fucked up anyones agriculture, since it never gained enough of an influence. Lysenkoism attempted to fuck up science. And it was unable to.

2) Capitalist approach to agriculture would've meant destruction of kolkhozs - agricultural co-ops. That did not happen.

Forcing kolkhozs to buy agrotech is not Capitalism. That's just retarded policy.

3) Soviets did not went broke due to "trading wheat for gold with the West". It was retarded economic model (the one that happened in 70-80s), but it was perfectly sustainable.

Moreover, they were trading wheat for oil, not gold at the time. Gold trading happened in the 1921/22 (American "Relief" - 10.000.000 dollars in gold) and famine - in 1932/33.

4) Soviets were not falling behind on innovation - even in the IT - as their Buran proved in 1989.

Soviets were falling behind on innovation of consumer goods. Partially, because of bureaucracy (only indirectly related to for-profit goals), partially because they had nobody to sell their hi-tech stuff to. Every Socialist nation was poor as fuck and no Capitalist nation would've bought their hi-tech.

5) Labelling Cybernetics as a pseudoscience has nothing to do with technological advances. Cybernetics got labelled as "bourgeois pseudo-science" because it was attempting to extend principles applicable to Computer Engineering to the other fields of science - without anything to support those attempts.

Yes, I overestimated the amount of natural resources remaining: bbc.com/future/story/20120618-global-resources-stock-check

I found this article while researching though that I thought was funny:
wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304279904579517862612287156
Classic WSG.

Why have they thrown in that random fact in the middle making it confusing? Are those numbers after 58 years have passed or not?

I've seen sources suggesting differently, maybe it was a mixture of both in the 80s or maybe in the 70s-80s you describe it was primarily oil. You agree that it was bad economic policy, do you not agree that the draw down of the Soviet Union's large gold reserves made it harder for them to overcome financial difficulties such as those they were experiencing in the late 80s? What do you attribute the economic problems they ran into exactly? Honest question.

That is not something I knew do you have a source for that? What innovations of the late Soviet era do you find particularly notable.

Its true the bureaucracy only indirectly benefited from for-profit goals and solutions that were pursued in the late USSR. Even the disparity between SOE management was relatively low by Western capitalist standards but I'd argue it was a worsening problem. There were private capitalists in the late USSR on the black market and some who operated on a statistically small but relatively profitable private property from what I can tell.

I hate to go Maoist or leftcom here but where do you think the Gorbachev/Yeltsin's came from? If socialism hadn't already had a good deal of damage done to it from the inside why did they go in for open capitalism in the early 90s? Why was power transferred to the capitalist class so peacefully when compared to other great historic revolutions/counter-revolutions? The party had the power to crack down on anyone pushing for open capitalism but they chose not to use it. In fact, Yeltsin went far to the right of the average Soviet citizen and pushed for open capitalism and the dissolution of the USSR. How could such a monstrous program as Russia's "shock doctrine" in the 90s have gone through without considerable support from those in the party and government (even if they were a minority) who were in favor of open capitalism?

Does this not suggest that even if you don't agree that they had capitalism in USSR after Stalin that they were certainly heading there? I personally think they did but that's a complex debate in itself.

meant for

I'm not sure, it's from New Scientist newscientist.com/data/images/archive/2605/26051202.jpg though I can't find their article.

I think the BBC one might be more accurate bbc.com/future/story/20120618-global-resources-stock-check

USSR failed because it erected a hierarchical power structure based on bootlicking.

There was nothing economically unsound about it, at least not compared to capitalism. It just couldn't persist forever without changes, and no change was what its aging ruling class from Brezhnev forward was trying to accomplish.

nah they failed because of the state

anarchists failed because of the state too :^)

Soviets were not buying wheat en masse until 70s. There was one wave in 1963-66, but that's it. Grain imports became systematic after 1972. At that point Soviets were already selling oil.

I'm not actually persuaded that gold reserves were relevant to anything. It implies that Soviets had no other trading going on. I.e. flawed premise.

I'm quite certain that gold reserve could've been increased easily enough. For example, it went from ~400 to ~700 during Andropov-Chernenko period. That's 100 tons of gold per year.

I don't think amount of gold would've changed anything. The problem was that USSR was not overcoming anything during Perestroika. It was creating difficulties.

Even if Gorbachev had 700,000 tons of gold (instead of 700), it would've meant USSR lasted a few months longer.

Decentralization of Planning primarily. We should have a proper thread on /marx/, I think. With sources and stuff.

For what? Specifics on Soviet Computers?

That's another thread-worthy question.

And this is the one point I'll need to find sources for too (don't have any on hand). Share of black market was negligible, IIRC.

You present it as if Socialism (i.e. economic structure of USSR) was inferior to the West in 1986. Or 1989. Or 1991.

It was not.

Yeltsin/Gorbachev were a consequence of mismanagement (by population) caused by insufficient understanding of politics (yes, Marxsim included) by Soviet population at large, coupled with immense complacency. Nobody believed that USSR could actually fall. Socialism doesn't fail, if works economically, they thought.

Btw, you are making the same mistake, when you think that economic structure alone defines if state would live or die.

No. It doesn't. And this is a third thread. Let's call it "Aggravation of Class Struggle under Socialism and the myth of State Capitalism".

That's too retarded to even argue about. Do I really have to?

Nope, they failed because they never became communist countries.

All of them stalled at the "transitory" dictatorship necessary for the state to take control of industry and production.

tl; dr all of them failed because people are inherently selfish

We're moving closer to the proletariat becoming superfluous.
If you fucking tankies don't get your heads out of your asses soon, porky will turn 90% of the world's population into dog food.

At this point Marxism-Leninism is little more than controlled opposition.

You know the whole "death of the working class" meme has been around a really long time, right?

And anyway I'd like to see what the non-controlled opposition you have in mind is, if I had to wager a guess I'd say UBI and Bordiga. That or some cringey "post-left" flavors of anarchism like crimethinc etc. with maybe some syndicalism thrown in.

We hear stuff all the time like "stop carrying pictures of Stalin it turns the normies off" etc. but since the normies are only a few years away from being juiced why worry about that?

You do know that without someone to work money has basically no meaning as no one is there to valorize capital. So assuming this, we're left with either a capitalist system that has collapsed on itself and therefore porky can no longer maintain his class power, or every thinkable job has been automated, porky has achieved communism but doesn't want to share it with the rest of us. But why would he care about keeping the proles out of this hypothetical fully-automated ultra-productive post-scarcity world if the proles share in it?

Any other scenario involves some portion of the working class continuing to exist and valorize capital just as happened throughout capital's history. The capitalists aim to immiserate the proletariat with automation, to pay less and get more, not to destroy wage-labor altogether, they know it is the core of their system. If only 4 in 10 people can get a job so much the better as that creates competition and keeps wages low. Assuming they want to be richer and they do, capitalists in the know speak of an inevitable coming era of trillionaires they will keep the working class focused on creating more and more to not only push their wealth to stratospheric heights but to increase the number of the rich across the board. That's the kind of future we can look forward to if capital is able to accommodate the new industrial technologies into the present system of production. The capitalists have subordinated every technical advance so far to their form of class rule whatever its liberatory potential.

I'm tired comrade, so I'll have to respond later.

It's dying. Many people today are only employed due to federal regulations or union pressure.
Also the servie sector is growing rapidly and giving people the impression that more people are employed in a meaningful manner.

There is no serious non-controlled opposition.
All you have is a bunch of autists hooting and hollering about a revolution that will never happen.

Normies have been thoroughly brainwashed, to the point where they just assume that everyone who unironically likes the Soviet Union is either a weirdo or LARPing.

I'm worried what will come after the collapse though. Because the ones left with the de-facto power over the capital won't be the proletariat.

Class can be created through ideology alone, as is the case in theological dictatorships.
With effective control over the capital(now automatied and thus not controlled by the people), especially the media and security forces, the porky either violently crush any rebellion or simply contain it by controlling all channels of information.
Imagine the bastard child of Facebook, the federal bureaucracy and the NSA, all at the disposal of the elite.

On what conditions though?
Would you be content to be at the mercy of porky?

But why would he care about keeping the proles out of this hypothetical fully-automated ultra-productive post-scarcity world if the proles share in it?
Arrogance? Delusion? Ideology? Greed for power?

Sure, porky will always keep a few people around to do the dirty work, but the rest of the population becomes useless.

Have you ever noticed how many virtually unproductive jobs there are today?

At some point, capitalists stop caring about money and start caring about power.
See the Rothschild family for example.
You're assuming that capitalists will always follow the economic laws laid out by capitalism, but they're human beings with flaws, delusions and aspiratons.

No, no, no.

All societies have a material base, the mode of production, and it's that base out of which springs the class relations of society. Ideology reinforces, reproduces, class society: it doesn't create it.

There are a lot of bullshit jobs but their main purpose is to ensure people keep consuming. No consumption, no surplus value pocketed by the bourgeoisie.

It's not a matter of choice. If you want to be a capitalist you produce for profit, you exploit your workforce, and you pocket the proceeds as the owner; or you go out of business and go back to being a prole.

How does it feel to be a fossil?

Bretty gud.

How does it feel to be living in pre-18th century times?

It feels like history makes actual sense instead of being a clusterfuck of mental gymnastics to reduce human existance to pure economy.

How about you check my flag.

Cool go back to thinking world history is unfolding according to God's plan and proceeding according to Christ's revelations. Or whatever equally mystical thing you happen to believe in.

"According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree."

You see, this is why nobody is taking Marxists seriously anymore.
Hell even Marxist themselves ditch this bullshit once they get into power.

Don't forget to have your coffee before responding.

How? Somebody would still have to program AIs, to make decisions. Do you expect AIs to run everything, with no human input? That's Rise of the Machines levels of retardation.

I like how you refuse to take any responsibility for anything. Tankies must save the world for you to shitpost freely.

It's not dying.

It's being suppressed in the Western world. Except West is a part of economic system that includes Third World: stuff you use is not made in Western world alone. Low levels of proletariat in the West is a consequence of Capital being moved out of the West to the Third World (where Proletariat is not going anywhere). Except things will not stay this way forever. Price of labour will continue falling in the First world until it will become indistinguishable from the Third World.

That's all there is to it: suppression of the Proletariat in the West for purely economic reasons.

Proletariat will become superfluous when you will be able to make everything you need from your home. Not sooner.

Which doesn't make theory somehow wrong.

Oh, boy.

No.
Read:
The restauration of capitalism in the Soviet Union
oneparty.co.uk/html/book/ussrmenu.html

Also, to understand the background:

Joseph Stalin
Economic Problems of the USSR
Remarks on Economic Questions
Connected with the November 1951 Discussion

To the Participants in the Economic Discussion:

I have received all the materials on the economic discussion arranged to assess the draft textbook on political economy. The material received includes the "Proposals for the Improvement of the Draft Textbook on Political Economy," "Proposals for the Elimination of Mistakes and Inaccuracies" in the draft, and the "Memorandum on Disputed Issues." On all these materials, as well as on the draft textbook, I consider it necessary to make the following remarks.
marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/index.htm

The beforementioned textbook in second edition from 1954 - last pre XXth Party Congress and antirevisionist work:

POLITICAL ECONOMY
A Textbook issued by the Economics Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R
marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/pe/

Will you stop with this nonsense? We already had a discussion about Bland.

No, they just failed to give the MoP to the workers

1. You had a discussion, i was not present
2. Take your opinion you broadcasted in some other "discussion" and shove it up your ass if you have nothing productive to share.
3. Bill Bland has his mistakes but his basic analysis of the khruschev revisionism is valid despite mistakes in his conclusions, so go fuck yourself.

...

Anyway, would you mind participating in looong discussion on /marx/ ?

If this is the standard you hold yourself to when "discussing" on >>>/marx/ just go fuck off back there and rot in your shithole, "comrade".

Okay.

Next you're telling me this is "dialectics".

Sometimes you do deliver good posts when you actually try to argue, but this is yet again one of those times i question if you're some elaborate troll as you step down to anarkiddy levels of shitposting. Nice thread derailment.

It's not my board, you moron.

If anything I'll be arguing with the owner of the board (assuming Hoxhaist user is Ismail) who is supporting your opinion.

The essence you take from being called a shitposter who refuses to even make a point and just cries "Bill Bland is stoopid", expecting to be taken any more serious than anarkiddies doing exactly the same shit is that you think calling it "your board" assumes you are the BO, which isn't even relevant to any of this?

Go to bed and come back when you're done with being a faggot for today.

I'm sorry, did you present a single fact that proves American book from 1980 to be the ultimate source of analysis on USSR?

I shared a source as a reply to a question for own investigation of the matter.

You reply with "Bland is stoopid" and expect me to take you serious while talking about discussions that you don't even share your essence with, nor give any other sources that might be better.

Yet again another low quality shitpost. I'm going to just block your faggot tripcode from now on as there is nothing constructive coming from your part.

Much better.

Bland used Soviet sources

Yeah, but he was american and he wrote a book that's thus american.

Don't you see the brilliance of this argument? He even named a year!
Bill Bland and the entire work BTFO just like that, totally legit mate!

Just ignore this shitposting troll faggot.

Btw yes i do know that he's a Brit, founder of the Stalin Society and so on, it's a fucking joke. Just like mister triggered "it's a fucking american 1980s book!" pseudo ML stache over there.

I'm not arguing against that.

Bland took - and carefully edited - pieces of Soviet sources and presented them as evidence. I already quoted examples here and on /marx/ (before the Holla Forums wipe).

Found a profile pic of the Tripfag

Anti-party group did nothing wrong.

I would like to remind you how you - very impolitely - refused to continue discussion on /marx/ where it could be sufficiently long, accessible to anyone and preserved for future reference.

And it was on the board with the mod who explicitly supports your point of view.

please elaborate
from my reading there's just too little room for any other interpretation other than gradual restoration of capital relations

...

I'll make a gooddamn thread on /marx/ this weekend and will demand from Ismail to sticky it.

Hoxhaist point of view is that Capitalist relations were restored.

oneparty.co.uk/html/book/ussrchap35-end.html

I'm not arguing that there was a slow transition away from Socialist mode of production, but changes were nowhere near as drastic as those suggested by Bland and others. Qualitative change - the one that allows us to say that society became Capitalist - happened only in 1988-1991. Not in 1961.

Khrushchev/Brezhnev reforms were quantitative.

Dialectical Naturalism and Ethics not Dialectical Materialism and Opportunism, OK? Praise Bookchin

bump

No. Gorby ruined it