"The Soviet Union wasn't Communist because the workers didn't own the means of production, it was State Capitalist"

"The Soviet Union wasn't Communist because the workers didn't own the means of production, it was State Capitalist".

When will M-Ls learn?

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Meme. When there is no surplus extraction to enrich the owners of the MoP there can't be capitalism. Wolff is an idiot.

Read a book.

It wasn't communist because it wasn't a stateless, classless society. It was administered by communists but not communist. It was bureaucratic statism with socialistic elements.

Then what do you call factory managers hording supplies and being less efficient to get more resources put towards them? Of for that matter, local distributors raising prices above the official amount?

There was surplus being extracted. Said surplus was then reinvested in the eocnomy. Have you not studied the Soviet economy?

Corrupt bureaucrats? Such a practice didn't happen before Krushchev revisionism anyway. At least in such a case, those incompetent managers can be blamed and removed while for capitalists owning a factory and cashing in the product is some sort of right given by god.

But that's not the point for these "state capitalism" people anyway. For them, all sorts of alienation are somehow capitalism even when it happens under complete different socioeconomic circumstances.

I actually did. Where the surplus go, then? Enlighten me.

Right, but even Marx noted that getting back the full-value of one's labor was a concept already in use on the part of utopian socialists, in reality children, the sick/disabled and the elderly needed to be taken care of among many other social goals, so Marxian socialism cannot just be a program of the productive worker earning back the full product of his labor. Marx also noted that the need to maintain and expand production would also make this goal implausible.

Surplus was extracted and re-invested in the economy but the key thing is the economy was socially-oriented and directed in the interest of the working class as a whole. That isn't quite the same as capitalist exploitation where your working for the benefit of the bourgeoisie and have no real say over the direction and conditions of production and the wider economy.

What did USSR mean by this?

kys

The idea of a degenerated worker's state is complete bullshit from a Marxist perspective. Either man up and call it state capitalism or go full tankie.


What a fucking hack Trotsky was.

People here are actually pretty honest about the fact that they don't see capitalism as having anything to do with capital accumulation.

this is what tankies unironically believe
Stalin himself was consistently worried about how to prevent this sort of thing from happening in the soviet border regions. Corruption within the party was a well documented fact

What is stopping communism from forming naturally in America with large partnerships? Why don't 100 or 200 people from here start a business owned by the workers?

First, we'd be competing with porky firms who have no qualms about exploiting workers and that would force us to exploit ourselves more efficiently then they can in order to survive. Secondly, leaving the market in place as the social lever of production is both inefficient and leaves the door open to the restoration of capitalism even more then a Stalinist-style planned economy

That being said I'd rather work in co-op then under porky but I don't have that choice right now.

How do you stop markets from forming?

Every time I see this phrase I picture some dimwitted American "libertarian" who thinks that the world can consist on nothing but small business owners and their employees voluntarily selling each other stuff.

By eliminating the need for them.

Not a meme, Lenin said so himself. You calling Lenin a liar?

How do you remove a need for them before post-scarcity?

Yes, the bureaucrats were not corrupt. This is why they murdered 700,000 people in two years, because they weren't corrupt and trying to consolidate their power - especially Stalin.

I know much of Holla Forums thinks this is super uncool and a drag but you do it by planning the economy instead of leaving production and distribution up to the anarchy of the market.

That way, if the two of us are in different coops, my coop and your coop don't have to compete; we don't have to end up producing the same type of goods just because the market for commodity X is the most profitable one.

Planned economies in the 20th century were actually quite successful, the USSR had the second-highest consecutive growth rate in the 20th century. Japan the second runner up, while capitalist, also had a good deal of planning in its economy after WWII.

We can do much better with new technology like the internet which will allow us to do things planners in the past couldn't do. The internet can allow us to enter in requests for desired goods almost instaneously that way we can better produce the goods people need when they need it and predict when they will.

Weirdly, he put members of the NKVD and other members of the government on trial for killing innocent people and exceeding the limits that had been placed on their power. He also wanted to get the party out of the business of running the state as a means to undermine and hold contested elections( clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr2.html)

But your insightful comment, which is in no way influenced by endemic anti-communist propaganda and is nothing but spirited Marxist critique, has forced me to contemplate my beliefs.

Statistics taken directly from the Soviet Archives are propaganda? He put everyone who could possible oppose him on trial, that's why almost every single Bolshevik except Stalin was killed or exiled.

Anyway, Furr is basically the lefts David Irving. He quotemines sources for ideological purposes and then spergs out about how everyone who disagrees with him is in on a conspiracy. Here's en email correspondence between him and this group that debates Holocaust deniers online, where he does exactly that. holocaustcontroversies.blogspot.ca/2007/03/and-now-for-something-not-completely.html

You do realize this is also a conspiracy theory, right? I'm just pointing this out because "tankies" are considered to be "crazy" for believing there was an opposition bloc headed by Trotsky and Zinoviev which was collaborating with the fascist powers.

The evidence isn't there in sufficient quantities to support this view and there is plenty of evidence that speaks against it.It certainly doesn't have much more credibility then many of the "conspiracy theories" that middle-brow conspiracy skeptics denounce. But it does fit with the pattern noted by Lance de-Haven Smith–that conspiracy theories about leaders in countries and movements that oppose the West are okay, whereas those critical of its own leaders are not.

And btw wasn't the archive statistics (and not even Furr really does either) that I took issue with but rather the assertion that it was done by Stalin in order to consolidate power for "corrupt" reasons.

Good. Maybe he will get arrested and it will be a major propaganda coup for the Left and eclectic centrist and liberals and right-wingers will come to his defense.

Are you Milo?

This is a meme. Scarcity will always exist – for some products. It is not something equally, and neither are our needs: some things are more scarce than others, and we need some things more than others.

What is in the store is in the store wether you pay for it or not.

This post is a huge strawman, I never said that Stalin was the only bureaucrat trying to consolidate power. I'm quite aware that there was an opposition to Stalin headed by Trotsky and Zinoviev, what I find dubious is the claim they were collaborating with fascist.

What?

So, at least you admit that much, that's good. I've got Furr's book on this issue, I actually started out skeptical but came out convinced of it. Afaik this is the only place I know that has reviewed the book and it is reddit so don't sperg out on me archive.is/9uZGo

If you have an open mind I'm thinking of scanning it and I'll probably link it to /marx/ when I do.

He's a tripfag that used to (?) shitpost here constantly back in the day.

This is something taught in highschool history classes, so I'm not sure why people would have trouble admitting it.

Oh, no I'm not.

Lenin said that in regards to the NEP. Completely different context.

Well, the part I guess where it gets heated is the assertion that the bloc continued to exist and operate after Trotsky's exile. That is denied by many Trotskyists and many Western scholars. But that was shown to be true by Pierre Broué who is a Trotskyist scholar a French trotskyist scholar who found evidence of it in Trotsky's own archives.

It's not so much that I'm against the critique of the bureaucracy under socialism although I do think it has a tendency to become a catch-all even in anti-rev critiques as I do not think the main blame for the Ezhovchina really lies with Stalin. Likewise, the campaign was undertaken with the intention of ridding the country of counter-revolutionaries and it was consented to due to the world situation (Japan and the USSR for instance went to war twice in this period). I do believe the Trotsky-Zinoviev bloc would match what you say about a bureaucracy killing people to consolidate its own power but the intention was to sell-out large parts of the country to the Axis powers and move the country to an open capitalist dictatorship along fascist lines. I know this view is controversial.

When Stalin put Beria in charge of the NKVD executions dropped from the high-level you cited to around a thousand and many people were released and rehabilitated. That does not seem like something you would do if the whole point of the terror was to consolidate the nomenklatura.

I don't think its as simple as Stalin-Did-Nothing-Wrong vs. Le Evil Pipe-Smoking Omnipotent Dictator both are over-simplifications in my view.
Both views overstate his importance to the Soviet machinery and his competency (whether for good or ill). It's well known that Stalin's de jure power was limited, how far his informal power went will be debated on forever, but even still he relied on a whole team of people to get things done and they generally shared Stalin's outlook but not always. From there the feedback went to the party and to the grassroots; unless we give up Marxism in historical affairs, i.e. we concede the masses really do not make history, then we are left with the matter of how the Stalin era USSR attained the consent of the grassroots. My view is that the working masses or some critical portion of them perceived Stalin's policies as closer to their own interests over that of the opposition.

Lenin called the NEP-era Russia "state-capitalist"? Where? I find it strange since it would actually have been a big step forward at the time.

If Trotsky was a Fascist collaborator then why did he write articles analyzing fascism and how the working class should fight it?

I dunno man. You're asking me to look into his brain and find a reason for what he did. Some of the trial defendants who were in contact with Trotsky or his son Sedov said that Trotsky believed that fascism was a powerful form of modern organized capitalism that would inevitably triumph over the USSR. I hate to quote Furr again but he reasons that Trotsky may have thought it was a necessary strategic retreat and that left to themselves Stalin and his team would blunder. I think that attribution of motivation pretty generous on Furr's part considering that the efforts of the opposition damaged the USSR's efforts to maintain war preparedness, their international reputation, internal cohesion etc. Again, according to the defendants Trotsky believed that socialism in Russia had failed and that it might be necessary to go back to capitalism before trying again. Ambition to return to a position of political power cannot be ruled out either.

It's a bit odd that you take this line of argument, not that I don't welcome it, but rarely does anyone take this line with Stalin and his writings. It's very rare for someone to say if "Stalin was a red fascist then why did he write against fascism?" or "if he was a state-capitalist why was he always writing against capitalism and expressing concern about the workers?" etc.

Hmmm, doesn't your very question shows that it was different from capitalism, where you don't need to break any laws and risk jail to do the equivalent thing?

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