Yes it was. USSR's ruling class commands the heights of the highly centralized Soviet economy and oppresses and exploits the working class directly through its stranglehold on the state apparatus. This class does not individually own the means of production, but this fact makes it no less a capitalist class. The central question to pose in determining whether the Soviet Union is capitalist or socialist is thus not whether the principal means of production have been nationalized, but which class holds real political and economic power. This power is held by the state bourgeoisie, which controls and disposes of state property and gears the whole economy towards the maximization of surplus-value extraction, towards “accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake.” (Capital, Vol. l)
The basic functioning of the Soviet economy reveals, however, that the extraction of surplus value is indeed the guiding principle. (All of the data we will present below come from Soviet publications approved for copyrighting). The Soviet bourgeoisie has been able to maximize capital accumulation because through the national economic plan it has had the power to mandate profit rates of 12-15% taken as the norm – a significantly high rate of return. These profit rates are not the result of voluntary self-sacrifice by the Soviet working class, but of high rates of exploitation.
This fact explains why this profit rate is undergoing a sharp decline. In the whole post-war period, the rate of growth of capital accumulation has been twice the rate of growth of output per worker. It is this relative decline in productivity that is at the root of the crisis facing the Soviet bourgeoisie. Its response must include a drive to intensify labor as well as to hold down the wages of the working class.
For a great proportion of the time during this same post-war period, the rate of growth of wages was way below the rate of growth of output per worker. What this means is that while the standard of living of the Soviet people may have been slowly rising, the Soviet bourgeoisie has had the power to keep the rate of increase depressed relative to the productivity of the working class and the rate of capital accumulation.
Like any industrialized capitalist country, the USSR has had to raise the level of social consumption, such as cn education and health care, in order to develop the kind of knowledgeable, skilled workforce it needs to labor in a mere technologically advanced, capital-intensive economy. But the Soviet bourgeoisie still puts the major emphasis on material incentives to be able to manipulate greater productivity without having to unduly raise the whole wage rate of the working class.
While the money wages of the Soviet working class have been rising, there has been a shortage of consumer goods for them to buy with their higher wages. The national economic plan deliberately short-changes the production of consumer goods, and this is a form of suppressed inflation. Even many of the consumer goods that the Soviet people finally receive are shoddy. This contrasts to the quality military hardware that somehow the same Soviet economy under the same national plan is able to produce.
Gulags also exploited the worker's labour. libcom.org/history/gay-gulag
