Refuting a common anti-communist argument

Those are the main reasons, yeah.

Relying on socialist idols is a fatal flaw, yes.

Aztec Communism when?

No genius: all society fitting the definition of capitalism is capitalism.

Socdem, leftcom or anarcho?

Git gud, fgt.

Marxist.

In a class society (eg: capitalism), the class holding economic power is not the working class by definition.
In a classless society (aka socialism), there is no working class, once again, by definition.

… is called a dictatorship of the proletariat and is still capitalism indeed – its very last stage: the revolution!

Russia went from being mostly feudal agrarian sociey to landing a lunar probe in 50 years.

When russia went capitalist in the ninties incomes fell by almost 70% and poverty increased tenfold.

All of this considering that command economies that are not planned in real time (russia's was planned every 5 years) are extremely innefficent.

The political collapse of the ussr sent less self sufficent worker's states into economic remission.
Personally I think that centeralism was a mistake, and led to authoritarianism. But let's not fall for the market efficiency meme either.

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Literally anyone who isn't a Stalinist should suffice. Unfortunately, that's the tendency that controlled the propaganda apparatus of a great power for 60 years.

this is great-man theory tier
vanguard parties were a mistake and will always lead to revisionism

Correct.

insurgentnotes.com/2013/10/yugoslav-self-management-capitalism-under-the-red-banner/
transform-network.net/journal/issue-092011/news/detail/Journal/workers-self-management-in-yugoslavia-an-ambivalent-experience.html

USSR as well as other countries with Marxism-Leninism in effect had no capitalists, thus no capitalism. How that is not socialism is yet to be explained by your own definitions. USSR ceased to have capitalists when the NEP was abolished and collectivization put to effect.

Vanguard parties are a necessity until there is sufficient class consciousness. When there is, we can have popular revolutions without them, but until that, discarding vanguardism means you won't be going anywhere. With a vanguard party, once we have strong enough class consciousness, there will be resistance towards letting revisionists like Deng and Khrushchev to hold power ever. That is the check and balance we need. Until then, MLs just have to seriously purge revision and opportunism harder.

Had a lot of problems, but a lot of good points too. Defeated fascists, got into space, supported a bunch of really good revolutions. But then we have the fact that they supported a lot of murderous regimes and crushed other good revolutions as well. Lenin was based, Stalin was pretty shitty, Cornman even more so, General Secretary Eyebrows was okay, and then Comrade Pizza Hut was a mistake. The USSR model wasn't really sustainable, which is why it collapsed.

Mao was a faggot who didn't know what he was doing. He even fell out of public favour at one point, only to take power again. How bad of a dictator do you even have to be to lose power from your own stupid policies?

Vietnam wasn't really founded on socialist ideals. Ho Chi Minh even stated that it was nationalism, not communism, that inspired him. There was some stuff there that was somewhat socialist under him, like collective farming, but during the 90s it mostly went away. Still pretty good while it lasted, though.

Initially just a USSR clone, but has gotten better in recent years. Even though Raul is fucking shit up currently.

Literally abandoned communist ideology as "out-of-date" in the early 1970s.

You probably mean "Democratic" Kampuchea, which was actually overthrown in a communist revolution and was replaced with the People's Republic of Kampuchea. The PRK then proceeded to rebuild the country and fix pretty much everything the Khmer Rouge destroyed. Hardly a failure.

Imagine Stalin, but with extra nationalism and more bunkers. Now you've got Hoxha. It was shit from the very beginning.

Shitty USSR clone, but still much better then what they have now.

The Prague Spring was pretty good, and Dubček seemed to be going in the right direction before the USSR decided to steamroll him.

Makhno was based as fuck, though. Got along well with Lenin, wrecked the White Army, and created a fully functioning anarchist society. But then Trotsky decided to fuck him over.

One of the longest-lasting successful examples of socialism in history. Living standards on par with Western Europe and Tito was loved both home and abroad. Only thing is that Reagan couldn't have that, so he decided to try and covertly overthrow the Yugoslav government. And we all know how that turned out.

Opinion discarded.

This is not true.

Even this is not true.

It was the law of value that regulated the production in the USSR: this is textbook capitalism – not by my own definition w but by Marx's!

… says Stalin's propaganda.

You are reaching heights of idealism.

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Russia had more than enough class consciousness. Those who were too conscious of it were smacked down. (Kronstadt)

Except Marxists have been denouncing Stalin's claim of having "achieved socialism" from the very start, that is way before the USSR collapsed.

Where were the capitalists, then?

Ignoring the fact that Kronstadt rebellion was due to ignorance about what the peasants did and was backed by the whites and/or French govt. Even the anarchist icon who anarkiddies constantly jack off to, Emma Goldman, acknowledged this.

Tbh Yugoslavia was ironically the most socialist out of all of them since it was the only one where workers actually controlled the economy.

Except they didn't make another one, they just kept up with their shitty Marxism-Leninism crap over and over and over again. The only exception is Yugoslavia, which collapsed for reasons unrelated to its market socialist system.

You know what a wage is right?

really the main one you have to explain is Russia. Most of the others were just Russian puppets or otherwise corrupted by ML's and really had little hope of being better than Stalinist trash in the first place.

Surplus allocated towards market exchange. Do you think socialism starts with how profits are distributed?

Read Marx 2bh:
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm

Or Rosa:
marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1900/reform-revolution/ch07.htm

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It isn't some sort of tinfoil hat conspiracy. There are literal declassified documents about this.

I'm not shilling for muh co-ops, I don't even consider market socialism to be socialism. That being said money made by workers in a co-op isn't a wage, because there is no external non-worker actor (like a capitalist) appropriating surplus value from them. A wage is a portion of the profits that is paid to the worker after surplus value has been extracted. Without extraction there is no wage.

you have a shitty and reductionist definition of what a wage is. it was just explained to you what a wage is, and why.

do as the leftcom said and read marx lol. i mean he even added the links.

Whoever made that video clearly hasn't read David Schweickart despite attempting to critique him. Two of his main criticisms of market socialism; that wage labour would be necessary to acquire start up money, and that workers would have to exploit themselves to acquire the funds to improve the productive process are not relevant to Schweikart's model.

Under his model workers pay a tax to rent the means of production which are really owned by society. These funds are in turn provided to entrepreneurs as interest free loans or re-invested in firms to improve their productive processes.

In the kolkhozes and the light industry. And also the state.

No they didn't: the law of value controlled the economy.

I haven't said it is. I say it's idealism to think that a whole society can regress from one mode of production to another because one man in some oval office decided so.

Maybe before we purge liberals from the world we must first purge the retards that think the USSR/degenerated workers state was socialism

"The prole had political and economic power!"

That's your fucking answer? So co-ops and unions are socialism

Nevermind me, just copypasting myself.

But… it didn't collapse. It was a behemoth of inefficiency and mismanagement, but it could be sustained for an undetermined amount of time.

This supposed collapse of the Soviet economy is part of a larger myth, that of the Soviet collapse. You see, the thing with the word "collapse" is that it implies the system was unstable and was bound to fail at some point. Whereas the Soviet economy – fuck, like the entirety of the USSR –, shit as it was, had stability, but was deliberatedly dismantled by the Communist Party itself. The exact same applies to Chinese communism, altho with very different methods.

The biggest agitators for breakup and capitalism and the mobsters who became obscenely rich overnight by buying state property for pennies, they were inevitably well-connected apparatchiks. There actually were protests against breakup and capitalism, not to mention the notorious referendum. The people just plain wanted to keep things as they were. But it didn't matter because Porky had already set in motion a palace coup, and welcomed their Russian brethren into the fold.

It all boils down to one cynical truth: the Party elites realized they would have it much, much better if they were capitalist elites. It's that simple. Addendum: and the Soviet people were powerless to stop them because that's how the Soviet state was built in the first place. Ironic, I know.