Why is the abolition of the value form necessary for socialism? Why did the USSR and Catalonia fail to do this?

Because marxist autism

You forgot the annihi flag.

The commodity (which generates the value form) is the cell out of which capitalism grows. Every political doctrine that cannot do away with the commodity form of products will inevitably reproduce the capital/wage-labour relationship and thus never leave capitalism in the first place. The value form is thus the fabric for the capitalist mode of production whole.

Several factors which would be hard to address in a single post. I recommend this text if you want to investigate the subject: endnotes.org.uk/issues/1/en/gilles-dauve-when-insurrections-die, which was also recently discussed on this left podcast (might be a good place to start; very engaging): podomatic.com/podcasts/dietsoap/episodes/2017-03-15T20_51_05-07_00.

True about Catalonia though.

Absolutely true: libcom.org/library/anarchism-spanish-revolution. Catalonia had very authentic moments but it basically built itself on terrible premises. Of course the Spanish Republican and Stalinist backstabbing and Francoist offensives didn't help the cause, but that was ultimately the least of its problems.

Really, nigga?

Even if Stalin wasn't there, the end result would be the same. The fact is that the USSR had no way to transition to socialism. I don't even think Lenin thought that they had built socialism.

The endless cycle of production for value is the foremost key definition of Capitalism, all other features, the persistence of wage labor, excessive work hours, the persistence of privately owned means of production, are practically symptoms of the Value Form. It's esentially the constant production of Capital in order to constantly funnel Capital back into production in order to make more Capital, at our current rate we produce five times beyond the rate of human consumption, and even then a large portion of people don't benefit from this surplus, remember, the number of homeless people is far exceeded by the number of empty homes, the number of starving people is far exceeded by the production industrial agriculture. Even labor itself doesn't benefit from this excess of manufacturing, the United Staes is still the largest manufacturer in the world, far greater then China or India, yet we have higher unemployment then ever before in our history, a major reason is that two thirds of this labor is done by automation or by unpaid prisoners in large industrialized prisons, and those who can find work are working hours most 19th Century Socialists would have found dystopian. The contradiction of unemployment and long hours is one Marx wrote about extensively in Capital.

I don't know about Catalonia, but in the case of the USSR the beuracrats became more and more concerned with competing with the West and defending their borders then revolutionizing their economic base, and as a result they eventually receeded into a Social Democratic state of State Capitalism. When this regression exactly happened is up for debate, ML's say 1956, Trots say 1934, and some Leftcoms would say as early as 1921.

USSR was bound to fail because the German revolution failed.

Lenin was pretty open about the USSR being state capitalism.

What? They understood this thing that Marx specifically wrote about in Das Capital?

and tbh funnily enough if you were to post some of Lenin's later writings rephrased here or other online spaces such as R E D D I T people would call you a dirty socdem

Given the number of self declared Marxists who didn't, this is worth mentioning.

It's posts like these that give me faith in this board.

the way i understand the whole concept of added value or surplus value is the basis of capitalism. if you are somehow adding more value to something than it cost to acquire and produce you are creating extra wealth for yourself potentially that did not exist before. you've invented an excuse to coerce others into trading for those resources and you're slowly defrauding resources from others and hoarding "added value" or profit to enrich yourself to acquire, dominate and leverage even more resources for yourself. this process has literally no end and is most obvious with landlording and people price gouging basic necessities like firewood, oil, water etc

*sorry, Dietsoap is called Zero Squared now, sometimes I forget

ya u see Kropotkin read Kapital and understood it and liked it

top kek my gomrade :^)

I actually like Kropotkin and Bookchin quite a bit, I was just being needlessly sectarian because I feel like Communalists specifically reject Marx to the point where it's a detriment to their revolutionary theory. Namely, they take Bookchin's misinterpretations of Marx seriously, as opposed to a byproduct of his neurosis when he interacted with Marxists, like when he used to get ridiculously pissed at Anarchists, even when they were essentially in agreement. I guess I just hate that Communalists always have a strawman of Marx that's completely alien from what Marx actually said. Also, Bookchinites are the third biggest shitposters on this board behind nazbols and egoists.

youtube.com/watch?v=dBZxth7SMmM

can you elaborate on this and give me an ELI5 for someone newer to leftist theory

From what I understand all that's required in order to abolish the value form is to abolish for-profit production, since value form is just the value assigned to a good relative to other goods (like money) for the purposes of exchange.

So how exactly did the USSR not abolish the value form?

Bookchin wanted to abolish the market economy, and replace it with a "moral economy" in which goods and services would be provided to on the basis of from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs, as well as according to ethical and ecological standards.

So he wanted to jump right to full communism Kropotkin style?

He favoured a gradual transition through the build up of dual-power, but yes, Bookchin wanted to abolish money and his work was characterised as a continuation of Kropotkin's ideas until Bookchin broke with anarchism.

By this I mean characterised as anarcho-communism

Is that even possible?

Many anarchists within the CNT, most notably the FAI, were highly critical of this. That being said, I do think it delayed the backstabbing by a little bit.
This is exactly what platformism was meant to avoid. They are not anarchists. There is no "neutral position" in the undeniable class war.
At the time, it was seen as necessary to collaborate with the Republican government - it did still command the majority of land, labor power, industry, and military strength and was nominally on the same side as the anarchists. It was the best that could be done to share representation in the GEC between both the anarchist worker-delegates and govt bureaucrats. It was
For all intents and purposes, the workers really did manage their own activities in production. It was not production for their own use, but rather for the use of the military, yes. This, however, is ridiculous to criticize. It was their need as well to defend Catalonia from fascist invasion.
According to George Orwell, Catalonia was the only place he had ever been where class consciousness was the norm rather than the exception.
I agree w/ the first part, but collaboration w/ it rather meant collaboration with an emergent bureaucratic class a la USSR. Stalin's go order for the backstab was the spark to a pile of dry tinder which set it ablaze - it is the natural tendency of the bureaucracy to defend itself first and foremost.

About halfway through the article, too tired to keep reading, will continue tomorrow.

The USSR still paid workers wages (just enough to survive and not rebel, in fact) and used the surplus to invest in improvement of capital accumulation processes and fund the military. In doing so to compete with the West, they were no different from a megacorporation such as the British East India Company had been hundreds of years earlier. It's no coincidence that what resulted from both (regular famines until industrialization was finished, lack of political freedoms, eventual collapse under the weight of its own homegrown bureaucracy, run by a cadre of faceless old bureaucrats in a top council who constantly switched places according to who was the best technocrat, etc.) was so similar.