Socialism has never been tried

...

t. unironic occultist

Socialism cannot be instituted or 'tried' because it is a process, not an event, in just the same way that capitalism did not just burst fully formed from the head of Adam Smith, but developed over centuries.

Yeah, capitalism is very much necessary. Anyone who refers to himself as 'anti-capitalist' doesn't know what he's talking about.

I think the subjective experience of the marxist is a better answer than his teleological dogma.

But why?

because capitalism creates the necessary conditions for socialism

The USSR and China are good examples of central planning of resources, but not Socialism.

Well, you can chose the first one and become the laughingstock in every debate or you actually learn some history and defend the USSR.

Doesn't mean you have to actually think the USSR was perfect socialism, but simply discarding it with "state capitalism xD" will make you look like a cringey idiot. Every time a socialist says "wasn't real socialism" instead of giving an informed response you deserve all the shitty strawman memes they throw at you, all of them.

No thanks.

And these are?

That doesn't make us anti-capitalist. In building upon capitalism to develop socialism we oppose the capitalist relations of production and forcibly overthrow them. That is anti-capitalist.

I pick and mix: socialism has never been tried and the rapid development of the USSR and China are attributed to an incredibly efficient Taylorism-flavoured capitalism coupled with the ideological edifice of workerism and red/solidarity-driven structures (Stakhanovism in the USSR, Mao thought/Lei Feng legend in China or even Udarnici in Yugoslavia, etc.). Marx, Engels and Lenin would all agree, much to the dismay of illiterate Stalinoids:
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/ch03.htm
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1857/grundrisse/ch05.htm

Capitalism is required to build up infrastructure and concentrate resources

How often do MLs have to get assblasted by leftcoms before they actually sit down and read Marx?

I get second-hand embarassment from these retards all the time.

Read Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin.

/Thread

Wew I sure got assblasted there

when are you starting?

No

...

...

You know Marx was wrong about revolution happening in the most developed capitalist nations - it happened in the periphery.

You can now pick up the ball and try to work with what you get or cowardly retreat into your dogmatic shell of autistic regurgitation of definitions while Marx wasn't even entirely clear on how a post-capitalist society would look like.

Nobody claims the USSR was fucking perfect. But to claim it's state capitalism is ridiculous, it clearly wasn't. There was no surplus extraction, no private ownership, democratic bottom-up structures and worker management of the means of production. To claim this is capitalism is retarded, you might as well just claim feudalism is capitalism. Everything is capitalism then.

It's a hideous attempt of leftcoms to apply Marxist Orthodoxy to a state system which Marx and Engels could have never imagined - they both grew up under semi-feudal capitalism, they didn't even experience liberal democracy. You can level criticisms at the USSR, there is nothing wrong with that, but to entirely label it as capitalism just because a single variable didn't add up the way Marx predicted it is horrifyingly stupid. I even prefer a fucking trotskyst critique over that. Of course, that would require you to actually study history and read something outside of your ideological safe space, which you probably will never do and then sit in your armchair in 2050 wondering how capitalism still exists.

Accumulation through overproduction, mass scale industrialization as a result of capital. It essentially constructs a "mature" economy capable of allowing people to take already established institutions and have them be organized then democratically.

Basically Capitalism has a unique problem inherent to it, it overproduces. You use this way of generating production then you reorganize the way in which they're used to provide people with a better basic living standard. Then once the foundations have been set you can manufacturer and extend consciously what's needed in a Socialist society from what's already been established.

I think,

Read my post above

Marxism is decidedly against utopionism you sperg. It's not the prospect of communism which is utopian, it's utopian to think it will just happen in some sort of "mystical spontaneous uprising". This is utopian and borderline religious.

Socialism has been tried plenty times.

Communism has never been achieved from that socialism.

wdhmbt

There were brewing revolutions all across Russia before they reached Russia. Success in Russia decades after this is to ignore how much effort the European bourgeois spent on killing them off in the developed world.
Even better: he was explicit in saying that the goal of communists should not be to envision post-capitalism, but to partake in class struggle and see communism as a movement. See: German Ideology, chapter 1 and marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1843/letters/43_09.htm in its entirety.
You would whenever you're not on blast.
Read PDF in .
Feudalism was not a society dominated by commodities and production for exchange.
They did, actually. Engels critiqued Kautsky on what he proposed, which is ultimately what the USSR most ended up resembling. What Marx and Engels could never have expected was the lengths to which appropriators would go to use their image as paraphernalia to support their variations of capitalism without understanding or perhaps even reading them at all.
Of course you would prefer the Trotskyist "critique" which was basically that Trotsky wasn't in the bureaucracy and that the Soviet Union didn't value the Rouble with the gold standard.

So what are the metrics of progress in a socialist direction? If socialism has been in development for 150 years what is it today?

What mostly killed them was the implementation of the welfare state and social security. Marx underestimated the ability of the capitalist state apparatus to adopt. Marx also criticized the Paris Commune to not properly and strictly organize against the reaction. You can hate the Bolsheviks all you want but they have been severely more vigilant about that and have been entirely successful.

First off, stop linking basic Marxist texts, I've read them all. Secondly, you must love the Bolsheviks then since they were a true proletarian movement. To think it was all Stalin and his bureaucracy is ridiculous, during the early 30s Stalin didn't even control most of Russia yet collectivization happened. Same with Maos mass line. Did you know that 12% of the entire USSR population was engaged in democratic decision-making and management by 1927?

Not an argument and also Chattopadhyay is not a historian and adds little of value to the leftcom circlejerk. He literally writes in a blog:

Feudalism had exchange on a primitive level as well as money. If I apply the same scrutiny you wield against the USSR to feudalism, I might as well just call it capitalism with feudal characteristics.

Kautsky fucking hated the October Revolution. He was a DemSoc/SocDem who had Marxism as endgoal but disagreed with the revolutionary praxis. Bolsheviks was a genuine proletarian movement to build a socialist society through revolutionary means. This is nothing of the sort what Kautsky had imagined.

The rest of your post is ad hominem

Absolutely. Even here, though I am not a leftcom, I do agree. Marx is absolutely not infallible. To say however that the supposed "attractiveness" of the welfare state suppository was that which crushed the communists around Europe in the early 20th century is insane. The anti-social democratic communist current had long been established. What crushed it was the two-pronged strike of bourgeois democracy and fascism.
What does this have to do with the fact that Russia was capitalist?
Successful in helping the Russian proletariat stage a successful and authentic revolution, yes, and in seizing power after the fact. After the turn the Comintern took to the right whoever, success is best measured in how it impressively engineered a fully-functional capitalism out of a mere semi-feudal one. There has never been a socialism in Russia, nor has there ever been one ever hitherto; merely dictatorships of the proletariat with various degrees of authenticity and success.
Then you didn't understand them.
At some point, yes.
Putting to the test the Russian experiment's authenticity versus Marx's word is not an argument?
Neither was Marx, and yet he theorized the objective view of history you (supposedly) adhere to.

All you're once again proving with this reply is that (at least) one part of your ideology's namesake, Marxism, is deeply triggering to you and your politics (if not the other part as well under a more serious reading, in spite of all of his flaws and deviations). Simply adopt the proper label for yourself in the future: social democrat.

Marx didn't quite get around to imagining its specifics, but we can imagine some generalities on the basis of the DotP refering to direct proletarian council democracy (leftcoms), an economy planned from below via this democracy (leftcoms), etc. The point is that society makes a full circle in a way, returning to some of the characteristics of primitive communism because of an elimination of alienation. If the USSR had some characteristics but also some serious flaws, sure, you could say it was the result of their ideas being applied in a different circumstance. The truth is that it was consistently the opposite of what was predicted and took alienation and exploitation to unknown heights in the name of state-managed extraction of surplus value to maintain and expand a grossly bloated military and bureaucracy. To keep up with the hostile West, the Soviets had to build up industry, and to build up industry with speed, they had to undergo the process of primitive accumulation internally. When these structures of primitive accumulation devised under Stalin did not "wither away" because the bureaucracy constituted its own class capable of defending itself with all the force of the state (see: Hungary 1956), it eventually collapsed out of stagnation. USSR was a massive feudalistic failure, even if you can fend off the worst arguments against it ("muh gorillions").
Nigga, what? The soviets were rubber stamps for the CPSU. I'd have /loved/ the USSR on every level if it was self-managed soviets confederating to plan society - this is what one would think when Lenin said "all power to the soviets"! Instead, they were all subservient to the Sovnarkom by 1918. The only area with workers' self-management was the Kuzbass AIC.

It was a failure, but that doesn't take away that it was a genuine, sustained, and fairly long lasting attempt to establish communism. And it doesn't mean we can't try again, and even incorporate some of the techniques that were then tried.

I pick "The USSR and China developed more rapidly due to their centrally planed economies with socialist elements but never progressed far enough to achieve full socialism.

>Being that uncreative.
"Socialism is so good that even shitty imitators BTFO capitalism."

The first since the USSR had state capitalism and China had market reforms

you are talking about administrative decision making infrastructure
DotP should be defined in economic terms by analogy with dictatorship of the bourgeoisie

first, bureaucracy
wealth inequality was orders of magnitude lower than in the west
if bureaucracy was appropriating amounts of surplus that you imply it would've been reflected in the data on wealth distribution

second, military
implying that military expenditures are useless for society, you imply that it should not concern itself with self-defense
West posed real threat to SU sovereignty
only way you can justify your claim is if you also think that intervention would've resulted in improvement of the living standards
as to the amounts of expenditures on military, you need to consider that it was an arms race, and it was SU that was behind
it reached arms parity with the US only in the mid 70s
sometimes society just don't have a choice in the matter

and third, your claim that surplus producers were robbed of their surplus
you should know that major part of said surplus later came back to the population in the form of social consumption funds

so I find your claim that proletariat was robbed of the products of his labor, a strawman

where is the serf - landlord relations?
agriculture was cooperative based

The two are related. Lots of capitalists claim to love their workers, be friends with them, and want to help them, yet the worker gets screwed over at the end of the day because of the power structures. Just because the party, bureaucracy, and military were nominally on their side, just because a lot of Party brass were formerly workers themselves, changes none of this. You're advocating idpol if you think it changes anything that a bureaucrat was once a worker himself, if you think that the regime was on the workers's side because it was draped in red and declared itself proletarian in character. Be more materialist.

The bureaucracy was the state made manifest. You know as well as I do (I would hope) that wealth inequality is irrelevant to Marxism. What matters is power. The bureaucracy, as a collective class, held all the power over the means of production. It was they who decided what materials were sent where, what enterprise managers were appointed, etc. They had all the power, the workers had none. As for wealth inequality, one word is needed to debunk your claim: nomenklatura. What matters is not the absolute gap, but rather the relative gap.

Yeah, they needed the military. This is why socialism/communism (as they are the same thing, the latter being a variant of the former) must be global. I'm not saying that they should have stopped spending on the military (as you would surely otherwise accuse me of advocating to fit your "utopian anarkiddie" narrative, even though the real Marx called Proudhon the first advocate of "scientific socialism"), but rather that this made socialism impossible because it introduced severe material constraints effectively emulating the artificial scarcity of capitalism. Stop calling the USSR socialism.

You could make the same argument for the USA at the time or European welfare states. Relative amounts of thievery do not matter. If someone robs you of $1000, do you go "well, at least it wasn't $2000" and sit back down? No, someone robbed you of your money, so you go and get it back! Classcuck.

You were forced to stay in kolkhozy and they lacked many features of true cooperatives, such as being paid in proportion to labor and being unable to take one's share and leave, as one was unable to leave at all under Stalin. Not real cooperatives, let alone socialism.

epic marx get that will trigger "m"-"l"s

I know exactly how this typo was made and it made me smile

A selection of texts describing Russia as a capitalist state. English edition.

'The Basics'

- Why Russia isn't socialist sinistra.net/lib/pro/whyrusnsoc.html

- An Analysis of Russian Economy marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1942/russian-economy/index.htm
- The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is a Capitalist Society marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1941/ussr-capitalist.htm
- The Nature of the Russian Economy marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1946/statecap.htm
- Doctrine of the Body Possessed by the Devil marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1951/doctrine.htm
- The Spirit of Horsepower libcom.org/library/horsepower-bordiga
- Lessons of the counterrevolutions libcom.org/library/lessons-counterrevolutions-amadeo-bordiga
- State Capitalism and Dictatorship marxists.org/archive/pannekoe/1936/dictatorship.htm
- The myth of "socialist planning" in Russia sinistra.net/lib/upt/compro/lipo/lipoebubie.html
- Eight Supplementary Theses on Russia (Dialogue with Stalin 1953) sinistra.net/lib/upt/comlef/art/eightsuppe.html

Longer Texts

- Capitalism and class struggle in the USSR libcom.org/library/capitalism-class-struggle-ussr-neil-c-fernandez
- The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience libcom.org/library/paresh-chattopadhyay-marxian-concept-capital-soviet-experience
- State capitalism and world revolution libcom.org/library/state-capitalism-james-clr

Bonus Material

- The Incoherence of “Transitional Society” as a Marxian Concept marxisthumanistinitiative.org/tag/transitional-society
- The Nonsense of Planning marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1937/08/nonsense-planning.htm
- Capitalism and Planning marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1935/01/capitalism.htm
- Value and Socialism marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1969/marx-keynes/ch22.htm
- Review: “The Revolution Betrayed” marxists.org/archive/mattick-paul/1937/11/revolution-betrayed.htm
- Marxism and Russia sinistra.net/lib/upt/compro/lipi/lipifbibie.html
- The Revolutionary Workers Movement and the Agrarian Question quinterna.org/lingue/english/historical_en/revolutionary_agrarian_question.htm
- "Left-wing communism, an infantile disorder" - condemnation of the renegades to come quinterna.org/lingue/english/historical_en/left_wing_communism_00.htm
- China: The bourgeois Revolution has been accomplished, the proletarian Revolution remains to be made sinistra.net/lib/upt/compro/lipi/lipifbobee.html
- "Proletarian dictatorship" and "socialist society" in the new Chinese constitution sinistra.net/lib/upt/prcomi/ropa/ropaerebie.html
- Mao's China, certified copy of the bourgeois capitalist society quinterna.org/lingue/english/historical_en/maos_china_certified_copy.htm
- Theses on the Chinese Question quinterna.org/lingue/english/historical_en/theses_chinese_question.htm

State capitalism is not a new form of economy nor is it a transitional form between capitalism and socialism: it is pure capitalism, and appeared along with all the other forms of monopoly in the period of the victory of the bourgeoisie over the feudal powers. On the other hand, the capital-state relation lies at the basis of the bourgeois economy in all of its stages.

In short;

- Capitalists existed in Russia. Both social and actual individuals. The state took the form of a capitalist and also the collective farms and peasants with their private plots. Markets existed, even free markets, including a black market. There were even "soviet millionaires". Private property was enshrined by law in the collective farms.
- Capital ran Russia. The law of value made itself felt by the shifting changes in prices and wages and on what was produced. Profit existed, in fact, it was made into a legal requirement for state firms to make a profit. Speculation existed in the countryside with their markets.
- Labour was alienated, there was a constant drive to push down wages and make labour more productive (along capitalist lines, of course. Relative freedom was only awarded due to the need for labour in the process of industrialisation. Still, unemployment was wide spread.
- Russia was not 'tending' towards or 'transitioning' to socialism/communism only to be thwarted at the last minute by "revisionists" and "capitalist roaders".

Britain has a free healthcare system, a socialist idea that works brilliantly.
It's never had a socialist government (even though some got pretty close) or full socialism as it would probably not even be possible in a capitalist world.
So a lot of socialist policies have worked well and produced great results even if it's never really been a socialist world since we stopped being tribes of hunter gatherers.

I don't give a shit either way. Statists are Liberals in denial.

Kill yourself

well it did until the tories decide to deliberately ruin it so they could get people to believe the free market will fix it in a few years time

The USSR and China weren't socialism because they didn't have democratic worker control of the MoP, but they did develop rapidly thanks to their planned economies which contained elements of socialism.

The USSR was socialist up until the death of Stalin. After that it truly did become a degenerated worker's state, especially once the Amerifats started meddling with its politics.

is this the state of right-wing b8 now? geez, at least shoot some good propaganda at us.

*Restored

I know, I'm french …

To have something that's worth anything, so Socialism can destroy it.

Fixed it for ya OP

Socialism has been tried, and it works. The USSR was fine before they stayed with state capitalism.

No, it was due to state capitalism, which is still an improvement over the capitalism of today. It's the next logical step.

...

it was on the worker's side because it couldn't be on the bourgeoisie side
bureaucracy is not a class with it's own class interests
until someone can prove the opposite without referencing to the hunger for some abstract "power", I'm not changing my mind

prove to me that the goal of the soviet state was valorisation of capital in itself, and I will admit that it was state capitalist

the bureaucracy was a necessary evil
industrial production requires coordination
to think that soviets had a choice in the matter is to be naive

it is not irrelevant to your claim that bureaucracy appropriated huge amounts of surplus for themselves

workers had the power to halt production, as Novocherkassk incident shows
as the wave of strikes was spreading through the SU, Khruschev was forced to trade food for gold on the international market

just a slang word for the party bureaucracy

in both absolute and relative terms wealth inequality was orders of magnitude lower

simultaneous global revolution is unfeasible

scarcity is not a feature of capitalism
it is a feature of life
it is naive to think that humanity can get rid itself of scarcity
it can only reduce scarcity and mitigate its effects

private property on MOP makes it in principle impossible to compensate for all the surplus labor expended

LIE
you received passport if you decided to go somewhere
just look at the students origin and bureaucracy origin
Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Yeltsin all were from a countryside, as were many others
plus in SU industry there was a chronic deficit of labor, so enterprises were sending hiring agents to the countryside to siphon some labor

and by the mid 70s all citizens of SU were with a passport anyway

kolkhozes were forced to sell a predetermined amount of product at fixed prices to the state
all surplus product belonged to the cooperatives and they could sell it on the kolkhoz markets
how this surplus product was divided between members was an internal affair of kolkhoz

members could leave
but to take one's share you need to sell said share to someone

bullshit

yeah, more like forcefully deported under stalin. gotta purge those minorities

gold for food

China never became predominantly Socialist (unlike USSR).

Hello, reddit. Go away, reddit.

Wolff is neither Marxist, nor Communist, nor even properly Left. We had talked about it more times than I care to remember.

That's not what it means.

It's not.

It's simply in some situations it makes sense to use free market exchange (Capitalism) to make things happen. USSR in 1920s was exactly in this situation: government was extremely weak, farming medieval, and industry non-existent. Their example is used by many opportunists (ex: Deng, Tito) to justify their anti-Socialist position.

Why aren't you using your "Left" AnCap icon?

For fucks sake. Engels literally wrote Anti-Duhring to combat this openly anti-Marxist notion. How can you even suggest this nonsense as "Marxism"?

Just kill yourself.

go suck a nigger cock

The bureaucracy had the final say over the distribution of the productive surplus of soviet society. That is power. When society is composed of one group with control over the entire society's productive surplus, that is a class society.

Like anybody with power, their first task is the maintenance of that power - their intentions don't matter, they can't exercise power they don't have, so keeping the power is necessarily their first priority. This is the real basis of 'class interest'.

I never particularly cared for the term 'state capitalist' personally, since proving it usually requires a whole bunch of complicated theoretical gymnastics. The key question for communists should be 'does this society abolish class?'. It's obvious that soviet society did not do this. Failing to abolish class is a road that will eventually lead you back to capitalism, as it did for the misnamed 'actually existing socialisms'.

On this I actually agree with you, for the most part. However, I note that the bureaucracy was the kind of necessary evil that inevitably undermined the entire enterprise. You don't protect someone from violence by shooting them, how do you expect that putting them in chains will free them?

This is the part I most strongly agree with you on. However, the fact that the bolsheviks were unable to devise a better method of economic organisation than putting the economy under the control of a separate minority class is suggestive.

To put it frankly, if you're just going to put one class in a position of economic power over the productive class, why bother calling it a revolution at all?

I know you're just going to cite improved literacy rates and pig iron production and pretend like that's an answer to my question, but as a radical I'm frankly not interested in the fact that the soviet bureaucracy was very good at running a social-democratic state with gulags. I want to see the wages system, classes, markets, money - all of it - abolished. That's why I'm a communist.

Well shit, by that logic capitalists don't have any power under capitalism either! Of course workers wield all the true power in class society, being the class that actually produces society's wealth. But under capitalism and soviet 'socialism', workers didn't have control over what was done with the wealth they produced. Fighting for that control is the entire fucking point of communism! If your system denies the workers control over their productive surplus, then you've gone badly astray in calling it 'communism'.

People like you who cry about minorities in the USSR are the first ones to autistically screech about nationalism even though almost all these minorities wanted to have their ethno-state.

Did you know what Australia or the US did to its indigenous people? They were pushing them off cliffs to save bullets. Meanwhile in Russia minorities have their language recognized and administrate themselves independently. But y'all don't give a fuck about that because Stalin relocated some meddling horse archers.

Meant to say something more like 'when a society is composed of two groups, one of which has power over the surplus produced by the other'

How were the bureaucrats a class? Did you know how many proletarians held high offices in the USSR? Just because someone delegates you doesn't mean he's part of a class. He doesn't consume the surplus labor for himself: This is the defining aspect of all class societies Marx laid down (Slaveholder, feudal and capitalist).

Compare the amount of people with rural or working class backgrounds in high positions in the USSR with the amount in the USA - or any capitalist nation.

So would elected delegates in Soviets, if your statement were true.

But how do you define those groups? By birth? Qualification? Ethnicity? Wealth?

If you're are telling me the competent and qualified should not delegate the incompetent and unqualified I have to disagree. That doesn't make them a "class".

lol

Who gives a flying fuck what class they were before they took power? You're supposed to be a Marxist, you should understand perfectly well that the maintenance and reproduction of a system demands the adoption of the system's logic. You could be Proley McProleface the proliest prole who ever proled the land and it wouldn't matter one whit, in the same way that it doesn't matter how good a person you are under capitalism.

As a matter of fact, allowing a restricted section of the proletariat to rule over the rest was a fantastic move for ensuring the continuity of the system - after all, every humble proletarian knew that they could easily be replaced with someone more agreeable to the bureaucracy's class interest if they didn't fall in line.

So you're saying that only the 'competent and qualified' (by what metric?) should have the right to determine how the resources we all produce are distributed. If you don't see how that makes the elite who would rule us a 'class', then I really don't know what to say. At that point you're just arguing for an aristocracy (literally, rule by the elite).

idk why MLs even bother, they get BTFO everytime

that was a burden for bureaucracy
post-Stalin tendency in planning was to try and disperse this burden, localize it
from sovnarchozes to semi-independent enterprises
from fetishisation of self-regulating cybernetic systems to fetishisation of "true" markets

bureaucracy too felt that state was repressing them
state became something of a Leviathan, thing in itself
there was a widespread sentiment in SU that everything was owned by no one

that is why bureaucracy so easily let go of its supposed power

but when this group of people can't dispense of surplus in its own interests, it can't be a class
and what independent interests bureaucracy has?

then why did SU fell?

it's not obvious that soviet society could not do it with time

socialism will be associated with SU no matter how many times leftcoms screech about the "true" definition of socialism

I don't see inevitability
all I see is wasted opportunities and human factor

bolsheviks were not magicians
there are material constraints you have to work with

in an instant?

I'm not against this control
but with libertarian lefties it usually amounts to cooperative market economy
and this kind of worker control in my book is no better than soviet bureaucracy control

So let's play your game and assume that there was a system in place which makes you a power-hungry faggot. That still doesn't make them a class. Class is defined through the transmission of power to another member of the same class, perpetuating the system. In capitalism these are property rights which are passed in to your children or another class member with capital. Plus the fact the bureaucrats didn't extract surplus value which you conveniently ignored.

Which is? To stay in power, they'd need to be efficient and are responsible to the workers in whatever firm they were responsible for.

In the long term, everybody should be competent. But obviously this wasn't the case in the USSR, so they'd need to rely on a meritocracy. Socialism doesn't mean everybody is equal. It means equal chances and opportunities. Guess why Maoist China never had as much success as the USSR: Because they had decentralized incompetent planning, mob rule, while the USSR had the Gosplan, a centralized think tank where the smartest people of the country planned the economy.

Bullshit. Aristocracy is hereditary.

Yeah if you just throw an utopian dream at people and complain about the slightest deviation irl you truly BTFO someone.