What are some myths about the Soviet Union that need de-bunking?

What are some myths about the Soviet Union that need de-bunking?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet–Afghan_War
youtu.be/AgX92v0VNWI
marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/
ironmarch.org/index.php?/topic/19-national-makeup-of-the-soviet-regime/
ciml.250x.com/archive/trotskyism.html
akarlin.com/2012/06/ayn-stalin/
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch14.htm
marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-5/paa.htm
enverhoxha.ru/Archive_of_books/English/enver_hoxha_reflections_on_china_volume_I_eng.pdf
enverhoxha.ru/Archive_of_books/English/enver_hoxha_reflections_on_china_volume_II_eng.pdf
marxists.org/reference/archive/hoxha/works/1976/khruschevites/09.htm
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/supp.htm
spiralofdialectic.blogspot.com/2017/06/robber-barons-after-all.html
twitter.com/AnonBabble

That it was socialist or communist in any form.

Holodomor. Also this foolishness about being run by Zionistas.

That it was a good place to live.

That people were "oppressed" after Stalin.

that it was a one man dictatorship where Stalin had absolute power. There was constant infighting among the bolsheviks.

That people in the US had a higher per capita income over Soviet citizens.

That they invaded Afghanistan. Not even a tankie but they did not invade Afghanistan.

That it was democratic in any meaningful way.

All this bullshit.

That shit leftcom memes like this bear any relation to historical reality.

That's an accurate picture, though.

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This. There was not a single Soviet citizen in Afghanistan at the time.

elaborate

no it was not

I am just going to put up a wall to keep my citizens trapped under my system of government, nothing oppressive about that at all

It more or less was, Stalin had some yes men. If I am wrong, please give me some revisionism

They did, if not throw some data at me

yes they did
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet–Afghan_War

Sure sounds like an invasion.

ok, so it is basically their Vietnam

The whole conspiracy stuff. Trotsky and his faction were the only Zionists and Stalin stopped them.

The main difference is that Afghanistan wasn't set up as a puppet state decades before.

But yes you are correct, the US did not invade South Vietnam but did invade North Vietnam. Though South Vietnam was a puppet government unlike Afghanistan.

lol basically everyone except good boy dindu nuffin Stalin was a kike

That there was a black market.

No. There were some but not all.

Thar Marxist scheme of revolution presupposes a degree of bourgeois development that Marxists consider progressive and welcome, which wasn't present in Russia

That the Leninists who thought they could create those from above deviated from many, if not most Marxists of their time

That they too actually understood this necessity and planned to keep the NEP for decades (even Trotsky) but their actions were often reaction to circumstances and events beyond their control instead of an articulation of political philosophy

That the crisis in agriculture that pushed Stalin to collectivization started when market relations and private property dominated this sector of the economy

That even after Stalin they perceived themselves as "building Socialism", and never claimed to have reached a stage that could be describe as Communist

There are probably more prisoners in the US right now than there has ever been under Stalin

Stalin and his allies were constantly complaining about factionalism within the USSR. During the great purges it was lower tier party official and individual soldiers who ignored orders from Moscow and escalated the killings even after the Communist party ordered them to stop. The purges themselves were mainly done wouldn't have been necessary if Stalin had absolute power-they were done as a way to eliminate competing factions within the bureaucracy and even that didn't work because of how huge and intricate the bureaucracy was.

First point: Lenin, Stalin, and Hoxha did not believe that the more the government does stuff the more socialist it is. They all distinguished between nationalization under a bourgeois state and nationalization under a proletarian state. Secondly, even under a proletarian state they distinguished between collective ownership, state-ownership and true public ownership of property.

>As very lengthy experience has already proved, state capitalism is supported and developed by the bourgeoisie, not to create the foundations of socialist society, (…), but to strengthen the foundations of capitalist society, of its bourgeois state, in order to exploit and oppress the working people more. Those who run the «public sector» are not the representatives of the workers, but the men of big capital, those who have the reins of the whole economy and the state in their hands. The social position of the worker in the enterprises of the «public sector» is no different from that of the worker in the private sector; his relationship to the means of production, to the economic management of the enterprise, the policy of investments, pay, etc., is the same. The bourgeois state, i.e., the bourgeoisie, appropriates the profit of these enterprises.-Hoxha Eurocommunism is anticommunism

As Stalin in Economic Problems of the Socialism in the USSR pointed out the overall trend was towards making things more and more owned publicly-owned and not mere state-ownership/control.

2. So do most normal people who read Marx. Marx and Engels clearly did not expect society to leap into full-communism over night:

-t. Engels

-t. Marx

Kinda sounds like they envisioned a transitional society to me fam and the Bolsheviks did their best to live up to their vision within the possibilities presented by the material conditions of the time.

3. Broken clocks are right twice a day and its literally the best example of a DotP in history. To not uphold the positive experiences of this history is historical idealism and amounts to trying to reinvent the wheel when there are good lessons to be learned from the Russian experience. .

4. Literally no one ever says this.

leftcoms BTFO

And we're done here.

Hahahahahahahaha

Almost idpol-tier; you could at least be honest and call yourself a Marxian socdem. Here's some advice if you're going to be such a reformist: at least make sure that such a stage of proletarian capitalism is removed before power accumulation leads to a rightwards shift. (Such shifts have occurred in virtually every ML state, regardless of the nature of bourgeois actions against such states. This is actually what I believe to be the true essence of the liberals' 'human nature' argument.)

People keep thinking it was socialist.
It was not. It was counter revolutionary even.

None of them, all Cold war era accusations against the USSR have been refuted and debunked

Especially the wackadoodle claim that they're socialists or even leftists in any way.

Correct, it stopped being socialist after 1953.

If you're really desperate for a socialist society to have existed recently then sure I can see how someone would compromise like that.

People think everybody was paid the same, if anything pay differentials between unskilled, management and higher skilled jobs was worse than in the West typically.

Read a history book which isn't a theory text form Raya Dunayevskaya. Even liberal historians don't deny that mutual aid and bottom-up planning did exist in the USSR. By 1928, every eleventh citizen of the USSR was part of a elected committee or Soviet, participating in economic allocation.

I'm missing the argument there. Marx said himself that in a transitional society there would still be limitations, as it just emerged out of revolution (and not reform by the way)

How was it capitalism?

divorcing ML realpolitik from some abstract idea of socialism is idealistic nonsense. its not good historical materialism. its literally feels over reals, and by reals i mean real actual history. You are no better than those ancaps with their muh not real crapitalism
feels over reals
liberal tier argument. Economic systems in the modern era are GLOBAL. its like libs claiming socialism has been tried 50 million times and therefore all socialism is bad, when all those systems were basically the same ML system copypastaed from the soviet union.

Source for this? I thought USSR's gini was no worse than European welfare states at the time

which facebook page posted this?
glad it's spreading (I made it)

Throw yourself off a cliff, sectarian sinner.

Popularizing anti-left bullshit is not helping. I'm not spending my time making agitprop pieces against Anarchists because I actually want a revolution

Ruzzians haxoring elections and shit…


Every country hacks other countries. And the Russians are nowhere near as well funded as the Chinese or Americans.

This

Yeah the only REAL socialist country is the land of equestrian.

You realized that the USSR stopped existing after 1991, right? You realize that the Russian Federation is a different country, right?

What

Wordfilter

The Soviet Union had the highest standard of living at the time along with having the most civil liberties of any nation. There are plenty of sources for you to find out.

Also, the GDP per capita of the USSR was second only to the US after World War II - with their country being completely devastated by the war.

youtu.be/AgX92v0VNWI

Here is some footage of the USSR under Stalin. This was only two years after the war. Truly a hellhole, right?!

Its still the same people in the same area of the planet.

that the soviet union was socialist

Epic meme

You probably should start making anti-anarchist memes to disrupt the anarchist-leftcom hive mind consensus on Holla Forums

lel next you will claim the natonaI socialists weren't socialist.

read Marx

Thanks for the reminder; I remember reading parts of Pat Sloan's Soviet Democracy though I'm still not sure if proletarians had direct control over resource distribution and if that power led to individual corruption. I'm still not sold on the ML idea because of its tendency to stagnate (unless it can overcome proletarian capitalism); I get the feeling that your latter comments didn't acknowledge the spoilers.

From what I know, surplus was extracted and distributed with by way of a wage labour system. The socialist system is quite different with no law of value in operation and direct control over resource distribution for the majority of citizens being an approximation (Marx did not wish to hypothesise; I contend with this to a great degree).


How will the MLs stop unequal accumulation of power and avoid the case of a splitting proletariat?


Nigger please, you'll have to do a lot better than that. I'm comparing some $$$tankies$$$ to identity-obsessed liberals because they seem to think that capitalism with a proletarian is always run in the interests of proletarians with no divergence of preferences across the hierarchy of power.


Yes, I understand that ML societies have been battered by scarcity and adversity from their origins but they still grew to be immensely successful - enough to worry the bourgeois states! My point still stands: there is nothing inherently within ML praxis to address the discrepancies in power accumulation. If there is, then why wasn't it followed, leading to anti-imperialism without the socialism and eventual collapse of the social-democratic state?

*with a proletarian face

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this tbh

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Without the collectivism of socialism Hitler wouldnt have been able to round up the Jews or get people to betray them etc.

That's some spicy shitpost.

marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/

Hmm that is the type of delusional rhetoric that only an ultra rich person who has never experienced real life would hold.

I like Wilde but like marx he has no perspective on ordinary people.

My problem with tankies is that they perpetuate the stereotype that people have of communists: USSR and Stalin apologists.
Also, and I'm not a marxist, but I agree with leftcoms when they say you revise Marx and Lenin yet accuse others of revisionism. Some examples:

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stop using the anfem flag, you're not subtle enough for it
you've been trying to push this "holocaust was collectivist and thus socialist lol" bullshit for a few days already

Yeah it's no wonder that anarchism is so fucking toothless these days.

leftcom, do you remember that time marx mentioned how socialism and communism were different?
me neither


face it, you just like the soviet aesthetic

This is why leftcoms are a fucking joke. You should have read dozens and dozens, if not hundreds, of books on Soviet history if you want to find out the truth about it. Leftcoms can talk shit about Grover Furr all day long but in the end they'll never do the kind of exhausting research that he does checking the footnotes of anti-communist books, translating aforementioned sources into English for the first time, stay up to date on the latest developments in sovietology and the work of various scholars in it and last but certainly not least–physically go to the Soviet archives in Russia and analyze what's there.

Sure you have your Dunayevskaya, Bordiga, and Duave but you can't really even check whether anything those theory nerds wrote is accurate because you're all history brainlets.

Somehow it was nothing but red capitalism despite the fact it had there was no way to privately accumulate capital and income inequality was capped to a very-low level, lower then the most egalitarian social democracies and most bourgeois economists focus on income and not wealth inequality which is always far-greater. If there are not capitalists or bosses paying themselves massive wages to compensate for the inability to take profit directly then how was their a Soviet capitalist class under Stalin? If there was no capitalist class then what social agent was behind this "red capitalism" as Marx's class theory/analysis is integral to his analysis of capital and capitalism as a mode of production. How was there capitalism when there was practically no market and the economy was planned? How could capitalism exist in the USSR under Stalin without having a business cycle?

Btw the preferred Soviet method of compensation where it was applicable was actually piece-work to avoid the pitfalls of wage-labor where you make more and more but your pay doesn't budge. The vast majority of the peasants and rural workers were actually in cooperatives and not state-owned farms even though the state was really the sole buyer so I don't see how le sdade gapitalism applies there.

Marx also found the whole "worker must get back everything he puts in" as a fallacious as can be seen in the Gotha program since expansion, let alone maintenance, of socially-produced goods could not occur in that situation.

Also, the law of value is not specific to capitalism as Engels pointed in the supplement to Volume 3. Stalin dealt with this issue rather well in Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR the Soviet Union was not yet at the point where they could abolish the law of value but he maintained that nonetheless it would be done.

So, how was the Soviet Union under Stalin not "the lower phase of communism" that Marx spoke of?

I was expecting a Marxist analysis and not an anarchist one. Engels BTFO the whole "power" argument in Anti-Duhring; but let me say that the whole thing about democratic centralism is designed to check that. Likewise, the Khrushchev clique killed Stalin and overthrew party centralism via a coup d'etat so what happened next was not the natural conclusion of Leninism.

Yes, I know "what about the reasons behind the coup" but Hoxha already answered that a labor aristocracy had slowly taken form in the Soviet Union for reasons that were not completely preventable at the time. In historical reality Stalin was an enemy of those elements and not their booster as Trotsky claimed.

No U.


I will continue to do so until someone can effectively counter my point.

Lenin was Jewish coming from the "Blank" (common hoax)
Stalin's name means "Son of a Jew" (surprisingly popular, but not on par of Lenin's)
Bolsheviks were primarly jews, like their Bavarian/Hungarian counterparts
Disproved by: Stalin, read a study by Russian Fascist on the ethnic makeup of USSR regime: ironmarch.org/index.php?/topic/19-national-makeup-of-the-soviet-regime/
Holodomor was planned as the ethnic genocide of the khohkols
Holodohoax even happened in the first instance
Number of the khokhols have DOUBLED under Stalin's reign, meanwhile the Poles Banderists bands have ruthlessly (comparable to Ustashe) killed have never returned there and country still don't have it's notable Polish minority like Belarus or Lithuania, another common myth with that is that the Soviets have expulsed Poles from the lands annexed into the USSR, which you can see by so many of them still living there to be not true
GULAG (it's an acronym) were started by Stalin
No, they existed under Lenin and as far as Imperial times
Lenin somehow promoted homosexual propaganda and behaviour
Pile of bullcrap and so far most common lie spread by SJWs, it was "made legal" when all Imperial laws were simply dismantled and only because of that reason. However Lenin told CheKa to look at the sexual deviants and deal with them the same way they did with the "free love" types. When Stalin finally finalised the constitution such behaviour was criminalised officially.
Trotsky was an appointed successor of Lenin
Ho boy, Lenin thought of Trotsky pretty low, I'd post it in English but I've lost my translation of the sources.

ciml.250x.com/archive/trotskyism.html

Actually, I've used his analysis in countless arguments against liberals and I know that Stalin was a democrat. 'At least he tried' is not a valid excuse, though. Theory should be able to deal with possible inadequacies, whether retrospectively or not - otherwise the 'it doesn't work on paper' crowd starts screeching.


…no, I'm the 'decentralised resource distribution networks' user.


I didn't deny that. However, on the subject of Gini coeffcients:

akarlin.com/2012/06/ayn-stalin/

…furthermore, income distribution is not the same as distribution of power, let alone accumulation of power.


There was no bourgeois capitalism but proletarian capitalism. I thought that you had nuked my argument until I found this.

That does not mean that the USSR was bad at all; I take a very contrary view. My issue is its stagnation.


If you're so well-read, explain where he nukes the argument regarding power accumulation. I think you need to read a bit of Stirner to understand the whole deal with just how quickly it can manifest itself with an individual who has such a mindset.

Yeah dude. It's alright that it was a horribly repressive dictatorship of the party, because at least Stalin didn't have absolute power. He had to share with others of his rulling class.

Nice

nobody here actually identifies as "collectivist" or sees left-right politics as a dichotomy between "collectivism" and "individualism", it's just a slur that ancaps use
similarly, trickle down economics aren't a real thing, it's what brainlets refer to when they mean supply side economics

back to /r/anarcho_capitalism

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Maybe Pat Sloan's Soviet Democracy would be a good read; I (ironically enough) was the first to bring it up in this thread.

Fair enough. I may have underestimated you typically Leftcoms are complete history brainlets, apologies.

Never really said you were I just like to post that pic to trigger any Bordigists that might be lurking.
What do you think about the experiences of Chinese decentralized planning under Mao? I think it showed that it leads to capitalism much faster then the Stalinist ML model but that's just me.

That shit is basically just a blogpost; I'd read Scheidel's The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the 21st century he's by far the most systematic, fair-minded and thorough bourgeois scholar on the subject so far–I took the screens on income inequality from his book btw.

Likewise, even Karlin admits that inequality wasn't all that high because private enterprise was banned–a fact that seems to be lost on most bourgeois scholars who focus only on income inequality. Even the most egalitarian Western social democracies had great inequities in wealth if not exactly income inequality and that's conveniently erasing undeclared income, organized crime, wealth processed through tax havens, black funds/government corruption within the state which is immense in the United States for example.

Marlin can only maintain that Western social democracies were more egalitarian by taking bourgeois statistics there at face-value and erasing the issue of wealth inequality. As many other scholars have noted before there were many correctives and measures targeting those in the upper-soviet income precisely so they wouldn't evolve into a new capitalist class. Maybe it was too little too late but you can't say that a lesson wasn't learned–Hoxha's Albania had the lowest income inequality in the world at 2:1 meaning those at the top made twice as much as the lowest earners.

My own research on wealth inequality during the Keynesian compromise in the USA shows that the 1% was actually as rich or richer then the oligarchs today when you measure what the real gold value of their fortunes were. Likewise, tax avoidance of a multiplicity of kinds was endemic at the time.


Really just read the whole thing because its a complete demolition job of all the idealism about the role of "force" and "power" in history. You'll never be able to read something from le french aids man or theory from anarchists with a straight face again.
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch14.htm

What would you say is the primary dichotomy between left and right then? Both in your view personally and the consensus here on Holla Forums?

Sidenote: I'd say if you're going to take the line of criticizing income inequality in the Soviet Union it would probably best to do a Furr and criticize Marx & Engels too for being ambiguous about it and even accepting of it in their conception of the "lower phase of communism"

I don't think Marx and Engels were wrong here because the fact a skilled welder gets paid more then a bus-boy isn't exactly le boor-zhwa-zee oppression. There probably is something to Furr's view though but I doubt it could be avoided due to the material conditions of the time; the alternative was voluntarism and the Cultural Revolution and the Great Leap showed how disastrous that could be.

Sure, you can say that the USSR stagnated but it wasn't really in the economic sense that it stagnated or even the scientific sense (there were great discoveries in the 30s-50s) but really in the ideological sense. We leninists have been trying to diagnose this problem–Stalin's last work was actually considered ultra-left by the Soviet nomenklatura after Khrushchev's rise to power.

The problem is everyone has been eager to throw the baby out with the bathwater and essentially those revisionist currents that lost respectability in the workers movement in the early 20th century regained their power. Even the Soviet "Leninists" of Khrushchev and the gang weren't really Leninists and were closer to Titoists or Bukharinists in their approach.

Perhaps the greatest betrayal to the world communist movement came from Mao who posed as a Stalinist but was really a bizarre anti-Marxist eclectic and that turned a lot of people off from serious communist praxis.

I'd say we Hoxhaists are actually closer to you leftcoms then you might think ironically enough.

Why is it exactly Hoxha had such bad beef with Mao?

Not him but historically the left-right dichotomy is anti-pro hierarchy

Left-right dichotomy is a shitty meme from the times of French Revolution, moving to the political compass(which is still flawed in many ways) would be a large improvement.

because Mao was a filthy revisionist
he also was in bed with US

Basically, the Chinese tried to turn Albania into a Chinese colony in the same manner that they tried to turn Cambodia into a Chinese colony under the Khmer Rogue: marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-5/paa.htm

That was the final breaking point, the Albanians had always had ideological differences with the Chinese and had hoped the Chinese would correct those differences but they never did. In 1973 they were forced to denounce publicly Mao's meeting with Nixon unlike most Maoists today, Hoxha saw the Dengist turn as being rooted in Mao Zedong thought rather then a deviation from it.

I would read his reflections on China for better insights into this conflict:
enverhoxha.ru/Archive_of_books/English/enver_hoxha_reflections_on_china_volume_I_eng.pdf
enverhoxha.ru/Archive_of_books/English/enver_hoxha_reflections_on_china_volume_II_eng.pdf

Also this chapter of The Khruschevites:
marxists.org/reference/archive/hoxha/works/1976/khruschevites/09.htm

Thank you. I'm still a history brainlet.

Nat Soc? More like Not Soc!!!! Do you guys see what I did there?

That wasn't funny even if we assume you're on 10th layer of irony.

Layers of irony? Stay spooked

It's actually quite possible.

how many layers of irony was the person who made this on

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boi

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It would be nice if everybody would do this.

Disagree internally, stand as a united front externally.

I'll begin with the biggest myths first.

1. That porn/hentai was illegal, and carried legal penalties with it

FALSE

2. Private gun ownership was outlawed

FALSE

3.Marijuana was illegal

FALSE

4.Da gubmit controlled everything and nobody had freedumbs :(

FALSE

5. The soviet government had plans to censor the internet

FALSE

6. The invasion of Afghanistan was "literally thier Vietnam", and was wrong.

FALSE

Don't we all do that, counting Holla Forums as internal. Seen at least 3 memes on Holla Forums FB pages to that effect over the last year

I agree. I cringe whenever I see anarchists use legit anti-communist propaganda and spread lies about the Holodomor or how many people died in the gulags, or try to peddle idealist nonsense about how the USSR was run by "evil people", as if people like Stalin govern in a vacuum outside of material conditions of the time.

This, USSR was essentially the closest thing social democracy got to being socialism not actual socialism itself, but that doesn't change that there were tons of lies spread about it. When I see Left-Wing Anticommunism in action I want to puke.

We need to form a new narrative of the USSR rooted in facts so that we can see what worked and what didn't and use it in a positive way.


Leftcoms are more annoying than anarkiddies

You ever noticed how many american ANTIFA protesters use the iron front symbol? These kinda people are the biggest obstacle to a communist movement.

ftfy

Value form transcends capitalism though. I never really got this Leftcom argument that value form would inherently be capitalist.

I mean, with the same mental acrobatics you could say that the Roman Empire, medieval France or China under the Ming Dynasty was capitalist - this is actually what AnCaps claim. I mean the existence of value form sure as hell can't exist in communism, but ML would claim that communism has ever been achieved.

has never*

Decentralisation in the Maoist model seems to suffer from something which I think will not be as great a problem today. My idea is for a 'federal' state to supply raw materials while the 'sub-states' (and perhaps even individuals) underneath it use 3D printer. Libre hardware will be key in the construction of such a society.


I'll screencap and booru that for future use (and I'll need sources to back that up since that'll be buried under mountains of bourgeois 'research'), though I don't believe that equality is always useful for the construction of socialism. Cockshott and Cottrell didn't shy from implementing wage differentials in their hypothetical transitory system.


All that I'm getting from what you've pasted is that historically-speaking, 'private property' (as Engels defines it) isn't the source of unequal power accumulation but that source is instead production for exchange. None of this damages my argument regarding unequal accumulation of power; my argument is that the ML systems didn't remedy the problem.


EPSU?

>In our country, the sphere of operation of the law of value extends, first of all, to commodity circulation, to the ex-change of commodities through purchase and sale, the ex-change, chiefly, of articles of personal consumption. Here, in this sphere, the law of value preserves, within certain limits, of course, the function of a regulator.


>Is this a good thing? It is not a bad thing. Under present conditions, it really is not a bad thing, since it trains our business executives to conduct production on rational lines and disciplines them. It is not a bad thing because it teaches our executives to count production magnitudes, to count them accurately, and also to calculate the real things in production precisely, and not to talk nonsense about "approximate figures," spun out of thin air. It is not a bad thing because it teaches our executives to look for, find and utilise hidden reserves latent in production, and not to trample them under-foot. It is not a bad thing because it teaches our executives systematically to improve methods of production, to lower production costs, to practise cost accounting, and to make their enterprises pay. It is a good practical school which accelerates the development of our executive personnel and their growth into genuine leaders of socialist production at the present stage of development.

I'm not seeing the ultraleftism, though here Koba appears to be very pragmatic in his reasoning.


Bingo. Such ideological failures led to the rightwards swing; the system was left unchecked and allowed Yeltsin and company to justify a coup (with little else to justify it).

I'll address an earlier point, too:


My analysis includes social programs; I've seen such a trick being used to defend the USSR's image.

I also meant to post for .

I've never heard of this argument before as you present it: the point is used to discern the end goals of social democrats from those of communists AFAIK.

The value form is meant to be abolished after it is no longer as useful as an alternative.

The way I understand it is it isn't so much the hardware as it is the fact that big computer network can do everything a series of decentralized networks can do but not vice-versa.

There will still be places with greater or lesser amounts of resources under communism, its necessary to manage the trade that occurs between these regions or else we will see the return of market-relations. That's what I take away from the failures of the Maoist model they moved back towards the open market and land-rent in the late 50s/early 60s until Mao unleashed the GPCR autism.

>I'll screencap and booru that for future use
Thanks, what will be the tag on the booru?

Have you read the whole thing? He was clearly proposing to inaugurate a shift towards a higher-political economy in the USSR and not a higher-stage of technocracy based on what had already been done in the 30s. Again, according to Furr at least, that was one Soviet interpretation of it and unsurprisingly then it was take out of print after Stalin's death.

Power flows from the economics of a society and not vice-versa. So, I don't understand what you mean by unequal accumulation of power; if there is economic inequality, there will be inequities in the realm of "power" and "force" but economics is absolutely dominant and as I've said there were techniques to check the problems of both inequality of power and force. The Soviet state actually had an elaborate checks and balances/progressive legal system. I'm not sure what more could be done passing another law or incrementally making your propaganda more radical doesn't do anything if you can't carry that over into the material conditions.

Sure, I think its likely that the necessity of dealing with fascism and making deals with the Western allies of necessity led to some ideological laxity. But throughout the history of the Bolshevik party from the 1900s to the 1930s they were purifying the party and purging anti-Marxist lines propagated by so-called socialists. They were the most advanced in the world in this respect and only Hoxha's Albania attained a higher realm of consciousness in this sphere because there was a more extended ideological battle with modern revisionism. Stalin was the one who started this battle when he had Yugoslavia expelled from Cominform and if Furr (along with other bourgeois scholars) were right he was gearing up for another wave of ideological struggle. For instance, in the 40s and 50s he had liberal economists were shot, those involved in economic sabotage in attempting to liberalize railway shipping were put to justice, there were plans to deal with residual America/Zionist influence in the USSR that came about during WWII etc. The Comintern was broken up precisely because it had drunken too deeply from social demcoratism in the anti-fascist struggle; the new Cominform was initially set up only with parties Stalin was convinced had a Bolshevik line.

We'll never know about what didn't happen but I believe if Stalin had lived (and he was poisoned as we now know) then he would've struggled for a higher phase of socialism and socialist ideology. Whether he would've succeeded is another question.

It's in the supplement to volume 3 that Engels BTFO's some Italian professor who was convinced law of value only applied to capitalism: marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/supp.htm

He held that law of value would was transhistorical across systems of commodity production and would hold good as long as commodity production held good. Stalin freely admitted that the USSR was in a lower-phase of communism where commodity production still existed but shows that the way law of value worked in the USSR is not the same as under capitalism.

/thread

Part of my assertion is the result of original research. Feel free to take a look at what I've written on the subject, although be warned it is US-centric:
spiralofdialectic.blogspot.com/2017/06/robber-barons-after-all.html

Will those with the most power not change the economy to suit their goals regardless of their nature?

Also, when I was asking about the counterargument made by , I was saying that I had never heard of any leftcom using the argument which they're knocking down.

Finally, the slightly-edited screencap (pic related) has the 'ussr' and 'Holla Forums' tags on the booru.

That it was state capitalist

The difference between SocDems and MLs is the praxis, not the end goal. Even the current neoliberal SocDems have communism as their end goal in their manifestos. I believe the SPD in Germany only recently removed that notion because some liberals got spooked about it. The difference is that MLs want to achieve communism through revolutionary struggle, to go to a transitional form of first-stage communism directly (what is now commonly known as socialism). When people say that ML states were "Social Democracies at the barrel of a gun" they are making a grave mistake, as Social Democracy is defined by the absence of revolutionary momentum.

I'd argue that this is dictated by material conditions only. The USSR under Stalin pushed towards use value where it was possible. The main reason why value couldn't be abolished was because that the world was still capitalist. If you're competing with capitalist countries, it is impossible not to attribute exchange value to things; that doesn't mean that exchange value was the dominating factor when it comes to the Soviet mode of production, if you look at how low the production for export commodities were under Stalin. Obviously that changed when revisionists turned Eastern Europe into a sweatshop for the West in the 70s. Almost all IKEA furniture was produced in the GDR in Europe. That is personally my biggest issue with the GDR from a socialist perspective.

As a recommendation, the American journalist John Scott who worked at the Magnitogorsk steel factory in the 30s portrays very well how people were producing for use and not for exchange. I sadly don't have a pdf. He's a liberal and later worked for the CIA so he's definitely a critical source - he describes how workers all said that they were working for the future of humanity, and not to generate exchange value. They even physically removed managers who were thinking in profits.


True, and they might succeed in the long term, but eventually radical changing economics will force the ruling class to step down. This can be seen very clearly in the transition from feudalism to capitalism. I also wrote a small paper once about how feudalism was entirely caused by changing material conditions and nothing else. Basically, after the fall of Rome, the roads went to shit everywhere. Therefore, locally operating mounted gangs of warlords where starting to extracting surplus value from the peasents - the old ruling class (church and imperialist bureaucracy) condemned such actions at first but it turned out that with the rotting infrastructure, they couldn't stop this from happening. Eventually the church decided to legitimize these thugs, giving them a code of chivalry, making them good Christians (the word miles changed from meaning "soldier of god" to "warrior") and the royalty officially leased them the land which they were de facto already occupying: This is how knights and feudal lords were created. As time goes on, the culture of chivalry (superstructure enforced by the material conditions of feudalism) even penetrated the spheres of royalty and church itself - by 1200, you can see Kings participating in jousting and bishops riding into battle with heavy armor.

This is a beautiful example of Dialectical Materialism.

It seems that what he's saying is that the law of value (or some approximation) holds wherever there is commodity exchange, and that as commodity production becomes more generalized, the law of value has becomes more and more accurate. However, it is only capitalism that is ruled by the law of value, since it is characterized by generalized commodity production and production for exchange.

But doesn't this contradict Marx? Commodity production goes hand in hand with commodity exchange (after all, a product is only a commodity if it is brought to the market to be exchanged), but there is no commodity exchange in any phase of communism (at least according to Marx).

E.g.
>Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of production, the producers do not exchange their products; just as little does the labour employed on the products appear here as the value of these products
-Critique of the Gotha Programme

There is a part where one might interpret him as saying there is still a "law of value" of sorts:
But I do not think this really supports that assertion. As he notes, he is hypothesizing that in early communism, distribution will be based on a sort of labor-proportional system, and so it will resemble commodity exchange in that way (although there will be no commodity exchange). However, under capitalism, because commodities are exchanged with each other, labor values are only indirectly expressed (they are social averages of labor time), and this is what leads to the disciplining of labor by the law of value. This is fundamentally different from what Marx describes will occur under communism.

Whether one calls the distribution process of early communism "the law of value" is not really important. The key question is to what extent commodity production and exchange, wage-labor, and capital existed and were developing in the USSR.

It seems like literally every leftcom on Holla Forums whether the self-appointed title is appropriate or not argues that the USSR was capitalist because of the law o value.

Will get back to you later. I'm slaving for Porky rn

A rogue ruling class will grow reactionary and prevent such changes unless there is autonomy and power lower down in the hierarchy. An intelligent bourgeoisie would actually anticipate and assimilate most if not all progressive measures into the expansion of capital, which is itself a process of expansion.


This is something which I understand, hence the need for a worldwide revolution, even if it starts within a single country.


Definitely a liberal from the initial looks of things; which work(s) are you recommending?


…the left-communist position is one of having 'genuine proletarian' momentum without a transitory stage, thus Leninists and MLs are seen as radicalised socdems if I'm reading it right.