He fucked everything up

...

This has been debunked before

whats the point of competition if we're slaves?

This is no refutation, point me to the page that denies fact of French investment in Russian railways and factories in Kiev,Moscow and st.petersburg?

Whatever.

What the point if I don't own my labor?

The strongest Egoist.
youtu.be/UDunWfMHOSk

finalfantasy.wikia.com/wiki/Squall_Leonhart/Dissidia/Quotes

More importantly: the first modern adaptation of a planned economy, however flawed.

Social, artistic, economic, scientific, technological progress is nice (and your "critics" just took a dump on the most fruitful period in human history like we have fucking abundance of any of these right now) but you won't convince idealist fucktards who pose as holier than thou communists with facts that aren't exclusively commie-related.

Anybody ITT that denies that a planned economy is in the exclusive domain of communism is denying facts. Anybody ITT that shits on 70 years of communist experimenting without nuance and thinks that there aren't hundreds of lessons to be learned isn't a comrade but an ignorant child having a hissy fit.

Lenin was more to blame. Stalin wouldn't have come into power without Lenin's counter-revolutionary policies.

Name 5.

no there is already a short book on that, but I'll leave the most important one
1. State owning the product of the worker's labor

...

Marx isn't sacred and he didn't create socialism or communism.
His analysis in Das Kapital is great but I don't take his ideology. Oh and btw the USSR is not what he wanted either.

"Marxists" everybody.

Historic revisionism for the defense of idealism should always be fought against.

Workers ARE the state

fuck off hahahahah

No, they were clearly not. Thats the turth sorry to bust your ideology bubble.

ML proved to the world that its doomed to fail.

It is. Society needs that surplus value to function, even in socialist state there is still need for "common funds".

When the anarchist revolution comes you can own the fruits of your labour for 3 months until it falls to imperialism

Yes they were, its even in the name "Soviet Union"

states are expressions of class rule, M-Ls and Trots consider the SU a rule by the proletarian class, a dictatorship of the proletariat
proving that the rulers were in fact bourgeois or some other class-category is difficult. you can't make the soviet nomenklatura into the new ruling class without bending the marxist theory of classes quite a bit, even if the nomenklatura did enjoy concrete benefits and priviledges

Flawless logic you have there

Well its in the name, are you implying they werent?

Marx wasn't in the business of creating ideologies but destroying them. Communism isn't an ideology – Marxism can be turned into one.

That's not how history works, tho. You sure like Dats Kapitalz, hue!

who are you quoting?

This is incredibly naive, tho. Are you going to live in a commune in your anarchist dreamland? If so, portion of your labor will have to be allocated to supplying those who can't produce (children, the sick, etc.) and to maintaining the commonly used infrastructure, to development of the means of prod, and so on.

Ofc, you can always be a primitivist and burn down everything in your angst.

Even if they came from the workers the system wasn't democratic and a separate managerial clique emerged. It would be really pushing it to call them a distinct class, though.

Again, since this repeated like a fucking mantra that even pro-Stalinists seem to buy it:

There was no emergance of a so-called "managerial bureaucratic class in the USSR before the reintroduction of the profit motive'''

"Stalinist bureaucracy" is a fucking meme invented by Trotsky, it's vague, it doesn't describe anything, it's sourceless. When you say that Stalinist USSR wasn't a proletarian democracy (because, according to sources and the 1936 constitution it was) you need to prove it. Tip: The fact that there were purges doesn't prove that. Stalin didn't receive a report outside of Moscow for three months in the middle of the collectivization movement.

The system doesnt have to be democratic to shape workers will into policies or statecraft

Not true. Nicholas the 2nd reversal of the reforms of his grandfather and WW1 prevented this.

Sure. Sub-optimal, but sure.

Wew. If I aim at understanding the period and look beyond the memes am I to be called one?

>Even if they came from the workers the system wasn't democratic and a separate managerial clique emerged. It would be really pushing it to call them a distinct class, though.
Those who wield power are separated from those who don't. How this is institutionalized is a completely different issue (I think it can be done right).

Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Bukharin (etc.) all in unison blamed the fucking bureaucracy from the very beginning. It's something they couldn't tackle, it's something they sometimes couldn't control, and when they could, it was too abiding and not creative enough to be autonomous. They headed the bureaucracy but it was a head that constantly disavowed its own body.

A constitution is just a constitution, a piece of paper, meaningless in a vacuum. What makes it breath life is the social and economic institutions which could act in accordance with it, around it, against it, etc. I believe there are plenty of examples for all three cases in the USSR.

I agree, but they increasingly took on a different character than the original revolutionary terror: it became a defensive war against pretty much everybody (from the politburo to party members to bureaucrats to workers to peasants), signalling a system that just couldn't bring about what it aimed to do.

libgen.io/book/index.php?md5=A87ECBB483BF27F182F31626527035A6

It probably has something to do with their perception and lack of knowledge about the functions of the USSR's planned economy under Stalin.

I worded it poorly. I'm saying that many people who even have an overall positive view of Stalin decide to defend the Trotskyst caricature of him.
I agree. I don't even think the Apparatchiks of the late revisionist USSR should be called a "class" because it really is just an economic category. My point was that what really caused the rise of this seperate, alienating group was the reintroduction of the profit motive by the Kosgyn Reforms. As production gets more volatile, a new group of allocators and managers are required to compromise between production for exchange and state plan. The planned economy under Stalin almost entirely ignored profitability and produced for use. There really wasn't that much bureaucracy as Trotsky makes you believe, it was very much worker controlled.
ia800308.us.archive.org/14/items/ManAndPlanInSovietEconomy/Man and Plan in Soviet Economy.pdf
True, I agree, but then in the end I think the term bureaucracy was never really logically coherently defined. It almost appears like a boogeyman to me. Someone is working for the state in a managerial position? That doesn't make him a bureaucrat right way. The whole term implies some form of alienation, and the pioneer spirit during Stalin's industrialization and collectivization amongst workers disagrees with that.
Also true, but the 1936 constitution was drafted by reciprocally asking the Soviet people what would work best. In the times of turmoil, war and purges, the constitution would probably not be materialized in many cases, but I don't think it is an argument is to say that the constitution was a ruse from the very beginning, that there were deliberate systems in place to undermine it - and that has yet to be proven. Material conditions restricting the ideal of a proletarian democracy is the not the same as a deliberate ruse to keep up the illusion of a people's republic (which is claimed by many anti-Stalinists). We have accounts of Soviet democracy working under Stalin - amongst liberal historians, even:
youtube.com/watch?v=Okz2YMW1AwY
True, Some purges jumped the shark, while others seemed justified from a utilitarian standpoint. However, obvious traiters and sociopaths like Yezhov who killed thousends of innocents and conspired with the Japanese are hardly Stalin's fault, as he didn't know about him being a fraud. Once he found out, Yezhov was executed. Revolutionary situations and intensified class struggle give birth to such men.

What we have to realize first is that the USSR was a massive construct with extreme forms of unequal development, many cultures, religions, ethnicities, languages etc.

Any analysis must be very carefully examining differences within regions and what was going on there. While in some places, there was a perfectly healthy proletarian democracy in place, in other places there might be corruption or undermining or worker's authority. However, undermining of worker's authority didn't fly very well under Stalin. Once such cases became clear, there would be dire consequences for the saboteurs.

Similar with China. While some Chinese communes almost abolished money, some others were quite capitalistic.

Do you know any books or any resources that take a closer more specific look at this uneven distribution like you said?

china, germany, great britain, japan, modern day russia, india, france and the US are socialist now

Nazis called themselves socialists, they mustve been leftists hurr durr

I agree. I recently watched a series of interviews from 70-80's Hungary that included "entrepreneurial" individuals. Paraphrasing what he said: "we knew that with the first market reforms we could hire 5-10 individuals, and that it was only a matter of years, a decade maybe, before we could hire 50-100." The hilarious (if you consider some portrayals of the "spooky greedy apparatchik") and tragic (if you are a communist) aspect of this that it wasn't the apparatchik that profiteered, but they turned a blind eye on something whose consequences they perfectly knew. It wasn't the direct self-interest of the apparatchik (profiteering), but the indirect one (keeping the economy afloat, paying back debnts, constantly raising the standard of living in fear of another '56) of elongating the process of the ship's sinking.

Again the same problem remains I hinted at before: either the reforms were due to individual motivations (incompetence, conspiracy, whatever) or due to systemic determinations. I think the latter (for the simple reason that individual mot. can always be traced back to it). The armament (and space) race plus the embargo was a huge factor in this, for sure, but I'm not to keen on uncritically praising the period of five year plans either.

Half of humanity was experiencing the fastest industrialization and urbanization process, while the other half was drowning in the great depression. It is fascinating.

Define. Book is from 1948. I can't even ctrl+f in it. I prefer history books that were written after the soviet archives were opened. What the soviet state wanted foreigners to believe it was doesn't correspond to what it really was, sadly. (Not to mention state secrets, mails found between p.buro members, the bureaucracy in the archives that give an organic picture of "how it really went on" vs. an descriptive analysis from the 1948.)

I'm pretty sure this is due to a lack in the classical Marxist oeuvre and not that the term itself is spooky or meaningless. Bureaucracy signifies the place wherein the letter and spirit of the law are in constant battle, where formal and informal relationships dig their own tunnels for various ends, resulting in a unique institutional culture (how shit gets done, punishments, avoidance of responsibility, etc.) and identity formations (what defines a good and bad cadre, personal attitudes towards significant cases of the institute towards inside groups) and usually general chaos.

Meh. Let's agree to restrict the use of the term to the wage system (as the mature Marx intended). It has its Kafkaesque dimensions. You go in an office requesting some shit and from that point on you are a number that lacks proper authorization forms, etc. If at the clinic the doctor's gaze reduces you to flesh, at the bureau you are abstracted into a theological entity.

That spirit was soon dropped around '35 where the errors in planning met with the impossible circumstances of Russia and the total chaos in agriculture.

I genuinely believe that the politburo's best intentions met with the obvious historic necessity to hold on to power as much as possibly they could. This in itself is not a deadly formula. The economic shitstorm coming mainly from agriculture is what tipped the balance to the latter and resulted in the purges.

Agreed.

I don't buy that story, tbh. He was a dupe who had to take some of the blame. We have the signatures (and his usual snarky comments on the sides of the official orders) by Stalin for every major purge. I can only recommend again the Getty book. It has freshly recovered documents from the soviet archives. Yezhov is a recurring figure in the book.

I think you are missing the point that the planned economy achieved in two decades what took 60-100 for the market. See Gregory, Paul Socialist and Nonsocialist Industrialisation Patterns: A Comparative Appraisal, New York: Praeger, 1970.

S-stalin did som things wronk

MLs everybody, you can't make this shit up

Not everything. Some of the bad decisions at least can be attributed to Lenin.

Oh really? What about 1991?

"He" did nothing wrong thats some great man theory bulllshit
the issue is that the Soviet model was corrupt at its very Foundations

so in 3 months we would have done what the Soviet Union didn't in 69 years.

Socialism.

why tankies are so retarded?

He wasn't even Russian, he was Georgian, and there's a good likelihood he was Jewish.

...