How exactly is soviet socialism that different from a complete monopoly that provides health care and stuff for its...

how exactly is soviet socialism that different from a complete monopoly that provides health care and stuff for its workers?

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What do you mean, "Soviet socialism"?

Tankism/Stalinism/etc its not very different honestly. Thats why we call it State Capitalism here.
These are fuck ups that don't know the definition of Socialism or Communism. Mistakes were backed up they took too much power and nobody could fix them, thats what happened. These governments did somethings right through like eliminating Nazis, making AKs, etc. But thats about it, more fuck up than anything else.

What I don’t understand is why the Soviets didn’t abolish conventional currency in favour of something like labour vouchers.

I think you missed something. In order to make a profit, wage is put below the value of worker's labor power (btw. why is it spelled labor and not labour?). Complete monopoly doesn't provide health care and stuff out of pure benevolence. Socialist movements made such securities possible. Monopolies are no good either, because without market competition the only company might (and probably will) have full control of price, setting them as high as they want.

they got too carried on with having power over others or just plain stupidity.
The Soviet Union is not a good example of socialism and when you hear someone say: "ins't socialism when the goverment… etc" please correct him, explain it to him so mistakes don't happen again.

Read marx.

"

Now, the same general laws which regulate the price of commodities in general, naturally regulate wages, or the price of labour-power. Wages will now rise, now fall, according to the relation of supply and demand, according as competition shapes itself between the buyers of labour-power, the capitalists, and the sellers of labour-power, the workers. The fluctuations of wages correspond to the fluctuation in the price of commodities in general. But within the limits of these fluctuations the price of labour-power will be determined by the cost of production, by the labour-time necessary for production of this commodity: labour-power.

What, then, is the cost of production of labour-power?

It is the cost required for the maintenance of the labourer as a labourer, and for his education and training as a labourer.

Therefore, the shorter the time required for training up to a particular sort of work, the smaller is the cost of production of the worker, the lower is the price of his labour-power, his wages. In those branches of industry in which hardly any period of apprenticeship is necessary and the mere bodily existence of the worker is sufficient, the cost of his production is limited almost exclusively to the commodities necessary for keeping him in working condition. The price of his work will therefore be determined by the price of the necessary means of subsistence.

Here, however, there enters another consideration. The manufacturer who calculates his cost of production and, in accordance with it, the price of the product, takes into account the wear and tear of the instruments of labour. If a machine costs him, for example, 1,000 shillings, and this machine is used up in 10 years, he adds 100 shillings annually to the price of the commodities, in order to be able after 10 years to replace the worn-out machine with a new one. In the same manner, the cost of production of simple labour-power must include the cost of propagation, by means of which the race of workers is enabled to multiply itself, and to replace worn-out workers with new ones. The wear and tear of the worker, therefore, is calculated in the same manner as the wear and tear of the machine.

Thus, the cost of production of simple labour-power amounts to the cost of the existence and propagation of the worker. The price of this cost of existence and propagation constitutes wages. The wages thus determined are called the minimum of wages. This minimum wage, like the determination of the price of commodities in general by cost of production, does not hold good for the single individual, but only for the race. Individual workers, indeed, millions of workers, do not receive enough to be able to exist and to propagate themselves; but the wages of the whole working class adjust themselves, within the limits of their fluctuations, to this minimum.

Now that we have come to an understanding in regard to the most general laws which govern wages, as well as the price of every other commodity, we can examine our subject more particularly. "

I think you missed something:

Every condition of the problem is satisfied, while the laws that regulate the exchange of commodities, have been in no way violated. Equivalent has been exchanged for equivalent. For the capitalist as buyer paid for each commodity, for the cotton, the spindle and the labour-power, its full value.
Capital vol. 1, chapter 7.

Thanks for the critique, I see that I made some mistake. When I made the previous post, I had this passage in mind
"
Let us assume that the money price of these means of subsistence averages 3 shillings a day. Our laborer gets, therefore, a daily wage of 3 shillings from his employer. For this, the capitalist lets him work, say, 12 hours a day. Our capitalist, moreover, calculates somewhat in the following fashion: Let us assume that our laborer (a machinist) has to make a part of a machine which he finishes in one day. The raw material (iron and brass in the necessary prepared form) costs 20 shillings. The consumption of coal by the steam-engine, the wear-and-tear of this engine itself, of the turning-lathe, and of the other tools with which our laborer works, represent, for one day and one laborer, a value of 1 shilling. The wages for one day are, according to our assumption, 3 shillings. This makes a total of 24 shillings for our piece of a machine.
But, the capitalist calculates that, on an average, he will receive for it a price of 27 shillings from his customers, or 3 shillings over and above his outlay.
Whence do they 3 shillings pocketed by the capitalist come? According to the assertion of classical political economy, commodities are in the long run sold at their values, that is, they are sold at prices which correspond to the necessary quantities of labor contained in them. The average price of our part of a machine – 27 shillings – would therefore equal its value, i.e., equal the amount of labor embodied in it. But, of these 27 shillings, 21 shillings were values were values already existing before the machinist began to work; 20 shillings were contained in the raw material, 1 shilling in the fuel consumed during the work and in the machines and tools used in the process and reduced in their efficiency to the value of this amount. There remains 6 shillings, which have been added to the value of the raw material. But, according to the supposition of our economists, themselves, these 6 shillings can arise only from the labor added to the raw material by the laborer. His 12 hours' labor has created, according to this, a new value of 6 shillings. Therefore, the value of his 12 hours' labor would be equivalent to 6 shillings. So we have at last discovered what the "value of labor" is.
"Hold on there!" cries our machinist. "Six shillings? But I have received only 3 shillings! My capitalist swears high and day that the value of my 12 hours' labor is no more than 3 shillings, and if I were to
demand 6, he'd laugh at me. What kind of a story is that?"
If before this we got with our value of labor into a vicious circle, we now surely have driven straight into an insoluble contradiction. We searched for the value of labor, and we found more than we can use. For the laborer, the value of the 12 hours' labor is 3 shillings; for the capitalist, it is 6 shillings, of which he pays the workingman 3 shillings as wages, and pockets the remaining 3 shilling himself. According to this, labor has not one but two values, and, moreover, two very different values!
"

bump

every fucking day

If I remember right the soviet central bank operated in weird ways. I think you had two types of cash, basically. "Bank Cash" and then paper cash. Paper cash was given only for paying workers (and buying goods) and bank cash was used for intercompany transfers, which had to be centrally approved. (So if you wanted to buy wood to make chairs, you could only buy the approved amount of wood, and if you needed a loan you could only get it from the central bank even if the wood company had a huge surplus of wood and would be glad to give you it on loan for nothing.)

Hence a lot of odd trading where the shoe factory would make too many shoes so that it could give shoes to the logging company in exchange for wood that could be traded for steel that could be traded for leather that could be used to meet the shoe production quota because the central bank didn't allocate enough.

correction on shoe example: the first shoes (overproduced) are fabric shoes, while the "shoe production quota" is actually the "leather shoe production quota", otherwise the example makes no sense, obviously.

nice.

brainlets and revisionists will be the first to the gulags.

And this is what happens when you have filthy meatbags trying to be computers.

Central planning isn't socialism to begin with.

To be fair, they weren't. Things were created for use value and not exchange value, so they didn't follow the same logic as commodity production.

Im not even a ml but still i think that soviet capitalism was way softer than normal capitalism, as the surplus value extracted from the workers were way less than now, and mainly it was extracted to improve the working class life.
It was more like a monopolic, keynesian and rather paternalistic economy, not as similar to modern capitalism as to the nazi system.

Well one thing is for certain, Russian workers are far less disciplined than American and Chinese workers. Look at the quality for finish on the Su-57 and compare it to F-22 or J-20, the Russian aircraft has a far rougher finish than the American and Chinese ones. These aircraft are the epitome of their respective states aerospace manufacturing capabilities so you would think (and hope) that the workers in the factory are the most skilled and disciplined. Too much pampering from the USSR's time?

hmmmm I'm still feeling alienated from my labor somehow, even though we live in the glorious socialist paradise of the USSR, fuck this plane, fuck work.

Soviet war material especially export is made to look rough
The whole ethos is to look rough and brutal and work reliably

I mean in a context like that the problem is far more likely technological than one of worker discipline. Especially when you consider the financial state of the countries involved. (China having nearly 10* Russia's GDP and falling behind even the UK, probably not factoring PPP.)
It's also worth noting that Chinese aircraft are broadly behind Russian ones in terms of engines. The J-20 for example will use russian engines in the initial batch, as does the J-10 already. (Although conversely, while the engine they use is the one from the SU-27, their own SU-27 clones use Chinese-made engines.)

ask on /marx/, I guarantee you'll get btfo

The absolute state of the left

Got 'im

maybe the reason liberals cant argue is because none of them really have a platform to begin with and are sort-of just larping as revolutionaries and freedom fighters

In capitalism the owning class exploits workers for the surplus value of their labor and keeps it. In the Soviet system the state itself is essentially the owning class and the surplus value gets reinvested into the state providing services, updating the manufacturing infrastructure, etc. It was meant to be temporary, but with the failed revolutions in Europe and constant threats they were forced to maintain it. Still state capitalism, but I'm not going to bitch about it.

Never existed it was State-capitalist authoritarian Social-democracy

the soviet union would have been forever if it the argument was good to begin with. all emperors die, deal with it.

what a pile of dog shit this post is.

I think you're all missing the point here:
if we define capitalism as a socio-economic system that relies mostly on exchange of commodities made possible by the fact that MOP is privately owned and wage labour is a big meme because of that and compare it to the system that the soviets implemented we can see that it didn't fit this definition.

Did the soviet economy sustain itself on exchange of commodities i.e. did it have commodities? If we define a commodity as something made for exchange (has a use value but is useless to the capitalist and because of that is sold for exchange) then no, the soviet economy did not rely on commodities. Most of products of labour were made in state entities and what, where and when it was made was dictated by state planners who in turn didn't plan to for exchange but for use. The population will need this and this much bread and this much cars etc. So we can already see that the USSR didn't quite fit the definition of capitalism.

Was there private ownership of MOP? Well, what does it mean to own them - ownership if more of MOP is defined by the relationship between people who own and who don't. Did state planners or foremen profit from other workers? No, they got what their labour could be paid for at the moment just like everyone else.

Was there wage labour in the USSR? Was labour a commodity? Not really - there was not market for labour and neither did it function as a commodity.

All definitions taken from here marxists.org/glossary/index.htm

A blatant lie.

Government plans for the maximum good of people (in theory), while monopolies do stuff for maximum profit of their shareholders.