According to Marx, communism can only be achieved through industrialization and the creation of a huge infrastructure under capitalism. So wasn't state capitalism successful in developing URSS industries while suppressing many inequalities and injustices that happens in a normal capitalist state (misery, inequality, hunger).
If anything the big mistake that happened was the inability to make the central power fade away and take the next step.
Other urls found in this thread:
There's nothing wrong, perse, with state capitalism if its being used to build to a transition into socialism.
State capitalism is mostly brought up in instances where people say that socialism is just muh big gubbermand controlling the economy because that's what the USSR et al were like.
This is what the Italian Left (Bordiga etc) claim. Stalin and Mao served as progressive bourgeois revolutionaries that if nothing else created the conditions for a genuine proletarian revolution in those countries.
State capitalism seems like it's best for underdeveloped countries such as russia during the early 20th century, seeing as how most of the population was under educated proletarians and peasants there was no way they could run the industry themselves initially. However in a modern developed country the workers could take over the means of production immediately seeing as how literacy isn't 28% like in pre revolution russia.
Show some conviction, dammit.
Can't be certain man, it could be even more amazing in developed countries but I don't know.
...
Shouldn't it read "pass capitalism"?
yes, it was a bad thing
en.wikipedia.org
Well, on a historical level there is nothing wrong with capitalism. It is definitely better than feudalism. But we should still be able to move past it and its flaws.
Reactionary nonsense. The Russia Empire regularly had famines prior to 1917, the Tsarist regime collapsed because it sucked so badly at primitive accumulation that it couldn't even reliability feed its population during peace time.
...
show me another so big famine under tsar
>>>/suicide/
Well the famine of 1916 was so massive it caused a revolution, going back there was the famine of 1891 where the Tsar didn't even have the excuse of a war.
show mortality figures.
He isn't wrong, actually, the extreme poverty and starvation is what led to the revolt.
>>>/trash/
For 1916 they don't exist because the goverment collapsed shortly after, as did the provisional goverment that replaced it but the mortality rate was so high that it took down two governments.
are there no estimates?
There is estimated 1 million deaths caused by malnutrition in the Russian Empire during WWI but that is a ball park figure.
...
This is how I view the USSR after learning more about Marxism and learning more about it's history from historians instead of borderline propaganda history lessons I had in school.
I have an antidote about how the presence of the USSR helped my family.
My father was an enlisted solider in the US Army. He joined in 1976.
He was stationed in Germany. Enlisted soldiers make really really low pay. And Germany's cost of living is waaay higher than the US' even in the 70's and 80's.
So the military give all it's soldiers COLA (Cost of Living Adjustment). It's a bunch of money to make up for the difference in cost of living in germany. It was given to all soldiers stationed there.
The thing is, housing is provided for free to soldiers in military owned apartments. Also the military has retail and grocery stories they own that sell goods at prices that are even lower than what you could find in the US. Same with gasoline.
So really there was no good reason to give soldiers COLA.
It was understood by all the soldiers they got COLA to make the US Army's soldiers a lot more wealthier than they really were. My father said for a private COLA could be as much as 30 to 40 percent raise in pay.
He saved his money but practically all of his peers went out and bought sports cars and other forms of conspicuous consumption.
He said the Soviets really seemed to believe that US soldiers were really wealthy. He completely understood though that without the threat of the Soviets he'd be making the same shitty pay he made back in the States.
Call me a heretic, but it seems to me that the state being the only thing left standing makes it far easier to finally take down to achieve horizontalism than continuing the endless spectacle of pretending the state and private sectors are somehow separate. While the initial anarchist reaction may (understandably) to be to reject this model as being authoritarian and abusive, when considered on a wider scale than just in the country itself (eg, taking into mind other things like the colonialism that was pushed by free market capitalism) the state socialist model seems to be no worse than the free market capitalist model. Sure, I don't like the USSR, but I think its time anarchists kept in mind the sum total of the global and local real effects of western capitalism as the primary alternative, instead of somewhat agreeing with the simple bourgeois propaganda of "Life is better in the US so capitalism is better than socialism".
Central planning is clearly a very powerful way of modernizing industry and infrastructure. I'm not convinced that what the Soviet Union and China accomplished couldn't have been done with central planning + socialist production arrangements however.
Marx intended for "the masses" to "exploit" the infrastructure built by "extraction of surplus value."
...
how is surplus value extracted in communism?
...
u mad?
Interesting.
I wonder if other soldiers felt the same way.
gommynism never tryed before
Nigga even liberal historians like Getty say it wasn't a genocide. Only fucking Ukro-fashs and the US gubmint still throw it around to commiebash.
Just goes to show that some anarcho-edgyist knows jack shit about anything.
where did i say it was genocide?