Ussr?

[NorwegianCommunist]

Was USSR totalitarian and authoritarian country?
Isn't that against communist priciples?

[NorwegianCommunist]

Authoritarian is also called Autocracy I think.
:cool:

[Grenzer]

If you're asking whether they used arbitrary and excessive force to enforce a dictatorship over the workers, then yes, they did.

In the late 1930's the Stalinist regime began a series of purges known as the "Great Purges" which killed upwards of two million people. The regime insisted that there was a vast conspiracy of Trotskyists, foreign infiltrators, and such that had infiltrated the USSR and planned on toppling the regime. There is no evidence this is true. The "proof" that Stalinists tend to cite are the confessions of the Moscow Show Trials, but there is little reason to believe they are credible at all. The most likely case is that they were fabricated entirely or that the confessions were extracted via torture and thus unreliable.

As much as I dislike shilling for a tendency, Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed really isn't a terrible overview of the fundamental anti-worker nature of the USSR if you don't care for a deep analysis and want something contemporary to the period.

Anyway "authoritarian" is just a buzz word. All communists are authoritarians because we're all for abolishing private property forcefully. However, it's important to note that a lot of 'communists' like the Stalinists will use this as a form of opportunism to justify sociopathic and anti-worker inclinations.

[Rooster]

It was just a regular dictatorship where the workers were divorced from the means of production.

[NorwegianCommunist]

Did the workers control the means of production in the USSR?

[Grenzer]

No, there is absolutely no evidence that they did. Marx stated that the dictatorship of the proletariat(power by the workers) would be a historic extension of democracy; yet in the fSU, there were no meaningful organs for democracy. The means of production were controlled by bureaucrats who according to some played the same exact role as the bourgeoisie in a normal capitalist state.

[Rooster]

Did the workers control the means of production in the USSR?

No. And not even in the Leninist sense of control either: one of supervision. The means of production were supposedly held by the state and the state was the people etc etc etc. That's just legalistic mumbo jumbo. I'm pretty sure that if workers were truly in control then they wouldn't impose such draconian labour laws on themselves where people who were injured and sick, women without child care, were sent to court for not being able to go to work. Or even in regards to control of the state, the re-introduction of school fees a couple of years after the 1936 constitution which supposedly abolished them. I'm not sure if people who had control over the state would allow that.

[Yefim Zverev]

If you're asking whether they used arbitrary and excessive force to enforce a dictatorship over the workers, then yes, they did.

In the late 1930's the Stalinist regime began a series of purges known as the "Great Purges" which killed upwards of two million people. The regime insisted that there was a vast conspiracy of Trotskyists, foreign infiltrators, and such that had infiltrated the USSR and planned on toppling the regime. There is no evidence this is true. The "proof" that Stalinists tend to cite are the confessions of the Moscow Show Trials, but there is little reason to believe they are credible at all. The most likely case is that they were fabricated entirely or that the confessions were extracted via torture and thus unreliable.

Such one sided perspective. If you had written all these sometime around 70s 60s somewhere in the west western anti-communism propaganda specialists would have been proud of you. Though I guess they are still proud of you now since they still exist.

Well done helping them on leftist forums.

[Grenzer]

Such one sided perspective. If you had written all these sometime around 70s 60s somewhere in the west western anti-communism propaganda specialists would have been proud of you. Though I guess they are still proud of you now since they still exist.

Well done helping them on leftist forums.

I'm still waiting for evidence of functioning proletarian democracy. You can sit there and whine about how unfair it is that we criticize the USSR, or you could, you know, try to make an argument against it with evidence? After you do that, you can start confronting the conundrum of why, if the workers were in charge, that they would commit actions fundamentally and irreconcilably opposed to their own interests like the examples Rooster provided.

[Yefim Zverev]

I'm still waiting for evidence of functioning proletarian democracy. You can sit there and whine about how unfair it is that we criticize the USSR, or you could, you know, try to make an argument against it with evidence?

I see that you criticize it and I only point out a single fact that there is no counter-criticism in your text here as answer to op. Just mono-minded anti-USSR thinking.

You've manifested arguments against USSR so it is your duty prove all of them including upwards 2.000.000 deaths etc. not mine. Concretely and not by sources from western journalists or anti USSR agents.

So go on and do it.

[Grenzer]

I see that you criticize it and I only point out a single fact that there is no counter-criticism in your text here as answer to op. Just mono-minded anti-USSR thinking.

You've manifested arguments against USSR so it is your duty prove all of them including upwards 2.000.000 deaths etc. not mine. Concretely and not by sources from western journalists or anti USSR agents.

So go on and do it.

Well the thing is, you're the one who's claiming that the USSR is socialist, the burden of proof is on you to prove that it was. So if the workers were in charge, why did they pass legislation that harmed them? You've yet to confront this.

Also so you know, the Western critique of Stalinism is that there were 30,000,000 deaths under Stalin, not 2,000,000. The most accurate estimate is between 800,000 and 2,000,000. If it's not true, then why do your fellow Stalinists like Ismail say that it is?

You're whining that I'm not considering Stalinist sources? There is no reason to believe they are credible, as I already explained. Stalin himself said that he believed there was a Trotskyist conspiracy (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/09/06.htm), an incredible claim for which no evidence was provided. As I already explained, there is little reason to think that the confessions of the Moscow Show Trials are credible. It seems that anything other than licking Stalin's boot is "mono-minded criticism" to you.

I'm also intensely curious for you to point out state propaganda criticizing the USSR as a capitalist state. The perfidy of Stalinists in betraying revolutionaries and allies of the working class such as in Spain and Vietnam is quite well documented. So again, why would the workers approve a campaign of mass terror and repression against themselves?

[Yefim Zverev]

Well the thing is, you're the one who's claiming that the USSR is socialist, the burden of proof is on you to prove that it was. So if the workers were in charge, why did they pass legislation that harmed them? You've yet to confront this.

Also so you know, the Western critique of Stalinism is that there were 30,000,000 deaths under Stalin, not 2,000,000. The most accurate estimate is between 800,000 and 2,000,000. If it's not true, then why do your fellow Stalinists like Ismail say that it is?

You're whining that I'm not considering Stalinist sources? There is no reason to believe they are credible, as I already explained. Stalin himself said that he believed there was a Trotskyist conspiracy (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/09/06.htm), an incredible claim for which no evidence was provided. As I already explained, there is little reason to think that the confessions of the Moscow Show Trials are credible. It seems that anything other than licking Stalin's boot is "mono-minded criticism" to you.

I'm also intensely curious for you to point out state propaganda criticizing the USSR as a capitalist state. The perfidy of Stalinists in betraying revolutionaries and allies of the working class such as in Spain and Vietnam is quite well documented. So again, why would the workers approve a campaign of mass terror and repression against themselves?

I appreciate that you write on the forum but I don't like your tone that you say all the time "You are whining" that's weird. It's not a good method to strengthen your texts.

I know that USSR did not function that perfect but nor that badly.

Try to include for example millions of party members who suffered death on the fronts both against white-army/western cooperation and axis in the second world war. Those were supposed to establish a better proletarian dictatorship but those were also the first to go to the fights on the front. Try to include such truth to your texts.

[Anarpest]

@Yefim: You could maybe give your own viewpoint? You have one, don't you? It's also not much use hiding behind the cover of evidence-seeking when your first post was a blatant ad hominem. If you really cared that much about evidence, I doubt that you would deliver a rather harsh insult in the form of an association with Western Cold War propagandists without any substantiation whatsoever.

[daft punk]

Such one sided perspective. If you had written all these sometime around 70s 60s somewhere in the west western anti-communism propaganda specialists would have been proud of you. Though I guess they are still proud of you now since they still exist.

Well done helping them on leftist forums.

Well done in presenting the other side, you thoroughly convinced me with that argument that the purges were necessary.

[daft punk]

I see that you criticize it and I only point out a single fact that there is no counter-criticism in your text here as answer to op. Just mono-minded anti-USSR thinking.

You've manifested arguments against USSR so it is your duty prove all of them including upwards 2.000.000 deaths etc. not mine. Concretely and not by sources from western journalists or anti USSR agents.

So go on and do it.

Nobody needs to prove that the purges happened, like nobody needs to prove that the holocaust happened. It is universally acknowledged.

wikipedia:

"According to the declassified Soviet archives, during 1937 and 1938, the NKVD detained 1,548,366 victims, of whom 681,692 were shot - an average of 1,000 executions a day (in comparison, the Tsarists executed 3,932 persons for political crimes from 1825 to 1910 - an average of less than 1 execution per week)."

Well that's just the official figures over 2 years. Obviously the true figure is higher, especially if you include those who were not actually shot but died in the gulag from the harsh conditions.

What were are interested in in particular is the number of socialists on the left who were killed, I think it is at least 10,000 just from one camp.

We know the old Bolsheviks were shot, including their children, husbands and wives and so on. Trotsky's granddaughter was exiled to Kazakhstan, after her father was shot and her grandmother was sent to the gulag for example.

If you were a socialist, you got shot. That is how it went.

[daft punk]

Stalin himself said that he believed there was a Trotskyist conspiracy (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/09/06.htm), an incredible claim for which no evidence was provided.
I did as thread on the Moscow Trials but no Stalinist posted, therefore they concede that it was all a fitup presumably.

Quick word on the confession. Most Trots stood their ground and went to the gulag to await getting shot. A few high profile people 'confessed'. They were conned. They were told that if they confessed, various people would be spared. It was a lie. People like Bukharin, Kamenev and Zinoviev had worried for years that Stalin would eventually kill them so some of the were broken by that. Also there were NKVD in the Trotskyist organisation who made false confessions assuming it was just play acting, part of the job, but were shot anyway! Many NKVD were shot eg the ones who had repressed the Spanish revolution, to keep them quiet.

[manic expression]

These are falsities that need to be rebutted, sorry.


Nobody needs to prove that the purges happened, like nobody needs to prove that the holocaust happened. It is universally acknowledged.
Though everything else is very much in controversy. Conquest's revision of his figures after J Arch Getty published his new research is a good example of this. The higher-end estimates are now mostly rebuked.


We know the old Bolsheviks were shot, including their children, husbands and wives and so on. Trotsky's granddaughter was exiled to Kazakhstan, after her father was shot and her grandmother was sent to the gulag for example.The treatment of Trotsky was quite exceptional, this was very much one case that did not have much bearing on the others.


If you were a socialist, you got shot. That is how it went.No, if you were denounced and found guilty during a time of instability, uncertainty and chaos, you might have been shot. That was how it went, and anyone who tries to assign post-facto maliciousness to fit their ideological motives is either delusional or a liar. Either way, such nonsense has no place in serious discussion of this complex issue.

[daft punk]

essential reading...this is about Leopold Trepper who was a hero who spent years spying on behalf of the USSR in Nazi-occupied territories. His colleagues warned of the German invasion of the USSR. Stalin ignored it. When he returned, his reward for his heroism and dedication to the USSR was 10 years in jail. His boss was shot.

http://www.permanentrevolution.net/entry/1009

"Trepper was enrolled at the Marchlevski University, alongside the future leaders of the world’s communist parties, including Tito, where the students were lectured by Old Bolsheviks, like Radek, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin, the future victims of Stalin, who were already too well aware of their impending fate. Trepper remarks “When he (Bukharin) finished a lecture, he regularly received a veritable ovation – which he always greeted with a blank stare…One day, looking sadly over a roomful of students acclaiming him, he muttered, “Each time they applaud it brings me closer to my death.” Trepper had arrived in the USSR in his own words “carrying the dreams of a neophyte. I was a young and an ardent communist…” but as he witnessed the rise of Stalin’s cult of the personality, the fake trials of “conspirators,” how “many militants publicly supported Stalin’s positions although they did not approve of them. This terrible hypocrisy accelerated the inner demoralisation of the party,” Trepper began to question the old certainties.
Lenin’s Testament, which had called for Stalin’s removal was being circulated amongst the students, but the completion of Stalin’s coup at the 17th Party Congress with the election of Kirov and Stalin, meant the pace of the incipient bureaucratism rapidly accelerated. The assassination of Kirov in 1934, probably the work of Stalin, was “Stalin’s Reichstag fire”, was the excuse for a general purge. The Old Bolsheviks were slaughtered on mass, Burkharin’s prophecy was fulfilled, forced to make tortured confessions, in mass show trials, before being dispatched with a bullet to the back of the head. No one felt safe.
No one was immune from the reach of the NKVD, Stalin’s secret police. Trepper describes how; “at night in our university…headlights would pierce the darkness… “They’re here! They’re here! When we heard that cry a wave of anxiety would run through the dormitories…stomachs knotted in insane terror, we would watch for the cars of the KNVD to stop… “They’re coming.” The noise got louder…shouts doors slamming. They went by without stopping. But what about tomorrow?”
Trepper was not alone in enduring the terror; “yet we went along sick at heart, but passive, caught up in machinery we had set in motion…all those who did not rise up against the Stalinist machine are responsible, collectively responsible. I am no exception to this verdict.”
Like most he was too lost to counter Stalin's assault on the party. A member from only the late 1920s onwards, he had neither the training, or experience to understand the political root of the degeneration of the revolution; “But who did protest…The Trotskyites can lay claim to that honour…let them not forget, however, that they had the enormous advantage over us of having a coherent political system capable of replacing Stalinism….they did not “confess,” for they knew that their confession would serve neither the party nor socialism.”"

[daft punk]

After Kamenev's execution, his relatives suffered a similar fate. Kamenev's second son, Yu. L. Kamenev, was executed on 30 January 1938, at the age of 17. His eldest son, air force (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_force) officer A.L. Kamenev, was executed on 15 July 1939, at the age of 33. His first wife, Olga, was shot on 11 September 1941 on Stalin's orders, in the Medvedev forest outside Oryol (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oryol), together with Christian Rakovsky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Rakovsky), Maria Spiridonova (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Spiridonova) and 160 other prominent political prisoners.[9] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Kamenev#cite_note-purges-8) Only his youngest son, Vladimir Glebov, survived Stalin's prisons and labor camps (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_camps).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Kamenev#Fate_of_the_family


Stalin had all the Left Opposition shot, their children shot, their wives or husbands shot, everyone was shot.

http://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/events/terror/cc-1917.jpg


Kollantai was Left Opposition but she was a diplomat in Sweden or Norway and somehow survived.

[Leftsolidarity]

Daft punk, try to have a debate where you don't just throw out obnoxious walls of texts.

[l'Enfermé]

If you want to learn the relationship between Bolshevism/Leninism/Marxism and Stalinism(i.e "Marxism-Leninism"), you only need to learn one fact:
Of the 26 members of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party during the October Revolution, the Party's greatest moment, 17 survived until the 1930s, the rest died during the Civil War/Foreign Intervention and in the 1920s mostly from natural causes. Of these 17 people, 13 were murdered on Stalin's orders(as Stalinist propaganda goes, the "Great Hero!" himself conducted some of the interrogation of these people before they were executed). Such is reality. It can't be ignored. Not only was Stalin the gravedigger of the October Revolution, but he was also the executioner of the October Revolutionists.

And yes, NKVD archives(I guess they were forged by the evil "revisionists", who revised like, totally everything!!11!!11!) show that at least 680,000 people were shot during in the years 1937 and 1938, 40,000 of these had their death orders signed by Stalin personally. That's just 2 years, and doesn't even take into consideration all the unreported executions(probably hundreds of thousands if not more)and the deaths in the GULAG system(about 14 million people passed through the system according to Soviet archives and the mortality rate was high).

[l'Enfermé]

No. And not even in the Leninist sense of control either: one of supervision.
The Leninist "sense of control" doesn't differ from the Orthodox Marxian one, and neither is one of "supervision".


Such one sided perspective. If you had written all these sometime around 70s 60s somewhere in the west western anti-communism propaganda specialists would have been proud of you. Though I guess they are still proud of you now since they still exist.

Well done helping them on leftist forums.
We should ignore truth because it helps the "western" anti-communists? Well, the Holocaust has been an excellent propaganda tool to promote "western democracy", as opposed to Nazi-Soviet "totalitarianism". Should we pretend the Holocaust didn't happen?

That's a joke.

[manic expression]

We should ignore truth because it helps the "western" anti-communists? Well, the Holocaust has been an excellent propaganda tool to promote "western democracy", as opposed to Nazi-Soviet "totalitarianism". Should we pretend the Holocaust didn't happen?

That's a joke.
The problem is that's not the truth and we all know it isn't. If you actually believe that anti-Soviet voices never lied, never fabricated anything, never exaggerated, never made stuff up...then that's very touching, but wrong.


Stalin had all the Left Opposition shot, their children shot, their wives or husbands shot, everyone was shot.
You mentioned the case of Kamenev...that doesn't mean "everyone". Anti-Soviets obviously can't keep track of what they believe.

And anyway, it wasn't Stalin but the whole of the USSR that was acting in such a way. The purges didn't happen because Stalin willed it himself...such a belief is anti-materialist, which is typical of your ideology.

[Rooster]

The Leninist "sense of control" doesn't differ from the Orthodox Marxian one, and neither is one of "supervision"

Some people hold another opinion. Nove is constantly at pains to point out:


Thus [Lenin] spoke to the first congress of Soviets in June 1917. In a similar spirit he returns again and again to "workers' control", but the Russian word kontrol' means not a takeover but inspection and checking (like the French controle des billets), and his emphasis was on the prevention of sabotage and fraud by the capitalists. - An Economic History of the USSR

And who could blame Nove when you have Lenin saying things like this:


The important thing will not be even the confiscation of the capitalists' property, but country-wide, all-embracing workers' control [notice that kontrol' again] over the capitalists and their possible supporters.https://epress.anu.edu.au/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/01.htm

And later Nove gives a brief run down on how this was supposed to be practised:


On 27 November 1917 came a decree on 'worker's control'. Factory committees, which existed already under the Provisional Government, were given stronger powers. They could actively interfere ... in all aspects of production and distribution of products. The organs of workers' control were granted the right to supervise production, to lay down minimum output indicators for the enterprise, to obtain data on costs... the owners of the enterprises had to make available to the organs of workers' control all accounts and documents.And I don't think this detachment from the means of production was ever overcame.

[daft punk]

Daft punk, try to have a debate where you don't just throw out obnoxious walls of texts.

And your contribution is?

Now, please explain why quotes from Leopold Trepper is obnoxious. He was a hero who risked his life to save the USSR from Germany.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Trepper

[Caj]

Was USSR totalitarian and authoritarian country?
Isn't that against communist priciples?

The term "authoritarian" (and its corresponding "libertarian") describes relationships. If those relationships aren't specified, the terms are meaningless. Because states are organs of class rule, the relationships that must be specified are class perspectives on their respective class' relationship to the state.

As Marxists, we advocate a proletarian dictatorship. The proletarian dictatorship, from the class perspective of the bourgeoisie, would be authoritarian. From the class perspective of the proletariat, the class holding state power, it would be libertarian.

In the USSR, the dictatorship was a bourgeois dictatorship. From the class perspective of the proletariat, it was authoritarian. From the perspective of the Soviet bureaucracy and bourgeoisie, the regime was libertarian.

The use of authoritarianism against the proletariat is contrary to communist principles, yes.

As for totalitarian, I think that's a word thrown around too much. What it actually means is a state that controls every aspect of everyday life, similar to Big Brother in George Orwell's 1984. Did the USSR fit this definition? I really doubt it. In fact, I doubt that any state in history could be described as totalitarian by this standard.


Authoritarian is also called Autocracy I think.
:cool:

Autocracy literally means "rule by one". In that sense, it does not, and has never, existed. It is often just used synonymously with authoritarianism or totalitarianism.

[Omsk]

Now, please explain why quotes from Leopold Trepper is obnoxious. He was a hero who risked his life to save the USSR from Germany.


He was an simple intelligence agent,no more no less,he like thousands others in that period was in the secret service.To say that he saved the USSR from Nazi Germany is absurd.

[l'Enfermé]

He was an simple intelligence agent,no more no less,he like thousands others in that period was in the secret service.To say that he saved the USSR from Nazi Germany is absurd.
Where did Daft Punk say he saved the USSR from Nazi Germany? Perhaps it is time you cease lying and fabricating arguments?

[Omsk]

Where did Daft Punk say he saved the USSR from Nazi Germany? Perhaps it is time you cease lying and fabricating arguments?



His post: He was a hero who risked his life to save the USSR from Germany

He neither was in the position that could have been instrumental to the USSR neither was he alone and special in the secret service job.

[Vyacheslav Brolotov]

It's funny how ultra-leftists use capitalist and reactionary resources to accuse fellow revolutionary leftists of crimes. It is like they are in bed with the enemy when it comes to attacking Marxist-Leninists. They would even go as far as agreeing with a quote from one of the most reactionary men in the last 30 years:

"The march of freedom and democracy. . . will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history."
-Ronald Reagan

[marl]

And anyway, it wasn't Stalin but the whole of the USSR that was acting in such a way. The purges didn't happen because Stalin willed it himself...such a belief is anti-materialist, which is typical of your ideology.

It's already been brought out that Stalin personally signed 40,000 shooting orders, and he clearly allowed the purges to occur. The only material conditions for the purges was his desire to keep his position (that's like fucking saying the Holocaust occurred for material reasons).

Btw, I like how Stalinists say 'Anti-Soviet' even though they're not particularly fond of the idea of the worker council.

[Caj]

It's funny how ultra-leftists use capitalist and reactionary resources to accuse fellow revolutionary leftists of crimes.

It's funny how Stalinists deny the crimes committed by them against their fellow revolutionaries.


It is like they are in bed with the enemy when it comes to attacking Marxist-Leninists.

Here we go again: "Marxist-Leninists are the victims of the evil anarcho-Trotskyist-capitalist conspiracy!"


They would even go as far as agreeing with a quote from one of the most reactionary men in the last 30 years:

"The march of freedom and democracy. . . will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history."
-Ronald Reagan

As if Marxism-Leninism isn't already on the ash-heap of history.

[Ostrinski]

It's funny how ultra-leftists use capitalist and reactionary resources to accuse fellow revolutionary leftists of crimes. It is like they are in bed with the enemy when it comes to attacking Marxist-Leninists. They would even go as far as agreeing with a quote from one of the most reactionary men in the last 30 years:Find me one "ultra leftist" that considers ML's "fellow" revolutionaries.

[Rooster]

It's funny how ultra-leftists use capitalist and reactionary resources to accuse fellow revolutionary leftists of crimes. It is like they are in bed with the enemy when it comes to attacking Marxist-Leninists. They would even go as far as agreeing with a quote from one of the most reactionary men in the last 30 years:

"The march of freedom and democracy. . . will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history."
-Ronald Reagan

Oh dear... If a source is demonstratively and factually correct then what difference does it make if it was made under a capitalist mode of production or a socialist? If you had two scientists, one who works under a capitalist mode of production and another under a socialist mode of production, and they both came to different results from the same experiment, then does that mean that the capitalist one is always wrong? If two people witness a murder and one was a pro-capital person and another a socialist, then are you doing to completely disown what that pro-capital person says?

[Omsk]

It's nothing shocking,we regard you as enemies of the revolution,and you have the same opinion about us,nothing new here,move along.

[Vyacheslav Brolotov]

It's nothing shocking,we regard you as enemies of the revolution,and you have the same opinion about us,nothing new here,move along.

Yeah, I was being a little too kind when I used the term "fellow leftist revolutionaries." I was just trying to get a point across, the point being that ultra-leftists are no better than capitalists when it comes to attacking all attempts so far at establishing proletarian dictatorship.

[manic expression]

It's already been brought out that Stalin personally signed 40,000 shooting orders, and he clearly allowed the purges to occur. The only material conditions for the purges was his desire to keep his position (that's like fucking saying the Holocaust occurred for material reasons).

Btw, I like how Stalinists say 'Anti-Soviet' even though they're not particularly fond of the idea of the worker council.
There was a need for some sort of purge, that much is universally acknowledged by anyone who seriously follows the matter. The party was quite heavily infiltrated, one of the highest-ranking party members had been killed in his office and no one knew what was next...purging the party was inevitable no matter who was in power. When the party leadership began to throw accusations against its own members and their respective supporters, chaos ensued and innocent people fell victim to it, something that Stalin himself later expressed regret over. The point is that the purges weren't some evil, hand-rubbing attempt to kill good communists, they were a time of exceptional instability and hostility within the party. Blaming Stalin is missing the point by a country mile.

"Stalinists" are more fond of worker councils than anyone else...namely, they don't stop calling them worker councils when they have the nerve to disagree with this or that ultra-left dogma.

[Caj]

ultra-leftists are no better than capitalists when it comes to attacking all attempts so far at establishing proletarian dictatorship.

Yeah, it sure is a good thing Stalin purged all those damn ultra-leftist, capitalist, Trotskyite, revisionist counter-revolutionaries so that the USSR could begin along the road to socialism.

[Ostrinski]

Yeah, I was being a little too kind when I used the term "fellow leftist revolutionaries." I was just trying to get a point across, the point being that ultra-leftists are no better than capitalists when it comes to attacking all attempts so far at establishing proletarian dictatorship.We don't attack the attempts, we just attack what they degenerated into.

[l'Enfermé]

It's funny how ultra-leftists use capitalist and reactionary resources to accuse fellow revolutionary leftists of crimes. It is like they are in bed with the enemy when it comes to attacking Marxist-Leninists. They would even go as far as agreeing with a quote from one of the most reactionary men in the last 30 years:

"The march of freedom and democracy. . . will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash-heap of history."
-Ronald Reagan
No they don't. They use Soviet archives. Not capitalist and reactionary resources. Those are only secondary, Soviet resources are sufficient to show what Marxism-Leninism really is: reactionary utopianism.

[l'Enfermé]

His post: He was a hero who risked his life to save the USSR from Germany

He neither was in the position that could have been instrumental to the USSR neither was he alone and special in the secret service job.
That doesn't mean what you think it means. Probably the problem is your English, which isn't your first language.

[marl]

There was a need for some sort of purge, that much is universally acknowledged by anyone who seriously follows the matter. The party was quite heavily infiltrated, one of the highest-ranking party members had been killed in his office and no one knew what was next...purging the party was inevitable no matter who was in power. When the party leadership began to throw accusations against its own members and their respective supporters, chaos ensued and innocent people fell victim to it, something that Stalin himself later expressed regret over. The point is that the purges weren't some evil, hand-rubbing attempt to kill good communists, they were a time of exceptional instability and hostility within the party. Blaming Stalin is missing the point by a country mile.

"Stalinists" are more fond of worker councils than anyone else...namely, they don't stop calling them worker councils when they have the nerve to disagree with this or that ultra-left dogma.

Okay, so let me get this straight. The justification of killing 600K+ people was a dead party member and growing opposition? How fucking reactionary.

[manic expression]

Yeah, it sure is a good thing Stalin purged all those damn ultra-leftist, capitalist, Trotskyite, revisionist counter-revolutionaries so that the USSR could begin along the road to socialism.
That road did indeed lead to socialism. It is very true how many leftists are as eager to bash that road as capitalists are, and it is true they try to use the same falsified sources.


No they don't. They use Soviet archives. Not capitalist and reactionary resources. Those are only secondary, Soviet resources are sufficient to show what Marxism-Leninism really is: reactionary utopianism.
Then please be so kind as to demonstrate this sufficiency.


Okay, so let me get this straight. The justification of killing 600K+ people was a dead party member and growing opposition? How fucking reactionary.
Obviously you didn't read my post with enough care. I said that it was a time of instability and uncertainty and because of that many were killed without justification, something that renders your post basically irrelevant to my words. That aside, infiltration of the party from anti-socialist elements certainly justified a purge, but the excessive violence is to be criticized IMO. But if we are to be revolutionaries we can't condemn something outright and call it "fucking reactionary" just because it offends some pacifist principle.

[Omsk]

That doesn't mean what you think it means. Probably the problem is your English, which isn't your first language.


What other meaning could it have?Enlighten me.

[Ostrinski]

Welp the USSR doesn't exist anymore so this is all irrelevant anyway

[marl]

Welp the USSR doesn't exist anymore so this is all irrelevant anyway
We're on an Internet forum, let us have fun by making arguments that were made 60 years ago.

[Omsk]

I doubt arguments about wether the USSR was socialist or not existed 60 years ago.

[Comrade Samuel]

I doubt arguments about wether the USSR was socialist or not existed 60 years ago.

That's because the only descriptions of it 60 years ago where

"godless commie shit hole"

Or

"workers paradise"

They here both wrong of corse but at least we dident have to listen to all the other explanations because nobody cared about them, matter of fact outside the Internet they still don't really matter.

[Grenzer]

Obviously you didn't read my post with enough care. I said that it was a time of instability and uncertainty and because of that many were killed without justification, something that renders your post basically irrelevant to my words. That aside, infiltration of the party from anti-socialist elements certainly justified a purge, but the excessive violence is to be criticized IMO. But if we are to be revolutionaries we can't condemn something outright and call it "fucking reactionary" just because it offends some pacifist principle.

Obviously, this excuses the fundamentally anti-worker nature of the USSR.

I mean, it wasn't that much different in Germany. It was a chaotic, uncertain time. So what if Hitler murdered a few million people? Like you said, it was an uncertain time; it's completely understandable. :roll eyes:

Supporting the Soviet Union is reactionary because it was a bureaucratic dictatorship which spared no opportunity to further exploit and fuck over the workers. We all acknowledge force is necessary, but it's the fact that the Soviet Union was an anti-worker regime which constantly furthered the process of liberal capitalist restoration which must be criticized. The only anti-Socialist elements in the Soviet Union were Stalin and his thugs.

Your apologetics for the anti-communist regime of Stalin is laughable. As usual, your degenerate politics expose the PSL for what it really is: a bourgeois party which consistently opposes worker's liberation so long as it doesn't have the tag of "made in the USA" on it.

[manic expression]

Obviously, this excuses the fundamentally anti-worker nature of the USSR.

I mean, it wasn't that much different in Germany. It was a chaotic, uncertain time. So what if Hitler murdered a few million people? Like you said, it was an uncertain time; it's completely understandable. :roll eyes:
Just so you know, this is a form of holocaust denial.

Anyway, it was completely different. The Holocaust was an agreed-to plan to liquidate certain populations that the NSDAP hated. They had meetings where they decided on it and then they carried it out.

The purges were a very ad-hoc process and were always shifting in intensity and in purpose, first of all, and moreover it WASN'T THE PLANNED MURDER OF ENTIRE PEOPLES.

I mean, really, have some decency.


Supporting the Soviet Union is reactionary because it was a bureaucratic dictatorship which spared no opportunity to further exploit and fuck over the workers. We all acknowledge force is necessary, but it's the fact that the Soviet Union was an anti-worker regime which constantly furthered the process of liberal capitalist restoration which must be criticized. The only anti-Socialist elements in the Soviet Union were Stalin and his thugs.

Your apologetics for the anti-communist regime of Stalin is laughable. As usual, your degenerate politics expose the PSL for what it really is: a bourgeois party which consistently opposes worker's liberation so long as it doesn't have the tag of "made in the USA" on it.
What's laughable is that your arguments don't even match up. First you say that the USSR was so horrible because it killed some people (even though you can't bring yourself to vaguely understand why), then you say that it was horrible because it happened to have a bureaucracy. Because of those two things, you say, it turned into capitalism.

Wonderful bedtime story, but a bad argument. I'll give you some time to formulate something worth typing.

[Anarpest]

Just so you know, this is a form of holocaust denial.I don't think that that was an accident.
I doubt arguments about wether the USSR was socialist or not existed 60 years ago. Of course they did, unless youre putting emphasis on the past tense.

[l'Enfermé]

Objecting to the shooting of 600,000 people, a large amount of whom were committed Communists, by the Stalinist dogs, is a "pacifist principle".

Riiight. Too bad Glorious Comrade Stalin Who Had Like The Biggest Genitals Ever wasn't able to save everyone who was innocent! Which is basically 100% of the people killed.

[manic expression]

A lot of the people who were shot were people who were denouncing others as well and can hardly be considered "innocent"...don't be so simplistic about the whole thing.

Anyway, yeah, revolutions aren't peaceful and neither is the task of keeping a revolutionary government together through the many pitfalls that inevitably confront a worker state. The Jacobins ended up killing many innocent people and that's a tragedy, but blaming it all on them instead of the pressures put upon the young Republic is very narrow-minded, and moreover what the Jacobins were fighting for is still legitimate nonetheless. The same goes for the Soviet Union, except amplified through various factors.

[Psy]

A lot of the people who were shot were people who were denouncing others as well and can hardly be considered "innocent"...don't be so simplistic about the whole thing.

Anyway, yeah, revolutions aren't peaceful and neither is the task of keeping a revolutionary government together through the many pitfalls that inevitably confront a worker state. The Jacobins ended up killing many innocent people and that's a tragedy, but blaming it all on them instead of the pressures put upon the young Republic is very narrow-minded, and moreover what the Jacobins were fighting for is still legitimate nonetheless. The same goes for the Soviet Union, except amplified through various factors.
And the USSR reverted to capitalism because there was no major Trotskist or Anarchist movement to mobilize a major class war against the USSR bourgeois bureaucracy with the goal of establishing a workers state. Also the KGB didn't kill Yeltsin with a pickaxe so does that mean Trotsky was more counter revolutionary then Yeltsin, no it means the KGB rather kill fellow revolutionaries then capitalists.

[manic expression]

And the USSR reverted to capitalism because there was no major Trotskist or Anarchist movement to mobilize a major class war against the USSR bourgeois bureaucracy with the goal of establishing a workers state. Also the KGB didn't kill Yeltsin with a pickaxe so does that mean Trotsky was more counter revolutionary then Yeltsin, no it means the KGB rather kill fellow revolutionaries then capitalists.
The KGB didn't exist when Trotsky was killed...so yeah.

Anyway, there was no "bourgeois bureaucracy", unless you redefine bourgeois into something entirely different from how Marxists understand the term. No bureaucrat was running private property or employing workers in his own payroll, so that's out immediately. Also, Trotskyism and Anarchism didn't speak for the workers and peasants of the USSR, neither ideology had any sway. Mind you, neither ideology has ever really, outside of maybe one or two exceptions, mobilized anything that could passingly be called significant "class war" let alone "major class war".

[Psy]

The KGB didn't exist when Trotsky was killed...so yeah.

The KGB filled that role by the time the Yeltsin was a threat to the USSR.



Anyway, there was no "bourgeois bureaucracy", unless you redefine bourgeois into something entirely different from how Marxists understand the term. No bureaucrat was running private property or employing workers in his own payroll, so that's out immediately. Also, Trotskyism and Anarchism didn't speak for the workers and peasants of the USSR, neither ideology had any sway. Mind you, neither ideology has ever really, outside of maybe one or two exceptions, mobilized anything that could passingly be called significant "class war" let alone "major class war".
Yes there was a bourgeois bureaucracy, as by the 1980's the bureaucracy was closer to following the ideas of Frederick List (Frederick List was even on a East German stamp) then Karl Marx's in that the Comecon was stuck in the economic model of state production for surplus value through exports, production for utility was absent by the 1960's which is why Moscow economists rebelled against GOSPLAN in the late 1960's because GOSPLAN refused to let production be planned based on needs via cybernetics.

As for significant class war of Trotskists one word P.O.U.M.

[manic expression]

The KGB filled that role by the time the Yeltsin was a threat to the USSR.
And that was when the KGB was taking orders from an admitted anti-socialist, so it's hard to hold it too much against them.


Yes there was a bourgeois bureaucracy, as by the 1980's the bureaucracy was closer to following the ideas of Frederick List (Frederick List was even on a East German stamp) then Karl Marx's in that the Comecon was stuck in the economic model of state production for surplus value through exports, production for utility was absent by the 1960's which is why Moscow economists rebelled against GOSPLAN in the late 1960's because GOSPLAN refused to let production be planned based on needs via cybernetics.
So you're saying that "cybernetics" would be closer to the ideas of Karl Marx? I had not seen such a term in his manuscripts, but perhaps I am mistaken.


As for significant class war of Trotskists one word P.O.U.M.
I like how the POUM is Trotskyist whenever it's convenient and very not-Trotskyist when it's not. It must be some manner of magic that allows the organization to shift ideologies so swiftly.

[Psy]

And that was when the KGB was taking orders from an admitted anti-socialist, so it's hard to hold it too much against them.

So much for Stalin's socialism in one nation if the KGB did not turn to be a stick to keep the USSR socialist.



So you're saying that "cybernetics" would be closer to the ideas of Karl Marx? I had not seen such a term in his manuscripts, but perhaps I am mistaken.

Yet Marx was a critique of Friedrich List (and vice versa). Yet East Germany commemorated his birth which explains a lot, the Comecon was following the economic teachings of Friedrick List not Karl Marx. The Comecon followed Lists advice of the state owning heavy industry in order to stabilize business cycles in markets and for nations to remain competitive in the global capitalist marketplace.

Wouldn't it would logical to say any state that commemorates any bourgeoisie economist mean they can't be Marxist? Also wouldn't it be logical to conclude the USSR also followed List due how similar the USSR was to East Germany and East Germany following the teachings of List and probably didn't read Marx's Capital.

[manic expression]

So much for Stalin's socialism in one nation if the KGB did not turn to be a stick to keep the USSR socialist.
I have no idea what it means to "turn to be a stick", but regardless my original point stands.


Yet Marx was a critique of Friedrich List (and vice versa). Yet East Germany commemorated his birth which explains a lot, the Comecon was following the economic teachings of Friedrick List not Karl Marx. The Comecon followed Lists advice of the state owning heavy industry in order to stabilize business cycles in markets and for nations to remain competitive in the global capitalist marketplace.
See, I might take that seriously if you hadn't just praised anarchism, which was heavily critiqued by Marx and Engels.


Wouldn't it would logical to say any state that commemorates any bourgeoisie economist mean they can't be Marxist?
It certainly isn't. Who you put on a stamp doesn't determine if you're socialist or capitalist. Let us be materialists instead.

[Psy]

I have no idea what it means to "turn to be a stick", but regardless my original point stands.

In turn be a stick to beat the counter-revolutionary tendencies out of the state.



See, I might take that seriously if you hadn't just praised anarchism, which was heavily critiqued by Marx and Engels.

The difference is Marx didn't call anarchist bourgeois but he called Fredrick List bourgeois.



It certainly isn't. Who you put on a stamp doesn't determine if you're socialist or capitalist. Let us be materialists instead.
So if a nation calling it self Marxist put John Maynard Keynes on their stamp you would not become instantly skeptical?

[robbo203]

Such one sided perspective. If you had written all these sometime around 70s 60s somewhere in the west western anti-communism propaganda specialists would have been proud of you. Though I guess they are still proud of you now since they still exist.

Well done helping them on leftist forums.


Actually no - the truth is quite the opposite of what you say. What you call "western anti-communism propaganda specialists" would love for us to believe that what existed in the Soviet Union was communism (aka socialism). All the better for them to be able to point out what a crappy system communism is and to triumphantly snigger at its collapse as "proof" of the superiority of capitalism.


The very last thing these "western anti-communism propaganda specialists" would want to hear is genuine communists pointing out that the Soviet Union was nothing of the sort, that it was a crappy exploitative anti-working class system of state-administered capitalism run in the interests of the privileged few (just as in the West) and that no communist worth their salt would want to see a return to the "good ol days" of the Soviet Union which only someone with a particularly conservative bent of mind would hanker after.

State capitalism was a complete cul de sac and of no benefit to our class whatsoever. Hopefully that lesson will have been finally rammed home.

[manic expression]

In turn be a stick to beat the counter-revolutionary tendencies out of the state.
Blame those who were giving the KGB orders...the KGB was never an independent entity onto itself.


The difference is Marx didn't call anarchist bourgeois but he called Fredrick List bourgeois.He called Robespierre bourgeois, too...I wouldn't be against putting the guy on a stamp.


So if a nation calling it self Marxist put John Maynard Keynes on their stamp you would not become instantly skeptical?Skepticism is one thing, using it as "proof" of capitalism is quite another...would you not agree?


Actually no - the truth is quite the opposite of what you say. What you call "western anti-communism propaganda specialists" would love for us to believe that what existed in the Soviet Union was communism (aka socialism).
Political naivete, pure and simple. Anti-communists think that communism is an impossibility, so they're fine to agree with the notion that the USSR wasn't communist. Further, any criticism that puts the USSR in a negative light, especially that which tries to undermine the reality of the rights and the position of the workers, is more than welcome.

[Psy]

Skepticism is one thing, using it as "proof" of capitalism is quite another...would you not agree?

Well Fredrick List popularized national capitalism where the state become the primary capitalist or in other words state-capitalism, not to break from the profit motive but to have the state partake in the profit motive through nationalized industry.

Then in the late 1960's you have GOSPLAN telling Moscow economists they don't want cybernetics even though Moscow economists present cybernetics as a tool for the USSR to effectively plan, as now you can have super computers tracking consumers like modern store consumer tracking system. It would have also been a huge step away from money and wages as with cybernetics computers can track production and consumption and attach that each individual consumer, meaning GOSPLAN would have known exactly what everyone in the Comcon bought and the second they rang it up at a store and could link them to the productive labor they partook in. Yet GOSPLAN rejected the tools to move away the political economy away from money and wages that makes sense if GOSPLAN believed in Fredrick List and was only interested in running the national economy like a corporation but not if they believed in Karl Marx and their end goal was to abolish money and wages.

Lastly as the world market slumped in the 1980's, the Comecom did not redirect production internally to satisfy domestic demand for utility.

[robbo203]

Political naivete, pure and simple. Anti-communists think that communism is an impossibility, so they're fine to agree with the notion that the USSR wasn't communist. Further, any criticism that puts the USSR in a negative light, especially that which tries to undermine the reality of the rights and the position of the workers, is more than welcome.

You have seriously got to be kidding.

Any anti-communist wanting to "undermine the reality of the rights and the position of the workers", have only to point that so called "workers paradise", where the rights of workers were routinely and brutally crushed by the state capitalist regime, if they need an excuse to do the same. In point of fact Ive just been reading something about F A Hayek, the right wing Austrian economist, who was troubled by the fact that the capacity of the Soviet Union to crush dissent might have given them something of an advantage over the West. Its not difficult to see where that logic takes you.

As for anticommunists being agreeable to the idea that the Soviet Union was not communist- if that were remotely true why do they persist in gloating of the collapse of so called communism? You are wanting to deprive them of a key argument in the propaganda war which enables them to assert that capitalism triumphed and, by extension, that capitalism is inevitable - notwithstanding that all we saw in the Soviet was a change from one form of capitalism to another.

Talk about "naivete".

[manic expression]

Well Fredrick List popularized national capitalism where the state become the primary capitalist or in other words state-capitalism, not to break from the profit motive but to have the state partake in the profit motive through nationalized industry.

Then in the late 1960's you have GOSPLAN telling Moscow economists they don't want cybernetics even though Moscow economists present cybernetics as a tool for the USSR to effectively plan, as now you can have super computers tracking consumers like modern store consumer tracking system. It would have also been a huge step away from money and wages as with cybernetics computers can track production and consumption and attach that each individual consumer, meaning GOSPLAN would have known exactly what everyone in the Comcon bought and the second they rang it up at a store and could link them to the productive labor they partook in. Yet GOSPLAN rejected the tools to move away the political economy away from money and wages that makes sense if GOSPLAN believed in Fredrick List and was only interested in running the national economy like a corporation but not if they believed in Karl Marx and their end goal was to abolish money and wages.

Lastly as the world market slumped in the 1980's, the Comecom did not redirect production internally to satisfy domestic demand for utility.
That's all well and good, but none of this seems to distinguish anything as capitalist or non-socialist. You yourself identified the late 80's as the time when capitalism began to be restored...it wasn't something that was hanging around before then, socialism was destroyed politically as class struggle is a political struggle.


Any anti-communist wanting to "undermine the reality of the rights and the position of the workers", have only to point that so called "workers paradise", where the rights of workers were routinely and brutally crushed by the state capitalist regime, if they need an excuse to do the same.
And what a pleasant surprise that they can use the words of leftists in order to slander socialism. It must be very reassuring for capitalists that they need spend so little time on anti-socialist propaganda when so many leftists are happy enough to do the job for them.

[robbo203]

And what a pleasant surprise that they can use the words of leftists in order to slander socialism. It must be very reassuring for capitalists that they need spend so little time on anti-socialist propaganda when so many leftists are happy enough to do the job for them.

If anyone is slandering the good name of socialism it was the Soviet Union and the assorted useful idiots tirelessly plugging the same old tedious line that this state capitalist dictatorship over the proletariat had something to do with socialism. No wonder the vast majority of workers are put of by the word "socialism"

[manic expression]

If anyone is slandering the good name of socialism it was the Soviet Union and the assorted useful idiots tirelessly plugging the same old tedious line that this state capitalist dictatorship over the proletariat had something to do with socialism. No wonder the vast majority of workers are put of by the word "socialism"
Ah, "useful idiots", a favorite expression of capitalist commentators.

And peddling the lie that workers don't like the word "socialism", another standard of anti-socialist voices.

Object all you like, your own words show us how much your criticisms dove-tail with anti-socialist rhetoric.

[Psy]

That's all well and good, but none of this seems to distinguish anything as capitalist or non-socialist. You yourself identified the late 80's as the time when capitalism began to be restored...it wasn't something that was hanging around before then, socialism was destroyed politically as class struggle is a political struggle.

If East Germany wasn't state-capitalist why did they even care about Friedrich List that popularized the idea of state-capitalism among the bourgeoisie? What proof is there that East Germany economy wasn't based on the teachings of Friedrich List instead of Karl Marx? Friedrich List also called for nationalization of heavy industry but to incubate the capitalist class so they can in the future compete with the global market which is exactly what happened in the long run.

[robbo203]

Ah, "useful idiots", a favorite expression of capitalist commentators.

And peddling the lie that workers don't like the word "socialism", another standard of anti-socialist voices.

Object all you like, your own words show us how much your criticisms dove-tail with anti-socialist rhetoric.


You are deluded. How can my criticism possibly "dovetail" with "anti-socialist rhetoric" when my criticism consists in clearly saying that what was the Soviet Union dragged the good name of socialism through the mud? For most workers, despite what you say, the (unwarranted) association of this term with that regime has been a big turnoff as far socialism is concerned

[Geiseric]

What is it with this forum and State Capitalism? Everything about soviet society was different than from Capitalist society! They weren't paid wages and their labor wasn't used for private profit.

You can have the most state control you can in an economy, like the U.S. did and like Great Britain did in WW2, however those wouldn't be described as even close to the social reality of the U.S.S.R. It was something new in and of itself.

"State Capitalism," is the reinforcement of already existing capitalist relations with excessive force. It is too general to describe something as unique as the U.S.S.R. because by your logic, it's the same thing as any country, like the U.S. which has nationalized some parts of the economy.

There was no private ownership, which is the exact feature in society that creates class struggles. State Capitalism means that there was classes. The Beauracracy my have functioned in the same way as the Bourgeois in other countries, however they themselves were not Bourgeois, since they actually didn't own any of what they commanded. They simply managed the economy and leeched off of its productivity, however they did not own any of it and it was to an extent accepted, not supported, as legitimate for most of the workers.

[Psy]

What is it with this forum and State Capitalism? Everything about soviet society was different than from Capitalist society! They weren't paid wages and their labor wasn't used for private profit.

You can have the most state control you can in an economy, like the U.S. did and like Great Britain did in WW2, however those wouldn't be described as even close to the social reality of the U.S.S.R. It was something new in and of itself.

"State Capitalism," is the reinforcement of already existing capitalist relations with excessive force. It is too general to describe something as unique as the U.S.S.R. because by your logic, it's the same thing as any country, like the U.S. which has nationalized some parts of the economy.

There was no private ownership, which is the exact feature in society that creates class struggles. State Capitalism means that there was classes. The Beauracracy my have functioned in the same way as the Bourgeois in other countries, however they themselves were not Bourgeois, since they actually didn't own any of what they commanded. They simply managed the economy and leeched off of its productivity, however they did not own any of it and it was to an extent accepted, not supported, as legitimate for most of the workers.
Because Fredrick List (which again was on the East German stamp) explained how you can have capitalists not directing owning production but still getting surplus value, by having capitalists investing in the state that ran nationalized production. The capitalists would be those investing capital in the Warsaw pact in exchange for surplus value in the form of interests on loans. Thus the relationship was the Warsaw pact produced for exports to get surplus value to pay the capitalists that invested their capital in the Warsaw pact which just happen to live outside the Warsaw pact. Thus the class relationship is not different as the Warsaw pact bureaucracy was still bound to the same logic of corporate bureaucracy of any corporation entrusted with capital investments for capitalists.

[Geiseric]

My main concern was that Engels said that State Capitalism is the end stage of capitalism once it's decayed to the point where the state needs to nullify the contradictions in capitalism, not when surplus labor is being extracted by a bureaucracy. No disrespect to anybody, but just a little bit it seems like opportunism to say that the U.S.S.R. was "State Capitalist," because, the way I see it, it's the result of Communists trying to disconnect themselves entirely from the U.S.S.R. without wanting to explain to people what went wrong with the workers state, in order to make people more OK with communism.

Capitalists who lived outside of feudal Thailand and other imperialised countries that retained a monarchy also extracted surplus labor from workers in those feudal states, so are countries like pre-nationalist china and Tzarist Russia also State Capitalist? Is it the fact that investments are made into a country what makes it state capitalist?

My friends, State Capitalism would mean that the Industrialisation and Collectivisation were all done for profit, which to my knowledge isn't true. They were done for the use value of having factories and electricity, and for having a better system of agriculture. Obviously it was leeched off of by the Bureaucracy, however the fact that surplus labor is being extracted doesn't make it Capitalist. You can extract labor from somebody in feudalism and it wouldn't be State Capitalist. It's the productive methods that determine what kind of economic system it is, and collectivisation and state planning, i.e. getting rid of a market, pretty much makes something non capitalist.

[Psy]

My main concern was that Engels said that State Capitalism is the end stage of capitalism once it's decayed to the point where the state needs to nullify the contradictions in capitalism, not when surplus labor is being extracted by a bureaucracy. No disrespect to anybody, but just a little bit it seems like opportunism to say that the U.S.S.R. was "State Capitalist," because, the way I see it, it's the result of Communists trying to disconnect themselves entirely from the U.S.S.R. without wanting to explain to people what went wrong with the workers state, in order to make people more OK with communism.

Capitalists who lived outside of feudal Thailand and other imperialised countries that retained a monarchy also extracted surplus labor from workers in those feudal states, so are countries like pre-nationalist china and Tzarist Russia also State Capitalist? Is it the fact that investments are made into a country what makes it state capitalist?

My friends, State Capitalism would mean that the Industrialisation and Collectivisation were all done for profit, which to my knowledge isn't true. They were done for the use value of having factories and electricity, and for having a better system of agriculture. Obviously it was leeched off of by the Bureaucracy, however the fact that surplus labor is being extracted doesn't make it Capitalist. You can extract labor from somebody in feudalism and it wouldn't be State Capitalist. It's the productive methods that determine what kind of economic system it is, and collectivisation and state planning, i.e. getting rid of a market, pretty much makes something non capitalist.
Yet Friedrick List maintains most of the capitalist arrangement, workers still are forced to sell their labor for a wage, the commodities built by workers still become the property of the owner of production (in this case the state) that sells it for more then then the owner paid the labor that created.

Just look at the East German debt crisis of 1989, East Germany could not service its debt from western capitalists, and since all East Germany cared about was making its capitalist investors happy it implemented austerity so it could pay its debt, the austerity measures caused East Germany to collapse as they were calculating a projected for 25–30% cut in living standards just so East Germany could pay its debts to western capitalists.

How in hell is this a state working off the works of Marx? If production existed to produce utility how the hell did East Germany get caught up exactly like Greece today?

[Yefim Zverev]

Actually no - the truth is quite the opposite of what you say. What you call "western anti-communism propaganda specialists" would love for us to believe that what existed in the Soviet Union was communism (aka socialism). All the better for them to be able to point out what a crappy system communism is and to triumphantly snigger at its collapse as "proof" of the superiority of capitalism.


The very last thing these "western anti-communism propaganda specialists" would want to hear is genuine communists pointing out that the Soviet Union was nothing of the sort, that it was a crappy exploitative anti-working class system of state-administered capitalism run in the interests of the privileged few (just as in the West) and that no communist worth their salt would want to see a return to the "good ol days" of the Soviet Union which only someone with a particularly conservative bent of mind would hanker after.

State capitalism was a complete cul de sac and of no benefit to our class whatsoever. Hopefully that lesson will have been finally rammed home.

Smart response I appreciate this comrade.

Soviet Union was not %100 socialist. It went into corruption from the first day but this has many reasons. All materialistic reasons. And they should be pointed out before such a quick aggression on USSR, so many people suffered in order to build it and we disrespect them, that is not the way.

What I dislike is that people always blabbering about gulags and Stalin all the time. Why don't they ever check the positive sides of USSR ? Instead they keep repeating what documentaries of anti-communists say.

[Rooster]

Smart response I appreciate this comrade.

Soviet Union was not %100 socialist. It went into corruption from the first day but this has many reasons. All materialistic reasons. And they should be pointed out before such a quick aggression on USSR, so many people suffered in order to build it and we disrespect them, that is not the way.

What I dislike is that people always blabbering about gulags and Stalin all the time. Why don't they ever check the positive sides of USSR ? Instead they keep repeating what documentaries of anti-communists say.

Which documentary says that the USSR was capitalist?

[daft punk]

He was an simple intelligence agent,no more no less,he like thousands others in that period was in the secret service.To say that he saved the USSR from Nazi Germany is absurd.

I didnt say he saved the USSR, I said he risked his life to save it. Obviously he wasnt the only one. So, he was a simple agent eh?

Now, please read and comment on this:

"Through a network of militants in France and Belgium, Trepper established sources of intelligence through the heart of the Nazi apparatus. A series of radio transmission stations or “orchestras” were set up, at immense personal risk to the operators, who were acutely vulnerable to Nazi tracking teams. This when combined with the work of the Schultze Boysen group and Richard Sorge meant that none of the German’s military plans were secret from the soviets, so that when Hitler signed the Directive Number 21 or Operation Barbarossa the plan for the invasion of the Soviet Union, Sorge was able to immediately forward a copy of the directive to Red Army Intelligence. In February Trepper provided details of the number of divisions and the proposed date of attack. In April 1941 Schultze Boysen sent the centre precise information of the operational plan. The problem was none of the messages were believed. Marshal Goikov the head of Soviet Intelligence Services noted; “All documents claiming that war is imminent must be regarded as forgeries emanating from British or even Germ Sources and in the margins of the documents forwarded by Trepper and Sorge, Goikov noted “Double agent” or “British source.”
Desperate, the day before Barbarossa was due, Trepper once again sent a further warning. Again it was ignored. “Generalissimo Stalin” preferred the words of his Nazi allies, to the warnings of his communist agents. The Nazi’s invaded on schedule and the destruction they wrought on the Red Army threatened the very existence of the USSR. By the autumn of 1941, the Nazi’s had advanced 1200 kilometres into the Soviet Union and before a meeting of his generals at Rustenburg to plan the final attack on Moscow, Hitler was able to announce “The Russian army has been destroyed. We will enter Moscow in a matter of days.” We know because a member of the Schultze Boysen group was the stenographer at that meeting, she passed on the Nazi plans to the Soviets. And they never did occupy Moscow."


Once again you are proved utterly wrong. Trepper was the leader of the Red Orchestra. He directed seven GRU networks in Nazi ocupied France. There was a film made about the Red Orchestra, and Trepper was the main character by the way.



The other group they worked with was Schultze-Boysen.



"In 1939 Leopold Trepper (http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUStrepper.htm), an agent for the NKVD (http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUSnkvd.htm), established the Red Orchestra network in Europe. and organised underground operations in Germany (http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Germany.htm), France (http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/France.htm), Holland (http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWholland.htm) and Switzerland (http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWswitzerland.htm). Red Orchestra worked closely with the French Communist Party (http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/FRcommunist.htm) and succeeded in tapping the phones of Abwehr (http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERabwehr.htm) in France. Trepper was also able to provide detailed reports on the plans for a German invasion of the Soviet Union (http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Russia.htm).
In the spring of 1942 the first Red Orchestra agents were arrested in Belgium (http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/2WWbelgium.htm). Some agents broke under torture and the Germans were able to liquidate the network in Europe. The Red Orchestra's headquarters were raided in November, 1942. Leopold Trepper (http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUStrepper.htm) managed to escape and remained in hiding until Paris was liberated."


http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUSorchestra.htm






"The Red Orchestra was probably the most successful spy network in WW2."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Orchestra_%28espionage%29


So, just a 'simple agent', or the agent who founded and led the most successful spy network in WW2, which warned Russia of the Nazi invasion?


This should serve as a warning to you, not to make wild claims without knowing anything.

fFX6-xhet7U

[Vyacheslav Brolotov]

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. If it uses anti-socialist capitalist propaganda and is brainwashed by capitalist lies, it's a fucking capitalist collaborator.

You ultra-leftists should really stop trying so hard to sound like my capitalist parents, and yes, they also say that the Soviet Union was capitalist. You guys are no better than semi-educated capitalists. Stop trying to act special by saying, "B-but we-e say it-t w-w-was capitalist-t, so-oo we are-e not-t like them!!!!!!!"

That's cute.

[daft punk]

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. If it uses anti-socialist capitalist propaganda and is brainwashed by capitalist lies, it's a fucking capitalist collaborator.

You ultra-leftists should really stop trying so hard to sound like my capitalist parents, and yes, they also say that the Soviet Union was capitalist. You guys are no better than semi-educated capitalists. Stop trying to act special by saying, "B-but we-e say it-t w-w-was capitalist-t, so-oo we are-e not-t like them!!!!!!!"

That's cute.

One day, when I am old and wise, I might understand what is being said in this post. Until that day comes, I will remain ignorant of it's deep meanings, in the dark about it's enlightening insights, deaf to it's powerful message.

So, about this duck...

[Psy]

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. If it uses anti-socialist capitalist propaganda and is brainwashed by capitalist lies, it's a fucking capitalist collaborator.

You ultra-leftists should really stop trying so hard to sound like my capitalist parents, and yes, they also say that the Soviet Union was capitalist. You guys are no better than semi-educated capitalists. Stop trying to act special by saying, "B-but we-e say it-t w-w-was capitalist-t, so-oo we are-e not-t like them!!!!!!!"

That's cute.
The USSR was capitalists because they went against the teaching of Marx's Capital, they did not move away from wages and prices in the 1960's when computer scientists offered the tools to move towards a economy for use.

[Red Rabbit]

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck.

Or someone in a very convincing duck costume.

[Omsk]

Yes,daft punk,as i said,he was a simple agent.The quote you posted is classical anti-Stalin rubbish completely divorced from the historical context and generally horrible.If you didn't know,"General Stalin" was probably one of them most competent Soviet leaders.Plus,the warning of 'the invasion' was,not known by the agents,some thing probably predicted by Stalin,as it is absurd to claim that he was somehow 'surprised'.

[Vyacheslav Brolotov]

My post was not a message to only one specific person or tendency, it was a general warning against letting your rhetoric go so far as to make you sound like a capitalist. Some of what you guys write reminds me too much of common capitalist, anti-communist rhetoric. It's disturbing.

[Ostrinski]

If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck. If it uses anti-socialist capitalist propaganda and is brainwashed by capitalist lies, it's a fucking capitalist collaborator.

You ultra-leftists should really stop trying so hard to sound like my capitalist parents, and yes, they also say that the Soviet Union was capitalist. You guys are no better than semi-educated capitalists. Stop trying to act special by saying, "B-but we-e say it-t w-w-was capitalist-t, so-oo we are-e not-t like them!!!!!!!"

That's cute.Lay it on thick homie. Everyone is taking you serious right now

[Vyacheslav Brolotov]

Lay it on thick homie. Everyone is taking you serious right now

I am not looking for idiots to take me seriously. I was just pointing out something very surprising and ironic: Revolutionary leftists in such strong agreement with capitalists.

[Grenzer]

I am not looking for idiots to take me seriously. I was just pointing out something very surprising and ironic: Revolutionary leftists in such strong agreement with capitalists.

Interesting.

I'd be curious for you to point out state propaganda produced by the United States or Britain decrying the Soviet Union as being a vile bastion of capitalism. In truth, the nature of our criticisms on the one hand, and the capitalists on the other; could not be more opposite. As it stands, you are spitting out childish invectives without really addressing the root of the issue, which is that the workers were not in charge and that the surplus value of labor was extracted via wage labor. Instead, the fruits of the extracted labor was controlled entirely by a small elite. Although the form differs from liberal capitalism, the essence does not. By Engel's reckoning, this is capitalism.

But if telling yourself that left communists hate the Soviet Union because they think it was a socialist state helps you sleep at night, then go for it man.

[Geiseric]

Yet Friedrick List maintains most of the capitalist arrangement, workers still are forced to sell their labor for a wage, the commodities built by workers still become the property of the owner of production (in this case the state) that sells it for more then then the owner paid the labor that created.

Just look at the East German debt crisis of 1989, East Germany could not service its debt from western capitalists, and since all East Germany cared about was making its capitalist investors happy it implemented austerity so it could pay its debt, the austerity measures caused East Germany to collapse as they were calculating a projected for 25–30% cut in living standards just so East Germany could pay its debts to western capitalists.

How in hell is this a state working off the works of Marx? If production existed to produce utility how the hell did East Germany get caught up exactly like Greece today?

I don't know much about East Germany tbh, but for the sake of the arguement please let's stay on topic with the U.S.S.R.

Workers were not paid in wages, they had money that they could use for buying some luxuries but distribution of what was made was determined by state planning, without a market. Thus it can't be capitalism. The market IS capitalism itself.

I don't think the U.S.S.R. was ever in debt to the Entente either, except for earlier on in its existence, which it agreed to pay off the Czarist debts in order to avoid war.

On top of that, "The State," according to marx works in favor of whichever social class is dominant, and this is determined by ownership, nothing else. The U.S.S.R. had a workers state, it had a dictatorship of the proletariat that arose from the revolution in the same way that a dictatorship of the bourgeois arose from the french revolution. If the dictatorship of the proletariat doesn't own and control the economy, who should? If a workers state can

But bureaucracies exist in any society, and yet are not a class in itself, since it doesn't own, but it does administrate. That is it's role, to administrate and manage. It doesn't own anything.

However, the way it worked in the U.S.S.R. was that their bureaucracy was allowed to seperate its interests wholly from the working class, however it is still a part of the working class, since it doesn't own any production. Individual bureaucrats didn't own capital, they managed and leeched off of the productive forces. That determines a whole lot more than how much wealth they had possession of, because the Bureaucracy still managed a publicly owned economy.

[Psy]

I don't know much about East Germany tbh, but for the sake of the arguement please let's stay on topic with the U.S.S.R.

Workers were not paid in wages, they had money that they could use for buying some luxuries but distribution of what was made was determined by state planning, without a market. Thus it can't be capitalism. The market IS capitalism itself.

They were paid wages, the USSR couldn't fix wages if they did away with wages, not to mention to get rid wages you have to rid of prices and money all together. So if the USSR got rid of wages it wouldn't have had a currency as everything would be produced for use thus is distribution dictated by planning not by markets regardless of how planned those markets were.



I don't think the U.S.S.R. was ever in debt to the Entente either, except for earlier on in its existence, which it agreed to pay off the Czarist debts in order to avoid war.

The USSR had debt which is why the fall in oil prices threw them in a debt crisis like East Germany.



On top of that, "The State," according to marx works in favor of whichever social class is dominant, and this is determined by ownership, nothing else. The U.S.S.R. had a workers state, it had a dictatorship of the proletariat that arose from the revolution in the same way that a dictatorship of the bourgeois arose from the french revolution. If the dictatorship of the proletariat doesn't own and control the economy, who should? If a workers state can

But when you are in debt you don't own production, sure you have title but you also have a capitalists having title to a portion of surplus value from that production.



But bureaucracies exist in any society, and yet are not a class in itself, since it doesn't own, but it does administrate. That is it's role, to administrate and manage. It doesn't own anything.

That doesn't really help the argument that the Soviet Block sold their entitlement to surplus value to the west. Not only in loans but selling distribution rights to capitalist companies like Pepsi.



However, the way it worked in the U.S.S.R. was that their bureaucracy was allowed to seperate its interests wholly from the working class, however it is still a part of the working class, since it doesn't own any production. Individual bureaucrats didn't own capital, they managed and leeched off of the productive forces. That determines a whole lot more than how much wealth they had possession of, because the Bureaucracy still managed a publicly owned economy.
But the bureaucracy had to honor the agreements it made with capitalists. If the Comecon really belived in Marx's capital they would have told all capitalists to go fuck themselves as they won't do business with them as they would have read Marx and knew capitalists only engage in agreements in the pursuit of surplus value thus no trade can occur between a workers state and capitalist state. Meaning the Comecon would have been a total closed market if it was truly Marxist thus the world markets would have had zero effect on the Comecon markets as they would be trading with nations inside the Comecon.

[Yazman]

Comrade Commistar, you're lucky warnings aren't retroactive or else I'd be infracting you for flamebaiting.

No more shit talking other users please. If you disagree with somebody's tendency, then post constructively or don't post at all.

[Vyacheslav Brolotov]

Comrade Commistar, you're lucky warnings aren't retroactive or else I'd be infracting you for flamebaiting.

No more shit talking other users please. If you disagree with somebody's tendency, then post constructively or don't post at all.

That's sweet, but what about the people who said that Marxist-Leninists are "delusional"? You did not say anything then.

[robbo203]

What is it with this forum and State Capitalism? Everything about soviet society was different than from Capitalist society! They weren't paid wages and their labor wasn't used for private profit.

You can have the most state control you can in an economy, like the U.S. did and like Great Britain did in WW2, however those wouldn't be described as even close to the social reality of the U.S.S.R. It was something new in and of itself.

"State Capitalism," is the reinforcement of already existing capitalist relations with excessive force. It is too general to describe something as unique as the U.S.S.R. because by your logic, it's the same thing as any country, like the U.S. which has nationalized some parts of the economy.

There was no private ownership, which is the exact feature in society that creates class struggles. State Capitalism means that there was classes. The Beauracracy my have functioned in the same way as the Bourgeois in other countries, however they themselves were not Bourgeois, since they actually didn't own any of what they commanded. They simply managed the economy and leeched off of its productivity, however they did not own any of it and it was to an extent accepted, not supported, as legitimate for most of the workers.

Sorry but this is grossly misinformed

Capitalism does not depend on there being individual capitalists having exclusive de jure owneship of capital as individuals. Where did you get this absurd idea from?

Here's Engels saying the complete opposite:

The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers - proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. Socialism Utopian and Scientific"

The state capitalist class did not have to legally own the means of prpduction. All they needed to do was exert ultimate control over the means of production which they did very effectively via their complete control over the state machine. This ultimate control amounts to the same thing as de facto ownership . Thats what the apparatchiks did - not as individuals but, collectively, as a small highly privileged and extremely powerful class, they owned the means of production in real de facto material terms. They had complete control over the disposal of the economic surplus - the telltale sign of an owning class - even if this was disguised by the rhetoric of pseudo-socialist terminology in which they clothed themselves


What was remarklable was not how different the Soviet Union was to other parts of global capitalism but how similar it was! You've got it completely the wrong way round. There were differences, to be sure, but they were secondary to the fundamentals which were what the Soviet Union shared in common with other capitalist countires. Even the levels of material inequalities were similar according to some studies. I know I have quoted these figure before but John Fleming and John Micklewright in their paper "Income Distribution, Economic Systems and Transition" cite the work of researchers like Morrison who, using data from the 1970s, found that countries like Poland and the Soviet Union had relatively high levels of income inequality, registering gini coefficients of 0.31 in both case, which put them on a par with Canada (0.30) and the USA (0.34) (http://www.unicef-irc.org/publications/pdf/eps70.pdf) Not much difference to speak of there


Your other claims are equally absurd - "workers werent paid in wages". What the hell do you think they were paid in then , eh? Packets of Cornflakes? Sugar cubes? Condoms? Of course they were paid in wages! According to Brus, the wage packet was the most important single component of income for Soviet workers (Brus W, "The Economic Role of the State: West and East", Survey, XXV, 4, 1980). Part of the Soviet worker’s consumption bundle was provided outside the market, through the ‘social wage’ supplied by the state (pensions, education, health care, sometimes housing) by the state enterprises (housing, holidays, social welfare) but this is not really all that different from the situation of workers in the capitalist West where the social wage likwise serve to reduce the nominal wage that workers receive in their paypackets.

Ironically payment in kind sharply increased after the fall of the Societ Union because of the growing difficultiues experienced by the economy. A lot more workers were being paid in food, consumer goods and even, Ive read, such exotica (or should I say erotica) as sex toys. What would that very bourgeois prude.V Lenin, have thought of all that with all his talk of sex "stealing fire" from the revolution in his debate with Kollantai, I dont know! Ill, fish out the relevant article sometime

Wage labour is wage labour and wages are wages. The fact that in the Soviet Union wages were tightly regulated - although state enterprises had a certain amount of leeway in negotiating wage levels - and independent trade unionism crushed does not make the Soviet Union any the less a system of generalised wage labour - what Marxists call "capitalism ". A tightly regulated market for labour power -like a tightly regulated market for anything else - is STILL A MARKET ECONOMY. Its just a ...er...tightly regulated one. What is bought and sold is still a commodity despite Stalin nonsensical musings on the subject of commodity production

And then there is your claim that there was no private profiit. But there was still "profit", wasn't there? - even if it did not directly into the hands of individual private capitalists who are, in any case, not essential to capitalism. Surely that is more important than whether or not this prpfit was private - the fact that profits existed? State enterprises were legally required to keep profit and loss accounts and pursue profits or be heavily penalised. This requirement did not exist for no good reason

True, loss making state enterprises did not go to the wall but were subsidised by the state out of the revenue generated by profitable state enterprises but then thats not that different from what happens in the West where subsidies and the like are not unheard of

[daft punk]

Capitalism does not depend on there being individual capitalists having exclusive de jure owneship of capital as individuals. Where did you get this absurd idea from?



Yes, really, Syd, capitalism requires capitalists?! How utterly absurd. Capitalism is defined by left communists, not by things like a capitalist class and production for profit.

Here is the Economist definition

"


Capitalism

The winner, at least for now, of the battle of economic 'isms'. Capitalism is a free-market system [or not] built on private state ownership, in particular, the idea that owners of CAPITAL (http://www.economist.com/economics-a-to-z/c#node-21529870) bureaucracy have PROPERTY RIGHTS (http://www.economist.com/economics-a-to-z/p#node-21529439) [or dont as the case may be] that entitle them to earn a PROFIT WAGE as a reward for putting their capital at RISK (http://www.economist.com/economics-a-to-z/r#node-21529781) in some form of economic activity.being bastards. Opinion (and practice) differs considerably among capitalist countries about what role the state should play in the economy. But everyone agrees that, at the very least, for capitalism to work the state must be strong enough to guarantee property rights.own the means of production. According to Karl MARX (http://www.economist.com/economics-a-to-z/m#node-21529850), capitalism contains the seeds of its own destruction, but so far this has proved a more accurate description of Marx's progeny, COMMUNISM (http://www.economist.com/economics-a-to-z/c#node-21529868) [which was actually CAPITALISM.] "

[daft punk]

the fruits of the extracted labor was controlled entirely by a small elite. Although the form differs from liberal capitalism, the essence does not. By Engel's reckoning, this is capitalism.

I forgot that Engels lived to see the USSR set up as a Stalinist state. Here was me thinking that he was writing about a capitalist state nationalising a company during a financial crisis.

[Dave B]

What “confuses” me with these neo Leninists is the fact that they choose to ignore the often stated fact by Lenin himself that the whole project of the bolshevik revolution was to introduce state capitalism in Russia modelled on the example in Germany.

"LEFT-WING" CHILDISHNESS May 1918




…………our task is to study the state capitalism of the Germans, to spare no effort in copying it and not shrink from adopting dictatorial methods to hasten the copying of it. Our task is to hasten this copying even more than Peter hastened the copying of Western culture by barbarian Russia, and we must not hesitate to use barbarous methods in fighting barbarism.

If there are anarchists and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries (I recall off-hand the speeches of Karelin and Ghe at the meeting of the Central Executive Committee) who indulge in Narcissus-like reflections and say that it is unbecoming for us revolutionaries to "take lessons" from German imperialism, there is only one thing we can say in reply: the revolution that took these people seriously would perish irrevocably (and deservedly).


At present, petty-bourgeois capitalism prevails in Russia, and it is one and the same road that leads from it to both large-scale state capitalism and to socialism, through one and the same intermediary station called "national accounting and control of production and distribution". Those
page 341
who fail to understand this are committing an unpardonable mistake in economics. Either they do not know the facts of life, do not see what actually exists and are unable to look the truth in the face,

http://www.marx2mao.net/Lenin/LWC18.html


That was what leftwing childishness was, denying that soviet Russia could be anything else but state capitalism.

Although my confusion isn’t entirely sincere.

Accepting that Soviet Russia was state capitalist under Lenin, as it was eventually accepted as, even by partisans against the idea like Bukharin, would mean for modern Trotskyists;

That it went from state capitalism under Lenin and Trotsky to a “degenerated workers state” under Stalin.

The Stalinist and Stalin was actually on firmer ground.

Even though from my perspective it was Lenin’s and Trotsky’s own state capitalism that under Stalin ‘degenerated’ as Bukharin predicted.

Although I don’t think it is correct to say that state capitalism degenerated under Stalin but just progressed into a more perfected and pure form.

[robbo203]

Yes, really, Syd, capitalism requires capitalists?! How utterly absurd. Capitalism is defined by left communists, not by things like a capitalist class and production for profit.



But the Soviet Union did have its capitalist class and I have helpfully pointed out to you who these were and why they were capitalists - because of their de facto collective ownership of the mean of production.

It does not matter that this state capitalist class did not possess the right to legally own capital as private individuals. This is absolutely irrelevant unless you are an idealist who thinks the legal superstructure carries more weight or explanatory power than material reality .

The precise form in which capital is monopolised by a minority is markedly less important for a Marxist than the fact that it thus monpolised which, in turn, can be inferred from the undeniable fact that this tiny class had complete control over the disposal of the economic surplus. Thats how you define a class in Marxian terms, after all - by its relation to the means of production - and anyone who thinks the soviet capitalist class bore the same relation to the means of prpduction as the Russdian workers is a deluded fool in my humble opinon. People who have the same relation to the means of production dont differ in respect of their ability to dispose of the economic surplus, do they they now?

So, yes, capitalism is defined inter alia by there being a capitalist class and that is precisely why there was capitalism in the Soviet Union - becuase there was a capitalist class there! After all, there could hardly NOT have been be a capitalist class there. If the working class existed (and Trots claim the Soviet Union was a "degenerated workers state" or mumbo jumbo of that ilk so they too must acknowlege such a class existed then) then it follows that a capitalist class must also have existed by inference alongside this working class. There is no such thing as a working class that exists on its own. It only exists in relation to another class - the capitalist class - as two sides of the same coin. Thats pretty obvious, I would have thought...

And, yes, capitaliasm is defined inter alia by the pursuit of profit as well which is precisely what state enterprises under soviet state capitalism were legally required to pursue - are you surely denying this? - and without which the whole programme inf industrialisation via capital accumulation could not have been financed. Where did the capital come if not out of surplus value? How did the state finance its own existence if not out the same?

Strewth , what planet are you Trots from? Sometime I seriously wonder. The kind of world you seem to imagine exists or existed simply does not tally with the basic humdrum material facts of life. Your perspective is so ideologised to the point where you seem to have lost touch with reality

[daft punk]

What “confuses” me with these neo Leninists is the fact that they choose to ignore the often stated fact by Lenin himself that the whole project of the bolshevik revolution was to introduce state capitalism in Russia modelled on the example in Germany.


Not true. Lenin pointed out that state capitalism under a Bolshevik regime was totally different to that in a capitalist country. He pointed out that it was a stepping stone from a backward country to socialism.

Oh, and you forgot the bit about Stalin's forced collectivisation.

[Psy]

Not true. Lenin pointed out that state capitalism under a Bolshevik regime was totally different to that in a capitalist country. He pointed out that it was a stepping stone from a backward country to socialism.

The USSR wasn't backwards after WWII and like I said GOSPLAN didn't go along with the idea of going over to a production for use economy in the 1960's.



Oh, and you forgot the bit about Stalin's forced collectivisation.
[/SIZE]
Which happened in capitalist Great Britain with the enclosure act.

[daft punk]

Your perspective is so ideologised to the point where you seem to have lost touch with reality
read this

http://www.marxists.org/archive/grant/1949/cliff.htm

also, let me ask you this. Suppose the Russian workers had not been purged in the 1930s, and the desire for socialism grew again. Suppose the workers got conscious, organised, formed a new party, and rose up. The Stalinist regime would have toppled quite easily. Let's assume this happened. Now suppose the workers began to carry out their plan of democratic socialism. What economic changes would be required to achieve socialism?

They had done the political revolution. According to you what is now needed is a social revolution. But where, why? They have the economy in their hands and are gonna democratically plan it. That is socialism. Achieved by a political revolution. Therefore it was not capitalist.

Anyway, read the above from Ted Grant.

[daft punk]

Originally Posted by daft punk http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2401944#post2401944)
"Not true. Lenin pointed out that state capitalism under a Bolshevik regime was totally different to that in a capitalist country. He pointed out that it was a stepping stone from a backward country to socialism. "

The USSR wasn't backwards after WWII


so?




and like I said GOSPLAN didn't go along with the idea of going over to a production for use economy in the 1960's.

not sure what this means



Originally Posted by daft punk
"Oh, and you forgot the bit about Stalin's forced collectivisation."
Which happened in capitalist Great Britain with the enclosure act.
is this relevant?

[Psy]

so?
The situation changed, the USSR no longer was state capitalist as a stepping stone since it already industrialized.



not sure what this means

In the 1960's computer scientists presented the means for GOSPLAN to move beyond wages and prices yet GOSPLAN was no interested.




is this relevant?
Yhea, collectivisation of farms doesn't make the USSR Marxist.

[daft punk]

sorry if i'm being a bit thick but I'm just not clear what point(s) you are making. can you spell it out? Russia was industrialised so it was no longer state capitalist - I agree with that. Russia wasnt backwards but it was too late for socialism. It had already degenerated. Are you saying Russia was socialist?

[Psy]

sorry if i'm being a bit thick but I'm just not clear what point(s) you are making. can you spell it out? Russia was industrialised so it was no longer state capitalist - I agree with that. Russia wasnt backwards but it was too late for socialism. It had already degenerated. Are you saying Russia was socialist?
I'm saying the justification no longer existed, after WWII you could no longer say that the USSR was state capitalist to pave the way to communism because the means of production were built and the USSR also had the industrial power of the Eastern European nations it took over.

[daft punk]

I'm saying the justification no longer existed, after WWII you could no longer say that the USSR was state capitalist to pave the way to communism because the means of production were built and the USSR also had the industrial power of the Eastern European nations it took over.

Justification for what? What do you think the USSR was ?

[Psy]

Justification for what? What do you think the USSR was ?
Justification for having production around creating surplus value, communist economies are based around production for utility.

[Geiseric]

This issue is tearing us apart! What are the consequences if the U.S.S.R. was indeed State Capitalist? How would that change our theory about things? That we should watch and regulate a bureaucracy once we have a revolution?

[daft punk]

Psy, why dont you just start from scratch and spell out your perspective of the USSR, it might be easier.

[Dave B]

read this

http://www.marxists.org/archive/grant/1949/cliff.htm

.....................

Anyway, read the above from Ted Grant.


You just don’t get it do you Daft Punk


Why didn’t the likes of Grant and Cliff and the rest of the magic circle of trot intellectuals discuss (openly) why Lenin said that Russia was state capitalism in his pamphlet leftwing childishness?

Unless it was because they were lying and taking the piss out of people like yourself

[Psy]

This issue is tearing us apart! What are the consequences if the U.S.S.R. was indeed State Capitalist? How would that change our theory about things? That we should watch and regulate a bureaucracy once we have a revolution?
That the U.S.S.R showed us the limits of reforming the capitalist system while still holding onto production being based around accumulating surplus value.


Psy, why dont you just start from scratch and spell out your perspective of the USSR, it might be easier.
The U.S.S.R started its life as state-capitalist as a stop gap measure while they waited for the revolution to spread to Germany as Lenin didn't see it possible for Russia to become communist on its own. The problem is this never changed even as the productive forces grew, this is why the Comecon faced a crisis of capital in the 1980's and the Comecon's solution was austerity. The Comecon having never read Marx's Capital didn't understand the nature of their crisis thus why the reacted to the crisis with opening up the flow of capital that simply amplified the crisis the capital.

[robbo203]

read this

http://www.marxists.org/archive/grant/1949/cliff.htm

also, let me ask you this. Suppose the Russian workers had not been purged in the 1930s, and the desire for socialism grew again. Suppose the workers got conscious, organised, formed a new party, and rose up. The Stalinist regime would have toppled quite easily. Let's assume this happened. Now suppose the workers began to carry out their plan of democratic socialism. What economic changes would be required to achieve socialism?

They had done the political revolution. According to you what is now needed is a social revolution. But where, why? They have the economy in their hands and are gonna democratically plan it. That is socialism. Achieved by a political revolution. Therefore it was not capitalist.

Anyway, read the above from Ted Grant.

I m not quite sure what you are getting at here with your hypothetical scenario. The very premisses upon which you construct this scenario are questionable. Like this one

"Suppose the Russian workers had not been purged in the 1930s, and the desire for socialism grew again"


"Again"? What "desire for socialism" existed among the Russian working class prior to the 1930s??? Evidence please! Problem is that for you "socialism" means state ownership of the means of production; for me, using the traditional Marxian understanding of the term, it means something totally different - a moneyless wageless stateless community based on the common ownership- not state ownership - of the means of priduction


Then there's this astonishing claim from you

They have the economy in their hands and are gonna democratically plan it. That is socialism.

Really? In what sense did the workers "have the economy in their hands in Russia"? Would it be in this sense when Lenin lectured the workers in 1921, thus?


Get down to business all of you! You will have capitalists beside you, including foreign capitalists, concessionaires and leaseholders. They will squeeze profits out of you amounting to hundreds per cent; they will enrich themselves, operating alongside of you. Let them, Meanwhile you will learn from them the business of running an economy, and only when you do that will you be able to build up a communist republic. (Collected Works, Vol. 33 page 72).

Fact is the workers never had the "economy in their hands". Not at any point in time. What you had was a state capitalist regime emerging, claiming to represent the interests of the working class in which a small tiny elite effectively controlled the means of production and therefore owned it in de facto terms. The Russian workers remained wage slaves separated from the means of production and therefore compelled to sell their labour power to the state rather than private employers for a wage . Trots who are in denial about the existence of wage labour in Soviet state capitalism think that the fact that wages levels were set by the bureaucrats (although this is not entirely true as state enterprises themselves had some leeway in the matter) rather than a so called free market means they are no longer wages. But it means nothing of the sort. A highly regulated wage system is a still a system of wage slavery and, in Russia, the workers did not even the nominal advantage of workers in some other parts of the world where they could at least organise independently to an extent against the bosses.

So much for the so called workers state theory and I note you have nothing to say about the argument I put to you that if a working class existed in Russia then logically so must have a capitalist class. You cannot have one without the other. No Trot Ive encountered has ever yet been able to wriggle out of that one!

I read the Ted Grant article and I have read other stuff of his. I can't say Im overly impressed. His argument is poorly constructed and there are gaping holes in it at several points. His critique of the Cliffite theory of state capitalism makes some good points but you need to be aware that there are other, more powerful, versions of the state capitalist theory than Cliff's

A much better article is this

http://wspus.org/2009/11/workers-state/

And here are some more from the same source

http://wspus.org/in-depth/russia-lenin-and-state-capitalism/
http://wspus.org/2009/02/why-didn%e2%80%99t-anyone-wake-me-up-while-the-revolution-was-going-on/

[daft punk]

You just don’t get it do you Daft Punk


Why didn’t the likes of Grant and Cliff and the rest of the magic circle of trot intellectuals discuss (openly) why Lenin said that Russia was state capitalism in his pamphlet leftwing childishness?

Unless it was because they were lying and taking the piss out of people like yourself

Fix your bloody font size ffs Dave.

In case you didnt notice, Stalin collectivised Russia 1928 after 1928. And the economy surged forward thanks to being a planned one. This is evidence that socialism can work well, something lost on you. Russia's economy grew faster in the 1950s an 60s than any other country except Japan, which was being helped by America. And it was that aspect that Trotskyists defend.

You are wrong that Lenin said Russia was state capitalist. He said it was in transition and contained elements of capitalism, state capitalism and socialism:

"No one, I think, in studying the question of the economic system of Russia, has denied its transitional character. Nor, I think, has any Communist denied that the term Socialist Soviet Republic implies the determination of Soviet power to achieve the transition to socialism, and not that the new economic system is recognised as a socialist order.
But what does the word “transition” mean? Does it not mean, as applied to an economy, that the present system contains elements, particles, fragments of both capitalism and socialism? Everyone will admit that it does. But not all who admit this take the trouble to consider what elements actually constitute the various socio-economic structures that exist in Russia at the present time. And this is the crux of the question.
Let us enumerate these elements:
1) patriarchal, i.e., to a considerable extent natural, peasant farming;
2) small commodity production (this includes the majority of those peasants who sell their grain);
3) private capitalism;
4) state capitalism;
5) socialism.
Russia is so vast and so varied that all these different types of socio-economic structures are intermingled. This is what constitutes the specific features of the situation.
The question arises: what elements predominate? Clearly in a small-peasant country, the petty-bourgeois element predominates and it must predominate, for the great majority of those working the land are small commodity producers. The shell of our state capitalism (grain monopoly, state controlled entrepreneurs and traders, bourgeois co-operators) is pierced now in one place, now in another by profiteers, the chief object of profiteering being grain.
It is in this field that the main struggle is being waged. Between what elements is this struggle being waged if we are to speak in terms of economic categories such as “state capitalism"? Between the fourth and the fifth in the order in which I have just enumerated them. Of course not. It is not state capitalism that is at war with socialism, but the petty bourgeoisie plus private capitalism fighting together against both state capitalism and socialism. The petty bourgeoisie oppose every kind of state interference, accounting and control, whether it be state capitalist or state socialist. This is an absolutely unquestionable fact of reality, and the root of the economic mistake of the “Left Communists” is that they have failed to understand it. The profiteer, the commercial racketeer, the disrupter of monopoly—these are our principal “internal” enemies, the enemies of the economic measures of Soviet power. A hundred and twenty-five years ago it might have been excusable for the French petty bourgeoisie, the most ardent and sincere revolutionaries, to try to crush the profiteer by executing a few of the “chosen” and by making thunderous declamations. Today, however, the purely rhetorical attitude to this question assumed by some Left Socialist-Revolutionaries can rouse nothing but disgust and revulsion in every politically conscious revolutionary. We know perfectly well that the economic basis of profiteering is both the small proprietors, who are exceptionally widespread in Russia, and private capitalism, of which every petty bourgeois is an agent. We know that the million tentacles of this petty-bourgeois hydra now and again encircle various sections of the workers, that, instead of state monopoly, profiteering forces its way into every pore of our social and economic organism.
Those who fail to see this show by their blindness that they are slaves of petty-bourgeois prejudices. This is precisely the case with our “Left Communists”, who in words (and of course in their deepest convictions) are merciless enemies of the petty bourgeoisie, while in deeds they help only the petty bourgeoisie, serve only this section of the population and express only its point of view by fighting—in April 1918!!—against . . . “state capitalism”. They are wide of the mark!"
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/may/09.htm


see also this



“State Capitalism”

During the last period, Urbahns, incidentally, has created a new theory: the Soviet economic structure, it appears, is a variety of “state capitalism.” The “progress” lies in that Urbahns has descended from his terminological exercise in the sphere of the political superstructure down to the economic foundation. But this descent – alas! – did him no good.
According to Urbahns, the newest form of self-defense of the bourgeois regime is state capitalism: one need only take a look at the corporate “planned” state in Italy, Germany and the United States. Accustomed to broad gestures, Urbahns also throws in here the USSR. We shall speak of this later. Insofar as the matter touches the capitalist states, Urbahns concerns himself with a very important phenomenon of our epoch. Monopoly capitalism has long since outgrown the private ownership of the means of production and the boundaries of the national state. Paralyzed, however, by its own organizations, the working class was unable to free in time the productive forces of society from their capitalist fetters. Hence arises the protracted epoch of economic and political convulsions. The productive forces pound against the barriers of private property and of national boundaries. The bourgeois governments are obliged to pacify the mutiny of their own productive forces with a police club. This is what constitutes the so-called planned economy. Insofar as the state attempts to harness and discipline capitalist anarchy, it may be called conditionally “state capitalism.”
But we should remember that originally Marxists understood by state capitalism only the independent economic enterprises of the state itself. When the reformists dreamed of overcoming capitalism by means of the municipalization or governmentalization of ever-greater numbers of transport and industrial enterprises, the Marxists used to reply in refutation: this is not socialism but state capitalism. Subsequently, however, this concept acquired a broader meaning and began to apply to all the varieties of state intervention into the economy; the French use the word étatisme (statification) in this sense.
But Urbahns not only expounds the travails of “state capitalism” but appraises them after his own manner. Insofar as it is generally possible to understand him, he pronounces the regime of “state capitalism” to be a necessary and, moreover, a progressive stage in the development of society, in the same sense as trusts are progressive compared with the disparate enterprises. So fundamental an error in appraising capitalist planning is enough to bury any approach whatsoever.
While, during the epoch of the capitalist upswing to which the war put an end, it was possible to view – under certain political preconditions – the various forms of statification as progressive manifestations, that is, to consider that state capitalism acts to lead society forward and facilitates the future economic labor of the proletarian dictatorship, the present “planned economy” must be viewed as a stage that is reactionary through and through: state capitalism strives to tear the economy away from the worldwide division of labor; to adapt the productive forces to the Procrustean bed of the national state; to constrict production artificially in some branches and to create just as artificially other branches by means of enormous unprofitable expenditures. The economic policies of the present state – beginning with tariff walls upon the ancient Chinese pattern and ending with the episodes of forbidding the use of machinery under Hitler’s “planned economy” – attain an unstable regulation at the cost of causing the national economy to decline, bringing chaos into world relations and completely disrupting the monetary system that will be very much needed for socialist planning. The present state capitalism neither prepares nor lightens the future work of the socialist state but, on the contrary, creates for it colossal additional difficulties. The proletariat let slip a series of opportune periods for the seizure of power. Through this it has created the conditions for fascist barbarism in politics and for the destructive work of “state capitalism” in economics. After the conquest of power, the proletariat will have to pay economically for its political lapses.

The Economy of the USSR

However, what interests us most within the limits of this analysis is the fact that Urbahns attempts also to include the economy of the USSR under the term “state capitalism.” And while so doing he refers – it is hardly believable! – to Lenin. There is only one possible way of explaining this reference: as the eternal inventor who creates a new theory a month, Urbahns has no time to read the books he refers to. Lenin did actually apply the term “state capitalism” but not to the Soviet economy as a whole, only to a certain section of it: the foreign concessions, the mixed industrial and commercial companies and, in part, the peasant and largely kulak [rich peasant] cooperatives under state control. All these are indubitable elements of capitalism, but since they are controlled by the state, and even function as mixed companies through its direct participation, Lenin conditionally, or, according to his own expression, “in quotes,” called these economic forms “state capitalism.” The conditioning of this term depended upon the fact that a proletarian, and not a bourgeois, state was involved; the quotation marks were intended to stress just this difference of no little importance. However, insofar as the proletarian state allowed private capital and permitted it within definite restrictions to exploit the workers, it shielded bourgeois relations under one of its wings. In this strictly limited sense, one could speak of “state capitalism.”
Lenin came out with this very term at the time of the transition to the NEP, when he presupposed that the concessions and the “mixed companies,” that is, enterprises based upon the correlation of state and private capital, would occupy a major position in the Soviet economy alongside of the pure state trusts and syndicates. In contradistinction to the state capitalist enterprises – concessions, etc., that is – Lenin defined the Soviet trusts and syndicates as “enterprises of a consistently socialist type.” Lenin envisioned the subsequent development of Soviet economy, of industry in particular, as a competition between the state capitalist and the pure state enterprises.
We trust that it is clear now within what limits Lenin used this term that has led Urbahns into temptation. In order to round out the theoretical catastrophe of the leader of the “Lenin(!)bund,” we must recall that, contrary to Lenin’s original expectations, neither the concessions nor the mixed companies played any appreciable role whatsoever in the development of the Soviet economy. Nothing has now remained generally of these “state capitalist” enterprises. On the other hand, the Soviet trusts whose fate appeared so very murky at the dawn of the NEP underwent a gigantic development in the years after Lenin’s death. Thus, if one were to use Lenin’s terminology conscientiously and with some comprehension of the matter, one would have to say that the Soviet economic development completely bypassed the stage of “state capitalism” and unfolded along the channel of the enterprises of the “consistently socialist type.”
Here, however, we must also forestall any possible misunderstandings, and this time of just the opposite character. Lenin chose his terms with precision. He called the trusts not socialist enterprises, as the Stalinists now label them, but enterprises of the “socialist type.” Under Lenin’s pen, this subtle terminological distinction implied that the trusts will have the right to be called socialist not by type, not by tendency, that is, but by their genuine content – after the rural economy will have been revolutionized, after the contradiction between the city and the village will have been destroyed, after men will have learned to fully satisfy all human wants, in other words, only in proportion as a real socialist society would arise on the bases of nationalized industry and collectivized rural economy. Lenin conceived that the attainment of this goal would require the successive labors of two or three generations and, moreover, in indissoluble connection with the development of the international revolution.
To summarize: under state capitalism, in the strict sense of the word, we must understand the management of industrial and other enterprises by the bourgeois state on its own account, or the “regulating” intervention of the bourgeois state into the workings of private capitalist enterprises. By state capitalism “in quotes,” Lenin meant the control of the proletarian state over private capitalist enterprises and relations. Not one of these definitions applies from any side to the present Soviet economy. It remains a deep secret what concrete economic content Urbahns himself puts into his understanding of the Soviet “state capitalism.” To put it plainly, his newest theory is entirely built around a badly read quotation."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1933/10/sovstate.htm

[daft punk]

That the U.S.S.R showed us the limits of reforming the capitalist system while still holding onto production being based around accumulating surplus value.


The U.S.S.R started its life as state-capitalist as a stop gap measure while they waited for the revolution to spread to Germany as Lenin didn't see it possible for Russia to become communist on its own. The problem is this never changed even as the productive forces grew, this is why the Comecon faced a crisis of capital in the 1980's and the Comecon's solution was austerity. The Comecon having never read Marx's Capital didn't understand the nature of their crisis thus why the reacted to the crisis with opening up the flow of capital that simply amplified the crisis the capital.

See my pastes above.

[daft punk]

I m not quite sure what you are getting at here with your hypothetical scenario. The very premisses upon which you construct this scenario are questionable. Like this one

"Suppose the Russian workers had not been purged in the 1930s, and the desire for socialism grew again"


"Again"? What "desire for socialism" existed among the Russian working class prior to the 1930s??? Evidence please!

The evidence is the purge itself. Much of it was against kulaks and the threat from the right. But much of it was against the left, thousands of socialists were shot. Stalin was killing socialists in Russia at the same time as crushing the Spanish revolution - this is no coincidence. Stalin feared a movement from below for socialism.





Problem is that for you "socialism" means state ownership of the means of production; for me, using the traditional Marxian understanding of the term, it means something totally different - a moneyless wageless stateless community based on the common ownership- not state ownership - of the means of priduction

How do you propose to abolish money and the state overnight?




Then there's this astonishing claim from you

They have the economy in their hands and are gonna democratically plan it. That is socialism.

Really? In what sense did the workers "have the economy in their hands in Russia"? Would it be in this sense when Lenin lectured the workers in 1921, thus?

If they got rid of the stalinist dictatorship it would have been possible for them to plan it democratically. It would be in their hands, it was already publicly owned. There was no bourgeoisie to expropriate.




Get down to business all of you! You will have capitalists beside you, including foreign capitalists, concessionaires and leaseholders. They will squeeze profits out of you amounting to hundreds per cent; they will enrich themselves, operating alongside of you. Let them, Meanwhile you will learn from them the business of running an economy, and only when you do that will you be able to build up a communist republic. (Collected Works, Vol. 33 page 72).


This was 1921 at the start of the NEP, which was seen as a temporary retreat. Lenin's long term plans were tax the rich, encourage the poor peasants into coops via subsidies, build state industries, gradually move towards a socialist economy, while realising that socialism is impossible in an isolated backward country. So they would have to do the best they could and try to spread internationally.




Fact is the workers never had the "economy in their hands". Not at any point in time.

This was because it was such a backward country. The fact is that in the 1930s the economy was no longer privately owned so only a political revolution was required, unlike in capitalist countries where a social one was also required.




What you had was a state capitalist regime emerging,

No, see my posts above.



claiming to represent the interests of the working class in which a small tiny elite effectively controlled the means of production and therefore owned it in de facto terms.

No, they did not own it, and it was not an elite until after Stalin got power.




The Russian workers remained wage slaves separated from the means of production and therefore compelled to sell their labour power to the state rather than private employers for a wage .

and your alternative would be?




Trots who are in denial about the existence of wage labour in Soviet state capitalism think that the fact that wages levels were set by the bureaucrats (although this is not entirely true as state enterprises themselves had some leeway in the matter) rather than a so called free market means they are no longer wages. But it means nothing of the sort. A highly regulated wage system is a still a system of wage slavery and, in Russia, the workers did not even the nominal advantage of workers in some other parts of the world where they could at least organise independently to an extent against the bosses.

They had wages yeah. It was not slavery. The Bolsheviks did their best. In the early days there was hardly any wage differentials. They were forced to increase them a bit. Under Stalin it got much greater.




So much for the so called workers state theory and I note you have nothing to say about the argument I put to you that if a working class existed in Russia then logically so must have a capitalist class.

there was a capitalist class in the 1920s, but not much of one in the late 1930s, though obviously Stalin did worry about the threat from the right as the bulk of people he killed were peasants. He had collectivised but I think they still had some private market.

However after the purges I dont think there was much in the way of a capitalist class.

Would I still call the one class that existed working class? Maybe I shouldnt, but you have to call it something, and a degenerated workers state is the best definition. Workers state meaning publicly owned industry.




You cannot have one without the other. No Trot Ive encountered has ever yet been able to wriggle out of that one!

It's not a wriggling game. It's a question of facts. If everyone is a worker, are they no longer workers?

How do you best communicate what the USSR was and what it had been and where it was going, and also where it could go if a different route was chosen by the people?

A degenerated workers state sums all this up. State capitalism does not.



I read the Ted Grant article and I have read other stuff of his. I can't say Im overly impressed. His argument is poorly constructed and there are gaping holes in it at several points. His critique of the Cliffite theory of state capitalism makes some good points but you need to be aware that there are other, more powerful, versions of the state capitalist theory than Cliff's

A much better article is this

http://wspus.org/2009/11/workers-state/

And here are some more from the same source

http://wspus.org/in-depth/russia-lenin-and-state-capitalism/
http://wspus.org/2009/02/why-didn%e2%80%99t-anyone-wake-me-up-while-the-revolution-was-going-on/

well, just read to posts above, the Trotsky quotes.

[Dave B]

He said it was in transition and contained elements of capitalism, state capitalism and socialism
But what were or was the element of socialism?

A few paragraphs after the one you quoted;


This simple illustration in figures, which I have deliberately simplified to the utmost in order to make it absolutely clear, explains the present correlation of state capitalism and socialism. The workers hold state power and have every legal opportunity of “taking” the whole thousand, without giving up a single kopek, except for socialist purposes. This legal opportunity, which rests upon the actual transition of power to the workers, is an [the] element of socialism
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/may/09.htm

Without wanting to try very hard to extricate Lenin from his own sophistry and state capitalism; he separates state capitalism not under workers control from state capitalism allegedly under workers control.

And calls state capitalism allegedly under workers control an element of socialism.

In 1918 Lenin pulls up short from the then still heretical idea that ‘state socialism’ or if you like state capitalism under workers control was socialism, and uses weasel words like ‘correlation’ and ‘elements’.

It was in fact an old idea.

Later in 1922 he didn’t need to mince his words so much or be concerned about stating more clearly that ‘communism’ (no less) was state capitalism under the control of the bolsheviks;



The state capitalism discussed in all books on economics is that which exists under the capitalist system, where the state brings under its direct control certain capitalist enterprises. But ours is a proletarian state it rests on the proletariat; it gives the proletariat all political privileges; and through the medium of the proletariat it attracts to itself the lower ranks of the peasantry (you remember that we began this work through the Poor Peasants Committees).

That is why very many people are misled by the term state capitalism. To avoid this we must remember the fundamental thing that state capitalism in the form we have here [ still the element of socialism?] is not dealt with in any theory, or in any books, for the simple reason that all the usual concepts connected with this term are associated with bourgeois rule in capitalist society. Our society is one which has left the rails of capitalism, but has not yet got on to new rails. The state in this society is not ruled by the bourgeoisie, but by the proletariat.


We refuse to understand that when we say “state” we mean ourselves, the proletariat, the vanguard of the working class. State capitalism is capitalism which we shall be able to restrain, and the limits of which we shall be able to fix. This state capitalism is connected with the state, and the state is the workers, the advanced section of the workers, the vanguard. We are the state…………..

……….. Up to now nobody could have written a book about this sort of capitalism, because this is the first time in human history that we see anything like it. All the more or less intelligible books about state capitalism that have appeared up to now were written under conditions and in a situation where state capitalism was capitalism.

Now things are different; and neither Marx nor the Marxists could foresee this. We must not look to the past. When you write history, you will write it magnificently; but when you write a textbook, you will say: State capitalism is the most unexpected and absolutely unforeseen form of capitalism—for nobody could foresee that the proletariat would achieve power in one of the least developed countries, and would first try to organise large-scale production and distribution for the peasantry and then, finding that it could not cope with the task owing to the low standard of culture, would enlist the services of capitalism. Nobody ever foresaw this; but it is an incontrovertible fact.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/27.htm

Which was Trotsky’s position in 1922.

And still was the position at the end of 1922;



……..we are still making progress along the path of state capitalism, a path that leads us forward to socialism and communism………
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/nov/05.htm



The economic transition was state capitalism.


You still haven’t answered my question as to why the Trot intellectuals didn’t explain to us what Lenin was on about in Leftwing childishness and it has been left to poor individuals like yourself.

And a secondary question;


Who, in say 1922, rejected the idea that the economic system Soviet Russia was state capitalist?


Given that it was accepted that it was state capitalism by more notable intellectuals than yourself eg

Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Sokolnikov (People's Commissariat of Finance), Kautsky, Otto Rühle etc

To quote Grant, how can you;


……..avoid the conclusion that state capitalism has been in existence since the Russian Revolution and the function of the revolution itself was to introduce this state capitalist system of society. For despite his tortuous efforts to draw a line between the economic basis of Russian society before the year 1928 and after, the economic basis of Russian society has in fact remained unchanged.

Incorrect Usage of Quotations

Comrade Cliff seeks to prove…………….

http://www.tedgrant.org/archive/grant/1949/cliff.htm


Do you really think that that was Grant shooting himself in the foot or a threat and a case of;

" break ranks Tony and take me down and we will all go down together."

[manic expression]

If East Germany wasn't state-capitalist why did they even care about Friedrich List
Because social relations has absolutely nothing to do with whom you put on your stamps. But by all means, repeat the same meaningless point as much as you like.


You are deluded. How can my criticism possibly "dovetail" with "anti-socialist rhetoric" when my criticism consists in clearly saying that what was the Soviet Union dragged the good name of socialism through the mud? For most workers, despite what you say, the (unwarranted) association of this term with that regime has been a big turnoff as far socialism is concerned
Probably because you're lifting anti-socialists' favorite turns of phrase in order to demonize your opponents. It's very classy stuff, calling people you don't like "useful idiots". Why not go all the way and say communists hate freedom and justice and the American Way (tm)?

And sorry, but no, workers aren't "turned off" from socialism because of what the USSR was (especially since some polls have turned up a majority of people who think socialism is better than capitalism), some of them might be turned off because of what anti-socialist windbags have convinced them about the Soviet Union. Thanks to the anti-Soviet left like yourself, their work was made all that easier, so go ahead and take a bow for all your good work on behalf of capitalist propaganda.

[Psy]

See my pastes above.
The USSR national industries were run in order to accumulate surplus value to generate more means of production so they can generate more surplus value to build more means of production. This economy policy was written in stone in the U.S.S.R which is why the capital crisis in the 1980's was a brick wall for GOSPLAN as the collapse of global commodity prices meant the rate of profit from exports fell for the U.S.S.R as GOSPLAN couldn't move past the capitalist mode of production to produce based on meeting utility demand.

Calling this state capitalism is because it is very similar to what the bourgeois economists Fredrick List called national capitalism in here he suggested a developing nation uses national industries to build means of production to generate surplus value to build more means of production, so the state would subsidize industrialization and modernization of a developing nation.

[Psy]

Because social relations has absolutely nothing to do with whom you put on your stamps. But by all means, repeat the same meaningless point as much as you like.

The point is Friedrich List popularized state capitalism, so we are to believe the East German state put the hero of state capitalism and a major critique of Marx on their stamp for reasons outside what made Friedrich List popular.

[manic expression]

The point is Friedrich List popularized state capitalism, so we are to believe the East German state put the hero of state capitalism and a major critique of Marx on their stamp for reasons outside what made Friedrich List popular.
They could have put him on a stamp for aesthetic reasons, it makes no difference.

[daft punk]

Later in 1922 he didn’t need to mince his words so much or be concerned about stating more clearly that ‘communism’ (no less) was state capitalism under the control of the bolsheviks;




http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/27.htm


I can't see where he says communism is state capitalism under the control of the Bolsheviks.


Which was Trotsky’s position in 1922.

And still was the position at the end of 1922;



http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/nov/05.htm



The economic transition was state capitalism.
[/quote]
The economic transition is not communism. And Trotsky said they were making progress along the path of state capitalism, he didnt say they were all travelling single file down that one path. There were various paths.

But I repeat, this was before collectivisation, which was done in a terrible way and for the wrong reasons but nevertheless did end up with a planned economy. Just not democratic. Another word for planned economy is workers state.





You still haven’t answered my question as to why the Trot intellectuals didn’t explain to us what Lenin was on about in Leftwing childishness and it has been left to poor individuals like yourself.

see the Trotsky article I posted. It is clearly explained. Things changed after 1922.
"Nothing has now remained generally of these “state capitalist” enterprises."


http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/nov/05.htm



The economic transition was state capitalism.
[/quote]
The economic transition is not communism. And Trotsky said they were making progress along the path of state capitalism, he didnt say they were all travelling single file down that one path. There were various paths.

But I repeat, this was before collectivisation, which was done in a terrible way and for the wrong reasons but nevertheless did end up with a planned economy. Just not democratic. Another word for planned economy is workers state.





And a secondary question;


Who, in say 1922, rejected the idea that the economic system Soviet Russia was state capitalist?


Given that it was accepted that it was state capitalism by more notable intellectuals than yourself eg

Lenin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Sokolnikov (People's Commissariat of Finance), Kautsky, Otto Rühle etc

To quote Grant, how can you;



http://www.tedgrant.org/archive/grant/1949/cliff.htm


Do you really think that that was Grant shooting himself in the foot or a threat and a case of;

" break ranks Tony and take me down and we will all go down together."


Very clever, but wrong. This is juxtaposing two things from different contexts.

Trotsky points out:
"Lenin came out with this very term at the time of the transition to the NEP, when he presupposed that the concessions and the “mixed companies,” that is, enterprises based upon the correlation of state and private capital, would occupy a major position in the Soviet economy"
"we must recall that, contrary to Lenin’s original expectations, neither the concessions nor the mixed companies played any appreciable role whatsoever in the development of the Soviet economy. Nothing has now remained generally of these “state capitalist” enterprises"

State capitalism was concessions and mixed companies, running " alongside of the pure state trusts and syndicates."

Grant says the economic basis of society in Russia remained unchanged. That doesn't mean that every detail remained the same.

First it was mainly capitalist/feudalist with a socialist government. Then it was war communism, then the NEP, then forced collectivisation.

By the late 1930s there was nothing left of the socialist government, but the economy had in fact moved further in the direction of public ownership.

[robbo203]

Probably because you're lifting anti-socialists' favorite turns of phrase in order to demonize your opponents. It's very classy stuff, calling people you don't like "useful idiots". Why not go all the way and say communists hate freedom and justice and the American Way (tm)?.

Try to come up with something a little more imaginative and convincing than this dullard's excuse for an argument. How can exposing state capitalist nature of the Soviet Union possibly aid the anti socialist cause as you stupidly alleged. I repeat - the "anti socialists" you witter on about desparately want us to to think the Soviet Union was socialist becuase they can then rub it our noses in the so called fact that that "socialism failed". If you cant see that then you are dumber than i thought. People like you are actually aiding the "anti socialist" cause by reinforcing a key point in their whole argument - namely, that the Soviet Union was indeed "socialist"




And sorry, but no, workers aren't "turned off" from socialism because of what the USSR was (especially since some polls have turned up a majority of people who think socialism is better than capitalism), some of them might be turned off because of what anti-socialist windbags have convinced them about the Soviet Union. Thanks to the anti-Soviet left like yourself, their work was made all that easier, so go ahead and take a bow for all your good work on behalf of capitalist propaganda.

Thats rich coming from someone who advocates state capitalism in practice!!

If you think many workers aren't "turned off" from socialism because of what the USSR was then you are exceedinly naive or out of touch with reality or more likely, both. Yes, other workers support what is a called "socialism" or wishy washy reformism but that is largely in spite of the SU, i would suggest. and not becuase of it. They have a kind of Labour Party view of "socialism" meaning more state control of the economy which is sod all to do with socialism anyway and everything do with trying to reform capitalism

And why do you think some workers have been "turned off because of what anti-socialist windbags have convinced them about the Soviet Union". One reason i suggest is becuase of the activities of perople like your good self. You have made the work of the anti socialists that much easier, by, as I say, agreeing with them on the key point that soviet union was indeed "socialist and not vigorously contest this point as any socialist worth their salt would do

So, no - you go ahead take a bow for all your good work on behalf of capitalist propaganda. Dont ask me to do it . I want nothing to do with your pro-capitalist propaganda

[manic expression]

Try to come up with something a little more imaginative and convincing than this dullard's excuse for an argument. How can exposing state capitalist nature of the Soviet Union possibly aid the anti socialist cause as you stupidly alleged. I repeat - the "anti socialists" you witter on about desparately want us to to think the Soviet Union was socialist becuase they can then rub it our noses in the so called fact that that "socialism failed". If you cant see that then you are dumber than i thought. People like you are actually aiding the "anti socialist" cause by reinforcing a key point in their whole argument - namely, that the Soviet Union was indeed "socialist"
I don't need very much imagination with you copying your words from anti-socialist rhetoric, and the only thing you're "exposing" is your opposition to socialism in practice.

Anti-socialists just want to denigrate and criticize the USSR and every other socialist state...how it's done is simply secondary, which means conveniently useful anti-socialist leftists are right up their alley. That's why you fail to grasp the meaning here, because for anti-socialists:

Anything that makes the USSR look bad is good.

Anything that makes the USSR look good is bad.

Repeat that and perhaps you'll come close to comprehending things.


Thats rich coming from someone who advocates state capitalism in practice!!
It's even richer when you're incapable of showing that socialism is state capitalism.


If you think many workers aren't "turned off" from socialism because of what the USSR was then you are exceedinly naive or out of touch with reality or more likely, both. Yes, other workers support what is a called "socialism" or wishy washy reformism but that is largely in spite of the SU, i would suggest. and not becuase of it. They have a kind of Labour Party view of "socialism" meaning more state control of the economy which is sod all to do with socialism anyway and everything do with trying to reform capitalism

And why do you think some workers have been "turned off because of what anti-socialist windbags have convinced them about the Soviet Union". One reason i suggest is becuase of the activities of perople like your good self. You have made the work of the anti socialists that much easier, by, as I say, agreeing with them on the key point that soviet union was indeed "socialist and not vigorously contest this point as any socialist worth their salt would do
The general view of socialism is a very vague and broad one, but it is quite well supported among the working class of the developed world, to say nothing of the developing world, which proves incorrect your earlier assertions, something you should get used to.

What is clear, though, is that the Soviet Union has little effect on that...what does have an effect is the false impression of what the Soviet Union was, the consequences of over 50 years of anti-socialists lying about it and trying to demean what was accomplished. That effort is where your tendency comes into play, ever-so-graciously supporting capitalist slander against socialism.


So, no - you go ahead take a bow for all your good work on behalf of capitalist propaganda. Dont ask me to do it . I want nothing to do with your pro-capitalist propaganda
Bow or don't bow, capitalists still thank you for their work, as they laugh at you for being so naive.

[Psy]

I don't need very much imagination with you copying your words from anti-socialist rhetoric, and the only thing you're "exposing" is your opposition to socialism in practice.

Anti-socialists just want to denigrate and criticize the USSR and every other socialist state...how it's done is simply secondary, which means conveniently useful anti-socialist leftists are right up their alley. That's why you fail to grasp the meaning here, because for anti-socialists:

Anything that makes the USSR look bad is good.

Anything that makes the USSR look good is bad.

Repeat that and perhaps you'll come close to comprehending things.


It's even richer when you're incapable of showing that socialism is state capitalism.


The general view of socialism is a very vague and broad one, but it is quite well supported among the working class of the developed world, to say nothing of the developing world, which proves incorrect your earlier assertions, something you should get used to.

What is clear, though, is that the Soviet Union has little effect on that...what does have an effect is the false impression of what the Soviet Union was, the consequences of over 50 years of anti-socialists lying about it and trying to demean what was accomplished. That effort is where your tendency comes into play, ever-so-graciously supporting capitalist slander against socialism.


Bow or don't bow, capitalists still thank you for their work, as they laugh at you for being so naive.

Capitalists project the USSR as a model of Marxism because economists like Milton Friedman were able to point to the collapse of the USSR as "proof" Marx was wrong and Hayek was right that free markets are the only solution to capital crises.

Capitalists don't want the USSR projected as being a model of the teachings of Friedrick List as that means the collapse of the USSR proves Marx right in that you can't reform capitalism to solve these contradictions of capital.

[Dave B]

I am posting the following from Kautsky mainly because it resulted in further later ‘debates’ on the nature of the soviet state and and Trotsky’s;

The Class Nature of the Soviet State (October 1, 1933)


http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1933/10/sovstate.htm

was probably a response to it.

As can be seen it includes ideas or comparisons between Italian fascism with its five year plans and Stalinism, bureaucratic classes, new classes, control and ownwership etc etc.



Karl Kautsky Social Democracy versus Communism


6. Is Soviet Russia A Socialist State?



State slavery does not become Socialism merely because the slave drivers call themselves Communists.
The methods of dictatorship in general and of the Five Year Plan in particular do not constitute the road to Socialism, but rather the road away from it.


Certainly, it is the aim of Socialists to deprive the capitalists of the means of production. But that in itself is not enough. We must also determine who is to control these means of production. When another minority takes the place of the capitalists and controls the means of production, independently of the people and frequently against their will, the change in property relations thus accomplished signifies least of all Socialism.

There are forms of Oriental despotism in which the master of the state wield also mastery over the country’s instruments of production. [2] In comparison with this form of state economy, the capitalist system of production is much less oppressive, and resistance to it much more promising of results. In Russia it is the government, not the people, who controls the means of production. The government is thus the master of the people.


What we see in Russia, is, therefore, not Socialism but its antithesis. It can become Socialism only when the people expropriate the expropriators now in power, to use a Marxian expression. Thus, the socialist masses of Russia find themselves with respect to the problem of control of the means of production in the same situation which confronts the workers in capitalist countries. The fact that in Russia the expropriating expropriators call themselves Communists makes not the slightest difference.

The difference between Soviet Russia and Western Europe is that the workers in the advanced capitalist countries are already strong enough to have limited to some extent the dictatorship of capital and to have altered power relationships to a point which makes the socialization of important economic monopolies a matter of the political victory of the workers in the near future, whereas in Russia the means of production are highly concentrated in one hand and their ownership protected by an absolutist state machine, while the workers, being divided, without organization of their own, without a free press or free elections, are completely shorn of any means of resistance.


Only Fascist Italy may be compared with Russia in this respect. It is precisely in respect to education that the Russian people have yet to win what the people of the West have long been enjoying. This cannot be attained so long as the dictatorship continues to rule. On this point, too, the road of Bolshevism leads not to Socialism but away from it.



The fact that the present rulers of the Kremlin follow these examples of Asiatic despots does not signify, a fundamental change in the face of the world. Neither the brutality of the rulers nor the enslavement of the ruled is altered by these achievements. It is not technical and economic innovations but the human aspects of a society that matters. Many see only the construction of plants and collectives, but fail to perceive the rise of a new aristocracy which controls these new means of production and exploits them for its own purposes. Above this aristocracy stands the nobility of members of the Communist Party, and still higher in power is the aristocracy of the political police, holding in its power the officialdom and party members.

But all of these elements of the aristocracy, each endowed with special privileges, are subject to the rule of the highest central authority in the state, headed for the moment by Stalin. He gives and he takes away. He raises those who please him to positions of influence and power and he hurls those who displease him into oblivion. The old nobility obtained its land, after the system of ownership had been definitely established, neither from princes nor from the Czar, and from time to time it ventured to exhibit discontent. In a modern dictatorial state this is impossible. Its aristocracy consists entirely of servile elements, lacking all character and independence.


The fruit of the Bolshevist regime has been the establishment of a new class rule. The Bolsheviks, to be sure, have destroyed the -old classes, but new classes, new elements of aristocracy have arisen under their regime. They have arisen of necessity from the conditions of the Bolshevist dictatorship, although they may be invisible at first glance because they had not been foreseen in Bolshevist ideology and phraseology.

But they are there, nevertheless. They are striking ever deeper root and are becoming in ever increasing measure the determining factor in the actions and aspirations of Bolshevism. Its ultimate Communist objective is becoming more and more a matter of decoration, a mere memory or allurement for Socialist idealists whom the dictator seeks to utilize for his own purposes.

A large number of the old Bolsheviks, however, have succumbed to the dictator and have degenerated from the level of revolutionists to the low estate of servile courtiers. Erstwhile Communists who preached the doctrine of equality have become the parvenus of a climbing parry hierarchy, archbishops and cardinals of the pope of the Bolshevist church. The new generation of Communists however, consists, for the most part, of conscienceless careerists, whose Communism is limited to mere lip service and whose activities are devoted solely to the attainment of power and the privileges it implies. Acquisition and retention of these privileges is their only aim.

Not the abolition of all classes but the substitution of new classes for the old has been the outcome of the Bolshevist revolution of 1917, as it was of the French Revolution of 1789. Then, too, the revolutionists had failed to note that in abolishing the differentiations of classes they had failed to create a system of universal freedom, equality and fraternity, but had merely facilitated the rise of a new class society.


http://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1930s/demvscom/ch06.htm

The last idea was even discussed by Grant, at the end;



Cliff himself points to the fact that in the bourgeois revolution the masses did the fighting and the bourgeois got the fruits. The masses did not know what they were fighting for, but they fought in reality for the rule of the bourgeoisie. Take the French Revolution. It was prepared and had its ideology in the works of the philosophers of the enlightenment, Voltaire, Rousseau, etc. However, they really did believe in the idealisation of bourgeois society. They believed the codicils of liberty, equality and fraternity which they preached.

As is well known, and as Cliff himself quotes Marx to prove, the French Revolution went beyond its social base. It resulted in the revolutionary dictatorship of the sans culottes which went beyond the bounds of bourgeois society. As Marx explained, this had the salutory effect of completing in a few months what would otherwise have taken the bourgeois decades to do. The leaders of the revolutionary wing of the petty bourgeoisie which wielded this dictatorship – Robespierre, Danton, etc, sincerely believed in the doctrines of the philosophers and attempted to put them into practice. They could not do so because it was impossible to go beyond the economic base of the given society. They inevitably had to lose power and merely paved the way for bourgeois society.

If Cliff's argument is correct, one could only conclude that the same thing happened with the Russian as with the French Revolution. Marx was the prophet of the new state capitalism. Lenin and Trotsky were the Robespierres and Carnots of the Russian Revolution. The fact that Lenin and Trotsky had good intentions is beside the point, as were the good intentions of the leaders of the bourgeois revolution. They merely paved the way for the rule of the new state capitalist class.http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/grant/works/4/9/reply_to_tony_cliff.html

[robbo203]

I don't need very much imagination with you copying your words from anti-socialist rhetoric, and the only thing you're "exposing" is your opposition to socialism in practice.

Anti-socialists just want to denigrate and criticize the USSR and every other socialist state...how it's done is simply secondary, which means conveniently useful anti-socialist leftists are right up their alley. That's why you fail to grasp the meaning here, because for anti-socialists:

Anything that makes the USSR look bad is good.

Anything that makes the USSR look good is bad.

Repeat that and perhaps you'll come close to comprehending things.


I repeat and please for heavens sake wrap your little pea-brain around this - the very last thing the"anti socialists" want to hear is that the Soviet Union was not socialist. They need us to believe the Soviet Union was socialist in order to discredit socialism. What part of that sentence do you not understand? Whatever good or bad qualities the Soviet Union might have exhibited it was still not socialist . Geddit?





It's even richer when you're incapable of showing that socialism is state capitalism.

Duh. Why on earth would I want to show that socialism is state capitalism? Socialism is not state capitalism obviously. If it was it wouldnt be socialism would it now? Strewth, have you lost the plot or something?

[manic expression]

I repeat and please for heavens sake wrap your little pea-brain around this - the very last thing the"anti socialists" want to hear is that the Soviet Union was not socialist.
Uh, no, all they need to hear is something negative about the USSR and they're happy.


Duh. Why on earth would I want to show that socialism is state capitalism?
No idea, but that's what you're trying to do.

[Psy]

Uh, no, all they need to hear is something negative about the USSR and they're happy.

But in this case the negative is that the USSR failed to follow Marx's Capital and capitalist rather have the USSR as a straw man for Marx's Capital. Bourgeois economists have devolved their complex theories so they can get away from Marx the last thing they want is to have to debate with the ideas of Marx as they know they will lose, the only way they can have logical arguments is to debate against the economic polices of the Comecon and call that equal to the ideas Marx's.

[daft punk]

So we are agreed that the USSR was not socialist. Was it a deformed workers state or state capitalist? Does it matter?

Well yeah, because their economy was moving faster than the capitalist countries after WW2. What is shows is the benefits of a planned economy, albeit one hindered by the bureaucratic dictatorship that ruled. This lack of democracy slowed things down. Eventually the disadvantages of the bureaucracy outweighed the advantages of the planned economy, and it slowed down. But in the 1950s, Khrushchev was boasting that living standards in Russia would overtake those in America.

If this was state capitalism it would imply that countries can do better by just nationalising stuff, and that the next type of society was more likely to be state capitalist than socialist. This logic puts socialism off the agenda similar to the way the Stalinists do it.

[Psy]

So we are agreed that the USSR was not socialist. Was it a deformed workers state or state capitalist? Does it matter?

Well yeah, because their economy was moving faster than the capitalist countries after WW2. What is shows is the benefits of a planned economy, albeit one hindered by the bureaucratic dictatorship that ruled. This lack of democracy slowed things down. Eventually the disadvantages of the bureaucracy outweighed the advantages of the planned economy, and it slowed down. But in the 1950s, Khrushchev was boasting that living standards in Russia would overtake those in America.

If this was state capitalism it would imply that countries can do better by just nationalising stuff, and that the next type of society was more likely to be state capitalist than socialist. This logic puts socialism off the agenda similar to the way the Stalinists do it.
The problem is that the USSR and China did not solve the contradiction of capital, they were able to rapidly industrialize but that just made the problem of overproduction worse. So the USSR is an example of just nationalizing not being a solution to get capitalism out its current funk as nationalizing will amplify the productive forces that would make already flooded markets more flooded.

[Geiseric]

So that proves that we need internationalism, especially if "Socialism in One Country," works out, right? We need a global economy so that the planned economy in Socialist territories can be used to send their excesses to less developed but still revolutionary countries which they can use to industrialize and continue the process. This is kinda like Trotskyism 101 it seems to me.

[Grenzer]

So we are agreed that the USSR was not socialist. Was it a deformed workers state or state capitalist? Does it matter?

It actually matters a lot. Now if you were to ask, does it matter whether one thinks the Soviet Union was capitalist or a mode of production which was neither capitalist nor socialist, then I would say that it doesn't matter. The key thing to realize is that the strategic implications of specifically the degenerated workers' state doctrine are reactionary in effect(simply because one thinks that the Soviet Union wasn't capitalist or socialist doesn't put them into the degenerated workers' state camp by default). The doctrine of DWS explicitly places these states as being somehow "closer to socialism" and worthy of being "defended" yet in practice, all this leads to is the perpetuation of imperialism and nationalism by these said states. On a theoretical level, we can see that this in truth are no closer to socialism than an ordinary capitalist state is, even if we don't see the fSU as being socialist; but also on a practical level, history has shown us the claim that they are closer to socialism simply isn't true either.

I think the one really big fuck up Trotsky made in the field of theory was the idea that degenerated workers' states are worthy of defense; though I do have disagreements in other areas of his politics, this is the one thing that really went beyond the pale. His mistake is understandable I think, given that he did not have the historical perspective and lack of emotional bias that we have. Q is a Trotskyist who does not adhere to the doctrine of degenerated workers' state, but there may be other around here as well.

[Geiseric]

The USSR national industries were run in order to accumulate surplus value to generate more means of production so they can generate more surplus value to build more means of production.

But isn't the role of any human economic system to generate surplus value and expand? Were all of the wars in feudal times that were done to expand a kingdom done in order to promote state capitalism? The basis of modern human economic and political existance (past 10,000 years) seems to mirror what your description of State Capitalism is.

I just think that it's an anomaly that shouldn't be repeated, and if we examine what went wrong (i.e. purges and bureaucracy) than we can let this go behind us if it's a serious discussion that might... I don't know, cause a split or something.

Btw Grenzier, I think he would have some sort of emotional bias since he was exiled and his familly was killed.

[daft punk]

The point is that a political revolution is far easier than a social one, and that was all that was necessary. Also that the success of the Soviet economy, despite the dictatorship, shows the promise inherent in the planned economy. Also that there is no new progressive stage, state capitalism, which countries can turn to for salvation. The closest to that was probably places like Taiwan, but they also go help from rich countries.

As Trotsky explained, the elements Lenin referred to as state capitalist did not exist later on.

[Psy]

But isn't the role of any human economic system to generate surplus value and expand? Were all of the wars in feudal times that were done to expand a kingdom done in order to promote state capitalism? The basis of modern human economic and political existance (past 10,000 years) seems to mirror what your description of State Capitalism is.

Right yet if you read Marx's Capital you'd notice Marx was talking about moving beyond economics grounded in surplus value and towards economics grounded in producing utility. The U.S.S.R came close to this during WWII where its economy are geared towards crushed Nazi Germany and surplus value be dammed, the problem is doing the same for production of everything.

[Geiseric]

Well what if the surplus value goes towards utility?

[Psy]

Well what if the surplus value goes towards utility?
The difference is when you are producing for utility, surplus value is irrelevant as you are looking at the use value not exchange value. For example during WWII you produce a T-34/85 for the utility of a tank on the battlefield, you don't care what the exchange value of a T-34/85 is on the world market.

[Geiseric]

What's the difference in "producing for utility" and "producing for surplus," though, in practice? Does producing grain denote producing for utility or surplus? What happened to most of the commodities made if the fSU?

I'm not debating anything, I'm trying to use diallectics >.>

[Psy]

What's the difference in "producing for utility" and "producing for surplus," though, in practice? Does producing grain denote producing for utility or surplus? What happened to most of the commodities made if the fSU?
Producing for surplus from a Marxist standpoint is trying to get to M1 in the M->C->C1->M1 cycle. Producing for surplus you have M->C->C1 or C->C1 cycle.

In the former Soviet Union the key commodities were exported in exchange for more value in money form.

[Geiseric]

The surplus though went more or less completely towards utility though, whereas in Capitalism the surplus goes to whatever makes the most profit.

They may of exported for more value than it was worth so that they could afford the utility, but that utility would of also went into helping the countries who they were partners with since they could import finished products from the U.S.S.R. as they sent raw materials? Is that how the Eastern Bloc worked more or less?

[manic expression]

But in this case the negative is that the USSR failed to follow Marx's Capital and capitalist rather have the USSR as a straw man for Marx's Capital. Bourgeois economists have devolved their complex theories so they can get away from Marx the last thing they want is to have to debate with the ideas of Marx as they know they will lose, the only way they can have logical arguments is to debate against the economic polices of the Comecon and call that equal to the ideas Marx's.
I fail to see how putting someone on a stamp and not using computers in a certain way "failed to follow Marx's Capital". Perhaps you can point me to the IT section of Das Kapital, I can't seem to find it right now.

[Brosip Tito]

Can ewe forget this idea that a planned economy is incompatible with capitalism. It's been used in Chile, the USA, France and other places which were capitalist at the time.

[Psy]

I fail to see how putting someone on a stamp and not using computers in a certain way "failed to follow Marx's Capital". Perhaps you can point me to the IT section of Das Kapital, I can't seem to find it right now.
That person (Friedrick List) was one of the people that criticized Karl Marx while he was still alive, one Marx dismissed as a German bourgeois economists upset over the dominance of British capitalism and wanting Germany to be in Britains place.

As for cybernetics, it is a clear example of GOSPLAN not looking at the use value not seeing the good of being able coordinate production around the demand for utility.

[manic expression]

That person (Friedrick List) was one of the people that criticized Karl Marx while he was still alive, one Marx dismissed as a German bourgeois economists upset over the dominance of British capitalism and wanting Germany to be in Britains place.
And his presence on a stamp means...nothing in relation to the social structure of the DDR.


As for cybernetics, it is a clear example of GOSPLAN not looking at the use value not seeing the good of being able coordinate production around the demand for utility.
So are you arguing that cybernetics is inherent to socialism?

[Psy]

And his presence on a stamp means...nothing in relation to the social structure of the DDR.

Considering how much effort the Comecon nations put into propaganda yhea it means the DDR wanted promote Friedrick List



So are you arguing that cybernetics is inherent to socialism?
In a modern society yes due to the massive utility cybernetics had towards coordinating the production of utility.

[manic expression]

Considering how much effort the Comecon nations put into propaganda yhea it means the DDR wanted promote Friedrick List
That bears no relevance unless the effort was into that specific stamp.


In a modern society yes due to the massive utility cybernetics had towards coordinating the production of utility.
So you're saying that Marx was wrong to promote the Paris Commune as a model, as they employed no computers?

[Psy]

That bears no relevance unless the effort was into that specific stamp.

The effort went into everything thus the point of censor boards.



So you're saying that Marx was wrong to promote the Paris Commune as a model, as they employed no computers?
Computers didn't exist at the time, by the 1960's the USSR had the means to partially automate planning through cybernetics.

[manic expression]

The effort went into everything thus the point of censor boards.
That's a statement that makes absolutely no sense.


Computers didn't exist at the time, by the 1960's the USSR had the means to partially automate planning through cybernetics.
Thus, working-class society has nothing to do with this or that application of computers. Nice.

[Psy]

That's a statement that makes absolutely no sense.

If the DDR was not state-capitalist they would have banned the image of Friedrich List since that is what the censors of the DDR did ban stuff that went against the party line.



Thus, working-class society has nothing to do with this or that application of computers. Nice.
It does as the USSR had that choice while the Paris Commune didn't. If the USSR was Marxists they would choose to use computer technology not only to better coordinate production with utility needs but also to reduce necessary labor time.

[manic expression]

If the DDR was not state-capitalist they would have banned the image of Friedrich List since that is what the censors of the DDR did ban stuff that went against the party line.
Images of "stuff that went against the party line" will inevitably appear in textbooks and the like, and so this newest statement of yours makes just as little sense as before.


It does as the USSR had that choice while the Paris Commune didn't.
Irrelevant. It's either an inherent part of working-class society or it isn't. Choose wisely.

[Psy]

Images of "stuff that went against the party line" will inevitably appear in textbooks and the like, and so this newest statement of yours makes just as little sense as before.

Think about it, if the DDR was Marxist then Fredrick List would be against the party line thus not be on a DDR stamp.



Irrelevant. It's either an inherent part of working-class society or it isn't. Choose wisely.
The point is that Marx supported the modernizing the means of production in order to reduce the necessarily labor time thus the GOSPLAN went against Marx by not embracing cybernetics.

[robbo203]

The evidence is the purge itself. Much of it was against kulaks and the threat from the right. But much of it was against the left, thousands of socialists were shot. Stalin was killing socialists in Russia at the same time as crushing the Spanish revolution - this is no coincidence. Stalin feared a movement from below for socialism.


Excuse me, but do you understand the question I asked you? I asked you for firm factual evidence you may have that there was a significant movement of any sort amomg Russian workers that sought a moneyless wageless stateless community based on the common ownership of the means of production - traditonal socialism. I did NOT ask you if there was a significant movement of workers who wanted state ownership of the means of production




How do you propose to abolish money and the state overnight?


What?! Are you seriously suggesting you can abolish money one pound - or dollar or rouble - note at a time? Of course money goes at one stroke. How else can it go? This is what Marx meant by "Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism" (German Ideology) Actually its not money as such that is being abolished as the system that requires money - capitalism . Since there cannot logically be anything in between a class-based society and a classless society the change from one to the other is logicallly an instant one.





If they got rid of the stalinist dictatorship it would have been possible for them to plan it democratically. It would be in their hands, it was already publicly owned. There was no bourgeoisie to expropriate.

You are ducking and diving and failing to address the points put to you. My claim is that the means of production were NOT owned by the public - public ownership is in fact a misnomer. They were owned by the state and thus by the people who controlled the state were the actual de facto owners of the means of production . These people - the state capitalist class or the state bourgeoisie if you prefer - would indeed have to be expropropriated of their collective class ownership in order to have communism.

As an aside, some of these state capitalists , the pseudo communist apparatchiks in the pseudo communist party of the Soviet Union, went on the become even more fabulously wealthy in the post Soviet era using their political connections to pull strings. A significant proportion of the modern day oligarchs were previously members of this state capitalist class, Poland for some reason has the highest percentage which if I remember correctly was about 70%





This was 1921 at the start of the NEP, which was seen as a temporary retreat. Lenin's long term plans were tax the rich, encourage the poor peasants into coops via subsidies, build state industries, gradually move towards a socialist economy, while realising that socialism is impossible in an isolated backward country. So they would have to do the best they could and try to spread internationally.

Yeah yeah weve hear this all before - this endless talk of gradually "moving towards" a socialist economy. Lenin's writing are full of this sort of nonsense. It is actually little more than a verbalistic ploy to invoke the appeal of socialism while firmly advancing towards the fill scale establishment of state capitalism which is what the whole Bolshevik project was all about in the first place. Socialism was not only impossible because Russia was an "isolated backward country", socialism was impossible because, as well as that, the subjective factor - mass socialist consciousness and the desire for a genuine socialist society (not your state owned economy) - was more or less entirely absent





This was because it was such a backward country. The fact is that in the 1930s the economy was no longer privately owned so only a political revolution was required, unlike in capitalist countries where a social one was also required.

Actually state ownership to be quite literal about it, is a form of private ownership or, at any rate, sectional onership. The state is not society or the public . The state is an institution apart from the public that is controlled by those who adminuster it and whose control these state owned means of production amount to a de facto ownership of these means

If what you were saying has one iota of truth about it then the position of a worker in a nationalised enterprise in the West like, say, the old British Rail would be qualitatively different in kind to the postion of same worker in the more recently privatised raislways. I invite you to show how in any way this is the case. Or indeed the position of the general public using the railways has changed.








No, they did not own it, and it was not an elite until after Stalin got power.


Once again you are bottling out the argument and falling back on the same old Trotskyist nonsense that there werent capitalists because individuals were not formally allowed to own private capital and invest it. According to you you only own something if you have a peice of paper or some legal deocument perhaps which says you own it . This is legalistic-cum -idealistic interpretation of history.

The fact of ownership is grounded in real material circumstances not whether the constitution of some state says individuals may or may not own private capital. Until you address this point head on you will continue to flounder in the fog of Trotskyist idealism

And you are quite wrong about there not being an elite in control of industry until Stalin. Heard of "one man management"? That came way before Stalin - under Lenin



and your alternative would be?


My alternative? Well you know what my alternative would be as I have spelt it out often enough. Workers should politically organise for the overthrow of the wages system (capitalism) and in the meantime organise in the most militant fashion possible against the boss class - the state or private capitalists - on the industrial front to defend wages and working conditions . And above not be suckered into thinking that state ownership in any way shape or form is the answer to the workers problems. It isnt.



They had wages yeah. It was not slavery. The Bolsheviks did their best. In the early days there was hardly any wage differentials. They were forced to increase them a bit. Under Stalin it got much greater.


See, when you are denying the reality of wage slavery in the Soviet Union you are using the liberal refromist notion of the term. It comes out the whole" A fair days wage for a fair day's work" school of thought which Marx ridiculed. You are basically just a liberal when it comes down to it. Give the worker a fair wage and well thats alright then 'cos she is not really being exploited anymore. Lets get all touchy-feely with the boss class . They're not so bad - are they - if like the Bolsheviks they "did their best" (never mind that under the Bolsheviks and Trotsky in particular the "militarisation of labour" programme was a brutal and vicious incursion into the already limited right of workers)

Wage differentials do not really have much to do with the fact of wage slavery. You are a wage slave simply by vurtue of the fact that you are economically compelled to sell your labour power for a wage and this compulsion derives from the simple fact that you are separated from the means of production. Thats is why you are a wage slave. You do not own sufficient or any capital to live upon

Wage differentials were indeed markedly less under theBolsheviks than later but they steadily increased under Lenin as the state capitalist project of the Bolsheviks starting gaining momentum. If Trotsky rather than Stalin replaced Lenin there would have been very little difference in that respect. The objective material exigencies of developing a system of state administered capitalism would have resulted in more or less the same outcome: a highly unequal society



there was a capitalist class in the 1920s, but not much of one in the late 1930s, though obviously Stalin did worry about the threat from the right as the bulk of people he killed were peasants. He had collectivised but I think they still had some private market.

However after the purges I dont think there was much in the way of a capitalist class.

Would I still call the one class that existed working class? Maybe I shouldnt, but you have to call it something, and a degenerated workers state is the best definition. Workers state meaning publicly owned industry.


It's not a wriggling game. It's a question of facts. If everyone is a worker, are they no longer workers?

How do you best communicate what the USSR was and what it had been and where it was going, and also where it could go if a different route was chosen by the people?

A degenerated workers state sums all this up. State capitalism does not. s.

The above really is all really based on a particular conception of what is capitalist or a capitalist class - namely Trotsky's narrowly legalistic-idealistic intepretation of the term denoting the legal right of individuals to privately own capital. Since I dont accept this absurdly limited interpretation then we are going to be talking at cross purposes unless and until you address the argument I raised about what constititues a capitalist or a capitalist class


But even you must see that this whole idea of a "degenerated workers state" is fundamentally problematic . You cannot get round the argument that if there is a working class there had to be a capitalist class - since you cannot have one without the other - and thatthis refuters your claim thatthere were no capitalists in the Soviet Union . The argument that what was installed in Russia was a "dictatorship of the proletariat " - an absurd claim anyway - can only be asserted at the price of acknwlegeing the eixstence of an exploiting capitalist class. Otherwise it makes no sense - who woyld the prolyeraiat allefeldt be dictating to if not the capitalist class. All that remains is to discover who this capitalist class were. Logically it could only have been the elite whocontrolled the state and therefore owned the means of prpduction in de facto terms. This is the the insoluble contradiction that lies at the heart of all variations of the "workers state" theory. It must logivally imply the existence of the capitalistc class and how can the capitalistclass exist except by exploiting the working class. In which case how can it possibly be a so called "workers state"


There is no way round this contradictiuon at all. Your problem is that your refuse to recognise the soviet state capitalist for what it was becuase you have a particular stereotype in mind of what you mean by a capitalist. You are not looking at the question in functional terms but merely in descriptive terms. This is not dissimilar to the workerist stereotype oif what constittues a meber of the working class. According to this sterotype , you have to be a cloth capped manual worker who is a horny handed son or daughter of toil iin ordeer to a member of this class. But this does not capture the essence of what it means to be a member of the working class - clerical workers are just as much workers as factory hands., By the very same token a capitalist does not have to be some a top hatted to toff who smokes a cigar and gambles on the stock exchange. A societ apparatchik - a high ranking policitian or bureaucrat or state enterprise manager - can also serve just as well as a capitalist in functional terms


You kind of get a glimpse of the baisc problem with your whole approach but unfortunately shy away from dealing with it head on. You say

It's not a wriggling game. It's a question of facts. If everyone is a worker, are they no longer workers?

Quite. Butconsider what you are saying here. This would mean you are using the term worker not as a class category butonly in the simple sense of someone who works. In other words this would imply the Soivuiet Uniuon was a classless society. If this is what you are suggesting then you have a serious problem on your hands: how can you possibly rewconcile this alleged classlessness with the existence of the state. What you are saying stands in total contradiction to the whole Marxian theory of the state which is that the state as insitition of class society enabling one calss to oppress another. When no classes exist how can the state in the Marxian sense exist.


Not only that why would Russian workers be paid in wages in an alleged classless society. A wage as stated earlier signifies the fact that one is dovorced from the means of prpduction. But somebody - or some group - owned the means of production did they not - it was no "unowned", Trots try to get round this by arguing that workers were nbot actually paid wages and that there was no wage labour which is blatantly ridicilous. Workers were paid something at the end of the week or month and this unquestionably a money wage. As usual our Trotskyist theoreticains are trying to make reality fit in with the facts rather than the other way round and this explains their completelycontorted mode of reasoning all too evident in such ridculous theoretcial constructuons as a "degenerated workers state"

Denying the existence of a capitalist class which is inseparable from the notion of a working class they are compelled as you are to redefine what is meant by a worker as no longer signifying a class category with the very clear implication that that the Soviet Union was no longer a class based society. But whatis a class. It is a socialgrouping which is defined byits relationshipto the means of prpduction. In a classless society everyoine stands in precisely the same relation to the means of prpduction becuase it is the common prioperty of all

Now you have admitted in no uncertain terms that at least under Stalin there was an elite (before Stalin you agree that there was a capitalist class) . The problem is this - how can you possibly maintain that the position of a member of this elite vis a vis the means of production can be considered identical to that or an ordinary worker, when this elite makes all the important decisions in the economy , exerts complete control over the disposal of the economic economic surplus and is markedly better off than the ordinary worker by any indicator you may choose to use. By any reasonable standard these differences signify a difference in relation to the means of production and therefore a class difference

By no stretch of the imagination can it be said that the elite had an identical relationship to the means of production vis a vis the ordinary worker and it would be a complete abuse of language and logic to suggest that it did. The question is where did it get this power to control the economy from? What was the material basis of this elite's extraoridinary power if not its de facto ownership of the means of production?

Once you try to answser that question you will soon begin to see that the only satisfactory answer that makes any sense is that this elite actually constituted a distinct class - the state capitalist class - and that the only adequate decription of the system that prevailed in the Soviet Union is that of state capitalism

[robbo203]

The evidence is the purge itself. Much of it was against kulaks and the threat from the right. But much of it was against the left, thousands of socialists were shot. Stalin was killing socialists in Russia at the same time as crushing the Spanish revolution - this is no coincidence. Stalin feared a movement from below for socialism.


Excuse me, but do you understand the question I asked you? I asked you for firm factual evidence you may have that there was a significant movement of any sort among Russian workers that sought a moneyless wageless stateless community based on the common ownership of the means of production - traditional socialism. I did NOT ask you if there was a significant movement of workers who wanted state ownership of the means of production. Thats something completely different




How do you propose to abolish money and the state overnight?


What?! Are you seriously suggesting you can abolish money one pound - or dollar or rouble - note at a time? Of course money goes at one stroke. How else can it go? This is what Marx meant by "Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism" (German Ideology - my emphasis) Actually, its not money as such that is being abolished as the system that requires money - capitalism . Since there cannot logically be anything in between a class-based society and a classless society the change from one to the other is logicallly an instant one.





If they got rid of the stalinist dictatorship it would have been possible for them to plan it democratically. It would be in their hands, it was already publicly owned. There was no bourgeoisie to expropriate.

You are ducking and diving and failing to address the points put to you. My claim is that the means of production were NOT owned by the public - so called "public ownership" is in fact a complete misnomer. They were owned by the state and thus by the people who controlled the state who were the actual de facto owners of the means of production . These people - the state capitalist class or the "state bourgeoisie" if you prefer - would indeed have to be expropropriated of their collective class ownership in order to have communism.

As an aside, some of these state capitalists , the pseudo communist apparatchiks in the pseudo communist party of the Soviet Union, went on the become even more fabulously wealthy in the post Soviet era using their political connections to pull strings. A significant proportion of the modern day oligarchs were previously members of this state capitalist class. Poland for some reason has the highest percentage of erstwhile high ranking "communist" amongst its oligarchs which if I remember correctly was about 70%





This was 1921 at the start of the NEP, which was seen as a temporary retreat. Lenin's long term plans were tax the rich, encourage the poor peasants into coops via subsidies, build state industries, gradually move towards a socialist economy, while realising that socialism is impossible in an isolated backward country. So they would have to do the best they could and try to spread internationally.

Yeah yeah weve hear this all before - this endless tedious talk of always gradually "moving towards" a socialist economy (and never getting there). Lenin's writings are full of this sort of nonsense. It is actually little more than a verbalistic ploy to invoke the appeal of socialism while firmly advancing towards the full scale establishment of state capitalism which is what the whole Bolshevik project was all about in the first place. Socialism was not only impossible because Russia was an "isolated backward country", socialism was impossible because, as well as that, the subjective factor - mass socialist consciousness and the desire for a genuine socialist society (not your state owned economy) - was more or less entirely absent





This was because it was such a backward country. The fact is that in the 1930s the economy was no longer privately owned so only a political revolution was required, unlike in capitalist countries where a social one was also required.

Actually state ownership to be quite literal about it, is a form of private ownership or, at any rate, sectional onership. The state is not society or the public . The state is an institution apart from the public that is controlled by those who administer it and whose control of these state owned means of production amounts to a de facto ownership of these means

If what you were saying has one iota of truth about it then the position of a worker in a nationalised enterprise in the West like, say, the old British Rail would be qualitatively different in kind to the position of same worker in the more recently privatised railways. I invite you to show how in any way this is the case. Or indeed that the position of the paying public using the railways has changed.






No, they did not own it, and it was not an elite until after Stalin got power.


Once again you are bottling out the argument and falling back on the same old Trotskyist nonsense that there werent capitalists because individuals were not formally allowed to own private capital and invest it. According to you, you only own something if you have a peice of paper or some legal deocument perhaps which says you own it . This is legalistic-cum -idealistic interpretation of history.

The fact of ownership is grounded in real material circumstances not whether the constitution of some state says individuals may or may not own private capital. Until you address this point head on you will continue to flounder in the fog of Trotskyist idealism

And you are quite wrong about there not being an elite in control of industry until Stalin. Heard of "one man management"? That came way before Stalin - under Lenin



and your alternative would be?


My alternative? Well you know what my alternative would be as I have spelt it out often enough. Workers should politically organise for the overthrow of the wages system (capitalism) rather than try to administer and reform it and, in the meantime, organise in the most militant fashion possible against the boss class - the state or private capitalists - on the industrial front to defend wages and working conditions . And above all, not be suckered into thinking that state ownership in any way shape or form is the answer to the workers problems. It isnt.



They had wages yeah. It was not slavery. The Bolsheviks did their best. In the early days there was hardly any wage differentials. They were forced to increase them a bit. Under Stalin it got much greater.


See, when you are denying the reality of wage slavery in the Soviet Union you are using the liberal reformist notion of the term. It comes out of the whole" A fair days wage for a fair day's work" school of thought which Marx ridiculed. You are basically just a liberal when it comes down to it. Give the worker a fair wage and, well, thats alright then 'cos she is not really being exploited anymore. Lets get all touchy-feely with the boss class . They're not so bad - are they - if like the Bolsheviks they "did their best" (never mind that under the Bolsheviks and Trotsky in particular the "militarisation of labour" programme was a brutal and savage incursion into the already limited right of workers)

Wage differentials do not really have much to do with the fact of wage slavery. You are a wage slave simply by virtue of the fact that you are economically compelled to sell your labour power for a wage and this compulsion derives from the simple fact that you are separated - alienated - from the means of production. Thats is why you are a wage slave. You do not own sufficient or any capital to live upon

Wage differentials were indeed markedly less under the Bolsheviks than later but they steadily increased under Lenin as the state capitalist project of the Bolsheviks starting gaining momentum. If Trotsky, rather than Stalin, had replaced Lenin there would have been very little difference in that respect. The objective material exigencies of developing a system of state administered capitalism would have resulted in more or less the same outcome: a highly unequal society



there was a capitalist class in the 1920s, but not much of one in the late 1930s, though obviously Stalin did worry about the threat from the right as the bulk of people he killed were peasants. He had collectivised but I think they still had some private market.

However after the purges I dont think there was much in the way of a capitalist class.

Would I still call the one class that existed working class? Maybe I shouldnt, but you have to call it something, and a degenerated workers state is the best definition. Workers state meaning publicly owned industry.


It's not a wriggling game. It's a question of facts. If everyone is a worker, are they no longer workers?

How do you best communicate what the USSR was and what it had been and where it was going, and also where it could go if a different route was chosen by the people?

A degenerated workers state sums all this up. State capitalism does not. s.

The above really is all really based on a particular conception of what is capitalist or a capitalist class - namely Trotsky's narrowly legalistic-idealistic intepretation of the term denoting the legal right of individuals to privately own capital. Since I dont accept this absurdly limited interpretation then we are going to be talking at cross purposes unless and until you address the argument I raised about what constititues a capitalist or a capitalist class


But even you must see that this whole idea of a "degenerated workers state" is fundamentally problematic . You cannot get round the argument that if there is a working class there HAD to be a capitalist class as well - since you cannot have one without the other - and that this completely refutes your claim that there were no capitalists in the Soviet Union . The argument that what was installed in Russia was a "dictatorship of the proletariat " - an absurd claim anyway - can only be asserted at the price of acknwleging the eixstence of an exploiting capitalist class. Otherwise it makes no sense - who would the proletariat allegedly be "dictating" to if not the capitalist class? All that remains is to discover who this capitalist class were. Logically it could only have been the elite who controlled the state and therefore owned the means of production in de facto terms. This is the the insoluble contradiction that lies at the heart of all variations of the "workers state" theory. It must logially imply the existence of the capitalist class and how can the capitalistclass exist except by exploiting the working class. In which case how can it possibly be a so called "workers state"


There is no way round this contradiction at all. Your problem is that you simply refuse to recognise the soviet state capitalist class for what it was becuase you have a particular stereotype in mind of what is meant by a "capitalist". You are not looking at the question in functional terms but merely in descriptive terms. This is not dissimilar to the workerist stereotype of what constittues a member of the working class. According to this sterotype , you have to be a cloth capped manual worker who is a horny handed son or daughter of toil iin order to qualify as a member of this class. But this does not capture the essence of what it means to be a member of the working class - clerical workers are just as much workers as factory hands., By the very same token a capitalist does not have to be some a top hatted toff who smokes a cigar and gambles on the stock exchange. A soviet apparatchik - a high ranking policitian or bureaucrat or state enterprise manager - can also serve just as well as a capitalist in functional terms


You kind of get a glimpse of the baisc problem with your whole approach but unfortunately shy away from dealing with it head on. You say

It's not a wriggling game. It's a question of facts. If everyone is a worker, are they no longer workers?

Quite. But consider what you are saying here. This would mean you are using the term worker not as a class category but only in the simple sense of someone who works. In other words this would imply the Soviet Uniuon was a classless society. If this is what you are suggesting then you have a really serious problem on your hands: how can you possibly reconcile this alleged classlessness with the existence of the state?. What you are saying stands in total contradiction to the whole Marxian theory of the state which is that the state as institution of class society par excellance enabling one class to oppress another. When no classes exist how can the state in the Marxian sense exist? How?


Not only that - why would Russian workers be paid in wages in an alleged classless society. A wage as stated earlier signifies the fact that one is divorced from the means of production. Meaning you dont own the means of prpdiuction. But somebody - or some group - owned the means of production did they not - it was no "unowned"? Trots try to get round this by arguing that workers were not actually paid wages and that there was no wage labour which is blatantly ridiculous. Workers were paid something at the end of the week or month and this unquestionably was a money wage. As usual our Trotskyist theoreticains are trying to make reality fit in with the facts rather than the other way round and this explains their completely ideologised and contorted mode of reasoning all too evident in such ridculous theoretical constructions as a "degenerated workers state". Debates among Trots as to whether this so called "workers state" was deformed or degenerated and when precisely it all happened remind of Medieval scholastics debating on how many angels you can fit on a pinhead

Denying the existence of a capitalist class - which is inseparable from the notion of a working class - they are compelled, as you are, to redefine what is meant by a worker as no longer signifying a class category with the very clear implication that the Soviet Union was no longer a class based society. But what is a class? It is a social grouping which is defined by its relationship to the means of production. In a classless society everyone stands in precisely the same relation to the means of production becuase these are the common property of all

Now you have admitted in no uncertain terms that at least under Stalin there was an elite (before Stalin you agree that there was a capitalist class) . The problem is this - how can you possibly maintain that the position of a member of this elite vis a vis the means of production can be considered identical to that of an ordinary worker, when this elite makes all the important decisions in the economy , exerts complete control over the disposal of the economic economic surplus and is vastly better off than the ordinary worker by any indicator you may choose to use. By any reasonable standard these differences signify a "difference in relation to the means of production"and therefore a class difference

By no stretch of the imagination can it be said that the elite had an identical relationship to the means of production vis a vis the ordinary worker and it would be a complete abuse of language and logic to suggest that it did. The question is where did it get this power to control the economy from? What was the material basis of this elite's extraordinary power if not its de facto ownership of the means of production?

Once you try to answer that question you will soon begin to see that the only satisfactory answer that makes any sense is that this elite actually constituted a distinct class - the state capitalist class - and that the only adequate decription of the system that prevailed in the Soviet Union is that of state capitalism

[manic expression]

Think about it, if the DDR was Marxist then Fredrick List would be against the party line thus not be on a DDR stamp.
Sorry, doesn't follow.


The point is that Marx supported the modernizing the means of production in order to reduce the necessarily labor time thus the GOSPLAN went against Marx by not embracing cybernetics.
Doesn't follow either...cybernetics didn't exist in Marx's time and so cannot be held as against the politics of Marx. It would be like saying that since GOSPLAN didn't give everyone a DeLorean they weren't Marxist.

[robbo203]

Daft Punk

You didnt respond to the post below. I am curious as to how you propose to defend the idea that Russia was some sort of "degenerated workers state" The ball is in your court...



Originally Posted by daft punk http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2402571#post2402571)
The evidence is the purge itself. Much of it was against kulaks and the threat from the right. But much of it was against the left, thousands of socialists were shot. Stalin was killing socialists in Russia at the same time as crushing the Spanish revolution - this is no coincidence. Stalin feared a movement from below for socialism.

Excuse me, but do you understand the question I asked you? I asked you for firm factual evidence you may have that there was a significant movement of any sort among Russian workers that sought a moneyless wageless stateless community based on the common ownership of the means of production - traditional socialism. I did NOT ask you if there was a significant movement of workers who wanted state ownership of the means of production. Thats something completely different

Originally Posted by daft punk http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2402571#post2402571)
How do you propose to abolish money and the state overnight?


What?! Are you seriously suggesting you can abolish money one pound - or dollar or rouble - note at a time? Of course money goes at one stroke. How else can it go? This is what Marx meant by "Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism" (German Ideology - my emphasis) Actually, its not money as such that is being abolished as the system that requires money - capitalism . Since there cannot logically be anything in between a class-based society and a classless society the change from one to the other is logicallly an instant one.
Originally Posted by daft punk http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2402571#post2402571)
If they got rid of the stalinist dictatorship it would have been possible for them to plan it democratically. It would be in their hands, it was already publicly owned. There was no bourgeoisie to expropriate.


You are ducking and diving and failing to address the points put to you. My claim is that the means of production were NOT owned by the public - so called "public ownership" is in fact a complete misnomer. They were owned by the state and thus by the people who controlled the state who were the actual de facto owners of the means of production . These people - the state capitalist class or the "state bourgeoisie" if you prefer - would indeed have to be expropropriated of their collective class ownership in order to have communism.

As an aside, some of these state capitalists , the pseudo communist apparatchiks in the pseudo communist party of the Soviet Union, went on the become even more fabulously wealthy in the post Soviet era using their political connections to pull strings. A significant proportion of the modern day oligarchs were previously members of this state capitalist class. Poland for some reason has the highest percentage of erstwhile high ranking "communist" amongst its oligarchs which if I remember correctly was about 70%

Originally Posted by daft punk http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2402571#post2402571)
This was 1921 at the start of the NEP, which was seen as a temporary retreat. Lenin's long term plans were tax the rich, encourage the poor peasants into coops via subsidies, build state industries, gradually move towards a socialist economy, while realising that socialism is impossible in an isolated backward country. So they would have to do the best they could and try to spread internationally.



Yeah yeah weve hear this all before - this endless tedious talk of always gradually "moving towards" a socialist economy (and never getting there). Lenin's writings are full of this sort of nonsense. It is actually little more than a verbalistic ploy to invoke the appeal of socialism while firmly advancing towards the full scale establishment of state capitalism which is what the whole Bolshevik project was all about in the first place. Socialism was not only impossible because Russia was an "isolated backward country", socialism was impossible because, as well as that, the subjective factor - mass socialist consciousness and the desire for a genuine socialist society (not your state owned economy) - was more or less entirely absent


Originally Posted by daft punk http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2402571#post2402571)
This was because it was such a backward country. The fact is that in the 1930s the economy was no longer privately owned so only a political revolution was required, unlike in capitalist countries where a social one was also required.


Actually state ownership to be quite literal about it, is a form of private ownership or, at any rate, sectional onership. The state is not society or the public . The state is an institution apart from the public that is controlled by those who administer it and whose control of these state owned means of production amounts to a de facto ownership of these means

If what you were saying has one iota of truth about it then the position of a worker in a nationalised enterprise in the West like, say, the old British Rail would be qualitatively different in kind to the position of same worker in the more recently privatised railways. I invite you to show how in any way this is the case. Or indeed that the position of the paying public using the railways has changed.


Originally Posted by daft punk http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2402571#post2402571)

No, they did not own it, and it was not an elite until after Stalin got power.

Once again you are bottling out the argument and falling back on the same old Trotskyist nonsense that there werent capitalists because individuals were not formally allowed to own private capital and invest it. According to you, you only own something if you have a peice of paper or some legal deocument perhaps which says you own it . This is legalistic-cum -idealistic interpretation of history.

The fact of ownership is grounded in real material circumstances not whether the constitution of some state says individuals may or may not own private capital. Until you address this point head on you will continue to flounder in the fog of Trotskyist idealism

And you are quite wrong about there not being an elite in control of industry until Stalin. Heard of "one man management"? That came way before Stalin - under Lenin
Originally Posted by daft punk http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2402571#post2402571)
and your alternative would be?

My alternative? Well you know what my alternative would be as I have spelt it out often enough. Workers should politically organise for the overthrow of the wages system (capitalism) rather than try to administer and reform it and, in the meantime, organise in the most militant fashion possible against the boss class - the state or private capitalists - on the industrial front to defend wages and working conditions . And above all, not be suckered into thinking that state ownership in any way shape or form is the answer to the workers problems. It isnt.


Originally Posted by daft punk http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2402571#post2402571)
They had wages yeah. It was not slavery. The Bolsheviks did their best. In the early days there was hardly any wage differentials. They were forced to increase them a bit. Under Stalin it got much greater.


See, when you are denying the reality of wage slavery in the Soviet Union you are using the liberal reformist notion of the term. It comes out of the whole" A fair days wage for a fair day's work" school of thought which Marx ridiculed. You are basically just a liberal when it comes down to it. Give the worker a fair wage and, well, thats alright then 'cos she is not really being exploited anymore. Lets get all touchy-feely with the boss class . They're not so bad - are they - if like the Bolsheviks they "did their best" (never mind that under the Bolsheviks and Trotsky in particular the "militarisation of labour" programme was a brutal and savage incursion into the already limited right of workers)

Wage differentials do not really have much to do with the fact of wage slavery. You are a wage slave simply by virtue of the fact that you are economically compelled to sell your labour power for a wage and this compulsion derives from the simple fact that you are separated - alienated - from the means of production. Thats is why you are a wage slave. You do not own sufficient or any capital to live upon

Wage differentials were indeed markedly less under the Bolsheviks than later but they steadily increased under Lenin as the state capitalist project of the Bolsheviks starting gaining momentum. If Trotsky, rather than Stalin, had replaced Lenin there would have been very little difference in that respect. The objective material exigencies of developing a system of state administered capitalism would have resulted in more or less the same outcome: a highly unequal society
Originally Posted by daft punk http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2402571#post2402571)
there was a capitalist class in the 1920s, but not much of one in the late 1930s, though obviously Stalin did worry about the threat from the right as the bulk of people he killed were peasants. He had collectivised but I think they still had some private market.

However after the purges I dont think there was much in the way of a capitalist class.

Would I still call the one class that existed working class? Maybe I shouldnt, but you have to call it something, and a degenerated workers state is the best definition. Workers state meaning publicly owned industry.


It's not a wriggling game. It's a question of facts. If everyone is a worker, are they no longer workers?

How do you best communicate what the USSR was and what it had been and where it was going, and also where it could go if a different route was chosen by the people?

A degenerated workers state sums all this up. State capitalism does not. s .

The above really is all really based on a particular conception of what is capitalist or a capitalist class - namely Trotsky's narrowly legalistic-idealistic intepretation of the term denoting the legal right of individuals to privately own capital. Since I dont accept this absurdly limited interpretation then we are going to be talking at cross purposes unless and until you address the argument I raised about what constititues a capitalist or a capitalist class


But even you must see that this whole idea of a "degenerated workers state" is fundamentally problematic . You cannot get round the argument that if there is a working class there HAD to be a capitalist class as well - since you cannot have one without the other - and that this completely refutes your claim that there were no capitalists in the Soviet Union . The argument that what was installed in Russia was a "dictatorship of the proletariat " - an absurd claim anyway - can only be asserted at the price of acknwleging the eixstence of an exploiting capitalist class. Otherwise it makes no sense - who would the proletariat allegedly be "dictating" to if not the capitalist class? All that remains is to discover who this capitalist class were. Logically it could only have been the elite who controlled the state and therefore owned the means of production in de facto terms. This is the the insoluble contradiction that lies at the heart of all variations of the "workers state" theory. It must logially imply the existence of the capitalist class and how can the capitalistclass exist except by exploiting the working class. In which case how can it possibly be a so called "workers state"


There is no way round this contradiction at all. Your problem is that you simply refuse to recognise the soviet state capitalist class for what it was becuase you have a particular stereotype in mind of what is meant by a "capitalist". You are not looking at the question in functional terms but merely in descriptive terms. This is not dissimilar to the workerist stereotype of what constittues a member of the working class. According to this sterotype , you have to be a cloth capped manual worker who is a horny handed son or daughter of toil iin order to qualify as a member of this class. But this does not capture the essence of what it means to be a member of the working class - clerical workers are just as much workers as factory hands., By the very same token a capitalist does not have to be some a top hatted toff who smokes a cigar and gambles on the stock exchange. A soviet apparatchik - a high ranking policitian or bureaucrat or state enterprise manager - can also serve just as well as a capitalist in functional terms


You kind of get a glimpse of the baisc problem with your whole approach but unfortunately shy away from dealing with it head on. You say

It's not a wriggling game. It's a question of facts. If everyone is a worker, are they no longer workers?

Quite. But consider what you are saying here. This would mean you are using the term worker not as a class category but only in the simple sense of someone who works. In other words this would imply the Soviet Uniuon was a classless society. If this is what you are suggesting then you have a really serious problem on your hands: how can you possibly reconcile this alleged classlessness with the existence of the state?. What you are saying stands in total contradiction to the whole Marxian theory of the state which is that the state as institution of class society par excellance enabling one class to oppress another. When no classes exist how can the state in the Marxian sense exist? How?


Not only that - why would Russian workers be paid in wages in an alleged classless society. A wage as stated earlier signifies the fact that one is divorced from the means of production. Meaning you dont own the means of prpdiuction. But somebody - or some group - owned the means of production did they not - it was no "unowned"? Trots try to get round this by arguing that workers were not actually paid wages and that there was no wage labour which is blatantly ridiculous. Workers were paid something at the end of the week or month and this unquestionably was a money wage. As usual our Trotskyist theoreticains are trying to make reality fit in with the facts rather than the other way round and this explains their completely ideologised and contorted mode of reasoning all too evident in such ridculous theoretical constructions as a "degenerated workers state". Debates among Trots as to whether this so called "workers state" was deformed or degenerated and when precisely it all happened remind of Medieval scholastics debating on how many angels you can fit on a pinhead

Denying the existence of a capitalist class - which is inseparable from the notion of a working class - they are compelled, as you are, to redefine what is meant by a worker as no longer signifying a class category with the very clear implication that the Soviet Union was no longer a class based society. But what is a class? It is a social grouping which is defined by its relationship to the means of production. In a classless society everyone stands in precisely the same relation to the means of production becuase these are the common property of all

Now you have admitted in no uncertain terms that at least under Stalin there was an elite (before Stalin you agree that there was a capitalist class) . The problem is this - how can you possibly maintain that the position of a member of this elite vis a vis the means of production can be considered identical to that of an ordinary worker, when this elite makes all the important decisions in the economy , exerts complete control over the disposal of the economic economic surplus and is vastly better off than the ordinary worker by any indicator you may choose to use. By any reasonable standard these differences signify a "difference in relation to the means of production"and therefore a class difference

By no stretch of the imagination can it be said that the elite had an identical relationship to the means of production vis a vis the ordinary worker and it would be a complete abuse of language and logic to suggest that it did. The question is where did it get this power to control the economy from? What was the material basis of this elite's extraordinary power if not its de facto ownership of the means of production?

Once you try to answer that question you will soon begin to see that the only satisfactory answer that makes any sense is that this elite actually constituted a distinct class - the state capitalist class - and that the only adequate decription of the system that prevailed in the Soviet Union is that of state capitalism

[Psy]

Sorry, doesn't follow.

That since Marx called Frederick List a bourgeois economist that the censors of a Marxist state would censor the image of Frederick List (if the state has strict censorship).



Doesn't follow either...cybernetics didn't exist in Marx's time and so cannot be held as against the politics of Marx. It would be like saying that since GOSPLAN didn't give everyone a DeLorean they weren't Marxist.
But it is basically mechanization of labor and Marx supported the mechanization of labor to lower the necessary labor time. Your logic is like saying bulldozers didn't exist when Marx alive so they are not necessary for a Marxist state even though not having bulldozers would increase necessary labor time.

A Marxist state to be Marxist have to adopt all technologies that lowers the necessary labor time to be in line with the teachings of Marx. If you don't then you are Luddite like the GOSPLAN was and have no business being a Marxist.

[João Jerónimo]

The regime insisted that there was a vast conspiracy of Trotskyists, foreign infiltrators, and such that had infiltrated the USSR and planned on toppling the regime. There is no evidence this is true. The "proof" that Stalinists tend to cite are the confessions of the Moscow Show Trials, but there is little reason to believe they are credible at all. The most likely case is that they were fabricated entirely or that the confessions were extracted via torture and thus unreliable.
There was evidence of sabotage for many of the cases. Also, the local secretary for Leningrad was murdered before the purges started.
It is actually very credible that there was foreign infiltration. After all, the decade before the country had been invaded in support for the "white" army.

JJ.

[manic expression]

That since Marx called Frederick List a bourgeois economist that the censors of a Marxist state would censor the image of Frederick List (if the state has strict censorship).
Would you then argue that since they didn't censor the image of everyone in history who wasn't a Marxist then they're not Marxist?

Sorry, but it still doesn't follow.


But it is basically mechanization of labor and Marx supported the mechanization of labor to lower the necessary labor time. Your logic is like saying bulldozers didn't exist when Marx alive so they are not necessary for a Marxist state even though not having bulldozers would increase necessary labor time.

A Marxist state to be Marxist have to adopt all technologies that lowers the necessary labor time to be in line with the teachings of Marx. If you don't then you are Luddite like the GOSPLAN was and have no business being a Marxist.Let us not get into bulldozers. :D

Anyway, no, my logic is like saying that a certain application of computers does not define socialism. You are saying that unless you use cybernetics you're bourgeois, which is laughably irrational.

[daft punk]

There was evidence of sabotage for many of the cases. Also, the local secretary for Leningrad was murdered before the purges started.
It is actually very credible that there was foreign infiltration. After all, the decade before the country had been invaded in support for the "white" army.

JJ.


Jesus fucking H. Christ. Trotsky built and led the Red Army to victory against the Whites and foreign armies! That is not very good evidence to back your ludicrous idea that he then suddenly swapped sides.

Now, show us this nonexistent 'evidence' you speak of. What is this strange invisible intangible substance you describe?

[Psy]

Would you then argue that since they didn't censor the image of everyone in history who wasn't a Marxist then they're not Marxist?

We are talking about a critique of Marx that believed capitalism could be reformed through nationalization of industry. Thus what would be the point of the GDR honoring the birthday someone that spent their adult life trying to disprove the works of Marx.




Let us not get into bulldozers. :D

Anyway, no, my logic is like saying that a certain application of computers does not define socialism. You are saying that unless you use cybernetics you're bourgeois, which is laughably irrational.
GOSPLAN argument was that computers would make them lose their jobs and the only way they could maintain their living standard was to defend the labor time required to do their job. This basically proved the USSR was still capitalists as labor was stuck in wage slavery as even the bureaucrats in GOSPLAN couldn't embrace technology to bring themselves leisure time.

[manic expression]

We are talking about a critique of Marx that believed capitalism could be reformed through nationalization of industry. Thus what would be the point of the GDR honoring the birthday someone that spent their adult life trying to disprove the works of Marx.
That point has nothing to do with the social relations of the DDR.


GOSPLAN argument was that computers would make them lose their jobs and the only way they could maintain their living standard was to defend the labor time required to do their job. This basically proved the USSR was still capitalists as labor was stuck in wage slavery as even the bureaucrats in GOSPLAN couldn't embrace technology to bring themselves leisure time.
Uh, no, that doesn't mean the USSR was capitalist because not wanting to lose your position is hardly unique to capitalist society.

[Psy]

That point has nothing to do with the social relations of the DDR.

If the GDR was Marxist then List would not have been remembered fondly.



Uh, no, that doesn't mean the USSR was capitalist because not wanting to lose your position is hardly unique to capitalist society.
If you have are Marxist then you have moved beyond surplus value. If you have moved beyond surplus value then living standards would not be linked to the hours and labor saving would result in workers working less for the same living standard if not more due to cheaper products of society.

[manic expression]

If the GDR was Marxist then List would not have been remembered fondly.
Again, doesn't follow. Social conditions do not automatically determine the light in which some individual is remembered.


If you have are Marxist then you have moved beyond surplus value. If you have moved beyond surplus value then living standards would not be linked to the hours and labor saving would result in workers working less for the same living standard if not more due to cheaper products of society.
So tell me, did the USSR become capitalist the instant they didn't implement cybernetics? If the answer is no, then your argument here doesn't seem to hold any water.

[Leftsolidarity]

If the GDR was Marxist then List would not have been remembered fondly.



Honestly, this is the worst argument ever.

[Psy]

Honestly, this is the worst argument ever.
So if in the USA we had a "workers-state" and we had the state celibate John Maynard Keynes don't you think something is not right? Especially when there some Marxist economists were being censored, wouldn't you wonder why the "workers-state" was protecting you from reading some Marxists economist but was okay with you reading a self-proclaimed bourgeois economist?

It would be different if the GDR didn't censor anyone in the Marxist tradition meaning those in the GDR could even read Tony Cliff, but the GDR thought List was more in-line with the party then some Marxists.



So tell me, did the USSR become capitalist the instant they didn't implement cybernetics? If the answer is no, then your argument here doesn't seem to hold any water.
The USSR was capitalist before, it inaction of GOSPLAN on the issue just proved the USSR suffered from the same contradictions Marx's described in Capital.

[Leftsolidarity]

So if in the USA we had a "workers-state" and we had the state celibate John Maynard Keynes don't you think something is not right? Especially when there some Marxist economists were being censored, wouldn't you wonder why the "workers-state" was protecting you from reading some Marxists economist but was okay with you reading a self-proclaimed bourgeois economist?

It would be different if the GDR didn't censor anyone in the Marxist tradition meaning those in the GDR could even read Tony Cliff, but the GDR thought List was more in-line with the party then some Marxists.




I'm setting aside my personal views about the GDR. You obviously are not.

You already have the view that it was not a workers state and are trying to use this stamp thing as a way to back up the views you already hold.

The proper way to look at something is for the evidence to prove the conclusion, not have a conclusion and try to make the evidence fit it.

The fact that the GDR had a bourgeois economist on a stamp doesn't mean anything. That is probably the worst evidence you could try to use. If you want to critic relations to production, social relations, etc. That is one thing. You are attacking a stamp they printed.

[Psy]

I'm setting aside my personal views about the GDR. You obviously are not.

You already have the view that it was not a workers state and are trying to use this stamp thing as a way to back up the views you already hold.

The proper way to look at something is for the evidence to prove the conclusion, not have a conclusion and try to make the evidence fit it.

The fact that the GDR had a bourgeois economist on a stamp doesn't mean anything. That is probably the worst evidence you could try to use. If you want to critic relations to production, social relations, etc. That is one thing. You are attacking a stamp they printed.
Again the GDR censored Marxist economists but not List that was a self proclaimed bourgeois economist. So in the GDR you were free to learn state-capitalism from List but learn about Marxist economy theories was a different story. So the GDR was Marxist how? Why would a Marxist state censor Marx but not Marx's critiques? That is like a church censoring the holy scriptures they are suppose to follow but being open about critiques that challenge those scriptures.

[manic expression]

So if in the USA we had a "workers-state" and we had the state celibate John Maynard Keynes don't you think something is not right?
I would think something would be quite not right if someone like Abraham Lincoln was not celebrated, actually. All sorts of non-proletarian figures are inspirational to working-class eyes.


The USSR was capitalist before,
Ah, so your argument is irrelevant, no?

[Leftsolidarity]

Again the GDR censored Marxist economists but not List that was a self proclaimed bourgeois economist. So in the GDR you were free to learn state-capitalism from List but learn about Marxist economy theories was a different story. So the GDR was Marxist how? Why would a Marxist state censor Marx but not Marx's critiques? That is like a church censoring the holy scriptures they are suppose to follow but being open about critiques that challenge those scriptures.

Aren't we talking about a stamp? Is this really "learning" or anything like that? This is a stamp.

[Psy]

I would think something would be quite not right if someone like Abraham Lincoln was not celebrated, actually. All sorts of non-proletarian figures are inspirational to working-class eyes.

Abraham Lincoln is not rememberer as a economist, List is that is. If the GDR wanted to celibate their industrial roots they could have celebrated some like Ferdinand Graf von Zeppelin that was just a industrialist.



Ah, so your argument is irrelevant, no?
It is relevant because GOSPLAN didn't act on Marxist logic when the question of cybernetics was presented to them. GOSPLAN still acted out of the logic of maximizing surplus value thus couldn't get their head around lowering labor requirements without also lowering living standards of workers. If those at GOSPLAN understood Marx's capital then when presented with cybernetics they would have understood it meant freeing up labor in the planing process without lowering utility in society thus there was no reason for them to earn less just because they would be working less.

[manic expression]

Abraham Lincoln is not rememberer as a economist, List is that is.
You haven't demonstrated that that matters at all.


It is relevant because GOSPLAN didn't act on Marxist logic
Marxist logic doesn't have to do with exactly how you use computers.

[Psy]

Aren't we talking about a stamp? Is this really "learning" or anything like that? This is a stamp.
If they put him on a stamp it means his writings were in libraries at the time, else the people putting him on stamps would go "who is Fredrick List and why should we celebrate his birthday".

[Psy]

Marxist logic doesn't have to do with exactly how you use computers.
Marxist logic in this case is how you view labor in relation to utility in a society. GOSPLAN used capitalist logic that if workers are working less they should be paid less because the goal of production is surplus value thus the savings of cutting wages of GOSPLAN for implementing cybernetics would go towards accumulating more surplus value.

From a Marxist perspective when you drop the work required you still have the same use value in society thus no reason to claw back what workers consume, thus GOSPLAN workers would simply work less hours period. The fact this simple Marxist idea went over GOSPLAN head shows they were thinking like capitalist not Marxists.

[manic expression]

Marxist logic in this case is how you view labor in relation to utility in a society.
Something that does not bear a direct relationship to the specific use of computers.


The fact this simple Marxist idea went over GOSPLAN head shows they were thinking like capitalist not Marxists.
No, it shows they didn't use computers in a particular way.

[Psy]

Something that does not bear a direct relationship to the specific use of computers.


No, it shows they didn't use computers in a particular way.
In this case computers are just machines to amply labor output, Marx was clear that this is a good thing because it lowers necessary labor time while increasing output. Thus from a Marxist perspective GOSPLAN should have been very enthusiastic about bring computers into GOSPLAN as it would mean they work less while can plan more.

[João Jerónimo]

Jesus fucking H. Christ. Trotsky built and led the Red Army to victory against the Whites and foreign armies! That is not very good evidence to back your ludicrous idea that he then suddenly swapped sides.
Nowhere I talked about Trotsky, so there is no need for you to rush in defense of your pope. I see his condemnation as one of the most stupid acts of the USSR, and I find it very hard to believe that he was really collaborating with the germans as he was accused. Trotsky was no saint, and as far as I know, ideologically he was a cretin, albeit a very competent organizer (after all he lead the Red Army to victory).


Now, show us this nonexistent 'evidence' you speak of. What is this strange invisible intangible substance you describe?I don't know details, but what I've read is that there were attempts by many individuals to sabotage imports of industrial machines. Some time ago I read ainterview to Ivan Alekssandrovitch Benediktov who was commissary of Agriculture during Stalin's years, and he told an episode where he was called to the KGB for inquiry about evidence of sabotage, that had been thrown upon him by a phony "comrade" at his workplace. This shows that there was evidence for convicting people. Which of course does not mean that there were not abuses of power, for the world is not made of black and white...
resistir.info/russia/benediktov.html
You may copy the above address into the URL bar of your browser. It's in Portuguese, but the original was published by a soviet magazine during the katastroika...

JJ.

[manic expression]

In this case computers are just machines to amply labor output, Marx was clear that this is a good thing because it lowers necessary labor time while increasing output. Thus from a Marxist perspective GOSPLAN should have been very enthusiastic about bring computers into GOSPLAN as it would mean they work less while can plan more.
What was being planned is far more important than precisely how they went about planning it. Any Marxist understands that.

[Psy]

What was being planned is far more important than precisely how they went about planning it. Any Marxist understands that.
The relationship between worker in production is far more important then the planning process.

[manic expression]

The relationship between worker in production is far more important then the planning process.
And how, altogether, does the lack of cybernetics determine that the worker is involved in the capitalist mode of production?

[Psy]

And how, altogether, does the lack of cybernetics determine that the worker is involved in the capitalist mode of production?
Because you had workers in GOSPLAN in fear of their ability to consume being clawed back if they accept time saving devices even though said devices would increase output even with less labor.

[manic expression]

Because you had workers in GOSPLAN in fear of their ability to consume being clawed back if they accept time saving devices even though said devices would increase output even with less labor.
So you're saying they had control over their workplace...interesting....

[Psy]

So you're saying they had control over their workplace...interesting....
No they didn't, if they did then they could simply not lay themselves off while taking the advantages of cybernetics. The GOSPLAN saw that the USSR ran under the capitalist mode of production thus the only way they could protect their jobs was to fight technological advancement that allowed for more efficient exploitation of labor.

If you have workers not being exploited they would of course accept all labor saving devices as they only want to get the job done as they don't have to prove the value of their wages.

[daft punk]

Daft Punk

You didnt respond to the post below. I am curious as to how you propose to defend the idea that Russia was some sort of "degenerated workers state" The ball is in your court...

I have explained the DWS thing a thousand times. A planned economy (workers state, definition 2) run by a bureaucratic dictatorship (degenerated).



Excuse me, but do you understand the question I asked you? I asked you for firm factual evidence you may have that there was a significant movement of any sort among Russian workers that sought a moneyless wageless stateless community based on the common ownership of the means of production - traditional socialism. I did NOT ask you if there was a significant movement of workers who wanted state ownership of the means of production. Thats something completely different

I dunno why you are mentioning a moneyless wageless stateless community. No socialist walks around offering that. You dont have to offer that to talk about socialism. You want to jump from a semifeudal society to an advanced socialist one in one jump? Lenin said it would take 3 generations. And even that would need advanced countries to help. Are you trying to win the argument based on a weird definition of what socialism might mean to people? If you are trying to educate a 5 year old you dont tell them they are studying for a PhD.







What?! Are you seriously suggesting you can abolish money one pound - or dollar or rouble - note at a time? Of course money goes at one stroke. How else can it go? This is what Marx meant by "Empirically, communism is only possible as the act of the dominant peoples “all at once” and simultaneously, which presupposes the universal development of productive forces and the world intercourse bound up with communism" (German Ideology - my emphasis) Actually, its not money as such that is being abolished as the system that requires money - capitalism . Since there cannot logically be anything in between a class-based society and a classless society the change from one to the other is logicallly an instant one.

lololol this is crazy. Marx didnt mean that literally. Especially not in a backward isolated country. Why do you think he put "all at once" in inverted commas? This usage implies an unusual use of the phrase, ie not literal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quotation_mark#Signaling_unusual_usage

Yes money would be abolished £1 at a time, starting with yours. Or, you could make healthcare free, then public transport, then food, then housing, then energy and so on, until you just had tokens for luxuries.





You are ducking and diving and failing to address the points put to you. My claim is that the means of production were NOT owned by the public - so called "public ownership" is in fact a complete misnomer. They were owned by the state and thus by the people who controlled the state who were the actual de facto owners of the means of production . These people - the state capitalist class or the "state bourgeoisie" if you prefer - would indeed have to be expropropriated of their collective class ownership in order to have communism.

State ownership is public ownership as opposed to private ownership. generally speaking. The key point here is that only a political revolution was needed.

Put it this way, if the masses rose up and organised for democratic socialism, forming a new mass socialist party in the USSR in 1936, and the Stalin regime crumbled, what would be required to get socialism? You wouldnt need to nationalise companies, it was already done. So you would have the basic structure in place for a sort of socialist economy.

The state did not own the means of production, they controlled it.






As an aside, some of these state capitalists , the pseudo communist apparatchiks in the pseudo communist party of the Soviet Union, went on the become even more fabulously wealthy in the post Soviet era using their political connections to pull strings. A significant proportion of the modern day oligarchs were previously members of this state capitalist class. Poland for some reason has the highest percentage of erstwhile high ranking "communist" amongst its oligarchs which if I remember correctly was about 70%

I know all this.






Yeah yeah weve hear this all before - this endless tedious talk of always gradually "moving towards" a socialist economy (and never getting there). Lenin's writings are full of this sort of nonsense. It is actually little more than a verbalistic ploy to invoke the appeal of socialism while firmly advancing towards the full scale establishment of state capitalism which is what the whole Bolshevik project was all about in the first place. Socialism was not only impossible because Russia was an "isolated backward country", socialism was impossible because, as well as that, the subjective factor - mass socialist consciousness and the desire for a genuine socialist society (not your state owned economy) - was more or less entirely absent

This is all nonsense. Lenin and Trotsky devoted their lives to socialism. They both died for it. They were both jailed at a young age for it. Their aim was a moneyless society, But they understood that you cannot achieve that over night. Nor can you wait forever for a perfect situation.






Actually state ownership to be quite literal about it, is a form of private ownership or, at any rate, sectional onership. The state is not society or the public . The state is an institution apart from the public that is controlled by those who administer it and whose control of these state owned means of production amounts to a de facto ownership of these means

If what you were saying has one iota of truth about it then the position of a worker in a nationalised enterprise in the West like, say, the old British Rail would be qualitatively different in kind to the position of same worker in the more recently privatised railways. I invite you to show how in any way this is the case. Or indeed that the position of the paying public using the railways has changed.

the nationalisation of British Rail had little in common with how a socialist society would be run. Now British rail is an example of state capitalism.

If everything was nationalised in that way, and you had a bureaucratic dictatorship instead of bourgeois democracy, yes that would be similar to what you had in Russia. But it wasnt, one was a workers state that was grotesquely deformed, the other was a capitalist state with a lot of state owned industry. In Britain, the rich ruled, they owneed the news papers, they dictated government policy to a large extent, they had the financial and cultural power. In Russia there was no capitalist class like that, Stalin had wiped them out.

No matter how much you want it to be, the bureaucracy in Russia and the capitalist class in Britain were quite different, and need to be dealt with in different ways.






Once again you are bottling out the argument and falling back on the same old Trotskyist nonsense that there werent capitalists because individuals were not formally allowed to own private capital and invest it. According to you, you only own something if you have a peice of paper or some legal deocument perhaps which says you own it . This is legalistic-cum -idealistic interpretation of history.


No. You are talking out of your arse. Sorry but I'm bored of this argument now. You need to treat things dialectically. Two things may appear similar, but if they come from different places they dont have the same history and it is pointless to simply say they are identical when they just have similarities.

Russia was not Britain, it was quite different. Please try to understand this.




The fact of ownership is grounded in real material circumstances not whether the constitution of some state says individuals may or may not own private capital. Until you address this point head on you will continue to flounder in the fog of Trotskyist idealism

The real material circumstances is that there was no capitalist class in Russia because Stalin had killed them and taken their property into public ownership. The bureaucracy lived privileged lives, but they did not own the MOP. Besides, read the Ted Grant article, you are ignoring the fact that the economy did very well for a while, this is very important. Please think about that aspect of it and see what Grant said as to ignore it is not possible. If Russia was state capitalism, then it looks like state capitalism can be a higher stage of capitalism. At least for a few decades. If that is the case how come capitalist countries don't end up like that?




And you are quite wrong about there not being an elite in control of industry until Stalin.
When the fuck did I say that? Never fcs. That is the last thing I would ever dream of saying and I am amazed you could say it. Or did you mean Lenin?





Heard of "one man management"? That came way before Stalin - under Lenin

heard of a fucking emergency? Not the best time to sit down and debate stuff. The Russian economy was in ruins after WW1/civil war and drastic measures were needed. But Lenin coupled that with freedom to discuss things in soviets outside working hours. He just said that at work you could not debate whether to do your job, as an expert had been appointed to manage and like it or not, that is a way of actually getting stuff done.






My alternative? Well you know what my alternative would be as I have spelt it out often enough.

No I dont




Workers should politically organise for the overthrow of the wages system (capitalism) rather than try to administer and reform it and, in the meantime, organise in the most militant fashion possible against the boss class - the state or private capitalists - on the industrial front to defend wages and working conditions . And above all, not be suckered into thinking that state ownership in any way shape or form is the answer to the workers problems. It isnt.

what does this actually mean? Abolish money overnight?




See, when you are denying the reality of wage slavery in the Soviet Union you are using the liberal reformist notion of the term. It comes out of the whole" A fair days wage for a fair day's work" school of thought which Marx ridiculed. You are basically just a liberal when it comes down to it.

I suppose Lenin was just a liberal as well, and armchair liberal in fact. Marx in fact did not ridicule that idea he said that would have to be the first stage. Marx never said inequality could be banished overnight. But the Bolsheviks came close, with a very small difference initially between the minimum and maximum wage, but it proved unworkable so they had to offer higher wages to specialists.




Give the worker a fair wage and, well, thats alright then 'cos she is not really being exploited anymore. Lets get all touchy-feely with the boss class .

Dude this is childish




They're not so bad - are they - if like the Bolsheviks they "did their best" (never mind that under the Bolsheviks and Trotsky in particular the "militarisation of labour" programme was a brutal and savage incursion into the already limited right of workers)

what 'militarisation programme'? And besides, Marx talked about the militarisation of labour (industrial armies).



Wage differentials do not really have much to do with the fact of wage slavery. You are a wage slave simply by virtue of the fact that you are economically compelled to sell your labour power for a wage and this compulsion derives from the simple fact that you are separated - alienated - from the means of production. Thats is why you are a wage slave. You do not own sufficient or any capital to live upon

and how would that be different in your interpretation of Marx's communism?

You still would not own the means of production.






Wage differentials were indeed markedly less under the Bolsheviks than later but they steadily increased under Lenin as the state capitalist project of the Bolsheviks starting gaining momentum.

They had no fucking choice. It just proves your crazy abolition of money on day 1 idea to be nonsense.




If Trotsky, rather than Stalin, had replaced Lenin there would have been very little difference in that respect.

The objective material exigencies of developing a system of state administered capitalism would have resulted in more or less the same outcome: a highly unequal society


Total nonsense proven by for instance the fact that from 1924-8 Trotsky advocated policies which were very different to those Stalin practised. Get real, read the Platform of the Opposition. Please dont type nonsense like this, debating it is a complete waste of time. I can handle crazy theories, but stick to facts.



The above really is all really based on a particular conception of what is capitalist or a capitalist class - namely Trotsky's narrowly legalistic-idealistic intepretation of the term denoting the legal right of individuals to privately own capital. Since I dont accept this absurdly limited interpretation then we are going to be talking at cross purposes unless and until you address the argument I raised about what constititues a capitalist or a capitalist class


But even you must see that this whole idea of a "degenerated workers state" is fundamentally problematic . You cannot get round the argument that if there is a working class there HAD to be a capitalist class as well - since you cannot have one without the other - and that this completely refutes your claim that there were no capitalists in the Soviet Union .

workers state just means planned economy. it does not presuppose the existence of two classes.




The argument that what was installed in Russia was a "dictatorship of the proletariat " - an absurd claim anyway - can only be asserted at the price of acknwleging the eixstence of an exploiting capitalist class. Otherwise it makes no sense - who would the proletariat allegedly be "dictating" to if not the capitalist class? All that remains is to discover who this capitalist class were. Logically it could only have been the elite who controlled the state and therefore owned the means of production in de facto terms. This is the the insoluble contradiction that lies at the heart of all variations of the "workers state" theory. It must logially imply the existence of the capitalist class and how can the capitalistclass exist except by exploiting the working class. In which case how can it possibly be a so called "workers state"


it was a dotp up to 1924, of course there was a capitalist class then







There is no way round this contradiction at all. Your problem is that you simply refuse to recognise the soviet state capitalist class for what it was becuase you have a particular stereotype in mind of what is meant by a "capitalist". You are not looking at the question in functional terms but merely in descriptive terms. This is not dissimilar to the workerist stereotype of what constittues a member of the working class. According to this sterotype , you have to be a cloth capped manual worker who is a horny handed son or daughter of toil iin order to qualify as a member of this class. But this does not capture the essence of what it means to be a member of the working class - clerical workers are just as much workers as factory hands., By the very same token a capitalist does not have to be some a top hatted toff who smokes a cigar and gambles on the stock exchange. A soviet apparatchik - a high ranking policitian or bureaucrat or state enterprise manager - can also serve just as well as a capitalist in functional terms

So why did Stalin kill the capitalists? How did a workers party carry out a bourgeois while simultaneously fighting a civil war against the capitalist class? The USSR economy grew faster than any other at the time. A Marxist has to support anything which develops the productive forces. If Russia was state capitalist this would mean the next stage in society should be state capitalism. You did read Ted Grant's article?



You kind of get a glimpse of the baisc problem with your whole approach but unfortunately shy away from dealing with it head on. You say

It's not a wriggling game. It's a question of facts. If everyone is a worker, are they no longer workers?

Quite. But consider what you are saying here. This would mean you are using the term worker not as a class category but only in the simple sense of someone who works. In other words this would imply the Soviet Uniuon was a classless society. If this is what you are suggesting then you have a really serious problem on your hands: how can you possibly reconcile this alleged classlessness with the existence of the state?. What you are saying stands in total contradiction to the whole Marxian theory of the state which is that the state as institution of class society par excellance enabling one class to oppress another. When no classes exist how can the state in the Marxian sense exist? How?


The state was there to defend the interests of the bureaucratic caste.





Now you have admitted in no uncertain terms that at least under Stalin there was an elite (before Stalin you agree that there was a capitalist class) . The problem is this - how can you possibly maintain that the position of a member of this elite vis a vis the means of production can be considered identical to that of an ordinary worker, when this elite makes all the important decisions in the economy , exerts complete control over the disposal of the economic economic surplus and is vastly better off than the ordinary worker by any indicator you may choose to use. By any reasonable standard these differences signify a "difference in relation to the means of production"and therefore a class difference

By no stretch of the imagination can it be said that the elite had an identical relationship to the means of production vis a vis the ordinary worker and it would be a complete abuse of language and logic to suggest that it did. The question is where did it get this power to control the economy from? What was the material basis of this elite's extraordinary power if not its de facto ownership of the means of production?

Once you try to answer that question you will soon begin to see that the only satisfactory answer that makes any sense is that this elite actually constituted a distinct class - the state capitalist class - and that the only adequate decription of the system that prevailed in the Soviet Union is that of state capitalism

But the elite did not own the means of production. There was no private ownership, no private market. There was one class and a publicly owned economy. If it was capitalist, why the cold war? Why couldnt they get along with the west? It's not as if Stalin didnt try. His aim for China, Eastern Europe etc was capitalism. The cold war happened because that plan failed.

[manic expression]

If you have workers not being exploited they would of course accept all labor saving devices as they only want to get the job done as they don't have to prove the value of their wages.
Or, they would make decisions as they see fit, not based on the opinions of an internet Monday Morning Quarterback 40 years in the future.

[Art Vandelay]

Or, they would make decisions as they see fit, not based on the opinions of an internet Monday Morning Quarterback 40 years in the future.

I have not been following this whole debate, so I will not just jump in here and take one side or the other, but are you actually arguing that the workers would reject technological advances which would increase their production, thus decreasing their amount of work?

[manic expression]

I have not been following this whole debate, so I will not just jump in here and take one side or the other, but are you actually arguing that the workers would reject technological advances which would increase their production, thus decreasing their amount of work?
I'm arguing that liberated workers are free to figure things out as they see best...there's no specific use of computers inherent in socialism.

[Psy]

I'm arguing that liberated workers are free to figure things out as they see best...there's no specific use of computers inherent in socialism.

Liberated workers are not afraid of technology stealing their jobs or lowering the value of their labor.

[manic expression]

Liberated workers are not afraid of technology stealing their jobs or lowering the value of their labor.
Liberated workers are free to decide how to plan their society. They can do it with colored crayons and construction paper and it wouldn't contradict any law of socialism.

But yeah, you're right, cybernetics was trying to make all the members of GOSPLAN unemployed beggars. :rolleyes:

[Art Vandelay]

I do not think anyone is arguing that liberated workers are free to do as they please, but that liberated workers would welcome increased productivity and arguing otherwise is a little ridiculous.

[Psy]

Liberated workers are free to decide how to plan their society. They can do it with colored crayons and construction paper and it wouldn't contradict any law of socialism.

Yes it would, Marx was not indifferent about industrialization on the contrary Marx criticize the old socialist movements for being Luddite in nature and not embracing the mechanization of labor through technological progress.



But yeah, you're right, cybernetics was trying to make all the members of GOSPLAN unemployed beggars. :rolleyes:

Cybernetics meant the mountains of paper in GOSPLAN being obsolete overnight along with all the paper pushers. It also made the way GOSPLAN planned obsolete, as computers could be programmed to make the decisions faster then humans in GOSPLAN could even react to the flow of information. What the computer engineers from Moscow were telling GOSPLAN was that since GOSPLAN were made of humans they were obsolete to the task of planning now that computers can take over the task.