Greetings, comrades!

[Iosif]

Zdravstvuyte tovarishchi!

I am a Marxist-Leninist and I believe that the USSR under Stalin was socialist! We must counter these bourgeois lies from their media as much as possible! I hope to learn much from you all here.

[Q]

Welcome :)

If you have political questions, you can ask them in the Learning forum. That's why it's there after all!

If you have questions about your account, don't hesitate to send me a PM or ask here.

How was the USSR socialist, in your opinion?

[Kalinin's Facial Hair]

Welcome, Iosif (oh you!).

Have a feeling that your introduction thread will be fun!

[LOLseph Stalin]

The OP post almost seems like a troll post, but I think he's serious. Ah well. Welcome!

[Iosif]

@Q

The USSR had a centrally planned economy, it had no capitalist class and no antagonistic classes and all the means of production was nationalized. The law of value was already withering away until the economy was changed.

[Brutus]

You've got the same avatar as red godfather. He won't be happy

[Q]

@Q

The USSR had a centrally planned economy, it had no capitalist class and no antagonistic classes and all the means of production was nationalized. The law of value was already withering away until the economy was changed.

- I dispute that it had a 'planned' economy. Planning implies rationality and there was little rational in the GOSPLAN. I recall slogans like "complete the 5 year plan in 4 years!" and the like. You could call it a target economy though, because targets are the only thing bureaucrats can come up with. Something very different though.
- The fact that it had no capitalist class or an operating law of value doesn't mean it was socialist. This is a logical fallacy.

To the second point I made a post (http://www.revleft.com/vb/raul-castro-retire-t178959/index.html?p=2584474#post2584474) (although it was posited against the other end of the fallacy: Those that claim the USSR was "state capitalist". The reasoning is the same though):



If one is a Marxist, then the economy of the Soviet Union must have been either capitalist or communist. There is no intervening period - except for the transformation of the one to the other. Was it transforming from one to the other? If not, it must have been one or the other. Which?

Or, do you reject the paradigm?

This is exactly the fallacy I'm protesting to. Capitalism, as Marx describes at length in his Capital, is a pretty specific set of conditions. You can't just say "well, it wasn't socialism, so therefore it was capitalism".

Claiming such a fallacy to be "Marxist" doesn't make it Marxist. The 'paradigm' you might be referring to of social evolution from barbarism to slavery to feudalism to capitalism to socialism, which was popularised by the Second International, is at best a model of historical materialism, an expectation based on certain parameters. To treat it as gospel is taking the scientific method out of historical materialism.

So, what was the USSR (or Cuba for that matter?). I like to use an analogy that I read a while back on this: Biologists are well aware that mutations happen all the time in various (probably most) species. However, most of these mutations are not going to survive or not able to reproduce at all. To give such a mutation therefore a name is a waste of time. New names are only given when a mutation is durable, when in other words it results into a new (sub)species.

Likewise, Stalinism was a dead end. A mutation that had no future and could only collapse into another type of society. That society has been capitalism since capitalism is the hegemonic mode of production on the planet.

I hope this suffices (it probably won't, but meh).

I also recommend this video (http://vimeo.com/29505740) where a Marxist economist explains the absurdity of "planning" in the USSR.