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22nd June 2016, 20:41

Heretek

22nd June 2016, 23:17

These are legitimate questions. I hope some of the brilliant minds on here can answer them.

1. How exactly was the USSR not a communist state? It followed the economic principles of Marxism-Leninism.

2. How do you reconcile communism with the natural desire for people to work to provide for themselves and not necessarily for the less fortunate.

3. How do you explain the failures of almost all socialist/communist states, and the movement's decline in influence from the Cold War to only five practicing states today.

I hope you guys can answer my questions. Thanks.

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Probably should have posted this in the economics forum...oh well

There are no brilliant minds here, only personified expressions of social knowledge and its interpretation. Nothing is closed off to anybody who desires to learn here.

1. Marxist-Leninists will disagree, but most other communists and anarchists consider that line of thought to be counter-revolutionary and inherently non-communist, even if we begrudgingly accept them as leftists and technically part of the tradition. For example, Socialism in One Country flies in the face of the original tradition of socialism and communism's internationalism, instead focusing on a national agenda much like reformist groups in the west in the wake of 1914. Additionally, it was a bureaucratic entity rather than a worker's democracy, meaning another original concept, the emancipation of the working class, was unfulfilled, and was instead turned to technocrats who claimed to know best for the workers without the workers having an actual say. Communism is meant to be a usurpation of capitalism, not a reorganizing of it into a state bureaucracy. Finally, there is no such thing as a "communist state," which can be seen in the very definition of communism; "a classless, stateless, society." Not even they recognized themselves as a communist state, rather they referred to themselves as the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (disputed by others of course, but it's what they called themselves), or as "socialist republics," despite their very 'stately' nature.

2.Easy enough, in a culture of scarcity (capitalism), people need to look out for themselves to ensure their survival, because there isn't enough to go around and basic nature includes self-preservation. In a culture of abundance (communism), people do not need to hoard things or compete with one another, simply because there is plenty for everyone. Additionally, naturally 'providing for yourself' creates surplus value that while normally used for yourself in capitalism would go to the common good in communism. In communism, things are created according to need, not an unanswerable 'hand of the market' or other liberal superstition. Everyone can work if they so need to, and the concept of "those less fortunate" is abolished with the reorganization of society, since it will be reorganized into an egalitarian model rather than a hierarchical one, basic needs provided for all. No one needs mansion when a house or apartment will do, and there are already plenty of resources to accommodate food, water, and shelter in addition to what could be considered "luxuries" for everyone (society simply isn't arranged this way today, hence mansions that could fit 300 families 5km from slums not fit for rats).

3. The actual failure of the states themselves has to do with inefficient management of resources and labor, while additionally being under continuous attack from the west in attempt to collapse the states (competition and all that). The failure of the revolution can be mainly attributed to the failure of worker movements to take off in other countries like Germany and France. Marx and other communists theorized communism could never succeed in any one area of the world alone (hence internationalism), but they also argued places like China and Russia were not good places to begin the revolution in the first place, due mainly to the lack of industry, a weak development of capital (communism is capitalism's successor, therefore it generally needs to exist as a base, as developed as it possibly can be before it becomes reactionary and contrary to furthering society), and little to no (or decimated) proletariat. The revolution was primarily carried by the peasantry in the two largest countries (China/Russia), especially in the wake of the Civil War in Russia, which lead to the proles' decimation. The industry withing was incapable of supporting the revolution within the countries, which lead to efforts to rapidly fix said industry (collectivization and Lenin's NEP), but these were primarily stop-gaps to keep the revolution afloat until it succeeded in the west. When it failed to succeed, the revolution collapsed into a national project, hence why some leftists refer to the USSR as a 'degenerated worker's state" (mainly the trotskyists, but they apparently aren't too welcome here) or others refer to the October Revolution itself as bourgeois in nature (due to the failure of the international revolution). As to the fall in popularity, there's a few factors. One, the systematic brutalization of leftist movements in all countries by the bourgeois. Two, the fall of the USSR disheartened many leftists, though mostly M-Ls. Three, the outcome of the Spanish Civil War, which, in the face of defeats in France and Germany, put many leftists out of mobilization for the rest of their lives. Four, and this is particular to a few groups (but one of which I'm a part of, so...), Marxism-Leninism hijacked the majority of the leftist movement to suit the national interests of the USSR over the international working class, a lot of other leftist groups became reformist from 1914 onwards, and the few remaining communist groups were marginalized and/or oppressed by both western governments and ML parties+the USSR.

This will get yelled at by plenty of other ideologues, in particular the Stalinists, but analyzing all the different takes and arguments is useful for finding logical conclusions you can agree with. Even subscribing to an ideology one should keep an open mind and prepare to have arguments leveled against them. Sometimes they have a point, sometimes not, but it can flesh out your own understanding of a particular tendency, usually when you ask questions of their reasoning or offer your own counter-arguments.

Note: Someone should probably move this to learning

Jacob Cliff

23rd June 2016, 04:54

These are legitimate questions. I hope some of the brilliant minds on here can answer them.

In combination with the tone of this last bit and the timing of your join date to this website, I have a very strong feeling you come from iFunny, no? No matter. I will still answer the questions, so long as it doesn't end up with some obscure user quote-sniping little pieces of the response here and divorcing it from the rest of the message. I must also make this clear: this is severely condensed, as these topics demand much more elaboration than what I can afford at the moment (my keys are not always typing the letters I press, making typing this intolerable).

1. How exactly was the USSR not a communist state? It followed the economic principles of Marxism-Leninism.

"Marxism-Leninism" is the formalized terminology used by Stalinists for Stalinism. I am not saying this to dismiss the argument -- but you must understand that references to 'Marxism-Leninism' are from a specific epoch that we are not in right now. The 20th Century is over -- 'Marxism-Leninism' and the politics that went with it (those supported by the Comintern -- i.e., 'Socialism in One Country, etc.) are dead and buried. M-L has no modern context -- any Marxist today professing 'Marxism-Leninism' is in fact a reactionary, for all practical purposes -- living in a historical epoch that we are simply not in any longer. The same applies to Trotskyist political cults, and so on. Today, for all practical purposes, one is either a Communist or isn't. 'Marxism-Leninism' is dead.

But this little bit of elaboration is beyond the point: in fact, the Soviet Union was Communist in character up to a point. Post-1917, there was a genuine proletarian dictatorship established, but we claim that this proletarian dictatorship, the communist character of the state, degenerated. Why? I will spare details for the sake of brevity:

Because one must understand the context the Bolsheviks were immersed in, the sheer pressure and chaos that enveloped the state as soon as it was founded. Russia to begin with was the 'weakest link' in the capitalist chain -- they were a rural backwater where over 80% of the population consisted of backwards peasants too illiterate to even sign their name. The urban proletariat, although deeply revolutionary and firmly Bolshevik, was a stark minority. And following the Civil War in Russia, this revolutionary proletariat that carried the Communists to power was almost utterly and completely wiped out. The Civil War had reduced the urban population 60%, the entire country was in shambles, and the Bolsheviks had no affirmative basis to build socialist organs of power that could supersede capitalism. What you had, after the Civil War and military communism (a necessity, mind you), was a country hardly standing on it's feet. The 1920s, after the defeat of the White Army, was a very ambiguous time: essentially what you had was a proletarian dictatorship without a proletariat. The country had no affirmative basis of survival -- the NEP had abjectly failed to modernize the country, as the peasants had no predisposition to modernization, and the Communists had simply no technical nor social basis for universalizing creative, socialist organs that could supersede capitalism. Again -- it's not that these didn't work or whatever, but there was no way to universalize, say, factory kitchens when the state was forced to strictly ration out grain due to shortages and so on.

So in the late 20s, the Soviet Union entered into an existential crisis: what do we do with the last remaining vestiges of the proletarian dictatorship? When all that is left of the proletarian dictatorship are it's functionaries, how do we proceed to modernize the country and save the gains of the revolution? These questions dominated the political sphere, and it became apparent that, in lieu of the failure of the German revolution (which would have allowed modernization along socialist lines), the revolution had to die for the state to live. This was what was entailed by Collectivization in the 1930s. It was not a conscious endeavor, the death of the revolution -- but it is one we can understand in retrospect. At the time, and even looking back on it: there was no alternative to collectivization, besides lofty military adventurism into Germany by the already fledgling soviet state. Stalin understood this very early: ten years before Operation Barbarossa, he had said that they had ten years to modernize lest they be crushed. This was a very real prospect at the time: foreign military invasion, counterrevolution at home, etc. -- the Soviet state led a very precarious existence and for it's own survival it had to modernize. Given the NEP's failure to do so, Collectivization became the only option.

And it worked. It did help modernize the country, it did supply with enough to sustain it's industrialization in the 1930s -- the point is that there was no other route for Soviet modernization. But here's the catch: it did so at the expense of the revolution, of the proletarian dictatorship. The Communist character of the state (i.e., it having a trajectory path of the supersession of capitalism, to put it in liberalspeak) was sacrificed for the sake of the survival of the state apparatus itself. Again one must not conceive this shallowly: it wasn't as if Stalin and the Party knew this, that they were scheming and rubbing their hands together saying "Oh, how will we kill the revolution today?". For them, saving the state was synonymous with saving the gains of October. Stalinism, and collectivization, was reactionary vis-a-vis October -- but were necessary for the very state's survival. You must understand: collectivization was not just a 'policy' that changed the way this or that was handled -- it effected every domain of life you can think of, from literature, to music, to the very language the State used in it's ideological discourse (for an example -- see the revival of bourgeois-liberal humanism in the 1936 Constitution, look at the change in political language). Collectivization completely changed the character of the state -- it, practically, played the role of a bourgeois revolution in the countryside. Imagine if the same proletarianization that happened 'naturally' in England and France was done through the state: THAT is what collectivization was, and it set the course for modern market relations. To put it succinctly: collectivization was a bourgeois revolution backed by the aegis of the state. The proletariat had largely died off in the Civil War; the State had to take the role of the bourgeoisie and assimilate the peasantry. They could not raise the peasantry to the level of the urban, industrial proletariat, which would be entailed by socialist modernization (an impossibility for them): they instead found themselves having to lower themselves to that of the peasants. You can see that reflected everywhere.

2. How do you reconcile communism with the natural desire for people to work to provide for themselves and not necessarily for the less fortunate.

This contradicts Communism? Why? WHY does this 'natural desire' to put oneself first contradict any maxim outlined by the Communist program? You must understand: communism is a socially self-conscious movement, entailing a socially self-conscious society; it is one where the UNIVERSAL and the PARTICULAR become synonymous. The universality of society, becomes embodied in each individual constituent: it is one which is made up of conscious men and women who move society in the direction that they themselves will it, without ANY external guarantees, and nothing more. There are not 'individual interests' in Communism that are separate from societal ones: the difference in effect vanishes. Hard for you to imagine? No doubt -- this is because you have a petty formalist idea of 'human nature' in your head that Communism will find itself stumped by if it were to assume power. I'm sorry: there is no human nature. The only real 'human nature,' if I can quote a user who previously said this, is the panicked wailing of a newborn baby trying desperately to latch onto a symbolic order. THE IMMERSION OF OURSELVES in the totality of social relations determines our being: and, surprise-surprise, this 'totality of social relations' is comprised of nothing more than real human beings. Our decisions, our moral paradigm -- our framework to act and think, what you assume as inevitable traits of some 'human nature' that resides beyond our grasp -- only exists within the social domain. So you ask "how you reconcile communism with the natural desire for people to work to provide for themselves and not necessarily for the less fortunate", this very pathological and, frankly, stupid statement, and yet you miss the point entirely: not only is Communism not this stupid fucking wetdream that the alt. right has come up with that is "wen u force ppl to be mor altruistic 2 others at the expense of urself", but in fact this banal notion that individual desire, or want, or drive does not in any way warrant a dismissal of communism, because what you perceive as 'natural' only exists within the context of our modern totality of relations. This isn't, in other words, an invariant trait of human nature. But let's play the devil's advocate, let's say it is: so what? People naturally put their own individual interests before others -- OK, and? Your point? What is this supposed to prove? This supposes Communism is just a synonym for altruism, which, if you're from iFunny, is not surprising.

Again my keyboard types horridly, so I have left out great chunks I could have elaborated on more in detail. The discussion on the Soviet Union is an especially touchy subject -- one that has been discussed innumerable times on this forum, if you decide to look it up on the search bar.

Jacob Cliff

23rd June 2016, 05:06

Finally, there is no such thing as a "communist state," which can be seen in the very definition of communism; "a classless, stateless, society." Not even they recognized themselves as a communist state, rather they referred to themselves as the Dictatorship of the Proletariat (disputed by others of course, but it's what they called themselves), or as "socialist republics," despite their very 'stately' nature.

A Communist State can indeed exists, because we are not operating on formalist, but instead DIALECTICAL, grounds. That is, we aren't using this formalist phrasemongering and containing the essence of communism within the definition as a "stateless, classless, moneyless society" -- Marx says Communism is THE MOVEMENT that abolishes the present state, one whose conditions arise from premises now in existence. It isn't this Utopian society that we 'reach' at some point -- Communism, yes, ENTAILS statelessness, classlessness, etc., etc., but it isn't this 'stage' we 'reach' after the proletarian dictatorship. It is not reducible to these qualities alone -- it is a process which happens to entail this by merit of its abolition of the social antagonism that gives rise to states, classes, and so on. So yes, the Soviet Union WAS communist in character for a time, even if it had a state, classes, money, etc. It is not as if we can take a snapshot of this society and then define it as communist or not based on some arbitrary checklist of these abstract qualities -- we must look not only at a society's qualities in the now, but how it is reproduced in the long run. THAT is what you are missing, Heretek -- you must understand this dialectically. I do not say this condescendingly -- but this reductionist phrase-mongering of leftists in regards to the 'definition' of Communism is ridiculous and it is one I too shared but a month ago.

ckaihatsu

23rd June 2016, 14:01

2. How do you reconcile communism with the natural desire for people to work to provide for themselves and not necessarily for the less fortunate.

In a material-economic context of post-capitalist socialized production 'labor' would most likely be complex, even *more* intertwined and interdependent than 'commerce' today, because there would be no market-dynamic impediments, like stock market crashes, to the full, unfettered collective self-coordination of free-producers all around the world.

This directly means that such a society would *not* be a fallback to rudimentary family farms, where most people would have to labor at farming simply for the sake of circumscribed self-sufficiency.

Instead, a worker-collectivized post-commodity world could have material-leveraged *industrial* production, with *complex* arrangements / supply-chains that criss-cross the globe, if the people of that society wanted things that way, presumably for advanced technological materials and goods.

In such a potentially sophisticated material-economic environment one's own liberated-labor would not be strictly for oneself, obviously (as is also the case today, through the expropriation of surplus labor value). Those who got bored or otherwise dissatisfied with tending strictly to their own lives would be able to volunteer their liberated-labor to the general betterment of society / social production, from which production all would consume for personal needs and wants as well.

The pivotal question would be if those who *do* volunteer their liberated-labor would be sufficient in numbers to produce adequately for *everyone's* needs, without the society falling back to private property accumulations and commodity-production -- if such socialized production *was* sufficient then rewards would be based on *need*, and not on labor-contributions, since rewards based on the latter is effectively equivalent to the commodification of labor.

In other words would such a society be capable of producing a societal *surplus*, or not -- ? Any nominal surplus of production implies a *sufficiency* of regular production for all, which would be a materially *complex* system of converting liberated-labor-efforts into anything and everything that people use and consume (use-values).

So the point here is that in such a massively intertwined social system of material production it would be difficult, if not impossible, to ascertain how much of one's efforts could be measured as being strictly for *oneself* -- versus one's "surplus" efforts, that would benefit *others* -- because one would also be *partaking* from an array of pre-planned social production as well.

If one truly only wanted to produce for oneself and for no one else, perhaps the society would allow such a separatist lifestyle, or perhaps it would not, instead insisting that all liberated-labor would have to be part of the overall world's collective production, for reasons of political economy.