This might interest you, speech of Lenin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0ljxQsgUM4
Yes, i think Stalin made the best out of the situation, or should we rather say the most stable. So long one country or large union is forced to react to international capital aggression and economic relations, real workers control, i.e. socialism, is an impossibility. World Revolution as the central idea of Trotsky, is becoming increasingly more current, as capital invests and is therefore dependent on production around the globe, international revolution becomes more and more likely, and the more highly advanced countries labor takes from capital, the more capital is weakened. C-A-P-I-T-A-L is the enemy of humanity.
well, you see, the working people mostly voted for the secretary. But he did not really decide so much about it, the communist party decided where to invest the actual capital into. The workers therefore did not control their own production=no socialism.
I don't quite understand. You wrote that the workers controlled and decided about the surplus. But you also wrote that it's NOT socialism, because Marx said; "they [the workers] themselves appropriate this surplus either of the product or labor". But are you saying that workers did not control the surplus, but a secretary of that spesific workplace?
But the USSR really had a difficult time and evolved into this capitalism through its material surrounding conditions: Fascism/Imperialism threat forcing it to use large amounts of surplus for military etc. Really though, i think the USSR could have tried to achieve real workers control, socialism, in workers voting for their supervisors instead of the party. I see absolutely no need for the state to control the economy. The DoP's workers' state should be forced to bargain with the workers who would become their own board of directors replacing shareholders (capital) with employees (labor).
'Did workers control the MoP?' "Yes, collectively through the workers' state." I would elaborate on this, because it is not very intricate. It was basically the local democratic soviets in which ALL workers decided about what needed to be done to produce and they voted for the secretary of that soviet, but the Communist Party (in which the most "conscious" workers, the members, voted for the leadership) decided about trade and where to invest the surplus capital of the workers. This is NOT socialism, as Marx writes about the microeconomy: "they [the workers] themselves appropriate this surplus either of the product or labor".
