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Where did the Soviet Union go wrong?
Where did the Soviet union begin it's path to capitalism?
The failure of the Soviet Union to move to begin the abolishment of the wage system as soon as the civil war ended in 1921 was a strategic error of the Bolsheviks. This error led to the ultimate defeat of the dictatorship of the working class in the early 50's. This is one of the key lessons revolutionaries today need to learn. Winning workers to abolishing the wage system is key to building communism.
The Soviet Union never left the path to capitalism.
"I'm not interested in indulging whims from members of your faction."
Seeing as this is seen as acceptable by an admin, from here on out when I have a disagreement with someone I will be asking them to reference this. If you want an explanation of my views, too bad.
Became a beauracracy that betrayed the people.
When they decided that there goal was to manage capital in a new way rather than to destroy it.
FKA Chomsssssssky, Skwisgaar, The Employer Destroyer, skybutton
Also this. The SU basically just brought capitalist markets under state control and made them less interesting by offering much less variety. Economically, they just replaced the capitalist class with another (and this time even less creative) state-centered ruling class.
Last edited by Skyhilist; 30th May 2014 at 23:35.
FKA Chomsssssssky, Skwisgaar, The Employer Destroyer, skybutton
From the beginning. When there is an elite (the vanguard party) supposed to govern, it's just obvious that this elite will want govern everything. It was illusion that new elite will not become new upper class. The vanguard party just became a new bourgeoisie.
"Property is theft."
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
"the system of wage labor is a system of slavery"
Karl Heinrich Marx
It was essentially the evolution of a Tsarist state that took control of the industries and rapidly industrialized them. Then it all died out. Heil Tsar Stalin I.
The Bolshevik party ceased to be a genuine communist party. Socialism is a classless, stateless, moneyless, wageless society, so Russia had never stopped being capitalist. When the Bolshevik party ceased to be a communist party, Lenin's policy of state capitalism as “the development of capitalism under the control of the proletarian state” became simply the development of capitalism.
The isolation of proletarian dictatorship will inevitably lead to it's degeneration, so that the revolution didn't spread was the cause of death. They also inherited much of the tsarist state apparatus, which was due to the emergency measures taken during the civil war.
Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le genti.
Socialism resides entirely in the revolutionary negation of the capitalist ENTERPRISE, not in granting the enterprise to the factory workers.
- Bordiga
When they allied with the bourgeois and capital rather than fighting them. Look at Soviet actions in Spain to see what it became.
Well, that's when they fought for the interests of Russian capital, which was happening long before Spain with the invasions of Georgia and so on.
Segui il tuo corso e lascia dir le genti.
Socialism resides entirely in the revolutionary negation of the capitalist ENTERPRISE, not in granting the enterprise to the factory workers.
- Bordiga
Failing to empower the people and instead creating a new bureaucracy.
Though i can sympathize with the extremely difficult situation the bolsheviks found themselves in finding themselves leading a revolution in the middle of a world war and then being invaded by foreign army's along with the domestic white army's wreaking havoc.
By the time things calmed down they found themselves with a firmly entrenched bureaucracy.
I suppose its rather alike the current situation in Venezuela.
You are entering the vicinity of an area adjacent to a location. The kind of place where there might be a monster, or some kind of weird mirror...
first time i've seen a truly sensible thread on this topic on revleft!
I'm the Laird of the land, I'm hot like Pol Pot.'A true white liberal.' - Sword and Shield (on me)
'i am a communism fer a long years.' - twenty percent tip
FKA Mahmoud Ahmerdinnerjacket
SWAG1
Vanguard parties aren't "elites", and this analysis is based in a liberal voluntarist narrative of "power corrupts", which if so means we might as well not even bother trying to change society. I'd like good concrete evidence as to how the vanguard party became a "new bourgeoisie", since I can't find any evidence that labour-power was a commodity in the USSR until near the very end.
“Socialism cannot abstract itself from individual interests. Socialist society alone can most fully satisfy these personal interests. More than that; socialist society alone can firmly safeguard the interests of the individual. In this sense there is no irreconcilable contrast between “individualism” and socialism. But can we deny the contrast between classes, between the propertied class, the capitalist class, and the toiling class, the proletarian class?” - Josef Stalin, Marxism Versus Liberalism: An Interview With H.G. Wells, 1934
"Those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I am ideological’." - Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, 1969
Anyway, as for where the U.S.S.R. "went wrong", I think some aspects of it endangered it from the very beginning, but overall the process that eventually saw capitalism restored in the U.S.S.R. didn't begin until the late 1940s, when a revisionist grouping began to gain strength within the CPSU. This grouping represented an emerging technocratic class which gained strength at the cost of the party itself. These changes in social being led to changes in social consciousness - the ideology of the revisionist line within the CPSU was one based in the humanism/economism couplet, which basically saw the class struggle renounced in favour of the "state of the whole people" and "peaceful co-existence" with imperialism* on the one hand, and the principles of "peaceful competition with capitalism" and primacy of the productive forces emphasized on the other. Both had their roots in the Stalin period, when Stalin was inconsistent over the question of productive forces vs relations of production (favouring the former in the famous Dialectical and Historical Materialism and the latter in Economic Problems in the U.S.S.R., which was denounced as left-deviationist after his death) and also on the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which he generally supported, but was inconsistent over on several occasions - for example, when he claimed class struggle no longer existed in the U.S.S.R. But there was a two-line struggle within the CPSU, and the revisionist line only became victorious after Stalin's death.
The distortions of revisionism didn't destroy socialism in the U.S.S.R. by themselves - it was the emergence of a second economy in the U.S.S.R. which led to the rise of another class altogether with a petit-bourgeois social consciousness that gave revisionism an even stronger basis in class. This bred corruption within the party and led to the destabilization of the planned economy, combined with constant economic reforms which tried to fix it by introducing more market mechanisms into it, and inevitably made it worse. Finally things came to a head in the 1980s when perestroika led to the all-out destruction of the distorted socialism left - ever so many quantitative changes led to a qualitative change from socialism back to capitalism.
*Lenin, Stalin and Mao also had policies of "peaceful co-existence", but these differed heavily from that of Khrushchev, for instance. This article is a good explanation.
“Socialism cannot abstract itself from individual interests. Socialist society alone can most fully satisfy these personal interests. More than that; socialist society alone can firmly safeguard the interests of the individual. In this sense there is no irreconcilable contrast between “individualism” and socialism. But can we deny the contrast between classes, between the propertied class, the capitalist class, and the toiling class, the proletarian class?” - Josef Stalin, Marxism Versus Liberalism: An Interview With H.G. Wells, 1934
"Those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I am ideological’." - Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, 1969
I seriously don't understand the idea behind vanguard at all. The base and the superstructure are still influencing us at the revolutionary stage. The vanguard however was in the position to do things capitalism drives them to, like benefiting from their gained power, exploiting workers, using authority, falling for ideology, being mysoginic etc.
Believing that the vanguard is somehow perfectly sheltered from the effects of capitalism is somehow idealist.
La dialectique, peut-elle casser des briques?
I don't think anybody believes that though, otherwise revisionism/dogmatism wouldn't be problems.
As for the rest I've largely addressed it above. You really don't understand the "idea behind vanguard", because you don't understand what a vanguard party is.
Last edited by BolshevikBabe; 27th May 2014 at 14:41.
“Socialism cannot abstract itself from individual interests. Socialist society alone can most fully satisfy these personal interests. More than that; socialist society alone can firmly safeguard the interests of the individual. In this sense there is no irreconcilable contrast between “individualism” and socialism. But can we deny the contrast between classes, between the propertied class, the capitalist class, and the toiling class, the proletarian class?” - Josef Stalin, Marxism Versus Liberalism: An Interview With H.G. Wells, 1934
"Those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I am ideological’." - Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, 1969
Soviet Union was build on concentrated power. Concentrated Power demands concentrated capital. To get that you need exploitation. So power leads to capitalism or some other kind of exploitation.
In that case, we'll always live under exploitation since power isn't a purely negative force but also a constructive one which needs to be contextualized to be analyzed. There will still be "power" without the state, it will simply differ in its exercise and manifestation.
“Socialism cannot abstract itself from individual interests. Socialist society alone can most fully satisfy these personal interests. More than that; socialist society alone can firmly safeguard the interests of the individual. In this sense there is no irreconcilable contrast between “individualism” and socialism. But can we deny the contrast between classes, between the propertied class, the capitalist class, and the toiling class, the proletarian class?” - Josef Stalin, Marxism Versus Liberalism: An Interview With H.G. Wells, 1934
"Those who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denegation of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I am ideological’." - Louis Althusser, Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, 1969
yeah well i edited power to concentrated power. Dont know if you wrote that after or before my edit.
