this post was submitted on 29 Jul 2023
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Russia was never even close to starting to try to attempt communism. There was some aesthetics, but it was state capitalism economically, and dictatorship politically. Not a lot changed.
That statement is not valid and I can't understand where its decisiveness comes from. The enonomy was centrally planned, nobody respectable calls the USSR "state capitalist"
IMO the urge to conclude this comes from having to reconcile two believes: First that "the USSR was evil" and secondly an interest in communism.
People affected can then either decide to denounce communism or reevaluate and deepen their knowledge of the USSR.
The latter option is often incomprehensible, so a third option is contrieved: decoupling one from the other.
I applaud you that you could uphold whatever positive view you hold of communism and instead settle for the last option rather than denouncing communism.
However the USSR obviously absolutely seriously tried to develop their country towards communism. A lot went wrong, mistakes were made even crimes committed.
But you also have to see the context of the times. The statehood is repealed in a revolution and you need to rebuild it. all the while a couple of the strongest nations on earth invade you and fund a civil war in your country also your people are poor. Then the behemoth war machine of the nazis invades. After you beat them, costing you 30 million people, the biggest power in history declares you their enemy.
A lot went extremely well compared to that: No society was ever development that quickly before and only China managed to pull this of as well. For a brief moment in the 60s life expectancy in the USSR was higher than in the US.
Wherever you stand: The USSR is something to learn from, successes and mistakes. Keeping them in the "evil" corner is just falling for propaganda.
That's the difference between state capitalism and the regular one. In the regular capitalism, the means of production are controlled by the capital holders, by the rich few. In state capitalism the means of production are controlled by the state, but the rest stays the same, people work for money, the results of their labour gets sold on a market of some sorts, and the surplus value is gathered by the stakeholders. Corporations in state capitalism consist of natural monopolies/oligopolies, which makes the market non-free by default, which makes everything else kinda fall apart, but it doesn't make it not capitalism, it makes it end-stage capitalism from the beginning. For the vast majority of the USSR existence that was the case.
from the desire to use words by their meaning. I am not talking about why USSR was what it was, I am only talking about what it was. It wasn't socialism, because the main characteristic of socialism is that the means of production are collectively owned by the workers, and the means of productions in USSR were owned and operated exclusively by the state which consisted on unelected elites. It wasn't communism, the main characteristic of that is that it's moneyless classless society that distributes the goods based on needs, and in USSR there were social classes, there was an exchange of goods and services for money, and although there was no privately owned means of production, the amount of goods a person could receive was dependent on how much work they contribute, not on how much they need.
Economically, the USSR was a form of state capitalism, and politically it was a totalitarian dictatorship. And no matter how much they said that the ultimate goal of a country is to transition to a communism (and believe me I know how much they did it, I had to endure it in school), I don't see any moment at which it really happened.
We could argue a lot about who declared whom an enemy, what were economical implications of the most brutal war in history, and what was the reason for the inhumane treatment of the soviet citizens by their own rulers, and is it really evil to starve to death millions of people if it means that the steel production will be a bit better, and based on your comment I assume you have a lot of strong opinions about that. But ultimately that will not be a debate about the economical structure.
There was obviously never a communist state as you have correctly depicted communism is a goal. No argument there.
I also agree that you can make the point the USSR wasn't socialist, but that was also not what I was arguing for. (Spoiler: I describe the USSR as "state socialist")
I was arguing against calling the USSR capitalist, even state capitalist, and I stand by it.
Capitalism is defined through private (not personal) property -- There was no private property. I think that should be enough to dismiss the notion the USSR was capitalist in amy capacity. But it also lacked competitive markets, "free" price systems and a ubiquitous profit motive, finance capital and certainly more characteristics.
Regarding the ownership of the means of production: I already agreed with you that it was not owned by the workers. However, being state owned, it was public ownership. You can say that isn't totally fair to you bc the name implies a level of participation of the people in the state which wasn't there, but their collective interests still somewhat mattered where today rules the profit motive (i.e. housing). That is not to say that planning, production and distribution did not fail the people often, they certainly did.
Since we were also talking about intent to build up a socialist system: When you look at it in the early days when it started out as a soviet republic, with worker soviets sending delegates to parent soviets cascading and culminating into the supreme soviet, the idea certainly was to create a state with (if not control then) direct expression of the workers interests. In that sense state ownership would be justified much more. This is also what has led me to call the system "state socialism".
The soviet union did definitively degrade hence I concede that it is well possible that initial intent to build socialism did not exist in late stage USSR leadership, I don't know much about that, to be honest and if that is what you experienced as a child I believe you.
But that this intent drove the initial conception should be obvious or do you think the writings of Lenin/Stalin and the internationals were all a big charade to get to power?
The degradation of the USSR, the communist party specifically, is one point why I mentioned the soviet union is an example to learn from. I believe Maoists have derived from that the principle of self-revolution within the party.
In the end to rationally learn from it is the important part, as long as we can do that it isn't important how its economic system is called or even if it was "good" or "evil" or whatever. And while I have opinions they honestly aren't always strongly held, as there is a lot to learn. Its just a mechanism of online discussions and them being overwhelmingly bad-faithed that brings that out