I know the socialist counter saying “the USSR wasn’t actually communist! Simply authoritarian.”
Yet someone mentioned on here that this wasn’t completely so.
Your thoughts? I have so far assumed that the USSR wasn’t actually communist.
One of my favorite conversations is:
Anti-capitalist: “Capitalism sucks.”
Me: “Would you rather have capitalist America or communist Soviet Union?”
Anti-capitalist: “Soviet Union wasn’t really communist.”
Me: “Then America isn’t really capitalist.”
That too 
It was briefly communist, and people starting burning the wood their house was made off to keep warm, and leaving the cities.
Calculation and Socialism | Joseph T. Salerno
Yes it was communist, the thing where communists will say Stalin wasn’t a real communist but an usurper of Lenin’s legacy is nonsense. Stalin was a truer communist than Lenin was. Lenin ended up with NEP and private ownership of farmland. Stalin dismantled this phony communism, launching Socialist Offensive and a war on peasantry.
Anti-capitalist: “Soviet Union wasn’t really communist.”
Me: “Then America isn’t really capitalist.”
Your conclusion doesn’t logically follow. For one, there can be more than two possibilities. Second, it’s possible for two countries to both be capitalist.
I know.
The point of saying, “Then America isn’t really capitalist[,]” is that if the other person is going to argue that the Soviet Union was not commie because it was not purely commie, then we could as easily argue that America is not capitalist because it is not purely capitalist.
First you have to make sure of what you mean by Communism. I think many use it to mean complete public (state) control of the means of production. In Marxian terms, that is in fact ‘Socialism’. ‘Communism’, on the other hand, is the final, Utopian state of humanity in which homo novus has emerged and the state has withered away. Of course, today ‘socialism’ can mean a large degree of state control, not necessarily total control.
As for the question whether or not the USSR was actually a Socialist (in Marxian terms) or Communist (in today’s terms) nation, we have to say that it attempted to be until March 1921. It abandoned the attempt since the result was economic collapse (for the reasons outlined by Mises in Socialism).
I, as the resident socialist around here , am willing to accept the USSR as an attempt at socialism. But it was an attempt at authoritarian socialism, much like I would consider Bismark’s or Mussolini’s rules as attempts at authoritarian capitalism.
The Paris Commune and Anarchist Catalonia are far better historical examples, imo, of socialism.
No. Nothing is,ever has been, or ever will be - it is impossible
I can claim to have a method for jumping over the moon and when other people test it and fall flat on their faces define them as not true moonjumpers and their attempt as not true moonjumping: a true moonjumper would be soaring over the moon, not laying around chewing pebbles; a true moonjump would sometimes be silent and panoramic, not always dirty and painful. I can criticize a scientist as a pseudoscientist doing pseudoscience after he is found wrong. A communist can define communist by the result rather than the idea.
Yeah, it was. It was a Communist state of Marxist-Leninism.
Communism, as Communists describe it, is an impossibility to begin with, since their goal is to eliminate the need for government by making the government all-powerful. Only the State can manage and allocate the resources under Communism, supposedly dissolving itself when it is no longer needed. But if only the State can do this, it needs to grow bigger and more oppressive of the people in the name of “the people”. This is why you always see useful idiots in both Communist and anarchy movements marching together.
And the more the plans fail, the more the planners plan.
Communist leaders know this from the start, of course, forever preaching their party line of a “workers paradise” as they grab more power and resources for themselves at the expense of the productive. The idea of the “well meaning” socialist is also a lie. The would have turned out no differently under Lenin or Trotsky than under Stalin. For that matter, any useful idiot pulled off the street and put into office would have run it the exact same way, because there is only one way to run a Communist state.
Exactly right. In fact, all countries are capitalist. What defines the type of government is who controls the capital.
If you go by the Marxist (or Marxist-Leninist) definition of “communism” - and the Bolsheviks surely went by that definition - then the Soviet Union was certainly not communist. Marxist and Marxist-Leninist thought considered communism as the final stage of social development. “Socialism” was seen as the immediately preceding stage, with the establishment of “the dictatorship of the proletariat”, social (i.e. state) ownership of the means of production, etc. Under this definition, the Soviet Union was barely even socialist. It had state ownership of the means of production, sure, but did it have a dictatorship of the proletariat? If it ever did, it only had it until the 1920s.
Lets ask Karl Marx & Ludwig von Mises.
Me: Ok Karl was the USSR a communist nation?
Karl: No not at all; Communism requires the complete abolition of the production of commodities for sale and profit in markets, which requires an end to all money. The crises, ineffecientcies & moral evils of capitalism are a direct result of production for sale in a market, capitalism has not ended until markets have ceased to exist.
Me: Ok Mises was the USSR a communist nation?
Mises: No communism is impossible, all societies at least need markets in the factors of production to not to fall into economic collapse. The relative scarcities of production goods in an economy can not be known or communicated without prices formed in the market. Without money the units to even think about scarcity rationally do not exist.
But wouldn’t you agree with FleetCenturion that all societies which have actually existed are capitalist, in practice; it’s just a question of who controlled the capital? I mean, if you’re going to categorise historical political arrangements purely in terms of the stated intentions of their politicians and advocates at the time, you’re on a very slippery slope. You’re not being consistent with that standard either.
I don’t know how Bismark would have reacted, but Mussolini and Hitler, certainly, would have rejected the notion that they were establishing any kind of ‘capitalism’ by intent. They both railed against ‘capitalism’, which they associated with Jews, and the decadence of Americans. The German fascists called themselves ‘National Socialists’, in fact, though most self-proclaimed ‘socialists’ today seem to come down with a severe case of selective amnesia in regards to that. Nevertheless, they did see their own ‘fascist’ movements as distinct from both the decadent liberal ‘capitalism’ of the West, as well as the “Jewish Bolshevism” of the East.
Politicians and government officials are professional liars. If you compare the structure of the political systems which actually manifested themselves under the fascists and the Soviets respectively, they were similar. Both systems relied heavily on slave labour, actually. The German system was somewhat less centralised, but not by much. I dare say the Soviet system would have been tight enough to prevent someone like Oskar Schindler from undermining the interests of The People as he did in Germany. The Soviet system was better able to prevent an individual in his position from rebelling against it, largely because there wasn’t an individual precisely in Schindler’s position in the Soviet system. There would be commissars reporting to a committee which reported to a committee in Moscow. No hope of mercy coming from that arrangement…
Thanks, guys. So maybe I should shift the question a bit to socialism, since you’re generally unanimous on the Communism bit (my fault). Was the USSR socialist or no? Because someone could argue that the workers didn’t really own the means of production because the government wasn’t truly democratic.
Socialism means public ownership of the means of production, i.e. the state. It entails central planning. If the state isn’t democratic, well… You can criticise any state for not being “truly democratic”, because democracy is essentially a scam. It’s meant to cast a veil of legitimacy behind which a plutocratic elite can rule.
The workers could own the means of production privately. All the workers in a business could be equal partners, but the fact that this option is available to people on a free market, and socialists still do not want a free market, indicates that this is not a form of socialism.
It really depends on the definition of “socialism” being used. During the revolutionary period in Russia, workers seized factories, soldiers seized barracks, and peasants seized land. At least with the former two groups, councils were formed either spontaneously or semi-spontaneously (i.e. spurred by the various leftist parties). The Russian word for “council” is совет - soviet. It was the Bolsheviks’ full endorsement of these councils - as expressed by the phrase “All power to the soviets!” - that arguably let them succeed in the October Revolution.
Actual soviet power didn’t last very long, however. The circumstances of the Civil War and the foreign intervention, at the very least, led to the bureaucratization of the Bolsheviks and the subsequent domination of the soviets by the state. In addition to this, the Bolshevik (later Communist) Party was fundamentally a party of the workers. That is, even though they had allied with the peasants in the Revolution, they were nevertheless opposed to their interests. Of course, the peasants made up the vast majority of Russians at that time, so one could say that the Bolsheviks were never really democratic to begin with.
On another note, in formulating the New Economic Policy, Lenin was consciously moving the Soviet Union to a state-capitalist system. Many prominent Marxist thinkers (Engels perhaps foremost among them) believed that state capitalism would be the last stage of capitalism before the advent of socialism. What they called “state capitalism” was simply a capitalist system where the state owned and managed all or most of the means of production. In that case, how did they distinguish between state capitalism and socialism? Their answer was that, under socialism, the proletariat would own and manage the means of production themselves.
My understanding at this point is that the Soviet Union was essentially a state-capitalist country, not a socialist country. The means of production were “publicly owned”, but in practice this meant that they were controlled by a bureaucratic-technical elite that served as de facto capitalists.