Taking communists and communism at face value is problematic. There were aspects of their ideology communists were sincerely passionate about, but there were also those they merely parroted for effect, ideologues included. Communist the world over may have talked vaguely about workers’ managment, but if they were not sincerely commited to it, then the USSR not implementing it wasn’t a shortcoming worth mentioning.
It seems to me that there are plenty of communists who are sincerely committed to the idea of workers’ management - at least among the rank-and-file.
What most socialists or communists you’re talking to mean when they say the USSR wasn’t actually socialist or communist is that it wasn’t the kind of socialism or communism they support.
As far as the USSR being a country of Communists, run by the Communist Party, it most certainly was. If you find a big C communist, then they most certainly will tell you that the USSR was a Communist country. They’ll blame external meddling, Anarchists, or some other political faction for its downfall.
Basically, there’s little c communism which can be representative of a whole lot of sometimes contradictorary philosophies, all of which advocate the eventual or immediate distribution of things by some interpretation of, “from each according to his [sic] ability, to each according to his [sic] need.” Then there’s big C Communism which is the philosophy and actions of the Communist Party and/or Communist Countries.
Were international communists of the 1920s, and 1930s rabbidly denouncing Lenin and Stalin over failure to introduce workers’ managment or were they busy supporting the hell out of the Soviet Union?
Sure communists today, after the USSR had shown itself as a failure try to distance themselves from it, but at the time?
No, the Soviet Union was not a nation.
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
(Im havin some font weirdness lol) No, I wouldnt say stated intentiuons has much to do with the analysis at all, as I don’t consider the DKRP socialist by any stretch of the imagination (it’s more like Orwellian Feudalism lol). I am willing to accept the USSR as socialist because the october revolution was a worker’s revolution, and the soviets were worker’s councils, regardless of the later actions of the Communist Party. I think the USSR challenged the capitlist political structure, but on the economic side, it really more concentrated capitalist power relations into state hands than challenged the relations outright.
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.
(Font fail lol)
Bismark, if I am not mistaken was in full support of bourgiousie hegemony. Hitler and Mussolini, despite any stated intnetions, worked to strenghten the power of property laws (tho not in the way you would comprehend lol).
And the reason socialists of today, and then, “forget” about the National Socialists is becuase they were at each other’s throats from day 1. I don’t think any sane person would even think for a second that the intentions of NAZIs and 9/10 socialists are in line with each other, or ever had been.
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…
You’ll get no argument here. But I think that has far more to do with statism than democratic self-management.
What were/are their intentions(i.e. national socialists/socialists)?
No, the Soviet Union was not a nation.
Yeah, I expected one of these answers. My bad. Undertaking, then, if not nation.
It wasn’t communist. It could not have been because it was
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A government
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A nation
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Unequal economically
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Class based
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Devoid of universal abundance
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There was no workplace democracy (not strictly required but usually associated)
The also nation wasn’t communist in the Marxist sense of the term either because on top of the above:
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It was not preceeded by an industrialist capitalist phase of economic development
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The people living there had set jobs they couldn’t leave
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It was not preceeded by a socialistic reallocation phase
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It was not internationalist in terms of trying to bring about and insight revolutions in many other countries.
Communist Russia was NOT communist.
EDIT
With all of this being said one could not deny the fact that the Soviet Union was a type of socialism, although it is not the same type that almost any soicalist alive today would advocate any more than and constitutionalist would advocate for a pre 1865 constitution
Communist Russia? What are you talking about here? You mean then only the period in country’s history until 1922 when it was still the RSFSR? Or are you talking about the later union republic of the USSR? You make a bunch of pedantic points, but then talk about something called “Communist Russia”?
The Soviet Union wasn’t “really” socialist, as many have pointed out. Real socialism is when the workers own the factories, or something like that, which is impossible for various reasons. The Soviet Union was state-socialist or national socialist, the only socialism that is physically possible.
That being said, no contemporary socialist in the US wants real socialism, they all wish to advance national socialism. Just take a look at the newspaper today, do you see socialists enhancing the workers ownership in their workplaces, or do you see them advancing the influence and control of the national state? Clearly they are always doing the latter. So it’s funny that they claim that the evils of the Soviet Union had nothing to do with their brand of socialism, because the Soviet Union wasn’t real socialism, yet all they do is advancing that very state-socialism that they consider so very false. So when they say “Russia wasn’t really socialist”, I would respond, “Yeah, neither are you”.
It should also be pointed out that Marx wasn’t a “real” socialist either. His prescription was to give a national state control of the entire economy, he therefore was a state socialist. The thing is that he got a honorary “real socialist” badge for just claiming that his ideas would lead to a stateless society with workers owning the factories… um, somehow. The early Soviet Union followed his prescription, so what they got was a police state in control of the entire economy. Go figure.
No, by communist Russia I simply mean the USSR, the Soviet Union, any point after Lenin and the Communist Party took control of the nation. Communist Russia is simply a term that I’ve heard a fair amount to describe Russia when it was supposedly communist from around 1917 to 1989
A term which is wrong. You wouldn’t say England in place of UK or Britain.
The USSR was definitely a Communist country. There are a lot of misperceptions flying around.
The big divide between the Communist Party before Lenin took control was between the bolsheviks that advocated global Communsim, and the mensheviks that advocated national Communism. The Mensheviks lost, and the Bolsheviks went on not only to oppress their own citizens, but invade other communities and support revolutions that they felt were in line with their goals. The USSR was not national Communism. In fact, a contemporary offshoot of bolshevism is National Bolshevism, which is considered fascist, and at odds with the original Bolshevik party.
Second, there is a difference between communism as a descriptive word of how society functions according to the phrase, “from each according to his [sic] ability, to each according to his [sic] need,” which seems to be what people here are describing as “real” socialism, and the ideology of the Communist Party, of which the USSR was in line with.
State socialists are simply people who do not seek the eventual “wither[ing] away” of the state for one reason or another. In this sense, the USSR was also a socialist country.
The USSR was not “state-capitalist” or anything like that. It was a Communist country run by people who didn’t want to give up their power.
The Soviet Union certainly was communist. How I know that, is that communists of the time thought of it as such. In fact the time when the Soviet Union commanded the most fanatical loyalty of communists outside the USSR coincides with the reign of Stalin who is nowadays the most likely to be picked as “proof” that Soviet Union was not really communist.
Fact is that communism is a political doctrine, but at the same time it is also a bunch of pseudo religious mumbo jumbo. Another fact is that communists are incredibly factitious and will form numerous factions each one accusing the others of deviating from proper communism. That, however, is a lot like the Roman Catholic Church opining that Pentecostalism isn’t properly Christian and doesn’t contain enough truth for ascension to heaven to be possible for Pentacostals, or some of the wackier Protestant types figuring the pope is a servant of satan and what not. They are still all Christian churches to us who aren’t invested.
By the same token regardless of the communists’ various pronunciations on each other, they are all still a bunch of communists to us. We really don’t need to get into their theology that can anyway be spun in numerous ways and used to support just about any judgment on the communism of something. Don’t forget that Stalin used the very same tactic, accusing people he wanted to distance himself from as being deviationists from proper communism. Why sanction the pronunciations of one faction of the communists over that of the other, is there a claim to there being strong coherence to communist ideology?
Birthday Pony, how then do you explain that the “General Line” of the CPSU after Lenin’s death had “Socialism in One Country” as one of its fundamental doctrines? That certainly sounds like national communism to me. Furthermore, I’m willing to bet that many Mensheviks joined the ranks of the Bolsheviks after the latter’s ascendancy. At least one did so beforehand, and his name was Leon Trotsky.
None of this really has to do with how the USSR was or was not communist other than the fact of the early internationalism which really didn’t play a big influence after Stalin came to power so at most you would be arguing that this was the case under Lenin. Furthermore there are a lot more requirments than the internationalist aspect.
I agree, there is a very important difference, but in order for something to be an “X” nation it must actually have the traits of X, otherwise it doesn’t work. That’s like pointing to a nation run by people whose ideology supports democracy and calling it a democratic nation when what the leaders actually impose is brutal dictatorship. According to this definition there are pleanty of free market, or at least nearly free market, nations on earth, and socialism can exist even in fully functional market economies if what the leaders want is socialism.
That’s a kind of socialism that has nothing to do with Communism or Marxism, but with that being said the Soviet Union most certainly fits that bill. It was most definitely a socialist nation, there’s no other term for it. although it is a type of socialism that most socialists would never approve of.
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Just beause people thought it was communist and fought in its defence does not mean it was actually communist, I don’t think that anyone outside of the USSR really understood exactly what was going on at the time.
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Just because someone claims to be something does not make them that, it’s all semantics from that perspective. If socialists renamed their ideology “free market capitalism”, would that make them free market capitalists? Under that line of reasoning there is no way the USSR could not be anything but communist, even if it had employed the policies of a libertarian monarchy so long as it kept calling itself communist
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We cannot become intellectually dishonest just becuase someone’s ideas are false, especially when we consider that communism is more consistent and makes more sense than 90% of what people believe today. If you do not want to go out of your way to discuss communist ideology then don’t go to a thread about it.
You can still find big C communists and Leninists today. They call themselves nothing but Communists.
I agree that just because someone calls themselves something it does not make it so, but more than just Communists are calling themselves Communists. Language is funny in how it works. I think their interpretation of Marx is extremely poor, as is their understanding of most things, but there remains no more accurate name than Communist, with the caveat that it’s only one kind of communist. Until the popular use of another term catches on, our language is trapped calling them Communists.
Wow, I think I agree with everything Autolykos said.
I recently read the book Anarchism, Marxism, and the Future of the Left, a collection of interviews with Murray Bookchin. In it, Bookchin tells of his time as a Marxist-Leninist in the 30’s. He indicates that few Communists outside of the Soviet Union at the time really knew what was going on there. Then Trotsky started speaking out against Stalin and some Communists began to turn on the Soviet Union. Bookchin would eventually become an anarcho-communist. You also have the Left Communists who initially supported the Bolsheviks but turned against them while Lenin was still in power.
I think their interpretation of Marx is extremely poor, as is their understanding of most things, but there remains no more accurate name than Communist, with the caveat that it’s only one kind of communist. Until the popular use of another term catches on, our language is trapped calling them Communists.
Personally, I call them Leninists (if they agree with Lenin’s interpretation).