The USSR did very well (and wasn’t just the RSFSR, but instead a federation of socialist republics). So well, in fact, that life expectancies doubled due to the advancements in development and social safety nets in socialism:
Complaining about communist “denialism” when the original claim is just generic Red Scare fearmongering doesn’t really make sense. What are communists denying, specifically? The idea that the communists were as bad as the Nazis? Such a claim is so thoroughly ahistorical that it doesn’t take a communist to find that absurd.
Trade is not tens of thousands of years old. That is ahistorical. And my argument was not about capitalism per se, it was more about the soviet union not having been socialist and not at all having been a development towards communism because it did trade as firstly as an entity within a world market that was not at all socialist and because trade was allowed internally and not necessarily bound to labour time or necessity, among an entire multiplicity of reasons.
Let’s suppose that this interpretation of finds by contemporary archaeologists is correct. There is quite a clear distinction to be made between exchanges between otherwise isolated communities that didn’t have a burning need for trade (which they btw absolutely didn’t, there is the concept of primitive communism that is rather well established from observations of recent hunter-gatherer societies) and trade as the dominant social force.
Trade predates capitalism and has taken different forms under different modes of production. Its existence under socialism does not make a society capitalist. What defines a social system is who controls the means of production and how surplus labour is allocated.
The Soviet Union inherited a devastated, largely agrarian economy encircled by imperialist states. Socialist construction could not skip stages. Public ownership of industry, finance and land became the foundation. Market mechanisms and limited private trade operated within boundaries set by the plan, not as its driving force.
Under socialism, the law of value is not abolished by decree. It is progressively constrained through planning, price regulation, and the expansion of decommodified services. Policies like the NEP were not retreats from socialism but applications of materialist method: you transform society with the conditions you inherit, not with ideal blueprints.
To dismiss the USSR because it engaged in trade is to mistake form for content. Socialism is a transitional process, not a finished state. It shifts power from capital to labour, expands collective provision, and subordinates exchange to social need. By these measures, the Soviet project lifted hundreds of millions from illiteracy and poverty, built industrial capacity from scratch, and defended social gains against relentless external pressure.
Please refrain from arrogance when your understanding of a topic matches that of the most learned dust mite.
Trade predates capitalism and has taken different forms under different modes of production. Its existence under socialism does not make a society capitalist. What defines a social system is who controls the means of production and how surplus labour is allocated.
It makes the society very much capitalist because it doesn’t rid it of an owning class. Here the party of the USSR.
The Soviet Union inherited a devastated, largely agrarian economy encircled by imperialist states. Socialist construction could not skip stages.
The Kuomintang and certain aspects of S. Korea after WWII share a very similar backstory, did they do socialism? You would probably deny this.
Public ownership of industry, finance and land became the foundation. Market mechanisms and limited private trade operated within boundaries set by the plan, not as its driving force.
Ok, you have centralised state enterprises that did trade with entities in other countries. Ok, you have planning, we have planning in all of capitalism today, capitalism is entrenched by it. It merely exists in an anarchic state, which was also the case for the USSR and its allies, you even had conflicts spurred on by nationalistic perversion that came from the logic of capital between nations that ideologically should have been brethren. Ask yourself why China and Vietnam post-“revolution” didn’t get along for most of their shared history.
Under socialism, the law of value is not abolished by decree
It is, that is what you call a being programmatic. The early Soviet Union had programmatic characteristics which it lost due to being a rushed development just like any other area on this blue planet late to the table of capitalism.
By these measures, the Soviet project lifted hundreds of millions from illiteracy and poverty, built industrial capacity from scratch, and defended social gains against relentless external pressure.
Your “argument” rests on a formalist reading of Marx that confuses legal categories with social relations. An owning class is defined by private appropriation of surplus and the ability to reproduce that power through inheritance and market competition. The Soviet nomenklatura held administrative authority, not private property. They could not sell factories, bequeath positions, or extract profit as personal wealth. That is a qualitative difference.
Comparing the USSR to the KMT shows some impressive ignorance and ignores the rupture in property relations. The KMT preserved landlordism and comprador capital. The Soviet state expropriated both.
Planning under capitalism coordinates individual firms while leaving social reproduction to market anarchy. Socialist planning, however imperfect, subordinates enterprise activity to social goals: full employment, universal services, industrial catch up. The presence of markets or external trade does not erase that direction of travel.
The law of value cannot be abolished by decree because it is a social relation, not a policy. Marx was explicit in the Critique of the Gotha Programme: right can never be higher than the economic structure of society. Socialism constrains the law of value through planned allocation, price controls, and decommodification. It withers through development, not proclamation.
International conflicts between socialist states reflect the pressure of the capitalist world system and unresolved national questions, not an inherent capital logic. Uneven development, border disputes, and great power chauvinism are real contradictions. They demand critique, but they do not settle the class character of a mode of production.
Prussia modernized under Junker aristocracy and state led development, but it never socialized the means of production or aimed at the withering of the state. Achievements in literacy or industry under socialism are not “just development”. They are the result of surplus being directed to social need rather than private accumulation.
Bordigist purity spectacles are a luxury of those like yourself, a settler, denizen of the imperial core whose only interaction with socialism is as an academic exercise. You have built nothing, defended nothing, and achieved nothing. You demand a socialism that arrives without contradiction, without transition, without struggle. Revolutionary practice must engage with concrete conditions, not ideal blueprints. If your standard for socialism is the immediate absence of all market forms, all state mediation, all external trade, then you have defined it out of historical possibility. You clearly wish to appear revolutionary without the effort of grappling with reality.
He is undoubtedly an idiot for equating the USSR with the KMT.
However (and this very clearly isn’t what he meant) under Dr Sun Yat-sen, the KMT wasn’t fascist but a nebulous anti-imperialist bourgeois-centrist style formation: the New Three Principles allowed united front work because they objectively opposed feudalism and foreign domination.
It wasn’t until after Dr Sun’s death, the internal KMT ideological struggle resolved in favor of the landlord-comprador wing, and fascism was then formalised under Chiang.
Which is basically social democracy, see the new deal being an inspiration for Mussolini. Heck he had his start as a self proclaimed commie. The trouble is though that fascism tends to be an unstable construction of sorts and what the Soviet Union did in its later stages had a lot to do with stabilisation and it never really evoked a volk myth in the style of fascist dictatorships. Plus when you look at fascism as an interclassist movement taking place under the roof of the nation there are overlaps with projects that claim or have claimed to be communistic like China/Vietnam/etc…
literally wtf r u talking about m8
Where I am from Prussian history has relevance and is taught. Prussia is renowed for being one of the first places if not the first to introduce compulsory education and other socialised services.
Oh you’re a Bordigist, that explains things. Either way, socialism is a transitional status between capitalism and communism characterized by public ownership as the principal aspect of the economy and the working classes in control of the state. Between capitalism and communism, elements of each are present, and do not themselves determine the identity of the mode of production but that which is rising and thus principal.
Trade on an international level, even with capitalist countries, is not a determining factor for socialism. Trade internally, even if not entitely tied to labor or necessity, is not a determining factor for socialism. You’re throwing dialectics away entirely in favor of a metaphysical outlook on production and distribution. While we’re recommending reading, why not add Gramsci’s On Comrade Bordiga’s Sterile and Negative “Left” Criticism.
I feel you can already get the gist of what I mean when I pointed out your metaphysical error, but in short dialectics is a method, with materialism as an outlook. Metaphysics sees subjects as “either/or,” while dialectics sees them as “both/and.” Movement is the result of contradictions, the unity and struggle of opposites. The rise of something paired with the dying away of something. Dialectics recognizes interrelation, the unity and struggle of opposites, as motion insepperable from matter and vice-versa, as things come into being and cease to be, as unending change.
In other words:
Dialectics does not regard nature as a collection of static, isolated objects, but as connected, dependent, and determined by each other.
Dialectics considers everything as in a state of continuous movement and change, of renewal and development, where something is always rising and something is always dying away.
Dialectics is not a simple process of growth, but where quantitative buildup results in qualitative change, and qualitative change result in quantitative outcomes, as a leap in state from one to the other, the lower to the higher, the simple to the complex.
Dialectics holds that the process of development from lower to higher takes place as a struggle of opposite tendencies that forms the basis of their contradictions.
So it is your claim that we need some sort of political realism. We have to make use with what exists and anything which posits a beyond is metaphysical territory? We might as well stop at doing social democracy because it doesn’t get any better than that with the means available to us. I hope I did not strawman your argument
Public ownership was the principal aspect of the soviet economy. The existence of commodity production does not mean an economy is not socialist, it just means it has not completed the transition from capitalism to communism. The soviet economy was not based on commodity production and the profit motive, but a social plan and the fulfillment of need.
The post mid-1920s govt expanded the development of capital, made medium-sized business possible and killed many of the most important theorists and revolutionaries. Then there was a reaction to that mid 1950s which culminated in the USSR completely abandoning the international struggle. The period between 1945-1970 cemented freaking patriotism as a “revolutionary doctrine” and perverted the memory and meaning of revolution as a result of the development of national-capitalism, i.e. trade with other nations and a central party of bureaucrat managers subordinating the worker and ripping the effort out of their hands. The USSR became the devil child of the reformist tendency adorned with the horns of the New Deal and futurist Italy, I would go as far as to call it the wet dream of the MSPD parliamentarian.
Socialism should build communism. This however was decades-long, and in its last decades largely unmoving, social democracy.
The NEP was a strategic move to expand the level of development of the productive forces. It was still socialist, but made significant submissions to capital to do so. It also paid off tremendously, as soviet power was solidified in the 1930s. Today, the PRC takes heavy inspiration from the NEP for its own Socialist Market Economy, which is why it is surpassing the entire capitalist world today.
Khrushchev’s declaration that “class struggle is over” in the USSR was revisionist, correct, but the USSR maintained their internationalism. Support for Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria, Palestine, and many more liberation movements still persisted in the USSR, including funding and arming resistance groups. The fact that the USSR post-World War II did not have any interest in open war does not mean they abandoned the internationalist struggle.
To the end, however, the USSR was still socialist. Private ownership was never the principal aspect of its economy, and the working classes were in control of the state until it was coup’d at the end. There were flaws and problems with soviet socialism, because it was real, and thus faced real problems and real struggles. The problems in the CPSU and government towards the end did not mean the USSR was no longer socialist, or that it’s destruction was inevitable; up to the very end it could have been saved from its murder at the hands of the Yeltsin faction.
The USSR did very well (and wasn’t just the RSFSR, but instead a federation of socialist republics). So well, in fact, that life expectancies doubled due to the advancements in development and social safety nets in socialism:
Complaining about communist “denialism” when the original claim is just generic Red Scare fearmongering doesn’t really make sense. What are communists denying, specifically? The idea that the communists were as bad as the Nazis? Such a claim is so thoroughly ahistorical that it doesn’t take a communist to find that absurd.
Yeah let’s exchange commodities and call that socialism.
Capitalism is when trade, capitalism is actually tens of thousands of years old, I am very smart
Trade is not tens of thousands of years old. That is ahistorical. And my argument was not about capitalism per se, it was more about the soviet union not having been socialist and not at all having been a development towards communism because it did trade as firstly as an entity within a world market that was not at all socialist and because trade was allowed internally and not necessarily bound to labour time or necessity, among an entire multiplicity of reasons.
Read “Dialogue with Stalin” on Marxists.org
Trading goes back to prehistory, as as archeologists will tell you.
Let’s suppose that this interpretation of finds by contemporary archaeologists is correct. There is quite a clear distinction to be made between exchanges between otherwise isolated communities that didn’t have a burning need for trade (which they btw absolutely didn’t, there is the concept of primitive communism that is rather well established from observations of recent hunter-gatherer societies) and trade as the dominant social force.
Trade predates capitalism and has taken different forms under different modes of production. Its existence under socialism does not make a society capitalist. What defines a social system is who controls the means of production and how surplus labour is allocated.
The Soviet Union inherited a devastated, largely agrarian economy encircled by imperialist states. Socialist construction could not skip stages. Public ownership of industry, finance and land became the foundation. Market mechanisms and limited private trade operated within boundaries set by the plan, not as its driving force.
Under socialism, the law of value is not abolished by decree. It is progressively constrained through planning, price regulation, and the expansion of decommodified services. Policies like the NEP were not retreats from socialism but applications of materialist method: you transform society with the conditions you inherit, not with ideal blueprints.
To dismiss the USSR because it engaged in trade is to mistake form for content. Socialism is a transitional process, not a finished state. It shifts power from capital to labour, expands collective provision, and subordinates exchange to social need. By these measures, the Soviet project lifted hundreds of millions from illiteracy and poverty, built industrial capacity from scratch, and defended social gains against relentless external pressure.
Please refrain from arrogance when your understanding of a topic matches that of the most learned dust mite.
It makes the society very much capitalist because it doesn’t rid it of an owning class. Here the party of the USSR.
The Kuomintang and certain aspects of S. Korea after WWII share a very similar backstory, did they do socialism? You would probably deny this.
Ok, you have centralised state enterprises that did trade with entities in other countries. Ok, you have planning, we have planning in all of capitalism today, capitalism is entrenched by it. It merely exists in an anarchic state, which was also the case for the USSR and its allies, you even had conflicts spurred on by nationalistic perversion that came from the logic of capital between nations that ideologically should have been brethren. Ask yourself why China and Vietnam post-“revolution” didn’t get along for most of their shared history.
It is, that is what you call a being programmatic. The early Soviet Union had programmatic characteristics which it lost due to being a rushed development just like any other area on this blue planet late to the table of capitalism.
Literally Prussia
Your “argument” rests on a formalist reading of Marx that confuses legal categories with social relations. An owning class is defined by private appropriation of surplus and the ability to reproduce that power through inheritance and market competition. The Soviet nomenklatura held administrative authority, not private property. They could not sell factories, bequeath positions, or extract profit as personal wealth. That is a qualitative difference.
Comparing the USSR to the KMT shows some impressive ignorance and ignores the rupture in property relations. The KMT preserved landlordism and comprador capital. The Soviet state expropriated both.
Planning under capitalism coordinates individual firms while leaving social reproduction to market anarchy. Socialist planning, however imperfect, subordinates enterprise activity to social goals: full employment, universal services, industrial catch up. The presence of markets or external trade does not erase that direction of travel.
The law of value cannot be abolished by decree because it is a social relation, not a policy. Marx was explicit in the Critique of the Gotha Programme: right can never be higher than the economic structure of society. Socialism constrains the law of value through planned allocation, price controls, and decommodification. It withers through development, not proclamation.
International conflicts between socialist states reflect the pressure of the capitalist world system and unresolved national questions, not an inherent capital logic. Uneven development, border disputes, and great power chauvinism are real contradictions. They demand critique, but they do not settle the class character of a mode of production.
Prussia modernized under Junker aristocracy and state led development, but it never socialized the means of production or aimed at the withering of the state. Achievements in literacy or industry under socialism are not “just development”. They are the result of surplus being directed to social need rather than private accumulation.
Bordigist purity spectacles are a luxury of those like yourself, a settler, denizen of the imperial core whose only interaction with socialism is as an academic exercise. You have built nothing, defended nothing, and achieved nothing. You demand a socialism that arrives without contradiction, without transition, without struggle. Revolutionary practice must engage with concrete conditions, not ideal blueprints. If your standard for socialism is the immediate absence of all market forms, all state mediation, all external trade, then you have defined it out of historical possibility. You clearly wish to appear revolutionary without the effort of grappling with reality.
Fuck no they didn’t do socialism. They did fascism[1][2]. How is this detour even relevant?
literally wtf r u talking about m8
If you don’t know anything then don’t say anything.
He is undoubtedly an idiot for equating the USSR with the KMT.
However (and this very clearly isn’t what he meant) under Dr Sun Yat-sen, the KMT wasn’t fascist but a nebulous anti-imperialist bourgeois-centrist style formation: the New Three Principles allowed united front work because they objectively opposed feudalism and foreign domination.
It wasn’t until after Dr Sun’s death, the internal KMT ideological struggle resolved in favor of the landlord-comprador wing, and fascism was then formalised under Chiang.
Which is basically social democracy, see the new deal being an inspiration for Mussolini. Heck he had his start as a self proclaimed commie. The trouble is though that fascism tends to be an unstable construction of sorts and what the Soviet Union did in its later stages had a lot to do with stabilisation and it never really evoked a volk myth in the style of fascist dictatorships. Plus when you look at fascism as an interclassist movement taking place under the roof of the nation there are overlaps with projects that claim or have claimed to be communistic like China/Vietnam/etc…
Where I am from Prussian history has relevance and is taught. Prussia is renowed for being one of the first places if not the first to introduce compulsory education and other socialised services.
Oh you’re a Bordigist, that explains things. Either way, socialism is a transitional status between capitalism and communism characterized by public ownership as the principal aspect of the economy and the working classes in control of the state. Between capitalism and communism, elements of each are present, and do not themselves determine the identity of the mode of production but that which is rising and thus principal.
Trade on an international level, even with capitalist countries, is not a determining factor for socialism. Trade internally, even if not entitely tied to labor or necessity, is not a determining factor for socialism. You’re throwing dialectics away entirely in favor of a metaphysical outlook on production and distribution. While we’re recommending reading, why not add Gramsci’s On Comrade Bordiga’s Sterile and Negative “Left” Criticism.
I just find this funny. I’ll stumble upon it in the sidebar of hexbears anarchism comm once in a while, together with the other funny versions of it.
That’s really funny, lmao. Bordiga was a bit of a goofy guy.
Before I answer I want to know what you mean by dialectics. That words gets thrown around harder than a dodgeball in middleschool
I feel you can already get the gist of what I mean when I pointed out your metaphysical error, but in short dialectics is a method, with materialism as an outlook. Metaphysics sees subjects as “either/or,” while dialectics sees them as “both/and.” Movement is the result of contradictions, the unity and struggle of opposites. The rise of something paired with the dying away of something. Dialectics recognizes interrelation, the unity and struggle of opposites, as motion insepperable from matter and vice-versa, as things come into being and cease to be, as unending change.
In other words:
Dialectics does not regard nature as a collection of static, isolated objects, but as connected, dependent, and determined by each other.
Dialectics considers everything as in a state of continuous movement and change, of renewal and development, where something is always rising and something is always dying away.
Dialectics is not a simple process of growth, but where quantitative buildup results in qualitative change, and qualitative change result in quantitative outcomes, as a leap in state from one to the other, the lower to the higher, the simple to the complex.
Dialectics holds that the process of development from lower to higher takes place as a struggle of opposite tendencies that forms the basis of their contradictions.
Dialectics (and more specifically dialectical materialism), as opposed to metaphysics.
So it is your claim that we need some sort of political realism. We have to make use with what exists and anything which posits a beyond is metaphysical territory? We might as well stop at doing social democracy because it doesn’t get any better than that with the means available to us. I hope I did not strawman your argument
Public ownership was the principal aspect of the soviet economy. The existence of commodity production does not mean an economy is not socialist, it just means it has not completed the transition from capitalism to communism. The soviet economy was not based on commodity production and the profit motive, but a social plan and the fulfillment of need.
The post mid-1920s govt expanded the development of capital, made medium-sized business possible and killed many of the most important theorists and revolutionaries. Then there was a reaction to that mid 1950s which culminated in the USSR completely abandoning the international struggle. The period between 1945-1970 cemented freaking patriotism as a “revolutionary doctrine” and perverted the memory and meaning of revolution as a result of the development of national-capitalism, i.e. trade with other nations and a central party of bureaucrat managers subordinating the worker and ripping the effort out of their hands. The USSR became the devil child of the reformist tendency adorned with the horns of the New Deal and futurist Italy, I would go as far as to call it the wet dream of the MSPD parliamentarian.
Socialism should build communism. This however was decades-long, and in its last decades largely unmoving, social democracy.
The NEP was a strategic move to expand the level of development of the productive forces. It was still socialist, but made significant submissions to capital to do so. It also paid off tremendously, as soviet power was solidified in the 1930s. Today, the PRC takes heavy inspiration from the NEP for its own Socialist Market Economy, which is why it is surpassing the entire capitalist world today.
Khrushchev’s declaration that “class struggle is over” in the USSR was revisionist, correct, but the USSR maintained their internationalism. Support for Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria, Palestine, and many more liberation movements still persisted in the USSR, including funding and arming resistance groups. The fact that the USSR post-World War II did not have any interest in open war does not mean they abandoned the internationalist struggle.
To the end, however, the USSR was still socialist. Private ownership was never the principal aspect of its economy, and the working classes were in control of the state until it was coup’d at the end. There were flaws and problems with soviet socialism, because it was real, and thus faced real problems and real struggles. The problems in the CPSU and government towards the end did not mean the USSR was no longer socialist, or that it’s destruction was inevitable; up to the very end it could have been saved from its murder at the hands of the Yeltsin faction.