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.
Your “argument” rests on a formalist reading of Marx
Trve
The Soviet nomenklatura held administrative authority, not private property.
The thing is though that private property is literally administrative authority and vice-versa. When I give my sister my Tudor Montecarlo from 1970-something with the grey dial and the steel bezel I give her administrative authority over the watch, she now administers the watch. Conversely, when I handle accounts as someone at a bank I have administrative authority in spite of dues to be paid to customers that make me the effective owner of a certain amount of capital. In other words the bank alienates something from customers in a similar way to a factory owning capitalist alienating labour power.
They could not sell factories, bequeath positions, or extract profit as personal wealth. That is a qualitative difference.
There very well could have been these limitations. To keep it short I am not going to critique these points about specific restrictions. There was still capital which crept into society through literal competitions between workers enforced directly by the state and periphery around productivity maximisation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Stakhanov
There are things which we cannot sell/be nominally capitalistic about in societies we all would agree are capitalist, pretty significant ones like public land, firefighting and certain internet services
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.
These are rather specific points that don’t get to the statement I was trying to make. I was referring to aspects of state-administered centralisation/monopolism and expropriation where it was necessary to advance the development of the working class (for both capitalism and socialism).
Planning under capitalism coordinates individual firms while leaving social reproduction to market anarchy
When the great man of history Trump says he should send another bajillion to Israel in the form of very specific arms shipments, isn’t that centralised planning? When Sweden built one million apartments were they doing socialism? Market anarchy doesn’t just concern the level of firms.
Socialist planning, however imperfect, subordinates enterprise activity to social goals: full employment, universal services, industrial catch up
While not strictly subordinated all the Scandinavian economies do or have done this, but they are not socialist.
The presence of markets or external trade does not erase that direction of travel.
It doesn’t, but it the existence of socialisation also doesn’t prove the direction of travel.
The law of value cannot be abolished by decree because it is a social relation
What is planning if not a decree, after all we are talking about instructions not proclamations in church. The whole point of socialism and communism is that instead of just doing stuff and then thinking about the consequences/handling them, we plan according to need and that changes the societal structure at its base. Call that thinking before doing. For that we really need to stop and think as a societal organism. The whole thinking process is not negated by the primacy of the development of the economic structure, it is something that arises out of the economic realities by necessity. Think of it as a collective awakening.
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
We do this in capitalism as socialisation is necessary for the continued existence of the economy. Postal service, social security, educational incomes, care work, libre software, you name it. Surplus being directed to social needs is not exclusive to socialism or communism. My friends call it necessary communization and they contrast it with movements that actually demand communism. In the first chapters of Kapital Marx grounds exchange of goods to necessity, without it no such thing as a commodity or capitalism.
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
Yeah whatever, just ignore me not being able to find a job, afford an education and my account balance being -30$. A true academic with just a highschool diploma. Beyond my intellectual circlejerking I probably have absolutely no reason to concern myself practically with the economy since I have it so good
A formalist reading of Marx is not just wrong. It abandons the soul of scientific socialism and borders on the reactionary. It substitutes legal abstractions for the analysis of concrete social relations and replaces historical materialism with moralistic catechism.
Your watch analogy is idiotic. A watch is not a means of production. Conflating personal possession with capitalist private property shows you have not grasped the most elementary distinction in Marxist theory. Private property is a social relation that enables the extraction of surplus labour through exclusion and market enforcement. Administering a gift does not let you exploit wage labour. Your bank analogy is equally empty. Try exercising your supposed “ownership” by walking into that bank and demanding to appropriate that capital you “own” as personal wealth. See how fast the social relation of capital reasserts itself through law, force, and institutional discipline. Administration is not ownership. Your confusion reveals a complete lack of conception of private property as a social relation.
Your point about public land, firefighters, and internet services under capitalism is detached from both theory and reality. Thatcherites privatized public land on a massive scale. Tech firms and telecom monopolies wage constant campaigns to enclose the digital commons and commodify every facet of the internet. The fact that capitalism tolerates or even manages certain public functions currently does not negate its driving logic. These are concessions wrung from capital or functional necessities for reproducing labour power, not evidence of a different mode of production.
Your KMT comparison remains idiotic even after clarification. Yes, both the KMT and the USSR employed state centralization. But form without content is idealism. The USSR broke private property relations in land and industry. The KMT preserved landlordism and comprador capital. The class character of state power and the direction of surplus allocation were fundamentally opposed. To ignore this is to reduce Marxism to a checklist of administrative techniques. That is not analysis. It is fetishism.
On planning under capitalism, you swing and miss again. Aid to Israel is not a benevolent decree. It is the outcome of a bidding war between arms firms, lobbying blocs, and imperial strategy, all mediated through the logic of accumulation. Sweden building apartments is not socialism. It is the imperial core using super-exploitation of the periphery to fund social peace at home. Ignore austerity, the housing crisis, and the privatization creep across Scandinavia if you like. Ignore the private health insurance racket in America if it suits your argument. But do not pretend these are equivalent to socialist planning.
Scandinavian economies do not subordinate firms to the public good. Private ownership remains the principle. Decommodification is tactical, contingent, and constantly under assault. Under socialism, social ownership is the principle and capital is repressed. That absolutely determines the direction of travel. The USSR, for most of its existence, directed surplus to industrialization, universal education, healthcare, and defence against imperialism. That is not a minor variation. It is a qualitative break.
When I say the law of value cannot be abolished by decree, I mean exactly what Marx meant. You can issue all the plans you want. Without the proper material conditions and productive forces, they will not amount to shit. That is why socialism is a transitional phase. It is the process of creating those conditions through planned development, class struggle, and the gradual withering of commodity relations. To demand the immediate absence of all market forms is to demand socialism without history. That is not revolutionary. It is utopian.
Your “necessary communization” point is equally detached. Postal services, education, social security: all are under active assault by capital. Privatization of public assets is a global trend (outside the remaining socialist holdouts). Social security in the imperial core is funded by imperial rent and is in structural decline as the periphery liberates itself. Austerity has been the dominant policy for over a decade. To cite these as evidence that capitalism already does what socialism does is to ignore the direction of travel and the class struggle over every concession.
Finally, your deflection about personal hardship misses the point entirely. Your precarity is likely real (if you’re telling the truth) and is produced by the system we oppose. But having no practice in building socialism, as a settler denizen of the imperial core, renders your theory a purely academic exercise. That is why your arguments are so detached from both reality and theory. Revolutionary clarity is not forged in grievance. It is forged through study, practice, and alignment with the movement of the working class. Bordigist purism offers the comfort of certainty without the burden of construction. It is easy to declare every actually existing socialist project impure from the safety of the core. If your theory cannot account for the struggle to build under constraint, it is not a meaningful or worthwhile guide to action. You have not refuted anything. You have only repeated your formalist catechism with more words and less understanding.
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.
Trve
The thing is though that private property is literally administrative authority and vice-versa. When I give my sister my Tudor Montecarlo from 1970-something with the grey dial and the steel bezel I give her administrative authority over the watch, she now administers the watch. Conversely, when I handle accounts as someone at a bank I have administrative authority in spite of dues to be paid to customers that make me the effective owner of a certain amount of capital. In other words the bank alienates something from customers in a similar way to a factory owning capitalist alienating labour power.
There very well could have been these limitations. To keep it short I am not going to critique these points about specific restrictions. There was still capital which crept into society through literal competitions between workers enforced directly by the state and periphery around productivity maximisation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Stakhanov
There are things which we cannot sell/be nominally capitalistic about in societies we all would agree are capitalist, pretty significant ones like public land, firefighting and certain internet services
These are rather specific points that don’t get to the statement I was trying to make. I was referring to aspects of state-administered centralisation/monopolism and expropriation where it was necessary to advance the development of the working class (for both capitalism and socialism).
When the great man of history Trump says he should send another bajillion to Israel in the form of very specific arms shipments, isn’t that centralised planning? When Sweden built one million apartments were they doing socialism? Market anarchy doesn’t just concern the level of firms.
While not strictly subordinated all the Scandinavian economies do or have done this, but they are not socialist.
It doesn’t, but it the existence of socialisation also doesn’t prove the direction of travel.
What is planning if not a decree, after all we are talking about instructions not proclamations in church. The whole point of socialism and communism is that instead of just doing stuff and then thinking about the consequences/handling them, we plan according to need and that changes the societal structure at its base. Call that thinking before doing. For that we really need to stop and think as a societal organism. The whole thinking process is not negated by the primacy of the development of the economic structure, it is something that arises out of the economic realities by necessity. Think of it as a collective awakening.
We do this in capitalism as socialisation is necessary for the continued existence of the economy. Postal service, social security, educational incomes, care work, libre software, you name it. Surplus being directed to social needs is not exclusive to socialism or communism. My friends call it necessary communization and they contrast it with movements that actually demand communism. In the first chapters of Kapital Marx grounds exchange of goods to necessity, without it no such thing as a commodity or capitalism.
Yeah whatever, just ignore me not being able to find a job, afford an education and my account balance being -30$. A true academic with just a highschool diploma. Beyond my intellectual circlejerking I probably have absolutely no reason to concern myself practically with the economy since I have it so good
A formalist reading of Marx is not just wrong. It abandons the soul of scientific socialism and borders on the reactionary. It substitutes legal abstractions for the analysis of concrete social relations and replaces historical materialism with moralistic catechism.
Your watch analogy is idiotic. A watch is not a means of production. Conflating personal possession with capitalist private property shows you have not grasped the most elementary distinction in Marxist theory. Private property is a social relation that enables the extraction of surplus labour through exclusion and market enforcement. Administering a gift does not let you exploit wage labour. Your bank analogy is equally empty. Try exercising your supposed “ownership” by walking into that bank and demanding to appropriate that capital you “own” as personal wealth. See how fast the social relation of capital reasserts itself through law, force, and institutional discipline. Administration is not ownership. Your confusion reveals a complete lack of conception of private property as a social relation.
Your point about public land, firefighters, and internet services under capitalism is detached from both theory and reality. Thatcherites privatized public land on a massive scale. Tech firms and telecom monopolies wage constant campaigns to enclose the digital commons and commodify every facet of the internet. The fact that capitalism tolerates or even manages certain public functions currently does not negate its driving logic. These are concessions wrung from capital or functional necessities for reproducing labour power, not evidence of a different mode of production.
Your KMT comparison remains idiotic even after clarification. Yes, both the KMT and the USSR employed state centralization. But form without content is idealism. The USSR broke private property relations in land and industry. The KMT preserved landlordism and comprador capital. The class character of state power and the direction of surplus allocation were fundamentally opposed. To ignore this is to reduce Marxism to a checklist of administrative techniques. That is not analysis. It is fetishism.
On planning under capitalism, you swing and miss again. Aid to Israel is not a benevolent decree. It is the outcome of a bidding war between arms firms, lobbying blocs, and imperial strategy, all mediated through the logic of accumulation. Sweden building apartments is not socialism. It is the imperial core using super-exploitation of the periphery to fund social peace at home. Ignore austerity, the housing crisis, and the privatization creep across Scandinavia if you like. Ignore the private health insurance racket in America if it suits your argument. But do not pretend these are equivalent to socialist planning.
Scandinavian economies do not subordinate firms to the public good. Private ownership remains the principle. Decommodification is tactical, contingent, and constantly under assault. Under socialism, social ownership is the principle and capital is repressed. That absolutely determines the direction of travel. The USSR, for most of its existence, directed surplus to industrialization, universal education, healthcare, and defence against imperialism. That is not a minor variation. It is a qualitative break.
When I say the law of value cannot be abolished by decree, I mean exactly what Marx meant. You can issue all the plans you want. Without the proper material conditions and productive forces, they will not amount to shit. That is why socialism is a transitional phase. It is the process of creating those conditions through planned development, class struggle, and the gradual withering of commodity relations. To demand the immediate absence of all market forms is to demand socialism without history. That is not revolutionary. It is utopian.
Your “necessary communization” point is equally detached. Postal services, education, social security: all are under active assault by capital. Privatization of public assets is a global trend (outside the remaining socialist holdouts). Social security in the imperial core is funded by imperial rent and is in structural decline as the periphery liberates itself. Austerity has been the dominant policy for over a decade. To cite these as evidence that capitalism already does what socialism does is to ignore the direction of travel and the class struggle over every concession.
Finally, your deflection about personal hardship misses the point entirely. Your precarity is likely real (if you’re telling the truth) and is produced by the system we oppose. But having no practice in building socialism, as a settler denizen of the imperial core, renders your theory a purely academic exercise. That is why your arguments are so detached from both reality and theory. Revolutionary clarity is not forged in grievance. It is forged through study, practice, and alignment with the movement of the working class. Bordigist purism offers the comfort of certainty without the burden of construction. It is easy to declare every actually existing socialist project impure from the safety of the core. If your theory cannot account for the struggle to build under constraint, it is not a meaningful or worthwhile guide to action. You have not refuted anything. You have only repeated your formalist catechism with more words and less understanding.