Comment

“I will overfixate on a debate on the academic definition of capitalism in order to be able to call X communist leader a capitalist instead of looking at the actual policy implemented” isn’t an honest framework to deal with this. In a worker state without bourgeoisie, such as the soviet union, there is no such thing as surplus value because there’s no capitalist class appropriating the wealth for itself. Instead, salaries are decided centrally, goods are provided at centrally-planned prices and NOT through the market principles. This is enough for me to claim that the USSR was socialist and not capitalist, and I refuse to engage in semantics rather than talking about policy: the USSR was materially and significantly different from any classical capitalist state, and much better by ANY actual metric than any capitalist state, and you’re just trying to bend definitions to call your Marxist-Leninist of choice a capitalist

source

Sort:hotnew top

Excrubulent@slrpnk.net ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
Bourgeoisie aren’t some genetically distinct group. The party supplanted the bourgeoisie and became them.

I will never understand how tankies can see a small group gain control of the means of production and understand it as anything but a new bourgeoisie.

source
- volodya_ilich@lemm.ee ⁨3⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
  
  The party supplanted the bourgeoisie and became them
  
  The party didn’t have nearly enough wealth, especially not intergenerational, they were as much public workers as doctors and teachers.
  
  small group gain control of the means of production
  
  Again proving you don’t know shit about soviet historiography and democratic mechanisms
  
  source
  - Excrubulent@slrpnk.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    I know Lenin said this:
    
    Reality tells us that state capitalism would be a step forward. If in a small space of time we could achieve state capitalism in Russia, that would be a victory.
    Lenin, Minutes of the Sessions of the All-Russia C.E.C., 4th Convocation. Verbatim Report
    
    You completely ignored that. Why?
    
    They controlled the entire economy, you’ve said yourself it was under central control, so they achieved state capitalism. And why does wealth need to be intergenerational for it to create a bourgeois class? Oh, I know why, because otherwise you’d have to accept that your hero Lenin was bourgeois, and you can’t do that. You named yourself after him, you’re way too personally invested to see this issue clearly.
    
    source
    volodya_ilich@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago
    
    it was under central control, so they achieved state capitalism
    
    “State capitalism is when central planning of the economy in a worker state without markets or surplus value extraction”. Lmao.
    
    Calling Lenin a bourgeois and making up a capitalist class out of thin air in the Soviet Union just proves again that you have done exactly 0 research or reading on the topic, you’ve just listened to someone online telling you that the USSR was state capitalism because central control, but you haven’t read any theory of communism and capitalism and you haven’t read any serious account of the functioning of the Soviet economy. Just disengage, you’re proving that you’re exclusively interested in putting “evil person” labels on certain historical leftist figures
    
    source