:USSR:

Yesterday @CoralMarks made a great reply on Andropov and how his approach to reforms and party work might have saved the USSR, had he lived long enough. I think analysing the downfall of the USSR is of great importance to us as leftists. The Soviet Union was an immense achievement but ultimately it failed and capitalism was restored. Future socialist projects need to learn from this to avoid making the same mistakes and to effectively debunk bourgeois “socialism always fails” propaganda.

On the top of my head a few points seems to be obvious:

  • The people in charge were too old. The system failed to include younger generations which made it lose touch with the people and made it harder to keep developing Soviet society
  • The development of the nomenklatura as a new bourgeoisie within the party made the system lose track of revolutionary goals and opened up for corruption
  • The Sino-Soviet split is one of the great tragedies of the communist movement as it prevented a strong communist block from forming. I don’t know enough about it to say if and how it could have been prevented but it is certainly high on my “Things in history I wish would have turned out differently” list.
  • Cultural conservatism did more harm than good to the USSR. I understand the fear that western cultural products could act like a Trojan horse for capitalist ideology but ultimately attempts to prevent western culture from affecting the USSR was experienced as silly in the population and made Soviet culture look weak and outdated in comparison. Maybe a more permissive and confident cultural policy that invited foreign inputs and expanded upon them in a socialist context could have made a difference and put the socialist world on the cultural offensive. It shouldn’t be that hard to pick up on a youth culture that rebelled against conservative bourgeois norms and see it through a socialist lens.
  • The balance that was found between protecting the revolution and the individual liberties of the people left the people dissatisfied and eroded trust in the system. It is a hard question; naive liberal permissiveness would have exposed the USSR to bourgeois subversion and brought the system down even faster but the people really didn’t like the censorship and the secret police stuff. Maybe there are valuable lessons to learn from China about being permissive and even inviting of public criticism of material problems and concrete policies but cracking down on challenges to the socialist system, ie. people should be welcome to tell about how the bus system is run badly and how the guy in charge is corrupt but they shouldn’t be allowed to say that done capitalist should own and profit from it.
  • The apparent wealth gap between the west and the AES countries was a highly efficient propaganda tool for the bourgeoisie. On one hand more could have been done to credibly tell people about the whole picture of how wealth and poverty coexisted in the capitalist west, for instance by facilitating cultural and personal exchanges with western proletarians. You might not believe it when the state media tells you about poverty in the west, but it is harder to dismiss when a poor American exchange student or guest worker tells you about his life story. On the other hand there was a significant gap and a greater supply of consumer goods, of treats, might have stabilised the system. The USSR was not as developed as the west and had to spend significant resources on defense, on the other hand Soviet industry was not as efficient as it could have been. The before-mentioned corruption and conservatism of an aging leadership proved disastrous to the USSR.
  • A series of failed liberal reforms under Gorbachev tried to solve the problems of the socialist USSR by making it look more like the capitalist west, but instead they accelerated the downfall that killed millions and impoverished the nation. Centrism is a dead end that ultimately leads in a reactionary direction. Problems in a socialist society must be dealt with in a socialist manner and policy must always be true to the revolutionary and proletarian roots.
  • whygodwhy [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    0·
    3 years ago

    First line of Capital by Karl Marx : “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities”"

    Average life of worker under capitalism - Work, make wages, buy stuff with wages, repeat.

    Average life of worker under USSR - Work, make wages, buy stuff with wages, repeat.

    It is this condition of the working class that communists seek to abolish. The working class in USSR suffered the same impersonal domination of the value-form as working classes everywhere.

    The USSR could not be communist because communism is an international movement, not something that can be realized in a single nation. Look at any capitalist country, trade(exports and imports) makes up a giant chunk of the GDP.

    The USSR called itself communist because since the Stalinist counterrevolution, they were simply opportunists who seek to enforce their own different version of capitalism while pretending they were communists (ring a bell? China, Cuba, NK all do the same thing)

    Communism is the real movement of the working class to abolish their present conditions of existence, and replace it with one where there is no longer any domination of capital over man, nor is there domination of man over capital, but capital literally doesn’t exist anymore.

    There is no money, exchange, wage labor, commodity production, profit and other such categories in a communist society.

    Such a society can only be achieved by an international movement of a revolutionary working class led by a class party that follows the principles of scientific socialism(aka Marxism).

    Hope this is clear. If you want to understand more, read the following texts

    “Communist Manifesto” by Marx, “German Ideology” by Marx. And these following ICP party texts.

    https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1958/marxism-property.htm

    https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1957/fundamentals.htm https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1926/lyons-theses.htm. If you spend the time and effort to understand these 5 texts, (it will take 6 hours at most) you will already be a better communist than 99% of self described communists out there, online and IRL, who simply do not understand the basic concepts of what communism is and what actually has to be done.

    • geikei [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      1·
      3 years ago

      : “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities"

      So how does this apply in the USSR even after the “Stalinist counterrevolution” as you say ? At what level and for which individuals did this accumulation of commodities prevailed as wealth ? Where was ownership leading to that short of accumulation observed ? By the party members that even at the most extreme earned 3-4 times what an average factory worker did and lived in somewhat larger appartments than the average worker ? Is the phenomenon was so rampant you should be able to present proof of how that wealth from immense accumulation of commodities existed widely in the capitalist USSR

      The USSR could not be communist because communism is an international movement, not something that can be realized in a single nation. Look at any capitalist country, trade(exports and imports) makes up a giant chunk of the GDP.

      Sure but

      The USSR called itself communist

      This never happened. The party called it self a communist party. Maybe at most the society was called one with communist values. The economy and mode of production and organization of the USSR was never descibed as an existing communist one by the party OR leaders , especially under stalin.

      Stalinist counterrevolution, they were simply opportunists who seek to enforce their own different version of capitalism while pretending they were communists (ring a bell? China, Cuba, NK all do the same thing)

      Just quoting this cause its a distilled and pure leftcom momment to a very funny degree. And even misunderstands leftcoms of that era who despite not considering the USSR socialist or communist they usualy refrained and distanced themselves from the baby brained “its just capitalism” analysis. Just linking to lasagna man with no context isnt enough

      In general you seem quite confused about the exploitation of workers and malding over the boogeyman of “state capitalism” . The “capitalist” USSR economy magicaly wasnt run for profit and didnt include accumulation of wealth or control over production by indivisual people . The image of capitalist opportunists enacting their version of capitalism to materialy benifit them selves is Disney level ahistorisism since even western anti-communist historians or even cia reports dont point out towards rgar. There wasnt a class in the economic sense profiting from the labor of the underclass or enacting a “dictatorship of X class” in the marxist sense over the workers. No one got rich in USSR by making his fellow people poor and exploiting them or even more so from exploiting the rest of the world. Even Stalin for all his faults basicaly died with nothing on his name and living an ascetic life. You can very rightfully argue about the shittiness of the bureocracy and the disconnect of the party from the working class and the elitism. You would be correct. But jumping from there to “state capitalist” hysteria is unfounded

      Yes there was exploitation in the USSR and sucking labor value from workers .How else would you finance the enormous military budgets or rebuilt the entire country from strcatch multiple times after ww1/civil war and then after ww2. Since USSR wasnt imperialist in the “exploiting third world labour or extracting resources from the rest of the world” sence and since it was economicaly isolated and sieged Surplus value was extracted from the workers in order to be redirected to those stuff. Its simple as that. And idk about how the USSR could avoid having to maintain huge military expensess or having to rebuild a vast country from rubble 2 times using the labour and value created only within their borders. And yes there wasnt a complete ablolition of wages , commodities class struggle . But the USSR never was and never claimed to have reached communism in order to do so

    • BolsheWitch [she/her, they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      1·
      3 years ago

      The USSR called itself communist because since the Stalinist counterrevolution, they were simply opportunists who seek to enforce their own different version of capitalism while pretending they were communists (ring a bell? China, Cuba, NK all do the same thing

      Found the ultra lol