Silver Needle, silverneedle@lemmy.ca

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

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.

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

They did fascism

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.

Before I answer I want to know what you mean by dialectics. That words gets thrown around harder than a dodgeball in middleschool

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.

Literally Prussia

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

Social demokkkrat on social demokkkrat violence

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.

Liberals did some pretty sick revolutions in the 19th century

It’s starting. And I’m so glad it is.

If the window for something society-changing is still open, it sure is about to close very soon. Political action has been that of individuals with grudges lately, there is still no indication of a mass movement of workers with radical demands.

It’s just one warehouse. Everybody, calm down.

I know that

That is the medical definition, the word has existed long before.

which is basically how quickly you can learn

Not even that! IQ measures how well one performs in a barrage of simple abstract tasks. That alone can never be the stuff of intelligence, let alone learning speed. It doesn’t hold a candle past grade four and outside of diagnosing certain cognitive issues.

I generally agree with your sentiments, I have met people whose IQs I don’t know but would be considered conventionally highly intelligent just from the level of knowledge they broadcast and their quick wit. Many of them self-ascribed “failures”. Suffice it to say, it’s been a mission of mine to deconstruct what intelligence is. Collective smarts seem to matter much more than those of any individual.

Since the seventies at the latest. Unions were unified and synchronized with parties post-WWII, workers’ demands reconciled with those of capital. That was originally the project of il Duce, but we took it out of his hands greedily.

We could do fascism better than him and what is more fascist than to peg the worth of individuals, the economy, to that of a not necessarily racialised abstract people of a Nation? Now anyone can become a fascist by subordinating themselves to the state. A German is anyone who is a good citizen to the German state, Japan and the US are the same.

In Benito’s words: “Race? It is a feeling, not a reality: ninety-five percent, at least, is a feeling. Nothing will ever make me believe that biologically pure races can be shown to exist today… National pride has no need of the delirium of race.”

If these are my last words on the public internet, I would like to say that Panty and Stocking with Garterbelt, while crossing the boundary of what can be considered tasteful, is a pretty funny series.

jesus

good or evil

We can not make science out of morals.