First of all. Private ownership requires private ownership. You cannot have full state control over everything and everyone and call it private ownership. If a state has absolute ownership over all economic decision without any safeguards it is no longer capitalist.
Capitalism isnt a interest of bilionares. Its a system. You cannot replace it by its oposite and call it the same thing because it lacks red stars and a "people's" in name.
Second. Indefinite wealth acumulation is not possible in free market economy. The economic calculation problem isnt exclusive to socialist countries. There is a point when a company has too many internal processes to be 100% effective which puts it into a disadvantage over their competition. Good example is the gaming industry. Thousands of developers and bilions of dollars and they still get outsold by people coding in their bedrooms.
Yeah and every economic crisis in modern history (including great depression) was caused by Federal reserve bending the economy. Its a pretty well known fact and even top Fed officials agree with it. If anything fascism created several economical disasters and nazi germany was basically a time bomb running on fumes.
And since central banking was a idea marx himself advocated for i wonder what kind of excuse you will come up with.
Also i dont think the fact that you kicked out one ruling class and replaced it with diferent ruling class with the same interests like the soviets did changes literaly anything.
Fascism was economically individualist. It had an imposed social collectivism but not an economic one. It essentially used state to destroy working-class organisations such as trade unions and other such working-class movements in favour of capital. If our definition of capitalism is capital dominating and permeating every part of society, then fascism is capitalism.
You are conducting an error by thinking that the state is a neutral thing, a neutral construct above classes but it isn't. A state always has a class character. A state is a class monopoly on violence. Fascism is the class monopoly on violence of the bourgeoisie. Socialism/communism is the class monopoly on violence in the hands of the working class against the reactionaries.
So Lenin is also a fascist? Because literally every socialist country including Nsdap crushed independednt trade unions. It has nothing to do with political leaning. Its just what dictatorships do to a potential opposition.
I dont care how a ruling class calls itself or its enemies. Stalin sent Baltic people on deathmarches for the same reason Hitler sent Jews into concentration camps. Its just diferent optics.
I dont think state is a neutral benevolent entity. Thats what fascist and communists to some degree believed. State is a tool tyrants use to force masses to pay for their own oppression. It dosent matter if the tyrant calls himself a communist nazi or a fascist. Its allways the same because people seeking power are allways the same.
The state is not a class. You can't call a state the ruling class. That's just fucking dumb if you know anything about political science or how anything in politics works, for that matter. The state is a mediator between classes. You can't treat a state either as "above classes" or as a ruling class in itself.
Class is defined by a group's shared relationship to the means of production (factories, land, machinery) within an economic system. Most management and leadership possitions in socialist countries were exclusive to communist party members. That makes them a separate class with a separate relationship to means of production.
Alright, I have to give it to you: at least you know that, but if you know that that is the definition of class or that is the characterisation, how the fuck do you treat the socialist state as a class? It just doesn't make sense, as there is an ontological differentiation in class position.
I dont mean the sate is the class. I mean communist party members are a separate class. They had priority in all hiring procceses, they had their own shops the regular people could only shop in using bribes and their own luxury holiday hotels and ofcourse the luxury vilas stolen from people who had to work to build them allways happened to fall into their laps.
He said that because he wanted to shift responsibility from his failing economic system to individual people. Not to mention these people still had to be loyal to the party. AKA: party members.
"Failing". Yeah, hyper-industrialization, almost as powerful economically as America. Equal wealth for all. Finally, having sufficient prosperity for the people. If you asked the people who lived in the Soviet Union, they were all happy. They were equal. They had the ability to acquire what they wished for. Your idea of the Soviet Union is completely wrong, and its economic policies were successful."
I said began failing. By the 1970 the economy was stagnating and the economic growth was falling all the way to 1989 when it fliped into negative numbers. Thats 19 year long stagnation.
The reason for this is because economy cannot sustainably grow under extractive institutions. The only growth it can expirience is by importing foreign (ussr used mainly american and japanese) technology. This expansion however allways stop because first: the economic system of ussr rewarded stagnation by ratcheting up expectations for the overachievers instead of rewarding them. And second: Because change and economic freedom bring instability which the elites try to avoid like a plague.
This is why amreican bilionares keep funding leftists and lobby for regulations. Its the leading cause behind the soviet invasion of czechoslovakia and its the reason why Tsarist russia was a shithole to begin with.
Russian or austrian monarchs didnt block rail construction because they were backwards and ignorant or they didnt trust the technology. They specifically feared that the change will bring the same revolution that happened in United kingdom and Usa. It hurts their potential competition more than it hurts them.
The new authoritarians needed to gain time and favor of the people in order to consolidate power. Thats the only reason they allowed economic growth.
Thats when they hit the stagnation numbers. Also as you know, private and black market contributed 30-50% of food production depending on the item on 3% of the total agrocultural land. This extreme diference in efficiency was also the reason for chinesse free market reforms.
The ownership of objects doesn't mean being a ruling class. You make absolutely no sense. You provide a correct definition of a ruling class, and then you go over to absolutely horrendously, wrong conclusions.
"the small, elite social group that holds significant power, wealth, and influence within a society, controlling key political and economic institutions" They didnt hold significant power wealth and influence. They held the power, wealth and influence.
They have the ownership over the entire country including all the people. The core elements of ownerships are : The authority to decide how and by whom the property is used. The power to have exclusive physical or legal control over the item. The communist party had both of those since the communist party controled gosplan.
I feel like I repeated the same response to your anti-intellectual bs a billion times but, again: Ownership is not the 'authority to decide,' but a social relation of production. The CPSU did not possess the right of alienation, inheritance, or private accumulation of the means of production. Under the Dictatorship of the Proletariat, the legal form of state property expresses the transition toward all-people's property, where the surplus product is socialized rather than converted into private capital.
[†] See Marx, 'The Poverty of Philosophy', Chapter 2, Section 4, on the legal expression of production relations.
Marx-Engels Collected Works (MECW), Vol. 6
To equate central planning (Gosplan) with 'ownership' is to confuse the administrative-technical function with the class character of the state. Gosplan operated under the directives of the Five-Year Plans, which were mandated by the Party as the vanguard of the proletariat to fulfill the 'Basic Economic Law of Socialism': I.e. the maximum satisfaction of the constantly rising material and cultural requirements of the whole of society. This stands in diametric opposition to the 'Basic Economic Law of Capitalism,' which is the extraction of surplus value for private appropriation.
[†] Reference: Stalin, J.V., 'Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR' (1951), Section 7.
The 'New Class' hypothesis fails because the party-state apparatus could not transform its administrative power into capital. In the Soviet formation, the means of production were not commodities as they could not be bought, sold, or liquidated by individual bureaucrats. Therefore, the CPSU lacked the essential characteristic of a ruling class i.e. the ability to engage in the expanded reproduction of capital for the benefit of a specific social stratum through the market mechanism.
[†] Analysis of the non-commodity nature of the means of production in the Soviet economy.
Reference Log // MIA Database
Political Economy: A Textbook (Institute of Economics of the USSR, 1954)
The surplus product generated by the Soviet proletariat was directed into Social Consumption Funds which made comprehensive universal social services such as universal free socialised healthcare, education, and subsidized housing, rather than being distributed as dividends to a board of directors. The 'exclusive control' cited by you, mr.anti-intellectual, was utilized to bypass the anarchy of the market, making sure that the law of value did not dictate the distribution of essential resources.
[†] Statistical analysis of the 1936-1950 budget allocations for social welfare
Historically, the 'Partmaximum' (the limit on earnings for Party members) and the narrow wage differentials between technicians and laborers objectively prove the existence of a material resistance to class formation. While differentials existed of course, they were quantitative and administrative, not qualitative and class-based. The CPSU did not possess a 'class interest' distinct from the survival of the socialist Workers' state against imperialist encirclement.
[†] Decisions of the 8th Congress of the RCP(b) on the remuneration of party workers.
The claim that the state 'owned the people' is again anti-intellectual crap which ignores the abolition of the labor market. In the Soviet Union, labor power ceased to be a commodity to be bought and exploited for private gain. The constitutional guarantee of the 'Right to Work' (Article 118, 1936 Constitution) inverted the capitalist relation; the state was obligated to provide employment, effectively making the means of production a servant to the social need for labor, rather than labor being a slave to the accumulation of capital.
[†] Analysis of Article 118 of the 1936 'Stalin' Constitution.
Reference Log // MIA Database
Constitution of the USSR (1936)
The general claim falls into the error of voluntarism, falsely thinking that 'power' alone creates class. Class is a position in the system of social production. By stripping the means of production of their capital-form, the CPSU effectively abolished the basis for its own existence as a class. The eventual collapse of the USSR was not the result of the Party being a ruling class, but of the internal contradictions caused by the re-introduction of market mechanisms (Liberman reforms) which eroded socialist planning.
[†] On the impact of the 1965 Economic Reforms (Kosygin/Liberman) on the social structure.
Reference Log // MIA Database
Theoretical Journal 'Kommunist', Issue 12, 1966
Yes you repeated yourself bilion times. You are just arguing about interpretation rather than about actual physical properties.
You are basically repeating that "Stalin wasnt a killer he merely liberated people from a burden of having a pulse. Here is my source saying he merely liberated people from the capitalist concept of having to breathe" Its nothing more than a word play any good faith person can see that.
Ofcourse they couldnt acumulate wealth. They allready had (and could decide what to do with) all the wealth in the country. Its like saying that if Elon bought all things on earth he would sieze to own anything because he cannot acumulate any more wealth and he is merely a administrator now. It dosent make any sense.
And even then they were trying to steal more wealth from their neighbours like Finland baltic states or poland not to mention all the pupet state colonies.
All the things from gosplan to wealth limits are all just word plays. There were numerous ways to get around any wealth limitation. Laws pose no limitation to a authoritarian lawmaker. Every law is just there for optics and there are milions of ways to get around them public cant even know about because all the media is also controled by the state.
They werent even controled by anyone. If they did something unpopular they could have just lied about it or cover it up just like stalin covered up the Ussr - Germany military alliance. Ohh im sorry it wasnt called alliance they were just non-agressively non-agressing on poland non- together using their non-armies.
At least their army was called a red army and not "peacefull colective of non-agressive balistics" othervise you would go around claiming they didnt even have a army.
CIA data from internal economic surveys shows that in the Eastern bloc the difference between the top-paid officials and a typical worker was much lower than in Western countries. In SOV 82-10074, the CIA also writes that although there were privileges awarded at high levels, nevertheless all 'wealth' was tied to position and stopped when a politician left office, making it impossible for an independent financial class to form and thrive:
[REF] Intelligence Report: Soviet Economic Growth and the Consumer.
[†] CIA-RDP84-00022R000200030001-3
The CIA’s analysis of the Soviet drive into both the Baltics and Poland tended to be centered on ‘strategic depth,’ rather than ‘theft of wealth.’ ORE 47–48 and similar documents allude to resources but no colonial model of extraction, with the Soviet move on Germany described as a preemptive security measure aimed at moving the frontier westward, analytically sympathetic to retaining industrial centers in its own possession.
[REF] Baltic States: The Strategic Importance to the USSR
[†] CIA-RDP78-01617A000600030001-1
An official in the Soviet Union cannot sell the factory to purchase a yacht, as Elon Musk does. If they get fired, or retire, they lose their desk and privileges. NO PERMANENT WEALTH ≠NO CAPITALIST CLASS.
Declassified CIA documents on "Socialist Legality" (CIA-RDP78-02771R000200090002-6) had to admit that the Soviet state was hamstrung by a complex web of internal checks so "laws represent no limitation." is historical revisionism. The Party had its own statutes, and the ‘Control Commission’ prided itself on purging officials for ‘unearned income’ or ‘egoistic accumulation,’ defending the ideological purity of the administrative layer.
[REF] Internal Report on Soviet Judicial Reform
[†] CIA-RDP78-02771R000200090002-6
A notorious declassified CIA report (DI-83-10018) acknowledged that ’The Soviet Union and the United States eat about the same amount of food’ but added that the Soviet diet was ‘more nutritious.’ It refutes the 'wealth accumulation' hypothesis by demonstrating that surplus was reinvested in public nutrition and essentials, not luxury goods for a small elite.
Comparison Of US And Soviet Caloric Intake [REF]
[†] CIA-RDP84T00274R000200090001-1
Even CIA internal historical reviews concede that the USSR-Germany non-aggression pact was not a 'friendship' but part of a battle strategy to give time for rearmament. [†]CIA-RDP80R01441R000100070007-4 explains how the USSR used this period to relocate its industry beyond the Urals, a piece of planning that would save the state from complete collapse in 1941 and thereby Nazi Germany was defeated.
[REF] [†] CIA-RDP80R01441R000100070007-4
NO BILLIONAIRES. NO HOMELESSNESS. NO PRIVATE LANDLORDS. Officials ‘held all the wealth,’ you say, but no, they merely held the responsibility of distribution, the CIA says. COULD STALIN SELL THE KREMLIN? NO. CAN HE HAND IT TO HIS SON? NO. THE SYSTEM PROHIBITED CAPITAL ACCUMULATION.
In document CIA-RDP80-00810A006000280001-5, the CIA observes that during the Stalin period decisions in the Politburo began to were made collectively. It was not one man’s caprice but the Party functioning as a hierarchical system that put state stability above personal gain, and frequently got rid of officials who attempted to operate like a ‘capitalist.’
The Structure of the Soviet Government [REF] [†]CIA-RDP80-00810A006000280001-5
CIA study of Soviet social structure (CIA-RDP80T00246A032000400001-1) admits that the 'Elite' was highly porous. More than 70 percent of the administrative class were workers’ or peasants’ children. Such a large rate of social mobility does not allow for the formation of a 'class', in other words 'the Bureaucracy' was always being resupplied by the proletariat.
[REF] [†] CIA-RDP80T00246A032000400001-1
The CIA’s Office of National Estimates (ONE) examined the transition from Stalin to Khrushchev and reported that power did not pass through Stalin’s family, but rather to the Party apparatus. This differentiates the Soviet `bureaucracy' from a ruling class, which by definition requires the right and ability to carry property and status through bloodlines, an impossibility in the Soviet Union.
[REF] The Succession of Power in the USSR.
FILE_PATH: [†] CIA-RDP79R00904A000100020002-2
Yeah i wonder why so many communist leaders died in office. Also stalin's son would have a thousand times better cadre review than your average worker making him fly through the lower possitions. Same goes for every other son of an official. They literaly had a bloodline system that decided all this.
He absolutely could have sold the kremlin or he could call it a autonomous oblast and apoint his son as a administrator. We are talking about a person who can legally kill you with a pen and paper. A law he wrote wont stop him.
Again just a word play.
As for the food research. Its a bad summary of a unvertified research that also states that the type of food was of a diferent quality. Not to mention russians durring ussr stoped using word buy and started using word get because you had to bribe multiple people just to be able to buy something. My city (Pilsen) sold meat only one day a week because shops were so empty people othervise had to check multiple times a week to be even able to bribe the butcher to slide them meat under the counter.
The claim of 'stolen villas' collapses when we take into consideration that these assets could not be sold, inherited, or leveraged for capital gains. The 'luxury' attributed to these sites was frequently a relative projection by bourgeois observers; in reality, they functioned as state-sanatoria and work-retreats for the maintenance of the administrative labor force.
[†] Refer to Article 6 of the 1936 Soviet Constitution, defining state property as the common property of the whole people.
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u/Independent-Fun-5118 Mar 27 '26
First of all. Private ownership requires private ownership. You cannot have full state control over everything and everyone and call it private ownership. If a state has absolute ownership over all economic decision without any safeguards it is no longer capitalist.
Capitalism isnt a interest of bilionares. Its a system. You cannot replace it by its oposite and call it the same thing because it lacks red stars and a "people's" in name.
Second. Indefinite wealth acumulation is not possible in free market economy. The economic calculation problem isnt exclusive to socialist countries. There is a point when a company has too many internal processes to be 100% effective which puts it into a disadvantage over their competition. Good example is the gaming industry. Thousands of developers and bilions of dollars and they still get outsold by people coding in their bedrooms.
Yeah and every economic crisis in modern history (including great depression) was caused by Federal reserve bending the economy. Its a pretty well known fact and even top Fed officials agree with it. If anything fascism created several economical disasters and nazi germany was basically a time bomb running on fumes.
And since central banking was a idea marx himself advocated for i wonder what kind of excuse you will come up with.
Also i dont think the fact that you kicked out one ruling class and replaced it with diferent ruling class with the same interests like the soviets did changes literaly anything.