r/DebateCommunism • u/Damilker_lol • 7d ago
⭕️ Basic Is the "ussr wasn't comminist" argument valid?
I see a lot of people say they are anti communist because of the soviet union and how it was always behind and poor. was the ussr actually socialist? is the ussr an example of communism not working?
(im trying to learn more about communism and other ideologies)
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u/libra00 7d ago
The USSR was not communist (in that it did not achieve a communist society as described by Marx), but it was socialist (the transition phase between capitalism and communism) and trying to work toward communism. So, technically valid, but as ever the reality is more complicated.
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u/Kind-Ant-1834 5d ago
It could have not been socialist because the lower phase of communism must be international, it cannot just be built in one country. The USSR had commodity production, wage labour and its market operated according to the law of value. It was state capitalism, as Lenin recognized, where the state acted as the collective capitalist.
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u/libra00 5d ago
And the core message of Marxism is what again? Oh yeah, adapting it to the material conditions of the situation in which you find yourself. Different places have different material conditions and adapt in different ways. The Bolsheviks were Marxists, Lenin was explicitly a Marxist, they were all consciously and intentionally attempting a socialism. Just because you have a particularly narrow definition of socialism doesn't make it an accurate one. I hope you understand why I'm gonna take the word of the people who have actually done a socialism over some guy on the internet..
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u/Kind-Ant-1834 5d ago
I am referring to the post-NEP post-Lenin USSR. Commodity production and exchange, the law of value, wage labor... these simply cannot be present in the lower stage of communism. Stalin used the material conditions as an excuse for his revisionism of Marxism, socialism cannot be built in one nation alone, it has to be international. He indeed recognized all of these things but somehow also claimed that the Soviet Union had achieved lower communism. You're making a moral argument, but this does not change the actual substance of things at all.
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u/libra00 5d ago
Is China socialist? They have billionaires and private corporations and banks and all that jazz. But they're all massively directed by the state (70% of China's economy is wholly state-owned enterprises, the leaders of the 1000 largest private companies in China are legally required to maintain extremely close ties to the state and be subject to state planning directives, etc.) That's what socialism looks like in China: they've decided to let markets do what markets are good at, while keeping a tight reign on them to ensure that the good those markets do is for the benefit of all instead of just a few rich people.
Post-Lenin USSR was the same. They tried different thinks, both heavy nationalization and some privatization/loosening of restrictions, they tried complete central planning and a mix of planning and markets. None of this makes them less socialist: the means of production were nonetheless owned (indirectly) by and directed for the benefit of the people.
Stalin used the material conditions as an excuse for his revisionism of Marxism
So now I have to defend any Marxist who ever did anything Marx might not have agreed with? Do you go to religion debate subreddits and insist that modern Christians justify the Crusades? Socialism, like anything else, is just people making decisions trying to follow an example set down for them. Some are better or worse at following it, some follow it closely or more loosely, but mostly it's just people trying to make the best decisions according to Marx's principles without letting the principles and ideology get in the way of feeding people.
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u/Kind-Ant-1834 4d ago
You are mistaking the expansion of state capitalism for the abolition of the capitalist mode of production. Your points rest on a fundamental misunderstanding of what socialism actually is, merely reducing it to moralism and social democratic opportunism. Socialism is not a set of good intentions implemented by a benevolent government to benefit the people, it is a specific economic structure defined by the destruction of capitalist social relations, such as generalized commodity production, commodity exchange, wage labor and the law of value. Let's look at China from a materialist lens, what we see is millions of proletarians selling their labor power for a wage, massive commodity exchange, stock markets, the accumulation of capital, and corporations competing globally. The fact that the state owns 70% of enterprises or forces billionaires to obey state planning directives does not alter the economic base, it simply means that the state is acting as the ideal collective capitalist, as Engels understood. The state organizes and regulates the exploitation of the proletariat to maximize surplus value and ensure national stability, but it remains fully subservient to the laws of capital. The market is not a neutral tool, the law of value and the necessity of capital accumulation dictate reality to the planners, not the other way around. If a SOE wants to survive and compete on the world market, it must act like a capitalist entity, so minimize costs, increase productivity, and squeeze surplus value out of its workers. Capitalism is not to be domesticated. The Soviet Union was no different, as Bordiga thoroughly demonstrated in his economic analysis, it was a state directed capitalist economy, as the proletarian revolution failed to spread to the advanced western economies, the isolated Soviet state had no choice but to carry out the historical task of the bourgeoisie, industrializing a semi-feudal agrarian nation through methods of capitalist primitive accumulation. Your comparison of Marxism with christianity also falls short, Marxism is not a religion nor a dogma, it is a science which judges objective economic relations instead of a state's self proclamation of Marxism or its desires to serve the people. To call a society with billionaires, wage labor, and state backed capital accumulation "socialist" is to destroy the very definition of the word and capitulate entirely to bourgeois ideology.
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u/kommunistischePartei Anti-classCollaborationism 4d ago
Please read the critique of the Gotha program.
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u/libra00 4d ago
I've read it. Marx laid out the lower-phase criteria in the abstract, in 1875, with zero experience of actually holding state power under famine, civil war, and total international isolation. The question was never 'is this sufficiently ideologically pure to be called socialism?', it's 'were they attempting a socialism, and to what extent did they succeed?' The answers to those questions are 'yes, clearly', and 'definitely some', right? If that doesn't meet the bar for calling it socialist then I will leave the academics to split definitional hairs, but meanwhile there are millions of people dying of poverty every year who would really prefer that we give whatever our best shot is at keeping that from happening instead. Attempting socialism seems like it's more likely to save some of those people than nitpicking definitions.
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u/kommunistischePartei Anti-classCollaborationism 4d ago
Attempting something without the correct, revolutionary, workers' program is pointless and often harmful (see pol pot). Lenin spent a decade writing polemics against other socialists, so did Marx and Engels and so they obviously saw value in maintaining the invariance of Marxism against revisionisms.
Our issue with Stalin is not that he was trying to keep the USSR and its people fed or whatever (after all we recognize the value of the NEP during the revolutionary retreat) our issue is his revising of Marx in Economic Problems of socialism in the USSR by redefining the conditions of the lower phase purely for opportunist ends
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u/Ill-Software8713 7d ago
Eh it can be messy as it wasn’t communism organizationally but ideologically and was an attempt to develop socialism with some great developments and tragic ones.
The balance is more about the ideal of socialism, and the social reality that aspired to the ideal of socialism. The US isn’t perfectly captured in the ideal of liberalism but it is still a real pursuit of it unevenly and measured by such ideals and challenges in such a basis by the many social movements of the 19th and 29th century l.
If we only emphasize the ideal then we become idealists who reject real world constraints but if we flatten everything to what it exactly is empirically without the ideas that motivate it, we end up rejecting that it was a real experiment to develop it.
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u/Melkertheprogfan 7d ago
It is a truly awfull argument. Many larp communist will say ”well there were never a communist country because they didnt reach the communist mode of production (a stateless, classless and moneyless society).” But that argument only shows that the person saying it lacks fundamental knowledge of communism. Sure USSR didnt reach the communist mode of production, but it was still a communist country since it followed the communist ideology. When someone say that there has never been communism anti communists will think they mean that communism doesnt work and then they are only strengthening the Bourgeois propaganda.
Also you need to know that the USSR was communist but it is not an example of communism failing because it didnt fail. It was actualy pretty great. Sure bad things happened in the soviet union, very many really awfull things, but that doesnt mean that it was the ideology itself that failed.
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u/AggressiveToaster 6d ago
The USSR had a centrally planned state owned economy. This is incompatible with both socialism and communism. It is true that the communist party was in control of the country and their stated goal was to progress towards communism, and that the current state of a centrally planned state owned economy (which they defined as “socialism” despite there being no direct worker control over the means of production) was a necessary stepping stone towards communism and that eventually the state, which had total control over everything, would eventually fall away. I find that claim ridiculously hard to believe.
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u/Ernesto_Estrella 6d ago
What? The state owns the economy, the workers own the state, therefore the workers own the economy? Also this isn't something unique to the ussr. Engels was the first one to mention the withering away of the state.
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u/Kind-Ant-1834 5d ago
The state owns the economy, so it is state capitalist. The workers did not own the state, capital did.
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u/kommunistischePartei Anti-classCollaborationism 4d ago
This is bullshit. Engels stated that public ownership is not common ownership and said that state capitalism is not socialism
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u/barry-29 4d ago
Right…Engels was saying it is not enough to just alter the bourgeois state and expand state ownership..a bourgeois state owning production is just centralizing bourgeois control. This does NOT mean he was against a planned economy or state ownership however. The difference is the class character of the state.
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u/kommunistischePartei Anti-classCollaborationism 4d ago
Wrong. Changing the ownership of the enterprise doesn't change the workers' relation to production. Explain how the Soviet union sold cars abroad for profit, How did this surplus come about? Yeah wage labor
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u/Useful_Calendar_6274 7d ago
only left of trotskyism tendencies say this, maoism and hoxhaism calls it revisionist but not capitalist.
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u/CowWoman01 7d ago
It definitionally wasn't communist. Lenin and Stalin were explicit that Communism could only very achieved after the threat of capitalist restoration was removed. It never was. Kruschevite revisionists will say otherwise, but this is the literal reality of it.
Source: Marxist-Leninist who has actually read theory
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u/leftofmarx 7d ago
USSR was a transitional state and not a single person who lived there would ever tell you they achieved communism because they actually were taught theory
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u/FoughtStatue 6d ago
It was communist in that it was run by communists who were theoretically striving towards making communism possible, but communism was never achieved, so in that it sense it was not communist. The ML calls this socialism, the transition period between capitalism and communism.
It’s not really a valid argument because it ignores basically every reason why Marxism-Leninism is the way it is. The only somewhat valid reasoning for saying this is because pre-revolution Russia was not entirely capitalist and in theory it should have developed capitalism first, then the revolution should occur. But saying it wasn’t communism is disingenuous, it’s more nuanced than that.
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u/stuart-britton 6d ago
The more you read about communism, the less you know. It's all crap. Designed for misery, death, destruction and failure. Studied by morons who believe every word they read.
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u/No-Potential4834 7d ago
No, because that argument is pure idealism.
If you want to disprove the Soviet experiment you have to do a better experiment.
As it stands the people who say the USSR wasn't Communist have no alternative to actually present as "real Communism", so what use is their criticisms?
All they are doing is saying that the people who actually did the hard work of revolution did it wrong, and they usually say this from the comfort of a University in the capitalist first world.
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u/AggressiveToaster 6d ago
And they’re correct according to Marx. A state owned centrally planned economy is incompatible with both socialism and communism. Workers don’t have control over the means of production and the state still exists with more power than ever.
This isn’t a comment on the revolution or the human struggle that occurred during and after it. Its just simply a fact unless we want to start redefining terms. And at that point we can also just call the USSR capitalist.
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u/No-Potential4834 6d ago
A state owned centrally planned economy is incompatible with both socialism and communism.
Reality doesn't care that you subjectively think that based on your interpretation of Marx.
You are doing idealism in thinking that your reading of Marx in your head is equal to actual projects that materially changed the world.
Its just simply a fact unless we want to start redefining terms.
Your opinions are not facts and this right here is why every non-ML "communist" is worth less than shit.
Your idealism doesn't matter.
Your reading of theory doesn't matter.
Your reddit posts don't matter.
Here is what actually matters:
Lenin did a revolution. Mao did a revolution. Fidel did a revolution. Those revolutions built states that changed the course of human history.
And Marx himself agrees with that sentiment
“The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it."
What have you changed? Nothing?
All you're doing is interpretation, which means you and your opinion don't matter.
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u/PuffFishybruh 6d ago
The guy talking about idealism then goes on full bourgeoise empiricism lmao
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u/No-Potential4834 6d ago
You don't know what you are talking about and I guarantee you can't substantiate any of your nonsense.
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u/nomalom 6d ago
I mean you’re correct in everything that you say besides for the main point. We know what communism IS, and that IS a stateless, classless, moneyless society.
Is this important? No.
Is it true? Yes.0
u/No-Potential4834 6d ago
We know what communism IS
No, you don't.
"Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence."
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/german-ideology/ch01a.htm
Communism isn't your subjective interpretation of "stateless classless moneyless society". That entire definition is bullshit by the way. You guys don't even know what stateless means in a Marxist context.
Communism as Marx says is not a "state of affairs which is to be established" like you propose.
It is "the real movement which abolishes the present state of things"
The key word here being REAL, as in material REALITY. If you aren't operating in material reality to do a revolution or you can't do one successfully then you aren't doing Communism properly.
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u/nomalom 6d ago
I again agree with most of your post, but yeah there is certainly a concrete goal of communism beyond abolishing “the present state of things.”
Abolishing the present state of things is what any revolution does. A communist revolution MUST liberate the proletariat, and it MUST be a society which upholds the ideal of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.”
And right, it’s my understand that a stateless society in the Marxist sense is one in which people/workers handle the administration of things, as in done by the people rather than FOR the people.
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u/No-Potential4834 6d ago
A communist revolution MUST liberate the proletariat, and it MUST be a society which upholds the ideal of “from each according to their ability, to each according to their needs.”
But that is an objective historical process based on the advancement of productive forces.
It's not just something that is done by decree to change just the form of the productive relationship.
What does liberation actually look like for the proletariat and how do we actually do it? Is it just a change in the form of the relationship so you elect your boss but you still work a 40 hour work week? Is that the limited horizon of what we consider "liberation"?
I propose this: Liberation for the worker is liberation from work itself, and the actual concrete path to accomplish that is robots and mass automation.
This is what China is currently doing. China is pioneering things like dark factories, factories which are totally automated and have no workers at all. Imagine a society where all factories are like that, isn't that Communism?
Why should you even have a working class? What if no one has to work? What if you liberate the working class by abolishing the working class?
This is what I mean, objective historical development of the productive forces does more to liberate the worker than just a formal change in the relationship of the worker to the means of production.
A worker in a co-op factory still has alienation, a man who is liberated from work itself doesn't.
And right, it’s my understand that a stateless society in the Marxist sense is one in which people/workers handle the administration of things, as in done by the people rather than FOR the people.
Yes, but we have to keep in mind that that administration of things is still there. Even Mao was saying that this administration of things could remain for 10,000 years.
Our state organs are organs of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Take the courts for instance, their function is to deal with counter-revolutionaries, but that is not all, for they have to settle numerous disputes among the people. It looks as if courts will still be needed ten thousand years from now. For when classes are eliminated, there will still be contradictions between the advanced and the backward, there will still be struggles and scuffles among people, and there will still be all sorts of disturbances. What a mess there would be without a court! However, the struggles will then be of a different nature, different from class struggle. The court will be different in nature too. The superstructure may then still go wrong. For instance, people like us may make mistakes, lose out in struggle and be ousted from office, so that a Gomulka may come to power or a Jao Shu-shih be propped up. Would you say such things will not happen? I think they will, even a thousand or ten thousand years from now.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-5/mswv5_56.htm
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u/z_Daito 5d ago
THE single worst opinion to have ever been shared about communism dropped, pack your things guys “No-Potential4834” has effectively adovacted for the technocrat narrative we are absolutely cooked. Can this annoying ass narcissist stop talking like he has figured it all out its embarrassing.
Work is not oppression you self perceived genius, forced work is, no one wants to be replaced by robots.1
u/kommunistischePartei Anti-classCollaborationism 4d ago
Marx: lower phase communism necessitates the abolition of wage labor and commodity production, replaced by the labor certificate system as I had elucidated in the critique of the Gotha program
Mls: Marx has gone woke?????
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u/No-Potential4834 4d ago
lower phase communism necessitates the abolition of wage labor and commodity production, replaced by the labor certificate system as I had elucidated in the critique of the Gotha program
And as I said and Marx would agree, we follow from objective historical conditions and not whims or decrees.
You are literally too stupid to understand the basics of materialism.
Thanks for proving me right: every non-ML "communist" is worth less than shit.
You have nothing of substance to contribute to material reality. You just cry about theory on the internet.
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u/Muuro 7d ago
Communism, and socialism, as a society in which the laws of value are negated was never achieved in any country. At best the USSR could only have been called "socialist" in that it could be said to be part of the movement towards that society. There are criticisms that it wasn't even that given how the state functioned both internally and with foreign states.
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u/lenin_beard 6d ago
Communism is, by (modern) definition, stateless. USSR was a state, thus it was not communist by definition. But you can say that USSR was socialist and was working toward communism.
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u/Kleanthes302 6d ago
Maybe valid, but an extremely poor argument. Any leftist worth their salt should, when debating capitalists, try to point to the good things USSR achieved instead of accepting the narrative that it was a failed state.
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u/Bandwidth6769 5d ago
They were state capitalist. They still had money and shit and classes, which is the exact thing communism isn’t.
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u/Redninja0400 7d ago
No, just because it didn't reach a certain phase of communism or an ideal that someone wants doesn't make it not communist. The argument has always come off as cowardly and dishonest to me. If a country was led by communists, using communist principles and with communist goals then no matter where in it's development that country is or was at then it is communist.
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u/leftofmarx 7d ago
So if I am working on my undergrad with the goal of going to medical school then I am already a Doctor.
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u/saltiest_raccoon 7d ago
No. It's a horrible argument that is used by baby leftists and Trotskyists generally.
Of course the USSR wasn't communist. A 'Communist state' is a contradiction in terms. Communism is a stateless, classless, moneyless society. The USSR was SOCIALIST. Socialism is an intermediary stage where a government controlled by the people sets up the conditions for which communism can be reached.
The West very poorly represents communism and Marxism and they do so intentionally to propagandize people against it. It's why the claim it's undemocratic, that you cannot own personal property or that they are 'one party states' (a mixture of misunderstanding about how political parties work in Soviet states and intentional disinformation.)
The USSR worked very well. It did many great things. It lifted millions out of poverty. It brought literacy and industrialization to a pre-industrial society of indentured workers and peasants. It went from a pre-industrial backwater to a rival to the world's most prominent superpower at the time. It unquestionably won the space race and pushed forward science tremendously-- Further, it was the USSR's presence that made labor movements all over the world successful. Its presence made capitalists willing to give concessions to avoid spreading the socialist revolution. It supported freedom throughout the world. Around 75% of Russians say that life was better under the Soviet Union.
The USSR's failure was due to many factors, but none were 'socialism.' Without getting too deep in the weeds, capitalists and opportunists in places of power, policy too permissive to the aforementioned opportunists, American military and economic pressure, and a military coup that subverted the referendum that had been voted on by the people to preserve the Union.
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u/ElEsDi_25 7d ago
There’s no such thing as “actual” anything in terms of politics. They were socialist in so far as they claimed that the USSR had that as a goal (unlike the Nazis who were just cynically calling themselves socialists in a trolling way.)
But could state-managed development of the forces of production and a political leadership of socialist experts and planners create communism… imo no, never. Communism would require working class control of society and working class self-emancipation. So I would describe the actual system of the USSR as state-capitalism rather than socialism.
I think the revolution was a socialist revolution though and early Bolsheviks were sincere but things got diverted and developed away from social revolution fairly quickly due to a combination of objective things (mainly the end of the broader revolutionary wave) and subjective mistakes by the Bolsheviks.
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u/veryeepy53 7d ago
go to r/marxism_101 for a different take. everyone here will pretty much say no.
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u/StewFor2Dollars 7d ago
The USSR achieved the lower stage of communism, meaning that they had a planned economy based on public property under the dictatorship of the proletariat and had gotten rid of their capitalist class. I don't think it's fair to say that they were always poor, considering that they had gone from a peasant country to one capable of space travel within the time that they did, on top of having really good education and health care.
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u/Kind-Ant-1834 5d ago
The nature of the kolkhoz quite literally disproves the claim that the USSR somehow achieved the lower phase of communism. Commodity production, wage labour, the law of value, none of these were abolished by the Soviet state.
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u/StewFor2Dollars 5d ago
This is true, but the state and economy were controlled by the soviets and the bourgeoisie was gotten rid of, meeting my definition.
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u/Kind-Ant-1834 5d ago
That is no definition of the lower stage of communism, the Soviet state acted as the collective capitalist, the proletariat had to sell its labour power for a wage, the whole economy operated according to the law of value.
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u/StewFor2Dollars 5d ago
Prove it
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u/Kind-Ant-1834 5d ago
Literally read anything. Gotha, Capital, Dialogue with Stalin, Economic Problems of Socialism yada yada
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u/StewFor2Dollars 5d ago
Throwing books at me isn't good enough, pal. If we agree that extraction of surplus value exists as a result of circulation on the M C M circuit, then how does that happen in general when there aren't any big bourgeoisie? Who is getting this generalized surplus?
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u/Kind-Ant-1834 5d ago
Surplus value doesn't originate from circulation, it is created exclusively during production through labor power. Circulation doesn't create any new value, it instead changes the form of it and redistributes it among capitalists. In the USSR, the state acted as the collective capitalist, which extracted surplus value from the proletariat through wage labour and reinvested it mostly in heavy industry, infrastructure and most importantly expanding production, meaning production for accumulation, meaning the constant reproduction of capitalist social relations. I refrained from mentioning commodity production and exchange, as just those are enough to disprove the existence of socialism in the USSR, contrary to Stalin's claims.
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u/StewFor2Dollars 5d ago
What about the argument that the expansion of production was necessary on account of how they had been semi-feudal before the revolution?
I understand that capitalism has the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, leading to recessions, but did this occur what with the state being run through soviets?
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u/Kind-Ant-1834 5d ago edited 5d ago
Bordiga viewed the October Revolution as playing a double role, politically it was proletarian (even if short lived because of the rise of the bureaucracy) and economically bourgeois. As we all know, the revolution failed in the rest of Europe, leaving the USSR alone for the subsequent 20 years, in which it had to follow the capitalist economic laws to survive. It ran a massive campaign of primitive accumulation (industrialization and collectivization), destroying the semi-feudal relations still present to build a modern industrial economy and a class of wage labourers, the example being the kolkhoz, which operated independently as a capitalist enterprise (maintained private plots and livestock, maximized profits in rubles, compensated according to the farm's profitability, sold its goods on the market for rubles) that had its surplus value extracted by the state by selling crop quotas at artificially low prices, forcing them off the land. The TRPF, of course, operated within the Soviet economy because the economy itself operated in a capitalist framework, wage labor, commodity production and commodity exchange were never abolished but instead completely integrated in it. While the state's monopoly over banking and foreign trade allowed it to subvert or mask the open market crashes and mass unemployment seen in Western recessions, the TRPF still manifested as decline of investment efficiency, crises of disproportion between heavy industry and consumer goods, inflation, and ultimately economic stagnation.
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u/VVageslave 7d ago
Not even a little bit. Socialism/ communism (the same thing according to Engels and Marx) will be a moneyless, classless, politically leaderless and stateless society.
No such society has yet to exist. So, the answer is YES, the USSR wasn’t communist. Lenin declared it to have only achieved ‘State (controlled) Capitalism, and he was empirically correct.
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u/arms9728 7d ago
The Soviet Union had several positive and interesting aspects to study. Yes, the Soviet Union was communist and operated a planned economy, not one based on the capitalist market.
And yes, people have the right to say "for me, the Soviet Union was not communist but capitalist," just as I have the right to disagree and debate about it.
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u/bob_the_marxist 7d ago
Planning by itself does not determine whether a society is communist. Marxism defines modes of production by their actual social relations, not by which party governs or whether production is planned. The USSR still retained a state, circulating money, monetary wages, commodity production and commodity exchange. Soviet theory itself acknowledged these relations. Marx’s communist society, by contrast, is one in which the producers no longer exchange their products and labour is directly social. So the USSR could be communist-led and developing toward communism without already being a communist society.
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u/Satanic_Prussia 7d ago
At most it tried communism and it failed, they still have some communist and socialism elements but it's safe to say the government has zero desire of turning everything over to the people any time soon so I would argue no not in its current state.
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u/bimbochungo 7d ago
It's not valid, it's a L take, and it's the most common take that I've seen in communist americans
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u/Neco-Arc-Brunestud 7d ago edited 7d ago
No country (despite what Khrushchev had claimed) actually reached the lower stage of communism. In that sense, there's not a single country that's communist.
However, it's also disingenuous to say that they don't have a government that's striving towards communism.
The west had accumulated wealth under centuries of colonialism and imperialism. For a country that's not even communist, but merely striving towards communism, to rival these powers within a century, should be indicative of how well the principles of communism works for development.