The USSR: Socialist or Capitalist?

[alexdillard1917]

I have recently been debating many Stalinists over the USSR. I usually cite the existence of generalized commodity production or the law of value persisting, but nevertheless they still will say that Marxism is a science, you can’t immediately abolish commodity production, or that you are being dogmatic and to read “Oppose Book Worship”

 

How do i debunk these people

 

Thanks

[Anonymous]

The Socialist Party archives are the best resources that you can use, we have more than 58 pages on the Soviet Union, and 100 pages of Leninism,  but the existence of the law of value of exchange in the soviet union is a very good argument, even more, Marx indicated that the law of value is only applicable to capitalism, but Stalinist, Trotskyist, Maoists and all kind of Leninists are going to look for all kind of pretexts to indicate that the soviet union was a socialist country based on Lenin division of socialism and communism. state capitalism as a precondition for socialism, socialism in one country, Socialism is a post-capitalist society, it is not a precapitalist society, for Marx the transitional society was capitalism instead of socialism/communism

[ALB]

One thing is clear: any society where there is “commodity production” ie the production of goods and services to be sold on a market cannot be socialist or communist (the same thing). This is because buying and selling is an exchange of ownership between separate owners whereas socialism is based on the common ownership of productive resources and of what is produced.

Where there is common ownership the question is not to sell what has been produced but to distribute it, so in socialism goods and services are distributed or made available to people directly to use. Goods and services are produced and distributed directly for use, not for sale; there are no markets and no money.

So whatever it was the old USSR wasn’t socialist. So what was it? In theory it could have been some new non-capitalist exploitative society and this view has been argued for as “bureaucratic collectivism”, “oriental despotism”, “state feudalism”, etc. These theories at least recognise that it wasn’t socialism and had nothing to do with socialism. But they are still not adequate.

What justifies saying it was a form of capitalism rather than a new kind of class society was the existence of the wages system there, with the producers excluded from ownership and control of productive resources and so forced to sell their working skills for a wage to an employer, just as in classical capitalism. In the USSR the main employer was the state; hence the description “state capitalism”. But this is just a variety of capitalism, the system of capital accumulation out of surplus value produced by wage-labour.

There are also those who argue that the USSR was a society in transition from capitalism to socialism where the government was pursuing a policy of gradually abolishing commodity production and wage-labour. This was factually incorrect but also theoretically impossible, as argued in the section of this book on “The impossibility of gradualism”, basically that if you have a section of the economy producing commodities this affects the whole system.

[Anonymous]

The Myth of The Transitional Society

This is an excellent article published by the Socialist Party of Great Britain which debunks the whole concept of the Transitional Society defended by the Leninists.

The USSR was not a society in transit toward socialism, it was the opposite, it was a society in transit toward a capitalist mode of production which we have called State Capitalism, and Lenin himself admitted but indicating that it was beneficial for the majority of the workers, since when capitalism has benefited the majority of the workers? He knew that it was not  true, he had studied Marx capital

Wage Slavery which is one of the essential elements of the capitalist mode of production was highly  present in that society, and even more, during the beginning of the Soviets Republics most workers were forced to work extra time, and they imposed  a military policy at the point of production,

They had to accumulate capital and surplus-value, and the only way to obtain that is through the workers’ economical exploitation, they had to exploit the only social class able to establish socialism communism

[Author]

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