So, was the USSR State Capitalist, or was it Socialist? Did the Bureaucratic Class in the USSR constitute a new Bourgeoise, or not? What books/articles should I watch to understand this?
>>2374585Some claim there is no difference.
some will ignore all the times either marx or engels contradict this, like that one used by dengists.
>Get down to business, all of you! You will have capitalists beside you, including foreign capitalists, concessionaires and leaseholders. They will squeeze profits out of you amounting to hundreds per cent; they will enrich themselves, operating alongside of you. Let them. Meanwhile you will learn from them the business of running the economy, and only when you do that will you be able to build up a communist republic. Since we must necessarily learn quickly, any slackness in this respect is a serious crime. And we must undergo this training, this severe, stern and sometimes even cruel training, because we have no other way out.
<Lenin, The New Economic Policy, 1921
>The mainland will maintain the socialist system and not turn off onto the wrong road, the road to capitalism. One of the features distinguishing socialism from capitalism is that socialism means common prosperity, not polarization of income. The wealth created belongs first to the state and second to the people; it is therefore impossible for a new bourgeoisie to emerge. The amount that goes to the state will be spent for the benefit of the people, a small portion being used to strengthen national defence and the rest to develop the economy, education and science and to raise the people’s living standards and cultural level.
Since the downfall of the Gang of Four an ideological trend has appeared that we call bourgeois liberalization. Its proponents worship the “democracy” and “freedom” of the Western capitalist countries and reject socialism. This cannot be allowed. China must modernize; it must absolutely not liberalize or take the capitalist road, as countries of the West have done. Those proponents of bourgeois liberalization who have violated state law must be dealt with severely.
<Deng Xiaoping, Bourgeois Liberalization Means Taking The Capitalist Road, 1985
>China is not a free market economy. We tried. We let them into the World Trade Organization. We sent businesses over there. We made trade deals. They are a controlled top-down economy. You will never compete and win against them, unless you take back the means of production.
<Hillary Clinton, interview with Chatham House [now deleted from Youtube] (2021)
>China has found a way to use capitalism against us, and what I mean by that is the ability to attract investment into entities that are deeply linked to the state.
<Marco Rubio, interview with Face the Nation on Jan. 29, 2023
>Will it be possible for private property to be abolished at one stroke? No, no more than existing forces of production can at one stroke be multiplied to the extent necessary for the creation of a communal society. In all probability, the proletarian revolution will transform existing society gradually and will be able to abolish private property only when the means of production are available in sufficient quantity.
<Friedrich Engels, Principles of Communism, 1847
>Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
<Karl Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875
>Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
<John Fitzgerald Kennedy, on the first anniversary of the Alliance for Progress, 13 March 1962
>Every demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the most shallow democracy, is simultaneously castigated as an "attempt on society" and stigmatized as "socialism". And finally the high priests of "religion and order" themselves are driven with kicks from their Pythian tripods, hauled out of their beds in the darkness of night, put in prison vans, thrown into dungeons or sent into exile; their temple is razed to the ground, their mouths are sealed, their pens broken, their law torn to pieces in the name of religion, of property, of the family, of order.
<Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852)
>The Japanese elite knew their country to be one among many confronted by the dangers of conquest or subjection which they had faced in the course of a long history […] what is perhaps more important, the Japanese elite possessed a state apparatus and a social structure capable of controlling the movement of an entire society. To transform a country from above without risking either passive resistance, disintegration, or revolution is extremely difficult. The Japanese rulers were in the historically exceptional position of being able to mobilise a traditional mechanism of social obedience for the purposes of a sudden, radical, but controlled 'westernisation' […] the 'Meiji Restoration' […] a drastic 'revolution from above' […] The parallelism between Japan and Prussia has often been made. In both countries capitalism was formally installed not by bourgeois revolution [against feudal lords] but from above, by an old [feudal] bureaucratic-aristocratic order which recognised that its survival could not otherwise be assured.
<Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Capital (1848-1875), Chapter 8
>Taken together, these accounts tell a pretty compelling and straightforward story: a worker state led by a vanguard party has placed the productive forces developed by capitalism under human control once again, for the benefit of the many rather than the few, and so definitively begun the complex and difficult transition away from capitalism and into communism that we call socialism. Capitalists, sheltered and insular in their dealings with fellow human beings, don’t understand that they are not sympathetic characters, so they shamelessly self-victimize in the press in the hopes of winning sympathy from the masses, in a futile effort to rally the necessary fervor for military intervention. The situation looks grim for the forces of reaction… And then the Western Left bursts onto the scene with a litany of harsh recriminations, determined to build up China into a villain worthy of war: “China has billionaires.” “China still has inequality.” “China still has wage labor.” “There’s no free speech there.” “Suicide nets.” “Free Tibet.” “Xinjiang is East Turkestan.” “Liberate Hong Kong.” “Neither Washington Nor Beijing.” Their indulgence in atrocity propaganda is unparalleled, and they’ll often outdo original sources and even the most vicious reactionaries in their preening paraphrases of Chinese horror.
<Roderic Day, China Has Billionaires, 5th of April, 2021
>If private property, money, abstract value production, class society, and the state, are abolished prematurely, when the oppressive logic and power of capital still controls the entire world, China would become vulnerable to both external imperialist violence and internal reactionary sabotage (no doubt under the banner of “democracy”). The Communist Party would be immediately compromised by foreign backed elements; the country might be torn apart once again by civil war, and once again subjected to imperialist domination. The Chinese revolution, what so many millions fought, worked tirelessly, and sacrificed their lives for, will have been for nothing. Marxism is anything but rigid and dogmatic, and has always been about adapting to the ever changing objective conditions of each era, using what ever is available toward revolutionary goals. The opinion of those baizuo who think that China should have chosen the disastrous course of action described above, or at least remained underdeveloped, poor, and weak, in order to satisfy their fundamentalist interpretation of Marxism, should not be indulged. These myopic and short-sighted “left com”, “ultra-left”, or modern “Maoist” types love to denounce modern China as a betrayal of socialism, without considering that it is the failure of the Western left to do successful revolutions in their countries which made it necessary for existing socialist states to adapt to the global conditions of entrenched neo-liberal capitalism. Those who think that 1.4 billion people, who for 200 years suffered so immensely under vicious colonial rule and brutal capitalist domination, will so quickly forget what their true enemy is, don’t know much about capitalism, colonialism, or people.
<He Zhao, The Long Game and Its Contradictions, 27th October, 2018
>Then in 1966 came the “cultural revolution”, which lasted a whole decade, a real disaster for China. During that period many veteran cadres suffered persecution, including me. I was labelled the "No. 2 Capitalist Roader" after Liu Shaoqi. Liu was called "commander-in-chief of the bourgeois headquarters" and I "deputy commander-in-chief". Many strange things happened in those days. For instance, people were told that they should be content with poverty and backwardness and that it was better to be poor under socialism and communism than to be rich under capitalism. That was the sort of rubbish peddled by the Gang of Four. There is no such thing as socialism and communism with poverty. The ideal of Marxists is to realize communism. According to Marx, communist society is a society in which the principle of from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs is applied. What is the principle of to each according to his needs? How can we apply this principle without highly developed productive forces and vast material wealth? According to Marxism, communist society is a society in which there is overwhelming material abundance. Socialism is the first stage of communism; it means expanding the productive forces, and it represents a long historical period. Only if we constantly expand the productive forces can we finally achieve communism. The Gang of Four's absurd theory of socialism and communism led only to poverty and stagnation. […] Certain individuals, pretending to support the reform and the open policy, call for wholesale Westernization of China in an attempt to lead the country towards capitalism. These people don't really support our policies; they are only trying vainly to change the nature of our society. If China were totally Westernized and went capitalist, it would be absolutely impossible for us to modernize. The problem we have to solve is how to enable our one billion people to cast off poverty and become prosperous. If we adopted the capitalist system in China, probably a small number of people would be enriched, while the overwhelming majority would remain in a permanent state of poverty. If that happened, there would be a revolution in China. China's modernization can be achieved only through socialism, not capitalism. There have been people who have tried to introduce capitalism into China, and they have always failed.
<Deng Xiaoping, We shall draw on historical experience and guard against wrong tendencies, April 30, 1987
>So, to build socialism it is necessary to develop the productive forces. Poverty is not socialism. To uphold socialism, a socialism that is to be superior to capitalism, it is imperative first and foremost to eliminate poverty. True, we are building socialism, but that doesn’t mean that what we have achieved so far is up to the socialist standard. Not until the middle of the next century, when we have reached the level of the moderately developed countries, shall we be able to say that we have really built socialism and to declare convincingly that it is superior to capitalism. We are advancing towards that goal.
<Deng Xiaoping, To Uphold Socialism We Must Eliminate Poverty, 26th April, 1987
>“I am convinced that more and more people will come to believe in Marxism, because it is a science. Using historical materialism, it has uncovered the laws governing the development of human society. Feudal society replaced slave society, capitalism supplanted feudalism, and, after a long time, socialism will necessarily supersede capitalism. This is an irreversible general trend of historical development, but the road has many twists and turns. Over the several centuries that it took for capitalism to replace feudalism, how many times were monarchies restored! So, in a sense, temporary restorations are usual and can hardly be avoided. Some countries have suffered major setbacks, and socialism appears to have been weakened. But the people have been tempered by the setbacks and have drawn lessons from them, and that will make socialism develop in a healthier direction. So don't panic, don't think that Marxism has disappeared, that it's not useful any more and that it has been defeated. Nothing of the sort!”
<Deng Xiaoping, Excerpts From Talks Given In Wuchang, Shenzhen, Zhuhai And Shanghai, 1992
>I think China is a socialist country, and Vietnam is a socialist nation as well. And they insist that they have introduced all the necessary reforms in order to motivate national development and to continue seeking the objectives of socialism. There are no fully pure regimes or systems. In Cuba, for instance, we have many forms of private property. We have hundreds of thousands of farm owners. In some cases they own up to 110 acres (some 150 hectares). In Europe they would be considered large landholders. Practically all Cubans own their own home and, what is more, we welcome foreign investment. But that does not mean that Cuba has stopped being socialist.
<Fidel Castro, Interview with La Stampa reporter Jas Gawronski, published 2nd of January, 1994
>"The modern factories that defeated the Germans in World War II had their origin in the many technical agreements signed with foreign firms […] By March 1930 the [USSR] had signed 104 contracts. Of the 104, 81 were with American or German companies […] Over 400 American engineers made the architectural drawings for the Magnitogorosk plant, the largest project in the First Five-Year Plan. […] In May 1930, McKee waws hired to supervise the construction as well. By 1931, 250 American engineers were working on the project […] McKee brought in engineers from General Electric to work on the huge electrical installation. New open-hearth furnaces were designed by the Freyn Company […] the American Morgan Engineering Company […] and the German Demag A-G.”
<Walter Dunn Jr., The Soviet Economy and the Red Army 1930-1945, 1995
>In speaking of the capitalists who strive only for profit, only to get rich, I do not want to say that these are the most worthless people, capable of nothing else. Many of them undoubtedly possess great organizing talent, which I do not dream of denying. We Soviet people learn a great deal from the capitalists.
<Stalin, Marxism Versus Liberalism, An Interview With H.G. Wells, 1934
>>2374426>USSR State Capitalist, or was it Socialistsocialist
>Did the Bureaucratic Class in the USSR constitute a new Bourgeoise, or notnot
>What books/articles should I watch books and articles are read though
>So, was the USSR State Capitalist, or was it Socialist?
Depends on the era, post Kosygin or pre. I'd say it's predominantly socialist until its final years, although the reforms following Stalin's death made it increasingly less so.
>Did the Bureaucratic Class in the USSR constitute a new Bourgeoise, or not?
Not exactly. Although the primitive nature of planning in the USSR did lead to bureaucrats having more power than they should and being vulnerable to corruption, they didn't own the means of production and reap surplus value as profit in the same way that a member of the bourgeoise under capitalism would.
<"A number of differences between profits in the Soviet Union and profits in market capitalist societies should be pointed out: (1) Profits cannot be increased in the Soviet Union by restricting production since all prices are centrally determined. (2) Profits are not owned or even very much controlled by private persons. Profits are shared out by the state and the enterprises according to criteria established by the state. Only a very, very small proportion accrues to the managers in the form of bonuses. Thus, unlike in the West, the profits of an enterprise do not lead to great differences in people’s social positions…"-Albert Szymanski - Is the Red Flag Flying The Political Economy of the Soviet Union pg 38
>What books/articles should I watch to understand this?
The attached PDF is a pretty good analysis focused on the post-Kosygin USSR, mostly focused on dispelling Maoist and Hoxhaist arguments that it betrayed communism, but there's also some analysis on the system during the Stalin era.
>>2374690>Since the downfall of the Gang of Four an ideological trend has appeared that we call bourgeois liberalization. Its proponents worship the “democracy” and “freedom” of the Western capitalist countries and reject socialism. This cannot be allowed. China must modernize; it must absolutely not liberalize or take the capitalist road, as countries of the West have done. Those proponents of bourgeois liberalization who have violated state law must be dealt with severely.Tho this just a symptom of reactionary tendencies in the dialectical building of socialism… considering what Iliescu has done over here…
Ye let's hope Xie retains a iron fist against those mfs
>>2374426According to Richard Kosolapov, former member of the central committee. The USSR was merely in the "transitional period from capitalism to socialism."
>To decipher this self-assessment of the meaning of the necessary transformations, I will have to recall one of the many discussions of 1989 at the Moscow Higher Party School. Its highlight was that Richard Ivanovich Kosolapov took part in it. At that time, I was even boyishly proud that the recent editor-in-chief of Kommunist, unexpectedly removed from this serious post by the new General Secretary, accepted the invitation of our department. In his rather lengthy speech, he touched on many aspects that were actively discussed at the time. I will recall here only one of them:
>"It's time for us to stop floating in some kind of illusory world. We say that we live under socialism, but in reality we live in a transitional period from capitalism to socialism…" And then followed a completely unexpected thesis: "…with the periodic return of certain old and contradictory socio-economic forms."
>The speaker then went on to explain: “Due to the fact that our country had existed for a long time under conditions of formal socialization with the powerful influence of purely administrative methods of managing the economy, it turned out that the bureaucracy imagined itself to be all-powerful. The enormous concentration of surplus product, which was needed to solve major national economic problems, began to be used in part for the needs of the bureaucracy, which signifies a state-capitalist tendency in our development. This negative tendency was superimposed on another in the 1960s and 1970s. The sovburs, who had just accumulated capital at that time, began to yearn for money, since they began to lack power in some way. At the same time, the stagnant bureaucracy, prone to corruption, became bored at the levers of power, since it wanted more comfort. Due to this, in my opinion, a bloc of one layer and another was formed. At the same time, I do not want to cast a shadow on all the managers and, naturally, the workers of the party apparatus, but some of them, undoubtedly, found themselves in the position of people who went against the people and were subjected to bourgeois degeneration.”
>The reaction to the speech was stormy, but… The backbone of the Democratic Platform, which was being formed at that time in the MVPSh, under the patronage of the Politburo member, Secretary of the CPSU Central Committee A.N. Yakovlev, was in solidarity with the criticism of the bureaucracy, but did not want a public indication of its commitment to bourgeois degeneration. The alternative wing of those present clearly rejected the motive of the state-capitalist tendency. And the idea of the "periodic return of society to the transitional period" remained, it seems to me, almost unnoticed by everyone.https://web.archive.org/web/20200326111240/https://gazeta-pravda.ru/issue/31-30963-26-marta-2020-goda/richard-kosolapov-i-etim-vsye-skazano/ >>2374606>Some claim there is no difference.some will ignore all the times either marx or engels contradict this
bait or severe mental retardation?