>>2386083> it's a textbook on political economy. a textbook.That’s exactly the problem
Instead of going directly to the source of communist theory, Marx, Engels, Lenin, even latter writers such as Perry Anderson who did an in-depth analysis of the slave and feudal modes of production, he went directly to the simplest, shallowest, economically determinist explanations of human historical development, in a text crafted, primarily, to train Soviet citizens into a peculiar form of Marxism that is not at all a ruthless criticism of all that exists and instead the ideological maintenance of the present state of things (in the USSR)
> yes i can. the first is that state capitalism (as Bukharin used it) is not applicable to the Soviet union (which you would know had you read his economics of the transitional period).Leftcoms are not referring to state capitalism as Bukharin mentioned it, and you have still not said what is “bad faith” about such a criticism, only reiterated that you disagree. We know you disagree. That does not make our criticism bad faith. Left-communism isn’t an attempt to make Stalinists feel bad.
> social democracy" is an umbrella term used equal out regimes from the soviet to fucking hitler.Not at all, the USSR is often written off as a social democracy by Leftcoms because the vast majority of the rhetoric MLs draft in its defense amount to defending its welfare system and state monopoly and calling both these things socialist, yet they were not conflated with “socialism” at all until MLs needed to defend themselves against socialist critics, or perhaps more accurately they were recognized as not socialist in nature once social democratic reforms were achieved in the imperial core and threatened capital in no way, shape, or form.
The folly lies upon MLs themselves, whose defense of socialism pushes them to uphold the gains brought forth by capital’s historical advance (industrialization, “modernization”, “national sovereignty”, modern science, mass state funded welfare) with socialism, whose only actual nature (socialism’s) is the abolition of capital’s mediations on the basis and utilization of its historical progress. The problem is that MLs perfectly mirror liberal critics when they argue that capitalism is socialism but in a positive, affirmative sense. MLs cannot respond to these criticism, truly, beyond openly flouting Marx, and revising his actual insights about the capitalist mode of production into a barely concealed defense of the capitalist mode of production.
> generalized refers to labor power being a commodity you nonce. how is labor power a commodity if there is no market for labor power, if the economy is planned i.e. unemployment is a statistical error, no leftcom can explain. there was commodity production, not generalized comprod. Labor power is sold as a commodity so long as its renumeration is in the form of the money wage, which obviously existed in the Soviet Union, for the only purpose of money is to conceal economic exploitation/the appropiation of surplus value. It does not matter if a private firm appropriates said value, or if a clique of shareholders do it, or if the state does it. By this same logic, a soldier is not selling their labor power in return for a wage, except, they are. By this same logic, capitalism ceases to exist within a monopoly. By this same logic, capitalism has not actually existed since the late 19th Century, when monopolies secured control over the advanced economies across the world. Socialism is not a synonym for state monopoly. If you have a proletarian class, you do not have a socialist society at all, what you do have, is a highly monopolized economy, which is itself still befuddled since pretty much all ML governments did have stipulations allowing for small producers (petit bourgeois) to persist in various fashion anyway.
Capitalism is not synonymous with some of its worst social symptoms, such as chronic unemployment nor homelessness. This is where MLs reveal themselves to functionally be radical social democrats, rather than actual Marxists, defending a society they feel sentimental attachment to, rather than ones that can be called socialist from a materialist standpoint.
> what do prices signal in a planned economy? certainly not the random fluctuations on the market as in a capitalist economy. they neither inform production plans. that's another thing, thinking that because things seem the same, they are the same. explain to me how did these prices inform gosplans? Prices do not determine production in capitalism in general
> were there workers who made production plans? yes. did this make them a new class? no. neither did the party members form a distinct class. do you even know what class means?? none of these people extracted any kind of meaningful surplus from their relation to the means of production.I didn’t state that the bureaucracy were a new class in itself, I stated that class rule was maintained. The secret of Capital, that Marx himself uncovered, is that the capitalist, the personification of Capital, is a relatively irrelevant figure, his most noteworthy act was the bourgeois revolutions by his ideological ancestors. This is a place where MLs seem to actively pretend to be more ignorant than they realistically should be, since even Lenin noted the rise of shareholders and the decreasing importance of the capitalist-industrialist-individual owner has long been a subject of both Marxist and even bourgeois analysis. Capital’s rule does not require an individual who is privately accumulating the surpluses to exist, it requires only personages who can maintain that surplus accumulation whether or not it falls into their own hands. Capital, as a social productive system and historical epoch, is not a conspiracy of the bourgeoisie.
> bla bla bla this is the new catchphrase when people get sick of listening to childish 'critiques' of the ussr, and then you even lapse into classical anticommunist slander (muh silencing of the opposition muh mass killings). you spent more time fighting against the ghost of moralism in your post than explaining the meaning behind you substanceless slogans.Your stance is moralist because nothing you have argued is built out of Marx’s actual theories, they center on how you feel. Your feelings are irrelevant. Yet you keep referencing them. And your personal offense. That would imply you cannot defend your own beliefs from a materialist standpoint. Your feelings do not matter, at all, they have no bearing on what is factual or correct.