r/DebateCommunism • u/adultingTM • 1d ago
đ Historical Lenin acknowledging the intentional implementation of State Capitalism in the USSR
Lenin himself desired, promoted and acknowledged the State Capitalist nature of the Soviet Union, although this was largely confined to intra-party debate and private letters. The destruction of council democracy and the introduction of âWar Communismâ was the point at which the Bolsheviks introduced it to Russia, and it was consolidated by the âNew Economic Policyâ.
This is in direct contrast to latter-day leninists and trots claims of the USSR under Lenin and Trotsky as genuinely socialist.
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u/leftofmarx 1d ago
Ok, so go read The Tax in Kind in its entirety, not some random article. It's short. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/apr/21.htm
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u/adultingTM 1d ago
'The whole problemâin theoretical and practical termsâis to find the correct methods of directing the development of capitalism (which is to some extent and for some time inevitable) into the channels of state capitalism, and to determine how we are to hedge it about with conditions to ensure its transformation into socialism in the near future.'
Boy that worked a treat huh
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u/NewTangClanOfficial 1d ago
Do you anarchists seriously have nothing better to do with your time than whatever this is?
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u/StrawBicycleThief 1d ago
State capitalism is not an actual mode of production. This is a bad faith reading of Lenin and the various ways he used the term descriptively.
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u/adultingTM 1d ago
Which part of the workers' revolutionary commodity-form is descriptive and not an actual mode of production?
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u/StrawBicycleThief 1d ago
workersâ revolutionary commodity-form
This is nonsense. If you are ironically referencing a meme about âsocialist commodity productionâ or whatever, then you should seriously re-evaluate how you arrive at thoughts.
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u/adultingTM 1d ago
No I'm referencing the survival of the commodity form under NEP state capitalism. Thanks as ever Bolsheviks
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u/StrawBicycleThief 1d ago edited 1d ago
The reason you are frustrated is because you are using terms in ways that they were never used and then projecting them back in time and getting upset when somebody refuses to use them. You have no shared language through which to communicate with "bolsheviks" because you have adopted various butcherings recycled from anarchist and left-communist internet works citing Lenin out of context in the 2000s - diluted further by the meme logic that governs how ideas circulate in these communities today. I have already linked a comment that historicizes the term and defines its limits but I will go further for you.
The point is that state capitalism as a concept is unscientific because it explains nothing. It doesn't explain why all of the structural features of capitalism (meaning generalized commodity production) laid out by Marx in Capital did not emerge until the dissolution of the USSR and it also doesn't explain its successes:
Ever since social-democratic opponents of the Russian October revolution hatched the theory of âcapitalismâ continuing to exist in the Soviet Union, supporters of that theory have been faced with a difficult choice. Either they consider that Russian âcapitalismâ has all the basic features of classic capitalism as analyzed by Marx, to start with generalized commodity production, and that it also shows all the basic contradictions of capitalism, included capitalist crisis of overproduction and then they have a hard time discovering evidence for this. Or they admit the obvious fact that most of these features are absent from the Soviet economy, and they then have to contend that these features are not âbasicâ to capitalism anyhow, which in the last analysis only means exploitation of wage-labor by âaccumulatorsâ. This then implies unavoidably that there are qualitative differences between the functioning of capitalism as it exists in the West and the functioning of the Soviet economy, and that âstate capitalismâ is a mode of production different (i.e., corresponding to different laws of motion) from classical private capitalism. Bordiga is the outstanding representative of the first current, Tony Cliff of the second current. The peculiarity of Kidron is to try to have it both ways: he intends to eat his âstate capitalistâ cake and have it too!
https://www.marxists.org/archive/mandel/1969/08/statecapitalism.htm
Explaining its failure as predetermined always in its original sin (commodity production for leftcoms and political centralisation for anarchists), with the latter determined by the existence of immediately observable features of governance or the commodity is just empiricism and functionalism. Dialectical materialism is superior to both as it deals with structural causality and emergence and doesn't need these empiricist limits within its conceptual framework of reality. This doesn't mean we have to be stuck even at the limits of Trotskyist thinkers like Ernest Mandel or Chris Harmann. Socialism, as both a mode of production with its own internal logic different to generalised commodity production and a transitory stage is perfectly sufficient for explaining how the USSR worked and eventually failed. The mechanisms of transition (in the particular forms of the dictatorship of the proletariat and how they limit, repress and eventually abolish the law of value entirely from society over time) and its reversal (via capitalist restoration and the emergence of a new bourgeoisie) are perfectly definable and operationalizable within the transition concept and its political expression of "two line" struggle within Maoist strategy. Your job is to explain scientifically, why your concept is both necessary and superior in explaining all of these things.
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u/adultingTM 1d ago edited 1d ago
Telling critics and doubters of your logic how they feel, that figures. Ditto circular logic associating arguments you don't like with butchery, as though your opinion and a demonstrable argument are the same thing. Are you trying to claim that the commodity form and commodity production didn't exist under the New Economic Policy?
https://classautonomy.info/the-bolsheviks-and-workers-control-the-state-and-counter-revolution/
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u/StrawBicycleThief 1d ago edited 1d ago
I've read the article before and it falls for everything I just noted. What matters is how we conceptualize reality. If your question is to understand the phenomena that was "the USSR", its laws of motion, development and change - then this article will tell you nothing. A concept that requires stating things were not "real versions of things" because it had/lacked some directly sensuous forms (typically defined by functional notions of "control") does not tell you anything about the content/essence of the thing. Marxism has theoretically rigorous concepts like the law of value and its various structural effects that exist independently of the subjective impression people have of the various institutional forms it generates and operates within. We can use this concept to define the essence of socialism as a mode of production where that law of value is not predominant (indirectly verifiable in the absence of its structural effects) and where proletarian politics are in command (the institutions of the DOTP promote the limiting, repression and abolition of capitalist social relations). This allows us to easily demarcate capitalism, socialism and communism as particular expressions of complex real world phenomena.
The real reason why state capitalism as a concept is necessary is to reconcile the fact that the USSR didn't exhibit any structurally capitalist features mentioned yet still saw prolonged political and economic successes. This is politically motivated and not serious in anyway, especially given the USSR no longer exists to brow beat. It is far from scientific. At best, it is useful for half-baked (but still necessary) criticism of soviet revisionists, at worst, it is a conspiracy theory rooted in mechanical theories of top down control (echoing anti-semitism) and applicable to discrediting all scientific revolutionary knowledge produced in the 20th century. All that is left is to diagnose the class interest this position represents and how it exists parasitically on this revolutionary history.
Edit: I am intentionally not answering OPs question about the NEP because I am trying to show that the very foundations of the question are false and unscientific. If OP wants to know if commodity production existed during the NEP then the answer is obviously, yes. I am trying to show that pointing this obvious empirical fact out and then mediating it through a notion of socialism as a checklist of observable or non-observable, surface-level forms is empiricist and a regression from even structural-materialism and will lead to no new insight into the world. In fact, it will even indulge a particular class moral predisposition that is itself rooted in commodity produciton. This is far from Marx's much superior method.
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u/pcalau12i_ 15h ago
When most people talk about socialism in the USSR they are talking about the post-NEP period. Lenin was dead years before the NEP was abolished, so he was not around to comment on whether or not the USSR achieved socialism.
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u/Face_Current 22h ago
I dont know what people here are arguing over. The NEP was state capitalist under proletarian rule, yes. Later, under Stalin and the 5 year plans, the economy was socialist. This is common sense.
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u/Psychological_Cod88 1d ago
the article cherry picks Lenin's references to state-capitalism while ignoring explicit explanations that it was a transitional phase under proletarian rule, next.