Trade is not tens of thousands of years old. That is ahistorical. And my argument was not about capitalism per se, it was more about the soviet union not having been socialist and not at all having been a development towards communism because it did trade as firstly as an entity within a world market that was not at all socialist and because trade was allowed internally and not necessarily bound to labour time or necessity, among an entire multiplicity of reasons.
Let’s suppose that this interpretation of finds by contemporary archaeologists is correct. There is quite a clear distinction to be made between exchanges between otherwise isolated communities that didn’t have a burning need for trade (which they btw absolutely didn’t, there is the concept of primitive communism that is rather well established from observations of recent hunter-gatherer societies) and trade as the dominant social force.
Trade predates capitalism and has taken different forms under different modes of production. Its existence under socialism does not make a society capitalist. What defines a social system is who controls the means of production and how surplus labour is allocated.
The Soviet Union inherited a devastated, largely agrarian economy encircled by imperialist states. Socialist construction could not skip stages. Public ownership of industry, finance and land became the foundation. Market mechanisms and limited private trade operated within boundaries set by the plan, not as its driving force.
Under socialism, the law of value is not abolished by decree. It is progressively constrained through planning, price regulation, and the expansion of decommodified services. Policies like the NEP were not retreats from socialism but applications of materialist method: you transform society with the conditions you inherit, not with ideal blueprints.
To dismiss the USSR because it engaged in trade is to mistake form for content. Socialism is a transitional process, not a finished state. It shifts power from capital to labour, expands collective provision, and subordinates exchange to social need. By these measures, the Soviet project lifted hundreds of millions from illiteracy and poverty, built industrial capacity from scratch, and defended social gains against relentless external pressure.
Please refrain from arrogance when your understanding of a topic matches that of the most learned dust mite.
Trade predates capitalism and has taken different forms under different modes of production. Its existence under socialism does not make a society capitalist. What defines a social system is who controls the means of production and how surplus labour is allocated.
It makes the society very much capitalist because it doesn’t rid it of an owning class. Here the party of the USSR.
The Soviet Union inherited a devastated, largely agrarian economy encircled by imperialist states. Socialist construction could not skip stages.
The Kuomintang and certain aspects of S. Korea after WWII share a very similar backstory, did they do socialism? You would probably deny this.
Public ownership of industry, finance and land became the foundation. Market mechanisms and limited private trade operated within boundaries set by the plan, not as its driving force.
Ok, you have centralised state enterprises that did trade with entities in other countries. Ok, you have planning, we have planning in all of capitalism today, capitalism is entrenched by it. It merely exists in an anarchic state, which was also the case for the USSR and its allies, you even had conflicts spurred on by nationalistic perversion that came from the logic of capital between nations that ideologically should have been brethren. Ask yourself why China and Vietnam post-“revolution” didn’t get along for most of their shared history.
Under socialism, the law of value is not abolished by decree
It is, that is what you call a being programmatic. The early Soviet Union had programmatic characteristics which it lost due to being a rushed development just like any other area on this blue planet late to the table of capitalism.
By these measures, the Soviet project lifted hundreds of millions from illiteracy and poverty, built industrial capacity from scratch, and defended social gains against relentless external pressure.
Your “argument” rests on a formalist reading of Marx that confuses legal categories with social relations. An owning class is defined by private appropriation of surplus and the ability to reproduce that power through inheritance and market competition. The Soviet nomenklatura held administrative authority, not private property. They could not sell factories, bequeath positions, or extract profit as personal wealth. That is a qualitative difference.
Comparing the USSR to the KMT shows some impressive ignorance and ignores the rupture in property relations. The KMT preserved landlordism and comprador capital. The Soviet state expropriated both.
Planning under capitalism coordinates individual firms while leaving social reproduction to market anarchy. Socialist planning, however imperfect, subordinates enterprise activity to social goals: full employment, universal services, industrial catch up. The presence of markets or external trade does not erase that direction of travel.
The law of value cannot be abolished by decree because it is a social relation, not a policy. Marx was explicit in the Critique of the Gotha Programme: right can never be higher than the economic structure of society. Socialism constrains the law of value through planned allocation, price controls, and decommodification. It withers through development, not proclamation.
International conflicts between socialist states reflect the pressure of the capitalist world system and unresolved national questions, not an inherent capital logic. Uneven development, border disputes, and great power chauvinism are real contradictions. They demand critique, but they do not settle the class character of a mode of production.
Prussia modernized under Junker aristocracy and state led development, but it never socialized the means of production or aimed at the withering of the state. Achievements in literacy or industry under socialism are not “just development”. They are the result of surplus being directed to social need rather than private accumulation.
Bordigist purity spectacles are a luxury of those like yourself, a settler, denizen of the imperial core whose only interaction with socialism is as an academic exercise. You have built nothing, defended nothing, and achieved nothing. You demand a socialism that arrives without contradiction, without transition, without struggle. Revolutionary practice must engage with concrete conditions, not ideal blueprints. If your standard for socialism is the immediate absence of all market forms, all state mediation, all external trade, then you have defined it out of historical possibility. You clearly wish to appear revolutionary without the effort of grappling with reality.
Your “argument” rests on a formalist reading of Marx
Trve
The Soviet nomenklatura held administrative authority, not private property.
The thing is though that private property is literally administrative authority and vice-versa. When I give my sister my Tudor Montecarlo from 1970-something with the grey dial and the steel bezel I give her administrative authority over the watch, she now administers the watch. Conversely, when I handle accounts as someone at a bank I have administrative authority in spite of dues to be paid to customers that make me the effective owner of a certain amount of capital. In other words the bank alienates something from customers in a similar way to a factory owning capitalist alienating labour power.
They could not sell factories, bequeath positions, or extract profit as personal wealth. That is a qualitative difference.
There very well could have been these limitations. To keep it short I am not going to critique these points about specific restrictions. There was still capital which crept into society through literal competitions between workers enforced directly by the state and periphery around productivity maximisation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Stakhanov
There are things which we cannot sell/be nominally capitalistic about in societies we all would agree are capitalist, pretty significant ones like public land, firefighting and certain internet services
Comparing the USSR to the KMT shows some impressive ignorance and ignores the rupture in property relations. The KMT preserved landlordism and comprador capital. The Soviet state expropriated both.
These are rather specific points that don’t get to the statement I was trying to make. I was referring to aspects of state-administered centralisation/monopolism and expropriation where it was necessary to advance the development of the working class (for both capitalism and socialism).
Planning under capitalism coordinates individual firms while leaving social reproduction to market anarchy
When the great man of history Trump says he should send another bajillion to Israel in the form of very specific arms shipments, isn’t that centralised planning? When Sweden built one million apartments were they doing socialism? Market anarchy doesn’t just concern the level of firms.
Socialist planning, however imperfect, subordinates enterprise activity to social goals: full employment, universal services, industrial catch up
While not strictly subordinated all the Scandinavian economies do or have done this, but they are not socialist.
The presence of markets or external trade does not erase that direction of travel.
It doesn’t, but it the existence of socialisation also doesn’t prove the direction of travel.
The law of value cannot be abolished by decree because it is a social relation
What is planning if not a decree, after all we are talking about instructions not proclamations in church. The whole point of socialism and communism is that instead of just doing stuff and then thinking about the consequences/handling them, we plan according to need and that changes the societal structure at its base. Call that thinking before doing. For that we really need to stop and think as a societal organism. The whole thinking process is not negated by the primacy of the development of the economic structure, it is something that arises out of the economic realities by necessity. Think of it as a collective awakening.
Achievements in literacy or industry under socialism are not “just development”. They are the result of surplus being directed to social need rather than private accumulation
We do this in capitalism as socialisation is necessary for the continued existence of the economy. Postal service, social security, educational incomes, care work, libre software, you name it. Surplus being directed to social needs is not exclusive to socialism or communism. My friends call it necessary communization and they contrast it with movements that actually demand communism. In the first chapters of Kapital Marx grounds exchange of goods to necessity, without it no such thing as a commodity or capitalism.
Bordigist purity spectacles are a luxury of those like yourself, a settler, denizen of the imperial core whose only interaction with socialism is as an academic exercise
Yeah whatever, just ignore me not being able to find a job, afford an education and my account balance being -30$. A true academic with just a highschool diploma. Beyond my intellectual circlejerking I probably have absolutely no reason to concern myself practically with the economy since I have it so good
He is undoubtedly an idiot for equating the USSR with the KMT.
However (and this very clearly isn’t what he meant) under Dr Sun Yat-sen, the KMT wasn’t fascist but a nebulous anti-imperialist bourgeois-centrist style formation: the New Three Principles allowed united front work because they objectively opposed feudalism and foreign domination.
It wasn’t until after Dr Sun’s death, the internal KMT ideological struggle resolved in favor of the landlord-comprador wing, and fascism was then formalised under Chiang.
Which is basically social democracy, see the new deal being an inspiration for Mussolini. Heck he had his start as a self proclaimed commie. The trouble is though that fascism tends to be an unstable construction of sorts and what the Soviet Union did in its later stages had a lot to do with stabilisation and it never really evoked a volk myth in the style of fascist dictatorships. Plus when you look at fascism as an interclassist movement taking place under the roof of the nation there are overlaps with projects that claim or have claimed to be communistic like China/Vietnam/etc…
literally wtf r u talking about m8
Where I am from Prussian history has relevance and is taught. Prussia is renowed for being one of the first places if not the first to introduce compulsory education and other socialised services.
Oh you’re a Bordigist, that explains things. Either way, socialism is a transitional status between capitalism and communism characterized by public ownership as the principal aspect of the economy and the working classes in control of the state. Between capitalism and communism, elements of each are present, and do not themselves determine the identity of the mode of production but that which is rising and thus principal.
Trade on an international level, even with capitalist countries, is not a determining factor for socialism. Trade internally, even if not entitely tied to labor or necessity, is not a determining factor for socialism. You’re throwing dialectics away entirely in favor of a metaphysical outlook on production and distribution. While we’re recommending reading, why not add Gramsci’s On Comrade Bordiga’s Sterile and Negative “Left” Criticism.
I feel you can already get the gist of what I mean when I pointed out your metaphysical error, but in short dialectics is a method, with materialism as an outlook. Metaphysics sees subjects as “either/or,” while dialectics sees them as “both/and.” Movement is the result of contradictions, the unity and struggle of opposites. The rise of something paired with the dying away of something. Dialectics recognizes interrelation, the unity and struggle of opposites, as motion insepperable from matter and vice-versa, as things come into being and cease to be, as unending change.
In other words:
Dialectics does not regard nature as a collection of static, isolated objects, but as connected, dependent, and determined by each other.
Dialectics considers everything as in a state of continuous movement and change, of renewal and development, where something is always rising and something is always dying away.
Dialectics is not a simple process of growth, but where quantitative buildup results in qualitative change, and qualitative change result in quantitative outcomes, as a leap in state from one to the other, the lower to the higher, the simple to the complex.
Dialectics holds that the process of development from lower to higher takes place as a struggle of opposite tendencies that forms the basis of their contradictions.
So it is your claim that we need some sort of political realism. We have to make use with what exists and anything which posits a beyond is metaphysical territory? We might as well stop at doing social democracy because it doesn’t get any better than that with the means available to us. I hope I did not strawman your argument
Trade is not tens of thousands of years old. That is ahistorical. And my argument was not about capitalism per se, it was more about the soviet union not having been socialist and not at all having been a development towards communism because it did trade as firstly as an entity within a world market that was not at all socialist and because trade was allowed internally and not necessarily bound to labour time or necessity, among an entire multiplicity of reasons.
Read “Dialogue with Stalin” on Marxists.org
Trading goes back to prehistory, as as archeologists will tell you.
Let’s suppose that this interpretation of finds by contemporary archaeologists is correct. There is quite a clear distinction to be made between exchanges between otherwise isolated communities that didn’t have a burning need for trade (which they btw absolutely didn’t, there is the concept of primitive communism that is rather well established from observations of recent hunter-gatherer societies) and trade as the dominant social force.
Trade predates capitalism and has taken different forms under different modes of production. Its existence under socialism does not make a society capitalist. What defines a social system is who controls the means of production and how surplus labour is allocated.
The Soviet Union inherited a devastated, largely agrarian economy encircled by imperialist states. Socialist construction could not skip stages. Public ownership of industry, finance and land became the foundation. Market mechanisms and limited private trade operated within boundaries set by the plan, not as its driving force.
Under socialism, the law of value is not abolished by decree. It is progressively constrained through planning, price regulation, and the expansion of decommodified services. Policies like the NEP were not retreats from socialism but applications of materialist method: you transform society with the conditions you inherit, not with ideal blueprints.
To dismiss the USSR because it engaged in trade is to mistake form for content. Socialism is a transitional process, not a finished state. It shifts power from capital to labour, expands collective provision, and subordinates exchange to social need. By these measures, the Soviet project lifted hundreds of millions from illiteracy and poverty, built industrial capacity from scratch, and defended social gains against relentless external pressure.
Please refrain from arrogance when your understanding of a topic matches that of the most learned dust mite.
It makes the society very much capitalist because it doesn’t rid it of an owning class. Here the party of the USSR.
The Kuomintang and certain aspects of S. Korea after WWII share a very similar backstory, did they do socialism? You would probably deny this.
Ok, you have centralised state enterprises that did trade with entities in other countries. Ok, you have planning, we have planning in all of capitalism today, capitalism is entrenched by it. It merely exists in an anarchic state, which was also the case for the USSR and its allies, you even had conflicts spurred on by nationalistic perversion that came from the logic of capital between nations that ideologically should have been brethren. Ask yourself why China and Vietnam post-“revolution” didn’t get along for most of their shared history.
It is, that is what you call a being programmatic. The early Soviet Union had programmatic characteristics which it lost due to being a rushed development just like any other area on this blue planet late to the table of capitalism.
Literally Prussia
Your “argument” rests on a formalist reading of Marx that confuses legal categories with social relations. An owning class is defined by private appropriation of surplus and the ability to reproduce that power through inheritance and market competition. The Soviet nomenklatura held administrative authority, not private property. They could not sell factories, bequeath positions, or extract profit as personal wealth. That is a qualitative difference.
Comparing the USSR to the KMT shows some impressive ignorance and ignores the rupture in property relations. The KMT preserved landlordism and comprador capital. The Soviet state expropriated both.
Planning under capitalism coordinates individual firms while leaving social reproduction to market anarchy. Socialist planning, however imperfect, subordinates enterprise activity to social goals: full employment, universal services, industrial catch up. The presence of markets or external trade does not erase that direction of travel.
The law of value cannot be abolished by decree because it is a social relation, not a policy. Marx was explicit in the Critique of the Gotha Programme: right can never be higher than the economic structure of society. Socialism constrains the law of value through planned allocation, price controls, and decommodification. It withers through development, not proclamation.
International conflicts between socialist states reflect the pressure of the capitalist world system and unresolved national questions, not an inherent capital logic. Uneven development, border disputes, and great power chauvinism are real contradictions. They demand critique, but they do not settle the class character of a mode of production.
Prussia modernized under Junker aristocracy and state led development, but it never socialized the means of production or aimed at the withering of the state. Achievements in literacy or industry under socialism are not “just development”. They are the result of surplus being directed to social need rather than private accumulation.
Bordigist purity spectacles are a luxury of those like yourself, a settler, denizen of the imperial core whose only interaction with socialism is as an academic exercise. You have built nothing, defended nothing, and achieved nothing. You demand a socialism that arrives without contradiction, without transition, without struggle. Revolutionary practice must engage with concrete conditions, not ideal blueprints. If your standard for socialism is the immediate absence of all market forms, all state mediation, all external trade, then you have defined it out of historical possibility. You clearly wish to appear revolutionary without the effort of grappling with reality.
Trve
The thing is though that private property is literally administrative authority and vice-versa. When I give my sister my Tudor Montecarlo from 1970-something with the grey dial and the steel bezel I give her administrative authority over the watch, she now administers the watch. Conversely, when I handle accounts as someone at a bank I have administrative authority in spite of dues to be paid to customers that make me the effective owner of a certain amount of capital. In other words the bank alienates something from customers in a similar way to a factory owning capitalist alienating labour power.
There very well could have been these limitations. To keep it short I am not going to critique these points about specific restrictions. There was still capital which crept into society through literal competitions between workers enforced directly by the state and periphery around productivity maximisation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Stakhanov
There are things which we cannot sell/be nominally capitalistic about in societies we all would agree are capitalist, pretty significant ones like public land, firefighting and certain internet services
These are rather specific points that don’t get to the statement I was trying to make. I was referring to aspects of state-administered centralisation/monopolism and expropriation where it was necessary to advance the development of the working class (for both capitalism and socialism).
When the great man of history Trump says he should send another bajillion to Israel in the form of very specific arms shipments, isn’t that centralised planning? When Sweden built one million apartments were they doing socialism? Market anarchy doesn’t just concern the level of firms.
While not strictly subordinated all the Scandinavian economies do or have done this, but they are not socialist.
It doesn’t, but it the existence of socialisation also doesn’t prove the direction of travel.
What is planning if not a decree, after all we are talking about instructions not proclamations in church. The whole point of socialism and communism is that instead of just doing stuff and then thinking about the consequences/handling them, we plan according to need and that changes the societal structure at its base. Call that thinking before doing. For that we really need to stop and think as a societal organism. The whole thinking process is not negated by the primacy of the development of the economic structure, it is something that arises out of the economic realities by necessity. Think of it as a collective awakening.
We do this in capitalism as socialisation is necessary for the continued existence of the economy. Postal service, social security, educational incomes, care work, libre software, you name it. Surplus being directed to social needs is not exclusive to socialism or communism. My friends call it necessary communization and they contrast it with movements that actually demand communism. In the first chapters of Kapital Marx grounds exchange of goods to necessity, without it no such thing as a commodity or capitalism.
Yeah whatever, just ignore me not being able to find a job, afford an education and my account balance being -30$. A true academic with just a highschool diploma. Beyond my intellectual circlejerking I probably have absolutely no reason to concern myself practically with the economy since I have it so good
Fuck no they didn’t do socialism. They did fascism[1][2]. How is this detour even relevant?
literally wtf r u talking about m8
If you don’t know anything then don’t say anything.
He is undoubtedly an idiot for equating the USSR with the KMT.
However (and this very clearly isn’t what he meant) under Dr Sun Yat-sen, the KMT wasn’t fascist but a nebulous anti-imperialist bourgeois-centrist style formation: the New Three Principles allowed united front work because they objectively opposed feudalism and foreign domination.
It wasn’t until after Dr Sun’s death, the internal KMT ideological struggle resolved in favor of the landlord-comprador wing, and fascism was then formalised under Chiang.
Which is basically social democracy, see the new deal being an inspiration for Mussolini. Heck he had his start as a self proclaimed commie. The trouble is though that fascism tends to be an unstable construction of sorts and what the Soviet Union did in its later stages had a lot to do with stabilisation and it never really evoked a volk myth in the style of fascist dictatorships. Plus when you look at fascism as an interclassist movement taking place under the roof of the nation there are overlaps with projects that claim or have claimed to be communistic like China/Vietnam/etc…
Where I am from Prussian history has relevance and is taught. Prussia is renowed for being one of the first places if not the first to introduce compulsory education and other socialised services.
Oh you’re a Bordigist, that explains things. Either way, socialism is a transitional status between capitalism and communism characterized by public ownership as the principal aspect of the economy and the working classes in control of the state. Between capitalism and communism, elements of each are present, and do not themselves determine the identity of the mode of production but that which is rising and thus principal.
Trade on an international level, even with capitalist countries, is not a determining factor for socialism. Trade internally, even if not entitely tied to labor or necessity, is not a determining factor for socialism. You’re throwing dialectics away entirely in favor of a metaphysical outlook on production and distribution. While we’re recommending reading, why not add Gramsci’s On Comrade Bordiga’s Sterile and Negative “Left” Criticism.
I just find this funny. I’ll stumble upon it in the sidebar of hexbears anarchism comm once in a while, together with the other funny versions of it.
That’s really funny, lmao. Bordiga was a bit of a goofy guy.
Before I answer I want to know what you mean by dialectics. That words gets thrown around harder than a dodgeball in middleschool
I feel you can already get the gist of what I mean when I pointed out your metaphysical error, but in short dialectics is a method, with materialism as an outlook. Metaphysics sees subjects as “either/or,” while dialectics sees them as “both/and.” Movement is the result of contradictions, the unity and struggle of opposites. The rise of something paired with the dying away of something. Dialectics recognizes interrelation, the unity and struggle of opposites, as motion insepperable from matter and vice-versa, as things come into being and cease to be, as unending change.
In other words:
Dialectics does not regard nature as a collection of static, isolated objects, but as connected, dependent, and determined by each other.
Dialectics considers everything as in a state of continuous movement and change, of renewal and development, where something is always rising and something is always dying away.
Dialectics is not a simple process of growth, but where quantitative buildup results in qualitative change, and qualitative change result in quantitative outcomes, as a leap in state from one to the other, the lower to the higher, the simple to the complex.
Dialectics holds that the process of development from lower to higher takes place as a struggle of opposite tendencies that forms the basis of their contradictions.
Dialectics (and more specifically dialectical materialism), as opposed to metaphysics.
So it is your claim that we need some sort of political realism. We have to make use with what exists and anything which posits a beyond is metaphysical territory? We might as well stop at doing social democracy because it doesn’t get any better than that with the means available to us. I hope I did not strawman your argument