The Soviet Union was AGAINST Socialism

The Soviet Union was not socialist, let alone communist;

'When the world's two great propaganda systems (the US and USSR) agree on some doctrine, it requires some intellectual effort to escape its shackles. One such doctrine is that the society created by Lenin and Trotsky and molded further by Stalin and his successors has some relation to socialism in some meaningful or historically accurate sense of this concept...

It is clear enough why both major propaganda systems insist upon this fantasy. Since its origins, the Soviet State has attempted to harness the energies of its own population and oppressed people elsewhere in the service of the men who took advantage of the popular ferment in Russia in 1917 to seize State power. One major ideological weapon employed to this end has been the claim that the State managers are leading their own society and the world towards the socialist ideal; an impossibility, as any socialist -- surely any serious Marxist -- should have understood at once (many did), and a lie of mammoth proportions as history has revealed since the earliest days of the Bolshevik regime. The taskmasters have attempted to gain legitimacy and support by exploiting the aura of socialist ideals and the respect that is rightly accorded them, to conceal their own ritual practice as they destroyed every vestige of socialism.

As for the world's second major propaganda system, association of socialism with the Soviet Union and its clients serves as a powerful ideological weapon to enforce conformity and obedience to the State capitalist institutions, to ensure that the necessity to rent oneself to the owners and managers of these institutions will be regarded as virtually a natural law, the only alternative to the 'socialist' dungeon.

The Soviet leadership thus portrays itself as socialist to protect its right to wield the club, and Western ideologists adopt the same pretense in order to forestall the threat of a more free and just society. This joint attack on socialism has been highly effective in undermining it in the modern period.

One may take note of another device used effectively by State capitalist ideologists in their service to existing power and privilege. The ritual denunciation of the so-called 'socialist' States is replete with distortions and often outright lies. Nothing is easier than to denounce the official enemy and to attribute to it any crime: there is no need to be burdened by the demands of evidence or logic as one marches in the parade. Critics of Western violence and atrocities often try to set the record straight, recognizing the criminal atrocities and repression that exist while exposing the tales that are concocted in the service of Western violence.

It is also worth noting the great appeal of Leninist doctrine to the modern intelligentsia in periods of conflict and upheaval. This doctrine affords the 'radical intellectuals' the right to hold State power and to impose the harsh rule of the 'Red Bureaucracy,' the 'new class,' in the terms of Bakunin's prescient analysis a century ago. As in the Bonapartist State denounced by Marx, they become the 'State priests,' and "parasitical excrescence upon civil society" that rules it with an iron hand.

In periods when there is little challenge to State capitalist institutions, the same fundamental commitments lead the 'new class' to serve as State managers and ideologists, "beating the people with the people's stick," in Bakunin's words. It is small wonder that intellectuals find the transition from 'revolutionary Communism' to 'celebration of the West' such an easy one, replaying a script that has evolved from tragedy to farce over the past half century. In essence, all that has changed is the assessment of where power lies. Lenin¹s dictum that "socialism is nothing but state capitalist monopoly made to benefit the whole people," who must of course trust the benevolence of their leaders, expresses the perversion of 'socialism' to the needs of the State priests, and allows us to comprehend the rapid transition between positions that superficially seem diametric opposites, but in fact are quite close.

The terminology of political and social discourse is vague and imprecise, and constantly debased by the contributions of ideologists of one or another stripe. Still, these terms have at least some residue of meaning. Since its origins, socialism has meant the liberation of working people from exploitation. As the Marxist theoretician Anton Pannekoek observed, "this goal is not reached and cannot be reached by a new directing and governing class substituting itself for the bourgeoisie," but can only be "realized by the workers themselves being master over production." Mastery over production by the producers is the essence of socialism, and means to achieve this end have regularly been devised in periods of revolutionary struggle, against the bitter opposition of the traditional ruling classes and the 'revolutionary intellectuals' guided by the common principles of Leninism and Western managerialism, as adapted to changing circumstances. But the essential element of the socialist ideal remains: to convert the means of production into the property of freely associated producers and thus the social property of people who have liberated themselves from exploitation by their master, as a fundamental step towards a broader realm of human freedom.

The Leninist intelligentsia have a different agenda. They fit Marx's description of the 'conspirators' who "pre-empt the developing revolutionary process" and distort it to their ends of domination; "Hence their deepest disdain for the more theoretical enlightenment of the workers about their class interests," which include the overthrow of the Red Bureaucracy and the creation of mechanisms of democratic control over production and social life. For the Leninist, the masses must be strictly disciplined, while the socialist will struggle to achieve a social order in which discipline "will become superfluous" as the freely associated producers "work for their own accord" (Marx). Libertarian socialism, furthermore, does not limit its aims to democratic control by producers over production, but seeks to abolish all forms of domination and hierarchy in every aspect of social and personal life, an unending struggle, since progress in achieving a more just society will lead to new insight and understanding of forms of oppression that may be concealed in traditional practice and consciousness.

The Leninist antagonism to the most essential features of socialism was evident from the very start. In revolutionary Russia, Soviets and factory committees developed as instruments of struggle and liberation, with many flaws, but with a rich potential. Lenin and Trotsky, upon assuming power, immediately devoted themselves to destroying the liberatory potential of these instruments, establishing the rule of the Party, in practice its Central Committee and its Maximal Leaders -- exactly as Trotsky had predicted years earlier, as Rosa Luxembourg and other left Marxists warned at the time, and as the anarchists had always understood. Not only the masses, but even the Party must be subject to "vigilant control from above," so Trotsky held as he made the transition from revolutionary intellectual to State priest.

A historian sympathetic to the Bolsheviks, E.H. Carr, writes that "the spontaneous inclination of the workers to organize factory committees and to intervene in the management of the factories was inevitably encourage by a revolution with led the workers to believe that the productive machinery of the country belonged to them and could be operated by them at their own discretion and to their own advantage" (my emphasis). For the workers, as one anarchist delegate said, "The Factory committees were cells of the future... They, not the State, should now administer."

But the State priests knew better, and moved at once to destroy the factory committees and to reduce the Soviets to organs of their rule. On November 3, Lenin announced in a "Draft Decree on Workers' Control" that delegates elected to exercise such control were to be "answerable to the State for the maintenance of the strictest order and discipline and for the protection of property." As the year ended, Lenin noted that "we passed from workers' control to the creation of the Supreme Council of National Economy," which was to "replace, absorb and supersede the machinery of workers' control" (Carr). "The very idea of socialism is embodied in the concept of workers' control," one Menshevik trade unionist lamented; the Bolshevik leadership expressed the same lament in action, by demolishing the very idea of socialism.

...As Lenin and Trotsky proceeded with the militarization of labour, the transformation of the society into a labour army submitted to their single will, Lenin explained that subordination of the worker to "individual authority" is "the system which more than any other assures the best utilization of human resources" -- or as Robert McNamara expressed the same idea, "vital decision-making...must remain at the top...the real threat to democracy comes not from overmanagement, but from undermanagement"; "if it is not reason that rules man, then man falls short of his potential," and management is nothing other than the rule of reason, which keeps us free. At the same time, 'factionalism' -- i.e., any modicum of free expression and organization -- was destroyed "in the interests of socialism," as the term was redefined for their purposes by Lenin and Trotsky, who proceeded to create the basic proto-fascist structures converted by Stalin into one of the horrors of the modern age.'

http://www.chomsky.info/articles/1986----.htm

 

Noam Chumpski is himself an anti American communist. And if the former soviet union which was brought down by Conservative Ronald Reagan wasn't a socialist/communist nation, then what economic ideology do you suppose would be an appropriate name to label them with? Perhaps you could give us a history of the origins of Communism so as to show the fine folk here just how duped they've been all along in believing that it was the former socialist/marxist/progressive communist Soviet Union that was responsible for the murder of upwards to 200 million Christians in the 20th century.

I sure hope for your sake that this attempt to revise history isn't because you yourself are a closeted red-diaper-baby commie.

 

State capitalist. Lenin maintained all his life that socialism was impossible in russia, that it had to be sped through the capitalist stage of development first. The USSR never called itself communist. Such a description only appears in american propaganda. Anyone who has studied the topic knows this.

 

Russia can call itself what ever it wants..Fact remains it is a disease on the planet for over 100 years.
The only good it does for the west is be a buffer against CHINA in the east.

 

The USSR was brought down by crippling debt. A cause from overspending on their military. Can you give us a source for the 200 million christians?

 

This was a very interesting take on German and Soviet socialism.

 

yes, I would like to see that too.

people I know who grew up in Russia during the latter part of the soviet era went to Russian Church regularly, so I think there was a lot of lies and propaganda that the west sold us to make us afraid of "the communist threat"

 

While this source only claims 100 million deaths or so, there are plenty of others that bring the total number up close to 200 million. The point being is that communism--be it soviet or of a Chinese style kills the very people it purports to help via their totalitarian government run of the economy.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism

 

You are very correct, Libhater.

We have some good friends who are from the Ukraine. They are very well-educated and came here from Russia. Her mother and aunt were both members of the Communist Party in Russia.

Both of our friends hate communism. Their relatives lived in the Ukraine during the reign of Joseph Stalin. Joseph Stalin had millions of innocent people in the Ukraine put to death because they opposed his economic policies of communism.

The Communists also slaughtered millions of people in Laos and Cambodia for the very same reasons. Do you remember the award winning book, "The Killing Fields”?
Communism, as practiced today, is a very repressive form of economic fascism and must be resisted and defeated at each and every encounter!

 

1. How ios he anti-American?
2. He's actually an anarchist
3. He's actually said America is one of the best places in the world
4. Your arugment is a logical fallacy - ad hominem.
5. Hence, given 4. how does this change what he has said? Character assassinations dont work in debate, well maybe for you, but not people seeking rational debate.

Actually it was bought down years later for reasons both the Russian Archives have shown and old time US policy makers like George Kennan have noted were separate to Reagan's international politics, although granted he did have his own impact (the thing is it was minimal)

Good question. Chomsky asserts it is an extremely rundown system of state-capitalism, but I think this is misleading and lacks precision. The system of the Soviet economy changed considerably over the years. Before the Bolsheviks it was a developing liberal economy, and capitalist. The early Bolsheviks were engaged with civil war and had a virtual melt down in the 20s. However, as Chomsky explains, they solidified the role of the state instead of worker's councils and organization (ie the soul of socialism) and implemented a planned economy. I would define it as a state-socialist system, since, even if they were relatively meaningless, the USSR's economy worked on the premise of being socialized in the most limited of senses and was deprived of any meaningful private property, let alone market system. This means that the term state-capitalist is rather misleading. So yes, I would call it state-socialist.

...?...200 million people - and they were all Christians? haha

yes state-something. I contend it was state-socialist.

Well the history of the Soviet Union and corruption of the term communism and socialism can be seen above. It is worth noting no state has ever actually called itself communist in official organization. The USSR's constitution says it is in the stage if "dictatorship of the proletariat". Now communism is an intrinsic theoretical concept accompanying socialism, so I'll start with the history of socialism. It basically emerged as a loose concept of communally orientated economics in the early 19th century and then found its way into more mainstream issues, developing into a theory that was worker centric. Marx essentially articulated the grievances with capitalism and then designed his own philosophy based on a dialectical class based perception of society. As Chomsky summarizes in the article, "Mastery over production by the producers is the essence of socialism". Workers work, and hence they should own everything they produce - that's the essential premise. Now the characteristics arising are 1. Worker centrality with social ownership structured around this social form of organization and 2. the introduction of direct democracy based on a similar structure of worker based action. Consequently the state dissolves into a managerial office, if that. The centrality is with the worker's communes, not the state, which is seen as a nuisance, similar to libertarianism on that latter point. Extended theories that do not see socialism as political system in its own right then contend transformation to socialism will lead to a communistic society - without classes, without ANY state structure but with total and direct democracy. Such a system or its characteristics other than notions of socialization and worker control (which was bs, and based on Leninist theories you cna read about above) could not be found at all in the USSR.

This is quite funny given that the USSR only saw under 26 million people die, some were Christians, some were atheists, MANY were actual socialists - it was no where near 200 mil. Indeed, while we are on the notion of 'Christians' many Christians perpetrated these crimes, as a major section of the Soviet populace remained religious throughout its existence.

LOL no, and why do you have to make yourself look so intellectually base with such insults? No I have always had this contention on this forum and generally in discussion. Calling the USSR socialist is like calling Nazi Germany capitalist - both assertions are wrong., We need to understand the nature of such systems so that we can not only see how and why they failed, but also the validity in theories such as socialism in real life. I realize you may find it hard to believe the USSR wasn't socialist since its been spoon fed to you probably your whole life, but think about it. Oh and just to clarify, I'm a libertarian.

 

On what point?

Indeed, it was terrible and I dont think Trotsky would have been any different even though his loyal supporters, even today, still claim he would have been

It may interest you to know Americans also killed many many people there and indeed they left them a legacy that is still killing them.

Where? Again, what is practiced today cna be called anything, but that doesn't make it so. Communism is a Utopian concept of society - not a state ideology.

If you're referring to Leninism and Maoist and their off shoots, I agree to an extent. We should oppose their use of force, but we cannot silence them, rather show the failure of said ideologies in places like China and Russia in order to show they dont obtain the communist utopia they seek - indeed they dont even obtain proper socialism.

 

Please dont get off topic. We aren't discussing Nazism, we are discussing so-called socialism in the USSR.

 

They would be grossly overstated numbers. Around 100 million is correct, possibly 110-120.

Please explain how it communism in the ideological sense. If it isnt, call it for what it really is - Maosim, Leninism, Stalinism etc.

Yes, quite true - but such rule is not communist let alone socialist.

I discussed this with someone else. Capitalism, as a system, has killed just as many people in India during the same time. This is going off the figures, not of some French guy, like the Black Book of Communism, but rather Nobel Prize winning economist Amartya Sen.

 

^

MegadethFan, it is very interesting when you say, "But we cannot silence them, rather show the failure of said ideologies in places like China and Russia in order to show they don’t obtain the communist utopia they seek - indeed they don’t even obtain proper socialism."

In your opinion, what would any nation have to do to obtain a high degree of "proper" socialism?

What in your opinion is "proper" socialism"?

Socialism will never work because in fails to take into consideration three important principles.

!. All people are motivated by their own self interests.

2. All people are motivated by greed and the accumulation of wealth and financial security.

3. When it comes to human nature, the needs of the “group” (i.e. strangers we don’t know or even care to know!) are never considered as important as the needs of the individual.

You will have to drastically change human nature before "socialism" will ever succeed in human society.

 

As far as I can understand it, anyone who doesn't believe that the moon is made of green cheese and that Mrs Palin can walk on water is by definition anti-American to the teabags. It is to do with the total failure of the War on Drugs, I suppose.

 

Iolo,

When you make very childish comments like this, you lose all credibility with the other members of our group.

Please stop embarrassing yourself!

 

Iolo,

Please answer the following question.

What in your opinion is "proper" socialism"?

Socialism will never work because in fails to take into consideration three important principles.

!. All people are motivated by their own self interests.

2. All people are motivated by greed and the accumulation of wealth and financial security.

3. When it comes to human nature, the needs of the “group” (i.e. strangers we don’t know or even care to know!) are never considered as important as the needs of the individual.

You will have to drastically change human nature before "socialism" will ever succeed in human society.

JC

 

How many were "slaughtered" in Laos?

 

I don't embarrass myself at all, Uncle. Tell truth and shame the teabags is what I was taught in Sunday school!

 

Democratic political control by those who do the work, not a fix by those who live off their backs as at present.

Childish nonsense - people are motivated by all sorts of things, and the urge to pile up dung-heaps-full of trade goods is very much a minority interest, though people obviously want security - which only collective democratic control could provide. Brainwashed peasants are motivated by self-interest only, but most people like to be liked, want to do good and all sorts of other things as well. In all societies that have ever existed the needs of the group are considered as immensely more important than the needs of the imagined 'individual' because the group survives while the individual 'bundle of sensations' is soon gone, as you know. 'Human nature' is silly ideological and unhistorical drivel. Humans are incredibly malleable. You are just someone who thinks today's weather has always been there. Don't be so ridiculous.

 

Pursue policies actually bringing about the change in social structures and orientation that socialism seeks. I dont think its possible on a structural or political manner, but I do think, was President Arevalo of Guatemala in the 40s defined as "spiritual socialism" is possible.

Remember this isnt my personal opinion, this is what actual socialist thinkers believed socialism should be and what the term meant to begin with.

Socialism basically emerged as a loose concept of communally orientated economics in the early 19th century and then found its way into more mainstream issues, developing into a theory that was worker centric. Marx essentially articulated the grievances with capitalism and then designed his own philosophy based on a dialectical class based perception of society. As Chomsky summarizes in the article, "Mastery over production by the producers is the essence of socialism". Workers work, and hence they should own everything they produce - that's the essential premise. Now the characteristics arising are 1. Worker centrality with social ownership structured around this social form of organization and 2. the introduction of direct democracy based on a similar structure of worker based action. Consequently the state dissolves into a managerial office, if that. The centrality is with the worker's communes, not the state, which is seen as a nuisance, similar to libertarianism on that latter point. Extended theories that do not see socialism as political system in its own right then contend transformation to socialism will lead to a communistic society - without classes, without ANY state structure but with total and direct democracy. This being said however socialism as an ideology can be supported as a system in its own right. Furthermore you can see how none of these core features were present in say, Russia, China or anywhere else once the communist parties (so-called) took over. Their incessant use of violence and the state destroyed whatever notion of socialism they had.

That's the thing. I will address your points individually.

1. No, people are not motivated entirely by slef interest and there has been PLENTY of sociological research showing humans are indeed capable of working on entirely altruistic actions (what Peter Kropotkin called 'reciprocal altruism'. Certainly selfishness is not absolute by any means. I would argue the only overriding feature we all pursue is the desire for happiness.
2. This is TOTALLY incorrect and basically unsubstantiated. If this were true, people would never get married unless through exploitative means, Similarly this would oppose thousands of years of human history where societies functioned communally rather than on the basis of self interest, which as a social concept of morality and thinking is quite modern.
3. Yes they can be. I already mentioned reciprocal altruism. In a society such as the US, where self interest is praised you are inevitably going to think the way you think. However objective observation of human capacity tells a different story. The whole point of socialism is that we are, no matter how self interested, we are social beings and require other humans to have meaningful lives. Whether you are a socialist or not I think this is quite true.

 

And Adam Smith is in congruence with both Marx and Chomsky, which most modern Corporate capitalists will ignore, because Smith is explicite in describing the same problems of collusion among "masters" at the expense of workers, in Wealth of Nations, considered to be the bible of capitalism.(or at least once was, until both Marx and Chomsky reference it to support their arguments)

 

Indeed. Chomsky summed it up nicely; "We're supposed to worship Adam Smith but you're not supposed to read him. That's too dangerous. He's a dangerous radical."

 

I love how that since pure egalatarian socalism cannot work, it doesn't even work in small scale monastic life, that the horrors it quicly evolves into are not a direct result of its attempt.

We start at A. We always wind up at B. Yet somehow A is not causing B. The experiment has been run time and time again. No matter how much you would like A the result is always B. What did Einstein say about insanity?

Let me give you some systems analysis since you intelectuals usually have no practical knowledge.

You have a function. Lets call it pure socialism. You put that socialism into a black box. That black box is the real world. Once that function of pure socialism is passed through that black box the output is horror, death, carnage and suffering. Since the real world is largely unchanging the only solution is to quit trying to pass the function of pure socialism through the real world. As Joshua would say the only way to win is not to play.

People who think that pure socialism can work are no different than people who think you can win a nuclear war.

 

Like the experiment of playing poker with a fixed deck, yes. In every society there are those who sabotage change, as you know, and at whatever cost - to others.