Considering that once Capitalism was restored wealth inequality skyrocketed, 7 million people died, and previously relied on safety nets were destroyed or sold for parts to Capitalists, I don’t think it’s something that can be attributed to simple youthful nostalgia.

As always, thanks for the excellent work you do, comrade 🫡

In the Marxist notion of “class,” no, they did not form a class. The State is an extension of the class in power, not a class in and of itself. In the Soviet Union, that class was the Proletariat.

Party members and Soviet officials did have privledges like higher pay, but in the Soviet Union this difference was only about 10 times between the richest and the poorest, unlike the 100s to 1000s or more in Tsarist Russia or the modern Russian Federation.

First off, bureaucracy is not a “class,” the Socialist states like the USSR were controlled by the Proletariat. The formation is described in Soviet Democracy by Pat Sloan, or you can check this infographic if you prefer:

Anyways, back to your question. In the instance of single-unit factory councils, it isn’t so much as a “ruling class” as it is that these workers have control only within their immediate domain, and no real control outside of it. The Soviet model is different, it laddered upwards and extended equal ownership over all within it.

The Marxist critique of the cooperative model is that trade between these cooperatives will result in the resurgance of Capitalism, not the elimination of class society, as time goes on and some cooperatives swell in power and others fall under their control, without equal ownership between them. Engels elaborates on this in Anti-Dühring. Cooperatives don’t scale without administration, either, which means at that point you may as well extend ownership equally across the whole economy so that it may be democratically controlled by all, even if those more local to an issue have more of a voice.

Now, that doesn’t mean cooperatives are bad, it’s just that they only really serve to play a role of “filling in the cracks” large industry leaves behind, as said large industry should be publicly owned. Cooperatives being small can remain as such, and only make themselves able to be properly folded into the public sector when they grow to include large networks of administration, at which point they have outscaled their original cooperative nature anyways.

European countries aren’t Socialist, though, and they depend on Imperialism to fund their safety nets like the US does, it’s just that in the US this money goes pretty much straight into the pockets of the bourgeoisie outright, instead of also funding safety nets.

It’s pretty undeniable that learning from the successes and failures of previous revolutions increases your chance of success. The Haitian revolution in particular was one of National Liberation, the likes of which Marxists like Frantz Fanon have spent lifetimes analyzing. It isn’t about finding “predefined theory,” but not reinventing the wheel every time. See what can be universalized, see what can’t be, and work from there.

Again, though, I recommend you dive into the myriad factions at play in the many successful Socialist revolutions we have seen. Many factions supported the idea of “general radicalization,” like the SRs, but ultimately it ended up being the more organized and dedicated to theory that successfully guided revolution.

That’s only one of his attempts at resignation. If anything, it seems like he hated his position, wanting to just retire and do small party work without the intense stress that came with his position. He even advocated eliminating it entirely, as he believed there was no need for his 2 positions given the collective nature of Soviet leadership.

That doesn’t mean he was some selfless great man, either. He had his fair share of errors, even the CPC considers him to have been 70% good, 30% bad. However, simply saying he only tried to resign because Lenin was angry at him for insulting his wife is wrong, he seemed to have hated his position for his whole career until his death.

For sure! Definitely different, but if I had to pick one it would be Blowback as there’s sticking power to it, and more importantly generates sympathy for the Global South. Too many new Leftists in the US take on nationalist stances, rather than internationalist.

No problem! Have a good one! 🫡

He’s great! I do think Blowback goes way farther though, while being entertaining and heart-wrenching.

There’s small but sustained growth in small firms, but these are nowhere near scaling to the level of large corporations and firms, indicating an inability to overtake them. Rather, they seem to be “filling in the cracks,” overtaking small sectors while leaving areas dominated by large firms untouched. This is why public ownership actually has a path to control these large firms.

The theory people need is the one informed and confirmed by past practice and formed through their own experiences in applying theory to their conditions. Everywhere will be different.

You directly compared me to Jordan Peterson, and you know I’m a Marxist, surely you can connect the dots and see how that would be insulting. Own up to that.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by Marx trying to sound smarter, or just regurgitate word salad? Or how it is that I don’t question Marx? Agreeing with him generally doesn’t mean I do so thoughtlessly.

The post I wrote here goes over why that doesn’t actually apply. The reason we consider countries to be relative barriers (until Communism is achieved and thus this becomes irrelevant) is because there is a degree of genuine sovereignty in countries regarding their economics. A publicly owned structure in Mexico is owned by Mexican citizens, not US citizens. Once the world is Socialist, this will begin to blur and break down towards Communism, but we aren’t there yet.

Can you elaborate beyond saying “nuh uh?” If the primary aspect of production in an economy is in the Public Sector, as it is in the PRC, it’s Socialist.

Moreover, the concept that production gets complex, and that as this increases it becomes more effective to plan from above with a view of the whole economy, is not “word salad.”

“Tankie” is a caricature. The idea of a tankie is the ideal vision of a McCarthyian Communist. In reality, the overwhelming majority of people labeled as such don’t actually fit that label, it’s more of a way to cast an image of someone’s positions based on, say, support for AES countries, and twist that into the evil Commie Pinko that haunts the dreams of 1960s children in the US.

The PRC has a Socialist Market Economy. The vast majority of large firms are firmly in the public sector, while the small firms and self-employed make up the bulk of the private sector, along with cooperatives.

They had democracy. Read Soviet Democracy by Pat Sloan, or read this infographic:

They did not deliberately cause famine. There is no reason for this in the first place, as that weakened their economy and starved millions.

The Soviet Union was not ended because it lowered wealth inequality. Wealth inequality was lowered until after the Socialist system dissolved. What caused the dissolution of the USSR was a combination of various factors such as Gorbachev’s liberal reforms ceding power over large firms to Capitalists, a huge amount of GDP spent on the millitary to protect against the US, and the continuing to plan by hand rather than use computers at scale later on as production complicated.

As for defeating the Nazis, there was some degree of assistance from the Allies, but 80% of the combat against the Nazis was done by the Soviets. They outweighed the contributions of every other allied power combined, by several times.

As for the economy, it worked very well, actually, until later on in its life. I recommend reading Do Publicly Owned, Planned Economies Work? and looking at the following data on GDP growth:

Canada has some safety nets, sure. I never said you cannot have safety nets without Socialism, we were talking about the effectiveness of the Soviet Union, which had those safety nets before Canada despite being lower in development levels than Canada.

I don’t actually dismiss everything bad about the Soviet Union as propaganda, only propaganda. I have quite a few critiques of the USSR in this comment alone, however it’s hard to discuss the genuine faults when your view of the USSR is based in fiction.

China indeed has private property and banks, even billionaires, however the economy is driven by Public Ownership. Marx spoke about how the large firms were to be nationalized, and that small firms would be nationalized as they developed, gradually. This is because of Marx’s concept of Historical Materialism and Socialism as an economic inevitability as time progresses. You yourself have been railing against theory, why should anyone trust your opinion on Marxism?

Everything I said about the PRC is true, though.

I never needlessly or dogmatically dismissed anything, and unlike you I brought reciepts. The important issue here is your repeated unwillingness to look at facts, simply denying them without offering anything to support your claims or debunk mine. There’s nothing to work off of that way.

Read Blackshirts and Reds.

Lenin and the Bolsheviks did follow the general process Marx described, though. Can you elaborate on what you mean, here? Further, Marx used Socialism and Communism interchangeably, but referred to Communism in stages, such as Lower-Stage Communism and Upper-Stage Communism. Lenin simplified this to Socialism and Communism, and over time we have come to understand that we can go further and break these up into even more stages.

Marx wasn’t around for the establishment of Socialism, his analysis was focused on Capitalism and how we may overcome it, not a prophetic view for how society must work. This isn’t a knock on Marx, rather, by contextualizing his ideas we can avoid dogmatism.

As for cooperatives in a Capitalist system, no, not really. What you are describing is Utopianism, ie the idea that you can think of an ideal society and adopt it directly. The data surrounding cooperatives don’t appear to indicate any danger to large firms and other Capitalist entities dominating markets.

I don’t really see the humor in what you said, though.

Jumping to insults, rather than asking for clarification on aspects that you are unsure of, doesn’t accomplish anything.

Regardless, in another phrasing, people’s ideas are shaped by their environment and current set of knowledge. When people act on their environment, their environment changes, informing them of new things and ideas, which in turn influences how they choose to act. This is repeated over and over, when people put their ideas to the test, parts of their ideas are confirmed, and others are rejected, allowing new hypothesis to be tested and confirmed or denied.

This is all obvious, of course, but Dialectical Materialism asserts that the primary driver of this process, ie which comes first, is the environmental aspect. People exist in their environment first, and then form their ideas based on that.

Of course, Dialectical Materialism has much, much more to it than that, such as looking at material reality in the context of motion, ie the river you see today is different from what it was yesterday because sediment has been eroded.