Thanks for sharing! I’m sure autotranslate doesn’t compare when it comes to prose, but this was still beautifully written!

🫡

There’s a ton that’s wrong with this comment, but I want to pick on something especially egregious that stuck out to me. Your conflation of administration with ownership:

Administration is not ownership.

To reiterate, it is. When I hold dominion over something like a steam train I practically own it because I get to say what happens to it, I get to say that it’s mine for example.

Here, Marx is responding to Bakunin:

…will consist of workers. Certainly, with your permission, of former workers, who however, as soon as they have become representatives or governors of the people, cease to be workers…

As little as a factory owner today ceases to be a capitalist if he becomes a municipal councillor…

…and look down on the whole common workers’ world from the height of the state. They will no longer represent the people, but themselves and their pretensions to people’s government. Anyone who can doubt this knows nothing of the nature of men.

If Mr. Bakunin only knew something about the position of a manager in a workers’ cooperative factory, all his dreams of domination would go to the devil. He should have asked himself what form the administrative function can take on the basis of this workers’ state, if he wants to call it that.

• Conspectus of Bakunin’s Statism and Anarchy

Your analysis is more that of an anarchist than a Marxist, and as I’ve shown before you frequently make metaphysical mistakes in your method. This is why Bordigists have never achieved anything of note, faulty analysis that results in self-sabotage.

Scratched.

Basically, yea. You scratch a liberal, and the fascist underneath reveals itself like a lotto ticket.

There were plans for many more. Only volume 1 was punlished while Marx was alive, the other two were compiled from notes and outlines by Engels.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was an anti-semitic Nazi sympathizer, and was arrested as such. His fiction is based on the folklore of the gulag system, and archival evidence and historical texts paint a much clearer picture of the soviet prison system. He’s essentially Yeonmi Park but for the USSR.

Here’s a real quote:

The German army could have liberated the Soviet Union from Communism but Hitler was stupid and did not use this weapon.

From an excellent thread going over his many ideological failings:

In his 2003 book, Two Hundred Years Together, he wrote that “from 20 ministers in the first Soviet government one was Russian, one Georgian, one Armenian and 17 Jews”. In reality, there were 15 Commissars in the first Soviet government, not 20: 11 Russians, 2 Ukrainians, 1 Pole, and only 1 Jew. He stated: “I had to bury many comrades at the front, but not once did I have to bury a Jew”. He also stated that according to his personal experience, Jews had a much easier life in the Gulag camps that he was interned in.

According to the Northwestern University historian Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern: Solzhenitsyn used unreliable and manipulated figures and ignored both evidence unfavorable to his own point of view and numerous publications of reputable authors in Jewish history. He claimed that Jews promoted alcoholism among the peasantry, flooded the retail trade with contraband, and “strangled” the Russian merchant class in Moscow. He called Jews non-producing people (“непроизводительный народ”) who refused to engage in factory labor. He said they were averse to agriculture and unwilling to till the land either in Russia, in Argentina, or in Palestine, and he blamed the Jews’ own behavior for pogroms. He also claimed that Jews used Kabbalah to tempt Russians into heresy, seduced Russians with rationalism and fashion, provoked sectarianism and weakened the financial system, committed murders on the orders of qahal authorities, and exerted undue influence on the prerevolutionary government. Petrovsky-Shtern concludes that, “200 Years Together is destined to take a place of honor in the canon of russophone antisemitica.”

His own wife called the Gulag Archipelago “folklore,” why on Earth are you listening to a rabid anti-semite and fiction author over actual historical evidence? I already said the soviets imprisoned fascists, you’re giving a great example of one and proving my point.

Liberals, when “scratched,” reveal their fascist side. Liberalism and fascism are two sides of the same coin.

Yep, the soviet union had prisons, and had to deal with fascists, traitors, and holdovers from former Tsarism. Read the book I linked, prisoners on average were treated better than in peer countries.

They rapidly developed, and managed to go their entire existence without the regular boom/bust cycles intrinsic to capitalism, due to having a socialist economy.

On the whole, soviet prisons and the justice system itself were more progressive than their peers, Mary Stevenson Callcott documented it quite well in Russian Justice.

The USSR had steady and consistent economic growth, and provided free, high quality education and healthcare, full employment, cheap or free housing, and fantastic infrastructure and city planning that still lasts to this day despite capitalism neglecting it. This rapid development resulted in dramatic democratization of society, reduced disparity, doubling of life expectancy, tripling of functional literacy rates to 99.9%, and much more. Living in the 1930s famine would not have been good, but it was the last major famine outside of wartime because the soviets ended famine in their countries.

Literacy rates, societal guarantees in the 1936 constitution, reports on the healthcare system over time, and more are good sources for these claims.

The USSR brought dramatic democratization to society. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference.

When it comes to social progressivism, the soviet union was among the best out of their peers, so instead we must look at who was actually repressed outside of the norm. In the USSR, it was the capitalist class, the kulaks, the fascists who were repressed. This is out of necessity for any socialist state. When it comes to working class freedoms, however, the soviet union represented a dramatic expansion. Soviet progressivism was documented quite well in Albert Syzmanski’s Human Rights in the Soviet Union.

The truth, when judged based on historical evidence and contextualization, is that socialism was the best thing to happen to Russia in the last few centuries, and its absence has been devastating.

Death rates spiked:

And wealth disparity skyrocketed alongside the newly impoverished majority:

Capitalism brought with it skyrocketing poverty rates, drug abuse, prostitution, homelessness, crime rates, and lowered life expectancy. An estimated 7 million people died due to the dissolution of socialism and reintroduction of capitalism, and the large majority of post-soviet citizens regret its fall. A return to socialism is the only path forward for the post-soviet countries.

When you look at the US Empire and western Europe as having higher quality of life than the USSR, you are looking at the benefits of imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism and wishing the USSR also practiced this, instead of helping liberate colonies and the global south. Russia in particular was a semi-feudal backwater in 1917, and made it to space 5 decades later. The USSR was not the picture of wealth, but was for its time the picture of development and rapid progress.

That’s really funny, lmao. Bordiga was a bit of a goofy guy.

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:

1. Dialectics does not regard nature as a collection of static, isolated objects, but as connected, dependent, and determined by each other.

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

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.

That’s not an actual lever for change.

The NEP was a strategic move to expand the level of development of the productive forces. It was still socialist, but made significant submissions to capital to do so. It also paid off tremendously, as soviet power was solidified in the 1930s. Today, the PRC takes heavy inspiration from the NEP for its own Socialist Market Economy, which is why it is surpassing the entire capitalist world today.

Khrushchev’s declaration that “class struggle is over” in the USSR was revisionist, correct, but the USSR maintained their internationalism. Support for Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria, Palestine, and many more liberation movements still persisted in the USSR, including funding and arming resistance groups. The fact that the USSR post-World War II did not have any interest in open war does not mean they abandoned the internationalist struggle.

To the end, however, the USSR was still socialist. Private ownership was never the principal aspect of its economy, and the working classes were in control of the state until it was coup’d at the end. There were flaws and problems with soviet socialism, because it was real, and thus faced real problems and real struggles. The problems in the CPSU and government towards the end did not mean the USSR was no longer socialist, or that it’s destruction was inevitable; up to the very end it could have been saved from its murder at the hands of the Yeltsin faction.

It was sad for hundreds of millions, both inside the USSR and even among fascists and capitalists, not to mention progressives the world over:

Impressive demonstrations of grief accompanied Stalin’s passing. In his death throes, “millions of people crowded the center of Moscow to pay their last respects” to the dying leader. On March 5th, 1953, “millions of citizens cried over his loss as if they were mourning for a loved one." The same reaction took place in the most remote corners of this enormous country, for example, in a “small village” that, as soon as it learned of what had happened, fell into spontaneous and collective mourning. The generalized consternation went beyond the borders of the USSR: “Many cried as they passed through the streets of Budapest and Prague."

Thousands of kilometers away from the socialist camp, in Israel the sorrowful reaction was also widespread: “All members of MAPAM, without exception, cried”, and this was a party in which “all the veteran leaders” and “nearly all the ex-combatants” belonged to. The suffering was mixed with fear. “The sun has set” was the title of Al Hamishmar, the newspaper of the Kibbutz movement. For a certain amount of time, such sentiments were shared by leading figures of the state and military apparatus: “Ninety officers who had participated in the 1948 war, the great war of Jewish independence, joined a clandestine armed organization that was pro-Soviet and revolutionary. Of these, eleven later became generals and one became a government minister, and are now honored as the founding fathers of Israel."

In the West, it’s not just leaders and members of communist parties with ties to the Soviet Union who pay homage to the deceased leader. One historian (Isaac Deutscher) who was a fierce admirer of Trotsky, wrote an obituary full of acknowledgements:

After three decades, the face of the Soviet Union has been completely transformed. What’s essential to Stalinism’s historical actions is this: it found a Russia that worked the land with wooden plows and left it as the owner of the atomic bomb. It elevated Russia to the rank of the second industrial power in the world, and it’s not merely a question of material progress and organization. A similar result could not have been achieved without a great cultural revolution in which an entire country has been sent to school to receive an extensive education.

In summary, despite conditioned and in part disfigured by the Asiatic and despotic legacy of Tsarist Russia, in Stalin’s USSR “the socialist ideal has an innate and solid integrity.”

In this historical evaluation there was no longer a place for Trotsky’s harsh accusations directed at the deceased leader. What sense was there in condemning Stalin as a traitor to the ideals of world revolution and as the capitulationist theorist of socialism in one country, at a time in which the new social order had expanded in Europe and in Asia and had broken “its national shell”? Ridiculed by Trotsky as a “small provincial man thrust into great world events, as if by a joke of history”, in 1950 Stalin had become, in the opinion of an illustrious philosopher (Alexandre Kojève), the incarnation of the Hegelian spirit of the world and called upon to unify and lead humanity, resorting to energetic methods, in practice combining wisdom and tyranny.

Outside communist circles, or the communist aligned left, despite the escalating Cold War and the continued hot war in Korea, Stalin’s death brought out largely “respectful” or “balanced” obituaries in the West. At that time, “he was still considered a relatively benign dictator and even a statesman, and in the popular consciousness the affectionate memory of “uncle Joe” persisted, the great war-time leader that had guided his people to victory over Hitler and had helped save Europe from Nazi barbarity." The ideas, impressions and emotions of the years of the Grand Alliance hadn’t yet vanished, when―Deutscher recalled in 1948―statesmen and foreign generals were won over by the exceptional competence with which Stalin managed all the details of his war machine."

Included among the figures “won over” was the man who, in his time, supported military intervention against the country that emerged out of the October Revolution, namely Winston Churchill, who with regards to Stalin had repeatedly expressed himself in these terms: “I like that man." On the occasion of the Tehran Conference in November, 1943, the British statesman had praised his Soviet counterpart as “Stalin the Great”: he was a worthy heir to Peter the Great; having saved his country, preparing it to defeat the invaders. Certain aspects had also fascinated Averell Harriman, the American ambassador to Moscow between 1943 and 1946, who always positively painted the Soviet leader with regard to military matters: “He appears to me better informed than Roosevelt and more realistic than Hitler, to a certain degree he’s the most efficient war leader." In 1944 Alcide De Gasperi had expressed himself in almost emphatic terms, having celebrated “the historic, secular and immense merit of the armies organized by the genius, Joseph Stalin." The recognition from the eminent Italian politician isn’t merely limited to the military sphere:

When I see Hitler and Mussolini persecute men for their race, and invent that terrible anti-Jewish legislation that we’re familiar with, and when I see how the Russians, made up of 160 different races, seek their fusion, overcoming the existing differences between Asia and Europe, this attempt, this effort toward the unification of human society, let me just say that this is the work of a Christian, this is eminently universalistic in the Catholic sense.

No less powerful or uncommon was the prestige that Stalin had enjoyed, and continued enjoying, among the great intellectuals. Harold J. Laski, a prestigious supporter of the British Labour Party, speaking in the fall of 1945 with Norberto Bobbio, had declared himself an “admirer of the Soviet Union” and its leader, describing him as someone who is “very wise.“14 In that same year, Hannah Arendt wrote that the country led by Stalin distinguished itself for the “completely new and successful way of facing and solving national conflicts, of organizing different peoples on the basis of national equality”; it was a type of model, it was something “that every political and national movement should pay attention to.”

For his part, writing just before and soon after the end of World War II, Benedetto Croce recognized Stalin’s merit in having promoted freedom not only at the international level, thanks to the contribution given to the struggle against Nazi-fascism, but also in his own country. Indeed, who led the USSR was “a man gifted with political genius”, who carried out an important and positive historical role overall; with respect to pre-revolutionary Russia, “Sovietism has been an advance for freedom, just as, “in relation to the feudal regime”, the absolute monarchy was also “an advance for freedom and resulted in the greater advances that followed." The liberal philosopher’s doubts were focused on the future of the Soviet Union; however, these same doubts, by contrast, further highlighted the greatness of Stalin: he had taken the place of Lenin, in such a way that a genius had been followed by another, but what sort of successors would be given to the USSR by “Providence”?

Those that, with the beginning of the Great Alliance’s crisis, started drawing parallels between Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany had been severely criticized by Thomas Mann. What characterized the Third Reich was the “racial megalomania” of the self-proclaimed “master race”, which had carried forth a “diabolical program of depopulation”, and before that the eradication of the culture of the conquered territories. Hitler stuck to Nietzsche’s maxim: “if one wants slaves, it’s foolish to educate them like masters." The orientation of “Russian socialism” was the precise opposite; massively expanding education and culture, it had demonstrated it didn’t want “slaves”, but instead “thinking men”, therefore placing them on the “path to freedom." Consequently, the comparison between the two regimes became unacceptable. Moreover, those that made such an argument could be suspected of complicity with the fascist ideology they sought to condemn:

To place Russian communism and Nazi-fascism on the same moral place, in the measure that both are totalitarian, is superficial at best; fascism at worst. Anyone who insists on this comparison could very well be considered a democrat, but deep in their heart a fascist is already there, and naturally they will only fight fascism in a superficial and hypocritical way, while they save all their hatred for communism.

• Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend, Domenico Losurdo

Some truly terrible people are listed here, but that’s Losurdo’s style for the book: relying almost entirely on anti-communist sources to tackle the Red Scare demonization of Stalin (and the soviet project in general) after his death. Despair for Stalin’s death was common among progressives of all stripes, and respect for him was common even among fascists and colonizers.

Stalin was more good than bad, Obama more bad than good. Both made mistakes, but Stalin was the leader of the world’s first socialist state during its most turbulent period, while Obama was an imperialist warmonger.

Public ownership was the principal aspect of the soviet economy. The existence of commodity production does not mean an economy is not socialist, it just means it has not completed the transition from capitalism to communism. The soviet economy was not based on commodity production and the profit motive, but a social plan and the fulfillment of need.