this post was submitted on 20 May 2025
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"koala bears are bears, even if they're pretending they're marsupials"
It's more: koala bears are marsupials, even if they're called bears.
Yes, that was my point. Socialism doesn't become capitalism just because you call them "state capitalism". Just like koala bears don't become bears just because you call them that.
And state capitalism doesn't become socialism just because you call it that.
Your only argument was essentially "it has capitalism in the name!".
Now you just have "nuh-uh"
No. I defined what's socialism for me (owning of the mean of production by the workers), and all can see that the USSR and friends weren't that. Then I gave Marx's definition of socialism, even if I'm not Marxist (a mode of production were the usefulness replaced the price as value), and all can see that the USSR and friends weren't that. Thus they're something else, and I used a term that Lenin himself used: state capitalism (which wasn't limited to the NEP). Please stop with your strawmen.
You did not give "Marx's definition of Socialism," you erased dialectics from his analysis of the transition from one mode of production to the next. Marx frequently referenced commodity production even remaining in lower-stage Communism, the goal is to abolish it but the presence of it alone does not disqualify a system from being Socialist. State Capitalism was a descriptor for the NEP by Lenin, and he still considered the USSR to be Socialist in that it was a transitional state towards Communism.
It's extremely condescending when you act like you know more about a subject while admitting to not studying it.
Where did I admitted that?
You said you aren't a Marxist, and you've claimed things about Marxism that are undeniably false. If I'm mistaken and you have studied Marxism, then I apologize for misunderstanding you, though that doesn't validate your misconceptions.
If your definition of socialism is "ownership by the workers, but they can't form any kind of representative body to administrate production (ie. a state)", then you've just defined socialism out of existence. Unless the expecting the entire population to come together and form a consensus on every decision, ("what color should we make the wall paper? Oh well time to get all eight billion humans on a group call").
If you think workers had anything to say in the USSR, you're delusional.
K. Very compelling point. "If you disagree with me you are mentally unwell."
But you've already condemned any representative representative body administrating things, so I'm not sure what your point is anyway.
Disagreements on opinions and beliefs are sane, normal and even cool. I love a good debate! Disagreements on facts aren't.
No, I never did that.
Well the fact is that you're wrong. So if you try to say you're right, it means you're insane.
Yes, you did. That's a fact, by the way, so you claiming otherwise is just you being unwell.
You can drop the ableism, and the proletariat ran the government in the USSR. The democratic structure looked like this:
Beautiful propaganda.
You can also read historical texts like Soviet Democracy by Pat Sloan, as well. There's also tons of information from the Soviet Archives, we know quite well that this is accurate information. Labelling everything that goes against your understanding as "propaganda" without doing the legwork to prove it is shallow.
It's factually true, but you don't like it, so time to deploy the thought terminating cliche