Re: [tlug] Introduction to (Tech) Worker Cooperatives, 09:00AM on Sunday, July 12th JST

[Benjamin Kowarsch <trijezdci@example.com>]

On Tue, 14 Jul 2020 at 16:43, Yasuaki Kudo <yasu@example.com> wrote:

Soviet communism is similar

There has never been any such thing nor is there any such thing as soviet communism.

The soviet system was bolshevism. Bolshevism has nothing to do with communism, nor with socialism.

The primary tenet of both communism and socialism are socialisation of means of production, more specifically expressed by the dictum that ownership in the means of production should be in the hands of the employees.

Ownership is not something you can just declare, then ignore and forget.

Ownership has a meaning, it has consequences. Specifically, it has two components:

* controlling ownership, the right to decide what to do with one's property, including the right to sell it altogether

* beneficial ownership, the right to receive the benefits of one's property

If these components are not present, then it ain't ownership.

If your neighbour is telling you that you are now the proud owner of his car, but you cannot sell it, nor rent it out, and you have to ask him whenever you want to use it, then your neighbour is a bloody liar and you would call him out as a liar.

Strangely though, when Lenin told that very same lie, not only did all Soviet citizens buy it, but our Western propaganda co-opted that lie and so we all bought it, too. But it remains a boldfaced lie. There never was any communism, nor any socialism in the Soviet Union.

Leninist apologists will of course tell you that the concept of ownership including control and beneficiary privilege is wrong and they can simply redefine it.

But that's another boldfaced lie. If that was true, then we could even declare the US capitalist system as communist, simply by redefining ownership in such a way that it will fit the system. It is like Bill Clintion arguing "That depends on what the meaning of "is" is." Nice try, but still a boldfaced lie.

 

just replace those managers with the communist party officials.

Indeed.

Bolshevism simply replaced the crew of the Titanic, it didn't even bother to re-arrange the deck chairs, the new captain simply declared the deck chairs re-arranged, all the while steaming full throttle into the iceberg. And the bolshevik Titanic hit the iceberg sooner than its capitalist sistership because capitalism needed some time to disable the market and eliminate competition by consolidation in order to reach a state of quasi-monopoly or oligopoly while bolshevism took a shortcut to immediate monopoly, the monopoly of the bolshevik state. Otherwise, the two are quite alike in their eventual outcome.