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

[Josh Glover <jmglov@example.com>]

On Tue, 14 Jul 2020 at 10:30, Benjamin Kowarsch <trijezdci@example.com> wrote:

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

This seems disingenuous to argue. Prior to the Russian revolutions (there was a nationalist revolution that preceded the communist revolution), the Russian communist party (confusingly called the Social Democratic Labour Party, but "social democracy" was how Marxists described themselves in the late 1800s and early 1900s) split into two factions; the Bolsheshiks were the majority faction (in fact, "bolshevik" simply means something like "member of the majority" in Russian) and Mensheviks were the minority faction ("menshevik" means "member of the minority).

Which is a long way of saying that the Bolsheviks were in fact communists, not in the sense that they practiced communism by living in a commune, but in the sense that they were striving to build communism on an international scale.

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.

Reducing the entirety of the Soviet citizenry and the entirety of the history of implementation of socialism in the Soviet Union to this statement is a bit absurd. There were rural communes in the Soviet Union, and there were many worker's soviets ("soviet" means something like "council" in Russian) which meet your definition of socialism in that they owned the means of production, but of course participated in a wider system in which the means of consumption wasn't socialised (i.e. they had to buy whatever their collective enterprise didn't produce). The ebb and flow of collectivisation and supporting and undermining the soviets over the 70 year history of the USSR is a complicated subject, but I don't see how you can categorically state that communism never existed in the Soviet Union, and again, by the Marxist definition of "socialism", there was socialism in the Soviet Union as long as society was actively striving to build communism.

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.

That's another whole can of worms you've opened, but I'll leave it alone, as understanding who you label a "Leninist apologist" is not material to the point of how one defines the terminology being discussed. 

Cheers,
Josh