A video from fellow pole, I haven't seen it posted here. I'm interested to hear opinions from community, I don't see many voices from ex-communist countries. There are english subtitles (alternatively you can learn polish language).
You don't "implement" communism, you built and work towards it in ways and rates according to the material and geopolitical conditions imposed upon you and the socioeconomic stage of development you have after the revolution. Sometimes in historical socialist projects like early ussr this meant just trying to survive as a project.
By that perspective the ussr didn't fail to establish communism. Cause it never got even close to a point where they could even attempt to implement a communist socioeconomic system. Even if the conditions were favorable and without roadblocks of siege, civil wars, world wars, economic warfare and undermining at a level unimaginable , 1918 ussr would still be many and decades away from actually achieving large scale communist mode of production and socioeconomic relations
I would say that at least until revisionism the ussr system and policies basically succeeded in following a progression,development and moves that would allow it to survive and work towards a communist future , even if that just meant it being able to survive aggressive domestic and foreign wars and develop. And it did manage to built a socialist transitionary economy and set of economic relations and did succeed into moving away from class society, commodity production and the profit motive. And fact was that by even right wing descriptions of the soviet economy of most eras it still had more workers participation in the decision making of their workplace and more co-op structures than any other state in the 20th century other than maybe , you guessed it, other socialist projects which seems what a road to socialism should look like for the vid maker
At no point no Soviet leader, certainly not lenin or stalin, claimed to have achieved anything close to communism. Hell they were pretty honest on state capitalism enacted by the dotp being a early part of socialist transitionary development.
This video makes some bold claims, many chomsky-esque in their understanding of pre ww2 ussr and the revolution. The anti Democratic Bolsheviks hiding their authoritarianism and cooptinf the TRUE revolution and socialism that was done by non Bolshevik leftists. Childish feel good history.
Beyond The inaccuraces and one sided presentations of moves the bolsheviks made during that period The burden of proof is on them that without centralizing power and economic organizing and without bringing the soviets and unions under Bolshevik and party planning and leadership the civil War would be won, invasion by 13 countries could be repelled and the project wouldn't collapse upon itself and into a hundred regional pieces. That industrialization at the scale of the ussr not only could happen without state planning and centralization but also happen at the impossible rate that allowed the ussr to survive a genocidal invasion soon after.
For the USSR road to communism these are foundemental roadblocks that had to be overturned and defeated for it to even begin to imagine about building communism. Any other approach aiming to achieve communism in the USSR would have to replicate what the Soviets did , but according to the vid it would have had to do it without having capitalist remnants and characteristics in the economy, only while diminishing hierarchies and avoiding centralization, not within an one party system etc. If this isnt utopianism idk what is
War communism was temporary and so was state capitalism. Both proved successful in an environment that the odds was heavily against the project surviving . Speaking of those decisions as leading to the failure of the communist projects pressuposes the existence of actual alternative structures and decision that would have the same successes and none of the failings
Ah and also nothing post NEP and pre revisionism really falls into the state capitalism description in the way people imagine it. State socialism is way closer to a description. Way too many of capitalisms basic characteristics are missing
Thanks for great response! Video felt like just shiting on USSR way too hard, but my knwoledge about the topic is too limited.
The view presented seems to be of anarchist anti-communism, they completely dismiss marxist-leninist states as capitalist states that merely used socialist rhetoric to capture grassroots energy of the workers movements to keep their own ruling class in charge, rather than the genuine attempts at socialism that they were. They dont try to analyze the material conditions of the eastern block countries and try to reason out how it influenced the decisions of the governments of eastern block countries, rather they lazily dismiss bolshevism as not real communism. In summary the video is bad
The real answer is war and computers, anything else is cope or liberal schismatics trying to kick my tankie friends while they're down
The idea that a state can implement communism is oxymoronic so without having listened to it I'm gonna guess they've never read Marx.
I would say that is a thesis of this video, that they were state capitalist countries, not coummunist
Which is not something requiring 35 minutes because literally no MLs would ever expect to create communism within a state. It's oxymoronic and they actually read theory. You could make that thesis in five minutes of quoting Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Sankara, Castro, etc.
I'm not exactly hyped to read 35 minutes of captions, but so far they seem to think they're very clever for discovering the capitalist aspects of the state capitalism, despite them being explicitly predicted and embraced by Marxists as a necessary transitional stage within socialism. They use this discovery to crap on those AES countries to distance his positions from them. They then define socialism as direct worker ownership of enterprise, like the co-op model. Their description of communism is similarly incomplete and only focused on the ownership of enterprise. They then state that the primary goal of socialism is the elimination of hierarchy.
Their thesis, so far, is just anarchist sectarianism that is ignoring all other theory and context to push their particular formulation of anarchism as the guiding principals of socialism, despite saying it applies to all formulations (it doesn't). More simply, their thesis is that ML countries aren't even socialist and they seem to be making this point to distance their preferred idea of socialism from the big bad commies.
It is also overlooking the material economic forces aspect of any critique of capitalism and is attempting to imply that Soviet leadership was the combination of the political class and the bourgeois class, whereas they did not actually enrich themselves off of the surplus labor value of workers via the owner-laborer dialectic. Soviet leadership did not gain wealth by paying workers less and lived fairly modest lives.
To be honest this is pretty trash.