I think the workers in the soviet union were still very much divorced from the means of production and thus from the surplus value they created. I do not see any big change in relation to the control over the means of production from the 20s to the 30s, other than the NEP ended and control was shifted more to the state.
They weren't. Their direct connection to the means of production through either state owned (and therefore worker managed and directed but subordinated to the central plan) industry or directly through the collective farms and tractor stations. Please go read the Communist Manifesto Chapter 2 with particular attention to the last 5 paragraphs on what Marx says should be done in a country and report back whether the Soviets did that
Do you really think the USSR has achieved that? The lower phase of communism should still not show symptoms of a state (a tool for class oppression, I think we agree with that) as it is a classless society.
For me it’s ridiculous to claim that the USSR didn’t show a class character and thus - that the USSR was stateless. It’s absurd.
Absolutely they achieved this lower form of communism (or what we would now term socialism). Marx and Engels explicitly say that the era between capitalist and Communisty society (here we mean full classless/stateless/moneyless etc.) can be none other than the dictatorship of the proletariat. Here is what they said.
The people’s state has been flung in our teeth ad nauseam by the anarchists, although Marx’s anti-Proudhon piece and after it the Communist Manifesto declare outright that, with the introduction of the socialist order of society, the state will dissolve of itself and disappear. Now, since the state is merely a transitional institution of which use is made in the struggle, in the revolution, to keep down one’s enemies by force, it is utter nonsense to speak of a free people’s state; so long as the proletariat still makes use of the state, it makes use of it, not for the purpose of freedom, but of keeping down its enemies and, as soon as there can be any question of freedom, the state as such ceases to exist.
In reality, however, the state is nothing but a machine for the oppression of one class by another, and indeed in the democratic republic no less than in the monarchy; and at best an evil inherited by the proletariat after its victorious struggle for class supremacy, whose worst sides the proletariat, just like the Commune, cannot avoid having to lop off at the earliest possible moment, until such time as a new generation, reared in new and free social conditions, will be able to throw the entire lumber of the state on the scrap-heap.
Of late, the Social-Democratic philistine has once more been filled with wholesome terror at the words: Dictatorship of the Proletariat. Well and good, gentlemen, do you want to know what this dictatorship looks like? Look at the Paris Commune. That was the Dictatorship of the Proletariat.
Nevertheless, the different states of the different civilized countries, in spite or their motley diversity of form, all have this in common: that they are based on modern bourgeois society, only one more or less capitalistically developed. They have, therefore, also certain essential characteristics in common. In this sense, it is possible to speak of the "present-day state" in contrast with the future, in which its present root, bourgeois society, will have died off.
The question then arises: What transformation will the state undergo in communist society? In other words, what social functions will remain in existence there that are analogous to present state functions? This question can only be answered scientifically, and one does not get a flea-hop nearer to the problem by a thousand-fold combination of the word 'people' with the word 'state'.
Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat.
They weren't. Their direct connection to the means of production through either state owned (and therefore worker managed and directed but subordinated to the central plan) industry or directly through the collective farms and tractor stations. Please go read the Communist Manifesto Chapter 2 with particular attention to the last 5 paragraphs on what Marx says should be done in a country and report back whether the Soviets did that
Absolutely they achieved this lower form of communism (or what we would now term socialism). Marx and Engels explicitly say that the era between capitalist and Communisty society (here we mean full classless/stateless/moneyless etc.) can be none other than the dictatorship of the proletariat. Here is what they said.
Engels to August Bebel In Zwickau, London, March 18-28, 1875;
Engels, Civil War In France
Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme