Your “argument” rests on a formalist reading of Marx that confuses legal categories with social relations. An owning class is defined by private appropriation of surplus and the ability to reproduce that power through inheritance and market competition. The Soviet nomenklatura held administrative authority, not private property. They could not sell factories, bequeath positions, or extract profit as personal wealth. That is a qualitative difference.
Comparing the USSR to the KMT shows some impressive ignorance and ignores the rupture in property relations. The KMT preserved landlordism and comprador capital. The Soviet state expropriated both.
Planning under capitalism coordinates individual firms while leaving social reproduction to market anarchy. Socialist planning, however imperfect, subordinates enterprise activity to social goals: full employment, universal services, industrial catch up. The presence of markets or external trade does not erase that direction of travel.
The law of value cannot be abolished by decree because it is a social relation, not a policy. Marx was explicit in the Critique of the Gotha Programme: right can never be higher than the economic structure of society. Socialism constrains the law of value through planned allocation, price controls, and decommodification. It withers through development, not proclamation.
International conflicts between socialist states reflect the pressure of the capitalist world system and unresolved national questions, not an inherent capital logic. Uneven development, border disputes, and great power chauvinism are real contradictions. They demand critique, but they do not settle the class character of a mode of production.
Prussia modernized under Junker aristocracy and state led development, but it never socialized the means of production or aimed at the withering of the state. Achievements in literacy or industry under socialism are not “just development”. They are the result of surplus being directed to social need rather than private accumulation.
Bordigist purity spectacles are a luxury of those like yourself, a settler, denizen of the imperial core whose only interaction with socialism is as an academic exercise. You have built nothing, defended nothing, and achieved nothing. You demand a socialism that arrives without contradiction, without transition, without struggle. Revolutionary practice must engage with concrete conditions, not ideal blueprints. If your standard for socialism is the immediate absence of all market forms, all state mediation, all external trade, then you have defined it out of historical possibility. You clearly wish to appear revolutionary without the effort of grappling with reality.
Your “argument” rests on a formalist reading of Marx
Trve
The Soviet nomenklatura held administrative authority, not private property.
The thing is though that private property is literally administrative authority and vice-versa. When I give my sister my Tudor Montecarlo from 1970-something with the grey dial and the steel bezel I give her administrative authority over the watch, she now administers the watch. Conversely, when I handle accounts as someone at a bank I have administrative authority in spite of dues to be paid to customers that make me the effective owner of a certain amount of capital. In other words the bank alienates something from customers in a similar way to a factory owning capitalist alienating labour power.
They could not sell factories, bequeath positions, or extract profit as personal wealth. That is a qualitative difference.
There very well could have been these limitations. To keep it short I am not going to critique these points about specific restrictions. There was still capital which crept into society through literal competitions between workers enforced directly by the state and periphery around productivity maximisation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Stakhanov
There are things which we cannot sell/be nominally capitalistic about in societies we all would agree are capitalist, pretty significant ones like public land, firefighting and certain internet services
Comparing the USSR to the KMT shows some impressive ignorance and ignores the rupture in property relations. The KMT preserved landlordism and comprador capital. The Soviet state expropriated both.
These are rather specific points that don’t get to the statement I was trying to make. I was referring to aspects of state-administered centralisation/monopolism and expropriation where it was necessary to advance the development of the working class (for both capitalism and socialism).
Planning under capitalism coordinates individual firms while leaving social reproduction to market anarchy
When the great man of history Trump says he should send another bajillion to Israel in the form of very specific arms shipments, isn’t that centralised planning? When Sweden built one million apartments were they doing socialism? Market anarchy doesn’t just concern the level of firms.
Socialist planning, however imperfect, subordinates enterprise activity to social goals: full employment, universal services, industrial catch up
While not strictly subordinated all the Scandinavian economies do or have done this, but they are not socialist.
The presence of markets or external trade does not erase that direction of travel.
It doesn’t, but it the existence of socialisation also doesn’t prove the direction of travel.
The law of value cannot be abolished by decree because it is a social relation
What is planning if not a decree, after all we are talking about instructions not proclamations in church. The whole point of socialism and communism is that instead of just doing stuff and then thinking about the consequences/handling them, we plan according to need and that changes the societal structure at its base. Call that thinking before doing. For that we really need to stop and think as a societal organism. The whole thinking process is not negated by the primacy of the development of the economic structure, it is something that arises out of the economic realities by necessity. Think of it as a collective awakening.
Achievements in literacy or industry under socialism are not “just development”. They are the result of surplus being directed to social need rather than private accumulation
We do this in capitalism as socialisation is necessary for the continued existence of the economy. Postal service, social security, educational incomes, care work, libre software, you name it. Surplus being directed to social needs is not exclusive to socialism or communism. My friends call it necessary communization and they contrast it with movements that actually demand communism. In the first chapters of Kapital Marx grounds exchange of goods to necessity, without it no such thing as a commodity or capitalism.
Bordigist purity spectacles are a luxury of those like yourself, a settler, denizen of the imperial core whose only interaction with socialism is as an academic exercise
Yeah whatever, just ignore me not being able to find a job, afford an education and my account balance being -30$. A true academic with just a highschool diploma. Beyond my intellectual circlejerking I probably have absolutely no reason to concern myself practically with the economy since I have it so good
A formalist reading of Marx is not just wrong. It abandons the soul of scientific socialism and borders on the reactionary. It substitutes legal abstractions for the analysis of concrete social relations and replaces historical materialism with moralistic catechism.
Your watch analogy is idiotic. A watch is not a means of production. Conflating personal possession with capitalist private property shows you have not grasped the most elementary distinction in Marxist theory. Private property is a social relation that enables the extraction of surplus labour through exclusion and market enforcement. Administering a gift does not let you exploit wage labour. Your bank analogy is equally empty. Try exercising your supposed “ownership” by walking into that bank and demanding to appropriate that capital you “own” as personal wealth. See how fast the social relation of capital reasserts itself through law, force, and institutional discipline. Administration is not ownership. Your confusion reveals a complete lack of conception of private property as a social relation.
Your point about public land, firefighters, and internet services under capitalism is detached from both theory and reality. Thatcherites privatized public land on a massive scale. Tech firms and telecom monopolies wage constant campaigns to enclose the digital commons and commodify every facet of the internet. The fact that capitalism tolerates or even manages certain public functions currently does not negate its driving logic. These are concessions wrung from capital or functional necessities for reproducing labour power, not evidence of a different mode of production.
Your KMT comparison remains idiotic even after clarification. Yes, both the KMT and the USSR employed state centralization. But form without content is idealism. The USSR broke private property relations in land and industry. The KMT preserved landlordism and comprador capital. The class character of state power and the direction of surplus allocation were fundamentally opposed. To ignore this is to reduce Marxism to a checklist of administrative techniques. That is not analysis. It is fetishism.
On planning under capitalism, you swing and miss again. Aid to Israel is not a benevolent decree. It is the outcome of a bidding war between arms firms, lobbying blocs, and imperial strategy, all mediated through the logic of accumulation. Sweden building apartments is not socialism. It is the imperial core using super-exploitation of the periphery to fund social peace at home. Ignore austerity, the housing crisis, and the privatization creep across Scandinavia if you like. Ignore the private health insurance racket in America if it suits your argument. But do not pretend these are equivalent to socialist planning.
Scandinavian economies do not subordinate firms to the public good. Private ownership remains the principle. Decommodification is tactical, contingent, and constantly under assault. Under socialism, social ownership is the principle and capital is repressed. That absolutely determines the direction of travel. The USSR, for most of its existence, directed surplus to industrialization, universal education, healthcare, and defence against imperialism. That is not a minor variation. It is a qualitative break.
When I say the law of value cannot be abolished by decree, I mean exactly what Marx meant. You can issue all the plans you want. Without the proper material conditions and productive forces, they will not amount to shit. That is why socialism is a transitional phase. It is the process of creating those conditions through planned development, class struggle, and the gradual withering of commodity relations. To demand the immediate absence of all market forms is to demand socialism without history. That is not revolutionary. It is utopian.
Your “necessary communization” point is equally detached. Postal services, education, social security: all are under active assault by capital. Privatization of public assets is a global trend (outside the remaining socialist holdouts). Social security in the imperial core is funded by imperial rent and is in structural decline as the periphery liberates itself. Austerity has been the dominant policy for over a decade. To cite these as evidence that capitalism already does what socialism does is to ignore the direction of travel and the class struggle over every concession.
Finally, your deflection about personal hardship misses the point entirely. Your precarity is likely real (if you’re telling the truth) and is produced by the system we oppose. But having no practice in building socialism, as a settler denizen of the imperial core, renders your theory a purely academic exercise. That is why your arguments are so detached from both reality and theory. Revolutionary clarity is not forged in grievance. It is forged through study, practice, and alignment with the movement of the working class. Bordigist purism offers the comfort of certainty without the burden of construction. It is easy to declare every actually existing socialist project impure from the safety of the core. If your theory cannot account for the struggle to build under constraint, it is not a meaningful or worthwhile guide to action. You have not refuted anything. You have only repeated your formalist catechism with more words and less understanding.
A formalist reading of Marx is not just wrong. It abandons the soul of scientific socialism and borders on the reactionary. It substitutes legal abstractions for the analysis of concrete social relations and replaces historical materialism with moralistic catechism.
Wordslop and the Stalino-Kruschevite fetishism of Formalism that doesn’t mean anything outside of its use as a verbal battering ram.
Your watch analogy is idiotic
I could make the same analogy with a piece of equipment used in production of goods and it would still hold water.
Administration is not ownership
It literally is. But in the Stalino-Trotskiite worldview you need to add extra steps to explain why managers, party officials and people high up in the military were totally socialist or communist and A OK.
Try exercising your supposed “ownership” by walking into that bank and demanding to appropriate that capital you “own” as personal wealth
You completely incorrectly conflate the subset personal wealth with capital. Just because the USSR had collective democratic mechanisms and was depersonalised (in a limited way) doesn’t mean it gets to be exempt from analyses of it.
Administration is not ownership.
To reiterate, it is. When I hold dominion over something like a steam train I practically own it because I get to say what happens to it, I get to say that it’s mine for example.
Your point about public land, firefighters, and internet services under capitalism is detached from both theory and reality. Thatcherites privatized public land on a massive scale. Tech firms and telecom monopolies wage constant campaigns to enclose the digital commons and commodify every facet of the internet. The fact that capitalism tolerates or even manages certain public functions currently does not negate its driving logic. These are concessions wrung from capital or functional necessities for reproducing labour power, not evidence of a different mode of production.
Here is the thing. Even if public land is privatised there is a hard limit to which you can do that. You might have a few counterexamples examples where land and certain services are privatised, but that does not disprove the fact that socialisation is an absolute necessity even in capitalism. You are also twisting my words, I never said that this as is was evidence of a different mode of production.
Your KMT comparison remains idiotic even after clarification. Yes, both the KMT and the USSR employed state centralization. But form without content is idealism. The USSR broke private property relations in land and industry. The KMT preserved landlordism and comprador capital. The class character of state power and the direction of surplus allocation were fundamentally opposed. To ignore this is to reduce Marxism to a checklist of administrative techniques. That is not analysis. It is fetishism.
Yo, I am literally pointing out the content. A few hammer and sickles on flags and pins are not content, that there wasn’t private property in exactly the same way as in Spain is not relevant. Making the state the landlord does not alter the class character of anything or whatever that word is supposed to mean. I am not reducing Marxism, a term Marx completely rejected, to a checklist of things. I am pointing out that the Soviet experiment from a standpoint of history had a very similar trajectory to many unabashedly capitalistic nations and that it failed in its goals.
[…] the privatization creep across Scandinavia if you like. Ignore the private health insurance racket in America if it suits your argument. But do not pretend these are equivalent to socialist planning
Then what the Soviet Union did was not socialist planning.
Scandinavian economies do not subordinate firms to the public good.
What does the word “good” even mean, who is “the public”???
Private ownership remains the principle. Decommodification is tactical, contingent, and constantly under assault. Under socialism, social ownership is the principle and capital is repressed. That absolutely determines the direction of travel. The USSR, for most of its existence, directed surplus to industrialization, universal education, healthcare, and defence against imperialism. That is not a minor variation. It is a qualitative break.
If I abstract concrete needs into an average of a population and go to the stock market to let this population do the bidding, or let bidding be done in its interest by some sort of elected representative or whatever, I no longer have private ownership per se, I have common ownership. I am however still doing capitalism. For example: the point of critique in regards to cooperatives is that their engagement with society, with the world at large, is still a capitalistic one. Again your line of argument conflates some form of common ownership with communization.
You can issue all the plans you want. Without the proper material conditions and productive forces, they will not amount to shit
This is the problem with Stalinists. When Cuba or Vietnam fails it’s the material conditions, when China actually makes a leap it’s material conditions. This is the handwavy explaining that Marx actively tried to avoid. Marx talks about the organisation of society as being part of the base, it’s most its important aspect in fact. The base does not just include the ultra tangible stuff you refer to when you talk about materialism.
[…] To cite these as evidence that capitalism already does what socialism does is to ignore the direction of travel and the class struggle over every concession.
This entire paragraph is confusing. Capital tends to centralise as a default and for its continued functioning needs to abolish certain aspects of trade, there is no movement to transform this centralisation and inherent partial decommodification into communist relations yet and the class struggle from below has been dead for half a century when you look at your beloved imperial core. Only very recently there were two or three practically meaningless deeds of adventurism by lone wolves and sixteen years ago you had occupy.
[…] Bordigist purism offers the comfort of certainty without the burden of construction […]
I frankly do not know what this last paragraph is supposed to mean really. If you want to critique my negativity or skepticism because it doesn’t nativly offer a planned out concrete alternative then I refer to the various critiques of appeals to constructive criticism that have existed in history. If you want fantastical imagery of a planned society then you’re asking for bona fide utopianism and immediatetism.
It appears continuing further will unfortunately be entirely unproductive. Your reply is clearly bad faith (I had hoped we could have at least some meaningful interaction but that was never your interest.): idiotic name-calling because you lack the theoretical capacity to engage with substance, zero grasp of formalism and how it directly negates Marxism’s scientific method, nearing functional illiteracy with your inability to hold or meaningfully respond to a single argument actually made, and CIA brainworms that have you wielding “Stalinist” as a slur while you plug your ears and turn away from reality. You project your own utopian immediatism onto me, demand purity tests instead of material analysis, and substitute sectarian noise for revolutionary practice. I stand by my opening conclusion that I was beginning to think was perhaps too harsh but now realise was directly on point. You have an understanding of theory and reality equivalent to that of the most learned dust mite yet hold an arrogance when you talk far greater than the most arrogant emperor.
I unfortunately cannot find it, there is the this meme where a white person tells another other white person that they need to be killed with the subtitle “third worldism”.
I think it’s quite interesting how you just launch all these attacks against someone who is mostly in the same boat with you but much stricter in their readings. I attend protests, I have been part of what people in my lane would deride as “activism”. Not because I believe in it, but because I want to understand organisation from a first hand perspective. I know socdems, demsocs, Maoists, Trotskiites, fuck it I was in a reading circle with a co-author of Cockshott, I don’t hate them nor do I want to see them completely disempowered because I do believe that organisational structure can experience ruptures and change towards radicalism no matter the exact tendency. There are certain fearless groups in Eastern Europe doing incredible work within the self-action of the worker and they do not belong to any ultraleftist orgs.
Keep doing what you are doing. I don’t see it necessary to actively convince anyone or proselytise. I don’t have any pretensions to drag people into camps.
Yeah big issue with your attempt to demean me with your shitty meme you couldn’t even be bothered to find is that I am neither white nor a denizen of the imperial core. I am also absolutely not a Third Worldist. I am a Marxist-Leninist. I even have a Master’s in Marxist theory (not that that is particularly relevant in this context beyond credential-stuffing.). My positions come from study grounded in practice, not abstraction.
You aren’t stricter in your reading, you’re more dogmatic, and thus unscientific. That’s a massive break from the core of Marxist socialism, which demands analysis of concrete conditions, not the application of invariant formulae. You are a settler operating with much arrogance and little understanding beyond the academic exercise you take socialism to be. This is the pattern of many modern “ultra” flavours in the imperial core: much “critique” from the margins, zero real engagement with the material contradictions of actually-existing socialism. I hope one day you can grow up and move beyond your infantile disorder, best of luck to you.
There’s a ton that’s wrong with this comment, but I want to pick on something especially egregious that stuck out to me. Your conflation of administration with ownership:
Administration is not ownership.
To reiterate, it is. When I hold dominion over something like a steam train I practically own it because I get to say what happens to it, I get to say that it’s mine for example.
Here, Marx is responding to Bakunin:
…will consist of workers. Certainly, with your permission, of former workers, who however, as soon as they have become representatives or governors of the people, cease to be workers…
As little as a factory owner today ceases to be a capitalist if he becomes a municipal councillor…
…and look down on the whole common workers’ world from the height of the state. They will no longer represent the people, but themselves and their pretensions to people’s government. Anyone who can doubt this knows nothing of the nature of men.
If Mr. Bakunin only knew something about the position of a manager in a workers’ cooperative factory, all his dreams of domination would go to the devil. He should have asked himself what form the administrative function can take on the basis of this workers’ state, if he wants to call it that.
Your analysis is more that of an anarchist than a Marxist, and as I’ve shown before you frequently make metaphysical mistakes in your method. This is why Bordigists have never achieved anything of note, faulty analysis that results in self-sabotage.
Your “argument” rests on a formalist reading of Marx that confuses legal categories with social relations. An owning class is defined by private appropriation of surplus and the ability to reproduce that power through inheritance and market competition. The Soviet nomenklatura held administrative authority, not private property. They could not sell factories, bequeath positions, or extract profit as personal wealth. That is a qualitative difference.
Comparing the USSR to the KMT shows some impressive ignorance and ignores the rupture in property relations. The KMT preserved landlordism and comprador capital. The Soviet state expropriated both.
Planning under capitalism coordinates individual firms while leaving social reproduction to market anarchy. Socialist planning, however imperfect, subordinates enterprise activity to social goals: full employment, universal services, industrial catch up. The presence of markets or external trade does not erase that direction of travel.
The law of value cannot be abolished by decree because it is a social relation, not a policy. Marx was explicit in the Critique of the Gotha Programme: right can never be higher than the economic structure of society. Socialism constrains the law of value through planned allocation, price controls, and decommodification. It withers through development, not proclamation.
International conflicts between socialist states reflect the pressure of the capitalist world system and unresolved national questions, not an inherent capital logic. Uneven development, border disputes, and great power chauvinism are real contradictions. They demand critique, but they do not settle the class character of a mode of production.
Prussia modernized under Junker aristocracy and state led development, but it never socialized the means of production or aimed at the withering of the state. Achievements in literacy or industry under socialism are not “just development”. They are the result of surplus being directed to social need rather than private accumulation.
Bordigist purity spectacles are a luxury of those like yourself, a settler, denizen of the imperial core whose only interaction with socialism is as an academic exercise. You have built nothing, defended nothing, and achieved nothing. You demand a socialism that arrives without contradiction, without transition, without struggle. Revolutionary practice must engage with concrete conditions, not ideal blueprints. If your standard for socialism is the immediate absence of all market forms, all state mediation, all external trade, then you have defined it out of historical possibility. You clearly wish to appear revolutionary without the effort of grappling with reality.
Trve
The thing is though that private property is literally administrative authority and vice-versa. When I give my sister my Tudor Montecarlo from 1970-something with the grey dial and the steel bezel I give her administrative authority over the watch, she now administers the watch. Conversely, when I handle accounts as someone at a bank I have administrative authority in spite of dues to be paid to customers that make me the effective owner of a certain amount of capital. In other words the bank alienates something from customers in a similar way to a factory owning capitalist alienating labour power.
There very well could have been these limitations. To keep it short I am not going to critique these points about specific restrictions. There was still capital which crept into society through literal competitions between workers enforced directly by the state and periphery around productivity maximisation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Stakhanov
There are things which we cannot sell/be nominally capitalistic about in societies we all would agree are capitalist, pretty significant ones like public land, firefighting and certain internet services
These are rather specific points that don’t get to the statement I was trying to make. I was referring to aspects of state-administered centralisation/monopolism and expropriation where it was necessary to advance the development of the working class (for both capitalism and socialism).
When the great man of history Trump says he should send another bajillion to Israel in the form of very specific arms shipments, isn’t that centralised planning? When Sweden built one million apartments were they doing socialism? Market anarchy doesn’t just concern the level of firms.
While not strictly subordinated all the Scandinavian economies do or have done this, but they are not socialist.
It doesn’t, but it the existence of socialisation also doesn’t prove the direction of travel.
What is planning if not a decree, after all we are talking about instructions not proclamations in church. The whole point of socialism and communism is that instead of just doing stuff and then thinking about the consequences/handling them, we plan according to need and that changes the societal structure at its base. Call that thinking before doing. For that we really need to stop and think as a societal organism. The whole thinking process is not negated by the primacy of the development of the economic structure, it is something that arises out of the economic realities by necessity. Think of it as a collective awakening.
We do this in capitalism as socialisation is necessary for the continued existence of the economy. Postal service, social security, educational incomes, care work, libre software, you name it. Surplus being directed to social needs is not exclusive to socialism or communism. My friends call it necessary communization and they contrast it with movements that actually demand communism. In the first chapters of Kapital Marx grounds exchange of goods to necessity, without it no such thing as a commodity or capitalism.
Yeah whatever, just ignore me not being able to find a job, afford an education and my account balance being -30$. A true academic with just a highschool diploma. Beyond my intellectual circlejerking I probably have absolutely no reason to concern myself practically with the economy since I have it so good
A formalist reading of Marx is not just wrong. It abandons the soul of scientific socialism and borders on the reactionary. It substitutes legal abstractions for the analysis of concrete social relations and replaces historical materialism with moralistic catechism.
Your watch analogy is idiotic. A watch is not a means of production. Conflating personal possession with capitalist private property shows you have not grasped the most elementary distinction in Marxist theory. Private property is a social relation that enables the extraction of surplus labour through exclusion and market enforcement. Administering a gift does not let you exploit wage labour. Your bank analogy is equally empty. Try exercising your supposed “ownership” by walking into that bank and demanding to appropriate that capital you “own” as personal wealth. See how fast the social relation of capital reasserts itself through law, force, and institutional discipline. Administration is not ownership. Your confusion reveals a complete lack of conception of private property as a social relation.
Your point about public land, firefighters, and internet services under capitalism is detached from both theory and reality. Thatcherites privatized public land on a massive scale. Tech firms and telecom monopolies wage constant campaigns to enclose the digital commons and commodify every facet of the internet. The fact that capitalism tolerates or even manages certain public functions currently does not negate its driving logic. These are concessions wrung from capital or functional necessities for reproducing labour power, not evidence of a different mode of production.
Your KMT comparison remains idiotic even after clarification. Yes, both the KMT and the USSR employed state centralization. But form without content is idealism. The USSR broke private property relations in land and industry. The KMT preserved landlordism and comprador capital. The class character of state power and the direction of surplus allocation were fundamentally opposed. To ignore this is to reduce Marxism to a checklist of administrative techniques. That is not analysis. It is fetishism.
On planning under capitalism, you swing and miss again. Aid to Israel is not a benevolent decree. It is the outcome of a bidding war between arms firms, lobbying blocs, and imperial strategy, all mediated through the logic of accumulation. Sweden building apartments is not socialism. It is the imperial core using super-exploitation of the periphery to fund social peace at home. Ignore austerity, the housing crisis, and the privatization creep across Scandinavia if you like. Ignore the private health insurance racket in America if it suits your argument. But do not pretend these are equivalent to socialist planning.
Scandinavian economies do not subordinate firms to the public good. Private ownership remains the principle. Decommodification is tactical, contingent, and constantly under assault. Under socialism, social ownership is the principle and capital is repressed. That absolutely determines the direction of travel. The USSR, for most of its existence, directed surplus to industrialization, universal education, healthcare, and defence against imperialism. That is not a minor variation. It is a qualitative break.
When I say the law of value cannot be abolished by decree, I mean exactly what Marx meant. You can issue all the plans you want. Without the proper material conditions and productive forces, they will not amount to shit. That is why socialism is a transitional phase. It is the process of creating those conditions through planned development, class struggle, and the gradual withering of commodity relations. To demand the immediate absence of all market forms is to demand socialism without history. That is not revolutionary. It is utopian.
Your “necessary communization” point is equally detached. Postal services, education, social security: all are under active assault by capital. Privatization of public assets is a global trend (outside the remaining socialist holdouts). Social security in the imperial core is funded by imperial rent and is in structural decline as the periphery liberates itself. Austerity has been the dominant policy for over a decade. To cite these as evidence that capitalism already does what socialism does is to ignore the direction of travel and the class struggle over every concession.
Finally, your deflection about personal hardship misses the point entirely. Your precarity is likely real (if you’re telling the truth) and is produced by the system we oppose. But having no practice in building socialism, as a settler denizen of the imperial core, renders your theory a purely academic exercise. That is why your arguments are so detached from both reality and theory. Revolutionary clarity is not forged in grievance. It is forged through study, practice, and alignment with the movement of the working class. Bordigist purism offers the comfort of certainty without the burden of construction. It is easy to declare every actually existing socialist project impure from the safety of the core. If your theory cannot account for the struggle to build under constraint, it is not a meaningful or worthwhile guide to action. You have not refuted anything. You have only repeated your formalist catechism with more words and less understanding.
Wordslop and the Stalino-Kruschevite fetishism of Formalism that doesn’t mean anything outside of its use as a verbal battering ram.
I could make the same analogy with a piece of equipment used in production of goods and it would still hold water.
It literally is. But in the Stalino-Trotskiite worldview you need to add extra steps to explain why managers, party officials and people high up in the military were totally socialist or communist and A OK.
You completely incorrectly conflate the subset personal wealth with capital. Just because the USSR had collective democratic mechanisms and was depersonalised (in a limited way) doesn’t mean it gets to be exempt from analyses of it.
To reiterate, it is. When I hold dominion over something like a steam train I practically own it because I get to say what happens to it, I get to say that it’s mine for example.
Here is the thing. Even if public land is privatised there is a hard limit to which you can do that. You might have a few counterexamples examples where land and certain services are privatised, but that does not disprove the fact that socialisation is an absolute necessity even in capitalism. You are also twisting my words, I never said that this as is was evidence of a different mode of production.
Yo, I am literally pointing out the content. A few hammer and sickles on flags and pins are not content, that there wasn’t private property in exactly the same way as in Spain is not relevant. Making the state the landlord does not alter the class character of anything or whatever that word is supposed to mean. I am not reducing Marxism, a term Marx completely rejected, to a checklist of things. I am pointing out that the Soviet experiment from a standpoint of history had a very similar trajectory to many unabashedly capitalistic nations and that it failed in its goals.
Then what the Soviet Union did was not socialist planning.
What does the word “good” even mean, who is “the public”???
If I abstract concrete needs into an average of a population and go to the stock market to let this population do the bidding, or let bidding be done in its interest by some sort of elected representative or whatever, I no longer have private ownership per se, I have common ownership. I am however still doing capitalism. For example: the point of critique in regards to cooperatives is that their engagement with society, with the world at large, is still a capitalistic one. Again your line of argument conflates some form of common ownership with communization.
This is the problem with Stalinists. When Cuba or Vietnam fails it’s the material conditions, when China actually makes a leap it’s material conditions. This is the handwavy explaining that Marx actively tried to avoid. Marx talks about the organisation of society as being part of the base, it’s most its important aspect in fact. The base does not just include the ultra tangible stuff you refer to when you talk about materialism.
This entire paragraph is confusing. Capital tends to centralise as a default and for its continued functioning needs to abolish certain aspects of trade, there is no movement to transform this centralisation and inherent partial decommodification into communist relations yet and the class struggle from below has been dead for half a century when you look at your beloved imperial core. Only very recently there were two or three practically meaningless deeds of adventurism by lone wolves and sixteen years ago you had occupy.
I frankly do not know what this last paragraph is supposed to mean really. If you want to critique my negativity or skepticism because it doesn’t nativly offer a planned out concrete alternative then I refer to the various critiques of appeals to constructive criticism that have existed in history. If you want fantastical imagery of a planned society then you’re asking for bona fide utopianism and immediatetism.
It appears continuing further will unfortunately be entirely unproductive. Your reply is clearly bad faith (I had hoped we could have at least some meaningful interaction but that was never your interest.): idiotic name-calling because you lack the theoretical capacity to engage with substance, zero grasp of formalism and how it directly negates Marxism’s scientific method, nearing functional illiteracy with your inability to hold or meaningfully respond to a single argument actually made, and CIA brainworms that have you wielding “Stalinist” as a slur while you plug your ears and turn away from reality. You project your own utopian immediatism onto me, demand purity tests instead of material analysis, and substitute sectarian noise for revolutionary practice. I stand by my opening conclusion that I was beginning to think was perhaps too harsh but now realise was directly on point. You have an understanding of theory and reality equivalent to that of the most learned dust mite yet hold an arrogance when you talk far greater than the most arrogant emperor.
lmaoooooooooooo
Arrogance, man speak for yourself.
Sure thing settler
I unfortunately cannot find it, there is the this meme where a white person tells another other white person that they need to be killed with the subtitle “third worldism”.
I think it’s quite interesting how you just launch all these attacks against someone who is mostly in the same boat with you but much stricter in their readings. I attend protests, I have been part of what people in my lane would deride as “activism”. Not because I believe in it, but because I want to understand organisation from a first hand perspective. I know socdems, demsocs, Maoists, Trotskiites, fuck it I was in a reading circle with a co-author of Cockshott, I don’t hate them nor do I want to see them completely disempowered because I do believe that organisational structure can experience ruptures and change towards radicalism no matter the exact tendency. There are certain fearless groups in Eastern Europe doing incredible work within the self-action of the worker and they do not belong to any ultraleftist orgs.
Keep doing what you are doing. I don’t see it necessary to actively convince anyone or proselytise. I don’t have any pretensions to drag people into camps.
Yeah big issue with your attempt to demean me with your shitty meme you couldn’t even be bothered to find is that I am neither white nor a denizen of the imperial core. I am also absolutely not a Third Worldist. I am a Marxist-Leninist. I even have a Master’s in Marxist theory (not that that is particularly relevant in this context beyond credential-stuffing.). My positions come from study grounded in practice, not abstraction.
You aren’t stricter in your reading, you’re more dogmatic, and thus unscientific. That’s a massive break from the core of Marxist socialism, which demands analysis of concrete conditions, not the application of invariant formulae. You are a settler operating with much arrogance and little understanding beyond the academic exercise you take socialism to be. This is the pattern of many modern “ultra” flavours in the imperial core: much “critique” from the margins, zero real engagement with the material contradictions of actually-existing socialism. I hope one day you can grow up and move beyond your infantile disorder, best of luck to you.
There’s a ton that’s wrong with this comment, but I want to pick on something especially egregious that stuck out to me. Your conflation of administration with ownership:
Here, Marx is responding to Bakunin:
Your analysis is more that of an anarchist than a Marxist, and as I’ve shown before you frequently make metaphysical mistakes in your method. This is why Bordigists have never achieved anything of note, faulty analysis that results in self-sabotage.