10 Jan 2024 8:09 am
LowIQTrash: "...if you asked me to choose between capitalism and socialism, I'd choose the latter (but not Marxism-Leninism; I have a different idea in mind)."
What do you have in mind?
LowIQTrash: "What I question is: 1) Whether the achievements you ascribe to socialism are due to socialist policies (as opposed to something else, like, say, modernization and industrialization). 2) Whether those countries practiced socialism. The Soviet Union and similar countries seemed to more or less represent an anti-bourgeois state capitalist system. Anti-bourgeois because they despised small business / small shops / small-scale landowners, and as some of your left-communist "colleagues" (thorns on your side) might note, there was never any serious attempt to do away with commodity exchange. Private wage labor was abolished, only to be replaced with a wage "offered" to (foisted upon) the glorious worker by the state."
Yes, of course, industrialization was crucial for achieving desired socioeconomic goals. It served as the material basis for those improvements, without which socialist policies wouldn't have been worth the paper they were written on. Under capitalism, the lion's share of the wealth derived from industrialization accrues to the capitalist class, while under socialism, worker-produced wealth realized through industrialization is used to improve society as a whole rather than the sliver of society known as the capitalist class. That material basis provided by industrialization explains the success of the Soviet Union's socialist policies.
Concerning whether those countries practiced socialism, it must be understood that socialism is a historical process, not a list of things one checks off (i.e., improved socioeconomic conditions) to say, "Now we have socialism." Capitalism and socialism are historically embedded processes unfolding dialectically and not as a static state of affairs. Therefore, socialist experiments stand distinct from one another for material reasons. As such, socialist societies will appear different based on those material conditions. The only constant is that capitalism and its social relations were eliminated within those experiments. In brief, Marxism or scientific socialism is an action guide, not a dogma. So, yes, those countries did practice socialism.
And yes, all socialist societies are anti-bourgeois, but not only because they reject small businesses/petty-bourgeois businesses. They are merely anti-capitalists, which encompasses capitalism (and) petty capitalism. And yes, indeed, it was the case that "there was never any serious attempt to do away with commodity exchange," which is a topic that takes us back to the material conditions therein, which hampered the ability to eliminate commodity exchange. After all, just as the improvement of social conditions depends upon underlying material realities rather than the soundness of government policies, socialist or otherwise, the ability to eschew commodity production is also so dependent. In short, having been established within the context of a backward, mostly uneducated semi-agrarian society, the Soviet Union lacked many of the prerequisites for the total implementation of socialism and, later, communism. But as the world's first socialist experiment, it was very successful.
LowIQTrash: "Capitalism is not a "non-violent" system - contrary to the propaganda from libertarians, neoliberals, and conservatives."
Yes, not only is the capitalist system extremely violent, but it is so in a variety of ways that most people don't understand. From socioeconomic-induced street crime to domestic violence and the loneliness of atomized capitalist society, "capitalism is horror without end." --Lenin.
To be continued...