I’m not engaging in any circular thinking here. I’m simply stating that capital accumulation is the core aspect of capitalism, that’s why it’s called capitalism. Once again, the state does not accumulate capital. That’s just something you made up and keep using as a straw man. The state directs the productive power towards producing material things people of the country use.

It did not, it produced infrastructure, housing, food, energy, and weapons that the people of USSR needed to live and defend themselves from the capitalist threat. Meanwhile, your argument regarding the wages is intellectually dishonest because it ignores all the things people got they didn’t need to pay money for, and the fact that prices for things like food were fixed.

People working to produce things that they all use collectively is not exploitation. Your whole argument here is fallacious. Nobody in USSR was exploiting the labour of the workers for personal benefit the way actual capitalism works. Labour was done in the collective interest.

Wage labor existed in the USSR. People paid for things in rubles. People purchased things on the market. The state bought and paid for things. The law of value was in operation (Stalin himself did not even contest this fact). Yes, they had some social programs, just like many social democracies do. It doesn’t become “not wage labor” because you decided to call it “socialist wage labor” and slap a happy face sticker on it. When wage-labor exists, capital accumulation exists by definition because the value paid in wages in only part of the total value produced. Yes, value, as in the Law of Value. Price-fixing is a thing that happens in capitalist economies as well - the existence of price-fixing does not imply non-capitalism. The fact that social programs exist does not imply that either.

You could make a coherent argument that organization of labour could have been better, or that there was lack of genuine workplace democracy. These could be sound and credible arguments drawing parallels between capitalist company structure and state owned enterprise in USSR. However, that’s not the argument you’re making.

That would be like pointing to a rotting ship at the bottom of the sea covered in barnacles and complaining that one of the planks is loose. What is “genuine workplace democracy” anyway? That’s not a Marxist term I’ve ever heard. I only ever hear Bernie/ Wolff enjoyers talk like that.

I’m beginning to think that you don’t understand what the term circular reasoning means. There was a dictatorship of the proletariat because the proletariat ran a communist revolution that was led by the communist party and took power. That’s why there was a dictatorship of the proletariat.

There was not a dictatorship of the proletariat because something that called itself the communist party took over. There was a dictatorship of the proletariat for a brief time under Lenin because the bourgeoisie and the capitalist mode of production were suppressed by the vanguard party of the proletariat. However this did not last past Lenin’s death as the failures of the revolutions globally ultimately led to the failure of the revolution in Russia. A DotP sustaining itself in Russia alone would have been impossible. The path Russia took and where it is currently sitting at today proves that correct.

Once somebody demonstrates a better way to do thing we’ll talk. The reality is that the approach that USSR followed actually created a better state of things than a capitalist society as imperfect as it was. This was a socialist state that was moving in the direction of communism. The goal of socialism is to create a transitional state that moves society from capitalist relations towards communist ones. This does not happen overnight.

This argument would make sense if there was a global socialist movement which does not actually exist. In absence of such a movement, creating a socialist state is obviously the next best option. If Europeans didn’t shit the bed at the start of the 20th century and joined the communist movement, then what you’re talking about may have been possible.

What you’re calling ‘creating a socialist state’ is not possible in that manner. Attempting to create a better society is certainly possible, but that society will still be capitalist in essence no matter if the people running the country want it or not. Capitalism is not something some functionary can sign away on some decree.

Unfortunately, your argument is not dialectical because it ignores the material realities that drove these departures. If USSR failed to rapidly industrialize under Stalin, the most likely outcome would’ve been that nazis Germany would’ve taken it apart and ushered in global fascism before US finally managed to do it.

I wasn’t suggesting they had another choice. What I do criticize them for is for hurting future revolutions by not just admitting that socialism was not possible at that time. They didn’t have to distort Marx, Engels, and Lenin with their abomination of ‘Marxism-Leninism’. I’m not saying they shouldn’t have defended themselves.

You’re presenting a position that ignores the material realities in favor of idealism. Lenin directly addresses this style of argument in “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder

Now you are just throwing random quotes at me. Lenin is correct here but it he is talking about his disagreement about tactics with some other communists as he viewed as inflexible in their strategy. Nothing he says here applies to my argument or supports what you’re saying. Lenin never argued for the continuation of commodity production and would have never suggested it as a strategy for any reason, any more than he would argue for throwing up their hands and immediately surrendering to the bourgeoisie. He did acknowledge that socialist relations would co-exist alongside commodity production for a time, but he acknowledged that the parts of society where commodity production prevails are still capitalist.

What we see in China today is not fundamentally different from NEP which Lenin realized was necessary for largely the same reasons. It’s very easy to argue and criticize things in the abstract, it’s much harder to actually implement these things while under duress from global capitalism.

Since we’re quoting Lenin:

“The development of the proletarian revolution in other countries is going to be somewhat more difficult, but only for the time being, only in the present period of bourgeois-democratic revolution, only in the present period of the collapse of the Second International. We know perfectly well, however, that ‘final’ victory can be achieved only on a world scale, and only by the joint efforts of the workers of all countries.”

“The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky” (1918). Lenin knew that the success in revolution in Russia depended on the successes of the revolutions in Europe. When he talks about final victory he’s not talking about some far-off future of gay space communism in 500 years. He was talking about the present period. Lenin signed the NEP and died before it was really apparent that there wasn’t any possibility left for a world revolution. Signing the NEP was a strategic action they took and they could not really have done anything else. “Socialism in one country” is not a “theory” he would ever have advanced though.