Was it communism?

That's socialism

>implying there is any meaningful difference
Wew lad

Or course not. They never even said it was.

The USSR was communist in that it wanted to achieve the stateless and collectivist system called communism, but obviously never got there.

Khrushchev said "we will have communism by 1980" but macro financial woes and the distraction of the Cold War prevented this from being possible.

>macro financial woes
Like communism?

What?

Communism is a stateless society where people share everything.

You're thinking of socialism, which is WORKER control over the means of production. The USSR claimed their government was a worker's state, but it was so undemocratic and repressive that this was clearly a lie.

What communism?

Ironically everyone who thinks the USSR is communism is buying into Soviet propaganda

Ironically everyone who thinks communism is a good idea is buying into Soviet propaganda

No, that's state capitalism

Nah man

Communism means there's no government. That's the point.

But how can it be socialist if workers didn't control the means of production?

US education is so shit at explaining ideologies haha

Great

No. Communism = No state. Socialism = co-operatives and unions. USSR = state capitalism

then why did they say it was communism

i hate the dishonesty in these threads

Because they said they aspired to be communist

No it was Brezhnev and Yeltsin

Then why didn't they say so???????

libshits are infurieating

For a state that professed to be for the people and against the "bourgeois" it sure was funny to see the Soviets prop up and encourage genres created by and for the rich like classical music and ballet while suppressing arts that were actually created by the "proletariat" like Jazz and Rock.

Socialists aren't liberals

They did, by repeatedly saying "We'll have true communism by 19XX!!!1!"
Also state with the communist ideology != state with communism
Don't be aggressively ignorant

socialism is just radical liberalism

What?

One of the biggest goals of communism is making bourgeois luxuries like art and education available to all. This is why Soviet films were so artsy and the government worked so hard on promoting ballerinas and composers.

Rock music is bourgeois, as it was literally created by record companies and radio stations to make money. A lot of rock is amazing, but early rock music was about nothing other than the money and doesn't hold up very well.

Blues and obviously folk are proletarian in their inception.

No it's not. Classical liberalism = civil liberties and market liberalisation. Modern American use of the word liberal like Bernie Sanders means social democracy which is underpinned by a belief that the market fundamentally produces good results but that there needs to be government intervention to prevent bad outcomes.

Socialism in a form like market socialism (business structured as co-operatives) is a precursor to communism which is underpinned by the belief that the market system is fatally flawed.

refer to

I gave two explanations of the word, the likes of Bernie Sanders are modelling themselves after European social democracy. in the UK the Liberal Democrats exist as a merger between the Liberal party and the Social Democrats, an attempt to marry classical belief with social justice.

The difference is they believe the market basically works and socialists are coming at it from a different angle.

I was disagreeing with your explanation of how liberal is used in modern america.

>communism = stateless society
Literally what? That is so fucking wrong it's not even funny. That's anarchism, not communism. If everyone control the production then everyone is the government, everyone leads, everyone IS the state.

Anarchy is the political ideal which is state-less. Stop getting your god dam definitions from wikipedia.

In a command economy like that of the soviet union mistakes keep piling up once they start being made and then there's no way back.
The situation was so bad that by 85 the only functioning industries were resource extraction and military hardware and even then those were wasteful. In timber logs would just be thrown into the river to freefloat without any support, resulting in many of them sinking.
One guy even calculated that the amount of wasted logs produced over the lifetime of the lumberyards could fill ALL of the russian river systems.

The thing is, the soviet union was hitting all it's marks and expectations of economic growth before the stagnation era, but the western nations were not only doung that but also EXCEEDING them.
What should have been ordinary growth became exponential growth, and this was because of the shift in production to consumer goods and the use of computer technology. In the 70s the ratio of amount of computers in the US to that in the USSR was 40 to 1(!), when you see numbers like that serious red flags should start popping up.
Instead of doing what the west was doing the soviets doubled down on extraction, agriculture and especially the military, and as a result were hopelessly left behind.

The stagnation had many many factors that contributed to it, way more than whatever fun facts I just mentioned, so factors that they simply can't be condensed explanation that points its finger at a single flaw in the system,
rather it was the entire system that failed because of many mistakes that then became endemic flaws in the system, often related but also often unrelated.
In the end the most we can say is that it was the Soviet Union, its system and its political situation that caused its downfall, not solely the restrictions of an ideology, although it too was definitely flawed.

No, because communism is impossible.

You should read more

To add to this, in your state-less "communist government" how do you war? Surely when it comes to something as complex as warfare you do not expect literally every single person to have his own mind in the campaign and exerting his own will over it?

How do you even set up a campaign when you're 'stateless'.

Right back atcha Mr.Communists have no Government.

The meaningful difference is that "communism" is the desired outcome of socialism, you fuckhead

Anarchists and communists have the same end goal, and always have. Communists believe you need a state first to make the transition, and communists believe a transitionary workers' state is preferable to bourgeois liberal democracy.

How can there be war if there are no states?

No, m8, the stare refers to government institutions and power dynamics upheld through implicit threat of force.

Got it, ancaps want freedom and property rights while commies want ultimate state power and total control.

Oh, so you just twisted the definition to suit your means, okay I understand now. Even though by literal definition, that is not what a state is. A state is a nation, a government.

So then communism is explicitly not a state-less government, glad we can agree there.

What? Governments are not the ones who have been warring for ever, at one stage we lived in anarchistic societies and still had to fight one another (tribal societies)

You guys live in fairy worlds.

Ancaps aren't really anarchists

When anybody who isn't an ancap says anarchism, they mean mainstream anticapitalist anarchists

You're thinking of Marxist-Leninists, a variety of communists who believe a strong state can seize property and power and then distribute it amongst the people.

Until they managed to take over Russia, Marxist-Leninists were a minority of communists, outnumbered by market socialists, Luxemburgists, and Orthodox Marxists, all of whom disagreed with the ultra-statistics nature of MLism.

These days, left communists and Trotskyists together outnumber MLs.

Communists believe you need a state to get to stateless communism

Anarchists believe you don't need a state to get to stateless communism

But does any of it matter when they 'all' want to use the state?

Why don't commies ever try to do it themselves within a capitalist system.
They are completely free to not exercise their property rights.

Why do they always try to tom sawyer their way into other people's property rights?

What's the difference between a commune and a tribe?

If communism is so great then why didn't they win the cold war? What happened?

>What happened?
Famine because communism and bootleg western goods came in from china/india.

Sorry if it's coming off as bait'y.
I mean what difference does it matter if most commies allegedly reject totalitarianism when they still want to increase state control and deprive others of their rights.
No matter what they are free to try to establish communism through willing participation, but instead they always refuse to put any skin in the game and instead use indoctrination or legislation.

Stateles:
Yes ▢
No

Classless:
Yes ▢
No

Worker control of the means of production:
Yes ▢
No

Anyone who thinks the ussr was communist is either retarded or using the ussr as the definition of communism, which is eating up cold war propaganda and which would make the question tautological anyway.

Shit, my checked boxes next to the "No" aren't showing.

>Communists believe you need a state to get to stateless communism
>Anarchists believe you don't need a state to get to stateless communism

Do you think?

>Communists believe you need a state to get to stateless communism

How else do you recommend we redistribute property?

>attempt communism
>it turns into quasi-fascist state capitalism
LOL, not real Communism

>attempt communism again
>it turns into quasi-fascist state capitalism again
LOL, still not real Communism

>attempt communism yet again
>it turns into quasi-fascist state capitalism once more
LOL, still not real Communism bro

Guys, guys guys. Maybe, just... just maybe Communism is an unattainable goal and all attempts to reach it result in the means of production being seized and held by the state that they were entrusted to?

>there are communists IN THIS THREAD who believe that nation-wide communism cannot be implemented without the two class system of ruling and other.

I hate the biased conditioning of higher academia...

Wait, so what's the difference between social democracy and social liberalism, then?

First off, democracy is a governmental system, and liberalism is a political ideology. The term "social liberalism," can mean many different things depending on context.

what is love?

...

>excuse me redditor

this is short, but it's true.
h-how do i upvote

Bureaucratic despotism.

There was no real communist countries, because everyone knew it was the shit, so quickly shifted to either crypto-fascism or socialism right after the "revolution".

Its a transition state towards communism but it can be considerd Socialist by Lenin his definition. (Not the defintion of the Workers owning the means of production)

For it to be Socialist in its orginal sense the workers need to be in direct controle over the means of production instead of by proxy of the state. For this to happen you also need to be able to enforce your ownership over your means of production without dependence on a seperate thing to make your idea of property existant. (For the idea of property to exist you need to enforce this)

If someone takes your shit and if you depend on the state to punish that person and give your shit back that means that stuff was never yours in the first place as you allow an seperate thing to actually command the object by means of force. If the seperate thing takes your shit then you cant do shit as you gave the seperate thing power over the object in the first place as you yourself lacked the power to assert your own might over the object yourself. Thats why worker militias are important as fuck to defend their own means of production instead of depending on the state and their police force/red army to defend it for them. Cause the state then essentially own the means of production cause the population cant resist when the state takes their shit by force as the population lack force.
Read Stirner. (Chapter: Owness)

That's fucking retarded, the means of production have not been seized.

I mean, I know that /pol/tards are, in the end, tards, but this is not THAT complicated

Did Lenin even read Capital?

Was this thread written by Joseph Heller?

...

Something that has never actually been tried according to many contemporary communists.

Fucking idiot, read a book.

Look up the definition of tribe.
You'll read some things about common ancestors, traditionnal social organisations, hierarchies, & nowadays ethnic bullshit.

That's a strawman. Those who supported Hugo Chavez & his bullshit still do, and most communists opposed him and always have. Frankly, moderate liberals because they have no clear ideology ("realpolitik") are the only ones changing their minds on the way, all the time (Syriza, Podemos in few years, etc.).

It was socialism until Stalin died and then Khrushchev sowed the seeds to revert back to liberal capitalism.

Anyone who says state capitalism is an idiot.

>The USSR has precisely zero of these qualities.

hehe

This desu. Marx only added the bit about the "state withering away" to appease the anarchist, who were a thorn in his side his whole life.

But the government controlling the economy ISN'T socialism

That's not what communism is at all

It is if it's done with proletarian interest.

>a political and economic theory of social organization that advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.
>government controls economy
>people choose government
>DURR NOT REAL SOCIALISM

t. stalin

His USSR was the best example of ML teaching so thanks :)

Tell me with a straight face that the USSR and Venezuela are democratic societies

Marxism-Leninism doesn't work unless the head of government is either God or an infallible AI

Agreed and Stalin was close to perfect.

Dumbass here.
Mind shortly explaining what are and what they want for each of those definitions?

Marxist-Leninist
Market Socialist
Luxemburgist
Orthodox Marxist
Left Communist
Trotskyists

Please tell me how all of those differ from one another.

These were not things Marx said would be present in a communist society, these were things he said should be enacted immediately after a revolution by a dictatorship of the proletariat themselves. So one: this in of itself proves the USSR wasn't communist and two: these things were not enacted by the proletariat but by an elitist faction under the moniker of the State, further proof if you needed any more.

...

>muh real communism has never been tried!

Maybe that's because the transition process always destroys everything

Stateless, classless, moneyless society is something we had 50,000 years ago. Anyone who wants that today is mentally ill

>communism
>real
Pick one.

Is "real communism" even feasible ? Even Anarcho-capitalism is more likely to happen than the sort of communism some people here want.

Big difference -- MLs believe the USSR was good, all others disagree.

Marxism-Leninism involves a revolution led or co-opted by a "vanguard" of well-read and well-trained communists who take over the state and turn into socialism then full stateless communism within their lifetimes. The private sector is replaced by the public sector.

Market socialism involves the creation of a semi-permanent society where unions, rather than the government or companies, control the economy. The economic is simultaneously public and private.

Luxemburgists follow the teachings of Rosa Luxemburg, who headed the failed German revolution of 1919. They're similar to Marxist-Leninists, but believe democracy must be upheld through elections and the toleration of political dissent. They love trade unions and don't like state control.

Left-communists believe revolution must be bottom-up, led by the people rather than a government. They have some similarities to anarchists, but believe grassroots efforts can establish a state to oversee redistribution and the defence of the people. Critics call them "ultra-lefties" because left-communists tend to refuse cooperation with other socialists and rarely tolerate dissent.

Trotskyists are similar to MLs but follow the guidelines of Marx more strictly. They still support a vanguard party, but think the biggest focus of a socialist movement should be uniting workers across national and cultural lines, and tend to be slightly less authoritarian than MLs. Trots are accused by some of imperialism, because they believe it's not only ethical, but absolutely necessary for a socialist state to invade its neighbors and spread the revolution. Trots also have a bad habit of forming their own political orgs when things don't go their way.

Maoists also exist, but we don't like to talk about them.

Peaceful egalitarianism combined with modern luxury sounds amazing, what are you smoking?