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ziq wrote

I think you mean to say 'try to put themselves at the top of the (state) capitalist hierarchy'.

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Solisition wrote

Not all of the parties are MLM or Trots- only most. Some places have legitimately Cool parties. Not many, but still!

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sudo wrote

Today's not opposite day, you know.

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ziq wrote (edited )

Just because I can never tell if you understand the point I'm making - Lenin admitted the USSR was state capitalism. Because it was state capitalism in every conceivable aspect. Joining a 'communist' (Leninist) party is akin to joining a state capitalist party. Leninism always results in state capitalism, and then eventually private capitalism again (after a few famines, mass-incarcerations, executions of workers and imperialist invasions of the surrounding lands). It's an infinite loop of greed, corruption and failure, and I suspect, just another attempt for the elite to subvert and pervert the prole struggle.

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sudo wrote

Lenin admitted the USSR was state capitalism.

No. He was referring to the NEP, which was a temporary retreat to state capitalism, to help the Russian economy recover from the civil war. Lenin never trusted the capitalists, and fully intended for the NEP to give way to socialism, and eventually communism. This article talks about it in detail.

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ziq wrote

if it was temporary, why did it never end, and in fact get more capitalistic each year? The outcome is the same.

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sudo wrote

It did end; Stalin got rid of it after Lenin's death, and replaced it with the first five-year plan.

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Solisition wrote

Actually, they started to detransition towards the end of Lenin's life. The 11th Congress was the start of this, IIRC?

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ziq wrote (edited )

If it was still state capitalism in practice, but given a new name by the new leader, it didn't end. That's just rebranding.

In January 1992, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of New Zealand came to the conclusion that the “capitalist counter-revolution” in Russia had begun in the Stalin era, not with Khrushchev in the 1950s as the CPNZ had previously asserted.

The Stalinist “bureaucrats” dominated the state apparatus and “coalesced into a new ruling class expropriating the fruits of the labour of workers and peasants”, the Central Committee declared.

These words are taken from the inner party circular of January 1992 announcing the Central Committee’s conclusions. Over the next year and a half, the CPNZ’s members and friends made a detailed study of events in Russia during the Stalin era.

The CPNZ’s 25th National Conference in September 1993 passed a resolution condemning Stalinism as the “gravedigger of the Bolshevik Revolution” and the “builder of state capitalism” in the Soviet Union. And conference adopted the declaration on Stalinism which you are now reading.

The Stalinist bureaucracy built state capitalism in Russia on the ruins of working class state power. Because this counter-revolution was carried out in the name of “socialism”, however, it had such a devastating impact on the international working class that the effects are felt to this day.

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