/marx/ - Marxism

The currency was the Soviet ruble.

If you want a brief introduction to Soviet workers in the 1930s (including stuff like wages), I recommend glancing at a 1937 pamphlet which can be viewed online here: http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/006831647

I would say the workers controlled the means of production, yes. Society operated on the socialist principle of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" and the economy was consciously planned by that society.

As for the press: "In the first place, nothing is permitted that is deemed 'counter-revolutionary'. This does not mean that no criticism of the government is allowed. On the contrary, there is, as the student will have concluded, no country in the world in which there is actually so much widespread criticism of the government, and such incessant revelation of its shortcomings, as in the USSR. Nearly every issue of the newspaper contains details of breakdowns and failures; of the scandalous behaviour of officials whose names are given; of cases of neglect and oppression; and of the need for this or that alteration or improvement of government policy or administration. The 'wall newspaper', in which, in every factory and office, the staff publicly criticise, and even lampoon, their superiors, is a universal institution all over the USSR." (Webbs, Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? Vol. II, 1936, pp. 1026-1027.)

>>2874

The state withers away with the victory of communism on a worldwide scale.

>>2876

Brinton's work is dishonest and doesn't actually refute the claim that the working-class controlled the means of production. Workers controlling individual factories is not and cannot be socialism.

And as I already noted, the press was quite free under Lenin and Stalin. It was not free for counter-revolutionaries, although at one point even this was (more or less) permitted: "But, notwithstanding a decree of November 17th giving powers to the Government to suppress hostile newspapers, which was adopted by a narrow majority (thirty-four—twenty-four) by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets elected at the Second Soviet Congress, the newspapers of a number of capitalist groups, as well as of the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks, went on being published until August, 1918, with scarcely any interference. The wildest inventions (such as that about an alleged 'nationalization of women' in certain Volga towns), the most violent denunciations of the Soviet Government and the Bolshevik Party, the most open championship of the enemies of Soviet power, filled the columns of these newspapers. To turn over their pages nowadays - those of the bourgeois papers like Utro Rossii and Zarya Rossii, or of S.R. and Menshevik papers in their infinite variety, like Dielo Naroda and Novaya Zhizn - is to see proof of a tolerance which was as fruitless as that of the Paris Commune." - Andrew Rothstein, A History of the U.S.S.R., 1951, p. 46.

>What his idea of the state "withering away" amounts to doesn't seem particularly clear to me, sometimes it looks like the state will remain forever, but "loses its class character", whatever that means.

My idea is the same as that of Lenin and Stalin, and was expressed in the former's work "The State and Revolution."

The idea that the state "loses its class character" is an anti-Marxist one, propagated after Stalin's death by Khrushchev and his successors who proclaimed the USSR a "state of the whole people" in which class struggle had supposedly ceased to exist.

>>2941

The October Revolution gave Jews equal rights with all other nations and peoples. There was no state-sponorsed anti-Semitism under Lenin and Stalin.

On the campaign against cosmopolitanism see: http://ml-review.ca/aml/CommunistLeague/COSMOPOLITANISM-COMPASS131-1998.HTM

As for the "Doctor's Plot," Stalin's daughter noted that Stalin himself did not believe the charges against the doctors. Some authors have pointed out, on the basis of archival materials, that Stalin himself was putting an end to the case by the time he died.

>>2944

>There was a purge of Polish Jews as part of a coup attempt by Mozcar.

You mean Moczar, and it's worth noting that he was denounced during the actual period of socialist construction and only rehabilitated under Gomułka, who had likewise been denounced until after Stalin's death when the Soviet revisionists forced the Marxist-Leninists of the Eastern European countries to bring back into positions of influence those justly condemned in prior years.

>cosmopolitanism was at least parallel to Zionism as seen by the fascists.

The campaign was used by anti-Semites for their own purposes, but that was not its official intention. It originated and was intended as a campaign against tendencies in the Soviet intelligentsia to view Soviet socialist culture and Western capitalist culture as converging into a "world culture." In effect, it was a campaign against efforts to prettify Western cultural trends.

As Stalin put it: "Why Mal'tsev, and then Rovinskii between brackets? What's the matter here? How long will this continue…? If a man chose a literary pseudonym for himself, it's his right…. But apparently someone is glad to emphasise that this person has a double surname, to emphasise that he is a Jew…. Why create anti-Semitism?" (quoted in The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin by Erik Van Ree, p. 205.)

As for Soviet anti-Semitism after the 1950s, Hoxha noted that, "The revisionist-capitalist policy, which is applied in the Soviet Union, has revived the old demons of the czarist empire, such as national oppression, anti-semitism, Slav racism, Orthodox religious mysticism, the cult of military castes, the aristocratism of the intelligentsia, bureaucracy in the old Russian style, etc."