I didn't say the USSR didn't doctor photographs to remove purged members. In my reply to your upper level comment, I explained why the purges were necessary and elaborated on their context. Nothing I said in that comment is counter to reality, I even brought sources.
Cowbee
joined 2 years ago
What helped me most, from floating around various liberal viewpoints to coming to Marxism-Leninism, was actually working in an industrial environment.
I think we should make the same argument against banks, leasing, and other highly financialized capital.
Some people need a gentle hand, others need a slap on the wrist. For those who have already licensed themselves away from changing their minds through logic, refutation, or general dialogue, an open mind comes from personal, deteriorating conditions and the desire to learn how to escape them. All the patience in the world isn't enough for some people until the right conditions are met.
The joint leadership of the peasantry and the proletariat as the ruling classes of the USSR. The peasantry are symbolized with the sickle, the proletariat, the hammer. The H&S is used as a symbol for socialism, communism, Marxism-Leninism, etc.
You're confused on 2 primary accounts:
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That I am saying we can accomplish better, more equitable housing within capitalism. I'm a communist, I want socialism, and that's the first step towards communism. I am not pointing out exploitation and a solution to it as some actionable goal within capitalism, but to point to the fact that a better world is possible, and we get there through revolution.
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There has never been a society where people could not work to get better housing. Not in the USSR, with the famous soviet housing, not anywhere. Public housing does not mean all housing is the same, just that fewer people go without. Further, your wages are being taken from you, in socialism that isn't a problem, so you won't have to put in a decade of renting to get something nicer.
The landlord was still exploiting you and taking a ton of the wages you keep, which are already being stolen from through capitalist exploitation. If you prefer renting, then it would be a much better system to have publicly owned housing that isn't run to make a profit, or even with the expectation that cheap or free housing is a social cost.
Then I think you should reread @[email protected]'s comments with that understanding. We all agree that management is a necessary part of the social production process, but that it is ownership that entitles people to stealing from the working class.
Oh, I was accidentally right then, haha. Does that make me double wrong? ๐
Essay? Article? Don't know what the word for it is, excerpt is wrong though now that I think about it.
Management is labor, sure. It all adds to the collective labor expended necessary for producing a widget, say, 1 hour of cumulative labor expended through dead labor (the percentage of tools used up) and living labor. Let's put constant capital at .5 hours, and variable at .5 hours. The value of the widget is 1 hour of socially necessary labor time, and it is sold for this price on the commodity market when supply meets demand.
Where do profits come from, then? From living labor. The price of the commodity labor-power is regulated around the average cost of subsistence. A worker may only need to truly work for 3 hours in a day to produce their social consumption, but they are paid for those 3 hours as spread out over 8, 9, 10, etc. hours. The difference between paid hours and the unpaid hours forms the surplus value extracted, which is the chief component in profit (though not the same).
That's an oversimplification, but the point is that ownership adds no value. Management and administration can, but not ownership alone. It is only ownership of the constant capital that the owner entitles themselves to the profits, participating in a Money -> Commodities(means of production + labor power) -> Production(combination of MoP and Lp) -> Commodities' (greater value than original commodities) -> Money' (greater sum of money than originally fronted, fresh for the surplus to contribute to subsistence of the capitalist as well as expanded production). This is just a Money -> Greater Money circuit, which exponentially grows, the only action being buying and selling from the owners perspective (and this is often automated by having others do it).
That's awful, I'm sorry to hear that. Unfortunately, a lot of trade union history is marred by racism and exclusionary rhetoric, even if the more unified and anti-bigotry organizations have had far more success historically.