Marxist theory and soviet practice

Marxist theory and soviet practice
The USSR downfall. Marxist analysis. Consequences.

This article allows us to answer two questions:
- what are the causes, why USSR, Soviet social order, has fallen down;
- what are the consequences for Marxist theory for future organizers of future communist social economic formation.

There are some ideas in Marxist social theory, which are not widely known, because they were not paid attention in the soviet ideology and were not discussed in the Soviet Union.
But the USSR perished, and, as author of this article thinks, the true explanation is possible only with the usage of these forgotten ideas, and the fact that USSR has fallen down, shows the great importance of these ideas. Therefore, these ideas are extremely important for the future attempt to build a social formation of the future
In any case, Marxist theory contains all the necessary theoretical baggage to explain the causes of the downfall of Soviet social order

To say that it is the guilt of some evil enemies, who are responsible for USSR perishing, means to explain nothing. No doubt, these evil enemies really existed, they wished USSR to perish and tried some actions for that. But Marx would begin to laugh, hearing such an explanation. This looks like an aircraft designer would design an airplane, it could not fly, and he would say, that it is the guilt of air resistance, which is responsible for failing the airplane to fly. Air resistance – is an objectively existing reality. If there were no air – there were no lifting force for airplane flight. But, if an air resistance doesn’t give an airplane the possibility to fly, it means only, that the aircraft is designed bad.
And in the society a new political movement, a new political regime always has its enemies and is affected by their resistance, including the one in the form of violence and terror,  but, if it is really a progressive social economic formation, then finally it will always be established successfully.

The causes of USSR perishing can be connected with Marxist point of view by the following simple thesis: USSR was built not according to Marx, and that is why it perished just according Marx.
Consequently, the fact, that USSR has fallen down, in practice doesn’t disprove, but  confirms the truth of Marx’s theory.

There are several concrete causes of USSR downfall  and they can be divided into two groups:
1) sociological
2) economic
And these groups are interconnected.

The followers of soviet ideology agree, that Marxism is a  science. But to their mind the whole scientific essence of Marxism is reduced to the thesis, that in capitalism where classes of bourgeoisie and proletariat exist, there is the antagonism of interests of these two classes exists, and bourgeoisie will always exploit the proletariat, because bourgeoisie is economically interested in it, that is why any changes to some better order are impossible neither by propagation nor by laws, and are possible only by changing the social order.
This is true, but is this enough?
Let us analyze the Soviet experience.

In the USSR social order was changed, means of production were nationalized, the class of bourgeoisie was liquidated.
The ownership inequality degree between citizens was one of the lowest in the world: the difference between the income of the poorest unskilled labourer and the richest minister was less than 3 times, which could not be compared to the difference between the unemployment compensation and the income of billionaires in «democratic world». But this could not help soviet social order to preserve its existence.
The inequality existed as such.
There was no class of capitalists, but everybody remained a capitalist by his own seat (social status). Careerism was accused formally, but career intrigues were widely spread in reality. The labour alienation was not overcome, what was noted by soviet philosopher E. Ilyenkov, and inevitable effects of this – laziness and hard drinking – took place. And both personal and group interests contradicted both each other and common interest.

As a result the top circles became conscious of their group interests as class interests, and they, being the ADMINISTERS of the state’s means of production, wanted to turn to be the OWNERS of them.

The rest circles of society didn’t object, because the propagandists of Perestroika assured them, that they would have more profitable state in the capitalist society, than in Soviet society.

Let’s repeat once more:  it turns, that propaganda of Perestroika flashed, like a lacmus sheet, that all the soviet society strata wanted to improve their social (material) state. Everybody turned to be interested in changes.

As the result, the top circles provided the changes, and the other people didn’t counteract.

The advocates of USSR may say that democracy brings nothing but harm, and “totalitarian” Stalin’s USSR became a superstate.

But the lower circles of soviet society hadn’t any means of influence to prevent the treacherous and destructive activity of the top circles.

Here must be one more conclusion about the weakness of the Soviet system.
So called Soviet power closed down the Soviets, which were formed before the October Revolution, and formed in that times unique democratic traditions of people’s self-organization and self-government were lost. And just in the moment, when this was needed so much, it turned, that , soviet society hadn’t any means of influencing the political events in their state.

The other aspect of the problem is, that even if they had, they didn’t object against the destruction of the Soviet social order.

Here may be formulated – maximum abstractly – the following conclusion: soviet society, the idea of which was the idea of harmonic society without rivalry, the society of solidarity, turned to be disharmonic and broken by contradicting group interests.

So, the vice of contradicting interests of different social groups was present in the very essence of the Soviet social order.

How was this mistake done, what has lead to it?
Is there an answer to this question in the works of Marxism theory classics?

Yes, there is.
First of all the following ideas must be taken into consideration: communism is classless society (and socialism is its first phase).
Because of this the importance of the following two ideas of Engels [1] becomes clear:
1) Even full 100% means of production nationalization doesn’t mean the overcoming of capitalism and its social vices (for example, exploitation. More than that, to Engels’s opinion, this even increases it). But, in spite of this, it is the necessary stage.
2) A kind of socialism, which preserves commodity-money relations, is not viable and inevitably degenerates into capitalism.

But why, to Engels’s opinion, is socialism incompatible with the commodity-money relations? In his explanation the arguments, based on economic EFFICIENCY of controlling the production with the means of commodity-money relations, are ABSENT.
Engels explains [1]  EXCEPTIONALLY from the point of view of SOCIAL effects of the commodity-money relations preserving.
Money as common equivalent – is not a tool only, as it seems primarily. It is special tool, specialized on generating and preserving the inequality in the society.
Engels described, how a socialism with commodity-money relations would degenerate, transforming itself into capitalism. First the ownership stratification would occur, then the most rich people would become the owners of the common property de-facto, though de-jure the property would remain common. After that socialism would be abolished, and the rich would become the owners de-jure also.
Soviet practice affirmed the truth of Engels’s ideas. USSR perished in the way just as was written.

Was it possible to avoid this catastrophical effect? May be the leaders, controlling managers, must show more flexibility, juristic law creators – more wisdom, police and special services – more vigilance, or, visa versa, more tolerance?

Is there an answer to this question in Engels’s ideas?
There are good news: Engels considers this question and gives a very definite answer.

Notably: against this all the juristic laws, all the tricks of leaders, controlling managers «are as helpless, as against the multiplication table or chemical formula of water»,- says he word-for-word [1].

This leads to two important conclusions:
1) It is necessary to establish an extremely high degree of social equality and harmony. So high, that it is sensitive to the concrete form of the means of accounting the resources and is impossible if the form of this means is money.
2) This extremely high level of social equality and harmony must be achieved in extremely short terms in order to the process of degradation of the social order would not start .

Social harmony is something more than «effective incentives», «fair laws» ,«adequate wages», «care for unprotected population strata», and so on, in general, than  justice and humanity.
This is the objective state of society, which can be described in the terms of sociology: social harmony – is such social state, by which the interests of society’s individual and group members do not contradict each other and the common interest.
In other words, the society is stable, because nobody is interested in struggle for dominating state in it.
This principle is formulated by K. Marx in the following way: “free development of everybody as the condition of development of all”

Let’s note, that it is not (only) about the things, which in Marxism are called superstructure. Development means not the development of, for example, esthetic taste. It is about, first of all, development of socially significant society member, about career development.

Now let us think about this formula! In rival (competitive) social medium it is absurd! If my colleague develops to the state of my chief, what can my development consist in? It is my fail! His development is not the condition, but the obstacle for my development! The condition of my development is his degradation – in this case I can become his chief!
That is why Soviet society was not a communism.

And in the future communist social economic formation everything is in the other way. “Free development of everybody as the condition of development of all”

For example, there is no neither market rivalry, nor career intrigues, nor even wish and efforts to take a more payable post.
And the absence of career intrigues and other things of that kind is not because of high moral ideals, but because of the absence of such interests.

That means that it is not profitable to rival, it is better to help each other.
If it is so, then no «enemy ideology», no «natural depravity» would bother.
This is what is called "being determines the consciousness". This is what the principle of historical materialism consists in, if to apply it to the considered problem.

If it would be proved, that the creation of such social order is impossible – then we should admit that communist idea is an utopia.

The means of the achievement of the aim is the establishing of the high degree of EQUALITY, higher than the one in “bourgeois democracies” and USSR.

The low efficiency of social lifts is considered a problem of modern society. But in the future communist social economic formation the  term «social lift» loses all the sense: nobody tries to elevate over somebody, everybody remain at the same height.

Let us pay attention, that we used the term from sociology – “small social group“. But Marx operated the biggest social groups – social classes.
But Marx (with his formational-class approach to the society) in fact became one of the founders of sociology (it is possible to say that sociology is the Marxism of  small social groups and short time periods, and Marxism is sociology of classes and long  historical epochs). The term «social group» in the times of Marx was not yet discovered even the “class” term was new.
We see by the example of USSR perishing, that it is not enough to eliminate the contraries between classes. For the stability of society it is necessary to eliminate the contraries between small social groups. 

This leads to two important conclusions:
1) An intent attention should be paid to the sociologic term «small social group» in Marxism.
What is the practical sense? The second conclusion is for practice:
2) If, as it were in the USSR, the elimination of the contraries between classes is achieved by the liquidation of the exploiting classes, this means not the finish of social reforms, but their real start. There essence consists in harmonization the interests of small social groups.

By what way? By the way of smoothing out, reducing the differences between them

The task of «reducing the differences between social groups» is associated with some forced, despotic, elimination the individuality and adjustment to some artificial pattern.
But this is nothing but stereotypes. Reality has nothing common with such ideas.
Individuality of a person of course influences the choice of the profession. But it is more important, that the membership in some social group is the main factor, determining the thoughts and actions of the person.
Such is the principle of historical materialism – being determines the consciousness..
And in the conditions of contemporary society, when the crisis makes people to rival “their heads off” this leads to the problem, which was called “professional cretinism” by soviet philosopher E. Ilyenkov [8].
This means that belonging to a social group suppresses man’s individuality, deforms his person and causes a very disharmonic, one-sided, development .
So, the smoothing out, reducing the differences between social doesn’t reduce the individualities of people, but allows them equal possibilities to have material goods, access to the cultural products and conditions for preserving health.

But what way was proposed by Marxism classics to eliminate the differences between social groups in the future formation?

In the long-term perspective by the eliminating the division of labour. Which was called by Marx “enslaving”.

Before this the distribution by labour exists, as by capitalism and in the USSR. But, by the distribution by labour, as we know from Engels, we should refuse using money.

In what way? For this purpose the idea of «labour tickets» by R. Owen, serves which were, occasionally only mentioned, but highly evaluated by Marx (the 3rd volume of “Capital” and by Engels in “Anti-During”.

Why was new term introduced, instead of habitual, familiar, “money”? Because this is an equivalent with features, different from the ones of money.
Namely – they are personalized. They are given to the concrete person by state for labour. Or because of the status of disability (child, pensioner, invalid).
They can’t be stolen (the stolen “tickets” can’t be used by the thief, because only one person has the right to exchange them for material goods), you can sell nothing to your neighbour and you can buy nothing by him for them.
A man is no more able to buy an expensive fur coat for his wife or bride. Because only men’s clothes and accessories are accessible for him to purchase. And if a fur coat is accessible for purchasing to her, she can purchase it without him, may be for the cost of refusing purchasing some other things, but things only, not food or medicine. Adult children can not any more  support their old parents, and parents – their children. Such terms as «alimony», «payment bonus» loose their sense.
Support of citizens is  the business of state.
This means, that possibilities  of theft and corruption are blocked radically once for ever, and also money transactions between citizens,1that is to say, the possibility of one citizens to accumulate the material goods, which could be used by the others.
That means that base is knocked out of material stratification, which could become the base of class differentiation the division into classes of exploiters and those who are exploited.

Since we refuse money usage and cost, “labour tickets”, will not have a numeric nominal, but will be a record in database on a server, that such and such citizen has the right to purchase such and such goods, if he hasn’t purchased it yet.
In fact there is no reason left to continue calling this PRINCIPLE of distribution without money  “tickets”, but we call it so in order to pay respect for the author of the idea – in his times there were no computer nets, and the only way to realize this principle was to implement some kind of tickets.

The needs and all of the outputs are taken into account with the help of UGAS.
The difference between the need and the finished product produced determines the production task.

In a planned farm, it is logical to plan the work of the employees in accordance with the physiological standards that are known.
Then it turns out that:
- There are no difficult jobs - planners allocate more people to them.
- There should be no storming - the planned terms should be designed for quiet work of people.
- There are no unnecessary, low-value jobs. These are not businessmen who "sell" to consumers what they don't need through advertising. If planners have planned the work, the society needs it.
- There are no jobs with harmful working conditions. If the cost of automation is equivalent to the creation of a mechanism made of pure gold, then this should be done. If automation is impossible - it is necessary to reduce the working day at such a place of work from 8 hours to 8 minutes, and, consequently, to provide for this place of work is not 1, but 60 people, as well as to provide for what they will be engaged in the remaining 5 hours 52 minutes (still Stalin wrote that the working day should not be longer than 6 hours). Why do we have to go for such expenses? Because the production goals change: not the maximum economic efficiency, but the welfare of people. One way or another, but such a phenomenon as occupational disease is evidence that a given society is exploitative, and this phenomenon, together with the society that gave birth to it, should go away.

Then it is possible to speak about equality of labor (labor input).
But for equal work people should receive equal remuneration.
This reasonable idea belongs to Lenin: "The point is that ... they work equally and receive equal remuneration”[2].

So, there is a differentiated salary - but at the same time:
- Differentiation exists in terms of the quality of work. Here the criterion can be % of the plan implementation.
- There is no differentiation according to the CHARACTER of labor. The janitor and the president, the scientist-engineer-inventor and the laborer - with the same percentage of the plan implementation - can claim the same share in the distribution of material benefits.

But if everyone gets the same, everyone chooses the job to their liking, and there are no career intrigues. Thus, the society becomes more harmonious.

Of course, we are talking about consumerism. For example, medicines, and any medical procedures, such as neurosurgical operations, are not consumer goods.

What is the use of Lenin's idea of "formal equality" [2] if there is an idea of "labor receipts"?
The fact that it takes time to implement "receipts". And formal equality, in Lenin's own words, can be implemented "immediately, from today to tomorrow.
 "Formal equality" in the distribution of "receipts" is maintained, and before their implementation it is implemented with payment in cash.

Thus, the classics of Marxism proposed ways of establishing material equality in society. Is it enough to establish full equality? In our opinion, no. This is a debatable question. This is the subject of a separate article; here we will limit ourselves to the fact that the problem will only be defined by

What did we have in the USSR instead?
Differentiation in terms of labor quality varied from enterprise to enterprise, differentiation in terms of HARACTER of labor was not overcome. At the same time, wages were paid in money.
That is, neither Lenin's idea of "formal equality" nor Owen's idea of "labor receipts" were realized.

Moreover, in 1965, the Kosygin reform was introduced, strengthening the role of the market in production management.
This led to further divergence of interests of economic entities and the emergence of underground capitalists - "shopkeepers".
Many authors call this reform the most important prerequisite for the collapse of the Soviet system.
It is impossible not to agree with it.
It is said that not only the people in the country's leadership were able to insist on its implementation, but also the conscious enemies of the Soviet system.
Perhaps.

But everything is more complicated.
Kosygin’s reform was introduced because something had to be changed.

And here we have smoothly passed to the second reason

The second reason is economic.

The Kosygin’s  reform was introduced because USSR came to an economic crisis - a crisis of inefficiency of the planned system [4].

Now it gives reason to supporters of liberalism to assert that the planned system is fundamentally ineffective, and only the market can be an effective system in terms of both economic and social.

Practice seems to confirm their rightness.

But this was preceded by the transformation of the USSR into a superstate thanks to the Stalinist economy. In which the USSR finally established state capitalism.


So what's more effective – a plan or a market? Why did the planned economy, which showed the wonders of efficiency, lose its efficiency?

What has changed?
Since the fact that the war has ended and the state of emergency with them has changed, i.e. the Gulag has ceased to be planted, the liberals' arguments that the Gulag was the reason for turning the USSR into a superstate seem plausible with a superficial view of the problem.


Perhaps the Gulag played a role - first, in the formation of a superstate: indeed, the state spent less on prisoners than on free laborers.
Second, it is likely that it was also in the formation of the psychology of political elites. They saw the economic benefits of exploitation. Which played a role in the collapse of the USSR.
Nevertheless, to consider this the reason is a false version.
Logic theory considers a logical mistake: post hoc ergo propter hoc (lat.) - after this, consequently, because of this.
Just applicable to this case.

Why is this version of liberals false?
For two reasons.
The first is a question.
If we have a privileged top and disenfranchised Gulag prisoners, in fact slaves, and repressive methods of managing free laborers, then why didn't the Soviet system degenerate earlier? It is impossible to find a more convenient moment for the elites! Maybe the elites were enriched by such a system? No.
Because both the Gulag and collectivization - because it should be so rapid that the parallel industrialization was forced - were aimed at ensuring that Russia, which had previously been backward, would have received industry for the production of world-class weapons and in the amount that would have allowed the Soviet Union to overpower the united Europe's army in the war - united under the banners of Hitler's Wehrmacht.
Not to the fat, to be alive! "All for the front, all for victory!
There were reasons to believe that the Gulag prisoners were exploited, but the fruits of this exploitation were used not by a handful of exploiters, but by the entire nation, including former prisoners who had served their sentences. They returned to a more developed country than the one that had imprisoned them.

Here is another conclusion for the future.
If in the future the attempt to build socialism will be undertaken in a country that is just as backward and in need of industrialization, then its people will come across all the great disasters that the people of the USSR did. But if it is one of the highly developed countries, such as the United Kingdom or Russia again, there will be no such horrors in the transition period, because such a huge effort will not be required.

Let us return to the question of why the planned economy, which was once super-efficient, has lost its effectiveness.

What else has changed?
Let us remember what was happening at the same time in the rest of the world.
There was a world economic crisis in the world, which was called the Great Depression in the USA. The 1930s, the time of Stalin's reign in the USSR.
Nothing similar to the crisis in the USSR didn’t take place, it was calm, orderly, developing.
This crisis has ended, and liberals have decided, that anything especial has not occurred - usual cyclic process, recession has replaced with rise.

In fact, the current crisis is nothing but a continuation of the crisis of the 30s of the twentieth century, which never ended, but was temporarily suspended due to two effective anti-crisis measures.
One of them is the Second World War. The war is the most effective measure against the crisis of overproduction, because, on the one hand, it allows to destroy the surplus of productive forces and, on the other hand, it allows to expand the production, because there are never too many weapons in the conditions of war.
And the second is concessions of capital to the proletariat (however, as is easy to see now, temporary). After all, Western civilization has not always been a comfortable state for working people with a high level of legal and social protection. At the beginning of the 20th century, not only in Russia, but also in Europe and the United States, terrible poverty and disenfranchisement reigned, not to mention what was happening in Western colonies. The victory of the revolution in Russia led all over the world to the intensification of workers' struggle for their rights. But only after the victory of the Soviet Union over Hitler's Germany did this struggle begin to yield results. Employers-employers agreed to make concessions to their employees and limit their arbitrariness against them, and gave commands to their pocket politicians. Seeing that the USSR could not be strangled neither by intervention during the civil war in the 20s, nor by Hitler's invasion in the 40s, the oligarchs of the West understood that their domination could also be swept away by a revolution of the Bolshevik type in Russia. The result? "Concessions made to the masses at home and in the colonies turned out to be more benevolent for the bourgeois economy than all the bloody massacres from Kanenyak to Hitler and all the colonial robberies, starting with the seizure of the treasures of Mexico and Peru. Conducted as a forced measure, as it used to be after each revolution, these concessions gave an unheard-of boost to the domestic market and allowed the capitalist industry to find the gold mine that nourishes it to this day”[9].

So, the second and main reason is the presence of the correct explanation: the obsolescence of commodity-money relations. This is the cause of both the current crisis and downfall of Soviet social order.

There are questions.
Why is there a crisis in the West?
Why, when Western capitalism came out of the crisis, did the USSR enter it?

The answer to this question was given by the Soviet cyberneticist academician Glushkov.

According to the theory of academician Glushkov, humanity has experienced two crises of governance in its history, or, as Glushkov himself called them, two information barriers [4].
The first one caused the decay of primitive society, when it became impossible to embrace a single view of the complicated economy. Humanity found a way out in the division of labor, when some people are engaged only in management, and others - only in production, the creation of a hierarchical (step) system of management and the introduction of "universal equivalent" - money. This led to social inequality, oppression, exploitation, and poverty, but preserved the manageability of the economy, and in the capitalist era led to rapid technological growth.
However, - says academician Glushkov - this growth has led humanity in the twentieth century to the second information barrier, when neither the hierarchical system of management, nor commodity-money relations do not allow to cope with the management of the economy [4]. In the light of such a theory, the current crisis gets a convincing explanation.
This is a crisis of commodity-money relations.

Academician Glushkov has also considered this problem quantitatively . For this purpose, he calculated the number of operations needed to manage the economy of the early USSR and the economy of the late USSR, which is modern to it. It turned out that for the management of the economy of the early USSR there was a rather small number of mathematical operations, which were easily coped with by the managers of the USSR of those times. In the modern Glushkov USSR, however, the economy became more complicated. In order to perform the necessary number of operations for the management of such an economy, it would take such a number of managers, which obviously exceeded the population of the USSR [4].
Of course, this is provided that both the collection and processing of information is done manually.

The USSR became a superstate thanks to the planned economy.
Simply, when the economy became more complicated, the USSR has for some time ceased to cope with planning. Not because of the alleged fundamental inefficiency of the plan as compared to the market. And because the USSR did not have effective tools to facilitate planning.
In order to make planning effective, moreover, much more efficient than the market, academician Glushkov proposed to computerize the USSR.
For the USSR, computerization meant costs equivalent to nuclear and space programs.
And capitalism itself presented the new builders of the future with computerization on a silver platter.

Already in the USSR, money ceased to be a production regulator, remaining only a means of accounting. This is what made the USSR one of the superstates. This is what should be borrowed for a new attempt to build the future of social formation as a progressive experience. Unlike the USSR, the ideas of cybernetics by academician Glushkov and economist Nikolai Veduta about introducing a computer system into planning should be implemented. For such a system the following names were suggested: Glushkov - OGAS - national automatic control system, Veduta national economy automatic management system, Steenford Beer - “Cybersyn”.

What does it give?
It is known how many people are there in the country. Therefore, it is known how much and what material goods should be produced to meet their needs.
And how much resources are needed to produce these goods: raw materials, workers, time, electricity? It is also known that without it there can be no modern production.
All resources, all finished products, all needs will be taken into account in their natural indicators: pieces, kilograms, running meters, man-hours of work, joules of electricity.
Natural - means not cost.
As the modern author S.V. Metik said: "If a dairy plant has a plan to produce a certain amount of dairy products in a given range and quality, it needs not money, but raw materials, equipment, electricity, labor resources, and accompanying technological and social infrastructure. And money can be used to glue the walls in the factory's smoker room. At least some benefit will be gained”.
That is, money will not be needed even as a means of accounting. It will be possible to give up completely.

What advantages do we get as a result?
Then it will be possible not only to cover the whole economy of the country with a single glance and to promptly respond to emerging needs and immediately find resources to meet them, but also to put the data in the mathematical model, and thus be able to calculate various options of the plan - that is, to do what has never been possible in the USSR.
According to Glushkov's calculations, such a system would pay off in 3 five-year periods, after which the USSR would overtake the most developed capitals in its development.
The alternative is known: the downfall of the Soviet system and the degradation of the once mighty economy.

Here are two important conclusions.
1) The USSR represented new relations on the former economic basis - monetary relations, i.e. essentially capitalist relations
2) Academician V. M. Glushkov in 1965 proposed a real project, which in fact - and according to V. M. Glushkov's own idea - would have been changed by BASIS - a capitalist basis on the communist one.

If Stalin had been at the helm - the project would have been implemented, and communism would have been built. But it was not Stalin who was in charge, but those who had already realized their interests as class ones...

However, another question arises.

Why has the Western market economy not undergone a crisis, when the more progressive, according to Marx, planned economy of the USSR began to experience difficulties?

Many people draw a conclusion from this - it must be admitted that the market cannot be abandoned, and the role of the market in the Soviet economy was insufficient.

What role does the market need for successful socialism? What economic factors led to the downfall of the Soviet system?

The opinion of Soviet and Russian economist N. Veduta was the following: the USSR had the vice of combining of the two incompatible things: planned manufacture regulation and the economy, based on commodity-money relations [10].
So, we, after the Soviet and Russian economist N. Veduta and the Soviet cybernetics academician V. Glushkov, claim that everything is strictly the opposite.
Soviet socialism proved to be ineffective not because it had gone too far away from the supposedly super-efficient market, but because it retained too many of its features.

The following analogy is appropriate.
The West modernized its capitalism cart to a car of civilized capitalism of the 21st century. In the Soviet Union from the very beginning, the goal was to reach the cosmic heights of communism, for which the construction of a new society's space rocket was announced. But, either because of imperfection of technologies, or because of stupidity of the authorities, the goal was replaced by a more "pragmatic" "to catch up and overtake America", and began to adjust the rocket engine of planned management to the same cart of commodity economy. They got not a space rocket or a car, but a strange hybrid - a rocket car of "socialism". The achievements of the Soviet Union are undeniable, socialism led him to the superpowers. Rocket cars became the first and only ground vehicle to cross the sound barrier. But in fact, the hybrid of "socialism" is unviable, just as rocket cars did not take root on our roads. To achieve space heights, we need a space rocket. This task is incomparably more complicated, science-intensive than the construction of a car, but quite feasible engineering task. But by simple ways the space heights are not achievable. And rocket cars for space flights are not originally intended.

What follows from this? This implies practical confirmation of K. Marx's correctness that there can be no intermediate formations between the capitalist and communist ones.

Such a comparison is appropriate here:
Capitalist and communist formations represent successive stages of social development, which can be represented as stepped plateaus on a plateau.
Between them there is a steep slope of the transition period.
It is possible to climb the slope for a long time. But one cannot camp on the slope.
Then the fall to the lower level is inevitable. This is exactly what happened to the USSR.
That is, there is a time frame beyond which social transformation is doomed to failure - not by the death at the hands of a superior enemy, but by natural degeneration.
The point of no return to the previous stage is reaching a new stage. Without this, you will not be able to stay above the previous step without moving up (or down).

That is, the strategic goal should be to build a communist formation.
It is its achievement that means reaching the point of no return.


The limited time frame was mentioned above.
Otherwise, it is a fall from the slope.

Actually, this is what happened.
The only question is when did it happen. Let's consider the dynamics of the Soviet system degradation.

Why do we think that capitalism was restored in the 90s? Because it was officially started?  Let's not be formalists... The capitalism providers did begin to speak  about their plans at once), but only when there was no need to hide the obvious situation... Because it was then, "in the dashing 90s", that we felt the deterioration of our living standards? Between the moment when the body gets infected and the appearance of painful symptoms there should be an incubation period...
So, not everything was safe in the post-war USSR... So, mistakes were made. And, we shall add, the reasons of defeat were put initially...

We assert that Khrushchev and his supporters committed more than just a palace coup d'etat - it was nothing but a counter-revolutionary, bourgeois coup d'etat, and the history of Soviet capitalism opens with the twentieth Congress of the CPSU. Simply put, the 20th Congress should be regarded objectively as the first meeting of shareholders of the CPSU, which has become a capitalist corporation, regardless of the subjective ideas of its participants... The coup participants may not have subjectively set themselves the goal of organizing a counterrevolution; they might well have thought that they were developing socialism, but with all certainty they put their keen interest at the heart of it. At that time, the CPSU corporation was still united, and as for the standard of living... At that time, it was already high in the capitalist countrie. But then, obviously, it was impossible to return to party maximum... Perestroika is just the disintegration of the single CPSU corporation into smaller corporations and individual owners. And we felt it on ourselves only because the disintegration of the corporation was accompanied by a criminal redistribution of its property. Of course, there were also changes in the legal laws. But this is, as the theory goes, a component of the superstructure. From the point of view of BASIS, capitalism remained capitalism, but social guarantees were only eliminated, and the owners became more(and the number of the means of production owners became greater)...

But if we recognize the presence in the USSR of the main classes of capitalist society, including the class of capitalists, then the question of relations between the classes naturally arises. The class of capitalists is the class of exploiters, and the class of proletarians is an oppressed class. So, was there exploitation in the USSR?
Some authors believe that free education and medicine are exploitation. As they were kept at the expense of taxpayers. While these services were not used by all and not constantly.
In our opinion, such allegations are groundless. The truth is that in the USSR the taxes levied on citizens were returned to them in the form of benefits distributed through free public consumption funds, and the standard of living of citizens remained high.
But examples of exploitation can be given.
For example, the Stalinist Gulag was nothing but legitimized by state slavery. In Ancient Egypt, slaves dug canals, in the USSR, prisoners the Gulag dug the Belomorkanal.... This can also include “prodrazverstka” (food requisitioning), and then the famine of 1932-1933. Problems of industry and urban population were solved at the expense of peasants. However, these phenomena were justified by military necessity. There was no class that would live in luxury due to the above examples of exploitation. It was the exploitation of citizens by the state, and it solved the most pressing problems of the country as a whole. The country was forced to survive under full strain, using all imaginable resources.
However, the situation changed in the post-Stalinist USSR. Let us give three vivid examples, which will not be written off as neither military nor any other necessity.
1) Availability of special distributors for party bosses, as well as "telephone law".
That is, the caste of owners of means of production used their (official?) position to create privileges in distribution. In addition, its representatives had real power, which was not prescribed by the laws, as it is the case in ordinary bourgeois society.
For the sake of justice, it should be noted that the difference in income that existed in the USSR was incomparable with the difference in income between a billionaire and low-paid employees of both Western countries and the post-Soviet space
2) Presence of professional diseases in the USSR.
Apologets of the social structure of the late USSR objected to the author that professional diseases are not a consequence of exploitation, but a consequence of the division of labor. Such beliefs are a consequence of Soviet stereotypes. Professional diseases are a consequence of savings on occupational labour  safety measures. It is a profit for the cost of the health of workers. What is it, but not exploitation? Such measures can be incredibly expensive, it may be necessary to limit the working day to 1 hour per shift and hire 8 workers instead of 1 ... But the Communists did not switch to bread and water and did not take these jobs themselves ... The presence of occupational diseases can be justified by military time, but in peacetime the country should not work with full tension of forces, and therefore, such expenses are quite justified.

For the sake of justice, we should note that no one in the West would have thought of calling a professional disease exploitation - they consider it normal when the business is done on people's health. 
3) Elimination of the Chernobyl accident by soldiers, often without individual means of protection, (not by communists), and with complete concealment of the scale of the disaster and the degree of danger.
In this case, the "communists" preferred - as in the case of professional diseases - to sacrifice their profits to people, and even to young and forced labourers. How has the psychology of the Communists changed compared to Stalin's times? In the Great Patriotic War, under the fierce fire of the enemy, when no attack would seem impossible, the Communists rose into the attack, if they heard the commander's call - which became famous: "Communists, go ahead!” From the point of view of communist ideology, the dilemma is simple: if a communist, then either sit on bread and water and go into the category of homeless people, but do not allow people to sacrifice themselves, or, if you can't sacrifice people ("Motherland calls!"), then - "communists, go ahead”!
For the sake of justice, we should note that even the most senior officials in the West could not have avoided responsibility and organized a total silencing of such a danger on a global scale for this purpose. This would be possible in the West if it were about pulling the son of a millionaire out of responsibility. But it should be remembered that in the USSR the statuses of political figures and representatives of the ruling class were combined in the same persons. 

So, the examples of exploitation in USSR are:
1) Stalin's GULAG;
2) The presence of occupational diseases in the USSR;
3) Liquidation of consequences of accident on Chernobyl NPP by forces of soldiers at concealment of danger of a situation, often without due providing with individual means of protection;
4) Rejection of the ideas of Stalin [3], Beria and Khudenko on the transition to a shorter working day than 8-hour

We do not here make a quantitative comparison between the levels of exploitation in the "totalitarian USSR "and in the"democratic West". We are only stating, following Erich Fromm, that it was a social phenomenon qualitatively similar. That is-the USSR was not free from exploitation.

The degradation of the Soviet system was also evident to contemporaries, for example, the Yugoslav dissident M. Gilas, the Soviet dissident M. Voslensky, criticism of Khrushchev's USSR from the left positions was exposed by: Chinese Maoists; Albanian Khojaists; Trotskyists; E. Fromm.

The fate of academician Glushkov's OGAS project is also indicative.
Soviet leadership:
- refused the introduction of OGAS;
- introduced Kosygin reform instead of OGAS;
- moreover, it demanded to DELETE the materials on  his project of transition to non-monetary calculation / distribution for the population.
This would equalize the upper circles of soviet communists with ordinary citizens and make revenues absolutely transparent.
Here the class interests of the bourgeoisie with party membership cards are clearly seen, as well as their opposition to the interest of establishing the formation of the future.

So far, it has been about domestic policy, but consider also foreign policy.

Ch. Aitmatov's fantastic novel "The Stormy Half Stop" has such an episode. Soviet cosmonauts at the space station came into contact with representatives of other civilization. They had a communist social structure, without money and status differentiation, living in harmony with nature. They asked the astronauts to help them organize a meeting with the governments of the Earth's states to teach them how to build a society based on their own experience. The government of the Soviet Union, having received such a message, ordered to keep these events in a secret. Following consultations with United States authorities, the Soviet Government did the following. Radio transmitters were launched to generate interference, making it impossible to receive radio signals from the space station, and the astronauts were left to die on the space station without food, water or air.
What pushed the writer to such a plot?
In his speech [7], dedicated to such a significant event for socialist Iraq as the nationalization of British and American oil companies, Saddam Hussein recalls how difficult this decision was made. He also mentioned that Iraqi representatives travelled to the USSR to gain support. But Brezhnev's leadership refused to support him, saying that the event affected the interests of the powerful imperialist powers. The argument that such a position is the support of the exploiters against the exploited did not take effect," Hussein recalled. But this is not to blame Soviet friends, but to demonstrate the difficulty of making this fateful decision," he said generously. And he began to describe the fantastic results achieved by the social security system, when revenues from the oil industry were redirected from the pockets of Western imperialist predators to the needs of the Iraqi socially oriented state.
However, this example shows not so much the desire to crush socialism in Iraq as the desire to build relations with other peoples solely on the principles of mutual benefit. The triumph of the communist idea is in no way prioritized here, either as a goal or as an object of suppression. But there are other examples.
According to the authors of the article [6], the bold social experiment of the Cambodian  communists (of Kampuchea) was destroyed because the ruling elite of the USSR regarded it as a threat to their class privileges:
"The reason for the destruction of Democratic Kampuchea, the reason why its leaders were poured with dirt and blamed for the most absurd sins, is that, by bringing all the data about Kampuchea into one register, system analysts in the Kremlin and the White House grabbed their heads. What if the peoples of the world find out that it is possible to blow up the State Bank and live without money? What can be razed to the ground ... Smoke factories in the sky and live in the original harmony with nature in the communes that the entire elite, be it monopolistic

"The reason for the destruction of Democratic Kampuchea, the reason why its leaders were poured with dirt and blamed for the most absurd sins, is that, bringing all the data about Kampuchea in one register, system analysts in the Kremlin and in the White House grabbed their heads. What if the peoples of the world find out that it is possible to blow up the State Bank and live without money? What can be razed to the ground ... The fact that the whole elite, be it monopolistic bourgeoisie or party bureaucracy, can be reeducated by hard and persistent peasant labor and turned into simple rural workers? "No!" - were screamed by those responsible for the fate of world politics. – So they will want to do such a thing for us too. Let's not allow it! Never! We need to crush and discredit all this urgently! And crushed by bayonets of the Vietnamese" under the guidance of Soviet instructors (in the Vietnamese army, as you know, there were advisers of the KGB and the USSR GRU)...

So, here are the facts characterizing the mode of action of the late USSR in foreign policy:
1) Contributing to the destruction of the Pol Pot regime in Democratic Kampuchea.
It has been suggested [6] that the regime was destroyed for its apparent "extra-system" (renunciation of money and leadership privileges);
2) the Refusal of the Brezhnev Soviet Union to support Iraqi President Saddam Hussein in the nationalization of Iraqi oil fields, the owners of which were American and British oil companies.
That is, as stated by the representative of the delegation of Iraq, the USSR sided with the imperialist predators against their enslaved colonies [7].

So, in the post-Stalinist USSR, not only the domestic, but even foreign policy of the ruling top of the Soviet Union was aimed at preventing communism, as in the bourgeois-imperialist states. Let us recall in this connection that the Maoists who called the Soviet system the social-imperialism...

This is true only for the late, post-Stalinist USSR. The historical mission of the early, USSR before Khrushchev’s time was exactly the opposite. This state defended the interests of the proletariat not only within the country, but also the entire world proletariat as a whole. Its role in history and class struggle cannot be exaggerated. It is the example of the early USSR that European proletarians owe their high standard of living to.

Of course, the reason for the change in the political course of the USSR was the Khrushchev's bourgeois counter-revolutionary coup d’etat

So, it is N. S. Khrushchev's fault? Indeed, he led the coup d';tat... But the consciousness of Khrushchev and his clique was formed by the being of the era of I. V. Stalin. It was under Stalin that the party maximum was abolished, and the communist top became a real political elite. But Stalin had to solve the problems of defending the country from the class enemy (in the form of the Wehrmacht armed with the whole Western civilization), and for this purpose to carry out industrialization, and for this purpose to outlive the legacy of the Lenin era in the form of NEP. And Lenin introduced the NEP, because otherwise it was impossible. Let's repeat, Lenin and Stalin sincerely sought to build socialism, but all they could do in those conditions was to complete capitalism to the point where it would be possible to start building socialism itself on its basis. Objective factors were not for them. And when Stalin completed the construction of capitalism and outlined a program of rejection of commodity capitalist relations, he died and thus freed the way for the bourgeois elite.

Why hasn't the Soviet Union managed to get away from the capitalist basis? After 1945, Stalin set the task of a new attack on capitalist relations, already mentioned above. But there was no material and technical basis for this in his time as well - and that is why, most likely, he proposed not to hurry. The solution was found only in 1965 by Academician V. M. Glushkov. It was then that he proposed the completed UGAS project to the Soviet government for consideration.
UGAS (State Automated Management System) is a system of planning and accounting based on databases and computer networks. Accounting and control, on the one hand, of all needs and, on the other hand, of all produced goods. The difference would determine the task of production. It gives the chance to make changes operatively, to correct the plan, to calculate variants. From really inefficient command and control system of the USSR the control system would turn into a truly scientifically planned system with fantastic possibilities.
 In other words, the introduction of the UGAS is nothing but a change in the BASIS from capitalist to communist

That is, the introduction of UGAS is nothing but a change in the BASIS from capitalist to communist
But not in K times. Marx, there were no computers at the time of Stalin, the prediction made by F. Engels in "Anti-During" about the abandonment of cost and the transition to accounting and control of resources in physical terms was not based on the capabilities of the technology of the time, but was a brilliant guess
Twenty years separate the moment of setting the task of abolishing commodity-money relations by I.V. Stalin and the moment of finding a solution to this task by V.M. Glushkov.
During this time there have been such events as the death of I. V. Stalin and the moment of finding a solution to this problem by V. M. Glushkov. Stalin, Khrushchev's bourgeois revolution and the beginning of the computer revolution. Academician V.M. Glushkov actually caught the party top of the already reborn capitalist corporation. Therefore, his project was rejected. The revolution was too early and crashed.

Social and scientific-technical progress does not necessarily coincide. The great achievements of the USSR turned out to be possible thanks to the socialist transformations, and the impulse given to productive forces turned out to be so powerful that not only after the Khrushchev's bourgeois coup d’etat, but also after the official rejection of socialism in 1991 and the collapse of the USSR Nowadays Russia retains the position of a highly developed industrial giant. The achievements of the late Soviet Union were not the result of the policy pursued at that time, but of the policies of the early Soviet Union (of the times before Khrushchev’s time). The consequence of the policy of the late post-Stalinist USSR was the Brezhnev period of stagnation and Gorbachev's Perestroika. These achievements were possible thanks to the movement towards socialism. But the troubles that fell to the people of the USSR from 1917 to 1945 were not the fault of the true communists under the leadership of Lenin and Stalin. They had to defend themselves from the class enemy seeking revenge for the Revolution, by means of the Civil and the Great Patriotic War, and then restore the economy destroyed by the wars, relying on their own forces of the people of the country, not on the exploitation of the colonies. "Not to be fat, to be alive" is the Russian proverb that most accurately describes the situation in the country, which was taken over by the Communists. On the other hand, the current capitalism with its low, as compared to the late USSR, standard of living, is not so much a denial of the late USSR as an inevitable consequence of the Khrushchev's bourgeois coup d’etat, a direct continuation, a natural stage of that, which has become capitalist, Soviet policy.

Why do we assess the activity of I. B. Stalin as progressive? In the same sense, in which capitalism is a progress compared to feudalism. As we said, Stalin's role was that he had completed capitalism and outlined a program of transition to socialism. Socialism, however, in its strict sense was NEVER achived in the USSR. The era of the early Soviet Union, the era of Lenin and Stalin - an era of progressive Moving towards socialism, followed by an era of bourgeois stagnation under communist banners, accompanied by a comfortable state of bourgeois economic prosperity for the average citizen. The October Revolution turned out to be an early one and fell down.


Could it have been avoided? Maybe there was little chance of saving the Soviet system. But it should be said that from the very beginning all the competent Marxists had a negative forecast.

We can start with Marx.
His letter to Vera Zasulich is known.
She asked him a question: according to the Marxist concept, a new formation can only be built on the basis of a highly developed state. Russia is a backward country. Therefore, power in it is weak, but it is easier for revolutionaries to seize power in such conditions. Maybe it is backwardness that gives an additional chance?
And Marx answered that, although it might be easier for revolutionaries to seize power, the main thing here how to use it. And in backward Russia, objective conditions will be against the builders of the new formation.
Therefore, they will not be able to lead society to a new formation. The maximum they will be able to achieve is "socialism in a certain sense".

We have already considered Engels above. By the way Engels described socialism, it becomes clear that socialism has never been achieved in the USSR.

Lenin, the builder of the USSR, understood everything adequately.
The words "socialism in a certain sense" can be found in his works, i.e. he knew about Marx's prediction.
In his program work "The State and the Revolution" Lenin describes communism, the construction of socialism. And he asks the question: when will communism be built? And he gives a clear answer. "We do not know this and we cannot know it" (!)
And what exactly is needed for this, says nothing, which means that such ignorance extends to the steps for such a transition.
Well, there were no computers in his time, so Lenin did not have the missing link that academician Glushkov discovered for building the future formation only in the 1960s. But Lenin understood that some link was missing here.
However, he went on a revolution.

Who are the Mensheviks? In the Soviet propaganda, they were called an "Esero-Menshevik bastard" together with the Social Revolutionaries.

But the Mensheviks are supporters of the Bolsheviks in the RSDLP party.
Lenin's idea to organize a revolution split the party into two factions. Most of them followed Lenin and became known as Bolsheviks. The lesser one believed Plekhanov and began to be called Mensheviks.
Plekhanov is a major Marxist. Contrary to the propaganda depicting him as a "servant of the bourgeoisie," he was a supporter of the oppressed proletariat against the bourgeoisie, and he agreed that capitalism should be destroyed by revolution.
But he understood that objective conditions were not ripe in Russia at that time.
And despite his sympathy for Marxism, socialism, and the oppressed proletariat, he saw that the attempt to build a communist formation was doomed to failure, making the revolution and all the sacrifices associated with it meaningless.
He asked the prominent contemporary German Marxime theorist Carl Kautzky to dissuade Lenin.
And Kautsky answered that Lenin was a competent Marxist, and that the social experiment would be pure, high quality.  So why would we deprive ourselves of a unique opportunity to observe a social experiment on the implementation of Marx's principles? – answered Kautsky-Let Lenin try to build "socialism in a certain sense".
In other words, it was obvious also to Kautsky that the idea was doomed to failure. But he wanted to observe the experiment.
Then, after the victory of the October Revolution, a certain Kritsmann wrote an article in one of the issues of the magazine "Bolshevik" in 1929 about the decision of the Bolsheviks to solve the peasant issue.
In fact, the NEP was a strategic retreat from Marxism. From the theoretical point of view, peasants were the reactionary class - the owners of the means of production. Unlike the proletarians, they could not see their interest in socialism. But they made up the majority of the population. Consequently, without their support, social transformations were doomed. Therefore, the October Revolution had to solve the problems of peasantry, i.e. to deal with the tasks of the non-slave communist revolution.
Therefore, peasants were declared an ally class of the proletariat class, these classes were called "workers" together, and this union of classes was reflected even in the symbols of the state - a hammer and sickle united together.
Accordingly, the NEP was introduced. It was a concession to the everyday life of the peasantry. And then, instead of a rigid variant of expropriation of peasant farms, a soft collectivization was carried out (although it had to be carried out forcibly, because many of them resisted). But in general, the peasants supported collectivization, because it made it possible to introduce equipment, increase productivity, obtain a guaranteed consumer in the person of the state, facilitate working conditions thanks to equipment, and develop rural infrastructure - and schools, kindergartens, hospitals, clubs were built at the expense of collective farms' income.
However, after the Great Patriotic War, Stalin wrote in the "EPS in the USSR" that sooner or later collective farms would have to be abandoned, because the task is to cancel the money, and the collective farms will not fit into the cashless social relations. And he touched upon the background of the question and wrote that according to the social structure of the society only one European country of that time, England, was ready for the communist reforms, and even more so the backward Russia was not ready for it.
Apparently, Stalin optimistically believed that all the problems were behind him, and that the Soviet Union would eventually die due to the fact that the non-monetary social relations would not be introduced, he could not even imagine in a terrible dream.

The Soviet system fell down because the superstructure of the new relations could not withstand the contradictions with the basis - the old commodity-money, and thus capitalist, relations.
There were no objective conditions for establishing a communist basis in 1917. What do we see now? Enterprises store, transmit and process data electronically, and the Internet also exists. That is, the UGAS has already been created mainly for academician Glushkov by capitalism itself. The crisis of capitalist relations has already been stated by non-Communist economists (M. Hazin, V. Katasonov, ...). All objective preconditions are ripe. Stop now is only for the subjective factor. However, the failure discredited the communist idea in the eyes of the general public.
There is an analogy.
К. Marx foretold the winter cold of the crisis of capitalism. Under these new conditions of cold weather, producers will no longer be able to carry out the chaotic Brownian movement characteristic of the market. The economy will increasingly be an association of previously atomized producers into ordered ice crystals
He suggested building ice castles of communist relations.
Soviet ideologists began to embody his ideas. They built masterpieces, but could not preserve them. Because a lot of energy was spent on creating cold to protect the ice castles from melting. Because we did not wait for the winter cold of the crisis of capitalism and computer revolution. It turned out to be a paradox: the possibility of creating ice castles was believed until the winter when they melted; everyone was disappointed; and now winter has come, but no one believes in them.

Conuclsion: a Failed Soviet attempt in the twentieth century caused the Communist idea to be discredited in the eyes of the masses.
However, the current economic crisis shows that capitalism will not give people the expected prosperity.
In order for the Communist idea to gain new masses of supporters, the Communists must answer all theoretical questions, come up with a proposal for a ready program of social transformation of society into a new formation and justify why a new attempt will not suffer the fate of the Soviet Bolshevik attempt. People should see that there is an attractive alternative to the present structure of society, and only the exploitative classes prevent the reconstruction of life on a reasonable basis, using the right of the strong


Thus, the conclusions.

1) Soviet ideology is a very superficial reflection of Marx's social concept in political ideology. Some important provisions of the Marxist concept were not reflected in Soviet ideology. It was the neglect of these little-known provisions that caused the demise of the Soviet system. This makes these provisions relevant for a new generation of builders of the formation of the future.

2) Specific causes demise the USSR several, and their can be subdivided on two groups:
(a) sociological
b) economic
And these groups of reasons are interrelated

3) The transformation of the USSR into a superpower is due to a planned economy (and not the Gulag, as claimed by opponents of the USSR).

4) Kosygin reform, which strengthened the role of the market in the management of the economy, was the most important prerequisite for the death of the Soviet system.

5) Kosygin reform was conducted because it was necessary to change something. The USSR ceased to cope with planning.

6) the Cause of the great depression, the death of the USSR and the modern economic crisis-one: obsolescence of commodity-money relations. Money has exhausted itself and more than anything, except the crisis, can not generate

7) a Modern alternative to money is the system of OGAS academician Glushkov

8) the USSR was a new relationship on the former economic basis-commodity-money relations, ie essentially capitalist

9) If the project OGAS academician VM Glushkov at his suggestion would be implemented in 1965, it is actually - and the thought of VM Glushkov-would CHANGE the BASIS of the Soviet system – capitalist basis (would be changed) to the Communist.

10) the Soviet Union perished because the superstructure of the new relations could not withstand the contradiction with the basis-the old commodity-money, and therefore capitalist, relations.

11) Commodity-money relations opposed economic entities and individuals to each other, that is, narrow group and individual interests to each other and the General interest.
Inequality was one of the lowest in the world, but it existed as a fact.
And the managers realized their interest as class. And set a goal to turn from managers of the means of production in the owners.
Accordingly, all were busy with their benefits, and there was no one to protect the system.

12) the following statements from Engels ' Anti-during prove that there was no socialism in the USSR:
a) Even 100% nationalization of the means of production does not mean overcoming capitalism and its social evils (for example, exploitation. Moreover, according to Engels, even exacerbates them). But this is still a necessary stage.
b) Socialism, which preserves the commodity-money relations, is not viable and inevitably degenerates into capitalism.
These provisions are extremely important for the Builder of the formation of the future

13) the Demise of the Soviet system does not begin with Perestroika, but with a Palace coup led by Khrushchev – and in fact a counter-revolutionary bourgeois coup

14) the Consciousness of the Khrushchev clique was formed by the existence of the Stalin era. It was under Stalin that the party maximum was abolished, which brought the existence of the Soviet political elite even closer to that of the ordinary bourgeois political elite.
Also, the Soviet government liquidated the Soviets, and formed a unique democratic tradition of self-government were lost. And-just when the intervention of the lower classes was necessary to counter the treachery of the upper classes, it turned out that the mechanism of influence on the power of the masses in the USSR was not.

15) Perestroika - this is just the collapse of a single Corporation of the CPSU into smaller corporations and individual owners. And we felt it for ourselves only because the collapse of the Corporation was accompanied by a criminal redistribution of its property

16) the era of Lenin and Stalin is a catastrophic era of state violence, wars and other upheavals. But this is not the fault of the leaders of the USSR, and the class enemy, with which it was necessary to fight. Lenin and Stalin sought to build socialism. But objective conditions were against them. They did everything they could-built capitalism to the level on which to begin to build socialism. In any case, it was a time of progressive movement towards socialism. Since the Khrushchev era, life in the USSR has become comfortable, the USSR was the first to go into space. But this is an era of bourgeois prosperity. The progressive movement towards the formation of the future has stopped. The achievements of the late USSR were the result not of the policy pursued at that time, but of the policy of the early, pre-Khrushchev, USSR. The Brezhnev period of stagnation and Gorbachev's Perestroika became a consequence of the policy of the late post-Stalin USSR.

17) regarding the possibility of building a future formation in backward Russia, literate Marxists gave a negative forecast.
The degradation of the Soviet system was also evident to contemporaries, for example, the Yugoslav dissident M. Gilas, the Soviet dissident M. Voslensky, criticism from the left of the Khrushchev USSR was subjected to Chinese Maoists and Albanian Khojaists, as well as Trotskyists and E. Fromm

18) Socio-economic formations capitalism and communism can be likened to a stepped plateau on a plateau. Between them-a steep slope transition period.
The point of no return to the previous stage is the achievement of a new stage.
That is, the strategic goal should be to build a Communist formation.
It is its achievement that means reaching the point of no return.

19) for the stability of a transitional society and the successful achievement of a new formation, a very high level of equality and harmony of society is needed. So high that it is sensitive to a particular form of accounting and unattainable in a monetary society

20) This high level of harmony of society must be achieved as soon as possible, so that the rebirth did not have time to happen.

21) the Harmony of society is expressed by Marx's principle: "the Free development of each as a condition for the development of all»

22) If, as was the case in the USSR, the contradictions between the large classes are eliminated by eliminating the exploitative classes, then social transformations do not end there, but only begin. And their essence is in the harmonization of the interests of small social groups.

23) The means of harmonizing society is to avoid the distribution of money.
At distribution on work distribution should be made on" labor receipts " R. Owen, but in electronic form, according to the offer of academician V. M. Glushkov.

24) from the first days of the revolutionary transformations, "formal equality" according to Lenin was introduced - " the whole point is ... to work equally and receive equally."
The essence of it is that:
a) EQUALITY of WORK is ensured (there are no hard work, work with harmful working conditions)
b) the differentiation of pay by the NATURE of work is abolished
C) differentiation of payment on quality of work remains (criterion - % of performance of the plan)

25) If the Communists manage to make a new attempt, but as a result of this attempt simply to restore the Soviet system in an unchanged form – that is, state capitalism - the new USSR will fall down not in 70 years, but earlier, because the conditions that destroyed the Soviet system have not gone away, moreover-have worsened.

26) Instead of the task of restoring the Soviet system in an unchanged form or in a form closer to capitalism, the task of achieving a Communist formation should be set as urgent. Then this attempt will have a good chance of success.
Objective conditions were not ripe for the victory of the new formation in 1917, in the time of Lenin-Stalin. But these objective conditions are ripe now. Stop only for the subjective factor.

27) a Failed Soviet attempt in the twentieth century caused the Communist idea to be discredited in the eyes of the masses.
However, the current economic crisis shows that capitalism will not give people the expected prosperity.
In order for the Communist idea to gain new masses of supporters, the Communists must answer all theoretical questions, come up with a proposal for a ready program of social transformation of society into a new formation and justify why a new attempt will not suffer the fate of the Soviet Bolshevik attempt. People should see that there is an attractive alternative to the present structure of society, and only the exploitative classes prevent the reconstruction of life on a reasonable basis, using the right of the strong

28) If in the future an attempt to build socialism will be made in an equally backward country in need of industrialization, its population will not be envied as the population of the USSR. But if it is one of the highly developed countries, for example, the UK or again the same Russia, then there will be no such horrors in the transition period, because such a colossal effort will not be required.

29) the Sociological concept of " small social group "in the social theory of Marxism should be given close attention, the concept of" class " is not enough.


Literature

1 Энгельс Ф. Анти-Дюринг
2 Ленин В. И. Государство и революция
3 Сталин И. В. Экономические проблемы социализма в СССР.
4 Пихорович В.Д. Невостребованная альтернатива рыночной реформе 1965 года. К 80-летию со дня рождения В.М. Глушкова  // Альманах «Восток», № 2 (14), февраль 2004 г. URL: http://www.situation.ru/app/j_art_781.htm
5 Э. Фромм "Революция надежды"
6 Красные кхмеры. Камбоджа. История страны. История Камбоджи (Кампучии) во второй половине 20 века. Практический опыт построения коммунизма. URL: http://www.turlocman.ru/cambodia/2106
7 Саддам Хусейн: Национализация нефти в целях защиты Ирака. Пер. с англ. Ивана Бедного, в сокращении // Рабочий класс, 2004, №27(225), с. 7
8 Ильенков Э. Об идолах и идеалах
9 Лифшиц М. Карл Маркс и современная культура
10 Пихорович В. Д. Концепция социально эффективной экономики Н.И. Ведуты. Часть 1.- URL: http://propaganda-journal.net/9118.html

Translation:

1 Engels F. Anti-During
2 Lenin V.I. . State and Revolution
3 Stalin V.I. Economic problems of socialism in the USSR.
4 Pikhorovich V. D. Non-demanded alternative to market reform of 1965. To 80th annivercary of birthday of V.M. Glushkov // Альманах «Восток», № 2 (14), февраль 2004 г. URL: http://www.situation.ru/app/j_art_781.htm
5 E. Fromm "Revolution of Hope"
6 Red Khmers. Camboja. Country History. History of Camboja (Kampuchea) in the second halа ща 20th century. Practical expirience of communism building. URL: http://www.turlocman.ru/cambodia/2106
7 Saddam Houssein: Nationalization of oil in the aim of Iraq Protection. Transl. from English. By Ivan Bedny, shortened version // Working Class, 2004, №27(225), с. 7
8 Ilyenkov E. About idols and ideals
9 Lifshits М. Carl Marx and Modern Culture
10 Pikhorovich V. D. The concept of  effective economy by Nikolay Veduta – Part 1.- URL: http://propaganda-journal.net/9118.html