MIA: Subjects of Marxism: Learning Marxism
Additional Readings on Socialism in the Soviet Union?
1917: Congress Establishing the Soviet government, by Vladimir Lenin
(1) Private ownership of land shall be abolished forever; land shall not be sold, purchased, leased, mortgaged, or otherwise alienated....(2) All mineral wealth — ore, oil, coal, salt, etc., and also all forests and waters of state importance, shall pass into the exclusive use of the state. All the small streams, lakes, woods, etc., shall pass into the use of the communes, to be administered by the local self-government bodies....
1923: Better Fewer, But Better, by Vladimir Lenin
We, too, lack enough civilisation to enable us to pass straight on to socialism, although we do have the political requisites for it. We should adopt the following tactics, or pursue the following policy, to save ourselves: [1] We must strive to build up a state in which the workers retain leadership of the peasants, in which they retain the confidence of the peasants, and by exercising the greatest economy remove every trace of extravagance from our social relations. [2] We must reduce our state apparatus to the utmost degree of economy. We must banish from it all traces of extravagance, of which so much has been left over from tsarist Russia, form its bureaucratic capitalist state machine.
1930: Political Report of the Central Committee to the Sixteenth Congress of the CPSU(B), by Josef Stalin
Our national economy is growing not spontaneously, but in a definite direction, namely, in the direction of industrialisation; its keynote is: industrialisation, growth of the relative importance of industry in the general system of the national economy, transformation of our country from an agrarian into an industrial country....The characteristic feature of our industrialisation is that it is socialist industrialisation.... this taken together, plus the introduction of the seven-hour day for over 830,000 industrial workers (33.5 per cent), plus the introduction of the five-day week for over a million and a half industrial workers (63.4 per cent), plus the extensive network of rest homes, sanatoria and health resorts for workers, to which more than 1,700,000 workers have gone during the past three years-all this creates conditions of work and life for the working class that enable us to rear a new generation of workers who are healthy and vigorous....
1936: What is the Soviet Union and where is it going?, by Leon Trotsky
The bourgeois world confines themselves to remarks about an extreme "exploitation of the peasantry". They are missing a wonderful opportunity to explain why the brutal exploitation of the peasants in China, for instance, or Japan, or India, never produced an industrial tempo remotely approaching that of the Soviet Union.....The process of economic and cultural development in the Soviet Union has already passed through several stages, but has by no means arrived at an inner equilibrium. If you remember that the task of socialism is to create a classless society based upon solidarity and the harmonious satisfaction of all needs, there is not yet, in this fundamental sense, a hint of socialism in the Soviet Union.
A unique law of Soviet industry may be formulated thus: commodities are as a general rule worse the nearer they stand to the mass consumer. Military intervention is a danger. The intervention of cheap goods in the baggage trains of a capitalist army would be an incomparably greater one.... so long as the Soviet Union remains isolated, and, worse than that, so long as European workers suffer reverses and continues to fall back, the strength of the Soviet structure is measured in the last analysis by the productivity of labor..... and capitalism is still far ahead in the matter of technique, organization and labor skill.
1964: On Khrushchov's Phoney Communism and Its Historical Lessons for the World, by Mao Tse Tung
For the masses of the Soviet people life is already bad enough at Khrushchov's hands. The Khrushchov clique seek a "better life" only for the members of the privileged stratum and the bourgeois elements, old and new, in the Soviet Union. These people are appropriating the fruits of the Soviet people's labour and living the life of bourgeois lords. They have indeed become thoroughly bourgeoisified. Khrushchov's "communism" is in essence a variant of bourgeois socialism. He does not regard communism as completely abolishing classes and class differences but describes it as "a bowl accessible to all and brimming with the products of physical and mental labour".