PEN-L message, Re: apocryphal soviet screw factory

>A friend of mine was working in a chemistry lab in Moscow during Gorbachev's crackdown on alcohol abuse. The lab workers just drank the alcohol sent to them to clean their instruments.<

Comment

Everyone gets whatever they can out of the system . . . any system. I am absolutely amazed at the elasticity of the Soviet system and how at every single "level" of society enormous resources are simply taken or siphoned by individuals or through a bureaucratic connection.

Not as a moral judgment . . . but rather as a social process that intersects in what is called the functioning of "the secondary economy" or the legal and illegal black and gray markets. In America we have an enormous secondary economy . . . that probably rivals the primary legal system of production in many sectors . . . during different periods of our history. Bootlegging became big when Liquor was outlawed and sugar and tires were rationed during the second Imperial World War era and today you can literally get damn near anything through the black market.

The Ole Man stated very frankly that the American workers could better tell us (meaning the Soviet workers) how far we had advanced down the road of socialism.

I kindda understood what he meant and really start understanding what I thought I understood during the mid 1980s . . . and understood better what I thought I understood better in the mid 1990s after the overthrow of Soviet Power. The Soviet multinational State did not really collapse as such but was pulled apart and overthrown by bourgeois nationalists under the banner of democracy and self determination.

Property . . . exchange . . . commodity relations take on a life of their own as these minute human acts of realizing needs that reproduce themselves spontaneously . . . while creating another set of needs. In this sense the legal economy no matter how organized or unorganized . . . free or planned . . . can never defeat the secondary economy.

How far did the Soviets advance down the road of socialism . . . cannot be assessed . . . in my opinion . . . on the basis of concepts of bourgeois democracy or an ideology of socialist democracy. Although I consider Gorbachev a rat fink . . . "the store was lost" during his watch (and this requires no heavy thinking) . . . he was trying to address a material reality.

The Soviet Union advanced down the road of socialism to that juncture that is the transition to a post industrial society as a fundamental reconfiguration of the industrial infrastructure and its corresponding social, political organization and underlying energy grid.

The Soviet peoples and the Russian proletariat in particular had enough of the duplicity, lies and privileges of the bureaucracy. Socialism did in fact deliver the goods in an ever increasing amount and I am betting that bourgeois Russia cannot achieve the standard of living of Soviet society for the mass of toilers in what was the Soviet Union in the next 30 years . . . period.

The law of value simply will not allow it. Heard of the law of value and the pace of the technological revolution driving value in the direction of zero and not away from zero. It sounds corny but it is some real shit. Human labor cannot successfully compete with computers and advanced robotics.

That's like trying to box with God. Hey . . . your arms to short to box God.

We are living an incredible period of history where we can actually compare the warts of Soviet industrial socialism with its bourgeois counterrevolutionary phase. During the next ten years I am going to compare the so-called "dark side of the Ole Man" . . . not with the dark underbelly of bourgeois property but its bright side . . . its alleged brilliance in meeting the peoples needs.

The so-called miracle of the market.

For a society to lose cradle to grave coverage of the minimum requirements of human reproduction . . . on an expanding scale . . . is catastrophic. Without question the Ole Man bent the gigantic back of the Russian proletariat and gave a nobody like me a chance to read Marx . . . and opened doors in America that would probably still be shut to me and my children.

My bourgeoisie is going to spank and break the back of the Russian proletariat . . . and if possible liquidate it from world history . . . as punishment for compelling the bourgeoisie to accept its first catastrophic defeat in history. The bourgeoisie never saw his defeat coming and shall never forget or forgive.

In this context we communists clinging to the legacy of Bolshevism . . . and lining up as one man along side and behind Joseph the Steel and Molotov the Hammer ... ready to eat bullets for breakfast, lay down our lives at the drop of the hat and take the bourgeoisie to the mat . . . are asked about our shortcoming and inability to provide all the consumer goods available in bourgeois society.

OK . . . here is the real answer: We turned out to be better fighters, insurgents, insurrectionists and thugs on the side of the proletariat than . . . factory managers. Sue me.

Hey . . . we did the cradle to grave coverage better than the bourgeoisie and the Social Democrats.

My mother use to say . . . "a hard head makes a soft ass." Well, . . . the bourgeoisie is in the process of softening the head of the world proletariat. And some smuck . . . asks about consumer goods . . . and the first priority was staying armed and preventing the wolf from entering the house. And taking care of the wolves in sheep clothing inside the house.

Consumer goods?

Fine . . . OK . . . buy them from China.

We'll be back.:-)

Melvin P.