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7/20/2020
The millionaire Paul Jay of the Real News Network pontificates over a subject over which he lacks actual class based experience nor even a much less reliable academic study of. But the interview raises some important questions, which I hope to address below:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fypT5l4SsV0
"Throughout the Stalinist period, most Soviet workers had been paid for their work based on a piece-rate system. Thus their individual wages were directly tied to the amount of work they produced.
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_reform_in_the_Soviet_Union,_1956%E2%80%931962
We should dismiss capitalist propaganda that under the Soviet Union all workers got paid the same amount and thus they had no incentive to work harder. They only lack the disincentive of being fired in mass like in capitalist countries to this date in the US and many other capitalist economies. Which results in their mass starvation, ultimate premature extinction and replacement.
Socialism does not make workers lazy. To the contrary, working in a society in which they control politically and benefit without being exploited, creates in them incentives to be productive far above any productivity that has ever existed. Being forced to work and being exploited creates resistance by workers to work less. When you cannot be fired due to some historical fragility of the respective class dictatorship, you have the luxury of being lazy. No such right exists among American workers.
There has never been Socialism in any country, ever. They have been all left wing Social Democracies. Of which is the most progressive form of dictatorship possible by the middle class. Where revolutionaries bullied and forced workers into working hard for the "revolution". Middle class revolutionaries of which a few of which were honestly attempting to represent and address the long term interests of workers like Lenin and Trotsky, but ultimately failed having no real experience as workers to really understand the working class.
There were also middle class opportunists who grew to become the majority of the party like Stalin who actually had contempt for the working class, who were as crude and brutal to the working class as any capitalist. Middle class dictatorships are inherently weaker and more unstable then the dictatorship of the bourgeois, which explains the current capitalist regimes in all these former so called Socialist revolutions, even those who still call themselves socialist.We should always talk in terms of class dictatorship, for no other form of government is possible in a class society. Specific forms of governments whether that of Democratic to Fascistic are to be understood only strictly within the class in power. It matters little to the working class what form the dictatorship dominates them, takes. Their respective wages and all other material benefits and rights are always a function of their ability to organize themselves and their respective resistance against the exploitation of their class enemy. This is true whether the government is democratic or fascists, etc...
The dictatorship of the proletariat is the final form of this class system. Only a dialectical transformation occurs as the dictatorship of this class is no longer that of a minority over the majority. In its essence, it is a democracy. Its dictatorship is strictly a defensive mechanism of the working class against foreign countries in which minorities still rule over majorities and against domestic possessors of capital who can still bribe large sectors of the working class to betray their own interests and that of their class as a whole.
Richard
PS: I understand that some comrades may interpret this essay as an attack on Lenin and Trotsky. I prefer to look at it as an historical reassessment of the mistakes of fellow comrades and not of actual betrayals of the working class. Lenin had some inkling of the domination of the middle class in the party, in his "better fewer, but better", essay. However he failed to understand the vital importance of the primacy of of the middle class in the party starting with himself. There is no substitution for actual experience as a proletariat. This does not negate the importance of a theoretical understanding of the society itself. But the character which forms the will of the leadership is dominated by one's experiences and not by one's studies.