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Comment by koverda | Hacker News Reader

People were paid for work and you'd buy groceries with money.

Yes.. like the joke goes.... The factory worker says: ‘They pretend to pay us an honest wage and we pretend to do an honest day’s work.’”

Interesting, we had sorta the same saying in romanian, "they pretend do pay us, we pretend to work".

So... capitalism?

Socialism, it’s in the country name.

A transition state towards communism. That's what the government officially called it. The country spent 74 years in that 'transition' state.

It had little in common with the socialist democracies of Europe, nothing in common with the communist proscriptions of Marx, and some in common with the much maligned state capitalism of today's China.

Yes. Real communism have never been tried. Perhaps impossible to try.

We'd be better off brainstorming a new, 21st century solution to the excess of capitalism, rather than relying on the industrial past.

> We'd be better off brainstorming a new, 21st century solution to the excess of capitalism, rather than relying on the industrial past.

That sounds like something a socialist would say:

https://www.currentaffairs.org/2018/03/socialism-as-a-set-of...

Democratic People's Republic of North Korea

"People's" is a negation word, like "non" or "not".

German Democratic Republic. Is "German" a negation word too?

What makes communism communism is central planning. Money becomes more of a voucher than a measure of value.

It depends who you're talking to. If you're talking about what the founders of modern Communist theory thought Communism is then you're incorrect; Marx sets out in Capital specifically what he considers to be wrong with money and wage labour in general - its genesis in commodity exchange, as Engels said, money is contained "in embryo" in the fact of commodity exchange.

The USSR, as a matter of fact, operated under mostly capitalist conditions, capitalism distinguished by:

* The predominance of wage labour in the economy

* The goal of economic activity as the accumulation of capital

* Private ownership of means of production (this is the "mostly" part - the USSR did not have much private ownership, which sets it apart from other capitalisms, but Marx was careful to point out that even under simple "public ownership", society becomes a "general capitalist")

In short: if there is wage labour, it is most definitely not "Communist". Money in its function as money in the circuit of capital, that is, C-M-C', remains money, not merely a symbolic "voucher". Socialists have proposed the idea of non-exchangable labour vouchers, but this is a far cry from real money which was what the USSR had. The ruble was just as much money as the dollar.

Nit - the goal of economic activity in the USSR was not entirely the accumulation of capital - it was production of what were considered necessary goods. Televisions, automobiles, bombs, tanks, that sort of thing.

This is, in some ways different from economic activity for the purpose of making more money (Which, in addition to producing things like television, automobiles, bombs, and tanks, also ends up producing things like advertising.)

That's a good point, but according to my knowledge this was a matter of degree rather than quality - almost all countries have or have had such production in whole or in part, implemented through subsidies and especially during wartime or other hardships. It's also to be expected when production is at least nominally democratic and central, it's not all about simple appearances. But what distinguishes a socialist society from any other is that goods would no longer be produced as commodities - i.e they are not imbued with the form of labour which tailors for exchange over use. Capital tends to totalize all labour into that which works for exchange over use, e.g. it has subsumed artwork and non-tangible goods from things of use into things with exchange value and a use-value. But exchange value tends to prevail and even changes the concrete form of labour, e.g. advertising as you suggested, and also, for instance, music sold on platforms like Spotify to maximize revenue, such as shorter, highly-replayable and segmented songs. Capital exists no less for the state, which will tend to share the same motivations as other capitalists, especially since it must buy and sell to other states or private individuals abroad.

There was certainly advertising in the USSR and other Eastern Bloc countries. Here's an article describing how bizarre it was: https://www.rbth.com/blogs/continental_drift/2017/05/18/sovi...

Ruble wasn't quite as much money as a dollar -- it's value, both relative to other currencies, and relative to goods, was completely artificial.

Also, that value was different for different people. I.e., if you were an average citizen, you could spend on bread, maybe meat, and vodka. Once a year you might get a "zakaz" (literally, it means an order, as in mail-order, but in practice a way of distributing some scarce goods to people deemed worthy; you'd still have to pay for it, of course) with maybe a piece of imported salami or a can of pineapple. If you were, say, a driver for Central Committee member, you could get into a different store, which at least had all the staples all the time. And if you were a Central Committee member, you would just shop in a store that had some pretty nice stuff, at a prices that werre set in 1930s and haven't changed since then. Obviously, your ruble would go much further in that case.

In capitalism many people get paid without work (they get paid for having capital).

Can you not own any real estate period in Communism?

That obviously depends on the communist you ask. I don't think many would support privately owned real estate – that is, land you own but don't use it yourself but rent it out or use wage labor to do something with it. Personal property – property you use yourself like a house you live in – is a different matter.

土地是国家的。

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