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Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

> And fwiw the USSR did not even consider itself a socialist state.

What is the S in USSR then?

And not the “Soviet” one, the other one.

> That’s why it decided on using the term communism instead,

No, they used “Communism” as well as, not instead of, “Socialism” for the same reasons as Marx did the same thing: “Communism” described the ideology and the goal state, “Socialism” the immediate mechanism.

(Now, Leninist Communism radically departed from Marxist Communism.on other points, to be sure...)

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> What is the S in USSR then?

False advertising. By the same logic, East Germany was more democratic than West Germany because it had "Democratic" in the name.

> False advertising.

Sure, that’s how non-Leninist socialists (including Marxists) see it. But the upthread claim was that the USSR did not use the term “socialist” but instead invented the term “communist” because it did not view its own system as socialist. In fact, the USSR used the pair of terms “socialist” and “communist” together in much the same pattern (if, arguably, a somewhat different understanding of the precise meaning of the two terms) as non-Leninist Marxists did (its worth noting that one of Marx’s well-known works, with Engels, was The Communist Manifesto.)

That is simply not true. You are partially correct on Marx’s use of the term, but by Marx’s standards, nothing about the USSR could conceivably be considered communism. Marx was starkly against pursuing revolution without first achieving capitalism. He was against Russian revolution because Russia was not a capitalist society.

That said, Marx was also less consistent on the definitions than some suggest.

Regardless, “communism” was the term decided on shortly after the civil war ended. It was confusing and a poor choice but there was certainly no confusion as to how well it correlated with the idea that communism was a final stage. Nobody believed the USSR had reached a final stage of anything.

> by Marx’s standards, nothing about the USSR could conceivably be considered communism

Yeah, my comment history has plenty of rants about the difference between Marxism and Leninism and how the phrase Marxist-Leninist is oxymoronic. But the claim I took issue with was not the (true) claim that the Soviet system was very much not Marxist, but the (false) claim that the Soviet union didn’t view its own system as socialist and, in fact, adopted “communist” in place of “socialist” for that reason. Leninists did (and they and their ideological descendants do) see their system as socialist and use the terms socialism and communism together in a similar way to the way that Marx and non-Leninist Marxist do, or at least did (non-Leninist Marxists now avoid “Communism” a lot because of association with Leninism, and use “Marxism” in its place.)

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