AHC: USSR announces "We've achieved full Communism!"

abc123

Banned
But, why would they? This way they could say that all the bad things of Socialism will be make good when the Communism arrives and that will be when hell freezes...;)
 
One of the basic perquisites for full Communism is that all capitalism has been extinguished. So unless the USSR somehow wins a 3rd World War in the intervening time, it would be kinda hard for them to declare full communism when there are still capitalist countries around. :p
 

Cueg

Banned
One of the basic perquisites for full Communism is that all capitalism has been extinguished. So unless the USSR somehow wins a 3rd World War in the intervening time, it would be kinda hard for them to declare full communism when there are still capitalist countries around. :p

Was that in the manifesto? From my extensive reading of the subject, it was a societal movement that sought the elimination of class hierarchy, along with other hierarchies deemed inherently oppressive.

There were most certainty drives to export Communism as a matter of principle within various schools of Marxian thought, but that by no means entailed the elimination of all global economic hierarchy in order to achieve the ends set out by the ideology within respective regions of the world.

To phrase it differently, Communism sought the elimination of class and other forms of oppressive hierarchy through revolution. With the aforementioned end established, must the complete global elimination of the various hierarchies be a required condition? I'll let you infer from here.
 
You'd need a leader who is very mentally unstable or perfectly happy to shatter the ideological foundations of the Soviet Union and turn a portion of the party and politburo against himself. None of the plausible leaders of the USSR have that level of mental instability.
 
Was that in the manifesto? From my extensive reading of the subject, it was a societal movement that sought the elimination of class hierarchy, along with other hierarchies deemed inherently oppressive.

There were most certainty drives to export Communism as a matter of principle within various schools of Marxian thought, but that by no means entailed the elimination of all global economic hierarchy in order to achieve the ends set out by the ideology within respective regions of the world.

Well, communism as it developed in the Soviet Union (that is, Marxist-Leninism) also viewed those same hierarchies as being responsible for things like war and that the capitalist states. This was one of the key reasons the Leninists believed a powerful state in the interim socialist period was necessary, as it could protect, as well as cultivate, the new socialist society as it moved towards communism. However, so long as capitalist countries existed, so too would a strong state be necessary to protect socialism as capitalist countries would seek to destroy socialism. As communism could not be achieved until the state was no longer necessary and since the state could not be considered unnecessary until the capitalist threat was eliminated, it stands to reason that communism could not be achieved so long as capitalist states continued to exist.

Now I'm less sure about other strands of Marxism, but since the Soviet Union of OTL was very Leninist in it's outlook obviously there could be no serious movement within the CPSU to declare the achievement of "full Communism" as that would. Indeed, the very idea of "full communism" being something that needs to be announced would be ridiculed by Marxist theorists of any particular bent. The achievement of communism is supposed to be natural and self-evident, not something which needs to be pointed out.
 
To phrase it differently, Communism sought the elimination of class and other forms of oppressive hierarchy through revolution. With the aforementioned end established, must the complete global elimination of the various hierarchies be a required condition? I'll let you infer from here.

Yes, eradication of communism was a required condition for communism - because according to marxism, communism is stateless. There is no police, no army, no government in a communist society.

That means that communism can only be achieved on a worldwide base, otherwise it will be put down by capitalist armed forces.
 
One of the basic perquisites for full Communism is that all capitalism has been extinguished. So unless the USSR somehow wins a 3rd World War in the intervening time, it would be kinda hard for them to declare full communism when there are still capitalist countries around. :p

As long as capitalist states existed, the USSR obviously could not dispense with an army and a security police, but Stalin (and Khrushchev) taught that it could nevertheless reach full communism in an *economic* sense:

"In principle there is no dispute between Soviet leaders that in the long run a state of affairs will be brought about in which the present 'Socialist' society will be transformed into a 'Communist' one. In Marx's original formulation this could only be done when the whole world was under Socialist control. For 'Communism' implied the stateless society, when the State had withered away. Stalin, however, formulated the view that for economic purposes Communism could be created earlier. That is, he held that the Soviet Union could be Communist except for the fact that it would have to maintain armed forces and a State security organisation. Politically speaking, this would in fact mean that none or almost none of the stateless condition of affairs previously thought of as characterizing 'Communism' would have been obtained. 'Communism' has, however, its economic side. It was believed that a truly classless and stateless society could be attained only when production was so advanced that it would be unnecessary any longer to have a system of exchange, and workers could be trusted both to do their work as a matter of social duty and to draw what they wanted from society's stores, without any shortage resulting. It was not, presumably, thought that the Soviet Union was on the immediate verge of attaining Communism (though Stalin in his speech of February 9, 1946, spoke of a period of three Five-Year Plans as sufficient to reach the new phase)...

"Stalin gives the conditions of transition to Communism as : (a) Expansion of production, and especially production of the means of production. (b) 'Converting' collective farm property into public property, 'though not necessarily by nationalisation'; 'introducing . . . products-exchange in place of commodity circulation'. (c) Cultural advance; five-hour day; better houses; and the doubling of real wages--particularly by reductions in the price of consumer goods...

"In Khrushchev's time the idea that constructing Communism is a task for the fairly hear future, as Stalin implied, is also put:

"'The building of a communist society in our country is no longer a remote aim but the immediate practical objective of all the work of the Soviet people and their leading force--the CPSU. The Soviet people are at present facing the majestic task of creating the material-technical foundation of communism, the task of catching up with and overtaking within the shortest possible time the most developed capitalist countries in the per capita production of the population.' (Party Theses for the Fortieth Anniversary of the Revolution (Pravda, September 15, 1957)"

Robert Conquest, *Power and Polivy in the USSR,* pp. 21-23 (1960).
 
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