was gonna write a single tweet, but it turned into a thread so:

Lenin genuinely believed in what he wrote in State and Rev, and fully intended to implement it. The problems immediately began to set in with the underdeveloped industry of Russia and made worse by the Civil War. https://twitter.com/RadWavvez/status/1273069978791673859

Marx did not believe in socialism as a transitional stage between capitalism and communism and neither did Lenin. Marx's schemata is dictatorship of the proletariat > lower-stage communism (no state, no classes, labour vouchers) > higher stage communism.

Lenin only differed from Marx by calling lower-stage communism socialism. He repeatedly stresses the USSR is not socialist. Partly due to MaTeRiAl CoNdItIoNs and partially through his own fuck ups, the USSR never really became a "true" DOTP.

But I don't think the USSR really derailed until 1928 - not just because Stalin bad (I think Trotsky's ascension would have probably done the same thing) but because he destroyed the alliance between the peasants and workers the Soviet state needed to stay a embryonic DOTP.

So what was the USSR after that? Was it capitalist? socialist? something else entirely? The most compelling answer I find is Ticktin's theories, commonly called "non-mode of production theory" (although he himself never used this term)

Ticktin proposes the USSR was originally transitioning towards socialism but with the ascendance of Stalin, it got "stuck" partway through. He is thus able to explain the peculiarities the Soviet model had that state capitalist societies such as China don't.

The value-form continued to operate in the USSR, but in a weird way - the state planned the economy around use-values, but *the state's use-values*, not Soviet society as a wholes.

Similarly, the organs of proletarian rule continued to exist to the end of the USSR, but had little to no actual influence over state affairs.

The USSR's increasing corruption, decline in product quality and inability to meet consumer demand was a fatal, systematic flaw.

Workers who did not own the means of production but had no reason to fear unemployment with the guarantees of the extensive Soviet welfare state could easily put less effort in and meet quotas by working smarter, not harder.

Bureaucrats could easily fudge the numbers by meeting the *quantity* demanded, but not the quality. And fed these false numbers, the central planners could easily print out new quotas increasingly detached from reality. The cycle repeats, the rot sets in deeper.

The central dilemma for the ruling elite was thus: Shift towards a more state capitalist model (as was attempted repeatedly after Stalin's death) and risk proletarian revolution by removing the guarantees - or genuinely adopt socialism and lose all their power.

Gorbachev, being a true believer who also recognized the increasing deficiencies in the Soviet model, tried to have his cake and eat it too, but only sent the whole house of cards crashing down on itself, and the rest is history.

TL;DR, in Ticktin's own words: