this post was submitted on 10 Aug 2026
28 points (100.0% liked)
Soviet
460 readers
2 users here now
C/SOVIET
Celebrate the art, music, history, architecture, and glory of the Soviet Union.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
28
This Soviet World reading group — Week 4, Aug 10–16: Chapter 4: “The Growing Democracy.”
(lemmy.encryptionin.space)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
(emphasis mine)
This seems to counter those ultra leftists (eg Trotskyists), who accuse the Soviet Union of "state capitalism" and of having a political / bureaucratic "class", that's fundamentally materially different from the workers.
This is something I don't understand. So if a local factory ends up producing a whole bunch of people who end up in high positions on the national scale, then they have to foot the bill for all of their salaries themselves? Shouldn't there be some recompensation from the wider constituency? Maybe I'm just nitpicking and this isn't a major expense.
And I understand that this is how politics works in general, but if the at base of support goes away, then that representative gets replaced. However, doesn't this cause some favouritism for certain municipalities that form the core of support for high-up representatives?
One factory cannot have many people representing it. The number is always capped.
Those sorts of people have a tendency to treat the Soviet system as some kind of unchanging and perpetual vague "authoritarianism" rather than a shifting and changing system that adapted and changed as the people within it did and the material conditions did. The late USSR was a pretty different place to the one described here. Though the Trotskyites will often use these sorts of claims against the USSR under Stalin specifically.