Dialogue with Stalin - Amadeo Bordiga (1952)

Chapters:

0:00 Intro

00:40 Day 1

05:07 Day 1: Tomorrow and Yesterday

10:35 Day 1: Commodities and Socialism

19:19 Day 1: The Russian Economy

23:40 Day 1: Anarchy and Despotism

28:38 Day 1: State and Retreat

31:57 Day 2

34:22 Day 2: Certainties and Uncertainties

43:21 Day 2: Society and Homeland

50:09 Day 2: Law and Theory

01:00:32 Day 2: Nature and History

01:05:16 Day 2: Marx and the Laws

01:12:49 Day 2: Socialism and Communism

01:17:08 Day 3 (Morning)

01:19:05 Day 3 (Morning): Products and Exchange

01:24:14 Day 3 (Morning): Profit and Surplus Value

01:29:27 Day 3 (Morning): Engels and Marx

01:34:32 Day 3 (Morning): Rate and Mass

01:41:57 Day 3 (Morning): 19th and 20th Century

01:51:11 Day 3 (Afternoon)

01:56:46 Day 3 (Afternoon): Competition and Monopoly

02:02:10 Day 3 (Afternoon): Markets and Empires

02:09:24 Day 3 (Afternoon): Latitude and Longitude Degrees

02:14:21 Day 3 (Afternoon): Classes and States

02:22:53 Day 3 (Afternoon): War or Peace?

02:25:25 Day 3 (Afternoon): “Right to the first night”

Audiobook

A substantive and highly informed critique of Stalin’s 1951 treatise ‘Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR’, and its theoretical rationalizations and justifications of the course taken by Soviet economic development; in particular taking to task Stalin’s claim that socialism has been realized, i.e. lower stage communism.

There are many choice quotes that can be extracted from the text - for example, the shallowness of smuggling in ‘state industrialism under the socialist banner’, and palming it off as if it represented a socialist advance; how Soviet industrialization represents a similar process of primitive accumulation (although I believe the German translates closer to ‘original accumulation’) as described by Marx in Capital; Bordiga even goes so far as to say that in much of the undeveloped world a certain glorification of the productive forces is ‘necessary.’

But what Bordiga is absolutely not prepared to accept is that this is socialist or a socialist process. He characterizes the Soviet economy as state capitalist.

Link to the text: https://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1952/stalin.htm