Rugoz wrote:
After the revolution the so-called working class, or rather the vanguard, become the new bourgeoisie faster than you can blink. The Soviet Union was more equal that many Western countries on paper, but in reality the higher-ups had access to all the goodies (often Western ones) while the "working class" stood before empty shelves or had to wait 10 years for a shitty car.
This is just base stereotyping, as for anything else.
The historical fact that the soviet form of workers' workplace control which proliferated in the early 20th century (in Russia), and given centralized political consciousness in the Bolshevik Revolution, eventually devolved and culminated in the form of nation-state-constrained Stalinism (Stalin's so-called 'socialism in one country'), means that something went wrong somewhere.
The culprit, as ever, was Western imperialism, which militarily *invaded* the nascent workers form of collective control over social production, necessitating a typically-*bourgeois*, nation-state-type form of nationalist consolidation, hence Stalin and Stalinism (etc.).
The Western imperialist counterrevolution in 1918 *cannot* be called a 'revolution', in the same sense as the Bolshevik Revolution (of 1917) -- since it was *antithetical* and *counterposed* to the soviet / workers-council proletarian revolution of the same period.
The resulting USSR under Stalin was *not* due to the goal of socialist revolution and its protagonistic vanguard, but rather was the Western-imperialist *stunting* of the nascent Bolshevik Revolution, a distinct concrete historical factor that's all-too-often overlooked, as in this treatment of yours, Rugoz.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_in ... _Civil_WarYes, the collectivist, non-imperialist (non-capital-exporting) USSR *was* stratified and somewhat elitist, but it *wasn't* capitalist since there was no private property. The catch-up development of *production goods* (factories / industrial infrastructure) was prioritized over the production of mass-market *consumer*-type goods, since there were no markets, there was collectivist production, no poverty, and the country had to catch-up to prevailing international levels of industrialized production.
So while the USSR's bureaucratic elite *was* favoritistic, it *wasn't* bourgeois, nor was it capitalist or imperialist. Western bourgeois nation-states *are* inherently bourgeois-sided, against *working class* interests, since the personnel of the bourgeois nation-state are made up of the bourgeoisie.