What certainly did occur in the U.S.S.R. was the abolishing of private property. The same happened in Albania, Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, the German Democratic Republic, Hungary, the People's Republic of Korea, Poland, Romania, Vietnam. But in none of them was public, collective property instituted. What replaced private ownership was state ownership. All the means of production were both de jure and de facto owned, controlled, and run by the state.
That fundamental and irreversible fact is what allows me to say unequivocally that neither socialism nor its supreme state of development, communism, ever existed in the Soviet Union or in any of the other so-called Communist countries. Yes, there did exist elements of a Socialist Policy, especially in what concerned and conerns social security; but those elements were no more pronounced in the Soviet Union than they are in Sweden or, for that matter, in Germany, neither of which qualifies as being Socialist/Communist countries. The contest, therefore, between the "democratic" world, symbolized by the United States, and the "Communist" world, embodied by the U.S.S.R., was in fact not a struggle between democracy and communism; it was a struggle between two forms of ownership: private and state. State ownership lost. It might be even be said that the struggle was between two forms of capitalism—bourgeois capitalism and state capitalism, with the former proving to be the stronger.引自 Introduction
The conditions of bourgeois society are too narrow to comprise the wealth created by them. And how does the bourgeoisie get over these crises? On the one hand by enforced destruction of a mass of productive forces; on the other, by the conquest of new markets, and by the more thorough exploitation of the old ones. That is to say, by paving the way for more extensive and more destructive crises, and by diminishing the means whereby crises are prevented.引自 The Communist Manifesto
Mass of labourers, crowded into the factory, are organised like soilders. As privates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. Not only are they slaves of the bourgeois class, and of the bourgeois State; they are daily and hourly enslaved by the machine, by the overlooker, and, above all, by the individual bourgeois manufacturer himself. The more openly this despotism proclaims gain to be its end and aim, the more petty, the more hateful and the more embittering it is.引自 The Communist Manifesto
