Except the Soviet society wasn't very communist. It definitely wasn't https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_each_according_to_his_abi...
Communism at a large scale does not work because it goes against human nature - we're not bees or ants or other similar animals but rather belligerent primates with a cultural predilection for living in families and clans. It is there where Communism can work, at a small enough scale so that leechers and moochers can be put in their place and there is no (need for a) Party. As soon as the size of the Communi(ty) gets so large that any individual can no longer check on all of the others Commun(ism) no longer works since it offers far too many opportunities for less scrupulous individuals to leech of others and for ideologists to rise to power 'in service of the people'.
And yet, we don't live as such animals and our collective behavior changed throughout history thanks to our reasoning capabilities taking over the inner "animal".
That 'inner animal' comes out the moment the shelves in the supermarkets are empty and the electronic payment systems are down. Those reasoning capabilities may have put a thin cultural veneer over the beast but it is still there, ready to defend itself and its own if push comes to shove as well it should - cultures have a way of collapsing when times get hard.
"scientific socialism"... really?
Without a market for their goods they'll end up just where they started, ripe for a new revolution.
Regarding the markets, considering their ever growing export sector, I wouldn't worry too much for now ;)
[1] whether Lenin ever used the phrase I'll leave in the middle but the concept stands
Yanis Varoufakis himself attended private school and his father in law was one of the biggest industrialists in Greece. I'm sceptical about how much he knows about working class realities.
From this perspective, just as the Soviet Union was a feudal-like industrial society pretending to be a workers’ state, the United States today is performing a splendid impersonation of a technofeudal stateIt may well head towards technofeudalism, but I dispute that. With automation, the peasantry become dispensable to the ruling class and that isn't very feudal at all. Feudalism is a system where money and power flows upwards. In feudalism, the lords are dependent on the peasantry for food, goods and troops... Which is not the case when all these are provided by machines.
Pure ideology.
The problem with the free market vs Marxism argument is that they are both materialist. These systems know the price of things and real value of nothing.
Marxism (and capitalism) sell themselves as ground upwards movements but are in fact top down. They are both based around materialism which leads to a cynical attitude to life and individuals.
We are heading to a centralised command economy. Marxists want more of that, not less, but sell it as liberating the working classes.
Marxists want the working class whose labor is applied to capital in production to direct capital, and thereby production, rather than capital being privately owned and its owners directing labor, and thereby production. While the democratic centralism favored in Leninist theory and its derivatives is (at least in the theory in which it is conceived) a means of achieving that, current Western Marxists are, IME, all over the map with regard to centralism. They are more united about who should wield power over the economy than about the structure of how that power should be wielded.
Well yes, because it does. You dont even need a fully planned economy, some market forces aint bad and some small bourgeois aint bad either. Bird in a cage etc etc.