What features of Socialism were missing for Lenin to not consider the USSR socialist?
Your quote was that Lenin stated
Soviet Russia was in a "transitory state", but did not include the desired end. As Lenin was a Marxist, the end goal was Communism, so he would have considered it transitory were it Socialism, and this is beared out by the fact he named the USSR the United Soviet
Socialist Republics.
Which was actually a coalition shuffling, because there's this weird quirk that the general population calling for Jim Crow laws were otherwise small government economic liberals and many of the staunch progressives calling for their end also desired strong governments to enact various social programs, so when Jim Crow laws were finally overturned in the Civil Rights Movement, the big government drive used to uphold Jim Crow laws became toxic to its constituants and attractive to its opponents.
The 1960 party platform of the Democrats called out the Republicans for deeming millions unemployed a normal adjustment. This was before the Civil Rights Act, and the economic talking point is
the exact same things.
For fuck's sake, the Democrat party platform of 1960 has this to say about immigration:
We shall adjust our immigration, nationality and refugee policies to eliminate discrimination and to enable members of scattered families abroad to be united with relatives already in our midst.
The national-origins quota system of limiting immigration contradicts the rounding principles of this nation. It is inconsistent with our belief in the rights of man. This system was instituted after World War I as a policy of deliberate discrimination by a Republican Administration and Congress.
The revision of immigration and nationality laws we seek will implement our belief that enlightened immigration, naturalization and refugee policies and humane administration of them are important aspects of our foreign policy.
These laws will bring greater skills to our land, reunite families, permit the United States to meet its fair share of world programs of rescue and rehabilitation, and take advantage of immigration as an important factor in the growth of the American economy.
In this World Refugee Year it is our hope to achieve admission of our fair share of refugees. We will institute policies to alleviate suffering among the homeless wherever we are able to extend our aid.
Practically word for goddamn word a modern speech, because as it turns out they
haven't done away with anything this complains about in the last 60 years. The flip was in
constituants, almost no actual policy change occured because the issue supposedly "flipped" was
no longer politically relevant, and the politicians themselves didn't do much switching parties.
Georgia is not Michigan is not New York is not California. A New York Democrat from the 80s is not a Georgia Democrat of the 60s. The former is
Donald fucking Trump, who should need no elaboration, the latter is Bill Clinton, who personally opposed the Jim Crow laws and ran the son of a man who filibustered the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as his VP.
The right and left wing and the features of what make them right and left are fixed.
Unless you think that monarchism is politically relevant today, this is untrue. It began in the French Revolution, and the Enlightenment is not the most recent philosophical "revolution". Postmodernism specifically rejects the Enlightenment's goals of hard data-driven intellectualism in policy, on the basis that not all reality is clean data.
All authoritarians are right wing but not all right wingers are authoritarians.
So what do you call the non-authoritarian right winger? Perhaps
liberal right? And if the Left is those who follow the Enlightenment, then the "Philosopher King" would be quite clearly Left-wing, as the entire notion of a monarch actually
needing to be a highly educated individual to have the skills to rule effectively was a central premise of the early Enlightenment, as opposed to such rulership being pure birthright; not all monarchies are hereditary, after all, just ask the Roman Emperors. Technocratic dictatorships, too, are very strongly rooted in the Enlightenment for much the same reason.
To say LibLeft vs AuthLeft is... well besides being insane it's a category error. No one outside of your lunatic echo chambers talks about left and right the way you do.
...or you are in an echo chamber and fail to realize that most of Europe considers spectacular welfare states (large fractions of your income
must be spent to meet the needs of people who are not you) and extreme environmentalist controls to be "left wing"? Incessent demands for censorship of anything remotely approaching nationalism as a whole is "left wing" and ludicrously commonplace for Europe, and quite cleanly authoritarian because it is state power applied to forcefully silence a viewpoint. Hell, the full-on outlawing of entire fields of technology, namely genetic engineering of food, to the point of
browbeating African countries into rejecting US food aid in the middle of mass starvation, is a mainstream "left-wing" matter in Europe.
Again, you recognize that not all the Right are authoritarian. As the generally considered opposite to authoritarian is libertarian, that means the extreme of the non-authoritarian Right is therefor libertarian Right, and using fixed points to define politics means that this is
more solid because the fact non-authoritarian Right-wingers exist means there must be something
other than authoritarianism defining the Right, and therefor points that define Right vs. Left separately from Authoritarian vs. Libertarian.
Centralized planning means that the plans are generated in a designated central location to drive the economic engine.
So the US actually counts right this moment, given the War Powers being enacted to establish control of the necessary elements of the economy to deal with the actually-not-very-lethal pandemic? Does it require it
actively be in use to be centralized, or does the
ability count? Because if it's the latter, where the government holding the authority to do so in the first place, then you'll find extremely few cases of decentralized planning after the Feudal period.
And once again you don't actually define your terms. I was thinking in terms of policy making, where there's a central body determining
laws, while you were completely ignoring that to consider it purely about resource allocation and don't clarify it as such. As we are talking about something that is in part a system of government, rather than
purely an economic system like capitalism or merchantilism, it is natural that centralization be considered in a political context.
Anarchism is not about the elimination of hierarchies or even about the elimination of governments.
...Anarchism literally means "no ruler". That is what the "an" prefix
means. Just as
monarchism means "one ruler". Just as "Democracy" means "people's power". These words are constructed from underlying etymology, and if Left Vs. Right is
static and unchanging, so to
must these other political categorization terms.
If by cultural genocide you mean the abolition of that culture... well then ya. If however you mean the death of the people who embody the culture then no.
The fact you actually need to ask this question clearly demonstrates you are in an echo chamber, because the UN specifically defines genocide with a split, with deliberate cultural destruction qualifiyng. Per the general consensus on human rights, by the mainstream international organizations, you are calling for genocide of the cultural subset. A firmly recognized crime against humanity.
You also had cultures that adopted much of other cultures thus they erased their own culture and replaced it with a new culture.
There is a qualitative difference between
transformation and
erasure. Not bothering to retain is functionally distinct from active removal. The former is natural and generally does not disqualify continuity from historians, the latter is generally agreed upon as being a crime against humanity, such that it is a central pillar of why the Nazis are considered evil.