ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an expanded Marxist definitions of the basic underlying categories of capitalism, and then shows how they continued to exist in the USSR. It establishes an original understanding of the capitalist nature of Soviet society. The chapter also proivdes a framework for understanding capitalist formations wherein the function performed in bourgeois countries mainly by the market is performed in a way that is qualitatively more bureaucratic. Commodities are goods which are bought and sold. On one hand, they are useful things which satisfy human needs, and hence have a utility or use-value. The chapter explains the significance of generalised exchange and necessary growth for the determination of the other main categories of capitalism. Special emphasis is laid throughout on the necessarily competitive nature of Soviet economic bureaucracy. In short, the USSR was a capitalist country which was especially bureaucratic, wherein money capital took forms which were largely bureaucratic rather than currency-based.
