I didn't say all regulations in the way of forming businesses are unecessary, and neither do I think every unecessary regulation in the way of forming businesses means there is no free enterprise. I rather define free enterprise as a system wherein no one is practically barred to doing so. Hence, we both would consider the US a free enterprise system, while a hardcore libertarian would not.
However, you would consider China a free enterprise as well, even though few are truely able to do so. For me, China would be a limited free enterprise system, unlike the US.
As I said, I don't consider the term "free enterprise" to be an objective category. It's a subjective designation, and a largely rhetorical one. There are varying degrees of state-imposed fetters on business activity, but I don't see in that any discrete economic formations.
A commodity is a good without that normally are near identical to eachother, like gold or coffeebeans.
The Marxian usage of "commodity" is different, as the videos explain. It refers to any good which is produced for the market; their homogeneity is established in the form of exchange-value, not in any physical property.
But I think you simply want abolish market relations for at least these, no? However, my fear is that considering commodities will never be infinite, the lack of market forces will cause scarcity. I'm not saying it is impossible to prevent scarcity, but certainly more difficult. How are you going to prevent overuse of commodities without market relations?
How would you prevent it with market relations? By limiting individual consumption. Communism at least is able to do this consciously and rationally, rather than purely by accident. The current levels of pollution, i.e. the over-consumption of the natural environment rather neatly illustrate the incompetence of capitalism in this area.
This part I'm going to have to address point by point.
The USSR was at large not a market economy, since in practically all cases, the state both supplied and demanded.
Not in reality, no. Firstly, the individual citizens of the USSR still constituted consumers set apart from any productive enterprise, and the relationship between them and the state was one characterised by market exchange.
Secondly, the state monopoly on production (whole, as in the USSR, or partial, as in the various Eastern Bloc states) was not in practice the monopoly of actual government institutions, but of state-owned enterprises, very much like the Western equivalent- the US Postal Service, say, or the old National Coal Board in Britain. These, despite being owned wholesale by the state, still operated within a market, with both end-consumers and with each other.
There was no free enterprise,as the state was determined by law to be the sole supplier of everything within the Soviet Union.
Hardly necessary. After all, there was no free enterprise in Britain during much of WW2, but I doubt that period would be regarded as a vacation for the market. Even a less exceptional example, such as the retention of state control and extension of state ownership to the coal mines in the UK in the years immediately following WW2 didn't constitute an actual break from the market, merely a particular formation within the market. State-protected, state-subsidised, and with a state-ensured monopoly, sure, but then neither of those are unheard of in private enterprise, either. It's just a matter of degrees.
Neither was there such thing as consumer demand as the USSR set prices, wages...
Individual state firms did, yes, and while this was nominally in response to plans being passed down from on high, that doesn't mean that it was . And even if it was- and it should certainly be admitted that the ham-fisted bureaucracy managed to deviate from the realistic more than a few times- that's just them cocking it up, not an actual departure from market relations as understood by Marx.
...and was the sole source of the money supply.
Isn't that true of all states?
Thus, market forces were laid still. Imagine one guy who supplies himself of everything he needs: He is not involved in market relations of any kind. The USSR would be a somewhat same story, except it is a state.
But the USSR was a major international trading power. Not quite as active as some of the leading Western states, granted, and more prone to cultivating a would-be-autarky in its political spheres of influence, but never self-sufficient. And so even if that was a defining aspect- and I don't think it was, because state borders do not define a society- it wouldn't apply in this case.
Now there were some windows of time in which some market economic activity was allowed in the USSR: The New economic policy which temporarily allowed free enterprise in the agricultural sector (because poor planning policies led to severe famines) and several reforms instituted by Krushev to allow for unequal wages (to promote production).
Well, in the Marxian understanding, the very fact that these windows existed is a sign that market relations existed all along. You can't just transition from socialism to capitalism willy nilly, its a socially revolutionary epoch from which there is no return, the fundamental remaking of all relations of production. The very fact that it was possible for the USSR to return to capitalism at all suggests, to Marxists (or at least those who've read Marx) that it was always capitalist, merely a particularly bloated, statist, inefficient capitalism.
And there might be some competition as well, though this would probably have some very strong political undertones, since no firm would come into existence without the state's say so.
Well, competition was complicated, and often rather shadowy; the tricks and turns involved can make the details difficult to understand for those who don't have a very firm grasp of the internal working of the USSR- and I don't include myself in that category. In some forms it was traditional, such as the competition between state farms, which were generally operated in practice as middling-sized enterprises under only loose collective management- often closer to a particularly nosy regulatory body than to genuine state management- or the competition between the producers of luxury goods (either between each other, say cigarettes vs. coffee, or between different state-owned producers of the same type of product, each with an output of a different variety or quality- they even had
advertising campaigns!). In others, it was more subtle, and took the form of vying for state investment, the state functioning in practice as a hive-mind bourgeoisie upon which all individual corporations (after all, the distinction between capitalist and company was already quite clear by 1917), by attempting to demonstrate the greatest potential for the accumulation of capital. Some concious attempts at planning went into this, sure, in the same way that the US government "plans" production by investing in, say, military manufacturers, but a lot of it was the same blind stumbling around in pursuit of capital accumulation that you saw in any openly market economy, and, if anything, the fetishisation of planning really just served to hamper this accumulation- there's a reason that those post-colonial "socialisms" that left room for more opportunistic and/or foreign investment, as in India or Dengist China, proved to be more successful.
That all said, I do understand the USSR was very far off your interpretation of Communism which doesn't feature money nor authoritarian leadership.
Not merely mine, but Marx's. That's the key.
