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hypnorotic posted:Do you think the Soviet Union was doomed by 1980? I'm of the opinion that if the USSR had survived till 2000 or so they would been able to apply the advances in computing to their economic system and begun to out preform the US (at least in human welfare). Centralized planning seems impossible to me without modern information and analysis systems. If the USSR survived until 2000 it's because they somehow got their economy to look like China's instead of Venezuela's
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Jun 12, 2016 23:22
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Typo posted:yeah not buying that dude you lose money if the cost of steel goes too high in a market economy, which is what should happen. If the thing you are making isn't worth the value of the inputs you should stop producing. It's worth pointing out again I suppose, but the USSR's complete lack of concern for profitability was actually on purpose. They didn't care if it cost more to make than to sell. What is important is that they make something useful that people will want. Typo posted:Right and if they get it wrong they go out of business or has to adopt a more optimal approach, this isn't the case in planned economies because whatever bureaucracy is in charge of making the product can just arbitrarily change prices to be whatever it needs to be for them to declare x product a success. What's more, the new price is probably just as arbitrary as the old one. In the real life USSR there was the case of a car they brought out in the 40s, the Pobeda. It turned out to suck, so they stopped making it and replaced it with a version that didn't. The USSR did actually have quality control people, and they weren't beholden to the manufacturers but the other way around. This was eventually formalised with the state quality seal initiative etc. Typo posted:the issue isn't straight up availability, because the planning ministry can just order more steel or w/e to be produced even if it's more efficient to substitute other materials that's precisely the flaw of the system You can't "just order" some very low level thing like steel, whats produced is what the industrial base is capable of producing. If you need more steel next year then time to build another steel mill first. Otherwise they would have sat there in 1928 and plan for infinity steel production. This is why, even in the perestroika era party programme, heavy industry was an area of key investment. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Jun 12, 2016 |
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Jun 12, 2016 23:29
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I think I answered the question about the South China Sea earlier in the thread, but I'll get to that and Han chauvinism after the Tonys. Uhhh, I'm very cool.
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Jun 12, 2016 23:31
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HorseLord posted:It's worth pointing out again I suppose, but the USSR's complete lack of concern for profitability was actually on purpose. They didn't care if it cost more to make than to sell. What is important is that they make something useful that people will want. quote:In the real life USSR there was the case of a car they brought out in the 40s, the Pobeda. It turned out to suck, so they stopped making it and replaced it with a version that didn't. The USSR did actually have quality control people, and they weren't beholden to the manufacturers but the other way around. This was eventually formalised with the state quality seal initiative etc. quote:You can't "just order" some very low level thing like steel, whats produced is what the industrial base is capable of producing. If you need more steel next year then time to build another steel mill first. Otherwise they would have sat there in 1928 and plan for infinity steel production. yeah sure but then in another 10 years you end up producing way more steel than you need because you are using steel whereas you could easily substitute wood or w/e other hypothetical raw material which costs less and the planning ministry just declare steel now cost less than wood regardless of whether a ton of steel actually cost less than at of wood
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Jun 12, 2016 23:35
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Typo posted:dude soviet products sucked rear end, like they had orders to produce fridges except the orders denominated the quota in tons so they literally on purpose made each fridge heavier so it's easier to fullfill quot the soviet state seal of approval or w/e was completely loving worthless This is literally an urban legend, I think I saw it first from milton friedman or some other libertarian who claimed they measured the number of trucks made in tons. It's not true because A) an economic planner knows you don't buy fridges or cars by the ton, you buy one whole fridge and one whole car, so they set the quotas in units of items. and B) The designers would specify the materials needed and how much it weighs after it is built, so if they came out of the factory twice as heavy someone will notice. There's also the really important part where a seal of quality is assigned based on an inspection of the item in question. They don't go "quota says 500 a month, must be brilliant!" They test the quality. That's why it's a quality mark.
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Jun 12, 2016 23:45
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HorseLord posted:This is literally an urban legend, I think I saw it first from milton friedman or some other libertarian who claimed they measured the number of trucks made in tons. I want you to read this argument back to yourself. You are basically repeating the Libertarian fallacy of presupposing the rationality and goodness of the actors in charge of economic decisions and adapting reality to fit with it.  Edit: Tesseraction posted:This is a bizarre way to criticise HorseLord's response and only really works if you want to discredit him by ad hominem (lolbertarians!!) on the expectation that everyone else will side with you because it's HorseLord they're arguing against. Yeah, not my finest hour. 
Absurd Alhazred fucked around with this message at 01:05 on Jun 13, 2016 |
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Jun 12, 2016 23:53
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I want you to read this argument back to yourself. You are basically repeating the Libertarian fallacy of presupposing the rationality of the actors in charge of economic decisions and adapting reality to fit with it. Explain to me how you think its plausible someone could sit down and think "I better measure how many of this item they're to produce, in weight" when the item in question is not one you can actually buy by weight. It's not like meat, you can't go up to the counter and say "Hello comrade, five slices of fridge please". I don't dispute that people act irrationally but there is a point where nobody is that irrational; you might as well ask me why I assume people are rational enough to wear clothes when they go outside. And there's still B). A design from the design office is assigned to the factory, and so are the materials that design requires. If you wanted to make the fridge heavier you need thicker steel sheet than specified. Where do you get that from? The steel supplier will not give it to you unless it is assigned. You can't wedge extra sheets into the gaps of the fridge panel-work to make it heavier, because you will run out of your assigned steel and have to request more, which will then cause them to ask what happened to the steel you were given earlier. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 00:03 on Jun 13, 2016 |
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Jun 12, 2016 23:58
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Homework Explainer posted:I suppose we could ask them. Anyway, there were a number of reasons, that was one of several I gave for the immediate postwar context of the creation of the Eastern Bloc. But good selective quotation! You do realise that this is a poll of former constituent states of the Soviet Union, not former communist republics in Eastern Europe, yes?
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Jun 13, 2016 00:00
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HorseLord posted:Explain to me how you think its plausible someone could sit down and think "I better measure how many of this item they're to produce, in weight" when the item in question is not one you can actually buy by weight. It's not like meat, you can't go up to the counter and say "Hello comrade, five slices of fridge please".  "Who needs this kinda nail?" "That's nothing. Most important we covered the entire nail quota just now!" It was pretty common knowledge that managers cheated making things because the quotas were set using various measures of gross output dude. I mean it really doesn't matter what you think is plausible. This is how things worked de facto and de facto is always the only thing that matters.
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Jun 13, 2016 00:05
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I want you to read this argument back to yourself. You are basically repeating the Libertarian fallacy of presupposing the rationality and goodness of the actors in charge of economic decisions and adapting reality to fit with it. This is a bizarre way to criticise HorseLord's response and only really works if you want to discredit him by ad hominem (lolbertarians!!) on the expectation that everyone else will side with you because it's HorseLord they're arguing against. There are more sensible ways to criticise his argument but this is just a drive-by shitpost. e: Lichy posted:
See this is an actual counter-argument and cuts to the heart of the issue.
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Jun 13, 2016 00:10
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Lichy posted:
That's literally a joke cartoon that was published in the soviet era; I can't wait to hear about how such a thing as this was allowed if it really was shining light on a problem they'd gulag you to hide. Or... it is just a joke, a "haha wouldn't it be funny if someone did this". It's not actually evidence of quota fraud in itself.
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Jun 13, 2016 00:10
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HorseLord posted:That's literally a joke cartoon that was published in the soviet era; I can't wait to hear about how such a thing as this was allowed if it really was shining light on a problem they'd gulag you to hide. http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/satire Believe it or not it existed in the Soviet Union and was even sometimes approved of officially.
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Jun 13, 2016 00:12
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Homework Explainer posted:I think we can at least agree the war wrecked the landmass and the Korean people would be better off had it not happened. Yes, I have no problem agreeing with statements that are obviously true. But that statement is a long way from Homework Explainer posted:If not, safe to say the peninsula would have done a lot better without so much of it being turned into rubble by American bombs. which is pure rhetoric, devoid of content.
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Jun 13, 2016 00:13
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HorseLord posted:That's literally a joke cartoon that was published in the soviet era; I can't wait to hear about how such a thing as this was allowed if it really was shining light on a problem they'd gulag you to hide. I thought there was freedom of speech in the Soviet Union.
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Jun 13, 2016 00:13
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Lichy posted:http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/satire Yes, it is satire, it is a joke. That is my point. A joke is not economic analysis.
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Jun 13, 2016 00:13
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Lichy posted:http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/satire I'm assuming during Comrade Krushchev's Thaw?
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Jun 13, 2016 00:15
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HorseLord posted:Yes, it is satire, it is a joke. That is my point. A joke is not economic analysis. Yeah it's satire, a joke. Jokes usually poke fun at phenomena people are likely to encounter in their life. This is the basis of "getting" a joke, indeed.
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Jun 13, 2016 00:17
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Lichy posted:Yeah it's satire, a joke. Jokes usually poke fun at phenomena people are likely to encounter in their life. This is the basis of "getting" a joke, indeed. In America the person who wrote Dilbert was sent to federal prison for the rest of his life. This was to conceal how working in white collar America is bad.
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Jun 13, 2016 00:17
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Have you seen the dilbert man's opinions? They made me want him to go to jail.
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Jun 13, 2016 00:22
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HorseLord posted:Have you seen the dilbert man's opinions? They made me want him to go to jail. I really don't think people should be jailed for making bad cartoons, or equivalently for being Marxist-Leninists on a comedy forum. Hope this helps friend.
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Jun 13, 2016 00:33
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Lichy posted:I really don't think people should be jailed for making bad cartoons, or equivalently for being Marxist-Leninists on a comedy forum. Hope this helps friend. It's not a comedy forum though, it's a discussion forum that grew out of an old and unfunny comedy website nobody has read since about 2003.
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Jun 13, 2016 00:38
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HorseLord posted:It's not a comedy forum though, it's a discussion forum that grew out of an old and unfunny comedy website nobody has read since about 2003. Much like your posting. Eyy.
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Jun 13, 2016 00:45
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HorseLord posted:It's not a comedy forum though, it's a discussion forum that grew out of an old and unfunny comedy website nobody has read since about 2003. Welp, you heard him boys, let's round up all of the red goons.
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Jun 13, 2016 00:48
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Tesseraction posted:This is a bizarre way to criticise HorseLord's response and only really works if you want to discredit him by ad hominem (lolbertarians!!) on the expectation that everyone else will side with you because it's HorseLord they're arguing against. "Your ideology is half-baked because it relies on patently false assumptions about human behavior" is actually a good and relevant argument here.
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Jun 13, 2016 01:11
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JeffersonClay posted:"Your ideology is half-baked because it relies on patently false assumptions about human behavior" is actually a good and relevant argument here. Except that the actual criticism isn't based upon 'human behaviour' and the homo economicus but on the reality of how factories deal with unrealistic quotas. Even using my previous sentence alone would have been a valid argument but instead he used a reliance on rear end-kissing back-up like yourself in lieu of making the actual argument.
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Jun 13, 2016 01:14
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Tesseraction posted:Except that the actual criticism isn't based upon 'human behaviour' and the homo economicus but on the reality of how factories deal with unrealistic quotas. Even using my previous sentence alone would have been a valid argument but instead he used a reliance on rear end-kissing back-up like yourself in lieu of making the actual argument. I am sorry I made a lovely argument in D&D. I should be setting a better example. 
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Jun 13, 2016 01:16
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I am sorry I made a lovely argument in D&D. I should be setting a better example. That's pretty much my point - despite our disagreements at times I don't dislike you as a poster. That said, as a mod you should reign in the drive-bys. Funny though they can be... well let's not encourage them! 
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Jun 13, 2016 01:21
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Tesseraction posted:Except that the actual criticism isn't based upon 'human behaviour' and the homo economicus but on the reality of how factories deal with unrealistic quotas. Even using my previous sentence alone would have been a valid argument but instead he used a reliance on rear end-kissing back-up like yourself in lieu of making the actual argument. It's absolutely based on human behavior because the economic planner or factory foreman might have every reason to design a system where it's easy for them to fudge the numbers, particularly when the alternative to making your quotas is the GULAG or worse.
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Jun 13, 2016 01:28
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Anyway, price controls and central planning aren't the same things necessarily, Venezuela has had price controls for years and only very recently made a effort to nationalize manufacturing. Venezuela's economy was always hodge-podge of ideas but its price controls are what is killing it. There is a pretty big difference from the state owning factories then setting prices, rather than the state setting prices then importing almost everything from abroad. In the case of the Soviets, their quota system often encouraged cheating (often because of lack of investment) but that said production had to generally work otherwise the history of the twentieth-century doesn't really work. Ultimately, system had a lot of issues though, pretending inflation doesn't exist...didn't work out and overbuying was a constant "bug" of the system. If you constantly set prices way below effective market prices it is going to always encourage over consumption. People bought all the sausages they could so they could set them to their neighbors. However, just pretend central planning was a complete joke that always fell flat on its face ignores the fact that the Soviets actually accomplished quite a bit and a lot of what they did may have not been possible otherwise, especially housing and defense. There is lot of things the Soviet economy actually accomplished across 70 years. However, it is in food and consumer products where the system faced the most issues because the state itself can't set consumption patterns. The state may know it needs so much steel it needs but it can't stop people from overbuying sausages. Moreover, there wasn't the ideological flexibility to allow major reforms to take place. That said Perestroika didn't work because the state offered firms more autonomy in production but price controls stayed the same, it wasn't tweaking what was actually broken with the system. That said when Yeltsin threw the entire apple cart things got even worse for much of the population, and while price controls have had many problems, the flip side of eradicating them wholesale during the 1990s was ugly as poo poo (and also a terrible idea). To be honest, the answer would have been to slowly raise prices over time to reach closer to market levels but keep some type of wage controls at some level so people could still afford goods. But by the 1980s, the Soviets were overly reliant on oil to keep the system running, and when the Saudis nuked the oil market in 1986 they were screwed. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 01:47 on Jun 13, 2016 |
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Jun 13, 2016 01:34
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Tesseraction posted:That's pretty much my point - despite our disagreements at times I don't dislike you as a poster. It wasn't even really funny, which makes it worse.  Anyway, enough of this derail, I have already detracted sufficiently from this thread.
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Jun 13, 2016 01:35
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HorseLord posted:See this is really interesting because your argument hinges on two claims. The first is that the USA does not militarily occupy other countries. The second claim, is that the US does not and has not dominated and controlled the economy of forgiven countries. Well I specifically questioned you on Germany, Italy and Japan so lets start with you explaining how the U.S. still economically dominates them. Homework Explainer posted:Sorry, but this just isn't accurate. The military government that would later become the Republic of Korea was an occupation government through the war, and formal independence wasn't returned for decades. Some would say, given the continued presence of American troops and a history of American interference in Korean affairs, it's still a functional occupation. The same was true of Japan until the 1970s. And to expand a bit to the European imperial powers, devastated though they were after the war, they maintained their colonies, or tried their darndest to do so. British control over India would have continued if financially feasible. The French held Indochina for years, along with parts of North Africa. If the United States was relatively benign, the rest of Europe certainly wasn't. Start by answering this: Warbadger posted:So a South Korean military government that transitioned to a democratic republic under US support = US occupational government even today, decades after it ceased to be a military government. Yes it would be correct to note that the U.S. did literally occupy Japan up until the point that they didn't. We agree Japan is now a sucessful independent state right? Or are you about to educate me on how economic soft power is basically the same as literal occupation ? quote:Plus, one could argue that the U.S. had far less strategic interest in perpetual occupation, given that it shares no border with the belligerents of the Second World War. If the United States had suffered through a war of extermination that left tens of millions of its citizens dead, maintaining more friendly territory rather than less would have been a paramount goal. If you take it as a given that the communist countries borne of WWII were little more than puppet regimes — I don't, though; it isn't insane to think the people who were liberated by the Red Army might have a favorable opinion of socialism — you can at least concede the Russians had an interest in solidifying a power base solely for the sake of self-preservation. Especially after Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the general ratcheting up of tensions after the war. No and this is why your scorekeeping on these issues has no credibility. The soviets had just beaten the Nazi's. Their self preservation could hardly be more assured. What wasn't assured was how much of a super power they'd become and grabbing control of their neighbors furthered that end. Following "they only did it because" excuse regarding the soviets you give us "but they only didn't do it because..." with the U.S. (and allies regarding colonialism) where you try to insinuate blame for action that didn't happen.
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Jun 13, 2016 02:11
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Absurd Alhazred posted:I am sorry I made a lovely argument in D&D. I should be setting a better example. It wasn't bad and the parallels between various bad ideologies are obvious and important to emphasize since people who are prone to one often just leap to another.
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Jun 13, 2016 02:19
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asdf32 posted:Yes it would be correct to note that the U.S. did literally occupy Japan up until the point that they didn't. We agree Japan is now a sucessful independent state right? Or are you about to educate me on how economic soft power is basically the same as literal occupation ? When I read the OP, I wanted to comprehend the intervention lists in the OP on their own terms. So the US still has military bases in South Korea, so maybe that justifies the idea that the US has intervened in Korea from the 1950s until the present, as listed. Sure! But Japan and Germany aren't listed that way. Ukraine isn't listed that way for Russia. It's almost as though this is all soaked through with arbitrary bullshit.
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Jun 13, 2016 02:26
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The U.S. sets the parameters within which the other major capitalist nations operate. It doesn't directly dictate any sort of policy, but it exercises a decisive influence. Usually it doesn't have to exercise this, as the ruling class/capitalist elite of the G7 genuinely support American actions anyway.
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Jun 13, 2016 02:46
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HorseLord posted:What you say is an interesting way to be wrong; you try and stuff your argument with lots of phrases that mean less than they seem to at first. You talk about interests, but you do not define what kind of interests. Well no kidding. Every human being wants to guarantee their own survival and benefit. But people have different ideas on how to go about organizing human beings to achieve that goal. It's why we have liberals, conservatives, communists, anarchists, nazis, or anybody. They believe their vision of society is better for everyone else. So thus they develop more interests in how they want to model society. Many people believe in capitalism. What are you going to do if they achieve a majority vote in your Communist society? You take notice that there has been no real protest movement in any Communist nation. They were all dealt with in force by their government, whether it be through the Gulags or the tanks of Tienanmen Square. Capitalism isn't a class. It's an economic model, and capitalists believe in that model, just as Communists believe in their ridiculous, continuously antiquated pipe-dreams. HorseLord posted:The united states, in 1917, had a headstart. It was far more economically developed. Far more politically developed. It had more industry. It did not depend on medieval farming techniques. It was not being torn apart by war. Everything about the USA, circa 1917, was better. This is an advantage, and this matters. HorseLord posted:That's an absolutely astounding, amazing opinion, I've never seen the Soviet front in WWII described as a conquest of eastern europe (and not say, defeating the Nazis) before. As a thought experiment I'll not challenge the ridiculous assertion that the citizens of the USSR were "starving, worked-to-death, desperate citizen-slaves", because something else more interesting is available to me. HorseLord posted:This bit here: Actually this might be a fun discussion. because there is a difference. Back in the days of the American colonies, the concept of egalitarianism and progressive ideals were not prevalent in any part of the world. Slavery existed here, but Great Britain was also doing it. African countries gleefully partook in the practice, same with the Asians, and the Arab slave trade was notoriously brutal. In short, human civilization in general would never meet your standards at the time of the Founding or even afterwards. Slavery, the institutions surrounding it, and the racism that justified it were all woven into the cultural fabric. Social phenomenon take time to change, and as you very well know, it did. The aristocratic slave-holding south and the free north battled it out in the Civil War and the practice ended in the United States. The Founding Fathers weren't prophets or infallible. This is why I said earlier that America is a work in progress. We continuously build off from their starting point, and move forward from that. They were brilliant men, but they were merely men, and products of their time at that. Some of them did oppose slavery, some were for it. However, the Soviet Union has no excuse. You sit there acting righteous in your ideals as if they provide the most progressive answers for humanity, but the blood of the Ukranians who died in the Holodomor contradict your lies. The anti-Semitic propaganda of the Soviet Union during Stalin's time was deplorable. The lack of any political representation of opposing ideologies outside of the isolation of Siberia or worse is inexcusable for Communism, your so-called perfect ideology. Communism is death no matter what time period it exists in. America constantly forges onwards and tries its best to right its wrongs. Wait a second. How old are you anyways? Do you even know what it was like during the Soviet Union beyond those of a similar ideology informing you? Have you even talked to anyone who actually lived in an SSR? Because I have, and between the garbage care they recieved from government health services to food shortages, I really don't think you can claim that the Soviet Union was some basket of fruit when there are plenty of grizzled old Russians and Poles residing in this country that would decry the worthlessness of Marx and Lenin. HorseLord posted:Very few countries did adopt computers as fast as the United States. Computers were very expensive even in the late 90s. Though, that you bring up computers is handy for me because of the next thing you say. I'm flummoxed that you would say this ridiculous crap, but others have responded to you on this matter better than I could. I probably should have just left this lie so they could deal with you, but I'm stubborn and want to do it myself.
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Jun 13, 2016 04:59
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Ardennes posted:
Also wage controls are a bad idea because price liberalization leads to inflation so if you fix wages all you are really doing is preventing wages from adjusting to meet the rise in prices, that's the lesson learned from china in the 1980s
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Jun 13, 2016 08:52
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Typo posted:Incidentally the way the Chinese did it was to have a dual track system in which a certain % of goods got sold at state controlled levels while the rest got sold at market levels, it didn't work out all that great because of arbitrage and price liberalization led to a lot of inflation which came to head in 1989. But it did enable a transition to a market economy without having to flip the system overnight. A dual track system doesn't sound like a great idea, because it would be difficult to impossible to keep arbitrage from happening, better to slowly liberalize the system as a whole but do in a cautious manner over years. The idea would be to allow lower-tier wages to meet price inflation while slowing the growth of higher-tier wages in relative terms. This would be a form of austerity for higher-tier earners but they would have plenty of cushioning to address the fact that sausages are 30% more expensive etc etc. This would have allowed state owned companies more flexibility to reinvest and hopefully combination of increasing supply and more constrained demand would have solved the issue. Then the state could allow producers more autonomy from quotas but still largely directed the outline of the economy through central planning. Also, they could liberalize small-medium enterprises to allow more variable products and also force state industries to compete. That said, ultimately we would still be talking about an economy that is probably 80-90% state owned.
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Jun 13, 2016 09:44
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Nazareth posted:Well no kidding. Every human being wants to guarantee their own survival and benefit. But people have different ideas on how to go about organizing human beings to achieve that goal. It's why we have liberals, conservatives, communists, anarchists, nazis, or anybody. They believe their vision of society is better for everyone else. So thus they develop more interests in how they want to model society. Many people believe in capitalism. What are you going to do if they achieve a majority vote in your Communist society? You take notice that there has been no real protest movement in any Communist nation. They were all dealt with in force by their government, whether it be through the Gulags or the tanks of Tienanmen Square. That is also a thing you have to do as a capitalist society, which is why America has a long history of subverting dissident organisations and assassinating their leaders. Nazareth posted:Capitalism isn't a class. It's an economic model, and capitalists believe in that model, just as Communists believe in their ridiculous, continuously antiquated pipe-dreams. Capitalists are a class. They are the class of people who own capital. The means of production. They are the bourgeoisie. You should not argue about things you don't understand. Nazareth posted:Actually this might be a fun discussion. because there is a difference. The best you can summon up to defend your bigger pile of skulls is "well, they didn't know any better", which ignores all the people that very loudly did know better, and then to fall back on trying to describe intentional features designed into the power structure of your society as mere accidents. And then you appeal to anticommunist Russians as if that's an argument winner, when in reality it's just as easy to find a pro communist Russian. Which is why the second most popular Russian political party to date is a Communist party. Nazareth posted:I'm flummoxed that you would say this ridiculous crap, but others have responded to you on this matter better than I could. I probably should have just left this lie so they could deal with you, but I'm stubborn and want to do it myself. I note that you don't (can't) explain why it is "ridiculous crap", and also don't notice that in the discussion of soviet economic problems which followed this post we were discussing a different set of problems (blat) which aren't directly related to what I was talking about here (accuracy and timeliness of planning). Ardennes posted:Anyway, price controls and central planning aren't the same things necessarily, Venezuela has had price controls for years and only very recently made a effort to nationalize manufacturing. Venezuela's economy was always hodge-podge of ideas but its price controls are what is killing it. There is a pretty big difference from the state owning factories then setting prices, rather than the state setting prices then importing almost everything from abroad. See here is an actual knowledgeable critique of soviet economics, it relies on carefully studied facts and not blind piss spraying anti-communism. A good post. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 12:55 on Jun 13, 2016 |
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Jun 13, 2016 12:44
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HorseLord posted:And then you appeal to anticommunist Russians as if that's an argument winner, when in reality it's just as easy to find a pro communist Russian. Which is why the second most popular Russian political party to date is a Communist party. I'd actually forgotten about this - and checking on the current make-up of the State Duma has all opposition parties being ardent socialists, although the Liberal Democratic Party seem to mostly be using that as a crutch for a kind of national socialism (hmm that seems familiar). Certainly of the Russians I know, they about half break for anti-Communist or pro-Communist. My mate's wife comes from a Tatar community where they all have giant pictures of Lenin in their living rooms which you are forbidden to show disrespect to. I guess that's a tangent from anti-Imperialism, but I suppose that it's hard to argue about it right now since a lot of defences of 'anti-Imperialist' states seems mostly about defending expansionist nationalism. So to try a different tack, I was wondering what the thread's views on Kashmir is? What would an imperialist or anti-imperialist solution be to you?
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Jun 13, 2016 14:00
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HorseLord posted:That is also a thing you have to do as a capitalist society, which is why America has a long history of subverting dissident organisations and assassinating their leaders. This would be a fair point if it wasn't coming from a shill for the Soviet Union. You seem disingenuous enough that you'll take issue with the Soviet Union subverting dissident organizations, so I'll include banning dissident organizations. One more word: Trotsky. Why would such a workers' paradise need to engage in such activities?
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Jun 13, 2016 14:28
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