Fiction posted:

you're alright baloogan

also what is HE's opinion on the 1956 hungarian (counter)revolution i'm genuinely curious

Tinker Tankie Soldier Spy posted:

tell me how the ussr wasn't socialist for reasons besides "had money and a state"

Yossarian-22 posted:

My lack of an avatar is appropriate b/c according to Lenin I have an infantile disorder

DOCTOR ZIMBARDO posted:

I signed up for someone at PSL to call me on Monday wtf is wrong with me

freckle posted:

Annual Prophet posted:

lol if you think they wait 50 yrs

Tinker Tankie Soldier Spy posted:

why's that wrong

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

Special icons are for chumps. Don't give me one...

Tinker Tankie Soldier Spy posted:

tell me how the ussr wasn't socialist for reasons besides "had money and a state"

rudatron posted:

money has nothing to do with it? like if you think the USSR was socialist then conceivably so was the incan empire, or the sumerian city states, or whatever governments existed before the advent of a market economy (or even currency, which neither the incas nor the sumerians had)

the party had zero accountability, chose its own members, had total control over all aspects of government & economic life and was lead by a single supreme leader+council. in exactly what sense can you say that 'the workers' can control over that state? it's effectively another strata of society

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

Pener Kropoopkin posted:

I farted.

Fados posted:

this isn't an actual quote btw, its pretty much just a word salad

Weeping Wound posted:

I did as well.

quote:

the ussr was not socialist

rudatron posted:

so the fact that ussr was chronologically after a capitalist economy means that it must be socialist? and you'll find the assessment is actually quite accurate

namesake posted:

Well then was the USSR socialist from start to finish then, or did it stop being socialist at some point before it stopped being the USSR? Obviously in a general argumentative sense Trots use state capitalism or deformed workers state or something to talk about how awesome and socialist the revolution was and then when all the inexcusably bad stuff happened it wasn't socialist anymore but if we're trying to analyse forms then we have to say 'X is Y and not Z' or we just turn everything into a blur. If I'm chatting with a bunch of people who I believe actually know theory then I might talk about the USSR potentially being a kind of authoritarian socialism, actually existing socialism, etc and giving an in depth review of its merits and failures while theorycrafting but talking to people generally then anything that comes across as 'I want to redo the USSR without any changes' is not particularly a winning argument when discussing what a socialist state will be, and if you can't say that the USSR is socialism then what was it?

splifyphus posted:

an honest to god marxy thread on something awful, in the year of our trump 1. im either tripping nutsack or i've time-travelled back to the days of that old-timey xtian calendar system.

gently caress, i feel a post coming on.


your categories and historical understanding aren't really working for me here. materialist ('scientific' lol) socialism/communism isn't some kind of pre-ordained systemic blueprint that you can just brute force society into. there's no roadmap to socialism because there is no platonic ideal of socialism up in the realm of forms or whatever. nobody really knows how to build socialism or what it will look like, all we really can know are the features that it won't and can't have. it has to be experimental, and (as far as i can tell) it has to be a collective dialectical interaction with material conditions.

marx made almost no positive assertions about what communism would be like, because as far as he was concerned its impossible to conceive of a new mode of production beforehand. this is one of the big sticks that he used to hit utopian and idealistic socialists with, and also why all the revolutionary successes of the 20c (however temporary) were materialist and not armchair daydreamers building utopias in their heads.

in the first waves of primitive accumulation, the emerging bourgeoisie weren't thinking 'we want to build capitalism, therefore we need to assimilate the commons and proletarianize the peasants and serfs'. all they were thinking was 'that can make me money, gimme'. that the accumulation cycle turned out to be self-reproducing and self-expanding was totally contingent. nobody knew beforehand. nobody 'planned' capitalism intentionally, even though it is a direct result of human historical praxis. once the accumulation cycle had been going on for a while people started to try to understand it and manipulate it further, and classical political economy was born.

the point being that historical understanding is always retrospective. nobody knew what capitalism was until it was already happening. nobody knew what a universe with god emperor trump would be like until it was already happening. nobody can possibly imagine what a communist world in any real detail would be like, and that's not just because of the built in retrospective nature of history, but also because the mode of production has an enormous impact on the development of the people enacting it. we can't blueprint a classless society in advance because by the time that poo poo gets rolling we will have radically changed ourselves in the making of it.

wrt the soviet union specifically, this all means that debates about defining it with a label are just as misguided as assuming that all revolutions must and always will follow that specific model. the russian revolution was the first successful class-conscious movement in the industrial age. it happened in a gigantic nation that at the time was devastated from war, had only a handful of operating factories, and was surrounded by hostile forces. everything was against them, and they were flying into the unknown without a map. that it lasted more than a week is a miracle in itself. that it had all kinds of horrific bugs, glitches, and breakdowns and was eventually assimilated and plundered isn't even remotely surprising. there's no loving training wheels for systemic change. there's no guard-rail, no big other guaranteeing meaning or success or that bad poo poo isn't going to happen. bad poo poo is going to happen, and all you can do is redirect your collective intellectual and labour praxis towards the problem until it's fixed. success in anything only happens through perpetually failing, until the chain of falsifications and negations has mapped the territory for you.

the investigation of the ussr's attempt at a new mode of production is really important, interesting, and difficult due to the cacophony of histrionic polemics and propaganda surrounding it, but structuring that investigation around a bunch of ostensibly transhistorical/universal abstractions obfuscates the concrete historical conditions, which is what marxian theory is always trying to excavate. the ussr wasn't socialist because the bureaucracy controlled the MoP and not the workers (and it failed to bring about communism). it wasn't capitalist because there was no labour market and therefore no real proletarian class - everyone had a a job, a room, and meal ticket at the least. it wasn't 'state socialist' because states are defined by their aims, organizational structure and specific social and material relations, and the soviet state was a totally new phenomenon that can't be automatically equated with other types of states without immediately loving up your a prioris (its ultimate goal was to dissolve itself into a stateless, classless society, as opposed to a bourgeois state where the goal is to perpetuate, expand and provide a crutch for the accumulation cycle). it wasn't a 'deformed worker's state' because genuine universal democracy was never completely 'there' for any significant length of time in the first place.

what the soviet union was was a specific attempt to kickstart a self-perpetuating democratic classless society in a specific place within a specific historical context and specific material conditions. the ideas, policies, techniques, and organizational strategies they used were specific interactions with those specific material conditions. they limited their aims to 'socialism in one country' because other revolutionary movements were crushed or failed to gain any impetus in the first place. they rolled with market reforms in the 20s because the country was in shambles and the emerging state apparatus had very little to work with. they liquidated the kulaks because they couldn't achieve what they were trying to do with an internal group of hostile land-owners. they collectivized agriculture on the model of the worker's soviets that were already a longstanding part of their specific culture. they built their industrial means of production around a centralized, taylorist model because that's what seemed to be working for contemporary capitalists. later on that bit them in the rear end when they were unable to continue to adequately developing the model (not to mention the resulting environmental devastation).

if there were a proletarian revolution say, tomorrow, in a core boog country, it's ridiculous to think that it would do or look anything like the ussr. we have widespread electrical infrastructure and communication systems that can talk to anyone anywhere and anytime almost instantaneously. we have a developed means of production with all kinds of new organizational structures like franchises. we have RFID tags and just-in-time manufacturing. we have ready-made gigantic vertical monopolies (walmart etc) that could be pretty easily democratized. we also have the most urgent historical necessity we have ever faced in the form of the 6th mass extinction event, which capital cannot do anything about because as the ultimate determinant of the metabolism between us and nature, it is the crisis. the material conditions and historical situation aren't even remotely comparable to the soviet situation, and you can only discover that by diving into the specific, concrete conditions and being extremely precise about what is universal and transhistorical and what is historically situated and contingent within a given situation.

if you really want to try deconstructing liberal ideology in person, i would suggest getting down to specific concepts that everyone in the conversation can understand and define, rather than throwing around the big theory labels. there are many kinds of 'socialisms' just as there are many 'capitalisms', and the vast majority of people don't even have a clue what core properties are supposed define either term in the first place. under the big abstractions lies multiplicity and fuzziness, which is why this poo poo is so hard to talk and think about (and also why thinkers that prefer to gently caress with the law of identity rather than slavishly worship it are so useful).

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

jarofpiss posted:

baloogan u fucken fascist that was a good post!!

splifyphus posted:

if there were a proletarian revolution say, tomorrow, in a core boog country, it's ridiculous to think that it would do or look anything like the ussr. we have widespread electrical infrastructure and communication systems that can talk to anyone anywhere and anytime almost instantaneously. we have a developed means of production with all kinds of new organizational structures like franchises. we have RFID tags and just-in-time manufacturing. we have ready-made gigantic vertical monopolies (walmart etc) that could be pretty easily democratized. we also have the most urgent historical necessity we have ever faced in the form of the 6th mass extinction event, which capital cannot do anything about because as the ultimate determinant of the metabolism between us and nature, it is the crisis. the material conditions and historical situation aren't even remotely comparable to the soviet situation, and you can only discover that by diving into the specific, concrete conditions and being extremely precise about what is universal and transhistorical and what is historically situated and contingent within a given situation.

if you really want to try deconstructing liberal ideology in person, i would suggest getting down to specific concepts that everyone in the conversation can understand and define, rather than throwing around the big theory labels. there are many kinds of 'socialisms' just as there are many 'capitalisms', and the vast majority of people don't even have a clue what core properties are supposed define either term in the first place. under the big abstractions lies multiplicity and fuzziness, which is why this poo poo is so hard to talk and think about (and also why thinkers that prefer to gently caress with the law of identity rather than slavishly worship it are so useful).

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

Baloogan posted:

"the investigation of the ussr's attempt at a new mode of production is really important, interesting, and difficult due to the cacophony of histrionic polemics and propaganda surrounding it, but structuring that investigation around a bunch of ostensibly transhistorical/universal abstractions obfuscates the concrete historical conditions, which is what marxian theory is always trying to excavate."


that sentense alone is probation worthy

splifyphus posted:

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

splifyphus posted:

(USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)

Fados posted:

nice to see another marx bro that shares the view that contigency generates retroactively it's own necessity, that was a great post man, marxism needs these ideas!

Baloogan posted:

simplify and summarize your diaelectrics zeigheists interpretive turbomarxism or at least dont loving post where i have to read it its loving early in the loving morning

splifyphus posted:

an honest to god marxy thread on something awful, in the year of our trump 1. im either tripping nutsack or i've time-travelled back to the days of that old-timey xtian calendar system.

gently caress, i feel a post coming on.