BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

little do people know, stalin's original plan was not to use an icepick against trotsky, but to construct a giant icebreaker to sail to mexico and ram trotsky while he was chilling on the beach, but the icebreaker was lost along the way

smarxist posted:

Getting mega depressed trying to think of an alternative to the USSR's shift to SIOC and becoming revolutionarily inert. it feels like there's this hard upper cap of reach that you run into if conditions internationally aren't perfect, basically "the lifetime of a man" in order to get as much done as you can before the movement you've put together gets infiltrated captured and killed by the prevailing culture of wealth/accumulation in the world, which can afford to invest itself into generational projects/reach and has the resources to see poo poo get done over centuries (terrible things mostly, like mass death/exploitation/genocide/war, etc)

It's like you and capital are in a game of Monopoly and they own literally everything and your only chance is to roll straight 10's from the "GO" square hundreds of times in a row in order to put anything together lol

THS posted:

im gay

Homeless Friend posted:

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/UrOrientalist/status/1252969465760923650?s=19

motherFUCK jacobin

what is this poo poo

GalacticAcid posted:

more like Whitening Knight

White Knighting for jakkkobin

GalacticAcid posted:

more like Whitening Knight

White Knighting for jakkkobin

GalacticAcid posted:

Jackbootbin...

Raskolnikov38 posted:

or an easier question: has an anarchist revolution or anarchist revolutionary movement ever succeeded

T-man posted:

remember when stalin thought biology was capitalism lol

dex_sda posted:

define success, if it's "non trivial amount of people improve under anarchist socialism for a significant period of time" the zapatistas are doing well (having expanded massively last year), and their response to the coronavirus was about as decisive as cuba's

T-man posted:

remember when stalin thought biology was capitalism lol

CYBEReris posted:

zapatistas don't like being called anarchist fwiu, they're a huge tent coalition of disparate ideologies and material groups

NotNut posted:

although I'm guessing that's not what Stalin was talking about, and I'm further guessing that this is an expression of the left-right constructivist-essentialist thing where Stalin found biology to be too deterministic

Ferrinus posted:

stalin famously made fun of soviet writers who tried to claim that the pythagorean theorem was communist or whatever

Victory Position posted:

Pythagoras also had a habit of disappearing people if they didn't match to the Platonic ideal

gradenko_2000 posted:

https://twitter.com/UrOrientalist/status/1252969465760923650?s=19

motherFUCK jacobin

what is this poo poo

uncop posted:

The trot mischaracterization of SIOC would have described a "stupid dead end" but it's also a mischaracterization. SIOC is not the idea that you can just build communism internally without anything like a world revolution. The sort of "transition to communism by 2050" declared policy goals in e.g. today's China and Vietnam represent some sort of neo-SIOC that the right wing of socialism in the USSR may have dreamed of already but which wasn't the actual SIOC policy.

You can't crit SIOC except in light of the other options the USSR supposedly had when the SIOC policy won there: it was the only country in the world interested in building socialism, devastated by war and largely run by amateurs, but large and primitive enough to have a relatively independent economy. SIOC then was the choice to build as much of a stable socialish society as possible, and propagandizing its achievements everywhere while belligerently supporting revolutionary movements across the world, actively collaborating to produce new world revolutionary conditions in the style of WW1.

I have never heard of any plausibly better alternative that was available then. The best crit I can think of is that they did the S-part somehow wrong, given how the on-paper incredible situation achieved by 1950 was sort of wasted, how the international cooperation was left fairly shallow and ultimately bred terrible neo-SIOCs rather than putting it all to rest as policies that didn't reflect the times anymore.

Jewel Repetition posted:

Tup

Jewel Repetition posted:

Tup

uncop posted:

The trot mischaracterization of SIOC would have described a "stupid dead end" but it's also a mischaracterization. SIOC is not the idea that you can just build communism internally without anything like a world revolution. The sort of "transition to communism by 2050" declared policy goals in e.g. today's China and Vietnam represent some sort of neo-SIOC that the right wing of socialism in the USSR may have dreamed of already but which wasn't the actual SIOC policy.

You can't crit SIOC except in light of the other options the USSR supposedly had when the SIOC policy won there: it was the only country in the world interested in building socialism, devastated by war and largely run by amateurs, but large and primitive enough to have a relatively independent economy. SIOC then was the choice to build as much of a stable socialish society as possible, and propagandizing its achievements everywhere while belligerently supporting revolutionary movements across the world, actively collaborating to produce new world revolutionary conditions in the style of WW1.

I have never heard of any plausibly better alternative that was available then. The best crit I can think of is that they did the S-part somehow wrong, given how the on-paper incredible situation achieved by 1950 was sort of wasted, how the international cooperation was left fairly shallow and ultimately bred terrible neo-SIOCs rather than putting it all to rest as policies that didn't reflect the times anymore.

quote:

But first, we need to clear something up, because every time I post theory for liberating a country in a half-revolution, I get the same comments asking over and over what it means, even though I have a whole paragraph in the introduction explaining it, which even starts with "if you're wondering what a half-revolution is, read this before commentating to ask". But maybe what you guys need isn't a paragraph. Maybe you guys need an EXAMPLE.

So, consider Lichtenstein--not even the whole county; just consider getting to that spot away from Switzerland's banking system, which is a necessary part of getting communism in Lichtenstein. So, how many revolutions does it take to get there? Well, if you say zero...that's wrong, because then the working class can't go far enough. If you say one, well, it's true that the working class can get there with one, but we can do a little better. We can do it in half a revolution. To do that, we enter Lichtenstein with the means of production already seized, and then we use that revolution to reach the platform.

Now, hold on. I know what you're thinking: A revolution is a revolution, permanently. You can't say it's only a half. Well, Leon """""Icepick""""" Trotsky, hear me out.

A revolution press actually has three parts to it: When the means of production are seized, when the means of production are held (in either a dictatorship of the proletariat or an anarchist commune), and when the state dissolves. And together, this forms one complete revolution. Now, usually, it's the seizing that's useful, because that's the only part that makes the borgiousie react. However, sometimes it's sufficient to just use the holding part, which allows the working class to do little kicks, to swim in liberal tears, to move outside of a market, and to spend labor vouchers instead of money. And as for the dissolution of the state, well, there's currently no cases where that's useful or important, so don't worry bout that part (since it hasn't happened historically yet).

Now, if we map out the required revolutions for Lichtenstein, it would look like this: we merely need to have our own means of production to not be dependent on the Swiss banking system, we need a revolution to provide a counternarrative against Lichtenstein's "princely" history, and we need a revolution again to achieve communism. So, how many revolutions is that total? Well, it appears to be three, and if we we're liberating this country in isolation, then yeah; it would be three. But in a worldwide spread of communism, there are other revolutions that occur earlier in history, such as /this/ revolution needed to offically dissolve the Switzerland-Lichtenstein border. So, if we take that revolution into consideration as well, then how many revolutions would it take? The left-com answer would be three: one to enter Lichtenstein, and the three within the country that we established earlier. However, we can do better! We can actually do it in two and a half, by simply holding the means of production seized during the border dissolution to be used for independence from the banking system, because the half-revolution only required the means of production to be held, not actually seized. So in this fashion, Lichtenstein only adds on an additional two revolutions to the worldwide spread of communism, since the first revolution only leeches off a previous revolution. So to capture this dialectic, we call it 2.5 revolutions. In a single country, you'd round that up to three, but in a worldwide spread, you'd round it down to two. So, in conclusion, since that first revolution counts in some contexts, but adds no additional revolutions in other contexts, we refer to it as a "half revolution".