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Lady Militant posted:My mom grew up on a ranch that had free range cattle out in Colorado. So it's within living memory that we can farm in ways that's not super inhumane and supply meat to people we just can't ensure a constant stream of beef slurry to mcdonalds Now I might be a moralist here but being murdered for someone else's food in the prime of my life isn't humane even if I get all the golden Colorado pastures I want before then. That's also going to still mean a lot of land use, and even lovely grazing land could be a new or restored forest. Yall are way overestimating what a sustainable food system is, especially when we add in the massive cost of meat/animal biproduct in terms of global warming, clean water use, and land use. Think more like a few times a year, not three days a week. Even more once we start seeing the various ecological and biological disasters currently happening affect the food system. On the other hand, hydroponics and aquaphonics (maybe even artifical ecosystems?) are going to see a lot of development if we don't all die! Even if we figure out vat meats its still going to be unhealthy and a waste of resources when a vegan diet is an option. (tropic levels still apply even if it's just a pile of goo.)
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Apr 29, 2020 21:46
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Ferrinus posted:that's not my understanding, although i haven't read about this in depth. i thought the tensions that became the split only got serious after kruschev's de-stalinization. why would the soviets not want the chinese to industrialize or launch five year plans? didn't the soviets send technicians and engineers over in droves to help china modernize? The Soviets considered it impossible for China to establish their type of socialism in decades, so fast industrialization on a planned basis looked to them like hollow imitation. They basically saw themselves a honorary western country in relation to China, not some kind of fellow peasant economy, and in general they had gotten used to telling foreign communist parties what to do especially after WW2 but in Asia long before that as well. The Chinese respected Stalin as a leader, but always considered Khrushchev to be far below them in basic revolutionary credentials and found it insulting to take orders from him. Khrushchev considerably ramped up the support to China compared to Stalin in order to secure support for his new position, but it was still in the form of loans rather than gifts. China was forced to rely on agricultural exports to pay back the debts that it racked up to industrialize, contributing to its food insecurity. You be the judge whether they were right to later implicate Khrushchev as a contributing factor to the GLF era famine given that they technically had the option to simply go slower, but to me it sounds like they felt more compelled to go forward and become self-reliant the more they felt like they were being held back as if they were dealing with a non-socialist country. But later history shows that Khrushchev wasn't a nice man that respected the lives of Chinese peasants either. The debt was one of the things that became a breaking point, the Chinese wanted a better deal and saw an opportunity in taking down Khrushchev's already precarious reputation and implicit right to lead the bloc, while the Soviets saw an opportunity to use the debt as well as their personnel in China as a blackmail method to end the criticism. The Chinese didn't blink and paid back the debt in a hurry, which no doubt contributed to the early Cultural Revolution period insecurity.
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Apr 29, 2020 21:50
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T-man posted:Now I might be a moralist here but being murdered for someone else's food in the prime of my life isn't humane even if I get all the golden Colorado pastures I want before then. That's also going to still mean a lot of land use, and even lovely grazing land could be a new or restored forest. good thing communism doesnt advocate cannibalism then
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Apr 29, 2020 21:52
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AnimeIsTrash posted:https://twitter.com/BenjaminNorton/status/1253737158764044289 What in the dusty gently caress
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Apr 29, 2020 22:35
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T-man posted:Now I might be a moralist here but being murdered for someone else's food in the prime of my life isn't humane even if I get all the golden Colorado pastures I want before then. That's also going to still mean a lot of land use, and even lovely grazing land could be a new or restored forest. You should probably go back to shitposting antagonistic one-liners because its clear you’re not too bright for this
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Apr 29, 2020 22:36
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Constantly LARPing posted:What you’re stating is basically Engles take. Engels was right, academics just conveniently ignore that Marx&Engels weren't in the business of producing blueprints for communist society and all their concrete policy recommendations were about basically the immediate moment after workers take power. The transition begins immediately because it begins with simply consolidating political power and ends with a coherent communist economic framework. It shouldn't be surprising if Engels sounds like a left-ricardian when he's consciously talking about workers' management of capitalism. There is no theoretical rift between Marx and Engels, they viewed history in nonlinear terms and developed a division of labor where Engels was more focused on the immediate demands of the class struggle while Marx focused on abstract high theory. Ferrinus however is wrong because they make those claims about the lower stage of communism, where the aspects of Marx's deeper critique have already come into play.
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Apr 29, 2020 22:37
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T-man posted:Yall are way overestimating what a sustainable food system is, especially when we add in the massive cost of meat/animal biproduct in terms of global warming, clean water use, and land use. Think more like a few times a year, not three days a week. Even more once we start seeing the various ecological and biological disasters currently happening affect the food system. On the other hand, hydroponics and aquaphonics (maybe even artifical ecosystems?) are going to see a lot of development if we don't all die! now, imagine if you would, zero-space aeroponics, where the lettuce and the kale grow into horrible little fractals like that one genus of broccoli
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Apr 29, 2020 22:39
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Ferrinus posted:i agree that there was at least an ideological pressure in that direction, but i think it's ridiculous to call a stagist view of revolution the mainspring of soviet policy towards the kmt for exactly the same reason you call the policy ridiculous: it's obviously possible to hurry or half-rear end the "bourgeoise democracy" stage of revolution even if you don't think it's completely skippable because of the soviets' own example. i would say that the ideological BASIS for supporting the kmt first and foremost is found in "foundations of leninism", where stalin writes that even a nationalist bourgeoise movement is revolutionary if it's part of the third world's resistance to the first (and that conversely even "socialist" movements in the first world, like the british labor party, are reactionary by default). so there were doctrinal or even dogmatic directives from joey steel himself as to which horse to back, but they were rooted in the fact that the chinese were victims of colonialism rather than the fact that the chinese were insufficiently proletarianized dont mean this as any offense but if you think there is a "bourgeoise democracy" stage of revolution it kinda means you disagree with like the core ideas of the october revolution. its not even that there isnt a transitory period that may need to be experienced by the workers prior to a socialist society, but that that transition does not need to be carried out by the capitalist class but by the working class itself. by supporting the kuomintang, it wasnt even just a position of ceding political power to the national bourgeoise which would be in keeping with the orthodox marxist/menshevik position, it was actually even worse because the kuomintang was actively repressing not just the communist party but the working class. there were purges and mass executions throughout the KMT territories even after the KMT split within the "left" KMT controlled regions. basically you have a situation where stalin and the comintern are saying the working class is not yet ready to take power and so the communists should fold themselves into an organization which is their enemy, at the same time that the workers are rising up and attempting to take power for themselves from that enemy. even if you agree that the workers in 1926-1928 china werent in a position to take power, its a complete betrayal of the principles of revolutionary socialism to not support them as they are taking the steps to take power. the bolsheviks didnt let the soviets go out and meet their doom in the july days while defending and supporting the provisional government as they attacked them (which is basically what the comintern did with the KMT throughout this period). they went out and supported the workers and soviets even while warning them that they weret prepared to take power yet and were driven under ground, arrested and repressed for it by the provisional government. but thats essentially what the comintern did in china. the shanghai workers revolted and the KMT destroyed them while the comintern continued to insist the CCP continue to work within the KMT. then later once this had repeated itself too many times and the position became discredited, they did a complete reversal and pressed for an ultra-left position in insisting on the canton uprising which the workers and communists were completely unprepared for.
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Apr 29, 2020 22:41
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uncop posted:The Soviets considered it impossible for China to establish their type of socialism in decades, so fast industrialization on a planned basis looked to them like hollow imitation. They basically saw themselves a honorary western country in relation to China, not some kind of fellow peasant economy, and in general they had gotten used to telling foreign communist parties what to do especially after WW2 but in Asia long before that as well. The Chinese respected Stalin as a leader, but always considered Khrushchev to be far below them in basic revolutionary credentials and found it insulting to take orders from him. interesting, thanks uncop posted:Engels was right, academics just conveniently ignore that Marx&Engels weren't in the business of producing blueprints for communist society and all their concrete policy recommendations were about basically the immediate moment after workers take power. The transition begins immediately because it begins with simply consolidating political power and ends with a coherent communist economic framework. It shouldn't be surprising if Engels sounds like a left-ricardian when he's consciously talking about workers' management of capitalism. There is no theoretical rift between Marx and Engels, they viewed history in nonlinear terms and developed a division of labor where Engels was more focused on the immediate demands of the class struggle while Marx focused on abstract high theory. sorry, wrong because i make certain claims about the lower stage of communism, or because marx and engels do? which claims? apropos to nothing posted:dont mean this as any offense but if you think there is a "bourgeoise democracy" stage of revolution it kinda means you disagree with like the core ideas of the october revolution. its not even that there isnt a transitory period that may need to be experienced by the workers prior to a socialist society, but that that transition does not need to be carried out by the capitalist class but by the working class itself. by supporting the kuomintang, it wasnt even just a position of ceding political power to the national bourgeoise which would be in keeping with the orthodox marxist/menshevik position, it was actually even worse because the kuomintang was actively repressing not just the communist party but the working class. there were purges and mass executions throughout the KMT territories even after the KMT split within the "left" KMT controlled regions. basically you have a situation where stalin and the comintern are saying the working class is not yet ready to take power and so the communists should fold themselves into an organization which is their enemy, at the same time that the workers are rising up and attempting to take power for themselves from that enemy. i'm not saying there's a necessary "bourgeoise democracy" state of revolution, i'm saying that nationalist bourgeoise movements can be revolutionary in terms of their end-effects if they happen to be the dominant form of resistance in the third world against the first. you can't separate the kmt/cpc split within china without considering the constant external threat of japan. it's like the brazil vs. england hypothetical
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Apr 29, 2020 22:51
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Nathan Robinson is trying to get nascent socialists to dovetail into being liberals by pretending to be one of them and then concern trolling them
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Apr 29, 2020 23:12
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Constantly LARPing posted:What you’re stating is basically Engles take. For my part i don't particularly care if it was engles' take or marx's or whether marx disagreed with it or not, man wasn't right about everything. So like Ferrinus I don't quite understand - if workers produce goods in a factory, and those goods directly feed into input quotas for some other factory and/or those goods are sold, and the money gained therein is used to service healthcare, education, welfare, etc for workers instead of being captured by a capitalist; how are those capitalist relations? mila kunis fucked around with this message at 23:26 on Apr 29, 2020 |
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Apr 29, 2020 23:20
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Ferrinus posted:sorry, wrong because i make certain claims about the lower stage of communism, or because marx and engels do? which claims? This whole claim quoted by the post I quote: quote:capitalism is specifically when private actors pilot the means of production to create things based on their market value, which was not what was going on. socialism - and here i mean lenin's socialism, or marx's "lower stage of communism" - doesn't actually mean you're not going to have a lovely job or hate your foreman or whatever. it just means that utility rather than profit will motivate production and it'll be the proletariat evaluating that utility The part where utility evaluated by the proletariat is conceptually disconnected from the shittiness of the job or the management is pure ideology. Jobs and management have utility for a worker, they just aren't commodities. It's why people may prefer lower compensation over shittier working conditions or dead-end development prospects. You conceive people under lower stage communism as if they only had power as consumer-overseers and approximately none as actual workers. That kind of split personality only makes any sense when workers are still practicing collective self-management under a basically capitalist economy. (Additionally the part about capitalism describes Stalin's USSR as well as ancient peasant communities as mixed-capitalist economies.)
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Apr 29, 2020 23:40
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Ferrinus posted:certainly workers in the soviet union produced objects with use-values that got sold in markets, but both use-values and markets predated capitalism by millenia. i don't think you can rightly call it capitalism if the difference between the value of your products and the value of your subsistence isn't being captured a capitalist and if that capitalist isn't choosing what to have you produce purely based on what will allow them to capture more of that value faster See this, is where I think you're wrong. It's a common claim, and one that really seems like "common sense", but really its just projecting capitalist relations back into the past when they didn't exist. It's denying that capitalism is historically contingent, and oddly enough, is one of the main ways orthodox political economists critique Marx. You're doing what Smith and Ricardo did, and as we know from the subtitle of Capital, Marx is critiquing them. To start with, you say markets have existed for millennia. Which is true, people have had locations to exchange stuff since before settled civilization began. But there is a massive difference between a market and THE MARKET. A market is a place where someone might go to sell some surplus or pick up something they need. The market requires you to participate in it. Oddly, this gets into questions on the transition debate that I was joking about before. The Pristine Culture of Capitalism posted:Capitalism is no longer a presupposition, whose unexplained existence in embryo must be assumed in order to account for its coming into being. Instead it emerged as an unintended consequence of relations between non-capitalist classes, the outcome of which was the subjection of direct producers to the imperatives of competition, as they were obliged to enter the market for access to their means of subsistence and reproduction. There was a world of difference between the French noble who did not need to expand or improve their estates and could still maintain their political and social power, and the emerging English class which had to produce for the market. You also keep mentioning use-value, even conflating it with utility. There's a reason Marx uses Bentham as the epitome of bourgeois idealism, and talking about utility falls right into that trap.I'll admit that Value-form theory is not my strongpoint, but I'll give it a shot. Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology posted:
In short, value, as we define it, is absolutely a social construct that exists under capitalism and is historically contingent. Sure, when early man knapped their first flint, it had some kind of use to him, but that is very different from assigning it a value. Furthermore, you can't separate use value from exchange value. There's no formula you can use to figure out how much exploitation is going on, and then just use that to give it back to the workers. That's what Marx is critiquing when he critiques left-Ricardianism. Now to be fair, I'd like a little more of the surplus value I produce back (although I'm a teacher, so I guess that's technically zero since you can't quantify social reproduction). But a pay raise at the expense of profits doesn't mean more communism. A pay raise at the expense of all profits doesn't equal communism. As long as the value-form exists, there is still going to be alienation and exploitation, since you're going to have to follow the logic of capital. Which is why Lenin loved him some Fordism, and the Soviet Union ultimately had to follow that logic. Is it state capitalism? I’d say not, because profit wasn’t a motivating drive. That’s why my answer to “What was the USSR?” is who the gently caress knows, it was really weird historically. Maybe it was premature by a few hundred years, and future communists will be talking about it the way nerds like us debate whether Babeuf was actually a communist or not before it was a thing. uncop posted:There is no theoretical rift between Marx and Engels, they viewed history in nonlinear terms and developed a division of labor where Engels was more focused on the immediate demands of the class struggle while Marx focused on abstract high theory. This is... umm... not true? Marx was basically a 19th century poster, he'd spend years getting in petty fights because someone, especially another socialist, said something bad, or even worse, wrong. There's a reason very little "high theory" as you call it, got published in his lifetime.
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Apr 29, 2020 23:53
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apropos to nothing posted:dont mean this as any offense but if you think there is a "bourgeoise democracy" stage of revolution it kinda means you disagree with like the core ideas of the october revolution. its not even that there isnt a transitory period that may need to be experienced by the workers prior to a socialist society, but that that transition does not need to be carried out by the capitalist class but by the working class itself. by supporting the kuomintang, it wasnt even just a position of ceding political power to the national bourgeoise which would be in keeping with the orthodox marxist/menshevik position, it was actually even worse because the kuomintang was actively repressing not just the communist party but the working class. there were purges and mass executions throughout the KMT territories even after the KMT split within the "left" KMT controlled regions. basically you have a situation where stalin and the comintern are saying the working class is not yet ready to take power and so the communists should fold themselves into an organization which is their enemy, at the same time that the workers are rising up and attempting to take power for themselves from that enemy. The principles of revolutionary socialism often have to be betrayed when they don't serve a practical purpose when exposed to reality. I mean, we get it, the USSR shouldn't have trusted the KMT but at the same time the CPC wasn't a useful geopolitical ally at the time and so the Soviet Union basically had a set of poor choices in opposing Japan (who was worse than even the KMT). The alternative scenario is: Soviet Union fully supports the CPC, proposing an uprising that gets immediately crushed, and the KMT either allies with Germany or the Entente Powers. Honestly, in a vacuum, supporting the KMT was probably the right choice even if it eventually blew up (and the KMT is poo poo etc). It just all goes back to SiOC. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 00:49 on Apr 30, 2020 |
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Apr 30, 2020 00:43
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Ardennes posted:The principles of revolutionary socialism often have to be betrayed when they don't serve a practical purpose when exposed to reality. I mean, we get it, the USSR shouldn't have trusted the KMT but at the same time the CPC wasn't a useful geopolitical ally at the time and so the Soviet Union basically had a set of poor choices in opposing Japan (who was worse than even the KMT). The alternative scenario is: Soviet Union fully supports the CPC, proposing an uprising that gets immediately crushed, and the KMT either allies with Germany or the Entente Powers. Honestly, in a vacuum, supporting the KMT was probably the right choice even if it eventually blew up (and the KMT is poo poo etc). It just all goes back to SiOC. yeah and the point that started this was im saying socialism in one country was a horrible political project. like at the end of the day you cant betray the labor movement and call yourself a genuine revolutionary socialist imo. im not saying theres some kind of dogma set in stone that has to be followed, its actually a huge mistake many sectarians make to try to apply statements or ideas made by folks like lenin or marx as universal precepts when often what they were writing was products of specific circumstances. but the one principle you cant betray is that our loyalty is to the workers movement. i also never said the comintern should have supported an uprising by the CPC or something, it was actually a massive mistake they made to push for the canton uprising which i mentioned before. the issue again, is that none of their decisions were based on the conditions of the workers movement in southeast asia at the time, they were based on what would be best for the russian party. the problem when you dont base your politics squarely on the class struggle is exactly what you see in china during this period: a complete flip between opportunist and ultra-left politics. at the end of the day opportunism and ultra-leftism can really be understood as 2 sides of the same coin, that being that the conditions of the class struggle aren't the political basis for revolutionary parties program
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Apr 30, 2020 01:14
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Victory Position posted:now, imagine if you would, zero-space aeroponics, where the lettuce and the kale grow into horrible little fractals like that one genus of broccoli Thanks this sucks
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Apr 30, 2020 01:24
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Constantly LARPing posted:You also keep mentioning use-value, even conflating it with utility. There's a reason Marx uses Bentham as the epitome of bourgeois idealism, and talking about utility falls right into that trap.I'll admit that Value-form theory is not my strongpoint, but I'll give it a shot. I'm not sure how Marx (and Engels) getting immersed in side projects changes anything about what I said. You can ironically call them posters, but seriously calling them that would be a huge mischaracterization. They were revolutionaries that conceived a practical role for themselves and divided dead serious responsibilities. Of course I simplified things, but the fact stands that generally speaking, Engels was the military theory, natural science and low-level labor struggle guy while Marx was the political philosophy and political economy guy. Also, I don't think utility is a bad dejargonization if it's presented in the sense of utilities of different qualities rather than some kind of utility in general. Only economists automatically think subjective and psychological when they hear "utility", normal people think of objective uses. Value-form theory was a mistake and the kind of remystification of capitalism that gets Marx rolling in his grave. The commodity is old as dirt and there was no alienation while people were in control of the process and objects of their labor regardless of whether they were produced for exchange. The claim that there's no formula you can use to figure out how much exploitation is going on is exactly the mystification I'm talking about. The formula is explicitly there and it reveals that in practice it's impossible for workers to take the full value they produce, which is a reason why the value framework isn't the most meaningful one for an economy they would run. I swear value-form theory's roots must be in deliberately misunderstanding the focus on the form that value takes. Things can't even take the form of value because value is not a form, it's content that shifts between different forms. A form is something that sensually or measurably exists, content is its internal logic. (Value is not actually measurable as is, markets don't reveal exactly how much abstract labor time is in an hour of each concrete labor.) The commodity is a form of value, which means it follows the law of value. Marx believed in initially striking at alienation by limiting the forms that value takes, eliminating free circulation and replacing it with explicit accounting of labor time. Under the conceptual lower stage of communism, the commodity still exists in the means of consumption sector but value doesn't take the form of exchange value or money: workers produce a commodity form of value, receive a labor certificate form of value and redeem it for an equal commodity form of value. Once the substance of value is made to also be the form of value, the mystery of value is dispelled and it's revealed as people relating their labors to each other, and it has to become easily accessible knowledge what concrete labors are behind each product of industry. uncop fucked around with this message at 02:00 on Apr 30, 2020 |
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Apr 30, 2020 01:31
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its true that national movements which resist imperialism are or can be progressive. but its wrong to believe that imperialism welds the classes of the oppressed nation together. that is the view of nationalists and patriots. the national bourgeoisie of colonized nations generally benefit from imperialism, but will still fight for national independence for a variety of reasons but one chief among them is that the fight for national independence can serve as a brake against the fight for liberation of the oppressed classes which they along with the imperialist powers exploit. an independent and active workers movement has to be built and has to operate and agitate even during the struggle for national independence because it is only through furthering the class struggle that the national bourgeoisie will be finally forced into alliance with the imperialists and the fight for national liberation can become the progressive fight for class liberation. so the communists/socialists/workers can and should enter into alliance with and work within the nationalist movements within oppressed nations, but they cannot enter into a bloc with the national bourgeoisie because by the very nature of entering into that bloc they are no longer able to engage in class struggle.
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Apr 30, 2020 01:50
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uncop posted:This whole claim quoted by the post I quote: not enjoying your work can be caused by being alienated from your labor due to the capitalist mode of production, but that's not actually the only reason you might not like the work you're doing or dislike your coworkers or managers. for example, i don't like doing the dishes very much, but i have no choice of whether to do so because i need the use-value available in clean plates and cutlery. that conditions were often bad doesn't mean that workers didn't have power or that the ussr had a capitalist economy, because a capitalist economy actually requires capitalists or firms who are capturing surplus values! Constantly LARPing posted:See this, is where I think you're wrong. It's a common claim, and one that really seems like "common sense", but really its just projecting capitalist relations back into the past when they didn't exist. It's denying that capitalism is historically contingent, and oddly enough, is one of the main ways orthodox political economists critique Marx. You're doing what Smith and Ricardo did, and as we know from the subtitle of Capital, Marx is critiquing them. i think you're misreading me. i point out that markets, small-m, preceded capitalism precisely TO draw the distinction between a marketplace and The Market. soviet workers got wages which they then spent at grocery stores or whatever but The Market wasn't actually the determining factor in what got produced and at what quantities, because things weren't being produced for their exchange values i don't see the point in acknowledging that the ussr wasn't capitalist, but then vehemently adding that it definitely wasn't socialism, surely not, it must have represented some heretofore undefined third thing that we'll be unraveling for years. it's much more straightforward to conclude that it was socialist and socialist economies have their own logistical and societal problems, especially socialist economies under eternal siege by vastly stronger capitalist powers apropos to nothing posted:yeah and the point that started this was im saying socialism in one country was a horrible political project. like at the end of the day you cant betray the labor movement and call yourself a genuine revolutionary socialist imo. im not saying theres some kind of dogma set in stone that has to be followed, its actually a huge mistake many sectarians make to try to apply statements or ideas made by folks like lenin or marx as universal precepts when often what they were writing was products of specific circumstances. but the one principle you cant betray is that our loyalty is to the workers movement. i also never said the comintern should have supported an uprising by the CPC or something, it was actually a massive mistake they made to push for the canton uprising which i mentioned before. the issue again, is that none of their decisions were based on the conditions of the workers movement in southeast asia at the time, they were based on what would be best for the russian party. the problem when you dont base your politics squarely on the class struggle is exactly what you see in china during this period: a complete flip between opportunist and ultra-left politics. at the end of the day opportunism and ultra-leftism can really be understood as 2 sides of the same coin, that being that the conditions of the class struggle aren't the political basis for revolutionary parties program i don't buy "they were based on what would be best for the russian party" here. like it would have been bad for the russian party, but it also would have been bad for the chinese party, if the CPC launched an uprising against the KMT at the same time as japan was invading and therefore doomed all of china to imperial rule, or allowed the KMT to free itself from any need for the CPC by reaching out to europe, or something. and again the ussr did provide actual material aid, and the chinese communists in turn only started to feud with the russian communists once kruschev took office and began to systematically repudiate the previous government, so it seems like you're crticizing the ww2-era ussr for having nebulously bad intentions rather than for overall results
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Apr 30, 2020 01:52
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apropos to nothing posted:yeah and the point that started this was im saying socialism in one country was a horrible political project. like at the end of the day you cant betray the labor movement and call yourself a genuine revolutionary socialist imo. im not saying theres some kind of dogma set in stone that has to be followed, its actually a huge mistake many sectarians make to try to apply statements or ideas made by folks like lenin or marx as universal precepts when often what they were writing was products of specific circumstances. but the one principle you cant betray is that our loyalty is to the workers movement. i also never said the comintern should have supported an uprising by the CPC or something, it was actually a massive mistake they made to push for the canton uprising which i mentioned before. the issue again, is that none of their decisions were based on the conditions of the workers movement in southeast asia at the time, they were based on what would be best for the russian party. the problem when you dont base your politics squarely on the class struggle is exactly what you see in china during this period: a complete flip between opportunist and ultra-left politics. at the end of the day opportunism and ultra-leftism can really be understood as 2 sides of the same coin, that being that the conditions of the class struggle aren't the political basis for revolutionary parties program So would you say it would have been better for the Soviet Union to collapse than betray Marxist principles? I am curious. It is more or less the central argument here in a broader sense. I would say SiOC was always a non-ideal choice that needed to exist because of reality. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 02:00 on Apr 30, 2020 |
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Apr 30, 2020 01:53
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Ardennes posted:So would you say it would have been better for the Soviet Union to collapse than betray Marxist principles? I am curious. i mean first of all its a complete counterfactual to say that if the comintern hadnt forced the communists into the KMT that the USSR would have collapsed, theres no way to know what would have happened and for all we know following "marxist principles" would have led to a successful socialist revolution in china in the 30s. second of all, the USSR did betray the principles of socialism and it collapsed so here we are. when the USSR existed, even with its mistakes, socialists should have defended it. even when the USSR invaded Poland with the Nazis, it was still a workers state which despite the problems should be defended due to its class nature. it doesnt exist anymore and its mistakes are plain to see. we can say we should defend it and yeah the USSR should be defended against the slander and attacks of the capitalists but it doesnt exist so now as we enter what is already a revolutionary period in much of the world, it is important to learn the lessons of its mistakes so that they are not repeated by revolutionaries today or tomorrow.
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Apr 30, 2020 02:02
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Lightning Knight posted:I feel like the first half of this doesn't really track in practice, although the second half pretty much does tbf. Why not the first half? The imperial bourgeoisie has decisive monopolies it wields to facilitate the exploitation of the global working class. Anything that weakens their grip is useful to the communist movement. This requires a careful study of reality since some forces which appear to be in opposition are in fact collaborators, ISIS being the best recent example. Prince Myshkin fucked around with this message at 02:08 on Apr 30, 2020 |
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Apr 30, 2020 02:05
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like in the middle of a strike, socialists shouldnt just uncritically support whatever the labor bureaucracy decides to do, they should be putting forward their own ideas during the struggle, bring up how they think the strike should go and what would lead to a victory. doesnt mean being sectarian, but it also doesn't mean uncritically supporting the union leadership if and when they are making choices and doing things which are hurting the strike or not in line with the will of the rank and file. thats 10000x more true once the strike is over, and 1000000000x more true once the strike is over and it ended in defeat for the workers. the ussr existed, and socialists should have critiqued it and the leadership for mistakes and betrayals when it existed while also supporting it at all times and even during those mistakes against capitalists and imperialists. now that its completely degenerated and gone, we have to learn from its defeat and specifically its mistakes.
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Apr 30, 2020 02:08
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Ferrinus posted:i don't know if "imperialism is the primary contradiction" is literally a mao (or later cpc) quote or just something a friend of mine said to me years ago but a big leninist idea has always been the primacy of 1st world vs. 3rd world, imperialist vs. exploited, global division. funnily enough you can find trotsky saying the same thing: It's a distillation of this: Mao Zedong posted:In a semi-colonial country such as China, the relationship between the principal contradiction and the non-principal contradictions presents a complicated picture.
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Apr 30, 2020 02:09
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Dreddout posted:Thanks this sucks  it's also not a whole genus, just one cultivar of one species
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Apr 30, 2020 02:28
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Ferrinus posted:i don't buy "they were based on what would be best for the russian party" here. like it would have been bad for the russian party, but it also would have been bad for the chinese party, if the CPC launched an uprising against the KMT at the same time as japan was invading and therefore doomed all of china to imperial rule, or allowed the KMT to free itself from any need for the CPC by reaching out to europe, or something. and again the ussr did provide actual material aid, and the chinese communists in turn only started to feud with the russian communists once kruschev took office and began to systematically repudiate the previous government, so it seems like you're crticizing the ww2-era ussr for having nebulously bad intentions rather than for overall results I've said a few times that the CPC shouldn't have launched an uprising against the KMT, and were mistaken when they attempted specifically to lead one in canton in 1927 after they flipped their position. the CPC inside the KMT were in positions within the party, they held political, military, and ministerial positions within the KMT. like prior to 1926, the CPC was part of a more or less 2 party alliance within the KMT, but in 26 chiang staged a coup and the chinese communists were arguing for a break with the KMT or at least a separation which would see them work in a bloc but which kept them separated. the comintern rejected this idea and then through 26 purges were carried out and repression against the communists and labor leaders in the KMT and KMT controlled territory. members of the CPC who were part of the KMT leadership like Tan Pingshan even wrote in 27 that they had squandered their opportunity. the left nominally was dominant in the alliance but after the coup, the comintern kept the alliance with chiang through the coup and even through some of the subsequent massacres and purges. its also not like keeping the CPC in the KMT prevented them from fighting during the invasions. through the 20s the battle the KMT had was against the warlords of the north not the japanese, though some were supported by japan and the british. by 1927 once the CPC had been purged from the KMT and then purged once again by the left KMT which had split, they were fighting each other.
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Apr 30, 2020 02:29
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apropos to nothing posted:i mean first of all its a complete counterfactual to say that if the comintern hadnt forced the communists into the KMT that the USSR would have collapsed, theres no way to know what would have happened and for all we know following "marxist principles" would have led to a successful socialist revolution in china in the 30s. second of all, the USSR did betray the principles of socialism and it collapsed so here we are. when the USSR existed, even with its mistakes, socialists should have defended it. even when the USSR invaded Poland with the Nazis, it was still a workers state which despite the problems should be defended due to its class nature. it doesnt exist anymore and its mistakes are plain to see. we can say we should defend it and yeah the USSR should be defended against the slander and attacks of the capitalists but it doesnt exist so now as we enter what is already a revolutionary period in much of the world, it is important to learn the lessons of its mistakes so that they are not repeated by revolutionaries today or tomorrow. 1. It isn't just about China, but socialism in one country. The Pacific Front was just one front. 2. Do you really think the Soviet Union collapsed because it betrayed its revolutionary Marxist principals? That is what happened in the mid-late 1980s?
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Apr 30, 2020 02:42
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basically the CPC was urged to continue to conciliate with what increasingly small sections of the KMT would tolerate them, while the KMT was increasingly faced with armed and organized peasants militias who were demanding an end to landlordism. the comintern insisted on continuing to push the CPC to side against the peasants and reign them in accusing them of being a disorganized mess and taking ultra-left positions. mao defended the position of siding with the peasants movements at the time saying in a report: "The fact is ... that the broad peasant masses have risen to fulfill their historic mission, that the democratic forces in the rural areas have risen to overthrow the rural feudal power.... To overthrow this feudal power is the real objective of the national revolution.... This is a marvelous feat which has never been achieved in the last forty or even thousands of years. It is very good Indeed. It is not a mess at all." and "All kinds of arguments against the peasant movements must be speedily set right. The erroneous measures taken by the revolutionary authorities concerning the peasant movement must be speedily changed"
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Apr 30, 2020 02:48
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Ardennes posted:1. It isn't just about China, but socialism in one country. The Pacific Front was just one front. 1. yeah its not just about china but this same approach occurred in other areas, many pages ago i gave examples of how this affected the early CPUSA. this was all well before ww2 unless you are referring to the pacific front on the unceasing and eternal war against capitalism. 2. i mean basically and its not like this process started in the 1980s. im trying to give examples of how the leadership did so knowingly throughout the 20s, but this extends to many examples like the purges and executions of the moscow trials in the 30s, the invasion of poland, the invasion of hungary, etc. it remained a workers state and again on that class basis it should be defended, but again at this point defended from who? it doesnt exist anymore theres nothing to defend. socialism in one country was a mistaken program but mistakes are inherent in any political project. the root cause of the problem was an undemocratic regime within the comintern which allowed mistakes to be compounded and repeated despite the evidence of the mistake.
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Apr 30, 2020 02:58
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Ferrinus posted:i don't know if "imperialism is the primary contradiction" is literally a mao (or later cpc) quote or just something a friend of mine said to me years ago but a big leninist idea has always been the primacy of 1st world vs. 3rd world, imperialist vs. exploited, global division. funnily enough you can find trotsky saying the same thing: Well, for Mao imperialism is just a period of capitalism and taking the relationship between imperialist and oppressed nations to be the primary contradiction is just considering class struggle against foreign and comprador bourgeoisie to be the principal form of class struggle during that period. Siding with some kind of comprador-fascist regime against an imperialist power isn't what's being prescribed, that's the dengist perversion of the concept. The idea is to use the war as cover to build an independent workers' paramilitary force that fights the imperialist power to earn legitimacy in the eyes of the people and turns its arms against the local government once it's threatened or the war is over.
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Apr 30, 2020 02:59
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Victory Position posted:now, imagine if you would, zero-space aeroponics, where the lettuce and the kale grow into horrible little fractals like that one genus of broccoli post pics plz thnx (｡◕‿‿◕｡) ヽ༼ຈل͜ຈ༽ﾉ ୧(▲ᴗ▲)ノ
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Apr 30, 2020 03:01
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I don't know what the jewish communal fund is
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Apr 30, 2020 03:54
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Karl Barks posted:I don't know what the jewish communal fund is i looked them up and aside for being jewish appear to have nothing to do with israel e: nvm appear to have connection to donors from israel https://jcfny.org/blog/israeli-philanthropy/ Sheng-Ji Yang fucked around with this message at 03:59 on Apr 30, 2020 |
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Apr 30, 2020 03:57
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they're about to do it https://twitter.com/therevcoms/status/1255694590322946049 https://twitter.com/therevcoms/status/1255691138213634049
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Apr 30, 2020 04:14
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rallies for social distancing
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Apr 30, 2020 04:21
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rally to restore sanitary conditions
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Apr 30, 2020 04:49
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apropos to nothing posted:I've said a few times that the CPC shouldn't have launched an uprising against the KMT, and were mistaken when they attempted specifically to lead one in canton in 1927 after they flipped their position. the CPC inside the KMT were in positions within the party, they held political, military, and ministerial positions within the KMT. like prior to 1926, the CPC was part of a more or less 2 party alliance within the KMT, but in 26 chiang staged a coup and the chinese communists were arguing for a break with the KMT or at least a separation which would see them work in a bloc but which kept them separated. the comintern rejected this idea and then through 26 purges were carried out and repression against the communists and labor leaders in the KMT and KMT controlled territory. members of the CPC who were part of the KMT leadership like Tan Pingshan even wrote in 27 that they had squandered their opportunity. the left nominally was dominant in the alliance but after the coup, the comintern kept the alliance with chiang through the coup and even through some of the subsequent massacres and purges. ok so CPC indeed shouldn't have attempted to actually usurp the KMT's power in the midst of japanese and british aggression. perhaps things would have worked out if they had made some kind of formal separation and fought the japanese as a team of rivals rather than a united front, although the KMT obviously had huge advantages in numbers and materiel and my understanding is that the CPC and KMT basically did their own thing despite soviet urging that they remain one unified national party. but i don't think you've actually connected this to your criticisms of "socialism in one country" - like how the advice being given by the ussr here, even if it IS flatly bad advice, somehow represents the USSR selfishly prioritizing its own development over china's and therefore shirking its moral responsibility to foment world revolution. like, one of the reason the CPC was able to flourish at all rather than just disappearing into obscurity like other of china's communist parties was because it was the one that had soviet support, and during the wind-down and aftermath of WW2 and the actual final chinese civil war the USSR was pretty blatantly on the CPC's side, like by delivering them captured weapons and allowing them to take up positions in manchuria before the soviet forces withdrew. while checking to make sure i wasn't making this up or remembering wrong i just dug this up about the soviets just plain dropping transport planes, fuel, etc into mao's lap to allow him to speedily take xinjiang https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/how-stalin-elevated-the-chinese-communist-party-to-power-xinjiang-1949 "socialism in one country" doesn't mean "socialism in ONLY one country" such that the one socialist country goes around directly kneecapping others in order to maintain its unique status. the soviet union objectively supported the chinese revolution through that revolution's victory. possibly they could have done it better, faster, and with less casualties on the CPC's side if they'd had a better picture of the situation on the ground or whatever but i don't see how these flaws flow out of SIOC specifically rather than the basic facts of having to make strategic decisions about who to support and to what extent from a geographic and cultural remove. like we can easily imagine a soviet union which did NOT espouse socialism in one country and put sparking revolutions in other countries at the front and center of its agenda still waiting to put full-throated support behind the CPC until after WW2 was over because the CPC's chances of surviving an early attempt at uprising were so low uncop posted:Well, for Mao imperialism is just a period of capitalism and taking the relationship between imperialist and oppressed nations to be the primary contradiction is just considering class struggle against foreign and comprador bourgeoisie to be the principal form of class struggle during that period. is trotsky a dengist now?
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Apr 30, 2020 05:05
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Sheng-Ji Yang posted:rallies for social distancing yeah this uhhh, yeah
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Apr 30, 2020 13:12
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gradenko_2000 posted:rally to restore sanitary conditions heh
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Apr 30, 2020 15:35
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Ardennes posted:So would you say it would have been better for the Soviet Union to collapse than betray Marxist principles? I am curious. The focus on sioc is super dumb. Marx believed that the revolution would start in advanced countries and that this revolution would logically be worldwide and at limited to advanced countries. Lenin wrote that socialist countries would exist alongside capitalist countries for some time. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/miliprog/i.htm quote:Thirdly, the victory of socialism in one country does not at one stroke eliminate all wars in general. On the contrary, it presupposes wars. The development of capitalism proceeds extremely unevenly in different countries. It cannot be otherwise under commodity production. From this it follows irrefutably that socialism cannot achieve victory simultaneously in all countries. It will achieve victory first in one or several countries, while the others will for some time remain bourgeois or pre-bourgeois.
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Apr 30, 2020 15:42
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