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Slanderer posted:they didn't pay them at all lmao
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May 6, 2020 04:54
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Prince Myshkin posted:It would be called the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. i'm sad i'll never get to see it then 
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May 6, 2020 06:13
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Lady Militant posted:i'm sad i'll never get to see it then Not with that attitude!
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May 6, 2020 08:10
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Lady Impotent
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May 6, 2020 08:13
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Prince Myshkin posted:Not with that attitude! True.  My dad mentioned this to me the other day laughing about it (obviously referring to where iv ended up politically). I think about it a lot.
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May 6, 2020 08:40
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splifyphus posted:Ticktin calls it a 'non mode of production', which is an analysis I've come around to. Basically the party apparatus managed to block (or at least effectively mediate) the value form from determining production, but there was no new social form to replace it with other than direct allocation backed by direct force. Clock without a spring is the metaphor. yeah, i've heard it before, i just don't buy it. i think these takes basically serve as an escape hatch for academics in the west, a way for them to have their cake and eat it too - on the one hand you can be an anticapitalist but on the other hand you don't have to give up on what you learned from Animal Farm or otherwise draw the establishment's ire. like, okay, the party apparatus was able to use the state to block the value form from determining production. what, then, determined production? did they simply build things at random and by accident? oh it was the use-value of those things because they actually, factually needed so and so many tanks and such and such much grain. what did marx call an economy in which use-value determines production again...? for that matter, if a state prevents rather than mandates that exchange value be what determines production, exactly which class is using that state as a machine of domination? it's surely not the bourgeoisie, because production for exchange is the source of all their power i don't really get your conclusion in your second paragraph at all. if socialism in one country is a dead end because intense discipline and militancy are required to withstand external siege... then we shouldn't bother to fight back against capitalist siege, or what?
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May 6, 2020 10:03
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Huh, I suppose I'm a pseudo-ticktinite when I highlight the war economy aspect of socialist countries. IIRC I once read some libcom article that had a lot to say about Ticktin's theory.
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May 6, 2020 10:14
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holy poo poo i found it. here's a book i really liked all about western perspectives on the soviet union, regrettably hosted on lib.com, that i read irl but have struggled to actually find the exact title of/links to since i gave it away to a friend last year: https://libcom.org/files/van_der_linden_western_marxism_and_soviet_union.pdf i would say that the author's conclusions are not as aggro as mine but it's a good breakdown of the prevailing theories from without ("bureaucratic collectivism" "degenerated workers' state" "asiatic despotism" etc), when they fell in and out of fashion, and at the end a critique of the various ways they fall short of either being marxist or matching the facts edit: the actual critiques/takedowns are on pages 310-320, if people are interested Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 12:11 on May 6, 2020 |
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May 6, 2020 10:32
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Thanks, I hate the takedown section. Basically states that orthodox marxist frameworks are unable to answer what the USSR represented because Marx never got far enough in his political economy to write about how all the stuff capitalist societies include that aren't part of the pure market capitalist forces relate to modes of production. The logical conclusion is that Marx was silly enough to consider that capitalism could be abolished by technicality, by taking out this or that little corner of reality that his pure model rested on. Van der Linden is essentially burying marxism as having been driven into irrelevance by modern developments and knows it, given that he's calling for a "post" marxism.
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May 6, 2020 12:49
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yeah i like the specific content of each his takedowns but i don't think the conclusion i reach FROM those takedowns is the one he had in mind (and hence it's little wonder he's being hosted on libcom dot org). i was also bemused by his diligent meta-analysis of how and why this framework or that one fell out of fashion
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May 6, 2020 14:24
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Slanderer posted:they didn't pay them at all lmao lmfao I heard, it’s so good
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May 6, 2020 16:28
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Ferrinus posted:yeah i like the specific content of each his takedowns but i don't think the conclusion i reach FROM those takedowns is the one he had in mind (and hence it's little wonder he's being hosted on libcom dot org). i was also bemused by his diligent meta-analysis of how and why this framework or that one fell out of fashion If your take is something like ortho ML, that's basically a match made in heaven with the author's outlook on how to academically approach marxism, which is pretty ironic.
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May 6, 2020 16:49
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Ferrinus posted:yeah, i've heard it before, i just don't buy it. i think these takes basically serve as an escape hatch for academics in the west, a way for them to have their cake and eat it too - on the one hand you can be an anticapitalist but on the other hand you don't have to give up on what you learned from Animal Farm or otherwise draw the establishment's ire. like, okay, the party apparatus was able to use the state to block the value form from determining production. what, then, determined production? did they simply build things at random and by accident? oh it was the use-value of those things because they actually, factually needed so and so many tanks and such and such much grain. what did marx call an economy in which use-value determines production again...? for that matter, if a state prevents rather than mandates that exchange value be what determines production, exactly which class is using that state as a machine of domination? it's surely not the bourgeoisie, because production for exchange is the source of all their power https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/ch02.htm
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May 6, 2020 16:53
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Top City Homo posted:https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/ch02.htm economic PROBLEMS of the ussr? i bet whoever wrote this was swiftly purged for daring to question the regime
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May 6, 2020 21:27
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Ferrinus posted:economic PROBLEMS of the ussr? i bet whoever wrote this was swiftly purged for daring to question the regime western marxists are insufferable nerds.
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May 6, 2020 22:16
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Top City Homo posted:western marxists are insufferable nerds. *quotes pages of USSR regional grain reports* *knows nothing about the federal reserve*
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May 6, 2020 23:19
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i think the big issue with stalin isnt that he or the soviet union under his leadership made mistakes, as is bound to happen to anyone and everyone. think its more that he and the soviet union killed a bunch of communists. speaking as a communist, i would like not to be killed.
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May 7, 2020 00:54
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apropos to nothing posted:i think the big issue with stalin isnt that he or the soviet union under his leadership made mistakes, as is bound to happen to anyone and everyone. think its more that he and the soviet union killed a bunch of communists. speaking as a communist, i would like not to be killed. Isn't that one of the mistakes they made, that are bound to happen to anyone and everyone
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May 7, 2020 00:56
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why did the USSR purge experienced veterans in the PCE/maquis between the end of the civil war and beginning of ww2
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May 7, 2020 00:59
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apropos to nothing posted:i think the big issue with stalin isnt that he or the soviet union under his leadership made mistakes, as is bound to happen to anyone and everyone. think its more that he and the soviet union killed a bunch of communists. speaking as a communist, i would like not to be killed. simply avoid engaging in revisionism or sabotage. or, uh, happening to fall in the sights of a revisionist or saboteur who managed to sneak into the party structure and is working to get as many party members purged or worse under false pretenses as he can get away with
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May 7, 2020 01:23
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The Great Purge largely started because of inter-politburo tensions over the collapse of Soviet trade in 1933-34, and the People's Commissariat of Industry bore the brunt of the blame. However, once the purges started, they only continued to gain momentum until 1938. Part of this was simply that the Soviet Union was, in reality, had been greatly affected by the Great Depression and this fed into paranoia and scapegoating (especially since Trotsky was still around).
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May 7, 2020 01:30
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apropos to nothing posted:i think the big issue with stalin isnt that he or the soviet union under his leadership made mistakes, as is bound to happen to anyone and everyone. think its more that he and the soviet union killed a bunch of communists. speaking as a communist, i would like not to be killed. Analysing the successes and failures of the most powerful and successful socialist state as understood by the leader of that society isn't going to get you killed its much more relevant to understanding the socialist form of production than bloviating about what annoying western marxists had to say on the matter.
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May 7, 2020 02:15
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edit: wrong thread
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May 7, 2020 02:39
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splifyphus posted:Ticktin calls it a 'non mode of production', which is an analysis I've come around to. Basically the party apparatus managed to block (or at least effectively mediate) the value form from determining production, but there was no new social form to replace it with other than direct allocation backed by direct force. Clock without a spring is the metaphor. i listened to some podcast once that drew from ticktin and a clock without a spring and some things about them rubbed me the wrong way, lemme copy paste my notes from another forum: first of they seemed to dismiss the idea that the fall of the USSR was gorbachev's fault ("the 'tankie' thing where everything was going great! and then gorbachev slipped on a banana peel"). my impression is this: the ussr had problems in the late 70s, but so did the capitalist world. the primary problem was 'stagnation', i'm a dumbass with no economic background so i dont quite know what that means. a no growth economy? if so that seemed to be a better situation than what followed: privatization and price control lifting that led to black markets, goods shortages and the rise of the russian mafia, decaying of infrastructure etc that was directly attributable to gorbachev and unthinkable before him. I feel its undeniable the union was in a far worse state in 1989 than it was in 1979. is this incorrect? second they discuss the writer they were reading from that ep who talks about how the soviet factory system lifted 'the form of capitalism' (factories, scientific management, etcera). they strongly hint that the soviet system was a distortion of marxism ('non mode of production') and bad and awful, and that it was bound to fail because it lacked some key characteristics of capitalism: - being able to discipline the workforce by firing people is hard when there's state guaranteed full employment - profit motive doesn't exist so there's no innovation or improvements But I believe the ussr gave up on equal pay after experimenting with it a bit, and there were pay grades, promotions and salary differentials. If that's not enough, and you NEED capital accumulation to drive these things, then what hope is there for a socialist society? What then explains how the ussr managed to keep up for decades? And if you needed harsh workforce discipline and the threat of unemployment and starvation as this author says then what hope is there for workers? These seemed like bog standard capitalist criticisms to me which seemed odd coming from socialists? thirdly another criticism they had of the soviet system was that it was that workers were alienated from their labour' - i assume this holds for pre gorbachev ussr as well. this is probably fair since work sucks. but if pay differentials, promotion prospects, guaranteed employment, health, housing blah blah and all are taken care of - if you know that the output of your work is used to clothe and feed and materially benefit everyone, rather than being hoarded by a few parasites at the top to hoard to themselves and buy themselves yachts and cocaine - if that's not enough, than what is? isn't what they're saying essentially that the capitalists are correct, that without aspirational grasping towards being the exploiter yourself, a system cannot work?
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May 7, 2020 02:40
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mila kunis posted:thirdly another criticism they had of the soviet system was that it was that workers were alienated from their labour' - i assume this holds for pre gorbachev ussr as well. this is probably fair since work sucks. i'm pretty sure this is wrong on the technical, marxian-political-economy level so long as the things you're producing are determined and distributed based on their use-value rather than their exchange-value. like yes if you help to manufacture a car and that car is then sold (at state-mandated prices, bought by state-mandated wages, which are used as top-down rationing/distribution mechanisms rather than emergent avatars of the will of the market) to some other worker than the use-value of your labor-power has directly benefited that other worker rather than you, but it's not like i'm alienating myself from my labor if i weave you a coat and give it over as a present. the point is that it's not being peeled away from your corpus in order to add to private profits, for no other reason but that it will increase those profits faster and with absolutely no regard for the nature of the commodities whose sale is finally realizing those profits
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May 7, 2020 02:55
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The problem the Soviets had was simple, Dutch Disease, too much investment was going into oil and gas investment during the 1970s due to multiple crises. This was sapping capital out of other productive industries but was generally getting a high return on investment until the mid-1980s when the Saudis suddenly started pumping as much as they could after a trip by then CIA Director Casey. Also, it was very difficult to actually get fired in the Soviet Union, but it doesn't mean punishments didn't exist and there was no reason for workers to show up. If you look at Soviet scientific advancements, usually they punched far above their weight as far as what they accomplished in most fields. It is just that the US usually had the capital (and the willingness) to throw far more funding at an issue and sometimes got a better result (but not always). Honestly, most of these criticisms can be batted away even with fairly introductory level monographs of Soviet history. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 03:06 on May 7, 2020 |
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May 7, 2020 03:00
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Ardennes posted:(especially since Trotsky was still around). And there you have it folks the great purge was masterminded by the fascists running dog trotsky
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May 7, 2020 03:23
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listen, you're the one that brought it up, not me. but since you mention him-
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May 7, 2020 03:27
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Dreddout posted:And there you have it folks the great purge was masterminded by the fascists running dog trotsky Trotsky was an easy scapegoat considering he was a former Bolshevik that was actively working with the West against the Soviets. To clear, the Fourth International was the avowed enemy of the Soviet government but I don't think Trotsky had much pull in the Soviet Union at that point, he was simply too discredited (a Juan Guiado like-figure). The problems of Soviet heavy industry at that point, the main issue, were more due to constrained machinery imports than anything else. That said, the scions of Monarchists/former landowning families, like Solzhenitsyn and Pasternak, were still around. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 03:57 on May 7, 2020 |
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May 7, 2020 03:50
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Dreddout posted:And there you have it folks the great purge was masterminded by the fascists running dog trotsky Yes
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May 7, 2020 03:55
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Tricksy Trotsky strikes again 
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May 7, 2020 04:06
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Jewel Repetition posted:Tricksy Trotsky strikes again I guess working with the FBI was a solid idea.
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May 7, 2020 04:13
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trotsky and the 4th international supported and defended the USSR, even during the molotov-ribbentrop pact. in fact its what caused a lot of the splits from the 4th international because people disagreed with supporting the soviets after they invaded poland. trotsky argued that because the ussr was still a workers state it was important to defend it
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May 7, 2020 04:38
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apropos to nothing posted:trotsky and the 4th international supported and defended the USSR, even during the molotov-ribbentrop pact. in fact its what caused a lot of the splits from the 4th international because people disagreed with supporting the soviets after they invaded poland. trotsky argued that because the ussr was still a workers state it was important to defend it https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/09/aboveall.htm Yeah, that doesn't seem to be backed up by sources.
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May 7, 2020 04:53
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Ardennes posted:https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/09/aboveall.htm the forums' most obnoxious Trot, a revisionist? I never
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May 7, 2020 04:57
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Ardennes posted:https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/09/aboveall.htm yeah my understanding is that trotsky supported the soviet union in the sense of like, being sure that the revolutionary soviet people would seize the opportunity to depose the tyrant stalin during the russian invasion, or of loudly tsk tsking about the tragic inevitability of kirov's assassination and other terror plots
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May 7, 2020 05:08
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Ardennes posted:https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/09/aboveall.htm yes ive read that. where is the support for the imperialist powers against the ussr? he is critical of the ussr for invading poland, but doesnt call into question its status as a workers state. read this published from the same period where he is specifically defending the analysis of the ussr I laid out. ill quote some key bits: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/09/ussr-war.htm "Those who seek nowadays to prove that the Soviet-German pact changes our appraisal of the Soviet State take their stand, in essence, on the position of the Comintern – to put it more correctly, on yesterday’s position of the Comintern. According to this logic, the historical mission of the workers’ state is the struggle for imperialist democracy. The “betrayal” of the democracies in favor of fascism divests the USSR of its being considered a workers’ state. In point of fact, the signing of the treaty with Hitler supplies only an extra gauge with which to measure the degree of degeneration of the Soviet bureaucracy, and its contempt for the international working class, including the Comintern, but it does not provide any basis whatsoever for a reevaluation of the sociological appraisal of the USSR" and later: "What do we defend in the USSR? Not that in which it resembles the capitalist countries but precisely that in which it differs from them. In Germany also we advocate an uprising against the ruling bureaucracy, but only in order immediately to overthrow capitalist property. In the USSR the overthrow of the bureaucracy is indispensable for the preservation of state property. Only in this sense do we stand for the defense of the USSR There is not one among us who doubts that the Soviet workers should defend the state property, not only against the parasitism of the bureaucracy, but also against the tendencies toward private ownership, for example, on the part of the Kolkhoz aristocracy. But after all, foreign policy is the continuation of policy at home. If in domestic policy we correlated defense of the conquests of the October Revolution with irreconcilable struggle against the bureaucracy, then we must do the same thing in foreign policy as well. To be sure, Bruno R. proceeding from the fact that “bureaucratic collectivism” has already been victorious all along the line, assures us that no one threatens state property, because Hitler (and Chamberlain?) is as much interested, you see, in preserving it as Stalin. Sad to say, Bruno R.’s assurances are frivolous. In event of victory Hitler will in all probability begin by demanding the return to German capitalists of all the property expropriated from them; then he will secure a similar restoration of property for the English, the French, and the Belgians so as to reach an agreement with them at the expense of the USSR; finally, he will make Germany the contractor of the most important state enterprises in the USSR in the interests of the German military machine. Right now Hitler is the ally and friend of Stalin; but should Hitler, with the aid of Stalin, come out victorious on the Western Front, he would on the morrow turn his guns against the USSR. Finally Chamberlain, too, in similar circumstances would act no differently from Hitler."
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May 7, 2020 05:10
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Autism Sneaks posted:the forums' most obnoxious Trot, a revisionist? I never if im obnoxious ill stop posting here then. only reason i do is cause lots of people in online spaces, even this one, are looking to get organized in some way and want to help in that process. namaste.
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May 7, 2020 05:18
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"In point of fact, the signing of the treaty with Hitler supplies only an extra gauge with which to measure the degree of degeneration of the Soviet bureaucracy, and its contempt for the international working class." He is pretty clear cut here man. I mean, if you really think he is supporting the USSR here, I don't really know what to say. At most he is saying the USSR "isn't like capitalist countries" but should still be overthrown and will (hopefully) be invaded. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 05:26 on May 7, 2020 |
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May 7, 2020 05:21
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apropos to nothing posted:if im obnoxious ill stop posting here then. only reason i do is cause lots of people in online spaces, even this one, are looking to get organized in some way and want to help in that process. namaste. I haven't read through this stuff but if you're posting in good faith keep doing it. It's intellectually healthy to have some pushback
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May 7, 2020 05:22
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