There is a spectrum haunting C-SPAM. I, on the contrary,

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > There is a spectrum haunting C-SPAM. I, on the contrary,

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Centrist Committee: Aug 6, 2019

uncop posted:

Would you prefer trotskys aesthetics?

Haha goddamn

# ? Jul 17, 2020 21:31

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# ? May 11, 2024 14:23

Goast: Jul 23, 2011; by VideoGames

didn't they figure out helmets by the time the russian revolution came around just look at that dumb loving hat

# ? Jul 17, 2020 22:01

Enjoy: Apr 18, 2009

Goast posted:

didn't they figure out helmets by the time the russian revolution came around just look at that dumb loving hat

Apparently they were train guards :shrug:

http://warfarehistorian.blogspot.com/2016/02/odd-fighting-units-trotskys-red-100-and.html

# ? Jul 17, 2020 22:43

indigi: Jul 20, 2004; ^{how can we not talk about family

when family's all that we got?}

uncop posted:

Would you prefer trotskys aesthetics?

love the facial expression

# ? Jul 17, 2020 22:46

Raskolnikov38: Mar 3, 2007; We were somewhere around Manila when the drugs began to take hold

uncop posted:

Would you prefer trotskys aesthetics?

what if le pantalon rouge, but more

# ? Jul 17, 2020 23:00

MizPiz: May 29, 2013; by Athanatos

uncop posted:

Would you prefer trotskys aesthetics?

I mean, if you're going to call yourself The Red Army

# ? Jul 17, 2020 23:20

Pomeroy: Apr 20, 2020

uncop posted:

The correctness of a line has more to do with keeping the movement together and strengthening it despite an endless stream of mistakes. A correct line can even embrace pretty blatant untruths, although that's always walking a thin line because those untruths have to be unraveled before they become hindrances to further development. On the contrary to what you're saying, it's damaging to assume that just because someone's principled and capable, they are always speaking the truth in official capacity. If the movement as a whole makes that assumption, questioning the truth-value of their statements then becomes questioning their authority, an attack on the movement's coherence and the correct line. Both wishful thinking and outright deception are part of politics in both its peaceful and warlike forms. The whole idea of communism is wishful thinking until the moment that it actually exists in reality, but it has to be treated as if it were a prophetic, unquestionable truth. It's far more productive to normalize even the greatest leaders often having incorrect ideas and being reliant on others to set them straight. Then, correcting an incorrect line doesn't have the potential to weaken the movement and thrust it into a fatal catch-22.

I largely agree with you, and this gets right to heart of the matter, I do appreciate the clarification. I agree that our knowledge is necessarily provisional, and that the relationship between theory and practice must be a dialectical one. In that process, lines will of course change, responding both to changing conditions and to our changed understandings of conditions. I also agree that we cannot assume principled comrades are always speaking the truth, or always correct. To give a trivial example, no one could argue with disguising by misinformation the time and place of a party meeting that might be expected to come under attack. What I mean by an attitude towards truth in our lines is that I consider it fundamentally impermissible to knowingly mislead the masses or party cadre on political questions, though we may find that there are compelling practical reasons to do so. A specific example of what I mean, that I think had profoundly disastrous consequences, and that is particularly fresh in my mind as I've been reading Haywood, is the attitude of the CPSU and Comintern towards Browderism. Now, I don't believe for a moment that Stalin, at least, had any sympathy for Browder's revisionism. Indeed, he had shown that he was aware of a major opportunist danger within the CPUSA when Lovestone was removed, and that he knew that danger was not confined to Lovestone's faction. I don't think there can be much doubt that Stalin and others who knew better decided that, for entirely understandable practical reasons, a less revolutionary party in the US was temporarily useful, and that its line could be rectified at a later date.

# ? Jul 17, 2020 23:53

Lady Militant: Apr 8, 2020; The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

uncop posted:

Would you prefer trotskys aesthetics?

i love that dr. Seuss character

# ? Jul 18, 2020 00:06

Dreddout: Oct 1, 2015; You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Goast posted:

didn't they figure out helmets by the time the russian revolution came around just look at that dumb loving hat

The Russians didn't have the capacity to mass produce helmets by the time of the civil war. The red army decided on using the budenovka because it was extremely cheap and easy to produce and could protect the head from the elements.

I like it, it gave the red army a tartar horde vibe that was picked up on in propaganda.

# ? Jul 18, 2020 18:24

Mr. Lobe: Feb 23, 2007; ... Dry bones...

uncop posted:

Would you prefer trotskys aesthetics?

I never thought about how exactly those potato masher grenades were stowed before

# ? Jul 18, 2020 20:54

NaanViolence: Mar 1, 2010; by Nyc_Tattoo

Holy poo poo is the WW2 derail over yet? I can only enjoy so many pages of forums poster Enjoy dunking on everyone's feeble defense of Stalin's mistakes.

# ? Jul 19, 2020 08:24

Goast: Jul 23, 2011; by VideoGames

NaanViolence posted:

Holy poo poo is the WW2 derail over yet? I can only enjoy so many pages of forums poster Enjoy dunking on everyone's feeble defense of Stalin's mistakes.

if dipshits like you keep having dumb ww2 takes it will never stop

# ? Jul 19, 2020 08:29

Pomeroy: Apr 20, 2020

NaanViolence posted:

Holy poo poo is the WW2 derail over yet? I can only enjoy so many pages of forums poster Enjoy dunking on everyone's feeble defense of Stalin's mistakes.

Enjoy was the main architect of the derailment, and anyone who wanted to make serious criticisms of Comintern policy between the wars would be furious with Enjoy for poisoning the well with liberal bullshit. gently caress back off to reddit already.

# ? Jul 19, 2020 08:55

Hodgepodge: Jan 29, 2006; Can't post for 229 days!

suggestion: mods, rename enjoy to "sunday friend"

or is that too harsh? :ohdear:

# ? Jul 19, 2020 08:59

NaanViolence: Mar 1, 2010; by Nyc_Tattoo

I've never been stupid enough to use reddit. Sorry for making your canned responses look like poo poo.

# ? Jul 19, 2020 09:05

Goast: Jul 23, 2011; by VideoGames

there is no canned response to "stalin should have invaded germany in 1939" because its such an absurd idea no matter what ideological lens you view that portion of ww2 through

# ? Jul 19, 2020 09:12

MizPiz: May 29, 2013; by Athanatos

Stalin should've personally saved Rosa Luxemburg

# ? Jul 19, 2020 09:16

Comrade Koba: Jul 2, 2007

stalin didn�t go back in time to kill baby hitler, guess he was the real hitler all along

# ? Jul 19, 2020 09:55

Kurnugia: Sep 2, 2014; by Nyc_Tattoo

well he did personally kill more communists than hitler

# ? Jul 19, 2020 09:56

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

Comrade Koba posted:

stalin didn�t go back in time to kill baby hitler, guess he was the real hitler all along

Jeb Bush: Better Than Stalin?

# ? Jul 19, 2020 10:08

Kurnugia: Sep 2, 2014; by Nyc_Tattoo

after carefully considering both stalin and hitler, im still very undecided, but ive been getting back into hitler posting lately

# ? Jul 19, 2020 10:16

Comrade Koba: Jul 2, 2007

Kurnugia posted:

well he did personally kill more communists than hitler

the only guy hitler personally killed was hitler, guess that�s hard to top no matter how you look at it :shrug:

# ? Jul 19, 2020 10:21

Sedisp: Jun 20, 2012

Comrade Koba posted:

the only guy hitler personally killed was hitler, guess that�s hard to top no matter how you look at it

A smile spreads across Stalin's face as he notices the assist counts as kill message.

# ? Jul 19, 2020 11:58

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

Old and Busted: Teddy Roosevelt is so badass, he got shot by a guy and just kept on going with this speech

New Hotness:

# ? Jul 19, 2020 14:57

GalacticAcid: Apr 8, 2013; NEW YORK VALUES

NaanViolence posted:

Holy poo poo is the WW2 derail over yet? I can only enjoy so many pages of forums poster Enjoy dunking on everyone's feeble defense of Stalin's mistakes.

Shut up, freak.

# ? Jul 19, 2020 15:08

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

Seconding whoever recommended Losurdo's book on Stalin. Extremely pro-read:

quote:

[T]he painting drawn by the American historian could here and there be confused with a product of Soviet propaganda, if it had not come from a fiercely anti-communist author! Let�s begin to examine it. In 1921, while the civil war rages on, for some time the Butyrka prison of Moscow operates as follows:

quote:
The prisoners were allowed free run of the prison. They organized morning gymnastic sessions, founded an orchestra and a chorus, created a �club� supplied with foreign journals and a good library. According to tradition―dating back to pre-revolutionary days―every prisoner left behind his books after he was freed. A prisoners� council assigned everyone cells, some of which were beautifully supplied with carpets on the floors and walls. Another prisoner remembered that �we strolled along the corridors as if they were boulevards.� To Babina, prison life seemed unreal: �Can�t they even lock us up seriously?�

Another socialist revolutionary, arrested in 1924 and sent to Savvatievo, is happily surprised to find herself in place that �didn�t resemble a prison at all." Not only can the political prisoners obtain abundant provisions of food and clothing thanks to their contacts, but they could turn their prison cell into the women�s branch of the socialist revolutionaries. Some years later, on the Solovetsky Islands, we see that the prisoners, many of them having been scientists in St. Petersburg, not only had access to a theater and a library with 30,000 volumes, but also had a botanical garden, including �a museum of flora, fauna, and of local art and history."463 It's true, the situation in the prison system at that moment in time was not uniform. However, the ones just stated are not isolated cases. However, even if they should be treated as isolated and happy islands, their existence in itself would be significant.

Of course, there was no absence of protests, but it�s interesting to read the demands (partially accepted) made during a hunger strike by political prisoners (in large part Trotskyists):

quote:
�Expand the library, include newspapers published in the USSR, at least with editions of the KI [Communist International], completely update the economics, politics and literature sections, and the sections with the works of minority languages. Allow the subscription to at least one foreign newspaper. Allow the enrollment in courses by correspondence. Organize for such purposes a special cultural fund, as happens even in criminal penitentiaries [...]. Allow the introduction into prison of all foreign publications permitted in the USSR, in particular the permitted foreign newspapers, including the bourgeois ones [...]. Allow the exchange of books between prisoners and guards [...]. Acquire paper in quantities of no less than ten notebooks per person each month.�464

This is in June of 1931, and the date is significant. While it brings with it a massive expansion of the concentrationary universe, Stalin�s rise to power and the campaign launched by him for the �liquidation of the Kulaks as a class� didn�t dramatically alter the situation existing within that universe. This is not just true for the political prisoners: �the beginning of the thirties [...] were almost �prosperous� and even �liberal� for prisoners." The management of the Gulag showed �a certain level of religious tolerance� and accepted the petition for a vegetarian diet put forward by the members of certain �religious sects."465 What follows is an excerpt on the penal colonies in the far north at the start of the 1930s:

quote:
Needing hospitals, camp administrators built them, and introduced systems for training prisoner pharmacists and prisoner nurses. Needing food, they constructed their own collective farms, their own warehouses, and their own distribution systems. Needing electricity, they built power plants. Needing building materials, they built brick factories.

Needing educated workers, they trained the ones that they had. Much of the ex-kulak workforce turned out to be illiterate or semi-literate, which caused enormous problems when dealing with projects of relative technical sophistication. The camp�s administration therefore set up technical training schools, which required, in turn, more new buildings and new cadres: math and physics teachers, as well as �political instructors� to oversee their work. By the 1940s, Vorkuta―a city built in the permafrost, where roads had to be resurfaced and pipes had to be repaired every year―had acquired a geological institute and a university, theaters, puppet theaters, swimming pools, and nurseries.466

What characterizes the Soviet concentrationary universe is, firstly, the fixation on development, and that fixation, [...] on the other hand has very different consequences. As in the society as a whole, they hope to encourage �socialist emulation� among the prisoners: those who stand out can enjoy �additional food� and �other privileges." And that�s not all:

quote:
Eventually, top performers were also released early: for every three days of work at 100 percent norm-fulfillment, each prisoner received a day off his sentence. When the [White Sea] canal was finally completed, on time, in August 1933, 12,484 prisoners were freed. Numerous others received medals and awards. One prisoner celebrated his early release at a ceremony complete with the traditional Russian presentation of bread and salt, as onlookers shouted, �Hooray for the Builders of the Canal!� In the heat of the moment, he began kissing an unknown woman. Together, they wound up spending the night on the banks of the canal.472

he pedagogical obsession is interlinked with a productive obsession, as shown by the presence in the camps of an �Educational-Cultural Department� (KVC), an institution in which �Moscovite leaders of the Gulag [...] truly believed in." Precisely for that reason they took �wall-newspapers very seriously." Indeed, if we read them, we see that the biographies of the rehabilitated prisoners are written in �a language extraordinarily similar to those of good workers outside the colony�: they worked, studied, made �sacrifices and tried to improve."473 The aim was to �reeducate� the prisoners, transforming them into �Stakhanovites�, among the first in line prepared to participate with patriotic enthusiasm in the development of the country. Let�s turn, then, to the American historian on the Gulag: �In the camps, as in the world outside, �socialist competitions continued to take place�, work competitions in which the detainees competed to see who could produce more. Moreover, they celebrated the Stakhanovite workers for their alleged capacity to triple or quadruple their quotas."474 It�s no coincidence that until 1937, the guard addressed the prisoner as �comrade."475 Being confined to the concentration camp didn�t exclude the possibility of social promotion: �many prisoners ended up working as guards or camp administrators�:476 overall, as we�ve seen, no small number of them learned a profession to exercise following the moment of their release.

# ? Jul 19, 2020 15:52

cenotaph: Mar 2, 2013

Has it been published yet or is this the translation that's already online?

# ? Jul 19, 2020 20:01

GalacticAcid: Apr 8, 2013; NEW YORK VALUES

Gotta be the online one. There�s still a change dot org petition floating around for MR Press or Verso to publish a new translation

# ? Jul 19, 2020 20:27

cenotaph: Mar 2, 2013

Last I saw Sinistra got the rights but their site is down.

# ? Jul 19, 2020 20:32

cenotaph: Mar 2, 2013

They also haven't posted on social media in two years, might not be legit.

# ? Jul 19, 2020 20:35

Ferrinus: Jun 19, 2003; i'm finding this quite easy, i guess in part because i'm a fast type but also because i have a coherent mental model of the world

gradenko_2000 posted:

Seconding whoever recommended Losurdo's book on Stalin. Extremely pro-read:

Another socialist revolutionary, arrested in 1924 and sent to Savvatievo, is happily surprised to find herself in place that �didn�t resemble a prison at all." Not only can the political prisoners obtain abundant provisions of food and clothing thanks to their contacts, but they could turn their prison cell into the women�s branch of the socialist revolutionaries. Some years later, on the Solovetsky Islands, we see that the prisoners, many of them having been scientists in St. Petersburg, not only had access to a theater and a library with 30,000 volumes, but also had a botanical garden, including �a museum of flora, fauna, and of local art and history."463 It's true, the situation in the prison system at that moment in time was not uniform. However, the ones just stated are not isolated cases. However, even if they should be treated as isolated and happy islands, their existence in itself would be significant.

Of course, there was no absence of protests, but it�s interesting to read the demands (partially accepted) made during a hunger strike by political prisoners (in large part Trotskyists):

This is in June of 1931, and the date is significant. While it brings with it a massive expansion of the concentrationary universe, Stalin�s rise to power and the campaign launched by him for the �liquidation of the Kulaks as a class� didn�t dramatically alter the situation existing within that universe. This is not just true for the political prisoners: �the beginning of the thirties [...] were almost �prosperous� and even �liberal� for prisoners." The management of the Gulag showed �a certain level of religious tolerance� and accepted the petition for a vegetarian diet put forward by the members of certain �religious sects."465 What follows is an excerpt on the penal colonies in the far north at the start of the 1930s:

What characterizes the Soviet concentrationary universe is, firstly, the fixation on development, and that fixation, [...] on the other hand has very different consequences. As in the society as a whole, they hope to encourage �socialist emulation� among the prisoners: those who stand out can enjoy �additional food� and �other privileges." And that�s not all:

he pedagogical obsession is interlinked with a productive obsession, as shown by the presence in the camps of an �Educational-Cultural Department� (KVC), an institution in which �Moscovite leaders of the Gulag [...] truly believed in." Precisely for that reason they took �wall-newspapers very seriously." Indeed, if we read them, we see that the biographies of the rehabilitated prisoners are written in �a language extraordinarily similar to those of good workers outside the colony�: they worked, studied, made �sacrifices and tried to improve."473 The aim was to �reeducate� the prisoners, transforming them into �Stakhanovites�, among the first in line prepared to participate with patriotic enthusiasm in the development of the country. Let�s turn, then, to the American historian on the Gulag: �In the camps, as in the world outside, �socialist competitions continued to take place�, work competitions in which the detainees competed to see who could produce more. Moreover, they celebrated the Stakhanovite workers for their alleged capacity to triple or quadruple their quotas."474 It�s no coincidence that until 1937, the guard addressed the prisoner as �comrade."475 Being confined to the concentration camp didn�t exclude the possibility of social promotion: �many prisoners ended up working as guards or camp administrators�:476 overall, as we�ve seen, no small number of them learned a profession to exercise following the moment of their release.

[/quote]

definitely reading this after i finish black bolshevik

# ? Jul 19, 2020 21:14

Atrocious Joe: Sep 2, 2011

https://twitter.com/getfiscal/status/1284927744854327297?s=20

# ? Jul 20, 2020 02:02

Sheng-Ji Yang: Mar 5, 2014

https://twitter.com/CursedBoomers/status/1286044071430062080

# ? Jul 22, 2020 22:05

GalacticAcid: Apr 8, 2013; NEW YORK VALUES

Sheng-Ji Yang posted:

https://twitter.com/CursedBoomers/status/1286044071430062080

Lmao is that really a �cursed boomer image�

seems more like something this thread would have conjured

# ? Jul 22, 2020 22:38

e-dt: Sep 16, 2019

Sheng-Ji Yang posted:

https://twitter.com/CursedBoomers/status/1286044071430062080

It's gone now, what did it say?

# ? Jul 23, 2020 14:33

Raskolnikov38: Mar 3, 2007; We were somewhere around Manila when the drugs began to take hold

something about anarchists being children who only want to eat dessert

# ? Jul 23, 2020 14:39

GalacticAcid: Apr 8, 2013; NEW YORK VALUES

from memory so maybe not verbatim but it was close to "Marxist-Leninists and Anarchists both want dessert, anarchists just don�t wanna eat their veggies first!�

# ? Jul 23, 2020 14:45

Mr. Lobe: Feb 23, 2007; ... Dry bones...

GalacticAcid posted:

from memory so maybe not verbatim but it was close to "Marxist-Leninists and Anarchists both want dessert, anarchists just don’t wanna eat their veggies first!”

It's funny cuz it's true

# ? Jul 23, 2020 15:42

Dreddout: Oct 1, 2015; You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you.

Boomers reinventing lf on facebook

# ? Jul 23, 2020 17:17

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ? May 11, 2024 14:23

exmarx: Feb 18, 2012; The experience over the years
of nothing getting better
only worse.

veggies rule

# ? Jul 24, 2020 06:37

The Something Awful Forums > Archives > Comedy Goldmine > The Goodmine > There is a spectrum haunting C-SPAM. I, on the contrary,

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