|
gradenko_2000 posted:If a socialist doesn't like the centralization and so-called alleged authoritarianism of the actually-existing socialism practiced by the USSR and the PRC, why wouldn't they just turn anarchist instead of trying to split the difference with democratic socialism we're going to vote out property rights
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2020 01:41
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 10, 2024 18:05 |
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:If a socialist doesn't like the centralization and so-called alleged authoritarianism of the actually-existing socialism practiced by the USSR and the PRC, why wouldn't they just turn anarchist instead of trying to split the difference with democratic socialism there’s good people on both sides
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2020 01:43
|
|
|
T-man posted:Bowtie socialism Willy Wonka socialism
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2020 01:46
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:If a socialist doesn't like the centralization and so-called alleged authoritarianism of the actually-existing socialism practiced by the USSR and the PRC, why wouldn't they just turn anarchist instead of trying to split the difference with democratic socialism i would call that social democracy or reformism anyway. people who'd call themselves "democratic socialists" aren't necessarily reformists, or at least don't see themselves as such. they just think that they'll do it right this time because they've had the genius idea of casting votes to make decisions
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2020 03:19
|
|
|
amerikan-style democratic socialism is social democracy. like "socialism is when government provides services" stuff. actual democratic socialism is when u want to achieve socialism thru electoral means i guess.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2020 05:38
|
|
|
V. O. T. E. Vore Only Taunts Elephants
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2020 06:04
|
|
|
exmarx posted:amerikan-style democratic socialism is social democracy. like "socialism is when government provides services" stuff. The second term applies to American socialism as well, in that it doesnt and will not happen.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2020 07:08
|
|
|
imagine thinking you could VOTE! your way into the working class controlling the means of production
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2020 07:23
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:i asked what DETERMINED production, not what MOTIVATED production. as in, how did they decide whether to build a tractor or a luxury car? in america, you decide based on which is more profitable. in the ussr, you decide based on which is more useful to the development of the state. maybe the party "defined" the tractor "as needful based on bullshit numbers" etc etc etc. let's grant for a moment that the party didn't know what the gently caress it was doing, constantly made wrong decisions, whatever. they were still determining production based on use-value rather than exchange-value. even if their calculations as to what would be the most useful were WRONG. bolded the needful. what was useful for the state apparatus is not the same thing as immediate, concrete use value in the lives of citizenry. also, if the states decisions about use-value were based on faulty data or were flawed decisions, then they were only able to produce for use-value in the abstract, even for themselves. this was the whole problem - without exchange value, they were unable to locate use value. what was useful was defined from the bureaucracy based on flawed data, which then maybe sorta kinda got produced with very little quality control (bc workers were still alienated from their boring, repetitive jobs which now had ballooning managerial oversight), what actually got produced got misreported, more flawed use-values orders came down, etc. what kept it going for so long was just sheer overproduction at all levels, and a whole lot of black marketing and secret local production. quote:marx did not at all waffle on, or fail to define, the difference between socialism and communism. marx divided communism into two stages - the "lower stage" in which society engages in production for use rather than production for exchange, but still pays people according to the work they do, and then the "higher stage" in which there's no longer any repressive apparatus and from each/to each is the only law of the land. I find this to be pretty vague and abstract, yes. Trying to get from these definitions to a concrete system even on paper is kind of the whole trick, isn't it? quote:later, lenin called the lower stage socialism and the higher stage communism. what existed in the ussr was "lower stage communism" or "socialism" depending on whose terminology you prefer. I sure hope it wasn't socialism, because it objectively did not get us to communism. this is also a retroactive definition based on lenin's assessment of the Bolshevik situation and the need to distinguish revolutionary projects from reformist 'socialists'. quote:these are all highly specious claims. the party which led a revolution and then defense against a world war didn't have a real support base? who the gently caress did all the farming and mining and manufacturing and soldiering, then? a mostly new proletarianized peasantry dominated by the militarized party state. quote:was each individual collective farmer or factory worker just tricked into believing they were the only one who didn't support the soviet regime, whereas in fact if they'd just asked around they would have realized almost nobody did and they could all safely ignore the politburo? guns, man, guns. you got shot/gulag'd/disappeared for not supporting. like all states, it was a gang of armed men in the last instance. quote:it's a ridiculous idea - no government which actually has no material basis with which to rule can rule, and the basis of the soviet government was the soviet citizenry. griping about your government isn't the same as denying it consent and legitimacy the basis of the soviet state was its military, which broke the back of any possible internal resistance. that's not to say lots of workers and peasants didn't support the state, plenty did, many enthusiastically so, but you can't pretend that there wasn't a coercive apparatus or that they had much of a choice. quote:banning explicit factions isn't the same as banning internal debate. in fact internal debate and criticism was a constant and unrelenting feature of internal committees, meetings, plenums, whatever. you're describing a liberal fantasy of the soviet union as some kind of stifling mind control regime rather than a real-world entity populated by real-world people who obviously disagree, bicker, and strategize just as much as people do in any collective undertaking regardless of its mode of production. the poo poo about the soviets tragically killing or exiting all their best and brightest mainly comes out of the people who were voted out of power and subsequently exiled because their ideas sucked poo poo and past a certain point bringing up the same long-debunked objections over and over again constitutes wrecking and sabotage they killed the old Bolsheviks man. i can't forgive that - those people were the among the greatest heroes of humankind. the USSR never resembled a stifling mind control regime - it was a minority state apparatus desperately trying to get a grip on sheer loving chaos at all levels. the more it gripped, the more chaotic it got, and the bigger the apparatus got. Stalin had to build an entire extra upper echelon of secret police/bureaucracy just to try to get a handle on the ballooning party bureaucracy, which had almost no grip on anything on the ground. the degree to which the state apparatus was rigid, monolithic and militarized was proportional to how bloody little control they actually had over anything. the kind of careerists that always infest this kind of structure are sycophants and yes-men. banning explicit factions didn't end debates and criticism, of course not - but over time ballooning hierarchies to manage the ballooning hierarchies heavily incentivized the advancement of parasite careerists. once people started disappearing in the purges, the smartest learned real quick to keep their mouths shut. this led inexorably to a monolith full of two-faced sychophants and the disappearance of criticism, self and other. when critical thought disappears, the communist horizon evaporates. and no, just because I bring up the purges does not mean I'm a liberal or I think stalin was some monomaniacal dictator. the purges happened because this was siege socialism, there were objectively wreckers and saboteurs, siege mentalities are inherently paranoiac, and the state apparatus was increasingly a monolith that had no factions to check the spread of the paranoia. if anything, stalin tried to limit the damage, but nonetheless many people who stuck out too obviously got hosed. lysenko managed to scam the entire loving apparatus because of its monolithic tendencies. plenty of biologists new he was full of poo poo but kept their mouths shut, because keeping your mouth shut was de facto mandatory just to have a position at all. you need diversity of opinion, you need every idea you can get including the poo poo ones (because being wrong is part of of the process by which you learn to be less wrong), and you absolutely need clear, transparent factional lines so the struggle can go on with a coherent structure on the new socialist terrain. mao was right. this was the big lie the ussr told itself - class struggle stops in socialism. it objectively does not, and if you try to enforce that lie you end up with an ineffectual monolith twisting in the wind. you need factional lines for debate, critical though, and worker/citizen identification with the project. 'us v them' is built into the structure of language. if you kill factions, you get alienated workers vs the state. cooperation and competition are interdependent- you kill one you lose them both. look at the American political system. the 2 parties are a stroke of inspired political genius. people are socialized into identifying with one party or the other. they form their political identities out of an antagonism that is completely artificial. does it matter to the actual oligarchs who holds power? not in the slightest. the American exterminatus rolls on regardless. meanwhile, the loyalty of the citizenry is assured by fact that us red/blue good peoples have to beat those red/blue bastards! identification with an us v them sublated from guns to words is how a political project reproduces itself as a unity. meanwhile back in the USSR over the course of 80 years, the sackless sychophants and careerists took over the whole project and eventually there were a bunch of loving neoliberals in charge. another colossal failure - the USSR, god rest its soul, utterly failed to reproduce committed communist leadership to carry it forward. sure, it's the fastest industrialization in history and beat the snot out of Hitler, but where is it now? 80 years from revolution to collapse - the majority of ancient slave empires lasted longer than this! i get the tendency to defend the ussr, I really do. it was a beautiful, courageous attempt, the loving anthem makes me cry like a baby, if it were still around i would be there right now. there's so much liberal bullshit blotting out the sun and it takes so much work to sift through it that we all have a knee-jerk reaction to defend, defend, defend. but defense is reactive. criticism and self-criticism is the engine we've got, it's the weapon the libs and the fash are absolutely incapable of, and we must proactively and productively criticize our own past if we are to have a hope of ever having another shot. emTme3 fucked around with this message at 09:21 on Sep 30, 2020 |
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2020 08:33
|
|
|
splifyphus posted:bolded the needful. what was useful for the state apparatus is not the same thing as immediate, concrete use value in the lives of citizenry. also, if the states decisions about use-value were based on faulty data or were flawed decisions, then they were only able to produce for use-value in the abstract, even for themselves. this was the whole problem - without exchange value, they were unable to locate use value. what was useful was defined from the bureaucracy based on flawed data, which then maybe sorta kinda got produced with very little quality control (bc workers were still alienated from their boring, repetitive jobs which now had ballooning managerial oversight), what actually got produced got misreported, more flawed use-values orders came down, etc. what kept it going for so long was just sheer overproduction at all levels, and a whole lot of black marketing and secret local production. i noticed that this quote of my post from back in july (?!) ended at a place that gave it kind of a weird cadence, so i decided to go back and see what you were actually responding to. there, on page 989, i discovered that the actual paragraph you're quoting does not place a period at the end of "WRONG" but rather goes on as follows: Ferrinus posted:(which to be clear i don't believe they were, because as Cerebral Bore points out the USSR bootstrapped itself into a superpower given around thirty years), they were still engaged in a mode of production that was not driven by the profit motive so i can't help but notice that you've actually edited my own words in order to make it seem like they stop right before the obvious and simple counter to your claims: in fact, the state apparatus was extremely good at making production and allocation decisions on the basis of use-value, as evidenced by the fact that it allowed a pack of illiterate turnip farmers to defeat the nazis and then land probes on venus. all this stuff about the unaccountable bureaucracy unable to provide for its citizens' needs is just anticommunist wishcasting and doesn't comport with the facts of history. as covered by some very good posts a little earlier in this thread, the late-soviet era of bread lines, empty store shelves, etc actually resulted from a lack of central planning - once liberalization allowed firms to determine their own production rather than follow a plan, various essential but unprofitable consumer goods ceased to be produced because their exchange value wasn't high enough! besides disingenuous, you also seem to be weak on the theory here. you say "without exchange value, they were unable to locate use value." but if you're a marxist, you know that exchange value and use-value are in no way commensurate. gold has incredible exchange value but its use-value is very different from the use-value of a tractor, which is why exchanging russian gold for american tractors was an extremely good idea for the early soviets. you've just wound back up at boilerplate liberal pablum about irreplaceable market efficiencies or whatever quote:I find this to be pretty vague and abstract, yes. Trying to get from these definitions to a concrete system even on paper is kind of the whole trick, isn't it? you've shifted the goalposts here from actually defining to actually achieving socialism. if you're interested in the nitty-gritty of revolution, read people like lenin and mao. but it's very clear from marx's writings what the lower stage of communism is quote:I sure hope it wasn't socialism, because it objectively did not get us to communism. this is also a retroactive definition based on lenin's assessment of the Bolshevik situation and the need to distinguish revolutionary projects from reformist 'socialists'. this is like saying that your omelette couldn't have been made from eggs because everybody knows eggs hatch into chickens in conclusion, was the ussr a state in which commodities were produced for their exchange value, or for their use-value? the latter, as per marx's definition of the lower stage of communism. easy! quote:a mostly new proletarianized peasantry dominated by the militarized party state. okay, you have to get why this is stupid, right? like aside from your tacit admission that there actually was a mass civilian base in the form of the proletariat and peasantry. in the 1930s, the ussr had a population of roughly 170 million people. during world war 2, the red army numbered approximately 3 million men. 1.7% of a population can't actually rule the other 98.3% with sheer force of arms. it doesn't work. soldiers need to eat. soldiers need to be equipped. soldiers have families. i needn't remind you that we're talking about a population that has already violently overthrown its tyrannical rulers within most of its members' lifetimes. obviously, any state needs a repressive apparatus to protect itself from internal threats, but that apparatus only works if the threats constitute an actual minority. there's a non-negotiable need for a supportive-to-disinterested-to-grouchy material basis for any government's rule that is actually waking up and going out to work every morning, people who might well hate those clowns in congress but who still basically believe in the regime's legitimacy. the usa, for instance, has a more or less feral police force that visits unrelenting violence onto a marginalized segment of the civilian populace, and that certainly has a chilling effect on other parts' of the populace willingness to oppose the state, but if you actually think most or even lots of americans are quaking in fear of the cops rather than nodding serenely as those cops ventilate members of minority groups you're kidding yourself. this is a fantasy i keep seeing people indulge in about states in general, whether socialist or capitalist, this idea that the people in power are just constantly rolling 20s on dungeons and dragons intimidation checks and that's the only way they stay in power. if that poo poo worked states wouldn't need all the rest of their propaganda and resource distribution infrastructure quote:they killed the old Bolsheviks man. i can't forgive that - those people were the among the greatest heroes of humankind. the USSR never resembled a stifling mind control regime - it was a minority state apparatus desperately trying to get a grip on sheer loving chaos at all levels. the more it gripped, the more chaotic it got, and the bigger the apparatus got. Stalin had to build an entire extra upper echelon of secret police/bureaucracy just to try to get a handle on the ballooning party bureaucracy, which had almost no grip on anything on the ground. the degree to which the state apparatus was rigid, monolithic and militarized was proportional to how bloody little control they actually had over anything. some of the old bolsheviks killed others of the old bolsheviks because it turns out that insurrections and revolutions are carried out by coalitions of convenience whose constituent parts enter the project with all sorts of personal creeds and ultimate aims. bukharin and stalin agreed on whether tsar nicholas should remain in power. they disagreed on whether farms should be collectivized or allowed to liberalize further. this doesn't mean bukharin wasn't a hero of the revolution or whatever, just that times change and every transformation into a new state brings forth a new set of contradictions which will themselves give rise to another transformation and so forth a big lie you're telling me right now is that the ussr pretended that class struggle stops in socialism. but in fact lenin explicitly wrote, and stalin quoted, that class struggle only sharpens under socialism, hence the continued need for a repressive apparatus to defend the revolution. remember, you're writing about real, actual people who are just as good at noticing that things are amiss as you are, and just as capable as you are of talking about it amongst themselves and at least trying out solutions. these aren't cartoon characters or video game NPCs. "factions" being formally allowed or banned doesn't actually have bearing on this because there's always going to be internal discussion and debate and there are always going to lines of consensus which no one is allowed to cross without expulsion or violence. all the other stuff you're giving me about monoliths and rule through fear is orwell poo poo
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2020 09:53
|
|
|
Oh, cool, another dumbass liberal to own us with surface-level 'analysis' and 100,000 words to say 'actually socialism isnt any more efficient than capitalism so I deserve to be a landlord'
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2020 10:17
|
|
|
Seriously I really did read that random post out of nowhere and my only conclusion is, if that post was in good faith, you're a loving moron so gently caress off, and if it was in bad faith, you're not funny so gently caress off.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2020 10:18
|
|
|
"democratic socialism" is gutless in the imperial core but it seems significantly more effective in the global south. at least, until the imperial regime change machine looks their way.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2020 10:23
|
|
|
allende-sempai.....
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2020 10:31
|
|
|
lol this thread is always freak*ng epic
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2020 11:21
|
|
|
splifyphus posted:bolded the needful. what was useful for the state apparatus is not the same thing as immediate, concrete use value in the lives of citizenry. also, if the states decisions about use-value were based on faulty data or were flawed decisions, then they were only able to produce for use-value in the abstract, even for themselves. this was the whole problem - without exchange value, they were unable to locate use value. what was useful was defined from the bureaucracy based on flawed data, which then maybe sorta kinda got produced with very little quality control (bc workers were still alienated from their boring, repetitive jobs which now had ballooning managerial oversight), what actually got produced got misreported, more flawed use-values orders came down, etc. what kept it going for so long was just sheer overproduction at all levels, and a whole lot of black marketing and secret local production. I think this is still misunderstanding the issue. The Soviet government definitely did not need to measure values to locate use-values, the proof for that is all the unprofitable production they were determined to do. Their data was good enough if flawed, and they by and large got what they wanted and needed. The government learned to measure values in order to maintain a stable currency for the consumer economy: they had tried to ignore value for years and the result had been workers escaping to the countryside so that they'd have some guarantee of a reliable compensation for their labor. And everyone hated the in-kind rationing economy that filled in for the lack of a functional consumer market. The real issue is in how use-values aren't things, they're relations between people and things. A thing is only a use-value for someone, and "producing for use" still begs the question of "the use of whom?" A value-based economy produces for the use of whoever is going to pay the most, a socialist economy produces for the use of whoever has been able to make their concrete political demands heard, either in an informal way ("hey, send us some of that good stuff") or in a formal one ("every shop should have bread available at this cost"). There is no inherent stabilization mechanism between competing demands, and hence no inherent check on overproduction either. And there is no way to just bypass political struggle and somehow produce what would simply make sense for everyone. Like you said later in your post, the big Soviet mistake was imagining (or pretending) that class struggle was over and concluding that it was a purely engineering question to give everyone what they needed and deserved, and therefore workers only needed to follow the plan. The fact was that they still needed unions and so on as independent political organs that could act as opposition: without their own organs of struggle, they had a hard time on the negotiating table and also were led to voice their discontent in unconstructive ways. I think party factions are a dead trot suggestion that comes from the same place as left unity (i.e. assuming that leftists/intellectuals rather than the masses are the key, and generally treating politics like a debate club). The party needs to be dependent on the support of the masses to get things done, just as it used to be before taking power. If it can't secure support, it shouldn't be governing. Hence also my old cries for constitutionalism: without generally recognized formalities, how does one uphold the capacity and readiness for incredible violence that is necessary for workers to hold onto real political power, while also avoiding a violent society? Workers need an independent and potent justice and violence apparatus, and it must be structurally uncapturable by careerists, but it can't escalate in an arbitrary and localized manner that just produces further controversy instead of settling things.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2020 11:26
|
|
|
gradenko_2000 posted:If a socialist doesn't like the centralization and so-called alleged authoritarianism of the actually-existing socialism practiced by the USSR and the PRC, why wouldn't they just turn anarchist instead of trying to split the difference with democratic socialism because they haven't actually read and understood any underlying leftist theory and practice
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2020 11:31
|
|
|
"i hate centralization, this sucks" *votes a lib into an office 3000km away*
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2020 12:59
|
|
|
i only support undemocratic socialism
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2020 13:28
|
|
|
uncop posted:Like you said later in your post, the big Soviet mistake was imagining (or pretending) that class struggle was over and concluding that it was a purely engineering question to give everyone what they needed and deserved, and therefore workers only needed to follow the plan. is this true? aside from the fact that lenin's and stalin's writings affirmed the exact opposite, it's pretty obvious that the question of whether to invest into heavy industry or consumer goods is a political as well as a technical decision, unless you're willing to stretch "technical" to the point of "well, scientifically speaking, to optimize for consumer goods 20 years from now we'll need a lot of tanks in 10"
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2020 17:50
|
|
|
apropos to nothing posted:lol this thread is always freak*ng epic Ignore any post longer than a paragraph and it's not so bad.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2020 19:12
|
|
|
T-man posted:Ignore any post longer than a paragraph and it's not so bad. In my opinion if you cant express a thought in about 6 sentences at most, you don't know what you're talking about.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2020 19:47
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:is this true? aside from the fact that lenin's and stalin's writings affirmed the exact opposite, it's pretty obvious that the question of whether to invest into heavy industry or consumer goods is a political as well as a technical decision, unless you're willing to stretch "technical" to the point of "well, scientifically speaking, to optimize for consumer goods 20 years from now we'll need a lot of tanks in 10" Not immediately, but it shows up and strengthens with time: first in the early-mid 30's in the declaration of socialism and the end of internal class antagonisms, then during and after WW2 with the whole national defense effort, and culminating in Khrushchev's "dictatorship of the whole people". I think it's by definition scientifically triumphalist to trust in planners and managers to direct the economy and to judge them simply by the economic results they get on paper. People were suspicious of them being wreckers, not so much them collectively taking society in their hands and making it serve them as a ruling class would. The Soviets, including critics like Trotsky, just fundamentally did not conceive the struggle against bureaucracy as a class struggle, and consequently considered resisting workers to be engaged in wrecking rather than principled struggle.
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2020 20:30
|
|
|
my understanding is that planners and managers didn't actually and literally direct the economy, but instead produce the equivalent of a first draft which would then be passed down the chain for revision and approval before returning to the supreme soviet for finalization and implementation. obviously highly placed party members and bureaucrats would in practice still be exerting much more power over the plan than collective farmer #803 out in the sticks somewhere, and obviously there's always going to be an arbitrary line drawn between legitimate and illegitimate protest that excludes some people who themselves feel as though they have very legitimate grievances and no other means of voicing them, but i don't think it was true that rank and file workers and peasantry had no opportunity for pushback save the kind of resistance that would get them accused of being capitalist roaders
Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Sep 30, 2020 |
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2020 21:19
|
|
|
T-man posted:Ignore any post longer than a paragraph and it's not so bad. im actually typically the guy guilty of this but more just how out of touch so many people seem about like...everything. like its good that democratic socialism is popular as a word, it destigmatizes socialism and lets you talk about, folks outta go back 10 years and see how easy it was to talk to people on the street about socialism then. also that big long post was more or less right even though lol at necroing a convo from 20 pages ago and also lol at larry callin the dude a lib landlord when hes literally explaining communism but also just lol @ larryin general, glad we got him reinstated, go team
|
|
#
?
Sep 30, 2020 23:40
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/RadEmpanada/status/1311433368735809544?s=20
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2020 00:46
|
|
|
apropos to nothing posted:im actually typically the guy guilty of this but more just how out of touch so many people seem about like...everything. like its good that democratic socialism is popular as a word, it destigmatizes socialism and lets you talk about, folks outta go back 10 years and see how easy it was to talk to people on the street about socialism then. also that big long post was more or less right even though lol at necroing a convo from 20 pages ago and also lol at larry callin the dude a lib landlord when hes literally explaining communism but also just lol @ larryin general, glad we got him reinstated, go team Did you not read the part where he clearly fell for the USSR HAD NO DEMOCRACY meme.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2020 02:21
|
|
|
Don't lay the blame on this one in Miami. The show's set in LA and the show runner is apparently from SoCal too.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2020 02:43
|
|
|
Larry Parrish posted:Did you not read the part where he clearly fell for the USSR HAD NO DEMOCRACY meme. he was just trying to teach us some basic communist principles like how it's impossible to run an economy without market signals and like how sustained military intimidation of the citizenry was the only thing holding the ussr together
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2020 02:53
|
|
|
Wonder how many slaves that family owned
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2020 02:59
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:my understanding is that planners and managers didn't actually and literally direct the economy, but instead produce the equivalent of a first draft which would then be passed down the chain for revision and approval before returning to the supreme soviet for finalization and implementation. obviously highly placed party members and bureaucrats would in practice still be exerting much more power over the plan than collective farmer #803 out in the sticks somewhere, and obviously there's always going to be an arbitrary line drawn between legitimate and illegitimate protest that excludes some people who themselves feel as though they have very legitimate grievances and no other means of voicing them, but i don't think it was true that rank and file workers and peasantry had no opportunity for pushback save the kind of resistance that would get them accused of being capitalist roaders There is some of that, but at least during the 1920s/1930s, a lot of it was simply brass tacks of the fact that the government needed x of a product at y cost to to pay for z amount of imports, and while managers (especially in the oil industry) had a lot of say in how this got done, there were clear limits of what could be done. It wasn't that the Soviet leadership didn't keep a close ear to the ground over protests and complaints but it had to be rationalized into the overall plan and usually the plan itself (even before 1927) was the important factor. I would say during the Kosygin reforms, an individual manager would have a lot more say in what was occurring, but the reforms didn't make much sense because the Soviets still needed price controls to allow society to function. Kosygin found out that the problem really wasn't the mechanics of central planning that were so much the problem but the basic strictures of material resources. As for the Soviet Union being a "military prison"....eh most of the Red Army was always made up of conscripts from 1918 to 1991. There were of course separate NKVD/OGPU units but usually, they were assigned to specific strategic areas (like Baku or the Polish border.) Otherwise, the state having a monopoly on violence is basically how modern human civilization has always worked (and before that it was whatever warlord was around). Ardennes fucked around with this message at 03:22 on Oct 1, 2020 |
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2020 03:18
|
|
|
Larry Parrish posted:Oh, cool, another dumbass liberal to own us with surface-level 'analysis' and 100,000 words to say 'actually socialism isnt any more efficient than capitalism so I deserve to be a landlord' Except they did actually own you and your tldr response is pathetic. Try harder.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2020 04:09
|
|
|
NaanViolence posted:Except they did actually own you and your tldr response is pathetic. Try harder. No, u
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2020 04:20
|
|
|
some shows are binge worthy, others... purge worthy.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2020 04:21
|
|
|
Mr. Lobe posted:imagine thinking you could VOTE! your way into the working class controlling the means of production well the state has a monopoly on violence and surveillance is pretty good these days so where does that leave you
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2020 05:02
|
|
|
mila kunis posted:well the state has a monopoly on violence and surveillance is pretty good these days so where does that leave you Waiting for death
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2020 06:47
|
|
|
you're not getting anywhere by simply abolishing the monopoly of violence on an institutional basis, that's a recipe for a gangster society. if there is to be rule by law then those laws need to be enforced somehow. another big problem in the soviet union was the politicisation of structural violence, where the decision to e.g. close a factory had to be deliberate and would lead to people losing their livelihoods. over the long term, this leads to expensive moscow steelworks producing enormous losses for the country because they can't be shut down, because the Union needs its own steel (reasonable - it was under siege and steel is a vital strategic resource) and moscow workers are right at the imperial centre. market economies get away with assigning that violence to the Market, praise be to it, so that it's nobody's actual fault, which allows it to move stuff around and take advantage of people's relative poverty to drive down costs
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2020 06:59
|
|
|
Larry Parrish posted:Did you not read the part where he clearly fell for the USSR HAD NO DEMOCRACY meme. Trots have always believed that idiotic meme
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2020 07:56
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:my understanding is that planners and managers didn't actually and literally direct the economy, but instead produce the equivalent of a first draft which would then be passed down the chain for revision and approval before returning to the supreme soviet for finalization and implementation. obviously highly placed party members and bureaucrats would in practice still be exerting much more power over the plan than collective farmer #803 out in the sticks somewhere, and obviously there's always going to be an arbitrary line drawn between legitimate and illegitimate protest that excludes some people who themselves feel as though they have very legitimate grievances and no other means of voicing them, but i don't think it was true that rank and file workers and peasantry had no opportunity for pushback save the kind of resistance that would get them accused of being capitalist roaders IMO that's just a practical definition of "directing the economy". Of course they couldn't just make the economy do whatever they wanted and had to consult people who were closer to the action. But unions were a consultative body whose task was to get workers to sign off on other people's decisions, they didn't have the right to organize disruptive resistance against management and force their hand like we think of unions doing. Workers had official channels to complain, but they weren't empowered to struggle if their demands weren't met. Everyone was conceived to be part of the same team in the end, and it doesn't make sense for a team to sabotage itself. But that is precisely denial of class struggle within socialist production.
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2020 08:56
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 10, 2024 18:05 |
|
|
https://twitter.com/mozsfashynipple/status/1311455689349492736
|
|
#
?
Oct 1, 2020 10:42
|
|