indigi posted:

I’m also guilty of this and wondering why the gently caress I care so much

dead gay comedy forums posted:

Unfortunately, not only it is a very toothless position to be in, Ideal-Socialism-Is-Not-About-That is a pretty empty place without any real people, because it can't offer anything of substance to anyone. This is the moral failure of that position, because ultimately if that leftist wants to be serious and get the gently caress out of that limbo, they have to stiffen their spine and affirm themselves in their conviction. In other words, in relation to this subject, they have to consider the merits and flaws of the different socialist experiences through history and own it accordingly.

quote:

Denmark: Non-whites shouldn’t exceed 30% of any neighbourhood

https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/denmark-non-whites-shouldn-t-exceed-30-of-any-neighbourhood-45125

Denmark has announced that it will limit the number of ethnic minorities in neighbourhoods to up to 30 percent in an apparent bid to "reduce the risk of religious and cultural parallel societies."

Some have branded the decision to limit "non-Western" residents as a "white supremacist" idea that avoids tackling racism in the country and keeps immigrant communities from integrating into society.

The announcement by the Social Democratic government will scrap the controversial term "ghetto" currently being used in legislation to describe immigrant neighbourhoods.

Instead the government will opt for the term "non-Western" arguing that neighbourhoods should not allow ethnic minorities to exceed 30 percent within 10 years.

Denmark has had some of the most draconian immigration policies in Europe, which the leftist Social Democratic party led by Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen has continued since gaining power in 2019.

In 2015, the country ran a series of controversial ads in Lebanese newspapers warning refugees to stay away.

The country in 2017 enacted a so-called 'jewellery law' which would see the state confiscate assets from refugees above $1,300 using the proceeds to pay for their upkeep. The United Nations described the decision as "at a minimum inhumane and degrading."

In 2018, the right-wing Danish government introduced laws that only deepened ethnic divisions in the country by designating areas with more than 50 percent ethnic minorities as "ghetto areas."

Under the proposals, children would be forcefully separated from their parents, starting from one to receive special education. Crimes committed in ghetto areas could also result in a double sentence.

International condemnation hasn't, however, dented consecutive governments enacting incrementally draconian legislation. More recently, the Danish state created an island where it would banish refugees until their case was processed.

Even as the civil war in Syria continues, the Danish government considers the parts of the country controlled by the Assad regime safe enough to return refugees. This year it became the first European country to deport Syrians back to the country.

The latest announcement is part of an anti-immigrant political consensus that has emerged in the country that spans the left and the right.

Following the latest decision, one activist said, "we need to stop putting Denmark on a progressive pedestal."

In 2018 the country banned the face-veil for Muslim women, which activists decried as enacting laws that "exclusively target the Muslim minority."

Increasingly Muslims feel that they have become scapegoats in the country. In the run-up to the 2019 elections, there was an increase in anti-Muslim rhetoric resulting in hate crimes against the community.

quote:

Currently, the only European Union country with more pigs than people is Denmark, with Eurostat figures from 2016 putting its pig-to-human population at 215 pigs for every 100 people. Denmark's human population is 5.7m, meaning that there are approximately 12.3m pigs.

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

but it's interesting to me that ho chi minh's reputation in the U.S. is relatively positive outside the most reactionary anticommunist right wingers, more often liberals will try to recuperate him and wash out the marxism-leninism. there isn't as much rush to condemn him as some "dictator." which i would reckon has to do with the simple fact that he won, and that there was more resistance in academia and in other western countries to the most hard right interpretations of the legacy of the vietnamese revolution. the USSR, on the other hand, has a very different interpretation in western countries and practically zero history that isn't influenced by either trotskyism or CIA-backed area studies -- and those who are interested in the history of the USSR and are sympathetic to it, rush to "vindicate" it, for whatever reason. actually, all the bad stuff that happened was just made up to slander it, or whatever, which has the unfortunate side effect of suggesting there are no mistakes to learn from it.

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

but it's interesting to me that ho chi minh's reputation in the U.S. is relatively positive outside the most reactionary anticommunist right wingers, more often liberals will try to recuperate him and wash out the marxism-leninism. there isn't as much rush to condemn him as some "dictator." which i would reckon has to do with the simple fact that he won, and that there was more resistance in academia and in other western countries to the most hard right interpretations of the legacy of the vietnamese revolution. the USSR, on the other hand, has a very different interpretation in western countries and practically zero history that isn't influenced by either trotskyism or CIA-backed area studies -- and those who are interested in the history of the USSR and are sympathetic to it, rush to "vindicate" it, for whatever reason. actually, all the bad stuff that happened was just made up to slander it, or whatever, which has the unfortunate side effect of suggesting there are no mistakes to learn from it.

BrutalistMcDonalds posted:

Dreddout posted:

"Dengism" much like, "obuamunism", is a made up term no one describes themselves as, the guy's been dead for decades.

The PRC was state capitalist before deng in the sense that Leninism understands lower stage socialism to be a state capitalist economy controlled by a communist party. The USSR was understood to be state capitalist by it's theorists as well.

Enjoy posted:

isn't state capitalism also an imprecise term? i've seen it mean "the state acts like a capitalist in extracting surplus and reinvesting it in the means of production", but also as a synonym for the right-wing phrase "crony capitalism", and even as just "the state intervenes in the market" (like "social democracy" but with negative connotations)

nvm there was another post about this point

Dreddout posted:

Trots and ultras like to pull the state capitalist card as a gotcha, but in reality the only alternative to this strategy was a socialist revolution suceeding in an advanced industrialized country. Which up until this point has yet to happen.

namesake posted:

That whole line of thought is undone by simply observing that industrialisation or industrial development does not inherently mean capitalism. The USSR refuted the idea its economy was predominantly state capitalist, plenty of Trotskist and other anti-USSR tendencies analysed it and called it other things, having read some of the arguments about the IS traditions use of the term I find it lacking, it's just bonkers to take some pre-revolutionary term and declare that's what actually happened.

Dreddout posted:

That's the term lenin used for the USSRs economic system. It shouldn't be controversial to us Lenin's terminology when discussing Leninist policy.

Economic development in the soviet union revolved around the state acting as the primary capitalist. The state extracted the surplus value of the working class and reinvested it according to whatever the planners decided was needed in order to grow the economy.

It was socialized capitalism with the goal of building towards socialism. Lenin didn't think this was an ideal state of affairs but he thought it was the best option given the failure of the German revolution.

I'm not sure why you want to die on this hill.

mawarannahr posted:

the logical endpoint of social democracy




also

mawarannahr posted:

the logical endpoint of social democracy

also

GalacticAcid posted:

namesake posted:

That whole line of thought is undone by simply observing that industrialisation or industrial development does not inherently mean capitalism. The USSR refuted the idea its economy was predominantly state capitalist, plenty of Trotskist and other anti-USSR tendencies analysed it and called it other things, having read some of the arguments about the IS traditions use of the term I find it lacking, it's just bonkers to take some pre-revolutionary term and declare that's what actually happened.

Dreddout posted:

Trots and ultras like to pull the state capitalist card as a gotcha, but in reality the only alternative to this strategy was a socialist revolution suceeding in an advanced industrialized country. Which up until this point has yet to happen.

quote:

Since day one of the Russian Revolution, friends, foes, and others have disputed the actual class structure of the USSR. On one point, most admirers and many detractors agreed: in terms of class, the USSR was socialism en route to communism. Among critics, some saw it as a "degenerated" or "deformed" socialism or collectivism, while others judged it to be a bureaucratic or state capitalism. Some even construed the USSR's class structure to be a merger of private and state capitalist enterprises akin to European fascisms. The groping for appropriate names to identify the USSR's class structure-and the above are but a sample-reflected both its uniqueness and disagreements over how to understand it. Intense passions, ideological commitments, and high practical stakes attached to these terms in a debate that has flared up recurringly from 1917 through the present. A small but significant part of that debate has focused on the term "state capitalism." However, neither supporters nor opponents of using this term for the USSR's class structure ever defined it as we did in chapter 3 above. Instead, they deployed the word "capitalist" to refer to a particular distribution of ownership of means of production or, most often, to a particular distribution of political power or to combinations of both. Thus, the long-standing disagreements over the definition of class resurface again. Where we use a surplus labor concept of class to build an analysis of the USSR's class structure as largely capitalist, other references to state capitalism have marginalized or, more often, altogether ignored surplus labor. This chapter aims to demonstrate how both their analyses and conclusions consequently differ fundamentally from ours.

quote:

On the other side, early defenders of the Soviet Union's development path, including Lenin, also used the term state capitalism, but positively. Reminiscent of Engels's remark, they saw Soviet state capitalism as a necessary stage between the overthrow of capitalism and the achievement of socialism (not to speak of communism). In Lenin's view, the unforeseeable twists and turns of social conditions forced the Soviet leadership periodically (and always conditionally) to rely on a controlled "state capitalism" as the means to their socialist ends: The workers ... are advancing towards socialism precisely through the capitalist management of trusts, through gigantic machine industry, through enterprises which have a turnover of several millions per year-only through such a system of production and such enterprises. The workers are not petty bourgeois. They are not afraid oflarge-scale 'state capitalism', they prize it as their proletarian weapon which their Soviet power will use.9 In effect, Lenin was arguing that state capitalism, if under the control of workers committed to the transition to socialism (i.e., Communists), was an acceptable as well as necessary stage for the USSR to pass through. The transition was ongoing so long as Soviet power was secure. Not the organization of surplus labor, but rather power relationships stood at the core of such qualified endorsements of state capitalism in the USSR. In the years after Lenin's death in 1923, the term state capitalism was less frequently used by defenders of the USSR as a descriptive or analytic term for state industry. After Stalin's ascendancy in the late 1920s, it vanished (Bettelheim 1978, 371-372). Instead, those who admired or defended the USSR's actual class structure labeled it socialism. Having abolished private property in the means of production, replaced markets with state planning, and subordinated the state to the workers' power via the Communist Party, they reasoned, the USSR had thereby eliminated capitalist exploitation and classes altogether. With socialism secure and communism ahead, there was no possible object for and hence no need to undertake class analyses of Soviet society.10 Ironically, most Marxian defenses of the USSR thus came to share with most anti-Marxian defenses of Western capitalism a strong disinclination to use any class qua surplus analysis. The defenders' reasons for banishing class analysis in this way included the undesirable and uncomfortable connotations of phrases like state capitalism or class structure. Having achieved the USSR's survival at stupendous social costs, its defenders could not tolerate phrases that seemed to them to denigrate the achievement and render those costs in vain. They also sought to distance themselves from and to counterattack the critics who denounced state capitalism in the USSR. The defenders thus rejected the notion of state capitalism as hostile propaganda. State capitalism evolved then as a concept used chiefly by critics to attack Soviet leaders and social development for betraying the 1917 revolution's goals.

quote:

The history of discussion of state capitalism-like the history of so many other aspects of the Soviet experience-reveals the conceptual blinders of its time. The passions of the 1917 revolutionaries and their czarist and liberal enemies, of the Stalinists and Trotskyists, and of the cold warriors endlessly juxtaposing state and private property and planning and markets: most were obsessed with power. They struggled, albeit in different ways and toward different ends, to understand and transform the distribution of power in society as the key lever by which to shape history. They presumed, rarely stopping to wonder why, that power was the object that must be the focus of theoretical attention and political action. Marxian class analyses thus became analyses of the distribution of power, whereas Marx had prioritized surplus labor for revolutionary attention. Marxists defined classes literally and almost exclusively in terms of who wielded power over objects and other people: capitalists or the propertyless masses. Anti-Marxian analyses likewise focused on power, equating Marxism with centralized, economically inefficient, dictatorial statism and contrasting private capitalism as equivalent to individualism, democracy, and economic efficiency. Because power was the essence on all sides, no one felt the need to pay much attention to surplus labor. Theorists did not do so, nor did the Soviet authorities in the planning or execution of state policy. Nor did the workers and managers in enterprises. One result was theoretical and practical blindness to the enduringly capitalist form of the production, appropriation, and distribution of surplus labor insid the USSR. Another result was the inability to see, let alone address, the ways in which the maintenance of a state capitalist class structure-conceived as socialism by most supporters and enemies alike-contributed to many of the USSR's deepening nonclass problems, including those which finally provoked its collapsee.

V. Illych L. posted:

who on earth is this

V. Illych L. posted:

who on earth is this

mawarannahr posted:

the logical endpoint of social democracy

Marx Headroom posted:

Yep Israel already pushing the frontier of border guarding tech



Coming soon to own on video and DVD a border near you!!

namesake posted:

Lenin (died January 21, 1924)

Xaris posted:

children of men was a documentary

it's pretty clear that this is going to be terminus. climate wars are only just kicking off and look at how very meager ~1-2m afghan/syrian refugees resulted in right-wing parties taking over significant power across the continent (sometimes minority, sometimes bigger like poland, hungary, turkey, uk, etc) and uk loving off to suicide their own country splitting in half. all this coupled with failing liberal democracy policies and domestic people struggling more and more with wage stagnation and rising rents and col furthering the friction of failed social democracy and trying to preserve it by othering and scapegoating. just wait till more megadroughts, indus etc start to run dry, and mega constant deadly heatwaves with predictable resulting resource wars and people seeking to find a stable life. they'll probably start buying some of those automated machine guns that israel is making and deploying.

smarxist posted:

i have a lot of feelings about state capitalism but yeah, I'm not sure what they expect a revolution to look like beyond the wanton murder, insofar as actually reorganizing society and the means of production.

Yossarian-22 posted:

pretty sure trotsky was a bad trotskyist as he was pretty willing and able to do the whole wanton murder thing, for better or worse. he was definitely no moralist

Ferrinus posted:

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

Josef Stalin, The Immediate task of the Party in the National Question posted:

2. If from the 65,000,000 non-Great-Russian population we exclude the Ukraine, Byelorussia, a small part of Azerbaijan, and Armenia, which in some degree have been through the period of industrial capitalism, there remains a population of about 25,000,000, mainly Tyurks (Turkestan, the greater part of Azerbaijan, Da-ghestan, the Highlanders, Tatars, Bashkirs, Kirghiz, etc.), who have not gone through any capitalist development, have little or no industrial proletariat, and in most cases have retained their pastoral economy and patriarchal-tribal manner of life (Kirghizia, Bashkiria, North Caucasus), or who have not gone beyond the primitive forms of a semi-patriarchal, semi-feudal manner of life (Azerbaijan, the Crimea, etc.) but have already been drawn into the common channel of Soviet development.

The Party's task in relation to the labouring masses of these peoples (in addition to the task indicated in Point 1) is to help them to eliminate the survivals of patriarchal-feudal relations and to draw them into the work of building a Soviet economy on the basis of Soviets of toiling peasants, by creating among these peoples strong communist organisations capable of utilising the experience of the Russian workers and peasants in Soviet-economic construction and, at the same time, capable of taking into account in their construction work all the specific features of the economic situation, the class structure, culture and manner of life of each nationality concerned, while refraining from mechanically transplanting from central Russia economic measures that are suitable only for a different, higher stage of economic development.

Josef Stalin, Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party posted:

The point is that a number of nationalities, chiefly Tyurk—comprising about 25,000,000 people—have not been through, did not manage to go through, the period of industrial capitalism, and, therefore, have no industrial proletariat, or scarcely any; consequently, they will have to skip the stage of industrial capitalism and pass from the primitive forms of economy to the stage of Soviet economy. To be able to perform this very difficult but by no means impossible operation, it is necessary to take into account all the specific features of the economic condition, and even of the historical past, manner of life and culture of these nationalities. It would be unthinkable and dangerous to transplant to the territories of these nationalities the measures that had force and significance here, in central Russia. Clearly, in applying the economic policy of the R.S.F.S.R., it is absolutely necessary to take into account all the specific features of the economic condition, the class structure and the historical past confronting us in these border regions. There is no need for me to dwell on the necessity of putting an end to such incongruities as, for example, the order issued by the People's Commissariat of Food that pigs be included in the food quotas to be obtained from Kirghizia, the Moslem population of which has never raised pigs. This example shows how obstinately some people refuse to take into account peculiarities of the manner of life which strike the eye of every traveller.

GalacticAcid posted:

opened this thread on my phone and the suggested searches when i clicked the browser are pretty good

dead gay comedy forums posted:

fwiw from what I remember of the NEP during my political econ classes, Bukharin's take was idiotic ("enrich yourselves", what a loving rear end in a top hat) but Lenin's and the other Bolshevik theoreticians was somewhat sound in relation to internal commerce and distribution of goods, which was the major loving deal to solve in a planned economy. IIRC Lenin was rather sour on the final form it went for approval, as he preferred a stronger centrally planned model.

BTW, here is where you have imho Stalin's finest hour as a theoretician, as he went for the kill against Bukharin and the rest especially regarding the complete dumbassery they did on trying to push for para-capitalist economic relations in parts of the Union that did not see even the most basic forms of development in that regard. Like, he extensively talks about the cultural and historical factors of the other republics to be considered in any sort of economic strategy, which is rather admirable there. Pity his brain went to loving mush later on



("some people" = Bukharin and others, I rate a solid 8 in the savagery scale)

dead gay comedy forums posted:

fwiw from what I remember of the NEP during my political econ classes, Bukharin's take was idiotic ("enrich yourselves", what a loving rear end in a top hat) but Lenin's and the other Bolshevik theoreticians was somewhat sound in relation to internal commerce and distribution of goods, which was the major loving deal to solve in a planned economy. IIRC Lenin was rather sour on the final form it went for approval, as he preferred a stronger centrally planned model.

BTW, here is where you have imho Stalin's finest hour as a theoretician, as he went for the kill against Bukharin and the rest especially regarding the complete dumbassery they did on trying to push for para-capitalist economic relations in parts of the Union that did not see even the most basic forms of development in that regard. Like, he extensively talks about the cultural and historical factors of the other republics to be considered in any sort of economic strategy, which is rather admirable there. Pity his brain went to loving mush later on



("some people" = Bukharin and others, I rate a solid 8 in the savagery scale)

GalacticAcid posted:

Yossarian-22 posted:

where some slice of the working class is upset with the pace of work decided on by the supreme soviet or people's congress or equivalent, isn't able to negotiate a change, goes on strike, and gets crushed by the state

right, the way any working class of any capitalist country resists the pace of work, nerd

which in this case represents the other 98% of the working class who, actually, really wants those munitions or solar panels or whatever to get manufactured on the agreed-upon terms, please

bizarre strawman attempt to delegitimize strikes in china, obfuscate them, and then act like you have your finger on the pulse of 98% of the chinese public

i understand how you would take this view if you really think that china is "speedrunning capitalism" with the aim of ultimately putting it under working-class control but i've seen no evidence that this is the case. it doesn't have to follow that china=a capitalist state with the same exact form and function as western capitalist regimes but you kind of show your whole rear end when you treat distressed workers as though they're some odd malignancy on the body politic

i guess i'm also baffled at the fact that so many "anti-revisionist marxists" in here who probably would have supported the cultural revolution seem to be total dengists. edit: that came off more angry than i intended it to lol

Yossarian-22 posted:

"speedrunning capitalism" is a convenient way to wrap one's mind around it without finding anything to be particularly objectionable about that