[Marx] I put on my anti-coat and wizard hat

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > [Marx] I put on my anti-coat and wizard hat

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(Thread IKs: dead gay comedy forums)

COPE 27: Sep 11, 2006

Cleanse the asiatic race by not providing liquidity to banks offering home loans west of the Urals

# ? Sep 9, 2021 04:58

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# ? May 24, 2024 14:14

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

quote:

I'm reading a biography of Deng Xiaoping and I'm getting the sense that the Sino-Soviet split had its roots in Khrushchev: it seems like Mao and the Central Committee did not agree with the Secret Speech, the "anti-cult of personality" policy, and the denunciations of Stalin, and this was exacerbated by disagreements on how to handle the crises of the Polish October and the Hungarian uprising. This was later exacerbated by the Soviets adopting a policy of "peaceful coexistence" with the US, along with foreign policy disagreements regarding Taiwan and India.

In the previous book I read, on the Sino-Vietnamese war, by that time the rift between China and the USSR was already significant, to the point where China regarded Vietnam as their "Cuba", analogous to the US, but it seems like the seeds for this were sown by as early as 1956.

EDIT: okay yeah it really sounds like the charge of "revisionism" derived from Khrushchev denouncing Chinese communes, adopting a line of the possibility of peaceful coexistence, and of a peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism.

quote:
Khrushchev is a poor Marxist. . . . His world view is empirical, his ideological method is metaphysics, he is a great power chauvinist and a bourgeois liberal. . . . Meeting with Khrushchev on many occasions, I observed that this is a man who doesn�t understand Marxism-Leninism, whose knowledge is superficial, who does not understand the method of class analysis, and is like a correspondent of a news agency: whichever the way the wind blows, he turns in that direction.

Cross-posting this here because I keep bouncing around topics in the Eurasia thread.

Continuing with my reading, it seems like one can draw a direct line because Khrushchev's denunciations of the "cult of personality" and anti-Stalinism, and the Cultural Revolution. As far as I can tell, Mao saw what Khrushchev did to the USSR's politics, and became so concerned with the possibility of a "Chinese Khrushchev" lurking within the party's senior leadership that he came up with the idea of the Cultural Revolution in order to motivate the people to rise up and purge the capitalist roaders.

# ? Sep 9, 2021 09:01

genericnick: Dec 26, 2012

gradenko_2000 posted:

Cross-posting this here because I keep bouncing around topics in the Eurasia thread.

Continuing with my reading, it seems like one can draw a direct line because Khrushchev's denunciations of the "cult of personality" and anti-Stalinism, and the Cultural Revolution. As far as I can tell, Mao saw what Khrushchev did to the USSR's politics, and became so concerned with the possibility of a "Chinese Khrushchev" lurking within the party's senior leadership that he came up with the idea of the Cultural Revolution in order to motivate the people to rise up and purge the capitalist roaders.

I've been listening to:
https://soundcloud.com/thesocialistprogram/chinas-foreign-policy-complete-series-bonus-content-1949-today
which is a six hour plus podcast about Chinese foreign policy. I got it from somewhere in CSPAM, so it might have been posted here already.

What I get as China's key grievances:
The USSR was genuinely concerned with not blowing up the world, but didn't bring China along to the negotiations with the US. With Korea, Tibet, and Taiwan, things were still pretty hot and close to home for the Chinese and they felt like they were getting sold out.
In fact, when they signed the NPT, China was still a few years out from testing it's own bombs.
China was pretty mad about Indonesia, while the USSR basically shrugged and went back to negotiate spheres of interest.
At some point before the points above Khrushchev recalled Soviet advisors.
The USSR didn't have their backs in the war with India.

# ? Sep 9, 2021 09:51

crepeface: Nov 5, 2004; r*p*f*c*

ha, I posted the same thing in response to gradenko when he posted that in the Eurasia thread:

crepeface posted:

I just finished listening to a 6 hour podcast (7 parts) about China's foreign policy from 1949 to the present while assembling some furniture so obtuse and diabolical that I'm convinced that this is China's revenge strike for the century of humiliation.

anyway, they attribute the largest break of sino-soviet relations as because of krushev meeting the Americans and agreeing on peace and nuclear non-proliferation at a meeting that excluded China while the US were aggressive in their region. USSR didn't like that china wasn't accepting their lead and recalled the scientists they had stationed in China for over a decade giving them help. china felt like USSR was behaving like a "great nation" dictating terms rather than promoting socialism and the US exploited these divisions by playing them against each other.

but even before Stalin's death, there were differences like Soviets being less globally confrontational than China, who were building up allies in the third world. there were also differences in how China chose to develop its economy compared to the path the USSR took (more focus on peasants etc)

part 1 is more focused on setting up the state of affairs with USSR and USA but is still probably worth listening, but part 2 is where they focus on the Sino-Soviet split:
https://twitter.com/TheSocProgram/status/1390419032826781697?t=Thi6X7GZ8BGNeep6Wx-2uA&s=19

or you can mainline the whole thing:
https://twitter.com/TheSocProgram/status/1421526521060093955?s=19

# ? Sep 9, 2021 11:39

genericnick: Dec 26, 2012

crepeface posted:

ha, I posted the same thing in response to gradenko when he posted that in the Eurasia thread:

Hah, pretty sure I got it from that post. Just had the tab open with a vague memory that it's from CSPAM somewhere.

# ? Sep 9, 2021 12:10

KidDynamite: Feb 11, 2005

how is The Anti-Communist Impulse by Parenti? It has jumped the queue since I borrowed it from the library

# ? Sep 9, 2021 13:42

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

The Khrushchev-Mao relationship was a really complex one. At first Khrushchev thought China was a huge opportunity for the USSR that Stalin had squandered by being too invested in Europe and too interested in testing Mao's loyalty (most notably with the Korean War), and he initiated what I think is still the largest ever peacetime aid program from one country to another. Massive amounts of Soviet capital, technical advisors, blueprints, etc., poured into China after Stalin's death. But these were all oriented towards the Soviet model of development, which was extracting an agricultural surplus from the peasantry and using it to fund urban industry facilitated by a strong central state, and they urged China to take it slow and not make any big deviations from that plan because that was what worked for them, it was the only proven model of socialist economic development in the world, and they wanted to avoid any big unexpected catastrophes.

In China's First Five-Year Plan (1953-57), this worked like a charm. The Chinese economy advanced by leaps and bounds and saw dramatic industrialization and urbanization, much of it funded and directed by Soviet aid. But Mao wasn't really satisfied and in general saw the Soviet model as too bureaucratic, too comfortable, too centralized, too urban, and too slow. On the side, against the advice of the Soviet advisers and against the wishes of other CCP leaders but with the support of Chinese peasants, he made sure collectivization was included in the Plan and it worked better than Stalin's collectivization had in the 30s, which made him think maybe the Soviet advice wasn't all that after all.

So at first under Khrushchev China and the USSR drew closer together, and Khrushchev--more than Stalin ever did--tried to accommodate Chinese interests and recognize them as a little more of an equal partner, by doing things like handing over joint ventures to Chinese ownership and control. But Mao was always suspicious of Khrushchev's motives and thought the Soviets might be taking advantage of China as an export market and source of raw materials rather than an equal partner. All the stuff about modeling their development on the USSR's own path kept rubbing him the wrong way too because his base of support was the peasantry, not the industrial proletariat. The Secret Speech and de-Stalinization made this worse, as did Khrushchev's shift to peaceful coexistence with the West, since Mao felt these could also be seen as veiled critiques of his own leadership in China and wanted a more confrontational attitude to the West in the name of anti-imperialism. The uprisings in Poland and Hungary then convinced Mao that de-Stalinization led to chaos, not to improvement.

Based on the great advances of the First Five-Year Plan, Mao pushed for China to speed up industrialization even further, but the Soviets pushed back and again urged China not to get hasty and make any rash mistakes. That again rubbed Mao the wrong way and started to think that the Soviets were threatened by China's rise to predominance in the communist world, and were trying to hold China back so it would remain a junior partner rather than a real equal. So the Second Five-Year Plan (the Great Leap Forward) had wildly inflated goals, inspired by Mao's intentional deviation from the centralized bureaucratic Soviet development model which he now saw as holding China back, as well as by his desire for China to develop enough that it no longer needed Soviet aid. It didn't work, and its catastrophic failures angered Khrushchev even more since, to him, the Soviets had repeatedly warned the Chinese that some kind of disaster would happen if they moved too quickly, and they had been completely ignored. To Khrushchev this was just the Chinese stubbornly refusing to learn from Soviet leadership and experience, while to Mao that same thing was seen as the Soviets wanting to restrict the potential of an alternative model of socialist development and a potential rival for leadership of the communist world. To be reductive, the Soviets saw China as a junior partner that should follow their lead, and the Chinese saw the Soviets as imperialists trying to dictate the path of Chinese development.

There were other events around this time that fed those sentiments, as well. China wanted the atomic bomb and the Soviets thought there was no need for them to have it since they were protected by the Soviet nuclear arsenal, another sign of junior partner status. The Soviets supported India (a Soviet ally) over China in the 1959 border war, another sign that the Soviets valued relations with non-communist countries more than relations with communist ones, and so on. Khrushchev withdrew Soviet advisers and a lot of Soviet aid in 1960, which exacerbated the failures of the Great Leap (joint projects went unfunded, Soviet machines that broke went unfixed, and so on), though iirc Khrushchev kept sending food aid to alleviate the famine. It took a few more years after that for the Sino-Soviet Split to really be official, but that was the biggest turning point.

It can't really be reduced to any one driving factor, and imo placing all the blame on Khrushchev overlooks Mao's own failings as well. Like many things in history, it's overdetermined--you can find causes in foreign policy, domestic policy, ideological differences, personal differences, and so on.

vyelkin has issued a correction as of 15:19 on Sep 9, 2021

# ? Sep 9, 2021 13:52

GoLambo: Apr 11, 2006

vyelkin posted:

and so on. *sniff*

Thanks for that quick summary, ive been lurking this discussion and I think a lot of us aren't very familiar with the sino-soviet split

# ? Sep 9, 2021 15:07

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

good post vyelkin but I'd say that reducing chinese foreign policy re the split to just Mao is a little reductive, unless you're using Mao as a shorthand for the chinese state as a whole. Deng and the post-Mao cpc continued the anti-USSR policy after all, despite repudiating a bunch of other aspects of late Mao-era policy like the GPCR

# ? Sep 9, 2021 15:23

dead gay comedy forums: Oct 21, 2011

from the little I know of it, it definitely feels like kroosh was missing the tone and handling with China almost all the time, especially with regards on collaboration and partnership as equals

in contrast, Fidel got him starstruck and got the USSR to do a lot for them

what I am saying is that they should have talked to Fidel to intermediate this one out and the sino-soviet split would have never happened

# ? Sep 9, 2021 15:45

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

i know you're probably joking but the relative positions of the ussr re china and cuba were determined by material forces, geopolitics and not the individual personalities of their leaders

# ? Sep 9, 2021 15:57

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

mila kunis posted:

good post vyelkin but I'd say that reducing chinese foreign policy re the split to just Mao is a little reductive, unless you're using Mao as a shorthand for the chinese state as a whole. Deng continued the anti-USSR policy after all, despite repudiating a bunch of other aspects of late Mao-era policy like the GPCR

yeah that's partly shorthand, but it also reflects the fact that the CCP wasn't a unitary actor and that while Mao was the most important decision-maker, he didn't always get his way and what he wanted often clashed with what other party leaders wanted. I'm much less of an expert on the Chinese than the Soviet side, but my impression is that while much of the increasing split in the 50s was due to Mao's personal proclivities (in conflict with others, including at the time Deng, who favoured the Soviet development model), by the 60s and 70s Mao's position became the consensus position of the Chinese state and the rest of the leadership coalesced around the view that the Soviets were a greater imperialist threat than the Americans, in part because those who disagreed often didn't stay in positions of leadership. After Mao's death his successors were less worried about war with the Soviets, which preoccupied Mao (helping explain the ironic shift under Mao from breaking with the Soviets in part because of Khrushchev being insufficiently anti-American to working with the Americans for security against a perceived Soviet threat), but they realized the enormous potential benefits of trade and investment links with the US and other wealthy capitalist nations and so continued the pro-American and anti-Soviet foreign policy that the Mao-era PRC had arrived at for different reasons.

# ? Sep 9, 2021 16:03

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

thanks for all the input, folks! I knew that if I posted enough about the Sino-Soviet split we could lure out others to weigh in on it

call it my Hundred Flowers Posting

# ? Sep 9, 2021 16:09

dead gay comedy forums: Oct 21, 2011

mila kunis posted:

i know you're probably joking but the relative positions of the ussr re china and cuba were determined by material forces, geopolitics and not the individual personalities of their leaders

yeah, I was doing a bit, sorry if it wasn't clear lmao

# ? Sep 9, 2021 16:10

AnimeIsTrash: Jun 30, 2018

https://twitter.com/b1g_damage/status/1435731129705930755

# ? Sep 9, 2021 20:21

genericnick: Dec 26, 2012

gradenko_2000 posted:

thanks for all the input, folks! I knew that if I posted enough about the Sino-Soviet split we could lure out others to weigh in on it

call it my Hundred Flowers Posting

Yeah, great success.

vyelkin posted:

Based on the great advances of the First Five-Year Plan, Mao pushed for China to speed up industrialization even further, but the Soviets pushed back and again urged China not to get hasty and make any rash mistakes. That again rubbed Mao the wrong way and started to think that the Soviets were threatened by China's rise to predominance in the communist world, and were trying to hold China back so it would remain a junior partner rather than a real equal. So the Second Five-Year Plan (the Great Leap Forward) had wildly inflated goals, inspired by Mao's intentional deviation from the centralized bureaucratic Soviet development model which he now saw as holding China back, as well as by his desire for China to develop enough that it no longer needed Soviet aid. It didn't work, and its catastrophic failures angered Khrushchev even more since, to him, the Soviets had repeatedly warned the Chinese that some kind of disaster would happen if they moved too quickly, and they had been completely ignored. To Khrushchev this was just the Chinese stubbornly refusing to learn from Soviet leadership and experience, while to Mao that same thing was seen as the Soviets wanting to restrict the potential of an alternative model of socialist development and a potential rival for leadership of the communist world. To be reductive, the Soviets saw China as a junior partner that should follow their lead, and the Chinese saw the Soviets as imperialists trying to dictate the path of Chinese development.

There were other events around this time that fed those sentiments, as well. China wanted the atomic bomb and the Soviets thought there was no need for them to have it since they were protected by the Soviet nuclear arsenal, another sign of junior partner status. The Soviets supported India (a Soviet ally) over China in the 1959 border war, another sign that the Soviets valued relations with non-communist countries more than relations with communist ones, and so on. Khrushchev withdrew Soviet advisers and a lot of Soviet aid in 1960, which exacerbated the failures of the Great Leap (joint projects went unfunded, Soviet machines that broke went unfixed, and so on), though iirc Khrushchev kept sending food aid to alleviate the famine. It took a few more years after that for the Sino-Soviet Split to really be official, but that was the biggest turning point.

Thanks for that. The Great Leap Forward didn't make an appearance in the overview podcast and that's really important context. That makes the withdrawal of advisors a bit less abrupt.

# ? Sep 9, 2021 22:04

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

Lenin and ML's in general have done more harm to the left than the right ever could.

Larpers like the guy you quoted forget that the pre 1917 Social Democrats supporterd the Socialist Revolutionairy party (SR's) under Kerensky and their violent overthrow of the Tsar. Lenins Coup overthrew the first government in world history ever run by a democratic socialist. The first overthrow of a leftist ruler was done by a Tankie basically who successfully turned the first post-revolutionairy state into red fascism essentially.

Lenin himself feared leftists more than he ever did the right because they threatened his rightist-charlatan ambitions and could call him out on his hypocrisy.

# ? Sep 9, 2021 22:13

AnimeIsTrash: Jun 30, 2018

I hate anarchists.

# ? Sep 9, 2021 22:19

dead gay comedy forums: Oct 21, 2011

mila kunis posted:

Lenin himself feared leftists more than he ever did the right because they threatened his rightist-charlatan ambitions and could call him out on his hypocrisy.

in this state company we only work with sourced quotes and receipts

# ? Sep 9, 2021 22:19

Buck Wildman: Mar 30, 2010; I am Metango, Galactic Governor

mila kunis posted:

Lenin and ML's in general have done more harm to the left than the right ever could.

Larpers like the guy you quoted forget that the pre 1917 Social Democrats supporterd the Socialist Revolutionairy party (SR's) under Kerensky and their violent overthrow of the Tsar. Lenins Coup overthrew the first government in world history ever run by a democratic socialist. The first overthrow of a leftist ruler was done by a Tankie basically who successfully turned the first post-revolutionairy state into red fascism essentially.

Lenin himself feared leftists more than he ever did the right because they threatened his rightist-charlatan ambitions and could call him out on his hypocrisy.

drat you hierarchy

# ? Sep 9, 2021 22:20

R. Mute: Jul 27, 2011

mila kunis posted:

Lenin and ML's in general have done more harm to the left than the right ever could.

Larpers like the guy you quoted forget that the pre 1917 Social Democrats supporterd the Socialist Revolutionairy party (SR's) under Kerensky and their violent overthrow of the Tsar. Lenins Coup overthrew the first government in world history ever run by a democratic socialist. The first overthrow of a leftist ruler was done by a Tankie basically who successfully turned the first post-revolutionairy state into red fascism essentially.

Lenin himself feared leftists more than he ever did the right because they threatened his rightist-charlatan ambitions and could call him out on his hypocrisy.

hisssss

# ? Sep 9, 2021 22:24

Anime Bernie Bro: Feb 4, 2020; FUCK MY ASSHOLE, LOL

mila kunis posted:

Lenin and ML's in general have done more harm to the left than the right ever could.

Larpers like the guy you quoted forget that the pre 1917 Social Democrats supporterd the Socialist Revolutionairy party (SR's) under Kerensky and their violent overthrow of the Tsar. Lenins Coup overthrew the first government in world history ever run by a democratic socialist. The first overthrow of a leftist ruler was done by a Tankie basically who successfully turned the first post-revolutionairy state into red fascism essentially.

Lenin himself feared leftists more than he ever did the right because they threatened his rightist-charlatan ambitions and could call him out on his hypocrisy.

counterpoint: vladimir lenin is based

# ? Sep 9, 2021 23:12

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

mila kunis posted:

Lenin and ML's in general have done more harm to the left than the right ever could.

Larpers like the guy you quoted forget that the pre 1917 Social Democrats supporterd the Socialist Revolutionairy party (SR's) under Kerensky and their violent overthrow of the Tsar. Lenins Coup overthrew the first government in world history ever run by a democratic socialist. The first overthrow of a leftist ruler was done by a Tankie basically who successfully turned the first post-revolutionairy state into red fascism essentially.

Lenin himself feared leftists more than he ever did the right because they threatened his rightist-charlatan ambitions and could call him out on his hypocrisy.

go away

# ? Sep 9, 2021 23:31

MSDOS KAPITAL: Jun 25, 2018

mila kunis posted:

Lenin and ML's in general have done more harm to the left than the right ever could.

Larpers like the guy you quoted forget that the pre 1917 Social Democrats supporterd the Socialist Revolutionairy party (SR's) under Kerensky and their violent overthrow of the Tsar. Lenins Coup overthrew the first government in world history ever run by a democratic socialist. The first overthrow of a leftist ruler was done by a Tankie basically who successfully turned the first post-revolutionairy state into red fascism essentially.

Lenin himself feared leftists more than he ever did the right because they threatened his rightist-charlatan ambitions and could call him out on his hypocrisy.

wrong thread

# ? Sep 10, 2021 00:04

elaboration: Feb 21, 2020

Anime Bernie Bro posted:

counterpoint: vladimir lenin is based

# ? Sep 10, 2021 00:05

Brain Candy: May 18, 2006

Raskolnikov38 posted:

go away

you got got, it's a quote

# ? Sep 10, 2021 00:09

dead gay comedy forums: Oct 21, 2011

Anime Bernie Bro posted:

counterpoint: vladimir lenin is based

# ? Sep 10, 2021 00:19

MeatwadIsGod: Sep 30, 2004; Foretold by Gyromancy

prolonging a mass imperial bloodletting, leftistly

# ? Sep 10, 2021 00:37

Crusader: Apr 11, 2002

Anime Bernie Bro posted:

counterpoint: vladimir lenin is based

# ? Sep 10, 2021 01:22

crepeface: Nov 5, 2004; r*p*f*c*

genericnick posted:

Hah, pretty sure I got it from that post. Just had the tab open with a vague memory that it's from CSPAM somewhere.

lol i think i got it from cspam too, can't remember where!

vyelkin posted:

thanks for this. the podcast lays out a similar rationale for the split. (but glosses over a few things that you covered)

# ? Sep 10, 2021 02:16

Goast: Jul 23, 2011; by VideoGames

calling lenin a tankie is probably the funniest thing ive seen in cspam in a while

# ? Sep 10, 2021 02:23

lumpentroll: Mar 4, 2020

Anime Bernie Bro posted:

counterpoint: vladimir lenin is based

# ? Sep 10, 2021 02:24

dead gay comedy forums: Oct 21, 2011

Goast posted:

calling lenin a tankie is probably the funniest thing ive seen in cspam in a while

some would even say he is the tankiest. the archtankie

# ? Sep 10, 2021 02:25

vyelkin: Jan 2, 2011

dead gay comedy forums posted:

the tankiest

# ? Sep 10, 2021 02:27

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

Also most "communist countries" are just some flavour of capitalist or oligarchic systems with a red flag slapped on top. Especially China and the Soviet Union.

# ? Sep 10, 2021 04:38

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

Goast posted:

calling lenin a tankie is probably the funniest thing ive seen in cspam in a while

the preeminent question on the left: would lenin have sent the red army into hungary?

# ? Sep 10, 2021 04:40

mila kunis: Jun 10, 2011

something that always struck me as funny is that trots would condemn the ussr when they did socialism in one country and didn't use the red army for spreading communism into other countries, and then also condemn them for when they did exactly that.

# ? Sep 10, 2021 04:43

Enjoy: Apr 18, 2009

dead gay comedy forums posted:

some would even say he is the tankiest. the archtankie

when he rolls into hungary he drives a kv-6

# ? Sep 10, 2021 06:24

MLSM: Apr 3, 2021; by Azathoth

mila kunis posted:

Lenin and ML's in general have done more harm to the left than the right ever could.

Larpers like the guy you quoted forget that the pre 1917 Social Democrats supporterd the Socialist Revolutionairy party (SR's) under Kerensky and their violent overthrow of the Tsar. Lenins Coup overthrew the first government in world history ever run by a democratic socialist. The first overthrow of a leftist ruler was done by a Tankie basically who successfully turned the first post-revolutionairy state into red fascism essentially.

Lenin himself feared leftists more than he ever did the right because they threatened his rightist-charlatan ambitions and could call him out on his hypocrisy.

gently caress off

# ? Sep 10, 2021 06:34

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# ? May 24, 2024 14:14

elaboration: Feb 21, 2020

are there any english language books about the soviet legal system?? or the PRC one, even

about any era would be fine. i just realized i have no idea what an attempt at what 'socialist law' would really look like and want to attempt to fill that gap at least a little

# ? Sep 10, 2021 06:35

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > [Marx] I put on my anti-coat and wizard hat

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