(Thread IKs:
dead gay comedy forums)
|
didn't stalin hear him say "yo we gotta kill stalin" through wire taps multiple times, tell him to knock it off, and give him a bunch of chances? i remember hearing about it and the great purge in general and then reading the events and it made stalin sound soft as gently caress. even then i think stalin just wanted to exile him still?
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2022 18:42
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 24, 2024 20:56 |
|
|
i know there's some novelist or playwright or whatever who was really depressed and kept writing kinda seditious material but stalin liked his work and was like "evgeny you're drunk just go home"
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2022 19:19
|
|
|
Was that Bulgakov?
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2022 19:47
|
|
|
that sounds right. i'd have to ask the friend who related this story to me to confirm
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2022 19:49
|
|
|
sounds like Bulgakov to me
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2022 19:54
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/lhsummers/status/1572433427365826565
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2022 21:51
|
|
|
[img-homer-emerging-from-the-hedge-but-its-marx.png]
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2022 22:01
|
|
|
Larry Summers coming across a Marxism by accident what a world
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2022 22:15
|
|
|
larry i know you're reading. i am available to advise you on americas social and economic malaise. all i require is a modest salary for $250k/yr with a five-year contract
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2022 22:33
|
|
|
mr orange voice LARRY
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2022 22:34
|
|
|
a consulting gig where you do marxisms without saying it is so seems like one hell of a deal tbqh
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2022 23:46
|
|
|
“so the rate of profit always tends to fall” “holy poo poo for real?” “hell yea. to avoid that, capital must flow into productive development and also distributed in order to people consume it. make people able to buy financial vehicles basically” “hmmmmmmmmmmm”
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2022 23:49
|
|
|
free larry from the straitjacket of orthodox economics
|
|
#
?
Sep 21, 2022 23:56
|
|
|
Cuttlefush posted:didn't stalin hear him say "yo we gotta kill stalin" through wire taps multiple times, tell him to knock it off, and give him a bunch of chances? i remember hearing about it and the great purge in general and then reading the events and it made stalin sound soft as gently caress. even then i think stalin just wanted to exile him still? The most fascinating thing to me about Stalin (ignoring the bank robbing revolutionary vagabond younger days) is when he got pissed at his kid for using the name Stalin. He was explicit that it was an invented persona, like a modern Brand, or celebrity. Joey Steele was not the same person as Soso Jughashvili.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2022 02:00
|
|
|
Atrocious Joe posted:I thought the new article on the Tricontinental, Ten Theses on Marxism and Decolonisation, was good. Unironically subscribe to Vijay’s newsletter, he’s great even if he supports the less revolutionary version of the CPI.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2022 02:01
|
|
|
dead gay comedy forums posted:a consulting gig where you do marxisms without saying it is so seems like one hell of a deal tbqh my dream job is to hook a bourgeois guy and Hitch him marxistly until i can retire. theres a market for it i just dont have the connections. for most of the year thats basically my job now for someone in middle management but it doesnt pay enough and sometimes i have to do real work
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2022 02:08
|
|
|
https://twitter.com/kristinepatag/status/1572761322944868353 https://twitter.com/kristinepatag/status/1572761753964126209 https://twitter.com/kristinepatag/status/1572762292739256320 quote:In a 135-page ruling, Manila RTC Br. 19 Judge Marlo Magdoza-Malgar said that the CPP-NPA was not organized for the purpose of engaging in terrorism.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2022 04:21
|
|
|
Ferrinus posted:i know there's some novelist or playwright or whatever who was really depressed and kept writing kinda seditious material but stalin liked his work and was like "evgeny you're drunk just go home" Sounds like Platonov.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2022 12:36
|
|
|
Is there a good book out there about organized crime in the USSR and also the USSR's response to it?
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2022 17:36
|
|
|
AnimeIsTrash posted:Is there a good book out there about organized crime in the USSR and also the USSR's response to it? I haven't read it myself so I can't speak to the quality, but probably the most up-to-date and comprehensive book covering this (in part) is Mark Galeotti's The Vory, which I think covers both the emergence and development of organized crime in the Soviet era and the way it evolved in post-Soviet Russia.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2022 18:02
|
|
|
We could call this science Karlism
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2022 18:18
|
|
|
vyelkin posted:I haven't read it myself so I can't speak to the quality, but probably the most up-to-date and comprehensive book covering this (in part) is Mark Galeotti's The Vory, which I think covers both the emergence and development of organized crime in the Soviet era and the way it evolved in post-Soviet Russia. Thank you I will check this out.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2022 18:19
|
|
|
AnimeIsTrash posted:Thank you I will check this out. np, if you get through it let me know how it is.
|
|
#
?
Sep 22, 2022 18:28
|
|
|
Cuttlefush posted:didn't stalin hear him say "yo we gotta kill stalin" through wire taps multiple times, tell him to knock it off, and give him a bunch of chances? i remember hearing about it and the great purge in general and then reading the events and it made stalin sound soft as gently caress. even then i think stalin just wanted to exile him still? the massive effort to paint him as a psychopath vs him just being a dude
|
|
#
?
Sep 23, 2022 19:44
|
|
|
for sure man. i mean he declined the 9 bestowments 5 times. does that really sound like something hed do if he wanted to seize the mandate of heaven?
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2022 15:53
|
|
|
Stalin was equal parts bro and monster, in summation he was a Man
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2022 16:16
|
|
|
ultimately i think its probably counterproductive to try and hash out the personal morality of historical actors or indeed anyone. stalin ordered a lot of people killed or imprisoned on charges of counterrevolution and to me, that seems pretty inevitable in any revolution. the entire point is to seize currently entrenched power and then, once you've done so, fortify that power against the actions of your political enemies who don't simply vanish or give up their own struggle for power just because they lost. that's going to involve violence any way you slice it. power is about compelling others and if you want society to work your way, violence will need to be used when rhetoric, bribes, and compromise fail. the more interesting question in my mind is whether or not stalin's policies on the application of state violence to protect the revolution ultimately helped or harmed the soviet project overall, as well as the international project of socialism. aggressive suppression of counterrevolutionary forces allowed, to my mind, for the resources gathered and applied toward industrialization in russia. it allowed the ussr to hold things together during those early disasters, which ultimately (after much suffering) improved quality of life dramatically across the republics. otoh, that level of violence will often cause your opponents to become more entrenched and less likely to get in line without even more. this is true internationally as well.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2022 16:22
|
|
|
croup coughfield posted:the more interesting question in my mind is whether or not stalin's policies on the application of state violence to protect the revolution ultimately helped or harmed the soviet project overall  this is honestly a great way of framing it for realimho I think the Cheka was inevitable exactly for the reasons of "we are here to win it"; the problem lies with having the NKVD and a sequel of Yagoda, Yezhov and Beria in the charge of it, which led to a lot of collateral self-harm in the process. It seems to me that the sequestration/capture of the former Imperial state structure by the Bolsheviks was the main factor, as the tools of government necessary to run such a state couldn't be transformed effectively in a short time frame and definitely not in those conditions. That also meant incorporating - nominally at least - a lot of people into the party that were definitely not communists, especially into the regional levels of administration. As the Revolution advanced, there was a lot of corruption, wrecking, sabotage which definitely required an answer, but got mashed together with the practical difficulties of making the revolutionary state happen (socialist planning of agriculture for example). With Lenin stroked out and Stalin not having his political advantages, it seems to me that the clusterfuck was locked in. Had Trotsky succeeded Lenin, it would have been a mess either way, too. Lenin in charge and in good health was perhaps the best scenario in those terms of collateral damage.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2022 17:39
|
|
|
personally, i think if lenin hadnt had the stroke we'd just be having this conversation about him instead
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2022 17:45
|
|
|
lenin could have posted through it
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2022 17:50
|
|
|
I forget where, but someone earlier posted the question as to how the Bolshevik party degenerated to the point that idiots like Gorbachev could rise to power and my completely uninformed opinion is that the extreme nature of the purges probably helped put a lot of credulous sycophants into positions of power. Xi is a good example of what happens when a party chooses only to remove political opponents from power, not execute them. Iirc his dad was purged during the cultural revolution and forced into working as a miner.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2022 18:42
|
|
|
dead gay comedy forums posted:Had Trotsky succeeded Lenin, it would have been a mess either way, too tbh im not sure. my personal view is that the most probable result of trotsky ascending is the party imploding over internal conflicts and drama. the second most is a simple rearrangement of names to actors but the story mostly stays the same but hornier. but i think its disingenuous to deny that there was a reasonable probability that if things had gone a different way in 24, the revolution may well have spread farther in the following years. whether that would've been good or bad, i dunno
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2022 18:43
|
|
|
Cpt_Obvious posted:I forget where, but someone earlier posted the question as to how the Bolshevik party degenerated to the point that idiots like Gorbachev could rise to power and my completely uninformed opinion is that the extreme nature of the purges probably helped put a lot of credulous sycophants into positions of power. Xi is a good example of what happens when a party chooses only to remove political opponents from power, not execute them. Iirc his dad was purged during the cultural revolution and forced into working as a miner. gorby was a true believer and rose up through the ranks under Brezhnev. he was just incredibly stupid and naive
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2022 18:44
|
|
|
Cuttlefush posted:lenin could have posted through it he had the power
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2022 18:50
|
|
|
Raskolnikov38 posted:gorby was a true believer and rose up through the ranks under Brezhnev. he was just incredibly stupid and naive Gotcha. So, shouldn't a capable and competent party have overridden his stupidity? Doesn't the ascension of stupidity reflect greater stupidity in the party itself? Where did that come from?
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2022 19:06
|
|
|
Cpt_Obvious posted:Gotcha. organizational decision-making, broadly speaking, isn't a reflection of the aggregate SPECIAL stats and renegade points of its constituents
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2022 19:30
|
|
|
dead gay comedy forums posted:
there's an argument to be made that while some state violence may be inevitable as it is in any system, the extremes it was taken to under Stalin were extremely harmful to the Soviet project in the long term (leaving aside the regular short-term debate over whether such extremes were necessary for the abrupt industrialization needed to survive WW2). The arbitrary and unaccountable nature of the NKVD led to an orgy of counterproductive violence that went far beyond just removing wreckers or saboteurs or corrupt chinovniki. In fact, the arbitrary nature of the purges meant that wreckers and saboteurs and corrupt chinovniki were if anything more likely to benefit than to be punished, because those were exactly the kind of people interested in score-settling or removing personal enemies or career advancement through eliminating rivals. In addition, it was an enormous waste of resources and human potential to expend so much effort on violence and waste so many human lives in execution chambers and labour camps. Besides the obvious human impact on millions of people and an even greater number of their family members and friends, by all accounts it was also extraordinarily wasteful because forced labour enforced through real or threatened violence tends to be less efficient than just paying people to do jobs that need to be done. On top of that, there was the long-term brutalization of Soviet society. Many, if not most, if not the overwhelming majority of the victims of the purges were loyal communists or regular Soviet citizens who had no interest in wrecking the Soviet project. Those who were punished for ideological deviations, like being part of a patronage network linked to Trotsky or Zinoviev, tended not to be people actually involved in (usually imaginary) conspiracies against the state or the Stalinist ruling faction, they were just people with different opinions over the best way to build socialism. And I would say most victims of the purges didn't even have that kind of ideological deviation, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time. That level of senseless violence directed against society for no apparent reason created some really deep wounds that never healed, and created some very perverse incentives for the post-Stalin Soviet leadership to continue covering up past crimes because any kind of cultural or intellectual opening up inevitably led to parts of Soviet society wanting to confront the Stalinist past, but the longer they covered up the crimes the worse it looked for them when they were revealed and critiqued. That was part of what undermined Gorbachev's popular support: glasnost allowed a real debate over Stalinism for the first time ever (which even Khrushchev didn't allow because the Khrushchev-era leadership were Stalinist cadres who were scared that doing so would undermine their own positions) and the more horrible stuff was uncovered, the more it undermined the system. Was it all inevitable even with someone else in charge? Maybe, given the history leading up to Stalin seizing power. There's a famous article by Sheila Fitzpatrick called "The Civil War as a Formative Experience," which argues that the experience of fighting for survival in the first years after seizing power made the Bolshevik leadership learn that their problems could almost inevitably be solved through the escalating use of extreme violence, in addition to remaking the Party from a tight-knit, small revolutionary vanguard into a mass movement built from the ground up to win a war rather than for any peaceful purpose - new Party cadres learned how to be communists in the Red Army, the Cheka, and the requisitioning brigades, and established party leaders learned that those institutions solved their problems. That, combined with their history as a conspiratorial revolutionary party, meant a lot of Bolsheviks, not just Stalin, saw threats hiding in every shadow, found it hard to distinguish the real threats from the imaginary ones, and responded to all perceived threats with the same strategy of violence and coercion. Similarly, there's a book by Julie Hessler looking at the early Soviet economy, making a similar argument: War Communism taught the Bolsheviks that they could solve economic problems with repression and coercion, and that became their emergency management strategy every time they encountered an economic crisis afterwards. Personally I don't think every aspect of Stalinism was necessarily inevitable, because even after Stalin took power you still see high-level Bolsheviks operating with the same information that Stalin had but making arguments that less violent strategies would be more effective, like Bukharin's proposals to make peace with the countryside or the Ryutin Platform calling for undoing the coercive elements of Stalinism near the end of the First Five-Year Plan. But I'm not sure those were ever majority positions, so it's hard to say if a theoretical USSR without Stalin in charge would actually have settled on a more peaceful course of action when it inevitably faced another crisis and a hypothetical different leadership had to decide whether to resort to tried and true methods of violence and coercion or roll the dice on a different strategy. vyelkin has issued a correction as of 19:43 on Sep 24, 2022 |
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2022 19:38
|
|
|
Stalin bungled the Comintern but if he focused too much on that he may have bungled the USSR. The demise of the CPUSA for example was just as much a reaction to the purge and flip flopping party lines as it was due to Capitalist repression.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2022 20:03
|
|
|
Cpt_Obvious posted:Gotcha. my understanding is that nikolai ryzhkov was the only other serious candidate considered besides gorbachev but i dont know why gorby was picked over him.
|
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2022 20:06
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 24, 2024 20:56 |
|
|
the purges reached a fever pitch under stalin's leadership but they were also sharply pulled back on to the point of executing the guy in charge of them under stalin's leadership, precisely because the bolsheviks had eyes and ears and could be like woah poo poo this is actually empowering some saboteurs at the same time as it's ferreting out others. you see the same dynamic play out in agricultural collectivization - the supreme soviet famously promulgated a bulletin titled something like "dizzy with success" instructing people (to the relief of many) to woooaahh, pump the brakes a little, we don't want to refight the revolutionary civil war here important takeaways here are that these things were decided on and carried out by "the bolsheviks", not "stalin", and that they represented sincere attempts to adapt to changing circumstances and self-correct rather than like the pre-rational lashing out of people in the throes of trauma there's also that funny anecdote from the kotkin biography that goes like, it's the middle of the night, the NKVD bangs loudly on the door! "you've got the wrong apartment, the communists live upstairs" Ferrinus has issued a correction as of 20:24 on Sep 24, 2022 |
|
#
?
Sep 24, 2022 20:21
|
|