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Amadeo Bordiga wrote a pretty good essay on the socialist mode of industrialisation. 'course, it relies on there being, you know, a socialist revolution first. http://www.marxists.org/archive/bordiga/works/1953/horsepower.htm
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Feb 20, 2012 23:21
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Yeah, the Russian/Georgian situation was seriously complicated and involved the Georgians actually killing Russian peacekeeping soldiers before the Russians attacked. I've read reports that the Russians were suspiciously well mobilised for a counter-attack, but nothing specific. There was no way that Russia was going to take that lying down, though, is the point - you don't shell a wounded but resurgent great power's protectorate and kill off its soldiers without a reprisal. Obviously I'm not sure they should have gone in all gung-ho, but it requires a level of knowledge of the events which I frankly don't have. Basically what I'm saying is, unless someone shells Chinese soldiers in the area it will be nothing like the Georgia conflict
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May 12, 2012 00:09
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Mmmh. I may have spoken too soon; the Russians maintain that their peacekeepers were shelled initially, and wikipedia states that peacekeepers got killed as they engaged attacking Georgian forces, but I cannot find any independent sources stating that the initial assault was targetted in any way against the peacekeepers. Still, Russian soldiers were killed in the course of the action, and the casualties were predictable, as was the Russian response. (http://rt.com/news/russian-peacekeepers-confirmed-killed-in-georgia/ for example)
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May 12, 2012 00:24
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french lies posted:You could write them an email today saying that Li Keqiang hosts gay orgies at the Zhongnanhai and they'd print a story about it tomorrow with you cited as a "reliable source". Someone do this please then report back tia
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Jun 17, 2012 01:40
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Vincent Van Goatse posted:There isn't one. eh one can make a coherent and useful description and argument about imperialism specifically in its modern form which doesn't care much about the colonisation of america or manifest destiny or what have you in such cases it's useful to define one's terms, but lenin does do that in his own way. it is reasonable to distinguish roman conquest from the age of sails colonies from the scramble for africa - it is legitimate to make theories of imperialism particular to any of these events. what lenin tries to do is to make a theory of the imperialism of the fin-de-siecle period, which is in large part still valid because capitalism hasn't really changed that much. it might be more fruitful to discuss more modern theories like rokkan's doctrine of center-periphery etc, but that doesn't make lenin wrong as such
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Aug 29, 2019 10:39
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though honestly at this point china is an empire unto and within itself, re its actions in the arctic, africa and in its own periphery
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Aug 29, 2019 10:42
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Baka-nin posted:The reason Lenin called monopoly capitalism of the 1910s "the highest stage of capitalism" is because he believed a worldwide socialist revolution was just around the corner. That didn't happen and since then capitalism has changed and developed a lot. And the reason why we have so many Marxist-leninists going around saying imperialism doesn't exist even when talking about situations that look like re-enactments of manifest destiny or the founding of the East India Companies is because they didn't read the book very closely. eh. i feel as though lenin's basic thesis - that modern imperialism is basically a capitalist project - is very reasonable, and his account of the forces involved holds up reasonably well today, i think. global financial capitalism and neocolonialism isn't actually that different to how it was back in the day, structurally speaking. the idea of hyperexploitation and worker's aristocracies in particular are perfectly cogent in today's global capitalist society. lenin's big innovation in that text is to study the intersection between state power in a captive periphery and capitalism, and it's hard for me to agree that the dynamics that are reigning there have fundamentally changed
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Aug 29, 2019 14:04
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i will get back to this in more detail, but i feel you're being a bit uncharitable to my namesake here the idea is that hyperexploitation gets pushed to the periphery and that this releases pressure in the centre. the modern pattern of massive industrialisation and proletarisation of that periphery seems to be congruent with this basic thesis - as does the relative deproletarisation of the 'west'. lenin's specific thesis about imminent world revolution did turn out to be wrong, but i'd argue that this is lenin underestimating the flexibility of capitalist production rather than him getting the structures wrong. the empires don't fall because of domestic welfare spending, according to lenin; domestic welfare spending falls because the empires collapse
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Aug 29, 2019 14:44
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Baka-nin posted:On hyper exploitation, the problem is the period Lenin is talking about 1870s-1916 had peak industrial development in the centres, which Lenin backed up with a lot of economic data from several countries. The declines in industrial centres in Europe and North America largely started in the 70s and 80s which was after most of the old colonies had broken free. Jobs aren't just going to what some call neo-colonies but independent and in some cases rising powers with an ambivalent attitude to the old powers. In many cases it looks like the main beneficiaries of this `easing of pressure` aren't the periphery at all but other nations in the centre. well no, lenin thought that capitalism was finished with WW1, i absolutely agree that he was mistaken in that. look, if you interpret the text as narrowly as you are in this post, you're naturally right. lenin makes predictions which we know don't come true. however, i think it is fruitful to consider the implicit, underlying model that lenin is basing these predictions upon, because i think that's an interesting one and basically correct. i might also have formulated my point about the proletarisation of the periphery somewhat obscurely, but it is this: lenin's basic thesis is that exploitation is exported to the periphery, and enforced by geopolitical power to maintain stability in the centre. he justifies this by a bunch of examples. since the centre at this time has the proletariat as the mass group with the highest standard of living, he focusses on the labour aristocracy in european factories, which are relatively well compensated by the use of super-profits from colonial exploitation - i.e. the centre subsidises its workers, allowing the centres of capitalism to buy stability at home. this leads to ever-increasing monopolisation, which leads to conflict etc. etc. i talk about the welfare state because that's the form it typically takes today; at any rate, lenin was intimately familiar with bernsteinite reformism, and will almost certainly have had it in mind when writing this text. where lenin is wrong in this thesis is that capital has shown a remarkable ability to make tactical retreats. so, as resource extraction and slave-colonies become untenable, capital seeks to invest in higher returns in other countries, leading to industrial development in the old colonies, etc. however, the dynamic of exploitation remains! in the west, the proletariat has basically been displaced entirely as a class. it still exists as a sort of rump, but it's very fragmented and its ability to meaningfully coordinate, let alone threaten to seize the means of production is completely hollowed out. rather, the old periphery (which for the most part remains periphery in this context) has emerged as the places where people make stuff in giant factories, propped up by international business regulations and a more-or-less compliant local managerial class rather than outright colonial firepower. these then displace the most crushing exploitation unto various undocumented or indigenous people, basically casual workers and people who haven't the potential for power that an actual mass proletariat has. exploitation in chinese factories is still much too intense for domestic western sensibilities; the stuff they do in their own peripheries is exceedingly grim. my feeling is that you read lenin like some people read freud - yeah, the guy got a lot of things wrong, but he also got some very important things right. he anticipated the basic mechanisms of globalisation, and his account of imperialism is IMO still useful for informing assessments of consumer culture. in casual conversation i would use completely different terms and metaphors, but i still got some insights from Imperialism which i very much appreciated and which continue to inform my thinking
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Aug 29, 2019 18:11
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Raenir Salazar posted:This is basically the entire point, eventually there is a limit and when it hits that limit bad things happen which hopefully leads to good things. that's the revised leninist hypothesis, anyway. it's academic, though; the environment cannot sustain that level of consumption at any level of technology which we will possess in the foreseeable future. e. i've lurked this thread a while, because i know very little about china. i do know a bit about lenin, though, so i waded in - i'm realising that this was a bit of a derail and i'll stop doing it now V. Illych L. fucked around with this message at 19:50 on Aug 29, 2019 |
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Aug 29, 2019 19:47
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middle-class types having to live with their parents is entirely possible in as broken a housing market as that in hong kong, though. any analysis that discards anyone with higher education as lost to the revolution or w/e is necessarily going to run into some issues as higher education has become a mass phenomenon in increasing parts of the world. it really isn't the sure ticket to a stable life that it was thirty years ago. students have plenty of revolutionary potential under the right circumstances - the paris spring '68 revolution was betrayed by the workers who were bought off by the pompidou regime honestly, even if the hong kong protests are basically bourgeois they're protesting against a form of base despotism, and should be supported
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Sep 22, 2019 10:42
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the PRC has some features which are interesting and which superficially seem to be inherited from the "people's" part of "people's republic", but i honestly don't know enough about it to say much more - at any rate, it's definitely pretty degenerate as far as workers' states go. a certain third worldism must also be accounted for in discussions of PRC on the fringe left, but i'm not a huge fan of those analyses
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Sep 23, 2019 17:41
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CAPS LOCK BROKEN posted:Hong Kong rioters are now shaking down restaurants and other businesses for protection money. If they don't cough up cash they get put on a list of businesses that "support the police" and targeted for violence: basically all insurrections do this sort of thing if they're at all organised so good on them i guess???
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Nov 10, 2019 18:56
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extradition laws &c are always going to be implemented when the subject is some objectively awful person, though, that doesn't mean that it's only going to be used on objectively awful people. one can legitimately protest a principle without being in favour of some psychopath - your rhetoric there is basically similar to the tough-on-crimes crowd
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Dec 19, 2019 02:27
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if someone gets detained in hong kong, they can expect to remain in hong kong lest people have a legitimate case against the state under the rule of law, which is An Important Thing. if extradition passes, they cannot expect this. that is a significant change, especially for liberals and whatnot who resent the Party's grip on hong kong. the right to a trial in the US doesn't mean that people don't get hosed over, but it's far from irrelevant
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Dec 19, 2019 02:39
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A big flaming stink posted:how useful is something like psychoanalysis of a protest though, really? at its core, a protest is simply the dissatisfaction with the status quo boiling over. political analysis is useful when it comes to assessing whether it's a cause worth supporting. to my mind, the HK protests are primarily about housing, but such protests always manifest as opposition to some form of misrule and then take a life of their own based on government reaction and the particular history involved, etc. in this case the protests have a very bourgeois character because a lot of the aggrieved people are essentially middle-class types who were expecting greater personal autonomy due to their education - there seems also to be very little genuinely revolutionary sentiment, with the protesters trying to achieve liberal institutional reforms and rallying to symbols to that effect
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Dec 19, 2019 02:45
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the odd desire some people have to wholeheartedly support an oligarchical and deeply corrupt regime in the face of obvious excesses never ceases to surprise me
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Dec 19, 2019 02:53
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trying to pretend that chinese industrial policy has been a failure seems a little, uh, desperate
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Dec 20, 2019 01:49
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imo the gap between 'languages are dying out in china' and 'minority groups are facing systematic genocides' is pretty big languages and cultures are dying at a massive rate everywhere (scottish gaelic being one obvious example) without people seriously positing globalisation as a genocidal force even though it arguably is
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Apr 7, 2021 09:36
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ok, let me rephrase: the consequence of having that sort of attitude to genocide is that we're in the middle of a whole swathe of ongoing genocides which seem to be nowhere on the agenda. the specific situation wrt the uighurs seems to warrant interest independently of whether it formally qualifies as a genocide by such criteria, as well as the PRC's general policy towards national minorities which, though possibly also in this sense genocidal nonetheless seems meaningfully distinct from what's going on in xinjiang
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Apr 7, 2021 11:36
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:No, genocide requires intent. Just because languages and cultures are being lost as a result of globalization does not mean globalization is a "genocidal force." does it? how does one divine unstated intent from national policy? surely if a policy has something as a predictable consequence this is inseparable from intent in this context? note that what i'm driving at here isn't xinjiang, but the PRC attitude towards national minorities in general. the policies and incentives in place may very well be strongly han-centric, but that dynamic seems to be around a lot of places and doesn't seem to be what people are upset about wrt xinjiang - as noted, local language education is at least made realistically available with adequate infrastructure for teaching and using it, and there are (exoticised and likely inadequate, but still) measures in place with the stated purpose of preserving regional customs and identities. what i'm getting at here is that if this policy constitutes genocidal activity, then what people are upset about re: xinjiang isn't so much the idea of genocide in itself since that is largely uncontroversial(!) in most other contexts, and so the debate as to whether chinese policy in xinjiang formally qualifies becomes a lot less interesting i tend to think that means that chinese minority policy *as applied on its baseline level in other contexts than e.g. xinjiang* cannot be called genocidal, since a consistent application of that standard seems to rob the term of applicability
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Apr 7, 2021 15:19
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re-education centers
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Owlspiracy posted:I dunno why you’d type up hundreds of words refuting a claim nobody has made - that China is committing genocide outside of a specific area, or that assimilationist policies are always genocidal - while adding caveats that this doesn’t apply to one area where genocide is happening. I mean, no poo poo? The discussion about other minority groups arose because people were arguing that of course it can’t be genocide because China loves minority groups! And it turns out the only love minority groups as long as they never agitate for sovereignty and by “love” you mean “still pressure them to assimilate”. If you want to quibble about the level of forced assimilation that amounts to genocide go for it, I firmly believe that when people are being arrested and detained based on their ethnicity or belief system that we are way past any quibbling. there was a turn in the conversation towards chinese minority policy in general, with a reference to language extinction and an imo pretty clear connection to the idea of genocide as the murder of a people, so i thought it was a useful distinction to make idk what the rest of your post is about, i don't think i've ever suggested that any country loves minorities, let alone china
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Apr 7, 2021 15:51
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it's pretty clear that there's an emerging consensus in the US that they want to contain china in various ways. i agree that a shooting war is very unlikely, but we're seeing trial runs of sanctions over xinjiang, and it wouldn't surprise me to see proxy conflicts start popping off in central asia and/or east africa the reason the US is talking about the uighurs is very clearly opportunistic to this geopolitical concerns. this does not necessarily mean that they're entirely wrong, of course
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Apr 8, 2021 09:30
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i don't know much of anything about china's military or posture, but it's worth noting that the comparative advantage in labour costs also applies to military procurement - a third of the dollar amount spending may simply go a longer way in medium-cost china than it does in high-cost USA. i saw somebody estimate this effect based on attack submarine unit costs once, and while it wasn't enough to make up for three times the budget it was pretty significant. also the US counts healthcare for its veterans as military expenditure, which at least in europe goes into the general public healthcare budgets instead. idk how china does this, but that may also be a factor.
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Sep 5, 2023 17:14
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though i do agree, a lot of the US' military expenditure is just "maintain a genuinely global footprint to fight anyone, anywhere" á la the british empire circa 1890 - china's focus is more limited, and so the question is how long that global US reach extends into china's more limited area of focus. china's not going to be making aggressive patrols off of florida keys any time soon, after all.
V. Illych L. fucked around with this message at 21:03 on Sep 5, 2023 |
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Sep 5, 2023 21:00
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nah military force is a matter of relative leverage. even if us military supply chains would be hosed without china, the actually-existing US military is a formidable stick to wave around. what raytheon is saying is that in the event of an actual war, a lot of stuff would have to be nationalised, dropped or massively subsidised. i don't think it would be a problem for very long, simply because i think the mushroom clouds would start rising the moment someone started seriously losing
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Sep 5, 2023 23:26
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i don't know if i'd agree that citing carl schmitt a bunch in policy papers necessarily means the state doing "active ideological copying" of nazi germany tbh, at least not to the point where it's enough to rather rudely assert it as an obvious fact
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Sep 27, 2023 21:50
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sourcing factual assertions about government appointments to the account where one first found the assertion is imo ok regardless of that account's attitude toward quack medicine. the caveat would then be that the assertions being made should, indeed, be factual, but that seems to be the case here as far as i can tell. i would go so far as to say that even if the source often provides highly suspect editorial opinions, it can be a convenient way to find certain types of factual information. i myself take this attitude towards several news sources in my country and it's very easy to maintain. basically, a reason not to use a certain source for a certain type of information would be if that source is known to not be reliable with regard to that sort of information. this guy looks to me to be a hugely pro-PRC-government commentator, which probably colours his posting, but if he consistently and reliably stays on top of this kind of appointment issue he can be a useful source even if one does not share his enthusiasm for xi jinping thought V. Illych L. fucked around with this message at 16:01 on Oct 25, 2023 |
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Oct 25, 2023 15:57
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to make an allegory, i'm happy to use the CIA world factbook for various information at a glance about countries, but i think using the CIA as a source for which states are doing crimes against humanity and which are not is much more suspect. if asked to justify this position, i would point to the CIA's role in legitimising the invasion of iraq; i don't see that as especially relevant when looking for stuff about the demographics of nigeria or what have you, however.
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Oct 25, 2023 16:52
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i fly airplanes posted:Speaks volumes that people glossed over his Uyghur genocide denialism and instead took offense at me calling out his participation in r/Sino and then defending quack medicine. the reason i didn't much want to discuss this is because "uyghur ethnic cleansing" or "uyghur genocide" denialism can mean anything from saying "nothing bad has ever happened in xinjiang" to endorsing op-eds from a mainstream european newspaper depending on the poster
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Oct 25, 2023 17:04
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i fly airplanes posted:Exactly—and this is in part, intentionally due to CCP strategy. https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/os-scook-092723.pdf okay, but you realise that by the standard you've set we should outright disregard the nzz for printing that piece right
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Oct 25, 2023 20:26
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e. you know what this is not going to go anywhere interesting, nevermind
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Oct 26, 2023 00:07
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what ronya's onto is a real thing which has a real history of contention on the radical left. after the bolsheviks took power, there was a conference in moscow where the bolsheviks enumerated twenty-one conditions (in norwegian these are called the "moscow theses") for the international communist movement. one of these conditions is name standardisation to denote loyalty to the greater Communist project. this was actually a big problem for many parties, including the norwegian labour party which briefly subscribed to the moscow theses but were very reluctant to change its name and were never able to suborn the union confederation to the party structure. so the version of the name denotes several things about the allegiance of the party, its view of the bolshevik revolution (which again has deep ideological implications) and the subsequent intra-soviet power struggle, the comintern etc. as one enters the somewhat esoteric realm of high ideology the naming convention is full of significance. i do not think, however, that almost anyone itt is ascribing such significance to the naming convention, but there is a real ideological reason why CCP and CPC are not straightforwardly interchangable. this is also why communist microparties have been called things like "communist party of XYZ(ml)" or "XYZ revolutionary league" - you can generally guess that the former is a maoist party and the latter is trotskyist from the structure of the name.
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Oct 27, 2023 12:33
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Daduzi posted:Then how come they are used interchangeably by members of said party? because ideological nitpicking at this level is not a mandatory exercise among members of the communist party of china, i would guess Raenir Salazar posted:I think its a bit of a stretch to say they aren't straight forwardly interchangeble. There's maybe a small historical context where one version might be slightly more technically correct than the other, but there's no evidence that this has implications on the level of saying "the ukraine" vs Ukraine. Even if you took say, political commentators/streamers who are critical of ML's like Keffals I don't think this would mean or imply anything about them. I don't think there's a single person anywhere around the world where you can go "They say CCP instead of CPC, ergo this is suspect." i provided a specific example of the naming scheme being problematic in the post you're quoting. i don't speak nor read any chinese language, so i can't comment specifically on how this plays out in china - i read this thread mainly to keep tabs at a slightly-above-tabloid level - but naming conventions have in fact been a big deal on the radical left, including among groups which have been real political actors and not just twelve nerds in a coffee shop somewhere. the point coming up itt seems to indicate that some people do react to the use of CCP vs CPC. V. Illych L. fucked around with this message at 22:08 on Oct 27, 2023 |
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Oct 27, 2023 22:03
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the soviets were a very useful figure to blame for a lot of stuff, and soviet rule was highly thuggish and often quite primitive in its demonstrations of force a big part of the project of (state) socialism is to transfer economic conflict into the explicitly political realm rather than outsource it to generalised market discipline, under the formal reasoning that the outcomes of market processes are intensely alienating and produce a large number of undesired outcomes. the idea is that a political process can in principle produce better outcomes. the soviet mentality of political power never quite got over its revolutionary and post-revolutionary phase, and considered open repression perfectly reasonable and open lies worthwhile so long as they were in the cause of advancing the world revolution. you can see something of this in the stalinist policy of the arts in high culture - guys like shostakovich were constantly being charged with counts of formalism when they made something too high-faluting. in a capitalist system, shostakovich's earlier, more experimental works would probably just have not been very popular and so he would've been forced by market pressure to adjust or to simply play to a reduced, specialist (probably quite well-off) audience. however, because the soviet system makes all this stuff explicitly political, you get people making arguments which make little sense to us about a weird term called "formalism" to replicate this effect and force the "formalist" to make humiliating public apologies. as it turns out, a lot of people really resent being subject to this kind of system precisely because there are obvious agents who could in principle be held to account for their mistreatment and yet are not. this goes double for people who have a reasonable expectation that they would be successful under a market-governed regime, such as prominent artists, organisers and academics. in the end, the soviets had no clear answer to the question of elite loyalty so when the soviets fall and the opposition takes over, that opposition has some very legitimate axes to grind against the old regime, and their founding doctrines are all about opposition to said regime anyway. from here follows some half-informed impressions about how this has played out in china: mao seems to have relied on something similar to the soviet approach; repoliticise all areas of public life and harness the forces thus unleashed to bring forward the communist project. as far as i can tell, dengism made a strategic decision to allow open markets to emerge and operate under controlled circumstances and in certain sectors, alleviating some of the pressure from these systems and letting the governing class govern in peace. the american expectation has been that this would lead to governing-class alignment with broader US strategic interests (in practice the post-cold war order), but it doesn't seem to have happened, and xi jinping seems to have taken things in a very different direction.
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Nov 19, 2023 23:37
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Herstory Begins Now posted:Yeah one of my biggest takeaways was and remains that coerciveness takes a hundred fold effort to undo, and even that very often doesn't succeed. People hate being coerced, hate having anyone they care about coerced, particularly in more extreme ways that states tend to, and that the memory of coercion takes a very, very long time to fade. Usually 2-3 generations and sometimes more. also the new governing elite's whole legitimising narrative is opposition to the soviet project, and that narrative was fully acceptable to every other surrounding elite. for a lot of ordinary people, the eastern bloc wasn't bad and often tends to be remembered fondly (call it irrational ostalgie or Lived Experience(tm), but as neuroliminal notes it's an empirical fact fact). these people and their impulses have very limited influence on policy or means of transferring their attitudes to the next generations, and so it quickly gives way to any convenient pinning of what ails ya on the historical shadow of bolshevism i do think there's something to be said for the "well yes this guy is formally a Human Rights Activist but he's also very, very annoying and obnoxious and this is why he's in jail" approach. if you don't raise expectations of accountability the argument made has to be for accountability as such, which as long as you can keep the broad mass politic in line is a very abstract and difficult argument to make. i guess we'll see
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Nov 20, 2023 10:41
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i fly airplanes posted:Try polling East Germany, Poland, Romania, Czech Republic, Slovakia and other Warsaw Pact countries on what their views are of the USSR. It's even more stark. the assertion with which you seem to take issue is that there's a strong correlation between "was adult [in the soviet union? in the eastern bloc?] in circa 1990" and "positive opinion of the soviet union" and that seems to be supported by your link. the effect naturally varies depending on country and probably experience of the Soviet period, but i don't see how your evidence refutes of the claim being made - in fact, from the polls in that link, the tendency appears to be universal with only its effect size varying. also several of the countries you mention are not represented in the polling data. i know that as of 2009 opinions of the communist period were fairly positive among older east germans (https://www.spiegel.de/internationa...m-a-634122.html), but i imagine that feelings were cooler in poland, at least. i have no clear expectations about the other eastern bloc countries, but it would indeed be interesting to see such polls. it's not clear to me what you're trying to argue with the poll of russian irredentism over time except that the russians think they have geopolitical grievances, so i'm not going to try to address that
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Nov 22, 2023 00:01
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Glah posted:I think his point wasn't to challenge the clear correlation amongst age cohorts in different countries trending towards negative as lived experience fades away but the fondness aspect itself. Were we to approach Soviet Union as an imperialist project, it makes sense that people who had lived experience of living in the core would defend it more than the subjugated peoples. And that shows in the polling too. i think this is reading a lot into that post which is not obviously in the text, to be honest. i also disagree with your allegory to the british empire on two points - the first being that an institution directly descended from and invested in the legitimacy of the british empire is, in fact, still around (so it's not a dead man) and the second being that i don't think there's any particular reason to think that e.g. indians or kenyans who lived through the latter days of the empire in their regions would approve of it more than people born after independence absent actual polling evidence of that. we do have evidence of such an effect in the peripheral parts of the soviet union and at least one of its satellites. until fairly recently the official line has been fairly clearly anti-soviet in all of the european-adjacent republics apart from belarus (and, more recently, russia). it is not unreasonable to think that this has something to do with public perceptions of the state on the part of people who weren't conscious during its existence, especially when it's borne out by polling evidence. to put it another way: i feel fairly comfortable with predicting that the recent, more positive line on aspects of the soviet project from the russian government (if maintained) is going to make the kids that grow up with the revised curriculum more positively disposed to the soviet union than people who grew up in the period between, let's say, 1992-2015
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Nov 22, 2023 17:52
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Glah posted:I thought it was obvious because it's the only way the post makes sense as a counter assertation instead of any other interpretation for very much the same reasons you outlined in your previous post. And it makes the point about Russian irredentism make sense too, they don't miss political and economic system of Soviet Union, they miss the lands of their neighbours that made "them" an empire. And that was what I was going for in my British empire example, it wasn't supposed to be 1 on 1 allegory, it was just an example of how people view past empires and how their views might differ depending on their own identity. if the charitable interpretation is that the post is meant to counter a claim which other than the one explicitly made (in this case it's unclear what the precise claim being rebutted would be - everyone who lived to see the soviet union liked it? some people liked the soviet union? people in the satellites didn't like the soviet union? the latter is plausible, but not supported at all by the provided evidence), i think charity is doing us something of a disservice. it's also notably asymmetrical; it requires the claim being rebutted to be a much broader one than is apparently put forward, so we'd be assuming a suspicious reading of neuroliminal's post to provide a charitable reading of i fly airplanes' post it's possible to say that russians generally have a better opinion of the soviet union than e.g. estonians for reasons of perceived national greatness, but that doesn't work to counter the claim made, and it doesn't seem address the ukrainians in neuroliminal's poll having a larger effect size than the russians. at best, the case being made is that there is also an effect of russian national pride in perceptions of the soviet union (again, this is certainly plausible!), but this would not actually be a rebuttal of neuroliminal's interpretation of the provided data. the post seems to want to do more ("It's not about the West killing off "fond memories of the USSR", it correlates to Russian propaganda and control."), i.e. perceptions of the soviet union are not correlated to a western-aligned/western-led (depending, again, on how suspicious we want to be of neuroliminal's original post - i certainly didn't read it as implying that this was all a foreign imposition) anti-soviet educational effort, but are correlated to how susceptible people are to russian propaganda. this would be irreconcilable with neuroliminal's position, but is not borne out by the evidence provided. i do think there's something to be said for the alternative interpretation that "the fall of the USSR was bad" can also mean "the period in which the USSR fell was really bad" and not necessarily "the USSR was good", but i don't think that this fully accounts for just how stark this generational effect is, nor the east german story which was phrased more explicitly. basically i'm saying that imo a more plausible interpretation of the post in question is that it's just missing its target or wrong. that is fine - this can be demonstrated and then the china thread can ideally go back to discussing china with the question of generational attitudes towards the soviet union a largely settled empirical question. i do think that there being such an effect is relevant, because the soviet project and the people's republic of china have many points of contact and it's worth noting that that project remains much more popular/much less unpopular to people with their own memories of it, implying that the general brutishness of the regime did not actually cause a general collapse of legitimacy among the masses, and when we discuss chinese neo-authoritarian strategies that is pertinent; if one's interpretation is that what the soviets did wrong was pretend to not be brutes and then behave brutally, which caused disaffection among certain elite segments who quite liked the idea of not being brutes, which contributed to the collapse of legitimacy among those elites, then just not entertaining those pretensions is a perfectly reasonable lesson to learn from the soviet collapse. it does not make sense if the correct interpretation is that the brutality itself destroyed popular consent for the soviet project per se - if that is the only supportable view, then the neo-authoritarians in ronya's telling seem to just be stupid. V. Illych L. fucked around with this message at 00:12 on Nov 23, 2023 |
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Nov 23, 2023 00:01
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Alchenar posted:I think the extremely rapid rise of right-to-far-right nationalist sentiment in the USSR and across the Warsaw Pact is a pretty strong indicator that the conventional wisdom that there was no ideological love for the USSR at at is correct, and that people value things they associate with stability over things they associate with instability. mass support for the soviet project was not especially deep towards the end, i agree with this. however, there's a difference between "not active ideological commitment" and "the project has fundamentally lost legitimacy among the masses". the generational attitude gap can, in my opinion, be best interpreted as a lot ordinary people in the soviet space being moderately positively disposed towards the soviet union but by no means willing to fight for it, and not on any deep level. that is congruent with mass consent - i.e. the soviet project was perceived as basically legitimate among the mass politic and its abolition was largely an elite-driven phenomenon. for china, then, the lesson becomes one of elite management, and the question of how to deal with dissent is fundamentally a question about how to deal with elites. judicious use of terror to impose discipline on some sections of the elite can even be quite popular among the masses, or at least not unpopular, as seen with jack ma's case; if the terror became too much a part of everyday life, then that would be a problem for the mass politic. when the soviet project collapses, because they saw the soviet project as basically legitimate, a lot of people then don't accept the post-soviet liberal-democratic political structure as more legitimate, and thus are willing to cast about for alternatives - and the most obvious one which is socially permissible and which they see as representing their interests is right-wing populism. there's imo no contradiction between having a positive view of the DDR and voting AfD, despite the AfD being vocally anticommunist - the key in my view is simply that these people don't have any loyalty to the replacement liberal-bourgeois regime, and especially don't like the elites representing that regime very much.
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Nov 23, 2023 09:56
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