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an honest to god marxy thread on something awful, in the year of our trump 1. im either tripping nutsack or i've time-travelled back to the days of that old-timey xtian calendar system. gently caress, i feel a post coming on. namesake posted:Well then was the USSR socialist from start to finish then, or did it stop being socialist at some point before it stopped being the USSR? Obviously in a general argumentative sense Trots use state capitalism or deformed workers state or something to talk about how awesome and socialist the revolution was and then when all the inexcusably bad stuff happened it wasn't socialist anymore but if we're trying to analyse forms then we have to say 'X is Y and not Z' or we just turn everything into a blur. If I'm chatting with a bunch of people who I believe actually know theory then I might talk about the USSR potentially being a kind of authoritarian socialism, actually existing socialism, etc and giving an in depth review of its merits and failures while theorycrafting but talking to people generally then anything that comes across as 'I want to redo the USSR without any changes' is not particularly a winning argument when discussing what a socialist state will be, and if you can't say that the USSR is socialism then what was it? your categories and historical understanding aren't really working for me here. materialist ('scientific' lol) socialism/communism isn't some kind of pre-ordained systemic blueprint that you can just brute force society into. there's no roadmap to socialism because there is no platonic ideal of socialism up in the realm of forms or whatever. nobody really knows how to build socialism or what it will look like, all we really can know are the features that it won't and can't have. it has to be experimental, and (as far as i can tell) it has to be a collective dialectical interaction with material conditions. marx made almost no positive assertions about what communism would be like, because as far as he was concerned its impossible to conceive of a new mode of production beforehand. this is one of the big sticks that he used to hit utopian and idealistic socialists with, and also why all the revolutionary successes of the 20c (however temporary) were materialist and not armchair daydreamers building utopias in their heads. in the first waves of primitive accumulation, the emerging bourgeoisie weren't thinking 'we want to build capitalism, therefore we need to assimilate the commons and proletarianize the peasants and serfs'. all they were thinking was 'that can make me money, gimme'. that the accumulation cycle turned out to be self-reproducing and self-expanding was totally contingent. nobody knew beforehand. nobody 'planned' capitalism intentionally, even though it is a direct result of human historical praxis. once the accumulation cycle had been going on for a while people started to try to understand it and manipulate it further, and classical political economy was born. the point being that historical understanding is always retrospective. nobody knew what capitalism was until it was already happening. nobody knew what a universe with god emperor trump would be like until it was already happening. nobody can possibly imagine what a communist world in any real detail would be like, and that's not just because of the built in retrospective nature of history, but also because the mode of production has an enormous impact on the development of the people enacting it. we can't blueprint a classless society in advance because by the time that poo poo gets rolling we will have radically changed ourselves in the making of it. wrt the soviet union specifically, this all means that debates about defining it with a label are just as misguided as assuming that all revolutions must and always will follow that specific model. the russian revolution was the first successful class-conscious movement in the industrial age. it happened in a gigantic nation that at the time was devastated from war, had only a handful of operating factories, and was surrounded by hostile forces. everything was against them, and they were flying into the unknown without a map. that it lasted more than a week is a miracle in itself. that it had all kinds of horrific bugs, glitches, and breakdowns and was eventually assimilated and plundered isn't even remotely surprising. there's no loving training wheels for systemic change. there's no guard-rail, no big other guaranteeing meaning or success or that bad poo poo isn't going to happen. bad poo poo is going to happen, and all you can do is redirect your collective intellectual and labour praxis towards the problem until it's fixed. success in anything only happens through perpetually failing, until the chain of falsifications and negations has mapped the territory for you. the investigation of the ussr's attempt at a new mode of production is really important, interesting, and difficult due to the cacophony of histrionic polemics and propaganda surrounding it, but structuring that investigation around a bunch of ostensibly transhistorical/universal abstractions obfuscates the concrete historical conditions, which is what marxian theory is always trying to excavate. the ussr wasn't socialist because the bureaucracy controlled the MoP and not the workers (and it failed to bring about communism). it wasn't capitalist because there was no labour market and therefore no real proletarian class - everyone had a a job, a room, and meal ticket at the least. it wasn't 'state socialist' because states are defined by their aims, organizational structure and specific social and material relations, and the soviet state was a totally new phenomenon that can't be automatically equated with other types of states without immediately loving up your a prioris (its ultimate goal was to dissolve itself into a stateless, classless society, as opposed to a bourgeois state where the goal is to perpetuate, expand and provide a crutch for the accumulation cycle). it wasn't a 'deformed worker's state' because genuine universal democracy was never completely 'there' for any significant length of time in the first place. what the soviet union was was a specific attempt to kickstart a self-perpetuating democratic classless society in a specific place within a specific historical context and specific material conditions. the ideas, policies, techniques, and organizational strategies they used were specific interactions with those specific material conditions. they limited their aims to 'socialism in one country' because other revolutionary movements were crushed or failed to gain any impetus in the first place. they rolled with market reforms in the 20s because the country was in shambles and the emerging state apparatus had very little to work with. they liquidated the kulaks because they couldn't achieve what they were trying to do with an internal group of hostile land-owners. they collectivized agriculture on the model of the worker's soviets that were already a longstanding part of their specific culture. they built their industrial means of production around a centralized, taylorist model because that's what seemed to be working for contemporary capitalists. later on that bit them in the rear end when they were unable to continue to adequately developing the model (not to mention the resulting environmental devastation). if there were a proletarian revolution say, tomorrow, in a core boog country, it's ridiculous to think that it would do or look anything like the ussr. we have widespread electrical infrastructure and communication systems that can talk to anyone anywhere and anytime almost instantaneously. we have a developed means of production with all kinds of new organizational structures like franchises. we have RFID tags and just-in-time manufacturing. we have ready-made gigantic vertical monopolies (walmart etc) that could be pretty easily democratized. we also have the most urgent historical necessity we have ever faced in the form of the 6th mass extinction event, which capital cannot do anything about because as the ultimate determinant of the metabolism between us and nature, it is the crisis. the material conditions and historical situation aren't even remotely comparable to the soviet situation, and you can only discover that by diving into the specific, concrete conditions and being extremely precise about what is universal and transhistorical and what is historically situated and contingent within a given situation. if you really want to try deconstructing liberal ideology in person, i would suggest getting down to specific concepts that everyone in the conversation can understand and define, rather than throwing around the big theory labels. there are many kinds of 'socialisms' just as there are many 'capitalisms', and the vast majority of people don't even have a clue what core properties are supposed define either term in the first place. under the big abstractions lies multiplicity and fuzziness, which is why this poo poo is so hard to talk and think about (and also why thinkers that prefer to gently caress with the law of identity rather than slavishly worship it are so useful). (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Jan 8, 2017 17:11
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I'm slowly reading through this thread and am still wading throw dozens of pages of 'degrowth' arguing, so this post will have nothing to do with the polec stuff going on now. There's a fundamental problem with advocating anprim/degrowth strategies as a solution to 'climate change', especially if we're going to call ourselves materialists. The problem has to do with how nature is conceived of in the first place from within the bourgeois order, and worse, that pretty much all environmental movements up till now have been working off of this extremely idealist, quasi-mystical conception. I'll try to be brief. The planetary ecosystem has no balance or equilibrium. Nature has no 'natural' state. There's nothing to go back to. Even if capitalism were over tomorrow and we all kumbaya'd into an anprim 'utopia' together, the climate would still exponentially feedback loop itself into a completely unlivable state within a few generations. poo poo's already baked in and the writing's on the wall. Even naming the problem as 'climate change' reifies some optimum equilibrium we can get to if we all work together. 'Anthropocene' is better, although this is another bourgeois concept that ignores the historically specific relations of production that define capitalism and it tends to lead to anti-humanist nihilism. Afaic the only serious materialist angle on this is the 'Capitalocene'. The problem isn't moral rot or overconsumption or overproduction or sustainability, let alone the despicable Malthusian obfuscation of overpopulation, the problem is that through the mediation of capital, the transhistorical metabolism between humans and nature - the labor process - is now the determining factor in the planetary ecology. Capitalism has essentially amounted to the beginning of a massive terraforming project with an implicit end-goal - a ball of dirt for cockroaches and tardigrades. The practical upshot is that any attempt to dismantle the productive apparatus we/capital has built is just an extremely stupid way to commit species-suicide. We can't go back. We are now responsible for this planet and the capitalist productive apparatus is the only tool we have to maintain our role in the planetary metabolism. Losing this lever equals extinction, and leaving it to take care of itself in it's capitalist form amounts to the same. The task of a 21st century ecocommunism is to take control of the terraforming project our idiot liberal ancestors have saddled us with and transformatively redirect it towards minimally habitable ends, and this project goes on forever because there has never been and never will be a natural state of ecological equilibrium. Some of the theoretical implications of this are that concepts like sustainability, preservation, Luddhism, Malthusianism, degrowth, all your anti-humanist deep ecology hippie junk, sure it's all inherently democidal, but more importantly its just pissing in the wind. It won't do anything except maybe delay the end for a few people. Billions of people are going to die regardless of who ends up winning the struggle for the future. Millions of extant species are going to go extinct, and the eco-war-communism we have to build isn't going to be fun or luxurious. There's no way around this, and bitching and moaning and throwing moralistic blame around about the casualty counts of x and y approach just belies an inability to stare utterly indifferent historical necessity in the face. We will do this, or there will be no 'we' anymore. Degrowth and antiproductivism are not the answer - the rational, ultra-hi-tech, scientifically planned production of a new planetary ecology is the only way forward. emTme3 fucked around with this message at 09:05 on Aug 22, 2019 |
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Aug 22, 2019 08:56
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Ferrinus posted:i don't see the point in acknowledging that the ussr wasn't capitalist, but then vehemently adding that it definitely wasn't socialism, surely not, it must have represented some heretofore undefined third thing that we'll be unraveling for years. it's much more straightforward to conclude that it was socialist and socialist economies have their own logistical and societal problems, especially socialist economies under eternal siege by vastly stronger capitalist powers Ticktin calls it a 'non mode of production', which is an analysis I've come around to. Basically the party apparatus managed to block (or at least effectively mediate) the value form from determining production, but there was no new social form to replace it with other than direct allocation backed by direct force. Clock without a spring is the metaphor. After the purging of the factions, the castrating of the soviets, the uncritical importation of Taylorism, the reinstallation of the domestic family, and the disappearance of effective internal self-criticism it's hard to see any other way the USSR could have gone. Whether consciously or not the society that arose after the revolution in the countryside had decisively closed off the conditions necessary for something like a new social form to arise. They were stuck, and it only got more obvious as the century wore on. It is argued all the time that these measures were necessary to combat the siege conditions they were in, but if lockstep party discipline, the disappearance of effective internal debate and criticism, and Taylorist workplace hierarchies are necessary to hold off capital then SIOC is truly a dead end. There were never be a SIOC that isn't under siege from its outset. emTme3 fucked around with this message at 00:16 on May 6, 2020 |
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May 6, 2020 00:12
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Ferrinus posted:yeah, i've heard it before, i just don't buy it. i think these takes basically serve as an escape hatch for academics in the west, a way for them to have their cake and eat it too - on the one hand you can be an anticapitalist but on the other hand you don't have to give up on what you learned from Animal Farm or otherwise draw the establishment's ire. yeah i get you. fair enough. quote:like, okay, the party apparatus was able to use the state to block the value form from determining production. what, then, determined production? nothing did. they had to force it at gunpoint. direct violence is a lovely motivator. the workers were hella alienated and not at all organized as a result. in capitalism there's objective structures that force workers to organize out of sheer survival necessity. workers in the ussr spent most of their time breaking poo poo, half assing it, running away to the country to escape the party census, and you know, getting pretend payments for pretending to work. quote:did they simply build things at random and by accident? kind of, ya. the central planning requisitions basically never got filled, and all the incentive on the factory end was to falsify the data (so you didn't get shot) and as result the planners never had accurate data to plan with in the first place. quote:what did marx call an economy in which use-value determines production again...? he waffled between socialism and communism and never really clearly defined the difference. again, it wasn't use-value in the abstract that determined production in the ussr, it was what the party defined as needful based on bullshit numbers that came down from on high with the threat of violence as the only motivator. if use value regulated anything directly, it regulated all the tiny private gardens/farms/workshops that people had to build on the side to get by. use-value regulated local production, but that local necessity was itself determined by the lack of determination in social production. quote:for that matter, if a state prevents rather than mandates that exchange value be what determines production, exactly which class is using that state as a machine of domination? it's surely not the bourgeoisie, because production for exchange is the source of all their power. the party apparatus didn't really represent any concrete class interest afaict. the proletariat the bolsheviks were fighting for was always a minority and was largely decimated after the revolution. all strata of peasants resisted collectivization and integration. it wasn't really a secret, the party was tacitly aware it didn't have a real support base and were desperately banking on the international revolution, at least at first. later on the party bureaucracy was pretty nakedly ruling in its own interests exclusively. quote:i don't really get your conclusion in your second paragraph at all. if socialism in one country is a dead end because intense discipline and militancy are required to withstand external siege... then we shouldn't bother to fight back against capitalist siege, or what? the soviet attempt at a SIOC has collapsed. i listed some of the factors i think led to that collapse, then said that if those factors are in fact, transhistorical imperatives for any SIOC attempt, then they'll all likely go the same way. i probably should have written another paragraph saying i don't think all of those factors are transhistorically necessary and so i also don't think SIOC is a dead end. intense militancy and discipline were not some of those factors. I'm 100% all in for that poo poo; if anything, by the 70s and 80s it was the lack of militancy and discipline that was a contributing factor to the collapse. but banning factions - holy loving poo poo how stupid and pompous can you loving be. internal self criticism is literally the motor of ANY political organization and they castrated themselves in the name of security. once that poo poo went public, the international worker movement split and hasn't stopped splitting since. they were in a position to be a beacon of hope for proles everywhere, and instead they made it insanely obvious immediately that russian workers had just swapped bosses. the damage this caused to worker movements around the world was and is still utterly catastrophic. if you're going to build a SIOC that means political factions for everybody, everywhere, in every institution. that's how people learn how to become political agents, that's how you learn what your workers want and need, that's how your praxis develops and improves, that's how you give yourself the optics you need to attract international workers to the cause. you can set up the faction lines in ways that are structurally advantageous to worker interests overall, but you can't ban factions. that poo poo is literally suicide. taylorist workplaces were loving awful in capitalism, and were loving awful in the ussr, with the added bonus that in the ussr there was no structural incentive to upgrade that poo poo. this move just drips with cynical pragmatism and totally backfired. turns out russian workers hated that poo poo just as much as any worker anywhere. you can't be a successful SIOC without the overwhelming support of a majority of your workers. this kind of bullshit majorly dampened whatever internal support base they had. i could go on but i tired and i forget what all i posted and all the other dumb poo poo they pulled that hosed them in the rear end. the secret police killing off all their best and brightest, the culture of sackless sycophantism that prevailed once internal debate disappeared, the pay grade hierarchy in the bureaucracy (the ussr wasn't 'socialist' in any sense solely based on this), rejecting mendel entirely based only on grossly simplified precritical ontological commitments and allowing an entire hemisphere to get scammed by a pseudoscientific fraud as a result (this is what happens when you purge all your actual philosophers), just, gently caress. all of this poo poo was insanely indisputably self-defeating and if the ussr were still around you could argue it was all a necessary ruse of history or whatever but it isn't and you can't. i'll rescind the tiktin and replace it with - it doesn't loving matter what it was because it's gone, and it's because it's gone that we know we have to do different and much better next time. emTme3 fucked around with this message at 13:18 on Jul 24, 2020 |
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Jul 24, 2020 12:59
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Ferrinus posted:i asked what DETERMINED production, not what MOTIVATED production. as in, how did they decide whether to build a tractor or a luxury car? in america, you decide based on which is more profitable. in the ussr, you decide based on which is more useful to the development of the state. maybe the party "defined" the tractor "as needful based on bullshit numbers" etc etc etc. let's grant for a moment that the party didn't know what the gently caress it was doing, constantly made wrong decisions, whatever. they were still determining production based on use-value rather than exchange-value. even if their calculations as to what would be the most useful were WRONG. bolded the needful. what was useful for the state apparatus is not the same thing as immediate, concrete use value in the lives of citizenry. also, if the states decisions about use-value were based on faulty data or were flawed decisions, then they were only able to produce for use-value in the abstract, even for themselves. this was the whole problem - without exchange value, they were unable to locate use value. what was useful was defined from the bureaucracy based on flawed data, which then maybe sorta kinda got produced with very little quality control (bc workers were still alienated from their boring, repetitive jobs which now had ballooning managerial oversight), what actually got produced got misreported, more flawed use-values orders came down, etc. what kept it going for so long was just sheer overproduction at all levels, and a whole lot of black marketing and secret local production. quote:marx did not at all waffle on, or fail to define, the difference between socialism and communism. marx divided communism into two stages - the "lower stage" in which society engages in production for use rather than production for exchange, but still pays people according to the work they do, and then the "higher stage" in which there's no longer any repressive apparatus and from each/to each is the only law of the land. I find this to be pretty vague and abstract, yes. Trying to get from these definitions to a concrete system even on paper is kind of the whole trick, isn't it? quote:later, lenin called the lower stage socialism and the higher stage communism. what existed in the ussr was "lower stage communism" or "socialism" depending on whose terminology you prefer. I sure hope it wasn't socialism, because it objectively did not get us to communism. this is also a retroactive definition based on lenin's assessment of the Bolshevik situation and the need to distinguish revolutionary projects from reformist 'socialists'. quote:these are all highly specious claims. the party which led a revolution and then defense against a world war didn't have a real support base? who the gently caress did all the farming and mining and manufacturing and soldiering, then? a mostly new proletarianized peasantry dominated by the militarized party state. quote:was each individual collective farmer or factory worker just tricked into believing they were the only one who didn't support the soviet regime, whereas in fact if they'd just asked around they would have realized almost nobody did and they could all safely ignore the politburo? guns, man, guns. you got shot/gulag'd/disappeared for not supporting. like all states, it was a gang of armed men in the last instance. quote:it's a ridiculous idea - no government which actually has no material basis with which to rule can rule, and the basis of the soviet government was the soviet citizenry. griping about your government isn't the same as denying it consent and legitimacy the basis of the soviet state was its military, which broke the back of any possible internal resistance. that's not to say lots of workers and peasants didn't support the state, plenty did, many enthusiastically so, but you can't pretend that there wasn't a coercive apparatus or that they had much of a choice. quote:banning explicit factions isn't the same as banning internal debate. in fact internal debate and criticism was a constant and unrelenting feature of internal committees, meetings, plenums, whatever. you're describing a liberal fantasy of the soviet union as some kind of stifling mind control regime rather than a real-world entity populated by real-world people who obviously disagree, bicker, and strategize just as much as people do in any collective undertaking regardless of its mode of production. the poo poo about the soviets tragically killing or exiting all their best and brightest mainly comes out of the people who were voted out of power and subsequently exiled because their ideas sucked poo poo and past a certain point bringing up the same long-debunked objections over and over again constitutes wrecking and sabotage they killed the old Bolsheviks man. i can't forgive that - those people were the among the greatest heroes of humankind. the USSR never resembled a stifling mind control regime - it was a minority state apparatus desperately trying to get a grip on sheer loving chaos at all levels. the more it gripped, the more chaotic it got, and the bigger the apparatus got. Stalin had to build an entire extra upper echelon of secret police/bureaucracy just to try to get a handle on the ballooning party bureaucracy, which had almost no grip on anything on the ground. the degree to which the state apparatus was rigid, monolithic and militarized was proportional to how bloody little control they actually had over anything. the kind of careerists that always infest this kind of structure are sycophants and yes-men. banning explicit factions didn't end debates and criticism, of course not - but over time ballooning hierarchies to manage the ballooning hierarchies heavily incentivized the advancement of parasite careerists. once people started disappearing in the purges, the smartest learned real quick to keep their mouths shut. this led inexorably to a monolith full of two-faced sychophants and the disappearance of criticism, self and other. when critical thought disappears, the communist horizon evaporates. and no, just because I bring up the purges does not mean I'm a liberal or I think stalin was some monomaniacal dictator. the purges happened because this was siege socialism, there were objectively wreckers and saboteurs, siege mentalities are inherently paranoiac, and the state apparatus was increasingly a monolith that had no factions to check the spread of the paranoia. if anything, stalin tried to limit the damage, but nonetheless many people who stuck out too obviously got hosed. lysenko managed to scam the entire loving apparatus because of its monolithic tendencies. plenty of biologists new he was full of poo poo but kept their mouths shut, because keeping your mouth shut was de facto mandatory just to have a position at all. you need diversity of opinion, you need every idea you can get including the poo poo ones (because being wrong is part of of the process by which you learn to be less wrong), and you absolutely need clear, transparent factional lines so the struggle can go on with a coherent structure on the new socialist terrain. mao was right. this was the big lie the ussr told itself - class struggle stops in socialism. it objectively does not, and if you try to enforce that lie you end up with an ineffectual monolith twisting in the wind. you need factional lines for debate, critical though, and worker/citizen identification with the project. 'us v them' is built into the structure of language. if you kill factions, you get alienated workers vs the state. cooperation and competition are interdependent- you kill one you lose them both. look at the American political system. the 2 parties are a stroke of inspired political genius. people are socialized into identifying with one party or the other. they form their political identities out of an antagonism that is completely artificial. does it matter to the actual oligarchs who holds power? not in the slightest. the American exterminatus rolls on regardless. meanwhile, the loyalty of the citizenry is assured by fact that us red/blue good peoples have to beat those red/blue bastards! identification with an us v them sublated from guns to words is how a political project reproduces itself as a unity. meanwhile back in the USSR over the course of 80 years, the sackless sychophants and careerists took over the whole project and eventually there were a bunch of loving neoliberals in charge. another colossal failure - the USSR, god rest its soul, utterly failed to reproduce committed communist leadership to carry it forward. sure, it's the fastest industrialization in history and beat the snot out of Hitler, but where is it now? 80 years from revolution to collapse - the majority of ancient slave empires lasted longer than this! i get the tendency to defend the ussr, I really do. it was a beautiful, courageous attempt, the loving anthem makes me cry like a baby, if it were still around i would be there right now. there's so much liberal bullshit blotting out the sun and it takes so much work to sift through it that we all have a knee-jerk reaction to defend, defend, defend. but defense is reactive. criticism and self-criticism is the engine we've got, it's the weapon the libs and the fash are absolutely incapable of, and we must proactively and productively criticize our own past if we are to have a hope of ever having another shot. emTme3 fucked around with this message at 09:21 on Sep 30, 2020 |
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Sep 30, 2020 08:33
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Ferrinus posted:i noticed that this quote of my post from back in july (?!) ended at a place that gave it kind of a weird cadence, so i decided to go back and see what you were actually responding to. there, on page 989, i discovered that the actual paragraph you're quoting does not place a period at the end of "WRONG" but rather goes on as follows: It wasn't my intent to edit your words. I'm phone posting and I may have hosed up the quote by accident. My apologies. I'm not denying that USSR accomplished all of that, I mentioned it at the end of my post. My point is not that they weren't able to accomplish what seem almost like miracles in retrospect, my point is that it was all for nothing. You're writing like it's still the 60s and all of these achievements actually did anything long term. It's 2020 now, and it's all gone man. All of it. Russia is a reactionary shithole now, and the anti-communist propaganda program is completely dominant. Revolutionary praxis starts with a clear eyed analysis of current conditions, and with the exception of a few scattered people's war fronts and the Cuban project, we're dead in the water. All that the USSR matters to anybody anymore is the lessons its failure can teach we communists who understand the necessity of trying again and again until we succeed. quote:
I'm very aware actual scarcity of consumer goods was a late stage result of neoliberalization, but I wasn't talking about the 80s, I was talking about the early five year plans. There was certainly enough material necessities to go around, and this is indeed successful UV planning. What it was not was a model that was able to outproduce or out-innovate the Western capital core. My point about the barely controlled chaos still stands - it was enough to feed, clothe, and house everybody for a few generations, it was not enough to compete as a firm on the world market, which it still had to do. So the question is, why? quote:besides disingenuous, you also seem to be weak on the theory here. you say "without exchange value, they were unable to locate use value." but if you're a marxist, you know that exchange value and use-value are in no way commensurate. gold has incredible exchange value but its use-value is very different from the use-value of a tractor, which is why exchanging russian gold for american tractors was an extremely good idea for the early soviets. you've just wound back up at boilerplate liberal pablum about irreplaceable market efficiencies or whatever. I'm not trying to be disingenuous, I'm attempting to engage in good faith. UV and EV are both in no way commensurate and also interdependent - it's dialectical, comrade. My position is not that value form dominated liberal societies are 'more efficient' (or efficient in any way whatsoever except killing planets). My position is that it is not enough to just delete EV and roll with UV, you need a new form that includes UV and a a metric to actually measure and locate it that is not EV. I think this is absolutely possible in practice, and we should all of us try immediately. quote:
Fair enough on the definition, I guess, but there are still many different ways to plan for UV, and the USSR only tried a few. They also didn't have networked computers, which makes their success even more dizzying. We can obviously do better than they did. Again, they successes were only temporarily spectacular, ultimately they were failures. quote:
I'll just repeat what I already posted: I sure hope not, because it objectively did not get the world or even Russia to communism. Not a single UV oriented planning system has lasted more than 80 years. Is your plan just to repeat the past? What is your analysis for why the USSR is gone? And if it's liberals in the leadership, how did it they get there? Where can you see a lower stage of communism now? Where is communism? quote:okay, you have to get why this is stupid, right? like aside from your tacit admission that there actually was a mass civilian base in the form of the proletariat and peasantry. in the 1930s, the ussr had a population of roughly 170 million people. during world war 2, the red army numbered approximately 3 million men. 1.7% of a population can't actually rule the other 98.3% with sheer force of arms. it doesn't work. soldiers need to eat. soldiers need to be equipped. soldiers have families. i needn't remind you that we're talking about a population that has already violently overthrown its tyrannical rulers within most of its members' lifetimes. The choice for the vast majority of the population in the 20s was red terror or white terror - you're drat right most of them kept their heads down and did their jobs. You don't have to point a gun at every single person to rule by force. The population in the 30s or the size of the red army in the 40s is totally besides the point of the class analysis I was making, which is that the proletariat that actually accomplished the revolution against the tsar was not the same proletariat that worked the first few five year plans. The former was a tiny fraction of Russia's population at the time, the latter an explosive growth drawn from the peasantry. quote:some of the old bolsheviks killed others of the old bolsheviks because it turns out that insurrections and revolutions are carried out by coalitions of convenience whose constituent parts enter the project with all sorts of personal creeds and ultimate aims. bukharin and stalin agreed on whether tsar nicholas should remain in power. they disagreed on whether farms should be collectivized or allowed to liberalize further. this doesn't mean bukharin wasn't a hero of the revolution or whatever, just that times change and every transformation into a new state brings forth a new set of contradictions which will themselves give rise to another transformation and so forth. and this was a reason to loving murder bukharin??? Jesus Christ. Again, there needed to be open, legal factions with some agreed upon method of deciding between more NEP agriculture or collectivization. You don't loving execute the opposition for disagreeing with the plan, the second you do that everybody with any initiative or courage is gonna flee for the nearest border and you get a state full of cynical careerists. Stalin's faction didn't just purge some of the old Bolsheviks, they purged the Deborites and the Machists and loving anybody or anything that didn't toe not just the political-economic line but a loving static ontological line, ending theoretical development within the project for decades and making a mockery of dialectical materialism, which must never stop developing if it is not to betray itself. Theory and Practice advance through contradiction. If you remove contradictions, you stagnate. If you stagnate, you fail. quote:a big lie you're telling me right now is that the ussr pretended that class struggle stops in socialism. Actually that's Mao. You callin Mao a liar? He made sure there were always factions and even tried a second revolution against his own bureaucracy. He was critically learning from the Soviet experience, why won't you? quote:but in fact lenin explicitly wrote, and stalin quoted, that class struggle only sharpens under socialism, hence the continued need for a repressive apparatus to defend the revolution. But the locus of the antagonism shifts after the revolution. For Stalin, class struggle continued as the fight of the apparatus against internal and external bourgeois threats. For the actual working class outside the apparatus, there was no way to continue the struggle. They couldn't even organize. quote:remember, you're writing about real, actual people who are just as good at noticing that things are amiss as you are, and just as capable as you are of talking about it amongst themselves and at least trying out solutions. these aren't cartoon characters or video game NPCs. Real, actual people's perspectival horizon is overdetermined by their social practice relative to the totality of social relations, or we are no longer Marxists. The state apparatus could not see new axes of antagonism that had formed within the project, because it did not allow these perspectives to organize and represent themselves. We can only understand ourselves through the mediation of the other. The Soviet state was a state in complete denial that it had an internal other whatsoever. Workers interests were the state apparatuses interests, and that was that. quote:"factions" being formally allowed or banned doesn't actually have bearing on this because there's always going to be internal discussion and debate and there are always going to lines of consensus which no one is allowed to cross without expulsion or violence. all the other stuff you're giving me about monoliths and rule through fear is orwell poo poo Orwell is a grotesque exaggeration of an unfortunately all-too-real phenomenom. Again, if the penalty for disagreement is death, you get stagnation and spineless careerism. You become blind. My analysis is attempting to diagnose problems like the spread of paranoia leading to self-destructive purges, the Lysenko affair, the lack of worker agency and organization, and the stagnation and collapse of the whole project. I have also suggested a solution to these problems - that the structure of any communist political apparatus must itself be self-consciousnessly dialectical. I have offered an (admittedly distasteful) model for this - 2 faction structure of the America Bourgeois dictatorship. You have only responded to my diagnosis with defensive denial, and have ignored my proposed solution. History is the laboratory and the final arbiter of success. The USSR failed. Why do you think it failed, and how do you think we can do better next time? emTme3 fucked around with this message at 10:27 on Oct 21, 2020 |
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Oct 21, 2020 10:12
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Peel posted:if anyone remembers phil greaves he's not had a good plague year this does point to a genuine problem with self-conscious materialist ontologies and empirical work - the temptation to make the results fit the ontology, or to just use the ontology itself to dismiss theories whole-clothe the alternative in bourgeois science, where we just pretend everybody is ontologically neutral from the start, isn't any better tho. dunno how to fix it. science is hard
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Nov 19, 2020 03:40
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uncop posted:The idea in there that we should discard theory and "see nature as it is" is crude empiricism instead of something a marxist can take seriously in the first place. Nature or natural reality is what exists independently of conscious observation, but Marx's "matter" is specifically reality that has entered consciousness as sensations and/or concepts. You could say that people have a Midas's touch that immediately turns whatever they sense or otherwise measure into matter. Marx's "matter" is the inversion of Hegel's "idea": it's the dialectical unity of opposites between the reality out there and its conceptual representation, except with the right side on top. ya ok but you see how like, you went from a post-kantian critical position back to naive realism between your first and second paragraph, right? like, we can't see nature as 'it is', so we need theory, but really theory is just matter as mind so we don't need theory? This is reflection style epistemology, Lenin style - and Lenin was wrong. We do need theory, and dialectical materialism is precisely the attempt to construct an ontological framework adequate to the reality revealed to us by the natural sciences. It's qualitatively distinct from other theories, or we may as well fall back into religion and mysticism. Their theories are just matter too, right?
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Nov 29, 2020 04:17
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uncop posted:No, I don't. I meant scientists don't need training in philosophy to produce theory, because the interactions of matter are enough to guide them to give them a working understanding of probable and vanishingly improbable structures. You are smuggling in your own plainly wrong assumption that there is no theory without ontology. There is no intelligible experience without a symbolic framework containing ontological assumptions, period. The philosophical discipline of ontology is the unearthing and critiquing of those assumptions. Diamat is that ontology which tries to unite the sciences, or at least tried to once upon a time. quote:
They're right and that process has continued to this day - nonetheless science is done by human beings operating within a socio-symbolic inscription that usually pragmatically corresponds to their social practice, and this inscription will contain the common sense ontological assumptions and prejudices of the society that has produced those scientists. This means even the most basic empirical terrains will have a range of interpretations and implications along the materialist/idealist axis, and that empirical scientists themselves will often be incapable of drawing out all those conclusions. quote:Diamat indeed claims a kind of funhouse mirror reflection style epistemology, and people who try to take out reflection also take out the materialism. Without it, diamat is nothing more than mysticism, side by side with the hegelian framework. Diamat as Lenin would have it is mostly just a mystical projection. All mysticisms posit transparent reflection/unmediated experience of reality-as-it-is, and it doesn't matter in the slightest if you call this in-itself matter or God. Positing brute experience as unmediated reflection is untenable after Kant, and pathological after the emergence of our contemporary neuroscientific paradigm. Hegel's framework is, of course, about as far away from that poo poo as you can can get. The only thing we experience immediately is mediation itself.
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Dec 29, 2020 11:01
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May 3, 2021 02:51
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the left eats itself
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May 3, 2021 02:58
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i totally forget the source on this but iirc there's stalin orders that are specifically trying to set a quantitative limit on the purges, and liberals translate them as setting quotas. dude was just trying to stop the bleeding re: siege paranoia.
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May 8, 2021 03:32
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THS posted:good idea can we turn this into the warhammer 40k lore discussion thread if wh40k lore is anything to go by, the only thing stalin ever did wrong was dying.
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May 15, 2021 07:11
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May 15, 2021 07:14
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Tiler Kiwi posted:My own comprehension of dialectical materialism that its akin to something like understanding what a computer program is doing; you have a button on screen and you press it and it plays a ping noise. But that's not really what it is doing, you have to peel it back and look at the code; it has calls and functions that draw things on your screen and plays a sound file when a click is noted in a specific screen area. But that is also not what is really happening; you peel it back more and you're dealing now with memory locations being accessed, with how the entire operating system actually works, what the lowest levels of the computer's brain are doing, then the material reality of the computer being a bunch of magnetic bits being fliped via an array of nand logic gates and even then you can get into the physical properties of the need for copper and silicone and electricity all to describe exactly what happens to cause you to think you're clicking a button and playing a ping noise. It's not that this results in some understanding more true than just going "well you click a button and it goes ping", but if, for instance, the program has some bug in it that makes it break, or perhaps is doing something nefarious and hidden, then the only way you could hope to discover the actual truth of what this thing is doing is to peel back those layers and then put them back on with a new understanding. in the simplest possible terms - we're including the subjective perspective on the objective in our assessment of the objective, and we're trying to do this without becoming idealists for whom everything is a subjective projection. in more Hegely terms, the relationship between essence and appearance AND the appearance itself are both a part of the essence and must be including in the trajectory of the analysis. similarly with form and content. re: the ship of theseus - the only place the ship really 'exists' as such is as the concept in the minds of the people who built and use it. objectively it's a haphazard pile of dead treeparts, indifferent to their momentary arrangement. subjectively it's a concept realized via labor. dialectically it's a feedback loop between both. the ship is the entire process including the people who conceived, built, and use it, so there never was an 'original' ship to begin with. the ships identity includes its own capacity for self-transformation. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) emTme3 fucked around with this message at 20:22 on May 15, 2021 |
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May 15, 2021 20:13
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