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R. Guyovich posted:i think the food security and variety issues all pretty much stem back to the main issue with the soviet union in the first place: it was playing catch-up with the united states and advanced european economies for its entire existence and dealing with imperial encirclement and aggression, which forced excess military spending and a focus on heavy industry in lieu of a more balanced economy. making up a half-century + industrial deficit is no mean feat especially when two devastating wars rock your population and resources. Part of the issue probably is also pricing, the price that the state was paying, for the most part, constrained production, the state usually did this because it needed to supply cities at a certain price point. Admittedly, the state could have lifted price controls but it would come at a cost. Nevertheless, the supply issues are also dramatically overblown, especially from a US perspective. Part of the issue just came down to oil/energy prices, and that in order to import grain, the Soviets needed to trade for it and that greatly depended on the price of oil at the time. Btw, this goes through the entire Soviets period since literally 1917/early 1918, when nationalization of Baku's oil industry was initially planned. Oil is arguably the prime commodity developing states have to to rely on in order to industrialize or simply support themselves without being tied to directly to the West and its been that way for over a century.
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Mar 1, 2019 12:40
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That said, it is psychologically softer than the reality, that the German way over-stretched their front-lines, and despite the clear initial successes of Barbarossa...there was pretty much no way to take Moscow and therefore actually defeat the Soviet Union. Better to think "oh drat if we had those winter coats we could have breached Moscow's ridiculous defenses and somehow deal with a massive counter-attack." Company of Heroes 2 pretty much links everyone of those type of theories together in one game.
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Mar 4, 2019 10:47
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gradenko_2000 posted:I've run into some recent scholarship (Glantz and House, Citino) that suggests that, at least for Case Blue, the decision to try and take Stalingrad and the Grozny/Maikop/Baku area of the Caucasus simultaneously was not due to indecision: supposedly Hitler might have felt that his window-of-opportunity to bring the Eastern Front to some kind of a conclusion before the US military came online was about to close, and consequently that he couldn't afford to wait any longer. The issue with Stalingrad was that even if it was taken and the rail line to Baku as severed, the Soviets still had a large Caspian fleet that could still shuttle supplies and men over as well as supply directly from Iran. In contrast, the Germans would have to embark on some pretty impressive mountain fighting to even reach Baku, it probably wasn't possible. Also, before the Germans took Grozny, the Soviets immediately torched the wells and would have done the same to Baku, it would have taken years to really get them back online. At best, they would deny Soviets domestic production and force the Soviets to rely on more lend-lease shipments. The Germans were actually far away from winning, and if anything after Barbarossa started to peter out in fall 1941, it became an act of depression to somehow claw back a victory. It is a bit humbling for the average Wehrboo to admit that Hitler was completely over his head and devoted the Reich to a completely unwinnable genocidal war. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 12:12 on Mar 4, 2019 |
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Mar 4, 2019 12:06
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Top City Homo posted:coh2 doesn't understand poo poo about history Yeah that is the point, it pretty much stacked every theory that made the Soviets looked bad into one game, and often just completely made poo poo up. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 19:24 on Mar 4, 2019 |
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Mar 4, 2019 18:26
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Yeah, I wouldn't count their wealth fund really as a resource the state could actually harness at this point considering how wrapped up it is investment markets. Otherwise, it is a pretty bog-standard mixed economy compared to a significantly higher number of SOEs in China. Norway was already a stable welfare state before major oil extraction even began so, yeah it isn't a unique developmental model for squat. Also, please don't bring up Singapore as a developmental model.
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Mar 7, 2019 19:19
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Flavius Aetass posted:Okay, that makes sense. What about trying to unite rural/urban socialists? What was the main beef with the SRs? That book seriously didn’t go into the left/right SR divide? Who wrote it ?
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Mar 17, 2019 19:27
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Flavius Aetass posted:Evan Mawdsley. I haven't gotten very far but it seems to be pretty exclusively focused on red vs. white, noting the Bolshevik consolidation of socialist power pretty quickly in the introduction without going into much of the parties' motivations. I checked and his Civil War book was written in the 1980s, before the archives were opened. I could just recommend you a different book, because honestly the West knew squat about what was happening until the mid-1990s then quickly moved to cultural history. Alan Wildman book on the destruction of the Russian army is pretty decent.
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Mar 17, 2019 19:44
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Serf posted:okay, so i made it through that article. boy these old fuckers can take a long time to say something simple. anyways, i can't see how lenin was wrong. after all, the soviets built something and those cooperatives didn't seem to amount to much Anyway, the civil war and foreign intervention made it moot since the question was about basic survival. Makhno fought a decent guerrilla war, but the survival of his movement depended on other factions being too distracted to focus completely on him. The Whites and their foreign backers weren't just making a show.
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Mar 30, 2019 15:27
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Sheng-Ji Yang posted:this is pretty funny because the all the right wing propaganda about the USSR was that it was Asiatic and Eastern It is a active topic of conversation on parts of the forum.
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May 2, 2019 17:35
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Frog Act posted:i really, really wish I spoke Russian and German. my mentor / thesis adviser / personal hero was an old fashioned history professor with fluent German who felt anyone in the profession should be at least bilingual and he joked on me relentlessly for never learning another language Eh, I learned Russian, it takes at least some effort but I am glad I did. I am mean you can just start with the basics, but certainly helps if you know a native speaker. Also, the entire Mosfilm archive is on youtube. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 17:45 on Jun 21, 2019 |
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Jun 21, 2019 17:39
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THS posted:trotsky wanted to put a ton more resources into exporting revolution and helping communist parties in western europe. stalin thought this wouldn’t work and wanted to focus on building up the ussr’s own productive capacity, with comintern support as an afterthought (and careful to not truly piss off france and the uk). that’s my baby understanding Granted the real background of what was going on was the Soviet Union had an extremely dire trade situation, but that involves lots of statistics so usually people ignore it. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 15:54 on Jul 12, 2019 |
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Jul 12, 2019 14:14
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mila kunis posted:you saw what happened in 41, the ussr taking on industrialized western europe following the civil war would probably have ended pretty badly The Polish-Soviet War showed the West could check Soviet advances by just supplying arms.
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Jul 12, 2019 15:56
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Plutonis posted:Not to mention that Japan had troops in Siberia until like the 20s so the risk of two fronts was real Yeah, they had troops around Vladivostok until 1922 and they occupied Northern Shakalin until 1925. But yeah, but "socialism in one country" was already a de facto outcome.
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Jul 12, 2019 18:15
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gradenko_2000 posted:I would have loved to be able to see what a Soviet computer would have been like, circa-2012 or something. Just playing Fortnite on my vacuum-tube NVidianovich GRU (Graphics Rendering Unit, of course) that needs to be constantly fed with ice-water to keep going. It would probably be 5-10 years behind the current generation, have some capability issues, and a Cyrillic keyboard but generally be fairly familiar tech. The East Germans/Soviets were able to produce a 80286 clone by 1989, 7 years after intel's version came out. It was just generally an issue of investment, and that COMECON was just economically much weaker than the West and in that context reserve engineering coupled with independent development made more sense. (Also, Bulgaria had specialized in electronics and computing which was a big jump for a traditionally agricultural country.)
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Oct 8, 2019 14:48
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The question is how do you actually try to run the country and industrialize while all of that is going on? (That or at least attempt to conduct trade with the outside world.) Anyway, the Soviet Union evolved for hard and fast practical reasons. You needed a bureaucracy and centralization to run a war, and you needed the NEP to stablize the economy and conduct trade. The first five-year plan was an attempt to accelerate that progress but partially failed in part due to the terms of trade the Soviet Union was experiencing. I mean talking theory is fun in sort of a fan-fiction/alternative history sort of way, but when it has nothing really to do with how the world works...it probably should be de-emphasized. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Dec 17, 2019 |
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Dec 17, 2019 14:44
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Larry Parrish posted:i don't really think the state is the problem with the later Soviet union and if this puts me on the other side of things from my boy Lenin, that's alright. Everything basically came down to Germany. If the Soviet Union had at least one industrial power as an ally, it probably could have sustained it's otherwise unfavorable trade situation. It didn't work out, and from that point forward the Soviets were attempting to industrialize on an ad hoc basis and this is where state capitalism arguably became necessary. Obviously, the Civil War and Western intervention/sanctions didn't help the situation either. (Also, sorry, Trotsky didn't know what he was talking about and the "New Course" would have turned into a disaster. The Soviet Union in 1923 was nowhere near ready for crash industrialization and Soviet agriculture was largely still a mess.) It is also illustrative of why the PRC has industrialized the extent it has, since after Deng the PRC no longer had the same geopolitical issues as the Soviets had. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 16:49 on Dec 18, 2019 |
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Dec 18, 2019 15:59
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Pener Kropoopkin posted:There's also a lot that could've happened differently in the 80s and even up to 1990 that could've saved the Soviet Union. It wasn't "doomed" from the start. Maybe the revolution would've failed or whatever, but even a degenerated workers' state ala China would be better than the full on shock doctrine of the 90s and Putinism today. Eh, by the mid-1980s they were screwed by Dutch Disease, maybe they could have avoided during the 1970s but a lot of it is just relatively mediocre leadership. Gorbachev didn't fix the issue through, and should be blamed for frittering away time on Perestroika rather than directly addressing falling Soviet hard currency reserves. I do think the Soviets were in a very difficult position, and it would have been very difficult to escape the bind they were in. Frog Act posted:a lot of that doomed to fail stuff seems to emanate from Marxist academics who were around in the 60s and 70s and felt a sense of disillusionment with the bureaucratization and “imperialism” of the Warsaw states.I’ve always thought the imperialist bit was rich, but I think there are interesting arguments to be made about the bureaucratic nightmare of certain elements of the Soviet system as a contributor to their inability to move past a pseudo-proletarian illiberal Democratic system. it’s calcification and ubiquity definitely recreated some of the worse elements of the technocratic tyranny of western private sector - arbitrariness, long processes, artificial hierarchies A big part of the issue is that Soviet terms of trade were never that great and again by the 1970s industrial growth was slowling down for rather predictable reasons. Arguably, the CMEA/Warsaw pact was so important to the Soviet Union because it at at least allowed the Soviets to trade with other states on a normalized basis. Also, as far as artifical heirachies go, I don't know what could do done about it at a certain point. What is the point of appointing bureaucrats to fire other bureaucrats? You hear this issue coming up in the US fairly often, that the problem is fundamentally about bureaucracy when in reality it is often a red herring for other fundamental issues. Honestly, I think it is just a result of a centralized system that had been around for nearly half a century at that point. Also, it should be mentioned that reformism in the West was always highly contigent on the ins and outs of the Cold War. It didn't just happen because the West suddenly became "more enlightened" from 1945 to 1980. (Btw it makes sense that the strongest social democracies in Europe were neutral states relatively psychically close to either the Soviet Union (Finland/Sweden.) Ardennes fucked around with this message at 18:40 on Dec 18, 2019 |
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Dec 18, 2019 17:45
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apropos to nothing posted:lol guess that’s why it took 20 years later to kill him. Stalin literally supported the provisional government until like mid 17 and Trotsky led the October revolution as president of the Petrograd soviet and we see where that got him. basically it’s almost like democratic debate within a party is a good thing and we prolly shouldn’t kill revolutionaries who disagree with the party leadership? The New Course was a terrible idea.
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Dec 25, 2019 23:38
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Btw, most of the fundamental issue just come down to what strategy is best when confronting Western governments. In the case of Trotsky, it probably wasn't a good idea to build creditability by cooperating with the security apparatus of the US government.
Ardennes fucked around with this message at 11:46 on Dec 26, 2019 |
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Dec 26, 2019 11:36
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BrutalistMcDonalds posted:i think he contradicted his own beliefs. like if capitalism is just going to emerge from feudalism no matter what because that's what science says then once you have the kulaks emerge then the project of building socialism is going to be threatened, so he opted to liquidate them and intervene directly against a basic historical law. and then there were the purges of the party bureaucracy which seemed like an insane overreaction for related reasons and fear of this bureaucracy going down the revisionist path. but if those people immediately took power the moment he kicked the bucket then it didn't seem like trying to put his finger on the (execution) button was very effective Most of what occurred in Stalinism was reactive not a result of a planned ideological construction. In 1929, most Soviet trade was agricultural products with some oil-based exports, and the Great Depression was catastrophic for Soviet trade. Collectivization, especially rushed collectivization was a way for the state to quickly reduce agricultural costs by basing mandating low prices to the peasantry so they could not only buy Western machinery but keeping paying off their debt to Western banks. Kulaks were liquidated because they simply got in the way. In addition, much of the Purge itself was unplanned and resulted from the Central Comittee looking for scapegoats due to the fact that the Second Five Year plan wasn't working (in part for aformentioned reasons) and it quickly spiraled out of control from there. Also, Krushchev obviously did dismantle Stalinism to a degree...and it resulted in the Sino-Soviet split. BrutalistMcDonalds posted:stalin really seemed like someone who set a bunch of landmines and then when the 1970s and 1980s rolled around, people starting tripping them left and right. This is the result of the fact that much of the post-revolutionary reforms were generally not that popular with much of the general population which was honestly very conservative, and it was a way to keep the public happy after the Soviet Union was in an economic crunch. This is also why the Russian Orthodox Church was brought back during the Great Patriotic War. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 11:59 on Dec 26, 2019 |
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Dec 26, 2019 11:55
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Also, there is also 5-4 advantage for conservatives on the SCOTUS and the entire Republican party to deal with. I honestly don't think Sanders would be able to do much beyond executive orders and what they can be used for is relatively limited. I think the biggest thing going on is exposing how much the Democratic Party (and the rest of the power structures of the US) will go after even a relatively mild social democratic canidate and that the US is arguably incapable of reforming itself this late in the game. Also, yeah, the US electoral system somehow is somehow more of a joke than it was before. That said, maybe "overhyping" Bernie is not such a negative thing if only since it is building up a degree of optimistism that can't be fufilled (even if Sanders did his best) and people should rightfully be more angry at the system in place.
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Feb 7, 2020 03:31
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Sheng-Ji Yang posted:yeah, what i see is the end result for a sanders presidency is some significant reforms that materially benefit the working class, and a lot of anger at the much more significant reforms that were blocked by the rest of the assholes in DC, that hopefully bernie never compromised on so he can basically be a martyr figure. and that is the platform to build a more radical movement on, hopefully. Granted, that is more optimistic than I am, I don't think much will change beyond relatively centrist policy not that Sanders wouldn't want more but that a president isn't actually an emperor and has to get legislation passed through congress. Maybe he could work some magic with executive orders but they would be temporary and couldn't impact spending to a significant degree. I hope it would lead to another another movement, but I think focusing specifically around Bernie and electoralism will probably limit its effect. AnEdgelord posted:I think another very salient point to make is that if we don't deal with Climate Change then any gains we make with class consciousness and organizing will be irrelevant in the face of ecological collapse. Sanders the only one running for president that has both a credible plan to deal with Climate Change, and the political will to enact it. I don't think there is any way to significantly halt climate change at this point to be honest, at best Sanders could demand more money for shelters, aquaducts, and seawalls.
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Feb 7, 2020 03:54
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Atrocious Joe posted:this dead, gay forum is not a great cross section of US society It isn't but if you look at the rest of the US...it isn't very hopeful. I would say SA is an oddity because some open criticism of the US is still allowed.
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Mar 6, 2020 06:25
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SSJ_naruto_2003 posted:I mean, I don't think the Bernie-ing is necessarily saying that's as far left as people go. I've knocked doors for Bernie but I absolutely know he's no where near what we need to do in the end, which is the end of capitalism And when Bernie gets mulched by the system, it is Biden time?
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Mar 6, 2020 08:13
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Hodgepodge posted:"bernie is the compromise candidate" is a pretty common take in c-spam The issue is there isn't a plan B.
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Mar 6, 2020 08:13
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gradenko_2000 posted:I'm reading this history of the Gorbachev-era Soviet Union and it's pissing me off because it reads like a lot of the economic troubles that are popularly associated with the USSR and with socialism/communism in general was the product of "economic reforms" passed under the broader program of perestroika. It was essentially re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The USSR by the 1980s was running into a massive trade deficit which was sapping their reserves, and the drive towards a market economy was an attempt to allow firms to be more financially independent from the state which in turn screwed average people due to shortages and inflation. I do think some of it was based on naivety, but there was also just a degree of desperation. As for market socialism itself, it really depends on how it is conducted and if the state itself has enough income to subsidize daily life. Prince Myshkin posted:That's assuming those people aren't just straight up lying or reporting family hearsay, of course. I can't remember who it is but there's someone who goes around telling their sad USSR stories despite having left the country as a literal infant. Yeah this is pretty common as well. Russian/Soviet emigrees from 1980s/1990s have a pretty skewed perspective in general, if they can actually remember it. uncop posted:China turning away from the USSR had nothing to do with Deng, Deng was if anything a "stay superficially friendly with everyone and keep your cards close to your chest" kind of guy. That's pretty much how he was able to plant the seeds of integrating China into the world market. I believe he was very talented and made great plays, which can be seen in how he rose back to the top and higher than he had ever been from a position of underdog and pariah. But when it comes to him, there was very much a struggle of priorities. Yeah, Deng was in power roughly 20 years after the beginning of the Sino-Soviet split and if anything generally repaired relations with the Soviet Union. The difference was geopolitical, and Deng saw that China could be allowed to access foreign markets as long as the PRC was useful to the US and during the 1980s China could slowly start increasing imports via revenue from exports. It worked. The Soviets couldn't do it because they were the "direct enemy" of the US. It wasn't just Mao, Krushchev clearly hosed up and did little to keep the alliance going. Krushchev was naive and shortsighted.
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Mar 7, 2020 01:34
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gradenko_2000 posted:I don't think Gorbachev was a "wrecker" or an otherwise ill-intentioned person. In both books I've read about his time, they gave the impression that Gorbachev was genuinely trying to improve the Soviet system in response to known problems such as wastage, low productivity, the need for better quality of life, and so on. He wasn't intentionally a wrecker, but you could honestly say (like Krushchev) that he was just hopelessly naïve. Sorry to say, but competitive elections were clearly used by the US to get further influence inside the USSR and absolutely increased nationalism across the Republics. The USSR was obviously under heavy economic and political pressure during the mid-1980s but in such an environment, compromise and "openness" was actually more hurtful than healthful. The ultimate people who would pay the price are everyday people themselves.
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Mar 7, 2020 04:58
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Rated PG-34 posted:what good is the DSA now anyway now that the Bernie campaign is dead Information should be free... to certain organizations.
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Apr 3, 2020 06:02
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Chuka Umana posted:Never forget the workers of Kronstadt. Too bad the Royal Navy couldn't get there to help them in time.
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Apr 22, 2020 23:00
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apropos to nothing posted:the best example is specifically china, where it was the insistence of the russian party that led the chinese communists into the first united front. the russians gave material assistance to the kuomintang and insisted the chinese communists join them and it led to the very near destruction of the chinese communist party I mean why do you think the Soviet Union would do such a thing, because they were secret right-wingers? Or maybe the Soviets were absolutely desperate to try to get literally anyone on their side (including Ataturk at one point) to trade/ally with and sometimes failure was the result. The Soviets signed a trade agreement with the UK in the middle of the Civil War aswell. Most of the evidence is freely accessible btw. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 01:29 on Apr 23, 2020 |
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Apr 23, 2020 01:25
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There is a kernel of truth/materialism to the protests, people are increasingly desperate but are not only is opening stores going to kill or maim untold numbers, it will do little to help their economic plight. That said, it may help investors who want to at least create an "aura of positivity" in the stock market. Also, Jacobin is still garbage like 99% of any English language publication.
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Apr 24, 2020 22:32
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The survival rate of someone on a ventilator is around 12%. Basically, the argument is to murder tens-hundreds of thousands of people to get a small bump from retail sales for 2 weeks. It isn't surprising considering you are talking about America.
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Apr 25, 2020 02:41
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The Ultimate Doge posted:What exactly makes you think the death rate would be lower if we opened later? What's going to change it? We need a full lockdown for 3 weeks.
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Apr 25, 2020 03:48
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Shear Modulus posted:betrayed by bernie and by chomsky within like a week Well man what can I tell you its 2020.
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Apr 25, 2020 10:02
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Hilario Baldness posted:This is the same dude that condemned Antifa for setting a limousine on fire. Dude sucks And what about Bernie?
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Apr 26, 2020 05:23
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gradenko_2000 posted:the only moral revolution was the Carnation Revolution Also, it only happened because the Portuguese state was on the brink of collapse after fighting a series of losing colonial wars. Revolution only happens when the monopoly of force is in question.
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Apr 26, 2020 09:14
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Being blackpilled about the West at this point is just accepting reality as it is.
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Apr 29, 2020 06:12
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Varinn posted:actually its an extremely stupid concept that implies a divide between people who "get it" and people who dont, which is classic channer horseshit. ah, im enlightened to how bad things are, not like those fakers. we all live in dogshit and we all know how bad it is Isn't that basically any and every political opinion ever?
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Apr 29, 2020 07:07
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Varinn posted:no, because its implying that "an understanding of how bad things are" is somehow some sort of veil that has to be lifted from your eyes from an Awakening. The point isn't that just things are bad, but there is actually something intrinsically wrong with the US at its heart. I don't think nationalism in the US is actually only a middle-class phenomenon from experience. It isn't a class question, it is an ideological one. There are working-class people, especially if they ever served in the US military, that believe everything is right with the US (besides x or y group "ruining it.") If you don't want to use the word "pill" fine w/e. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 07:25 on Apr 29, 2020 |
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Apr 29, 2020 07:19
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apropos to nothing posted:dont mean this as any offense but if you think there is a "bourgeoise democracy" stage of revolution it kinda means you disagree with like the core ideas of the october revolution. its not even that there isnt a transitory period that may need to be experienced by the workers prior to a socialist society, but that that transition does not need to be carried out by the capitalist class but by the working class itself. by supporting the kuomintang, it wasnt even just a position of ceding political power to the national bourgeoise which would be in keeping with the orthodox marxist/menshevik position, it was actually even worse because the kuomintang was actively repressing not just the communist party but the working class. there were purges and mass executions throughout the KMT territories even after the KMT split within the "left" KMT controlled regions. basically you have a situation where stalin and the comintern are saying the working class is not yet ready to take power and so the communists should fold themselves into an organization which is their enemy, at the same time that the workers are rising up and attempting to take power for themselves from that enemy. The principles of revolutionary socialism often have to be betrayed when they don't serve a practical purpose when exposed to reality. I mean, we get it, the USSR shouldn't have trusted the KMT but at the same time the CPC wasn't a useful geopolitical ally at the time and so the Soviet Union basically had a set of poor choices in opposing Japan (who was worse than even the KMT). The alternative scenario is: Soviet Union fully supports the CPC, proposing an uprising that gets immediately crushed, and the KMT either allies with Germany or the Entente Powers. Honestly, in a vacuum, supporting the KMT was probably the right choice even if it eventually blew up (and the KMT is poo poo etc). It just all goes back to SiOC. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 00:49 on Apr 30, 2020 |
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Apr 30, 2020 00:43
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