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mila kunis posted:this was helpful, thank you ask them in here imo
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Apr 27, 2020 00:04
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doesn't rojava benefit from a cozy or at least nonhostile relationship with the USA because it makes it logistically easier for the USA to threaten syria in some way or other, like playing host to nearby military bases or something
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Apr 27, 2020 02:49
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setting aside things like power grids and pandemic responses, you need a state to both defend yourself against other states and to prevent counterrevolution and the resumption of capitalist relations within your own society
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Apr 27, 2020 18:10
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libertarians is the same
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Apr 28, 2020 20:46
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there are exactly two political stances: communist, and liberal
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Apr 28, 2020 21:02
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T-man posted:the person in the tweet you posted is an idiot, but posting red kahuna or whatever and saying all tankies are the same as nazis would be an equally incoherent thought. there are, in fact, two dimensions of popular politics, and unless you're a full on nazbol you know the red and green have far more in common than the auth right. the "two axis" concept is just a ploy to trick people into thinking that libertarianism is a real ideology
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Apr 28, 2020 22:17
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really-existing anarcho-capitalism would be an empirical disproof of marxism
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Apr 28, 2020 22:19
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T-man posted:Yeah again, I'm sorry the notion of two dimensions is too hard for cspam. These are some of the stupidest takes ive seen on the internet, so gj I guess good luck with the People's Bootlicking Brigrade. can you point to an example of a society run on libertarian right wing principles, as distinct from authoritarian right wing principles?
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Apr 28, 2020 22:44
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i talked a bit about this before but i'm increasingly convinced that the theory of what a state is, and whether a state can be said to be an entity in itself with its own interests and agency, is THE central political-theoretic disagreement between communists on one hand and anarchists and other liberals on the other. the idea that you can somehow dial a state's administrative power up and down independently of how you distribute power between the proletariat/peasantry and the bourgeoisie would be flatly ridiculous to lenin but is the fundamental underpinning of "yeah, i'm fiscally conservative... but get this. i'm socially quite liberal!" thought
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Apr 28, 2020 23:29
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Constantly LARPing posted:Apparently state theory is making a come back in Marxist intellectual circles, so you might be on to something. Don’t ask me anything about it though, I’m still trying to understand the transition question, so I’m like twenty years behind the world at this point. the first big tell for me was a great book i read a while ago laying out western leftist perspective on the soviet union, and how one of the prevailing theories was that it wasn't a socialist state... it was a Bureaucratic Collectivist state. what does that mean? well, rather than the workers running things via the mechanism of a state, the state itself has slipped its leash and is now running wild! then you had the guys patiently explaining that actually, the ussr was simply an example of asiatic despotism, gradenko_2000 posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rRXvQuE9xO4 i don't really buy this at all and i think lenin pretty clearly laid out what marx and engels's view on states was in s&r. it may well be true that marx used varying or even inconsistent language but he definitely DID describe A) a transitionary period in which commodities are produced for their use value rather than their exchange value by people who are paid in proportion to the useful labor they perform and B) an idyllic post-state endgame with all held in common Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 09:01 on Apr 29, 2020 |
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Apr 29, 2020 08:56
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Constantly LARPing posted:The best answer I’ve read on “What was the USSR?” is who the gently caress knows, it was really weird historically! But I feel confident in saying that it wasn’t socialist or communist. The difference between River Rouge between Magnitogorsk was minimal, you’re still producing value under capitalist social relations around production. To be clear, this isn’t an anarchist critique of the state, producing steel for a worker owned coop where your friend is the foreman for a one year term or something is still sucks (maybe more!). you sound like the theorists of the other prevailing western theory of the ussr (and of course other modern socialist states), one that of course operates to this day: the ussr wasn't socialism, but simply "state capitalism!" because workers went in every day and put in more labor-hours than were strictly necessary to feed them, and because the resulting surplus was appropriated by the state and used to create new factories or whatever, in reality the state was like a single gigantic capitalist capturing ALL the profits from ALL your work! however, i think this is in practice a very stupid take, because capitalism isn't when somebody gets to tell you what to do, and capitalism isn't when you produce a surplus by working more than you strictly need to stay fed and clothed. capitalism is specifically when private actors pilot the means of production to create things based on their market value, which was not what was going on. socialism - and here i mean lenin's socialism, or marx's "lower stage of communism" - doesn't actually mean you're not going to have a lovely job or hate your foreman or whatever. it just means that utility rather than profit will motivate production and it'll be the proletariat evaluating that utility apropos to nothing posted:its not dealing with them, it was specifically the pressure to join uncompromisingly with the kuomintang. when the canton uprising occurred for example on the orders of the comintern to coincide with the party congress which was occurring at the same time, the communists didnt have access to guns or supplies because the USSR was supplying directly through the kuomintang and not through the communist party. wasn't the decisive factor here NOT a dogmatic belief that bourgeoise society had to develop to a certain point before socialism was possible (which, as you say, the soviets themselves had disproved) but the fact that japan was either breathing down china's neck or actually and actively invading? i'm reminded here of trotsky openly fantasizing about a Real Socialist coup against stalin at the same time as, indeed because of the opportunity presented because, the literal nazis attacked Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 19:25 on Apr 29, 2020 |
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Apr 29, 2020 19:22
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uncop posted:It was the dogmatic belief. The Comintern did not recognize immediate socialist potential in eastern countries, and committed socialists like Mao basically had to pretend to be doing nationalist capitalist development even in the 50's when the Comintern and Japan were long gone. The Soviets weren't happy when the Chinese announced that actually they were going to do a five-year plan with a massive industrial development goal, it was just too late for them to do anything about it. The basis for the Sino-Soviet split was basically there from the beginning: the USSR's stance was very paternalistic while China immediately set itself the goal to outgrow the USSR and take leadership internationally. that's not my understanding, although i haven't read about this in depth. i thought the tensions that became the split only got serious after kruschev's de-stalinization. why would the soviets not want the chinese to industrialize or launch five year plans? didn't the soviets send technicians and engineers over in droves to help china modernize? Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 19:59 on Apr 29, 2020 |
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Apr 29, 2020 19:57
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Lightning Knight posted:I'm curious about what some of this meant to Marx, or would mean to modern communist theorists. Some of it seems obvious and agreeable to me, and some of it is either confusing or worded in a way I must not be parsing. Example, "confiscation of of the property of all emigrants [and rebels]." The rebels part seems obvious to me, but it's not clear why emigrants are in this category. Is it because of absentee landlordism? i think confiscating the property of emigrants is specifically to stop capital flight. a factory owner can flee the country but he can't take his machinery with him i think the "liability of all to work" in combination with "industrial armies" basically means that anyone and everyone can potentially be conscripted into being a garbageman or machinist or farmer or w/e
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Apr 29, 2020 19:59
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Lightning Knight posted:Ok, that makes sense then. i've long assumed that any socialist state would have to draft people to do essential work at some point. obviously you'd offer the order of lenin and extra labor vouchers or whatever to people who actually volunteer for lovely jobs but if that's not enough then SOMEONE'S gotta do it. the good news is that the labor draft would probably be way more humane and pleasant than the existing system, because it's probably something like "they drew your name out of the bucket down at city hall, you're going to have to collect garbage on thursday mornings for the next three months" rather than "this is the best your economic circumstances will ever allow you, enjoy the rest of your life you poor sap"
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Apr 29, 2020 20:11
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apropos to nothing posted:regardless of what the basis for the decision was, the result was the liquidation of the chinese communists on 2-3 separate occasions by forces in the kuomintang. I'd argue there was an ideological basis though, especially based on writings from communists in vietnam and others from the period which specifically point to the idea of a cross-class government and mention applying "the principles of the new economic policy to develop the economy of the country in collaboration with the possessing classes." i agree that there was at least an ideological pressure in that direction, but i think it's ridiculous to call a stagist view of revolution the mainspring of soviet policy towards the kmt for exactly the same reason you call the policy ridiculous: it's obviously possible to hurry or half-rear end the "bourgeoise democracy" stage of revolution even if you don't think it's completely skippable because of the soviets' own example. i would say that the ideological BASIS for supporting the kmt first and foremost is found in "foundations of leninism", where stalin writes that even a nationalist bourgeoise movement is revolutionary if it's part of the third world's resistance to the first (and that conversely even "socialist" movements in the first world, like the british labor party, are reactionary by default). so there were doctrinal or even dogmatic directives from joey steel himself as to which horse to back, but they were rooted in the fact that the chinese were victims of colonialism rather than the fact that the chinese were insufficiently proletarianized
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Apr 29, 2020 20:33
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Apr 29, 2020 20:42
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Lightning Knight posted:This makes sense, insofar as how doing it randomly for set intervals would be more fair than the people on the bottom being forced to do it, but it sort of makes me wonder, how did the Soviet Union handle this? Like, I actually don't know how jobs were assigned in the Soviet Union. i don't know a lot about this. i do have a good read (though it's like 70ish pages; i've linked it before) about what democratic decision making looked like in the immediate post-ww2 soviet union but it doesn't go into too much detail about how you GET a job: https://drive.google.com/file/d/174Y2CYVVaMumINW1ApKRO5DiC7JOyCI8/view i'm pretty sure that wages were all set statewide and there was some kind of job guarantee, and reading makes it sound like a lot of people just kept working in their factory or farm community or w/e except it was collectivized now, but idk exactly what happens if someone moves (i DO know that you had to get permission to move to a new town or city) to a new place and needs to find work, or if there's some job that needs to get done and no one's doing Lightning Knight posted:I feel like the first half of this doesn't really track in practice, although the second half pretty much does tbf. i don't know if "imperialism is the primary contradiction" is literally a mao (or later cpc) quote or just something a friend of mine said to me years ago but a big leninist idea has always been the primacy of 1st world vs. 3rd world, imperialist vs. exploited, global division. funnily enough you can find trotsky saying the same thing: I will take the most simple and obvious example. In Brazil there now reigns a semifascist regime that every revolutionary can only view with hatred. Let us assume, however, that on the morrow England enters into a military conflict with Brazil. I ask you on whose side of the conflict will the working class be? I will answer for myself personally—in this case I will be on the side of “fascist” Brazil against “democratic” Great Britain. Why? Because in the conflict between them it will not be a question of democracy or fascism. If England should be victorious, she will put another fascist in Rio de Janeiro and will place double chains on Brazil. If Brazil on the contrary should be victorious, it will give a mighty impulse to national and democratic consciousness of the country and will lead to the overthrow of the Vargas dictatorship. The defeat of England will at the same time deliver a blow to British imperialism and will give an impulse to the revolutionary movement of the British proletariat. Truly, one must have an empty head to reduce world antagonisms and military conflicts to the struggle between fascism and democracy. Under all masks one must know how to distinguish exploiters, slave-owners, and robbers!
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Apr 29, 2020 21:07
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Constantly LARPing posted:But, Engles, as was often the case, was wrong and is coming dangerously close to a left-Ricardian argument that Marx railed against. You can’t just put the workers in charge and call it a day. Making the peasants feudal lords doesn’t abolish feudal social relations. Marx’s critique goes beyond simply a belief in exploitation, it points out that things like commodity production, labor time, etc. are all social constructs and historically contingent. And, most importantly, that exploitation and alienation are wrapped up in all of those things. River Rouge and Magnitogorsk were both engaged in commodity production (even using the same Fordist model!) because capitalist logic held even when the workers were in charge. certainly workers in the soviet union produced objects with use-values that got sold in markets, but both use-values and markets predated capitalism by millenia. i don't think you can rightly call it capitalism if the difference between the value of your products and the value of your subsistence isn't being captured a capitalist and if that capitalist isn't choosing what to have you produce purely based on what will allow them to capture more of that value faster the soviet union definitely did contain actual capitalist labor relations at various parts of its history, like obviously during the NEP. and china using capitalism to generate profits to this day, albeit under much stricter state control than the us could ever dream of. i think having these internal capitalist terrariums, effectively summoning up a demon slave and hoping it stays within the bounds of your summoning circle, is what lenin actually meant when he talked about "state capitalism" as opposed to what western critics mean when they throw the phrase about. but calling it capitalism when the ussr executes on a five year plan to develop an industrial base in the urals or whatever is a bridge too far for me
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Apr 29, 2020 21:14
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uncop posted:The Soviets considered it impossible for China to establish their type of socialism in decades, so fast industrialization on a planned basis looked to them like hollow imitation. They basically saw themselves a honorary western country in relation to China, not some kind of fellow peasant economy, and in general they had gotten used to telling foreign communist parties what to do especially after WW2 but in Asia long before that as well. The Chinese respected Stalin as a leader, but always considered Khrushchev to be far below them in basic revolutionary credentials and found it insulting to take orders from him. interesting, thanks uncop posted:Engels was right, academics just conveniently ignore that Marx&Engels weren't in the business of producing blueprints for communist society and all their concrete policy recommendations were about basically the immediate moment after workers take power. The transition begins immediately because it begins with simply consolidating political power and ends with a coherent communist economic framework. It shouldn't be surprising if Engels sounds like a left-ricardian when he's consciously talking about workers' management of capitalism. There is no theoretical rift between Marx and Engels, they viewed history in nonlinear terms and developed a division of labor where Engels was more focused on the immediate demands of the class struggle while Marx focused on abstract high theory. sorry, wrong because i make certain claims about the lower stage of communism, or because marx and engels do? which claims? 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. i'm not saying there's a necessary "bourgeoise democracy" state of revolution, i'm saying that nationalist bourgeoise movements can be revolutionary in terms of their end-effects if they happen to be the dominant form of resistance in the third world against the first. you can't separate the kmt/cpc split within china without considering the constant external threat of japan. it's like the brazil vs. england hypothetical
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Apr 29, 2020 22:51
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uncop posted:This whole claim quoted by the post I quote: not enjoying your work can be caused by being alienated from your labor due to the capitalist mode of production, but that's not actually the only reason you might not like the work you're doing or dislike your coworkers or managers. for example, i don't like doing the dishes very much, but i have no choice of whether to do so because i need the use-value available in clean plates and cutlery. that conditions were often bad doesn't mean that workers didn't have power or that the ussr had a capitalist economy, because a capitalist economy actually requires capitalists or firms who are capturing surplus values! Constantly LARPing posted:See this, is where I think you're wrong. It's a common claim, and one that really seems like "common sense", but really its just projecting capitalist relations back into the past when they didn't exist. It's denying that capitalism is historically contingent, and oddly enough, is one of the main ways orthodox political economists critique Marx. You're doing what Smith and Ricardo did, and as we know from the subtitle of Capital, Marx is critiquing them. i think you're misreading me. i point out that markets, small-m, preceded capitalism precisely TO draw the distinction between a marketplace and The Market. soviet workers got wages which they then spent at grocery stores or whatever but The Market wasn't actually the determining factor in what got produced and at what quantities, because things weren't being produced for their exchange values 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 apropos to nothing posted:yeah and the point that started this was im saying socialism in one country was a horrible political project. like at the end of the day you cant betray the labor movement and call yourself a genuine revolutionary socialist imo. im not saying theres some kind of dogma set in stone that has to be followed, its actually a huge mistake many sectarians make to try to apply statements or ideas made by folks like lenin or marx as universal precepts when often what they were writing was products of specific circumstances. but the one principle you cant betray is that our loyalty is to the workers movement. i also never said the comintern should have supported an uprising by the CPC or something, it was actually a massive mistake they made to push for the canton uprising which i mentioned before. the issue again, is that none of their decisions were based on the conditions of the workers movement in southeast asia at the time, they were based on what would be best for the russian party. the problem when you dont base your politics squarely on the class struggle is exactly what you see in china during this period: a complete flip between opportunist and ultra-left politics. at the end of the day opportunism and ultra-leftism can really be understood as 2 sides of the same coin, that being that the conditions of the class struggle aren't the political basis for revolutionary parties program i don't buy "they were based on what would be best for the russian party" here. like it would have been bad for the russian party, but it also would have been bad for the chinese party, if the CPC launched an uprising against the KMT at the same time as japan was invading and therefore doomed all of china to imperial rule, or allowed the KMT to free itself from any need for the CPC by reaching out to europe, or something. and again the ussr did provide actual material aid, and the chinese communists in turn only started to feud with the russian communists once kruschev took office and began to systematically repudiate the previous government, so it seems like you're crticizing the ww2-era ussr for having nebulously bad intentions rather than for overall results
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Apr 30, 2020 01:52
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apropos to nothing posted:I've said a few times that the CPC shouldn't have launched an uprising against the KMT, and were mistaken when they attempted specifically to lead one in canton in 1927 after they flipped their position. the CPC inside the KMT were in positions within the party, they held political, military, and ministerial positions within the KMT. like prior to 1926, the CPC was part of a more or less 2 party alliance within the KMT, but in 26 chiang staged a coup and the chinese communists were arguing for a break with the KMT or at least a separation which would see them work in a bloc but which kept them separated. the comintern rejected this idea and then through 26 purges were carried out and repression against the communists and labor leaders in the KMT and KMT controlled territory. members of the CPC who were part of the KMT leadership like Tan Pingshan even wrote in 27 that they had squandered their opportunity. the left nominally was dominant in the alliance but after the coup, the comintern kept the alliance with chiang through the coup and even through some of the subsequent massacres and purges. ok so CPC indeed shouldn't have attempted to actually usurp the KMT's power in the midst of japanese and british aggression. perhaps things would have worked out if they had made some kind of formal separation and fought the japanese as a team of rivals rather than a united front, although the KMT obviously had huge advantages in numbers and materiel and my understanding is that the CPC and KMT basically did their own thing despite soviet urging that they remain one unified national party. but i don't think you've actually connected this to your criticisms of "socialism in one country" - like how the advice being given by the ussr here, even if it IS flatly bad advice, somehow represents the USSR selfishly prioritizing its own development over china's and therefore shirking its moral responsibility to foment world revolution. like, one of the reason the CPC was able to flourish at all rather than just disappearing into obscurity like other of china's communist parties was because it was the one that had soviet support, and during the wind-down and aftermath of WW2 and the actual final chinese civil war the USSR was pretty blatantly on the CPC's side, like by delivering them captured weapons and allowing them to take up positions in manchuria before the soviet forces withdrew. while checking to make sure i wasn't making this up or remembering wrong i just dug this up about the soviets just plain dropping transport planes, fuel, etc into mao's lap to allow him to speedily take xinjiang https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/how-stalin-elevated-the-chinese-communist-party-to-power-xinjiang-1949 "socialism in one country" doesn't mean "socialism in ONLY one country" such that the one socialist country goes around directly kneecapping others in order to maintain its unique status. the soviet union objectively supported the chinese revolution through that revolution's victory. possibly they could have done it better, faster, and with less casualties on the CPC's side if they'd had a better picture of the situation on the ground or whatever but i don't see how these flaws flow out of SIOC specifically rather than the basic facts of having to make strategic decisions about who to support and to what extent from a geographic and cultural remove. like we can easily imagine a soviet union which did NOT espouse socialism in one country and put sparking revolutions in other countries at the front and center of its agenda still waiting to put full-throated support behind the CPC until after WW2 was over because the CPC's chances of surviving an early attempt at uprising were so low uncop posted:Well, for Mao imperialism is just a period of capitalism and taking the relationship between imperialist and oppressed nations to be the primary contradiction is just considering class struggle against foreign and comprador bourgeoisie to be the principal form of class struggle during that period. is trotsky a dengist now?
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Apr 30, 2020 05:05
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apropos to nothing posted:yeah nobody is saying that the building of the economy in an isolated socialist nation like the USSR is bad or an example of socialism in one country. the left opposition argued for the development of the soviet productive forces. the example of china is one of the soviets putting the russian party needs first because there are specifically notes where comintern leaders discussed how the fear was that japanese/british alliance against a communist movement in china would pose a larger threat to russia than a dictatorship by chiang. its also in keeping with the other policies the soviet leadership at the time pursued which were in keeping with policies they had pursued even before they held power and would continue to pursue into the future. again, the policies of the profintern and their "red unions" or the removal of national party leaders by the comintern or the reversal and overriding of policy within national parties by the comintern, or even the resistance to the very formation of the USSR by members like stalin who wanted the smaller nations of the russian empire to be part of one russian state. lenin had to fight for the creation of the USSR against the communist party leadership and it was one of his last battles, specifically in order to safeguard what would become the smaller soviet states from being merged into a russian dominated single state. unfortunately it didnt prevent the russification of many of these nations by the 30s but he and others were staunch internationalists who saw this problem developing even before it came to dominate soviet policy after his death. okay i've bolded the part of your post that's an actual specific claim as to how "socialism in one country" as a specific policy damaged the chinese revolution. however, i don't think what you're saying makes sense, because a japanese/british alliance against a communist movement in china would also pose a threat to... the communist movement in china, and indeed if the ussr were to be openly hostile enough to the world capitalist order that it got jointly invaded prior to ww2 that would also threaten the cpc by cutting it off from its biggest source of international material support and stifle the prospects of the global spread of socialism in general. you're criticizing everything bad that might or did come out of either making arguably-suboptimal short term decisions OR the general concept of playing the long game/taking losses now to reap gains later as specific fallout of SIOC but i just don't think it makes sense for you to tie those things together honestly i've never been clear on what the alternative to socialism in one country was supposed to be. you yourself have (rightly, i believe) criticized stuff like egging on the canton uprising as ultraleft adventurism that prioritized taking an insane moonshot over soberly evaluating the conditions on the ground and playing the hand you're dealt. so, given that the russian revolution succeeded but the german revolution failed, what were the soviets to do that WASN'T a desperate scramble for internal industrial buildup in order to give them the best possible chance of surviving an inevitable capitalist or fascist (but i repeat myself) invasion? wouldn't, say, a deeper if not all-out commitment to kickstarting socialist efforts at insurrection in other parts of europe or asia just be another canton uprising? Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Apr 30, 2020 |
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Apr 30, 2020 21:15
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Ardennes posted:Also, the left-opposition's big plan was to push collectivization and centralized industrialization back in 1923-1924, which was way too early to do. The NEP was necessary in the first place if only to allow state enterprises some breathing room to re-tool and also for the Soviets to get access to foreign markets. There is a pretty good chance that early collectivization/force grain purchasing would have lead to even earlier supply issues especially since the Soviet Union barely had any tractors at that point. if i recall correctly the left opposition was stridently against the NEP and wanted to immediately collectivize, and then was stridently against collectivizing and wanted to be gentle with the NEP
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Apr 30, 2020 22:24
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galenanorth posted:There is one issue I thought of with regard to democratic socialism. I buy into the idea that workers can manage their company just as well as capitalists can, but as far as how the overall economy fares, what will be the impact of the money the workers keep being unable to flow across different industries, say from paper manufacturing to pharmaceuticals or from grocery stores to airlines? I guess workers would probably be better off as a result of the net change, but not the same as if workers had all the money that capitalists have now. There doesn't seem like something it'd be possible for there to be evidence for, like how there are plenty of successful WSDEs for the "workers manage as well as capitalists" part i don't actually think "democratic socialism" is a real thing with actual policy prescriptions or theoretical underpinnings. it's just "socialism but without all the bad parts you learn about in social studies" and might signify either that the person professing it is not very well read, or that the person professing it thinks YOU'RE not very well read Ardennes posted:I believe the switcheroo happened only after the first five-year plan started. I know that Trotsky's line was that Stalin's collectivization was really bad...but he would have done it better because of ... reasons that will be decided on later. this article coming out hot on the heels of "kautsky was right, actually" drives me up the drat wall
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May 1, 2020 04:23
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Jewel Repetition posted:The problem with this is that it's a very incomplete description of an economy because so much economic activity isn't based on need. For example a socdem country could be said to satisfy that criteria because everyone can get food, shelter, clothes, healthcare, education, entertainment, etc. But it's still capitalist a social democratic economy is still ruled by the profit motive, the stewards of the state just have the foresight and discipline to recognize that it's harder to generate profits if your population is dying of deprivation and/or in open revolt. that's why marxism is about actually seizing the means of production and controlling what gets made and for whom rather than simply extracting increasingly better deals re: health care, wages, whatever
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May 1, 2020 04:47
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dex_sda posted:I think localized barter-like 'markets' will always be a thing, especially with goods that are surplus to the planned need-meeting production, but that's not what I think when I hear the word 'market' tbh. yeah i was considering the question and concluded that insofar as i could imagine “markets” that were benign or even useful i was really thinking of “stores”
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May 1, 2020 10:54
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common misconception. the quickest way to communism is to encircle the cities from the countryside
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May 1, 2020 20:44
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dex_sda posted:Encircle the countryside from the cities REVOLUTIONARIES 1 AND 2: holy poo poo
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May 1, 2020 21:05
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i think it's a mistake to treat bottom-up decision-making/the need for a buy-in from the masses as unique to anarchist organizing specifically or even as unique to state or nation-building, generally. like, western historians like to portray fascist germany as though it was composed of masses of good liberals who had simply been terrorized into compliance by a dictator and his forces, but that's not actually a realistic scenario. if your entire people hate you you can't rule over them even if you have the army on your side because who's going to feed the army? in fact most german citizens supported or at worst didn't much care about their government's insane policies, and the few conscientious objectors were just sheepishly ignored or allowed to go about their business because they didn't actually want for volunteers to do the most heinous poo poo in the same way, the ussr had a "supreme soviet" and obviously a centralized, disciplined army with a specific commander, but when it came to e.g. designing a five-year plan there was a massive amount of negotiation interplay between the top of the hierarchy on one end and every single little collective farm and factory on the other. so i would say that it's not that decentralized decision-making that's ultimately safeguarded by a centralized monopoly in force, like that of the zapatistas, is some kind of libertarian pipe dream, but rather that that's what other socialist states were also doing insofar as their circumstances allowed them to
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May 1, 2020 23:23
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gradenko_2000 posted:https://twitter.com/ICFI_WSWS/status/1256579312813301760 jacobin btfo once again
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May 2, 2020 18:16
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https://twitter.com/VoxPVoxD/status/1256078368568676352
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May 3, 2020 23:13
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splifyphus posted: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. 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. like, okay, the party apparatus was able to use the state to block the value form from determining production. what, then, determined production? did they simply build things at random and by accident? oh it was the use-value of those things because they actually, factually needed so and so many tanks and such and such much grain. what did marx call an economy in which use-value determines production again...? 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 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?
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May 6, 2020 10:03
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holy poo poo i found it. here's a book i really liked all about western perspectives on the soviet union, regrettably hosted on lib.com, that i read irl but have struggled to actually find the exact title of/links to since i gave it away to a friend last year: https://libcom.org/files/van_der_linden_western_marxism_and_soviet_union.pdf i would say that the author's conclusions are not as aggro as mine but it's a good breakdown of the prevailing theories from without ("bureaucratic collectivism" "degenerated workers' state" "asiatic despotism" etc), when they fell in and out of fashion, and at the end a critique of the various ways they fall short of either being marxist or matching the facts edit: the actual critiques/takedowns are on pages 310-320, if people are interested Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 12:11 on May 6, 2020 |
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May 6, 2020 10:32
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yeah i like the specific content of each his takedowns but i don't think the conclusion i reach FROM those takedowns is the one he had in mind (and hence it's little wonder he's being hosted on libcom dot org). i was also bemused by his diligent meta-analysis of how and why this framework or that one fell out of fashion
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May 6, 2020 14:24
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Top City Homo posted:https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/ch02.htm economic PROBLEMS of the ussr? i bet whoever wrote this was swiftly purged for daring to question the regime
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May 6, 2020 21:27
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apropos to nothing posted:i think the big issue with stalin isnt that he or the soviet union under his leadership made mistakes, as is bound to happen to anyone and everyone. think its more that he and the soviet union killed a bunch of communists. speaking as a communist, i would like not to be killed. simply avoid engaging in revisionism or sabotage. or, uh, happening to fall in the sights of a revisionist or saboteur who managed to sneak into the party structure and is working to get as many party members purged or worse under false pretenses as he can get away with
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May 7, 2020 01:23
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mila kunis posted:thirdly another criticism they had of the soviet system was that it was that workers were alienated from their labour' - i assume this holds for pre gorbachev ussr as well. this is probably fair since work sucks. i'm pretty sure this is wrong on the technical, marxian-political-economy level so long as the things you're producing are determined and distributed based on their use-value rather than their exchange-value. like yes if you help to manufacture a car and that car is then sold (at state-mandated prices, bought by state-mandated wages, which are used as top-down rationing/distribution mechanisms rather than emergent avatars of the will of the market) to some other worker than the use-value of your labor-power has directly benefited that other worker rather than you, but it's not like i'm alienating myself from my labor if i weave you a coat and give it over as a present. the point is that it's not being peeled away from your corpus in order to add to private profits, for no other reason but that it will increase those profits faster and with absolutely no regard for the nature of the commodities whose sale is finally realizing those profits
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May 7, 2020 02:55
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listen, you're the one that brought it up, not me. but since you mention him-
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May 7, 2020 03:27
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Ardennes posted:https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/09/aboveall.htm yeah my understanding is that trotsky supported the soviet union in the sense of like, being sure that the revolutionary soviet people would seize the opportunity to depose the tyrant stalin during the russian invasion, or of loudly tsk tsking about the tragic inevitability of kirov's assassination and other terror plots
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May 7, 2020 05:08
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 20:57 |
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apropos to nothing posted:yes ive read that. where is the support for the imperialist powers against the ussr? he is critical of the ussr for invading poland, but doesnt call into question its status as a workers state. read this published from the same period where he is specifically defending the analysis of the ussr I laid out. ill quote some key bits: trotsky is defending the USSR on one extremely narrow and completely theoretical point - he is fighting with the "bureaucratic collectivsm" theorists in order to support his own "degenerated worker's state" theory, both of which are the dumb western leftist poo poo that my boy marcel van der linden skewers so succinctly in my link upthread. trotsky doesn't actually refer to any of the USSR's actions or strategic determinations, internally or internationally, with anything but doomsaying or outright contempt - like he's sketching out a scenario there in which the USSR basically builds the nazi military that allows hitler to conquer western europe, before hitler inevitably turns on stalin, whose evil exceeds perhaps even hitler's own. and trotsky repeatedly restates his desire that the soviet people rise up in an insurrection against the soviet bureaucracy in the exact same way that he expects the german people to rise up against the german bureaucracy. he's cheerleading the ussr undergoing another revolution at the same time as the nazis are building up next door! Ferrinus fucked around with this message at 05:35 on May 7, 2020 |
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May 7, 2020 05:33
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