jools posted:c_man posted:could you elaborate?
the purges were supported by a fairly broad section of soviet society, mostly new low-level administrators and similar who were the children of peasants and had been educated at new technical schools etc
is this controversial? i thought that the whole point was to get rid of e.g. the kulaks
jools posted:theres a guy who wrote a book about it but his name and its title escapes me
Fitzgerald gets into it somewhat in Chapter 8 of tome "Everyday Stalinism". The chapter's title: "A Time of Troubles".
roseweird posted:never make anything incrementally better, wait till it collapses because humanity is irredeemably evil. let society fall into warfare because only conflict is authentic. o god o god o god i wanna be real so bad!!!
sure, but there's also a point where you say enough is enough
babyhueypnewton posted:hmm yes reformism and revisionism is actually a rational response to the excesses of communism. actually that's not bougie enough, let's attack the very idea of a planned economy. while we're at it lets erase class struggle and material conditions rooted in production and make personalities (Mao was pretty fit tho) and fictitious capital the real motor of history.
this seems pretty rhetorically weak, "let's do this one thing i just read here and don't like. now let's do this other thing no one is suggesting" At least make it funny.
Lessons posted:2014 became the most important year in the history of economics, if not all of human history, when Donald McDonalds finally disproved socialism once and for all with his now-famous McNugget Theory.
Donald was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics, and also the Nobel Peace Prize, and also a giant plate of McNuggets, in a joint ceremony at CIA Headquarters. His acceptance speech was met with rousing approval. "We can still do everything we want even though Marxism has AIDS", he said. "We can still do critical theory and literary deconstruction. We can check our privilege and promote green growth. And we can eat nuggets lol". He received 1488 standing ovations, a world record and well-deserved. The ghosts of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao were all in attendance and they all recanted socialism and agreed that McNuggets were full of win. It was the happiest day of Donald's life because he had finally destroyed socialism, which he hated. Also all the girls made out with him even though he was bald and weighed bout tree fiddy. They all lived happily ever after, except for the idiot socialists who never even ate a nugget. The end.
getfiscal posted:
that should probably be the first post in every ifap thread
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getfiscal posted:Lessons posted:2014 became the most important year in the history of economics, if not all of human history, when Donald McDonalds finally disproved socialism once and for all with his now-famous McNugget Theory.
Donald was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics, and also the Nobel Peace Prize, and also a giant plate of McNuggets, in a joint ceremony at CIA Headquarters. His acceptance speech was met with rousing approval. "We can still do everything we want even though Marxism has AIDS", he said. "We can still do critical theory and literary deconstruction. We can check our privilege and promote green growth. And we can eat nuggets lol". He received 1488 standing ovations, a world record and well-deserved. The ghosts of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao were all in attendance and they all recanted socialism and agreed that McNuggets were full of win. It was the happiest day of Donald's life because he had finally destroyed socialism, which he hated. Also all the girls made out with him even though he was bald and weighed bout tree fiddy. They all lived happily ever after, except for the idiot socialists who never even ate a nugget. The end.
- the clearly protocapitalist Rome of the 2nd century AD had gone back to a latifundium-based agrarian economy long before 476, and a sufficiently motivated historian could pull a whole lot of "excess deaths" outta the decline period
- the rumblings of capitalism in late ming china were squished by the manchus
- the dutch republic did great for a bit until its resources were exhausted fighting the French on land and England at sea, countries which were obvz a lot less capitalist
- i reckon the south's defeat in the civil war was clearly a failure of one style of capitalism at the hands of another
- decolonization and the subsequent eclipsing of Europe as the literal workshop of the world is about as much of a "collapse" as what happened to the USSR
getfiscal posted:i think there is a more mundane reason for revisionism: officials witnessed in real time the fact that the attempt to move towards an administered economy organized on a physical basis was leading to absurdities and terrible inefficiencies. they then responded in rational ways to this chaos with various motivations. many of them offered desperate advice to correct the problem to their colleagues and were suppressed. the system achieved high growth rates for a short period after gutting consumption and focusing on heavy industry, as well as essentially militarizing labour discipline. some leading economists suggested reforms that would include more financial accounting elements and were denounced and executed.
once stalin died every socialist country in europe (except albania) gave up the idea of moving towards a full command economy in the short-term and there were numerous attempts to sideline 'hardliners' because their ideas were harmful. they attempted to build local alternatives to straightforward commandism which maintained the integrity of socialism. the leaderships often tried to go further and were 'corrected' by moscow. but moscow itself had already moved away from commandism and there were further experiments under kosygin.
china only gradually escalated its fight with khrushchev. the soviets thought the 'great leap' was a bad idea and they ended up being obviously correct. the chinese leadership probably mostly agreed with them, which is why mao had to retreat for a few years. people like liu shaoqi and deng xiaoping became prominent because they seemed more credible than the disastrous commandism of the great leap. mao used his prominence and personal popularity (due to liberation and not subsequent policy) to launch a counterattack. that failed, which mao ended up accepting, causing him to systematically undermine leftist currents and then align with the US in hopes of getting modern fertilizers and other technologies. deng xiaoping took power and then further reforms (which were already happening all over anyway and were now being condoned). however, as hoxha notes, mao himself had never really tried to run the economy on a truly physical basis, probably because everyone underneath him told him it was a terrible idea, despite everything he said in public.
one explanation requires the vast majority of workers to be tacit accomplices to a right-wing plot by the vast majority of party officials, the solution to which is some sort of extreme people's war and cultural revolution to systematically destroy opposition to socialism, which is the true aim of all working peoples. the other suggests that reforms were a mass demand fulfilled by fairly intelligent people which brought about other problems. also i'm not saying some narrow version of marxist socialism is impossible, just that it didn't seem all that great in those historical cases. obviously running an economy via directives is not impossible.
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roseweird posted:never make anything incrementally better, wait till it collapses because humanity is irredeemably evil. let society fall into warfare because only conflict is authentic. o god o god o god i wanna be real so bad!!!
That;s an interesting plan, but communists have a better idea! Thru the power of Marxist-Leninist science, one knows to: organize & work to create a better world! Hey, now, things aren't gonna just happen by themselves. And, hell, you used to be a noob once too ya know!
roseweird posted:never make anything incrementally better, wait till it collapses because humanity is irredeemably evil. let society fall into warfare because only conflict is authentic. o god o god o god i wanna be real so bad!!!
see evry1 eventually sees the shining light of accelerationism
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go to an optometrist and get your measurements first.
littlegreenpills posted:there are probably a whole ton of ways to do a) socialism b) an economy coordinated on a rational basis in order to meet human needs and only a few of them have ever been tried and it doesnt make you a stinker to note they were all wrong nor does it mean we shdnt take useful lessons from them
What if you do that because you HATE socialism with a burning passion and want to replace it with pomo micropolitics? Does that make you a stinker or is that cool in youre view
roseweird posted:it seems like it would be more useful to talk about greed than about capitalism
Lol
roseweird posted:it seems like it would be more useful to talk about greed than about capitalism
9 out of 10 ayn rands agree
roseweird posted:it seems like it would be more useful to talk about greed than about capitalism
roseweird posted:it seems like it would be more useful to talk about greed than about capitalism
have you read any socialist feminism yet roseweird