Makeshift_Swahili posted:
getfiscal posted:grover furr's defence of stalin hinges on the idea that yezhov became a mass murderer in order to undermine stalin's rule and eventually substitute himself, but that this became apparent and yezhov was removed, and afterwards the system reached a sort of equilibrium where there weren't hundreds of thousands of arbitrary state murders. this is an interesting argument because it accepts basically every horror about stalinism as true but then simply says that stalin himself was only indirectly to blame. as if any leftist should care about stalin's individual culpability and not the huge apparatus of repression.
animedad posted:what's an example of pomo micropenis. I can never get an erect answer about this stuff
would it kill you to put "trigger warning: Swede" before you post 
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.
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.
roseweird posted:please don't
if you dont want people responding to you with pithy one liners then maybe you should stop doing the same? Just my two cents
roseweird posted:sorry, i don't actually have any anticommunist political arguments, ive just decided to indulge in extraordinary selfishness on a personal level and feel bad about myself. obviously
jools posted: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
and getmugs
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.
And, AND!!!!
getfiscal posted:anyway, disputing the idea that comprehensive planning is something that's so obviously positive and needed that we should make it the focus of our efforts does not imply a huge amount beyond that. especially because it's already near consensus among the left. who has disputed this and then formed government. the nepali maoists? almost immediately they gave up the idea of a real planned economy for the foreseeable future (saying nepal needed capitalist development) and then lost power anyway. there are lots of ways to organize an economy and lots of them probably are better than what we do now.
this seems like some good shit for socialists to talk about and hear more about and learn which books talk about!! If they're not fuckin scared
roseweird posted:i thought i was a socialist, then i spent a year here
ahhhh dont rosewerid!!! )): this is just a place where some socialists hang out with other people, online. join a gruppe
roseweird posted:i thought i was a socialist, then i spent a year here
not loving stalin is the the twelfth type of liberalism