Panopticon posted:robert conquest says 2.5 million died in the purges. but the NKVD records reveal only 650k died. so you see, the soviet system was much more moral than anti-communists would have you believe.
please stop being dumb about what the actual point of all this is. reassessing factual claims (such as death counts) is just the first step, and the second step is not to proclaim relative morality, it is to then say "so what actually happened during the purges because this was nonetheless a terrible fuckup nobody would want to see repeated". to simply say "well either way lots of people died so stalin was bad" is to learn nothing. are you really going to boil the soviet union down to a single man and blame all of its mistakes on him? and if so, what the fuck do you think you're going to learn from that?
Petrol posted:are you really going to boil the soviet union down to a single man and blame all of its mistakes on him?
nope. in my first few posts in this thread i stated that i believe terrible crimes like the purges can be avoided with democracy and rule of law. that is what i take away when i look at stalin and the soviet system
Panopticon posted:Petrol posted:are you really going to boil the soviet union down to a single man and blame all of its mistakes on him?
nope. in my first few posts in this thread i stated that i believe terrible crimes like the purges can be avoided with democracy and rule of law. that is what i take away when i look at stalin and the soviet system
this is so glib as to be meaningless. "the rule of law" is a principle with little inherent meaning - what then shall the laws be? how shall they be enforced? how shall allegations be investigated and tried, and who shall make the judgements? how shall the guilty be sentenced? and the same, of course, applies to democracy. and i stress that you will find it difficult to come up with concrete worthwhile answers in relation to the soviet system (i.e. how could things have been done better) unless you first endeavour to understand the truth of what occurred.
swampman posted:Panopticon posted:why should the proletariat resolve the principle contradiction of production?
The question isn't "why should they." They will do this, it is a historical inevitability.
i feel a lot better now knowing this
Petrol posted:this is so glib as to be meaningless. "the rule of law" is a principle with little inherent meaning - what then shall the laws be? how shall they be enforced? how shall allegations be investigated and tried, and who shall make the judgements? how shall the guilty be sentenced? and the same, of course, applies to democracy. and i stress that you will find it difficult to come up with concrete worthwhile answers in relation to the soviet system (i.e. how could things have been done better) unless you first endeavour to understand the truth of what occurred.
"A state operating by means of rules (general, abstract and permanent norms), which are non-contradictory, possible, comprehensible, certain, public and non-retroactive - and by means of commands (individual norms), upholding the principle of the hierarchy of norms and organising the material sanction of the infringement of the rules by means of a power that is distinct and independent from the normative power. In this state the conformity of commands with rules and the respect of the meta-rule (generality of rules) are controlled by a power or powers that is/are distinct and independent from the normative power."
Panopticon posted:Petrol posted:this is so glib as to be meaningless. "the rule of law" is a principle with little inherent meaning - what then shall the laws be? how shall they be enforced? how shall allegations be investigated and tried, and who shall make the judgements? how shall the guilty be sentenced? and the same, of course, applies to democracy. and i stress that you will find it difficult to come up with concrete worthwhile answers in relation to the soviet system (i.e. how could things have been done better) unless you first endeavour to understand the truth of what occurred.
"A state operating by means of rules (general, abstract and permanent norms), which are non-contradictory, possible, comprehensible, certain, public and non-retroactive - and by means of commands (individual norms), upholding the principle of the hierarchy of norms and organising the material sanction of the infringement of the rules by means of a power that is distinct and independent from the normative power. In this state the conformity of commands with rules and the respect of the meta-rule (generality of rules) are controlled by a power or powers that is/are distinct and independent from the normative power."
if you decide to think and respond to people in your own terms rather than incessantly quoting what you think are relevant things other people have said, you might find yourself thinking and saying things that are not only pertinent but productive. hth
ve HEIL fart HEIL fart in comrade stalin's face
getfiscal posted:i disagree that marxism sees "morality" and "science" as separate spheres in that specific way. the issue is that morality must be rooted in that actual world, in the real lived experiences of individuals. this means the question is what sorts of practices should prevail and what sort of actions are necessary. the question is how to act as an individual or part of an organization in a specific situation.
i mean, marx directly identifies morality - a subset of what he described as "phantoms formed in the brain" - in contrast to what he proposed as a "real, positive science." the ability to mount a real criticism of production allowed by development of communist views, in his words, "shattered the basis of all morality, whether the morality of asceticism or of enjoyment."
marx obviously proposes very overtly a notion of necessity and subsequent call to practice but it's a mistake to presume that this implies a moral argument
remember the very deep indebtedness marx has toward the tradition of hegel and german idealism. hegel proclaims that "Nature has therefore in its existence no freedom but necessity and chance." this is necessity in the sense of that which could not be otherwise, the system of nature being presented as a medium of the logically necessary compounded with the contingent
that is to say, we are dealing with an idea of necessity as logical category as opposed to moral directive
engels relates hegel's notions of necessity to that of freedom:
Hegel was the first to state correctly the relation between freedom and necessity. To him, freedom is the insight into necessity (die Einsicht in die Notwendigheit).
"Necessity is blind only in so far as it is not understood ."
Freedom does not consist in any dreamt-of independence from natural laws, but in the knowledge of these laws, and in the possibility this gives of systematically making them work towards definite ends. This holds good in relation both to the laws of external nature and to those which govern the bodily and mental existence of men themselves — two classes of laws which we can separate from each other at most only in thought but not in reality. Freedom of the will therefore means nothing but the capacity to make decisions with knowledge of the subject. Therefore the freer a man’s judgment is in relation to a definite question, the greater is the necessity with which the content of this judgment will be determined; while the uncertainty, founded on ignorance, which seems to make an arbitrary choice among many different and conflicting possible decisions, shows precisely by this that it is not free, that it is controlled by the very object it should itself control. Freedom therefore consists in the control over ourselves and over external nature, a control founded on knowledge of natural necessity; it is therefore necessarily a product of historical development.
in the german ideology it's described how the bourgeois theorist (in this case feuerbach) in response to seeing "a crowd of scrofulous, overworked and consumptive starvelings, he is compelled to take refuge in the "higher perception" and in the ideal "compensation in the species," and thus to relapse into idealism at the very point where the communist materialist sees the necessity, and at the same time the condition, of a transformation both of industry and of the social structure."
that is to say that the call to action, as it were, promoted by marx and engels is founded on the fulfilment of the logical necessity embedded in external nature (with the recognition of such necessity being reliant on the real, positive science of communist materialism - and as such historically determined) rather than a moral argument
Edited by blinkandwheeze ()
Petrol posted:if you decide to think and respond to people in your own terms rather than incessantly quoting what you think are relevant things other people have said, you might find yourself thinking and saying things that are not only pertinent but productive. hth
when i respond in my own terms i am called glib or asked for citations. when i provide citations i am told to think for myself and to stop quoting anti-communists.
Panopticon posted:swampman posted:Panopticon posted:i believe in justice, and the ussr under stalin was an unjust system which lacked democracy and rule of law.
citation needed
the forsaken: an american tragedy in stalin's russia, tim tzouliadis
fuck you.
aerdil posted:fuck you.
fuck people who laugh off thousands of people dying needlessly
Panopticon posted:aerdil posted:fuck you.
fuck people who laugh off thousands of people dying needlessly
what about the california gold rush
swampman posted:Panopticon posted:aerdil posted:fuck you.
fuck people who laugh off thousands of people dying needlessly
what about the california gold rush
two wrongs don't make a right. i am not defending capitalism. i am criticising stalin and his system, a system which has been dead for 30 years, or longer if Khrushchev Lied.
aerdil posted:weird how every citation about the crimes of stalin come not from scholarly research but shitty pop-history novels written by anticom liberals. very weird. i sure do like that an idiot is quoting them earnestly in my rhizzone though. good job everyone.
what's your definition of scholarly? written by an academic from within his own discipline? oops, there goes grover furr, the medieval english literature professor.
Panopticon posted:aerdil posted:weird how every citation about the crimes of stalin come not from scholarly research but shitty pop-history novels written by anticom liberals. very weird. i sure do like that an idiot is quoting them earnestly in my rhizzone though. good job everyone.
what's your definition of scholarly? written by an academic from within his own discipline? oops, there goes grover furr, the medieval english literature professor.
something heavily sourced from reliable contemporary documents paired with intelligent and fair analysis. so uh no the hacky anticom propaganda your subjecting us to doesnt quite count.
aerdil posted:hello i'm a marxist and i believe the rule of law is very important. but uh let's just ignore the fact that one of the most famous passages in Capital is when Marx points out that rights discourse is bullshit because between two conflicting rights, such as the relationship between worker and employer, force decides; bourgeoisie notions like the rule of law are untenable for a socialist society, it must be founded on something more material.
is this an appeal to an ideal or a specific example grounded in materialism?
aerdil posted:Panopticon posted:aerdil posted:weird how every citation about the crimes of stalin come not from scholarly research but shitty pop-history novels written by anticom liberals. very weird. i sure do like that an idiot is quoting them earnestly in my rhizzone though. good job everyone.
what's your definition of scholarly? written by an academic from within his own discipline? oops, there goes grover furr, the medieval english literature professor.
something heavily sourced from reliable contemporary documents paired with intelligent and fair analysis. so uh no the hacky anticom propaganda your subjecting us to doesnt quite count.
you mean like the katyn execution orders signed by stalin? which grover furr dismisses because "there's no proof it's NOT a forgery"
Panopticon posted:aerdil posted:Panopticon posted:aerdil posted:weird how every citation about the crimes of stalin come not from scholarly research but shitty pop-history novels written by anticom liberals. very weird. i sure do like that an idiot is quoting them earnestly in my rhizzone though. good job everyone.
what's your definition of scholarly? written by an academic from within his own discipline? oops, there goes grover furr, the medieval english literature professor.
something heavily sourced from reliable contemporary documents paired with intelligent and fair analysis. so uh no the hacky anticom propaganda your subjecting us to doesnt quite count.
you mean like the katyn execution orders signed by stalin? which grover furr dismisses because "there's no proof it's NOT a forgery"
youre the one bringing up grover furr. i havent personally read him. he very well could be just as bad as tim tzimafuckshit you've been quoting. because a communist might also be a bad scholar doesnt make your anticommunist source any better.
aerdil posted:youre the one bringing up grover furr. i havent personally read him. he very well could be just as bad as tim tzimafuckshit you've been quoting. because a communist might also be a bad scholar doesnt make your anticommunist source any better.
no, petrol brought him up.
c_man posted:btw im not talking about reading whatever garbage grover furr posts on his webzone, im talking about actual scholarly history. im talking about being able to account for yourself as an ideological product and recognizing that the structures that you have grown up with were explicitly designed to prepare you to not take alternative social structures seriously unless they jump through and endless array of hoops that are produced by the regime we live in which is even more murderous and arbitrary than the ones it needs to depose in order to reproduce itself.
i want an alternate social structure. i'm just inclined to believe that the katyn massacre was a result of the arbitrary exercise of power in the soviet union, stemming from a lack of rule of law
Panopticon posted:you mean like the katyn execution orders signed by stalin? which grover furr dismisses because "there's no proof it's NOT a forgery"
Actually, what Furr says is that a new set of documents were disclosed in 2010 that cast doubt on the genuine status of Closed Pack No. 1, but doesn't harp on this point, giving instead evidence that germans did most if not all of the killing and that the eyewitness testimony contradicts itself extremely, is distorted by snyder, &c.
Well why summarize? Here's what he says
https://msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/pol/truthaboutkatyn.html
IMO the evidence suggests that both the Soviets and, later, the Germans shot Polish officers, for different reasons. This explanation has the advantage over others in that it does not entail "dismissing" lots of the evidence we have, or "assuming" the evidence against one side is true while that against the other side is false.
Edited by swampman ()
aerdil posted:real talk, i also find it kinda hard to care too much that stalin signed off on executing a bunch of polish fascists and military officers in the midst of world war two. he shouldn't have but eh oh well.
it shows the system had no checks on the power of the state apparatus to execute people. this should be a bad thing in and of itself if you value justice.
Panopticon posted:i'm just inclined to believe that the katyn massacre was a result of the arbitrary exercise of power in the soviet union, stemming from a lack of rule of law
is there a reason that you think that, as opposed to maybe that it was the nazis, that isnt related to books or other media that were created with the explicit intent of generating hatred for the ussr? if the presence of the "rule of law" is so important for you here, do you feel like the nazi commitment to the rule of law was so much stronger than that in the ussr that they are much more trustworthy?
blinkandwheeze posted:that is to say that the call to action, as it were, promoted by marx and engels is founded on the fulfilment of the logical necessity embedded in external nature (with the recognition of such necessity being reliant on the real, positive science of communist materialism - and as such historically determined) rather than a moral argument
i think you are confusing hegel. the point about necessity is a reply to kant. moral imperatives do exist but they have no force in themselves, only within a specific situation. that situation has an institutional and individual context. ethics for hegel involves the unity of the particular and the universal, it is not just a restatement of an abstract moral imperative. this is not rejecting the idea of morality, it is saying that morality operates within history and cannot be separated from it into a pure regulative idea. a similar point is made by machiavelli. the argument machiavelli makes is not "ignore morality", it is that you need to actualize realize morality within the ugly reality of human history. and if that means you have to ignore the law at times in order to reinforce the overall stability of your system, then that is what one must do. this is not a rejection of the law as such, which would be insane to machiavelli, it is a rejection of the idea that the particular never creates exceptions to professed universals. the reason why marx doesn't dwell on this (after the 1840s) is that he thinks the moral side has been settled by the real movement - socialists already say all sorts of things about freedom. (in the 1850s marx re-published his early calls for unlimited freedom of speech as part of a collection of writings). plus the only real example available to him was the paris commune of actual socialist practice, which marx used to ridicule people who said that socialists didn't care about free speech or whatever.