Horselord posted:the reason i really hate trots is that they swoop in on anyone who's questioning the necessity or morality of capitalism, and offer them an easy path that doesn't involve unlearning all of the anticommunism that's baked into westerners since birth. the easy path of "oh, sure, (insert smeared socialist county here) is evil, but we're the good guys!"
on top of that it just doesn't work. as in, it doesn't work to build socialism, but it also doesn't work to convince anyone in the West that Trots are the non-scary Communists, whether or not those people might be sympathetic to socialism. i feel like close to everyone in the West who thinks that the neatest country to ever exist in history was specifically "the USSR for a few years until Stalin ruined it" is already a member of a Trotskyist party, and the year-over-year buildup of such people seems unlikely to increase very much. Meanwhile, the number of people there receptive to questioning the entire capitalist version of 20th-century history seems to be on a moderate uptick right now, and still if you try to tell most people in general that you're the Good Communist because you like Leon Trotsky and not Josef Stalin they are just going to back away slowly because you said you're a Communist. what i am saying is that Trotskyists should stop with the self-owns and become Maoists who believe in the possible like deadken.
cars posted:"Stalinists" usually don't care that much about stalin when it comes to their own political practice, or really care a ton about hoary old defunct political fights from decades ago at all, beyond defending the legacy of socialism from Western revisionist history and investigating socialist history to try to learn from past mistakes.
cosigned
in my experience the extent to which "stalinists" care is usually this: stalin is easily one of the most mythologized figures in world history, for better or for worse (though overwhelmingly the latter in my part of the world), and cutting through that mythology is a worthwhile operation considering his nodal importance in a very pivotal era
but given the parenthetical bit above, simply trying to separate fact from fiction, let alone seek truth from fact, is viewed as an act about as sensational as simply fabricating an equally nonsensical myth in support of Koba The Mustachioed Sorcerer (Who Was Actually The Good Kind of Sorcerer)
Horselord posted:the reason i really hate trots is that they swoop in on anyone who's questioning the necessity or morality of capitalism, and offer them an easy path that doesn't involve unlearning all of the anticommunism that's baked into westerners since birth. the easy path of "oh, sure, (insert smeared socialist county here) is evil, but we're the good guys!"
is that why there are so many more trotsky sects than marxist-leninist/etc ones?
also, i see "actually existing socialism" in reference to some countries occasionally but that doesn't make sense to me. i mean there are definitely some countries that have made great progress against capitalism/imperialism but I don't think any of them have achieved a stateless classless society yet.
Synergy posted:also, i see "actually existing socialism" in reference to some countries occasionally but that doesn't make sense to me. i mean there are definitely some countries that have made great progress against capitalism/imperialism but I don't think any of them have achieved a stateless classless society yet.
Socialism is the transition to communism. A stateless classless society can only exist after the defeat of capitalism, which is not only distant in the future, but can't happen without peoples continually making effort against imperialism, in the form of these imperfect socialist states which have to exist in the real world.
The DPRK for example was subject to possibly the bloodiest invasion of modern history and since then has been under incredible economic and military pressure from the West. To criticize their society as a "deformed workers' state" or whatever discards these material conditions, and ignores that their deviations from "full" communism are an attempt to survive in the face of this pressure.
Synergy posted:Horselord posted:
the reason i really hate trots is that they swoop in on anyone who's questioning the necessity or morality of capitalism, and offer them an easy path that doesn't involve unlearning all of the anticommunism that's baked into westerners since birth. the easy path of "oh, sure, (insert smeared socialist county here) is evil, but we're the good guys!"
is that why there are so many more trotsky sects than marxist-leninist/etc ones?
also, i see "actually existing socialism" in reference to some countries occasionally but that doesn't make sense to me. i mean there are definitely some countries that have made great progress against capitalism/imperialism but I don't think any of them have achieved a stateless classless society yet.
a stateless and classless society is a communist society, not a socialist one. there is no contradiction between having a state and being socialist
swampman posted:Socialism is the transition to communism.
I've always understood socialism as an umbrella term with the same goal in mind. Communism/anarchism/etc are just different methods of getting to a stateless classless society. Then again every group has a different idea of what these terms mean so...
The DPRK for example was subject to possibly the bloodiest invasion of modern history and since then has been under incredible economic and military pressure from the West. To criticize their society as a "deformed workers' state" or whatever discards these material conditions, and ignores that their deviations from "full" communism are an attempt to survive in the face of this pressure.
I'm not criticizing their society, I just don't think they've achieved "actually existing socialism" or whatever. As you and others have mentioned, until capitalism is weakened on a global scale we aren't likely to see a near perfect society.
Synergy posted:Communism/anarchism/etc are just different methods of getting to a stateless classless society.
anarchism is squatting an abandoned building until more than 3 people join at which point you denounce the tyranny of being told to flush the toilet, then move back in with your parents
Synergy posted:I've always understood socialism as an umbrella term with the same goal in mind. Communism/anarchism/etc are just different methods of getting to a stateless classless society. Then again every group has a different idea of what these terms mean so...
IMHO this is an equivocation encouraged in bourgeois democracy by the kind of ineffective managed dissent prevalent on campuses. If you go back to core anarchist roots like Proudhon then at least the shared end goal sort of holds up, but most self-professed anarchists today wouldn't have the first idea who that even is, and they no longer have that kind of politics. More importantly, anarchism distinctly doesn't have a method of getting to a stateless classless society. There's no strategy for creating and defending a classless society, because if they seriously joined their analysis to action with that end goal in mind they would just be communists. There's also the problem that modern anarchism is too broad a term, encompassing so many often radically opposed politics as to be almost meaningless. Many anarchists would vehemently deny that their end goals are the same as those of communists, and most of them would be right.
Horselord posted:anarchism is squatting an abandoned building until more than 3 people join at which point you denounce the tyranny of being told to flush the toilet, then move back in with your parents
Because first world "maoist" bloggers writing 10 billion word screeds back and forth about why their three person party is splitting are so much less pathetic! 
Having worked with competent anarchist organizers, and of course witnessed plenty of spoiled anarchist tantrums, I still think there are sufficient anarchists that are potentially valuable allies that it's counterproductive to get into a pissing match. This mostly goes for actual organizations, like the IWW depending on how good they are in your city, since lone anarchists are far more likely to be the crusty squatter stinking of cat piss type. It's worthwhile to work with them where interests align, especially in the tactical short term. Even the best anarchists still deliberately lack a coherent and viable long term strategy, which makes their ideology a dead end, but the smart ones whose hearts are in the right place will recognize good work, and if you're doing good work they'll help. Which is more than I can say for fucking Trots!!
Synergy posted:I've always understood socialism as an umbrella term with the same goal in mind. Communism/anarchism/etc are just different methods of getting to a stateless classless society. Then again every group has a different idea of what these terms mean so...
Except in order to have a productive conversation we have to agree what words mean. When we're talking about economic organization, socialism is the intermediary stage between the collapse of capitalism and the beginning of communism, characterized by increasingly democratic control over the production and distribution of material goods. Anarchism doesn't have an implied end goal of communism, some anarcho-communists theorize that communism will arise spontaneously from a state of true anarchy but they are wrong and stupid for a great many reasons we can discuss at enormous length for a thousand years.
I'm not criticizing their society, I just don't think they've achieved "actually existing socialism" or whatever. As you and others have mentioned, until capitalism is weakened on a global scale we aren't likely to see a near perfect society.
Okay, I do think the DPRK achieved "actually existing socialism" for two reasons: first, they're "actually existing," and second, they have a planned, socialist economy and refer to themselves as "socialist."
Edited by swampman ()
take basically anything in history, soviet or otherwise, that a western intellectual would characterize as tyrannical, statist, authoritarian, collectivist, heirarchical, vertical, dictatorial, autocratic, repressive, or whatever else and you'll always discover that these claims are just not only just idle bitching from people who openly admire the logic of capitalism and have no sincere interest in building effective alternatives, but also that western liberal democracies are almost always involved in much worse anyway
for example: americans didn't feel remotely scandalized by their own prison system until people started pointed out that it outdoes even the most grossly exaggerated claims about the gulags in both enormity and brutality.
its just not a particularly insightful line of inquiry to ask where stalin sits on a liberty <-> tyranny scale, not least of all because the most recent purpose of the scale itself is to convince suckers that theyre actually libertarians, but also because the whole body of postwar political psychology from which terms like "authoritarian" come from was invented for the sole purpose of assuring ourselves that our society was somehiow fundamentally different from the one that produced the nazi party (spoiler alert its not)
ive never seen a liberal writer go into any detail of what state 'corruption' actually entails, it almost always serves as a signal phrase to let the readers know that whatever theyre talking about can be classified as pure bad
"assad's syrian regime is notoriously authoritarian and corrupt" is the equivalent of saying that its notoriously a government that is staffed by human beings. which i guess Does actually remind me of the third reich :thinking:
kamelred posted:it really is insane how flimsy and basically moronic the whole discourse of like, "authoritarianism" ends up being
take basically anything in history, soviet or otherwise, that a western intellectual would characterize as tyrannical, statist, authoritarian, collectivist, heirarchical, vertical, dictatorial, autocratic, repressive, or whatever else and you'll always discover that these claims are just not only just idle bitching from people who openly admire the logic of capitalism and have no sincere interest in building effective alternatives, but also that western liberal democracies are almost always involved in much worse anyway
for example: americans didn't feel remotely scandalized by their own prison system until people started pointed out that it outdoes even the most grossly exaggerated claims about the gulags in both enormity and brutality.
its just not a particularly insightful line of inquiry to ask where stalin sits on a liberty <-> tyranny scale, not least of all because the most recent purpose of the scale itself is to convince suckers that theyre actually libertarians, but also because the whole body of postwar political psychology from which terms like "authoritarian" come from was invented for the sole purpose of assuring ourselves that our society was somehiow fundamentally different from the one that produced the nazi party (spoiler alert its not)
i dont think the modern liberal democracy of britain has ever murdered half a million of its citizens with chekist troikas during an anti-kulak campaign
Panopticon posted:i dont think the modern liberal democracy of britain has ever murdered half a million of its citizens with chekist troikas during an anti-kulak campaign
http://www.erythrospress.com/store/stalin-yezhov.html Ships January 12
By the way, of the 1943 Bengal famine, Churchill said "Famine or no famine, Indians will breed like rabbits"
Edited by swampman ()
Panopticon posted:i dont think the modern liberal democracy of britain has ever murdered half a million of its citizens with chekist troikas during an anti-kulak campaign
Youre right, the modern liberal democracy of britain likes to confine its murder of millions to non citizens
Panopticon posted:i dont think the modern liberal democracy of britain has ever murdered half a million of its citizens with chekist troikas during an anti-kulak campaign
they managed to murder a quarter of a million Iraqis in just the past decade. what else should we add to that body count, the coup against Mosadegh in Iran? or do they all not count because they weren't citizens, or because they weren't using "chekist troikas during an anti-kulak campaign?" is that what really matters? because wow neither did hitler, ~*really makes u think*~
while we're at it let's take a look at the foundations of the wealth and power that created the modern liberal democracy of britain
https://www.quora.com/Exactly-how-many-people-did-the-Britishers-massacre-and-how-much-wealth-did-they-plunder-during-their-200-year-reign-in-India
swampman posted:Panopticon posted:
i dont think the modern liberal democracy of britain has ever murdered half a million of its citizens with chekist troikas during an anti-kulak campaign
http://www.erythrospress.com/store/stalin-yezhov.html Ships January 12
By the way, of the 1943 Bengal famine, Churchill said "Famine or no famine, Indians will breed like rabbits"
i thought the stalinist position was that wartime famines aren't the responsibility of the government?
shriekingviolet posted:Panopticon posted:
i dont think the modern liberal democracy of britain has ever murdered half a million of its citizens with chekist troikas during an anti-kulak campaign
they managed to murder a quarter of a million Iraqis in just the past decade. what else should we add to that body count, the coup against Mosadegh in Iran? or do they all not count because they weren't citizens, or because they weren't using "chekist troikas during an anti-kulak campaign?" is that what really matters? because wow neither did hitler, ~*really makes u think*~
while we're at it let's take a look at the foundations of the wealth and power that created the modern liberal democracy of britain
https://www.quora.com/Exactly-how-many-people-did-the-Britishers-massacre-and-how-much-wealth-did-they-plunder-during-their-200-year-reign-in-India
kamelred said the liberal democracies so i dont think we should look at imperial india - i accept that the british empire's excesses prior to the expansion of universal suffrage were on par with the soviet union's.
as for iraq, yep that's definitely a bad thing, it would be foolish to blame every death on the british government though, it would be like blaming assad's government for the civilians murdered by terrorists.
i thought the stalinist position was that wartime famines aren't the responsibility of the government?
we don't know the stalinist position until we read grover furr's new book
Panopticon posted:prior to the expansion of universal suffrage
The Bengal Famine occurred from 1942 to 1944, and killed 7 million, twice as many as the current scholarly accepted contemporary estimates of ~3.5 million deaths in the Holodomor.
Panopticon posted:the british empire's excesses
do you even listen to yourself when you parrot imperialist apologist terms like this
85 million dead
excesses?
Panopticon posted:on par with the soviet union's.
85 million dead
shriekingviolet posted:I'd always understood Holodomor to simply be a neutral term referring to the event, not connotating directly to deliberate genocidal intent, and I live in the Stalin Wanted To Exterminate The Ukranian People capital of the west. Although on second thought maybe that's why.
"The 1932-33 famine in Eastern Ukraine and Eastern Belorussia that was ended thanks to the kolkhozy or collective farms" rolls off the tongue better
an interesting comparison is between the russian wiki on it and the english wiki on it
The famine in Ukraine (1932-1933) - famine that swept in 1932-1933 the whole territory of the Ukrainian SSR in existence at the time the borders and povlёkshy multimillion casualties.
On the mass famine that struck during this period of time other areas of the Soviet Union, see. Article Famine in the USSR (1932-1933) .
In Ukraine, the mass famine of 1932-1933 was named " Holodomor ", which may imply a deliberate extermination by hunger .
vs
The Holodomor (Ukrainian: Голодомо́р), was a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and 1933 that killed an estimated 2.5–7.5 million Ukrainians, with millions more counted in demographic estimates. It was part of the wider Soviet famine of 1932–33, which affected the major grain-producing areas of the country.
During the Holodomor millions of inhabitants of Ukraine, the majority of whom were ethnic Ukrainians, died of starvation in a peacetime catastrophe unprecedented in the history of Ukraine. Since 2006, the Holodomor has been recognized by Ukraine and 24 other countries as a genocide of the Ukrainian people carried out by the Soviet government.
n/c
Panopticon posted:kamelred posted:
it really is insane how flimsy and basically moronic the whole discourse of like, "authoritarianism" ends up being
take basically anything in history, soviet or otherwise, that a western intellectual would characterize as tyrannical, statist, authoritarian, collectivist, heirarchical, vertical, dictatorial, autocratic, repressive, or whatever else and you'll always discover that these claims are just not only just idle bitching from people who openly admire the logic of capitalism and have no sincere interest in building effective alternatives, but also that western liberal democracies are almost always involved in much worse anyway
for example: americans didn't feel remotely scandalized by their own prison system until people started pointed out that it outdoes even the most grossly exaggerated claims about the gulags in both enormity and brutality.
its just not a particularly insightful line of inquiry to ask where stalin sits on a liberty <-> tyranny scale, not least of all because the most recent purpose of the scale itself is to convince suckers that theyre actually libertarians, but also because the whole body of postwar political psychology from which terms like "authoritarian" come from was invented for the sole purpose of assuring ourselves that our society was somehiow fundamentally different from the one that produced the nazi party (spoiler alert its not)
i dont think the modern liberal democracy of britain has ever murdered half a million of its citizens with chekist troikas during an anti-kulak campaign
okay fine but thats not whats at question. theres probably a better place and a better poster to pick the Crimes of Stalin fight with, the point is rather is that the discourse of authoritarians and dictators and cults of personality is totally incoherent and relies largely on a theory of political psychology that ends up being (my god) pure ideology
comrade
shriekingviolet posted:Panopticon posted:
prior to the expansion of universal suffrage
The Bengal Famine occurred from 1942 to 1944, and killed 7 million, twice as many as the current scholarly accepted contemporary estimates of ~3.5 million deaths in the Holodomor.
the ussr wasn't even in a war at that point, the civil war had been over for 10 years. also the "holodomor" is just the ukrainian part, there were famine victims elsewhere. this is one reason we know it was not intentional and just the result of the soviet system being utterly worthless.
shriekingviolet posted:Panopticon posted:
the british empire's excesses
do you even listen to yourself when you parrot imperialist apologist terms like this
85 million dead
excesses?
Panopticon posted:
on par with the soviet union's.
85 million dead
i expect it's pretty similar when you calculate murders per year
Panopticon posted:i expect it's pretty similar when you calculate murders per year
*unreal tournament voice* HOLY SHIT
kamelred posted:like for the purpose of this discussion im totally ambivalent to any moral question about various historical states, im just specifically referring to how theyre characterized in political terms
comrade
a saint once said "I don't believe in bourgeois objectivity and I take sides"
Constantignoble posted:*panopticon voice* ah, but if we decontextualize this number, we see th
what do you mean
Panopticon posted:as for iraq, yep that's definitely a bad thing, it would be foolish to blame every death on the british government though, it would be like blaming assad's government for the civilians murdered by terrorists.
You're right, it would be foolish. Every single death in Iraq, to the present, should be laid on the entirety of Blair's party, all opposition parties who acquiesced, all the British people who voted for them and continue to do so, and all the troops; every single one of them should (and will) be held to account.
assad's government
please don't be racist on this forum.
toyotathon posted:Panopticon posted:
i expect it's pretty similar when you calculate murders per year
how to hide 85 million dead and 250 years of exploitation: first, divide one by the other
sure if mathematics scares you that much i guess it does count as hiding it
RTC posted:Panopticon posted:
as for iraq, yep that's definitely a bad thing, it would be foolish to blame every death on the british government though, it would be like blaming assad's government for the civilians murdered by terrorists.
You're right, it would be foolish. Every single death in Iraq, to the present, should be laid on the entirety of Blair's party, all opposition parties who acquiesced, all the British people who voted for them and continue to do so, and all the troops; every single one of them should (and will) be held to account.
assad's government
please don't be racist on this forum.
wtf
Panopticon posted:wtf
I'm confused by you. Why do the lives of a million Ukrainians matter to you more than 85 million brown people? Are your a white supremacist? You realize that Ukrainians, as Slavs, are not considered "White" right.
toyotathon posted:Panopticon posted:
sure if mathematics scares you that much i guess it does count as hiding it
hmm sometimes a new mathematical quantity can be clarified with example problems. is 170 million killed over 500 years worse or better? is 1 million over 3 years worse or better? i don't think it helps in analyzing the causes of, then stopping, mass death. there are lots of possible physical quantities that are mathematically consistent and also physically useless. even if the units are consistent, it doesn't necessarily reveal anything meaningful or useful about your physical system. back to your quantity: what was the death's first time derivative in the colonization compared to the great leap forward? when it's high, it could show moments of state oppression, famine, disease outbreaks; and when it's low, new medical procedures, good harvests, end of war -- but your quantity by itself can't explain the changes in the time derivative. you need history for that.
edit, sorry came off as a dick
if you don't think the units are important you'd have to take that up with shriekingviolent who was that one that compared the murders in the kulak campaign against the murders in the famines in british india
RTC posted:Panopticon posted:
wtf
I'm confused by you. Why do the lives of a million Ukrainians matter to you more than 85 million brown people? Are your a white supremacist? You realize that Ukrainians, as Slavs, are not considered "White" right.
i guess i just expect better from leftists