Constantignoble posted:

but then again the very fact that you're no longer ascribing intent to the famine in ukraine says we're making progress in at least some small capacity, so there's that

i don't think i ever ascribed malicious intent to the famine

Constantignoble posted:

you're right man, i guess we're just not as far left as you. like, we're all pretty far left, but we're gonna need another term for your spot in the continuum. perhaps "ultra" left?

i don't think opposing arbitrary mass murder via chekist troika is an especially ultra-left position

Edited by Panopticon (Jan. 10, 2017 12:19:30)

Constantignoble posted:

no, it's definitely not. the ultraleft position is rather to find the single worst aspect of a thing, dip the broadest brush they can find in it, and paint the rest of it to match, all in the name of abstract "left" principles. it's a fairly straightforward idealist affectation. thus, rhetorically at least, every year of USSR history becomes 1937, and every unit of manpower is mobilized in the name of arbitrary, paranoiac chaos

this is like apologists for imperialism saying "sure the famines were bad but look at all the railroads the empire built"

Constantignoble posted:

and then, as a bonus, you blast that brainturd from a mortar to insinuate folks in here are in favor of "arbitrary mass murder." gosh, why on earth would people keep losing patience with you?

there's actually been plenty of support for the purges in this thread

EmanuelaBrolandi posted:

1/3 of the people removed in purges were wanted criminals and 3/3 of them deserved it

Synergy posted:

In order to accomplish this it had to not only politically defeat the generation of revolutionary leaders who had made the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 but to physically exterminate them. Not only the central leaders of Lenin's party, but almost the entire membership that had participated in the 1917 revolution, perished in the great terror of the 1930s. This fact gives the lie to those who claim that the Stalinist regime was a logical extension of Bolshevism."

http://www.dsp.org.au/node/123

What the Soviets Expected.
Why the Red Army was ready. Harry F. Ward reviews Anna Louise Strong's latest book.

ANNA LOUISE STRONG holds a distinguished and distinctive position in that small group of writers who can be called journalistic historians. To their writings the scholars of tomorrow will turn to get the flesh and blood to put around the dry bones of official documents in order that the past may live again. One or two others of this group have shown a like capacity to give an accurate and honest account of what they have seen. But no one of them has Miss Strong's uncanny capacity for getting inside the people of the lands she writes about and so enabling the reader to understand them. To this feeling for the people is added an understanding of the nature of the world crisis, partly intuitive and partly the result of her long sojourn in the Soviet Union, which makes her its true interpreter, when other writers who have lived there are either lost in a fog of their own making, or have become prejudiced and lying servants of reaction.

The title of Miss Strong's latest volume does not do it justice. The book is very much more than an explanation of the fact that the Soviets knew they were going to be attacked sooner or later, that their leaders got them ready for it at a terrific cost which the people paid because they understood its necessity, that opposition to the speed and cost of industrialization, as essential for defense as it was for social advance, by some Communist Party leaders, was one of the steps that finally led them to the position of traitors. In the foreword the author insists that, for our own sake as well as for the sake of all mankind, we must know not only that the Soviets expected this war and got ready for it, but "that they see a way through — not only to their own victory but to the great peace of the peoples, based on equality of all races and nations, on free access by the world's people to the world's resources, on democratic choice. For unless we understand the tremendous hope that rallies the Soviet people to this conflict, we shall not only fail our strongest ally, but may lose the battle for ourselves and for the world." This means that by understanding this hope we can come to share in it, to translate it into reality. In short, the message of this book is more than a call to the defense of democracy and the defeat of Hitler; it is a challenge to go forward to the democratic organization of the whole of life.

The plan of the book is evidently influenced by what Miss Strong has found out the American people need to know about the Soviet Union in her periodic lecture tours across this continent. First comes a graphic and revealing portrayal of the Russians as people, of what they are fighting for, and of their leader—Stalin. This is followed by an equally interesting and skillful popular history of the Soviet Union and its part in world affairs during the world-changing last ten years. Here the reader will learn how the Soviets prepared industrially for the war, how they made and modernized a people's army, how they smashed their fifth column. There follows the tragic story of the failure of the fight for peace and collective security, and after that the only alternative strategy of the march into Poland and the building of the Buffer Belt is explained. The sovietizing of the Baltic peoples is depicted by Miss Strong's eyewitness account of that episode in Lithuania. Her account of how the pact with Hitler was used to block him will be an illuminating revelation to many who knew the propagandized and accepted version of the meaning of that instrument was a lie, but had not the facts with which to refute it.

The book ends with an account of the war of the whole people which is showing the Nazis a "total war" which they are unable to accomplish, understand, or defeat. Finally there is a picture of the way the world is lining up which is very hopeful in terms of the peoples who make the world and in the end will rule it, since democracy cannot be destroyed. But to that it is necessary to add, as the Soviet authorities frequently do to their announcement of military successes, a reminder of the struggle that lies ahead. The Bullitt appointment is a sinister warning of what the democratic peoples have to do to, and with, the anti-democratic forces that are still represented in their governments.

It is a heartening thing that a popular priced edition of Miss Strong's book is made available alongside another 1,000,000 edition of the Dean of Canterbury's The Soviet Power. Those who read these two books will have an arsenal of weapons with which to destroy the lies of our fifth columnists; they will gain courage and hope to sustain them in the darkest days of the struggle before them, to carry them forward on the victorious march into the future.
HARRY F . WARD.
http://www.unz.org/Pub/NewMasses-1941dec30-00021
Ordering this book....

Synergy posted:

so is socialism the stage where the workers have control of production or before that?

yes, once communism arrives there should be no more class division and therefore no working class; the economy would be controlled by society as a whole. this is what stalinists refer to when they say "democracy" (as opposed to things like elections for representatives)

Horselord posted:

Panopticon posted:
this is what stalinists refer to when they say "democracy" (as opposed to things like elections for representatives)


wild that stalin spent the last half of his life advocating for representatives to be chosen by multi-candidate secret ballot elections, even putting it in the 1936 constitution personally

the ussr was not a communist society

babyhueypnewton posted:

it's sort of obvious that the withering away of the state is the withering away of the law (and thus the rule of law) but what this means in a concrete form is the interesting part for communists today. is socialist law simply the humanistic impulse of a socialist sense of justice, presumably differentiating between proletarian law and bourgeois law? is it simply the dismantling of legal structures layer by layer until only the state of administration (as Pashukanis calls it) remains? is it an entirely new form of mass law that is radically democratic? is it the preservation of the best aspects of bourgeois law, like innocent until proven guilty and habeas corpus, while eliminating the bad parts?

Stalin went both ways, strengthening the rule of law in the early 30s before the purges abandoned it entirely. And since Stalin was great, whatever he did is correct. So I'm inclined to believe that the rule of law serves as a useful fiction for the socialist state, though subordinate to the needs of socialism, until it is radically attacked and replaced with some kind of law of the masses.

cars posted:

i know it's a lot of fun for you to argue in bad faith but it's beyond ridiculous for you to ascribe bhpn's pov on things such as law and science to "the stalinists", or even to anyone else on this forum

if you have another perspective you should post it

Panopticon posted:

we have gone over this ground before and the stalinists don't think the legalism of bourgeois rule of law is communism's final form

but what does this have to do with stalin's lifelong tireless advocacy for secret ballot, multicandidate electoral democracy in the soviets

Panopticon posted:

it's sort of obvious that the withering away of the state is the withering away of the law (and thus the rule of law)

no it's not. in the marxist tradition the state is the instrument by which one class oppresses the other classes. therefore a classless society is by definition a stateless one because there is no class oppression.
this has nothing to do with law and government, which are aspects of the weberian definition of the state.