Panopticon posted:Constantignoble posted:*panopticon voice* ah, but if we decontextualize this number, we see th
what do you mean
i mean that one of the most important lessons from Marx is the importance of historicizing and contextualizing everything. all of these discussions with you follow a similar trajectory: many details come and go, but the ultimate ground is "this One Weird Huge Number superimposed over Stalin's face," and all roads ultimately lead there. it's got a sort of talismanic quality, your comforting mantra.
like, nobody cares if you like the guy or whatever, but your unwillingness to actually consider his context in any depth at all beyond comfy anti-communist shibboleths (aka "lib shibs") and childish transpositions like "the soviet system (was) utterly worthless" (see, it's just your oh-so cutting critique of Stalin, plus zero new information, but you said "system" so it's somehow deeper) is dumb and boring
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
Panopticon posted:i guess i just expect better from leftists
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?
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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
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Panopticon posted:i don't think opposing arbitrary mass murder via chekist troika is an especially ultra-left position
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
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?
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
and "purge" now means the same thing as "murder"
shit, maybe words don't even really mean anything, it's all just noises in the air
edit: lol wait, weren't you the one who thought "liquidated as a class" meant "literally exterminated"? fucking never mind then
Constantignoble posted:hm, yes, i can see how you might mistake "treating history with respect" for "excusing the depredations of imperialism," thank you for this profound goon wisdom
and "purge" now means the same thing as "murder"
shit, maybe words don't even really mean anything, it's all just noises in the air
edit: lol wait, weren't you the one who thought "liquidated as a class" meant "literally exterminated"? fucking never mind then
given that the extermination part happened everywhere marxist-leninists tried to take control you can see why i made that mistake
pictured: someone guilty of arbitrary mass killings, probably
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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."
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....
swampman posted:Except in order to have a productive conversation we have to agree what words mean.
a few years ago i asked about these terms over at revleft (lol) and got a bunch of conflicting answers so that's probably why i'm struggling so much
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.
so is socialism the stage where the workers have control of production or before that?
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.
does catalonia count towards this?
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)
Synergy posted:so is socialism the stage where the workers have control of production or before that?
Socialism is that but it is also a mode of production (because any society in which man shapes nature to his own ends has a mode of production) and it is much more useful to think about it in those terms. A mode of production is determinant and objective while "workers control of production" can mean anything you want it to mean from Lenin to Bernie Sanders.
babyhueypnewton posted:Socialism is that but it is also a mode of production (because any society in which man shapes nature to his own ends has a mode of production) and it is much more useful to think about it in those terms. A mode of production is determinant and objective while "workers control of production" can mean anything you want it to mean from Lenin to Bernie Sanders.
i take your point but holy shit dude don't okay the clown idea that anything Bernie Sanders endorses even comes close to workers controlling the means of production or could be claimed as such
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
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
KilledInADuel posted:have yall this one yet?
yeah getfiscal went Ultrapositive with a joke about hitler telling stalin that he didn't like him but respected him for his demonic plan to secretly kill a large range of numbers of slavs. but what i've learned is that a time to post Timeline.jpg can instead be a time to share positive memories with posting friends.
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
Horselord posted: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
because "it's sort of obvious that the withering away of the state is the withering away of the law" (bhpn, rhizzone university press, 2016)
my original post was in response to a question by synergy about the transition from socialism to communism, ie the withering away of the state
to their credit, panopticon's original original response actually did address this:
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.
there's an excellent quote from Garibaldi that illustrates the need to realise the importance of the state, if it is a state predicated upon the correct goals.
"Yesterday I said to you: war to the death to Bonaparte. Today I say to you: rescue the French Republic by every means"
therefore, we have to fight the bourgeois state to the death, but defend the proletariat state to our last drop of blood. it's not a confused position, its a realistic one. not establishing a monopoly of force within the territory we control (the simplest definition of a state) merely hands the initiative to the forces of reaction.
as for the law, it merely simplifies and codifies the rules of conduct necessary to the establishment of communism. this provides a clear benefit, as not having any rule of law means individual personalities can run rampant. this would not be a bad thing, if the new {wo}man of communism was ubiquitous, but since people are still influenced by bourgeois thought, some guidelines are necessary.