The Offtopicgrad Soviet: A Place to Discuss All Things Red

[Hygro]

I don't really care what the prisoners wanted. Prison labor was ubiquitous in that period, and it is still quite prevalent in the US today.
[...]
Don't waste my time with your pathetic crocodile tears about the "human cost" when you clearly don't care about the human cost of capitalism.

Speaking of selective caring.

 

[Traitorfish]

Emma Goldman was an anarchist, and Rosa Luxemburg did approve of the Russian Revolution, she just had some criticisms and concerns about it.

Their objection is meaningless though.

If criticism from the right is "slander",

And criticism from the left is "meaningless",

Then who exactly is allowed to criticise the Bolsheviks?

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Speaking of selective caring.

I have never claimed to be objective.

You liberals, on the other hand, fetishize it.

If criticism from the right is "slander",

And criticism from the left is "meaningless",

Then who exactly is allowed to criticise the Bolsheviks?

Other Bolsheviks.

I mean to be honest, criticize all you want. But your criticism won't be listened to, and it will be founded upon either hypocrisy, smugness, or both.

 

[Traitorfish]

Well, Trotsky was a Bolshevik, and it's not my understanding that his criticisms were greeted with a great deal more warmth than Goldman's. So even then, I'm sensing hidden caveats.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Well, Trotsky was a Bolshevik, and it's not my understanding that his criticisms were greeted with a great deal more warmth than Goldman's. So even then, I'm sensing hidden caveats.

His criticisms while still a Bolshevik were given the same treatment as anyone else.

Once he stopped being constructively critical and attacked the basis of the USSR and its security, then he ceased to be listened to.

Yes, there are "hidden" caveats. Your criticism has to be worth something, i.e. based in real theory. An opinion is worth nothing by itself, except against other opinions.

 

[Traitorfish]

Trotsky always maintained that his criticisms were "constructive". (Heck, the whole concept of the "degenerated workers' state" is basically a theoretical gloss on "it's just a little airborne, it's still good".) So who makes that particular jugement?

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

Trotsky always maintained that his criticisms were "constructive". (Heck, the whole concept of the "degenerated workers' state" is basically a theoretical gloss on "it's just a little airborne, it's still good".) So who makes that particular jugement?

It's not hard to pick apart Trotsky's argument using dialectics.

Why are you people so obsessed with how people feel about what they do? Does Trotsky's opinion about the nature of his criticism have any bearing on anything at all? Does it suddenly become right because he thought it was important and right?

And for what it's worth, some of his criticisms were constructive. Some were good, some were bad, some were right and some were wrong. Again, so what?

 

[Traitorfish]

It's probably not hard to pick apart Trotsky's arguments using dianetics, either, but that's rather besides the point. The question isn't whether his criticisms were correct, even less whether they were consistent with a particular doctrine, it's whether they were constructive. If we're setting that extremely low bar for not having your critics assassinated, it can't be too much to ask that you tell us what, even just loosely, separates a constructive criticism of the Soviet government from a non-constructive criticism, and who possesses sufficient authority to make a definitive judgement on the matter.

 

[Hygro]

I have never claimed to be objective.

You liberals, on the other hand, fetishize it.

[GAP]

Other Bolsheviks.

I mean to be honest, criticize all you want. But your criticism won't be listened to, and it will be founded upon either hypocrisy, smugness, or both.

Second post in a row where the opening line juxtaposes beautifully with your closing line.

I guess it's a reminder to anyone watching that you're not arguing from a moral standpoint, or a humanist standpoint. You're arguing from an aesthetic or evolutionary or ego standpoint. You don't want to end starvation, you want to change a mode of human social interaction and will point to starvation to help propel your Cheezy The Whizgeist forward. You don't not want to end starvation of course, you aren't evil, but the mode of social regulation matters first.

related: the demographic assertion above personal posting history: "you liberals" forgetting that I'm a person who might actually not be that.

I write this for everyone watching whose wondering if you've figured it out on another level. Naw, you're asserting the self in the same ego struggle that defines our generation. It's instagram selfies but the avatar-text game.

Anyway, you're the only well read orthodox hammer and sickle Marxist I know so don't stop, you're doing us all a service. Still I see you for the person.

Why are you people so obsessed with how people feel about what they do?

We're talking to someone who is, so it looks that way.

it's funny though, because this is a big argument for socialism: the dignity people and how they feel about what they do.

It's probably not hard to pick apart Trotsky's arguments using dianetics, either,

I had to look that one up.



If you actual care about people, and understand that other people exist it doesn't matter what system you have. "I want everyone to be able to eat" is something people are doing active work, now, to get done, and it's working. Never before has that existed. Trying to hurry up socialism's time table by 10 years so that 25 years later world hunger is solved is slower than trying to end world hunger in 15 years in the current system.

And the better our system is, the better the transition will be to the next one. "Our system" just means "people" and the "next one" means the same "people".

 

[Lexicus]

Only in the minds of Ukrainian ultra-nationalists and Nazis was there such a thing as "Holodomor."

Sure, obviously untrue, but my question is why bother to distinguish between the two?

If you're referring to the 1932-3 famine that happened all across the southern grain-growing region of the USSR, again, it had nothing to do with the Five-Year Plans except that component collectivization ended famines in the USSR. There's this thing called "weather," you see, and non-mechanized agricultural societies are quite susceptible to its whims. Mechanization came with the Five Year Plans, and after 1933 there were no more famines there.

No, mechanization ended famine. Collectivization unnecessarily killed about 10 million people by Stalin's own...admission? Boast? Whichever.

Again, not a word about the tens of millions who starved in famines in India because the British forcibly destroyed the Indians' ability to feed themselves. Not a word about Roosevelt destroying food during a time of hunger in the US because it wasn't profitable to sell it at such a low price. Don't waste my time with your pathetic crocodile tears about the "human cost" when you clearly don't care about the human cost of capitalism.

Well, actually it's because the topic is the crimes of the USSR and your apologism for/denial of them, not those other crimes. Which, naturally, I acknowledge happened and care about, which is why I consider myself a socialist and not a capitalist. And I know, I know, to you I'm no socialist, just a Nazi/liberal or whatever (again why bother pretending there's a difference?).

Actually I remember bringing up the people who starved in the US during the Great Depression upthread though maybe I'm mistaken and that thought didn't make it into the final post. At any rate I've never been able to find good statistics on the starvation deaths from that. You got any leads there?

 

[Ajidica]

There are five presently-existing socialist states: China, DPRK, Vietnam, Laos, and Cuba.

Out of curiosity, any reason you are living in Scotland (IIRC) rather than moving to Actually Existing Socialism?

Add to that probably another dozen historically: The USSR, Poland, DDR, Romania, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Albania, Mongolia, and perhaps some of the African attempts like Burkina Faso, Tanzania, and The Gambia.

Interesting you mention Tanzania; at what point would you say it stopped being -or actively pursuing- Socialism that Actually Existed?
As for Eastern Europe, how do you account for the fact most political parties and popular opinion made it very clear they weren't thrilled with the Soviet model? While they may not have Shock Therapy, their desire to abandon the Soviet model was pretty clear. You can't call all of them counterrevolutionary bourgeois imperialists and their running dogs.

Don't be coy. I'm clearly saying that this is false:

"The Soviets couldn't even get a 5 year plan to work during arguably the height of bureaucratic control over the economy."

The Five Year Plans worked stupendously, and Soviet economic planning worked just fine afterwards too.

I've encountered many different views of Soviet economic planning but I have to hand it to you, I've never once heard it described as working stupendously or just fine.
It is one thing to praise the rapid mechanization, electrification, and education efforts made by the Soviet Union. Same goes for the frankly monumental post-war reconstruction and urbanization.
Soviet economic planning worked fine for large, capital intensive projects like building steel mills, railways, or mass housing. Once you built all the railways, steel mills, and housing and the people were no longer starving dirt farmers, the Soviet economic planning started to fall apart and they never really got a handle on "consumer communism".

So your argument boils down to "people have lied before, therefore I don't believe these people when they say things."

I don't see any inherent reason to trust what a politician says, regardless of whether they salute the hammer and sickle or stars and stripes.

Britain didn't honestly want decolonization, it was forced to engage in it because it could no longer defend its Empire. It has nothing to do with being "products of their time" and the idea that the Chinese are pursuing socioeconomic development like the British pursued decolonization is ridiculous.

I was more approaching it from the position of how silly decade long plans are. In 1988, when the Soviet leadership was drafting their 5 Year Plan (or whatever year they drafted it) they envisioned that by the end of 1991 the Soviet Union would have collapsed and that its core members - Ukraine and Belarus- were ditching it faster than rats fleeing a sinking ship?
I see no reason to believe that Chinese planners are any more prescient than Soviet planners.

If you're referring to the 1932-3 famine that happened all across the southern grain-growing region of the USSR, again, it had nothing to do with the Five-Year Plans except that component collectivization ended famines in the USSR. There's this thing called "weather," you see, and non-mechanized agricultural societies are quite susceptible to its whims. Mechanization came with the Five Year Plans, and after 1933 there were no more famines there.

Well, collectivism certainly didn't help matters in 1933. I know that prior exploration of collectivized farming on a limited scale showed promise - raising production while holding down capital needed. That said, given how collectivization got wrapped up in a de facto uprising against Soviet authority it seems a pretty poor idea to get into a situation where some farmers were actively sabotaging agriculture in the middle of a famine.

Again, not a word about the tens of millions who starved in famines in India because the British forcibly destroyed the Indians' ability to feed themselves.

Where are you getting the tens of millions number from? The Bengal Famine of 1943 saw around 3 million dead from starvation. Plus, as you noted earlier, famine was a chronic problem in non-mechanized agriculture. Indian agriculture, as far as I am aware, was/is highly dependent on the monsoon to a degree larger than European crops are on weather.

It's probably not hard to pick apart Trotsky's arguments using dianetics, either, but that's rather besides the point.

For a second, I thought dianetics was a Daily Mail thing where everything is viewed in the context of Princess Diana.

 

[Lexicus]

I was more approaching it from the position of how silly decade long plans are. In 1988, when the Soviet leadership was drafting their 5 Year Plan (or whatever year they drafted it) they envisioned that by the end of 1991 the Soviet Union would have collapsed and that its core members - Ukraine and Belarus- were ditching it faster than rats fleeing a sinking ship?
I see no reason to believe that Chinese planners are any more prescient than Soviet planners.

The kind of funny thing is...he's sort of right that planning works: the kind of planning you see in the countries where you have political freedom. Conditions of complete political freedom- very different from conditions prevailing where according to the Wiz Actually Existing Socialism rules- are absolutely essential for accurate planning. Hate on liberals all you want (I do, all the time) but the fact remains the systems of government they've worked out have proven themselves better in the long-run at arriving at sensible policy than anything else.

Where are you getting the tens of millions number from? The Bengal Famine of 1943 saw around 3 million dead from starvation. Plus, as you noted earlier, famine was a chronic problem in non-mechanized agriculture. Indian agriculture, as far as I am aware, was/is highly dependent on the monsoon to a degree larger than European crops are on weather.

I think if you add up all the famines from the Seven Years' War on (conservative estimate probably) you get a number on that order of magnitude.
Whether it's fair to call this a 'crime of capitalism' is less clear, though. Much of it happened under primitive accumulation, but not capitalism per se. And as you note, the famines were at their core caused by eg failure of the Monsoon in 1789-93. British rule just exacerbated them.

It's not as if famine was unknown previously in India but I think that the most recent scholarship is basically revealing new heights of just how much the British raped India. Certainly if Cheezy has an image of Indian peasants enjoying an idyllic near-paradise until the nasty British showed up to starve them to death he's dreaming.
Not to minimize capitalism's crimes, but the point of studying history should be to find redemption in a vast sea of blood.

 

[ReindeerThistle]

I guess it's a reminder to anyone watching that you're not arguing from a moral standpoint, or a humanist standpoint. You're arguing from an aesthetic or evolutionary or ego standpoint. You don't want to end starvation, you want to change a mode of human social interaction and will point to starvation to help propel your Cheezy The Whizgeist forward. You don't not want to end starvation of course, you aren't evil, but the mode of social regulation matters first.

That's a load of bull. Socialism is the means to the end. Where has poverty gone down and income gone UP in the last 30 years? Socialist nations. Where ARE people starving ? Capitalist nations. The US is one of only 8 nations in the world where maternal mortality is RISING. [For those of you who just talk and don't read, maternal mortality is where the woman dies in childbirth].

it's funny though, because this is a big argument for socialism: the dignity people and how they feel about what they do.

That's another load of bull. The argument in favor of socialism is the the alternative, capitalism, fails for 99% of the population.

You have been brainwashed by your college education. Get your money back. You have been cheated.

 

[Namor]

That's a load of bull. Socialism is the means to the end. Where has poverty gone down and income gone UP in the last 30 years? Socialist nations. Where ARE people starving ? Capitalist nations. The US is one of only 8 nations in the world where maternal mortality is RISING. [For those of you who just talk and don't read, maternal mortality is where the woman dies in childbirth].

Are those soft s socialist nations? I don't think most people in this thread really have an issue with a hybrid system that covers everyone's needs. Hygro even alluded to a transition to something else taking place in the future at the end of his post.

The point of contention at this point seems to be if we need big c communism to return and crush anything and everything in its wake. And if we should even care about the new harm caused since that is apparently already covered in the often repeated "but capitalism made us do it!" argument.

 

[Lexicus]

The point of contention at this point seems to be if we need big c communism to return and crush anything and everything in its wake. And if we should even care about the new harm caused since that is apparently already covered in the often repeated "but capitalism made us do it!" argument.

The tankies sure think that. The USSR had to send the tanks into Budapest because it was a capitalist Trojan Horse! They had to destroy Afghanistan because the capitalists were in danger of taking over! Really, it's all the mirror image of all the horrid insistence that we had to destroy Vietnam to prevent Communism from taking over.

 

[ReindeerThistle]

if all y'all do not see a problem with a system that allows 62 people to own $1.76 trillion of wealth, the combined wealth of the poorest 3.5 billion; who do not have a problem with exteriorly-imposed regime change from the US, EU/ NATO or the UK; or do not have a problem wit the fact that since ObamaCare has been put in, health provider profits have increased 250 to 300%, while out-of-pocket medical expenses for working people had increased 700% AAAAAAAND choose to ignore the fact that no act of aggression has been perpetrated by a socialist nation in living memory OOOOOOOOR if you choose to believe the lie that the USSR destroyed Afghanistan AAAAAND you don't mind believing that "free" nations like the US, or Holland, or Germany are perfect little capitalist systems...

then discussion of socialism is really out of the question. If you have something to gain from capitalism, even if you don't mind that it is at the expense of someone else, then, by all means, enjoy it. I work 24/7 as an unpaid advocate of the working poor, and I see the effects of capitalism all the time. I have friends who have been to VietNam, DPRK, Cuba and China -- and have seen the glorious wonders that socialism can produce -- and I have never run into any of you IRL, so, that makes you the lucky ones.

 

[Hygro]

Black and white thinking is defense mechanism against change.

 

[Tani Coyote]

Not very convincing. All sorts of enterprise require massive initial investment and involve massive risk, and people will only do it if they can get massive reward and if they can control the company. The state can do it as well, as it did in the USSR, but you still lose on innovation. But the notion that workers' cooperatives will be able to invest in and create stuff that requires billions in initial investment is just not realistic.

I don't require the dissolution of the state fortunately, merely its democratization. I see no reason the government could not provide for funding in cases where the rank and file workers can't.

Note that in the present system we're free to create cooperatives where we can elect our own bosses. It's just that we're also free to be the bosses of the stuff we own as well.

Ah, but that's the core debate between socialism and capitalism, isn't it? Whether or not the boss has the moral right to as much as what they tend to have. You can make arguments for either side.

It has never been an easy issue for me, as I am a business owner myself (albeit a sole proprietor at present). As much as I love supervising things, I still can't help but feel sympathetic to the idea that a worker deserves some say in the company. It also seems like a given with how the political system is: in politics, we can avoid a lot of issues by giving as many people as possible a chance to voice their view and exercise some power. Why not in business?

Slightly longer answer? Because Yugoslavia, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR tried market socialism and got their socialist governments overthrown for it.

Isn't that an oversimplification? 3 of those examples had ethnic issues and short of a true class consciousness (which I question the attainability of, but that's another issue), I can see that throwing a wrench in things. This is especially true given that democracy and ethnic variety very often do not mix. Opening a society's government and economy up when there is a strong ethnic divide virtually always spells disaster, as I'm sure you know.

As I explained just a page ago or so, market socialism is not socialism. It's capitalism. Even if a proletarian dictatorship is in charge, even if the old bourgeoisie is destroyed completely, the conditions that create a bourgeois class still exist, and sooner or later, that bourgeoisie will have enough strength to assert its interest and contest state power, and if it's victorious then your "socialism" is gone. That's exactly what happened in most of Central and Eastern Europe in the late 80s and early 90s.

Didn't many of these nations' idea of market socialism create an essentially capitalist framework, though? As far as I know, they tended to go for such things as privatization and "shock therapy" rather than creating a system of worker cooperatives (regardless of the company's size). With that sort of approach, I would have to agree a move towards capitalism is inevitable, because it does not strip bosses of their independence the way a cooperative does.

And plus, we don't need market socialism. Economic planning works better.

It was my understanding that the Soviet Union and other state socialist societies were very excellent at handling industrial goods (hence why it's not surprising poorer countries find the idea so appealing), but the central planning generally fell short when it came to consumer goods. Is this incorrect?

Black and white thinking is defense mechanism against change.

Indeed.

One must love the brain's interest in giving us pleasure jolts when we find opinions we agree with or reject opinions we disagree with.

 

[Narz]

Were there many Americans and Western Europeans who defected to the Soviet Union or just the opposite?

 

[Hygro]

Indeed.

One must love the brain's interest in giving us pleasure jolts when we find opinions we agree with or reject opinions we disagree with.

Yeah. I for one enjoy changing my mind. But in RT's line of work he doesn't have a lot of support for his positions from the mainstay, so I suppose he can't risk wavering lest he tire out or change his mind with all the contradicting information coming his way. In that sense, it's reasonable (necessary?) to craft such ferocity.

While that makes for a great soldier, it means you are deaf to any truths you weren't lucky enough to take with you when you shut the gates to outside knowledge.