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Mans posted:I'm a proud supporter of the most orthodox communist party in europe after the KKE and even i understand that it's pretty easy, and pretty common, to pretty up camps for the cameras. Oh yes, obviously you tell your shittiest couple of guards to stay home for the day and keep your most unreformable violent psycho prison gangster away from visitors. But it stretches credibility to suggest that for the sake of 1 western newspaper reporter coming to visit you'd build shitloads of fully functional classroom and theatre buildings full of people. What would you do when the visit was over, knock them down again? Mans posted:But they also resulted in good karmic justice for a few million axis soldiers (who i guess are also counted as victims of communist) so Hell yeah Helsing posted:Sorry, what? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Truman_Show HorseLord fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Feb 13, 2016 |
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Feb 13, 2016 19:01
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It strains credibility to you that the USSR would take an active interest in how it was seen by western journalists and intellectuals in the 1930s? Really?
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Feb 13, 2016 19:04
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No, but the idea that they'd go so far as to literally build the Truman show does. That's why I'm mocking you. There is getting everyone on their best behavior for the guest, and then there's the scenario you suggest, which is what some crazy people think. You'd have to be completely crazy to see a brick theatre building with performers in it and chairs and electric lights and plastered walls, and go "they made this to trick me, personally". Like straight up I'm not even going to move the goalposts or anything, here's exactly what I said: HorseLord posted:But it stretches credibility to suggest that for the sake of 1 western newspaper reporter coming to visit you'd build shitloads of fully functional classroom and theatre buildings full of people. What would you do when the visit was over, knock them down again? HorseLord fucked around with this message at 19:10 on Feb 13, 2016 |
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Feb 13, 2016 19:07
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You think it is crazy that the USSR would stage manage the perception of western observers to make its prison and justice system look better than they actually were? No one is claiming that entire prisons were built and staffed with actors as some kind of trick, merely that the western observers were manipulated.
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Feb 13, 2016 19:08
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Is it really so far fetched to imagine that visitors were guided to the latest facilities with the best, happiest workers? That poo poo happens in factories and nonprofits right now, every day. e: HorseLord give us your thoughts on Lysenkoism
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Feb 13, 2016 19:10
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Honestly HorseLord making GBS threads himself in this highly public manner is probably the best introduction that you could give someone to what a contemporary English speaking Stalinist looks and sounds like.
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Feb 13, 2016 19:10
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Helsing posted:You think it is crazy that the USSR would stage manage the perception of western observers to make its prison and justice system look better than they actually were? No, and I have not said that. I have specifically gone out of my way to not say that. Here is me not saying that. HorseLord posted:Oh yes, obviously you tell your shittiest couple of guards to stay home for the day and keep your most unreformable violent psycho prison gangster away from visitors. Please read slower and don't skip over any of the words. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 19:15 on Feb 13, 2016 |
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Feb 13, 2016 19:11
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it's entirely possible that some labor camps were nicer than others and that the ussr showed those nicer ones (like one would show low security prisons in your analogy) instead of the harshest ones, that still factually existed and were very bad from a humanitarian point of view. These aren't contradictory affirmations.
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Feb 13, 2016 19:20
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Run a couple of very nice prisons and only show people those? Similar logic to showing people your nice open plan new corporate office and not the lovely 1970's concrete block where most of your company work actually gets done. It's not exactly difficult, you don't run around with an elaborate troupe of actors, you just have the parts people are going to see be where you put the effort in. Or even the place I actually work at, people only follow health and safety or tidy the place when they're being inspected. Rest of the time it's a free for all. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 19:27 on Feb 13, 2016 |
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Feb 13, 2016 19:25
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HorseLord posted:No, and I have not said that. I have specifically gone out of my way to not say that. What you're doing is responding to an argument that no one made -- that somehow the USSR would build an entire prison staffed with actors to fool a single journalist -- and you keep shadow boxing with that fake straw man argument instead of participating in the actual debate. You're doing this because while you can't credibly deny that the USSR was manipulating foreign visitors and pretending its society was more humane and progressive in the 1930s than it really was, you figure you can at least muddy the waters and confuse things by insinuating that the people you disagree with are claiming things they never actually claimed. There is a particular irony here that your deliberate misreading of other people's arguments is delivered in the form of an admonition that I should read more carefully. That was a nice flourish. I suspect it may backfire, however, given that this entire conversation is visible to anyone who reads the thread.
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Feb 13, 2016 19:26
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You can argue the factual total number of gulag prisioners, the factual use (or non-use) of these facilities, the total victims, which were political prisioners, regular criminals or axis POWs and if there were gulags with better conditions than others. This falls under historiography and it's perfectly fine to say that some henious poo poo happened there. Again, this is from the dude whose party sends open compliments to their comrades in North Korea and Syria. That Old Guard needs to drop the act because the stubborn blindess against any slight torwards the ussr and friends is really embarassing when talking with someone who never talked politics.
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Feb 13, 2016 19:36
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The Nazis covered up the conditions of the Theresienstadt ghetto by forcing their slave labor to "beautify" it before Red Cross inspectors showed up in 41, and put on events to make it look like everything was hunky dory, so I'm not sure why this idea is totally far fetched.
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Feb 13, 2016 19:40
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site posted:The Nazis covered up the conditions of the Theresienstadt ghetto by forcing their slave labor to "beautify" it before Red Cross inspectors showed up in 41, and put on events to make it look like everything was hunky dory, so I'm not sure why this idea is totally far fetched. What, like The Truman Show? 
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Feb 13, 2016 19:49
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Helsing posted:What you're doing is responding to an argument that no one made -- that somehow the USSR would build an entire prison staffed with actors to fool a single journalist -- and you keep shadow boxing with that fake straw man argument instead of participating in the actual debate. No, this is a thing you said: Helsing posted:You think it is crazy that the USSR would stage manage the perception of western observers to make its prison and justice system look better than they actually were? When I've never suggested that the USSR didn't make efforts to present itself in a good light. I actually have acknowledged that they did do that, several times. It's particularly important given that you started this line of debate over a poster quoting some dude who went there and saw the rehabilitative efforts of the gulag system. Those things were real and not made up, and there is more evidence to their existence than merely one dude who got shown around.
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Feb 13, 2016 19:54
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Sheikh Djibouti posted:It's confusing because it uses the words "personal" and "private" in a way that's very different from the same words as they're normally used. Rather than creating that problem, it's clearer (albeit an oversimlification) just to say that property owned by individuals for personal use is fine, but produtive assets should be owned collectively, by the relevant workers or the state. The average person doesn't even know the difference "private property" and "property." To most, the fact that private property (especially in land and other productive assets) is a relatively recent development in history comes as news. It is easier to assume everyone had some private property from the beginning of time, just like we do today, and they traded it freely with each other until the g-man came along. Naturally... This fact is very important for socialists. You might call it moralizing, but the typical argument against socialism is precisely a moralizing one arising from the mystification of property relations. Don't you think your landlord deserves compensation for allowing you to use his house? Why are you being so ungrateful to your employer who feeds you? Why shouldn't a genius entrepreneur become rich? You wouldn't have a strong counter-argument to these questions without an understanding on how private property enables someone to extract wealth through implicit, state-backed coercion.
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Feb 13, 2016 19:57
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fspades posted:The average person doesn't even know the difference "private property" and "property." To most, the fact that private property (especially in land and other productive assets) is a relatively recent development in history comes as news. It is easier to assume everyone had some private property from the beginning of time, just like we do today, and they traded it freely with each other until the g-man came along. Naturally... All of that is true, but there remains a colloquial understanding and use of the terms (lots of people have a mortgage and understand what real property is, and lots have a common understanding of private property), so my personal view is that it's clearer to convey the point without the use of those particular terms as shorthand.
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Feb 13, 2016 20:09
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HorseLord posted:No, this is a thing you said: Oh, show us some of this excellent research. Does rolling a prisoner into a frozen grave count as rehabilitation?
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Feb 13, 2016 20:20
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Sheikh Djibouti posted:All of that is true, but there remains a colloquial understanding and use of the terms (lots of people have a mortgage and understand what real property is, and lots have a common understanding of private property), so my personal view is that it's clearer to convey the point without the use of those particular terms as shorthand. The colloquial understanding obscures the difference between personal and private - among other kinds - of property. This puts the socialist at a rhetorical disadvantage, because she is unable to present her argument in everyday terms (the use of paraphrase will just give descriptions of things that fall under the common understanding of private property, for example). I've known more than a few people whose impression of socialism fundamentally changed once they were made aware of some basic distinctions like that one, so the moralizing might be effective.
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Feb 13, 2016 20:23
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As the thread's ignoramus, I was not aware of the distinction between personal and private property until a few layers of wiki articles deep just a while ago. I thought they were the same thing.
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Feb 13, 2016 20:31
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Most westerners aren't; they aren't going to teach that commie crap in schools around here no sir.
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Feb 13, 2016 20:33
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HorseLord posted:Most westerners aren't; they aren't going to teach that commie crap in schools around here no sir. Can you give us a little more info on the wonderful rehabilitative properties of the gulag system?
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Feb 13, 2016 20:34
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a peasant who turns anti-communist because he thinks he will lose his shovel or plough if the farm turns into a cooperative is something that is an actual real problem that was seen over here during the PREC period. It's really important to make people understand the different between private property and personal assets\goods because not everyone has an academic education on materialism.
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Feb 13, 2016 21:08
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SedanChair posted:Can you give us a little more info on the wonderful rehabilitative properties of the gulag system? They were nothing new by the time the Soviets came around. The Russian Empire already had them.
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Feb 13, 2016 21:12
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FRINGE posted:Labor has value rather than just being a magical emanation of the god-will of the capitalist? Prism Mirror Lens posted:Like yeah Marx absolutely does talk about primitive accumulation in that link but that's like one chapter, occurring fairly late into Vol I, out of three volumes in which he mostly doesn't talk about that. Gazpacho fucked around with this message at 22:40 on Feb 13, 2016 |
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Feb 13, 2016 21:15
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^ alright smartass  still standing by the idea that it's not the sole point of MarxismMans posted:a peasant who turns anti-communist because he thinks he will lose his shovel or plough if the farm turns into a cooperative is something that is an actual real problem that was seen over here during the PREC period. It's really important to make people understand the different between private property and personal assets\goods because not everyone has an academic education on materialism. Hell, there's an SA poster with a red title of a hacksaw because he was so deeply concerned that the communists wanted to take away his DIY tools
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Feb 13, 2016 21:18
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SedanChair posted:Can you give us a little more info on the wonderful rehabilitative properties of the gulag system? potemkin culture i suppose Wilson T. Bell posted:Scholars have discussed various "programs for identity in the 1930s" and have also linked cultural revolution and reeducation, arguing that the over-arching goal was the creation of new human beings. there's a whole bunch more in there about how the universal dignity of labor was emphasized throughout, even in the harsh war periods of soviet life. when sentenced, soviets would specifically request labor camps over prison, as one author is quoted as saying the "main punishment" of prison "had been to deprive us of dignity by giving us no work." this serves propaganda purposes, certainly, and the anticoms or non-marxists itt might scoff, but there's nothing suggesting inmates themselves didn't believe it. until the late 1930s they weren't even called "prisoners," they were called "railroad soldiers" or the like, and their labor was valued with reward and with credit by the government, as was the case with the building of the white sea-baltic canal. it's also worth noting that the author's primary sources are the prison newspapers from the period, put together by inmates as yet another means of providing culture and education to those in the prison system. these cultural programs are examined in detail as well. again, not gleaming pleasure palaces. they're prisons. but a drat sight better than the murderous meat grinders anticoms would have you believe edit: i found some more. from "life and terror in stalin's russia" Robert Thurston posted:Different kinds of camps and exile with widely varying features and regimens existed, indicating that gulag practice was not simply to hold or destroy innocent people. Prisoners were treated according to the nature and degree of the crimes for which they had been convicted. The NKVD colonel Almazov reported that inmates sentenced to administrative exile were often hired by the camps as free workers. The gulag administration did not need to house, guard, or feed such people, whose productivity was higher than that of the regular prisoners. An Avar man arrested in 1937 went to a state farm in Kazakhstan, part of a colony of such NKVD facilities. "We all worked very hard in the hope of eventual freedom," he recalled. Nor did he report any starvation at his site. A young Russian man arrested in the same year was sent to a factory in Archangel. Not kept under guard, he was taught how to use a powersaw for wood. "I learned and worked hard on this machine," he said later. This man was not a political. Instead of being used for economic gain, political prisoners were typically given the worst work or were dumped into the less productive parts of the gulag. R. Guyovich fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Feb 13, 2016 |
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Feb 13, 2016 21:54
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Dead Cosmonaut posted:They were nothing new by the time the Soviets came around. The Russian Empire already had them. All of history up until the very relatively recent history often seems to be one group of people or civilization trying to out-atrocity their peers and previous generations. You think the 
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Feb 13, 2016 23:04
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site posted:As the thread's ignoramus, I was not aware of the distinction between personal and private property until a few layers of wiki articles deep just a while ago. I thought they were the same thing. It doesn't really come up when you live somewhere where every item and place is owned by someone.
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Feb 14, 2016 03:36
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Stalinism. The gunchat of Marxist discussion.
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Feb 14, 2016 11:07
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Guns actually exist though.
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Feb 14, 2016 12:03
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stalin existed too iirc
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Feb 14, 2016 17:12
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site posted:stalin existed too iirc Again, this is all from an outsider's perspective, so take it with a grain of salt. What he's getting at is that "Stalinist" isn't a label that anyone uses on themselves. The people others would call "Stalinists" identify as Marxist-Leninists, as they view Stalin as continuing with Lenin's ideas and policies. The main people who disagree with that assessment are the Trotskyists, who I think also just call themselves Marxist-Leninists? Basically, every faction sees itself as the true continuation of Marx's theories, and sees every other faction as some weird degeneration led by some other dude. Essentialism is weird.
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Feb 14, 2016 17:27
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I've never seen trotskyists use the term Marxist-Leninist for themselves. They normally use trotskyist, or Leninist when they're trying to be evasive. Which is weird because Lenin and Trotsky spent a whole hell of a long time fighting each other, disagreeing on most issues, and getting very personal more often than not. In the modern day the split is maintained over theory and practice; Trot theory has lead generally nowhere, with their practice founded upon it turning into extremely shifty organizations like the ISO and SWP. These are dudes who show up to try and hijack every public protest by handing out free signs (with their logos extremely visible) and use bullhorns to lead them away from busy public areas. If it's an antifa event, for example, they'll try to get as many people as possible to follow them away from the event location down a back alley out of sight. Then release a press statement on how they "stopped a fascist demo" by occupying a space three streets away. They're basically only interested in publicity and newspaper sales, and will do everything possible to keep on the good side of police. As you can imagine their membership base is mostly upper middle class university students who don't want to be so revolutionary they might get in trouble, or worse, risk their future careers in media/law/medicine. Now, that's first world Trotskyism. I'd give an example of them in the third world, but I actually can't find one - All the communist movements still going in the third world are either Maoists fighting a people's war, or Marxist-Leninists that've got too caught up in parliamentary politics. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 18:50 on Feb 14, 2016 |
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Feb 14, 2016 18:32
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This is a very interesting article but do you really suppose it isn't "Potemkin culture"? A penal system explicitly designed to reform the minds and character of its inmates. Do you think the inmates will use their newspaper to demonstrate ideological compliance?
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Feb 14, 2016 18:34
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SedanChair posted:This is a very interesting article but do you really suppose it isn't "Potemkin culture"? A penal system explicitly designed to reform the minds and character of its inmates. Do you think the inmates will use their newspaper to demonstrate ideological compliance? i don't understand your question. should rehabilitation not include programs for societal reintegration, and should those programs not be ideological for some reason?
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Feb 15, 2016 01:56
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I'm asking you why on earth we should take those inmates, who had a stake in showing what good new Soviet men they'd become, at their word about the system they were in.
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Feb 15, 2016 02:07
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Gonna offer the radical viewpoint that Stalinism was bad and should not actually be tried again, but that this does not mean capitalism is good or should be maintained.
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Feb 15, 2016 03:52
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SedanChair posted:I'm asking you why on earth we should take those inmates, who had a stake in showing what good new Soviet men they'd become, at their word about the system they were in. i don't think you have to. whether the inmates genuinely reformed or not, the point is the system was set up to facilitate that change and there's plenty of evidence showing this was done purposefully. unless you're asking something else?
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Feb 15, 2016 06:50
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Prism Mirror Lens posted:^ alright smartass I remember that thread and how insane that argument was. I still smile whenever I see him post in D&D
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Feb 15, 2016 07:11
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KomradeX posted:I remember that thread and how insane that argument was. I still smile whenever I see him post in D&D I really want to read this now, anyone got a link?
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Feb 15, 2016 16:43
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