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dex_sda posted:i'm sure USSR wanted to trade away primo real estate for useless land out of the goodness of their hearts, and Finland said 'no' because they wanted to be dicks obviously the USSR wasn't acting out of the goodness of their hearts but lmao if you think murmansk is useless land, both countries would have benefited if Finland played ball
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Jul 14, 2020 17:58
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Regarde Aduck posted:'M'am I would like to speak to u about communism. You're not a degenerate right? You haven't partaken of the Certain Degenerate American Pragmatic Theories of Truth I hope. Just kidding M'am. If I thought that I'd have already beaten you to death with a Rifle Butt. Haha. Degenerate. I love that word.'
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Jul 14, 2020 17:59
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Dreddout posted:obviously the USSR wasn't acting out of the goodness of their hearts but lmao if you think murmansk is useless land, both countries would have benefited if Finland played ball Finland obviously did not think so.
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Jul 14, 2020 18:04
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VictualSquid posted:Leninism, not general marxism. The tendency to become an autocratic dictatorship is inherently prefigured in the idea of a vanguard party. How ya figure?
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Jul 14, 2020 18:58
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Atrocious Joe posted:I think long term Finland would have been integrated into the rest of the USSR. The Soviets were pretty consistent in maintaining that the old Tsarist borders of Russia were the legitimate borders of the Soviet Union. Mongolia wasn't explicitly part of the Russian Empire so it stayed it's own state after the revolution. For the same reason Tannu Tuva technically maintained its independence for so long. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finnish_Democratic_Republic Btw, Finland always had a large degree of autonomy during the Tsarist period.
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Jul 14, 2020 19:09
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PERPETUAL IDIOT posted:How ya figure? If your solution to any problem is building a centralized command group that looks down on the peons, then you will end up with being ruled by a centralized group that looks down on the peons. The step from oligarchic autocracy to leader cult is pretty small.
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Jul 14, 2020 19:20
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Atrocious Joe posted:The Soviets were pretty consistent in maintaining that the old Tsarist borders of Russia were the legitimate borders of the Soviet Union. Yeah, well, the big exception to those borders was Poland. And Finland was a troublesome autonomous region like Poland within the Russian empire. For sure the Soviets knew it'd be a lot of trouble to integrate them if they didn't decide to join voluntarily. And the later eastern european policy hints that they weren't dumb about trying to force countries into the union. Finland was also operating on paranoid anticommunism and old nationalist ethnic hatred of Russians that left no space for negotiation because the USSR's attempts could be read as strategy to weaken Finland's defenses in order to just invade and annex it later, and just enable wholesale revenge for White terror in Finland, the invasion of Soviet Russia during the civil war etc. The Winter War wasn't really a product of rational four-dimensional chess but mutual distrust and communication failure. I don't think the Finnish leadership expected to be able to repel the Soviets and wouldn't have risked it if they believed there was a way out.
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Jul 14, 2020 19:27
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VictualSquid posted:If your solution to any problem is building a centralized command group that looks down on the peons, then you will end up with being ruled by a centralized group that looks down on the peons. The step from oligarchic autocracy to leader cult is pretty small. drat, a vanguard party's solution to any problem is building a centralized command group that looks down on the peons? gently caress!
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Jul 14, 2020 19:29
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uncop posted:Finland was also operating on paranoid anticommunism and old nationalist ethnic hatred of Russians that left no space for negotiation because the USSR's attempts could be read as strategy to weaken Finland's defenses in order to just invade and annex it later, and just enable wholesale revenge for White terror in Finland, the invasion of Soviet Russia during the civil war etc. The Winter War wasn't really a product of rational four-dimensional chess but mutual distrust and communication failure. I don't think the Finnish leadership expected to be able to repel the Soviets and wouldn't have risked it if they believed there was a way out. considering they were invaded right after offering simple negotiation resistance to the soviets, I think their fears weren't completely unfounded
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Jul 14, 2020 19:42
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VictualSquid posted:Leninism, not general marxism. The tendency to become an autocratic dictatorship is inherently prefigured in the idea of a vanguard party. From what I can tell, it's not prefigured in the leninist idea of doing revolution so much as the practice of actually doing revolution. Both organized crime and military structures end up centralized around a small secretive leadership group. The vanguard party wasn't really envisioned to be like that (the idea was to take from German social democrats, the original vanguard party) until it was just sort of forced into that shape with time. All improvements to the party form have to be justified by their practical effectiveness, and e.g. the mass line wasn't there to counter centralization around a small group but the tendency for that group to become isolated from what the people are thinking and what's happening on the ground. Conditions that allow one to sidestep all of that don't come by very often, or for free.
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Jul 14, 2020 20:00
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What about the criticism that communism ought to be attempted in already advanced countries like Germany, and not in a backward country like Russia or China, and that Lenin was actually expecting Germany to have a revolution very soon, as they did but failed; the success of the Russian (and world) revolution pretty much banking on that? *and subsequently, when this did not happen, the Russian revolution "failed". Grevling fucked around with this message at 20:11 on Jul 14, 2020 |
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Jul 14, 2020 20:07
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dex_sda posted:considering they were invaded right after offering simple negotiation resistance to the soviets, I think their fears weren't completely unfounded The ultimatum over the areas that the USSR demanded and wholesale annexation are two different things. It was obvious that the USSR was going to go to war over Leningrad, much less so that they would have gone to war to take over Finland. AFAIK even in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact there's no evidence that the USSR desired Finland's whole territory enough to go to war over it, the sphere of influence was there to keep the Germans out and make it possible to invade Finland in a way that wouldn't start a war with Germany if it began sheltering German military. Anyway we don't know for certain and I don't believe in some clean good guy USSR so go wild.
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Jul 14, 2020 20:09
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thanks for the info. wrt to most of my post, if should have clarified that i was mostly responding to the hypothetical about the Finns completely collapsing against the soviets.Grevling posted:What about the criticism that communism ought to be attempted in already advanced countries like Germany, and not in a backward country like Russia or China, and that Lenin was actually expecting Germany to have a revolution very soon, as they did but failed; the success of the Russian (and world) revolution pretty much banking on that? Turns out revolutions are more likely to be successful where imperialism is weakest, not in the capitalist core countries.
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Jul 14, 2020 20:13
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uncop posted:From what I can tell, it's not prefigured in the leninist idea of doing revolution so much as the practice of actually doing revolution. Both organized crime and military structures end up centralized around a small secretive leadership group. The vanguard party wasn't really envisioned to be like that (the idea was to take from German social democrats, the original vanguard party) until it was just sort of forced into that shape with time. But both the fact that a centralized leadership is seen as necessary and the isolation from the masses set a leninist revolution on the path towards dictatorship. And the rare cases where leninist revolutions have avoided turning into autocracies seem more like luck then planned internal reforms.
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Jul 14, 2020 20:13
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Grevling posted:What about the criticism that communism ought to be attempted in already advanced countries like Germany, and not in a backward country like Russia or China, and that Lenin was actually expecting Germany to have a revolution very soon, as they did but failed; the success of the Russian (and world) revolution pretty much banking on that?
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Jul 14, 2020 20:19
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VictualSquid posted:But both the fact that a centralized leadership is seen as necessary and the isolation from the masses set a leninist revolution on the path towards dictatorship. And the rare cases where leninist revolutions have avoided turning into autocracies seem more like luck then planned internal reforms. How many revolutions are successful without centralization in the first place? How does a government not be isolated "from the people" to some extent?
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Jul 14, 2020 20:25
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uncop posted:The ultimatum over the areas that the USSR demanded and wholesale annexation are two different things. It was obvious that the USSR was going to go to war over Leningrad, much less so that they would have gone to war to take over Finland. AFAIK even in the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact there's no evidence that the USSR desired Finland's whole territory enough to go to war over it, the sphere of influence was there to keep the Germans out and make it possible to invade Finland in a way that wouldn't start a war with Germany if it began sheltering German military. I'm not saying there wasn't politics (tm) at play with their own set of reasons but ultimately I cannot fault the Finns for being mistrustful of the USSR and there are plenty of ww2 crimes ussr should have answered for, and the ribbentrop-molotov pact was just one of them
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Jul 14, 2020 20:27
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VictualSquid posted:Yes, it is not prefigured with a revolution in general. And this specific approach works well in the short term. all states are dictatorships; the question is of which class is acting as the dictator. it's not materialist to imagine that lenin and stalin and their inner circle were in fact autocratically working their will against the cowering masses rather than acting with the support of the people, just like it's not materialist to imagine that most germans were secretly good liberals who didn't want to go along with hitler's dictates but had no choice, or that the broad popular support the cpc enjoys is actually a polling trick and in reality all the farmers and fishermen hate their cruel masters but simply cannot throw off the yoke of beijing's authority, or indeed to imagine that most americans, as poorly served as they are by their own government, aren't still more comfortable allowing their decrepit imperialist state to continue on its path rather than take the risk of making real change
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Jul 14, 2020 20:31
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Ardennes posted:How many revolutions are successful without centralization in the first place? How does a government not be isolated "from the people" to some extent? But, you can have democratic reforms or second revolutions if you overcome the tendency to look down on the outsiders. Vietnam managed to get relatively far, for example. I personally like the anarchist idea that the tendency of a central coordinator to end up being a central autocrat can and should be resisted.
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Jul 14, 2020 20:36
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Ferrinus posted:all states are dictatorships; the question is of which class is acting as the dictator. it's not materialist to imagine that lenin and stalin and their inner circle were in fact autocratically working their will against the cowering masses rather than acting with the support of the people, just like it's not materialist to imagine that most germans were secretly good liberals who didn't want to go along with hitler's dictates but had no choice, or that the broad popular support the cpc enjoys is actually a polling trick and in reality all the farmers and fishermen hate their cruel masters but simply cannot throw off the yoke of beijing's authority, or indeed to imagine that most americans, as poorly served as they are by their own government, aren't still more comfortable allowing their decrepit imperialist state to continue on its path rather than take the risk of making real change True. But every poll in any of those societies show that the majority people would enact reforms if they had the power to do so without significant effort. The concentration of the power to reform away from the majority is the primary critique we have of capitalism and feudalism. So why should we tolerate it among future systems or the organisations that we support.
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Jul 14, 2020 20:41
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pretty sure the primary critique of capitalism and feudalism is how they are class systems dependent on the exploitation of the vast majority of people to maintain/increase the wealth and living standards of a few.
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Jul 14, 2020 20:45
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VictualSquid posted:True. But every poll in any of those societies show that the majority people would enact reforms if they had the power to do so without significant effort. everyone would enact reforms if they had the power to do so without significant effort. the problem is that most reforms actually do take significant effort! in particular, reforms in countries like the ussr or china took significant effort from all the people because these nascent revolutionary states were basically constructing their command-and-control infrastructure on the fly and needed mass buy and trust in in order for people to organize into collective farms or smelt pig iron in their backyards or whatever, even though they had party members threaded through the state to coordinate these activities and repressive forces on hand to crack down on those who engaged in particularly outright malingering or sabotage. stalin was able to do what he did thanks to huge popularity, not despite antipathy and resentment from the people he was directing the general diagnosis of vanguardism necessarily leading to autocracy, as though autocracy can be meaningfully said to exist in any modern state (in its more specific definitions) or is avoidable in any large undertaking of any form (in its looser definitions) does not make sense to me
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Jul 14, 2020 20:51
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VictualSquid posted:If your solution to any problem is building a centralized command group that looks down on the peons, then you will end up with being ruled by a centralized group that looks down on the peons. The step from oligarchic autocracy to leader cult is pretty small. https://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1990/myth/myth.htm
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Jul 14, 2020 20:56
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VictualSquid posted:Almost no revolutions are successful without centralization. And those have failed in other ways, generally. Doesn't mean we should give up, though. It seems if the choice is centralization or a failed revolution, I think centralization wins. Vietnam is a pretty traditional Marxist-Leninism state. As for anarchism, there is a reason they usually get crushed relatively easily. As for looking "down" on outsiders, usually it a sign of mistrust or fear of infiltration.
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Jul 14, 2020 21:03
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Atrocious Joe posted:pretty sure the primary critique of capitalism and feudalism is how they are class systems dependent on the exploitation of the vast majority of people to maintain/increase the wealth and living standards of a few. Nah, unequal wealth and living standards are less important then unequal power. They are also symptoms of the unequal power.
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Jul 14, 2020 21:09
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VictualSquid posted:Nah, unequal wealth and living standards are less important then unequal power. They are also symptoms of the unequal power. the question of power is always a question of class power, ref: modern-day USA which gets to claim the mantle of a democracy (with significant buy-in from the people) while fairly demonstrably having rather narrow interests represented in the grander policy of things
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Jul 14, 2020 21:20
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dex_sda posted:I'm not saying there wasn't politics (tm) at play with their own set of reasons but ultimately I cannot fault the Finns for being mistrustful of the USSR and there are plenty of ww2 crimes ussr should have answered for, and the ribbentrop-molotov pact was just one of them That's some serious Cold War narrative brain though. For one, deep Finnish national unity was a myth. Sure, there was enough of it to fight a war after imprisoning lots of people and having an officer core thoroughly purged of leftists, but the implicit idea that the peace activists and USSR sympathizers who went to prison were some kind of fifth column that didn't represent The People is a black lie. There is a whole mythology dedicated to erasing peace activists, antifascist partisans etc. and absolving Finnish leadership and soldiers of all crimes up to and including literally working as SS stormtroopers. The traitors to the Finnish state generally deserve more respect than the leaders, especially starting from 1941. Secondly, how does Molotov-Ribbentrop rank into any list of notable war crimes of WW2 that went unpunished? How did it get into a list of war crimes at all? No doubt there were a lot of war crimes that went unpunished, but you're calling the general war preparation/aversion strategy of the USSR a war crime, equivocating them with the fascists as fundamentally criminal leaderships. For... using underhanded great-power methods to combat the fascists? Before any war had begun? And yes, I know the actual core leadership was most likely directly involved in major war crimes, but that's no different from the leaderships of the USA and UK who deserve the same judgement. The difference is basically between being a criminal participant in a war and doing war crimes during a justified war.
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Jul 14, 2020 21:25
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VictualSquid posted:Nah, unequal wealth and living standards are less important then unequal power. They are also symptoms of the unequal power. the idea that the problem isn’t the prevailing mode of production but rather the general idea that someone somewhere might get to tell you what to do might well be the central flaw of anarchist theory
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Jul 14, 2020 21:29
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uncop posted:Secondly, how does Molotov-Ribbentrop rank into any list of notable war crimes of WW2 that went unpunished? How did it get into a list of war crimes at all? No doubt there were a lot of war crimes that went unpunished, but you're calling the general war preparation/aversion strategy of the USSR a war crime, equivocating them with the fascists as fundamentally criminal leaderships. For... using underhanded great-power methods to combat the fascists? Before any war had begun? And yes, I know the actual core leadership was most likely directly involved in major war crimes, but that's no different from the leaderships of the USA and UK who deserve the same judgement. The difference is basically between being a criminal participant in a war and doing war crimes during a justified war. They collaborated with the fascists in an actual invasion. The territory thus partitioned gave the fascists access to areas full of the Jewish people. I am aware of their reasoning and they aren't as culpable as the Nazis, that doesn't make what they did any less lovely. I am not implying the US or the UK shouldn't be persecuted for their war crimes, btw, the opposite if anything. dex_sda fucked around with this message at 21:37 on Jul 14, 2020 |
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Jul 14, 2020 21:35
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Put it another way, a deal with the devil is a deal with the devil, doesn't matter whether you're getting something in return. Hell, if you didn't, that'd be immoral AND stupid.
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Jul 14, 2020 21:39
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Btw German forces were already pushing into eastern Poland before Soviet troops attacked (Lvov was taken by the Germans), the partition meant German forces had to retreat back to the agreement upon line.
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Jul 14, 2020 21:52
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Ardennes posted:Btw German forces were already pushing into eastern Poland before Soviet troops attacked (Lvov was taken by the Germans), the partition meant German forces had to retreat back to the agreement upon line. It also meant that they could quickly re-focus their forces on fighting on the western front, allowing them to take most of Europe easier than they would otherwise. And no matter the actual outcomes, if I, a socialist, went out to stomp people with the fascists I would (and should) be crucified no matter the strategical merits of my stomping.
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Jul 14, 2020 22:09
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USSR’s deal with the devil regarding Poland was taking a bunch of ground that Poland had annexed from them that would alternatively have been taken by the Nazis, once the Nazis decided to begin an invasion. All this after having had its previous offers to defend Poland wholesale rebuffed. I fail to see the inherent immorality that doesn’t rely on expectations of purity to the point of irresponsibility. And the common accusation that the USSR is responsible for the German invasion and the whole WW2 by proxy by giving them the confidence that they wouldn’t be attacked from the east is a morbid joke. Molotov-Ribbentrop is not even comparable to the policy of appeasement of the Nazis and containment of the USSR that led to it.
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Jul 14, 2020 22:11
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uncop posted:I fail to see the inherent immorality that doesn’t rely on expectations of purity to the point of irresponsibility. I fail to see a standard of morality where the actions USSR took at the beginning of WW2 aren't inherently immoral, so I guess we'll just have to disagree.
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Jul 14, 2020 22:14
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dex_sda posted:I fail to see a standard of morality where the actions USSR took at the beginning of WW2 aren't inherently immoral, so I guess we'll just have to disagree. it's immoral to allow the nazis to win
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Jul 14, 2020 22:18
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hadn't the government abandoned and fled Poland at that point? so if it wasn't the USSR it would have been the Nazis.
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Jul 14, 2020 22:19
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CYBEReris posted:hadn't the government abandoned and fled Poland at that point? so if it wasn't the USSR it would have been the Nazis. Yeah, and the Nazis had taken or surrounded most of the major cities Eastern Poland at that point. Polish-Soviet causalities were rather minimal from actual combat. Also, I don't know why the Soviets have a higher standard of a burden than the Allies considering the Munich agreement and everything else. If France had taken Slovakia as a colony, would there had been much of a difference?
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Jul 14, 2020 22:25
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CYBEReris posted:hadn't the government abandoned and fled Poland at that point? so if it wasn't the USSR it would have been the Nazis. The USSR signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact before the invasion occurred
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Jul 14, 2020 22:30
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Ardennes posted:Also, I don't know why the Soviets have a higher standard of a burden than the Allies considering the Munich agreement and everything else. If France had taken Slovakia as a colony, would there had been much of a difference? People like Neville Chamberlain are correctly ridiculed for appeasement
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Jul 14, 2020 22:31
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Ardennes posted:Also, I don't know why the Soviets have a higher standard of a burden than the Allies considering the Munich agreement and everything else. I don't know why you keep insisting that I'm suggesting the rest of the Allies shouldn't also be held accountable for their crimes too. However, what percentage of the US leadership should have stood trial is irrelevant to the analysis of the problems USSR had. I'm also not suggesting they didn't have their reasons, but the irrevocable fact is that they have made a pre-war agreement with the Nazis that - which we know by the virtue of Nazis having taken that agreement - benefitted the Nazis. That is a war crime. You can go do a lot of "the ends justify the means" mental gymnastics but that does not erase their guilt.
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Jul 14, 2020 22:33
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