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HorseLord posted:I'm lazy as gently caress. Well get around to it. 
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May 17, 2016 01:14
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OwlFancier posted:Well, actually it's more that I can see Lenin as being well intentioned if either short sighted, or in a position where he had to gamble, and lost. Lenin took a gamble and won. He won the most that you can win at anything ever. I notice that you didn't actually say anything relevant to what I pointed out, the tendency to treat a prominent political leader as a personification of an entire country. A negative personality cult, created because it's easier to get people to hate a face than a series of office buildings.
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May 17, 2016 01:18
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Winning the most you can win at anything ever would have been the successful usurpation of capitalism the world over, not the decline and fall of the USSR within the century.
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May 17, 2016 01:21
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I don't really see how it has a harder time - in the US, economic power runs totally counter to the democratic political institutions. It absolutely is not a safeguard against over-reaching political power. Practically, your only real solution is total democracy. An unelected elite had no incentive to not just turn into another 'landed gentry', even if it does LARP as a workers party. The structures of power have a funny habit of reproducing themselves, regardless of the intent of the rulers. How exactly you transition from a revolutionary party to a governing body, while creating that system, is a hard problem, but I see no reason for it to be intractable. The more interesting problem, as I see it, is whether it's possible to organize the vanguard in a congruent way to the society it is attempting to create - the transition is then just extending the franchise. The problem is that both systems have different requirements, and something that works well, or good enough for one situation, is impractical or destructive for the other. I have a couple of ideas, but nothing concrete, and no substance to back them up, so they're as good as anyone else's.
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May 17, 2016 01:26
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Tesseraction posted:Speaking of, you said you'd give me some decent textbooks to promote a pro-Stalin understanding of history but then you seemed to be busy for a few months immediately afterwards. Gimme the titles you jerk! This book has been mentioned as setting out a balanced view: http://www.amazon.com/Stalin-Revolutionary-European-History-Perspective/dp/033371122X/ref=cm_rdp_product
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May 17, 2016 01:28
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 "Well... they're really more of an idea than an actual political force."
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May 17, 2016 01:29
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OwlFancier posted:Winning the most you can win at anything ever would have been the successful usurpation of capitalism the world over, not the decline and fall of the USSR within the century. Lenin died in 1924
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May 17, 2016 01:34
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And the state he helped found collapsed in 1991, an impressive run, but not, I think, what he hoped for.
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May 17, 2016 01:36
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HorseLord posted:Lenin died in 1924
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May 17, 2016 01:37
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OwlFancier posted:Winning the most you can win at anything ever would have been the successful usurpation of capitalism the world over, not the decline and fall of the USSR within the century. Russia went from backwater failed empire to a nuclear power within a generation. I can criticise their human rights but yeesh, the development of the country was astounding and only matched by China. Both with horrific death tolls but they also managed to make their countries later immune to the same causes of the death tolls.
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May 17, 2016 01:43
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I don't think trying to throw all the blame on Stalin, to leave Lenin pure, is a good tactic. I have a lot of sympathy for Lenin, but the issue isn't that the 'wrong' people got into power, it's that a system existed where that was possible in the first place.
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May 17, 2016 01:44
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386-SX 25Mhz VGA posted:Give up, you're not going to get the guy to budge There comes a point when it's no longer about trying to reason with someone, but making it clear to all witnesses that person is unreasonable. I mean, really, trying to claim someone can be a failure 67 years posthumously is damned absurd. You can't chair the politburo from your tomb, what people decide to do after you are dead has nothing to do with you. It's like saying Lord Nelson was poo poo as his job because the modern british navy isn't up to much. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 01:47 on May 17, 2016 |
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May 17, 2016 01:44
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rudatron posted:I don't think trying to throw all the blame on Stalin, to leave Lenin pure, is a good tactic. I have a lot of sympathy for Lenin, but the issue isn't that the 'wrong' people got into power, it's that a system existed where that was possible in the first place. That might be the thing I have been suggesting for the past couple of pages.
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May 17, 2016 01:49
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OwlFancier posted:That might be the thing I have been suggesting for the past couple of pages. Being fair you're talking to anti-Trotsky posters. Trotsky specifically criticised Leninism as being exploitable by totalitarianism. Or so I'm told. Some arsehole won't give me the alternative texts to read.
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May 17, 2016 01:57
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HorseLord posted:There comes a point when it's no longer about trying to reason with someone, but making it clear to all witnesses that person is unreasonable. "Not an unqualified success" is not "is a failure"
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May 17, 2016 01:58
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rudatron posted:I don't really see how it has a harder time - in the US, economic power runs totally counter to the democratic political institutions. It absolutely is not a safeguard against over-reaching political power. Economic power and political power are not completely separated and certainly don't run entirely counter to one another. At it's extreme a centrally planned economy takes all the power of the fortune 500 CEO's, their boards and their owners and gives it to an even smaller body of the ruling political/military elite. There are less extreme forms of socialism but but they all involve concentrating significant chunks additional economic power into government. Ok the check on all of this is democracy. That would be great if the claim wasn't that democracy is already usurped by the existing elite. The point is that money and ownership aren't magic forms of power.
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May 17, 2016 02:09
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Tesseraction posted:Being fair you're talking to anti-Trotsky posters. Trotsky specifically criticised Leninism as being exploitable by totalitarianism. Trotskyism as being anti-leninist in spirit and form confirmed
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May 17, 2016 02:10
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You don't for vote for the existing elite, they get their power from owning the means of production. Having that owned in common, that is removing the ownership class all together, it's the transition to socialism. Capitalism corrupts democracy, that's the claim. The fact that leaders exist is not the same as saying a class of born-to-rule rear end in a top hat leaders exist, which is what we have in today's stratified society. Edit: Like the most class conscious class is the ownership class. They are aware of their privileged position, as a group, and are dearly afraid of losing it. So they are willing to do away with individual interest on certain cases, and act as a group, to secure their class interest. If they don't like the government in power, they'll even do things like stop investing, to hurt the economy as a whole, to tarnish that government. Removing that stratification, and having leadership roles distributed, without respecting that or other arbitrary stratification, prevents that from happening. You don't need stratification to have leaders - but you will need a good turnover, and a somewhat arbitrary selection method, to prevent an elite forming. rudatron fucked around with this message at 02:50 on May 17, 2016 |
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May 17, 2016 02:36
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rudatron posted:You don't for vote for the existing elite, they get their power from owning the means of production. Having that owned in common, that is removing the ownership class all together, it's the transition to socialism. Capitalism corrupts democracy, that's the claim. The fact that leaders exist is not the same as saying a class of born-to-rule rear end in a top hat leaders exist, which is what we have in today's stratified society. We already know how to remove the financial mechanisms for self perpetuation (inheritance/wealth tax). Scandinavian countries are probably the most egalitarian societies in terms of intergenerational wealth correlation in history. The rest of the problems listed aren't remotely specific to ownership elite.
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May 17, 2016 03:47
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Sure, they're problem not limited to ownership elite. But a system with private ownership of wealth generating assets will tend to create an elite, so to prevent that from forming, so you'll have to do away with that. That doesn't necessitate the creation of a new strata, even if that is possible, and what has happened. The trick is preventing that.
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May 17, 2016 03:55
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OwlFancier posted:"Not an unqualified success" is not "is a failure" I think you're rather deliberately missing the point, I said he succeeded as much as it was possible for him to succeed. You're trying to poo poo on that by trying to pretend what happened decades after his death counts against him, which is absurd, because the definition of being dead is no longer being an active participant in mortal affairs. The real bone to pick with you, OwlFancier, is that in the last few pages alone you've both A) condemned Leninism as immoral, and B) Admitted that it was "probably" the correct thing for the situation that it happened in. What can be concluded from this is that you'd have rather the Bolsheviks had been ineffective and get crushed along with the proletariat than for them to succeed but upset your impossibly high moral sensibilities. That is the stand you have taken, no matter how much you flap your gums and desperately insist there must somewhere be a nice, family friendly, polite and thoroughly PG-13 way of waging revolution that could actually work. You will never find one. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 04:19 on May 17, 2016 |
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May 17, 2016 04:09
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rudatron posted:Sure, they're problem not limited to ownership elite. But a system with private ownership of wealth generating assets will tend to create an elite, so to prevent that from forming, so you'll have to do away with that. That doesn't necessitate the creation of a new strata, even if that is possible, and what has happened. The trick is preventing that. So what, you prepared to enact a random lottery to see who gets to be defence secretary, program manager at nasa, or attorney general next year? I hope not and if not then you're going to have a society with a group of people who have orders of magnitude more power than other people for significant amounts of time. Seperately have you actually looked at real life results? In Denmark someone born to a father in the top 20% of income has a 75% chance of ending up below the top 20%. It's reasonably close to random.
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May 17, 2016 04:24
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Ormi posted:
That is the point, a political force in revolutionary Russia needed structure and people willing to die for your cause, and the SRs were lacking in that department if not basic unity. Moreover, a big portion of the SRs [Left-SRs] sided with the Bolsheviks before the election, which both heavily diluted the results and made the already amorphous blob of the SR party even more dis-unified. The SR as a party was a loose concept at best by that point, and the right SRs never rose to be a real challenge to the Bolsheviks after Green armies were finally formed. The SRs worked as a concept that united the peasantry, but in terms of realpolitik if not basic practicality they didn't amount to very much. Ardennes fucked around with this message at 05:30 on May 17, 2016 |
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May 17, 2016 04:44
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Their big mistake was to continue the war, had they not done that, there's no guarantee Lenin would have won.
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May 17, 2016 04:59
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Tesseraction posted:Speaking of, you said you'd give me some decent textbooks to promote a pro-Stalin understanding of history but then you seemed to be busy for a few months immediately afterwards. Gimme the titles you jerk! this isn't necessarily pro-stalin, more just analyzing the stalin era in context and history rather than reducing everything to great men theory, but here ya go the triumph of evil by austin murphy farm to factory by robert allen is the red flag flying? by albert szymanski life and terror in stalin's russia by robert thurston origin of the great purges by j. arch getty (he and tauger along with wheatcroft and davies are good sources on the famine, too) socialism betrayed by roger keeran and thomas kenny
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May 17, 2016 05:31
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rudatron posted:Their big mistake was to continue the war, had they not done that, there's no guarantee Lenin would have won. The war was the biggest issue for the Provisional Government, but it was far from the only one and the Bolsheviks more or less filled with a power vacuum that was left by infighting and a lack a leadership. If they had just surrendered to the Germans, that might have been able to hang on but it is still a big if and in all honesty, they very likely might have been overthrown by proto-Whites instead.
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May 17, 2016 05:33
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Ardennes posted:That is the point, a political force in revolutionary Russia needed structure and people willing to die for your cause, and the SRs were lacking in that department if not basic unity. Moreover, a big portion of the SRs [Left-SRs] sided with the Bolsheviks before the election, which both heavily diluted the results and made the already amorphous blob of the SR party even more dis-unified. The SR as a party was a loose concept at best by that point, and the right SRs never rose to be a real challenge to the Bolsheviks after Green armies were finally formed. Of course it was about the reality of power, it's just funny that they even held it in the first place when it was dissolved and declared invalid after 13 hours. They didn't have much experience crafting pretenses yet.
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May 17, 2016 07:00
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I never understood why people pointed to the rapid modernization of the USSR as some kind of credit to Marxism-Leninism. It's like yeah, a vast state rich in human and natural resources modernized rapidly in the 20th century, you don't say. It must have been the ideology that did it. Maybe if there hadn't been a revolution, Russia would have modernized even more quickly and would be a constitutional monarchy with an economy as big as that of the United States. Who knows?
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May 17, 2016 08:04
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SedanChair posted:I never understood why people pointed to the rapid modernization of the USSR as some kind of credit to Marxism-Leninism. It's like yeah, a vast state rich in human and natural resources modernized rapidly in the 20th century, you don't say. It must have been the ideology that did it. Given that a plethora of other vast states rich in human and natural resources never achieved industrialization, one would logically have to look at the differences between the USSR and those states for an explanation. And given that the main policy goal of the USSR, and the one that they turned pretty much all of the country's resources towards for decades, was industrialization and modernization there's a definite causal link here. Contrast this with other states rich in human and natural resources that had a predominantly capitalist economic structure during the 20th century and how those countries have pretty much been relegated to providers of raw materials and/or cheap labour. tl;dr, if the revolution hadn't happened, Russia would probably look like Nigeria or the Congo today.
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May 17, 2016 08:21
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Also the fact that the USSR adopted a planned economy where profits did not matter was what allowed them to both afford industrialization and pull it off in a controlled manor that allowed them to do huge chunks of it at once. The USSR was building shitloads of mills and factories, seeing huge growth and generally progressing very well at a time the rest of the world was completely hosed due to the great depression, because it was immune to it. They went this path because of ideology.
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May 17, 2016 11:15
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Cerebral Bore posted:Given that a plethora of other vast states rich in human and natural resources never achieved industrialization, one would logically have to look at the differences between the USSR and those states for an explanation. And given that the main policy goal of the USSR, and the one that they turned pretty much all of the country's resources towards for decades, was industrialization and modernization there's a definite causal link here. Contrast this with other states rich in human and natural resources that had a predominantly capitalist economic structure during the 20th century and how those countries have pretty much been relegated to providers of raw materials and/or cheap labour. There is a book written specifically on this subject, called "Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution" by Robert C. Allen The author is not a communist, but even he begrudgingly admits that the Soviet Union's industrialization and modernization campaign was the second most successful in history, bested only by Japan during the Meiji restoration. edit: Woops someone already posted it a while back.
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May 17, 2016 11:48
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You could make another parallel in the two different trajectories of industrialization in the North and South of the US. Economic history in this period not really my strongest area of knowledge so this could be talking out of my rear end, but a lot of the reason why the South lagged so far behind can be traced to Jeffersonian Republicanism and its agrarian, anti-urban ideal, whereas the North and especially Northeast was the last bastion of Federalism, the party of Hamilton with his experiments into government-subsidized industrial development. Now, you could say, "What about slavery?" and that's a fair point, but since Marxism is a bit of a hot topic in this discussion, this isn't necessarily a flaw in the argument. Ideology flows from relations of production in Marxist analysis, and it does so everywhere, in the Early Republic/Antebellum US and in Meiji-era Japan and the early USSR. If reliance on slavery for production of cash crops impeded industrialization in the South, we still have to ask why Southerners did not, in larger numbers or with more institutional support, decide it might be a good idea to move their economy towards industrialization and at that point you'll run into ideas about the moral superiority of slavery compared to industrial wage labor.
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May 17, 2016 12:46
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I'm sure this has been brought up already ITT, but one of the most common things I get from people is "how do you incentivise people to do poo poo jobs for same pay?" and I can't be arsed writing out explanations again and again. Does anyone have a handy link or paragraph or effortpost or something I can save and whip out for future reference?
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May 17, 2016 13:44
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You can spread out menial labor as wide as possible and accept the (significant) loss of economic efficiency, but the question becomes a lot more troublesome if you include intellectually demanding work in that category too. Warm fuzzies generally do not factor into political economy. Nobody has come up with a miracle solution, the best compromise usually involves material compensation without money or a market economy à la the USSR's queue cutting and Black Sea vacations, though they also varied salaries between professions slightly to attract labor. The subject was discussed a bit in the subforum PSL thread.
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May 17, 2016 14:30
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Coohoolin posted:I'm sure this has been brought up already ITT, but one of the most common things I get from people is "how do you incentivise people to do poo poo jobs for same pay?" and I can't be arsed writing out explanations again and again. Does anyone have a handy link or paragraph or effortpost or something I can save and whip out for future reference? You don't, you pay them more to compensate them for having a worse job. A USSR example was how those working nights got paid more but did an hour less work every shift. Compare this with the capitalist solution where usually the worse jobs are the worst paid, (unless the workers manage to form a strong union), and people do them anyway because homelessness sucks.
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May 17, 2016 16:14
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Coohoolin posted:I'm sure this has been brought up already ITT, but one of the most common things I get from people is "how do you incentivise people to do poo poo jobs for same pay?" and I can't be arsed writing out explanations again and again. Does anyone have a handy link or paragraph or effortpost or something I can save and whip out for future reference? You pay them in accordance with the worth of their job, which is pretty loving high for things like binmen and carers, because if we didn't have them we'd be hosed. A poo poo job may be poo poo but it is probably a very important one, and should be compensated appropriately, also bearing in mind that it's poo poo and therefore harder. The problem with pay is that hard work doesn't pay well, the people who are paid well don't work as hard as everyone else.
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May 17, 2016 17:11
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Homework Explainer posted:this isn't necessarily pro-stalin, more just analyzing the stalin era in context and history rather than reducing everything to great men theory, but here ya go How trustworthy is the Austin Murphy book, I have it but the "US ATROCITIES, COMMUNISM IS GREAT ACTUALLY" intro and table of contents set off a lot of alarm bells and I never read it
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May 17, 2016 17:34
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Hah there's a guy at my work who's convinced he's an anarchist but always ends up going on about voluntarism and agorism. I don't have the energy...
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May 17, 2016 18:18
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Prism Mirror Lens posted:How trustworthy is the Austin Murphy book, I have it but the "US ATROCITIES, COMMUNISM IS GREAT ACTUALLY" intro and table of contents set off a lot of alarm bells and I never read it If anything that might potentially challenge what you believe "sets off alarm bells" and stops you from reading it then that's strictly a problem with you.
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May 17, 2016 23:19
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Well, aside from the fact that kicking off your book with "Dedicated to the knowledge that anyone who aids the USA in its international terrorism is committing a crime against humanity" is bound to raise a few eyebrows even among communists, I'm also worried about the fact that it has like 6 reviews between Amazon and goodreads and I can't really find anything out about the author. It doesn't inspire great trust, is all
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May 17, 2016 23:48
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