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site posted:So, recently I've been wondering about the relationship between Marxism and minority groups. One of Marx's earlier works is titled On the Jewish Question and though I haven't read it, seems to imply at least some sort of direct relationship between Jews and bourgeois society. Was Marx antisemitic? The USSR also had policies "dealing"with Jews, so were Lenin and Trotsky antisemitic as well? I'm just gonna assume Stalin was. Is antisemitism ingrained within Marxism itself or can it be separated out as purely personal belief? If you want to learn about the remationship between Marxism and minorities, I would recommend that you look less at Marx, who after all was an 19th century white European dude, and more at Marxist thinkers who were members of minorities themselves.
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Mar 5, 2016 12:03
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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 16:25 |
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OwlFancier posted:If it comes to that then I accept it, providing you have sufficient popular support. Democratic self defence is still democratic. Using violence to seize the state with a minority of support in the hopes of using the apparatus of the state to gather majority support is what leads to the USSR, which I personally would prefer not to repeat. Sounds legit, except that wasn't how the USSR came to be. Besides that, how do you propose that you as a hypothetical revolutionary party determine if you have majority support or not? Do you ask the people you want to overthrow to hold a referendum on whether most people would support a violent insurrection or what? DeusExMachinima posted:How many millions of Americans have starved in the last 2 years as the government rejects outside food aid? Imperial powers tend to starve their colonies rather than the metropole, so your question is both loaded and nonsensical.
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May 16, 2016 16:14
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How the gently caress do you propose to a) extract yourself from an unwinnable World War, b) win the inevitable civil war and c) rebuild your shattered pariah country afterwards without strong central authority? It seriously seems like you're open for a socialist revolution by any means except those that have a chance of working.
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May 16, 2016 21:27
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OwlFancier posted:With difficulty. The fundamental problem is that you're totally misunderstanding what a revolution is and how revolutions work. Revolutions are not something that "we try", revolutions are something that happen when a political system has lost its legitimacy and becomes incapable of supporting itself due to a severe enough crisis. Revolutions don't happen because some bearded conspirators sit in a dark cellar somewhere and decide that we're having a revolution tomorrow, revolutions happen when everything has already gone to poo poo, because somebody will certainly exploit the power vacuum. And when you're in the loving poo poo it isn't difficult to get out of there with your preferred methods, it's impossible. Say that you get your way after the old regime is toppled and refuse to consolidate power centrally and instead implement your ideas, write a constitution and all that. Well, the country is still in the poo poo and unless you get it out of there pronto your own legitimacy is going to be undermined, which will obviously be exploited by any political organization that doesn't share your ideals. So in the very best case you have to somehow organize and win that election and then somehow get most everyone to agree with you and respect your preferred constitution to the point that anybody better organized and more ruthless than you will have to stay quiet. In the worst case you get couped by the loving fash, who then proceed to have you and yours shot. You're literally gambling with the lives and freedom of your own supporters here. This brings me to the second main point, successful revolutionary regimes centralize power out of goddamn necessity, much like any other nation does in a state of emergency. Furthermore, to pretend that something like a constitution and decentralization would somehow settle the situation of the country being in the poo poo is naive at best and delusional at worst. If you want an example of this in action, one Kerensky and his government comes to mind.
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May 16, 2016 21:55
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OwlFancier posted:Whereas the alternative is centralizing power, getting assassinated, being succeeded by some despotic lunatic who then proceeds to gently caress the country over. There's no logical reason that would necessitate history to play out exactly like it did in the early USSR in the event of a socialist revolution, whereas, as I explained, your ideas are unworkable on their own merits. Don't you see that it's kinda absurd to use a mere hypothetical possibility of failure to argue for near-certain failure? And since you're admitting that you're gambling with everyone's lives here, would you not be obligated to pick the option that isn't extremely likely to have you couped out of power in short order? Also I'd appreciate it if you addressed my points instead of ignoring my actual criticism of your ideas.
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May 16, 2016 22:37
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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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| # ¿ Apr 28, 2024 16:25 |
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Simply put the fact that the Khmer Rouge wanted to revert society to an agrarian stage is in itself enough to disqualify them from being any kind of Marxists. The core idea of the Marxist theory of history is that society necessarily advances through successive economic stages and that this is a good thing, which means that if you try to go back to some kind of bizarro agrarian slave economy you're sure as poo poo not with the program.
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Jan 5, 2017 12:03
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