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You titled the thread "Teach Me About Marxism, Socialism, and Communism", but what you actually mean is "tell me what opinions to have about marxism, socialism, and communism." The only way to learn about the works of Marx and Engels, Lenin and his contemporaries Stalin and Trotsky, and Mao Zedong his contemporaries, is to read their works. You have to gain understanding of them directly, not second hand. Otherwise you'll gain an understanding of Marxism-Leninism that's distorted by other people's understanding (and misunderstanding). You'll be lead astray. The only thing I'll say about other Leftisms is that Marxism in all it's forms is a science. Political theory is scientific theory in that it can only be developed from observing evidence, and it must be tested like a science experiment too. If it's put to the test and reality contradicts it, then the theory must be adapted to the new evidence. If it is proven totally, completely wrong, then it should be abandoned. Knowing this, you must gauge the correctness of an ideology by how successfully it has changed the world. The ultra-left would rather claim moral purity than achieve anything, so their theory being proven wrong by practice does not matter to them.
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Feb 9, 2016 10:54
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:This is probably the most common misunderstanding of Marxism, which drives me nuts. You are practising Marxism as a dogma. You have the idea that "Marxism" is merely a list of Karl's opinions existing in a vacuum, and cannot be questioned, put to the test, elaborated on, or corrected when proven untrue. This is silly, and actually against the whole point of any of Marx's efforts in anything ever. Dude was a scientist, he developed his theories from evidence. If something disproved an idea of his he would reconcile this and form a new idea - you know, that dialectics thing? Also, your casting of Marxism - even list-of-karl's-opinions-marxism - as the idea that socialism would come about through trade union based reformism is bizarre and wrong. That's labour party poo poo. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 20:12 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 20:03
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Cingulate posted:On the other hand, the word Marxism probably has some meaning. It can't mean everything, and not everything can be Marxism. Marxism is a branch of science, like how you have "chemistry" and "biology". It is named after the man who founded it, and who's methodologies it is reliant. "Marxism" is not merely a bearded man's opinions. It is method. Material methods, Historical and Dialectical.
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Feb 9, 2016 20:17
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Helsing posted:Marxism is more than just a dead bearded guys opinions but it's also not directly comparable to physical sciences like chemistry or even biology because the situations that Marxism attempts to explain cannot easily be reproduced in a laboratory. It is a science because it's theory is created to explain what is observed, and whenever evidence contradicts that theory, new theory is created in whole or in part to explain that, tool. If you need to know where the lab is to accept this, then here you go: It is a laboratory without walls. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 20:33 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 20:30
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:My definition of Marxism is Marx's definition. It's part of the etymology of the term, specifically his comments on the Programme of the Parti Ouvrier. Marx was absolutely a revolutionary, but he consistently argued for demands that were attainable within existing capitalist frameworks. When the leaders of the French Workers' Party disagreed with him on this point, he famously said of Paul Lafague "if his views are considered Marxist, I am certainly not a Marxist." Dr. Fishopolis posted:Moreover, how could any political scientist defend Lenin, Stalin or even Castro's interpretation of Marx's ideas as successful in creating a stable society? Every time anyone has attempted to short-circuit the revolutionary progression that Marx proposed, it's devolved into totalitarianism. That's not actually true, but I'm not willing to have another slapfight with a deliberately ignorant person when I owned all of those already on the first page. I'm too tired, and nobody will gain from 40 pages of circular arguments about why a dictatorship of the proletariat and class struggle are mean. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 20:41 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 20:37
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Dr. Fishopolis posted:Revolution can and does happen without a war or coup. No, they don't. "Revolution" doesn't just mean "power changes hands." A revolution is a revolt, and it is as violent as it needs to be to unseat the old power. The powerful tend not to leave so easily, they have an army on their side. Dr. Fishopolis posted:Also, please describe this stable, non-dictatorial communist state you seem to know about. States do not exist under Communism, and Socialist States are plenty dictatorial, which is a good thing. "Totalitarian" is a word that comes out of the mouths of those who're being dictated to - "Cuba is so totalitarian! Castro took my plantation away!" HorseLord fucked around with this message at 20:51 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 20:47
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Helsing posted:For those who have no clue what HorseLord is talking about he's advancing a traditional "Marxist-Leninist" analysis of the USSR, or what most people would colloquially refer to as a "Stalinist" perspective. It must be stressed what this means - nobody is suggesting a re-enactment. Whatever our countries will look like in revolutionary times, we know they'll be different in a lot of ways to the mostly-feudal, mostly illiterate Russian empire. But we must remember the body of knowledge gained from previous revolutions, and apply our science to determine our actions should there be a new one. Revolutions are mostly done flying on the seat of your pants so it helps to know how others have managed similar situations. Helsing posted:Trotskyists, anarchists and various other left wing groups will tend to respond that the end result of the USSR was simply to create an unaccountable dictatorship that eventually reverted back to capitalism. Of course why they think that varies: anarchists will say that Lenin's refusal to immediately try and abolish the state was the root cause of the problems. Trotskyists will tend to say that the real problem wasn't anything about the political structure of the Soviet Union in it's early days but rather the fact that the revolution was confined to a single backward country when it should have been spread to the rest of the globe. My personal belief is it was a cocktail of revisionism, particularly the abandonment of class struggle. Once you do that then the class character of everything starts to change. And of course, external pressure from the imperialist countries, leading to the long term adoption of measures which were harmful to soviet political life. OwlFancier posted:I always understood Marx's use of the word revolution to mean a desire for a complete change of social ordering, similar to the accession of the bourgeoisie to power. But not necessarily violent, or indeed immediate, that being the whole bit about socialism as a gateway to communism and the desire for organized political action like strikes and whatnot. Immediately achievable, but steps on the road to revolution. That doesn't really fit in with what his sidekick said: Engels, On Authority, 1872 posted:Have these gentlemen ever seen a revolution? A revolution is certainly the most authoritarian thing there is; it is the act whereby one part of the population imposes its will upon the other part by means of rifles, bayonets and cannon — authoritarian means, if such there be at all; and if the victorious party does not want to have fought in vain, it must maintain this rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionists. Would the Paris Commune have lasted a single day if it had not made use of this authority of the armed people against the bourgeois? Should we not, on the contrary, reproach it for not having used it freely enough? No record of them squabbling on this, I could probably find an excerpt of Marx himself saying similar but this was what first came to mind. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 21:16 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 21:10
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OwlFancier posted:Then what's the point in things like unions and organized striking? If you ask a typical union organizer they'd say collective bargaining for a pay rise, employment protection, and better working conditions. None of that includes overthrowing the capitalist class. Revolutionary unions are very violent, in america alone there were huge gun battles between them and Henry Ford's goons. There's countless other examples. OwlFancier posted:If the road to revolution is military force then why bother with the political side of it? If guns and guillotines are what's needed then why advocate for anything else? For a revolution, you need popular support. Gaining popular support for your political goals is politics. OwlFancier posted:I was given to understand that the best force to apply against Capital is to starve it by withdrawing the labour it needs to function, because it has a monopoly on force of arms, and without de-legitimizing the basis by which it wields them you will lose any armed conflict, and if you can de-legitimize capital, why do you need to impose a military dictatorship to keep it that way? Capital has an army and the state. They will not look out the window and go "oh well, better give up" if they see a general strike. You can pack central london with a million people chanting "Bourgeoisie out!" and they will ignore you because you aren't actually a threat. Begin to disrupt the function of the state, though, and they will send in riot police. Political power comes from your ability to enforce it with as much strength as you need to at any given moment. "Military dictatorship" is a crude term that betrays your true sympathies. The purpose of a revolutionary army is to overthrow a state and create a dictatorship of the proletariat, the current dictatorship of the bourgeoisie also has a military. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 21:48 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 21:41
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Cingulate posted:The main point is still: being able to explain stuff does not make a framework scientific, and adding the tendency to adapt the theory to new evidence makes it, if at all, even less scientific. That is literally what science does. 
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Feb 9, 2016 21:54
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OwlFancier posted:Yes capital has an army and the state, however both are made up of people. If you have popular support, why does that not extend to state workers and the armed forces? Ask the white army. OwlFancier posted:I entirely acknowledge that a general strike or anything else comparable would be ridiculously difficult to organize when you consider the pressures arrayed against that kind of idea, but I am suggesting that a 'dictatorship of the proletariat' would be equally far fetched and that anything less far fetched would not be any such thing as a dictatorship of the proletariat. If you haven't got overwhelming popular support, you're just a normal dictatorship. Perhaps a benevolent one, with high ideals, but not a rule of the people. You seem to have the idea that support for a political movement amongst the population of a country is either 100% or 0%. That's really weird. There are plenty of fascist, nationalist working class people, but we don't have to give them the franchise in a socialist state, or wait until they reform their politics and defect from the British army before beginning a revolution. If you had, for example, 80% of politically active workers being pro vs 20% being anti, it would still be a super-majority. That 80% of proletarians suppressing the other 20% would not suddenly be unproletarian. Please get a grip. By the way are you still arguing "as a marxist"? Because uh, guess who came up with the dictatorship of the proletariat? HorseLord fucked around with this message at 22:05 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 22:00
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OwlFancier posted:If you have 80% support for your ideas you do not need to kill people to achieve them. I have no objection to suppression via democracy but I really don't see where the bit about armed uprising comes in. You could not actually be more wrong. There's literally no event in human history where the bourgeoisie have, as an entire class, voluntarily handed over their power, no matter how large the group politely asking for them to do so is. It has never happened ever. What has always happened is that they simply ignore polite requests, and deny impolite ones using as much force as they need to. They can do this because, if we continue the example, they have 20% of the politically active proletariat at their command. They will make up the bulk of any of the state's violent organizations, particularly if those organizations are volunteer ones, like modern armies, and the police. It is worse than just the formal army and the police, because in revolutionary times, informal reactionary violent groups form. They even still do in peace time. Revolutions, the deliberate, coordinated overthrow of one ruling class by another, are violent. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 22:25 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 22:22
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OwlFancier posted:Again, I don't expect people to hand over power voluntarily, I expect them to have no choice against an organized non-compliant populace. It is simple, they use their guns on the non-compliant to get them to comply. You remind me of that other guy who was in here, you both have no grasp of marxist reasoning. But while he couldn't do the reasoning but accepted Marx's conclusions, you can't... do either? Why did you call yourself a marxist again? OwlFancier posted:A democratic revolution both preserves the apparent structure of many modern states, thus giving it a greater probability of international legitimacy, as well as a greater proximity to an actual dictatorship of the proletariat. No, a "democratic revolution" preserves the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, by preserving the bourgeoisie's state. This is not the dictatorship of the proletariat, because it is not by them or for them, it does not disenfranchise the bourgeois as the proletariat are under the bourgeoisie. It doesn't do anything revolutionary. Your whole conception of things was proved hogwash with the Attlee cabinet: 70 years later still no further away from capitalism, no closer to socialism, and no closer to having the working class be the ruling class. There is nothing that you have said in our discussion which reflects reality. No chapter of history you can point to as proof. All you have is pacifist feelings. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 23:02 on Feb 9, 2016 |
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Feb 9, 2016 22:52
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OwlFancier posted:Socialism by stages is not inevitably successful in one go. We did well in establishing nationalized industries and then we shat it up by not going further. The issue is with the lack of follow up, not the first step. The goal of the movers and shakers in the Labour party was not socialism. They were social democrats firmly on the side of capitalism-imperialism. Their program was to protect the bourgeoisie by appeasing the proletariat's immediate demands, therefore neutralizing any potential revolutionary movement at what was a very critical time to do so. You can see this both in their rabid anti-communism and their modernization, but not discontinuation, of imperialist foreign policy, not to mention the willing transfer of power back towards the blue team. I could say "the master's tools will not destroy the master's house", but I'd also like to underline they especially won't when the master is still holding them. OwlFancier posted:I mean if we're going to get historical I don't think the Red Army did very well in establishing a proletarian government either. They succeeded wholeheartedly. The Soviet Communist party went out of it's way to recruit and train workers and peasants, not as a mere chair filling move, but to fill the uppermost ranks of the party. This was true even in it's dying days - Gorby and Yeltsin were peasants. Your understanding of Marxism and of the history of socialism is very poor, and reminds me of the sort of crap I used to think back when I'd only recently became interested in politics, and hadn't yet hit the books. The difference between present day you and teenage me though, is that I never held on to the delusion that my novice self knew better than 150 years of human endeavour. Simply unlike you, I never called myself a Marxist without knowing what he stood for and his reasons. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 00:18 on Feb 10, 2016 |
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Feb 10, 2016 00:10
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Rodatose posted:Both sides accused each other of being ~revisionists~ (revising the historical truths marx supposedly laid out for their own regimes) and tensions were mounting. Revisionism is to throw away what is known to be true (both historically speaking, and in terms of what is proven scientifically with Marxism-Leninism) for petty political gain. China and a fair few other socialist states were right to Label Khrushchev's CPSU as a revisionist party. They abandoned class struggle. They selectively abandoned, and selectively misconstrued Marxist-Leninist understanding of imperialism for that peaceful co-existence nonsense which they knew to be impossible. Marxism-Leninism as an actual living science died out in the USSR in many ways, because when it pointed to something inconvenient for the Khrushchev/Brezhnev Administrations, it was ignored. It's pretty ironic though, that China itself went whole hog in that "peaceful co-existance" crap. Cosy up to the USA against the USSR and for the meanwhile imperialism won't target you. Great plan, shame you have to throw out any semblance of internationalism but oh well... The astoundingly wrong theory the CPC had to create to justify this did an incredible amount of damage. You had self styled Maoists teaming up with the loving Taliban against "social imperialist" soviet feminism and clean drinking water. OwlFancier posted:If you take someone out of a field and put them in an political office, train them to be political officers, and give them the lifestyle associated with that, they cease to be proletarian. People aren't born bourgeois or proletarian, it is a function of their life. Now the life they live is likely heavily influenced by the circumstances of their birth, but it is that life that makes them who they are. I hate to break it to you but most of Labour, even back then, were posh their entire lives. OwlFancier posted:A centralized, authoritarian government which dictates everything about a country is not communist, it may be socialist, but it is not communist Good thing they didn't name it the U.S.C.R then. OwlFancier posted:and I see very little way in which it can be proletarian. It is simply another form of oligarchy, whereby adherence to the prevailing ideology determines one's fitness to rule over others. That ideology may be socialist for a time but it is unlikely to remain so, and it is unlikely to progress past that. You can't dictate socialism from a minority government, because it will be assailed from all sides by dissent. Here is something that will help you with this problem: http://www.massline.info/sum1p.htm No socialist state has ever had a "minority government" in any sense by the way, both the USSR and China for example were very heavily into getting as many people as possible into political life. That's generally how they achieved everything they set out to do. That's how you transform one society into another. You should at least have heard of things like the cultural revolution or the collective farms movement, even if you've only heard of them negatively. Why you gotta act like a know it all when you just got here? Why do you insist, despite repeatedly having things explained to you, that your idea of Marxism is correct? You subscribe entirely to liberal definitions of "authoritarianism", "Military dictatorship", " democratic revolution", not Marxist ones. You deny basic Marxist knowledge of the nature of revolutions, the idea of dictatorship of the proletariat, etc even to the degree you ignore famous and well known historical events - some of which your knowledge comes from poo poo on the anti-communist side of the cold war, and more that is older than it, so you have no excuse. This whole argument started because you were comically wrong about the marxist conception of a revolution. I showed you that you were wrong. I literally put Engels writing on the matter in front of you. But you persist. All that you had to do was go "oh, I was mistaken. That clears it up", and it'd be over. I get the feeling you only just got an interest in Marx. That's okay. Everyone is new at first. But you cannot be a Marxist if you can't accept being proven wrong. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 01:11 on Feb 10, 2016 |
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Feb 10, 2016 00:39
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site posted:Well, I mean stuff like violent crackdowns and this red terror thing and cheka and gulag and it sounds like there my have been some foreign policy mistakes and really banking on a euro revolution that didn't end up happening. There was this minor matter of a Civil war going on, it's a bit much to say a guy is "really bad" for, you know, not letting monarchist armies and about fourteen different foreign invading armies (Including Russia's WW1 allies!) murder the poo poo out of everyone. OwlFancier posted:Horselord I simply don't agree with you. I also don't necessarily agree with everything Marx or Engels or anyone else says on the matter. I most specifically disagree with the notion that you can seize power by military force, try to indoctrinate as many people as you can into your ideology, and have that be sustainable. I don't suggest that a democratic revolution is at all likely to happen, much as I like the idea of communism I don't see it as being a thing that is ever likely to happen and I don't see any evidence to suggest it would be stable if it did. I'm not giving you a viable alternative, I'm telling you why your suggestion is flawed. I don't have a viable alternative and I don't see why what marx described necessarily has to be one. No. Stop. You are talking as if you are a professor when you're actually in nursery. Stop this. Your entire conception of revolution is wrong. You seem to think marxist revolutionary process is: 1. Decide you want to be in charge. 2. Do a war, using your loyal army which has materialized out of thin air, and not been recruited from the masses. You certainly didn't build a mass support base through education and agitation or anything. 3. tell everyone to believe in your ideas at gunpoint, because until you shot the King, nobody in your country did yet. 4. no step four. This tells me that you're either ignorant or deliberately dishonest, because this doesn't fit the pattern of any revolution that has ever happened. Not the USSR, Not china, not anywhere. OwlFancier posted:I simply don't see how you can hope to initiate global societal change by seizing power in one country and using the apparatus of the state to compel people to follow an ideology. I didn't think of that, We better pack it all in, then. Nevermind. That's sarcasm, by the way. First you started by implying weird totalitarian cold war stereotype poo poo, the real sinister "I hope you are not dissenting, comrade, I wouldn't like to see you liquidated" poo poo. And then you ask a bunch of questions as if you think Lenin himself would be stumped by them. This sort of behaviour is why I tell you to wind your neck in. I will not even bother to answer them. If you really cared for the answers, you'd maybe once have googled something like "how does Class struggle continue under socialism", or "How did communism spread internationally" or, for beginners, "how do communists perform political education". OwlFancier posted:In the event that the world becomes such that people everywhere want a change enough, then there will be nothing anyone can do to stop a revolution. I expect it will be bloody regardless because things usually are, but it will be democratic. There won't be a need for anyone to enforce an ideology because a new one will emerge because of the conditions we find ourselves in. I'm not a pacifist, if anything I rather like violence, I'm just conscious that it so very rarely does any good. Violence is something everyone can do and allows them to project a disproportionate amount of influence, so it's always tempting to try to use it to effect a change you believe to be right. But it can't truly change society, it doesn't create lasting change. So I have no problem with a violent democratic revolution. Peaceful would be nice but I doubt we'll have the option. Violent resistance to Capital's attempts to deny people the right to self-determine is something I am completely and 100% fine with. What I have issue with is when you need to use force and fear to try to enforce ideological purity against a majority of opposition, because you won't succeed. You keep talking about how revolutions must be democratic. This implies that you think a revolution could exist which is not democratic. This is nonsense. A revolution is a democratic act by definition. It is the most direct kind of democracy possible, it is direct political action of the whole people, with the victory going to the largest, most competent movement among them. That you can even suggest that a non-democratic revolution is anything other than an oxymoron just further betrays your bourgeois, liberal understanding of the world. Forget that mass line, serve the people nonsense, the OwlFancier Revolution can only happen after the Vanguard Party wins the general election. Obviously. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 20:30 on Feb 11, 2016 |
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Feb 11, 2016 19:30
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site posted:What are your opinions on Stalin? I'm not fond of the direction soviet foreign policy took, there was too much pressure on the Communist parties of the imperialist countries at certain times to appease those countries, which meant they ended up taking obviously incorrect lines. When the USSR was trying to delay war with Germany, they were told to advocate the idea that it would just be another imperialist, regressive war. Then when Germany invaded, they immediately changed their official lines to support for an antifascist, progressive war. This sort of thing culminated postwar, when the USSR was keen to keep on the good side of it's wartime allies. The communist parties of those countries adopted the line that they weren't in revolutionary times, and that dictatorship of the proletariat could be attained purely through the ballot box. Considering what postwar Europe was actually like on the ground, the idea that it wasn't a potent time for revolution is ridiculous. Now these things were obviously good for the USSR. But they destroyed western european communist parties. The CPGB went from a revolutionary organization which served the people into the unpaid cheerleader squad of the Labour Party.
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Feb 11, 2016 20:17
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site posted:It's funny how you managed to type all those words and yet not answer the question at all. I did answer the question. I gave you my criticism of what I think is the most important Stalin leadership thing to a Communist living outside of the USSR. If you're asking me about his qualities as an individual, I can say I think he made a very good writer. He gets his points across well, in a conversational sort of tone that's easy to read. In what film footage I've seen of him he looked pretty easy going in public. I've obviously never met him, and I don't buy into Great Man ideas about history, so I don't attribute much more to him than that.
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Feb 11, 2016 20:28
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I see what this reaction means. "You defended Lenin! I will now bait you into defending Stalin, who due to the ancient magics baked in to the universe at the first dawn, is objectively Satan himself. The power of these magics is so strong that anyone who would defend Stalin automatically and retroactively becomes wrong about everything, to the degree that reality itself warps around that person when they perform mathmatics. When this magic takes effect, I can then disregard any challenge to my preconceptions of Lenin, or really anything else." But that backfired, because the only important thing I said on the guy was a Criticism. But it wasn't the criticism you'd feel comfortable with, so all you can do is : ughh : . gj there anime avatar. Really what was the point in opening a thread where you ask to be educated on a subject, yet set up artificial barriers on what you will consider? You really gonna be like "I don't know a drat thing about this subject, so I'll ask. But this one detail of it? I'm the real expert and the people I asked don't know poo poo." It's like bringing your broke down car to a mechanic then sassing him when he tells you the headlights don't run on gas. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 21:52 on Feb 11, 2016 |
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Feb 11, 2016 20:49
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Cingulate posted:The death of millions is just a statistic. The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion: You Are Racist > Teach Me About Marilyn Manson
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Feb 11, 2016 20:51
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site posted:im the edit horselord made an hour later completely rewriting his post after he was persecuted for liking stalin with an emoticon This post is the sound site makes when the superglue on their earplugs has set. SedanChair posted:Russian bank robbers who lucked into power and became despots. Wrong again. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/index.htm HorseLord fucked around with this message at 16:05 on Feb 13, 2016 |
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Feb 13, 2016 16:00
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Helsing posted:Jerome Davis, the guy you're quoting, also defended Stalin's mass show trials by arguing that there was nothing unusual about hundreds of accused prisoners simply confessing their crimes. I imagine that setting up a series of fake prisons with fake classrooms, workshops and theatres, and filled with thousands of highly trained improv skilled actors wouldn't work out any cheaper than real ones. I mean, the USSR collapsed 25 years ago, if Jim Carrey really had stolen Stalin's idea someone would have found a copy of the script.
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Feb 13, 2016 18:50
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Private property is property owned by a person (or corporate entity) for use mainly by other people. So if you were the sole owner of a factory, then that's private property. Because you're not actually using it, you might never even visit it, and the only people using it are the factory's workers.
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Feb 13, 2016 18:54
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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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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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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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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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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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Guns actually exist though.
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Feb 14, 2016 12:03
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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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Crowsbeak posted:Could I interject in here? So I was wondering if I would be considered a Socialist, because I believe an ideal society is where you have competing firms completely owned and operated by their employees, with firms operating through democratic when large enough, committees. Does that make me a socialist? While aslso allowing for healthcare to be covered by the government or through private insurers. Part of socialist thought, yes. The problem with an economy consisting purely of co-ops is that it's still going to be a market economy, with all the problems that causes - unemployment and underemployment being two severe ones. Having a co-op sector operating under market rules alongside a planned economy would be fine though, and probably to be encouraged. The co-ops would fill emerging gaps in products and services, and the planned sector would always be there to absorb the jobless and provide those services which you can't reasonably expect to be financially profitable (or being profitable without immoral behaviour). We see this in a prototypical form in the eastern bloc socialist countries, in a rapidly developing form in Modern Cuba, and a similar emphasis on direct worker control in Yugoslavia. HorseLord fucked around with this message at 13:46 on Feb 16, 2016 |
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Feb 16, 2016 13:42
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Tesseraction posted:Uh, Yugoslavia? They were big on worker's self management.
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Feb 16, 2016 16:04
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There's no problem with the tense, because Yugoslavia is still an example you can use. Knowledge of the country didn't vanish with the country itself.
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Feb 16, 2016 16:10
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tekz posted:One major problem I have with Marxism (other than all it's various documented 20th century failures), 70 years of success. tekz posted:is that the central text was written over a 100 years ago. Is there anyone who addresses how they'd go about establishing socialist/centrally planned societies in the 21st century and actually get them to work, taking modern technology, automation and globalization into account? They were writing about that from the 50s onwards in the USSR. I don't speak Russian so I can't pull one up, but this paper goes into what they were doing. InterNyet. They generally wanted to create the exact same computerized planning and logistics system you see at say, walmart, but apply it across all economic activity. This never got off the ground because of the difficulty in getting different economic ministries to work together. In the 70s there was Chile's Cybersyn, which they actually got online and proved it's effectiveness... about five minutes before Pinochet did a fascism.
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Feb 17, 2016 10:33
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NNick posted:This is correct. We fetishize commodities instead of seeing them simply in terms use value and as a process of production. Instead of thinking about something rationally, these items become irrational valued, in other words, mystical. It's also worth mentioning that key to this is alienation. Marketing is the alienation industry, it exists not to merely say "hey product X exists, go buy it", but to manipulate what we associate with that product. Intellectually, we know that a can of coke is the end product of an entire hierarchy of misery, with death squads and all kinds of horrid poo poo at the bottom. But what do we think of when we're reminded of coke? Those trucks covered in lights at christmas. We're deliberately alienated to such a degree that an ad campaign is more real to us than a known fact. Many people become vegetarians after visiting a farmyard slaughterhouse, but it's not like they didn't know they're eating animal corpse before then.
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Feb 19, 2016 01:50
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Disinterested posted:That's not what alienation really is from a Marxist POV, at least primarily. What you're talking about is more of an ideology/false consciousness angle. Oh, I'm know Marx's work on alienation is focused on the production side. But the way labourers are alienated from the products they produce ("I make cars all day for $10 an hour. Then they leave the factory and vanish from my world. I'll never own one") has a big symmetry with the way consumers experience those same products. ("I just bought a Caddilac. It entered my world when I walked into a fully stocked dealership, and I don't need to know who built it, or what they looked like, or how they live. It was just there when I needed it to be.") Commodity production is fake for everyone the whole way through.
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Feb 19, 2016 12:16
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Sheikh Djibouti posted:Actually that's a little closer to the notion of commodity fetishism. Though obviously it's ultimately the substance that's important, rather than the terminology. It's been a while since I slept, really
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Feb 19, 2016 14:33
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Celot posted:Is it unethical to exploit really bad people? Look, if you can take a bunch of useless nazis, and get some coal out of them, it's a net gain.
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Feb 20, 2016 12:51
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OwlFancier posted:There remains a particular dislike of homosexuality among the working class, I don't really know why. If I had to guess perhaps it might be because that's where you get the strongest religious fervor as well, because people don't have much else. It's much simpler than that. Just because people become aware of class politics, doesn't mean there's some magic change in every view and opinion they have. Everything reactionary is the same; if you don't hit it, it won't fall.
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Feb 21, 2016 14:34
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I'm not sure I'd be down with your inspiring vision. "Socialism is good, the last time we had it we built the NHS and killed shitloads of people in the colonies for demanding independance"
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Feb 22, 2016 15:21
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Ormi posted:Marxism isn't antisemitic in the least. There really were a relatively large number of Jewish Marxists and Leninists in Europe, which shouldn't be surprisingly, because the movements had been internationalist from their inception. In fact, Marxism was often taken to be the alternative to Zionism, and the two ideologies had a lot of bleedover and syncretism among Jews. Trotsky was Jewish, by the way. Stalin wasn't so much antisemitic as that he viewed Jews the same as any other minority population in the Soviet Union; they had to be contained and controlled to prevent separatism and sedition. The USSR adopted an official Anti-Zionist stance and established an autonomous oblast in the Russian Far East for Jews as an alternative. I don't believe there were forced population transfers of Jews within the Soviet Union, but Polish Jews were definitely moved to the oblast after Poland was partitioned, which turned out to be something of a blessing. To extend the point about Jews being treated the same as all minorities, this extended to the soviet affirmative action policies, where there was a focus on legitimising and elevating non-russians within society. Probably the best showcase of this was Minsk, Yiddish was borderline the most important language in the city, becoming the language of education, popular culture and local government. It'd be ridiculous and untrue to say they waved a magic wand and banished anti-Semitism, but there was real genuine positive intent and a great deal of progress there. Then the holocaust happened.
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Mar 5, 2016 17:09
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