Was it justified for the Bolsheviks to disband the Russian constituent assembly?

The people lead a revolution, as ling as they're proles. Whether they're industrial workers or farmer is irrelelant.

So?

Their victory was a victory based not on the will of the proletariat but the peasantry.

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Which is completely irrelevant.

There couldn't be a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat because there were too many peasants. Also what about the split in the SR that could have allowed the Bolsheviks to win.

thanks for letting us know you filtered a shit post you helped the thread and the board by being annoyed.

no

the SRs should executed all the Bolshies

Not for Marxists.

The SR's were basically liberals. They supported the provisional government and some of them even supported the war.

Announcing filters, reports, etc. is even more annoying. Nobody likes metaposts.

Then you don't have a dictatorship of the proletariat, the conditions for it clearly did not exist. The Bolsheviks had no democratic legitimacy.

Bolsheviks did nothing wrong

The Bolsheviks represented the true will of the workers of Russia. What they should have done was hold another election with the split between the SR accounted for. That way they would have one.

Those were a minority, but they were purged by the power hungry faggot that Lenin was, simply because they dared criticise him.

Because the ballots had been made before the split the right SR's were supper over represented. If they had done the election again the Bolsheviks would have one with a collation.

🎩
🐷

Something tells me you're not into nuance or history.

good, it was legitimate.

The provisional government was run by an incompetent bourgeois failure and was continuing the war that the working people wanted to end.

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kys

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Sounds about right.

marxists.org/archive/damen/1943/love-russia.htm

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Stop being infantile.

No.

Kek

Really gets those neurons firing

Kek.

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This but and what you're basically saying is
Also trade unions are not inherently revolutionary and can be reactionary, and the abolition of the councils came from their own agreement to assimilate for NEP. The rest is history we're all familiar with.

They're far more representative of the working class than some vanguard party.

The Vanguard party got 85% of the votes from the workers and yet it didn't represent the workers? Hmmm….

how can you possibly say that? they barely had a few months of power and still did plenty of good stuff. Freedom of speech, religion, abolished the death penalty, stopped Great Russian chauvinism etc

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No amount of political freedom will satisfy starving workers and peasants or soldiers fighting in a pointless imperialist war.

That vanguard party got just 20% of the total votes, keep ignoring that.

Read the wikipedia article.

I wonder if we want to move beyond said conditions whose opinion matters the most?

Russia was a rural backwater, the vast majority of its population were peasants, urban industrial workers were irrelevant compared to them. The whole point of socialism is to destroy the class system, yet you seem to believe industrial workers are more relevant than peasants. Read the communist manifesto.

The whole point of communism is toe establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. Not a dictatorship of the peasants.

You are making a value judgement based on what was and not on what direction the country should move onto (communism), te kretén.

How about you actually read it. Commiefesto has Marx repeating several times that the working class is the only revolutionary subject capable of overthrowing capitalism. Because its interests actually lie in its overthrow immediately.

You also ignore the fact that communism also emancipates the whole of humanity into becoming proletarian, as it consequently did by going from a feudal-capitalist system to a proper capitalist one (like literally everywhere else). In doing this the Leninist vanguard has probably been the most humane and non-violent, ironically, as it's clear you've never investigated what bourgeois revolutions that overthrew feudalism looked like.

The dictatorship of the proletariat is a means to establish communism. Russia didn't have the means to become one in 1917

They did achieve socialism though.

According to your own logic then communism can never get on the 'agenda' until capitalists make the right conditions. That's like saying to the workers of Russia should wait indefinitely until your "right conditions" arrive by the grace of the bourgeoisie.

Bullshit.

Here's where I'll disagree with Leninhat. "Actually existing socialism" is (was) code word for social democracy at the barrel of a gun. Russia's arguably come the closest ever to a lower communist (socialist) phase in the immediate period post-October revolution, but the last third of the War Communism era and consequently NEP and on were not socialistic in any sense.

marxists.org/archive/dunayevskaya/works/1942/russian-economy/index.htm

The NEP didn't last that long, tho. Lands were collectivized on a massive scale, the internal market heavily regulated, the surplus reinvested almost entirely.

No, they didn't. Perhaps for a very short period after the Bolsheviks consolidated their power, but as the bureaucracy ossified, it lost all of it's socialist characteristics.

Thats sort of what I meant. For a little bit workers self managed and they had working socialism. I don't know how to feel about the Stalin era because in that time the bureaucrats weren't exploiting the proletariat to live in luxury but everything after that definitely wasn't socialism.

The minimum of all characteristics of state capitalism is still state capitalism.

Dunayevskaya and her analysis illustrates everything NEP, post-NEP and on until the time of her publishing (1942) and not even the biggest of tankies will say things improved or were "more socialist" after that, so consider it methodologically and chronologically relevant to the question of whether Russia had socialism or just state capitalism under the red banner.

Under Stalin, the State (which wasn't a dictatorship of the proletariat and therefore was a stratified, distinct organ from the working class) owned the means of production and used that power to rapidly industrialize the USSR at a historically unprecedented rate.

You can thank Stalin for at least creating the economic conditions (industry, technical and scientific literacy, mass surplus of food, etc.) that would make socialism possible.

Under Khrushchev and the others the value the proletariat generated was given back to the proletariat and was not used on the bureaucrats themselves who lived somewhat modestly. The workers weren't exploited but I don't think it was socialism.

Sorry. Typo. Under Stalin the value the proletariat generated was given back to the proletariat and was not used on the bureaucrats themselves who lived somewhat modestly. The workers weren't exploited but I don't think it was socialism.

Come on guise. I know the so-called actually existing socialism had many perks and was far from as awful as bitter Trots and classcucked libs make it out to be, but you're doing me a triggering.

Not really, no. The value produced typically went to the Party bureaucracy which was then used to further industrialize the country and bring agricultural collectivization. Though granted some trickle back was inevitable, and there were some thing that the proletariat really did benefit from (mass homelessness solved under Stalin, rapid spike in literacy rates, mass growth of college-level education, etc).

This was not socialism, and the wealth produced for the most part was not giving directly back to the workers. Indirectly given back, that's a different story.

IMO this is where you reduce the term "state capitalism" to a buzzword, much like anarchists do with "muh authority." While both of these hold onto some truths on their own they function primarily to provide a stop-gap to deeper analysis, of choosing sides, essentially, and to draw conclusions. With you, this is palpable when you say: "immediate period post-October revolution." History didn't end there, and the Bolsheviks, for better or worse, implemented their policies as they did.

Not once in history such conjunctures (almost entirely reinvested surplus, massive collectivization, heavily regulated market, etc.) appeared outside 20th century communist projects.

My reason for preferring "actually existing socialism" (or the inane) "state socialism" over "state capitalism" is first and foremost a political one. These mistakes were done by communists and we should own up to the task not discard it with buzzwords.

I also don't buy the (Trotsky-reminiscent) "ossification of the bureaucracy" argument, because it misses the point, IMO. Bureaucracy will be always something we can't evade, and the Bolsheviks' fault was not creating an efficient and egalitarian bureaucracy, leaving the country in an unending state of emergency.

sounds a bit like glorified social democracy

I wasn't arguing that was the USSR qualified as socialist. On the contrary I believe it was only socialist (barely) for an extremely short period following right after the Revolution.

I simply argued here that it was due to Stalin that socialism became achievable from a materialist point of view. Not that they actually achieved socialism.

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kek

I also reject the Trotskyist theory of Russia as state capitalist, but not for its statement ("Russia is state capitalistic"), but for the rhetoric it uses ("Russia is state capitalistic because bureaucracy"). Big difference, and Dunayaveskaya and her arguments include not only a very different rationale, but also a direct critique of Trotsky's lacking rhetoric.

Read Marx's letter to Vera Zasulich. In it, he argues that a revolution in Russia must rely on the peasant mir (feudal-remnant commune) to set up communism immediately, and that it will otherwise fail. In other words, Marx was far more like Kropotkin than like Lenin. The former both created materialist accounts of history - the latter simply took the early conclusions of the first as dogma.

Lenin had absolutely no understanding of Marx and communism, and clearly neither do you.

That's because it is. Bolshevism is dogmatic social democracy at gunpoint.

Didn't engles respond later on saying that Lenin had a point?

For starters, you have an acute case of post-truth history. I'm guessing 1984-pedia is the vector. If you want to do actual facts about anything related to Socialism - do not rely on 1984-pedia, it is filled with propaganda bullshit.

"Disbandment" of Constituent Assembly is an attempt to rewrite history to legitimize subsequent invasion (by UK, France, US, Japan, and whoever else there was). If anyone disbanded Assembly, it was the alliance of Centre and Right politicians, who did it to prevent Bolsheviks from participation in coalition government.

Fun fact #1: As any proper democratic institute Constituent Assembly needed quorum (400 delegates out of 715) to function.

Fun fact #2: As of January 18, 1918 Constituent Assembly had ~410 delegates.

Fun fact #3: Left-wing (united bloc of Bolsheviks and Left SR) candidate for chairman - Spiridonova - got 153 votes, while Right-wing candidate - Chernov - got 244 votes.

Fun fact #4: During the vote for the agenda (i.e. if Soviet Decrees about land division, peace, marriage, etc. are to be discussed), votes split similarly: Right got 237 votes, while Left got 146 votes.

As any basic math should demonstrate, without Left delegates Constituent Assembly did not have enough people to be legitimate government.

Consequently, when Centrist SocDem SR and Right-wingers decided to boycott Bolsheviks - by using their majority to simply refuse to discuss any of the pertinent questions (aforementioned Soviet Decrees) - and Bolsheviks (with the allied Left SR delegates) had to leave Assembly, it was no longer possible for Assembly to function.

This is how Bolsheviks "disbanded" Constituent Assembly. Not by storming the Winter Palace with giant robots of whatever is it written in the modern propaganda pamphlets that are euphemistically called "history books".

Being Fascist does not make you an expert on Communism. Especially when you don't even know what is written in Manifesto.

You surely meant "Dunayevskaya and her rabid propaganda". It takes a very special "Socialist" to argue that Soviet soldiers should not fight Nazis in 1942.

Central Planning is not production for market exchange.

No, it did not.

Honestly? Most everything following the October Revolution was a huge clusterfuck. Lenin managed a miracle in maintaining the only socialist country alive, but many of these threats imanated from his own policies.

I mean come on, what the fuck did they expect was going to happen?

kropotkin_was_right.jpg

Now with trip

And with flag.

How I understand it Someone sent a letter to Marx asking about the agrarian question and if communism could be devolved through peasant communes. Marx said that if their was a revolution elsewhere in Europe yes. Later engles said that the Bolsheviks had a point in trying to go to communism without peasants.

It was a massive step forward and liberalism is a necessary stage. Russia was barely out of serfdom.

yeah because the massive famines the Bolsheviks caused were so much better

and let me guess, the invasion of Poland and the Baltic states wasn't imperialist at all

I've never heard of this. It's the logical conclusion of a historical-materialist analysis, however, that the peasant commune in Russia would be the basis of communism if a communistic revolution were to take place.

Prior to the conception of communism, there were 3 major instances of communism beyond the primitive realm to be taken as examples: the Iroquois Confederacy, 18th century pirate ships, and the Cossack stanitsa. This last one is of particular note because it showed how the natural evolution of the Russian peasant's mir, when deprived of feudal authority, would become democratic and communistic - rather than have the land be divided up by an aristocrat or simply passed down, the Cossacks elected an ataman to divided up the land between families according to farming ability and need. This bears more than a passing resemblance to the later soviets and other kinds of spontaneously-formed revolutionary democracies.

It is this kind of class institution of the exploited which could potentially serve as a basis for new society, much as the free markets and small businesses of the bourgeoisie in the West served as a basis to overthrow the remnants of Western feudal aristocracy.
marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/ni/vol08/no10/marx-zas.htm

Lenin was the biggest disaster for the left ever.

No, he does not.

> The analysis in Capital therefore provides no reasons either for or against the vitality of the Russian commune. But the special study I have made of it, including a search for original source­ material, has convinced me that the commune is the fulcrum for social regeneration in Russia. But in order that it might function as such, the harmful influences assailing it on all sides must first be eliminated, and it must then be assured the normal conditions for spontaneous development
However, harmful influences were not eliminated and normal conditions were not assured. 36 years later peasant communes were a total and utter mess. Russian Empire was following the route of Western Europe.

marxists.org/history/etol/newspape/ni/vol08/no10/marx-zas.htm
How many times do I have to beat a tankie over the head with Marx's own words to make them realize that they're Blanquists and not Marxists? Do you actually doublethink when you read Marx or something? Do you even read Marx, bro?

How many times do I have to point out the obvious things to the delusional Anarchists? That's one of the drafts, not an actual reply.

And read further:
> But for collective work to supplant piecemeal work – a form of private appropriation – in agriculture properly so called, two things are needed: the economic need of such a transformation and the material conditions to accomplish it.
It will not happen automatically. No material conditions -> no Socialism. And at least a third of peasants were using wooden ploughs even in ~1910. It did have neither economic, nor material conditions to survive.

That's what I have to ask. Read what Marx writes - he is not a prophet and never pretended to be. For something to happen, there has to be actual reasons. And Marx cites those reasons.

Whats the difference between Leninism and Blanquism?

No one's saying that he's a prophet. His ideas expressed here are, however, perfectly consistent with the historical materialism structure which he devised.
This is how he ended the final letter actually sent. His argument for why it can be pushed to happen is the modernization of Russia, if you read back up a little bit - namely, that the collective property of the peasants is being made the private property of the capitalists. Yes, it did not result in a revolutionary movement (partly because the Marxist notion that people ever spontaneously gain class consciousness in meaningful numbers is silly and is the only way to make the flawed dialectical model created for the evolution of ideas conform to material realities), but the point is that it could have led to socialism if you follow the way of thinking outlined by Marx.There's no reason to say that socialism must arise under industrial conditions. Read Marx's works on the communism of the Iroquois.
republicancommunist.org/blog/tag/karl-marx-the-iroquois/
You know, I too was once a Marxist (although always mistrustful of Leninism, seeing as both my parents escaped its results) and believed all the lies told about anarchists. Well, I was looking for more recent works on syndicalism (as I was a DeLeonist, an unfortunately dead current) and came across the videos of Noam Chomsky. Watching his lectures, I began to realize that anarchists had been smeared by every Marxist current unfairly just because of some stupid 200 year old feud. Every current takes the smear from the last one and makes it even more outrageous and detached from reality. Only when I read the likes of Statism and Anarchy and various essays from Anarchist Writers did I realize the many inconsistencies and flaws which had lied within Marxist thinking, even the libertarian variety to which I had previously adhered. Moreover, having given both sides a real chance to prove themselves by believing in them, I saw that the anarchist critiques (arising primarily from the semantic lack of distinction between state and government as well as the poor shoehorning of dialectics into material realities) were real and that the Marxist ones (too many to even count, but most of them along the lines of "anarchists are petty bourgeois market-loving bandits!") were mere smears. Is this to say that Marx was an unequivocally useless hack? No, his economics and class analysis is far superior to those of his anarchist contemporaries, and it even contains an ecological element (the lack of which is my main criticism of "The Conquest of Bread"). Overall, however, there are deep-running flaws at the base of Marxism itself, flaws which force it to either pervert itself into tyrannical state capitalism, become anarchism draped in different rhetoric, or resign itself to never achieving anything.
I tend to find Marx's drafts to be extremely useful because they help you chart his thought process. If you get the pattern right between his works and are conscious of whether it's the libertarian-idealist young Marx, authoritarian-materialist middle-aged Marx, or libertarian-materialist old Marx talking, you can almost always guess what he's going to say next and, more importantly, why he will. In fact, it's rather helpful in some senses that Capital Vol. 2 and 3 were drafts and not actually published because they allow the basic thread of thought to be fleshed out in a more modern context for the reader.

As far as I can see, nothing beyond rhetoric. At least Blanqui was honest about the dictatorial tendencies of state power unchecked and the need, therefore, to act for its abolishment from the moment it is instated.

If you are interested in actual answer (rather than pseudo-Anarchist interpretation), the answer is reliance on mass-movement.

Note how Bolsheviks did not hide, but were on the forefront of Revolution: from April Theses, to 4th July, to defence of Petrograd against Kornilov's junta and arguing in Soviets for Revolution.

I already quoted this and then you answered, but never actually addressed my point. Why? Are you autistic or simply disengenuous? I have to ask, because it is often considered a "good tone" for Americans - even self-proclaimed "Socialists"- to defend anyone by any methods, as long as it is anti-Communist. I see no point arguing with the latter.

Never existed. That's Anarchism you are talking about.

Now you are just posting some smart-sounding words without understanding meaning of those words.

And now we are getting personal again. Note that it was you who resorted to ad hominem - I only quoted you word-by-word.

No, you weren't. You already demonstrated your complete and utter ingorance.

And stop with the cheap rethorics, or I'll start writing how "I too was once a rabidly anti-Communist AnCap".

And we are over. It's a question of identity for you, not an actual discussion.

Pick 1

Are you actually insane? Do you seriously - seriously - think that anarchists are all ancaps, or that ancaps are even anarchists? You don't think calling people "delusional" to prove your point is ad hominen?
Dialectics rely on there being two objects which cancel each other out and synthesize simultaneously to create something previously unknown. This makes perfect sense for ideas, although as Stirner (who was likely Engels) proved, idealism collapses of its own accord when taken to its logical conclusion. The only way in which it can apply to the material world is if there are two irreconcilable divisions of people along material lines who are destined to enter into some conflict and, by the prevailing material circumstances of a time, result in the creation of a new system free of contradictions. This system in turn continues on until it develops its own contradictions as its development reaches a logical conclusion, the divisions reappear, and the dialectic continues. It's remarkable how close it comes to the reality of history, but it ignores the role of ideas (in particular, spooks) and how people will refuse to act because of or for them. It only works when you assume that the exploited will ever gain consciousness simultaneously either through the influence of a single class conscious institution truly representing all of them at once (impossible, read first chapter of Bakunin's "Statism and Anarchy") or the spontaneous reaction of the many against a last straw of further exploitation (see refutations of left communism).
It simply made me extremely suspicious of Leninists, and everything that I've read since has only confirmed that. No one's denying that the USSR made real advances in improving the living standards of people compared to what they had before, but the experience of my father growing up in it - that everyone lied to each other, that there wasn't toilet paper or free speech, etc - is that of a world which he wouldn't want to live in and bore little resemblance to what Marx spoke of. It's one thing for a Western historian biased towards capitalism to write about the failures of the USSR for the common person and another for someone who actually lived there to give their perspective on the good and the bad.
Seriously? Seriously? You're seriously going to tell me what my ideology stands for when you've never even read a work by an anarchist? Seriously? No way, this has got to be a joke. You're thinking of leftcoms, who explicitly identify as MARXISTS.
Alright, I'll take you at your word, although I've lost any remaining shreds of respect I had for your ability to critically think. Anarchists want for class consciousness to arise from everyday struggles being connected to a larger class one via institutions such as unions. Syndicalism, for example, has been a movement with explicitly anarchist roots. It relied upon converting workplace struggles for higher wages and the struggle of the homeless for basic living goods to, respectively, be transformed into workplace occupations and exercises in mutual aid.
theanarchistlibrary.org/library/emma-goldman-syndicalism-the-modern-menace-to-capitalism
Class consciousness isn't something which arises spontaneously from a haughty party intellectual explaining Das Kapital to a worker. It arises from anarchists showing workers how what works to the mutual benefit of the most exploited workers can be the basis for a new world, training for these workers to themselves take the helm and run cooperatives and mutual aid societies. It is, to put things in quasi Marxian terms, a bid for revolution expressed by movement to abolish the present state of things and create a new one.

(cont.)
Even Marxists accept that Blanqui advocated real action. The idea of Blanquism is basically to have a small group drive protest actions and other forms of resistance into a larger mass revolution.
jacobinmag.com/2017/02/louis-auguste-blanqui-france-paris-commune-revolution-marx/
However, instead of putting power in the hands of autonomous local assemblies (soviets) like how Marx supported the council during the Paris Commune, Lenin promptly shut them and did the Blanquist thing of - you guess it - building a bourgeois-republican state to implement "socialism from above". Admittedly, it was with the express purpose of connecting with the authentically Marxist revolution taking place in Germany, but if he had made it there, he probably would have lost power anyways, and what he called "state capitalism" was the NEP and not Stalin's program.

The NEP was necessary to build some sort of infrastructure in Russia. He couldn't return to the system they tried to implement before the Civil War because it had been so devastating for the country. If there wasn't any real material improvements for the workers than they themselves would overthrow socialism.

When I say 'it' I meant the Civil War.

Daily reminder: Dialectic is used for better understanding.

For example:
marxists.catbull.com/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch11.htm
> Thus, by characterising the process as the negation of the negation, Marx does not intend to prove that the process was historically necessary. On the contrary: only after he has proved from history that in fact the process has partially already occurred, and partially must occur in the future, he in addition characterises it as a process which develops in accordance with a definite dialectical law. That is all.
> It is therefore once again a pure distortion of the facts by Herr Dühring when he declares that the negation of the negation has to serve here as the midwife to deliver the future from the womb of the past {D. K. G. 502-03}, or that Marx wants anyone to be convinced of the necessity of the common ownership of land and capital {503} (which is itself a Dühringian contradiction in corporeal form) on the basis of credence in the negation of the negation {479-80}.

The core of Marxist philosophy is not Dialectics, but Materialism.

One cannot call himself a Marxist, if he relies on explicitly anti-Marxist (and factually wrong) interpretation of Marxism to understand it.

I meant to write after saying it that Stalinism was still state capitalism. If socialism cannot bring higher living standards from the getgo, however, I don't see why the people would adhere to it anyways.

And yet Marxists consistently criticize anarcho-communists in the line of Kropotkin's thought for their "fatalistic" and "mechanistic" materialism. If Marxism is any sort of materialist socialism, then Lasallian social democracy and anarcho-communism are Marxism as well. So, then, what is it which makes Marxism Marxism if not the dialectical structure? If dialectics cannot deliver a rough sketch at least of what will result from a given confluence of circumstances, then they fail as material abstractions and therefore fail to be of use. Then, we must identify where the flaw lies. I believe it does in that workers will never take the concept of class consciousness explained to them any more seriously than, say, religion or nationalism. This isn't to say that workers are dumb, counterrevolutionary hicks. They simply understand things, like all other people, as they're useful to them. A materialist pragmatism explains things as well as dialectics do when they work and extends beyond them in both simplicity and scope of explanation. Plus, it has potential to be made into a falsifiable model. Thus, the problem with Marxism is that dialectics, as understood in your explanation of Anti-Duhring's central argument, aren't materialist enough. You can't uphold them now.
Dialectics have become a way to shoo off any criticisms of Marxism's project, be they legitimate or not, by simply arguing that critics don't understand it right. If it cannot be proven or disproven that history ever follows dialectical patterns more than in a tangential manner, then the assumption that history runs on dialectics can't ever be taken seriously.
If I were to deny Galileo's physics ideas because I don't like a proponent of them or an aspect of them disagrees with my other beliefs, and so I therefore used Aristotelian explanations for phenomena and denied that others understood them when their flaws were pointed out, people would dismiss me as a crank. Why shouldn't I dismiss you as a crank? If the dialectic really was in motion, in the middle of happening and reaching a climax as Marx wrote Capital, shouldn't a communistic revolution in the West have swept away capitalism during its heyday? The trends of Marx's day continued until the 1890s, and have arguably continued since in different forms.
Marx at least has the excuse (if a poor one at best) that dialectics were the sole philosophical model of action beyond the universally shortsighted positivist models of his day. It's been almost 200 years since Marx wrote his works and used a dialectical concept of class conflict to escape the crosshairs of the egoist critique. We have to develop a more scientific, a more falsifiable, alternative, or otherwise we will fail to learn from the failures of Marxism and its self-proclaimed descendants. It's criminal not to. A lot has changed since Marx wrote his works, even if enough has remained constant that it convinced me to move to the far left.
Where did I mention idpol? Where did I make any sort of argument against communism? Where did I argue for dissent to simply be stamped out by moderation? Stop this.