Why did the Soviet economy collapse? What was the reason the shops ran out of products and there was no more food?

The (nuclear) arms/space race had been going on for decades before Reagan put the final nail in the coffin.

But, indeed, the roots of the problem go back to Leninism/Stalinism, and their use of the military to expand the USSR. Had they just focused on making Russia itself a proper communist paradise, and let that serve as an inspiration for other nations to have their own revolutions (Trotskyism), everyone in Russia would have been very well fed indeed.

They had been overspending on the military since Khruschev was kicked out of power. Reagan made them to double down on a retarded idea.

Trotsky wanted to expand socialism into Europe by any means including invasion. Trotsky's reaction to the invasion of poland was "its about damn time"

Maybe I misunderstand his philosophy then? Or maybe he wasn't consistent throughout his life?

I thought the major disagreement he had with Lenin was that he thought that the proles in each given country should have their own organic revolutions, as opposed to using the USSR's military to take over countries and install Communist governments.

Also, what you call Trotskyism is essentially Stalin's Socialism in One Country doctrine which ended up being a total failure. Trotsky believed that building socialism in Russia alone would be essentially impossible and that the developed nations of Europe had to turn red alongside Russia before capitalism could be transcended.

Turn Red by what means, though? By a USSR invasion or by organic revolution?

If you truly think capitalism is an evil system/the countries you're invading have brutal dictatorships anyway, why wouldn't you be fine with overthrowing their governments and creating a better world?

They could have used their standing army for actually productive shit, like farming or infrastructure.

both. The revoltuion had to be spread to the industrialized parts of europe by any means.

One of the few actually good ideas Khruschev had was down sizing the red army in favour of increased nuclear weapons.

bourgeois propaganda

Because imposing a new system by force causes so much resentment that people don't participate in it willingly and it doesn't work like it would if (nearly) everyone understood why it was the best way of doing things.

People start looking for ways to game/cheat the system, and to horde power, because they don't get that everyone would be much happier if we all just worked together. This is exactly what happened in the Soviet Union.

That's really interesting. Why didn't that plan work then?

Imposing a new system by organic revolution also causes shitloads of resentment. Look at the attempts at counterrevolution that follow every revolution. The revolutionaries need to hoard power (atleast for a short time) to prevent the old system from coming back. This is the lesson of every revolution from America to France to Russia.

… is the definition of a revolution.

Utopian delusion.

What happened in the Soviet Union is that capitalism was imposed by force while communism wasn't.

A combination many things including gambling his standing within the party on idiotic agricultural plans and hardliners within the army and the security apparatus not liking his downsizing of the army.

The answer is both, essentially. For Trotsky this was worldwide, interconnected process. Dominoes knocking each other down, each strengthening the process as it happened. Obviously he hoped for the proletariat of each nation to rise up, but he also supported the invasion of Poland by the USSR. It was really about turning over the interconnected world economic system, not changing the governing party in each nation.

I consider all those revolutions to be failures. They did no succeed in creating free societies. In the case of the American revolution it was really just a change in management. In the case of the French Revolution it lead to a lot of bloodshed and then Napoleon. In the case of the Russian Revolution it lead to an effectively fascist military dictatorship with next to no freedom of expression.

It should be a non-violent revolution, where no one is forced to participate, but where we don't cooperate with anyone who insists on enforcing their property rights (go on strike indefinitely).

I want the delusional liberals to leave.

I think it was mainly profligacy with no checks to power, despite the enactment of the Politburo.
A central planned economy has lots of flaws unto itself.

For example: BAM, the 4,300km (2,700-mile) railway across Siberia cost the Soviet Union $14 billion and took 36 years to build. BAM was one of the projects that crippled the Soviet economy. Pretty much the Soviet Union had wasted its money on construction projects whose main purpose was to “utilise” government funds. This was made possible only by a political culture which deprived people of any say and substituted the narrow corporatist interest for the country’s.

You can see the same thing attributed to the wastage of the Sochi Olympics. Its pure retardation.

As an anarchist pacifist communist, I'm left of Marx.

Excellent post, comrade! You can't just socialize the fruits of labor, you must make decisions democratically if a socialist society is to truly serve the needs of the people and not the bureaucracy.

I would love a non-violent revolution if it were possible. The problem is that even if the revolution was bloodless, the old rulers wouldn't sit on their asses complaining about property right. they would organize and attempt to reinstate the old system by force. The October revoltution itself was relativly bloodless, especially compared to the liberal revolution in febuary. The attempt at counterevolutiuon by the whites is what turned russia into a blood soaked nightmare.

Autocratic doesn't mean fascist. Also lol at the USSR being a military dictatorship.

lol so much for a moneyless society

Might as well have just gone full capitalism then.

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Would they employ force themselves, or would they hire people to use force for them? If the latter, would that be possible if the vast majority of people were class conscious? I feel like it'd be difficult to find many people willing to fight their fellow countrymen, especially when they have TRUTH and LOVE on their side. You'd have to form an army of psychopaths and fools, really.

How many levels of revisionism are we on?

You're a loony. Bakunin had zero problems with violence, as he wasn't a retarded utopian who believed the bourgeoisie wouldn't simply abuse your commitment by non-violence to murder you in defense of their power. Being pacifist doesn't make you further left, it just shows you have no comprehension of what is actually at stake here. We've already seen how low Reaction will sink when it feels genuinely threatened. Why do you think these badges for "political enemies" are red?

I know that Bakunin isn't a pacifist, but he is an anarchist, which makes him, and myself, left of Marx.

Could you please enlighten us as the what EXACTLY the distinction is between ML and MT? There seems to be a tremendous amount of confusion.

Find me a successful revolution that was founded on peave, love and non-violence that stayed non-violent.

that and people who have been lied to about how the evil revolution is killing relgious faithful or how they are breaking down tradtional values or a number of other spooks. People who aren't part of the ruling class can also support the old system if they view it protects whatever is at the top of their priorities. (religion etc.)

They are both marxist and leninist but ML usually refers to stalinism and maoism.

Well, this is why I think Communists are foolish for rejecting religion all together. It instantly alienates people of faith, and ignores that religion isn't inherently hierarchical/exploitive, although the vast majority of Christian Churches certainly were/are.

But indeed, before any revolution there should be a period of discussion where we make the case for Communism in the clearest and most relevant terms, so that the vast majority of people are on board.

Only THEN, do we execute a well considered non-violent revolution.

A statement which has little more value than a dick measuring contest.

You're reversing cause and effect. Communists turned against religion because the religious establishment was part of the reactionary elite which struggled to maintain the current structure of society and rallied the masses to oppose the ideas that could liberate them. They didn't just do it because they were a bunch of fedoras.
Your conception of how to convince people is obscenely naive to the point where it's just painful to read. If it were so simple, don't you think someone would have done it by now? Read Althusser, Lukács and Gramsci.

No. Because communication technology is so much more advanced now, and also our understanding of psychology/marketing. Also, I think that psychedelics should be employed in this eduction effort.

I think it almost happened in America during the 60's counter-culture. I think we should try something similar again, taking into account everything we've learned since then, and also employing the latest communication technology.

My point was just that calling me a liberal is absurd.

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Really? Then how do you explain pic related?

nice in-depth analysis

Nobody here has expressed a liberal position! I think you're confusing anarchism for liberalism.

Read this and you know what he did

marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/

marxists.org/subject/economy/authors/pe/

fuck us if we want to yell at a Tolstoyesque anarcho-christian

/thread

you piece of shit. you dingbat. you slutty yutz. you naked fuck

I'LL KILL YOUR FAMILY

the fleshy veils of my anus unfold like a red rose at daybreak. i beckon you into my oasis.

he was a visionary. he was going to lead israel into a new age of peace, and eternal safety and security for the jewish people.

oh god i'm so angry. my breasts expand. they envelop the sky. i begin to dance

Engels frequently condemned the efforts of people who desired to be “more left” or “more revolutionary” than the Social-Democrats, to introduce into the programme of the workers’ party an explicit proclamation of atheism, in the sense of declaring war on religion. Commenting in 1874 on the famous manifesto of the Blanquist fugitive Communards who were living in exile in London, Engels called their vociferous proclamation of war on religion a piece of stupidity, and stated that such a declaration of war was the best way to revive interest in religion and to prevent it from really dying out. Engels blamed the Blanquists for being unable to understand that only the class struggle of the working masses could, by comprehensively drawing the widest strata of the proletariat into conscious and revolutionary social practice, really free the oppressed masses from the yoke of religion, whereas to proclaim that war on religion was a political task of the workers’ party was just anarchistic phrase-mongering.
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1909/may/13.htm

That quote is out of context. He doesn't mean that religion is a "drug" in the current demeaning sense but a way to escape the troubles of daily life, while Poets and Artists would rely on actual opiates to relieve themselves of their spiritual pain the working class would be relieved of their alienation by religious belonging.
It's a symptom, not an illness. But that (wrong) interpretation of it has often been espoused by actual communist leaders.

It's easy to be pro-religion (or at least apathetic towards it) when you are white male and therefore are not one of its targets.

black churches don't real

>>>/gulag/ you idpol cancer faggot… even as a joke this is beyond annoying

This is Wikipedia's interpretation of it:

~ en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opium_of_the_people#Meaning

Do you think it's accurate?

Black churches still promote homophobia and transphobia. I'm not trying to be all idpol here. I'm just pointing out that there is a reason why so many leftists are against religion and refuse to compromise on that position.

Not all religions are hierarchical/patriarchal/exploitive.

And in 1877, too, in his Anti-Dühring, while ruthlessly attacking the slightest concessions made by Dühring the philosopher to idealism and religion, Engels no less resolutely condemns Dühring’s pseudo-revolutionary idea that religion should be prohibited in socialist society. To declare such a war on religion, Engels says, is to “out-Bismarck Bismarck”, i. e., to repeat the folly of Bismarck’s struggle against the clericals (the notorious “Struggle for Culture”, Kulturkampf, i.e., the struggle Bismarck waged in the 1870s against the German Catholic party, the “Centre” party, by means of a police persecution of Catholicism). By this struggle Bismarck only stimulated the militant clericalism of the Catholics, and only injured the work of real culture, because he gave prominence to religious divisions rather than political divisions, and diverted the attention of some sections of the working class and of the other democratic elements away from the urgent tasks of the class and revolutionary struggle to the most superficial and false bourgeois anti-clericalism. Accusing the would-be ultra-revolutionary Dühring of wanting to repeat Bismarck’s folly in another form, Engels insisted that the workers’ party should have the ability to work patiently at the task of organising and educating the proletariat, which would lead to the dying out of religion, and not throw itself into the gamble of a political war on religion.[3] This view has become part of the very essence of German Social-Democracy, which, for example, advocated freedom for the Jesuits, their admission into Germany, and the complete abandonment of police methods of combating any particular religion. “Religion is a private matter”: this celebrated point in the Erfurt Programme (1891) summed up these political tactics of Social-Democracy. (ibidem)

So is it fair to say the Marxism is anti-religion, or not?

but they aren't white so checkmate liberals

Anti-religion is one form of idpol.

It is inherently atheistic and works towards the overcoming of religion.
It is not however anti-religion. See

The concept of lumpenproletariat is pure classism.

Would people ever engage in religious practice in a Marxist society?

Just so. The full context of the quote makes it rather more clear what he means.
He rejects religion for its incapacity to provide real solutions to the material sources of people's problems, whilst acknowledging it as a protest to real suffering. He, as a man of history, also realizes the historical of organized religion as, to use Althusser's terminology, as a fundamental part of the ideological state apparatus which upholds the current system. It is a criticism of religious institutions and a call to transcend it in favor of material solutions, not Marx saying religion is a drugged delusion of which the practitioners should be strung up.

Yes, except for Marxists.

Sure. But as is already happening in nations like Czechia or Holland, resolving people's material problems will usually cause them to gradually lose interest in religion as they no longer require the panacea it offers.

Wow. Well, I think that religion can be a revolutionary force. Indeed, I feel that only in a society based on faith can Communism/Anarchism work at all.

All men live not by the thought they spend on their own welfare, but because love exists in man.
I knew before that God gave life to men and desires that they should live; now I understood more than that.
I understood that God does not wish men to live apart, and therefore he does not reveal to them what each one needs for himself; but he wishes them to live united, and therefore reveals to each of them what is necessary for all.
I have now understood that though it seems to men that they live by care for themselves, in truth it is love alone by which they live. He who has love, is in God, and God is in him, for God is love.
Leo Tolstoy, in What Men Live By (1881), Ch. XII
The sanctification of political power by Christianity is blasphemy; it is the negation of Christianity.
Leo Tolstoy, Church and State (1882)
Christ says, "Do not resist evil." The sole object of courts of law is – to resist evil. Christ enjoins us to return good for evil. Courts of law return evil for evil. Christ says, "Make no distinction between the just and the unjust." Courts of law do nothing else. Christ says, "Forgive all. Forgive not once, not seven times, but forgive without end." "Love your enemies." "Do good to those who hate you." Courts of law do not forgive, but they punish; they do not do good, but evil, to those whom they call the enemies of society. So, the true sense of the doctrine is that Christ forbids all courts of law.
Leo Tolstoy, What I Believe (1885), Ch. III

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Simple user.

When communists say they must "seize the means of production" you should listen to them. That is the manifesto if you will.

When you have a "communist revolution", then the government is subverted by communists and overthrown. It becomes a government run by communists.

The communist then "seizes the means of production" as promised.

Private property is seized. Assets are seized. Personal belongings are seized. Businesses are seized. Wealth is seized. The rest is history….

What do you expect to happen? Governments to play fair and provide you a utopia? HA! That'll be the day!

Naturally you wont find much agreement and we're obliged by our theory to do antireligious propaganda, however we can work together and there is no hostility needed, and as Marxism teaches, that'd be counter productive even.

gimme dat fuckn toothbrush ya cunt!

We can work together to expose the evils of Capitalism, but not much more than that.

For you want to install a socialist transition state, while I want to establish anarchist, faith based communes/ashrams.

Word. Hence why anarcho-pacifism is the only viable form of Communism!

I have no problem with Christianity. In fact, I am quite fond of it: some of the Bible's story can genuinely move me to tears, I believe the decline of Biblical knowledge among the population is a cultural loss, and I greatly respect the work of the early church fathers and figures such as Wesley and Tolstoy. Nevertheless, I believe it is destined for a slow decline as we are currently seeing in Europe, and cannot offer an escape from oppression as it has been totally and fundamentally recuperated by the ruling system for the past 1700 years.

We need a new faith for a new age then, although such a faith should borrow liberally from Christianity. But there are valuable insights to be found in nearly every religion.

islam is the light and we are guide by the party of god, Hezbollah

To tell you the truth, this is why I would prefer anarchism over communism, because communism doesn't solve the whole government corruption problem, it simply transfers power to others who will take advantage of it and exploit it.

Not that anarchism provides utopia either, you still get groups/gangs that can form and usurp power as well over others not capable of defending themselves.

Why not both?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchist_communism

This is beyond retardedo

no u

Yeah that's not literally anything related to what he said there

What is this? Is it the "people in power will just agree with me even though their rational interests are completely contrary to my demands" ideology?

...

...

Yeah whoops i completely misinterpreted you as responding to the ghandi quote, time for sudoku

Actually, it's in everyones rational interest to cooperate together. For if we did, we'd surely invest our resources in actual useful/cool stuff instead of servicing the silly whims of the bourgeoisie, who themselves aren't even satisfied.

You might find this PDF interesting. ou can also read "Zenarchy" online:
theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kerry-thornley-zenarchy

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I have a feeling they'd want to join in when they see how much fun we're having. Maybe offer them some of the 'shrooms/DMT/acid we're taking as part of our practice.

That is a major omission, I agree.

Here, I'll give him some props in this post.

What's to stop them from taking shrooms outside any religious context? Also, I don't know about you, but I really wouldn't want to live in some hippie commune where the foundation of the community is acid.

Nothing's to stop them, of course. But I think most humans like to join in on a good time.

I would love to! Probably the best times of my life have been on 'shrooms/LSD/DMT. And I think it would be so much more fun if I could do it as a group practice out in the open in beautiful locations.

Shit argument, the US was payinv for just as many arms but they still produced more agriculturally and industrially

They can have as good of a time as they want, without any enforcement their faith will wither away in such a setting, all you'll be left with is some high dudes wondering if "there is something out there". Also, how do you propose to get to such a system from where we are today? inb4 "everyone would just look at some pot smoking hippies and abandon capitalism"

The Cold War was never a struggle between equals. The USSR was substantially poorer and weaker than the USA to begin with. The US could afford to waste money on military expenditures, the USSR could not. That's just a fact regardless of which economic systems were in place.

Slavery being abolished in the Borthern States and a massive expansion of the franchise are not relevant?

They destroyed feudalism and created ideals which remain relevant to this day. For all its violence (which was startes by the reactionaries) Robespierrr or Napoleon were far less oppresive than Austria or Russia, or even the UK.

.

I think Stalin and to a lesser extent Lenin were complete faggots, but you're retarded if you think they never improved anyone's life or that the tsarist regime wasn't just as bad.

Well that figures considering the US had significantly more domestic natural resources, and also that its corporations where extracting human and natural resources from the third world.

However, the USSR was foolish to get into a pissing contest with the US, and also for its military adventurism, most glaringly its invasion of Afghanistan, which the US turned into an expensive quagmire that sealed the USSR's fate.

Bollocks. The way you're using "high" as a pejorative is laughable. Psychedelics allow people to enter into heightened states of spiritual awareness. This is well supported by anecdotal evidence as well as scientific studies.

Indeed, when people realize just how satisfying a life they can have just by hanging out, making/consuming art, and taking psychedelics together, they will not want anything to do with capitalism. When people realize that we could all work for a few hours a week to take care of all of our material needs, why would they want to slave away for their entire lives?

Workers of the world… Relax!
A philosophical treatise against the practice of forced labor for income.
youtu.be/Ie5zO-mF31M

OK, fair enough. I really am not knowledgeable enough to say what things were really like for your average person before and after those revolutions. Perhaps they were stepping stones towards something better.

It's political economy never allowed for growth and a rise of a standard of living compared to Western capitalist countires. Czechoslovakia and East-Germany were just as wealthy as countries like Austria pre-WW2, but by the 80's they had fallen far behind. Soviet-style planned economies were extremely inefficient.

Because social democracy is built on the contradictions of capital, user.

Well it's easy to grow and increase your standard of living when you're enslaving the Third World and raping its natural environments for resources!

Then why didn't this happen in the hippie era? And what is to stop the nations to enforce their current rule thorough the usage of drones and the like? Read this.

What does this even mean? When I google it all that shows up is new age bullshit. Highly doubt one can even prove such a concept through scientific studies.

Many capitalist actually spend their youths doing that.

The USSR had plenty of resources, it had similar or larger oil reserves, uranium, timber, coal, plenty of arable land etc. Resources aren't an automatic source pf wealth, there's pretty much no correlation between having them and being rich.

The USSR had plenty of sattelite and allied regimes in the third world.

They spend their youths spending a lot of money too, usually.

Czech Republic also lived through communism though so they won't fall for that shit a second time, they know how awful it is.

The USSR had plenty of allies and puppet regimes from which it could get resources. Again: resources in and of themselves do not make you rich.

An extremely intense anti-psychedelic propaganda campaign and the violent War on Drugs.

If they were to start droning their own citizens wouldn't a huge number of people stop participating in the system (going to work, paying taxes) out of disgust? They'd lose their moral authority if they tried that, and then they'd lose their wage-slaves.

~ newscientist.com/article/dn9522-magic-mushrooms-really-cause-spiritual-experiences/

They do, but my point is that psychedelics don't turn you into an enlightened spiritual communist still stands, I've seen neo-nazi skinheads who've been in K-holes, and that's the pretty much the pinnacle of the spiritual experience of psychedelics.

...

All I'm saying is that if the US/Capitalist economy had access to more resources, then they wouldn't necessarily have to be using them more efficiently to be more prosperous.

So which side had more resources? Including human resources? Clearly the West/US/Capitalists.

Try to stop me :^)

Ketamine isn't even a psychedelic… its a dissociative. Clearly you're not well versed in this topic. Does taking a psychedelic necessarily lead to spiritual enlightenment? Of course not. But they can be a tremendously powerful tool as part of one's practice. Before taking shrooms I was an atheist anarcho-capitalist. After taking shrooms I became a theistic communist.

So why won't this happen again?
In a war between an efficient military state and pacifist hippies high on acid, I would do my best to stand in line for the time being.

It might happen again, and it might not. Certainly the material conditions are quite a bit different now than then.

The power of the ruling class is still present

They only have power to the extent people cooperate with them.

Made me trip harder than any psychedelic I ever took, even DMT pales in comparison. Don't be a pedantic nerd, language is just signifiers after all.

It's the sublime, some are dragged away by the awe, others simply open their eyes and let the wave collapse around themselves. This isn't limited to psychedelics, and in a lot cases it seems to me that people use it to bolster the ideology they already had "I all saw it so clearly and was so overwhelmed by it", yeah duh, it's your own mind without the filters in the first place.

This is true. It's like how people often interpret scripture/philosophy in a way that confirms the beliefs they already hold.

But that doesn't mean that works of philosophy and scripture are totally worthless, just that people don't necessarily get their true meaning. But for those who DO get the true meaning its tremendously helpful.

As stated earlier, most people would side with the current system over a movement with zero chance to beat them. If you want people to side against capitalism you better have a plan if shit hits the fan.

Anyways, I need to get some sleep. This is retarded utopianism and it makes me sad there are some people who get this view of the left because of people like you. Good luck convincing Chinese factory workers as well as the US army that they just need to relax and get high. Read the file I posted earlier, it's really short.

You are all stupid people in this thread, just centralize more like good little workers
Sell a t-shirt with Che on it while promoting porky
Accept corporations (monopolies only) to your heart
Everything will work itself out
Oh and this is a gun-free zone, turn it in

wages were growing faster than production of consumer goods, the result was that the money supply got too big

It's not that it worthless as a means of learning, it's that it reveals things you already think, but much clearer than usual.

An example is a bad trip I had on some shrooms, I got stuck in thought-loops and blamed myself for everything, that I was disappointment and so on, not because I really am all that I thought, but because of the guilt I subconsciously feel became unfiltered.

...

If all the Chinese factory workers went on strike "relaxed" as you say, that would deal a massive blow to Capitalism, no?

Did not you learn from that experience as well?

I think we've determined in this thread that it's because psychedelics were illegal there.

you could simply use the word liberal

I don't know, it didn't came as a complete surprise to me, neither was it wholly a horrid experience because it also allowed me to think further than I normally can. I didn't so much learn anything new as it became clear to me how massive my subconscious issues are, that I was directly witnessing what it is otherwise filtered into obsessions and feelings that are part of my sober state.

Gorbachev's reforms gave state enterprises more autonomy and turned the economy into capitalism with wage labor and the like.

Coupled with regulatory failure, it was more profitable for the managers to buy their own product at state prices and export. This led to shortages and creation of oligarchs everybody hears so much about.

Sounds to me like you learned a lot about yourself. That sort of self-knowledge is tremendously helpful, regardless of what endeavours one wants to undertake. I'm sure that experience will help you be a better revolutionary.

How the hell is anarcho-pacifism supposed to work? After we seize the means of productions do we just let the police cart us off?

How the hell are the police gonna get paid if everyone is on strike?

Probably by the capitalists. We'd need to be on strike for a damn long time before they ran out of funds. This is also assuming that EVERYONE will go on strike, which would take some pretty serious organizing.

If your action plan involves everyone doimg as you want them to voluntary, you might be suffering from mental retardation. It can also be a side effect of being a pot smoking hippie.

Also the police will be all robots before you know it.

Shooting some of them will scare of most of the rest. Unless you are ready to fight back, it will be but an extatic moment.

And what will they purchase with this money, when nobody is shipping products to stores?

You are absolutely right. Now go ahed and tell some coal miners to stop working and smoke pot.

Top fucking kek
You never had any food faggot.

But if even a relatively small fraction of the workers, say a quarter, could manage to hide out somewhere for a few months that would deal a crippling blow to the Chinese economy. They would find themselves in a massive recession and no one would want to invest there. The whole system would collapse as capitalist's investments became worthless. The way would then be cleared to establish a socialist community.

...

It would have to be a critical mass of workers going on strike all at once, say 20-30% of the workforce. Not just a handful of coal miners.

Trying to predict what millions of people need, where they need it, when they need it, and at what price they can afford it, is an incredibly complicated problem.

In a free market the consumers themselves solve this problem, with each individual doing their own small part simply by being allowed to buy what they want, affecting supply and demand. Private businesses adjust stock accordingly and if they aren't efficient they fail.

In the soviet system the government tried to predict all this by themselves with quotas of goods being requested and shipped. Their bureaucracy was bloated and inefficient. With this shit you would end up with one region getting tons of tires when they need food, and another region getting tons of food when they need tires.

I have no problem with mass strikes. But what is the plan? What demands should the workers put forward? Do you expect the workers to just quit their jobs permanently and starve their familiy? Also, in most countries there is an army of unemployed ready to take their place. A collapse of societies current power structure will mean a regression into barbarism or a police state, not some kind of utopia.

A free market is horribly inefficent at meeting human needs. It's only merit is being possibly better than the soviet retardation.

Can you list a more efficient system? I'm genuinely curious.

Communist revolutionaries should amass a stockpile of food and supplies before a general strike so that people could strike for a sufficiently long time, say a year. During that time the strikers would come to a consensus about what the society they want to build on top of the rubble of the old regime would look like. They would use the collected wisdom of the ages, along with psychedelics as guidence.

But… it didn't collapse. It was a behemoth of inefficiency and mismanagement, but it could be sustained for an undetermined amount of time.

This supposed collapse of the Soviet economy is part of a larger myth, that of the Soviet collapse. You see, the thing with the word "collapse" is that it implies the system was unstable and was bound to fail at some point. Whereas the Soviet economy – fuck, like the entirety of the USSR –, shit as it was, had stability, but was deliberatedly dismantled by the Communist Party itself. The exact same applies to Chinese communism, altho with very different methods.

I'm no messiah, but some system where peoples needs are actually concidered. Currently they are not, only your buying power is concidered. This can be done through some kind of labour vouchers that are exchanged for goods that are still scarce, while those who exist in abundance could be freely distributed. You can have the necessary decicions to be made democratically, or centrally planned using computers.

Of course, none of this has ever been achived as of yet. In fact you can at any point in history point to the dominant mode of exchange and production and say that this is the best system hitherto.

This is a very interesting perspective. Could you link to something about this please?

I never read anything specific about it because it's the actual, official history. It's just how I saw the patterns and interpreted them. The biggest agitators for breakup and capitalism and the mobsters who became obscenely rich overnight by buying state property for pennies, they were inevitably well-connected apparatchiks. There actually were protests against breakup and capitalism, not to mention the notorious referendum. The people just plain wanted to keep things as they were. But it didn't matter because Porky had already set in motion a palace coup, and welcomed their Russian brethren into the fold.

It all boils down to one cynical truth: the Party elites realized they would have it much, much better if they were capitalist elites. It's that simple.

So basically Trotsky was right about the undemocratically appointed apparatchiks forming a new ruling class?

East Germany definitely had issues with stagnating prduction, but I think it's unfair to blame it entirely on the Soviet-style economy. The region started out with over 40% less GDP per capita, and Russia forced them to pay millions in war reparations ala WW1 - meanwhile West Germany was getting millions in US aid.

Trotsky, Orwell, Djilas, the anarchists and God knows how many others.

I reckon that democracy isn't a sufficient condition for healthy socialism, but it is a necessary condition.

>But right of Bordiga

they were communist

Even if we assume democracy means majority-rule (it's mostly distorted into majority-participation) this is still bullshit. There is no evidence whatsoever for the idea that the despotism of a million is in any way less bloody or chaotic that that of a thousand.

This is not a condemnation of mass power, just a reflection that the quantity of votes is the inferior of quality. The oligarchy-democracy distinction is meaningless.

anarchists really are retarded

Because Marxism-Leninism doesn't work.

What the fuck is with all the Soviet sympathizing here. There's a lot more of it then there used to be.

THE CAT HAS YOUR PIPE

We're not all the same, you moron.

pls stop posting and go watch a movie or something.

Anarchists are more radical than Marxists. Therefore they are more leftist than him. Does anyone deny this?

Reddit exodus.

What does this even mean? How are you going to measure a term as vague as "leftism"?

That's a good point, but the trick is, how do you determine the quality of a vote? An oligarchy most definitly does not guarantee quality, but democracy at least guarantees fairness. It's not possible to objectively gauge quality of a vote, so you rely on quantity instead, for the sake of fairness. I reckon that the next step in that direction would be the old Athenian way: democracy by lot. It's as fair as it gets, but obviously quality is clearly at extreme risk, even if we can't measure it.

There was an author that wrote about various systems of elections, separating them into various categories, like representation, fairness etc. and IIRC he came to the conclusion that it's literally impossible to have a system that satisfies all these criteria. I can never remember the name of the bastard.