Why do Leftcoms have a problem with this guy again? Anarchists I understand, but Leftcoms?

That's not what people mean by Internationalism, user.

Maybe the human cost was a little too big?

Especially the part where he opened a pandora's box of everyone's terror against everyone.

The cost of industrialisation alone was kind of bearable: it wasn't necessarily any worse than what the capitalists did, just more condensed so you maybe got more famine and stuff in a short time rather than 100 years of hellish work conditions.

Then give me a suggestion as in to what he could have done different as the leader of the KomIntern to spread socialism.

Are you offended because he used to word "motherland" in a speach in front of the Red Army to lift people's fighting spirit?

But the industrialization had to happen real fast.

Nazi invasion proved him right in that.

what I want to know is why Dunayevskaya was so butthurt about the SU
she was screeching "no defense of the capitalist society existing in Russia" while SU invaded by nazis

*was invaded by nazis

She was Trotskys secretary. Maybe she was little more than that.

I guess after they off'ed him in 1940 she was madly pissed

I don't know if you ever bothered reading about the subject, but Stalin essentially transformed the Comintern into an organ for personal political power, robbing it of all its autonomy and pushing strategies that were unlikely to work or rejecting strategies that were likely to work just because they represented an opponent's or rival's point of view.

Examples are many: he drove the Chinese communists into suicide at the hands of the KMT because Trotsky, a more serious proponent of "permanent revolution", believed a proletarian revolution could succeed in China while Stalin, for petty political reasons, adhered to a "bourgeois revolution" idea that not only negated some of Bolshevism's basic tenets but was also lead to the killing and arrest of thousands of Chinese communists at the early stages of their party's history. He followed a similar line on other underdeveloped, feudal, and colonial states as well, only abandoning it when it proved unworkable (and when Trotsky was no longer a threat). He forced the Comintern parties throughout the 20s to abandon the prospect of armed insurrection because it could give prestige to opponents such as Zinoviev, who first attempted such strategies in Reval. He followed a similar line with fucking Germany, denying Trotsky permission to go there undercover (after an invitation) in order to assist an uprising, dooming the uprising to failure as well. He also deliberately weakened the party because Germans in the Comintern would often side with Trotsky and Radek, and he couldn't have that.

And this is just a few examples in an overall trend of denying the parties autonomy or driving them into abstentionism or just plain suicide because that's what helped him cement his own personal power at home. How he worked against United Fronts in the first half of the 30s against the advise of other Communists is well-known, what's not as well known is that he gave Communist parties in places such a Brazil instructions to stage an uprising despite lack of popular support or funds, giving the bourgeoisie a pretext to ban those parties and kill/arrest/exile its leadership. The Communists parties aligned with Moscow were nothing but grey, unimaginative bureaucrats working under shitty instructions and adhering uniformly to horrible theories and strategies just because Moscow demanded. And those are just different manifestations of what Socialism in One Country is.

Did not abolish the Law Of Value, did not communize, did not allow for the self-organization of the proletariat. Anarchists and leftcoms are very similar, no matter how much they might deny it.
IDK, how about leave the workers' councils to self-organize and recreate the factory committees which were autonomously organizing and which Lenin and Trotsky shut down?
flag.blackened.net/revolt/talks/russia_fac.html
It's important to note here that what anarchists speak of as "democracy" as being workers' control has far more in common with the leftcom idea of organic, spontaneous, natural order.
In her "Theses Towards A Critique Of Democracy", Eden Sauvage states
That this conclusion to her ultra-left theses is so similar to the basic position of the anarchist article posted above goes a long way to show my point of them being similar in practice. The factory committees were absolutely an example of what both championed.

Now, where anarchists and leftcoms do differ on this issue is whether the operation of factory committees as a way of coordinating the economy could mean full communism (or something similar) established within the borders of the USSR. No, it couldn't. This means that I side more with the leftcoms, even if I take more from Kropotkin than I do from Marx. Why is that? At the time, they lacked the robust computational technologies to coordinate all those committees in a communistic fashion to industrialize quickly for war.

What ways could there have been to preserve the structures of communism while driving the country towards industrialization in a way which created neither a well-rooted bureaucracy nor a horrific dictator like Stalin? There has to be an answer to this question somewhere. Nowadays, the answer is simple - get a party to have support within theoretical workers' councils which promises to modify the computerized plan to focus on military outputs and raw industrialization. You could even have communism in just the USA and a few surrounding countries or in the former Eastern Bloc (plus China?), seeing as Comecon had the potential to be self-sufficient or close to it if organized properly. Could the USSR have even achieved a centrally-planned economy which had decentralized democratic organs with any semblance of efficiency?

Also this.

I don't even like Stalin but he is right in this regard, they can't push socialism in a feudal backwater like China.

>le Hitler x2!

But it can in countries like Russia and Brazil? Come on man.

And look, it's not question of whether or not you think he's right at this or that moment, it's the fact that one: he purposefully weakened communist parties for selfish reasons and two: he had his own standing as the main drive behind he strategies he pushed.

And it's difficult not to agree with him on certain moments actually, because during the factional struggles of the 20s he consistently changed views according to who he was fighting, and as consequence the Comintern policies zig-zagged completely. One day you were told to repudiate all other parties and stage an armed uprising against the government, in the other you were told to form Alliances with them.

ancom detected

What is this even supposed to mean? Are you falling for the conservative meme "the right are pro market, the left are against it"?

Has anyone attempted any kind of credible psychoanalysis on Josif? I wonder how the deaths of Nadezhda and Kirov affected his behaviour.

Showing willingness to move past capitalism instead of having a more moderate, conservative approach to socialist construction.

Funny how liberals and leftcoms alike believe in this myth.

Liberals base theirs on the "is-ought" fallacy which David Hume refuted and studied in depth when he developed his conception of spontaneous order, which I believe may have influenced Marx and his critique of utopianism. Marxism is precisely the opposite, "ought-is". Understand that the metaphysical nature of scientific socialism is intended to translate an idealist ought to an existing is. Proudhon, the first exponent of a scientific socialism (see pg 264 of "What Is Property?") relied upon the Kantian antinomy. Marx relied upon materialist dialectics, that is, Hegel turned on his head. Left communism is simply the final development of this dialectical approach to the matter.

Read a book.
I'm not even a Marxist, anymore

lel

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That could be legit the dumbest description of the Soviet Union I've ever seen. Read a book, for the love of god.

Socialism isn't capitalism with coops.

It also isn't "when the state does stuff". Cooperatives are at least closer (and arguably the only thing legitimately straddling the line between socialism and capitalism) because they provide a basic building unit of socialism, requiring only changes to the structures linking them to become socialist in nature.

"social democracy at gunpoint" isn't a new concept.

It makes about as much sense as "reformist Bolshevism". The split that gave Social Democracy the meaning we attribute to it today literally came out of the October Revolution, to call the state that came out of it Social-Democratic is really fucking stupid.

The parallels make sense to a degree. In both systems, you have the state giving handouts to pacify a population from which surplus value is extracted to benefit a property owner. Under conventional market capitalism, this surplus value is appropriated to be reinvested in further capital accumulation, while some is appropriated by the state for the redistributive purposes (there was a study somewhere showing that socdem policies don't actually reduce wealth inequality) and for the military. Under the USSR, it was much the same, even if the proportions were different, the workers did get somewhat better services overall, and the quality and amount of goods was far paltrier. They are fundamentally similar system, hence the name "social democracy at gunpoint".

Yes, the USSR made major advances in living conditions for the average person, perhaps more so than any other society in history given the timeframe and circumstances. Yes, they made huge strides in technology. That does not make them socialist, however.

Lenin and Keynes. The Leftwing of Capital.

Liberating the proletariat generally doesn't involve killing them in droves.

Saved

Because leftcoms are Marxists.

He killed millions of innocent people. Literally worse than Hitler. WTF is your problem?

Lenin was a fairly orthodox Marxist. He reacted to the given circumstances in what he thought made the most sense. It's clear major mistakes were made now.

Read Pannekoek's "Lenin As A Philosopher". Yes, he was an Orthodox Marxist - he didn't understand dialectics or their application to a materialist analysis of history!

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See what I did there?

Bullshit, there are about 200 tiers of evil between Hitler and Stalin of which Truman and Churchill fit right in.

I agree that Churchill was worse than Stalin, but Hitler? Come on. You best be joking. Hitler was an innocent little kitten in comparison.

Pick 1

NATIONISM ISN'T LEFTIST

Hitler didn't start it, ya dofus. England and France did by declaring war on Germany.

dufus*

nevermind the whole poland thing

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You can argue about that all you want, but it doesn't change the fact that he launched a genocidal war against the Soviet Union later.

ww2 might as well be fiction at this point tbh.

Which the Soviets deserved. They were killing themselves by the millions anyway, Hitler wanted to free Russia from the evils of Bolshevism.

I'm afraid you'll have to do better than that, Tankie.

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The truth lies here

And yes, Stalin WAS planning to invade. Hitler was smart enough to strike first (although a couple of months too late since the Russian winter ruined the whole campaign).

Wrong.

Admittedly I was semi-memeing to piss off tankies, I like Lenin, but Marxism-Leninism in it's historical practice has been, largely speaking, productivist Social Democracy with a bit of a DoTP thrown into the mix, but socially managed Capital is still Capital, no matter what cognitive dissonance MLs use. Also, this user is right it's worth giving a read.

Stalin only killed millions if you attribute to him all the deaths of the famine during 1932-33. And Hitler wanted to invade Russia for most of his life.

Also wrong.

You're a delusional fool.

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Stalin was an awesome character
youtube.com/watch?v=2bcmGnygysU

The gulags and the purges doesn't count? Fucking retard.

Hardly.

when Holla Forums will learn that if they want to discredit someone else proofs they have to give proofs themselves instead of just "lol NO i don't like it".

This is who you're arguing against. I mean fuck you even fell for the "if only Hitler attacked earlier" myth which he completely BTFO of.

He didn't though, and that is a problem.

I feel sincerely sorry for you

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Wow, the nation with fuck all industry achieved larger relative growth after building some than the nations which already had a ton. Surprise.

recommend me books senpai
checked

I think you are falling a little bit for the liberal meme of an "evil tyrant" doing everything for the sake of his own power. Even non-leftist historians like Kotkin lay down very correctly how Stalin was a genuine communist who genuinly wanted to bring about communism.

The China affair is probably the most well-known incident which drove a huge rift between the Bolsheviks - I admit, Stalin misjudged the situation there entirely. But you also realize that this happened in a time where communists got BTFO'ed everywhere, and when Western countries took serious measures against communist uprisings and a war with Great Britain was possible after the UK exiled the Soviet ambassador. The Soviets self-interest was their own survival as well. It's also pretty one-sided to blame Stalin for all the mistakes and failures the communist movements of the respective countries did. Are you seriously believing Luxemburg and Liebknecht did nothing wrong?

I don't think it was a good idea to send a "Judeo-Bolshevik" into a country in which military, justice system and police are taking hold of völksch, neoconservative ideas. The armed forced of Germany never habored the same hatred towards the aristocracy like the Russians, they unironically believed Wilhelm did nothing wrong and that the plutocrats and Jews backstabbed the Imperial Army.

So on one hand you said he didn't enough for Internationalism but here you are blaming him for trying?

This sounds like propagdana, no offense. Pretty vague, insubstantial claims. To assume Stalin even had the power to control and micromanage every communist party between 1928-1942 is ridicolous, he didn't even had full control over the Soviet Union itself.

After 1945 of course, Stalin was pretty much omnipotent and probably the most powerful man in the world. But was there any prospect of series of international communist uprisings in the West after 1945? I don't think so considering how well the West did at that time. And the Korean War would have just escalated into a nuclear war with the US, which is something you can not seriously find feasible.

I'd like to additonally say that what you could blame Stalin for was the stale, bureaucratic state the ML parties in Europe were after 1945. But this wasn't the cause for their Eurocommunist turn of them in the 70s. European countries straight out outlawed ML parties (KPD in 1956) so they were forced to take on a more parliamentarian cloak.

bump

I don't and I'm pretty sure that I'm not using the wrong flag given that I have criticisms regarding ML theory and I prefer decentralised revolutions.

It's literally the flag of Bordiga's Italian communist party, so it's probably the wrong flag.

There's no other leftcom flag.

I don't post with a flag, but I'm a Leftcom and I 100% agree. The issue is MLs take any and all critique of the USSR as Liberal anti-communism, no matter how mild, disciplined, or comradly the critique is. I don't think the USSR was "Red Fascism", I don't think Stalin was "totalitarian", but any criticism, or even the simple reality that the USSR inevitably failed in all of it's attempts to create Communism, is just too much for MLs to handle.

Hmmmm, its almost like the economic growth was due to the extraction of surplus value from the workers.
Really makes you think…

He mistook his bourgeois subjectivity for revolutionary objectivity.
/thread

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You do realize Hitler wrote about invading the soviets as far back as when he was in prison writing Mein Kampf right?

Hmmmm, it's almost like you need to concentrate some surplus product for extended reproduction
Really makes you think, especially when leftcoms should know about the Marx's reproduction schemes

they hate ussr thinking they were doing state capitalism

Not all the way left. Read Kerry Bolton