Why did this guy ban all party factions and destroy the power of trade unions? How can he even be called a socialist...

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Socialism isn't
Socialism is the low stage of communism, the stage of revolution against capitalism.

What did you expect the DotP to look like?

Like a dictatorship of the whole proletariat
not a dictatorship of the ruling bourgeois party

How do you prepare for a 14 country coalition that's about to crush your revolution, genius?

Socialism is worker's control of MOP you vulgar Marxist

that would be nice
but without a vanguard, there is no way to effect change
This vanguard will eventually become a new state or ruling class.
Not until Socialism is achieved can the whole proletariat rule.

And how can you have communism when the MoP is monopolized by an elite and there is an alienated state powe with de facto private property rights?

There is no socialism without democracy and direct worker control of the economy.

The Vanguard will never cause effective material change

history says otherwise

You're the vulgar Marxist, go back to your Wolff threads. Worker's "control" is a vague concept, whereas the USSR was without a doubt not capitalist.

Well for one, Marx was 100% in favor of monopolization, and he thought that communism would involve a highly centralized form of industry just like capitalist monopolies. As for your "monopolized by an elite" bullshit, there was no exploitation in the USSR, the party did not own the means, they only managed things.

I'm not a Marxist vulgar or not.

I can understand, that a vanguard party is necessary, but in the future, there must be some mechanisms be implemented into the theory, which avoid the misuse of power. There were too many innocents killed in the past. This is my biggest concern on democratic centralism.

fair

Be specific. You just want less brutal purges? Or what?

Exactly.

Well everyone agrees with you, we want as few innocents harmed as possible. However, while you can put up safeguards, there is simply no guarantee they can hold up during a revolution of any kind, centralist, anarchist, liberal, or whatever. Desperation and expediency can melt political barriers in the blink of an eye. This is the thing about revolution: it's extremely violent and scary, and the only reason we want it is because we know the alternative is ultimately even worse.

you are asking the right questions user. i hope more people will realize that authoritarianism and eliminating dissenters always ends up in tyranny.

not a stirnerite but pulling vague concepts out of your ass because you lack an argument is just pathetic.

Considering the situation of Russia at the time, specifically the economic and political chaos and underdevelopment, I can't really blame him, despite the fact that the repression clearly bled over to other socialists and innocents. I do not believe the RSFSR would have survived the infiltration attempts or invasions without a highly disciplined and authoritarian attitude. The NEP was also a sad (temporary) necessity, as I highly doubt capitalists would have provided the tools for mass industrialization to a nation openly hostile to them, rather than yielding to them, but then again, I don't know how much the situation had changed before the NEP was abolished.

I wonder how the Soviet Union would have been with his proposed restructurings of the 20s.

Same reason he betrayed all his promises and convictions: he thought it was needed to keep the one socialist State standing. Whether his guess was right or not is another matter.

Lenin was the ultimate "the ends justify the means" sort of figure who then saw the intended ends collapse before he could do anything. He did whatever was necessary to bring Russia under Bolshevik command so they could help out the other revolutions and set off the chain reaction that would topple capitalism. After that failed, he became somewhat more mellow and started advocating for the introduction of government organs which limit the party's power controlled directly by the workers and the destruction of the bureaucracy and whatnot, but by then he was so ill he could be ignored by the party elite. From his perspective what he did was reasonable, but from our perspective we can see that he sacrificed all his principles for nothing and it all ended up in failure.

"But a real socialism, it is argued, would be controlled by the workers themselves through direct participation instead of being run by Leninists, Stalinists, Castroites, or other ill-willed, power-hungry, bureaucratic, cabals of evil men who betray revolutions. Unfortunately, this “pure socialism” view is ahistorical and nonfalsifiable; it cannot be tested against the actualities of history. It compares an ideal against an imperfect reality, and the reality comes off a poor second. It imagines what socialism would be like in a world far better than this one, where no strong state structure or security force is required, where none of the value produced by workers needs to be expropriated to rebuild society and defend it from invasion and internal sabotage.

The pure socialists’ ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed.

The pure socialists had a vision of a new society that would create and be created by new people, a society so transformed in its fundamentals as to leave little room for wrongful acts, corruption, and criminal abuses of state power. There would be no bureaucracy or self-interested coteries, no ruthless conflicts or hurtful decisions. When the reality proves different and more difficult, some on the Left proceed to condemn the real thing and announce that they “feel betrayed” by this or that revolution.

The pure socialists see socialism as an ideal that was tarnished by communist venality, duplicity, and power cravings. The pure socialists oppose the Soviet model but offer little evidence to demonstrate that other paths could have been taken, that other models of socialism–not created from one’s imagination but developed through actual historical experience–could have taken hold and worked better. Was an open, pluralistic, democratic socialism actually possible at this historic juncture?"

"Decentralized parochial autonomy is the graveyard of insurgency–which may be one reason why there has never been a successful anarcho-syndicalist revolution. Ideally, it would be a fine thing to have only local, self-directed, worker participation, with minimal bureaucracy, police, and military. This probably would be the development of socialism, were socialism ever allowed to develop unhindered by counterrevolutionary subversion and attack. One might recall how, in 1918-20, fourteen capitalist nations, including the United States, invaded Soviet Russia in a bloody but unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the revolutionary Bolshevik government. The years of foreign invasion and civil war did much to intensify the Bolsheviks’ siege psychology with its commitment to lockstep party unity and a repressive security apparatus. Thus, in May 1921, the same Lenin who had encouraged the practice of internal party democracy and struggled against Trotsky in order to give the trade unions a greater measure of autonomy, now called for an end to the Workers’ Opposition and other factional groups within the party. “The time has come,” he told an enthusiastically concurring Tenth Party Congress, “to put an end to opposition, to put a lid on it: we have had enough opposition.” Open disputes and conflicting tendencies within and without the party, the communists concluded, created an appearance of division and weakness that invited attack by formidable foes.

Only a month earlier, in April 1921, Lenin had called for more worker representation on the party’s Central Committee. In short, he had become not anti-worker but anti-opposition. Here was a social revolution–like every other–that was not allowed to develop its political and material life in an unhindered way."

where this quote from

"Left Anticommunism: the unkindest cut" by Michael Parenti

greanvillepost.com/2015/05/23/left-anticommunism-the-unkindest-cut/

it is by no means vague, control = use = ownership, state ownership in dictatorship is pretty much a fascist sellout, by 60's lot of ussr colonies displayed major traits of fascist reactionism

stfu ban all party factions only marxism-leninism is allowed

Stop using that shitty term you've taken from wikipedia, it's a so vague a mutualist and a maoist could agree they want that despite having completely different concepts once you go deeper.

It was a rational and understandable response to unify the nation in the face of global capitalist reaction.

It is literally impossible to build socialism under a nation-state democratically. Geopolitical and economic constraints will eventually mandate some form of centralization of power or dictatorial control.

In what sense was it though, if seen this repeated over and over but nobody really argues exactly why banning other parties, factions, trade unions was necessary in order to fight the capitalist reaction and counter-revolutionaries.

The point was all "the power to the soviets", and the communist party and the soviets had a complicated relationship, mostly because the country was in a state of emergency for much of its early life.

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Sure, can you explain what you mean by this? Private property and surplus extraction didn't exist. Production for profit didn't exist. The Soviet Union had cooperatives in agriculture, where the workers were completely independent in their decision making. In many state firms, the manager was often directly recalled or reported on if he didn't represent the interests of the workers. Most firms had worker councils as well. Only worker organizations would be able to nominate delegates for the soviets. And most importantly, the trade unions had a central organ with which they could reciprocally negotiate central planning and salaries with the Gosplan. How is this not worker control?

If worker control is just workplace democracy for you, well, the Soviet Union had this, and workplace democracy alone doesn't constitute socialism. Sure, some other socialist countries had more workplace democracy, like North Korea.

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Yeah he was in favour of monopolization by the workers, not a state that was completely outside of worker control.

I don't know enough about the specifics of the Soviet economy to comment on whether or not there was exploitation, but there was definitely an elite. The problem was that political power was almost totally denied to the average worker, and concentrated in the hands of bureaucrats and party brass, it was an authoritarian oligarchy plain and simple. Given that oligarchies are almost always exploitative, I don't think it is out of the realm of possibility that this one was as well. At the very least you could say that Breshnev and co never experienced shortages of luxury goods like the rest of the population.

I was talking about this from an Anarchists perspective, as I was responding to one. From a Marxist perspective, the Soviet Union had no private property, no market, no production for exchange which means no commodity production EXCEPT for agricultural cooperatives, no wage labor and mostly production for use and worker-based allocation of goods.

The soviet union knew state firms, where access to productive material was limited to those employed there,
for the purpose of valorizing their labor on the national market, as well as even the international in many cases,
selling the surplus of their labour in value with to-be-exchanged goods measured in Roubles stemming from wage-labour.

The above is just as divorced from socialism as this is: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_management.

Challenge your terrible understanding of political economy through (supposedly) Marx by reading the attached PDF I posted. Both Lenin and Bukharin knew better too BTW.

Which period of the USSR are you talking about? This is totally wrong. I already said that workers had more ways to politically emancipate themselves than in the west, and the word "bureaucrat" is an absolutely meaningless term. What does "bureaucrat" mean? Someone who works for the state an allocates goods? Then fucking everybody working for the state is a bureaucrat. Then Revolutionary Catalonia had a bureaucracy. This is useless definition. Most of the infamous "bureaucracy" didn't appear before Krushchev strengthened the independence of firm managers that from this point on acted as quasi-capitalists (production for exchange, underlying profit motive) which gave rise to a class of middle men responsible to mediate between the state interests and the managers interests. It's when you have quasi-capitalist relations persisting in a still entirely state-owned and centrally planned economy, it creates a dichotomy, which created this big group of "apparatchik" people always love to rant about when they talk about the Soviet Union.

The way the French did. National mobilisation.

So yeah, speaking of ol' based Bukharino. In a text with Preobrazhensky, he masterfully does away with later notions of "socialism" as they were put forward by Stalin, years before his collectivization (of capital) campaign:
(marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1920/abc/03.htm#019)

It's hilarious when one of the biggest engineers of the pragmatic NEP (state capitalism) dispels the pseudo-socialism that succeeded it.

No shit. It wasn't communism. You can't abolish restrictions to production as long as you still have scarcity (and a capitalist siege, mind you).
There was no national market, neither was there a labor market. The USSR didn't have unemployment. The prices a Kolkhoz was selling its surplus to the state was under a fixed price system.
Again, there was no labor market. Goods weren't exchanged, they were allocated, and workers had access to a certain amount of them for consumption. Money in this case is more of a credit point system.
Guy had a terrible understanding of the economy as he wanted the NEP to go on forever, I'm not in favor of his right-wing policy in regards to that.

Both of you are wrong, faggots. Socialism is what happens after the revolution, when capital is abolished. The revolutionary stage is the DotP

If you've knuckleheadedly taken your reading from Marx to define socialism as "when capital is managed through the state collectively and where there's the money-capital (rouble) form" then you're probably beyond any help on my part. God bless you.

Lenin was literally a CIA puppet whose job was to build a country that could be used to dismiss leftists of the future. The entire cold war was a massive psyop to make the west and especially Ameicans shit-scared of commies.

I thought it was supposed to be a German puppet.

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Makes sense

Yeah you said that, but didn't back it up with anything, you simply claimed it. How do workers have any emancipation if they get crushed any time they try to organize themselves intependently of the state capitalist approved channels? Oh but let me guess, those were all a bunch of Bukharinite-Trotskyite-capitalist-counterevolutionary-ultraleft-anarchist-fascists am I right?

Yes they are, but bureaucracies are hierarchical organizations, meaning that the USSR was a dictatorship of the bureaucratic elite.

Yes it did. I don't know what I said to lead you to believe I was an anarchist.

Maybe so, but are you seriously going to sit there and tell me that there was genuine democracy under Stalin?

Well I fundamentally disagree with you that the underlying laws of capital even operated in the Soviet Union under Stalin in the first place, so no, I don't read Marx like that.

Are you serious? I mentioned cooperatives, soviets with only workers as delegates, worker councils, trade unions, etc. Do you want sources? I am on my phone but you could take a look at "Soviet Communism" by Sidney and Beatrice Webb, "Working versus Talking Democracy" by Davidow, "People's Control in Socialist Society" by Turovtsev, "Man and Plan in Soviet Economy" by Rothstein and so forth. It's hard for me to debunk such an obfuscating generalized statement, if you have quarrel with a specific aspect of how the USSR did things then specify it please.
I guess all the bureaucrats that got removed from their positions by worker activity during the construction of Magnitogorsk didn't exist then. You also just contradicted yourself in your statement.
Again, I don't know what you are exactly referring to, but looking at the 1936 Stalin constitution (which was drafted through sending officials all over the country who asked the people how they would like things to be organized) it seems to me that this one was actually more democratic compared to how things where done before, looking at the actual content.

You disagree because you've never really tackled anything approaching the question with any depth, and even then you have a doodoo-tier understanding of Marx and his criteria for capitalism and post-capitalism.

Why don't you meaningfully engage with the PDF I posted here:

It contains four different tendencies and their views of the Russian economy in the period post-NEP until Stalin's death, contested to be socialist by MLs, and comprehensively brings forth the arguments.

Please stop propagating the stereotype that leftists don't have a sense of humour

Amazing. Sick arguments. I'm stumped. Everyone watching your post right now is convinced: Stalin's socialism was not just social democracy at the barrel of a gun under the red banner.

wew.

Wew. I think you can be arsed to bring fourth an isolated argument by yourself. I can as well just tell you that I'm refusing to answer, go engage with Albert Szymanskis "Is the Red Flag flying?" and write a book about it.
I haven't read it, maybe I will, but if it brings forth strawmen instead of historic reality like most Leftcom criticism then it won't convince me, considering that the first part is entirely about Trotskyst theory.

He made a grave mistake thinking the NEP wasn't already at a dead end by 1928, so yeah, he was wrong there. Allen's "From Farm to Factory" breaks down the necessity of of Stalins collectivization and puts outdated Bukharinist notions to rest. I'm not denying that Bukharin was a staunch Marxist, but so was Stalin.

It wasn't that funny, fam

Requesting sources, please.

OOPS

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what a smart boy

ye

Can you post some of these books, user? I've been wanting to read how USSR democracy actually worked aside from ilberal/anarchist propaganda.

no he wasn't
you can also say any totalitarian leader is like Stalin which is false, since the latter existed in unique circumstances created by Lenin's revolution, an unheard-of event in history.

The Russian Civil War and getting invaded by a hundred different countries happened.

Yes, Lenin did some brutal shit, but you guys don't seem to be aware just how close the Bolshevik Revolution came to failing.

pls respond

Why is leftypol becoming a bastion for leftcoms to concern troll on anything relating to the USSR

leftypol has always had many people critical of the USSR.

The fuck you talking about? That's an ancom flag. I'm a leftcom and critical of almost nothing Lenin did. Most leftcoms here are.

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Yeah, we know. Critique for all is fair and just. Critique of self is revisionism.

How is Lenin myself? And I did say almost. Lenin did (almost) nothing wrong.

"the working class…must be thrown here
and there, appointed, commanded just like
soldiers. Deserters from labour ought to be
formed into punitive battalions or put into
concentration camps”.”12 The congress itself
declared “no trade union group should di-
rectly intervene in industrial management”.
- Trostky
“[I] pointed out the necessity of recognising the
dictatorial authority of single individuals
for the purpose of carrying out the soviet
idea”. 14
- Lenin
If you read the pdf linked, Lenin shut down the factory committees, indepedent unions, and other organs of worker's control while claimimg to support "workers's democracy". He did so because he held a simplistic, didactic view of what "socialism" is (which he got from Kaustky and the 2nd International at large), far apart from what Marx himself believed (see the letter to Arnold Ruge). Marx was far more similar to Proudhon and Bakunin than he was to Lenin. Even if Marx was monumentally flawed as a thinker, he was leagues better than Lenin and bears little relation to him. There are other large divergences and revisions (for example, Lenin's Frankenstein "empirio-criticism" versus Marx's own epistemology) which resulted in this, but I'm phoneposting.
He can't be
No, and there's little difference between Stalin and Trotsky.

It's propaganda because you disagree with it? Even Lenin himself stated that he believed in rule by an individual, and went to great lengths to twist the word "democracy" to jive with this, despite that democracy first in opposition to the archons, who ruled alone, and was defined as "popular control". This is much the same as how he redefined "state" and "socialism" to meet his own immediate ends.
As the word "democracy" is commonly understood by supporters and critics alike outside of Leninist circles, there never was and was never supposed to be "democracy" in the USSR. If a Leninist tells you otherwise, they're either misinformed or intellectually dishonest.

Not true. See pdf.

This needs to be on the booru.

>>>/reddit/

doesn't matter what flag he has. This is what most leftcoms criticize Lenin for.

Well you would be the first leftcom I see to admit it.

He lived and ruled when Russia was in the middle of civil war. He never got chance to rebuild his country.

councilists don't even exist. most of us have read bordiga, and that's the majority of leftcoms.

Where that PDF came from?

libcom.org/history/stalin-didnt-fall-moon-workers-solidarity-movement

Nope. youtu.be/PaFklTLNy8c

Oh no! A youtbe video of a TV interview during the Cold War! My argument is undone! Oh wait, no it's not. The Americans flat out went to war with the Red Army to support their proxies.

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Expeditionary_Force_Siberia

Beacause there are people that call themself socialists while they spout shit like this

They didn't deploy enough men to crush the revolution, they were there to mitigate damage. The whole point of the October revolution was to keep Russian oil and mineral resources off of the market so western industrialists would have no competition.

A little bit more

Tl;dr The American expidition was there to protect railroads and only deploye a small number of men. If they really wanted to crush the Bolsheviks Lenin would have ended up in a ditch somewhere with his testicles in his eye sockets.

Specifically all the munitions that they had sent to the royalists. I know you read that part. Why leave it out?

To rescue 40,000 soldiers and see them safely to the Western Front.

Ha! We're talking about the 1919 United States, not the 1969 United States. They had just finished fighting a bloody war that everyone was sick of, and full-scale revolution was simmering out West where the labor unions, particularly the IWW, were dangerously powerful. They had taken to occupying entire western cities. That is to say nothing of the epidemic unemployment crisis. The unrest that would result from attempting another foreign war–especially against the internationally popular Lenin–would have been incredibly dangerous and very well could have provoked a civil war.

Only the Dutch-German side had big problems with Lenin, and not all of them. Gorter for example shared positions with most things, most importantly the revolutionary defeatist position.

The Italian side thought he had the correct Marxist and communist views on things. Almost nothing in LWC is aimed at the Italian communist left, mostly the Dutch, German and English left.

To fight the germans.

so you agree they weren't there to crush the revolution?
Less revolutionary potential then 1965 US considering large swaths of Youths in the US during the late 60's were radical leftists. in 1919 the red summer occurred in which tons of black rape gangs, and leftist agitators were hanged, shot, burned and mutilated. The IWW wasn't as powerful as your laughable hyperbole suggests. IWW often ended up as tree decorations when they got uppity

They had already been fighting for the White faction, and after the failed German Spring offensive the Great War was all over but the negotiations over Germany's terms of surrender.

They were unable to. All they could do was fund and arm the royalists.

Top-fucking-lel. You should sue whatever school you learned history in.

Hyperbole? Open a book some time. They actually did take over cities, and they were not alone. The AFL, the Knights of Labor, and the other major unions were tremendously powerful out west.

I did and learned about how tons of leftist were killed by RWDS during the red summer. There were armed leftists fighting against whites at Tulsa in 1921.

read days of rage you illiterate retard.