Why do tankies still exist, they fuck everything up...

I'm an eastern european, and USSR killed off our fascists successfully, but they didn't liberate us in any meaningful way. USSR wanted to turn my entire country into a fucking mining industry complex and pollute the environment not only with industrial waste but with loads of people from all corners of USSR to work in them who will never intergrate, possibly creating a time bomb of right-wing reactionary nationalism to come (and in some ways, it did come).

But hey, don't take my word for it, read for yourself:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phosphorite_War

Stop it you're making me hard.

Why can't tankies face it? It did some good but tons of harm too, move on cretins, no normie is going to support your vanguard party shit

what did he mean by this

this is why everyone hates you. it's so funny that you retards are murderously committed to enforcing your ideology when you also just literally don't read and don't know what socialism is

Inspiring the left wing of capital is not a good thing.

Yes, anarchists are hopeless utopian fools, just like marxist-leninists.

What else is new?

USSR was riddled with corruption, the entire society was based on "it matters who you know" saying much more than even in this current neoliberal regime, because during that time, if you were to be some socially awkward loner, you'd probably starve to death because somebody always got before you in breadlines and you wouldn't know who to approach to get fed.

Most modern leninists are against the revisionist USSR that came to exist by the time this dispute took place. Have you ever read Hoxha or the Albanian communists? Or even Mao's work as much as I hate to recommend anything Maoist on Soviet revisionism?

What has left communism done for the workers of the world

Only people oppossing the revolution would get killed, if you don't want class liberation then you're a traitor and deserve punishment for not fighting alongside other proletarian

Doesn't matter, everyone on the USSR had representation

Mao complained about Soviet revisionism?

you;d better fucking execute all of the stalinists who murdered the CNT/FAI and Poum fighters because their sectarian idiocy was a great example of "not fighting alongside the proletariat"

hello?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-Soviet_split

I don't think they actually do this tbh. Leftcoms and tankies are quite similar with their "centralism".

No I don't read those authors, and I don't have time to argue with you over books, I just wrote my reply to state some historical facts.

I see nothing wrong with this.

Let's analize about other ideologies shall we

based pol pot did nothing wrong amirite

CNT/FAI made a new regime under the excuse of anarchism, POUM were not communist, many were fascists infiltrated in the republican side

i can play this game too

you are making a huge ass out of yourself and you should stop.

Nothing. Just like Marxism-Leninism has done nothing for the workers of the world.

Just like Anarchism and Maoism and 'democratic socialism' and whatever the fuck.

No ideology 'does something for the workers of the world'.

Communism is the real movement of the workers of the world against capital. There's no 'outside force' that 'does things' for them, you idealist goon.

good lord. i thought you people stayed on facebook and hearts of iron lets play videos.

Then why are you carrying that leftcom flag like a sign of pride and rationalism

Pol Pot wasn't ML. Also he was CIA.

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we've reached peak revisionism

Yes, the CNT-FAI alongside the Communist Party of Spain and the POUM were all opportunists that successfully derailed the real proletarian movement in Spain and channeled its energy to into bullshit bourgeois 'anti-fascism'.

Because I think that particular style of hammer and sickle looks cool. That's literally it.

lmao this thread

Why would the Comintern lie? What would they gain from lying during a time of fighting imperialism? You just make boogeyman up and justify the fact that you ate up porky propaganda

Im sick of anarchists talking shit about the only ideology that managed to create a near worker's paradise on the east side of europe

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Because the USSR, like all other capitalist powers, was concerned with the expansion of capital and its own influence, at the expense of other bourgeois forces like liberal republicans and anarchists in Spain.

FinBol made a video on this, look it up he proves that the USSR had a great deal of democracy

At least anarchists learned to stop taking the bait you imbecilic reprobates.

a worker's paradise where trade unions we're not permitted.

What makes Marixism-Leninism a social democratic thing

I bet you people believe in the 500 gorillion thing

exactly. Social democracy would imply "tyranny of the majority" first.

Look up FinnishBolshevik, he literally proves y'all wrong on everything, the USSR was well concerned with their population and made many institutions to protect the workers

The fact that all capitalist social relations were kept intact but there were lots of fun social programs and rhetoric about muh workers.

Literal definition of social democracy.

So the USSR was a social democracy.

Got it.

Being nice to the workers has jack shit to do with communism.

If you'd read stories about average worker in the USSR around 70's and 80's, you'd think different. It was basically this

What is so paradise-y about it?

The people actually had the means of production, no one in the ussr was concerned with capital

Probably a bourgouise lie

finnish bolshevik is a retard Grover Furr dumbass who thinks trotsky sided with hitler

Okay then so who do you support? No one? You people seem like the type that becomes neo-conservatives when older, i doubt any of you would be a leftist when you hit 40 years old

marx

It really is not. The whole story of grey, depressing economic stagnation with grey, depressed people comes from after the reforms which allowed profiteering and gave massively increased rights to bosses over the workers. I am not even sure you know which reforms I'm talking about, though.

These are stories from people around me, you can hear same stories everywhere here in eastern europe, but if you're not over here, you can also read them. This shit is very common if you read past the party pamphlets and what the actual people have been saying.

There was no Democracy after 1918

Ok so you don't want a revolution you just want to jerk off to writings as an intellectual

Why are you a communist then?

Who gives a shit if people in the USSR were 'concerned with capital'? It still existed and dictated everything.

That honestly says a lot more about you then it does about us. It actually looks poorly on you that you don't believe enough in your ideology that you'd kill someone for it. I mean if you want to know why you guys lose there you have it right there.

You know I asked a leftcom here if he'd gulag or kill enemies of the revolution and to his credit yes, but ideas don't make revolutions. And I thought that was very curious I said "do you think left-communism is the ideology of the proletariat" and he's like

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Then what is socialism

He did.

i want a revolution that's actually marxist, where the proletariat liberates itself, rather than the stupid secretive party-state shit that leninists do which robs the worker of the dialectical process of building the self-knowledge required to lead their country themselves and dooming the country to either bureaucracy or revisionism

Because I believe that the hopes and dreams of people were betrayed somewhere in the process of creating the worker's state such as USSR, and I wish they were redeemed some day through some form of marxism.

Typical.

Holy fuck. Read this and then kill yourself. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1965_Soviet_economic_reform

Read Wage Labor and Capital and Value, Price and Profit. I bet you even think Marx said that socialism was a transitionary stage before communism.

fascinating. literally no historians think this. claiming the moscow trials were real trials for real crimes is on the same intellectual tier as holocaust denialism.

Give me a an actual fucking answer, and yes i know Marx used socialism and communism as the same

If left-communism is the ideology of the proletariat then you believe that you should propagandize the workers so that they understand what needs to be done to effect their liberation.

"no"

The workers don't need to 'understand the way to effect their liberation'. No revolution has ever happened because the workers were convinced x ideology was the best.

Yeah, actually. You say this sarcastically, but history has borne out that this is what happens.

See:

Paris, 1871.

Russia, 1917.

Germany, 1918-1920.

Italy, 1919.

Shanghai, 1927.

Spain, 1936.

The list goes on.

the abolition of capital, commodity production, markets, wage labor, etc.

'Worker ownership' is perfectly compatible with capitalism. See: shit like Mondragon.

To be fair, I don't think Lenin expected to die after he enacted a "temporary" ban on dissident factions

Those were hardly spontaneous, especially not Russia.

And btw the left-com wouldn't even answer "Yes" when I pressed him on whether he believed left-communism was the ideology of the proletariat or whether it was the best one out of all the alternatives. It was just kind of sad like the nice guy who asks for a date then as the girl is on the verge of answering just spergs out "W-well…you don't really want to have to go out with me if you don't want to…n-no pressure" and ruins it for himself.

Well i always thought that worker ownership of the MOP and abolition of capital were the main things.
The USSR had some commodity production didn't it? Umm

commodity production and no worker ownership of anything since it was a one-party state.

So the USSR was really a social democratic country?

Please explain how these revolutions happened because some jackass came along and convinced all of the workers that marxism was da best.

Proletarians will often adopt x ideology in a time of revolution, but it will not be that ideology which spurs or determines the course of the revolution.

social without the democratic part

Holy fuck these Leftcoms have some really good points

I'll gladly give you an answer when you fix your faulty "you either completely agree with me or ur a EVIL CAPITALIST!" logic and substantiate on why you think the Soviet Union's disasterous anti-socialist 60s reforms are worth supporting. Daily reminder that the reforms of the 60s allowed factory bosses to sell and buy equipment on the open market, solidifying the commodity production of the USSR as an accepted and commonplace occurrence.

Okay you know what im done with Marxism-Leninism

ITT: Leftcoms and other actual marxists school some tankie on what socialism actually is

They happened because some jackass came along and explained why their lives were shitty (e.g. "it's the Tsar").
Organizing the workers =/= preaching Marxism.
and Germany in 1918 probably would not have occurred without the other Marxist Social revolutions that had happened at the time.

the official good opinion is that the USSR was a social democracy, but social democracy is still a good thing and the USSR was more or less good for exploring the avenues of revolutionary science. we should try to not repeat its failures and especially not murder everyone who points out its failures.

What's it like being a retard? It's not that ideas themselves cause revolutions but do they have an effect? Can they make it more likely that revolutions occur, that their more likely to protect themselves or be successful?

You know what I notice about your list, queer? There's a whole lot of failed revolutions on it. And, correctly me if I'm wrong, but didn't Marx and Engels criticize the communards for being under the influence of French utopian socialist and rad republican doctrines that ultimately led to their failure. Didn't their adherence to these ideologies lead to some failures that helped contribute to the failure and massacre of the Paris Commune? Of course, they achieved good things without having been guided by Marxist ideology but they could've done much better with it.

It's so hilarious that you guys maintain this silly position because you guys maintain everything failed because the problems with the law of value and the commodity-form were only understood by a handful of navel-gazing thinkers who accomplished nothing and were mostly hated and/or ignored by their peers in the contemporary proletarian movement. How could the failure of workers to understand Marxist ideology not have contributed to the failure of revolutions in the 20th century? I'll wait.

I just don't see how you guys buy into your own bullshit when you know very well that most workers, especially the majority who are unfamiliar with the key tenets of Marxism don't even know what the law of value is.

Tankies whose supported by China went full retard and ruined communist revolution in my country during 1982-1983 and forced others communists and collaborators to fled from the forests, they also cockblock any attempt to create any new communist party and try to force every Marxist-leninist to join their shitty new revolution party. they are piece of shit to me why are they even allow to breath.

Luckily the USSR was able to achieve the killing off of communism as a real political movement in addition to all the workers' lives it destroyed at the behest of fat bureaucrats. How I envy such "achievements".

Capitalism did the same for the USA.
Joint effort with the USA though the USSR did more work.
If by liberated you mean brought under state capitalism and killed a lot of people in the process. Granted, not nearly as many as the USA did when it "liberated" North America and others.
The USA has far more influence.
Don't know if you noticed but ML states end up failing while anarchist societies get invaded by foreign powers.

I'm not so much advancing a particular view here, just want to point out how abysmally awful your argument was.

Im the lenin hat guy, thank you for waking me up lol

Communism isn't an "ideology" to be imposed upon the worker, nor is it a state of affairs to be established. It's an inherent tendency contained within the proletarian condition itself, the real movement to abolish the present state of things. For all your lengthy sperging, you clearly haven't read Marx.

Why don't we consult Trotsky's own writings during WWII?

1940, the following long paragraph appeared in place of the opening two sentences of the Sunday Express version: '…I consider the main source of danger to the USSR in the present international situation to be Stalin and the oligarchy headed by him. An open struggle against them, in the view of world public opinion, is inseparably connected for me with the defense of the USSR. (Writings of Leon Trotsky: 1939-1940
(NY: Merit Publishers), p. 124)

That's interesting his advancing the argument that Stalin is more of a danger then Hitler in 1940, isn't it? At the same time he was also petitioning for the independence of Ukraine, a well-known hobbyhorse of Hitler and the reactionary press at the time.

In this article on the Tanaka Memorial Trotsky reveals Soviet intel collection methods in Japan while admitting the reason that Moscow didn't want to enrage Japan. Then he later goes on to say that most of the Soviet agents are probably gone Luchkov's defection but how would he really know that in exile in Moscow? Supposedly, Trotsky had no contact with his supporters in the USSR after being exiled, after all…
marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1940/01/tanaka.htm

Then there was the incident where Trotsky voluntarily agreed to give his testimony to HUAC only for the US to eventually say they didn't want it. Trotskyists still stumble over that today, and we haven't even yet gone over the evidence attaching Trotsky to the opposition bloc in the USSR.

Considering the system Stalin created destroyed the USSR, I'd say he was right. Also, you should remember that Stalin had made a non-aggression pact with Hitler at the time.

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You're fucking retarded. If there is anything that makes you "le tru socialists" a fucking joke is that you unironically bring up the no-true-scotsman bullshit when someone points to a ML country instead if defending it which makes you a fucking laughing stock. No private property? No wage labor? No market? No surplus extraction? Production for use? Still not socialism, try again! My special kind of socialism has never been tried!

Jesus Christ, grow up.

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Non-aggression pact being different then an alliance. Britain also had a non-aggression pact with Hitler and so did other European countries. The USSR's non-aggression also had a non-aggression pact with Japan that kept them from fighting a two-front war against Germany.

You know, I'm going to go out on a limb here, but I'd say the guy whose line you don't like is a little less dangerous then an ultra-reactionary capitalist who wants to kill all Slavs.

Even if we were to take left-communism and Trotskyism's premises about Stalinism at face-value and they are quite fraternal ideologies it would be quite hard for Soviet workers to overcome the problems of Stalinism if they all happened to get genocide. It would be even more difficult for the precious Western European workers that Trotskyists and Bordigists fetishized to overthrow their oppressors and realize socialism if they had stayed under the boot of European fascism.

For all their criticism of the anti-fascist front, and there is criticism to be made of it, they fail to realize that the fascists are by and large not going to care about your ideological squabbles of the worker's movement when they put you in the gas chamber. Communism wont inherently realize itself under the jackboot of fascism, in fact, when fascist regimes fall the working masses history have long period about the limits and failings of bourgeois democracy as history has shown. It also shows that fascist regimes that became entrenched create right-wing constituencies that can always be called on to kill the Left should the time come again.

The fascist regimes wouldn't have simply fallen on their own either, they had to be smashed.

I'm a council communist, not a Bordigist. Bordiga was a Leninist much like yourself. These struggles frequently aren't enough on their own, yes, but that doesn't make them pointless. They are expressions of a distorted class consciousness, and must be detourned.
The point is to elaborate on already-existing forms of resistance and side with them against forms of false consciousness (seeming routes out which aren't true alternatives, such as fascism or stuck up Leninist-utopian intellectuals thinking they can "teach" socialism to what they call "the working class").
If you have so many questions, why don't you read a book which answers a lot of them? For beginners such as yourself, I'd recommend "Eclipse And Reemergence Of The Communist Movement".

You just have to get rid of the value-form, jesus christ! Of course, the USSR didn't and yet you defend it anyways because it's a "big strong state" fighting against "the ebil scary imperialist boogeyman!" You have the mind of a reactionary, overused amygdala and all - you just have different terminology for it.

Epic meme bro

Funny how tankies always bring up GDP and production numbers when defending the USSR. It's almost like they're more concerned with being better managers of capitalism rather than liberating the working class

epic meme indeed

The working class had no choice, they couldn't seize a fully developed means of production, they had to build it. I don't really see how anti-productivist arguments are Marxist, as Engels points out here (good argument against spontaneity also): marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/10/authority.htm

How is teaching socialism any different from teaching history, math, or science? I don't see why workers are supposed to be indifferent to teaching when the opposite is the case, they seek it out.

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But they chose to form worker's councils and soviets that where swiftly crushed by the new state

Careful, don't wanna get spooked.

I lean right but I larp as a tankie sometimes because I want to see actual violence escalate so we can get some proper combat going on and not these faggy tight jean wearing starbucks twinks from antifa screaming about niggers constantly.

But it wasn't democratic. The state(which was a dictatorship), not the workers, owned and controlled the MoP. It was literally capitalism with the state as a boss, even Lenin admitted to this

Because there is one retard who hasn't read Marx makes your infantile ideology correct.

Do you seriously think you can abolish the law of value through a single policy like in a real time strategy game im exchange for 50 food and 90 gold or something? Damn, if someone had told uncle Joe he just needs to abolish the law of value everything would be good!

See, this is why nobody takes you seriously. You pretend the material condition the USSR had to work with didn't exist, you pretend that the law of value wasn't a transhistorical thing because you have shit tier understanding of dialectical materialism and you pretend that the socialism wasn't in direct competition with the capitalist world. Instead you double-down on a thing that is likely ever to disappear under global communism so you disregard the USSR as socialist with a handwave, meanwhile, anarchist projects would (and did) operate under the law of value just the same and any Leftcom projects (don't give me that shit about "ideologies don't make revolutions", you can't be a dogmatic dialectical materialist but at the same time critisize dialectical materialism as a stalinist deveation, another inconsistency in your Weltanschauung), if they ever bothered to do anything, would - at least for a major amount of time of its existence cause world revolution won't ever occur at the same time, global capitalism is far too interlocked and capable to outsource crisis into specific areas. Get fucked, anti-materialist utopian.

I like when Leftcom/Anarkiddies pretend economic growth is actually a bad thing. Hippie tier. You can't avoid being measured in stuff like GDP as long as capitalist competitors exist. The reason this gets brought up is to prove that the underlying laws of capital didn't operate in the USSR since even during its revisionist area, it wasn't affected by booms and busts and the GDP growth is almost a straight line.

*meant to say historical materialism instead of dialectical materialism the first time

95% of the people here claiming the USSR was a dictatorship probably haven't even read the 1936 constitution, let aloe informed themselves about the election process and the trade unions.

Wat

You don't seem to get it. Socialism entails abolition of the value form at its core (without the value form, the commodity ceases to be a commodity and is noted purely for its use-value). If there's GDP, then the value form clearly exists and governs the whole of the economy in a capitalistic, productivist manner. It is not socialist in that instance. is absolutely correct.

A) Democracy and self management do not socialism make alone, although autonomy is important
B) There was no democracy. Lenin even stated himself that it was necessary that proles submit themselves to capitalistic management

woops, forgot to take shitposting flag off

You're ignoring my argument. The whole point of socialists endorsing GDP numbers in the case of socialist states is because they are under-developed. The number one priority is organizing production, it wasn't like Great Britain where workers could just seize the means of production and abolish the value form. Your arguments regarding Lenin are dependent on the idea that workers didn't see the consolidation of state power and its direction of production as in their interest. The conductor of an orchestra doesn't need to own the instruments.

WOT

Russia's GDP during the revolution was the same as Great Britain's over a century previous. When the Soviet Union developed it was taken over by revisionists, so it's impossible to say what Lenin or Stalin would have done at that point.

top fucking kek. Your orthodox Leftcom definition of socialism is absolutely fringe, most anarchists don't adhere to that either. Remember that socialism is what Marx described as the lower stage of communism and it's annoying as fuck to say "real existing lower stage of communism" all the time. Do you want to argue semantics now?
Marx and Engels didn't "critisize" capitalism, they analyzed it. Also, show me which aspects. Make an argument.
My statement still stands. You don't offer any solutions at all, so I don't see why you are in a position to ridicule others who do.
Weltanschauung is a normal German word and no terminus technicus coined by Marx. Nice appeal to authority though. However, what Marx critisized is exactly what you do, you don't like the post-capitalist systems which have been established, so you denounce them because the future has to look exactly like you want to make it out to be, due to your limited understanding of historical materialism.
I couldn't give less of a fuck what flavor of what meme ideology you adhere to.
My god. You can have a communist utopia and still able to measure the GDP with bourgeois economic calculations. If aliens would visit Earth in the time of global fully automated communism, they would still be able to measure the GDP from the outside. Since you haven't bothered the slightest with Marxist-Leninist economics you wouldn't even know that calculating stuff like GDP per capita or purchasing power is extremly difficult for socialist economies, because the said laws of market capitalism didn't operate in these economies. Case in point, I dare you to calculate the purchasing power of the GDR Ostmark compared to the west which gives historians and economists a headache up to this very day. And yes, economic growth is somewhat a good thing, you vulgar relativist. It doesn't matter anyway, you don't offer solutions, you just critisize everybody who wants to do something because it doesn't immediately abolish the law of value within a nano second.
The causes for that lie in measures that have been undertaken by Krushchev already, such as abolishing the quotas and accumulating internal debt. What do you mean by "industrial crisis"?
THIS FUCKING ARROGANCE. I'm sure you genius can come up with a better system of economic management than the one thousand most qualified people of the Eastern Bloc working in Gosplan.
Read this:
redstarpublishers.org/ManPlanSoviet.doc
The All-Soviet Trade Union (congress of all trade unions) negotiated their salaries with the Gosplan reciprocally and had therefore a significant input in organically planning the economy.
lmao. Confirmation bias is a thing.
Why do you blame everybody for lying when you are lying yourself? Candidates that weren't favored by the party got elected into positions all the time.
youtu.be/Okz2YMW1AwY
And before you cry hurrdurr YouTube check out the sources he uses in the bottom which include the works of liberal historians.

Rofl everyone in Russia hated the Tsar. No jackasses needed at all. The first Soviets in 1905 were established by self-organizing workers who sought to go beyond trade unions.

Maintaining the commodity form will not constitute socialism no matter how much you screech autistically to the contrary user

holy shit, when did it get this bad? You fags need to get the fuck back to reddit. Can't believe you are so easily buying this shit.

t.Slav

so much for anti-sectarianism.

gonna need citation for that. Stop deflecting by bringing the CNT into this btw.

the OP fag first brought CNT into this, and I didn't bother replying to every single thing in the thread so I generalized. FinnishBolshevik covers the loans and I'll try to find a written source I saw it some time ago.

A form of commodity production only existed in cooperative farms and under different (socialized) preconditions (guarantee to sell surplus to the state with a fixed price). The rest of production was for use. Try again.

That's bullshit though. Ruble was an internationally traded currency and the soviets even whent to international expos to sell commodities like their lightbulbs. It's mentioned in that documentary The Lightbulb Conspiracy.

Pretty sure at this point communist subreddits have better politics, as they didn't give ultras free reign over their forums. leftypol is good for showing how much leftcoms and fascists fraternize with other though. This place will be totally hijacked eventually, just like Holla Forums was hijacked by the stormfags.

you are wrong, ultras have always been the staple of Holla Forums, only the new ultras are far more stupid than the old ones because most are reddit refugees.

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I decided to google it and found it mentioned somewhat in Bookchin's The Third Revolution, but not in the way you characterize it. CNT-FAI turned to shit after the joined the government and I don't think any anarchist would dispute as much. It goes without saying that the USSR certainly didn't help matters

Didn't mean to say it was a recent thing. Ultras have always been a staple, and are good demonstrations of the problems of 4chan culture. All of the celeb leftists connected to weev a good example.

The problem is this form "open discussion" isn't the ideal, as it allows those with the least principles to take advantage. It's not like Holla Forums has open discussion, it's just endless propaganda spam, some of which is paid for. That shit bleeding into here is worse than reddit, IMO.

Fuck off. You just want a tankie torture chamber

you've accomplished nothing to explain your opposition to ultras but complete tripe

Keep twisting history. The Ruble was protected and could only be used within the USSR. For international relations, as well as economic calculation within the Comecon the Transfer Ruble was used.

og

You mean giving foreign powers money, allowing them to say purchase commodities from the USSR. Fuck off with your piss poor mental gymnastics. I also like how you completely ignore the rest of my post.

In terms of some topics - mostly related to culture or the newest hot meme theorist like Dauve or Bookchin - Holla Forums due to its contrarian culture to the mainstream left is a better place for discussion, but in terms of actually debating socialism or the history of socialism Holla Forums doesn't work due to the ultra problem. Reddit, as shitty as it is, is far better in this regard - most people here don't know anything about the USSR or any socialist state, but are willing to regurgitate all the worn-out propaganda against it as if these are undeniable facts. Just go into any random DPRK thread and see people claim that Kim Jong Un made everybody wear the same hairstyle.

The fact that anti-communist leftism like the ultra-problem or Stirnerist individualism can fester here has also something to do with the inherent basement-dweller culture of Holla Forums, you can pull off the no-tru-scotsman thing in theoretical discussions, but in real life it gets you righteously laughed at, especially in academia. Nobody is interested in theoretically constructed utopias based on ad hoc reasoning.

You are imagining many of these problems that you are claiming we have here. You should return to reddit regardless, you'll fit in better.

Reddit is only "better" because it's a super controlled safe space where dissenting opinions and evidence are banned and deleted. I hope you never leave so we can keep pointing out how much shit you're full of

you're not even trying anymore.

The rest of the post? That the USSR went to Expos? After you completely ignored my post, which was ten times the size of yours? Fuck off.
Are you talking about relation within the Comecon? You realize those weren't normal capitalist trade relations, right? Besides that, the only Eastern Bloc country that did have quite a relevant trade surplus with the west was the GDR, mostly assembling Ikea stuff. The USSR mostly only exported grain - because there was surplus and overproduction due to commodity production, duh.

That the USSR went to show it's own commodities in hopes of selling it to the west, you mean. The USSR exported commodities like machinery and weapons to other "socialist" countries, and the fact that things were produced for exchange constitutes the existence of the commodity form and therefore dismisses any pretenses of a socialist system. You can do all the mental gymnastics you want, but in the end you'll just be a revisionist.

Considering I got banned here two times already for as much as posting data, I would be very careful with that accusation. Reddit is shit for different reasons but the framework for actual debates regarding socialism provides often more insightful exchanges than here. Holla Forums with its anomic nature is good for debates of daily happenings or leaks (barely happens here anymore) or discussions about culture, music, movies, etc cetera.

I didn't say Holla Forums is straight-up bad. I'm aware it has few strengths.

Well who takes Dauve seriously besides Situationists.

stop, you're being painfully stupid.

They shouldn't ban you. Letting you post is better since it reveals how shit M-L is. "Insightful exchange" really means "opinions that fit within my already accepted world view". I'm not a fan of Duave, but who really takes M-Ls seriously besides other M-Ls?

Again, are you aware how these exports worked? Your claim is: The fact that there was an exchange of goods between the WP states constitutes that production for exchange existed in the majority of the industrial branches of the USSR. Substantiate your claims about that because it reads like you have no idea how these exchanges actually worked. Please don't make me defend the brezhnevite USSR, but despite its revisionism, you should read this to get some clearer insight:
marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-6/red-flag.pdf

Pic related. ML remains the most promising socialist tendency to this very day, shaped by experience, historical review and universal applicability. Your perspective is also awfully eurocentric.

My claim is only that production for exchange existed i.e. commodities therefore constituting the USSR as a capitalist state. Foreign trade of commodities is one example but the fact that people were paid in currency, currency that did not necessarily reflect hours worked with amounts differing from profession to profession, clearly constitutes the existence of commodities in itself. Your delusions of the resurgence of M-L is just that, delusions. Modern communist parties are nothing more then socdem parties by another name, and this is due in large part to the USSR which pushed communist parties to adopt reformist positions instead of agitate for revolution

I'll have to bully you more when I wake up. Night my delusional tankie friend :^)

On different days I hear leftcoms say that they are libertarians like you seem to be here but also that the party needs to be much more centralised and despotic. Please be at least a little bit coherent.

As for OP, he is clearly a faggot, history is literred with most based Tankies such as Fred Hampton, Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Vladimir Lenin, Abdullah Ocalan pre jail and still to some extent, Frantz Fanon, Thomas
Sankara, Colonel Gaddaffi to some extent

As an anarchist you should critically support these people but support them nonetheless, yeh they betrayed us at key points in history but also they did a lot of great shit for the working class and did kill many fascists also

Apologize: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrés_Nin_Pérez

Production for exchange is not unique to capitalism and has existed in pre-capitalist societies. It will take global communism in order to completely abolish it. Thinking that production for exchange can completely 100% be done away with just like that, while the most powerful countries in the world are still capitalist/imperialist is insanely stupid. If you don't wanna differentiate between socialism and communism like Lenin did, that's fine. And if you don't wanna call anything socialist while there is still (limited forms of) production for exchange, that's also fine (as it's just semantics). But I think it's incredibly reductionist and dumb to just call it a capitalist state, like there was absolutely no differences between the USSR (which, even if you don't wanna call it socialist, absolutely took huge steps towards socialism) and a country like the US, or a social democracy like Sweden.

I asked you to substantiate how the exchange of goods between the WP states constitutes production - you couldn't answer that, so now you are backpedaling by going back to the original point that the USSR had commodity production which I already answered that is only existed in a socialized form in cooperative farming that didn't operate fully under the laws of capital.
Which you could neither substantiate nor quantify.
I like how you add the word "necessarily", implying that it could be, rendering your criticism meaningless. Currency didn't really operate as money in the traditional sense, as it was not accumulated or exchanged.
Eurocommunism was pushed by Krushchev, but despite that, I didn't see the USSR advocating for reforms in Korea or Vietnam. Again a pretty eurocentric perspective. The reason some of the ML parties advocated for reform was because revolution was absolutely impossible in the west, the failure of movements like the RAF prove that. If the USSR openly (!) supported terrorist groups like them it would only led to an escalation.

The leftcom label applies to multiple schools of thought. It's not a unified ideology.

Eurocommunism wasn't a thing until the 70's while Kruschev ended his premiership of the USSR in 64. Eurocommunism was also explicitly opposed and independent to the CPUSSR. Your last point is factually incorrect.

I just don't like tankie b/c I think it only works in the third world, and even there, like Colombia, it was decades and the dedications of literally 100 000s of fighters with somehow access to guns and hiding places and they still didn't win.

Imagine tankies in any first world country achieving anything in this time? The state is too developed and civil society far too powerful

tankies just aren't pragmatic enough

Huh, that worked

Sounds like your biggest issue with the USSR is that you are a massive racist pal. What's the fucking deal with everyone in the baltics being a nazi?

Tankism wouldn't work today, it's a relic of the past, did it's job well but it's time to move on to Council communism, communalism, etc

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What is "false consciousness" if there isn't a clear correct revolutionary ideology, nerd? Again, in this discussion you guys have shied away from saying you would teaching either 1. your special snowflake interpretation of Marx and Engels 2. or just teaching the works of Marx and Engels themselves since you wouldn't want to force any kind of ideology on the proletariat. I suppose the class interests of the proletariat will not be determined by any ideology designed to aid in their struggle for liberation but simply their fucking feels.

Wouldn't telling them that fascism is bad and not in their interest be the same as "teaching socialism"? Wouldn't it be "forcing" your alien ideology onto the proletariat?

You can absolutely teach socialist theory, as Lenin says, "without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement." Socialist theory and socialist history is a weapon in the hands of the working class but the working class is not imbued with correct ideas inherently. It boggles my mind that you guys have managed to take the just-do-something-don't-think attitude of anarchists and radical liberals and strip extract even the activity portion from it. What you're recommending is like anarchism for lazy niggers. When you give up the propaganda and education aspect of the struggle it literally is not a strawman any longer for someone to say all you want to do is sit in your armchairs.

Wew

You are missing the point. Ideology on itself does nothing. Workers make things happen, labor makes things happen, people's actions make things happen.

Also,

It was the Soviet workers that made the USSR into a world power. It was their labor that made it happen. Their sacrifices that defeated the Nazis. Their struggles that inspired revolutionary movements the world over.

When will you MLs understand that Workers/Labor/People > Ideology?

Fuck off im no longer a Marxist-Leninist i got roasted enough yesterday

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Production for exchange is the dominant form of production, and this wasn't any different in the USSR. Markets still existed internally and commodities were traded externally on the international market. Even if we're going by the definition of "democratic worker control over the MoP", the USSR wasn't controlled by the workers but an alienated state bureaucracy. youtube.com/watch?v=sZhJ-74FcR8
Trade of commodities with foreign powers is production for exchange m8, not use. How does this constitute production for use? If wages differ from profession to profession, then obviously people are not being rewarded for number of hours worked but rather the exchange value of their profession.

He's not a brainlet for listening to reason instead of retreating into absurd dogmatism. If anyone is the brainlet here it's you

test

By reason you mean utopianism and retreat into unscientific liberal ideas and narratives, right? Where are all the hard-hitting substantive replies to my posts? Oh, right ya'll just gave up after getting refuted point-by-point because you'd rather pick out some theory/history noob brainlet instead.

Btw "dogmatism" here just means "opinion that I don't like" as if there isn't cultish attitude around the writings of Duavé, Bordiga and other leftcom writers.

I think its funny that Holla Forums has been telling me that revisionism didn't matter, the Khruschevites didn't change anything, Khrushchev was a secret Stalinst, Tito was a real communist and all sorts of other garbage and then ya'll go and make my argument for me by citing the 1965 Soviet economic reforms. Funny how that works.

There was, as I mentioned, a real proletarian movement in Spain. That's what your quote is describing. A lot of the people who participated in said movement were members of the FAI or otherwise affiliated with it, but the organization itself rather eagerly collaborated with the bourgeois republican state.

I'm not disparaging the achievements of actual revolutionaries in Spain.

Pointing out that the commodity form existed throughout the whole of the USSRs history isn't "utopian" or "liberal", it's merely a statement of fact. Pretending that socialism can exist while the law of value persists is revisionism m8

How do leftcoms love non-ideological "spontaneous revolution" so much, but at the same time shill for an ideologically dogmatic "organic centralist" organization that's rigidly opposed to spontaneous "opportunism"? Any sort of "spontaneous revolution" without an ideology seems to me to be inherently opportunist, done out of short-term self-interest. I just don't understand it. It seems like a bizarre cross between post-left anarchism and Marxist-Leninism in that regard. Or am I confusing Bordiga with other leftcom tendencies?

Of course they collaborated with the republican government, what did you expect, to single-handedly fight off the republican army and the fascist one?

Left communists don't form a unified group with a strict theory, unlike MLs. The spontaneists are one section in this group, while others very well accept the party.

Yeah that's exactly what they should have done. They should have pressed for full revolution and abolished the republic.

tankies are our rednecks, our lolbertarians. arrogant dipshits whose first introduction to ideology establishes their entire personality for the rest of their life. You could literally just make the US as it currently is a tankie nation just by changes terms, and flags, and names.

So they would have lost even harder? And how do you want them to abolish the republic if the only places were the workers were relevant were catalonia, the basque country and andalucia?

it's also stupid, because the only thing we've got close to "spontaneous revolutions" is misguided bullshit like BLM and Antifa, which have more liberals than people who actually care about achieving a stateless classless society and care more about Female CEOs and ending "white muh privilege"

We should probably archive this thread of we haven't already.

I don't think they would have lost though. Their alliance with the government did more damage than if they had fought against the both of them. The government oversaw the dismantling of the anarchist militias and the re-privatization of production. With friends like that who needs enemies?

how does archiving work here

I don't fucking know I just hoped the good-for-nothing BO saw my message.

A fact that nobody disputes and certainly isn't really that relevant to any post I've made so far. Ugh.. thanks for telling me, I guess…

I don't know how many times I have to cite Engels on this question for you guys to understand that law of value isn't specific to capitalism. Law of value existed before capitalism, it existed in feudal and slave societies and probably the most primitive societies forms of civilization where commodities were exchanged.

Capitalism is a lot more then the law of value, you just can't say that if law of value existed then the USSR must've been capitalist. But it all goes back to the fact that leftcoms and anarchists reject any kind of transitional program or transitional society, when in fact a program for a transitional society was laid out right in the manifesto. Even in Critique of the Gotha program accepts some very basic kinds of inequality in his material critique of the utopians, talks about how socialist society will emerge from the womb of capitalist society furnishing its materials, and how even the principle that the laborer will get back the full product of their labor (which is a slogan of the Owenites) is dumb since there are necessary things to account for in society like caring for elderly, disabled, the young, restocking the social consumption/investment funds etc.

I'm skeptical about the whole 'organic party' thing

There was no republican army in the early days of the war. The insurgent rising and ensuing revolution paralyzed the republican state and power 'lay in the streets'. It was only BECAUSE the so-called 'revolutionary' organizations decided to collaborate with bourgeois republicans that the state was able to rebuild itself into an entity capable of marshaling an army and crushing the real revolutionary movement.

If the revolutionaries had taken the chance given to them in July-October of '36, they might have destroyed the republican state in one stroke and then turned their attention to the insurgents.

First off, those areas all together were about half of Republican Spain. And it's not true that those were the only areas where proletarian power existed. Madrid too was in the hands of the workers. The same went for countless smaller towns and cities across the country.

In the early days of the war, the republican state existed pretty much only in name, thanks to the defection of half the army and the ensuing proletarian revolution. The passivity and active collaboration of the CNT, PCE, and PSOE (among others) allowed it to reassert itself.

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I don't know if you've been paying attention but there were plenty of people ITT pretending that the USSR was socialist, so to say that nobody is disputing it is just factually incorrect. I guess I'll have to repeat myself: Commodity production only recently became the dominant form of production and it persisted to be the dominant form of production within the USSR. USSR certainly was not a transitional society since in the end it degenerated back into liberal capitalism. Marx in critique of the gotha program advocated for labor vouchers so I don't know what you're talking about when you suggest he didn't believe people should be rewarded according to the hours they've worked.
The wage system in the USSR cannot be said to be equivalent to what marx suggests here.

Yes, it is quite true there are people arguing it was socialist but to argue that it was socialist and to argue that it had commodity production are quite different things.

Commodity production has existed far-longer then capitalism, fag. You don't even know the difference between the two.

lol even under capitalism people get some compensation of their work this is just a bad misreading of my post.

Here, in the section you cited, he validates the point that I was making that the notion that the worker gets "the full value of his labor" is utopian nonsense. Engels also makes a similar criticism of the Owenites and other utopian socialists who believed the worker must get "the full-value" of his labor in Anti-Duhring

What are the deductions that Marx had in mind that would be taken from the producer?

Stating that commodity production only recently became the dominant form of production is not the same thing as stating that it only recently came into being. Capitalism is marked by the fact that commodity production has become the dominant form of production. Explain to me what you mean by socialism if not the abolishment of commodity production and private property. You are practicing a selective reading of what I posted. The worker does indeed get the full value of his labor back, for any deduction would ultimately go back to the worker.
The USSR did not merely deduct for socially necessary aspects either. Bureaucrats did not produce anything, but still they are rewarded more than the average worker. The USSR was not at all a case of "only workers" but of workers and party bureaucrats. The bureaucrat, like the capitalist, is not necessary to production but instead a parasite on the proletariat.

This was done by the revisionists such as Khrushchev et. al who abandoned socialism, quietly moved to restore capitalism and then reverted the USSR to open liberal capitalism. The vast majority of ML tendencies that are revolutionary and have any impact today have been at war with these traitors since the 1960s.

Let me, play devil's advocate here, I will assume that your position is correct, for the sake of argument, even if it were so that the USSR was never anything other then state-capitalism its undeniably true that state-capitalism is more progressive then traditional private lassiez-faire capitalism. Lenin was right, private ownership and private capitalism are relics, and the petty-bourgeoisie that these social phenomenon foster are the main enemy of socialism–they are the mass base of capitalism. Crushing those elements and speeding up the contradictions of capitalism at the world scale by itself would be more progressive then waiting around a couple hundred years or so until the conditions are right to take power on the world scale.

The bugaboo of state-capitalism has always been cri de coeur of the frenzied petit-bourgeois who realize that their world is dying. While our aims can never be limited to state-capitalism, to pretend its worse then any other form of capitalism is just a bunch of petty-booj winging.
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/may/09.htm

I want it to be clear of course that that's not the position I hold concerning the USSR, I think it went beyond just state-capitalism even if the socialism that was achieved was flawed due to Russia's backwards conditions.

I don't think state-capitalism is worse then regular capitalism. Indeed, one of the things the USSR did do right was providing a better standard of living for workers as well as enabling them all better education and healthcare. My beef with state-capitalism is that I find it more difficult for it to transition to actual socialism then liberal capitalism, with all it's ugliness and inhumanity. People are more easily pacified by stability brought by state-capitalism. And the bureaucrats in control will never want to innovate themselves from their own muh privileged positions.

So, I suppose in the sense of bringing about socialism it is indeed worse, but besides that it is arguably better.

Capitalism is a different kind of commodity production based on new social relationship that were different from any previous kind of commodity production. If you were right then the lolberts would have a point about their being 6,000 years of capitalism, it just didn't break out on a large scale apparently until the 1700s!

No, capitalism is marked by the fact that capitalist commodity production has become the dominant form. Capital is what's let off the chain in this new form of production and not merely commodities in themselves, it only appears that this new world is one dominated by commodities which act seemingly of their own volition. The cycle of productive capital creates the first societies capable of allowing capital to become the dominant social relation, the most primitive kind being M-M'

Not quite true. Do you have any idea what kind of human brain-power it must've taken to run a planned economy featuring millions of commodities in an age where the most advanced computing device were slide-rules, paper, and water computers made out of hydraulic pipes?

Even a small NGO or company creates massive amounts of bureaucracy and paperwork and usually has a fair amount of labor allocated for that purpose. Those companies don't do that because they like to and neither do capitalist governments.

Could you imagine what it would take to efficiently run a society with over 200 million people in the 1920s? Yeah, a lot of brainpower. And as Marx points out even managerial labor is labor, so it wasn't possible for them to do without managers either. Then there was the need for various scholar, writers, artists, military/police etc.

Lenin himself said on the subject of bureaucracy:

It's not as if Capital only started to exist recently either m8. Lets not split hairs here, especially since capital is merely another form of commodity. Tell me this, what is stopping workers from planning their own work place and coordinating with other work places to create a plan of production? Why is a bureaucrat who is nowhere near the production cycle necessary for this? And should not the coordinators and managers be responsible to the workers and not the other way around? State-capitalism masquerading as socialism convinces people not to move beyond state capitalism to socialism, because they think they've already achieved "socialism". Socialism loses it's meaning in such a place and becomes bastardized, leading people to think they have to choose between this and liberal capitalism. Status quo or reaction. Nothing is progressive about such a state of affairs.

lmao

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it's been a pretty bad week for tankies

Wrong order first one last

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I like how tankies defend themselves by glossing over the odious shit their personality cult leaders did and instead pretend they’re just pragmatic because nobody else ever did anything… but they are at the same time staunchly opposed to anything short of total spontaneous reformation of the vanguard party in the pursuit of 100% ideologically pure international communism when it comes to politics in their own country

so in the end the great pragmatists who wish they could be gritting their teeth and thinking about red flags while daddy brutalizes the working class are sitting at home jerking off over narco‐capitalists and nationalists with red flags, preferably non‐white

Source for Lenin admitting this?

Yes, but the capitalist mode of production as a fully-fledgedhistorically delineated mode of production and its attendant social relations are quite recent indeed. For someone claiming to have the upper-hand in his interpretation of Marx it really doesn't sound you have either read or understood Marx on this matter.

Pure commodity fetishism.

Meanwhile leftcoms getting BTFO'd in the Richard Wolff thread

As I already said previously, only recently has it become the dominant form of production. Why are we wasting our time arguing semantics? Capital is indeed a commodity. How is this disputable? Coordination between sectors of the economy does not require an alienated state buercracy. There's no reason why workers cannot send delegates to a central planning committee to facilitate this, instead of having a bureaucrat be appointed by the state. If M-Ls were so against bureaucracy than they would have not created a massive inefficient bureaucracy in the first place, but that would mean giving powers to the workers instead of keeping it for the part. NEP was a capitalist economic plan and Lenin readily admitted to this.

you're aware that the USSR collapsed in 1991, right?

Stasi literally did not do anything wrong, they were fighting the class struggle through whatever means they had available. Are you one of those idealist shits who believe class antagonisms disappear the day after socialism is established?

Fucking liberals I swear. Every problem in communism always comes down to weak liberals who think socialism is unicorns and rainbows.

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ML is the only thing that works as proven by history.
You fringe socialist babies can cry about this all you want.

Where you from?

Nigga you're the one crying here. Go back to your safe space
>>>/marx/

kek, couldn't make a better parody of you guys

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Excrpt all but a handful of ML have collapsed

They might be capitalists, but at least they don't drool over world domination like the US, nro try to force their retarded shit in my country. Or at least i still haven't see in the cinema with 10 russian filsm being shown like i see 10 shitty hollywood films for your "choice". Or my city isn't filled with Iranian fast food places.

Americans are evil, i don't like them, i don't trust them…there's always something fishy about them.

Krushchevs policy of peaceful coexistence was the seed of the following Eurocommunist deveations. Most communist parties where still under the influence of the revisionist USSR in the late 50s, and only due to the popularization of Maoism in the late 60s a definite Eurocommunist tendency (opposed to revolutionary action of the Maoists) fledged itself out. Brezhnev returned to a more confrontational stance with the west, causing the Eurocommunist parties to be more opposed to the USSR as well.

The question is not whether commodity production existed or not, but whether or not it was generalized (read Engels etc.). Do you actually have the data about the foreign trade surplus of the USSR? Like, actually foreign trade, not Comecon transactions? I keep asking for proof for the supposed billions of dollars in value the USSR made by foreign trade with non-WP countries but keep getting obsfucating vague hot takes about internal markets and the such.

You do realize the emergence of an internal market didn't happen before the 1965 reforms right?

Literally every claim made by ultras in this thread has been refuted, they keep switching arguments and ignoring points which are made, running arround like headless chicken. And when asked for evidence they just ignore it. Just look at the guy cherrypicking a single point from a longer post, only to complain I didn't thoroughly adressed every single word of his four-liner afterwards, and then pretend he's going to "bully me tomorrow" and never showed up here again after being assflustered and running in circles.

That's not a legit argument considering it has to be measured to the success of your proposed alternatives which didn't even get off the ground. All these miniscule small-scale experiments have been proven to be utterly unworkable or being thoroughly impotent against the machinations of capitalism.
Strange how Marxism-Leninism led almost every single revolution then. Weird. Almost as if the superstructure has a reciprocal relationship with the base. It's also funny how the revolutions which succeeded were in every fucking case Marxist-Leninist, but according to you guys it had nothing to do with that, yet at the same time Marxism-Leninism is this boogeyman that crushes them? You can't have it both ways.

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Weird thread. Everyone's acting like ML's are getting absolutely BTFO yet Hoxha flag guy and tank flag guy have refuted basically every leftcom/anarchist argument in here in a series of long, high effort posts, only to get replies which are either one-liners or only adress one point out of many.

bump

This is from trade with the US alone. In regards to internal trade, watch the video I linked.

I don't need to right a paragraph to get my point across. Hoxa flag simply plays the semantics game, and poorly, and none of them have bothered to define for me what socialism is if not the abolishment of private property and the commodity form

They're basically the same as the identity politics retards

Not smart enough to actually have a nuanced opinion on anything. They just want an identity to latch on to and have a "team" to root for. They poison the well of discussion because their lobotomized brains can't understand anything more difficult than "left good right bad"

lmao, have you actually looked at the numbers you are posting? Who are you trying to fool? That's barely even 800 million dollar. USSR and USA trade never exceeded 1% of their entire trade surplus for both countries. I'm not a Brezhnevite so I don't justify the increased foreign trade which started by the 70s, but to say that foreign trade made up a significant chunk of the Soviet economy (which was still protected by a non-convertible currency anyway) is a ridiculous statement. Even in 1985, foreign trade made up less than 5% than the estimated Soviet GDP. Again, read Is the Red Flag Flying for a better refutation. To say that production for exchange was predominant in the USSR because they exported a bunch of furs is ridiculous.

It wasn't him who started it though. The argument of Leftcoms is always a mere appeal to philosophical authority so he just debated on their terms.

Very nuanced opinion of you though.

Wrong. Capital is neither a commodity, nor money but only a particularly form that money assumes when it enters into certain social relations.

If I'm some kind of say small artisan that owns my own means of production and employs only myself as a laborer and sell my commodities for money then I'm not a capitalist. It maybe operating in the context of capitalism, and the pressure SNLT puts on small competitors may inevitably force me to become a capitalist or die, but the fact is I am not yet a capitalist. Much of pre-modern trade and economic life consisted of communities of small-producers who owned their own means of production, some of these relations in some countries have endured to late modern times or exist today. I should note its still commodity production even if peasants control their means of production because their exchanging commodities that do not fulfill their own use-values for commodities that do and/or for money as a store of value.

Now, as to your claim that capital=commodities or commodities=capital, let's say I have a pile of commodities that I dumped in my backyard, by themselves are they anything? No. Let's say posit that I am a manufacturer and I sell my commodities at a profit, is what I retain after the exchange Capital? No, by itself it is just money, so if I take that money to Vegas and blow it on blackjack, strippers, and hookers, my personal consumption of commodities then that money has left my pocket and is no longer even potential capital. I have expended my income on use-values and however frivolous, however excessive, however much they derive from my class-p.rivilege that has nothing to do with capital as a social relation. Capital must be derived from what isn't spent on personal income which is why all capitalists, no matter how greedy, usually invest some money back into their business and keep some for themselves.

Let's say I have the same stack of commodities but this time I can only sell them at their cost-price this time I can only invest enough into my business to break even, I can't expand my capital which is the nature of capitalism.

If the same commodities are valued as being worth less then their cost-price or nothing, then I have lost part of all of the capital expended on them permanently. Therefore, capital isn't commodities or commodity production.

Your assertion that capital is a commodity is ludicrous and makes a mockery of the very basic distinction of money or the money-commodity and commodities in general. You can't walk into a store and say "I'd like some capital, please." that's not how it works in the first place its a social relation, in the second-place what one attains from a bank or lending service is not capital but money which merely has the potential to become capital.

The reason banks charge interest is because money isn't like any other commodity, it is a monotheistic in that sense, such deals must be paid in money which is lent at interest. Therefore, for the potential capital or money to be spent on use-values that you get from a bank in return the bank acts as a money-capitalist, they seek to earn a long-term profit from your short-term need for money.

This is why capitalist societies are obsessed with money first and foremost and commodity production is only a means to an end in the quest to attain money. Any group of people oriented towards commodities and their use-values, whatever else they maybe, are not capitalists if they aren't focused on monetary-gain and capital expansion first and foremost.

You're waiving all my criticisms off as "semantics" but its quite clear that you don't understand Marxist theory at a basic level.

More evidence supporting my point regarding the revisionist era of the USSR, thanks!

LEFT GOOD, RIGHT BAD! OOOGA BOOOGA!

I never said billions, you did. Furthermore, the fact it exists at all dispels the myth that the USSR was socialist. You cannot have a socialist society where production for exchange exists. You lied multiple times saying that commodities only existed in the agrarian sector and this disproves that. Also, this is just the US and not the other western powers.

Capital only exists insofar as commodities exist. I'll concede that capital = commodities is an oversimplification, though. It's still ultimately a semantic argument because simply changing the wording from "USSR had commodities" to "USSR had capital" still rings true. Nothing about my argument changes, only the wording used.

I don't agree with either of you, but I don't think you understand the idea that fundamentally, capital (outside of actual shit like manufacturing equipment) is meaningless. It is simply a tool used to extract rent in a capitalist society. Labour exists independently of capital and is what capital purchases.

Again, that's wrong because you can have commodity production without capitalism. What part of this aren't you getting?

So, you were wrong…

Who gives a shit if it "rings true" the only question is is it actually true? It's not really a semantic argument at all the only reason that nothing changes for you except "the wording" is because you're a fucking retard.

The fact that the revisionist (!) USSR exports its surplus that makes up less than 3% of their entire economy proves that it isn't socialist? Give me a break. According to that logic, capitalism is 6000 years old. You sure have a major mental problem with the fact that the USSR had generalized production for use.
Hold on, I've said that in regards to the Stalin era in response to a reference to Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR. But even if we talk about the revisionist USSR, less than 3% of their economy coming from export is simply miniscule, and even then it doesn't directly constitute commodity production, by that I mean the capitalist form. A lot of the goods exported look like stuff that has been overproduced due to the nature of the industry it was steming from.

Yes you can have commodity production without capital but as I said
Is it true that capital existed within the USSR? Yes of course it did. Just because capital is being managed by the state does not mean it does not exist.

The fact that it had capital and production for exchange is proof that it's not socialist m8. Foreign trade is evidence for this among other things. If workers are being paid a wage so that they can purchase commodities from their local markets how is this production for use?

So you are just going to ignore all of my arguments and the works of Engels and consequently Marx because your understanding of polticial economy concludes that capitalism has existed since the beginning of civilization.
This isn't at all what Marx means by wage labor and production for exchange? What the fuck? Read Critique of the Gotha Program and Anti-Dühring and then explain to me how a market stand as a mere allocation installation preconditions production for exchange. Marx and Engels spend a good amount of time BTFOing utopians who take "full product of one's labor" literally.

I never stated capitalism existed since the beginning of time. All throughout the thread I've stated multiple times that commodity production has only recently become the dominant form of production, and with it came the rise of capitalism. This is not the equivalent of saying that capitalism has always existed. You've failed to answer me: what constitutes socialism if not the abolishment of private property and the commodity form? Workers receive that full product of their labor indirectly through other means,, but this was not the case in the USSR.

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You've failed to answer my question every time it's been asked: what constitutes socialism if not the abolishment of the commodity form and private property? How does foreign trade contribute to these things? You're incorrect in your assertion that commodity production was always the dominant form of production. Feudalism was agrarian with the vast majority of people producing food not to be sold at a market but to feed themselves, and whatever small surplus they have left being commodified. Commodity production was not the dominant form of production. Marx's view of slave society is actually pretty inaccurate, since the dominant form of production in places like Egypt was not slavery but was more feudalistic, with most people being devoted to farming more so than any other profession. Bureaucrats are not needed for planning for reasons I've stated previously, and your defense of them is similar to a capitalists defense of his own position as "necessary". Merely being more egalitarian does not constitute socialism. If bureaucrats are the ones controlling and benefiting most from capital then how are they not a separate class from workers? How is it not in the interests of the workers to abolish the bureaucracy and do the planning themselves?

The USSR did away with all private property, all land was nationalized, all the capitalists had been expropriated. So, private property in the capitalist sense did not exist but even in the raw sense of the term as simply private land it had pretty much been abolished. Personal property of course did exist but Marxists have never opposed that.

As for the abolition of the commodity form it couldn't be done in a underdeveloped peasant country emerging out of the conditions of two World Wars and a Civil War. You've yet to elaborate a way that commodity production could've been abolished in such conditions that aren't based on an idealist non-materialist view of what the conditions were at the time.

Which is still commodity production, and you really think that people didn't exchange things for their needs too? As if peasants didn't say trade five chickens to another family for a cow? Or trade part of their grain to a family that has more vegetables? Engels described early peasant economies so well:

For reasons that you've stated but failed to prove. Likewise, you never had one good materialist argument in response to why the USSR might not have been able to avoid some of the problems of bureaucracy especially given the conditions of the time.

These discourses on bureaucrats are so cancerous it always feels like I'm talking about a republican or libertard bitching about the DMV or the post-office or Max Weber. Bureaucrats are typically simple white collar workers, whether their conditions are better then those on the factory line really doesn't mean they have some opposing class interest.

What capital? The economy was planned according to social need and production was not dictated by profit. All individual capitalists had also been wiped out as well.

You're also merely asserting that the bureaucrats were better off and hogging the gains rather then proving it. Likewise, I've already refuted the nonsense that socialism is about equal pay or receiving the full-value of their labor, there may have been good reasons why an economic planner with a doctorate in economics or an atomic scientist made more then a typical unskilled worker.

Again, you're assuming things I've never said and in fact have actually maintained the opposite. Just because I said it was historical idealism to assume the USSR could've made due without its bureaucracy doesn't mean I want bureaucrats to micromanage your personal life and get two scoops of ice cream while everyone else gets one. I've already pointed out that Stalin himself was no friend of bureaucracy and wanted to pass through major reforms that would hurt "bureaucratic" interests he was killed before that happened.

At the time it may not have been possible, with computers and the internet it maybe a lot more manageable and that was something they were talking about in the Soviet Union already in the late 40s and 50s. But who knows? Workers may find they'd rather employ someone to manage that shit rather then do it themselves, the key is not whether a factory worker gets to try his hand at economic planning or gives it to someone else to do but only that there be proletarian control over that process.

Not only are you an idiot but you're a complete utopian as well. If Lenin and Stalin hadn't sought foreign technical assistance to industrialize the USSR but instead tried to reinvent the wheel like Mao did with backyard furnaces you would be bitching about that. To build socialism and survive capitalist encirclement modern up-to-date machinery was needed. The tanks and aircraft that destroyed the Nazi menace and won WWII had to have an industrial base and infrastructure to create them and there was no shame in buying industrial machinery and key raw materials that helped that process abroad. In fact, this process helped the Soviet industrial process kick off and in the process made the country more immune to the fluctuations of foreign trade then it was previously.

Btw since your key to bring up commodity production here is Engels on the law of value:

Private property does not cease to be private property because it's now controlled by the state. You if you want to make the case that the USSR could not achieve socialism because it was underdeveloped then fine, but you haven't been making that argument so far. Yes it's commodity production, I never pretended otherwise, but the point is that it was not the dominant form of production. Commodity production was not the main focus of production, that didn't happen until capitalism. Roman society was an exception not the rule.

You're the one stating that bureaucracy is a necessary part of planning. How do you plan to prove as much? The Free territory was able to organize production without bureaucracy, and if you want to go even smaller in scale cooperatives tend to be more efficient than regular bureaucratic corporations while lacking a bureaucracy. If you had watched that video I linker earlier, you would know that firms within the USSR negotiated on prices with one another in an attempt to maximize their own profit. Are you disputing that bureaucrats did not have any special muh privileges, material or otherwise? No, what I asserted socialism was is the abolishment of private property and the commodity form, and workers should indeed get back the full portion of their labor through other means as Marx stated. Deductions that do take place are inevitability rewarded back to the worker, and this was not the case in the USSR for reasons previously stipulated. Again, if you want to make the case that foreign trade was good because it allowed them to industrialize then fine, but do not pretend that the USSR had achieved socialism at the same time as it did this. And again, I never said commodity production was a recent phenomena, I stated only that it's dominance in the productive cycle is a recent development and did that it was the dominant form of production within the USSR

Yes, it does, that is what the term private means as opposed to state, national, or public. You can make the argument that there was state-capitalism in the USSR or exploitation under the veil of nationalization but you can't really make the case that there was private property.

I mean you'd have to argue it was a peculiar type of capitalism as a totalistic "state-capitalism" is rather peculiar in the history of state-capitalism being that even in advanced Western countries the vast majority of all business investment is done by the private sector, so called "mixed economies" tend to be majority private sector, but you could make the argument. Its just simply a major conflation of terminology and vulgarization of theory to make the argument that there was private property just "controlled by the state".

It couldn't leapfrog right into Gay Space Reddit Communism or whatever the fuck you have in mind given the conditions of the time, I've been emphasizing that over and over. That is not to say that socialism can't be achieved in an underdeveloped society only that it faced major handicaps.You've yet to really establish why a transitional socialist society cannot exist or why the USSR couldn't have been one. You admit, that Marx did write of a transitional society and transitional demands but the only criteria that you really allow is the abolition of commodity production and the law of value. Pic related.

Ok, so going by that standard that must mean Rome was capitalist, right?

Archiving this thread because I've learned interesting stuff from all points of view

web.archive.org/web/20170828055217/https://8ch.net/leftypol/res/2018404.html

Read Cockshott, the USSR had over ten million industrial products and planning was quite a chore in the 1930s with the extremely primitive state of computing at the time. Even in the 1950s it took the labor-power of millions to
eprints.gla.ac.uk/4476/1/4476.pdf
ricardo.ecn.wfu.edu/~cottrell/socialism_book/new_socialism.pdf
IRCC it took at least a few million people working to plan the Soviet economy. But I mean, hey, why might that have been a problem for socialism? Better just spout some ultra-left slogans and pretend that it wasn't a real issue, right?

Also, if it existed in the USSR that must mean its a problem inherent to ML inherently and not a problem that could be easily surpassed using modern computers and networking systems. There are no other possible conclusions :^)

The guy takes testimonies from the show trials as proof of guiltiness when they were tortured out of the defendants. Opinion entirely discarded. I now have no choice but to concede that Stalin was everything everyone besides tankies claimed him to have been because you clearly can't be trusted to give the truth.
Now you're just grasping at straws. It wasn't until a few hundred years ago that commodity production came to dominate anyone's lives beyond those of merchants and medieval bourgeoisie. How dumb are you? Just intellectually disingenuous, of course.

Private property owned by the sate is still exclusionary, it's not really freely available to the rest of society, it's available to whoever the state deems it. Nobody is talking about FALC, we're talking only of the abolishment of private property and the commodity form. Transitioning from capitalism to socialism does not constitute the USSR as a socialist society m8. You've not yet made clear what constitutes socialism to you. The city or the empire? Perhaps a case could be made that within the city existed a sort of "primitive capitalism" but for the rest of the empire I would say no. Finnish Bolshevik doesn't even bother to quote from the books he linked to, simply stating it matter of factly instead of providing evidence from his source material. At least Bookchin had the good sense to quote properly from Paul Avrich. if I can watch "TheFinnishBolshevik" make slanderous statements for 16 minutes than you can watch 20 minutes of Wolff making factual statements. What constitutes a socialist country? You've failed at every opportunity to explain what constitutes socialism, because it's obviously not the abolishment of the commodity form and private property. I don't see any single country as being able to achieve socialism, it must be a global affair. However, countries and peoples that are aiming at socialism can be more or less successful based on how they've structured the system. Is it structured in such a way that empowers the workers or does it empower the party? I'm not a leftcom, I support leftist movements like DFSNS, but I don't disingenuously pretend like they've abolished capitalism.

...

Thailand

pick one.
And yet the factory committees formed spontaneously within a month after the revolution began. Spontaneous order birthed the ultra-efficient reality of capitalism from feudalism's collapse, so it shall also birth communism from capitalism's ruins. It's much easier to have decentralized planning than to centrally plan an economy entirely, to draw up specific temporary organizations for particular production chains and logistics purposes according to need than to have some line of paper pushers and greedy managers decide it without strict oversight or incentives.
He kept the single factory managers which Lenin had implemented. The major change (although not the only) under Stalin was a return of the peasantry to serfdom (they could not freely leave kolkhozi)
Bullshit. They didn't even give it a chance. Don't make me start grabbing the quotes.

So what did we learn today?

bump

Legendary thread

looks like Trotskyism is all that's left.

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That's because it's so shit nobody feels the need to mention its shittiness

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Not an argument

shouldn't you be beating the dicks of zionists and right-libertarians?

hahhahahahahaha

Shouldn't you be defending bourgeois dictators and LARPing?

no because unlike you I'm not a cretin

The only reason people like you exist is because of Rojava. In a year or two once Rojava is gone (or has gone full liberal/socdem) you will be pretending that you were never really a communalist and go back to being a liberal/ancom.

Read Bookchin instead of basing your opinions on memes like Holla Forums does

Truly the height of tankie discourse.

fuck off cultist

You've read Ecology of Freedom then? No? Let's say something easy like the Next Revolution. Still no? Wow, you sure have read bookchin friendo

why? what did i do?

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Wow.

M-L is a death cult m8

Wow indeed

does he really have to explain what's wrong with Zionism ITT?

How are they abysmal? Your whole point is saying that american imperialism had more influence than USSR. It does not invalidate its accomplishments, if anything it shows how abysmal is the capacity american leftists have to do or influence anything. Also, for better or worse, the USSR threat made it possible that wages and workers conditions increased all around the world. The 1945 social democracies would never be possible without that.

Bookchin wasn't a Zionist m8. Do I really have to explain that making an accusation is not the same thing as making an argument ITT?

actually, he was. KYS

You know that's the M-L flag, right?

actually he wasn't, and you can't prove that he was. Shitty whataboutism =/= zionism.

Hmmm.

Not necessarily. Tankie, stalin stache, hoxa flag and maoist china flag are M-L

Irrelevant really
Didn't do that
Didn't do that either
Never supported a Jewish ethno-state, therefore not a zionist. Any questions?

Where's the evidence they were tortured? I've only seen it asserted and never proved, and even if they were tortured that by itself wouldn't bring us a step closer to determining if they were guilty or innocent. If there was independent evidence that existed outside the Soviet Union, and there is, then it would lead credence to the validity of the Moscow Trials testimony as evidence–torture or not torture.

Whether they would be found innocent in an American court due to technicality has nothing to do with if they were really guilty. Indications of Trotsky's betrayal were found in his own writings:

And in the Trotsky archives at Harvard itself.

Even the Dewey Commission admitted that if Trotsky was in a terrorist conspiracy they would have no way of knowing due to his experience in the revolutionary underground. Famed historian Charles Beard actually resigned from the Dewey Commission because it was overly prejudicial towards Trotsky and chaired by an anti-communist who largely agreed with Trotsky's views on the USSR already.

I think I've been exceedingly generous towards you, so I don't see how you can make that claim. Let's review what was said:
I said that commodity of production was older then capitalism and that every mode of production has been based on commodity production, slavery was based on the literal commodification of human beings and Ancient Rome was highly commercial.

You disputed this, but you admitted that

You're responding to two different people as if they're the same person, so I'll try to reply to only the parts relevant to me. Lets for the sake of argument use the term capital instead of commodity. Capital is not a recent phenomena anymore than commodity production is. Rome, being the center of trade in europe, saw enormous amounts of traders who's primary goal was the accumulation of capital. Goods would be bought at their locality, brought to Rome, and than sold for a profit. If this is not an example of accumulation of capital then what is? Slaves were themselves procured in order to make a profit, to be used to generate more money (for the most part at least. there are of course exceptions to this). Is this not also the accumulation of capital? Now, was the accumulation of slaves the dominant form of production for everyone within Rome? Not at first at least, but with the concentration of wealth in the hands of the aristocracy, plebians now had to earn a wage and in fact compete with slaves for the right to work fields. This itself created enormous societal problems in Rome that eventually lead to the rise of Caesar, but let us not get into that. So was Rome some kind of "proto" or "primitive" form of capitalism? Perhaps it was, but this was a single city and is not applicable to the rest of the world. As I said, Rome is an exception, not the rule. Also, bartering does not constitute a capitalist relationship (M > C > M). Widespread commodity production is the only thing that enables capital to become the dominant form of production, and the dichotomy you try to make between widespread commodity production and capital as the dominant driving force is a false one. You cannot have the dominance of capital without the dominance of commodity production also. The pic isn't intended to prove that mahkno achieved the abolishment of the commodity form and private property, only that TheFinnishBolsheviks claims that he did nothing towards those ends and instead instituted slavery is nothing more then baseless slander. I'm not criticizing Paul Avrich, I'm criticizing the fact that TheFinnishBolsheviks made these claims without providing anything in the way of evidence, making them purely slander. In regards to his "secret service", I'm no anarchist and do not consider such a thing as worthy of condemnation. I won't you to understand that by writing these posts I'm not trying to attack you, or establish my own dominance over you. I'm human and capable of being wrong just as much as you are. My goal in writing these posts is simply to create a healthy dialectic so that we both may come closer to the truth.

bump in anticipation of hoxha flag poster response

and also this

screen-capping for future reference that leftcoms are inherently sectarian

I'm not a leftcom, and criticizing the USSR doesn't mean that I'm unwilling to work with other leftists. Feel free to screencap this thread though

This is actually true and something I've never denied. Capital in its simplest form M-M^ has existed for a long time perhaps as long as civilization.

Michael Hudson documents this processes very well in his work on Ancient Babylon and Sumer. Graeber while building mostly on Hudson's groundbreaking work has done a fairly good job of showing this was a global phenomenon.
michael-hudson.com/2002/04/the-new-economic-archaeology-of-debt/
michael-hudson.com/2016/07/financially-approved-financed-history/
libgen.io/book/index.php?md5=484F833A04B4560BEF1A9BF80E547FC0
libgen.io/book/index.php?md5=784A4D178F690858F66331408070A498

Now, Hudson in his book explains that Mesopotamian credit evolved to meet the incongruity between Harvest time and human need. That suggests to me that in this early civilized society there was already contradictions between use-value and exchange-value.

The insertion of the debt relation into the mix suggests commodity production on a pretty large scale as the indebted masses have to trade their commodities or attain money from someone in order to pay off their debts. Already we have a simple form of capital M-M^ a form of financial exploitation and alienation placed upon the producers. But since the alternative is to give out money for nothing (which is still a risk) no viable alternative is found.

Marx supports this position:
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch36.htm

The pre-modern modes of production could not sustain this primitive capital long-term and had to cancel or throw it off every now and then. This, of course, does not mean that these debt relations did not wreck havoc on Ancient society. Far from it, and for this reason Ancient religions across the world came to condemn usury with varying degrees of success. In this sense, there is a grain of truth to the assertion by conservative anti-capitalist ideologues and narratives that most hierarchal civilizations of the past were """"anti-capitalist""".

Merchant's capital is another early form of capital that Marx calls "the twin brother" of usurer's capital. It can be expressed as M-C-M^ in practice it usually involved the profit a merchant could make by exploiting differences in prices over long distances or hoarding necessary items in times of need. Both kinds of capital had to be subordinated to social control by ancient and medieval societies.

The aim of these primitive capitalists to maximize their profit (M-M^ or M-C-M^) was diametrically opposed to the mode of production prevailing at the time who were largely focused on C-M-C and as you yourself note with the example of barter this process of commodity production was not inherently capitalist.

As Marx explains only when these traditional social relations are supersede by productive capital which can be expressed as "M-C-P-C'-M^" does capital itself find a sustainable social order capable of reproducing and expanding it. This is a new type of commodity production and not merely commodity production of the old type now suddenly becoming "dominant" or a further intensification of commodity production and trade. This effected by the expropriation of the producers by either brutal direct violence this is primary imo and/or gradual alienation and expropriation.

It was also an Empire of 70 million people and the practices of the City of Rome were reflected in the Empire, especially in the Italian peninsula.
pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/089533006776526148
Now whether this is a completely accurate portrait I'd still say that Rome was exceptionally advanced and I'd probably argue that Rome's failure to adopt the capitalist mode of production follows from Marx's argument that while Roman slaves were property they also controlled the means of production de facto and so while you can argue that Ancient Rome in some places and at some times came close to capitalism the fact is that it failed to do so.

This is like arguing that if I sold you an egg a couple months ago then you must have a chicken by now. The fact that capitalism grows out of commodity production does not mean that where there is commodity production there must be capitalism.

On what grounds is this exception made? I think you simply don't want to look like you're arguing against Marx. I say, away with this modestly! You should enlighten and embolden us all with your new theory.

Woah there, buddy. This whole time you've been arguing a rather absolutist and all-or-nothing approach towards socialism against the transitional and "gradual" approach of the Bolsheviks and now we are to uphold Makhno on the grounds that he made moves towards those ends. But haven't you maintained its a rather all or nothing venture?

This is now something quite apart from whether FinBol is right or wrong on the historical case about Makhno since it can also be claimed that the Bolsheviks made moves towards those ends but did not succeed for one reason or another.

I think I know why all these failed revolutions that lasted maybe a few months or a few years at most are so popular among ultra-leftists. You can always claim that communism was going to happen and never be proven wrong in your hypothetical because in actuality it failed. It relies on historical counterfactuals such as if Franco hadn't won, if the Bolsheviks hadn't won, if the Versailles government hadn't smashed the Paris Commune, if the Nationalists hadn't crushed the Shanghai commune, if the Spatrakists weren't massacred by the Freikorps working for the SPD etc.

Using that method you literally cannot be wrong. And I get it, I do, many of those failed revolutions I wish had succeeded too but we should draw lessons from those defeats as much as we should draw lessons from our success.

The difference then between studying the Soviet Union and these failed revolutions is much like the difference between studying a real decades-long marriage with real flaws and a passionate affair that lasted a few weeks but ended much too soon.

With the latter you can always daydream about what might've been.
I don't consider it worthy of condemnation; nothing is wrong with it. But, I think its legitimate to point out that such an organization is not really anarchist. Secret police, spy agencies, etc. are perhaps the boldest example of state-repression and intimidation. Why this is suddenly so evil when the Leninists and "Stalinists" did the same thing is not something that I understand.

bump. I intend to respond but not just yet. Maybe in a day or so

Nigga you dumb

WAKE ME UP

WAKE ME UP INSIDE

CAN'T WAKE UP

WAKE ME UP INSIDE

SAAAVE MEE

fug

jej

You clearly never read Soviet theory, or you would of been able to debunk their arguments on why the USSR wasnt socialist, but nsgrad you switched ideolgoies on ad ime because you are a fucking retard and should kill yourself

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No, you kill yourself for your religious cultism

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is that a dayz sprite?

Where?

Good posts. So we can both agree that capital has existed for a long time before it became the dominant productive mode. We can both agree that widespread commodity production is necessary for the proliferation of capitalism as the dominant system. Our disagreement stems from whether or not widespread commodity production can exist independently of capital production, or in other words can widespread commodity production exist without capitalism existing. Perhaps it stands to reason that the superstructure of these ancient civilizations is the only thing that kept them from proliferating commodity production further towards capitalism, given the threat not just to the majority peasantry but also the minority elite who would have their influence threatened by unaristocratic wealth and power. When I say Rome is an exception, I say it because for the most part cities did not have such a massive concentration of wealth and resources nor population. Cities like Rome were a rarity, and even given an urbanization of 30 percent that still leaves 70% of the population living an agrarian feudal lifestyle (this is only the italian penisula, mind you. Forgive me if I've mistaken their meaning of 30% urbanization). It's not so much "all or nothing" as it is recognizing that USSR didn't achieve socialism, and it can't be said that they were transitioning to Socialism when in the end they ended up as liberal capitalism. I think the reason for this is simple: the way their superstructure was structured more or less ensured degeneration. Concentration of political power in the hands of the few has it's own contradictions that lead inexorably to growing class distinctions and inequality. You're right in saying that we need to analyze why these revolutions failed, but you have to apply your own logic to the USSR. How is saying "if only it wasn't for Khrushchev they would have achieved socialism" any different? I consider Mahkno to be more of a communalist than an anarchist, and there's nothing wrong with that. It's important to recognize how these apparatuses were utilized by mahkno and contrast that with how the Cheka were utilized. I'll have to read Kontrrazvedka some more before I come to any conclusion, though.

off yourself

Perhaps, that's the reason I think we had all these bourgeois revolutions. Hell, if you include the Dutch Revolt at the beginning and the anti-colonial revolutions at the tail-end then the period of bourgeois revolutions lasts approximately from the mid-16th century all the way to the mid-1970s–that's a period of 400 years! I probably give the bourgeois revolutions more credit for creating or kicking off capitalism then most Marxists tbh but I think you have a good point here. I can high-light at least one structural reason why capitalism began in the West, which is that during the Roman Empire credit provision was in the hands of private creditors whereas in most Asian and African civilizations it remained in the hands of the state/community.

By socialism, I would assume you mean the higher-stage of communism that Marx talked about? No, I don't think the USSR achieved the higher stage of communism but I think it achieved the lower stage even if its transition to a higher-stage was thwarted. Essentially what we mean by the distinction between "socialism" and "communism" is the distinction between a higher and lower-phase of communism and not necessarily that they are totally different entities or things inherently.

You have to remember that the transition to capitalism and the liberation of the peasantry from feudalism suffered its own set-backs especially in the early modern period. Even though the restoration didn't in Britain and France didn't stop capitalism it did slow it down, it did succeed to some extent at preserving aristocratic muh privilege at the expense of both the bourgeoisie and the working masses. In many respects, the US, along with a newly liberated Latin America, and especially the European settler-colonies all over the world were more advanced in both ideological superstructure, institutions and economic base when it came to capitalist governance and expansion.

In many respects, the New World served as the trump card of the bourgeoisie, and even when they failed to achieve their goals in Europe itself its power on the world market was sufficient to drag the Old World "metropolis" into the modern age kicking and screaming.

The aim of Khrushchev was to restore capitalism in the USSR and in this respects his interests ran against those of the working class and the communist movement regardless of what you think about Stalin.

Those of us in the modern ML movement have come to understand what many people outside the USSR in the 50s and 60s didn't necessarily understand, which is that revisionist infiltration of the Soviet Union had begun by the 1930s and never stopped.

The first major betrayal was the take-over of the Comintern by the revisionist Georgy Dimitrov who advocated class-collaboration to stop fascism in place of the Stalinist position against fascism and social-democracy.
ml-review.ca/aml/Comintern/ALLIANCE36-CI-NS.htm
The Comintern later liquidated under this influence and Stalin reformed it as the Cominform which was set-up to fight revisionist tendencies in the world communist movement:
ml-review.ca/aml/Comintern/Cominform_WBB_StalinSoc.htm

In addition to the aforementioned reforms that Stalin attempted to make in the USSR, he also fought right-revisionist economic tendencies and his book Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR was intended to help the party in this struggle, after his death his book was actually deemed ultra-leftist and discontinued.

I think Stalin died fighting for communism but neither he and the other MLs were the majority and they knew that to some extent, which is why he favored major reforms in the USSR that many of his colleagues either opposed openly or quietly. To sidestep great-man theory, I'd say that the Civil War, the famine, Ezhovchina and WWII all took a great toll on both the Bolshevik party and the revolutionary energy of the Soviet people and on the party itself. Most of the former exploiters weren't destroyed physically but only repressed by the dictatorship of the proletariat and any loosening of discipline could only lead to them taking advantage of that situation.The Bureaucracy, as I explained before, could better be explained as a labor aristocracy then as a capitalist class or a class-in-itself, to some extent this was unavoidable because of the problem of "bourgeois right" as Lenin put it and in other respects the struggle against these elements may have slackened because of genocidal threats that were external in nature.

I'd also say that while a labor aristocracy is bad enough by itself that that doesn't mean those in the bureaucracy weren't working class. The Soviet "labor aristocracy" wasn't nearly as pr1vileged as the labor aristocracy in the West in comparison to the lower segment of workers.

Even despite that "the worker elite", as it is sometimes called, is often found on the forefront of the class struggle even in the core capitalist countries in tempestuous times. One might recall the fighting efforts of the public unions in Wisconsin or the Verizon strikers, who, if I recall correctly, were white collar workers with higher-then-average pay and benefits in comparison to the rest of the American working class.

Because the free market is treating them so well right and, and because they were totally better off as feudal countries…

I think one of the failings of many marxists is that sometimes they fail to give the superstructure enough emphasis. Arguably, the potential to transition to capitalism existed within the base for many centuries before it actually did, culminating in revolutions in france and elsewhere. But even in these revolutions I do not believe that a bourgeois victory was necessarily guaranteed. The French revolution more than any other "bourgeois revolution" had the potential to result in socialism. The "american revolution" was lead not by capitalists or towards capitalist interests, but by the landed gentry within the country that wanted to establish themselves as an aristocracy ruling a republic like that of Rome. The problem with putting all the blame on kruschev is it does not address the problems within the USSRs superstructure that allowed this unilateral "return to capitalism" take place. This kind of thing is nothing new. Bookchin makes a convincing argument that the superstructure within pre-private property society (primitive society) allowed the rise of private property in the first place. Though shamans and "big men" did not have any special property rights, their status within the superstructure of primitive society allowed them to establish special property rights eventually, culminating in the ziggaurats of ancient Sumeria and the first kings. My point is simply this: Khrushchev would have been incapable of creating such changes in the base if the superstructure was structured properly. I suppose it can be said that socialism is not merely how the base is structured but also how the superstructure is structured. This article touches on this point somewhat in regards to DFSNS
cooperativeeconomy.info/could-communal-economy-be-a-distinct-mode-of-production/
>However, without expropriating the expropriators and smashing the exploiters that hold social accumulation with determined organisation, it is clear that the attempt to build communism will be doomed to failure as a utopian idealism. Additionally, the organisation of social life in communes in order to increase participation and dispel the bureaucracy-society contradiction is not necessarily mutually exclusive to the idea of socialist central planning. The approach that pejoratively uses the idea of centralisation in the economy makes the mistake of reading self-governance as the autonomy of communes, rather than the equal participation of communes in decision-making mechanisms. Conversely, every effort for mutualism is a practice of centralisation. In this sense, what contradicts the notion of the commune is not centralisation, but bureaucracy.

I would like to add on a final point to this: the USSR cannot be said to have been in early stage of communism because it's superstructure was structured in such a way as to make a transition to full communism in impossibility

This is well explained by Engels in Ant-Duhring both the English and French bourgeois revolutions produced movements with utopian communist visions but neither could realize them because of the material conditions. The problem of trying to chart a path towards communism prior to the 19th century is that as Marx explained the feudal mode of production while nominally more "social" in terms of superstructure was far more individualistic, there were millions and millions of individual producers who taken as a whole made up of community but their labor was not socialized to such a high-degree as it is today, to say nothing about its generally low-state of productivity. Gerrard Winstanley was the only early modern thinker to propose how "communism" (for lack of a better word) could be achieved in the conditions of a feudal England that had barely started down the road to capitalism. Certain ideas that he had such as a government public office to promote technical innovation and state-control of foreign trade was far ahead of their time. The science of economics had yet to even be defined and at that point had nothing to do with theoretical problems aside from thousand year old Church discourses on usury and fair trade but only existed in the form of pamphlets dealing with practical problems from the first person perspective of merchants. They were not economics as such.

Society had yet to liberate itself from feudalism, not only were the aristocracy not overthrown or disempowered but the vast majority of non-aristocratic Europeans were still not free in either the legal or real sense and had no real voice in government. To destroy the aristocracy which didn't even happen in the 17th century British revolutions–they were only weakened and then to arrest and destroy the bourgeoisie and make the transition to socialism was not only a very tall order but not one I think either the productive or class forces were up to at that time. The bourgeoisie at the time was barely very far distinguished from the peasantry or the artisan class and without the existence of a large, fighting proletariat there was no force that could disempower the bourgeoisie and abolish private property. In that sense, the bourgeoisie itself effects the abolition of private property (in the sense of means of production) for the vast majority of people and that process isn't even finished today but wouldn't essentially be effected until the 18th century; the proletarian revolution finishes that process by abolishing the property relations of the bourgeoisie.

The French Revolution did mirror the English one in the key respect that the gravediggers of capitalism didn't exist in sufficient quantity or experience to bring about its downfall. The class contradictions of France were more severe in the sense that the aristocratic class was more powerful then in England and the French bourgeoisie was stronger then when its English counterpart took up arms alongside with Cromwell and played in the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

On the subject of historical revisionism about the French Revolution:
libgen.io/book/index.php?md5=82D420ADBAA395F81ADD15ED0D63DB49

This is a good piece on that subject
marxist.com/class-struggle-and-the-american-revolution.htm

Engels mentions this too and from this flows the evolution of patriarchy and private property in Ancient society. Of course, the expanding productive powers of humans, particularly following the invention of agriculture enshrined a new inequality associated with the division of labor. Marx's analysis of villages in India that existed without a ruling aristocracy where the village heads were all craftsmen gives some idea of how the transition occurred: first came commodity production on a voluntary basis that allowed growth in equality and then these inequalities fed on each other. The slave and feudal modes of production proved to be more efficient, or what comes to the same thing, more powerful then the early communally-based modes of production. I would probably argue that the big men and shamans of primitive society reflected a new burgeoning division of labor beyond what existed between men and women, which is why the practice of "first right" began according to Engels.

This is a rather pleasant surprise in the sense that usually its argued that changes in the superstructure couldn't bring about changes in the base. But I would say in your next post you take a rather extreme Gramscian position, or better put: more Gramscian than Gramsci!

*growth in inequality

I think the answer to this question of how producers at that time could truly centralize production is simple: confederation. I believe that the true driving force behind the revolution in france was not the bourgeois but the peasantry and craftsmen , and this is not such a wild thing to speculation given that arguably these classes suffered the most heavily from feudalism and had the most to gain from it's abolishment. I defer to bookchin for more on this:
libcom.org/library/were-we-wrong-murray-bookchin
In regards to the article, I haven't finished reading it but it keeps misclassfying the "founding fathers" as bourgeois, when in reality they were landed gentry and the bourgeois did not really establish themselves as masters of the republic until the Civil War. Both Bookchin and Apo make a strong case for the Ziggurat as the essential structure for class society as we know it predating the first cities, and it's form has roots in the primitive communist societies that preceded it. Being divided into three levels, the bottom containing in essence the whole of society outside of the priesthood. Producers of every kind lived, created, and stockpiled resources on this level. The second level contained the priesthood, with the exception of the high priest. And on the third level was the high priest and the "gods", which for religion of time live and were embodied by statues on this level. Hierarchy and class distinctions are embodied in this structure, with priests constituting their own class of non-producers above a singular class of producers, and this structure has roots in the shaman controlled societies that proceeded it. There is data to suggest that places with agriculture did not automatically result in the creation of classes, with the minoan civilization being one often referenced by Apo. It stands to reason then that there is more going on there, that indeed the already existing superstructures of these societies ultimately determined how the new found developments in the base were utilized, with some resulting in class stratification and others not. I'm not terribly familiar with Gramsci tbh

I've thought about this question, quite a lot and I don't see much of an alternative to capitalism in the immediate aftermath of the bourgeois revolutions.

The bourgeoisie tended to come from the rich and middling peasantry, they were the leaders of that particular community, as well as the upper-stratum of the craftsman in addition to non-titled government functionaries and merchants. Merchants and bankers were perhaps the most obvious targets in a barely post-feudal society but they were also the least numerous segment of the bourgeois class and the ones most likely to side with the landlord class (especially the latter group) during times of insurrection.

The people were fighting for freedom from the class oppression of the aristocracy in the economic sense as well as freedom from the attendant oppressions inherited from feudal society. In a certain sense, people desired liberation from society and community as it had been developed and preserved by feudalism.

For most people, liberty was a by-word for decentralization of sorts and the state was considered only necessary to the extent that it facilitated this process. The centralization of the means of production occurred in spite of whatever desires people had, it was the end-result of people pursuing their liberty to buy, to sell etc. in a capitalist context.

The pursuit of happiness and the rights of man, like any bourgeois right as Marx and Lenin pointed out were freedom for inequality much any right. While the bourgeois revolutions rejected inequality in the form of unearned hereditary economic muh privilege they preserved it precisely through the documents that declared all men equal. And, this wasn't merely sins of omission or subterfuge but the natural working out of these rights in practice.

Capitalism at that time offered extraordinarily high-profit rates, high-social mobility, rapid growth-rates and rising standards of living for the core societies that undertook these transitions. No pre-modern society had ever grown as fast as Victorian Britain and its counter-parts were growing in the 19th century. Some other accomplishments worthy of mention was the fact that Britain became the world's first majority urbanized society during the first half of the 19th century and that it was precisely the high-wages of British workers that gave them the caloric capacity to work the grueling workweeks of the Industrial era. The relatively good position of England's laborer's were part of what made industrialization possible in that a good portion of them could afford to consume meat daily and get enough calories to work a full workday. Feudal societies imo lacked the "protestant work ethic" because a large portion of the workforce was not well-enough to do more then 3 hours of light labor at a time, in 18th century France that figure was approximately 40%.

A socialist alternative in that era would've had to been more dynamic then capitalism in a society emerging from the womb of feudalism and even still there would've been no guarantee that it wouldn't crash and go down the capitalist path or even all the way back to feudalism.

Winstanley imo was the only one contemplating something even semi-viable in that regards and even then I don't think it would've worked. The Diggers had fewer followers too then just those who simply wanted democracy and that latter group were themselves a minority during the English Revolution.

The bourgeois weren't very far separated from those latter two groups in the era prior to the revolutionary assaults against feudalism. Even in the early 20th century, European revolutionaries talked about the peasantry having similar interests to that of the bourgeoisie in desiring a free market, commodity production, the right to make a profit off of or to rent property, to hire wage-workers etc. for that reason, following Marx, socialists were to focus on the poor peasantry who were most like the proletariat in outlook. This did not preclude socialist alliance with the middling and well-to-do peasants in certain circumstances but there was an understanding that not all of the peasantry could be one to the banner of the proletariat and in fact formed a reserve army of reaction utilized by the bourgeoisie.

I think its also not well-understood that even if the bourgeois were most likely to become leaders of the movement and to take advantage of the fruits of the revolution it was still the masses that made the bourgeois revolutions. This is the Marxist position, it was the masses who forced the bourgeoisie to be better then they really were in certain respects. But the revolutions of those times were limited by the bourgeois horizon, the winning ideas of these conflicts had to be bourgeois ideas and the bourgeois class was the class that was rising against the aristocracy and not merely "the Third Estate" or "the People" as revolutionaries of the time liked to pretend.

The bourgeoisie was the result of the decay of feudal society and it was rising not merely due to the decay of the aristocracy but also due to the decay of all the classes inherited from feudal medieval times. The peasantry and petty craftsmen were just as much in decay as the aristocracy and in expanding its rule through the defeat of the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie accelerated that process of decay. The proletariat is a symptom of the capitalist mode of production but in its own way represents the decay of the bourgeoisie as increasingly society is divided between a growing pool of workers and a proportionately smaller number of capitalists. The class interests of the peasantry and craftsmen caused them to follow the bourgeoisie all the way down to their doom but only the proletariat as a special product of capitalism arises with the will and capacity to oppose capitalism. Marx said that by disclosing "the secret of its existence" the proletariat discloses the fact that it is the end of the world. In this way, it is quite different from other classes who can find ways to ally their class interest with capitalism.
I disagree with Bookchin on this and I think his major ideas on the French revolution follow the right-wing historical revisionist notably headed by Furet.

The article talks about some of the anti-feudal results of the revolution and many of its agitators and a number of the founding fathers were bourgeois. The article talks about the fight against feudalism in the American colonies and some of the anti-feudal results of the revolution:

As an aside, there's quite a bit of argument about whether slavery in post-1776 America was capitalist but regardless of which position you take, it was really the Northern and Mid-Western states where the bourgeois and the capitalist mode of production was most developed and dynamic that was both the antebellum powerhouse of the country and the ultimate victor. The victory of the Northern bourgeoisie over the southern slaveholders was one of the most radical and far-reaching bourgeois revolutions in all of history.

*historical revisionist school

...

bump. sorry for the delays in response, I've been trying to transition from a polyphasic sleep schedule to a monophasic one and it's left me tired for the last few days.

Bookchin doesn't meantion any of the work of Furet in that article, and I can't say I'm well acquainted with him either. In regards to the claim that the peasantry and bourgeois interests coincided:
In regards to the american revolution being bourgeois, I remain unconvinced. What aspect of the revolution, despite abolishing the nobility, was truly bourgeois? Is the roman overthrow of their king considered to be bourgeois now?

I'm not a racist, they just speak a different language and it's wildly inconvenient.

Bumping. Will reply later

This board is dying.

If this board is dying, people like you are the ones killing it

It's important to distinguish between what people at the time thought they were trying to do and believed and what actually happened. I think Marx put it best:
< Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so can we not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness
So, really if we asked people from what they were fighting for we might get a hundred different explanations but we can't say on that basis that objectively they were fighting for capitalism and in particular the democratic form of capitalist rule. It wasn't just the peasants, sans-culottes, or American yeoman who were conservative and backward-looking but in fact Marx fully acknowledged that these revolutions started off conservatively to begin with:

Treating better than the USSR's awful system of centralized exploitation

Oh please, I made the Soviet Cybernetics threads, one of the highest quality threads of all time! In fact, that was one of two times that I've ever posted a thread.
No, what makes bunkerfag bad is that it's all bullshit and provable as such (see: most of this thread before the most recent parts). People refute it at first, but then they get tired because he spews so much. He keeps spewing and you stop replying? He wins by default. You'll notice that all the leftcoms have stopped replying long ago, and yet he keeps responding and is hailed as the "winner" by lurkers. It's moronic, but that's how it is and it's why Holla Forums is dying.

That essentially answers its own question, that the petit-bourgeoisie were major boosters of the revolution is something even the historical revisionists rarely attempt to deny. The petit-bourgeoisie are a mass base for capitalism and a seedbed for new capitalists. It's unsurprising that in Paris, the city where the class contradictions and urban population were the greatest that we see perhaps the strongest revolutionary resolve.

That the Parisian petit-bourgeoisie, the sans-culottes, and certain factions of the French capitalist class (see pic related) came together to form a radical democratic anti-feudal government makes sense; it also makes sense that this fragile but dynamic coalition inevitably fell apart. The Jacobins did their jobs too well in a certain sense. Outside of Paris the government had the support of the revolutionary segment of the peasantry in confiscating and selling off the lands of the Aristocracy; in this case, too, it was the rich peasantry, the kulaks, who benefited the most from this reform and consequently they came to form a rural capitalist bourgeoisie.

In the time before the bourgeois revolutions this threat came mainly from the Aristocracy. So, the peasantry and the emergent bourgeoisie came to use the rhetoric of liberty as a shield to protect themselves from the ruling class starting in the middle ages ('Lust for Liberty by Samuel K. Cohn is quite a good book on this) but during the age of bourgeois revolution they found themselves strong enough to go on the offensive. Since then, regardless of whether it has improved conditions for proles or not, this has largely been maintained as a legal fiction to keep the state or anyone else from interfering to greatly with bourgeois private property. It's violation by bourgeois fascist governments helps deceive workers into thinking that libertarian and democratic ideas and approaches that capital is capable of adapting to is the solution to their oppression, or at the very least much better then what they've been through.

Completely nebulous term. A welfare state is an example of a moral economy; charities and foundations are examples of a moral economy. Anti-trust and monopoly laws are examples of a moral economy and not at all dissimilar from early modern/medieval ideas about just-price. As for the bit about traditional rights in Europe during the transition to capitalism one way to expropriate aristocratic property (and this was done both intentionally and unintentionally) was to fix rents at their traditional rates and allow inflation and growing productivity to whittle down the real value of the rent. Christopher Hill made an interesting case that commons in the 17th century came to house both displaced peasants and businessmen looking to avoid rents and tax and thus became a hotspot of capitalist activity. Seas, rivers, the air, roads, sidewalks, these are examples of commons in everyday life that have been able to accommodate capitalism. Indeed, the USSR was essentially a gigantic commons in the sense that most everything was publicly owned property, I think I would expect someone who thinks that the USSR was state-capitalist to see that capital is ductile enough that it was more than capable of growing in spite of an imagined restoration of the traditional rights of the peasantry. The collapse of that quaint medieval world itself was the event that precipitated the takeover of the planet by capital.

Perhaps the abolition of the nobility for the start? Many countries wouldn't see similar transformations until the Napoleonic Wars, the middle-to-latter 19th century or even had to wait until the 20th century to see progress on that front.

The US bourgeoisie won economic self-determination from the English bourgeoisie allowing it to develop its own industry; the American example lit a path that the rest of the Western hemisphere would come to follow and that the anti-colonial bourgeois movements would seek to emulate rather self-consciously, I might add. In addition to that, the US turned itself into a democratic nation with an optimistic growth-based economic culture with institutions geared towards the support of scientific progress. There were very few states on the planet that were true representative democracies even in the 19th century and the US was the first state to model itself on Enlightenment ideals. I should add that you wrote earlier that you believed that the superstructure of Ancient society might have been the only thing holding capitalism back don't you think that the superstructural change here is of great significance?

There's a respectful and engaged conversation throughout the thread, it's clearly not a monologue. You're just made because you disagree with the guy.

You mean the beginning of the thread when it was mainly just an anti-ML circle jerk consisting mostly of one-liners, ultra-left talking points, personal experience, conventional wisdom, and wikipedia links? Wow, really showed me.

If you notice though, most of the latter part of this thread has been about certain points of contention about Marxist theory and historiography and not about Grover Furr but it is telling how much the mention of his work triggers people here.

It could also be said that I know more then the average poster, and really that's not grounds for self-congratulations, but the refusal of people here to really study and not my posting are the real reason Holla Forums is dying.

I don't necessarily look at it as a matter of winning or losing, certainly Holla Forums's ideology is of a certain nature that I know I could never change it by "winning" one debate or even a series of debates. But I can't lie and say I don't get a kick out of debate but even I get tired. At least one of my opponent's here has been quite generous with some HQ posts and so I return the favor as best I can.

if anything, this thread has proved to me that the "tankies don't read" meme is just that, a meme.

What alt>>2022713

this happens literally every time

meant to tag>>2022713

...

you having troubles mate?

yeah bloody hell don't know what's wrong with me tonight

You're just a bit tired from working so hard. It's understandable and we all make mistakes. I love you no matter what.

Hoxa Flag is literally the only tankie left on here that actually reads and isn't a retard, but that doesn't mean he can't be and isn't wrong

In the case of the american yeomen, they literally had a second revolution against capitalists in the form of Shay's rebellion. If this doesn't show an obvious divergence in class interests then what does? I think that marxists remain very mistaken in suggesting that yeomen and other such groups desired or favored policies like free trade which the bourgeois wanted, policies which really only benefited city dwellers and not the largely rural and subsistence based rural classes. Things, like land reform, were certainly in the interests of peasants but this is a far cry from suggesting that things like free trade or even a majority of the bourgeois policies were favored by the majority of the population, especially the peasantry. Freedom from arbitrary authority did not mean the same thing to the peasantry that it did to the bourgeois, and the continued conflation of the two is preposterous. Moral economy is a term which bookchin elaborates on at length elsewhere: youtube.com/watch?v=44EPrrZAgWY
Obviously, their conception of moral economy is not the same thing as a welfare state as you suggest. The abolition of the nobility is not purely a bourgeois interest, and indeed in many cases the bourgeois supported the nobility as stated above. The continued conflation of landed gentry with bourgeois is not helpful to the dialogue either, nor can it be said that they two are exactly the same. You now refer to the American revolution as freeing themselves from English bourgeois when before you referred to them as freeing themselves from the english feudal order. The US was never a "democracy", from it's beginnings it was meant as a replication of the Roman Republic of old, with it's aristocracy and centralization of power in the hands of land holders. The real bourgeois revolution was never the American Revolution but the American Civil War, and that is where the true super-structural change took place that created a bourgeois America. The bourgeois had most certainly existed in america prior to this, but the landed gentry where almost always the ones with the most political power.

ML has just to many contradictions to work and will collapse or degrade overtime

Workers controlled the means of production, there was democracy, there was a dictatorship of workers, and imperialism was defeated, but it wasn't perfect so you sign your posts with an anti-semite flag.

False
False
False
Also false.
lol wut

The key-point being that this rebellion, significant as it was, failed. In the aftermath of the revolutionary war many Yeoman were saddled with high-debt burdens, foreclosures, a government refusing to print money to alleviate the cash-shortage and ruinous price-deflation. I think its a bit of a stretch to think that what they were fighting against was capitalism itself rather than simply its worst features.

Even political-economy itself was rather new, Adam Smith had just written his famous book The Wealth of Nations other famous economists who would advance the science of economics such as Ricardo would not be writing until the 19th century. The work of Petty and other English-political economists among whom some of the work of the American Founders should probably be included was just a little bit more than 100 years old. Scientific political economy was quite young and even in Marx's time most radicals had a tendency to make quite a mess of political economy which still has some entertainment value today:marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch22.htm and even today, when access to education is much-more widespread, most left-wing radicals tend to be political junkies rather then thorough-going or even simply consistent economic thinkers. Even the word "capitalist" was rather new in English and if the Oxford English dictionary is to be believed the word that now describes capitalism as a system had yet to be introduced into English.
adamsmithslostlegacy.blogspot.com/2007/02/origins-of-word-capitalism-thackeray.html

The words of one participant in Shays rebellion actually gives us some insight into their economic worldview:
marxist.com/shays-rebellion-and-american-revolution.htm

So, here we see this particular participant railing against "monopolizing" and living off interest or rent. This is not so inconsistent with the point of view of classical political economy which attacked both feudal land-rent and usury as drags on the emerging capitalist system headed by productive capitalists. We also see a not-so subtle echo of just-price theory that was handed down from medieval times, which was perhaps the greatest theoretical economic innovation of those times. The farmer here also rails against merchants which I have to say is more utopian then early American activism and populist rhetoric against usury. A small farmer who brings his produce to market is in a sense his own merchant even if we assume the middle-man here is cut out. While I've seen evidence that some in the Shays rebellion espoused utopian communist sentiments I haven't seen any evidence that they proposed a method for handling the problems of trade and foreign trade much less many other more intimidating problems of socialist political economy.

Well, here we have another reason why the rebellion did not succeed it could not win to its banner the laboring classes in the cities because who would fight for high agricultural prices besides farmers? The American farmers, like most people, were content with free-trade when it was in their interests as shown by the fact that British taxes placed upon foreign consumption goods was one of the inciting acts of the revolution. French women in Paris likewise rioted over sugar prices that resulted from the abolition of slavery in Haiti.

The notion that the peasants, especially the rich peasants, supported free-trade, private property, the right to make a profit, etc. was something the socialist movement learned from hard experience. Kulaks resisted collectivization efforts in the USSR and in China in one province 75% of peasants supported capitalist freedoms around trade. The bourgeoisie is not simply an urban phenomenon but arises out of the peasantry too, in fact the rich peasants are typically the leaders of that community. Only with the increased division of the peasantry into rich and poor, between an agricultural proletariat and a wealthy agrarian bourgeoisie does the fundamental contradiction of capital finally lay itself bare in the countryside. That many of the newly minted rural proletarians join their brothers in the cities is of course also a consequence of that process.

I thought I made it pretty clear that it wasn't merely limited to the welfare state but that the welfare state is merely one form of moral economy. Other kinds of economic practices that can be considered moral economy as its conventionally understood include: philanthropy, legislation against monopoly, price-gouging and so on, debt forgiveness, policies designed to keep interest rates low for consumers, progressive taxation, communally-based credit relations, UBI, and gift-giving culture. We can see that in our own world, as capitalists never cease to remind us, that there is a certain amount of moral economy which at the very least serves to humanize a system built on exploitation and irreconcilable contradictions.

Here I may not be using the term "moral economy" in your sense and I'm more then willing to engage with it but I would ask maybe for a time-stamp or a certain chapter or article from Bookchin clarifying this. Two and a half hours is quite a lot to listen to tbqh

I don't recall saying that it purely was but only that it advances bourgeois interests and it opens up ground for peasants freed from feudalism to either turn themselves into capitalists or to fall down into the ranks of the proletariat. Either way the changes to a society's superstructure in favor of capitalism (so long as socialism is not achieved) is typically quite immense.

The last chapter of the Brumaire is quite an instructive on both rural class relations and the development of capitalism in the aftermath of a revolution abolishing aristocracy:marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch07.htm Other historical examples could be supplied if necessary.

Some of the bourgeoisie supported the monarchist reaction, that much is true. I seem to remember a little song sung by volunteers from a certain "reactionary" city that later became the French national anthem. I think the bourgeois in the port and industrial cities were more put off by the abolition of slavery in Haiti which also produced most of Europe's cotton in addition to sugar then the execution of the King and the establishment of the republic. But even if a majority of French capitalists did not support the Revolution (that has not been proved) or the Jacobins a convincing explanation needs to be found for why a rather powerful cohort of capitalists actually did support the Jacobin government. I would argue that those particular capitalists were the most far-sighted, advanced, and progressive in their class and thus were willing to support the most extreme plank of bourgeois democratic revolution at the time. I think in that respect it is somewhat similar to how it is the worker's with the most advanced class consciousness who make or attempt socialist revolution and typically not proles who vote for bourgeois-conservative parties, support monarchists/fascists, are rabidly religious etc.

I think the answer is actually both. The English revolutions of the 17th century had only been partially successful but it had done enough that the English bourgeois had established itself in a rather comfortable position and typically didn't feel the need for further revolutions. The English bourgeois however were quite happy that the aristocracy kept the American bourgeoisie and the American colonies in check and indeed lobbied for such oppression of their trade and industries. There were remnants of substantial feudal oppression on both sides of the Atlantic but it was the colonies most in need of it. There was an oppressive landed class at home and abroad that stifled progress and to boot the English bourgeoisie aided in denying the colonies their self-determination. We shouldn't deny the fact that the bourgeoisie can make a revolution against an imperialist bourgeois power as was the case in US independence, Latin American independence wars, and the 20th century de-colonization. I would note further that dealing with the land problem was an element common to almost all of them with highly-variable degrees of success.

I would say a country with universal male franchise in the majority of its states prior to the Civil War is a democracy by 19th century standards

*white male franchise

Thousands of Jews fled Hungary in fear of pogroms from the "revolutionaries." The founding myth of the "tankie" slur was filled with anti-semites. This often extends to entire analyses of the soviet union by leftcoms, where all of the democracy and anti-imperialism is a sham made up by a jewish conspiracy.

Thousands of Jews fled Hungary in fear of pogroms from the "revolutionaries." The founding myth of the "tankie" slur was filled with anti-semites. This often extends to entire analyses of the soviet union by leftcoms, where all of the democracy and anti-imperialism is a sham made up by a jewish conspiracy.

good lord

BTFO

I know right? It is so enjoyable seeing leftcoms getting BTFO.

bump. will respond tomorrow

Did anyone else not read this thread?

fag

Wait are people who support China and think it's communist tankies?

...

Shay's rebellion was instigated by predatory merchant practices (their refusal to extend credit and their demand for hard currency in regards to transactions, which ultimately lead to seizing of land since yeomen were subsistence farmers and didn't have much access to hard currency as it is), which government policies could have alleviated but didn't. This is an important distinction. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here . That the school of economics did not manifest itself properly yet at that time? Why isn't the relevant? Seems more like an appeal to idealism tbh. There's an obvious difference between a yeoman's opposition to monopolization and a bourgeois opposition. The yeoman's desire is to continue subsistence, the bourgeois desire is to accumulate capital. We cannot pretend as if this is the same thing. You recognize that in essence the peasants interests diverge from the "kulaks" interests but at the same time lump them together and insist that they are of the same interests. I'm not sure how you can reconcile this contradiction. Moral economy is referring to something very specific in this context, not anything like philanthropy or welfare. Moral economy in this sense refers more or less to an "irreducible minimum", more or less the maxim the idea that each get what they need and each contribute what they can. Or to put it in more familiar terms, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need". Rural society freed from both bourgeois and feudal lords is very much communal in nature. In essence, a peasants self interest is a return to this communal or "organic" order, not the "ascension" to bourgeois. The word you are looking for is "opportunistic". Revolution was happening with or without the bourgeois, not because of them. As bookchin said, they were "saddled" with it. The explanation is simple: either co-opt the revolution towards their own interests or be ground underfoot by it. To attribute any "progressiveness" to such a thing is absurd in the extreme. I can't help but resent that you continue to imply that the American revolution given my previous statements. Why do landed gentry constitute bourgeois when in essence their goal is not the accumulation of capital, or do you simply deny the enormous and undoubtable role that landed gentry played in the revolution before and after? The founding fathers were openly contemptuous of democracy, and the system they created was not to enable all men to rise to office but to ensure that men of their standing, those that essentially constituted a new aristocracy, were put into positions of political power. This is no more democratic then Rome was. At least Rome had the plebeian tribune

I thought it wasn't a bourgeois revolution though? Before you restate yourself, I'm aware of your previous position, but why do you think the rebels felt the need to rebel against such practices or make a second revolution in your words if the bourgeoisie and capitalist production hadn't taken an immense step forward in the aftermath of the Revolution?

This is understandable, during every capitalist cycle the limits to credit expansion are eventually reached. And, to be quite frank, even "le moral economies" like the credit relationships of medieval Europe analyzed by David Graeber also hit their limits and eventually have to stop lending and/or go through with some kind of debt relief/cancellation. I would also point out that if they had to go merchants and other bourgeois to get credit then it seems to me that the bourgeoisie was already in control and not Yeomen.

Wew, 200 years later and people are still drinking the same anti-precious metal kool-aid that has made its reappearance it seems with every pseudo-Left populist movement. Up until that point the US had been printing money to pay for everything and it had been perhaps the primary contributor to war-time inflation. Inflation was a problem and not only for city-dwellers and to go back to just printing money could've made the problem worse. When it comes to a civilized society with commodity production it seems to be the case that even when the money is not bullion-based, it will be token money, paper money, even complete credit money but usually some form of precious metals exist somewhere in the background either in a vault or in the form of Jewelry. This becomes even more true the more trade expands and comes to encompass greater geographical locations and more diverse cultures.

In our hypothetical argument, it could be assumed that since Shays rebellion in your eyes was tending towards socialism that there would be no need for hard money as labor could be exchanged directly for use-values without a mediator in the form of a money commodity. But hard-currencies didn't come into exist by accident they have been preferred by merchants for long-distance trade for sometime and a socialist-agrarian America would still have to do some trade with the outside world and that would likely have to be done in precious metals or a credit-money backed up by precious metals especially in lieu of the fact that an early socialist America would've probably been an international pariah. But assuming that's not the case even the most generous moral economies and practices of the middle ages broke down when trying to deal with the problems of international trade.

The French also got a hard-lesson when they bought into the "just print the money lmao" meme during the Revolution and for that reason Napoleon insisted on using hard-currency and keeping the state books balanced. As an aside, the hard-currency part was not so bad but the French were really hindered by the fact that the British wisely embraced deficit-spending to fund their war-expenses.

The 70s itself provides a much needed antidote to any of the Keynesian and heterodox rubbish about the supposed benefits of fiat money, especially the notion that increasing the money supply can be a long-term strategy to prevent or alleviate crisis. There wasn't an alternative to hard-currency because the money-commodity isn't simply like any other commodity, and money itself isn't simply a means of exchange but really the commodity that all others are measured against. That people are still spouting this nonsense in 2017 really makes me doubt that far more difficult theoretical problems of socialist construction could be handled in an age where the field of scientific political economy itself was woefully underdeveloped. That's one reason why its not idealism to point out that the science of political economy was not there to guide the nascent working class to victory even if the Yeomen could be brought into an alliance. What is historical idealism is the notion that communism could be brought into existence before either the material, cultural, and theoretical prerequisites had been reached for such a change.

Your whole premise here that the nations undergoing bourgeois revolutions in the 17th and 18th centuries could've moved to communism is based on historical counterfactuals. Even if we are to dwell upon this subject which is really the domain of alternate history writers, a hypothetical communist alternative would have had to have been both viable and more dynamic than capitalism. At that time capitalism had quite a lot going for it and the profit-rates alone were an enormous incentive for the change.

"Stop being more efficient than me!" isn't really much of an argument otherwise, the bourgeois critique of monopoly and a critique of monopoly from the point of view of a small proprietor is very much the same.

Except that people desire things that are beyond their mere subsistence. Capital is rather inefficient when it comes to the problem of human wants and needs but it can't really be said that it doesn't fulfill these things in some manner. If an artisan is very efficient worker its not like he would be naturally inclined to accept less than the market-price for his commodity since it didn't take him as long to make as the other guys. These inequalities are understandable but its also understandable how a small-producer who earns a profit by hook or crook may come to implement capitalist relations such as hiring help as wage labor, lending at interest, renting/leasing property, or hoarding/speculating. While capital itself is an inhuman force its utilization is adopted for very human purposes. It has been said before by certain Marxist theorists that women and children were the proletariat of the men in these traditional societies and likewise Marx pointed out that richer peasants/serfs began keeping other peasants as serfs in the middle ages. Not only was the desire there for capitalism to emerge organically from the peasantry and artisan classes themselves but the legacy of previous class societies meant that such domination was by no means seen as a bad thing even by many commoners.

I have to say you have a rather odd-position, first you maintained that all commodity production is essentially capitalist. Having retreated from that position it seems that you're now holding that the peasantry is essentially communist in its orientation, despite the fact that perhaps no class is as singularly defined by its consciousness as a commodity producer as the peasantry.
It's because while there was inequality among the peasantry in pre-modern societies that was not the main contradiction but rather it was between the commonfolk as a whole against the peasantry. This is why the bourgeoisie enlisted the rest of common society rather easily into its struggles and won it over with its ideas. This is also why the struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat only begins when the bourgeoisie has become dominant and the new class-lines become demarcated. The peasantry and other common folk were able in the past to act in unison in the past despite its internal differences against its oppressors, as capitalism emerged it became clear one could no longer speak of a unified peasantry in any sense. It quickly became a rapidly decaying and obsolete class to boot and inequality increased rapidly in the peasantry in comparison to before.

You mean return to something that never existed.
This really high-lights the theoretical difference between Marxists and anarchists. For anarchists, history is a grand conspiracy against the oppressed classes and not a natural outgrowth of the mode of production which follows the material conditions of a given society. Anarchists tend to believe that things are held in place by a domination culture that artificially creates hierarchies among people rather then the hierarchies being the result of the conditions of life; both freedoms taken for granted from time-immemorial and hierarchies predicted to last forever succumb easily when the the conditions that enabled them are changed. But, for anarchists, since the oppression is a result of a conspiracy, either one of male dominance or class-dominance imposed by force then the enduring mystery must be why the oppressed took so long to shake-off their chains and still haven't completely done so. If the bourgeoisie didn't exist in order to "steal" the revolution then some other nefarious group would have to be invented. But really why mince words? The bourgeoise in reality "stole" the revolution, they "manipulated" the people into doing their bidding. Why such hesitancy to use a word like bourgeois revolution when that is exactly what such effective cooption entails.

Surely you agree a good portion were also bourgeois, and many of the gentry dabbled in business some too. You agreed that they abolished the nobility in the colonies in a previous post and that the revolution allowed the bourgeoisie to rise.
So were most Enlightenment-era thinkers; I'm betting you Daddy Bookchin didn't tell you that?!

*as a whole against the aristocracy

Bump. Doing stuff thid weekend so probably won't respond till monday

take your pills

bump

It wasn't a bourgeois revolution, but this is not the same thing as saying that merchants didn't exist and have some political power. Massachusetts was a state where merchants had considerable political power, but this alone is not enough to qualify the revolution as "bourgeois". I'm not making the case that shay's rebellion had the goal of abolishing commodities, but that doesn't mean that it's not an expression of differing class interests between themselves and the bourgeois. Most of your post is arguing against the assertion that the government could have relieved the crisis, and indeed it did do that after the revolution by implementing many policies that were against the interests of the bourgeois. My premise is not that the revolutions could have moved on to communism but that the suggestion that the revolutions were bourgeois is false, that the interests of the peasantry and bourgeois are very different, and that the revolutions were not spurred by the bourgeois but that the bourgeois were merely opportunists who took advantage of them. The opposition is not the same because ultimately the peasant is not nearly as concerned with market competition. The peasant is not concerned with the creation of profit after all (unless you want to conflate subsistence farming with landed estates again). I never suggested all commodity production is essentially capitalist, what I did state is that widespread commodity production as the dominant means of production constitutes a capitalist system. I'm not sure if you can say that they could achieve communism, but to say that they're not socialistic is disingenuous, and it's just factually inaccurate to say that they're "singularly defined by its consciousness as a commodity producer" when they're mostly producing for their own use. The divide between rural and urban populations is not enough to justify "kulaks" as having the same interests of the peasantry. How are you not making an essentially idealistic statement by claiming that the bourgeois "won it over with its ideas"? How do you reconcile such a belief while purporting to believe in historical materialism? To say that such a state never existed is to deny modern anthropological data. To criticize me for creating a grand conspiracy erstwhile claiming that the bourgeois essentially hatched a conspiracy to win over artisans and "commonfolk" with their ideas. To state that they co-opted the revolution is not making any statement about culture, but rather that bourgeois used the resources available to them in their own class interests, which in this case meant co-opting the revolution so as to secure their own interests. The founding fathers were landed gentry (with maybe one or two exceptions) and their primary class interests was not the accumulation of capital but of land, slaves, and social/political standing. In this way they are not very different from the Roman aristocracy. I'm not sure what that has to do with my point, besides reaffirming the fact that the US was never a democracy.

forgot to take off flag

I would say that was the case in most of New England and not coincidently from there followed the growing split between the southern ruling class and the northern ruling class. Not coincidentally, New England would also be the earliest part of the nation to embrace bourgeois democracy in the full sense and to abolish slavery. Even many of the Southern states that later became the confederacy had universal white male suffrage and developing industries etc. but even that could not bridge the growing rift between the two regions.

Like?

Where did I do this?

Let's assume this is true, what you have failed to answer so far is why the American Revolution occurred in 1776 and not the 1670s or why the French Revolution occurred in 1789 and not 1000 AD. If we take the latter case, we largely have a similar class make-up in that most of the people are rural peasants and the ruling class is made up of the dominant aristocracy. How come "The Rights of Man" were not proclaimed in the Middle Ages? The example could be taken back farther but there is no need. Let's expand it then, how come out of all the peasant rebellions of the Middle Ages there was not a single revolt that either changed the mode of production or liberated the peasantry from feudalism? And, no, the fact that they won better conditions and increased their realm of relative freedom through such rebellions does not count. We can look at thousands of years of rebellions including those with pseudo-democratic rhetoric going all the way back to the propagation of the Christian faith in the late Empire and no success.

The change in class relations is the thing that best describes why 1789 was successful and the Jacquerier was not. The rise of the bourgeoisie and the rise of capitalism makes modern Enlightenment Democracy possible.

Just because Marxism is concerned with material relations does not mean we rule out the influence of ideas. And in fact, ideas are created by men and women working within a social context created by their respective material conditions and they are spread through vectors that are material. Ideas can and do reflect the class interests of those who think up and propagate them.

Many of the philosophers behind the Enlightenment were "common" men–not in the sense that they were poor or had an "common" amount of wealth but in the sense that they were often untitled or came from bourgeois families who were newly ennobled as part of a revenue-raising scheme.

Printing itself was for a long-time, in England and America, at the very least, a bourgeois profession. And, England's most famous playwright and the circles he travelled with were also bourgeois. Bourgeois dominance in English literature did not end in the 16-17th centuries but the writers of many of 18th and 19th century's greatest novels were also bourgeois.

I'll write more in reply to your post when I get time.

makes one think

This is really "socialism is when government does stuff"-tier stuff. In the first place, socialism only really comes to have its modern meaning with the rise of capitalism; in the second place, most peasants were not egalitarians, as previously explained, in fact it can easily be said that the slave-owners, the clergy, the aristocracy, the knighthoods etc. and all the other exploitative class elements that came to dominate the peasantry originally grew from the ancient peasant communities themselves which during the start of civilization cultivated lands their lands freely without coercion.
The bourgeoisie themselves are more enslaved to competition than they are boosters of it. Who would willingly sell say a beer at a 50% profit when they used to earn an 80% profit on it? It may also be said that profit creates competition in the first place, so that other capitalists being attracted by a high-profit rate in one sector enter into it and in the process end up lowering the profit-rate in that sector. Competition is more of a symptom of capitalism and is as little-liked by an established capitalist as it is by a peasant. The bourgeoisie themselves cannot protect themselves from bouts of overproduction and other contradictions that cause their profit-lines to go negative every once in a while.
I would say you more than just implied that it was possible in these two posts:

And, if there was an alternative to capitalism in that period it obviously has to be demonstrated that it was possible.
Ya cause its not like common families in feudal England were literally named after the trades their fathers and forefathers practiced or anything. If that's not a sign of consciousness being determined, even fixed, by their position as a commodity producer I don't know what is. We went through this before, even the presence of indebtedness implies commodity production on some scale; the opulence of pre-capitalist ruling classes was predicated entirely on the ability of the subordinate classes to produce a not-so insignificant amount of surplus in the form of commodities. Peasant families produced for personal-use but isn't like anyone becomes a tailor merely to make their own shoes; people produced certain goods they were most skilled at beyond their personal needs and traded them to others in the community. Even in the most ideal situation that can only be called production for use in the sense that the money or bater which was rare between the two equivalent parties didn't go towards making a profit or paying a rent/debt. I think this ties in to the other point you raised which I've already handled at length.
Wrong. I was criticizing anarchist methodology and epistemology.

No one has ever denied the bourgeoisie has pursued its class interest; in fact, I've been emphasizing that the bourgeoisie supported the great revolutions of the 17th-18th centuries precisely because it was in their interest.

Let us take the example of the Tennis Court Oath that is generally seen as the starting moment of the French Revolution. When the monarchy revived the Estates General in 1789 to deal with the fact that France was bankrupt it wasn't exactly actual commoners in the modern sense (of modest wealth) who were elected to represent the Third Estate but bourgeois of varying types. It wasn't as if the drafting of the Declaration of Independence was open to the public either; it was in fact a secret. In the French case, the actual inciting act came from the bourgeoisie; whether it began to careen outside of the limits set by the bourgeoisie is rather irrelevant imo. I've shown before that a powerful group of capitalists supported the Jacobins; now, the question is not merely why they supported them but why did the Jacobins succeed in taking power and not some "more radical" faction in Bookchin's words?
Unlike Ancient Rome, there were wasn't an aristocratic senate that basically had the power to overrule the decisions of the population. Nor was there a system of legally recognized titles or a hereditary house of lords like in Britain. The worst landlords were wiped out and their land confiscated as you acknowledged previously and the rest of US territory would be newly cultivated largely on a capitalist basis. Even the South outside of the original slave-states lost much of its feudal character and took on more and more of a capitalist character (there is good Marxist work on this).

Bump

You're bunching the kulaks, landed estate owners, with that of the rest of the peasantry as if they're the same class. The revolution happened in both areas because of an incompetent/degenerating aristocracy more so than anything the bourgeois did. Medieval Europe's superstructure was more stable because the papacy was still incredibly powerful and reinforced the feudal system. Once it started to degenerate and lose it's power, so to did feudalism as a system start to wain. The idea that the peasantry's class interests were just subverted by "bourgeois ideas" (many of which are not explicitly concerned with purely their own class interests. Adam Smith didn't believe in unfettered capital accumulation after all, and not to mention all the philosopher and theorists that came after but were staunchly against capitalism like Kropotkin, Engles and Bakunin) is just lazy and doesn't give any agency to the peasantry as a class. I'm sorry but you analysis is just incorrect given the modern anthropological data. How is from each according to their ability to each according to their needs not socialistic? Previously you stated that the bourgeois and peasants both had the desire for things like free and open trade, market competition etc and now you are contradicting yourself by stating they desire neither, that it's actually an inconvenience. Which is it? Besides stating that peasantry could centralize production through centralization, I never suggested that communism as conceived by Marx could be achieved by peasants in the 17th century. Marx's conception of communism requires industrialization, but that doesn't mean they cannot achieve a sort of "primitive communism". Planned production has never been an impossibility. From "palace economies" to isolated mutualistic villages, capitalism is never an inevitability. Now you're conflating craftsmen with peasantry. Which anarchist are you referring to? Kropotkin? Maybe Bakunin but I don't see how you can paint Kropotkin in that light, and Kropotkin is without a doubt the most influential anarchist in modern times. Also, you clearly implied you meant me when you said that:
And if it wasn't addressed at me then why even bring it up? Do you have a source for who actually constituted the third estate delegation? The American populace didn't really have any means to express their will outside of senates/houses on the federal and state level, seats which were almost always occupied by landed gentry or bourgeois (but mostly landed gentry, depending on the area)