/gulag/

Read Trotsky's criticism of the dekulakization and he was definitely not on the side of the kulaks. Basically the USSR was advancing industrially quickly enough for there to be trade between country side and the cities. So the rich farmer speculated in grain in order to gain profit. When food prices went up too high the soviet authorities had a reckless kneejerk reaction to it. Even though a few years before they supported the Kulaks.
marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch02.htm#ch02-1

Sorry I mean USSR industry wasn't developing quickly enough for there to be trade between countryside and cities.

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Unlike Stalin, Trotsky was a real theorist, so…

READ STALIN
marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/decades-index.htm

lmao Trotsky had fuck all and what he did have made zero sense

Stalin was a shitty writers whose only "theory" was written to justify whatever stupid shit he happened to be doing at that particular moment.

t. someone who's never read Trotsky

kill yourself, 4

t. someone who's never read Lenin
You can't be a Leninist and a Trotskyist at the same time. Lenin dunked on Trotsky nonstop, and Trotsky was wrong every time.

shitposting flag?

He wasn't, if anything the mistake was in not doing it sooner.

Trotsky never advocated skipping capitalism, what the fuck are you talking about.

Lenin and Trotsky had disagreements, sure, but it was never on anything fundamental to the issue of Marxism. Lenin, on the other hand, would have been absolutely appalled by the idea of "socialism in one country".

probably why stalin killed him before he proposed it.

nytimes.com/2012/05/08/health/research/lenins-death-remains-a-mystery-for-doctors.html?mcubz=0

20 Billion and one
give me a fucking break here eh?

What makes you think you have a right to take what someone else owns or built? How would you like it if I stole your computer and justified it by saying I was collectivizing it for the good of the people?

One of the core fundamentals of economics, no matter the school (Austrian, Chicago, Keynes, etc.), is that people respond to incentives. Why would anyone produce anything if they knew that it would be taken from them and they'd be thrown in a Siberian concentration camp for doing something constructive?

Protecting property rights, enforcing contracts between people, and correcting market failures due to externalities and market power is literally what governments are for. Even the most ardent free-marketeer that names his kids after Frederic Bastiat and Ayn Rand will accept a state that does that much.

I can't understand why anyone would try to glorify massacres or defend and excuse some of the worst leaders in history. Looking through this thread I can't help but think I'm reading Nazi propaganda with only a few word substitutions.

If Stalin believed that his people would starve and begin killing one another over scraps of food while there were (for the time) large scale farms hoarding grain and other things that could keep more people alive if they were redistributed, isn't there some argument to be made for forcing them to distribute the grain to the peasants around them? Doesn't it kinda' become similar to eminent domain at some point? Public good over private profit and all that?

We may very well agree that the treatment they received was horrific and barbaric, but millions of the poorest people in the country dying due to preventable famine so that the richer farmers could stay richer is also pretty horrific, isn't it?

WEW that's based

Stalin was absolutely correct in what happened to the kulaks. They were fucks. What sucks is its used against him by reacitonaries. Nevertheless liberals gonna lib

When are people going to realize this is a meme ideology?

There are certain instances that I happen to agree, under the context of what the USSR was, that I think he made the right choices
Nevertheless as an anarchist I still oppose the state. Is that really difficult to understand. Life is absolutisms friendo

Hey, anarchists are the ones who say that states are bad under all circumstances. I'm just asking you to be consistent on that absolutism.

I explained the kulak situation to my mom without using the Soviet Union or anything. The situation with the famine and all that. I asked her what she would do and she said you'd be an idiot not to receive the help and give back.

My mommy the commie.

This is what capitalists do. Property is a social construction, it only exists because the government uses force to restrict access to certain goods for certain people.
1. Economics is not a science and its grasp of human motovations and psychology is extremely limited.
2. People have incentives far beyond mere profit and competition, the whole concept of altruism is ruineous to many economic models, in actually the human species prospered because it lended itself so well to cooperation.

Governments are instruments of class rule. Actual research has shown that the impact that lower class people have on actually implemented policy is extremely limited, even in supposed democracies like the United States. Btw market externalities are not nearly compensated for enough.

Tankies are indeed a scourge, but many so called respected leaders in the west are responsible for death and misery on the same plain as Stalin.

Fuck off with your retarded horse shoe theory, the USSR was never as murderous as the Nazis.

And the Holodomor wasn't? The way I see it, Stalin hated the Ukranians because they weren't completely on board with his vision, so he decided to kill and replace them with loyal ethnic ruskies. That sounds a lot like what the Nazis were trying to do in purging, then colonizing their seized territory a short time later. I just can't see that as anything but despicable, and a crime against humanity.

If the food was really that badly needed then why not buy it? Stalin was in charge of the government, he had control of the money supply. If he was worried about inflation, he could have sold off state assets to wealthy foreigners to pay for the food. Statues and art are nice to look at but they don't put food on the table unless you sell them.

The more I study the history of that period, the more I see parallels between the Soviets and the Fascists in Germany and Italy. If the Soviets really had the people's best interests in mind why would they invent mobile gas chambers? If the only way you can win a debate is by killing your opponent, doesn't that prove that you've lost the argument?

Clearly the only correct thing to do was for the Tzar to collectivize all the land of the kulaks, therefore reducing them down to the level of the peasants and proletariat. This would of spurred them to develop a class consciousness with the workers, and they would of stopped being classcucks for the capitalists.

So you're saying you're not a thief when you take something from someone else because the concept of ownership is artificial? Well, the things that we produce are artificial too. What's your point? If I tracked you down and stole the computer you used to write that post, I'm pretty sure you'd get mad at me. You might even call the police and report a crime. Then again, police and crime are just artificial constructs and tools of the man to keep the proletariat down. POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

Economics is a social science and does actually have a fairly good grasp on human motivations. It's far from perfect, and its long-term predictive capabilities are spotty at best, but when dealing with short-term situations it does characterize human behavior reasonably well.

Economics isn't actually about profit. It's about maximizing personal satisfaction or happiness.

Consider the following situation:
Jane has $20 and wants a baseball glove. Tom has a glove and wants $20. According to economics a trade between these two will benefit both because each will get what they want. Jane will get the glove she wants, while Tom will have the money he wants.

According to your warped view of economics, where it's all about money, the trade would be a bad deal for Jane because she would need to give up her $20 to get what she wants.

I think that a lot of people who hold these views of money, profit, business, and economics do so because they don't really understand what profit and money are. While commodities can be used as money it's usually only done to prevent counterfeiting or limit inflation. Money isn't the commodity though, money is the representation of economic goods. It's a sort of point system for the labor of the workers and the goods they produce. The more goods and labor there is in relation to the money, the more valuable each point is. Conversely, the more money there is in relation to the labor supply and the physical assets in an economy, the less valuable each point is.

Profit isn't some nebulous or tangible thing that gets extracted from the workers like blood, it's whatever econ-points are left over after some economic activity.

Finally, on this point at least, altruism can only sustain individuals and economies for so long. Like I said, or rather wrote, money is just a score keeping device for economic activity. It's there so that people can be compensated for the work they do, so the equation can be balanced. If people go too long without compensation for their work they'll eventually die, not from a lack of money, but due to a lack of the things that money is traded for.

Communist parties in the CCCP, PRC, and elsewhere were, or still are, usually highly structured. People at the bottom of that structure, and the people outside it entirely, have little or no influence on the party as a whole. I'm not convinced that communism, especially in a one-party state (officially, de facto, or other), is the way to solve that issue.

I'm also not convinced that informal classes are necessarily a bad thing as long as mobility is relatively easy and merit-based. Mechanical engineers make up only about 1% of the workforce, do we not deserve greater compensation than a janitor or cashier? I've worked all 3 of those jobs and I can tell you that engineering is by far the most challenging of the 3. Wouldn't it be better to cooperate and build a better society for everyone instead of trying to tear down your betters and abscond with their hard-earned profit?

Stalin killed, or was responsible for, between 8 and 60 million deaths during his reign, though most historians have pegged 20 million as the best supported figure based on available evidence.

Name one western 20th century leader who killed as many. Keep in mind that Hitler only got to 11 million with his 'final solution'.

See above.

Well, that's all for tonight. I have work to do.

Remember, kids, a man is only worth the sum of his possessions.

private property only exists by force of law. the government takes a share of everyone's income as taxes, has the right to take away goods it considers illegal and can requisition your property in a time of war or emergency. You can observe this basic violation of the supposed sacred right to property everywhere, but nobody seems notice, simply because the arbitrary arangement of taxation is accepted.

social sciences aren't nearly as scientifically accurate or empirically testable as hard sciences like chemistry. And it simply doesn't grasp human motivations.

which doesn't mean anything, because personal satisfaction is extremely personal and individual and can hardly be measured empirically, let alone be combined into mathematical models that can predict behaviour with any real degree of accuracy.

workers make the goods and service you and I use, and all goods are essentially products of human labour. If I buy a share in a corporation right now I would get divideds without actually having done anything to contribute to the actual production, while a worker wouldn't. that is fundamentally unfair and irrational. If the company goes bankrupt I am protected by limited liability, while the worker loses his income and risks becomingg destitute.

I am not advocating for any kind of marxist-leninist state.

except that is not the case, people are barred from social mobility through factors of race, sex, sexual orientation and class. meritocracy is an illusion.

these are all useful and necessary jobs, and I dont''t object in principle to a difference in income between these professionsl but that is not what class is, because all these jobs involved you working for a wage, you didn't own the company you worked for.

I'm sure that engeneering in more difficult mentally than cleaning buildings, but low wage workers are in no way lazy or stupid.

"my betters" lmao

hitler did more than just the holocaust you moron, his invasion of the soviet union killed between 20 and 30 million people alone, and that's not even counting the rest of the massive bombings, famines, and massacres he's responsible for. Any serious historian will tell you Hitler has a larger kill count than Stalin does.

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oh good the sophist is back

Just a quicky because I only ever intended to stir up shit.

But you are contributing to the production. The money you used to buy that share is a representation of labor and/or property. By purchasing a share, you are contributing your stored labor to the production. You may not be there on the assembly line, but that's only because you provided some other service to someone else.

Yes, you are.