Tankies btfo!!!!

Tankies btfo!!!!

How will they recover…

This critique isn't just made by anarchists or libertarian Marxists.

It starts at 36:44 : youtube.com/watch?v=ysZC0JOYYWw

Other urls found in this thread:

youtube.com/watch?v=NU1novFkMRI
youtube.com/watch?v=g6RyROS3D6Q
youtube.com/watch?v=sZhJ-74FcR8
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch06.htm
twitter.com/AnonBabble

Ha, Zizek shits on it, Chomsky shits on it and Wolff shits on it. Why do tankies have a similar definition to socialism as propertarians? Oh, it's because the tankies are the ones who caused this misconception.

eeeexcuse me, i've been considered as a tankie by a lot of you, but i -just like almost every other tankie(exceptin nazbols)- simpatize with stalin not because he generated high human development in the urss, but because he won the second world war, and thanks to him the urss developed industrialization.
also the qualification of "dictator" isn't possible, as it's against the main principles of historical materialism.
i'll bet that an important fraction the stalin mainted deaths were because the destruction of arable ground after 3 huge wars, kulaks, and of course mediatic terrorism from the CIA and trots that has exaggerated the facts.

of course stalin was a totalitarist and a lier (for arguing state capitalism was communism) but it's a huge mistake to coin the 999 gorillion to him exclusively, since they were in fact hard times and probably those stats are exaggerated by media.

Marxism-Leninism sees socialism as an associated economy defined by the fulfillment of society's needs replacing the expansion of capital as the driving force of production. Obviously, this applied to the planning system constructed under the Stalin regime. This has nothing to do with the standard liberal definition of socialism, and that's an especially laughable claim coming from people whose definition of socialism perfectly meets that of what most would call capitalism. Wolff himself regularly makes apologies for capitalist production, sometimes even going so far as to claim for-profit coops were what Marx supported by virtue of their "worker control."

Stephen Kotkin's book on Stalin is pretty good. Bonus: lecture with Zizek: youtube.com/watch?v=NU1novFkMRI
Arch Getty's interviews are pretty interesting aswell. youtube.com/watch?v=g6RyROS3D6Q

"The 18th of Brumaire of Luis Bonaparte": "Thus the industrial bourgeoisie applauds with servile bravos the coup d‘etat of December 2, the annihilation of parliament, the downfall of its own rule, the dictatorship of Bonaparte." I guess Marx wasn't really a materialist.

>>Stalin 'won WW2
how materialistic


Can you give any source on the bit on Wolff? Seems like a bit of stretch.

He says some pretty tankie things about the state being a means to an end as a transitional institution towards real workers control.

State capitalism is a meme though since it only applies to the contradictions of a socialist country in a capitalist world but the USSR was not inherently capitalist on the inside. No market, no surplus extraction, no private profit. But since this was a lecture for normies I'll not hold that against Wolff.

How will anarkiddies recover?

conclusion: marx was a fucking reactionary, im more marxist than marx.


so stalin was a common person like everyone else, thus he wasn't a dictator. check mate

kek, don't take it personally user. You're okay.


Okay user.

i didn't missed the point; saying stalin didn't won the war is accepting he also didn't nothing wrong.

that's like the basics.

From not watching youtube? Never.

Learn to read. And write.

Regurgitating the same old tired "state capitalist" meme doesn't make it true.

Besides Wolff has been living in Murica his entire life as well being educated in Murican universities, who knows how much of the neoliberal propaganda he has unwittingly swallowed thus far?

Wolff has often given the USSR and PRC their credit, saying they are the two greatest economic growth stories in history. That still doesn't make them socialist.

wew lad

That's kind of my point. He's not a libertarian, and even he dismisses the USSR as a state with a socialist economy while being a tankie. He still gives the USSR credit where it deserves it though.

Wolff isn't really your average person.


A lot of your points are irrelevant.

I'll admit I wasn't expecting that.

But also me:

youtube.com/watch?v=sZhJ-74FcR8
You should watch this

Sometimes I think he browses here.

T A N K I E S
BTFO!!!!!!

you have it the other way around, everyone here parrots Wolff (not that that is a bad thing)

I know this is for an American audience, but this is a gross simplification of the revolution bordering on distortion and outright falsification.

Giving peasants a plot of land to work after collectivization constitutes an extension of private property? This isn't even worth addressing. If it was such an empowering development the peasantry did not react as expected. After several decades of agricultural "private property" it wasn't a new class of kulaks who seized the crumbling soviet state either.

Wolff conflates the use of money and price controls in the Soviet economy with the existence of official markets – this was not the case, though there were extensive black markets due to the deficiencies of the command economy. Eg. farmers could strip a state-supplied tractor for parts and make a killing. Unfortunately, even if you had money there wasn't much to buy, officially, so that further fueled black market exchange. This emphasizes that you can't abolish money, or the market, without overcoming what they are meant to address: abstracting value and the development of productive forces. The USSR failed on that front. The command economy as it was organized was an effective halter in many ways – it had outlived its purpose, but for numerous reasons this was never addressed. Also, the USSR did trade outside the Warsaw Pact states but it did not do so with the rouble, which was worthless. It exchanged raw resources like grain or oil for technology transfers and so on – things that they had trouble developing or acquiring otherwise, or, indeed, certain luxury items like bananas or western consumer goods.

The key argument is that the USSR did not attempt to abolish alienation – and this is true. But alienation can't be abolished at a stroke – any more than money or markets. If the USSR failed to do away with those, it is no surprise that alienation remained. Workers' control won't be capable of it with great speed either, it would only ameliorate it until productive forces were developed to the extent that labor was a fully creative, gratifying activity – communism. And what room is there to move towards such labor when the state is first under actual siege, twice, and then under an effective siege for the rest of the time? Little to none. How can you have a large standing army, fully equipped with modern war machines, without appropriating a surplus and allocating it in a centralized manner? It's not possible. I know some will claim that it's possible under anarchism or with workers' councils, but if so, and that's a very big IF, it has yet to succeed. The state has proven very adept at producing armies; decentralized and communal societies, not so much.

TL;DR maderial conditions :DDD

Material conditions is beginning to sound like an excuse to me. Can't we just admit that we're fucked.

Didn't Rojava just push ISIS out of a city.

The USSR was fucked by the failure of the Germany revolution before any of that, if that makes you feel any better.


They're backed not only by the US air force but special operations forces, and they get their war matériel from the outside. Rojava is not unlike the early USSR – primarily agricultural, very little industrial base. And they know it. The difference is the imperialists are helping them to fight ISIS, rather than letting the Turks roll over them.

Yep. One country going up against the whole world… not going to work

You should've said so. I didn't open the link and assumed it was yet another youtuber having a "revelation".


Yes. I already watched this shit and this led me to actually exploring this propaganda nonsense in all it's entirety. Still reading picrelated, btw.


You see, Wolff has his own definition of Socialism, Communism and Capitalism. Wolff's State Capitalism (I assume) is derived from Trotskyist (post-Trotsky, full-revisionist Trotskyism - Trotsky himself was against calling USSR state capitalist) tradition of inventing a very special definition of "State Capitalism" for USSR by calling bureaucrats capitalists.

He completely ignores Lenin's own definition of State Capitalism (using bourgeoisie - owners - and specialists on factories, and then NEP - concessions and trusts to run things because workers are simply not educated enough; while using state to keep things in check). Wolff instead is relying on re-defining the classes (inventing "appropriators" and "producers" - I'm still reading) and deriving "Capitalism" from this to call USSR Capitalist.

I.e. his statement about Stalin (or, to be precise, Party - because Wolff continues this anti-Soviet tradition of pretending that Stalin alone was in control) abandoning Lenin's demand for having State Capitalism only temporary is a blatant lie.

Lenin did not and could not use Wolff's definition of State Capitalism.

The State Capitalism Lenin was talking about was NEP. And Stalin clearly replaced it with Central Planning, once centralization of the economy under NEP took place.

I think his general point is that the State handled the profit created by the commodity production of the workers and spent that accordingly with the interest of the State.

Stalin-era USSR was not socialist.

Except using the "the State" is an example of idealistic thinking. Strinerizing it to Holla Forums level: "State" is spook.

There are specific people doing things. And workers held them accountable.

Do you know how "purges" looked like? I'm not talking 1937 here.

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

Why don't you go and read it? It's specifically written for those "who are governed by the irresistible impulse to demonstrate again and again in black and white their frightful ignorance and, following from this, their colossal misconception of socialism."

Or is Engels too tankie for you?

The USSR still used wage labour marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/wage-labour/ch06.htm

Therefore at best, it was a hybrid of the two systems with the state working as the manager supposedly to the benefit of the workers.

Also, when I say "state" I don't mean "lol spooooky state" I mean it was a bunch of "people doing things" who have a monopoly on power that they can use at will.

I understand Engles said "the state would become representative of the whole class" and this was not the case with the USSR in any point in its history.

From Labour and Monopoly Capital:

Gross oversimplification.

Even if we do not include a system that accounted for your "above the average" input (to motivate better work and inventions), profits did not go to rich guys pocket. They stayed within the society and were spent on improving MoP, on worker's comfort, education, culture and so on.

I.e. you did not get paid in money alone.

I repeat: you have no idea how things worked in USSR.

Stop posting Hollywood propaganda. There was no monopoly on power among the Party or bureaucrats. Obviously, politicians/administrators abused their power, but the limits were extremely narrow, if you compare to any other real system (not your imaginary rainbow horse kingdom).

Let's start by actually proving it.

There was no political actualization of the DOTP. The fact that a prole could be sent to a labour camp for criticizing the actions of the State proves it was not a "spook" but a real monopoly on power.

For this I would like to use the infamous Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who was sent to the Gulag for making private derogatory comments within a letter to a friend about Stalins conduct in the war.

Hardly what you would call a DOTP. Not to mention the state prohibited nonsense, like Lysenko with genetics as well as banning Jazz. I don't recall a vote ever being held between the workers about what they wanted to make illicit, but feel free to show me one.

It wouldn't be to farfetched to say Stalins idea of socialism was idealistic - industrialization would yield a socialist society.


And how that money was distributed was decided by the party, not in conjunction with the workers. If I remember correctly, wasn't there a period just before the purges where Stalin did not let the party vote for a decade?

How could they abuse their power if they had no monopoly on power?

Except you don't know how it should look like, nor what was going on in USSR.

Ergo: it is doubly impossible for anyone to take this statement seriously.

What "State"? Did we not establish already that "State" does not exist? Was criticizing people forbidden? It happened all the time.

Even in 1951 people were openly writing letters that said that Stalin was completely and utterly wrong. And they did not get executed, nor sent to SECRET SOVIET DEATH CAMPS.

And this discussion is over.

The asshole deserted from the frontline, then the asshole made a career writing nasty stories for Khrushchev propaganda machine, and once he got caught lying one too many times - he went to West and demanded to nuke the Soviets.

Examples of this?

Here you said
The fact that there were people who "could abuse their power" at all means that a State exist, at least in an anarchistic sense.

You also did not address what I asked about Lysenko and the numerous other things the Soviet Union banned. When did they ask the proletariat what they and weren't okay with?

Arguably there was, briefly, but it was smothered by the civil war. That's not a denouncement of Lenin et al. War communism was necessary. Imperialists on one side, the Czech Legions on another, and Makhno – sometimes ally, sometimes enemy – and of course the Whites. Japanese too from memory. A lot of enemies to contend with in an enormous country, with a nasty climate and war devastation which brought economic problems.

Condemning the USSR because the DotP did not emerge from that maelstrom is pretty harsh. If condemnations are necessary, it goes to the German SPD. Bastards, the lot of them. Germany lost Rosa and Russia lost Lenin, and we're all poorer for it.

I'm a leftcom so I completely agree as far as Rosa goes.

I'm not condemning the USSR for not having the DOTP. I'm saying that the political actualization of the DOTP has to happen before you can call it socialism. If a party member can abuse power(as Stalinstache admitted but brushed to the side), you can't claim a DOTP. Which is why I said, and posted that quote that Stalin-era USSR was a hybrid while Kruschev was a return to State capitalism. You can make the argument that the USSR was limited by material conditions and that's a fair one to make, but that doesn't make it socialism.

A principled position, but ultimately one with its own problems. If it was merely state capitalism, why was the USSR not embraced by the West and reintroduced to the world market? Why the state of siege which only ended with its political disintegration? Why the virulent anti-communism in the West?

It makes it sound like some kind of case of mistaken identity. State department strategist George Kennan, however, identified the main sin of the USSR being that communists were "essentially traitors" – his words. In the late 1950s, the USSR was considered incapable of complementing the industrial economies of the West, hence its economic isolation. Clearly there were serious, material differences between "Western" capitalism and Soviet "state capitalism" – enough that its containment both economically and ideologically was necessary. I.e. the Cold War makes no sense if it was just another form of capitalism. It had to have some kind of socialist content, essence, that was heretical in the West. I can name a few: a lack of private property, planned production, no inheritance and hence no wealth transfer from generation to generation, centralization of finances, communication, transportation and the establishment of industrial and agricultural "armies", free education, healthcare, etc. etc. A great deal of this should sound familiar.

We are sorely lacking a proper historical materialist analysis of the Soviet Union. What I find irksome with many of its critics is to claim that, because it necessarily did not adopt some key aspects of socialism – workers' control in the main – that it has automatically abrogated all right to be called socialist. I sense you're more reasonable than most, so I'll agree to disagree. All I'll say is that the history and development of the USSR and the subsequent Cold War makes no sense if it's just a rival capitalist regime. No sense at all.

Case study: Yaroshenko (as in "Concerning the Errors of Comrade L. D. Yaroshenko" by J.V.Stalin)

November, 1951 - review of Stalin's "Economic Problems of Socialism in USSR" is happening. Yaroshenko claims that it is utterly wrong. His opinion is not supported by majority of review committee. It is not even mentioned in final report.

March, 1952 - Yaroshenko sends letters to everyone he can (including Politburo), demanding to recognize his position officially, include it into the review, give him at least a year of vacation time and two helpers to write proper textbook. Claims that doing it otherwise is manipulating public's opinion and anti-communist.

Result:
1) (May, 1952) Stalin writes 26-page answer to Yaroshenko. It gets circulated among the reviewers and in Politburo. Will be published later.
2) Yaroshenko gets transferred from Moscow to Irkutstk (within the same Central Statistic Agency he works in).
3) Yaroshenko get's a "serious reprimand" by a Party decision, but does not get expelled.

Then Yaroshenko starts writing to all the members of Politburo again, claiming unfair treatment and Stalin (with review committee) being wrong and biased. Apparently, get Voroshilov very angry.

Result:
1) Yaroshenko gets recalled to Moscow
2) Yaroshenko gets two discussions with members of Central Committee (is unrepentant; will later claim that Voroshilov was threatening him with violence)
3) Yaroshenko gets expelled from the Party
4) Yaroshenko spends a few months in prison for hooliganism

1956 - Yaroshenko retires and comes back to live in Moscow
1961 - becomes Party member again during XXII Party Congress.

1989 - (yet another wave of rabid destalinization) contacts a newspaper and demands to publish his story of being victim of Stalin's regime.

Pretty decent bait, more amusing than anger inducing, and you lose points for difficulty (this is leftypol, after all), but a solid 7/10.

On point
A bit obvious with the mistakes, unless you're euro or have English as a second language.
Good ideas, but you could have taken it more seriously.
Good. Blaming the CIA for it is quality.
I like it. The DPRK flag is the cherry, but bringing up the massive death tolls that nobody has mentioned only to dismiss them is the icing.

Nobody could hire or sell labour in the USSR. Production was planned for use rather than for profit. The End.

The USSR is dead. The End.

What does that have to do with the discussion at hand?
Also I don't think I need to point out the USSR and China were the longest lasting socialist states.

...

that's exactly to what am i against, the only engine that moves history is the working class.

If we were to assign a percentage to it, how much power would you say that the Party and bureaucrats had in the USSR?

Honestly, we need to make a "what was the USSR??" sticky thread with docs summarizing the viewpoints of each political persuasion (tankies, leftcoms, anarkids, etc), cause we've had a gorillion threads on this and a lot of info gets thrown around

PDF (semi)-related

Fair enough. I didn't mean to say it was just "capitalism with a State", it had some characteristics of socialism which is why I believe it can be more properly called a hybrid.

Yes… Except it's too fast here. It gets washed away.

And I don't really care about viewpoints. I'd rather deal with the facts of kulak-run kolkhozs or how the purges (real, not 1937 meme ones) were executed.

No idea. I don't know what scale we use and there is no "Soviet bureaucracy". USSR is a spook, yes.

Balance was always changing. Power of the Party and state bureaucrats continued to grow more and more:
- Stalin's time was more authoritarian than Lenin's,
- Malenkov's more authoritarian than Stalin's,
- Khrushchev's more authoritarian than Malenkov's,
- Brezhnev' more authoritarian than Khrushchev's,
- Andropov''s more authoritarian than Brezhnev's,

until everything culminated in Gorbachev's attempt to become a dictator by bribing bureaucrats with state property. Except, obviously, Lenin and Stalin put too much effort into Soviets to be used that way and everything imploded. Even then Yeltsin had to use army to suppress Parliament, institute dictatorship and completely reorganize government system - by claiming that self-management and direct democracy were too bureaucratic(!).

P.s. I'm not comfortable with the processes that took place in the USSR, but I consider it absolutely retarded to pretend that you need to abolish Central Planning because of NKVD or don't have a Vanguard during Revolution, because 35 years later it might become too strong and destroy Socialism 70 years later.

This is precisely what B. Russel anticipated back in the 20's in his "The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism .

However, the book just affirms what said about material conditions hindering the proper development of what I will refer to as "full socialism", as in complete with practical DotP, i.e. workers directly owning the MoP.

Why's it so hard to just agree that the USSR simply wasn't completely socialist and that the lack of actual DotP, in a way, but not only, nor precisely due to the lack of it because of many other internal and external factors; helped the SU roll back to capitalism? How's this for you?