This is why the Soviet Union was the best and most socialist country ever and why Stalin's a cool guy.
not a tankie shitpost [cuz I ain't one] -> refute and/or support my claims which I got from MLs; let's have a direct discussion on the good old motherlad [again, ugh, but haven't seen a thread like this in a while]
Other urls found in this thread:
aeon.co
twitter.com
The creatures outside looked from tankie to Holla Forumsyp, and from Holla Forumsyp to tankie, and from tankie to Holla Forumsyp again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Also it's pretty pointless to refute all that pure ideology. I'd ask for better arguments, but I know the tankies don't have any.
How would you refute it even though it's pointless?
A) Just because Stalin was a dictator doesn't mean the USSR was democratic.
B) Kulaks may have deserved it, but dirt farming peasants didn't. Collectivization had to happen, it could have been forced in the case of the actual kulaks, but in the case of poor peasants another method should have been used. A stick and carrot approach could have been used to motivate people to collectivize, or the land could have been bought from the peasants by the state.
C) Purges were stupid and ultimately only happened because Stalin didn't want to tolerate any challenges to his authority. They also ultimately hurt the country since many experienced Civil War era generals were purged and as a result the officer corps of the Red Army was relatively inexperienced when the Nazis came.
Yeah but after the collectivization of agriculture and ww2 he went nuts and killed thousands of innocent people that weren't "British spies"
At least when collectivization killed millions you could say if was for a cause
Legit question for a shit thread - why did the USSR fall apart? Thus far I've only been exposed to the cappie narrative that ""communism"/central planning failed because it went against the market", but I would be interested in hearing the leftist take on it.
material conditions
had workers authority in the party. A number of journalists reported on the subject already.
Wew.
key phrase "in the party"
it's not really democratic if a small group of individuals are making decisions for the whole, whether it's a royal family, a capitalist inner circle, or a "socialist party".
Please elaborate. If I can't get a satisfactory answer to this question I may renounce leftism and start using phrenology to try and prove that Blacks are an inferior race.
as for why it actually fell apart, Gorbachev attempted market reforms which weakened the communist party, and then Boris Yeltsin declared russian independence.
lel
the state needed to be strong and stable to survive, just historical necessity in retrospect.
Also, workers had their say on things, which is after all the point.
It still had money exchange for commodities.
My view from my limited knowledge of the subject is that most of their problems were political in origin. The lack of transparency and accountability in the Soviet government made it a fertile breeding ground for corruption. You had officials scooping goods from the factory to sell on the black market and other bullshit like that. This obviously totally fucked attempts at planning as quotas were filled and goods were swallowed by the black market. I would also concede that central planning has issues, for example its shit at creating consumer goods, largely because planners don't concern themselves with shit like iPhones and Sham-wows. Also supposedly the economy began growing faster than planners could keep up with, and so they began falsifying records to avoid looking incompetent, which only made things worse.
Wow, if that's all it takes then why don't we just give workers a certain number of seats in Congress? Then the US can be a worker's state too.
socialism isn't communism as far as I know
"Hush, proles! I'm speaking for you."
The thing is that it preserves the concept of the commodity, something that must be abolished to end capitalism. If you don't abolish the commodity (and money along with it) then you end up with the same form of capitalism that you end up with in market "socialism"
oooooh
they were going to get rid of that, Stalin literally saw that as a problem in his book aptly titled "Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R."
bitch how
The commissar comes to your house and takes you to the gulag if he finds and money or commodities
Do tankies have any solutions that don't consist of simply throwing gulags at a problem until it goes away?
Yes, no gfs
the tankie guide to how you achieve communism
1.kill everyone who likes what I don't like
2.???
3.profit
There are the Lubyanka basements and Uzbekistan.
Trotsky was right after all
did not say this
that ain't me
they were going to change all that, the Stalin's faction that is, but revisionists won. This happened because the revisionists were new, inexperienced and bad with ideology because of the WWII and all.
classic
Bitch, I actually answered the question. He asked how. I don't see you doing that.
What a nightmare tbh. Their potassium is of poor quality.
Whoops! I forgot to add "by legally abolishing the commodities and their subsystems and implementing production for use".
Okay, but that doesn't change the fact that, at the time, they were still operating under a form of capitalist production.
You can't say they were in a form of socialism because they intended to change to a form of socialism and were stopped.
now how can you argue it was capitalist production when you had no capitalists nor private appropriation, production and consumption was social and collective
Because capitalism isn't dependent on the existence of the bourgeois class, and goods production remained in the form of exchange-value commodities, otherwise the USSR wouldn't have had money.
Source me up, Uncle Joe.
That's literally what the revisionists belived, but no, there wasn't production for profit, the market was a form of the workers collect their socialized labor(minus the amount used to expand the means of production and consuption), money in the USSR was basically a labor voucher(the same one that Marx recomended for the lower stage of communism) and used as a form of acounting that didn't circulated, in the industrial sector the value form was only alive between the coops and the state sector, because coops needed to make profit, but between enterprises in the state sectror there was not value form, only a simple input and output balance, thats why the next step by Stalin(as described in his book Economic problems of socialism in USSR) was to incorporate the coops in the state/social sector and get rid of the value form for good, but after the revisionist took power they went the oposit way, sold the tractor stations to coops that didn't had the money to upgrade it, wich caused various ineficiencies in the agriculture. and instuted various reforms , that revived the value form e.g. profit as benchmark for state enterprises.
Because everything. What you need to look at is how USSR stayed together for over 70 years and what wasn't there anymore to keep all the pieces together in 1991-93. If you look at how the Soviets fell apart, the answer is obvious - organization. Or "democracy" in it's original meaning.
In an attempt to become (first) Soviet dictator Gorbachev destroyed upper-level democratic institutions of Soviet Union (1989-1991 state reforms), but lost legitimacy - people's support and thus was easily overthrown by Yeltsin - who had no intention of keeping USSR whole (to completely avoid any restoration of Soviet constitution and structure, since any return to previous situation would greatly limit his power) and finished disorganization of workers by destroying low-level democratic institutions (by increasing amount of people that elect their representatives - now deputees needed 10.000 votes, rather than 200 to get elected; thus it was no longer a question of electing someone you know, but the question of having money for election campaign).
I.e. no legitimate grassroot initiative was capable of restoring USSR by 1993 and there was no Vanguard (at least, sufficiently bloodthirsty and organized Vanguard) to start a revolution.
You are forgetting that Gorbachev opened borders, and let state enterprises sell goods directly to the foreign buyers.
Soviets kept prices on vital goods artificially low (below manufacturing cost, with state subsidies) to make those goods easily available for everyone (in theory, staple goods like bread were expected to become completely free by 80s) - that's what those two (>>989348 ) are talking about: gradual transition to Communism via social pricing of thee goods.
Except when those goods became available to foreign buyers for this low subsidized price - those goods predictably got bought out. But Gorbachev refused to raise prices to world level nor did he close borders. Thus the infamous "deficit" - failure of Soviet economy to supply the whole planet with subsidized goods.
In the very same book Stalin admits that the USSR had commodity production and that the value form continued to exist in the USSR.
Don't bother, Stalinstache will tell you you're wrong about the USSR and then not cite anything to correct you.
Except when those goods became available to foreign buyers for this low subsidized price - those goods predictably got bought out. But Gorbachev refused to raise prices to world level nor did he close borders. Thus the infamous "deficit" - failure of Soviet economy to supply the whole planet with subsidized goods.
The stagnation and deficit the Soviets experienced happen well before Gorbachev and was happening at the time that Kruschev came to power. It was due to not being able to accurately judge firm performance.
Also, workers had their say on things, which is after all the point.
Ahh yes, sounds more and more like fascism by the minute.
Don't become Holla Forums
I agree with most of it but the agricultural reform was still a major fuck up
Don't forget how Stalin undid any revolutionary reforms in the Spanish Civil War, handing power and industry back to the bourgeois in Republican Spain just in time for Franco to carry on with business as usual.
Don't forget that Stalin was aiding the nationalists in China till it was all too clear to everyone that Mao was going to win that struggle.
Don't forget that Stalin immediately regretted his decision to recognise North Vietnam and insisted that China be solely responsible for providing material and training assistance to the Viet Cong.
Stop pretending that he was talking to me.
Not to mention, I had already explained this bit several times anyway - and got no intelligent counter-arguments beyond the usual shit-flinging of "how dare you disagree with [insert some post-Trotskyist pseudointellectual]" - which is why I'm not even trying to reply to this nonsense anymore: it's pointless to discuss Marxism with those who don't understand the basics of it.
Two statements and nothing to support either of them. Who is telling "you are wrong" and not citing anything?
Except, you are not even telling that I'm wrong. There is literally no reaction to the actual point that was made.
Go away Serbian
aeon.co
Not directly answering your question, but it's a good place to start.
The Soviets had become so calcified and bureaucratic that it all started to fall down around them while the party elites refused to engage with any of the problems.
Gorby tried to, but ended up just being a weak-SocDem. I think the Soviet system was kind of unsalvageable to be honest.
Weak? He practically reached Rosa Luxemburg levels of SocDem.
1990, four years after Glasnost: Soviet Congressmen (elected public officials of the highest order) are officially not allowed to talk nasty things about Gorbachev under the threat of immediate revocation of their parliamentary immunity and persecution for treason (Gdlyan-Ivanov case).