Landback and decolonization. Because your great great grandparents stole the car, the people it was stolen from have been subject to generational poverty, genocide, and slavery that impacts them today, while you sustain a generational benefit. It needs to be rectified.
Yea I agree!
Thanks for sharing! I’m sure autotranslate doesn’t compare when it comes to prose, but this was still beautifully written!
There’s a ton that’s wrong with this comment, but I want to pick on something especially egregious that stuck out to me. Your conflation of administration with ownership:
Administration is not ownership.
To reiterate, it is. When I hold dominion over something like a steam train I practically own it because I get to say what happens to it, I get to say that it’s mine for example.
Here, Marx is responding to Bakunin:
…will consist of workers. Certainly, with your permission, of former workers, who however, as soon as they have become representatives or governors of the people, cease to be workers…
As little as a factory owner today ceases to be a capitalist if he becomes a municipal councillor…
…and look down on the whole common workers’ world from the height of the state. They will no longer represent the people, but themselves and their pretensions to people’s government. Anyone who can doubt this knows nothing of the nature of men.
If Mr. Bakunin only knew something about the position of a manager in a workers’ cooperative factory, all his dreams of domination would go to the devil. He should have asked himself what form the administrative function can take on the basis of this workers’ state, if he wants to call it that.
Your analysis is more that of an anarchist than a Marxist, and as I’ve shown before you frequently make metaphysical mistakes in your method. This is why Bordigists have never achieved anything of note, faulty analysis that results in self-sabotage.
Basically, yea. You scratch a liberal, and the fascist underneath reveals itself like a lotto ticket.
There were plans for many more. Only volume 1 was punlished while Marx was alive, the other two were compiled from notes and outlines by Engels.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn was an anti-semitic Nazi sympathizer, and was arrested as such. His fiction is based on the folklore of the gulag system, and archival evidence and historical texts paint a much clearer picture of the soviet prison system. He’s essentially Yeonmi Park but for the USSR.
Here’s a real quote:
From an excellent thread going over his many ideological failings:
In his 2003 book, Two Hundred Years Together, he wrote that “from 20 ministers in the first Soviet government one was Russian, one Georgian, one Armenian and 17 Jews”. In reality, there were 15 Commissars in the first Soviet government, not 20: 11 Russians, 2 Ukrainians, 1 Pole, and only 1 Jew. He stated: “I had to bury many comrades at the front, but not once did I have to bury a Jew”. He also stated that according to his personal experience, Jews had a much easier life in the Gulag camps that he was interned in.
According to the Northwestern University historian Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern: Solzhenitsyn used unreliable and manipulated figures and ignored both evidence unfavorable to his own point of view and numerous publications of reputable authors in Jewish history. He claimed that Jews promoted alcoholism among the peasantry, flooded the retail trade with contraband, and “strangled” the Russian merchant class in Moscow. He called Jews non-producing people (“непроизводительный народ”) who refused to engage in factory labor. He said they were averse to agriculture and unwilling to till the land either in Russia, in Argentina, or in Palestine, and he blamed the Jews’ own behavior for pogroms. He also claimed that Jews used Kabbalah to tempt Russians into heresy, seduced Russians with rationalism and fashion, provoked sectarianism and weakened the financial system, committed murders on the orders of qahal authorities, and exerted undue influence on the prerevolutionary government. Petrovsky-Shtern concludes that, “200 Years Together is destined to take a place of honor in the canon of russophone antisemitica.”
His own wife called the Gulag Archipelago “folklore,” why on Earth are you listening to a rabid anti-semite and fiction author over actual historical evidence? I already said the soviets imprisoned fascists, you’re giving a great example of one and proving my point.
Liberals, when “scratched,” reveal their fascist side. Liberalism and fascism are two sides of the same coin.
Yep, the soviet union had prisons, and had to deal with fascists, traitors, and holdovers from former Tsarism. Read the book I linked, prisoners on average were treated better than in peer countries.
They rapidly developed, and managed to go their entire existence without the regular boom/bust cycles intrinsic to capitalism, due to having a socialist economy.
On the whole, soviet prisons and the justice system itself were more progressive than their peers, Mary Stevenson Callcott documented it quite well in Russian Justice.
The USSR had steady and consistent economic growth, and provided free, high quality education and healthcare, full employment, cheap or free housing, and fantastic infrastructure and city planning that still lasts to this day despite capitalism neglecting it. This rapid development resulted in dramatic democratization of society, reduced disparity, doubling of life expectancy, tripling of functional literacy rates to 99.9%, and much more. Living in the 1930s famine would not have been good, but it was the last major famine outside of wartime because the soviets ended famine in their countries.
Literacy rates, societal guarantees in the 1936 constitution, reports on the healthcare system over time, and more are good sources for these claims.
The USSR brought dramatic democratization to society. First-hand accounts from Statesian journalist Anna Louise Strong in her book This Soviet World describe soviet elections and factory councils in action. Statesian Pat Sloan even wrote Soviet Democracy to describe in detail the system the soviets had built for curious Statesians to read about, and today we have Professor Roland Boer’s Socialism in Power: On the History and Theory of Socialist Governance to reference.
When it comes to social progressivism, the soviet union was among the best out of their peers, so instead we must look at who was actually repressed outside of the norm. In the USSR, it was the capitalist class, the kulaks, the fascists who were repressed. This is out of necessity for any socialist state. When it comes to working class freedoms, however, the soviet union represented a dramatic expansion. Soviet progressivism was documented quite well in Albert Syzmanski’s Human Rights in the Soviet Union.
The truth, when judged based on historical evidence and contextualization, is that socialism was the best thing to happen to Russia in the last few centuries, and its absence has been devastating.
Death rates spiked:
And wealth disparity skyrocketed alongside the newly impoverished majority:
Capitalism brought with it skyrocketing poverty rates, drug abuse, prostitution, homelessness, crime rates, and lowered life expectancy. An estimated 7 million people died due to the dissolution of socialism and reintroduction of capitalism, and the large majority of post-soviet citizens regret its fall. A return to socialism is the only path forward for the post-soviet countries.
When you look at the US Empire and western Europe as having higher quality of life than the USSR, you are looking at the benefits of imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism and wishing the USSR also practiced this, instead of helping liberate colonies and the global south. Russia in particular was a semi-feudal backwater in 1917, and made it to space 5 decades later. The USSR was not the picture of wealth, but was for its time the picture of development and rapid progress.
That’s really funny, lmao. Bordiga was a bit of a goofy guy.
I feel you can already get the gist of what I mean when I pointed out your metaphysical error, but in short dialectics is a method, with materialism as an outlook. Metaphysics sees subjects as “either/or,” while dialectics sees them as “both/and.” Movement is the result of contradictions, the unity and struggle of opposites. The rise of something paired with the dying away of something. Dialectics recognizes interrelation, the unity and struggle of opposites, as motion insepperable from matter and vice-versa, as things come into being and cease to be, as unending change.
In other words:
Dialectics does not regard nature as a collection of static, isolated objects, but as connected, dependent, and determined by each other.
Dialectics considers everything as in a state of continuous movement and change, of renewal and development, where something is always rising and something is always dying away.
Dialectics is not a simple process of growth, but where quantitative buildup results in qualitative change, and qualitative change result in quantitative outcomes, as a leap in state from one to the other, the lower to the higher, the simple to the complex.
Dialectics holds that the process of development from lower to higher takes place as a struggle of opposite tendencies that forms the basis of their contradictions.
Oh you’re a Bordigist, that explains things. Either way, socialism is a transitional status between capitalism and communism characterized by public ownership as the principal aspect of the economy and the working classes in control of the state. Between capitalism and communism, elements of each are present, and do not themselves determine the identity of the mode of production but that which is rising and thus principal.
Trade on an international level, even with capitalist countries, is not a determining factor for socialism. Trade internally, even if not entitely tied to labor or necessity, is not a determining factor for socialism. You’re throwing dialectics away entirely in favor of a metaphysical outlook on production and distribution. While we’re recommending reading, why not add Gramsci’s On Comrade Bordiga’s Sterile and Negative “Left” Criticism.
That’s not an actual lever for change.
The NEP was a strategic move to expand the level of development of the productive forces. It was still socialist, but made significant submissions to capital to do so. It also paid off tremendously, as soviet power was solidified in the 1930s. Today, the PRC takes heavy inspiration from the NEP for its own Socialist Market Economy, which is why it is surpassing the entire capitalist world today.
Khrushchev’s declaration that “class struggle is over” in the USSR was revisionist, correct, but the USSR maintained their internationalism. Support for Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria, Palestine, and many more liberation movements still persisted in the USSR, including funding and arming resistance groups. The fact that the USSR post-World War II did not have any interest in open war does not mean they abandoned the internationalist struggle.
To the end, however, the USSR was still socialist. Private ownership was never the principal aspect of its economy, and the working classes were in control of the state until it was coup’d at the end. There were flaws and problems with soviet socialism, because it was real, and thus faced real problems and real struggles. The problems in the CPSU and government towards the end did not mean the USSR was no longer socialist, or that it’s destruction was inevitable; up to the very end it could have been saved from its murder at the hands of the Yeltsin faction.
With a more independent Russian economy, with higher trade with China and the global south, and less cheap LNG for Europe?