Figure out a way to implement communism without creating a Stalin that takes advantage of the situation to seize power, and we can talk. Until then, that is a major problem requiring a solution, and ignoring it makes people look blind.
Figure out a way to implement capitalism without creating genocides through imperialism and we can talk. Until then, that is a major problem requiring a solution, and ignoring it makes people look blind.
Did you specifically choose 100 years in order to not include the Great Famine in Ireland? Or what the East India company did in India? Lassez faire capitalism in action right there, baby.
How about US funded right wing death squads in central and South America that eliminated whole peoples in the 70s and 80s? There are entire languages that are no longer spoken in countries like Guatemala because the people who spoke it were all murdered systematically with US taxpayer money.
Not a function of capitalism. Function of human greed. Communism doesn’t solve this. It just moves the greed from corporations and politicians to bueareacrats.
It sounds like you’re arguing more against extreme materialism, where people believe that accumulation of physical goods holds more value than human life.
Also, citing genocide due to use of US taxpayer money isn’t critiquing capitalism. It was taxpayer money, not market or investor money. That’s government corruption, which is independent from capitalism. You see this kind of corruption in both capitalist and communist systems.
I think your main argument should be the prioritization of human dignity over anything else and an extreme vigilance for corruption in institutions of all sorts.
For your first paragraph, yes, I did choose just one century because I am aware that our behavior has changed over our history, many times.
edit: Just to provide an example, we used to genocide our Native Americans and steal their wealth. Now we let them build casinos even though we usually prohibit ourselves from building them, and we gamble away our money to them. These are different things. This indicates a change in our behavior.
For your second paragraph, can you provide a source for that?
Have you seen the hold France and Russia keep in Africa?
The CFA Franc still exists in Africa, even though France uses the euro and is an EU country. France enjoys a de facto veto on the boards of two banks of the CFA Franc zone.
Those “Wagner” pieces of shit were doing business in Africa before they went to Ukraine.
How about Israel & Palestine and Saudi Arabia & Yemen? Or does it not count if the capitalism is in the middle east and it is just sparkling shitty economic systems then?
If so then look no further than the USA in south east Asia with agent orange or does it not count because it was done during a totally justified and noble war?
Then take a look at the 20,000 migrants who have died trying to cross the Mediterranean in the last decade or so while the European authorities turn a blind eye to mass drownings.
Genocide is a very, very specific word. Your examples do not qualify.
Middle Eastern countries had their borders carved out by the west, yes. For how long do we stay responsible for their actions? When do they get their free will back?
Vietnam was a loss, a disaster and a bad joke, all at American expense. One of the largest failures we’ve ever engaged in. It was not a genocide, we did not attempt to erase Vietnamese culture.
Your migrants case is your best example due to the amount of hate flying around these days, but you do understand that genocide takes more than not helping people, right? We are not feeding the starving people of the world, is that genocide because we do not give them all food?
Exactly. We, as people, espesically NATIONS, cannot tend to all issues at once. We simply can’t. You touch on a very important point that has to be made.
The problem with this argument is that the risk for someone taking advantage of the situation to accumulate power is the same under any system. I would rather take that risk for an economic system that aims to treat everyone more fairly than for one that, by design, sends wealth up to a select few who hoard it.
If the risk is so equal, why did the USSR fall to it very quickly, where the US, 300 years after our founding, just resisted Trump when he tried to do the same?
I think your risk is higher, because you are taking down the current system in order to put in a potentially improved one. But during that downtime you have extreme vulnerability.
We do not have that problem unless we also dismantle our system to a similarly vulnerable state.
I don’t stop with authoritarianism as the only measure of people being oppressed. There are a ton of ways USA citizens are being oppressed. We just vote for who our oppressors are.
“Dictatorships are inherently unstable: you can slaughter, imprison, and brainwash entire generations and their children will invent the struggle for freedom anew. But promise every man a chance to impose the will of the majority upon his fellows, and you can get them all together behind a system that pits them against each other.” Source
I agree, there are many forms of oppression. However, without the rule of law, the oppression would become rather Mad Max, instead of just disappearing.
We had oppression before we had states. So long as one man can hurt another with physical damage, oppression will be possible
“Vote for our oppressors”.
Maybe we are, but if you look through history, you’ll find that every time period has oppression. Doesn’t matter where. You can’t get rid of oppression. It’s not something you can toss away.
This is true and sort of adds to my point. If I am going to risk being oppressed oppressed anyways, I might as well risk it for a system that, if done halfway decent, can lead to more fair distribution of resources. Currently a lot of wealth is being funneled into the hands of a few.
Because every single other dominant power teamed up more thoroughly than they had ever done prior or since for the sole purpose of ratfucking them down to every last brick and feasting on the carcass?
True. I was kinda hitting back at this idea that the USSR was getting lots of credit for anything good that happened there, but when it came to their fall, well, that was all our fault.
I generally agree with your other comments as well.
We didn’t invade them because of mutually assured destruction. We did proxy war them, espionage them, propagandize them, sanction them, embargo them, engage in brinkmanship with them, send blank checks to their enemies, sabotage them, and more, and all of NATO was of a one track mind in doing so.
Was the USSR so weak it was unable to be self-sufficient on the world stage? No, the USSR was so strong that starting from a mean 27 year life expectancy and zero productive infrastructure, it was able to survive this onslaught for nearly a century, and while doing so, put the first human in space, achieve world-class technological innovation, gender equality, literacy rates, and more.
North Korea has even fewer friends and allies than the USSR did, with their Warsaw Pact. Kim is doing just fine, even got Putin to lick his boots recently.
I think they shouldn’t need us to play nice with them in order to survive.
The USSR fell because Yeltsin illegally dissolved the USSR by withdrawing the RSFSR from the union. Yeltsin illegally dissolved the USSR because after decades of anti-communist propaganda and an escalation of the Cold War from Reagan, the people elected liberal leaders (Gorbechev and Yeltsin) from the communist party, who tried to appease the west and destroyed the party, weakening the government, and making it vulnerable to a stunt like Yeltsin’s.
No. If you knew how ridiculous that statement was, I don’t think you would have said it. The USSR was never a communist society. Do we change between direct democracy and a democratic republic depending on which party is elected in the US?
Never? Even when they tried to get rid of the ruble, implementing their strides system instead, that tried to measure work based on the average exertion it required?
This occured before Stalin, under Lenin. It lasted about 20 years.
A communist society is a stateless, classless, moneyless society where the means of production are owned by the workers, the basic needs of all people are met, and all people give what they are able. Considering the fact that the means of production were owned by the state, the state maintained currency, and that they were a state, I don’t think they met the criteria. This can be said even if an informed leftist has a different definition of communism. Lenin was experimenting with methods of implementing a socialist economy. As the first country to have a proletarian democracy with a communist party, they didn’t exactly have a lot of historical examples to try and model.
Fair. Thank you for the reasonable response. My point is that strides were being made, before Stalin was in charge. Then serious attempts largely stopped. Would you describe that as inaccurate?
you are in over your head if you think replacing a currency with a different currency pegged to the value of labor is communist. Socialist, maybe, communist, not even a little.
This document is very dated and fairly simplistic but it’s a good 101 basis for what we believe. Just so we’re speaking eye to eye, go read this (it’s very short and light reading, don’t worry), then come back, and use this definition of communism. It’s the definition that communists actually use and it’ll do you well to know your enemy before you pick fights with them.
I would argue that the attempt to abolish money and replace it with a measure of value that was neither arbitrary nor pegged to a commodity like gold was very much a move to liberate the proletariat.
I picked it because the abolition of money has a great deal of symbolic value, that’s all. We could use them getting rid of factory owners and seizing industry instead if you wish.
I fully agree. I was more interested in a conversation on communism and history, so my comment took the conversation in that direction. Personally I support social democratic systems like you find in the Nordic countries.
Stalin is a really mixed bag. Yes he was responsible for the murder of millions of people and especially towards the end of his life was not working to better the Soviet people, but he’s also one of the few leaders in Russian ir Soviet history that actually tried and succeeding in bringing up the quality of life for the average person in significant ways.
As a former boss put it “Yeah Stalin killed my uncle for no reason but he’s also why my village had electricity, plumbing, and telephones”
Fucking lol. He was up there till he died. He was a monster that killed millions of people. Fuck him and fuck any people worshipping him or whitewashing him or his crimes.
Can you please edit Stalin’s wikipedia page? I’m sure it could benefit from the input of someone with your level of expertise. Particularly the areas around his vindictive personality, executions, and torture.
There are hundreds of cited sources in there, those will also need to be updated. Thanks!
There’s a big difference between trying to resign and someone saying you are trying to resign. When a man really, genuinely wants to resign, then he simply does so.
According to the accounts you describe, did the people beg him to stay or something? What prevented his resignation?
VOICE FROM THE FLOOR – We need to elect comrade Stalin as the General Secretary of the CC CPSU and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR.
STALIN – No! I am asking that you relieve me of the two posts!
MALENKOV – coming to the tribune: Comrades! We should all unanimously ask comrade Stalin, our leader and our teacher, to be again the General Secretary of the CC CPSU.
It was just two men that asked him to stay? How convenient. How can you trust that? I barely trust my own government, much less someone else’s. People lie, and people ask people to lie. This is very common on Earth.
click into the source please (or at least read the URL), he tried to resign 4 separate times and every single time the motion was even entertained he was voted to stay unanimously, once even by Trotsky’s delegation.
if you want to turn this into “your sources are fabricated”, well then, no YOU, and with that, we’re done here. I’ve seen this play out too many times to bother with it again.
Every source is potentially fabricated, this is inescapable. All sources should be approached with some doubt at all times, or you are not performing your due diligence. This is simply necessary, due to the fundamental issues involved with the study of history, where we only have records made by humans, who are imperfect.
I did read it after I posted, I agree my reply was premature. I had assumed you highlighted the parts you did because that was all I would need, but that was just an inappropriate assumption of mine and I apologize.
In this case, even assuming the source is 100% accurate, this could still be very complicated, instead of being as simple as it sounds. Did he bribe any of them? We must consider it, since it is possible.
Figure out a way to implement communism without creating a Stalin that takes advantage of the situation to seize power, and we can talk. Until then, that is a major problem requiring a solution, and ignoring it makes people look blind.
Figure out a way to implement capitalism without creating genocides through imperialism and we can talk. Until then, that is a major problem requiring a solution, and ignoring it makes people look blind.
Who have we genocided in the past century? Any of us “western” countries would be an acceptable example that proves your point.
Did you specifically choose 100 years in order to not include the Great Famine in Ireland? Or what the East India company did in India? Lassez faire capitalism in action right there, baby.
How about US funded right wing death squads in central and South America that eliminated whole peoples in the 70s and 80s? There are entire languages that are no longer spoken in countries like Guatemala because the people who spoke it were all murdered systematically with US taxpayer money.
The East India company predates capitalism
Not a function of capitalism. Function of human greed. Communism doesn’t solve this. It just moves the greed from corporations and politicians to bueareacrats.
It sounds like you’re arguing more against extreme materialism, where people believe that accumulation of physical goods holds more value than human life.
Also, citing genocide due to use of US taxpayer money isn’t critiquing capitalism. It was taxpayer money, not market or investor money. That’s government corruption, which is independent from capitalism. You see this kind of corruption in both capitalist and communist systems.
I think your main argument should be the prioritization of human dignity over anything else and an extreme vigilance for corruption in institutions of all sorts.
For your first paragraph, yes, I did choose just one century because I am aware that our behavior has changed over our history, many times.
edit: Just to provide an example, we used to genocide our Native Americans and steal their wealth. Now we let them build casinos even though we usually prohibit ourselves from building them, and we gamble away our money to them. These are different things. This indicates a change in our behavior.
For your second paragraph, can you provide a source for that?
Have you seen the hold France and Russia keep in Africa?
If that’s not imperialism, I don’t know what is.
Wagner is still active in Africa
How about Israel & Palestine and Saudi Arabia & Yemen? Or does it not count if the capitalism is in the middle east and it is just sparkling shitty economic systems then?
If so then look no further than the USA in south east Asia with agent orange or does it not count because it was done during a totally justified and noble war?
Then take a look at the 20,000 migrants who have died trying to cross the Mediterranean in the last decade or so while the European authorities turn a blind eye to mass drownings.
Genocide is a very, very specific word. Your examples do not qualify.
Middle Eastern countries had their borders carved out by the west, yes. For how long do we stay responsible for their actions? When do they get their free will back?
Vietnam was a loss, a disaster and a bad joke, all at American expense. One of the largest failures we’ve ever engaged in. It was not a genocide, we did not attempt to erase Vietnamese culture.
Your migrants case is your best example due to the amount of hate flying around these days, but you do understand that genocide takes more than not helping people, right? We are not feeding the starving people of the world, is that genocide because we do not give them all food?
Exactly. We, as people, espesically NATIONS, cannot tend to all issues at once. We simply can’t. You touch on a very important point that has to be made.
The poor
The problem with this argument is that the risk for someone taking advantage of the situation to accumulate power is the same under any system. I would rather take that risk for an economic system that aims to treat everyone more fairly than for one that, by design, sends wealth up to a select few who hoard it.
If the risk is so equal, why did the USSR fall to it very quickly, where the US, 300 years after our founding, just resisted Trump when he tried to do the same?
I think your risk is higher, because you are taking down the current system in order to put in a potentially improved one. But during that downtime you have extreme vulnerability.
We do not have that problem unless we also dismantle our system to a similarly vulnerable state.
I don’t stop with authoritarianism as the only measure of people being oppressed. There are a ton of ways USA citizens are being oppressed. We just vote for who our oppressors are.
“Dictatorships are inherently unstable: you can slaughter, imprison, and brainwash entire generations and their children will invent the struggle for freedom anew. But promise every man a chance to impose the will of the majority upon his fellows, and you can get them all together behind a system that pits them against each other.” Source
I agree, there are many forms of oppression. However, without the rule of law, the oppression would become rather Mad Max, instead of just disappearing.
We had oppression before we had states. So long as one man can hurt another with physical damage, oppression will be possible
“Vote for our oppressors”. Maybe we are, but if you look through history, you’ll find that every time period has oppression. Doesn’t matter where. You can’t get rid of oppression. It’s not something you can toss away.
This is true and sort of adds to my point. If I am going to risk being oppressed oppressed anyways, I might as well risk it for a system that, if done halfway decent, can lead to more fair distribution of resources. Currently a lot of wealth is being funneled into the hands of a few.
I think it has to do with how they deal with certain things. Democracy is inherently stable, although there are major flaws.
Because every single other dominant power teamed up more thoroughly than they had ever done prior or since for the sole purpose of ratfucking them down to every last brick and feasting on the carcass?
So? We did not invade and destroy them. Was the USSR so weak it was unable to be self-sufficient on the world stage?
Well, US did do a huge part in the fall of the USSR, but you’re right, we did not invade them.
True. I was kinda hitting back at this idea that the USSR was getting lots of credit for anything good that happened there, but when it came to their fall, well, that was all our fault.
I generally agree with your other comments as well.
Yeah. However, that doesn’t mean that US is the villain. Nations are well…rather complex.
We didn’t invade them because of mutually assured destruction. We did proxy war them, espionage them, propagandize them, sanction them, embargo them, engage in brinkmanship with them, send blank checks to their enemies, sabotage them, and more, and all of NATO was of a one track mind in doing so.
Was the USSR so weak it was unable to be self-sufficient on the world stage? No, the USSR was so strong that starting from a mean 27 year life expectancy and zero productive infrastructure, it was able to survive this onslaught for nearly a century, and while doing so, put the first human in space, achieve world-class technological innovation, gender equality, literacy rates, and more.
North Korea has even fewer friends and allies than the USSR did, with their Warsaw Pact. Kim is doing just fine, even got Putin to lick his boots recently.
I think they shouldn’t need us to play nice with them in order to survive.
Yeah, but the people are suffering.
The USSR fell because Yeltsin illegally dissolved the USSR by withdrawing the RSFSR from the union. Yeltsin illegally dissolved the USSR because after decades of anti-communist propaganda and an escalation of the Cold War from Reagan, the people elected liberal leaders (Gorbechev and Yeltsin) from the communist party, who tried to appease the west and destroyed the party, weakening the government, and making it vulnerable to a stunt like Yeltsin’s.
Just out of curiosity, would you describe the Stalinist USSR as a communist society?
No. If you knew how ridiculous that statement was, I don’t think you would have said it. The USSR was never a communist society. Do we change between direct democracy and a democratic republic depending on which party is elected in the US?
Never? Even when they tried to get rid of the ruble, implementing their strides system instead, that tried to measure work based on the average exertion it required?
This occured before Stalin, under Lenin. It lasted about 20 years.
A communist society is a stateless, classless, moneyless society where the means of production are owned by the workers, the basic needs of all people are met, and all people give what they are able. Considering the fact that the means of production were owned by the state, the state maintained currency, and that they were a state, I don’t think they met the criteria. This can be said even if an informed leftist has a different definition of communism. Lenin was experimenting with methods of implementing a socialist economy. As the first country to have a proletarian democracy with a communist party, they didn’t exactly have a lot of historical examples to try and model.
Fair. Thank you for the reasonable response. My point is that strides were being made, before Stalin was in charge. Then serious attempts largely stopped. Would you describe that as inaccurate?
you are in over your head if you think replacing a currency with a different currency pegged to the value of labor is communist. Socialist, maybe, communist, not even a little.
This document is very dated and fairly simplistic but it’s a good 101 basis for what we believe. Just so we’re speaking eye to eye, go read this (it’s very short and light reading, don’t worry), then come back, and use this definition of communism. It’s the definition that communists actually use and it’ll do you well to know your enemy before you pick fights with them.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm jk the Manifesto is more relevant here, a little less short and substantially more dense but if you’re gonna argue with Marxists about Marxism you should probably read the 23 page pamphlet that Marx is actually famous for https://www.marxists.org/admin/books/manifesto/Manifesto.pdf
I would argue that the attempt to abolish money and replace it with a measure of value that was neither arbitrary nor pegged to a commodity like gold was very much a move to liberate the proletariat.
I picked it because the abolition of money has a great deal of symbolic value, that’s all. We could use them getting rid of factory owners and seizing industry instead if you wish.
“Figure out how I’m gonna be completely happy and healthy for the rest of my life and then we can discuss chemotherapy”
That’s now how you fix things. Relinquishing capitalism doesn’t mean Stalinism, nor communism to be honest.
I fully agree. I was more interested in a conversation on communism and history, so my comment took the conversation in that direction. Personally I support social democratic systems like you find in the Nordic countries.
social democracies still rely on exploitation, they just push all the negative aspects of capitalism somewhere else
Stalin is a really mixed bag. Yes he was responsible for the murder of millions of people and especially towards the end of his life was not working to better the Soviet people, but he’s also one of the few leaders in Russian ir Soviet history that actually tried and succeeding in bringing up the quality of life for the average person in significant ways.
As a former boss put it “Yeah Stalin killed my uncle for no reason but he’s also why my village had electricity, plumbing, and telephones”
Democratic Socialism exists
It’s hilarious hearing people like you talk up Stalin as a bloodthirsty monster, and finally reading what he wrote and seeing a quiet academic.
If Stalin was so intent on seizing power, why’d he try to resign so much?
Fucking lol. He was up there till he died. He was a monster that killed millions of people. Fuck him and fuck any people worshipping him or whitewashing him or his crimes.
Is this impression based on any primary sources, or just a general vibe?
Can you please edit Stalin’s wikipedia page? I’m sure it could benefit from the input of someone with your level of expertise. Particularly the areas around his vindictive personality, executions, and torture.
There are hundreds of cited sources in there, those will also need to be updated. Thanks!
Which primary sources support your claims?
Actions speak louder than words. Words aren’t just cheap, they’re free.
🧐
There’s a big difference between trying to resign and someone saying you are trying to resign. When a man really, genuinely wants to resign, then he simply does so.
According to the accounts you describe, did the people beg him to stay or something? What prevented his resignation?
https://socialistmlmusings.wordpress.com/2017/02/23/stalins-four-attempts-at-resignation/
It was just two men that asked him to stay? How convenient. How can you trust that? I barely trust my own government, much less someone else’s. People lie, and people ask people to lie. This is very common on Earth.
click into the source please (or at least read the URL), he tried to resign 4 separate times and every single time the motion was even entertained he was voted to stay unanimously, once even by Trotsky’s delegation.
if you want to turn this into “your sources are fabricated”, well then, no YOU, and with that, we’re done here. I’ve seen this play out too many times to bother with it again.
Every source is potentially fabricated, this is inescapable. All sources should be approached with some doubt at all times, or you are not performing your due diligence. This is simply necessary, due to the fundamental issues involved with the study of history, where we only have records made by humans, who are imperfect.
I did read it after I posted, I agree my reply was premature. I had assumed you highlighted the parts you did because that was all I would need, but that was just an inappropriate assumption of mine and I apologize.
In this case, even assuming the source is 100% accurate, this could still be very complicated, instead of being as simple as it sounds. Did he bribe any of them? We must consider it, since it is possible.
Is there a reason that you’re confident in your knowledge of Stalin, yet unaware of the facts? What is your confidence based on?
Also, you didn’t answer the question. Is it because you don’t actually know anything about Stalin?
No, I know several things about him. He had a very large moustache for instance.
Perhaps you could educate me on these accounts you are describing? I clearly am unfamiliar with them, otherwise I would not be asking you about them.
You made the claim, you should back it.
Or you should acknowledge that you don’t know what you’re talking about.
Either way works for me. ♥️
What claim did I make that I now need to back? That Stalin took over the USSR, or something else?
Regardless, I can’t help but point out how obviously you are avoiding my single, very reasonable question.
Source?
Do you mean a source for Stalin having a quiet, academic, writing voice?
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/foundations-leninism/introduction.htm