This is a subject near and dear to me, as it greatly effected the last century and that baleful century lead to so many issues of the now. There's been some good comments but some misunderstandings on the subject I'll like to clear up.
Guest Wrote:Yet it is quite hard to judge the consistency of communism as there are few examples of non-Stalinist communism outside of the Third World, I doubt that Marx's intentions can be exemplified by the 500th Sub-Saharan nigger junta killing their tribal adversaries while demanding Soviet/Chinese aid because of "De workers collective, or something..."
Mr Guest as you say yourself, communist revolution is the low taking the high, the Bolsheviks knew their Marx and boiled it down to its simplest form for the conscripts, there are only two classes. There's few places that can go. I'll cite the good academic Augusto Del Noce's last essay published a week before he died on December 30th 1989 on its very essence and ultimate fate in light of that, with some sentences highlighted:
https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/article...-the-west/
Augusto Del Noce Wrote:The year 1989 is often viewed as the conclusion of the post-war period: in the long conflict Marxism has finally lost, while the Eastern countries are progressively taking their place in the unified world of freedom, well-being, consumption, democracy. Regarding this victory of the West, however, let us be careful: in the years immediately following 1945 the conflict was thought to be in terms of a struggle between Christian civilization and Marxism; later the opposition of democracy and totalitarianism became prevalent. It has also been said that in the post-war period the struggle between Fascism and anti-Fascism continued, at a different level. Supposedly, the present moment is when Communism is shedding the features it had in common with Fascism.
Now, nothing of this is true. Marxism has fully realized itself, but disproving its premises and promises. It did not do so due to mistakes or to betrayal by its leaders, but by the necessity of its nature. It has not expressed the radical alternative between the thesis represented by capitalism and the antithesis represented by the proletariat, it has not been the creation of an entirely new humanity. Instead, historically, it represented the transition from one stage of the bourgeoisie to another, the ulterior and definitive stage. About it, in his important and original book, Marcello Veneziani cites St. Anselm’s ontological argument, according to which today’s Occidentalism presents itself as the Id quo maius cogitari nequit, that than which nothing greater can be conceived; and he refers to some exponents of the new liberalism, who aim to establish the insuperability of the current stage reached by the neo-bourgeois society, which they conceive as the final stage.
Marxism has been the culture of the transition from the Christian-bourgeois society—of which we find the insuperable example in the work of Benedetto Croce—to the bourgeois society in its pure state. We could even say that Marxism represented the “transition to the worst” in the sense that, through Marxism, bourgeois society has shed every residual moral and religious sense, unburdening itself of all “impurities” that still tied it to traditional society, thus presenting itself as full materialism and full secularism. The West has realized everything of Marxism, except its messianic hope. “Socialism” Veneziani writes “has not inherited capitalist society, but has become included, entangled in capitalism itself; in many respects, it has been the intermediate stop on the journey from capitalism to neo-capitalism.” Veneziani notices that Western society realizes the essence of Marxism: “radical atheism and materialism, internationalism and universal non-belonging, the primacy of praxis and the death of philosophy, the domination of production and the universal manipulation of nature, technological Faustianism and equality that realizes itself as homogenization.” The new globalist liberalism, Veneziani observes, absorbs the lesson of Marxism, purifying it of all prophetic, gnostic and anti-modern slag, and of solidaristic suggestions.
Studying the nature of communist regimes and the end of them/transformation of the remainder I have only found this idea more true. Look at the supposed capitalist lords of the world in London and America swooning over the supposedly impressive program of "modernization" in reality mass liquidation and brutalization in the Soviet Union one that would turn to their supposed foes for everything from technical matters help against the Fascists to at last the yardstick for what to reach and surpass, one that they would never meet. And consider what motivated people to cast them off in the end? Sloughing off the anti-modern slag Del Noce refers to was one of the defining drives of 1989/1991. Look at Romania, wherein the people would demand free speech free elections charge their dictator with criminal food mismanagement(In itself guided by a approach to economics of the nation as one big household and refusing to borrow) and ending the abortion ban.
Morphing society into
this, only to find the people demand the real stuff from the American Leviathan. I could go on about how you can see all this in Lenin himself his mongoloid idea of "a rational society" one shared by all fellow travelers no matter if they thought comrade Stalin went too far and now cope today about how it would not lead to that, it was a GREAT dream the workers and sailors you know and other necrophilia(Sadly all too often adopted by the right as alternative concepts for geopolitics economics, history etc) additionally the nature of this society was a primer for their "capitalism"
https://www.nihilist.li/2019/03/03/the-c...-planning/
(Ignore everything this author says about the promise such societies had or the transition being due to the fat cats the people charged with defending the revolution/caring for the workers on paper and the people who became oligarchs were often the same person and needless to say never went to the University of Chicago. Remains the best plain explainer for the rot I have seen-telling how rose tinted Western views have been.)
Romeo Kokriatski Wrote:The Soviet Union had a very loose association with the truth. Aside from the more famous examples of deletion practiced by Stalin and the KGB, truth was twisted into lies and falsehoods on a more personal basis. The newspapers, such as the ironically named Pravda, was a pure propaganda organ, and dissension was not typically treated lightly. To tell the truth in the Soviet Union was not simply a mistake, it was, oftentimes, a political crime.
The entire system was predicated on the continuation of lies. For example, if a Moscow bureaucrat decided that this month, the country needed 1000 units of widgets to sell, then, that was now the reality. No matter what, those 1000 widgets must be produced, and they must be produced on the time-scale dictated by the bureaucrat. Anything else was counter-revolutionary.
Imagine that you are the manager of a widget factory. You receive a mandate to produce 1000 widgets. However, there are a few obstacles. Let’s say that your factory does not have the capacity for 1000 widgets in that timeframe, but 500. Let’s say as well that the steel foundry you source your raw materials also only has capacity for 500 units of steel to send to your factory, and besides, the factory has other obligations with other factories as well.
You know, as the manager of that factory, that there is no physical way — not political, not human — that you can produce 1000 widgets in the time allotted to you. Yet you still must produce 1000 widgets. How do you solve this problem? Well, there are a few options:
The first, and most obvious, is simply to tell the central bureaucrat that you cannot produce these widgets. It’s impossible. You can send the complete list of all of your resources, supplies, produce graphs and charts, take a train to Moscow, and explain in no uncertain terms that your factory, physically, in incapable of meeting that quota.
If the Soviet Union was a rational government guided by good governance, the bureaucrat would acknowledge your arguments, and simply adjust his planning to include those new contingencies. However, if the bureaucrat needs to answer to a Party minister, who in turn needs to answer to the General Secretary, who in turn needs to prove to the other Party elites that he is an effective and competent administrator and is thus too important to undergo ‘review’ by the secret police — then, that bureaucrat is incentivized to not accept your argument, and further, is incentivized to report you for counter-revolutionary sabotage to the secret police, after which you will be replaced by another manager.
Let’s assume that you do not want to be sent to an interview room with a few KGB agents, so you need to consider other solutions.
One common solution in the Soviet Union, when faced with simply unrealistic demands, was to unofficially buy the widgets from some other factory with a surplus. After all, the Soviet Union was a pretty big place, and there was usually some surplus somewhere — if you knew how to find it. So, in order to purchase the shortfall of 500 widgets, you would need to scrounge up some money.
Despite being a ‘communist’ country, the Soviet Union wasn’t cashless, and everything was still priced in currency. But, since salaries were low, you couldn’t exactly buy the widgets yourself — you needed to find money in the budget. Luckily, the budget was one area where you had oversight. So, you could, for example, ‘forget’ to pay your workers in rubles — instead, you pay them with ration cards, so they could still purchase food, for example, but you can now appropriate the stolen wages to purchase the widgets from some other factory, claim them as yours, and present the 1000 widgets to the Kremlin bureaucrat. Or, you could skim money from a discretionary fund, such as a vacation fund for your workers, or a medical fund, or anywhere where you had access to the books, and the people who would suffer from that lack wouldn’t be able to contradict you.
Like all large, centrally-run organizations, skimming funds when you hold the checkbook wasn’t particularly noticeable if the amounts were small. But skimming enough money for 500 widgets, presumably, might even be an amount that the secret police would notice. So instead, you try a third option: bribery.
Ultimately, everyone involved in this game – the factory manager, the central planning bureaucrat, the Party minister, the General Secretary and the Politburo & know that the thing, the trick, is not to actually do things – doing things is dangerous, risky, and could bring down the secret police – but to seem like things are done. The General Secretary, for example, needs 1000 widgets to look good, but he isn’t going to wheel them into the Kremlin in front of the Politburo and strut around like some provincial plebe. All he needs is the appearance of 1000 widgets.
So you, as the factory manager, who wants to take the path of least risk of ending up in an interview room with Comrade Colonel Belkov and Comrade Lieutenant Lenski, skim just enough funds to procure a sizable bribe, let’s say a bribe large enough for the bureaucrat to obtain a summer house in Sochi, or purchase a French washing machine, or buy some Belgian sausages and wine. Often, the bribes weren’t rubles, but objects, corruption by barter instead of currency.
That way, while a few of your workers may notice that their salary was a little bit lower than usual (perhaps assuaged with a few extra days of medical leave around Labor Day), the skimmed funds are almost unnoticeable, and you can now persuade the bureaucrat to take the 500 widgets, but write 1000 on the bill. The bureaucrat will of course need to use a portion of the bribe you paid him to the inspectors, Party minister, and so on, but they won’t squeeze you too much, because despite the reality that you need to deliver 1000 widgets, even an incompetent functionary can understand that there is no physical way to deliver it.
A few weeks later, you see on the news a parade hosted for Comrade General Secretary, who is being lauded for his efficient, competent administration of widgets, and who had managed to even produce 1000 widgets in a resource shortage. You may even get a promotion, thanks to your hard work in instilling your factory workers with the patriotism needed to do the impossible.
It’s enough to make a man a cynic.
Notice, what makes the gears turn here the drive for "a summer house in Sochi, or purchase [of] a French washing machine, or...some Belgian sausages and wine."
What kin.
Now for the other point I wanted to address
Muskox Wrote:Did you know, by the way, that leftists invented the suicide vest?
No, The organization your referring that is popularly credited with pioneering suicide bombing the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam aka the LTTE was not leftist in any serious sense, from Paradise Afire Vol 1 by Tom Cooper & Adrien Fontanellaz:
Quote:Later on, Pirabhakaran had a book about Che Guevara translated by his
militants into the Tamil language (he never spoke any other language but
Tamil). However, he never developed much interest in such leftist
theoreticians as Marx, Lenin or Mao: instead, Pirabhakaran always
emphasised armed action over political works. Correspondingly, and
contrary to the usual practice for ‘classic’, Marxist-Leninist movements, the
organisation he gradually developed eventually became a military with a
political wing. When an intellectual tried to argue with him about priorities
of political work, Pirabhakaran offered a very clear answer:
We have to act first, people will follow us then […] You intellectuals
are afraid of blood. No struggle will take place without killing. What
do you want me to do? You people live in comfort and try to prove me
wrong. So what should I do? Take cyanide and die?
(This civil war I find fascinating actually for showing how modern national dynamics and conflict play out even in a isolated place that was besides a Indian intervention to secure its neutrality and nonalignment neutral and alone with no foreign string pulling really for either side. But that's for another thread)
This is another reality I consider important when considering communism, after 1945 you have this rising tide of color, at last the hoped for world liberators...many simply pretended just took up the word socialism because it sounded good liked how Lenin did for violent political takeover organization what Ford did for car making and maybe wanted access to the weapons ATM that was the USSR/China. The poor Russians Ukrainians and Belorussians of the Union were constantly bled for this and the always prioritized expansion and defense(We don't know exactly due to the wonderful trait of State Secrecy but the USSR spent anywhere from 10-30% of GDP on the military industrial complex and military desiring both supreme conventional and nuclear forces-there is/was also no civilian military divide as we know it as a rule in any such regime) of the Glorious Dream of Marx. No small part in the material reasons it went away but AFTER its work was done so to speak.
See here
https://devlin.substack.com/p/soviet-sub...oluntarism
Quote:Normally, when people are discussing socialism, they mean the system of extreme national autarky, but I think it’s wrong because it concentrates on Soviet Russia in it. Socialism as the economic system on the world scale is most and foremost a system of Russian subsidies.
It works both on the international level and, far too often missed, the Soviet federal level. The story is something akin to the resource curse in which your entire economy is transformed into a quite weird and often inefficient structure to service the needs of Soviet Russia and your failings are covered by the Russian subsidies.
The Socialist Republics of Central Asia and Transcaucasus have seen quite decent development not because of some amusing micro policies in the regions, but persistent transfers by the Soviet budget from Russia to them.
We have seen quite decent documentation of the international situation in The Triumph of Broken Promises.
International socialism ended when Russia broke its spine and was unable to fund it anymore.
(Side note:Imperial Russia was on its way to develop into a proper industrialized country the Bolshevik hijacking and sparking of a apocalyptic civil war did not help at all Stalin did not create a superpower if anything the commies insured a falling behind due to their various stupidities Any technocratic team of the era could do similar if not better. In fact, one nation clearly did-from a yet to be published substack of Devin.)
"But Nuc didn't you just say those groups were true to the idea"-Its complicated, LTTE was clearly not but then you get the African regimes in the 1980s that did mass population movements and collectivization. Looking further into the past before WWII and after 1917 you see famed dove thinker Rosa Luxembourg when the chips came down striding along and defending the actions of thugs directly working on Moscow's orders. And if one steps away further from that well, is that not just becoming a someone who works within the Western society De Noce describes("Social Democracy"?) In any case its clear the belief system has played itself out whatever the thought form but it's expulsion and what creatures it has nurtured(The Third World wit large and the ideology of it, most of the cult of anti fascism and most baleful of all the "Post War Order" in general guaranteeing its existence by the blood of citizens and the poisoning of minds their revolt causing the European Civil War as Nolte wrote) remain to be cleaned up. I could go on about the dysfunction the reshaping the backwardness compared to any idea of real progress but this is the crux of my view.