Questions about Communism

[Lindenbaum]

I watched a video with Thomas777 in it about Bolshevism recently and it got me thinking about Marxism and the Soviet Union, and there are some things that I don't understand. If any of you are knowledgeable on the subject, I'd appreciate it if you could give your thoughts on a few questions.

1. Why does Marxist ideology inevitably lead to societies resembling giant prison / death camps? As far as I know, every time a Communist revolution has happened, the society that they end up creating resembles a giant prison. Constant state spying and paranoia, extreme repression of freedoms, heavy use of forced labour / death camps, heavy usage of secret police etc etc. So you could say that the average person would live a life not too different than a slave or prisoner. What is it about the ideology of Marxism that makes it inevitably lead to this? It is said that Stalin would give arbitrary quotas for the amount of people to be executed / sent to gulags for each province of his empire, and that the secret police would arrest people at random to fulfil these quotas. This just doesn't make sense to me, wouldn't society run a lot more smoothly if people could go about their daily lives without being in a state of constant paranoia because they could be selected to be killed at random by secret police? Why would you have a policy like this? What is it about Communist ideology that makes the state act in such a strange seemingly schizophrenic way?

2.  I heard a historian claim that the early Bolsheviks killed every engineer in Russia and that the Gulag camps had to be built by American engineers. Why would you do that, and then just invite over American engineers anyway? And surely these Russian engineers were replaced, I doubt that the Soviet Union went its entire existence without engineers, so what was the point in doing this? Did Lenin not worry about what the effects of killing every skilled member of society might be? How can something like this be rationally justified? But it actually seems to have not mattered too much that he did things like this anyway since the Soviet Union did end up becoming a global superpower, which leads to my third question.

3. Given that the Soviet Union acted in such seemingly irrational ways, how did it end up becoming a world super power? I know that the early Soviet economy was terrible and they constantly had mass starvations, how did they recover from this? Isn't Communism supposedly economically retarded? So then how did the Soviet Union end up being an industrial powerhouse? It is infamous in these circles that American bankers and financiers and other such people invested heavily into the Soviet Union, but was this enough to turn them into a superpower despite them killing the most productive members of society? Was it really just these American investments that allowed the Soviets to become so powerful? 

4. What were the true motivations for Lenin and people like him? He wasn't a member of the proletariat, so it couldn't be that he was resentful at being forced to work in a factory for 12 hours a day. As far as I know, he never laboured for a day in his life. Was it really just that he was Jewish and hated the Tsarist treatment of Jews, even though he and his family seemed to be living fairly decently under the Tsarist regime? I know that many people care about their ethnic group, so it wouldn't necessarily matter that Lenin and his family were treated well, considering that other Jews weren't treated so well, but is there any evidence that Lenin strongly identified with his Jewish ancestry? I'm not saying that he didn't, I genuinely don't know. Also, why did he hate Kulaks so much? It couldn't really be that they were "class enemies", since Lenin himself wasn't actually of the working class. Some say that Lenin wasn't a "true believer" and that trying to achieve "true Communism" was never really on the cards for him, what do you think?

[isotope]

1. Why does Marxist ideology inevitably lead to societies resembling giant prison / death camps? As far as I know, every time a Communist revolution has happened, the society that they end up creating resembles a giant prison. Constant state spying and paranoia, extreme repression of freedoms, heavy use of forced labour / death camps, heavy usage of secret police etc etc.

It is not how things were in the communist countries. Revolutionary terror was an initial condition of Soviet Union, and to a smaller degree its puppet states that have come to existence after WWII (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary etc.). The only countries that were maintaining stalinist orthodoxy to the very end were Romania and Albania. Vast majority of communist mass murders, starvings and the gulag atrocities in other countries had taken place before late 1950s.
In the long run communist countries were "just" horrifically mismanaged. Millions of people used to work in nonsensical jobs. One older member of my extended family used to work in a factory during the communist era, and he did absolutely nothing important there, he would just drink vodka with his friends, and each month he was paid an equivalent of less than 10 USD. He couldn't quit this "job" as being long-term unemployed was against the law. Others used to drive from one city to another not transporting anything, just wasting gasoline. And they were happy, because they had access to cars! There were about 100 thousand passenger cars in Poland in 1960. This country had around 30 million inhabitants at the time.
Another aspect of living in a communist country that is not understood by the westerners is rampant workplace thievery. In a planned economy, nearly all goods are in shortage. It was not uncommon to spend several hours to exchange stamps for items, if there were any. Sometimes an older member of a family would wait for a few hours, and then he would be swapped by a grandchild, who would wait for several hours more.

To cope with this phenomenon, people would steal literally everything they could from their workplace. For example, construction workers would steal cement, bricks, wires, tools etc, gastronomical workers were stealing forks and spoons, agricultural workers employed by the state would steal chickens... I could go on like that forever.
I don't know about Soviet Union, but in Poland communist authorities allowed movie directors to softly criticize the government in comedies. You can watch one or two of them to get a picture of that epoch.

I can't tell you about particulars of Soviet economy, but I don't think all engineers were murdered. During the stalinist era they were living in special gulags (they agreed to it - what else could they do? There was no place to escape to, and no different position to take in life) that were not as harsh as gulags for commoners. You need to take into account the fact that Russia was at the time rather unindustrialized. With a large peasant population, it was possible to make the more intelligent ones into engineers. In post-Stalin period (1960s onwards) engineering was in fact one of the more important professions one could have. Engineers and scientists accepted communism, because they couldn't do anything about it. Immigration to west was very hard, a change in the system seemed impossible, and for many economic incompetency was something that was just a fact of life - some of those born under communism could not comprehend that better life was possible. In fact many of them were even grateful to communists, as they believed that it was impossible for them to achieve social advance under capitalism.

3. Given that the Soviet Union acted in such seemingly irrational ways, how did it end up becoming a world super power? I know that the early Soviet economy was terrible and they constantly had mass starvations, how did they recover from this? Isn't Communism supposedly economically retarded?

North Korea is also economically retarded, and it is an understatement to call it a bad place to live. Yet it manages to have a nuclear program. Soviet Union was much, much larger and populous than North Korea. Having an inefficient economy does not cause a country to be militarily weak.

[Guest]

 What is it about Communist ideology that makes the state act in such a strange seemingly schizophrenic way?

Such inconsistency alongside the inevitable phase of mass purging and revolutionary fervour every communist state goes through is a result of their leadership having to rewire and condition their subjects to accept an ideology antithetical to Human nature. Convincing the healthy, civilised, and intelligent of a country that they should only exist for the sake of the dysgenic is a difficult task. In effect, society is turned on its head and the rotten dredges at the very bottom of all hierarchies are thrusted into positions of administration. (I recall in particular an anecdote about various party members under Mao's regime having no familiarity with flushing toilets due to their peasant upbringing) It is only until the second or third generation of a communist society when fit people can be truthfully turned into slaves of the handout state, taking control and affecting policy in their own way. 

These conflicting interests result in the schizophrenic way communist regimes behave, ensuring that normal members of society are on board with enslaving themselves for the sake of literal retards requires compromise at best and slaughter at worst, it really says something that despite normies being more than willing to subjugate themselves to the legitimate government that they have historically refused to comply with the most backward communist policies. Stalin's USSR was the most effective communist state as they knew a gun to the neck would keep the right people down, with their faux 'nationalism' still duping Americans to this day. 

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..." From a European perspective at least, communism has made itself clear as the stance of being opposed to all signs of a functioning nation, to an almost comical degree. Factionalism commonly emerges in communist states as leading party members consider actually committing to efficient policy rather than dysfunction, yet they are usually drowned out by the peasants they surround themselves with. To put it simply, they're niggers, and niggers are retarded.

[Aizen]

What is it about the ideology of Marxism that makes it inevitably lead to [insert insanity]?

Things make a lot more sense when you see the various forms of Marxism as an expression of biology rather than ideology. The Marxist State is little more than a slave revolt given teeth, and the underlying ideology is no more than window dressing. Compare the American Revolution to the French Revolution to the Haitian Revolution. The first was a mostly civilized, European-style war between the United States and her allies and the British and her allies, leading to a Treaty recognizing the US as an independent polity. The second led to the butchering of the French Nobility but then to Napoleonic Caesarism. The third led to the butchering of the entire French population of Haiti and a slum state in perpetual internal conflict. All three of these claimed to follow the ideology of the Enlightenment.

You could make the argument that the US was the highest expression of Enlightenment values, but only because it was a population that was biologically sufficient to carry them out--considering that the Enlightenment sought to uplift everyone to the level of aristocracy. Only the US could follow this ideal sufficiently, as most of the population were land owners, and by fact of being a land owner, you are a part of "the militia"--by meeting these first conditions, one could meet the requirements for refinement into Aristocracy. Enlightenment values almost seem ready-made for the early USA it fits so well. You could then make the argument that either the early USSR or PRC was the highest expression of Marxism--as the most violent and insane Marxist States--because Marxism seeks to reduce all to the level of slaves. Who better to carry this out than the slaves themselves?

It's more interesting to discuss why Marxism was able to take power if it were nothing more than a slave revolt to begin with, and you inevitably come to the conclusion that it was because of Western support and financing. Some claim that it's a Jewish financier plot laid out in the Protocols(maybe in part), but why would Anglo liberals like FDR and Harry Dexter White or Anglo like JP Morgan support the USSR? Likely because it seemed to them to be a natural continuation of the Enlightenment, a very damning conclusion of their character and spirit.

[Senusret iii fan]

You could make the argument that the US was the highest expression of Enlightenment values, but only because it was a population that was biologically sufficient to carry them out--considering that the Enlightenment sought to uplift everyone to the level of aristocracy. 

This is interesting to consider if (and this is a tentative idea) we can think of the original U.S.A. as an attempt by Anglo Saxons to throw off the Norman/Nordic yoke; that is, as part of a (conscious or unconscious, does not matter) centuries long attempt for Anglos to claim their own freedom again. Off topic, but still, Fun! 

also

It's more interesting to discuss why Marxism was able to take power if it were nothing more than a slave revolt to begin with, and you inevitably come to the conclusion that it was because of Western support and financing. 


This is, to my knowledge, mostly true: The USSR, or any gay communist projects could not survive without extensive western support (at least not without totally compromising on the values which made it), let alone survive a direct assault by Europe + friends (I dislike the term west; looking for synonyms). Everybody knows this, the fighting at the margins is ultimately what brand of gay communism you get, etc etc etc. 

What is interesting to consider is why, over centuries, these values were allowed to metastasize in Europe: one can very easily make a miscegenation argument, but then you would need to explain why aristocrats, people who justify themselves through the concept of blood, would so blatantly throw away their first principle...

I think this all leads to a very tragic tendency in Aristocracy toward being suicidal, often times as a consequence of otherwise good traits

[thankyoucomeagain]

What is interesting to consider is why, over centuries, these values were allowed to metastasize in Europe: one can very easily make a miscegenation argument, but then you would need to explain why aristocrats, people who justify themselves through the concept of blood, would so blatantly throw away their first principle...

I think this all leads to a very tragic tendency in Aristocracy toward being suicidal, often times as a consequence of otherwise good traits

I feel such values became so popular among elite classes because such people, due to the advent of visible decay in a civilization, begin looking to establish some kind of utopian vision, which seems to them as a noble use for their wealth. Throughout the 18th and early 19th century such projects tended to be about eugenics, systematic education, supplements, etc. But from what seems like the late 19th century, maybe a little earlier, they began to look for revolutionary economics and methods of rearranging society and economics in a way that removed poverty and starvation, the most visible signs of a society's weakness. Marxism, and other communist ideas may have just been the most detailed and convincing utopian vision that fit their interests at the time.

[Muskox]

A large part of the problem for the communist revolutions of the 20th century is the fact that they all occurred in relatively pre-industrial societies with large peasant populations. They attempted to establish a "dictatorship of the proletariat" with no proletariat. You can't just say "1, 2, skip a few, communism!" In fact, if you are a consistent Marxist, you will come to the conclusion, as Amadeo Bordiga did, that doing ANYTHING to attempt to bring about a communist revolution is a waste of time at best and counter-productive at worst. It's all just useless activism.

To say, “An objectively revolutionary situation exists, but the subjective element of the class struggle, the class party, is deficient”, is wrong at every moment of the historical process; it is a blatantly meaningless assertion, a patent absurdity... Ostentatious activism seeks to make the wheels of history turn with Waltz steps, swinging its derriere to the electoral symphony.

There never was a revolution where the leaders got together and said "we are going to establish capitalism," rather the emergence of capitalism and the growing power of the middle classes were reflected in various political struggles leading to the current arrangement of things. Why should the theoretically inevitable emergence of communism be any different? There is NO truly Marxist counter-polemic to Bordiga's criticism of the Soviet Union, and history has proven him correct. The end result of practically every communist revolution has been the exceedingly brutal and authoritarian transition to an industrial capitalist economy. To Bordiga, the task of the communist party was to develop and defend Marxist theory, but many of his followers ultimately realized the futility of that task as well and abandoned Marxism completely, like Jacques Camatte. If communism were ever to come about, it would have to be after the entire world had developed to such a point that most labor were completely automated and unnecessary, allowing everyone to "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner... without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic," as Marx said. In essence, the world of WALL-E. Maybe you don't think that being a hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic is such a bad thing. But to the Marxist, it is. They may recognize that the division of labor was necessary for the creation of civilization, but they don't want it. They may recognize that hierarchy is necessary too, but they hate it. They believe that we can get rid of all of the prerequisites for civilization and not only keep the civilization, but improve it.

Bordiga may be the most consistent Marxist, but Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari are the most consistent leftists. They are super-Marxists. Whereas Marx is content to say that order and hierarchy are generally bad within human society, and perhaps even carve out areas where they're justifiable as a necessary evil, Deleuze and Guattari take things to their natural conclusion and elevate order and hierarchy to ontological evils. It's really not worth reading Anti-Oedipus or anything like that, but I'll link a short essay by Guattari called Everybody Wants to Be a Fascist, which I encourage you to read. Their ideal societal organization is a return to the primordial soup.

Think about their concept of the "body without organs": a body without differentiation in its structure. This is truly biological leftism. Contrast this conception of biology with that of Ray Peat, where disease is theorized as the breakdown of structure and substances are positively referred to as "structure-supporting." This is not as different from the Deleuzian idea as it might seem; the difference lies in valuation. For the Deleuzian, the breakdown in structure is a positive good. Disease is preferable to health. This is the essence of leftism.

The communist state acts in a schizophrenic way because it is schizophrenic. How can a functioning state's goal be the destruction of the state? Once a communist party comes to power they are given the impossible choice between governing and accomplishing their goals. It's like strapping on a suicide vest, making a list of impossible demands and then going about your day. Did you know, by the way, that leftists invented the suicide vest?

[NuclearAbsolutist]

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. 

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/

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.) 

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

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:

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

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.

[Polytropos]

This is not a novel observation, but most of your questions are related to the fact that the emergence of Communism in the Soviet Union and pretty much every other country it emerged in is itself out of alignment with Marxist theory. Communism was "supposed" to be a natural and inevitable economic development in countries that were on the industrial cutting edge, an ascension of the proletariat over the bourgeoise driven by increasing economic wealth and productivity, paralleling the ascension of the bourgeoise over the aristocracy in the French Revolution. The Communist revolutions were supposed to happen in countries like France, Britain, and Germany. The idealist Russian intellectuals like Lenin were faced with a society in which the pre-conditions for a "smooth Communist transition" didn't exist even according to the theory they ascribed to, and so their only recourse was to try to brute force economic, political, and social realities into what they wanted them to be. The hatred of the kulak is related to this- the existence of a massive agricultural peasant class is not supposed to exist in countries ripe for a Communist revolution, they're supposed to have transitioned to being factory-working archetypal proletariats. A kulak probably doesn't know or care what the bourgeoise even are, it's a completely different situation from the countries Marx had in mind in which you actually did have labor unions in violent conflict with owners and something resembling "class consciousness." 

It's worth touching upon what the ultimate fate of the Communist theory was and why it's so absurd today. None of what Marx predicted happened, the conditions of the proletariat improved to the point where the average bourgeoise in 1850 would envy the income stream of an Amazon warehouse worker, and the very brief period in which there were admittedly abominable industrial conditions passed away and with it "class consciousness." This is why you see people argue over whether Starbucks baristas are the "proletariat," in the technical sense of the term they are because they don't own the business they work for but it's obviously absurd to draw an equivalence between them and 19th century factory workers. Marxist class analysis is a theory that was plausible for a brief period in the 19th century and has since been rendered completely obsolete by the actual course of history since then, when 50 y/o lesbian academics approach history through the lens of Marxist theory they are employing an empirically debunked hypothesis, never let them forget that.