Noam Chomsky on the Soviet Union

[Aspiring Humanist]

The Soviet Union, for example, was called a socialist society by the two big propaganda machines, that would be the western one and the soviet one. They both called it socialism, for opposite reasons. The west called it socialism in order to defame socialism by associating it with this miserable tyranny. The Soviet Union called it socialism in order to benefit from the moral appeal that true socialism had among large parts of the general world population. But this was about as far from socialism as you can imagine. The core notion of traditional socialism is...that working people have to be in control of production, and communities have to be in control of their own lives. The soviet union was the exact opposite of that. Working people had no control over anything, they were virtually slaves. And the collapse of the soviet union is a small victory for socialism, it eliminated one of the major barriers to it.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4Tq4VE8eHQ

In your opinion, does Noam have any validity when he says this or is it just his anarcho-syndicalist side talking?

[Chimurenga.]

Noam Chomsky was (and still is) among the multitude of academics and leftists who derided the Soviet Union as being completely opposite of socialism. Yet they all had one thing in common, they could not produce a legitimate alternative to building a workers state under constant military encirclement and threat by the world imperialist powers. Other than saying "the workers don't control everything!", they contributed nothing and often took to anti-socialist sentiment (as you can see with Noam Chomsky calling the fall of the Soviet Union 'a victory for socialism'). This has carried on to today.

Michael Parenti, who is often thought as a rival to Chomsky, rightly had this to say about such people:


The pure socialists' ideological anticipations remain untainted by existing practice. They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted. Instead, they offer vague statements about how the workers themselves will directly own and control the means of production and will arrive at their own solutions through creative struggle. No surprise then that the pure socialists support every revolution except the ones that succeed."Chomsky is alright for exposing hypocrisy within the U.S. foreign policy but not so good when it comes to Socialism and the Soviet Union.

[Sir Comradical]

"the collapse of the soviet union is a small victory for socialism"

I love Chomsky, but this is one of the most pathetic things I've ever read.

Parenti's positions (http://www.uncommonthought.com/mtblog/archives/2009/01/27/left_anticommun_1.php) are spot on.

[Aspiring Humanist]

But the Soviet Union was completely bureaucratic, it had its scarcity of resources, policy differences were settled by slamming an ice pick into your opponents head, etc
So the anarchists are too vague, and the Stalinists are just hypocrites?

[Os Cangaceiros]

good god, not this topic again.

I was going to post "inb4parenti", but alas, I was too late!

[Os Cangaceiros]

look, Chomsky has stated that the USA is the closest thing that mankind has come to as far as a truly democratic, free society is concerned. I'd take what he says with a grain of salt, cuz he clearly thinks "democratic and free" = "i can say whatever I want as an academic".

[Sir Comradical]

But the Soviet Union was completely bureaucratic, it had its scarcity of resources, policy differences were settled by slamming an ice pick into your opponents head, etc
So the anarchists are too vague, and the Stalinists are just hypocrites?

Resources don't automatically become plentiful with the introduction of socialist property relations.

[Os Cangaceiros]

Although I'll give my main man chomsky some props for giving me firepower to use against the "American exceptionalism" crowd. lol

Still though, his ruminations on anarchism and left-wing thought in general are just sad, very sad. Like how he sees anarchism as merely the continuation of "Age of Reason"/Enlightenment thought, with some socialism tacked on. See the second quote in my sig for my thoughts on that sentiment.

[Aspiring Humanist]

I know that but you can't say that anarchists don't explain how they will distribute scarcity of resources when the Soviet Union had utterly failed in distributing resources in the Ukrainian famine

[Tablo]

While Chomsky isn't the smartest academic when it comes to socialism, I do think there is a lot of truth in that quote.

[CynicalIdealist]

I'm pretty sure most people here agree that the Soviet Union was never socialist. Some here would say that Stalin tried to create socialism in the USSR, and more feel that way about Lenin (whom Chomsky has no sympathy for whatsoever).

[Delenda Carthago]

But the Soviet Union was completely bureaucratic, it had its scarcity of resources, policy differences were settled by slamming an ice pick into your opponents head, etc
So the anarchists are too vague, and the Stalinists are just hypocrites?
All the m-ls/ stalinists that I know in person, agree that the sooner CCCP was over, the better for revolution, since they charactirise Soviet Union social democratic after 56 and socialfascist in the late 60s(under Brehznef).

[Sir Comradical]

I know that but you can't say that anarchists don't explain how they will distribute scarcity of resources when the Soviet Union had utterly failed in distributing resources in the Ukrainian famine

The NEP was failing, the country was experiencing food shortages anyway and the financial boycott against the USSR was virtually still on. They had no choice but to collectivise as they were responding to objective economic necessity. How Anarchists would respond to these conditions is a counterfactual, but I'd say they'd do the same thing.

[∞]

I am a firm believer that freedom is just as important as equality and both exist in the same matrix. One aspect missing in the USSR was freedom, and bureaucratic institutions really hinder away from the true essence of socialism.

To me the true essence of socialism exists on a democratic praxis.

[RedSonRising]

And the collapse of the soviet union is a small victory for socialism, it eliminated one of the major barriers to it.

Ok no. I'm a huge fan of Chomsky but no. Centralized structures may have obstructed a more desirable development of socialism as a model in Soviet Russia, but for fuck's sake an authoritarian welfare state is ten times better than the horrific "shock treatment" the international bourgeoisie decided to fuck the country over with.

People perhaps being more critical of USSR or learning to avoid automatically associating the principles of socialism with the mistakes of the CCCP is what he wants. And that isn't so bad. But claiming the fall of the USSR helped any working class is a real abstraction.

[Chimurenga.]

J1OyIJtjdpo

I wonder if Chomsky could tell these folks that they are better off without the Soviet Union.

[kahimikarie]

sure is stalinist in here

[RedSonRising]

sure is stalinist in here

http://www.revleft.com/vb/collapse-soviet-union-t146514/index.html

^^ See Poll.

I don't think most people on this board support Stalin (as I also do not), but most comrades are able to objectively identify a rapid decrease in the material conditions of the working classes in post-soviet countries and the emboldening of capitalist states around the world, particularly the United States, which was left unchecked in all of its violent imperial ambitions as the Lone Superpower.

[Savage]

This isn't news, his argument isn't particularily profound and this thread already exists innumerable times on this forum.

[RedHal]

Millionaire Chomsky and his middle class followers don't care if the living conditions of the toiling masses have fallen dramatically since the fall of the USSR, their only concern is to freely babble about how horrible the government is. Their bellies and pockets will always be full

[∞]

He actually did mention that Russia is worse now...

I think he was talking about some vague "ideological victory".

[RedSonRising]

He actually did mention that Russia is worse now...

I think he was talking about some vague "ideological victory".


Yea, I could see that, but it's a cheap thing to highlight such an opinion without the context of the material consequences.

[Delenda Carthago]

its funny that the answer to: "it was a victory cause now we can start over and make it better" is not "no its not better because it was good to have it even though it was rotten" but "people had more money back then". Socialdemocracy all the fuckin way.

[Jose Gracchus]

Blah blah MLs have bigger dicks, Chomsky's just a professor who sells books, blah blah blah.

In other news, Chomsky is, in the main, absolutely right. There was little to anything like real socialism by late 1918, which may be excused by the exigencies of civil war turning socialism to an armed camp, by but the early 20s it was completely extinguished. The USSR had no intrinsic working class content. The crap the Stalinists peddle is essentially the social contract that the government worked out with the workers: cede all administrative, social, and political control to us, and we'll put a floor on certain kinds of suffering and try to improve living standards.

Since the USSR and its regime blocked any attempts at indigenous socialism, and since the USSR's social contract was not something the workers won in their own right, I feel no tears for the bureaucrats and apparatchikki who lost as collective power they had before -- most of them were reward handsomely by transitioning to conventional capitalism. Just because living standards went down doesn't mean the collapse of the USSR as such was a not a victory for workers. To suggest it was a loss is to pretend the "conservatives" in the USSR had working class content: they didn't. It was a side-show to which the workers were not invited.

Chomsky has described at length the fate of working people in the former Eastern Bloc, that liberal intellectuals fail to notice in their enthusiastic masturbating for the Polish petty bourgeois who "gets it" and sells fancy dresses to German bourgeois versus the miner who wonders what happened when it was noble and something desirable to be a miner, now just left to waste on a tiny pension. He doesn't pretend to lend the USSR from 1921-1991 any bona fides as a working class or popular entity, and neither do I. I don't see what the problem is.

And before the Stalinist hysterics start, I live with a refugee of Russia from the 90s, so I hardly need your idiot YouTubery to explain to me the fruits of Jeffery Sachs in the fSU.

[Rusty Shackleford]

Blah blah MLs have bigger dicks, Chomsky's just a professor who sells books, blah blah blah.

In other news, Chomsky is, in the main, absolutely right. There was little to anything like real socialism by late 1918, which may be excused by the exigencies of civil war turning socialism to an armed camp, by but the early 20s it was completely extinguished. The USSR had no intrinsic working class content. The crap the Stalinists peddle is essentially the social contract that the government worked out with the workers: cede all administrative, social, and political control to us, and we'll put a floor on certain kinds of suffering and try to improve living standards.

Since the USSR and its regime blocked any attempts at indigenous socialism, and since the USSR's social contract was not something the workers won in their own right, I feel no tears for the bureaucrats and apparatchikki who lost as collective power they had before -- most of them were reward handsomely by transitioning to conventional capitalism. Just because living standards went down doesn't mean the collapse of the USSR as such was a not a victory for workers. To suggest it was a loss is to pretend the "conservatives" in the USSR had working class content: they didn't. It was a side-show to which the workers were not invited.

Chomsky has described at length the fate of working people in the former Eastern Bloc, that liberal intellectuals fail to notice in their enthusiastic masturbating for the Polish petty bourgeois who "gets it" and sells fancy dresses to German bourgeois versus the miner who wonders what happened when it was noble and something desirable to be a miner, now just left to waste on a tiny pension. He doesn't pretend to lend the USSR from 1921-1991 any bona fides as a working class or popular entity, and neither do I. I don't see what the problem is.

And before the Stalinist hysterics start, I live with a refugee of Russia from the 90s, so I hardly need your idiot YouTubery to explain to me the fruits of Jeffery Sachs in the fSU.



yeah, taking any gain made by the working class and smash it and return society to the hellhole it was before the revolution. that sure helps the struggle for socialism. yup.

[Jose Gracchus]

Yes, you're right, I'll ask my girlfriend if her family was returned to pre-modern single-plot peasant farming immediately after December, 1991. Yup. That's right, you got me. :rolleyes:

Your "solution" for the working class would be to support the Soviet "conservatives" in the hope they, somehow against all material factors and realities, could prop up the makework and consumer good subsidies. The Eastern Bloc working class in 89-91 did pay dearly for the fact that way too many socialists throughout the 20th c. spent all their time apologizing for the populist welfare measures of the USSR like it was socialism. Maybe if a credible international working class movement existed, there would be credible alternatives besides the fatuous "support the hardliners! [which invariably had been part of the Gorbachev-Andropov reform push from the start -- the USSR was moving toward orthodox capitalism since the 70s]."

Of course I would rather the working class had been able to resist and force political freedoms on the Russian/Soviet elite while simultaneously demanding the retention of their social benefits and concessions. Sadly, the working class was totally excluded from your precious "workers' state"'s moves to ditch them entirely, so that the nomenklatura could also vacation on the French Riviera and become billionaires.

[Rusty Shackleford]

Yes, you're right, I'll ask my girlfriend if her family was returned to pre-modern single-plot peasant farming immediately after December, 1991. Yup. That's right, you got me. :rolleyes:

Your "solution" for the working class would be to support the Soviet "conservatives" in the hope they, somehow against all material factors and realities, could prop up the makework and consumer good subsidies. The Eastern Bloc working class in 89-91 did pay dearly for the fact that way too many socialists throughout the 20th c. spent all their time apologizing for the populist welfare measures of the USSR like it was socialism. Maybe if a credible international working class movement existed, there would be credible alternatives besides the fatuous "support the hardliners! [which invariably had been part of the Gorbachev-Andropov reform push from the start -- the USSR was moving toward orthodox capitalism since the 70s]."

Of course I would rather the working class had been able to resist and force political freedoms on the Russian/Soviet elite while simultaneously demanding the retention of their social benefits and concessions. Sadly, the working class was totally excluded from your precious "workers' state"'s moves to ditch them entirely, so that the nomenklatura could also vacation on the French Riviera and become billionaires.


And ill just ask my comrade if the situation in Ukraine improved at all for workers after the collapse. Obviously the leadership of the soviet union led the charge towards capitalist reforms under gorby but it doesnt mean the working class still didnt have an advantage over the western proletariat. now what, there are fascists and nazis everywhere and even on May 9th are veterans who defeated fascism being attacked by nationalist youths.

there were mistakes made, but it doesnt mean the "baby should be thrown out with the bathwater"

[Stranger Than Paradise]

Chomsky is wrong in equating the collapse of the Soviet Union as any sort of victory for the working class. It merely replaced one form of Capitalist management with another.

He still is spot on in his analysis of the SU though, except for claiming that people were slaves, as if that was more true than in liberal democracies.

[TheLeftStar]

I agree with Noam Chomsky but only to a certain extent. Socialism is good

[PhoenixAsh]

I love these debates.

It shows how incredibly hypocritical some posters get in thier willingness to slam anybody who even thinks about voting for a slightly better condition for the working class...but are perfectly willing to defend to the bone the support for a government which was not socialist because it had slightly better conditions for the working class.

Fucking hilarious.

The USSR is the worst thing that could happen to socialism, communism and the revolutionary perspective. Its utter failure to bring any kind of socialism and instead create a bureaucratic elite running on state capitalism and taking all true workers power and controll away from the workers by (brutal) repression and centralisation of power...should be a wake up call for all authoritarians.

[W1N5T0N]

Noam Chomsky writes books to create awareness of the unfairness and deceiving nature of governments around the world. By selling these books, he makes money. He can then write more books, thus keeping up his struggle to make people think. I don't see anything wrong with trying to educate a naive people, who believe their government is so fair and liberal. I think that he is keeping up a struggle! And furthermore, I doubt he has a big house, big car and a pool...Noam Chomsky is one of the greatest minds of our day. The reason why he opposes the Soviet Union is because the state-propagated 'utopia' was actually a dystopia in many ways, and had lost a lot of it's socialist roots. I mean, a lot of ex-inner party members just came out of the closet as capitalists after 1989. Soviet Union wasn't all bad or all good, but it certainly wasn't a model socialist transitional state.

[Wanted Man]

I think he was talking about some vague "ideological victory".

Surely that's exactly the problem with being a millionaire celebrity academic, whose main concern in life is how to sell more books and avoid taxation, rather than a worker in the former SU.

For him, a "victory for socialism" is something that fits more neatly into a theoretical conception of how socialism should be brought about. Anything that works into that direction is a victory in the academic mind, even if it leads directly to the immiseration of millions. Chomsky believes in a kind of voluntary, libertarian socialism. The demise of "state capitalism", "authoritarian socialism" or whatever would supposedly give the people a better idea of individual freedom, and therefore bring them closer to his conception of socialism (so far, the evidence of this happening in the former SU is nowhere to be seen).

In other words, the ends justify the means and hypothetical courses of events (workers of the former SU learning about real socialism) are more important than material reality. In fact, this point of view is not so far removed from the academic "Stalinists" who justified all sorts of things as a necessary evil in "building socialism". In fact, it can be compared to just about any form of mental gymnastics to justify the suffering of millions in the service of a pie-in-the-sky dream.

The difference is that most of these are (rightly, to some extent) shouted down, whereas Chomsky's similar utilitarian, cold-logic viewpoint only gets excuses or even vocal agreement from his fans. Take, for instance, the posts by The Inform Candidate. His (m)anger and indignation in his defence of Chomsky can only make one laugh, because it's really just a passionate defence of mass impoverishment of the working class. This, it has to be remembered, from adherents to "real socialism" as opposed to harsh, cold-hearted Stalinism.

[jake williams]

I'm still not sure this thread is going anywhere productive, but it could have turned out a lot worse than it has.

I have a lot of respect for Chomsky, who has a lot of admirable traits others would do well to emulate - for example, a sincere respect for the American working class.

I do think that he is making no profound or radical statement to assert that the Soviet Union had serious faults of, among other things, a severe deficit of workers' democracy, including the direct implication of the working class in the process of planning and production. I know few people who would argue otherwise, and he isn't taking some specific and special position among the left masses who think the Soviet Union was perfect - I'm not entirely convinced any actually exist.

The specific statement he is making though - that the counterrevolution in the Soviet Union (it can't really be described as anything else unless either you think that the SU was a capitalist state, which I think is delusional, or that capitalism is historically progressive, which I don't think Chomsky does, though sometimes I wonder) was a victory for the working class - is, I think, really problematic. It should at any rate be clear now that the working masses not simply in Russia, but everywhere else, have in no way benefitted from the collapse of a state which, however imperfect, did have as its predominant tendancy the attempt to construct socialism locally and internationally and protect those gains that were achieved. I see no benefits to this at all, and can think of all kinds of ways where it has very specifically harmed the working class, and not simply in the former SU.

In view of the very imperfect society that the Soviet Union was, there might be some excusing of this position in the very early 90s, for the same reason that many sincere communists in the CPSU initially supported Gorbachev's "reforms". But there's no excusing it now. There's simply no evidence at all that anyone other than Russian oligarchs, liberal triumphalists, ultra-right reactionists and the bourgeoisie internationally as a whole have benefitted from the end of the Soviet state.

[Spartacus.]

policy differences were settled by slamming an ice pick into your opponents head, etc
So the anarchists are too vague, and the Stalinists are just hypocrites?


No, the policy differences were settled by debate, which Trotsky has lost. After that, having resorted to terrorism, sabotage and collaboration with the fascists, he was justly punished by Great Comrade Stalin in a very imaginative and creative way.



Evidence of Leon Trotsky’s Collaboration with Germany and Japan

Grover Furr

http://clogic.eserver.org/2009/Furr.pdf (http://clogic.eserver.org/2009/Furr.pdf)


It's nice to see people defending and pitying the fascist collaborators who were ready to betray their own country for the sake of their political ambitions. :rolleyes:



I know that but you can't say that anarchists don't explain how they will distribute scarcity of resources when the Soviet Union had utterly failed in distributing resources in the Ukrainian famine
First of all, there was never an "Ukrainian" famine, but a Soviet famine of 1932-33. The idea that famine was only limited to Ukraine is just anti-communist bullshit that is used to propagate the idea that big, bad, totalitarian monster Stalin wanted to "exterminate" Ukrainians, although at that time the majority of ethnic Ukrainians were living in Poland and not in the Soviet Ukraine. Second, the idea that Soviet Government failed to "distribute" anything is oversimplification of complex events that led to a tragic famine and only serves to enhance the image of ruthless Communists that "kill" millions for no good reason whatsoever. If you want to read a scholarly work on the famine, its causes and outcomes, I recommend Mark Tauger and his work.


As to the Chomsky and his "ideas" about the Soviet Union, despite the respect I have for that men, I must say that he is talking bullshit. Since there has already been a mention of the drastic fall of the living standards in the former USSR, it would be good to mention the effect the destruction of the Soviet Union had on the world worker's movements and on the global position of the working class. As long as the Soviet Union existed, despite all of its flaws and shortcomings, the Communist parties had at least some authority among the masses, because they could point to the real-existing socialism and give example of how things could be different. With the destruction of the SU, things have become much tougher as Communism was proclaimed "dead" and capitalism lionised as the only possible road to success and progress. When now someone points to Communism as a solution to the world problems, the people will laugh and say: "Oh, really? Tell me, if Communism is so good, then why did the Soviet Union collapsed?" And then, they will mention the Stalin and the "fact" that he killed millions/tens of millions... Not to mention the fact that today, with the global financial crisis, the capitalists are free to implement all sorts of austerity measures against the workers with no fear of the popular response, thanks to the fact that working class is disorganised, disoriented and demoralised and thinks that there is no better alternative to capitalism and its horrors.


Because of this reasons, the loss of Soviet Union was a disaster for the world Communist movement, a shock that would take us decades to recover of. Noam Chomsky, with his ignorant jubilation over the fall of the SU, is just another confused liberal who thinks that with the destruction of the "Stalinist" :rolleyes: Soviet Union, the world is a step closer to the realisation of a "true" socialism. He is not the first one though. We should remember the happiness and joy of the Trotskidiots when the SU fell and their proclamations about possibility of "true" socialism now that "Stalinism" is "dead". Should I even point how the time has proven that they (and Chomsky) were utterly and totally wrong?

[SolidarityScot]

I'm not really big on Stalinophilia.

[Kenco Smooth]

I'm just waiting for the inevitable false dichotomy of better conditions for the working class or freedom of speech to be brought up again.

[Lucretia]

Yet they all had one thing in common, they could not produce a legitimate alternative to building a workers state under constant military encirclement and threat by the world imperialist powers.

Could not produce a legitimate alternative? How about the obvious one of pulling off a workers revolution in those very imperialist countries rather than in a semi-feudal backwater where half the population still believed that the tsar had supernatural powers?

[Chimurenga.]

In other news, Chomsky is, in the main, absolutely right.

Who would've known the Chomsky fanboy would come in to defend his great idol.

:laugh:

[maskerade]

chomsky also said that compared to worker's rights in most of the third world, the soviet union was a paradise. He also has made favourable comparisons between ML states' achievements in health care, education etc which he claims are largely lacking in the liberal West.

I don't agree with his idealistic standard which he compares the USSR to, but some of these criticisms against him are so ridiculous. When has Chomsky called himself a worker? he frequently says that he is allowed to say what he says because 'power' does not want to crack down on people like him, white people with 'privilege'. Chomsky never claimed to be an ideologue, and to be honest I very much doubt he would like to be one - but these criticisms against him make him seem like he is, which is incorrect.

If a capitalist welfare state was to collapse, and all the people in poverty would be made homeless etc, would that be a defeat of socialism? yes, they were gains made by workers in a capitalist state, but that is not socialism.

[RadioRaheem84]

Blah blah MLs have bigger dicks, Chomsky's just a professor who sells books, blah blah blah.

In other news, Chomsky is, in the main, absolutely right. There was little to anything like real socialism by late 1918, which may be excused by the exigencies of civil war turning socialism to an armed camp, by but the early 20s it was completely extinguished. The USSR had no intrinsic working class content. The crap the Stalinists peddle is essentially the social contract that the government worked out with the workers: cede all administrative, social, and political control to us, and we'll put a floor on certain kinds of suffering and try to improve living standards.

Since the USSR and its regime blocked any attempts at indigenous socialism, and since the USSR's social contract was not something the workers won in their own right, I feel no tears for the bureaucrats and apparatchikki who lost as collective power they had before -- most of them were reward handsomely by transitioning to conventional capitalism. Just because living standards went down doesn't mean the collapse of the USSR as such was a not a victory for workers. To suggest it was a loss is to pretend the "conservatives" in the USSR had working class content: they didn't. It was a side-show to which the workers were not invited.

Chomsky has described at length the fate of working people in the former Eastern Bloc, that liberal intellectuals fail to notice in their enthusiastic masturbating for the Polish petty bourgeois who "gets it" and sells fancy dresses to German bourgeois versus the miner who wonders what happened when it was noble and something desirable to be a miner, now just left to waste on a tiny pension. He doesn't pretend to lend the USSR from 1921-1991 any bona fides as a working class or popular entity, and neither do I. I don't see what the problem is.

And before the Stalinist hysterics start, I live with a refugee of Russia from the 90s, so I hardly need your idiot YouTubery to explain to me the fruits of Jeffery Sachs in the fSU.


How scornful do you have to be of any gains made by the Russian people?

So fuck those kids who got fed under communism? The USSR was so not socialist that it doesn't matter if people had a modicum of decent living standards.

If the right wing had their way here in States or in Europe and effectively rolled back the gains made by the working class during the 20th century, would that be a victory for socialism, because the US and Europe and social democracy are definitely not socialist? The fall of the welfare states would be a triumph for socialism because they didn't represent true socialism and were messily bureaucratic, sometimes inadequate, insufficient, and even full of corruption?

Chomsky is fucking wrong on this. Idiotically wrong.

The Eastern Blocs are wastelands living off of the carcass of their former selves, but for the sake of ideological purity and maintaining principle, we'll consider it a victory. :rolleyes:

[RadioRaheem84]

Surely that's exactly the problem with being a millionaire celebrity academic, whose main concern in life is how to sell more books and avoid taxation, rather than a worker in the former SU.

For him, a "victory for socialism" is something that fits more neatly into a theoretical conception of how socialism should be brought about. Anything that works into that direction is a victory in the academic mind, even if it leads directly to the immiseration of millions. Chomsky believes in a kind of voluntary, libertarian socialism. The demise of "state capitalism", "authoritarian socialism" or whatever would supposedly give the people a better idea of individual freedom, and therefore bring them closer to his conception of socialism (so far, the evidence of this happening in the former SU is nowhere to be seen).

In other words, the ends justify the means and hypothetical courses of events (workers of the former SU learning about real socialism) are more important than material reality. In fact, this point of view is not so far removed from the academic "Stalinists" who justified all sorts of things as a necessary evil in "building socialism". In fact, it can be compared to just about any form of mental gymnastics to justify the suffering of millions in the service of a pie-in-the-sky dream.

The difference is that most of these are (rightly, to some extent) shouted down, whereas Chomsky's similar utilitarian, cold-logic viewpoint only gets excuses or even vocal agreement from his fans. Take, for instance, the posts by The Inform Candidate. His (m)anger and indignation in his defence of Chomsky can only make one laugh, because it's really just a passionate defence of mass impoverishment of the working class. This, it has to be remembered, from adherents to "real socialism" as opposed to harsh, cold-hearted Stalinism.

Enough said.

Although if I may add one thing, there is a minor difference between Chomsky and the "Stalinist", the "Stalinist" maintains a harsh crush heads to keep social gains mentality, while Chomsky reminds me of the typical idealist classical liberal where the ideal must be put above material reality. The latter to me seems much more ludicrous as it pretty much describes the history of capitalism.

[Die Rote Fahne]

If anyone in this thread believes the USSR was socialist, or that Stalin actually tried to build socialism, you're a moron and should be treated as such. The USSR had plenty an opportunity to become a socialist state. However, the authoritarian and totalitarian party structure of the vanguard, Bolsheviks, caused this goal to not be achieved, and Stalin took it even further in the wrong direction. If they had handed the means of production over to the workers, and allowed free socialist elections, in the beginning the USSR would never have gone the way it did. Inb4 "protect from counter-revoderptionaries".

To base all socialist revolutions on the standard of: "Well, their living standards increased! Therefore it was guuuuuuud! Th3y haz s0cializumms". Is fucking absurd. Stop being apologists for the failure of the Marxist-Leninist revolutions. Stop ignoring reality.

-- Herp "Let's all be reformists, cause you know what happens to social democracies, their living standards are top notch compared to the previous liberal capitalism they had!!!!" Fucking derp. --

To the rest of you who are still obsessed with the tyrant counter-revolutionary Stalin, Chomsky is not suggesting that a liberal-bourgeois state, or that Czarism was better, or that no socialism would have been better. No, are you fucking stupid? He's telling it how it is, and it's a fact, that the failed, State Capitalist USSR has DEFAMED and DISTORTED the true face of socialism.

You ask a westerner what communism is, and the majority think it's always a system where the government is a dictatorship and owns everything and people are poor and forced to work for nothing. Why? Because of Stalin.

Note: If you're going to personally attack Chomsky for having money, look at him. Does he live large like the bourgeois sneak you claim he is? No. He wears wool sweaters and slacks like anyone else. He spends his money to promote leftism, promote the working class, socialism.

You want to critique people who have money, let's critique Che Guevara. Che Guevara, that bourgeois ****, had money! How dare he!

[RadioRaheem84]

You ask a westerner what communism is, and the majority think it's always a system where the government is a dictatorship and owns everything and people are poor and forced to work for nothing. Why? Because of Stalin.Yet, they're describing third world countries not the USSR. So let's defame the positive aspects of the USSR in order to appease the wrongly held perception of socialism in the States? Nevermind the incessant propaganda system that continuously defames socialism in the West at every turn too.

Totalitarian? Stop embarrassing yourself.

[jake williams]

You ask a westerner what communism is, and the majority think it's always a system where the government is a dictatorship and owns everything and people are poor and forced to work for nothing. Why? Because of Stalin.
If you asked western workers about the Soviet Union what they thought about communism while Stalin was actually alive, many views were quite positive until late into the Cold War - even as conditions in the Soviet Union were improving, among other things because for the first time in its history, the SU wasn't at war. At any rate, those same people to whom you're referring also think feminists are Nazis, anarchists are stupid kids throwing rocks, and they've never, ever heard of Rosa Luxemburg.

Also, what "true face of socialism" are you referring to? I'd be ecstatic if anyone could find a better way to do socialist revolutions than how it's been done by the people who have actually done them, because the way they've been done has had very high costs.

[RadioRaheem84]

You want to critique people who have money, let's critique Che Guevara. Che Guevara, that bourgeois ****, had money! How dare he!Guevara gave up a lucrative career in medicine to fight dictatorships in Latin America and Africa.

He was also born into an upper middle class family. He didn't make any money himself by being revolutionary.

Chomsky has money, and I agree that shouldn't matter, but don't blow a gasket because some people think of him as being more of a rockstar academic.

Jeez, the Chomsky fans get really irate when Chomsky is heavily criticized.

[Die Rote Fahne]

Yet, they're describing third world countries. So let's defame the positive aspects of the USSR in order to appease the wrongly held perception of socialism in the States? Nevermind the incessant propaganda system that continuously defames socialism in the West at every turn too.

Totalitarian? Stop embarrassing yourself.

Sure, there were positive aspects to the USSR, under Lenin. Stalin, not so much...though I'm sure you can elaborate...right?

Yes, the western propaganda machine was much to blame as well, but the west would not have had the ammunition to attack socialism, had Stalin not handed it to them.

Totalitarian, I must be a fool...yes...I recall so many party elections for new leaders, and general elections for a new socialist party government in the USSR...so many...I apologize.


If you asked western workers about the Soviet Union what they thought about communism while Stalin was actually alive, many views were quite positive until late into the Cold War - even as conditions in the Soviet Union were improving, among other things because for the first time in its history, the SU wasn't at war.

While he was alive...yes...but now we have historical perspective. Unlike those workers.

We know that Stalin was a counter-revolutionary. We know that he was a dictator. We know that he executed millions. We know that he didn't give the working class political power. We know so much, that any irrelevant notion that just because workers in the 40s/50s like him, he was good and a socialist, is absurd.


At any rate, those same people to whom you're referring also think feminists are Nazis, anarchists are stupid kids throwing rocks, and they've never, ever heard of Rosa Luxemburg.

I'm not defending those people. I'm stating the point that socialism is defamed and is reduced to that due to Stalin's totalitarian, militaristic, massively bureaucratic, paranoid, police state...

Of course those people are uneducated. Of course they believe the propaganda.

Where would the ammo for propaganda come from, had Stalin actually gave power to the workers, had held elections so another socialist party could take power, had Stalin not collaborated some things with the Nazis, had Stalin not murdered millions in his purges?


Also, what "true face of socialism" are you referring to? I'd be ecstatic if anyone could find a better way to do socialist revolutions than how it's been done by the people who have actually done them, because the way they've been done has had very high costs.

True face? The one where the working class is in control of the means of production and political power. You know...the Marxist one.

I'm not criticizing the revolutions...I'm criticizing the regimes that have come out of them. There are reasons for these regimes, and that is the authoritarian nature of the "Vanguard" party.

[Die Rote Fahne]

Guevara gave up a lucrative career in medicine to fight dictatorships in Latin America and Africa.

He was also born into an upper middle class family. He didn't make any money himself by being revolutionary.

Chomsky has money, and I agree that shouldn't matter, but don't blow a gasket because some people think of him as being more of a rockstar academic.

Jeez, the Chomsky fans get really irate when Chomsky is heavily criticized.

Only when the critiques are absurd and irrelevant.

[CleverTitle]

This whole thread is strange.

I dislike the Chomsky attitude on this subject. If it's not 100% ideal, it's not progress? The fall of the USSR wasn't a victory for anyone but the bourgeois. It was hardly a workers' paradise, but I'd never say that it was anywhere near as negative as a capitalist economy like that of the US or present day Russia.

[Wanted Man]

If anyone in this thread believes the USSR was socialist, or that Stalin actually tried to build socialism, you're a moron and should be treated as such. The USSR had plenty an opportunity to become a socialist state. However, the authoritarian and totalitarian party structure of the vanguard, Bolsheviks, caused this goal to not be achieved, and Stalin took it even further in the wrong direction. If they had handed the means of production over to the workers, and allowed free socialist elections, in the beginning the USSR would never have gone the way it did. Inb4 "protect from counter-revoderptionaries".

To base all socialist revolutions on the standard of: "Well, their living standards increased! Therefore it was guuuuuuud! Th3y haz s0cializumms". Is fucking absurd. Stop being apologists for the failure of the Marxist-Leninist revolutions. Stop ignoring reality.

-- Herp "Let's all be reformists, cause you know what happens to social democracies, their living standards are top notch compared to the previous liberal capitalism they had!!!!" Fucking derp. --

To the rest of you who are still obsessed with the tyrant counter-revolutionary Stalin, Chomsky is not suggesting that a liberal-bourgeois state, or that Czarism was better, or that no socialism would have been better. No, are you fucking stupid? He's telling it how it is, and it's a fact, that the failed, State Capitalist USSR has DEFAMED and DISTORTED the true face of socialism.

You ask a westerner what communism is, and the majority think it's always a system where the government is a dictatorship and owns everything and people are poor and forced to work for nothing. Why? Because of Stalin.

Nobody cares about your dumb and useless opinion on Stalin. It's all a big distraction from Chomsky's actual statement about the Soviet Union: that its demise was a victory for socialism. Deal with it.


Note: If you're going to personally attack Chomsky for having money, look at him. Does he live large like the bourgeois sneak you claim he is? No. He wears wool sweaters and slacks like anyone else. He spends his money to promote leftism, promote the working class, socialism.

You want to critique people who have money, let's critique Che Guevara. Che Guevara, that bourgeois ****, had money! How dare he!

I honestly don't care how he lives. As for how he spends his money: I didn't know that big oil, big pharma and big military contractors had anything to do with socialism. And yet Chomsky has invested his retirement money in all of them. There's nothing wrong with having money, and no socialist is expected to live in a cabin, but there are many obvious alternatives available. Do they make as much money, though? Umm no.

I'm sorry to piss on your parade, but despite his many virtues, Chomsky is, in essence, a business, a brand name (which sometimes gets attached to books that he had a negligible role in, just to grab more attention and earn money). The man is a walking Che T-shirt. The obvious difference is that Che had no influence on his commodification because he was already dead.

[jake williams]

While he was alive...yes...but now we have historical perspective. Unlike those workers.

We know that Stalin was a counter-revolutionary. We know that he was a dictator. We know that he executed millions. We know that he didn't give the working class political power. We know so much, that any irrelevant notion that just because workers in the 40s/50s like him, he was good and a socialist, is absurd.

...

I'm not defending those people. I'm stating the point that socialism is defamed and is reduced to that due to Stalin's totalitarian, militaristic, massively bureaucratic, paranoid, police state...

Of course those people are uneducated. Of course they believe the propaganda.

Where would the ammo for propaganda come from, had Stalin actually gave power to the workers, had held elections so another socialist party could take power, had Stalin not collaborated some things with the Nazis, had Stalin not murdered millions in his purges?
My point is you can't use the popular beliefs of a heavily propagandized population as evidence. It's true that many popular beliefs have basis in fact, but there are many which have little or no basis in fact.

So, for example, Stalin('s government) tried to make a pact with the (hated) Allied powers to prevent a war. They refused, because they preferred to see fascism crush what workers' power existed in central and eastern Europe. Perhaps, if you really think Stalin was such a reactionary, you might be sympathetic, but it quite concerned the actual European socialists who desperately tried to figure out what they could do to prevent another war. Seeing no other option, the SU did make an agreement with Nazi Germany, an agreement which in hindsight we can see did no good. Would that you and your better ideas had been there instead.


True face? The one where the working class is in control of the means of production and political power. You know...the Marxist one.

I'm not criticizing the revolutions...I'm criticizing the regimes that have come out of them. There are reasons for these regimes, and that is the authoritarian nature of the "Vanguard" party.
We haven't seen a country yet where the whole working class really does have total perfectly democratic control of the state and production, with no political violence or repression, etc. etc. My point here is that because you have none you can point to where we've been able to do that, it suggests either that no one has tried, or that it's not actually so easy to do, and the people who do try that end up with the results we've seen.

[RedSonRising]

It seems to me a situation similar to reformist in the West. Is electing liberal democrat who responds to a constituency segment of union-workers a victory for the working class? Probably not as that democrat is probably raising working class taxes and enhancing property rights and circumventing accountability for corporations.

They might, however, get increased bargaining rights for their pensions or general access to more social services. Proletarian Victory? Hardly. But...

Even though clearly, nobody serious on the left would defend this democrat as a positive infkuence since he's perpetuating the class system that oppresses them...for a gain made by the working class under this condition, however small in the context of a long-term revolution, it can be quite meaningful for a working person living day-to-day. For a republican to come and take away the gains made under this democrat makes their material conditions worse. Which would be a proletarian defeat that the left would look on with disdain, even though capitalism still exists in both scenarios.



You may believe that the Soviet Union was a class system which failed to institute a worker-controlled system of governance, but one has to recognize that a working class can be disempowered and deprived in a class system, and they can also be disempowered and deprived much worse in a class system. Class struggle is not an all-or-nothing set of categorical systems per se, but a constant contention between exploiter and exploited that can see compromises met and gains made. While the development of the USSR may not have been a "victory" as a liberation of the class, for the gains of the working class in the USSR to be swept away so brashly was certainly a defeat for working people in Russia and elsewhere.

Less resources and a lost sense of class consciousness, let's see how easy it is to 'start over' now.

[khad]

More than anything Chomsky is just expressing his liberal idealism and Western bias. This ideological haranguing over what is or isn't "true" socialism is just a debate marginal sects in the Western left ghetto like to spend their time doing all the time. By all means, continue.

But when three-fourths of people polled in Kyrgyzstan said they preferred socialism to the current situation, they weren't talking about Chomsky's liberal paradise society that has never existed anywhere at any point in history.

For much of the world, the continued association of the Soviet system with socialism is a strength.

[punisa]

Chomsky is completely wrong - and what is even worse, he is very biased.
He is making this statement only based upon his current position. Of course that in the USSR he wouldn't be able to openly critics the government and such.

But hey, guess what? I'd rather have a world without a single Chomsky or any other academic and rather have people who have shelter, work and do not starve !

In nowadays capitalism, even when I have a job I still worry daily that I might loose it and with that loose everything and end up on the street like so many did before me.
So screw you Noam.

[punisa]

You want to critique people who have money, let's critique Che Guevara. Che Guevara, that bourgeois ****, had money! How dare he!

Do not... criticize ... CHE ! :che::che::che::che::che:

But seriously, its a very weak comparison. Che had it all and decided to give it all up in order to make a difference and fight for the people.

[Sir Comradical]

While Chomsky isn't the smartest academic when it comes to socialism, I do think there is a lot of truth in that quote.

You want truth? Let's suppose the Swedish people were to undergo the same kind of ruthless shock-therapy imposed on the people of the Soviet Union. Hypothetically speaking, would Noam Chomsky cite this as a victory for social-democracy because the Swedish system wasn't a true social-democracy? Or would he point out that it's a massive victory for big-business who have proceeded to seize working people by their throats? Probably the latter, but when it comes to the USSR, his position becomes the knee-jerk reaction for all left-intellectuals who want to remain "credible" within their highly propagandised capitalist states.

Put that in Manufacturing Consent, Noam.

[Spartacus.]

If anyone in this thread believes the USSR was socialist, or that Stalin actually tried to build socialism, you're a moron and should be treated as such.

If anyone in this thread believes the USSR was not socialist, or that Stalin actually didn't tried to build socialism, he is a moron and should be treated as such.
Wow, what an argument!!! You are such a genius, boy! :rolleyes:


The USSR had plenty an opportunity to become a socialist state.

Yeah, a semi-feudal, backward, un-industrialised wasteland, further devastated by WWI and Civil War, with a population consisting of 90% of illiterate, ignorant peasants cultivating small plots of land, with no mechanisation whatsoever and with the pre-revolutionary government being made up of the worst autocrats and despots the world has ever seen. Before the Revolution, the Russia had almost no parliamentary tradition, no constitution, no "democracy" even in the limited burgeuos sense of that word. How the hell would you build a perfect socialist state in these conditions? But I suppose that any constructive answers are thing that can't be expected from ultra-leftists. They just love to sit on the fence and criticise without ever doing anything themself. :rolleyes:


However, the authoritarian and totalitarian party structure of the vanguard, Bolsheviks, caused this goal to not be achieved

Apart from using the term that has been long ago abandoned in the serious research of the Soviet Union (see works of J.Arch. Getty for the debunking of the myth of SU being a "totalitarian" state), you are just parroting the old line about "authoritarian" Leninists without proposing any viable alternative to our system of party organisation and carrying out of the Revolution. Wow!!!


and Stalin took it even further in the wrong direction.

Empty claims. No evidence. No facts. No reasoning whatsoever. Perhaps your parrot has hijacked your keyboard and started spamming on this forum.


If they had handed the means of production over to the workers

:lol: You are fucking joking, right? What means of production????? They had no means of production! NONE!!! In order to develop them, they had to implement policy of forced industrialisation utilising command economy and expanded bureucratic powers (although, until 1956 the bureucracy still didn't have control over state apparatus), so they could develop means of production that could be than handled to the workers. Although I doubt I will get any serious answer from you, I'm interested how would you develop means of production in a semi-feudal and backward country and would still retain the workers control over them without utilising the centralised, bureucratic, command economy? Direct answers, please!


To the rest of you who are still obsessed with the tyrant counter-revolutionary Stalin

Tyrant-an ancient Athenian term used to describe an unelected, popularly supported leader that takes power in order to promote interests of the broad masses against corrupt elites.

Stalin was elected numerous times and although he was a "tyrant" in a sense that he promoted interests of the workers at the expence of the capitalists, he hardly fits in the historical definition of the tyrant. You are just using empthy rhetoric in order to discredit a real, socialist experience due to your inability to make any serious argument that would back your claims against Stalin.
Stalin, a Counter-revolutionary? You are a joke!:laugh:


You ask a westerner what communism is, and the majority think it's always a system where the government is a dictatorship and owns everything and people are poor and forced to work for nothing. Why? Because of Stalin.

Perhaps a reason for their "opinion" is not Stalin himself, but the fact that they themself are living in a little more subtle dictatorships, skillfully hiden under the name of liberal "democracy"... A good propaganda can make miracles:




Forty years of anti-communist indoctrination under Somoza and Ametican cultural
influence had also left their marks. A government militant put it this way:
Tell a Nicaraguan factory worker ... that we are building a system in which workers will control the
means of production, in which income will be redistributed to benefit the proletariat, and he will say
"yes—that's what we want." Call it Socialism and he will tell you he doesn't want any part of it. Tell
a peasant—in whom the problem of political education is even more acute—that the revolution is all about destroying the power of the big
latifundistas, that the agrarian reform and the literacy campaign will incorporate the peasantry into political decisions ... and lie will be enthusiastic, he will recognize
that this is right and just. Mention the word Communism and he will run a mile.


From: William Blum, Killing Hope, US Military and CIA interventions Since World War II



He's telling it how it is, and it's a fact, that the failed, State Capitalist USSR has DEFAMED and DISTORTED the true face of socialism.


Interesting. I come from an ex-socialist country... ups, state-capitalist hellhole where people were starved to death, spent their entire lives in forced labour camps, with everyday mass executions... Oh, but despite that, the vast majority of people actually have extremely positive opinion about "failed", state-capitalist "socialism" and think of it as their golden times. But then again, I suppose that ignorant, brainwashed westerner that has absolutely no knowledge of any former socialist countries and thinks of them as totalitarian slave colonies is probably right in his opinion about USSR just because he is a follower of the most failed and obscure "revolutionary" movement on the world! I mean, who has ever heard of any Luxemburgist party that had more than 5 members? :lol:



We know that Stalin was a counter-revolutionary.
Evidence???



We know that he was a dictator.
Every leader of every class society is a dictator... Obama is a dictator. Sarcozy is a dictator. Cameron is a dictator. Everyone is a dictator, because every society is a dictatorship of one class over another. You cannot have a "democracy" in a class society. Just ilusion of it. If that satisfies you, than you have my sincere pity...



We know that he executed millions.


No. We don't know that. Only the dumbest idiots (moderators; I wasn't pointing to anyone!) "know" the often propagandised and repeated story of a brutal, bloody, ruthless, totalitarian dictator that "killed" millions/tens of millions and that is widely accepted among the ignorant and brainwashed population of the western "democracies". The actual number of people executed during the famous purges and that was authorized by central Soviet authorities (not that Stalin was implicated in every murder, as commonly believed) was according to the Getty's "Excesses are not permitted: Mass Terror and Stalinist Governance in the Late 1930s." The Russian Review 61 (January 2002), p.132, 236,000 people (about as much people as was killed by "Democracy" in only one night during the bombing of the Dresden!). Go and read some serious work instead of spamming nonsence that you saw at some shitty documentary on the FoxNews.



We know that he didn't give the working class political power.


He tried. And unfortunately failed. I would love to see you in those circumstances. I bet that the only thing you would be able to do when faced with real and tough problems that needed solutions that meant you have to get dirty and bloody would be to sit and cry. But it's easy to be a brave internet warrior, criticising everything and hiding yourself behind the most failed ideology Marxism has ever witnessed. I mean, if Marxist-Leninist Socialism was a failure, what to say about Luxemburgists, the tendency which suffered defeat at the very first grab for power which it led, with its leader being shot thanks to her rejection of the Leninist principles that you despise so much?


As to the Stalin and worker's power:


http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html


Robert Thurston's "Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia" also offers some instances of worker's power and examples of it. A highly recomended reading. Actually, the workers control over production, despite its defficiencies under Stalin, decreased after his death and continued to deterioate all up untill the 80's. But, of course, it is the easiest thing to describe every defect in Soviet economy/society to actions of just one man, without taking into account the objective material conditions. A real Marxist analisis, no doubt in that.



II'm not defending those people. I'm stating the point that socialism is defamed and is reduced to that due to Stalin's totalitarian'm not defending those people. I'm stating the point that socialism is defamed and is reduced to that due to Stalin's totalitarian


Again, nothing but an empthy rhetoric and utter rubbish backed with no historical facts. "Totalitarianism" is nothing but an anti-communist nonsense used to put two ideological opposites together: Communism and Nazism. Are you really so naive, ignorant or are you a commited counter-revolutionary when you could so mindlessly repeat capitalist propaganda?



militaristic


Well, if it hasn't been for Stalin's "militarism", the whole world would today live under Nazi boots, the Soviet Union would have vanished and the entire nations would have been exterminated or enslaved. But I suppose building armed forces in order to protect one's own existence from a serious existential threat is considered "militarism" by the phony western liberal "Communists".



massively bureaucratic


There were bureaucratic deviations in the party and the state organs, but there was never a bureaucratic control over the party and state apparatus. Also, there was a very serious and hard fight against them during the 30's, culminating in the Great Purges, which is excelentlly described by Getty in his works. Try to read some. :)

police state...


Every state is a police state. This is just rhetorical nonsense.


Of course those people are uneducated. Of course they believe the propaganda.




Where would the ammo for propaganda come from, had Stalin actually gave power to the workers, had held elections so another socialist party could take power, had Stalin not collaborated some things with the Nazis, had Stalin not murdered millions in his purges?



Apart from the standard bullshit about "millions", which I have already debunked, I would like you to explain to me why Anarchism is so unpopular among the working class in the US? After all, since Stalin was not an Anarchist, they could not be demonized by reactionary propaganda, which would imply massive support for their movement. But then again, we know the reality...


So perhaps the problem isn't in the Stalin, as naive and ignorant wannabee "Communists" would like to suggest, but in the inertia and conservative nature of US workers which have lost their revolutionary potential due to the fact they are living in imperialist country and that they are enjoying the sweet fruits of the imperialist plunder. Why would they want to jeopardize their existence with attempts to overthrow the system, when they are perfectly happy with the current order of the things? That is the reason why has the "authoritarian" Stalinist Lenin made a theory which states that chains of imperialism must be broken at its weakest link. Today, that is India. And guess what? The workers and peasants there are marching under Stalin's and Mao's images and not the one of Rosa Luxemburg (although, to be honest, I have great respect for her theoretical work, as opposed to my opinion on her today's followers).

[Tim Finnegan]

What does Chomsky mean, exactly, when he says a "victory for socialism"? I can certainly understand how it might be meant: as an observation that the removal of the distorting influence and distracting presence of the USSR allows for a more effective socialism movement to be organised. But, as a lot of people seem to be assuming, he could also be suggesting that the collapse of the USSR was in itself a step towards socialism, which is obviously far more contentious, and far more questionable.


And guess what? The workers and peasants there are marching under Stalin's and Mao's images and not the one of Rosa Luxemburg (although, to be honest, I have great respect for her theoretical work, as opposed to my opinion on her today's followers).
More march under the banners of Christ or Muhammad than march under any red banner you'd care to name. If posthumous demagoguery is a measure of theoretical validity or political viability, then your idols put up a poor fight against even a couple of of archaic mystics, which speaks very poorly of them.

[Jose Gracchus]

Chomsky has written extensively against the story of the "freed and joyous" Eastern Bloc, as I described before. He acknowledged that Stalinism had very impressive economic growth, and asserted in fact it was this that which greatly threatened the West and was subversive in the Third World. He openly said that the Eastern Bloc was the Second World, and was being forced back into the Third World by neoliberal reforms. He once pointed out that Russia's trajectory in development and growth vis-a-vis the Western European powers was sclerotic, and only the USSR reversed this, greatly closing the gap in a short period. He noted that 89-91 brought much of the East back to the same relative position to Western Europe as in 1917. He clearly acknowledges the material reality of neoliberalism on the former Eastern Bloc general population, and has called it out as looting. Except unlike Parenti, he's not shy about admitting who facilitated it: the apparatchikki themselves.

I think its clear if one's followed his writing over the years, that he must mean the former in fact, not the latter. The former is actually the case: the task for the working class in the Gorbachev-era USSR was to resist the ruling class's moves to further open the autarkic system to the Western-dominated international capital and market system (in fact, linkages and shared exploitations had always existed, and in fact grown only greater over the years - but they were proposing an even further evolution toward the orthodox model), and to domestically loosen things up for more efficient exploitation of workers. In short, the task was something that could only mean moves to institute actual workers' control: a workers' revolution was all that could have preserved the meager gains workers' struggle had rendered in the Eastern Bloc. Unfortunately, it was precisely the old regime's ideological mystification and repressive apparatus which rendered that virtually impossible.

Note: it was much easier to find someone who loved Hayek in Eastern state apparatus than someone who loved Rosa Luxembourg. Those who cling desperately to a "gotcha!" moment on the "millionaire professor" using the phrase "victory for socialism" are those who think the workers' task was to try to uncritically support the most conservative and ossified interests in that state apparatus. Ironic, isn't it? In their own way, they remind me of right-wing libertarians: always trying to dwell in the past based on a long-dead universe of material realities, never to return - always pining for those glory days. I wonder seriously what kind of economic policy they think could have been driven by Soviet conservatives, somehow supported by Soviet workers and the international left, implemented over the Gorbachevites, and where the material basis for all this was in the Soviet society. Come to think of it, what are most (I'll admit - not all, just most) Leninists' real economic proposals today, if Jean Bricmont's god were to hand them power? Retreat to 1917's slogans? Nationalize all the industry? Just the "commanding heights". Still using something derived from Kautskyism? Maybe mimic some Third World high-on-rhetoric, low-on-substance populism that didn't even attempt to outright suppress orthodox private ownership or open commodity markets at all?

No...let's make room for more "treachery!" call-outs within the Western Left. Hoo-rah. I'll say this for DNZ, at least his crazy politics purport to be some response to the latter question, rather than retreating ever-more into lefter-than-thou or purely historical polemics.

[RadioRaheem84]

I still don't understand how the fall of the USSR was a victory for socialism if the thing that replaced it was even further removed from socialism?

[Die Neue Zeit]

Come to think of it, what are most Leninists' real economic proposals today, if Jean Bricmont's god were to hand them power? Retreat to 1917's slogans? Nationalize all the industry? Just the "commanding heights". Still using something derived from Kautskyism? Maybe mimic some Third World high-on-rhetoric, low-on-substance populism that didn't even attempt to outright suppress orthodox private ownership or open commodity markets at all?

No...let's make room for more "treachery!" call-outs within the Western Left. Hoo-rah. I'll say this for DNZ, at least his crazy politics [I]purport to be some response to the latter question, rather than retreating ever-more into lefter-than-thou or purely historical polemics.

How exactly is my emphasis on class institutions and fleshing out "something derived from Kautskyism" re. economic transitions "crazy"? :confused:

Oh crap, you were referring merely to Third World situations.

[Jose Gracchus]

I think you're pushing a road to some kind of state-bureaucratic capitalism, if you will. But so are many Brezhnevites, except they think it is more noble to praise totally historically extinct forms.

To be fair, I think Chomsky is being either a.) needlessly sectarian and inflammatory ("the collapse of the Soviet Union was a victory for socialism" would not be anywhere near the top ways I would choose to describe the historical events), or b.) needlessly trying to appeal to liberals. Honestly, I will admit I think Chomsky has suffered, increasingly since the 70s and early 80s, from what I suspect is his attempt at speaking to a modern and much less politicized (as well as highly-indoctrinated) audience, where memories of struggle have long since evaporated. But I think not only is this inevitably result in treading way too far outside revolutionary lines in order to appeal, to the point of being misleading, unclear, or revisionist. I think he also suffered from something of all older left intellectuals or activists, who I think after the 70s, and more isolated from real struggles than ever, became increasingly fatalistic about class struggles in a way which to the youngest generation, knowing Bush or Blair, and the War on a Noun, the ravages of neoliberalism, and now Great Recession and austerity seems pretty defeatist and capitulating to liberalism and the ruling institutions. I think that's fair, and I kind of feel that way sometimes. I think now is not the time to be just as lukewarm toward moving more in the direction of clear, and increasingly overt, class politics. I think its not just a Late Chomsky problem, its also endemic among the left "plurality of struggles", unclear historical or material lines, and an anemic (in my opinion) competent theoretical analysis of modern economic history.

I guess I'm kind of a leftcom on the content of the official left when its pretty isolated from real class struggles, and not arising organically out of it. Of course, I think the Brezhnevites are just butt-hurt.

[Die Neue Zeit]

[In the First World, I'm for demarchy, societal ownership, and labour credits (so much for "capitalism"), but share Bordiga's and Kautsky's common position re. bureaucracy. That's hardly "state capitalist."]

I did say before that the Third World scenario could be properly called a form of state capitalism, like the state capitalisms of most of the old satellite states. Only bourgeois private property (vs. petit-bourgeois private property) is scrapped and the extent of market relations vs. that of state and common planning is up in the air.


I guess I'm kind of a leftcom on the content of the official left when its pretty isolated from real class struggles, and not arising organically out of it. Of course, I think the Brezhnevites are just butt-hurt.

Chomsky isn't of the "official left."

[Die Rote Fahne]

Nobody cares about your dumb and useless opinion on Stalin. It's all a big distraction from Chomsky's actual statement about the Soviet Union: that its demise was a victory for socialism. Deal with it.


It's actually not. It's on point because I'm pushing that his statement is accurate. It's not my fault that being an apologist for Stalinism is making blind.


I honestly don't care how he lives. As for how he spends his money: I didn't know that big oil, big pharma and big military contractors had anything to do with socialism. And yet Chomsky has invested his retirement money in all of them. There's nothing wrong with having money, and no socialist is expected to live in a cabin, but there are many obvious alternatives available. Do they make as much money, though? Umm no.

Really. I'm sure you have sources to cite for that :rolleyes:.


I'm sorry to piss on your parade, but despite his many virtues, Chomsky is, in essence, a business, a brand name (which sometimes gets attached to books that he had a negligible role in, just to grab more attention and earn money). The man is a walking Che T-shirt. The obvious difference is that Che had no influence on his commodification because he was already dead.

I'm also sure you have sources to cite about his "negligible role" in certain books.

His political analyses, his books, his lectures are all irrelevant because of he is "a brand".

[Die Rote Fahne]

My point is you can't use the popular beliefs of a heavily propagandized population as evidence. It's true that many popular beliefs have basis in fact, but there are many which have little or no basis in fact.

So, for example, Stalin('s government) tried to make a pact with the (hated) Allied powers to prevent a war. They refused, because they preferred to see fascism crush what workers' power existed in central and eastern Europe. Perhaps, if you really think Stalin was such a reactionary, you might be sympathetic, but it quite concerned the actual European socialists who desperately tried to figure out what they could do to prevent another war. Seeing no other option, the SU did make an agreement with Nazi Germany, an agreement which in hindsight we can see did no good. Would that you and your better ideas had been there instead.

I can agree with you to some extent. No, you can't base it on the propagandized opinion of a population. However, what Stalin did gave ammunition to the creators of propaganda.

That's impossible to answer, I haven't been in such a situation, I can never place myself or my ideals in that situation. To suggest, however, that just because Stalin "did what was best for the working class", which is questionable consider he and his own power would be threatened, he is some kind of good socialist is just stupid.



We haven't seen a country yet where the whole working class really does have total perfectly democratic control of the state and production, with no political violence or repression, etc. etc. My point here is that because you have none you can point to where we've been able to do that, it suggests either that no one has tried, or that it's not actually so easy to do, and the people who do try that end up with the results we've seen.

So, your telling me that Marxism was wrong on this front? That the worker's can't control the means of production? That the goal of a revolution, is not, in fact, a socialist system, but another capitalist system based on a "dictatorship for the proletariat", where the party structure reaps the profits, controls the means of production?

I may have none, but I have one I can point to and say "that's obviously not how", and that's the USSR.

[La Comédie Noire]

Noam Chomsky should really retire. He is viewing the Soviet Union through the prism of imperialist propaganda (How ironic) and heaving a sigh of relief. Phew! Now we won't have to make excuses for that awful soviet system.

I hope the impoverishment and the death of millions has made it a little easier for you to justify yourself to parents and department heads.

[smk]

An important distinction to make here is that he said that "The fall of the USSR" was a gain for socialism, not "the rise of the Russian Federation." This signifies that he is not making any comment on the situation of the workers before and after the fall of the USSR, but rather just the situation of socialism. that is how I interpreted it. it was an ideological gain, not a physical one.

[Jose Gracchus]

I do love the pro forma whining and moral sanctimony, as if I have enthusiasm (or as if our abstract moral "stance" on the topic has any material relevance) for the collapse of the Soviet Union as such and the attendant collapse in the living standards of the general population, resulting in death, misery, despair, the usual neoliberal success story.

I've formed my opinion not only because of study but because I've met whole families of relatively poor expatriates of the USSR, and they fully admit that in some ways it was much better than now, but that they were passive spectators at best and repressed at worst. I do think the USSR was like a kind of ultra-statist authoritarian social democracy, and therefore it has some interesting features. Ultimately though, like its Kautskyite inspirations, its a tool of reaction and of continued exploitation of workers as a class. The last bit is really the fundamental item. With that reality intact, I can no more mourn the USSR's 91 demise as it was.

We also need to dismiss empty moralism. The fact is the USSR and satellites had entered a genuine crisis of internal contradictions by the late 70s. They were not going to magically keep chugging along if only those "crypto-liberals" could be shouted down and conservatives rallied to. I think it would've been better had the state structure of the USSR largely been preserved, and reformed internally (under pressure from the working class, is the only plausible mechanism) to yield political liberties and freedoms sufficient for the working-class to re-establish independence as a class, while trying to resist the penetration of foreign capital more strongly, while coming up with some kind of reasonable but not quasi-fascist settlement for nationalities.

But was there any material basis for that? I think without the international working class was pretty much in general global retreat, international capital was obeying its own laws of motion, and the Soviet working-class in particular disoriented by decades of socialism as an ideological defense of the ruling system and extensive repression, couldn't rally any kind of revolutionary defense of the workers of the Soviet Union who went under intense neoliberal attacks. But that's hardly unique to the USSR, but pretty much the fate of the entire global working class, especially those in the periphery and under systems that like the Soviet system, privileged the national capital and had a kind of development or living standard social contract with the population.

[Die Rote Fahne]

If anyone in this thread believes the USSR was not socialist, or that Stalin actually didn't tried to build socialism, he is a moron and should be treated as such.
Wow, what an argument!!! You are such a genius, boy! :rolleyes:

It was a statement, not an argument...I guess we need Chomsky to give Stalinists a lesson in semantics as well.


Yeah, a semi-feudal, backward, un-industrialised wasteland, further devastated by WWI and Civil War, with a population consisting of 90% of illiterate, ignorant peasants cultivating small plots of land, with no mechanisation whatsoever and with the pre-revolutionary government being made up of the worst autocrats and despots the world has ever seen. Before the Revolution, the Russia had almost no parliamentary tradition, no constitution, no "democracy" even in the limited burgeuos sense of that word. How the hell would you build a perfect socialist state in these conditions? But I suppose that any constructive answers are thing that can't be expected from ultra-leftists. They just love to sit on the fence and criticise without ever doing anything themself. :rolleyes:I...said...the...USSR...didn't...I...jno t...pre...revolution...russia...

You're telling me that Stalin, who had built the economy industrially to rival Nazi Germany, had no opportunities to turn over the means of production and political power, at any point?

Ultra-leftists, yeah we're busy sitting on the fence while you guys "purge" us from your ranks.

Where did I mention "perfect"? I didn't. I mentioned socialist. The Marxist definition.


Apart from using the term that has been long ago abandoned in the serious research of the Soviet Union (see works of J.Arch. Getty for the debunking of the myth of SU being a "totalitarian" state), you are just parroting the old line about "authoritarian" Leninists without proposing any viable alternative to our system of party organisation and carrying out of the Revolution. Wow!!! Alternative? COUGH The Dialectic of Spontaneity and Organisation COUGH


Empty claims. No evidence. No facts. No reasoning whatsoever. Perhaps your parrot has hijacked your keyboard and started spamming on this forum.My empty and fact free claims such as? Maybe you can provide me evidence against my claims? Or would you prefer I provide the evidence first, so you can then realize you can't.


:lol: You are fucking joking, right? What means of production????? They had no means of production! NONE!!! In order to develop them, they had to implement policy of forced industrialisation utilising command economy and expanded bureucratic powers (although, until 1956 the bureucracy still didn't have control over state apparatus), so they could develop means of production that could be than handled to the workers. Although I doubt I will get any serious answer from you, I'm interested how would you develop means of production in a semi-feudal and backward country and would still retain the workers control over them without utilising the centralised, bureucratic, command economy? Direct answers, please!De-centralized planned economics. The same way a socialist state should be ran in ideal conditions.


Tyrant-an ancient Athenian term used to describe an unelected, popularly supported leader that takes power in order to promote interests of the broad masses against corrupt elites.

Stalin was elected numerous times and although he was a "tyrant" in a sense that he promoted interests of the workers at the expence of the capitalists, he hardly fits in the historical definition of the tyrant. You are just using empthy rhetoric in order to discredit a real, socialist experience due to your inability to make any serious argument that would back your claims against Stalin.
Stalin, a Counter-revolutionary? You are a joke!:laugh:Yes, assassinating fellow socialists, I use fellow lightly here, is sooooo good for the revolution.

Stalin...elected...dear god either give me your sources, or give me your meth.


Perhaps a reason for their "opinion" is not Stalin himself, but the fact that they themself are living in a little more subtle dictatorships, skillfully hiden under the name of liberal "democracy"... A good propaganda can make miracles:



From: William Blum, Killing Hope, US Military and CIA interventions Since World War II



Interesting. I come from an ex-socialist country... ups, state-capitalist hellhole where people were starved to death, spent their entire lives in forced labour camps, with everyday mass executions... Oh, but despite that, the vast majority of people actually have extremely positive opinion about "failed", state-capitalist "socialism" and think of it as their golden times. But then again, I suppose that ignorant, brainwashed westerner that has absolutely no knowledge of any former socialist countries and thinks of them as totalitarian slave colonies is probably right in his opinion about USSR just because he is a follower of the most failed and obscure "revolutionary" movement on the world! I mean, who has ever heard of any Luxemburgist party that had more than 5 members? :lol:



It's like I'm watching the Wizard of OZ, cause all I see is strawman.




Every leader of every class society is a dictator... Obama is a dictator. Sarcozy is a dictator. Cameron is a dictator. Everyone is a dictator, because every society is a dictatorship of one class over another. You cannot have a "democracy" in a class society. Just ilusion of it. If that satisfies you, than you have my sincere pity.. ...this is getting boring...I'm aware of the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie...

It's like you abandoned any attempts to have a rational debate to lecture me on the basics...

You're sad.




No. We don't know that. Only the dumbest idiots (moderators; I wasn't pointing to anyone!) "know" the often propagandised and repeated story of a brutal, bloody, ruthless, totalitarian dictator that "killed" millions/tens of millions and that is widely accepted among the ignorant and brainwashed population of the western "democracies". The actual number of people executed during the famous purges and that was authorized by central Soviet authorities (not that Stalin was implicated in every murder, as commonly believed) was according to the Getty's "Excesses are not permitted: Mass Terror and Stalinist Governance in the Late 1930s." The Russian Review 61 (January 2002), p.132, 236,000 people (about as much people as was killed by "Democracy" in only one night during the bombing of the Dresden!). Go and read some serious work instead of spamming nonsence that you saw at some shitty documentary on the FoxNewsI have never once called capitalist society a democracy. Once again, I love you're strawman arguments.


Do us all a favour and grow the fuck up.



He tried. And unfortunately failed. I would love to see you in those circumstances. I bet that the only thing you would be able to do when faced with real and tough problems that needed solutions that meant you have to get dirty and bloody would be to sit and cry. But it's easy to be a brave internet warrior, criticising everything and hiding yourself behind the most failed ideology Marxism has ever witnessed. I mean, if Marxist-Leninist Socialism was a failure, what to say about Luxemburgists, the tendency which suffered defeat at the very first grab for power which it led, with its leader being shot thanks to her rejection of the Leninist principles that you despise so much?And here we go with a complete lack of substance. Am I supposed to have an emotional reaction to you basically shitting on Rosa Luxemburg?

I don't care. I don't have an obsession with her, as you do with Stalin.




As to the Stalin and worker's power:




http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html


Robert Thurston's "Life and Terror in Stalin's Russia" also offers some instances of worker's power and examples of it. A highly recomended reading. Actually, the workers control over production, despite its defficiencies under Stalin, decreased after his death and continued to deterioate all up untill the 80's. But, of course, it is the easiest thing to describe every defect in Soviet economy/society to actions of just one man, without taking into account the objective material conditions. A real Marxist analisis, no doubt in that.



Can't you make your own analysis, or provide the facts here?

Maybe I should just link you to the full text of "Revolution Betrayed" by Leon Trotsky.



Again, nothing but an empthy rhetoric and utter rubbish backed with no historical facts. "Totalitarianism" is nothing but an anti-communist nonsense used to put two ideological opposites together: Communism and Nazism. Are you really so naive, ignorant or are you a commited counter-revolutionary when you could so mindlessly repeat capitalist propaganda?


Well, if it hasn't been for Stalin's "militarism", the whole world would today live under Nazi boots, the Soviet Union would have vanished and the entire nations would have been exterminated or enslaved. But I suppose building armed forces in order to protect one's own existence from a serious existential threat is considered "militarism" by the phony western liberal "Communists".



There were bureaucratic deviations in the party and the state organs, but there was never a bureaucratic control over the party and state apparatus. Also, there was a very serious and hard fight against them during the 30's, culminating in the Great Purges, which is excelentlly described by Getty in his works. Try to read some. :)



The usual Stalinist tactic of using the defeat of Nazi Germany as complete justification of everything he does.

I don't suppose he thought about invading and stopping the fascist from coming to power? I mean, I know Germany wasn't Russia, and we all know that Stalin loved Russia above all. No...he didn't...oh...




Every state is a police state. This is just rhetorical nonsense.
Semantics. But if you want to call it that way, Stalin's Russia was the police who shot instead of apprehending, beat for information rather than interview. Arrested for political reasons, not law related reasons.


Apart from the standard bullshit about "millions", which I have already debunked, I would like you to explain to me why Anarchism is so unpopular among the working class in the US? After all, since Stalin was not an Anarchist, they could not be demonized by reactionary propaganda, which would imply massive support for their movement. But then again, we know the reality...

So perhaps the problem isn't in the Stalin, as naive and ignorant wannabee "Communists" would like to suggest, but in the inertia and conservative nature of US workers which have lost their revolutionary potential due to the fact they are living in imperialist country and that they are enjoying the sweet fruits of the imperialist plunder. Why would they want to jeopardize their existence with attempts to overthrow the system, when they are perfectly happy with the current order of the things? That is the reason why has the "authoritarian" Stalinist Lenin made a theory which states that chains of imperialism must be broken at its weakest link. Today, that is India. And guess what? The workers and peasants there are marching under Stalin's and Mao's images and not the one of Rosa Luxemburg (although, to be honest, I have great respect for her theoretical work, as opposed to my opinion on her today's followers).
More substance free Stalinist apology.

I await your reply, when you're finished masturbating to Stalin's picture of course.

[Die Neue Zeit]

I've formed my opinion not only because of study but because I've met whole families of relatively poor expatriates of the USSR, and they fully admit that in some ways it was much better than now, but that they were passive spectators at best and repressed at worst. I do think the USSR was like a kind of ultra-statist authoritarian social democracy, and therefore it has some interesting features. Ultimately though, like its Kautskyite inspirations, its a tool of reaction and of continued exploitation of workers as a class. The last bit is really the fundamental item. With that reality intact, I can no more mourn the USSR's 91 demise as it was.

We also need to dismiss empty moralism. The fact is the USSR and satellites had entered a genuine crisis of internal contradictions by the late 70s. They were not going to magically keep chugging along if only those "crypto-liberals" could be shouted down and conservatives rallied to. I think it would've been better had the state structure of the USSR largely been preserved, and reformed internally (under pressure from the working class, is the only plausible mechanism) to yield political liberties and freedoms sufficient for the working-class to re-establish independence as a class, while trying to resist the penetration of foreign capital more strongly, while coming up with some kind of reasonable but not quasi-fascist settlement for nationalities.

It would have been better had the CPSU been reformed internally and not the state per se. It already had 8-10% of the adult population, and every Soviet leader except Brezhnev strived for as mass a membership as possible despite the "vanguard" rhetoric (Lenin in 1917, Stalin through the Lenin Levy and during WWII, Khrushchev throughout his tenure).

Regarding the nationalities settlement: Care to go into more details?


international capital was obeying its own laws of motion

Sounding a bit like right-populist screams of "international capital" or "international finance," are we? :confused:

[black magick hustla]

Like the great twenty percent tip said, Chomsky is an "academic bimbo".

I think the shock doctrine was in a sense, part of a massive defeat of the international working class - in the 80s the working class was massively attacked from all fronts, not only in the former USSR but everywhere. The dissolution of the great imperialist blocs, and the parcelling of the new world by the bureacratic pigs of the east, and the "democratic" vermin of the west was a tragedy and ruined and killed so many people.

However, the task of communists was never to do PR work for the capitalist states, whether they were socdem like in a lot of western europe, or "socialist" as in the east. In my opinion the USSR can be explained best as a capitalist country, but whatever it was, it clearly posed itself against the working class in general, this is why it experienced uprisings, wildcat strikes, etcetera as the western capitalist countries did. In the sense Marx talked about the Party, our "Party" was at work when the masses of workers rose in places like East Germany or Poland. A lot of of the "official communists" did a whole lot of doublethink and a whole lot of towing in the moscovite line to try to disguise their massive betrayal. We real communists remember when they sabotaged us in Spain and in France.

Now that the USSR is dead there is not even any reason for the tankies to exist anymore. Remnants of tankieism, like the PSL in the US, are corpses that keep towing a line that emerged because of geopolitical reasons, so those reasons do not exist anymore. So instead, you get support for tinpot vermin in Africa and the Middle East, and fossils of the past like the Belarusan state. Nobody pays them, nobody justifies their existence anymore.

[CynicalIdealist]

I think Chomsky is right to say that the Soviet Union was never socialist. (I would only myself concede that it may have been for a brief period under Lenin, or that Lenin at least made the attempt to make it so.)

However, for Chomsky to say that the fall of the Soviet Union was a victory for working people is downright stupid and, as has already been said, idealistic. Then again, if my memory is correct, I'm pretty sure he actually said that it was a "victory for socialism," and that by that he meant the global image of socialism. I could be wrong though.

I don't think disagreeing with Chomsky here necessitates "Stalinism" or "apologism." It just means that you recognize the real material gains of workers in the former USSR. In fact, I'm pretty sure that both the authoritarian and libertarian socialists agree more than they think they do here.

So stop the petty sectarianism, please. As for my two cents, I'd rather an authoritarian Russia in which people are fed than a starving liberal democracy where males live to 54 years of age myself.

[Jose Gracchus]

And remember, it isn't even a functioning liberal democracy (Though do those even exist anymore? Did they ever?).

[jake williams]

So, your telling me that Marxism was wrong on this front? That the worker's can't control the means of production? That the goal of a revolution, is not, in fact, a socialist system, but another capitalist system based on a "dictatorship for the proletariat", where the party structure reaps the profits, controls the means of production?

I may have none, but I have one I can point to and say "that's obviously not how", and that's the USSR.
Marx was wrong insofar as he might have thought that real and full democratic control of the whole society by the whole working class - communism - would come quickly and easily. It's not clear, though, that he thought that.

That said, insofar as aspects of Soviet society entailed the control of production by and reaping of profits for individuals in the CPSU, those who allowed that to happen were wrong too. But I think that it's vastly overstated how much that actually did happen. It happened, too much, but it didn't absolutely and fundamentally characterize everything that happened in the society/economy.

[Chambered Word]

Like the great twenty percent tip said, Chomsky is an "academic bimbo".

I think the shock doctrine was in a sense, part of a massive defeat of the international working class - in the 80s the working class was massively attacked from all fronts, not only in the former USSR but everywhere. The dissolution of the great imperialist blocs, and the parcelling of the new world by the bureacratic pigs of the east, and the "democratic" vermin of the west was a tragedy and ruined and killed so many people.

However, the task of communists was never to do PR work for the capitalist states, whether they were socdem like in a lot of western europe, or "socialist" as in the east. In my opinion the USSR can be explained best as a capitalist country, but whatever it was, it clearly posed itself against the working class in general, this is why it experienced uprisings, wildcat strikes, etcetera as the western capitalist countries did. In the sense Marx talked about the Party, our "Party" was at work when the masses of workers rose in places like East Germany or Poland. A lot of of the "official communists" did a whole lot of doublethink and a whole lot of towing in the moscovite line to try to disguise their massive betrayal. We real communists remember when they sabotaged us in Spain and in France.

Now that the USSR is dead there is not even any reason for the tankies to exist anymore. Remnants of tankieism, like the PSL in the US, are corpses that keep towing a line that emerged because of geopolitical reasons, so those reasons do not exist anymore. So instead, you get support for tinpot vermin in Africa and the Middle East, and fossils of the past like the Belarusan state. Nobody pays them, nobody justifies their existence anymore.

This.

Chomsky is talking shit, but it doesn't stop me from enjoying the reactions he gets from Brezhnevites here.



More than anything Chomsky is just expressing his liberal idealism and Western bias. This ideological haranguing over what is or isn't "true" socialism is just a debate marginal sects in the Western left ghetto like to spend their time doing all the time. By all means, continue.

As if people outside of the West don't have these debates. To me, this sounds like an attempt to characterize everyone who doesn't live in the west as a stupid, poverty-stricken peasant who doesn't care about what socialism actually entails. I agree with the point about Chomsky though, I'd classify him as a liberal (albeit a good one compared to such utterly chauvinistic ideologues as Hitchens).


But when three-fourths of people polled in Kyrgyzstan said they preferred socialism to the current situation, they weren't talking about Chomsky's liberal paradise society that has never existed anywhere at any point in history.

All this really means is that people are sick of capitalism, I recall seeing similar polls from the US and I don't imagine that those people cared much for Chomsky's exact conceptions of socialism either.

Anyway, I'll end this by saying that an imperfect worker's state (as in Russia somewhere around 1918-24; plagued by a vicious civil war slowly tearing the already underdeveloped economy apart, desperation on the part of the leadership and the erosion of the working class' collective power, without the revolution immediately spreading successfully, bureaucratic deformations appearing etc) is a far cry from the state capitalism which retained only the form of a worker's state, or social democracies with reformist leaders - I don't think the late Soviet Union or places like Venezuela or Cuba compare to a state which has risen from a worker's revolution and a dual power situation, proletarian in its whole character. Criticism of such states cannot be dismissed by passing off 'construction' of socialism as being imperfect.

[Jose Gracchus]

Soviet power was dead by the end of 1918. (Dual power, refers to the situation involving the Provisional Government, and I don't see how it applies, unless you think resistance in 1921 was a move toward developing dual power in response to the authoritarian state, which I doubt you mean.) Attempts to resurrect it in 1921 were crushed. Its history, not abstract philosophy or scholasticist disputes over the angels on the head of the pin. That is, of course, if you believe in a conception of socialism that has the self-emancipation of the working-class as its central article. If any vague-ass shit that provides more social services than some pro-Western societies via populism or whatever qualifies, well then we're just talking at cross purposes.

Of course, these populists like to drape themselves in red and call themselves Marxists, so its a bit curious.


Marx was wrong insofar as he might have thought that real and full democratic control of the whole society by the whole working class - communism - would come quickly and easily. It's not clear, though, that he thought that.

That said, insofar as aspects of Soviet society entailed the control of production by and reaping of profits for individuals in the CPSU, those who allowed that to happen were wrong too. But I think that it's vastly overstated how much that actually did happen. It happened, too much, but it didn't absolutely and fundamentally characterize everything that happened in the society/economy.

I think we both agree that Marx did not imagine or foresee that a workers' revolution would plausibly be isolated but produce a structure and regime which would survive the onslaught of the international bourgeoisie, but fail to continue propagating the revolution and being exploiting the working class again.

But what was the nature then of the USSR? Its allies? What was going on on a material basis? I feel like your comments seek to abandon a class perspective, a material analysis to abstractly imply well...it was like a workers' state with individual corruption.... Individual corruption has a class basis in bourgeois societies - in the USSR it was an essential element of the black markets which themselves played an important role in enabling production purportedly according to plan (it wasn't). What was its character in this society?

[Aspiring Humanist]

Sorry to bring up a dead topic, but I was reading Chomskys "What Uncle Sam really wants", he says it again,

If socialism is the tyranny of Lenin and Stalin, then sane people will say: not for me

With the collapse of the Soviet system, there's an opportunity to revive the lively and vigorous libertarian socialist thought that was not able to withstand the doctrinal and repressive assaults of the major systems of power. How large a hope that is, we cannot know. But at least one roadblock has been removed. In that sense, the disappearance of the Soviet Union is a small victory for socialism, much as the defeat of the fascist powers was.
(Chomsky, 93)

Maybe he means its a victory for libertarian socialism?

[syndicat]

i totally agree with this quote from Chomsky. the USSR had absolutely nothing whatever to do with an authentic socialism. it was a repressive regime controlled by a dominating bureaucratic class, and the working class remained a subordinate, exploited class. to say the Soviet Union should in any way be defended tells me that the person who says this isn't serious about working class liberation.

[Die Rote Fahne]

Nobody cares about your dumb and useless opinion on Stalin. It's all a big distraction from Chomsky's actual statement about the Soviet Union: that its demise was a victory for socialism. Deal with it..
Which is why you took the time to go off topic yourself, and act self righteous. Obviously you care about my opinion, or you would have just ignored my posts.

[RedSonRising]

i totally agree with this quote from Chomsky. the USSR had absolutely nothing whatever to do with an authentic socialism. it was a repressive regime controlled by a dominating bureaucratic class, and the working class remained a subordinate, exploited class. to say the Soviet Union should in any way be defended tells me that the person who says this isn't serious about working class liberation.


One doesn't have to classify the USSR as an authentic socialist system to hesitate to call the restoration of capitalism through catastrophic shock-treatment a "victory" for socialism and the working class.

If there was some kind of popular reform or revolution of the USSR which created a shining example of workers' control, then yes. But there wasn't.

[Aspiring Humanist]

I agree with Redson, the USSR was a defeat for socialism for the sole reason that it was the major financier and supporter of actual marxist movements, and for the fact that the russian federation is a total piece of shit infested by class inequality and poverty

[syndicat]

I agree with the Chomsky quote up to the last line:
And the collapse of the soviet union is a small victory for socialism, it eliminated one of the major barriers to it.

I'm don't see why collapse of the soviet union is a victory for socialism. It had disastrous consequences for the Soviet working class.

so i would agree with this:


One doesn't have to classify the USSR as an authentic socialist system to hesitate to call the restoration of capitalism through catastrophic shock-treatment a "victory" for socialism and the working class.


the bureaucratic ruling class were the people responsible for bringing about this catastrophic change. it was a revolution from above.

[∞]

Forget about someone's idea of "socialism". What about the lives that were affected by the fall of the Soviet Union?

Is that in any way, a victory for the proletariat?

[Die Rote Fahne]

Forget about someone's idea of "socialism". What about the lives that were affected by the fall of the Soviet Union?

Is that in any way, a victory for the proletariat?

Would the fall of American capitalism as the result of a depression be good for the proletariat? Maybe not immediately, but it would advance to socialist cause.

[∞]

Would the fall of American capitalism as the result of a depression be good for the proletariat? Maybe not immediately, but it would advance to socialist cause.

No, the equivalent of that would be for it to fall back to feudalism, which would be disastrous and not advance the socialist cause. I don't the fall of the USSR did anything but make socialism sound worse. For now people have equated it mythologically, as a suppressive failure (which it kind of was). However, the fall of the USSR to the general public, looks like the fall of socialism, making it seem archaic. I mean leftist movements had much more prominence when the Soviet Union was in power, regardless of ideological basis.

[The Man]

Noam Chomsky is a professional liar.

[Tim Finnegan]

Noam Chomsky is a professional liar.
The Man is an amateur rhetorician.

[The Man]

The Man is an amateur rhetorician.

I'll give you an example:

In this video, he claims that Thomas Jefferson and 'The Real' Adam Smith are Libertarian Socialists.. start at the :30 mark.. I think he's just saying that so he could help get his point across.

RxPUvQZ3rcQ

Of course, he later denied that he ever said such things, because I emailed him asking how he could call them Libertarian Socialists and he said:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/attachment.php?attachmentid=8219&d=1307249726

[Rusty Shackleford]

Chomsky is a wanker and Krondstadt hasnt been mentioned up until now.


refreshing.

[robbo203]

No, the equivalent of that would be for it to fall back to feudalism, which would be disastrous and not advance the socialist cause. I don't the fall of the USSR did anything but make socialism sound worse. For now people have equated it mythologically, as a suppressive failure (which it kind of was). However, the fall of the USSR to the general public, looks like the fall of socialism, making it seem archaic. I mean leftist movements had much more prominence when the Soviet Union was in power, regardless of ideological basis.


Insofar as people have been misled into thinking that the state capitalist dictatorship of the Soviet Union has anything to do with socialism then, yes, its fall would have encouraged the perception that "socialism" had failed. This certainly would not have done much to advance the socialist cause

On the other hand, individuals who consider themselves to be "socialist" but as result have cause to reflect that this particular model of "socialism" turned out to be a dead end and that might induce them to consider other models of "socialism" more favourably or with more of an open mind.

To that extent, at any rate, the fall of the Soviet Union could have helped the socialist cause in a small way. It increases the probability of individuals coming to consider and accept the real thing rather than the fake socialism that was the Soviet Union.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Insofar as people have been misled into thinking that the state capitalist dictatorship of the Soviet Union has anything to do with socialism then, yes, its fall would have encouraged the perception that "socialism" had failed. This certainly would not have done much to advance the socialist cause

On the other hand, individuals who consider themselves to be "socialist" but as result have cause to reflect that this particular model of "socialism" turned out to be a dead end and that might induce them to consider other models of "socialism" more favourably or with more of an open mind.

To that extent, at any rate, the fall of the Soviet Union could have helped the socialist cause in a small way. It increases the probability of individuals coming to consider and accept the real thing rather than the fake socialism that was the Soviet Union.

What you say may be true in terms of logic and theory, but ignores the very real and substantial depression of living standards that occurred with the restoration of Capitalism in the former USSR, when up until near the end of its lifetime, it was possible to be reformed away from its bureaucratic and statist ways.

[Jose Gracchus]

I think its pretty obvious that that (what robbo said) is what Chomsky was getting at, but naturally that won't stop those who cheered on the riot police of Tienanmen or the orders of the Party Congress members hastily drafted into the Kronstadt (just had to for Trusty Rusty) shock force (in order to counteract the extremely low morale of the soi-disant "Workers' and Peasants'" Red Army sent to kill its class brothers), and now out once again looking to grind an axe.

We should be grateful that unlike our comrades on Kronstadt, they are bereft of the resort of a revolver round to the brain today and must rely on simple slanders ("OMFG ARE YOU AGAINST THE SOVIET WORKERS???? [even though I would've supported GOSPLAN bureaucrats in 87 LOL]").

EDIT: Where is there any shred of evidence that the old Stalinist property and managerial forms of Russian state-capitalism had any further lease on life in the 1980s, much less could be "reformed" on the workers' behalf? That sounds like a pure assertion from fiat, without any material realities to back it up.

[Bombay]

If you think about the Soviet Union without the socialist rhetoric and the red flag, no one would think it was socialist. What if Stalin had waved the nazi flag and had done exactly the same things he did? He would be considered a fascist by everyone.

[robbo203]

What you say may be true in terms of logic and theory, but ignores the very real and substantial depression of living standards that occurred with the restoration of Capitalism in the former USSR, when up until near the end of its lifetime, it was possible to be reformed away from its bureaucratic and statist ways.


Except that I dont accept the "restoration of capitalism" thesis. Capitalism wasn't restored with the fall of the Soviet Union; it merely changed its form.

All of the essential core features of capitalism existed in the Soviet Union

There was generalised commodity production. Not just consumer goods but means of production too were bought and sold between state enterprises who signed legally binding contracts with each other to that effect with state agencies like GOSSNAB acting as intermediaries. It was a regulated market economy but a market economy all the same.

Wage labour was the norm and, as any Marxist would know, wage labour presupposes capital and vice versa. Capital accumulation was the overrding concern as in other capitalist countires and in order to ensure the extraction of surplus value from Russian workers, state enterrpises were legally required to make a profit and could be penalised if they did not.

Central planning was a largely a myth. Often plans were not even formalised by the state by the start of the implementation period and, when they were made available, they were constantly revised to suit changing circumstances rather than actually guide circumstances. The was much more decentralised decisionmaking at the state enterrpise level than is commonly supposed.

The Soviet Union was a capitalist economy through and through. Whatever superfical differences it had with western capitalism pale into significance by comparison with what it had in common with the latter.

[Jose Gracchus]

Robbo is right. The fact that Soviet-type state capitalism is in fact, just part of state capitalism as a general tendency of late capitalism is revealed by the extent to which it constantly made more and more overt concessions toward Western state capitalism throughout its existence and the numerous intermediate forms such as Tito-style "self-management", the Deng model, the NEP, Kadarite socialism, "Socialism with a Human Face" by the Czech liberal communists, and the proposed "self-governing republic" of the pro-compromise PZPR and Solidarity, ad nauseum.

The entire post-76 history of the People's Republic of China belies the idea that any fundamental difference in the mode of production exists between the orthodox Stalinist model and market capitalism. To say nothing of the fact generalized commodity production persisted, there was considerable circulation or turnover in labor between enterprises who lured workers with wage incentives (labor markets), shadow unemployment, shadow markets and for-profit "facilitators" who were an indispensable part of meeting production, and the like.

Most of the fetish for the Soviet model comes from a lame appeal to welfarism (the fact the Soviet authoritarians' social contract involved placing a floor on certain types of suffering) and a wholesale adoption of the core theses of neoliberal economics (such as adopting the "private capital market" fixation as a core element of capitalism, rather than Marxian criteria). One wonders if they realize that European social democracies once claimed to be evolving toward eventual socialism, claimed to be striving toward eliminating unemployment with make-work, and even proposed things like Meidnerism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehn-Meidner_model). But of course no self-respecting socialist here thinks that is "socialism". So what defines socialism?

Red drapes and getting shit on in The New York Times?

[Rusty Shackleford]

If you think about the Soviet Union without the socialist rhetoric and the red flag, no one would think it was socialist. What if Stalin had waved the nazi flag and had done exactly the same things he did? He would be considered a fascist by everyone.


from the 1936 constitution of the USSR

the "stalin" constitution

http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/1936toc.html



ARTICLE 9. Alongside the socialist system of economy, which is the predominant form of economy in the U.S.S.R., the law permits the small private economy of individual peasants and handicraftsman based on their personal labor and precluding the exploitation of the labor of others.

ARTICLE 30. The highest organ of state authority of the U.S.S.R. is the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R.
ARTICLE 31. The Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. exercises all rights vested in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in accordance with Article 14 (http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/36cons01.html#article14) of the Constitution, in so far as they do not, by virtue of the Constitution, come within the jurisdiction of organs of the U.S.S.R. that are accountable to the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R., that is, the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R., the Council of People's Commissars of the U.S.S.R. and the People's Commissariats of the U.S.S.R.
ARTICLE 32. The legislative power of the U.S.S.R. is exercised exclusively by the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R.
ARTICLE 33. The Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. consists of two Chambers: the Soviet of the Union and the Soviet of Nationalities.
ARTICLE 34. The Soviet of the Union is elected by the citizens of the U.S.S.R. according to electoral areas on the basis of one deputy for every 300,000 of the population.
ARTICLE 35. The Soviet of Nationalities is elected by the citizens of the U.S.S.R. according to Union and Autonomous Republics, Autonomous Regions and national areas on the basis of twenty-five deputies from each Union Republic, eleven deputies from each Autonomous Republic, five deputies from each Autonomous Region and one deputy from each national area.
ARTICLE 36. The Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. is elected for a term of four years.

ARTICLE 118. Citizens of the U.S.S.R. have the right to work, that is, are guaranteed the right to employment and payment for their work in accordance With its quantity and quality.
The right to work is ensured by the socialist organization of the national economy, the steady growth of the productive forces of Soviet society, the elimination of the possibility of economic crises, and the abolition of unemployment. ARTICLE 119. Citizens of the U.S.S.R. have the right to rest and leisure. The right to rest and leisure is ensured by the reduction of the working day to seven hours for the overwhelming majority of the workers, the institution of annual vacations with full pay for workers and employees and the provision of a wide network of sanatoria, rest homes and clubs for the accommodation of the working people.
ARTICLE 120. Citizens of the U.S.S.R. have the right to maintenance in old age and also in case of sickness or loss of capacity to work. This right is ensured by the extensive development of social insurance of workers and employees at state expense, free medical service for the working people and the provision of a wide network of health resorts for the use of the working people.
ARTICLE 121. Citizens of the U.S.S.R. have the right to education. This right is ensured by universal, compulsory elementary education; by education, including higher education, being free of charge; by the system of state stipends for the overwhelming majority of students in the universities and colleges; by instruction in schools being conducted in the native Ianguage, and by the organization in the factories, state farms, machine and tractor stations and collective farms of free vocational, technical and agronomic training for the working people.
ARTICLE 122. Women in the U.S.S.R. are accorded equal rights with men in all spheres of economic, state, cultural, social and political life. The possibility of exercising these rights is ensured to women by granting them an equal right with men to work, payment for work, rest and leisure, social insurance and education, and by state protection of the interests of mother and child, prematernity and maternity leave with full pay, and the provision of a wide network of maternity homes, nurseries and kindergartens.



ARTICLE 134. Members of all Soviets of Working People's Deputies--of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R., the Supreme Soviets of the Union Republics, the Soviets of Working People's Deputies of the Territories and Regions, the Supreme Soviets of the Autonomous Republics, and Soviets of Working People's Deputies of Autonomous Regions, area, district, city and rural (station, village, hamlet, kishlak, aul) Soviets of Working People's Deputies--are chosen by the electors on the basis of universal, direct and equal suffrage by secret ballot.
ARTICLE 135. Elections of deputies are universal: all citizens of the U.S.S.R. who have reached the age of eighteen, irrespective of race or nationality, religion, educational and residential qualifications, social origin, property status or past activities, have the right to vote in the election of deputies and to be elected, with the exception of insane persons and persons who have been convicted by a court of law and whose sentences include deprivation of electoral rights.
ARTICLE 136. Elections of deputies are equal: each citizen has one vote; all citizens participate in elections on an equal footing.
ARTICLE 137. Women have the right to elect and be elected on equal terms with men.
ARTICLE 138. Citizens serving in the Red Army have the right to elect and be elected on equal terms with all other citizens.
ARTICLE 139. Elections of deputies are direct: all Soviets of Working People's Deputies, from rural and city Soviets of Working People's Deputies to the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R., inclusive, are elected by the citizens by direct vote.
ARTICLE 140. Voting at elections of deputies is secret.
ARTICLE 141. Candidates for election are nominated according to electoral areas. The right to nominate candidates is secured to public organizations and societies of the working people: Communist Party organizations, trade unions, cooperatives, youth organizations and cultural societies.
ARTICLE 142. It is the duty of every deputy to report to his electors on his work and on the work of the Soviet of Working People's Deputies, and he is liable to be recalled at any time in the manner established by law upon decision of a majority of the electors.

[Jose Gracchus]

That Constitution also replaced the soviets with "Soviet" bourgeois parliaments across the board, and pre-figured the "state of the whole people" with the giving of universal suffrage to the "Soviet" elections. Naturally this is all bullshit anyway, of course, and doesn't matter. However it does go to show how far some will go to apologize for "Communists" so eager for bourgeois democratic approval that they wrote out even the soviets on paper, and the dictatorship of the proletariat as any substantive form other than stating it exists.

Funny the man says Stalin's socialism was only empty words of propaganda, and you trot out a...empty propaganda document to disprove the assertion.

[Rusty Shackleford]

That Constitution also replaced the soviets with "Soviet" bourgeois parliaments across the board, and pre-figured the "state of the whole people" with the giving of universal suffrage to the "Soviet" elections. Naturally this is all bullshit anyway, of course, and doesn't matter. However it does go to show how far some will go to apologize for "Communists" so eager for bourgeois democratic approval that they wrote out even the soviets on paper, and the dictatorship of the proletariat as any substantive form other than stating it exists.

Funny the man says Stalin's socialism was only empty words of propaganda, and you trot out a...empty propaganda document to disprove the assertion.

What i am pointing out is this: at its very core, legally within the soviet union, there is nothing resembling fascism/class collaborationism.

to simply say "naturally this is all bullshit anyway, of course, and doesnt matter" doesnt help at all with the discussion.

also, the "eagerness for bourgeois democratic approval" is bullshit. socialism is about democracy. proletarian democracy. the state was set up to promote the interests of the working class within its territory. due to all industry being state property which is run by the CPSU which is elected universally by everyone over 18 does two things. It represented the will of the working class on a multi-national scale and also made it impossible to actually be a capitalist by making industry and the means of production state owned of collectively/worker owned non-state industry.

[ZeroNowhere]

I agree that the Soviet Union was not identical to Nazi Germany in the general way that this similarity is posed (ie. the liberal democratic West vs. the totalitarian states). However, using the 1936 constitution to demonstrate this is akin to using the fact that the National Socialist party contained the word 'socialist' in its name to establish the opposite.

[Jose Gracchus]

What i am pointing out is this: at its very core, legally within the soviet union, there is nothing resembling fascism/class collaborationism.

to simply say "naturally this is all bullshit anyway, of course, and doesnt matter" doesnt help at all with the discussion.

also, the "eagerness for bourgeois democratic approval" is bullshit. socialism is about democracy. proletarian democracy. the state was set up to promote the interests of the working class within its territory. due to all industry being state property which is run by the CPSU which is elected universally by everyone over 18 does two things. It represented the will of the working class on a multi-national scale and also made it impossible to actually be a capitalist by making industry and the means of production state owned of collectively/worker owned non-state industry.

What I'm pointing out is this: Uncle Joe and Grandpa Nikolai (who actually wrote it, and since you uphold Stalin and the Moscow Trials, you must believe he was in fact a wrecker collaborating with fascism anyway, so your citation of the 36 Constitution leads on to draw the opposite conclusion, prima facie, that you would prefer) can write whatever they want on a piece of enchanted parchment. Just as I'd tell any Tea Partier: that doesn't mean shit.

In fact, the Nazi state never abolished the Wiemar Constitution, and formally in fact, was continuously in a state of emergency enabling rule-by-decree from 1933 to 1945.

You also have not a clue what I am talking about; rather than soviets being elected by and from working people engaged in production, from the enterprise to the district to the city to the region to finally the republic or union level, Bukharin (when he was not penning this ideal socialist constitution for you while simultaneously selling out to partition the USSR to fascists) substituted this with the election of city councils and parliaments by the conventional bourgeois method.

I suppose State and Revolution had no socialist content, since Lenin explains and justifies this exact political constitutional concept, and its meaning for the revolution in particular, at length. But that is all irrelevent, and they might as well have let the Constituent Assembly enact a bourgeois parliament and universal suffrage and federation of nationalities, since that's what they did anyway.

[Rafiq]

Chomsky is an Idealist antimarxist tosspit.

Certainly, if one understands chomsky, they'd realize he's a "Pro-US estabilishment" Anarchist.

like NGMM5 or whatever that guys name is.

He's a Liberal.

[manic expression]

What I'm pointing out is this: Uncle Joe and Grandpa Nikolai (who actually wrote it, and since you uphold Stalin and the Moscow Trials, you must believe he was in fact a wrecker collaborating with fascism anyway, so your citation of the 36 Constitution leads on to draw the opposite conclusion, prima facie, that you would prefer) can write whatever they want on a piece of enchanted parchment. Just as I'd tell any Tea Partier: that doesn't mean shit.

In fact, the Nazi state never abolished the Wiemar Constitution, and formally in fact, was continuously in a state of emergency enabling rule-by-decree from 1933 to 1945.To the contrary, what is written on paper can mean shit, but only if it is reflected in the functioning of that society. If, on the other hand, someone simply changes "Commissariat" to "Ministry", as happened during the evolution of the Soviet system of government...it doesn't exactly mean so much. You at once say that it means nothing to you what is on paper and then wave around what is merely on paper as proof of your arguments. The real issue, though, is this: Were the workers yet in control of society? Yes, they were. Next question.

[Agnapostate]

The USSR was not a socialist country because the hierarchical concentration of power divorced the large majority of the population from day-to-day management of the means of production, but it could no longer be called "totalitarian" after destalinization, and standards of living did improve sufficiently for the majority of the population to nonetheless vote for its preservation in the referendum on that subject. A substantial portion of the late era ruling class did transition to governance of the Russian Federation, so the dissolution (not a collapse) of the Soviet Union was perhaps irrelevant for socialism.

[Tim Finnegan]

Chomsky is an Idealist antimarxist tosspit.
Anti-Leninist isn't the same thing as anti-Marxist. I have a copy of Workers' Councils sitting right here, which I understand is a rather significant text in council communism, and it has an endorsement from Chomsky on the back. Whatever criticisms of him you may have, at least try to avoid claiming things which are blatantly untrue.

[Rusty Shackleford]

The USSR was not a socialist country because the hierarchical concentration of power divorced the large majority of the population from day-to-day management of the means of production, but it could no longer be called "totalitarian" after destalinization, and standards of living did improve sufficiently for the majority of the population to nonetheless vote for its preservation in the referendum on that subject. A substantial portion of the late era ruling class did transition to governance of the Russian Federation, so the dissolution (not a collapse) of the Soviet Union was perhaps irrelevant for socialism.

1: Socialism still maintains the state, so yeah of course there is hierarchy. socialism =/= communism.

2: after "destalinization" the economy did boom and the standard of living did indeed rise. But that was built on the "totalitarian" economic development of the 30s and the post war period. By the time brezzy came around, the economy was turning south.

3: It was more like the overthrow of the Soviet Union. Gorby wanted it dead, and Yeltsin and the heads of industrial ministries were all into being oligarchs and alcoholics. Id say this was due to a shift in the party's ideology over time.

Even with all these problems, the soviet union was still, up until its overthrow, trading with countries like Cuba and the DPRK, keeping thousands of hospitals and movie theaters open, guaranteeing the right to housing, employment, and rest. All that needed to happen was for the party to get its shit together, but that is impossible and this is just hindsight. what did this do to the world socialism movement?

Cuba went through its special period.
DPRK had its famines
Millions went homeless and jobless in the fSU
Eastern europe now dirt poor
Yugoslavia broken up violently
Iraq invaded twice
Afghanistan
Somalia
Libya
Albania isnt socialist either (thought it wasnt relying on it, it was part of a major trend)
Nationalist strife in central asia, the caucus, and ukraine.
oh and not to mention a neglected nuclear stockpile and arms depos.
basically what followed was the anarchy of capitalism and something akin to warlordism.

[gestalt]

1: Socialism still maintains the state, so yeah of course there is hierarchy. socialism =/= communism.

According to Lenin and the bureaucratic followers thereof.

[Paulappaul]

And the collapse of the soviet union is a small victory for socialism, it eliminated one of the major barriers to it. I'm don't see why collapse of the soviet union is a victory for socialism. It had disastrous consequences for the Soviet working class.

I don't mean to pick on just you Syndicat, this is being said by alot of posters so I am gonna take it up right now. For one, Chomsky did not say it was a victory for the people, he said it was a victory for Socialism. Second, when considering the nature of Russia during and post Soviet Union it's useful to think of things from the perspective of Amadeo Bordiga. He said that Fascism was just as bad as Republican Capitalism. They were exploitative in their own respective ways. While materially the people of the Soviet Union may have been better off for the under the Communist Party, aspects of modern day Russia are certainly better.

Furthermore from the perspective that the failure of the Soviet Union also meant the total disenfranchisement of Marxist - Leninism and of the policies of the Third International for me presents a huge victory for Socialism. Similar to the failure of Keynesian, Welfare State Capitalism and Fascism, it allows the working class to move beyond the elements which had hindered its spontaneous and revolutionary development.

To those users who pout the line Anarchists and Libertarian Marxists never present a better model for a workers' and peasant government that is surrounded on all sides by enemies, we say this:

1) Why was it that in spite of a World Revolutionary movement, only one extremely backward country made a revolutionary government? It was a the failure of Social Democratic principles which governed the minds the Left, which Lenin at first fought aganist but later took up again in the 3rd International. The Soviet Union and Marxist - Leninism contributed to the opportunism which governed the movement for social change at the time.

2) We have offered models, but ultimately we realize that without a World Revolution there our models will either be destroyed or will be turned into another Authoritarian State. This what happened to the Ukrainian Free State, The German Workers' Councils and Revolutionary Spain. We would rather go out on the principles of Libertarian Socialism then on Capitalism as the Soviet did.

[Agnapostate]

1: Socialism still maintains the state, so yeah of course there is hierarchy. socialism =/= communism.

There are few historical instances of statist hierarchy being compatible with genuine collective ownership and management of the means of production. The Soviet Union isn't an example of one.


2: after "destalinization" the economy did boom and the standard of living did indeed rise. But that was built on the "totalitarian" economic development of the 30s and the post war period. By the time brezzy came around, the economy was turning south.

Central planning produced massive economic gains in the 1930's as the capitalist world experienced economic depression, and the same did occur in the 1950's and 1960's. The process was perhaps more difficult to maintain throughout the 1970's and 1980's, as the education gained in the USSR produced citizens not as amenable to authoritarian direction in later decades.


3: It was more like the overthrow of the Soviet Union. Gorby wanted it dead, and Yeltsin and the heads of industrial ministries were all into being oligarchs and alcoholics.

In the waning years of the USSR, Gorbachev's interests seemed geared towards Yugoslav-style market socialism or even Scandinavian social democracy, but certainly a considerable departure from classic central planning.

[Jose Gracchus]

The USSR was a capitalist state after 1921. I do degree it had heterodox features, but certainly nothing that hadn't been anticipated by both traditions - Marx and Engels' writing about the theoretical case where all individual capitals became united in one state capital, that it would remain capital, and the workers, workers; and Bakunin's admittedly polemical "Red bureaucracy". But the fact remains it remains part of the industrial society of generalized commodity production, ipso facto, capitalist society. The fact that the ruling class in the USSR could only personally appropriate wealth in their role as capitalists was by bureaucratic corruption and privileges, does not strike me as that novel. The distinction has been made long before between the functional capitalist - in the corporation, its management - and the non-functioning capitalist (idle wealthy owning capital managed by others). Moreover, as time went on their greed and zeal to be able to realize the wealth personally became ever greater -- they, like the more successful Chinese, were looking for a way out.

Welfarism is not socialism. The working class was attacked everywhere in the 1980s and even 1990s. The social compacts with the old industrial working class were being assaulted and destroyed everywhere. Soviet-type state capitalism suffered the same crisis as all state capitalism, in this era. Socialism is about classes, mode of production, and relations. What you see is what you get. Appeals to welfarism do not make socialism.

[Rafiq]

Anti-Leninist isn't the same thing as anti-Marxist. I have a copy of Workers' Councils sitting right here, which I understand is a rather significant text in council communism, and it has an endorsement from Chomsky on the back. Whatever criticisms of him you may have, at least try to avoid claiming things which are blatantly untrue.

Have you even read any of his crap on Linguistics, ect.?

His theories, his analysis of history, economics, ect. is completely antimarxist and antimaterialist.

Stop spouting utter shit all over the place, Timmy, when you have no clue why I am calling him Anti-Marxist.

certainly has nothing to do with his moralistic criticism of Lenin.

[Rafiq]

what did this do to the world socialism movement?

Cuba went through its special period.
DPRK had its famines
Millions went homeless and jobless in the fSU
Eastern europe now dirt poor
Yugoslavia broken up violently
Iraq invaded twice
Afghanistan
Somalia
Libya
Albania isnt socialist either (thought it wasnt relying on it, it was part of a major trend)
Nationalist strife in central asia, the caucus, and ukraine.
oh and not to mention a neglected nuclear stockpile and arms depos.
basically what followed was the anarchy of capitalism and something akin to warlordism.


These would have still existed had the Soviet Union stuck around.

The Soviet transformation to Bourgeois Democracy was inevitable, regardless if they had have kept their old Bolshevist rhetoric (red flag, Lenin crap, Socialist realism, ect., similar to how the Italian PCI is today)

[Rafiq]

According to Lenin and the bureaucratic followers thereof.

Though I am no fan of Lenin and his parading Right-Socialists, Marx did speak of the lower phases of communism, where the state still exists....!

I don't think calling for the abolition of the state right away on ideal and moral grounds is productive, actually, I think it's quite dangerous.

[gestalt]

Though I am no fan of Lenin and his parading Right-Socialists, Marx did speak of the lower phases of communism, where the state still exists....!

I don't think calling for the abolition of the state right away on ideal and moral grounds is productive, actually, I think it's quite dangerous.

Good thing I am not a Marxist, right?

[Tim Finnegan]

Have you even read any of his crap on Linguistics, ect.?

His theories, his analysis of history, economics, ect. is completely antimarxist and antimaterialist.

Stop spouting utter shit all over the place, Timmy, when you have no clue why I am calling him Anti-Marxist.

certainly has nothing to do with his moralistic criticism of Lenin.
"Anti-Marxist" and "not a Marxist" are different terms, and you didn't exactly offer any clues as to your actual meaning in your post, so I can't help but feel that the blame lies as much on your shoulders as it does mine. Raffy.

[Rusty Shackleford]

These would have still existed had the Soviet Union stuck around.

The Soviet transformation to Bourgeois Democracy was inevitable, regardless if they had have kept their old Bolshevist rhetoric (red flag, Lenin crap, Socialist realism, ect., similar to how the Italian PCI is today)
though imperialist aggression would still exist, i dont think it would have been so... well... aggressive.

about the transformation, a part of me feels like that was inevitable.

two global camps one had to fall. while the US upped its anti-communist aggression, the SU adopted the double edged sword of peaceful coexistence. i cant really say i am against it in reality but i can be in theory. Had the SU been more aggressive militarily towards NATO humanity could have been annihilated. one side had to step down.

man, i hate nukes.

[Die Neue Zeit]

To say nothing of the fact generalized commodity production persisted, there was considerable circulation or turnover in labor between enterprises who lured workers with wage incentives (labor markets), shadow unemployment

Having a wage system in general (inclusive of wage incentives) is still different from having a labour market, even a fully socialized labour market.

What kind of "shadow unemployment"? Cyclical? Structural? Just frictional?


One wonders if they realize that European social democracies once claimed to be evolving toward eventual socialism, claimed to be striving toward eliminating unemployment with make-work, and even proposed things like Meidnerism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rehn-Meidner_model). But of course no self-respecting socialist here thinks that is "socialism". So what defines socialism?

That's only part of Meidner's economic model, which expanded over time.

[Rafiq]

Good thing I am not a Marxist, right?

No, actually, bad thing, really bad thing.

This means that you'll eventually leave the Left, because you don't have any scientific or theoretic basis for your beliefs other than "HUUUUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRRRRRRR ALLLLLLLLL AUTHORITY IS NO GUUDDDD"""""

Thus getting owned by a Libertarian Capitalist or a Theologian in an argument.

Than you'll grow very old, forgetting about the whole thing

[Rafiq]

though imperialist aggression would still exist, i dont think it would have been so... well... aggressive.

about the transformation, a part of me feels like that was inevitable.

two global camps one had to fall. while the US upped its anti-communist aggression, the SU adopted the double edged sword of peaceful coexistence. i cant really say i am against it in reality but i can be in theory. Had the SU been more aggressive militarily towards NATO humanity could have been annihilated. one side had to step down.

man, i hate nukes.

I think the main reason the Soviet Union transformed was because of two reasons, one being dominant, the other, a contributing factor.

Dominant reason: Economic isolation from World recources, production, not as much imperialism as the U.S. ( But still some ).

Contributing factor: Extremely unstable political estabilishment. The USSR was not a very organized society, politically and socially. There was so many political tensions between different factions within the beurocracy, it was unbelievable.

[ZeroNowhere]

Though I am no fan of Lenin and his parading Right-Socialists, Marx did speak of the lower phases of communism, where the state still exists....! No, he didn't.

[robbo203]

Though I am no fan of Lenin and his parading Right-Socialists, Marx did speak of the lower phases of communism, where the state still exists....! .

No he didnt. He spoke simply of the lower phase (not phases) of communism but made no mention of the state existing in communism. That would totally contradict his notion of the state which is that it is class instrument and would imply the existence of classes in a classless communist society

[gestalt]

No, actually, bad thing, really bad thing.

This means that you'll eventually leave the Left, because you don't have any scientific or theoretic basis for your beliefs other than "HUUUUUUUUUUUUUURRRRRRRRRRRRR ALLLLLLLLL AUTHORITY IS NO GUUDDDD"""""

Thus getting owned by a Libertarian Capitalist or a Theologian in an argument.

Than you'll grow very old, forgetting about the whole thing

While this post seems facetious, in the off chance it is not:

Tell that to a few centuries worth of class struggle anarchist, libertarian socialists, et al.

My analysis of the world is influenced by Marx, it would be hard for it not to be, however I part ways with most of the doctrines and programs, paths and procedures advocated in his name.

Rest assured I know my enemies (especially among our own), their arguments and their logical shortcomings.

[Rafiq]

Well than don't say stupid crap like "Good thing I'm not a Marxist" without a logical basis, other than Idealist hogwash.

[manic expression]

To those users who pout the line Anarchists and Libertarian Marxists never present a better model for a workers' and peasant government that is surrounded on all sides by enemies, we say this:

1) Why was it that in spite of a World Revolutionary movement, only one extremely backward country made a revolutionary government? It was a the failure of Social Democratic principles which governed the minds the Left, which Lenin at first fought aganist but later took up again in the 3rd International. The Soviet Union and Marxist - Leninism contributed to the opportunism which governed the movement for social change at the time.
Wait, are you blaming Lenin for the defeat of the German Revolution? If anything, that the Bolsheviks survived and the Spartacus League didn't should tell us that Marxism-Leninism has something to offer when it comes to defending working-class revolution.


2) We have offered models, but ultimately we realize that without a World Revolution there our models will either be destroyed or will be turned into another Authoritarian State. This what happened to the Ukrainian Free State, The German Workers' Councils and Revolutionary Spain. We would rather go out on the principles of Libertarian Socialism then on Capitalism as the Soviet did.When your models have a habit of being destroyed rather quickly, perhaps it's time to get another model.

The German workers' councils weren't purely anarchist/left-communist and it's wrong to assert as much, the Ukrainian Free State was a cossack band and the conflicts that defined Revolutionary Spain were often a question of tactics as much as ideology (namely: do we defeat fascism first or do we go about full-on social revolution, perhaps oppose anti-fascist forces in the process and fight Franco all at the same time...whatever answer you give, and I find both to hold water, it's hard to claim that the other is "opportunist").


Tell that to a few centuries worth of class struggle anarchist, libertarian socialists, et al.
And much of that represents something to be proud of. However, we should be honest when it comes to results. It remains written upon the historical record that working-class revolution has only ever been significantly defended through the principles of Marxism.

[Paulappaul]

Wait, are you blaming Lenin for the defeat of the German Revolution? If anything, that the Bolsheviks survived and the Spartacus League didn't should tell us that Marxism-Leninism has something to offer when it comes to defending working-class revolution.

The "Marxist - Leninists" best represented in the KPD was a Smaller party compared to the KAPD the Left Communist Party. The Former espoused Social Democratic principles and was effective in creating disunity and leading the working class towards reformism, rather then towards the "Working-Class Revolution".


When your models have a habit of being destroyed rather quickly, perhaps it's time to get another model.

I would imagine that has to do with the fact we would stick to our principles and go down in history not as murders and tyrants for the ammunition of the Right Wing and the Bourgeois.


The German workers' councils weren't purely anarchist/left-communist and it's wrong to assert as much

It's wrong to look at them in purely ideological terms at all. As being what they were, Workers' Councils, they were ransacked by Opportunists.


Ukrainian Free State was a cossack band

no


Revolutionary Spain were often a question of tactics as much as ideology (namely: do we defeat fascism first or do we go about full-on social revolution, perhaps oppose anti-fascist forces in the process and fight Franco all at the same time...whatever answer you give, and I find both to hold water, it's hard to claim that the other is "opportunist").

I agree, but despite ideological battles the system of Social and Common ownership provided a much more Egalitarian system of subsistence.

[Lucretia]

1: Socialism still maintains the state, so yeah of course there is hierarchy. socialism =/= communism.

Sorry, but I am alarmed that you cannot see how terrible this argument is. Socialism has a state, but Marx and Engels and, later, Lenin were very clear that it would be a proletarian state through which the vast majority of the population democratically controlled production and distribution decisions. This is the point your interlocutor brings up in arguing that the USSR was not socialist. The point is that the USSR from about the mid-to-late 1920s was not a proletarian or workers' state. Hence it was not socialist. It was a political state, that is a state that existed as an alien force guiding production in place of the people, the kind of state Lenin said was to disappear with the seizure of the means of production, not the kind of state he said would wither away under communism.

[manic expression]

The "Marxist - Leninists" best represented in the KPD was a Smaller party compared to the KAPD the Left Communist Party. The Former espoused Social Democratic principles and was effective in creating disunity and leading the working class towards reformism, rather then towards the "Working-Class Revolution".
Marxism-Leninism wasn't even a tendency when the German Revolution started, and it wasn't a tendency when it was defeated. Anyway, if you're talking 1923-1933, then the KAPD wasn't any more revolutionary in practice than the KPD at least. The Comintern was following the Popular Front tactic, which even if you disagree with it was all about pushing forth the interests of the workers through the self-organization of the class...hardly what anyone could call "Social Democratic principles" IMO (let's not forget that the Social Democrats were the ones actively opposing the KPD's attempts to fight fascism in the streets).


I would imagine that has to do with the fact we would stick to our principles and go down in history not as murders and tyrants for the ammunition of the Right Wing and the Bourgeois.
Once you stop caring about bourgeois lies, that issue goes away. They'd call us murderers no matter what...it's not like they never level the charge against other tendencies. If there wasn't a Stalin or Lenin to bash, we'd still be hearing day and night about all the horrifying atrocities of anarchists against the peaceful priests of Spain. Forget what capitalists say, they're habitual liars and their schtick is wearing thin to anyone we should be reaching.


It's wrong to look at them in purely ideological terms at all. As being what they were, Workers' Councils, they were ransacked by Opportunists.
Just so we're clear, you mean the type of councils that came to be the foundation of the Soviet Union?


no
Yes. Makhno never demonstrated that his model could function as anything more than that. You can say it was "cut short" if you like, but that's part of my point.


I agree, but despite ideological battles the system of Social and Common ownership provided a much more Egalitarian system of subsistence.
Right. Basically, I don't 100% approve of the Comintern line on Spain but I understand why it was taken, and I think it was done from a progressive standpoint.

[Jose Gracchus]

The soviets were destroyed as institution of working-class power in 1918, so they in fact were not the "foundation" of the "Soviet" Union.

[manic expression]

The soviets were destroyed as institution of working-class power in 1918, so they in fact were not the "foundation" of the "Soviet" Union.
Just because the Soviets didn't support for your faction of choice doesn't mean they were "destroyed".

[Jose Gracchus]

:lol: You just reveal how incompetently your little sect actually bothers to educate its brain-dead cadre. Do you know anything about the Russian Revolution? I mean from the fact you emptily quoted the Soviet Constitution By The Fascist Wrecker Bukharin (hey, that's your choice to hold up the "workers' state" responsible for the trials, not mine) as if that proved anything in reply to me - as if when self-styled Communists write on magical paper that something is true, that makes it a reality.

Speaking of reality, the Bolsheviks lost soviet elections in 1918, you imbecile, and were forced to resort to party military force to shutter them. Furthermore, the popular support for a revolution in October was based around the demand for a left-socialist coalition, including Left SRs and Menshevik Internationalists; the Bolshevik leadership resisted this demand at all costs, even as the radical workers of the Vizkel railway union worked to try and force it on them. They failed. Any history book would tell you about these coups. So in fact, the effect was the exact opposite of that you describe. The soviets didn't support your faction of choice, so they ceased being respected as institutions of working class rule.

For further reading, go no further than Simon Pirani's The Russian Revolution in Retreat for how the soviets were progressively denuded of any content by the workers themselves at their own initiative, become cold and empty occasions for contrived pro-party declarations, that the Communist cadre struggled to get workers to even show up to.

Also, on the Comintern line on Spain, so you support looting a fighting working-class of basic gold reserves in wartime? Or how about supporting a "workers' party" whose majority membership was petty bourgeois and not working class, and explicitly became a party fighting for the "progressive bourgeoisie" while the workers were locked into intense class struggles? I guess I shouldn't be surprised though, since the PSL advocates that the workers line up to fight and die for the "progressive" capitalists, so long as they don't wear red-white-and-blue.

[manic expression]

:lol: You just reveal how incompetently your little sect actually bothers to educate its brain-dead cadre. Do you know anything about the Russian Revolution? I mean from the fact you emptily quoted the Soviet Constitution By The Fascist Wrecker Bukharin (hey, that's your choice to hold up the "workers' state" responsible for the trials, not mine) as if that proved anything in reply to me - as if when self-styled Communists write on magical paper that something is true, that makes it a reality.
You're the one who denies that things written on paper mean anything...unless you think they mean something. :lol: You've been making things up as you've gone along, which is typical for ultra-leftist hacks who spend most of their time slandering socialism and the revolutionaries who struggle for it, and now you're accusing others of ignoring reality. Well, since you don't care about any sort of consistency, let's see what anti-socialist lies you have in store this time around.


Speaking of reality, the Bolsheviks lost soviet elections in 1918, you imbecile, and were forced to resort to party military force to shutter them. Furthermore, the popular support for a revolution in October was based around the demand for a left-socialist coalition, including Left SRs and Menshevik Internationalists; the Bolshevik leadership resisted this demand at all costs, even as the radical workers of the Vizkel railway union worked to try and force it on them. They failed. Any history book would tell you about these coups. So in fact, the effect was the exact opposite of that you describe. The soviets didn't support your faction of choice, so they ceased being respected as institutions of working class rule.Pure BS from a mindset that produces nothing but. The July 1918 Congress of the Soviets (the one just before the Left-SR's rebelled against that body) saw the Bolsheviks hold more delegates than any other party, with over 700 delegates out of 1,164. In addition to this, the Bolsheviks did in fact form a coalition government with the Left-SRs...when later in July 1918 that same group began fighting Soviet authority through violence and terrorism, the Bolsheviks moved to defend the Soviets by shuttering the Left-SRs. Once again, you confuse your preferred group of anti-Soviet terrorists with the Soviets. Perhaps you would better distinguish the two if you had someone draw a picture for you.


For further reading, go no further than Simon Pirani's The Russian Revolution in Retreat for how the soviets were progressively denuded of any content by the workers themselves at their own initiative, become cold and empty occasions for contrived pro-party declarations, that the Communist cadre struggled to get workers to even show up to.Or you could open up a book that doesn't cling to ultra-leftist myths.


Also, on the Comintern line on Spain, so you support looting a fighting working-class of basic gold reserves in wartime? Or how about supporting a "workers' party" whose majority membership was petty bourgeois and not working class, and explicitly became a party fighting for the "progressive bourgeoisie" while the workers were locked into intense class struggles? I guess I shouldn't be surprised though, since the PSL advocates that the workers line up to fight and die for the "progressive" capitalists, so long as they don't wear red-white-and-blue.The gold was used to pay for much-needed weapons...rifles don't exactly grow on trees. The Popular Front was all about allying with non-proletarian forces for the purposes of anti-fascism, but thanks for reminding us that you don't know the first thing about what you mindlessly criticize. Speaking of which, PSL members don't all have the same views on the Spanish Civil War (do you know what "nuance" means?). And at any rate, the Popular Front tactic was one that had a great deal of merit. It's not a good idea to weaken oneself and strengthen one's enemy in times of open conflict, and the Popular Front maximized the forces of the Republic against Franco. That doesn't mean I endorse it completely, it just means I'm willing to deal with the reality of the issue. You should try it sometime.

But since you mention "red-white-and-blue", it's funny that throughout your childish little rant, you've somehow managed to only argue against one of those colors. Here's a hint: it's the one that represents socialism...you know, the movement you have nothing to do with.

[Tim Finnegan]

Is it actually possible for Stalinists to disagree with somebody without feeling obliged to insist that they are, somehow, secretly, anti-socialist fanatics? There's weird quasi-religious undertones to that whole "True Believer" mentality, which I don't think gels particularly well with politics that are, supposedly, class-based, rather than sect-based. Shades of the Wee Frees, sure enough...

[Das war einmal]

Hmm yes the victories of non-leninist communists/leftists have been astonishing since the fall of the USSR. Oh wait...

Perhaps people can see through the 'not a true scotchman' fallacy.

Edit: a few more of these Chomsky 'victories' and humanity is done for.

[Tim Finnegan]

Perhaps people can see through the 'not a true scotchman' fallacy.
Well, firstly, "Scotch" is the whisky. The people are "Scots". ;)
Secondly, I'm not sure that it's fair to characterise the libertarian socialist critique of the Soviet Union in those terms. There are extensive, highly detailed analysis of the Soviet system in existence, and even if you don't agree with them, simply dismissing them as crudely fallacious is undermining your own position by exhibiting a refusal to actually engage with criticism in favour of bluntly dismissing that which does not reach the same conclusions as you have done.
Thirdly, "revisionism". If you get what I'm driving at, here.

[Das war einmal]

Well, firstly, "Scotch" is the whisky. The people are "Scots". ;)
Secondly, I'm not sure that it's fair to characterise the libertarian socialist critique of the Soviet Union in those terms. There are extensive, highly detailed analysis of the Soviet system in existence, and even if you don't agree with them, simply dismissing them as crudely fallacious is undermining your own position by exhibiting a refusal to actually engage with criticism in favour of bluntly dismissing that which does not reach the same conclusions as you have done.
Thirdly, "revisionism". If you get what I'm driving at, here.

Bolded is exactly how I think about this people simply dismissing the USSR as not 'being socialist' and be done with it. Chomsky and fans saying the fall of the USSR was a 'victory' because 'it wasn't socialist in anyway' are undermining their own cause.

I have not seen an extensive, highly detailed analysis, but a very simple and stupid quote from Chomsky in the opening post. That bothers me the same as people who think communism = grey flats and crappy cars.

[Tim Finnegan]

I have not seen an extensive, highly detailed analysis..
Have you looked for one?

[Martin Blank]

I could spend hours responding to both sides of this argument, but for the moment I will limit myself to one.


Sorry, but I am alarmed that you cannot see how terrible this argument is. Socialism has a state, but Marx and Engels and, later, Lenin were very clear that it would be a proletarian state through which the vast majority of the population democratically controlled production and distribution decisions. This is the point your interlocutor brings up in arguing that the USSR was not socialist. The point is that the USSR from about the mid-to-late 1920s was not a proletarian or workers' state. Hence it was not socialist. It was a political state, that is a state that existed as an alien force guiding production in place of the people, the kind of state Lenin said was to disappear with the seizure of the means of production, not the kind of state he said would wither away under communism.

I agree that the RSFSR/USSR from 1921 onward was no longer something that could be accurately described as a proletarian state. The working class ceased to have any control over the Soviet government by 1920.

The factory-shop committees had been turned into subordinated appendages of the trade union officials, then abolished altogether. Individual (petty-bourgeois) management controlled the means of production, even where a formal parity between managers and workers (in the form of union officials) was said to exist. Local Soviets that differed with the central government were either ignored or the target of "recalls" that replaced recalcitrant representatives with ones more "understanding" of the Council of People's Commissars (which were run like bourgeois ministries from the early days of the Revolution). Instead of being reflective and truly representative of the viewpoint of the working class, the Communist Party was belligerent and combative toward it. And, no, I'm not talking about Kronstadt. There were quite a number of proletarian communists who resisted and protested against the actions of the Party and the government, both inside and outside of the Communist Party.

All this said, I think it's wrong to say that, because workers were not in control, it was not socialist. I would say that it was a kind of socialism: petty-bourgeois socialism. Socialism is a vague term that encompasses a large number of trends, but is distinct from communism (as a movement, as a society). Broadly speaking, socialism is little more than a "society of equals", where equal opportunity and equal responsibility are the dominant features. Of course, the meaning of "opportunity" and "responsibility" mean different things to different classes, which is why Marx and Engels made a point to include a section in the Communist Manifesto that addressed these different, class-based forms of socialism. It was only later, with the rise of social democracy and the Second International that socialism and communism became conflated and confused -- a mess we are still trying to clean up more than a century later.

One of the reasons Marx and Engels placed such an emphasis on trends such as petty-bourgeois socialism is because they understood that, with the impending democratic revolutions in Europe, there would be a tendency for the petty-bourgeois democratic movements to cast themselves as "Socialists" in order to be able to command enough of the proletariat to win state power. As Marx pointed out, in exchange for their support in coming to power, the working class would receive from the petty bourgeoisie a "social contract":


The rule of capital and its rapid accumulation is to be further counteracted, partly by a curtailment of the right of inheritance, and partly by the transference of as much employment as possible to the state. As far as the workers are concerned one thing, above all, is definite: they are to remain wage labourers as before. However, the democratic petty bourgeois want better wages and security for the workers, and hope to achieve this by an extension of state employment and by welfare measures; in short, they hope to bribe the workers with a more or less disguised form of alms and to break their revolutionary strength by temporarily rendering their situation tolerable.

This is what makes the entire "social gains" argument an empty and moralistic one. Any type of petty-bourgeois socialist regime, whether resting on an economy that depends on commodity production and capital (which the USSR certainly did, through its relations with world capitalism), is going to make the same "social contract" with the proletariat in exchange for its support. Were workers "better off", in the sense that their living and working conditions were more tolerable? Yes. But they were "better off" in the same sense that workers in Sweden, Germany, France, Britain, etc., under the post-WWII "social-democratic consensus" were in relation to workers in other countries. That it was dressed up as "socialism" in these countries is little more than a testament to how insightful Marx's comments were -- about the petty bourgeoisie, about the utter uselessness of the "socialism" label, etc.

In fact, Marx had a clear answer to those who would look upon such a situation as an opportunity to become cheerleaders and mouthpieces of petty-bourgeois socialism.


While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible, achieving at most the aims already mentioned, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far — not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world — that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers. Our concern cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish it, not to hush up class antagonisms but to abolish classes, not to improve the existing society but to found a new one.

To this I can only add that our concern, in a period of transition from capitalism to communism, is also not to surrender direct control of the state and economy to petty-bourgeois "specialists", bureaucrats and officials, but to master that control and eliminate the need for such elements.

Finally, don't come to me with counter-arguments that boil down to saying that communism is a "liberal paradise society that has never existed anywhere at any point in history". This reduces the question to the bourgeoisie's terms (that communism is about authoritarianism and repression, not about a society of generalized freedom), with us only being given the choice of seeing that bourgeois definition as a positive or negative. Moreover, it completely ignores the fact that the Bolsheviks came to power purporting to be a party that would create the "liberal paradise society" Marx and Engels wrote about. If the Bolsheviks were indeed a Marxian communist party who attained state power on the basis of a communist program, then it is only reasonable to expect them to act accordingly, or at least try to do so when the opportunity afforded itself. But they did not.

I'll leave it here for now.

[manic expression]

Is it actually possible for Stalinists to disagree with somebody without feeling obliged to insist that they are, somehow, secretly, anti-socialist fanatics? There's weird quasi-religious undertones to that whole "True Believer" mentality, which I don't think gels particularly well with politics that are, supposedly, class-based, rather than sect-based. Shades of the Wee Frees, sure enough...I got called "Stalinist", "sect-based" and "imbecile" in the span of two posts...but I´m the one committing hyperbole. Nice. Anyway, if someone openly opposes socialism then I´ll call them anti-socialist.
I agree that the RSFSR/USSR from 1921 onward was no longer something that could be accurately described as a proletarian state. The working class ceased to have any control over the Soviet government by 1920. Only if you give no attention to the role of the vanguard party.

[Thirsty Crow]

Only if you give no attention to the role of the vanguard party.
But the character and the declarative program of the party which monopolizes state power do not determine the nature of the state.

[Jose Gracchus]

The Bolsheviks were not a party located in a "vanguard of the proletariat" by 1921; the vanguard of the proletariat was attempting to re-invirgorate soviets in Moscow, Petrograd, and other industrial centers, including the Kronstadt soviet which was infamously repressed. Furthermore, there's only one possible reason to use force to cancel elections to workers' soviets: you cannot maintain the political support of the working class. How then, could such a party possibly continue to be a vanguard party in any meaningful sense of the term?

Uncle Sam: Those are some really prescient remarks, that I've seen rarely discussed before. Though this is somewhat academic, is it not true that the petty bourgeois cannot be considered a class in the same sense as the proletariat or the bourgeoisie, in terms of relations to production and logical possibility of being able to dominate production and society? In converting the nationalized means of production into a substrate for the continued domination of the workers as a class, did these individually petty bourgeois managers, officials, party leaders become, as an association, a new capitalist class? Seems contradictory to me in Marxian terms to suggest that the petty bourgeoisie in the Soviet Union successfully liquidated their old native bourgeoisie, Tsarist, and landlord enemies, succeeded in perpetuating the exploitation of the working class as such, but did not in the process become capitalists. Where capital exploits workers, must we not necessarily have a capitalist class, even if was only the nomenklatura collectively which exercised the role of the "functional" capitalist class?

[manic expression]

The Bolsheviks were not a party located in a "vanguard of the proletariat" by 1921; the vanguard of the proletariat was attempting to re-invirgorate soviets in Moscow, Petrograd, and other industrial centers, including the Kronstadt soviet which was infamously repressed. Furthermore, there's only one possible reason to use force to cancel elections to workers' soviets: you cannot maintain the political support of the working class. How then, could such a party possibly continue to be a vanguard party in any meaningful sense of the term?
What possible reason is there to resort to terrorism mere days after receiving only a distinct minority of delegates to the Congress of the Soviets? Yep, that one. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks had over 700 delegates out of 1,164. It's as clear as day who had the support of the workers.

But you'll always have Kronstadt...

[Jose Gracchus]

I have a question: do you think the workers only need be invited to participate once, and then the state remains a "workers' state" for the subsequent seventy years? Is that how it works? Of course the Bolsheviks had a majority at the All-Russian Congress, they fixed the apportionment to disenfranchise the peasantry, a mere 80-85% of the population. The anti-soviet coups occurred at the city soviet level, not at the All-Russian Congress. Since the latter is elected indirectly by the former, there was no need to depose the Congress. Rather, it was converted into a sham rubber-stamp body, while the soviets became empty shells, certainly a process completed with total Bolshevik leadership participation, by 1921. Do you claim that this is untrue?

[manic expression]

I have a question: do you think the workers only need be invited to participate once, and then the state remains a "workers' state" for the subsequent seventy years? Is that how it works?
Entirely not. A worker state is determined by the class that controls it, and in the case of the Soviet Union, the Bolsheviks were the vanguard party of the proletariat...and furthermore after 1918 were essentially the last party still standing in support of the Soviets and of the Revolution. The eventual development to the point that the Bolshevik party and the Soviet state became synonymous is because of this, not through any choice of the Bolsheviks and most assuredly not through some grand design by Lenin.

Regardless, 1918 demonstrated who had the support of the proletariat. The Civil War then confirmed this beyond any real doubt.


Of course the Bolsheviks had a majority at the All-Russian Congress, they fixed the apportionment to disenfranchise the peasantry, a mere 80-85% of the population. The anti-soviet coups occurred at the city soviet level, not at the All-Russian Congress. Since the latter is elected indirectly by the former, there was no need to depose the Congress. Rather, it was converted into a sham rubber-stamp body, while the soviets became empty shells, certainly a process completed with total Bolshevik leadership participation, by 1921. Do you claim that this is untrue?
The proletariat is the revolutionary class of capitalism. Thanks for admitting that the Bolsheviks had the support of the workers. But there was no coup, you're just trying to rationalize the cold, hard fact that the Soviets didn't vote for your faction of choice. Of course, the Left SRs first took part in, and then rebelled against, the Congress of the Soviets, which tells us everything we need to know about who the real anti-Soviet forces were.

You also fail to mention that the Left-SRs who were not involved with or in support of the anti-Soviet uprising were released, and that around 200 of their delegates returned to the Congress of the Soviets and denounced the reactionary actions of their organization.

Lastly, as I said, the Bolsheviks were left as the only ones in support of the Soviets...due to the anti-Soviet measures taken by other organizations. The Soviets only became a "rubber stamp" because of this fact. The Left SRs have only themselves to blame for running headlong into the dustbin of history.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

If anything, that the Bolsheviks survived and the Spartacus League didn't should tell us that Marxism-Leninism has something to offer when it comes to defending working-class revolution.

When your models have a habit of being destroyed rather quickly, perhaps it's time to get another model.



When your models have a habit of burning out, stagnating, and decaying before being taken over by "capitalist roaders", it's also time to get another model.

The experience of Marxist-Leninist parties in history often show the following traits: (a) A slow decay where the vibrant first generation is replaced by increasingly elderly technocrats, (b) A steady rise in the level of corruption, (c) the slow, steady takeover of "capitalist roaders", (d) the rise of an increasingly harsh police state, (e) colossal military overspending. Sure, this came after a short burst of improved health care, literacy, public transit, etc, but all those wonderful achievements don't mean squat in the long term if your country ends up stagnating for decades until it finally implodes and the working class finds itself living under Capitalist relations again.

All of those developed out of mistakes made by democratic centralist, supposedly Marxist Leninist parties, and these were mistakes that these hated "leftwing critics" of the USSR such as Trotsky, Chomsky and others had identified. It happened in the USSR, PRC, Vietnam, Albania, Yugoslavia (where the problem exploded into pointless ethnic butchery on all sides), the Warsaw Pact countries ... and today you have Cuba now desperately looking for a way to reform their model without making the same boneheaded mistakes.

[manic expression]

"My models" (not mine, but whatever) also have a habit of maintaining working-class state power and socialism far longer than anyone else's. "My models" have proven they can effectively defend themselves from the worst onslaught in the history of humanity.

And what do you offer instead? Noam Chomsky's armchair critiques, that's what.

[Sinister Cultural Marxist]

"My models" (not mine, but whatever) also have a habit of maintaining working-class state power and socialism far longer than anyone else's. "My models" have proven they can effectively defend themselves from the worst onslaught in the history of humanity.

And what do you offer instead? Noam Chomsky's armchair critiques, that's what.

I'm not claiming to offer a thing, I'm just pointing out that every leftwing ideology out there deserves quite a bit of criticism considering none of them succeeded in the long term, and that it's unfair to give a purely historicist criticism of their ideology where such a criticism works equally well against the alternative you advocate (ok, I won't say "Yours", apparently you're in a pedantic mood today). That goes for Chomsky, that goes for Trotsky, Lenin, Hoxha, Che and Mao. That goes for Marxists and anarchists. But no, everyone gets so touchy when someone critiques their pet theorists ... sometimes Leftists treat them like various Abrahamic sects treat their prophets!

[manic expression]

OK, that's fair. We can all use some criticism, we can all do better. However, I still say the October Revolution resulted in decades upon decades of working-class power and progress. The same goes for other revolutions. We shouldn't ignore that.

[Martin Blank]

Uncle Sam: Those are some really prescient remarks, that I've seen rarely discussed before. Though this is somewhat academic, is it not true that the petty bourgeois cannot be considered a class in the same sense as the proletariat or the bourgeoisie, in terms of relations to production and logical possibility of being able to dominate production and society? In converting the nationalized means of production into a substrate for the continued domination of the workers as a class, did these individually petty bourgeois managers, officials, party leaders become, as an association, a new capitalist class? Seems contradictory to me in Marxian terms to suggest that the petty bourgeoisie in the Soviet Union successfully liquidated their old native bourgeoisie, Tsarist, and landlord enemies, succeeded in perpetuating the exploitation of the working class as such, but did not in the process become capitalists. Where capital exploits workers, must we not necessarily have a capitalist class, even if was only the nomenklatura collectively which exercised the role of the "functional" capitalist class?

You ask some really good questions. Unfortunately, I'll be tied up for the next couple days dealing with personal stuff, so give me that time to respond. Thanks.

[Jose Gracchus]

No prob. Thanks for the response.