How authoritarian or democratic was Lenin and the USSR at his time? [Archive]

Kindness

2nd March 2013, 04:29

I wouldn't say that. I'm obviously not a fan of Lenin, but I don't think he can even remotely be compared to Pol Pot, Stalin, and especially not Hitler.

You don't think actions like these are on the level of Pol Pot, Stalin, or Hitler?

Cheka interrogators utilized torture methods which were, according to Orlando Figes, "matched only by the Spanish Inquisition." At Odessa the Cheka tied White officers to planks and slowly fed them into furnaces or tanks of boiling water; In Kharkiv, scalpings and hand-flayings were commonplace: the skin was peeled off victims' hands to produce "gloves"; The Voronezh Cheka rolled naked people around in barrels studded internally with nails; victims were crucified or stoned to death at Dnipropetrovsk; the Cheka at Kremenchuk impaled members of the clergy and buried alive rebelling peasants; in Orel, water was poured on naked prisoners bound in the winter streets until they became living ice statues; in Kiev, Chinese Cheka detachments placed rats in iron tubes sealed at one end with wire netting and the other placed against the body of a prisoner, with the tubes being heated until the rats gnawed through the victim's body in an effort to escape.
Executions took place in prison cellars or courtyards, or occasionally on the outskirts of town, during the Red Terror and Russian civil war. After the condemned were stripped of their clothing and other belongings, which were shared among the Cheka executioners, they were either machine-gunned in batches or dispatched individually with a revolver. Those killed in prison were usually shot in the back of the neck as they entered the execution cellar, which became littered with corpses and soaked with blood. Victims killed outside the town were conveyed by lorry, bound and gagged, to their place of execution, where they sometimes were made to dig their own graves.
According to Edvard Radzinsky, "it became a common practice to take a husband hostage and wait for his wife to come and purchase his life with her body".[3] During Decossackization, there were massacres, according to historian Robert Gellately, "on an unheard of scale." The Pyatigorsk Cheka organized a "day of Red Terror" to execute 300 people in one day, and took quotas from each part of town. According to the Chekist Karl Lander, the Cheka in Kislovodsk, "for lack of a better idea," killed all the patients in the hospital. In October 1920 alone more than 6,000 people were executed. Gellately adds that Communist leaders "sought to justify their ethnic-based massacres by incorporating them into the rubric of the 'class struggle'".
Members of the clergy were subjected to particularly brutal abuse. According to documents cited by the late Alexander Yakovlev, then head of the Presidential Committee for the Rehabilitation of Victims of Political Repression, priests, monks and nuns were crucified, thrown into cauldrons of boiling tar, scalped, strangled, given Communion with melted lead and drowned in holes in the ice.[29] An estimated 3,000 were put to death in 1918 alone.
Estimates for the total number of people killed in the Red Terror range from 50,000 to over a million.

Leftsolidarity

2nd March 2013, 04:40

How do we measure the amount of democracy?

It had 74% democracy.

Althusser

2nd March 2013, 05:10

Kindness. I denounce those torture methods you described, but wikipedia? Come on. All those sources are rabidly anti-communist. I even see the Black Book of Communism in the sources.

I see you are an anti-Leninist, but I am curious as to what you are.

Judging by your avatar, I think it's safe to assume you don't belong here. Who the fuck joins a revolutionary forum and claims to be a pacifist, has a peace sign in his avatar, and sports an avatar incinuating guns are not needed. You can complain about Lenin with some liberals here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/

Orange Juche

2nd March 2013, 05:21

Kindness. I denounce those torture methods you described, but wikipedia? Come on. All those sources are rabidly anti-communist. I even see the Black Book of Communism in the sources.

Wikipedia is subject to misinformation, and will have biased sources, but it's actually far more accurate than people give it credit for. It's not like Wikipedia took a good guy and turned him into a bad guy.

Debating what level of atrocious Lenin was is irrelevant, if we can agree he was atrocious.

Althusser

2nd March 2013, 05:28

I'm in fucking bizarro land. I think it's time to go to sleep because this thread is an anti-Leninist cesspit of reactionary "Black Book of Communism" scumbaggery.

Leftsolidarity

2nd March 2013, 05:35

Debating what level of atrocious Lenin was is irrelevant, if we can agree he was atrocious.

I don't think we can do that.

I thought this was about how democratic the USSR was, not a thread about if we think Lenin was "atrocious".

MP5

2nd March 2013, 06:45

Okay either i am having some weird acid flashback or there are a hell of alot of people who are anti-Leninist on here. Either that or your all just being sarcastic which does not always translate well into text. I am not a Leninist and i have my own fair share of criticisms of Lenin's policies but he was certainly nowhere near as bad as what some people in this thread are making him out to be.

The USSR under Lenin was not a one man show as some would make it out to be. He was Chairman (although Lenin actually suggested Trotsky should be chairman but after Trotsky brought up the fact his "Jewishness" might not go over well in Russia at that time it was decided that Lenin should be chairman) yes but everything had to go through the central committee of the Communist party. Many of his ideas where overruled or passed by a narrow margin so in this sense the USSR at the time was certainly no less democratic then most of the west and i would argue was more democratic then some western states are today. Hell the prime minister of Canada has far more power then Lenin did in reality. So a absolute leader who ruled by terror alone he was not.

It was not a democracy but then again Lenin never claimed to be fully democratic at all. Also one must remember that due to the sheer size of Russia it was very hard to get the Soviets to all tow the party line. So despite the fact that the USSR was a state ruled by democratic centralism there was alot of decentralization during the Lenin years and even a certain amount survived up until the very early part of Stalins absolute rule.

My main criticisms of Lenin would be the implementation of democratic centralism and the needless crackdowns on people who opposed the Bolsheviks such as the Anarchists. He certainly could have done more to get them on his side but it would be utopian to think that anyone could have instituted a fully democratic socialist state under such conditions as Russia was in at the time. He helped advance civil rights for alot of people such as women, homosexuals and Jews which was certainly not a easy task at all in the early 1900's especially in Russia of all places. He stopped the Jewish pogroms that ran rampant under the Tsars and for that alone he must be commended. To compare him to the likes of Stalin, Pol Pot or fucking Hitler is rather foolish in my opinion.

In the end it all comes down to what people define democracy as to which of course there is no one answer.

Flying Purple People Eater

2nd March 2013, 07:04

This is just ultraleft slander.

Lenin was as authoritarian as he had to be.

Let's get free really translates into let's get revisionist and let the imperialist invade.

Comrade Jandar

2nd March 2013, 07:10

This is just ultraleft slander.

Lenin was as authoritarian as he had to be.

Let's get free really translates into let's get revisionist and let the imperialist invade.

Saying the criticism is "ultra-left" is giving it some credence. The problem lies in that it is an empty bourgeois, non-materialist criticism which does not even deserved to be addressed.

MarxArchist

2nd March 2013, 07:18

Extremely authoritarian. First it was revolution then it was war communism followed by the NEP which was also authoritarian because it's not the job of socialism to advanced an economy. Most of the negative things that happened wouldn't have happened in a more developed nation with a more mature and broader working class who had enjoyed a certain amount of enlightenment values under bourgeois democracy. Lenin and his CHEKA's shit behavior can mostly be chalked up to the conditions in Russia not Marxism proper. Mao encountered much of the same conditions in China and used much of the same tactics as has every Marxist who pushed revolution and then development in nations not ready for a socialist revolution without support from advanced nations (Cuba wasn't as bad because they had support from the USSR). What I'm saying is it was doomed to be authoritarian if the Russian Bolsheviks were to maintain their misguided attempt to build "socialism". There was no other way other than to just let bourgeois capitalism develop and they weren't going to do that. They weren't even going to let other opinions surface which were based in the socialist tradition. It was their way or the highway and this was backed up by murder, intimidation, torture and suppression. It's not a model to follow (starting with attempting socialist revolutions in backwards nations).

MP5

2nd March 2013, 07:23

This is just ultraleft slander.

Lenin was as authoritarian as he had to be.

Let's get free really translates into let's get revisionist and let the imperialist invade.

I don't see how this is ultra-left slander at all. I would probably be considered ultra-left by most peoples standards but i don't agree with hardly any of the so called criticisms of Lenin in this thread. This is mainly because they are not legitimate criticisms but instead read more like anti-Communist propaganda. Honestly it's more like something you would hear neo-conservatives or American Libertarians make up about Lenin rather then legitimate criticisms of Lenin's policies.

Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist

2nd March 2013, 07:43

Kindness

2nd March 2013, 08:04

Lenin did what he needed to do, would you rather he played nice and had the revolution fall to imperialism so they could have had an Iraq like occupation? There are no good or bad guys in history, there is only the result of material conditions. So stop moralizing as if morality isn't amaterial bullshit designed to keep the toiling classes in intellectual backwardness.

I would rather he'd not torture and murder thousands of beautiful, unique human beings. I'd also rather he'd not crush democracy and set up an authoritarian state in which the people had no say. That is not moralism, but humanism and socialism.

I'm a metaphysical naturalist, but I think "dialectical materialism" is facile nonsense. Socially constructed norms, values, and institutions, along with human agency, shape actions, not just economic conditions and relations to the means of production. Economics plays a role, but it is not the only factor.

Le Socialiste

2nd March 2013, 08:18

The idealists are riddled with contradictions; either they moralize from the sidelines, as nothing regarding the organic growth or movement of the class can meet their absurdly high standards, or they seek to impose their 'cookie cutter' expectations on the whole of the movement. Abstentionism or sabotage - these are the dangers of moralistic infantilism.

OP: I'll try and respond to your question tomorrow.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

2nd March 2013, 08:41

Extremely democratic, when the circumstances permitted, and extremely authoritarian, when the circumstances required authoritarianism. Surely, viewing dictatorship and democracy as irreconcilable opposites is a sign of mechanicist, anti-dialectical thinking?

The soviets remain the most advanced democratic form discovered by man; not just formally democratic, but democratic in content - comprised of the labouring masses, and being working, instead of simply deliberative bodies, they meant that any labourer could take part in the administration of the soviet state. And yes, there were defects, but the soviets represented a level of democracy that is impossible in bourgeois talk-shop parliaments.

Even so, it should be noted that during the latter stages of the civil war and afterwards, the system of soviets degenerated somewhat due to the destruction of the most politically conscious stratum of the proletariat - and nearly the entire economy - by White bandits.

And, of course, after a brief period in which the soviet state was reluctant to shoot even Purishkeviches and Krasnovs, the firmest dictatorship over the reactionary and adventurist elements was imposed. Surely no one wishes to imply that the Russian republic should have let the White bandits murder workers, peasants, Jews and Bolsheviks as it pleased? That the left Esers shoudl have been free to murder anyone they liked?

As for the CheKa, I would like to see more credible sources than the Black Book of Nazi Sympathies.

The provisional government established after the February Revolution was a sort of liberal democracy.

How? The Provisional Government was not elected, it kept Russia in an imperialist war against the wishes of the majority of the population, arrested any dissenters, marched military forces on the capital several times, and when it finally collapsed, the only ones that tried to support it were Tsarist generals, the Cadets, having absorbed the worst elements of the Octobrists, Progressists, Nationalists and Black Hundreds, turning into a proto-fascist organisation, and of course the defensist Mensheviks and Esers. All several hundreds of them.

The USSR under Lenin was completely dictatorial from 1917 for the classes being "liquidated" (including many poor peasants [...]

The liquidation of the class implies dissolving the economic relations that constitute that class, not murder.

MP5

2nd March 2013, 09:44

I would rather he'd not torture and murder thousands of beautiful, unique human beings. I'd also rather he'd not crush democracy and set up an authoritarian state in which the people had no say. That is not moralism, but humanism and socialism.

I'm a metaphysical naturalist, but I think "dialectical materialism" is facile nonsense. Socially constructed norms, values, and institutions, along with human agency, shape actions, not just economic conditions and relations to the means of production. Economics plays a role, but it is not the only factor.

How where the imperialist white army beautiful human beings? Yes they where so beautiful when they crucified, raped and decapitated anyone who they even suspected of having socialist leanings or being sympathetic towards the Bolsheviks. They where oh so beautiful when they carried out anti-Jewish pogroms that would have made the Nazis green with envy. A white force under the command of Anton Denkin slaughtered a estimated 1500 Jews who where mostly elderly or women and children in Fastiv, Ukraine alone. Such beautiful people indeed :rolleyes:

But seeing as you are a pacifist i guess you would have sat by and done nothing while the white army slaughtered these people. Going by the logic (if you can even call it that) of pacifism the world should have sat by and done nothing while the Nazis slaughtered everyone who did not fit into their stupid mythical Aryan race. When would you pick up a gun? When they where about to string up your mother and rape your sister and g/f? Oh wait i guess even then you couldn't shoot back because you could possibly kill one of those beautiful anti-Semitic mad men.

There really is no greater gift to tyranny then people who sit by and do nothing all because they follow the misguided ideology of pacifism.

Tim Cornelis

2nd March 2013, 11:15

I'm in fucking bizarro land. I think it's time to go to sleep because this thread is an anti-Leninist cesspit of reactionary "Black Book of Communism" scumbaggery.

Kindness referred to a piece whose source was this: George Leggett. The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police Oxford University Press, 1986. ISBN 0-19-822862-7 pages 197-198
Not the Black Book of Communism.

This is just ultraleft slander.

Lenin was as authoritarian as he had to be.

Let's get free really translates into let's get revisionist and let the imperialist invade.

Ultraleft slander: Lenin was authoritarian
You: Lenin was authoritarian

Lenin did what he needed to do, would you rather he played nice and had the revolution fall to imperialism so they could have had an Iraq like occupation? There are no good or bad guys in history, there is only the result of material conditions. So stop moralizing as if morality isn't amaterial bullshit designed to keep the toiling classes in intellectual backwardness.

You're so edgy with your amoralism! Don't pretend you don't have a moral framework.

But thank god, scalping and torturing people to death saved Russia from imperialism!

You Leninists are so warped in your logic.

Morality is mostly empathy. It's not "designed" unless you believe in God.

Extremely democratic, when the circumstances permitted, and extremely authoritarian, when the circumstances required authoritarianism. Surely, viewing dictatorship and democracy as irreconcilable opposites is a sign of mechanicist, anti-dialectical thinking?

I don't see how authoritarianism is required.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

2nd March 2013, 11:40

Kindness referred to a piece whose source was this: George Leggett. The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police Oxford University Press, 1986. ISBN 0-19-822862-7 pages 197-198
Not the Black Book of Communism.

As if that book, that liberally cites from such reliable sources as Denikin and Chernov, is any better.

Morality is mostly empathy. It's not "designed" unless you believe in God.

Judicial murder of revolutionaries, or free women, and so on, blessing imperialist wars of plunder, that is all "mostly empathy", apparently! No, one does not have to believe in the good lord God to recognise the function played by bourgeois morality in the maintenance of the bourgeois dictatorship, and in fact belief in the lord God, or some universal, semi-theological, classless morality only hinders that recognition.

I don't see how authoritarianism is required.

It isn't, unless you think something should have been done about the White bandits, about the pogromists, kulak insurgents, the demoralised peasant army, etc. etc. - if you think the entire soviet administration should have simply sat on their hands while Russia, and more importantly Russian workers, burned, then no, authoritarianism was not needed. Perhaps a state that did nothing while proto-fascists burned and murdered their way through it would even receive the most moral accolades of our most moral pacifists - if anyone cared enough to remember them.

Rurkel

2nd March 2013, 11:44

I don't see how authoritarianism is required. It can be required in order to achieve victory over the opposing forces. There's something to be said for Russian revolution starting to degenerate process since its first months, but you can't just go and automatically blame the degeneration on Lenin.

Of course, there is such thing as unnecessary authoritarianism. The grand majority of torture falls into that category. If you can demonstrate that Lenin tolerated sadistic torturers, that would be a legitimate charge against him.

The liquidation of the class implies dissolving the economic relations that constitute that class, not murder. Admittedly, some self-proclaimed communists have problems understanding that :D Lenin, afaik, never spoke about "liquidating the poor peasants as a class" anyway.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

2nd March 2013, 11:53

Of course, there is such thing as unnecessary authoritarianism. The grand majority of torture falls into that category. If you can demonstrate that Lenin tolerated sadistic torturers, that would be a legitimate charge against him.

I think it is possible, maybe even probable, that some of the chekists committed excesses, but one should keep in mind how decentralised the VeCheKa was. There was no time for the praesidium in Moscow to approve every decision by the local extraordinary commissions. And an extreme minority of CheKa units connected to the "left" Esers even turned against the soviet power during the LSR "revolution".

As for Lenin himself, I think his conduct in the Oldenburg case, and his correction of some very rash statements by Latsis, are evidence enough.

Admittedly, some self-proclaimed communists have problems understanding that :D Lenin, afaik, never spoke about "liquidating the poor peasants as a class" anyway.

True, but much is made of the subsequent liquidation of the kulaks as a class. And the liquidation of all middle and large peasantry as peasantry, as the petite bourgeoisie, was surely assumed.

Tim Cornelis

2nd March 2013, 19:58

As if that book, that liberally cites from such reliable sources as Denikin and Chernov, is any better.

So sources can only be reliable if they are by people you are politically in agreement with?

Judicial murder of revolutionaries, or free women, and so on, blessing imperialist wars of plunder, that is all "mostly empathy", apparently!

Do you even know what empathy is? It is the degree to which you emotionally sympathise with others or other things. They had no moral objections to murder because their empathy did not extent so far.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empathy

It isn't, unless you think something should have been done about the White bandits, about the pogromists, kulak insurgents, the demoralised peasant army, etc. etc. - if you think the entire soviet administration should have simply sat on their hands while Russia, and more importantly Russian workers, burned, then no, authoritarianism was not needed. Perhaps a state that did nothing while proto-fascists burned and murdered their way through it would even receive the most moral accolades of our most moral pacifists - if anyone cared enough to remember them.

This is beyond ridiculous. Not being authoritarian implies not doing anything apparently. Maybe look up the meaning of authoritarianism as well:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism

Spoiler: the use of authority is not authoritarian by definition.

cantwealljustgetalong

2nd March 2013, 20:19

This is a question whose answer is lost to time. There is no unbiased approach to this, no matter how objective you try to be about it, due to the highly politicized nature of many of the sources. What should be recognized is that much of 'textbook Lenin' comes from White Army and Makhnovist sources, and both of these groups were involved in performing the same kinds of horrific slaughter as part of the war. No indictment of Lenin ever seems to mention the anti-Jewish pogroms going on by White and Black army forces at the time, and how this was never institutionally corrected (as were pogroms carried about by Bolsheviki Red Army forces), or anything else the social democrats and anarchists did that casts them in a negative light.

Any attempt to turn this into a Kantian moral argument should recognize all sides of atrocity in the Russian Civil War; otherwise we are regurgitating bourgeois propaganda and not approaching the situation critically.

Kindness

2nd March 2013, 20:21

How where the imperialist white army beautiful human beings? Yes they where so beautiful when they crucified, raped and decapitated anyone who they even suspected of having socialist leanings or being sympathetic towards the Bolsheviks. They where oh so beautiful when they carried out anti-Jewish pogroms that would have made the Nazis green with envy. A white force under the command of Anton Denkin slaughtered a estimated 1500 Jews who where mostly elderly or women and children in Fastiv, Ukraine alone. Such beautiful people indeed :rolleyes:

But seeing as you are a pacifist i guess you would have sat by and done nothing while the white army slaughtered these people. Going by the logic (if you can even call it that) of pacifism the world should have sat by and done nothing while the Nazis slaughtered everyone who did not fit into their stupid mythical Aryan race. When would you pick up a gun? When they where about to string up your mother and rape your sister and g/f? Oh wait i guess even then you couldn't shoot back because you could possibly kill one of those beautiful anti-Semitic mad men.

There really is no greater gift to tyranny then people who sit by and do nothing all because they follow the misguided ideology of pacifism.

I'm not against the use of violence in direct self-defense if there is truly no non-violent option available. In such cases, the minimum amount of harm should be inflicted on the perpetrator to protect oneself / one's family. If, for example, Nazis broke into one's house and were determined to rape / kill, a person has a right to defend herself and her family with deadly force if necessary, but with non-lethal force if possible.

Lenin's violent crimes, however, were not done in self-defense, nor were they confined to military attacks on the White Army. He ordered the torture and murder of prisoners of war (who were in no way a threat), as well as completely innocent farmers, landowners, kulaks, anarchists, liberal democrats, anti-Bolshevik socialists, and others who were just peacefully living their lives. Those were not justified homicides, but brutal, immoral killings by a bloodthirsty maniac.

Edit: I don't support the White Army any more than I support Lenin's Bolsheviks. Both were criminal gangs bent on the destruction of human life, both committed atrocities, and both deserve a dark place in history.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

2nd March 2013, 20:24

So sources can only be reliable if they are by people you are politically in agreement with?

Not really; the records of the RSHA, for example, are reliable sources when it comes to Nazi police actions. But the propagandistic accounts of proto-Nazis, that could not have been familiar with the operations of the CheKa, are simply unacceptable sources. Their wide acceptance in anti-communist literature simply indicates how intellectually bankrupt that genre is.

Do you even know what empathy is? It is the degree to which you emotionally sympathise with others or other things. They had no moral objections to murder because their empathy did not extent so far.

I know what empathy is very well; I am simply pointing out how naive the claim that the morality that had sanctioned and sanctified those acts is "mostly empathy".

Spoiler: the use of authority is not authoritarian by definition.

But to instil an iron discipline in the army, to smash the White armies without mercy and to eliminate the White spies and saboteurs, to take hostages and to destroy the landowner and Kulak uprisings - that required an authoritarian approach.

Yuppie Grinder

2nd March 2013, 20:37

ITT: Moralistic anarchists and revisionazis, neither of which have a very nuanced understanding of 1917.

homegrown terror

2nd March 2013, 22:31

i think a lot of people who idolise lenin are mostly looking at his pre-power era. the see his ideas and concepts from a kinda idealist perspective, and choose to focus on that. in the end, i think he could have done a lot of good, but as we all know, power corrupts, and somewhere along the way he and his cronies lost sight of what the revolution was SUPPOSED to be about.

Art Vandelay

2nd March 2013, 22:35

i think a lot of people who idolise lenin are mostly looking at his pre-power era. the see his ideas and concepts from a kinda idealist perspective, and choose to focus on that. in the end, i think he could have done a lot of good,

No offense, but I think this is actually the exact opposite. Those who generally have a good understanding of Lenin's work, see him as simply a genuine Marxist. He made some theoretical contributions to Marxism, however he is generally praised more for being an astute politician and revolutionary leader.

but as we all know, power corrupts, and somewhere along the way he and his cronies lost sight of what the revolution was SUPPOSED to be about.

No we don't and no it doesn't.

Kindness

2nd March 2013, 22:45

Le Socialiste

2nd March 2013, 23:08

Power does indeed corrupt -- that's one thing on which I agree with the anarchists. Name one political dictator / politician of significant authority who did not commit at least some corrupt actions. There is not one.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

If that's the case, what's the point of the working-class ever gaining power over the bourgeoisie? Sounds a little defeatist...

Kindness

2nd March 2013, 23:11

If that's the case, what's the point of the working-class ever gaining power over the bourgeoisie? Sounds a little defeatist...

The idea would be that power would be spread out among a wide variety of people, to prevent the problem the USSR had with dictatorship.

Also, I'm a little unorthodox here, but my goal isn't to see the working class gain power over the capitalist class, but for the oppression of the working class to end and for a new, equal society to rise, in which no class of people is dominated by another class (in fact, a society where class does not exist).

Le Socialiste

2nd March 2013, 23:17

Althusser

2nd March 2013, 23:40

I would rather he'd not torture and murder thousands of beautiful, unique human beings. I'd also rather he'd not crush democracy and set up an authoritarian state in which the people had no say. That is not moralism, but humanism and socialism.

As someone else said, acting as if every action committed in Russia during that period was a result of Lenin or even that Lenin is personally responsible for deaths and torturing described by anti-communists, is the worst kind of "Great Man Theory" idealist Hegelian nonsense.

I'm a metaphysical naturalist, but I think "dialectical materialism" is facile nonsense. Socially constructed norms, values, and institutions, along with human agency, shape actions, not just economic conditions and relations to the means of production. Economics plays a role, but it is not the only factor.

That's where your problem lies.

Socially constructed norms and values are a reflection of material conditions and relation to the means of production. Can you explain further this "human agency" and the socially constructed institutions you mentioned?

I'm not against the use of violence in direct self-defense if there is truly no non-violent option available. In such cases, the minimum amount of harm should be inflicted on the perpetrator to protect oneself / one's family. If, for example, Nazis broke into one's house and were determined to rape / kill, a person has a right to defend herself and her family with deadly force if necessary, but with non-lethal force if possible.

1.) You don't think killing nazis in the street (or tsar loyalists) is a good thing, in fact you feel they should be dealt with non-lethally unless they are a bout to rape or kill you. DYYYAeSWOlI

2.) Since your a pacifist and don't condone violent insurrection by the proletariat (because of your ridiculous idealist standards) you don't belong here. You aren't a revolutionary. I wouldn't be surprised if you're from some liberal organization bent on converting us. Oh mods... restrict this guy for being a pacifist! (And I don't use that card often. I'm usually the guy defending people's reactionary views because I feel bad and think there is some hope of enlightening them)

Once again, http://www.democraticunderground.com/. (Though I'm almost positive you have this favorited)

Art Vandelay

2nd March 2013, 23:43

There is a serious problem with liberalism on this site.

MarxArchist

2nd March 2013, 23:57

The idea would be that power would be spread out among a wide variety of people, to prevent the problem the USSR had with dictatorship.

Also, I'm a little unorthodox here, but my goal isn't to see the working class gain power over the capitalist class, but for the oppression of the working class to end and for a new, equal society to rise, in which no class of people is dominated by another class (in fact, a society where class does not exist).
But this can't happen without force be it centralized (Marxist) or decentralized (anarchist) expropriation. Either way the process will be violent and coercive because trillionaires, billionaires, millionaires and millions of their reactionary followers aren't just going to welcome a new economic base, unless of course it's painfully obvious that capitalism con no longer function but even then there will be a lot of people arguing for a new form of capitalism or fascism.

This is why I don't think revolution, right now, is possible in advanced western nations and I don't think 'socialist' revolutions should be taking place right now in non advanced regions. People still see it as a progressive system which can provide a 'comfortable' life. These are the multitude of millions who will, now, support capitalism. There's also multitudes of millions who, now, don't see capitalism as a progressive system which can provide a comfortable life and these, right now, are the people we need to connect with.

A lot of people disagree with me (idealists) but there's going to be a material foundation for ending capitalism and this will be when the system itself can hardly generate profits. We may see pockets of idealist revolt but for a global revolution to usher in socialism capitalism is going to have to enter a crisis like we have yet to experience. In those conditions it will be less likley to be a 'civil war' scenario as most people will be ready to junk the capitalist system.

For me the most important thing is to work in the community helping to facilitate proper class consciousness so when the opportunity does arise we can have a majority working class movement ready to, as Orwell said:

But the proles, if only they could somehow become conscious of their own strength. would have no need to conspire. They needed only to rise up and shake themselves like a horse shaking off flies

cantwealljustgetalong

3rd March 2013, 00:11

CyM

3rd March 2013, 00:36

Actually, the revolution was quite democratic and peaceful. In fact, the most democratic state in human history is how I would describe what existed for a shirt period after 1917, until the bureaucratic counterrevolution under stalin.

Was the provisional government democracy? If it was, why was Trotsky in prison, why was the bolshevik printing press smashed and their newspaper banned? I think it would be quite foolish to consider that regime democratic.

The revolution against the provisional regime that refused to end the war was a populare revolution that found not a single opponent willing to risk their lives to maintain the old order.

It passed without a shot more or less. More people died on the set of the movie made about it.

It is the ferocious attack after the revolutiom that was the real violence.

You cannot choose between the bolsheviks and some lovey dovey democracy, that was not the choice. The choice wad between the Bolsheviks and around 20 invading armies. Between the bolsheviks and denikin's fascist white army. The white army who carried out mass rapes, mass murder of jews, mass execution of communists and trade unionists in the areas they took over.

The civil war was not a war between evil Lenin and some sort of liberal wet dream. It was between the workers' party under Lenin and the slaveowners who wanted their slaves back.

If they had won, it would have probably ended with a regime not very different from Hitler's. In fact, it is likely it would have been far worse. Hitler's regime arose because of the need to beat the workers back into submission, and its ferocity was a reflection of the intensity of the attempted revolutions that came before it.

Compare that to a successful revolution, and you understand that the murders would have had to have been on a far vaster scale in order to teach the slaves a lesson.

Every revolutionary defeat ends in these mass murders, look at Franco's Spain, Pinochet's Chile, the defeat of the Paris Commune, etc...

What the liberals argue for is that the revolutionaries were wrong to even try, should have not had a revolution. History shows that that you don't have the option of telling the workers to go home.

The revolution had to happen, and had Lenin and the bolsheviks not won, we would have had Fascism. In the final analysis, the liberal moralists tie our hands and tell us to act morally, while the fascist guns us down.

If you cannot defend the bolshevik revolution against the fascist threat which was the alternative, I don't see why you won't sell us out to the future pinochet on the same moral basis.

Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist

3rd March 2013, 00:44

I would rather he'd not torture and murder thousands of beautiful, unique human beings. I'd also rather he'd not crush democracy and set up an authoritarian state in which the people had no say. That is not moralism, but humanism and socialism.

I'm a metaphysical naturalist, but I think "dialectical materialism" is facile nonsense. Socially constructed norms, values, and institutions, along with human agency, shape actions, not just economic conditions and relations to the means of production. Economics plays a role, but it is not the only factor.

Ok then let's apply your standards then, lets go on about "morality" shall we?

You, as an individual, are a member of the capitalist system. Everyone who walks on the earth participates in it because participating in it guarantees the best possible livelihood that you can have under the present conditions. However, by participating in it, you are contributing to it and supporting it. It is with your dollar that the capitalists commit genocide, instigate imperialist wars, destroy the environment, and oppress and exploit the broad masses of the world.

So with this in mind, you are a part of the system that is oppressing billions. You are as guilty as everyone else. Now who is more moral, Lenin, whose actions could have resulted in the abolition of this system, or yours, who have done nothing but prop it up by participating in it.

cantwealljustgetalong

3rd March 2013, 00:47

There is a serious problem with liberalism on this site.

And it's our duty to comradely help those that come here, including ourselves, out of the liberal bubble. It is the learning section, after all.

Tim Cornelis

3rd March 2013, 00:52

Not really; the records of the RSHA, for example, are reliable sources when it comes to Nazi police actions. But the propagandistic accounts of proto-Nazis, that could not have been familiar with the operations of the CheKa, are simply unacceptable sources. Their wide acceptance in anti-communist literature simply indicates how intellectually bankrupt that genre is.

Ok. The RSHA and Nazi records prove something that is favourable to you: atrocious actions, and therefore is reliable. Accounts by anti-Bolsheviks prove something that is unfavourable to you, therefore they are not reliable. Is that it then?

I know what empathy is very well; I am simply pointing out how naive the claim that the morality that had sanctioned and sanctified those acts is "mostly empathy".

This is what we call "ant fucking" in Dutch, or hair splitting in English. Let me rephrase: a moral framework is primarily empathy or the absence thereof. Those acts were sanctified by their morality because they had no empathy towards those whom against they committed those acts.

But to instil an iron discipline in the army, to smash the White armies without mercy and to eliminate the White spies and saboteurs, to take hostages and to destroy the landowner and Kulak uprisings - that required an authoritarian approach.

Instilling iron discipline lead to demoralisation and contributed the desertion of almost three million troops from the Red Army -- three million. Some even put the number at 4 million by 1921.
Taking hostages, nice one. I suppose arguing against the immorality of such an act would be futile given your lack of empathy for such victims. Maybe point out the counter-productivity would be more... productive. Kidnappings, for instance, contributed to the declining support for the FARC and fortunately they saw this and have since given up on it.

In any case, you don't need 'authoritarianism' to smash uprisings or counter-revolutions, certainly not scalping and poison gas.

The reaction of 'you no do what I like, I smash you' is primitive, instinctive, and usually counter-productive. We know full well that this is an instinctive reaction to crime but not a productive one.

Imagine how quickly the Zapatistas would have lost support if they began suppressing dissent from their communal councils, how this would have lead to a declining popular support, and growing resistance to such violent repression. It would likely culminate in an uprising against the Zapatistas and then imagine them using poison gas on the resisters. How many here would support the Zapatistas then, claiming such authoritarianism was necessary in order to hold their ground against the Mexican state? I hope everyone here would have the sanity to see the error in such authoritarianism.

It would end in Zapatista rule over peasants and agricultural workers, not by.

I hope this shows the ludicrousness of invoking the need for authoritarianism to defend a revolution as it results in the reverse of this.

P.S.
"Without mercy," I always wonder with you people. Do you even talk like that in real life or do you realise how ridiculous it would sound? Is it to sound 'edgy' or 'kewl'? It makes you sound like you're in a cult, don't let your parents hear you talk like that!

Power does indeed corrupt -- that's one thing on which I agree with the anarchists. Name one political dictator / politician of significant authority who did not commit at least some corrupt actions. There is not one.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

“It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.”

Aung San Suu Kyi

The Bolsheviks did not corrupt because they had power, but because they were afraid of losing it. Stalin did not corrupt because he had power but because he was afraid of losing it. The internationally (and nationally) hostile environment for the Bolsheviks and later Stalin lead them to fear for the loss of power, and therewith the losses of the gains made by the revolution, and resulted in hysterical authoritarian measures that turned out to be self-defeating. It was a slippery slope of fighting counter-revolutionaries to dissenters.

There is a serious problem with liberalism on this site.

Just shut up. I know some of you orthodox marxist hipsters like to play the 'prolier than thou' game a lot, but it has no basis in this argument. You're not objecting to liberalism, you're objecting to a combination of pragmatism and common sense.

Actually, the revolution was quite democratic and peaceful. In fact, the most democratic state in human history is how I would describe what existed for a shirt period after 1917, until the bureaucratic counterrevolution under stalin..

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_communism

#FF0000

3rd March 2013, 00:56

Goddamn, the responses here are so off-base and positively cartoonish in their portrayal of Lenin's USSR.

In any case, I wouldn't really uphold the early USSR as a good example of a democratic society. From what I've read, the Bolsheviks certainly had aspirations towards those ends and made moves to create a bottom-up, democratic society, but they didn't really succeed for a whole lot of reasons (some beyond the Bolsheviks control, others not so much), namely the actual machinery for ground-up democratic decision making being totally broken and shitty.

#FF0000

3rd March 2013, 03:23

That being said, I don't think people who question those aspirations of democracy the Bolsheviks claimed or others claim they had, considering how they came to power in the first place, pretty much taking down the provisional government unilaterally, and then forming a new government with Bolsheviks at the head of everything,

#FF0000

3rd March 2013, 03:43

This is quite convincing.

I usually seriously doubt the veracity of the claims people make about the Red Terror, tbh, given what I've learned about the condition of the actual "state" in the USSR. It was a barely functioning thing in a death spiral from the early going.

Be sure to look at sources.

EDIT: George Leggett and the Black Book. Bullshit ahead.

l'EnfermÃ©

3rd March 2013, 03:58

According to this thread, Lenin went all Vlad-the-Impaler on the clergy's ass(and crucified, scalped and boiled them, too, for good measure), turned naked prisoners into living ice statues, rolled people around in barrels studded with nails, and killed "all the patient in the hospital" in Kislovodsk for some reason(maybe because he could see into the future and learned that in 1918 the glorious freedom fighter Solzhenitsyn would be born there?).

Oh, Revleft...

http://gfx.quakeworld.nu/files/327.jpg

Drosophila

3rd March 2013, 04:02

I would rather he'd not torture and murder thousands of beautiful, unique human beings.

Oh boy, it's gonna be fun having you on this site :rolleyes:

Leninist

3rd March 2013, 04:05

those who "accuse" comrade Lenin of not being "democratic" should read this again and again and again:
marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/dec/23.htm

those who "accuse" comrade Lenin of being authoritarian, why don't you make a revolution without being authoritarian when it's necessary to oppress the once oppressors, so we can see how it happens?

Comrade Lenin was the great leader of the first proletarian revolution ever took place in the entire history of humanity so far. He was the first, he had no role model, no example. He had to take the most critical decisions every day that would seal great Soviet Union's fate. He was no "prophet" nor he was a "god". He was great comrade Lenin, a real Marxist who had to take crucial decisions every single day with the guidance of Marxism.

criticizing comrade Lenin with the notions and arguments of his enemies, the imperialists, must be a bad joke.

Imperialists and capitalists have killed and still are killing proletarians and poor peoples and petite bourgeois people everyday in life, in occupational accidents, in wars, from hunger, from starving, etc.
you see no problem in those killings because it has become ordinary in life for you, a part of daily life under imperialistic capitalism. because you have become inured, you got used to it.

but then you fall for imperialism's propaganda that bolsheviks under great Lenin and comrade Stalin mass murdered millions of people. you fall for bourgeoisie's propaganda that there is an alternative method to change the system for better, other than making an armed revolution as in great October Revolution.

that is exactly what great Lenin warned us Marxists about, that renegades, revisionists and opportunists like Kautsky and others would try to convince us that we should stick with social democracy and leave Marxism.

No sir, we will not fall for it, we will condemn social democracy and stick with Marxism-Leninism till the dawn of communism's world-wide triumph!

Long live comrade Lenin, long live Great Socialist October Revoluiton!

Leninist

3rd March 2013, 04:06

Kalinin's Facial Hair

3rd March 2013, 04:13

Well, since you like wikipedia so much, you might as well look at "White Terror" article.

Then you might understand why Lenin "was so evil" against "unique and beautiful human beings", who were reactionary, agents of counter-revolution.

The bourgeoisie has no pity of communists, why should communists be merciful with the bourgeoisie?

Orange Juche

3rd March 2013, 04:13

Oh boy, it's gonna be fun having you on this site :rolleyes:

Yeah I know, right? Not wanting people to be tortured and killed is so silly!

Orange Juche

3rd March 2013, 04:15

The bourgeoisie has no pity of communists, why should communists be merciful with the bourgeoisie?

Because we aren't children with an unhinged bloodlust. Well, at least the sane ones of us.

Kalinin's Facial Hair

3rd March 2013, 04:23

Because we aren't children with an unhinged bloodlust. Well, at least the sane ones of us.

No bloodlust desire here, comrade. I just recognize the right to self-defense of a successful revolution.

I'm not preaching "kill torture blood!", I'm saying: the proletariat has the right to defend itself from the bourgeoisie. If the bourgeoisie is violent, what will the proletariat do? Try to convince them through talk?

Orange Juche

3rd March 2013, 04:29

No bloodlust desire here, comrade. I just recognize the right to self-defense of a successful revolution.

I'm not preaching "kill torture blood!", I'm saying: the proletariat has the right to defend itself from the bourgeoisie. If the bourgeoisie is violent, what will the proletariat do? Try to convince them through talk?

There's a difference between people engaging in violent attacks, and expressing ideas. Under Lenin, or Stalin, it's not like were I a libertarian (for example) I'd get away with handing out flyers and holding up a sign about it on a streetcorner, much less be able to express that publicly at all. And believe me, I despise libertarianism.

But I'm interested in there being no more oppression, not a new form of it - and I seriously don't buy in to the idea that you have to eliminate such "elements" by force or the power of the state - these are human beings, despite the ridiculous crap they believe in.

Kalinin's Facial Hair

3rd March 2013, 04:32

1) You can't possibly think that only oppressive white-army reactionaries were killed and tortured?
Of course no. In that case, it is obviously unfortunate (sorry I lack the knowledge of a more suitable word). It is a tragedy, no doubt.

2) Two wrongs do not make a right.

Being peaceful when reaction is not, equals capitulation.

Kalinin's Facial Hair

3rd March 2013, 04:43

There's a difference between people engaging in violent attacks, and expressing ideas. Under Lenin, or Stalin, it's not like were I a libertarian (for example) I'd get away with handing out flyers and holding up a sign about it on a streetcorner, much less be able to express that publicly at all. And believe me, I despise libertarianism.

And then again, handing out flyers about libertarianism (to use your example) during a Civil War is an act of counter revolution. Furthermore, you might be oppressed by the workers themselves, not Lenin, the evil dictator.

But I'm interested in there being no more oppression, not a new form of it - and I seriously don't buy in to the idea that you have to eliminate such "elements" by force or the power of the state - these are human beings, despite the ridiculous crap they believe in.

I have no problems with people who believe in different things, I have a problem with people who try to wipe out a revolution. I am as well interested in the extinction of oppression, but this will only happen, unfortunately, through oppression of another class.

To be honest, I was against violence until I read some Victor Serge. The way he describes what the white terror did with Finnish communists or what happened to the communards (the list goes on and on) made myself realize that it is class war.

Kalinin's Facial Hair

3rd March 2013, 04:45

No one here, I think, is attacking revolution, only terrorism, torture, etc of people especially those who weren't participating in the White Terror.

In that case I agree with you. Torturing is an awful (I again lack a proper word), terrible inhuman activity.

Orange Juche

3rd March 2013, 04:58

And then again, handing out flyers about libertarianism (to use your example) during a Civil War is an act of counter revolution. Furthermore, you might be oppressed by the workers themselves, not Lenin, the evil dictator.

I have no problems with people who believe in different things, I have a problem with people who try to wipe out a revolution. I am as well interested in the extinction of oppression, but this will only happen, unfortunately, through oppression of another class.

To be honest, I was against violence until I read some Victor Serge. The way he describes what the white terror did with Finnish communists or what happened to the communards (the list goes on and on) made myself realize that it is class war.

Handing out flyers really is just handing out flyers - if it was counter revolution, it would be picking up a gun, or aiding in the organization of those who would do acts of violence. I tend to think that the mentality with which you're approaching this, intentional or not, is false equivocation with said violence/aiding in violence. And if handing out flyers or holding up a sign is "wiping out a revolution", then the idea the revolution is fighting for is so extremely weak it can't stand on its own two feet. I don't buy that actual socialism is weak, and therefore those such as libertarians would be a non-issue, because the success of socialism itself would make them irrelevant. Pests, at worst.

l'EnfermÃ©

3rd March 2013, 05:24

Wait, everyone here is aware of the fact that the Bolsheviks did not employ torture to any considerably extent during the Civil War, right?

The Red Comet

3rd March 2013, 05:36

This thread is so full of Liberalism I don't even know what to say or think. Lenin did what he had to do to secure the position of the revolution. It's not like Lenin woke up one day and said, "Hey. I feel like murdering people today." Why are people using sources from The Black Book of Communsim to justify their positions? Is it okay to use biased right-wing Anti-Marxist sources when it benefits you?

I'm sorry, but Anarchist need to get over Kronstadt and the fact that the Russian Revolution wasn't theirs. Or that any successful revolution has ever been theirs. I feel no pity for counter-revolutionaries.

Kindness

3rd March 2013, 05:43

Wait, everyone here is aware of the fact that the Bolsheviks did not employ torture to any considerably extent during the Civil War, right?

Actually, that is incorrect. The Bolsheviks did indeed carry out a systematic campaign of torture during and after the Russian Civil War.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheka

Kindness

3rd March 2013, 05:44

This thread is so full of Liberalism I don't even know what to say or think.

Opposition to torture and murder is not liberalism.

Lenin did what he had to do to secure the position of the revolution.

As I've said earlier and will say again, the ends don't justify the means.

I'm sorry, but Anarchist need to get over Kronstadt and the fact that the Russian Revolution wasn't theirs. Or that any successful revolution has ever been theirs. I feel no pity for counter-revolutionaries.

Every successful Stalinist revolution has ended in a totalitarian, murderous state. I don't want any more of that.

Orange Juche

3rd March 2013, 06:02

Opposition to torture and murder is not liberalism.

No, but it sure is a red herring (calling it liberalism).

The Red Comet

3rd March 2013, 06:21

Opposition to torture and murder is not liberalism

So how are you supposed to overthrow the Bourgeoisie? With picket signs? Tea Parties? I guess you could simply ask the Bourgeoisie to hand over the means of production.

Also how was the Bolshevik Revolution a Stalinist Revolution before Stalin even took power? Clever use of a time machine?

Die Neue Zeit

3rd March 2013, 06:43

For posters here to ponder, I'll leave this unorthodox but more unsettling quote by Lars Lih on what he calls "state monopoly campaignism":

The undemocratic part of Lenin's legacy comes in large part from European Social Democracy, while the Russian context contributed to the democratic part.

Drosophila

3rd March 2013, 06:52

Yeah I know, right? Not wanting people to be tortured and killed is so silly!

I don't really care about the torture argument one way or the other. My reaction was in response to his "beautiful and unique human beings" bullshit.

#FF0000

3rd March 2013, 07:17

this discussion is fucking bonkers goddamn

Althusser

3rd March 2013, 07:20

Kindness

3rd March 2013, 07:55

Anyone who fights against this transition, all those unique and beautiful fascists

People opposed to communism -- or in favor of a non-ML form of it -- are not fascists. That kind of absolutist "us vs. them" language is quite fascist, however. Fascists love to use facile binary thinking to produce an emotional response.

. . .trying to save capitalism, will be killed. End of story. If you and your pacifist liberal friends want to set yourself on fire to protest this, trust me, no one is stopping you. I'll even buy you the gasoline and a matchbook.

There seems to be a lot of anger in this post. I am morally opposed to murder. Period. I'm not willing to compromise that principle for any reason. Once one abandons his principles, he is capable of committing the worse atrocities. Lenin sacrificed his principles, and became a monster in the process. Even the noblest of plans can result in evil if they are pursued in unethical ways.

Not that this matters in any way, and I'm totally not ageist, but Kindness... how old are you? (I am not sure if telling a 13 yr. old to light themselves on fire is a kind thing to do.)

I'm twice that age.

Le Socialiste

3rd March 2013, 08:07

There seems to be a lot of anger in this post. I am morally opposed to murder. Period. I'm not willing to compromise that principle for any reason. Once one abandons his principles, he is capable of committing the worse atrocities. Lenin sacrificed his principles, and became a monster in the process. Even the noblest of plans can result in evil if they are pursued in unethical ways.

Would you attempt to stop those who are willing to engage in violence in revolutionary situations? What about those who choose to utilize arguably 'violent' means to defend themselves against conservative and reactionary elements?

MP5

3rd March 2013, 08:11

I'm not against the use of violence in direct self-defense if there is truly no non-violent option available. In such cases, the minimum amount of harm should be inflicted on the perpetrator to protect oneself / one's family. If, for example, Nazis broke into one's house and were determined to rape / kill, a person has a right to defend herself and her family with deadly force if necessary, but with non-lethal force if possible.

Lenin's violent crimes, however, were not done in self-defense, nor were they confined to military attacks on the White Army. He ordered the torture and murder of prisoners of war (who were in no way a threat), as well as completely innocent farmers, landowners, kulaks, anarchists, liberal democrats, anti-Bolshevik socialists, and others who were just peacefully living their lives. Those were not justified homicides, but brutal, immoral killings by a bloodthirsty maniac.

Edit: I don't support the White Army any more than I support Lenin's Bolsheviks. Both were criminal gangs bent on the destruction of human life, both committed atrocities, and both deserve a dark place in history.

If one waited for the white army or Nazis to come knocking at their door before they fought back you wouldn't stand a chance. The white army where pre fascists and they deserved every licking they got in the civil war and then some. Self defense does not always mean that you wait for them to attack first it can also mean that you hit them before they hit you. I certainly have no moral qualms about the killing of fascists or imperialists of any kind and the best defense is a good offense. Even though i am no Leninist and indeed i consider myself more of a Anarchist Communist then anything else but the Bolsheviks where by far the lesser of 2 evils evils. In fact i think that Lenin was far ahead of his time when it came to equal rights for women, Jews and other ethnic groups and homosexuals. He was far more socially liberal then most leaders are today even. For that alone he deserves alot of credit as accomplishing that during the early 1900's especially in a country as backwards as Russia was no easy task.

Where there mistakes made by Lenin and the Bolsheviks? Certainly there where such as democratic centralism and not doing more to get the Anarchists on side but they where certainly in the right when it came to putting down the white army with every means of terror available to them. You can only communicate with people through a language that they understand and the only language that the white army would have understood was violence. One does not want their enemy to love them one wants their enemy to fear them and to tremble at the mere mention of their name. Also i don't see how purely self defensive tactics and less then lethal force would have worked against the likes of the Nazis. The only way to deal with fascists is to kill them and keep killing them until there are none of them left or failing that not enough of them left to pose any threat at all. Personally i think the west is guilty of being way to soft on the fascists as they should have been dealt with in a much more brutal fashion then they where. More examples should have been made.

Could you imagine what would have happened during WW2 if the white army had won the Russian civil war? We would not only have had the Nazis to deal with but we would have had a fascist and very anti-Semitic Russia to deal with as well and i doubt very much that the allied forces could have put down both the Nazis and the whites. That would have been a worst case scenario for sure.

Are these elements trying to kill them or their families? What other options do they have? If a non-violent option is available, they should take it.

So you don't believe in killing reactionaries such as conservatives and fascists for the greater good? Their very existence poses a threat not only to our families but also anything good and decent in society. What are you going to do go stand outside the quarters of the SS and beg that they not mow you down with machine gun fire or throw you and your family into concentration camps? That is really going to get you far indeed :rolleyes:

Kindness

3rd March 2013, 08:11

Would you attempt to stop those who are willing to engage in violence in revolutionary situations?

Yes.

What about those who choose to utilize arguably 'violent' means to defend themselves against conservative and reactionary elements?

Are these elements trying to kill them or their families? What other options do they have? If a non-violent option is available, they should take it.

Le Socialiste

3rd March 2013, 08:17

Yes.

How so? Would you intervene physically?

Are these elements trying to kill them or their families? What other options do they have? If a non-violent option is available, they should take it.

Does solidarity end at the door of one's home? If a counterrevolution is being waged, do you wait passively until the aggressors are at your door before acting?

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

3rd March 2013, 09:40

Ok. The RSHA and Nazi records prove something that is favourable to you: atrocious actions, and therefore is reliable. Accounts by anti-Bolsheviks prove something that is unfavourable to you, therefore they are not reliable. Is that it then?

Oh for fuck's sake. Once again, the accounts were propagandistic in nature, and the esteemed pogromist gentlemen could not have been familiar with the operations of the CheKa. It makes as much sense to believe these accounts as it does to believe that the emperor Wilhelm was a helmeted gorilla that kidnapped attractive young women.

This is what we call "ant fucking" in Dutch, or hair splitting in English. Let me rephrase: a moral framework is primarily empathy or the absence thereof. Those acts were sanctified by their morality because they had no empathy towards those whom against they committed those acts.

An absence of empathy can not provide motivation for anything; and since bourgeois morality does not simply tolerate the acts I have described (and the judicial murder of homosexuals, forcing women to give birth etc. etc.), obviously it is quite more than "mostly empathy".

Instilling iron discipline lead to demoralisation and contributed the desertion of almost three million troops from the Red Army -- three million. Some even put the number at 4 million by 1921.

As if there was no desertion before the reorganisation of the army! But the chief difference is that the Red Army units would actually fight, instead of continuously retreating like the remnants of the Tsarist forces and the detachments of sailors.

Taking hostages, nice one. I suppose arguing against the immorality of such an act would be futile given your lack of empathy for such victims. Maybe point out the counter-productivity would be more... productive. Kidnappings, for instance, contributed to the declining support for the FARC and fortunately they saw this and have since given up on it.

How is that relevant? The FARC was a guerrilla movement with negligible popular support, surrounded on all sides by the bourgeois state; the Soviet government was, well, the government that presided over a revolutionary civil war and had the confidence of most of the workers and poor peasants.

The taking of hostages stopped the former Tsarist officers from sabotaging the war effort and going over to the White bandits; it helped crush the kulak insurgency in Penza and the Antonovshchina in Tambov, etc. etc.

What do you want me to do? Have sympathy for the counterrevolutionaries that were taken as hostages? But I would rather have sympathy for the millions that would have died if there had been no institution of the hostages, no extraordinary commission, and no Red Army.

In any case, you don't need 'authoritarianism' to smash uprisings or counter-revolutions, certainly not scalping and poison gas.

"Scalping" is one of those accusations that can only be traced to the propaganda of the Denikins and the Chkheidzes; as for poison gas, it was used by Antonov-Ovseenko and Tukhachevsky to destroy the bandits that had fled Tambov for the nearby forests after the Antonovshchina had been crushed; obviously it worked, since these bandits never harassed the population of Tambov again.

Imagine how quickly the Zapatistas would have lost support if they began suppressing dissent from their communal councils [...]

What "dissenters" in the soviets did the Bolsheviks suppress? The Mensheviks, or what remained of the Mensheviks after the progressive section had departed for the Mezhrayonka, the Internationalist group, and ultimately the Bolshevik party, and right Esers were only closed when they would not stop agitating against the Soviet government during a civil war; given that they openly supported White governments in Siberia and elsewhere, they probably should have been banned earlier. The left Esers were part of the government before they tried to blow up half the country and start a war with Germany. And even then, the left SR party was not banned, just those delegates that sided with the terrorists. The left Esers disintegrated soon after that, with the revolutionary majority forming a People's Communist Party that was absorbed into the RKP(b) eventually.

"Without mercy," I always wonder with you people. Do you even talk like that in real life or do you realise how ridiculous it would sound? Is it to sound 'edgy' or 'kewl'? It makes you sound like you're in a cult, don't let your parents hear you talk like that!

What cutting satire.

Just shut up. I know some of you orthodox marxist hipsters like to play the 'prolier than thou' game a lot, but it has no basis in this argument. You're not objecting to liberalism, you're objecting to a combination of pragmatism and common sense.

Common sense, perhaps, that last bastion of bourgeois philistinism, but there is not a modicum of pragmatism in the suggestion that the proletariat should accept the bourgeois morality that has been used as a weapon against it for centuries; there is no pragmatism in the notion that the revolution should abandon the Red Terror and be slaughtered by the bourgeoisie, the same bourgeoisie that your liberal idols will bless and defend.

That being said, I don't think people who question those aspirations of democracy the Bolsheviks claimed or others claim they had, considering how they came to power in the first place, pretty much taking down the provisional government unilaterally, and then forming a new government with Bolsheviks at the head of everything,

The October Revolution was initiated by the democratically elected Petrograd Soviet; and the left Socialist-Revolutionaries were members of the government until they tried to drag Russia back into the imperialist war, by blowing people up.

There's a difference between people engaging in violent attacks, and expressing ideas. Under Lenin, or Stalin, it's not like were I a libertarian (for example) I'd get away with handing out flyers and holding up a sign about it on a streetcorner, much less be able to express that publicly at all. And believe me, I despise libertarianism.

"Libertarianism" in the American sense, probably; libertarians in the older sense were members of the soviets and the Red Army from the very start (Serge, or Zheleznyak). And as long as you did not agitate against the Soviet Government, you would have been fine; I mean, the Soviet government let the social Tsarist Plekhanov publish his rag.

Would you attempt to stop those who are willing to engage in violence in revolutionary situations?

Yes.

Interesting. Would you have tried to stop the Red Army from shooting at the Whites? Would you have tried to stop the war against Nazi Germany?

Tim Cornelis

3rd March 2013, 12:07

Oh for fuck's sake. Once again, the accounts were propagandistic in nature, and the esteemed pogromist gentlemen could not have been familiar with the operations of the CheKa. It makes as much sense to believe these accounts as it does to believe that the emperor Wilhelm was a helmeted gorilla that kidnapped attractive young women.

I'm tempted to reiterate my last argument, but let's have this rest.

An absence of empathy can not provide motivation for anything; and since bourgeois morality does not simply tolerate the acts I have described (and the judicial murder of homosexuals, forcing women to give birth etc. etc.), obviously it is quite more than "mostly empathy".

Of course absence of empathy can provide motivation for something. A psychopath has no empathy and thus no moral framework. His actions are guided by uncompromising egoism. If he had had empathy this wouldn't be the case. Again, murder is justified by one's moral framework if empathy does not extent to the victims. This is common sense.

Also, you're conflating ethics with morality.

As if there was no desertion before the reorganisation of the army! But the chief difference is that the Red Army units would actually fight, instead of continuously retreating like the remnants of the Tsarist forces and the detachments of sailors.

This doesn't prove anything either way. The last part is a red herring.

How is that relevant? The FARC was a guerrilla movement with negligible popular support, surrounded on all sides by the bourgeois state; the Soviet government was, well, the government that presided over a revolutionary civil war and had the confidence of most of the workers and poor peasants.

I'm not here to discuss the FARC, but it enjoyed widespread popular support by peasants when it began as a self-defence force of peasant communities. My point was most don't appreciate kidnappings and it is counter-productive, I appealed to a recent example to make my case.

The taking of hostages stopped the former Tsarist officers from sabotaging the war effort and going over to the White bandits; it helped crush the kulak insurgency in Penza and the Antonovshchina in Tambov, etc. etc.

It also helped bury the revolution. And don't forget about the poison gas. If revolutions are the locomotive of history, the Bolsheviks stalled history.

What do you want me to do? Have sympathy for the counterrevolutionaries that were taken as hostages? But I would rather have sympathy for the millions that would have died if there had been no institution of the hostages, no extraordinary commission, and no Red Army.

I want you to use common sense and see how authoritarianism in the form of the Red Terror contributed to the degeneration of the Russian revolution. Excesses are unfortunate if they happen, but to the extent they occurred in the Russian Civil War was an overkill. Perhaps understandable at the time, and presumably I would have been a Bolshevik if I had lived then. In hindsight, however, with the information available to us now, we can see that the brute reaction of the Bolsheviks became its own gravedigger.

Had the Bolsheviks:

1) Utilised proportional violence
2) Not imposed, rash, top-down, undemocratic decisions

There would have been no reason

1) For peasants or workers to abandon the support for the Bolsheviks
2) The Red Army wouldn't have been bothered by peasant rebellions and could have aimed the full brunt of their armed power towards the defeat of the whites.

"Scalping" is one of those accusations that can only be traced to the propaganda of the Denikins and the Chkheidzes; as for poison gas, it was used by Antonov-Ovseenko and Tukhachevsky to destroy the bandits that had fled Tambov for the nearby forests after the Antonovshchina had been crushed; obviously it worked, since these bandits never harassed the population of Tambov again.

If you have such an objection to propaganda, why insist on using "bandits" to describe these peasant rebels when clearly this is pravda-like Soviet propaganda.

The population of Tambov was the rebellion. The peasants weren't whites, they were peasants who objected to Bolshevik authoritarianism, especially grain requisition. It were the Bolshevik "bandits" that harassed the population and had many of them locked away in lethal concentration camps.

What "dissenters" in the soviets did the Bolsheviks suppress? The Mensheviks, or what remained of the Mensheviks after the progressive section had departed for the Mezhrayonka, the Internationalist group, and ultimately the Bolshevik party, and right Esers were only closed when they would not stop agitating against the Soviet government during a civil war; given that they openly supported White governments in Siberia and elsewhere, they probably should have been banned earlier. The left Esers were part of the government before they tried to blow up half the country and start a war with Germany. And even then, the left SR party was not banned, just those delegates that sided with the terrorists. The left Esers disintegrated soon after that, with the revolutionary majority forming a People's Communist Party that was absorbed into the RKP(b) eventually.

I was talking about the suppression of free speech in general, and of leftists in particular.

Common sense, perhaps, that last bastion of bourgeois philistinism, but there is not a modicum of pragmatism in the suggestion that the proletariat should accept the bourgeois morality that has been used as a weapon against it for centuries; there is no pragmatism in the notion that the revolution should abandon the Red Terror and be slaughtered by the bourgeoisie, the same bourgeoisie that your liberal idols will bless and defend.

How clever. I was waiting to see when this accusation would come up, once again I'm bourgeois because I believe in self-emancipation instead of authoritarianism. You are also positioning a false dichotomy: the use of red terror or the defeat of the revolution. In reality, the red terror contributed to the defeat of the revolution. War communism and red terror invoked resistance from groups previously supportive of the Russian revolution and the Bolsheviks.

The accusation of "bourgeois liberalism" has no basis whatsoever. Liberalism is the democratic wing of capital. You advocate state management of capital, I advocate the abolition of capital. You favour authoritarianism over self-emancipation*, I the reverse.

As if objecting to primitive, infantile, violent, blood fetishism is somehow liberal, as if the bourgeois-liberal revolution of France did not involve terror. May be it is you who is the bourgeois-liberal for advocating revolutionary terror to uphold capital.

*Yes, they are mutually exclusive. Authoritarianism involves social organisation by a minority over a majority.

My arguments stem from pragmatism, excesses, while unfortunate, could be excusable to a certain point. To the extent they were used they became its own gravedigger.

The Bolsheviks were responsible for the outbreak of numerous popular rebellions against their regime for the implementation of War Communism. Unpopular, unsupported, undemocratic measures lead to peasant rebellions. Can seriously say that grain requisition was not bound to lead to popular uprisings against the Bolsheviks?

Rurkel

3rd March 2013, 12:27

Well, the majority of the peasants is petty-bourgeois scum j/k
Seriously, the relationship of a small landholder to communist movement in general and of peasantry towards the Bolsheviks is quite an interesting question.

Tim Cornelis

3rd March 2013, 14:32

What is common sense? Common sense is that when you impose the principle of "to each according to his abilities, to each according to his bare minimum" through grain requisition, the peasants will have no reason to produce beyond their bare minimum. Common sense is that when you punish peasants for not producing more they will be prone to revolt to your oppressive, authoritarian measures. Common sense is that when these peasants see the red army behave no better than the whites, they will support neither.

What is Irony? This is irony:

the discipline of bourgeois armies must be maintained by force; for this reason, flogging, tortures of every kind, and mass shootings, are not simply occasional incidents, but the foundations of order, discipline, 'military education'.

Bukharin and Preobrazhensky (ABC of Communism)

Crux

3rd March 2013, 15:10

The provisional government established after the February Revolution was a sort of liberal democracy. I think that is what he was referring to.

The Provisional Government of 1917 (pre-October Revolution) did.
Uh. No or at least not like any liberal democracy I've known. Voting rights for worker's and poor were severely limited, I don't remember the exact formula, but a rich man's vote was literally worth the vote of a worker or non-land owning farmer several times over. The Provisional Government also, let us not forget, pushed for a continuation of WW1.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

3rd March 2013, 15:30

I'm tempted to reiterate my last argument, but let's have this rest.

It's good that you chose not to reiterate your "last argument", simply mentioning it obliquely, because I might have pointed out, obliquely of course, how ridiculous the argument is in light of the example I had provided; it being perfectly irrelevant to any of my political positions whether kaiser Wilhelm was a screaming gorilla or not.

Let me ask you, comrade, do you find the reports of the appearance of the Blessed Virgin Mary in your favourite backwater credible? I mean, obviously you don't want to dismiss propagandistic accounts, so I don't see what other option you have.

Of course absence of empathy can provide motivation for something. A psychopath has no empathy and thus no moral framework. His actions are guided by uncompromising egoism. If he had had empathy this wouldn't be the case. Again, murder is justified by one's moral framework if empathy does not extent to the victims. This is common sense.

Common sense is a lot of things, apparently. Common sense is a colloquial use of the term "psychopath" without regard for psychological fact; common sense is the equation of a lack of restraint with motivation. Common sense is, in the last analysis, shooting one's own argument in the foot by providing the actual cause (egoism) while trying to blame murder on a simple lack of empathy.

Also, you're conflating ethics with morality.

They're the same bloody thing, even though some people have taken to calling things they like "morality" and things they don't like "ethics" or vice versa.

This doesn't prove anything either way. The last part is a red herring.

Let me get this straight: I mention that an authoritarian approach was necessary to instil discipline in the demoralised peasant army. In response, you cite statistics about the number of desertions from the Red Army, implying that this attempt to instil discipline failed. And when I point out that before the reorganisation the army was in a horrible state and could barely retreat in an orderly manner, this is a "red herring" and "doesn't prove anything"! Do the military victories after the reorganisation prove something then?

I'm not here to discuss the FARC, but it enjoyed widespread popular support by peasants when it began as a self-defence force of peasant communities. My point was most don't appreciate kidnappings and it is counter-productive, I appealed to a recent example to make my case.

You appealed to an example that has precisely nothing in common with the Russian Civil war. Perhaps it would be instructive to examine the Paris Commune, but you probably wouldn't want to publicly condemn the Parisian proletariat, so your avoidance of that example is understandable.

It also helped bury the revolution.

And don't forget about the poison gas. If revolutions are the locomotive of history, the Bolsheviks stalled history.

I want you to use common sense and see how authoritarianism in the form of the Red Terror contributed to the degeneration of the Russian revolution. Excesses are unfortunate if they happen, but to the extent they occurred in the Russian Civil War was an overkill. Perhaps understandable at the time, and presumably I would have been a Bolshevik if I had lived then. In hindsight, however, with the information available to us now, we can see that the brute reaction of the Bolsheviks became its own gravedigger.

These are all assertions without evidence: how did the Red Terror contribute to the "death" of the revolution?

Had the Bolsheviks:

1) Utilised proportional violence
2) Not imposed, rash, top-down, undemocratic decisions

There would have been no reason

1) For peasants or workers to abandon the support for the Bolsheviks
2) The Red Army wouldn't have been bothered by peasant rebellions and could have aimed the full brunt of their armed power towards the defeat of the whites.

What peasants had abandoned the Bolsheviks? What workers? Do you think it is an accident that of all the groups that claimed to have the workers and peasants on their side, only the Bolshevik Party survived?

In any case, in the first months after the October Revolution, the new authorities were reluctant to use violence. And what happened? Bandits and murderers like Purishkevich escaped unpunished; imprisoned Tsarist generals were let go and immediately joined the Whites; Eser terrorists started killing Soviet officials.

The Soviet government learned its lesson. Perhaps those that moralise over the CheKa and the Red Terror should as well.

As for Military Communism, how do you think the Red Army and the cities should have procured grain?

If you have such an objection to propaganda, why insist on using "bandits" to describe these peasant rebels when clearly this is pravda-like Soviet propaganda.

Rebels without demands and without a program? Come, now.

The population of Tambov was the rebellion. The peasants weren't whites, they were peasants who objected to Bolshevik authoritarianism, especially grain requisition. It were the Bolshevik "bandits" that harassed the population and had many of them locked away in lethal concentration camps.

This is a direct untruth. The concentration camps that the CheKa and the Red Army established in the Tambov gubernia were internment centres, not extermination camps.

I was talking about the suppression of free speech in general, and of leftists in particular.

What specific leftists? I had discussed concrete leftist parties and groups; I don't know why you would respond in so vague a manner unless you don't have specific examples.

The accusation of "bourgeois liberalism" has no basis whatsoever. Liberalism is the democratic wing of capital. You advocate state management of capital, I advocate the abolition of capital. You favour authoritarianism over self-emancipation*, I the reverse.

Oh, this again. Yes, I advocate state management of capital and I advocate the Red Terror and dictatorship over counterrevolutionary elements. It would be nice if we could just snap our fingers and construct a communist economy without prior transitional stages, and it would be nice if revolutions could happen without resistance by the former exploiters, without demoralised and declassed elements turning against the revolution, and if they could happen without a single bullet being fired. And it might be nice for the state to give me free chocolates and opium, but that won't happen either. History progresses without regard for what would be nice; the material conditions that determine social realities are not designed to make us feel good about ourselves.

As if objecting to primitive, infantile, violent, blood fetishism is somehow liberal, as if the bourgeois-liberal revolution of France did not involve terror. May be it is you who is the bourgeois-liberal for advocating revolutionary terror to uphold capital.

Blood fetishism? Sorry, I am not aroused by menstruation. Do you really think that Leninists like the thought of killing someone? If you do, that might be the most childish, ultrasectarian mischaracterisation of the Leninist position I have ever heard.

Very few people like killing and terror. But some of us recognise when they are necessary.

The Bolsheviks were responsible for the outbreak of numerous popular rebellions against their regime for the implementation of War Communism. Unpopular, unsupported, undemocratic measures lead to peasant rebellions. Can seriously say that grain requisition was not bound to lead to popular uprisings against the Bolsheviks?

Can you seriously say the Soviet government would have been able to buy the grain at market prices, and feed both the Red Army and the cities?

Tim Cornelis

3rd March 2013, 16:21

If you think my responses are too short, it's because I've decided not to engage in irrelevant comments or fallacies.

Common sense is a lot of things, apparently. Common sense is a colloquial use of the term "psychopath" without regard for psychological fact; common sense is the equation of a lack of restraint with motivation. Common sense is, in the last analysis, shooting one's own argument in the foot by providing the actual cause (egoism) while trying to blame murder on a simple lack of empathy.

Read again what I wrote. Empathy dictates one's moral framework. I have explained why. You haven't proven anything to the contrary. Egoism is the lack of empathy for others.

They're the same bloody thing, even though some people have taken to calling things they like "morality" and things they don't like "ethics" or vice versa.

No they are not.

Let me get this straight: I mention that an authoritarian approach was necessary to instil discipline in the demoralised peasant army. In response, you cite statistics about the number of desertions from the Red Army, implying that this attempt to instil discipline failed. And when I point out that before the reorganisation the army was in a horrible state and could barely retreat in an orderly manner, this is a "red herring" and "doesn't prove anything"! Do the military victories after the reorganisation prove something then?

No the second part of what you said was a red herring.

You appealed to an example that has precisely nothing in common with the Russian Civil war. Perhaps it would be instructive to examine the Paris Commune, but you probably wouldn't want to publicly condemn the Parisian proletariat, so your avoidance of that example is understandable.

I don't see why it's not acceptable to give an example of why X is bad to prove my point.

These are all assertions without evidence: how did the Red Terror contribute to the "death" of the revolution?

I already explained this.

What peasants had abandoned the Bolsheviks? What workers? Do you think it is an accident that of all the groups that claimed to have the workers and peasants on their side, only the Bolshevik Party survived?

Military victory and repression =/= popular support.

In any case, in the first months after the October Revolution, the new authorities were reluctant to use violence. And what happened? Bandits and murderers like Purishkevich escaped unpunished; imprisoned Tsarist generals were let go and immediately joined the Whites; Eser terrorists started killing Soviet officials.

I'm not against violence. I'm against authoritarianism.

The Soviet government learned its lesson. Perhaps those that moralise over the CheKa and the Red Terror should as well.

If you'd paid attention, you would realise I haven't appealed to morality as an argument.

As for Military Communism, how do you think the Red Army and the cities should have procured grain?

I don't know. The fall of industrial productivity lead to a fall in exchange with the countryside and subsequently resulted in a chain of events that resulted in disastrous policies and famine. If we can identify the cause of the fall of industrial productivity we might know what the Bolsheviks should have done differently.

Rebels without demands and without a program? Come, now.

You said it yourself, the soviet government learned its lesson by admitting to the demands of these rebels and ending grain requisition through the NEP.

This is a direct untruth. The concentration camps that the CheKa and the Red Army established in the Tambov gubernia were internment centres, not extermination camps.

I never claimed they were extermination camp. I pointed out they were lethal, with a death rate of 1/4 if I remember correctly.

What specific leftists? I had discussed concrete leftist parties and groups; I don't know why you would respond in so vague a manner unless you don't have specific examples.

The suppression of free speech for leftists in particular. I didn't mention specific examples.

[QUOTE=Semendyaev;2586260]Oh, this again. Yes, I advocate state management of capital and I advocate the Red Terror and dictatorship over counterrevolutionary elements. It would be nice if we could just snap our fingers and construct a communist economy without prior transitional stages, and it would be nice if revolutions could happen without resistance by the former exploiters, without demoralised and declassed elements turning against the revolution, and if they could happen without a single bullet being fired. And it might be nice for the state to give me free chocolates and opium, but that won't happen either. History progresses without regard for what would be nice; the material conditions that determine social realities are not designed to make us feel good about ourselves.

I don't argue we don't need a transitional phase.
The Bolsheviks induced resistance through counter-productive policies through their war communism.

Blood fetishism? Sorry, I am not aroused by menstruation. Do you really think that Leninists like the thought of killing someone? If you do, that might be the most childish, ultrasectarian mischaracterisation of the Leninist position I have ever heard.

Admittedly, that was a false characterisation.

Very few people like killing and terror. But some of us recognise when they are necessary.

They are counter-productive.

Can you seriously say the Soviet government would have been able to buy the grain at market prices, and feed both the Red Army and the cities?

Given that the result of grain requisition was an unprecedented fall in food production, which lead to a famine killing millions, I'd say buying food at market prices would have been preferable.

War Communism was a false medicine to the problems faced by the Russian revolution which exacerbated the social ills plaguing it, ultimately resulting in the death of millions and the self-defeat of the Russian revolution.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

3rd March 2013, 17:32

Read again what I wrote. Empathy dictates one's moral framework. I have explained why.

I need stronger glasses, then, because I have only been able to find assertions to the effect, without explanation; even disregarding how empathy is determined by moral ideology (for example, which of us would empathise with someone that tried to rape a woman and was killed?).

You haven't proven anything to the contrary. Egoism is the lack of empathy for others.

That's an interesting position. The religious fanatic, then, is always egotistic? And egotistic people can't feel empathy?

No they are not.

Then it should be no problem for you to cite a sentence that uses the words "ethics" or "morality" and whose meaning would change if the words were exchanged.

No the second part of what you said was a red herring.

Why?

I don't see why it's not acceptable to give an example of why X is bad to prove my point.

It is, but the example you have provided has nothing to do with the situation in Russia, circa 1918, and is perfectly irrelevant to this debate.

I already explained this.

Once again, you have asserted it without explanation, unless you think that peasant uprisings are obviously a sign of a failed revolution. And that is simply not the case; the Chouannerie did not mean the end of the French Revolution for example.

Military victory and repression =/= popular support.

In this case it does; what other advantages did Bolshevik Russia, besieged on all sides and filled with internal enemies have?

I'm not against violence. I'm against authoritarianism.

That is perfectly irrelevant, unless you think that the Soviet government could have responded to, for example, Tsarist officers going over to the White bandits or the sabotage attempts by the VIKZhel (and Kamenev and Zinoviev) without resorting to authoritarian methods.

I don't know. The fall of industrial productivity lead to a fall in exchange with the countryside and subsequently resulted in a chain of events that resulted in disastrous policies and famine. If we can identify the cause of the fall of industrial productivity we might know what the Bolsheviks should have done differently.

Sabotage and the civil war, neither of which the Bolsheviks were responsible for. Unless you count their unwillingness to resort to repressive methods sooner when confronted with sabotage by the VIKZhel, by the former ministry officials etc.

You said it yourself, the soviet government learned its lesson by admitting to the demands of these rebels and ending grain requisition through the NEP.

The Antonovshchina happened almost entirely after the prodrazvyorstka was abolished, and proposals about the end of War Communism were considered since the early 1920. So the facts are simply at variance with that interpretation.

I never claimed they were extermination camp. I pointed out they were lethal, with a death rate of 1/4 if I remember correctly.

That sounds suspiciously high, but is a high death rate really surprising given the conditions in Russia? And how many civilians would have died without the internment centres that removed them from the area of military operations?

The suppression of free speech for leftists in particular. I didn't mention specific examples.

Correct. And I would appreciate it if you did; surely, with all those suppressed leftists, you can remember one name?

I don't argue we don't need a transitional phase.

Why the animus toward "state management of capital" then?

Given that the result of grain requisition was an unprecedented fall in food production, which lead to a famine killing millions, I'd say buying food at market prices would have been preferable.

Productivity fell due to the atomisation of peasant holdings and the drought that hit the western regions; prodrazvyorstka might have led to a drop in productivity, but it also saved those poor peasants that would have literally been crucified by the Whites had the Soviet government only procured grain through market methods, with money it did not have.

Rurkel

3rd March 2013, 20:28

I am... extremely dubious in Bolshevik ability to prevent a famine of some kind in 1921. Both the Whites and the Reds used prodrazvertska-like methods - in fact, it were Tzarist authorities who started to use them immediately preceding the revolution. That suggests that there was simply no other reasonable way to ensure some basic grain supply to the cities and to the army as a result of a steady collapse of Russian agriculture productivity and the Bolsheviks did what they needed to do to survive. Sometimes harsh conditions do actually exist - the Bolsheviks were not omnipotent. Lenin was fairly explicit in portraying grain requisitions as extreme, forced measures, when establishing the foundation for NEP.

Antonovshchina happened almost entirely after the prodrazvyorstka was abolished, happened almost entirely after the prodrazvyorstka was abolishedAlmost, but not quite? Didn't it start in late August 1920, with prodrazvyorstka being abolished only in early spring the following year? I think it's a mistake to represent peasant uprisings just as "banditry" - they were far more problematic for the Reds then that. Having said so, I didn't joke about landholder peasants not actually being proletarians for nothing - I don't subscribe to the "die, petty bourgie peasant scum" line, but their interests are not necessary the interests of workers, as revealed by Marxist Material Analysis (tm).

#FF0000

3rd March 2013, 20:33

The October Revolution was initiated by the democratically elected Petrograd Soviet; and the left Socialist-Revolutionaries were members of the government until they tried to drag Russia back into the imperialist war, by blowing people up.

Er, I'm not really sure about that. The whole siege of the Winter Palace happened without anyone else in the Soviet knowing, unless I'm getting mixed up here. The Bolsheviks wanted to hold the meeting until the palace was seized so they could have make a grand proclamation at the beginning of it, but it went ahead anyway.

CyM

3rd March 2013, 21:17

Er, I'm not really sure about that. The whole siege of the Winter Palace happened without anyone else in the Soviet knowing, unless I'm getting mixed up here. The Bolsheviks wanted to hold the meeting until the palace was seized so they could have make a grand proclamation at the beginning of it, but it went ahead anyway.

It was the most known secret, but yes, the congress of soviets approved the action after the fact.

That being said, what he was talking about was the petrograd soviet, and the petrograd soviet authorized the Military Revolutionary Committee and its actions in defence of the coming congress of Soviets.

Leninist

4th March 2013, 00:24

Can There Be Equality Between the Exploited and the Exploiter?

...To make things clearer I shall quote Marx and Engels to show what they said on the subject of dictatorship apropos of the Paris Commune:

Marx: “...When the workers replace the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie by their revolutionary dictatorship ... to break down the resistance of the bourgeoisie ... the workers invest the state with a revolutionary and transitional form ...

Engels:> “...And the victorious party” (in a revolution) “must maintain its rule by means of the terror which its arms inspire in the reactionaries. Would the Paris Commune have lasted more than a day if it had not used the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie? Cannot we, on the contrary, blame it for having made too little use of that authority?...

Engels: “As, therefore, the state is only a transitional institution which is used in the struggle, in the revolution, to hold down one’s adversaries by force, it is sheer nonsense to talk of a ‘free people’s state’; so long as the proletariat still needs the state, it does not need it in the interests of freedom but in order to hold down its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist ....

...Kautsky, with the learned air of a most learned armchair fool, or with the innocent air of a ten-year-old schoolgirl, asks: Why do we need a dictatorship when we have a majority? And Marx and Engels explain: —to break down the resistance of the bourgeoisie;
—to inspire the reactionaries with fear;
—to maintain the authority of the armed people against the bourgeoisie;
—that the proletariat may forcibly hold down its adversaries.

Kautsky does not understand these explanations. Infatuated with the “purity” of democracy, blind to its bourgeois character, he “consistently” urges that the majority, since it is the majority, need not “break down the resistance” of the minority, nor “forcibly hold it down”—it is sufficient to suppress cases of infringement of democracy. Infatuated with the “purity” of democracy, Kautsky inadvertently commits the same little error that all bourgeois democrats always commit, namely, he takes formal equality (which is nothing but a fraud and hypocrisy under capitalism) for actual equality! Quite a trifle!
The exploiter and the exploited cannot be equal.
This truth, however unpleasant it may be to Kautsky, nevertheless forms the essence of socialism. ...

...

The exploiters can be defeated at one stroke in the event of a successful uprising at the centre, or of a revolt in the army. But except in very rare and special cases, the exploiters cannot be destroyed at one stroke. It is impossible to expropriate all the landowners and capitalists of any big country at one stroke. Furthermore, expropriation alone, as a legal or political act, does not settle the matter by a long chalk, because it is necessary to depose the landowners and capitalists in actual fact, to replace their management of the factories and estates by a different management, workers’ management, in actual fact. There can be no equality between the exploiters—who for many generations have been better off because of their education, conditions of wealthy life, and habits—and the exploited, the majority of whom even in the most advanced and most democratic bourgeois republics are downtrodden, backward, ignorant, intimidated and disunited. For a long time after the revolution the exploiters inevitably continue to retain a number of great practical advantages: they still have money (since it is impossible to abolish money all at once); some movable property—often fairly considerable; they still have various connections, habits of organisation and management; knowledge of all the “secrets” (customs, methods, means and possibilities) of management; superior education; close connections with the higher technical personnel (who live arid think like the bourgeoisie); incomparably greater experience in the art of war (this is very important), and so on and so forth.

If the exploiters are defeated in one country only—and this, of course, is typical, since a simultaneous revolution in a number of countries is a rare exception—they still remain stronger than the exploited, for the international connections of the exploiters are enormous. That a section of the exploited from the least advanced middle-peasant, artisan and similar groups of the population may, and indeed does, follow the exploiters has been proved by all revolutions, including the Commune (for there were also proletarians among the Versailles troops, which the most learned Kautsky has “forgotten”). ...

...The transition from capitalism to communism takes an entire historical epoch. Until this epoch is over, the exploiters inevitably cherish the hope of restoration, and this hope turns into attempts at restoration. After their first serious defeat, the overthrown exploiters—who had not expected their overthrow, never believed it possible, never conceded the thought of it—throw themselves with energy grown tenfold, with furious passion and hatred grown a hundredfold, into the battle for the recovery of the “paradise”, of which they were deprived, on behalf of their families, who had been leading such a sweet and easy life and whom now the “common herd” is condemning to ruin and destitution (or to “common” labour...). ...

...The indispensable characteristic, the necessary condition of dictatorship is the forcible suppression of the exploiters as a class, and, consequently, the infringement of “pure democracy”, i.e., of equality and freedom, in regard to that class. ...

Comrade Lenin had seen and dealt with the likes of you, mr Kindness, and you better know that we will have no "kindness" in our approach to you and the likes of you in our revolutionary struggle!

long live Lenin, long live the revolutionary struggle of world proletariat!

Althusser

4th March 2013, 02:30

People opposed to communism -- or in favor of a non-ML form of it -- are not fascists. That kind of absolutist "us vs. them" language is quite fascist, however. Fascists love to use facile binary thinking to produce an emotional response.

There seems to be a lot of anger in this post. I am morally opposed to murder. Period. I'm not willing to compromise that principle for any reason. Once one abandons his principles, he is capable of committing the worse atrocities. Lenin sacrificed his principles, and became a monster in the process. Even the noblest of plans can result in evil if they are pursued in unethical ways.

What is your definition of murder? Is the masses taking up arms against their oppressors something you can't condone because it's not in direct self-defense? They could have just stayed home and not fought for socialism. You're a social-democrat and should be restricted for adhering to an ideology that betrayed the working on many occasions.

How do you not realize that socialism has to created by force in a revolutionary situation? It's tragic yes, but people will die in this fight to achieve socialism, communists and bourgeois henchmen alike. Not because we like murder, but because violence is the inevitable outcome (against us) in the fight for socialism.

The bourgeoisie will fight to their last breath for their class' interest against the people. They and their henchmen will fight us like the social-dems and the Freikorps in post WWI Germany, Franco's forces in Spain, the Chilean military (and the US) in '73, and the Nazis in Germany again, etc.

The goal is to take over the state and expropriate the means of production from the bourgeoisie. If you think that some idealist end of V for Vendetta moment will come, you are mistaken. What pisses my off most is not that scum like you exist, but that you're self-righteous idealist shit is tolerated on a site (supposedly) run by revolutionary leftists. Revleft disappoints me more and more every day.

Let's Get Free

4th March 2013, 02:45

Althusser

4th March 2013, 02:53

In regards to how "democratic" Russia was, we see Russia winning great democratic freedoms after the February revolution, and it became (for a short time) the most democratic state in the world. However, the provisional government failed to act. It did not begin peace negotiations and made no attempt to get out of the war. It did not embark on agrarian reform. It took no measures against the forces of reaction. And despite all the rights and freedoms, strong democratic institutions (apart, perhaps, from the Soviets) were not created in the country. Thus, there was nothing surprising about the Bolshevik takeover. A reactionary military dictatorship was also a real possibility at the time.

With the Bolsheviks in power, we see some negative trends- political dissent suppressed from the very first months, "one man management" of the factories, further curtailment of democratic rights and freedoms, the consolidation of the one-party system, secret police repression even within the ruling party, and the formation of a hierarchy of officials appointed from above.

Tell me how the Bolsheviks could have run the country better after taking power from social-democrats who, as you've said did not begin peace negotiations and made no attempt to get out of the war, did not embark on agrarian reform, took no measures against the forces of reaction.

Please lay out in what way you feel the Bolsheviks could have fended the newly created Dictatorship of the Proletariat from imperialism, forces of reaction, and political sabotage. I love how people in this day and age complain about Bolshevik rule as if they could have done it better without collapsing the nation entirely. Also supporting the provisional government of Feb. 1917 isn't doing it better, not saying you directly are.

Let's Get Free

4th March 2013, 02:57

Please lay out in what way you feel the Bolsheviks could have fended the newly created Dictatorship of the Proletariat from imperialism, forces of reaction, and political sabotage.

They could have started by not shooting striking workers

Leftsolidarity

4th March 2013, 03:12

Er, I'm not really sure about that. The whole siege of the Winter Palace happened without anyone else in the Soviet knowing, unless I'm getting mixed up here. The Bolsheviks wanted to hold the meeting until the palace was seized so they could have make a grand proclamation at the beginning of it, but it went ahead anyway.

Are you talking about the mass demonstrations that were proclaimed as an attempted Bolshevik insurrection pre-overthrow of the Provisional Government? Or are you talking about when they actually seized the power?

Althusser

4th March 2013, 03:14

They could have started by not shooting striking workers

There were numerous mistakes and overreactions by the Bolsheviks during that time, and the shooting of those striking workers at the money printing works was wrong, as well as many of the Cheka's actions. This doesn't mean that the provisional government can be supported or that the Bolsheviks should be completely demonized.

Kindness

4th March 2013, 03:51

I'm not trying to demonize anyone, only point out that the Soviet government of the time was highly unethical and violated human rights on a grand scale. That doesn't mean that I support the Whites, just that I condemn murder.

Kindness

4th March 2013, 04:15

What is your definition of murder? Is the masses taking up arms against their oppressors something you can't condone because it's not in direct self-defense? They could have just stayed home and not fought for socialism. You're a social-democrat and should be restricted for adhering to an ideology that betrayed the working on many occasions.

I stand by what I've said. I don't condone violence except in direct defense. Plus, my view of revolution is much different than that of most on this website. I support non-violent gradual change according to the dual power theory, not a sudden overthrow of the existing order.

I'm not a social democrat.

#FF0000

4th March 2013, 04:16

Are you talking about the mass demonstrations that were proclaimed as an attempted Bolshevik insurrection pre-overthrow of the Provisional Government? Or are you talking about when they actually seized the power?

When they actually seized power, I think? When Kerensky managed to escape out the side door and drive away?

Geiseric

4th March 2013, 05:24

Leftsolidarity

4th March 2013, 05:36

When they actually seized power, I think? When Kerensky managed to escape out the side door and drive away?

I'm still a little confused cuz that also sounds like one of the mass demos during the July Days (iirc) where some people tried to kidnap Kerensky and Trotsky ordered the men to let him go.

---

I also want to speak to how Let's Get Free is talking about how democratic the Provisional Government was. What makes you think that? It was a massive farce and pitiful class collaboration.

Orange Juche

4th March 2013, 05:56

That doesn't mean that I support the Whites, just that I condemn murder.

I think Leninists have a hard time disassociating political/social enemies with the idea of someone being deserving of torture and death.

Althusser

4th March 2013, 06:30

I support non-violent gradual change.

I'm not a social democrat.

Lol, we've been trolled people. Everyone go home.

Kindness

4th March 2013, 06:34

Lol, we've been trolled people. Everyone go home.

I'm not a troll. When I think of "social democrats," I think of organizations like the UK's Labour Party and the Canadian NDP -- capitalists who support a strong welfare state. I'm for a more fundamental change to the system, so I don't identify as a social democrat.

Plus, your quote took me out of context. I said, "I support non-violent gradual change according to the dual power theory," whereas your chopped quote makes me sound as though I'm advocating reformism.

The fact that I disagree with you doesn't make me "scum" or a "troll."

Althusser

4th March 2013, 06:41

I'm not a troll. When I think of "social democrats," I think of organizations like the UK's Labour Party and the Canadian NDP -- capitalists who support a strong welfare state. I'm for a more fundamental change to the system, so I don't identify as a social democrat.

The fact that I disagree with you doesn't make me "scum" or a "troll."

No, social-democrats, by definition, want to create socialism through a slow transition. Labour party is just a capitalist bourgeois party (though social-democrats can probably be considered capitalists as well since they have betrayed the working class along with the right-wing for decades)

Plus, your quote took me out of context. I said, "I support non-violent gradual change according to the dual power theory," whereas your chopped quote makes me sound as though I'm advocating reformism.

Dual power theory is social-democratic reformism. Worker councils can't work with the bourgeois provisional government. Eventually you end up with fascism or a dictatorship of the proletariat, and I'd much rather the latter.

Le Socialiste

4th March 2013, 07:12

Kindness, can you clear up some questions I asked you earlier? When you responded that you would attempt to stop people from engaging in violence in the midst of a revolutionary situation, you said you would. What I'd like to know is, how would you seek to do this, and would physical intervention be an option?

Kindness

4th March 2013, 07:31

Le Socialiste

4th March 2013, 07:37

Althusser

4th March 2013, 12:25

I would attempt to reason with them first. If they were still unpersuaded, then I would protest against them / use passive resistance tactics to try to stop them from using violence. Finally, as a last effort, I'd attempt to use less-than-lethal force to stop them.

We'll step over you, but if you begin to be a real nuisance.... Anyway, I have a better idea. Since, as a leftist, you don't believe in private property, and you said you do genuinely want socialism, why don't you go on Stormfront and tell them not to fight against the working class when we seek to take what belongs to us? Why come to the revolutionary leftists and tell them not to rise up, instead of telling the people who are responsible for the violence, the henchmen of the bourgeoisie who seek to save a failing and unequal system, not to use violence against us?

People opposed to communism -- or in favor of a non-ML form of it -- are not fascists. That kind of absolutist "us vs. them" language is quite fascist, however. Fascists love to use facile binary thinking to produce an emotional response.

The social-democrats in Germany worked hand in hand with right-wing paramilitaries, the Freikorps, to destroy The Spartacist Uprising of 1919 and three other communist revolutions in different German cities after World War I. The social-democrats might as well have been fascists because they protected a provisional government that ultimately led to the wounded bourgeoisie reestablishing itself with a fascist dictatorship, a situation that would have come of Russia if your beloved social-democrat "dual power" Menshevik phonies would have been able to beat Lenin and the Bolsheviks.

In Germany post WWI, the social-democratic government tortured and executed communists, hunted them like dogs. The ones that weren't wiped out were afraid to even vote in parliamentary elections for Ernst Thälmann or any future candidate. Social-democrats have a record of fighting working class revolution because they are delusional panzys and deserve to be treated like they fascists they work with.

I have a great hostility toward social-democrats, but I think history legitimizes this distrust and anger I have toward them.

Power does indeed corrupt -- that's one thing on which I agree with the anarchists. Name one political dictator / politician of significant authority who did not commit at least some corrupt actions. There is not one.

Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.

Name one person, with or without power, that never made a mistake. (other than Hegel obviously)

Your usage of such bourgeois phrases like the one emboldened above is laughable. It's not power that corrupts and makes people go on corrupt rampages of killing, it's a (justified) fear that the one thing you have for years devoted your life to, can be taken away by reactionary scum if you don't act fast and with authority. Lenin wasn't infallable, but I highly doubt he gave the Cheka a checklist that they had to follow to torture and kill people in the most creative ways.

Orange Juche

6th March 2013, 06:38

There were numerous mistakes and overreactions by the Bolsheviks during that time, and the shooting of those striking workers at the money printing works was wrong, as well as many of the Cheka's actions. This doesn't mean that the provisional government can be supported or that the Bolsheviks should be completely demonized.

You're making it sound like "oops, we accidentally shot and permanently killed those striking workers on purpose!" I think to those workers "mistake" is probably an understatement. That kind of action defines the essence of what was going on at the time, and the attitude of those in charge. It says everything, it's not "woopsie!"

MP5

6th March 2013, 07:40

I stand by what I've said. I don't condone violence except in direct defense. Plus, my view of revolution is much different than that of most on this website. I support non-violent gradual change according to the dual power theory, not a sudden overthrow of the existing order.

I'm not a social democrat.

I would not exactly call that revolutionary at all as that is more like what parliamentarianism is and we see how far that has gotten us. Revolution in and of itself is a violent act and the whole point of it is to oust the ruling class and crush the state which is the very apparatus that gave rise to the bourgeois in the first place. I don't see how revolution can be gradual as there have been plenty of gradual changes by Capitalist countries to pacify the working class enough so that they don't revolt against the state and the corporations that rule it and depend on it. All of these gradual changes have resulted in nothing more then half hearted charity measures that do nothing to help the working class and have only served to extend Capitalist rule.

To me the term revolution means the sudden violent overthrow of the bourgeois ruling class and the crushing of the state through working class self emancipation. Know one can grant you your freedom as freedom granted to you by your oppressors is little more then slavery "with benefits". True freedom can only be achieved when the oppressed rise up and take it.

Tim Cornelis

6th March 2013, 15:50

I need stronger glasses, then, because I have only been able to find assertions to the effect, without explanation; even disregarding how empathy is determined by moral ideology (for example, which of us would empathise with someone that tried to rape a woman and was killed?).

Empathy is not determined by moral ideology, better pick up those glasses. And the example does not pertain to anything I said.

That's an interesting position. The religious fanatic, then, is always egotistic? And egotistic people can't feel empathy?

It does not follow from the position that egoism is the lack of empathy that religious fanatics are always egoistic. Completely egoistical persons don't exist, unless maybe psychopaths. If you behave in a egoistic manner then in that context you lack empathy for the person you're using for your own advantage. (Hereby egoism is defined as the pursuit of self-interest at the expense of others).

Then it should be no problem for you to cite a sentence that uses the words "ethics" or "morality" and whose meaning would change if the words were exchanged.

A word can be swapped and the sentence can still make sense. A sentence where ethics and morality cannot be exchanged in the following sentence:

"Ethics is the philosophy of morality"

Why?

I don't remember.

It is, but the example you have provided has nothing to do with the situation in Russia, circa 1918, and is perfectly irrelevant to this debate.

I concluded that kidnapping is counter-productive. Kidnapping was used in Russia (you say). Therefore it is related and relevant.

Once again, you have asserted it without explanation, unless you think that peasant uprisings are obviously a sign of a failed revolution. And that is simply not the case; the Chouannerie did not mean the end of the French Revolution for example.

The Peasant rebellions were a response to the authoritarian measures taken by the Bolsheviks. Had the Bolsheviks not taken these measures, the peasants would have -- in all likeliness -- continued to either support the Bolsheviks or not support one faction over another.

In this case it does; what other advantages did Bolshevik Russia, besieged on all sides and filled with internal enemies have?

So military victory necessarily means you have popular support? I don't see how. Does the US victory over Japan prove the US government was more popular than the Japanese government in Japan?

That is perfectly irrelevant, unless you think that the Soviet government could have responded to, for example, Tsarist officers going over to the White bandits or the sabotage attempts by the VIKZhel (and Kamenev and Zinoviev) without resorting to authoritarian methods.

Yes. The use of violence is not by definition, nor inherently, authoritarian. Authoritarianism is social organisation characterised by control of a minority over a majority through subversive means.

Sabotage and the civil war, neither of which the Bolsheviks were responsible for. Unless you count their unwillingness to resort to repressive methods sooner when confronted with sabotage by the VIKZhel, by the former ministry officials etc.

Civil war, no doubt, contributed to the fall of productivity. Other factors may have contributed to it as well. I don't know the degree to which though. Workplace participation is linked to higher productivity. The Bolsheviks introduced Taylorism, the opposite of this. This can't explain the dramatic collapse of the economy though. Hyperinflation as a result of extensive money printing and price controls by the Bolsheviks, can however.

The Antonovshchina happened almost entirely after the prodrazvyorstka was abolished, and proposals about the end of War Communism were considered since the early 1920. So the facts are simply at variance with that interpretation.

That sounds suspiciously high, but is a high death rate really surprising given the conditions in Russia? And how many civilians would have died without the internment centres that removed them from the area of military operations?

I don't know, I do know it does not excuse internment of civilians because they may not be supportive of your regime.

Correct. And I would appreciate it if you did; surely, with all those suppressed leftists, you can remember one name?

You seriously think no leftist's free speech was violated? It's unreasonable to expect me to plain anarchists from 100 years ago. As if not knowing victims of the Great Chinese Famine proved it didn't happen.

Why the animus toward "state management of capital" then?

Leninists tend advocate state management of capital post-transition. Perhaps not you, in which case my assertion was premature.

Productivity fell due to the atomisation of peasant holdings and the drought that hit the western regions; prodrazvyorstka might have led to a drop in productivity, but it also saved those poor peasants that would have literally been crucified by the Whites had the Soviet government only procured grain through market methods, with money it did not have.

Reportedly, 5 million people, mainly peasants, died as a result of the Russian famine of 1921/2. Even assuming it's inflationary, there is no way the whites could have crucified or killed so many peasants (unless through a famine of their own). So your argument is absolutely ludicrous.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

7th March 2013, 00:10

Empathy is not determined by moral ideology, better pick up those glasses. And the example does not pertain to anything I said.

The example is perfectly relevant, since it demonstrates that moral ideology (the condemnation of rape) can result in a lack of empathy.

It does not follow from the position that egoism is the lack of empathy that religious fanatics are always egoistic. Completely egoistical persons don't exist, unless maybe psychopaths. If you behave in a egoistic manner then in that context you lack empathy for the person you're using for your own advantage. (Hereby egoism is defined as the pursuit of self-interest at the expense of others).

Again, your use of (outdated) medical terms is extremely colloquial. And it follows from your position that anyone is egoistic to the extent that they are without empathy - so a hypothetical "perfect" religious fanatic, someone that follows their religion to a letter, without regard for others or themselves, is perfectly egoistic! And this is plainly nonsensical. Flagellants and ascetic fanatics are of course horrible people, but they are simply not egoistic as the term is commonly used.

A word can be swapped and the sentence can still make sense. A sentence where ethics and morality cannot be exchanged in the following sentence:

"Ethics is the philosophy of morality"

Fair enough; I had forgotten about that usage. Even so, your claim still does not make much sense to me. Why do you think I had "conflated ethics and morality"?

I concluded that kidnapping is counter-productive. Kidnapping was used in Russia (you say). Therefore it is related and relevant.

Then your conclusion was unwarranted; at most you could have justifiably concluded that kidnapping (which is different from the system of hostages) was counterproductive in Columbia in that period.

The Peasant rebellions were a response to the authoritarian measures taken by the Bolsheviks. Had the Bolsheviks not taken these measures, the peasants would have -- in all likeliness -- continued to either support the Bolsheviks or not support one faction over another.

The Bolsheviks had a solid majority of supporters in the KomBedy; even if this were not the case, what of it? Does the revolution disappear if the peasantry no longer approves of it?

So military victory necessarily means you have popular support? I don't see how. Does the US victory over Japan prove the US government was more popular than the Japanese government in Japan?

Again, you are ignoring the specifics of the situation; Bolshevik Russia was isolated, besieged and almost completely ruined. To compare it to an industrial giant such as the United States is simply daft.

Yes. The use of violence is not by definition, nor inherently, authoritarian. Authoritarianism is social organisation characterised by control of a minority over a majority through subversive means.

Subversive means? Assuming you had meant to say "repressive", such means were necessary when the majority became declassed and demoralised. And dictatorial measures against the minority of exploiters and their lackeys were necessary from the first days of Bolshevik rule, from the days of the Kerenskiad and Kadet plots in Petrograd.

Civil war, no doubt, contributed to the fall of productivity. Other factors may have contributed to it as well. I don't know the degree to which though. Workplace participation is linked to higher productivity. The Bolsheviks introduced Taylorism, the opposite of this. This can't explain the dramatic collapse of the economy though. Hyperinflation as a result of extensive money printing and price controls by the Bolsheviks, can however.

Hyperinflation occurred because of the drop in industrial output; so it can't have been the cause.

I don't know, I do know it does not excuse internment of civilians because they may not be supportive of your regime.

Then what should have been done? Let the civilians wander around the area of military operations?

You seriously think no leftist's free speech was violated? It's unreasonable to expect me to plain anarchists from 100 years ago. As if not knowing victims of the Great Chinese Famine proved it didn't happen.

I seriously think that you should produce concrete examples if you wish your claim to be taken seriously. I know that certain left groups were suppressed; I listed them and the reasons for their suppression.

Reportedly, 5 million people, mainly peasants, died as a result of the Russian famine of 1921/2. Even assuming it's inflationary, there is no way the whites could have crucified or killed so many peasants (unless through a famine of their own). So your argument is absolutely ludicrous.

Reported by who? Curtois? And yes, famine occurred in the area occupied by White bandits as well - unlike their god, the Whites could not multiply bread - but it was also followed by the torture and murder of all the progressive elements of society. Do you think that it is an accident that even the middle peasant "People's Army" of the Eser KomUch defected to the Bolsheviks when their dearest representatives in the Constitutional Assembly got in bed with the Whites?

slum

12th March 2013, 05:30

So, pardon my ignorance here but my knowledge of 1917 is pretty much limited to having read 10 days that shook the world like three years ago:

is there any existing history of the cheka that isn't bourgeois propaganda bent on portraying lenin's 'red terror' as a hell on earth that would be at home in a hieronymus bosch painting? or even any history that takes into account the incredible material/economic stressors the bolsheviks were under that necessitated the exercise of authority*?

*i am not against authority on principle or anything, just saying shit was pretty tough for russia just then and ofc germany didn't pull thru

i also was under the impression for some reason that the cheka was largely drawn from old tsarist agents or was in some ways a continuation of previous tsarist organizations. is this completely erroneous?

obviously there's no such thing as an unbiased source but the mainstream historical mentions i see of cheka atrocities seem hugely exaggerated and always have that undertone of "see? see what socialism does?!". on the other hand i don't want to have a rose-coloured version of actual history. history is important.

keep in mind, kindness, that counter-revolutionaries don't come marching back with the intention of just restoring the status quo and putting all us misled reds in cozy prisons.

Geiseric

12th March 2013, 05:52

Well the quote "while there is a state, there can be no freedom. There can be no freedom with the state," should be at the center of our minds if communists hypothetically "win". Russia needed the state to keep the ruined economy from turning everything into Mad Max style chaos, with the famine and devastation that happened during the war. Abolishing it wasn't a option as long as capitalists were poised to invade.

However what we saw in the breakdown of democracy and the rise of the stalinist state is by no means destined to happen again, unless a third world country hasa revolution that doesnt spread. That is why marxism is international, haha.

AConfusedSocialDemocrat

12th March 2013, 07:34

Kindness. I denounce those torture methods you described, but wikipedia? Come on. All those sources are rabidly anti-communist. I even see the Black Book of Communism in the sources.

Anyone else find this line of argumentation a lot like holocaust denial, instead of these sources are wrong because the author is Jewish, we have the author is wrong because he is capitalist.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

12th March 2013, 09:23

Anyone else find this line of argumentation a lot like holocaust denial, instead of these sources are wrong because the author is Jewish, we have the author is wrong because he is capitalist.

Not really; the author is wrong because his work is obvious Nazi propaganda, because he can't get basic historical facts straight, because he's trying to sell an idealist view of history in which every material circumstance is the direct fault of the evil sorcerers Lenin, Stalin, and Mao, and so on, and so on.

Lucretia

12th March 2013, 19:49

Lev Bronsteinovich

12th March 2013, 20:53

In the end, Kindness is anti-communist --as are ALL of the shitty references in the Wikipedia page. Lenin was not a mass murderer any more that Lincoln was. He was a leader of the USSR during a particularly bloody period. The Red Terror was a defense.

So, the way this works is this: If you are in favor of the goals of Socialism and Communism you take a positive view of the Red Terror as it preserved the Soviet State to fight another day for world revolution. If you are against, you will find all kinds of mean things that they did.

This webpage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror#Atrocities) gives a quick (and shocking) overview of Lenin's atrocities. His actions were just as monstrous as those of Pol Pot, Stalin, Hitler, or any other despot. Fuck Lenin.

That web page is a piece of idiotic anti-communist shit. The sources are out-and-out reactionary mouthpieces. The numbers are absurd. 3 million, that's right, 3 million men deserted from the Red Army between 1918 and 1921? There would have been no army left. The numbers of people killed by the Red Terror are simply being made up in that article. The "Black Book" has been debunked on many threads here so I won't bother, but it too has zero credibility.

I love this quote:

"Comrades! The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity ... You must make example of these people. (1) Hang (I mean hang publicly, so that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers. (2) Publish their names. (3) Seize all their grain. (4) Single out the hostages per my instructions in yesterday's telegram. Do all this so that for miles around people see it all, understand it, tremble, and tell themselves that we are killing the bloodthirsty kulaks and that we will continue to do so ... Yours, Lenin. P.S. Find tougher people."Somehow, this is uncredited in the article. I wonder why.

As for you comrade -- Fuck you for spreading this reactionary filth. You are either very ignorant about history and Lenin, or just an out-and-out anti-communist.

Lev Bronsteinovich

12th March 2013, 22:33

Anyone else find this line of argumentation a lot like holocaust denial, instead of these sources are wrong because the author is Jewish, we have the author is wrong because he is capitalist.
No, because the sources are really not credible. There are quite a few scholarly historical books about the revolution, written by historians that are not overly sympathetic to Lenin and the Bolsheviks, but who are reasonably honest and do a decent in job. They don't just make shit up, like most of the sources for the Wiki page. Those numbers are pulled out of someone's ass (and don't even make sense) and the quotes are out of context or of dubious origin. I've spend a lot of time studying Soviet history. The Wiki sources are pathetic.

I usually take a fairly measured tone, especially with people new to the site. I'll make an exception here. This is reactionary propaganda of the worst type. It does not belong on these pages. And if the person that posted a link to this shit is really interested in learning something about history I suggest he start reading something not written by a reactionary hack. Maybe start with some of EH Carr's works. But shut the fuck up about the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution until you actually know something about their history.

AConfusedSocialDemocrat

12th March 2013, 22:51

But shut the fuck up about the Bolsheviks and the Russian Revolution until you actually know something about their history.

And what a charming gentleman you are!

Lev Bronsteinovich

13th March 2013, 02:11

And what a charming gentleman you are!
Yes I am. Thank you for recognizing this. The uncomradely language was to make a point. I am not a new poster, and I am usually quite civil. People who equate Lenin with Hitler through ignorance and use laughable sources to back it up (on RevLeft, no less) deserve whatever heat they get. And ignorance is the best case scenario here. So to publicly spout off about serious issues that you are ignorant about deserves a reprimand.

I wasn't addressing this to you, Confused, but to "Kindness." To you I would suggest that you be more precise. For the most part, the people who write the garbage quoted in the Wiki article could be described as "pro-capitalist," or supporters of the bourgeoisie. I doubt that any of them own the means of production to any significant extent.

Old Bolshie

13th March 2013, 15:58

The USSR under Lenin was a brutal and repressive autocracy (as Lenin had abolished democracy and implemented Party dictatorship), but it later morphed into an extremely brutal and repressive autocracy under Stalin.

This description is obviously very far from reality and results from misconceptions about Lenin's rule which is often wrongly described as dictatorial. Lenin never had absolute power concentrate in his hands like other dictators such as Stalin or Hitler. None of those dictators had ever to persuade and argue freely with others in order to impose their own will and whoever disagree with them was always repressed some way or another. This was never Lenin's case. His decisions were always submitted to a CC which was never controlled by Lenin and there was democratic debate within the Bolshevik party until Stalin's ascension.

Even in critical times like when the revolution was being voted there was freedom of debate and voting for all the CC members. Those who opposed Lenin's proposals were never purged or imprisoned.

Mauve Osprey

13th March 2013, 16:19

Lenin did what he needed to do, would you rather he played nice and had the revolution fall to imperialism so they could have had an Iraq like occupation? There are no good or bad guys in history, there is only the result of material conditions. So stop moralizing as if morality isn't amaterial bullshit designed to keep the toiling classes in intellectual backwardness.

This couldn't be said any better. Lenin was having to deal with a large war against counter-revolutionaries and Imperialists that were that were literally trying to invade Russia and aid the white armies.On top of that there was mass starvation from famine and embargoes setup by the nations of western imperialism. Lenin had no time for dabbling in what he felt was "right" or "wrong", but what would be good for the masses who were trying to build a socialist nation. So I agree stop moralizing history please.

AConfusedSocialDemocrat

13th March 2013, 16:37

Yes I am. Thank you for recognizing this. The uncomradely language was to make a point. I am not a new poster, and I am usually quite civil. People who equate Lenin with Hitler through ignorance and use laughable sources to back it up (on RevLeft, no less) deserve whatever heat they get. And ignorance is the best case scenario here. So to publicly spout off about serious issues that you are ignorant about deserves a reprimand.

The last book I read on Leninism (http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Mensheviks-after-October-Dictatorship/dp/0801499763), rather nicely documenting Bolshevik authoritarianism against other leftist groups, even before Kronstadt, never mind the analysis on the revolution Chomsky put forward (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQsceZ9skQI).

To you I would suggest that you be more precise. For the most part, the people who write the garbage quoted in the Wiki article could be described as "pro-capitalist," or supporters of the bourgeoisie.

Why, because they come to a differing conclusion to you, so therefore they are wrong? And of course, you have come to 100% objective accurate conclusions from you prefered party's paper and revleft threads?

IrishSocialist

13th March 2013, 16:39

I can't help but be amused by those slandering Lenin. A tyrant? Only a right winger would suggest that. Lenin not only founded an international revolution which triggered further events, but he allowed the world to understand the fraud capitalist system. My only sadness is that he wasn't allowed to fulfill his goal, and curse the day Stalin came to power!

Rurkel

13th March 2013, 16:53

There are legitimate ways to make a left-wing critique of Leninism, but Kindness' "he was bad because he killed people" (during a civil war, none the less) really doesn't cut it.

On a side note, here's a provocative question:

What would it take to change your option on Lenin and the Bolsheviks in general?

DarkPast

13th March 2013, 17:00

I love this quote:
Somehow, this is uncredited in the article. I wonder why.

It's real:

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9zgtOP_FgIM/TscWxtmZX_I/AAAAAAAAAM8/ZZzVzMdm0oQ/s1600/Hanging+order.jpg (http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-9zgtOP_FgIM/TscWxtmZX_I/AAAAAAAAAM8/ZZzVzMdm0oQ/s1600/Hanging+order.jpg)

CyM

13th March 2013, 17:07

It's real:
Holy crap! That piece of paper in a foreign language, in an indecipherable handwriting, really convinced me!

Your typed and translated quote from a known pro-Nazi must really be accurately telling us what was written in that chicken scribble that I can't read.

DarkPast

13th March 2013, 17:21

There are legitimate ways to make a left-wing critique of Leninism, but Kindness' "he was bad because he killed people" (during a civil war, none the less) really doesn't cut it.

I don't think anyone is saying that Lenin was bad because he had some tsarist officers or bureaucrats shot. The fact is many workers and peasants were killed, too, often simply for belonging to a vaguely defined social category. The best example are kulaks.

According to the SOVNARKOM's 1929 "Indices of Kulak Farms" a peasant could be considered a kulak if he met just one of the following criteria:

1) hiring of workers for agricultural or artisan work
2) owning an "industrial enterprise"
3) hiring out mechanized agricultural equipment
4) hiring out premises or buildings for business purposes
5) having any family members who have sources of income not derived from labor

Other (earlier) definitions emphasized plot sizes, livestock numbers, etc. (I recall reading somewhere on this site that owning as little as three cows could brand you a kulak). In addition, it was the local authorities that interpreted what each criterion meant (i.e. it was rather arbitrary).

Do you really think Lenin's order to hang 100 kulaks - selected pretty much at random - was in any way just or necessary our cause?

On a side note, here's a provocative question:

What would it take to change your option on Lenin and the Bolsheviks in general?

Kindness is restricted; he can't reply to you on this thread. You'll have to either PM him or open a discussion in Opposing Ideologies.

Rurkel

13th March 2013, 17:27

My question is addressed to every participant.

For what it's worth, the text in DP's screenshots does correspond to the translation. Can't say more, don't know much about Lenin forgeries.

DarkPast

13th March 2013, 17:38

Holy crap! That piece of paper in a foreign language, in an indecipherable handwriting, really convinced me!

Yeah, 'cause Lenin would have written it in English, in Microsoft Word. :rolleyes:

Your typed and translated quote from a known pro-Nazi must really be accurately telling us what was written in that chicken scribble that I can't read.

Hah! Playing the Nazi card already (I'd like to see some proof of this btw.)? Not that it will convince you that your Great Leader could ever be wrong, but here's another translation:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/aug/11c.htm

AConfusedSocialDemocrat

13th March 2013, 17:41

Hah! Playing the Nazi card already (I'd like to see some proof of this btw.)? Not that it will convince you that your Great Leader could ever be wrong, but here's another translation:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/leni...18/aug/11c.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/aug/11c.htm)

B-b-but Lenin did nothing wrong, Menshivik propoganda, Menshevik propoaganda, the conditions caled for it, social fascism!

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

13th March 2013, 21:17

Geiseric

13th March 2013, 21:40

In cases such as the red army invasions of the Caucuses, and the Urals, and poland, there are many examples of forced deportations, mass oppression, and intimidation which was obviously tragic, seeing as it was directed in a "you're with us or the whites, and here's an example of what happens otherwise," way. Those at the time probably weren't easy decisions to make, and a lot of information the whites and reds got was wrong determining who supported who.

But a lot of it was also legitimate punishings and expropiation of rich, upper class, either bourgeois or aristocratic, who were not violently punished untill they sided with the white army, and supported progroms and the insurgency. I don't think anybody is sheding a tear about the later. But if a revolution happens again, we need to make sure power isn't abused, like it was during the georgian affair.

Lev Bronsteinovich

13th March 2013, 21:58

I don't object to criticisms of Lenin and the Bolsheviks during the Civil War. I disagree with most of them. It is the scurrilous lies about MILLIONS of deserters and millions of executions during the war that gets me very irritated. It is utter nonsense and leaves no room for discussion. The whites and their allies were exceptionally brutal in their handling of people with any connection to the Bolsheviks. I'm afraid that passive resistance was not a preferred method of dealing with them. The apologists for White Terror don't really seem very concerned with that. And thank you comrade Semendayaev for your clarification.

The Red Terror was necessary for the survival of the USSR. So, in my eyes it was unfortunate but unavoidable. Not obscene like the US rounding up people of Japanese descent and throwing them in concentration camps.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

13th March 2013, 21:58

Mauve Osprey

13th March 2013, 22:32

So far it appears we have liberals trying to slander Lenin to the point of absolute nonsense. Could you all try proving your wild accusations without the use of Fascist propaganda or the Black Book of Communism? This was a Socialist revolution and the Bourgeoisie were trying to destroy the revolution. Then when Lenin tries to defend the revolution (yes that did involved some violence) that somehow makes him a tyrant? It seems quite suspicious to me that you all are neglecting to talk about the horrendous acts of violence committed by imperialist and counter-revolutionary forces, not to mention the famine imposed by the kulaks and the imperialist embargoes.

AConfusedSocialDemocrat

13th March 2013, 23:13

Could you all try proving your wild accusations without the use of Fascist propaganda or the Black Book of Communism? This was a Socialist revolution and the Bourgeoisie were trying to destroy the revolution.

Everything that contradicts my world view is literally fascist propoganda. Burnt my toast this morning, damn fascists striking a man in his own home.

Then when Lenin tries to defend the revolution (yes that did involved some violence) that somehow makes him a tyrant?

Yes, those damn Kronstadt counter revolutionaries, those damn autonomous worker councils, those bloody unions.

It seems quite suspicious to me that you all are neglecting to talk about the horrendous acts of violence committed by imperialist and counter-revolutionary forces, not to mention the famine imposed by the kulaks and the imperialist embargoes

B-b-but Claire's mummy let's her eat ice cream for breakfast!

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

13th March 2013, 23:31

It must be nice living in a world where white terror and pogroms do not necessitate Red Terror. And the clouds are made of ice cream, no doubt, in this sots-demtopia.

AConfusedSocialDemocrat

13th March 2013, 23:41

Knocking off generals and princes isn't terror, using the organs of the state to specifically target individuals of differing viewpoints, whether anarchist, menshevik, or Ukranian farming families, in order to, quite literally terrify the rest of the population to bend to your demands is. And at least the whites were unashemedly doing it for an elite minority, unlike the Bolsheviks, who were repressing the people in the name of the people (they claimed to represent), It's like an obscene joke.

Lev Bronsteinovich

13th March 2013, 23:44

Everything that contradicts my world view is literally fascist propoganda. Burnt my toast this morning, damn fascists striking a man in his own home.

Yes, those damn Kronstadt counter revolutionaries, those damn autonomous worker councils, those bloody unions.

B-b-but Claire's mummy let's her eat ice cream for breakfast!
As I said earlier, if you start from a premise that the October Revolution was not worth defending from day one, than it is natural you would be shocked by Red Terror. Of course, this same hostility to proletarian revolution will send you off in many a reactionary direction.

What are your thoughts about the lovely Social Dems in Europe voting war credits for their "own" bourgeoisies in 1914? This makes them palpably responsible for the slaughter of WWI -- which makes the Red Terror look like a freaking picnic. I'm confused why anyone would want to follow in their footsteps.

AConfusedSocialDemocrat

13th March 2013, 23:51

As I said earlier, if you start from a premise that the October Revolution was not worth defending from day one, than it is natural you would be shocked by Red Terror. Of course, this same hostility to proletarian revolution will send you off in many a reactionary direction.

An Octobor revolution would have beena good idea, pitty Lenin and Trotsky had to shut down the Soviets and worker councils, the very essence of socialism.

What are your thoughts about the lovely Social Dems in Europe voting war credits for their "own" bourgeoisies in 1914? This makes them palpably responsible for the slaughter of WWI -- which makes the Red Terror look like a freaking picnic. I'm confused why anyone would want to follow in their footsteps.

I remember Martov and his party strongly arguing against involvement in the Great War, like pretty much every other left wing party in Europe.

Old Bolshie

14th March 2013, 00:09

In cases such as the red army invasions of the Caucuses, and the Urals, and poland, there are many examples of forced deportations, mass oppression, and intimidation which was obviously tragic, seeing as it was directed in a "you're with us or the whites, and here's an example of what happens otherwise," way. Those at the time probably weren't easy decisions to make, and a lot of information the whites and reds got was wrong determining who supported who.

Everything in a war is tragic. Judging Lenin's actions as evil and tyrant because of how he handled one of the most brutal wars in History is completely nonsense. I never seen a war fought with roses so I don't see how Lenin can be attacked for what he did for win the war. Besides, the terror was not only red but white too. Are the socialists suppose to be more kind and nice to its enemies than the bourgeoisie? The Paris Commune was well present in Lenin's mind.

As far as the telegram goes the Kulaks were the major social force behind the Whites support so I don't see how you can condemn Lenin. It was brutal? Definitely. But what isn't brutal in a War and specially in a revolutionary one?

Lucretia

14th March 2013, 00:26

All this thread has really established is that their are a lot of self-styled "revolutionists" who are idiotic enough to think that overthrowing capitalism will be a peaceful affair, and who therefore look at horror at the defensive violence of the Russian Civil War. That is all.

AConfusedSocialDemocrat

14th March 2013, 00:49

You can hardly call state terrorism 'defensive violence'. And there is a pretty big difference between the violence needed to set up a workers' co-operative, and an NKVD troika.

AConfusedSocialDemocrat

14th March 2013, 01:04

And before some one brings it up, we've all heard the "you want revolution without a revolution quote" by Robespierre. A nice play at sophistry and rhetoric, however, this is not some abstract accademic seminar in some random university, statements like Robespierre's have direct effect on 'rea'l humans. While this quote may sound grand on the internet, it doesn't sound like such a great thing to say to some guy's children when you're explaining the reason their father isn't coming home tonight is because you've had him shot for protesting the central commite's stance on war communism, or the reason their sister was tortured to death in some dank NKVD cell due to the suspicion she was an anarchist.

Marxism is primarily a humanistic philosophy, let's not endorse methods that break human beings, or degrade the individual.

Lev Bronsteinovich

14th March 2013, 01:37

An Octobor revolution would have beena good idea, pitty Lenin and Trotsky had to shut down the Soviets and worker councils, the very essence of socialism.

I remember Martov and his party strongly arguing against involvement in the Great War, like pretty much every other left wing party in Europe.
I'm not sure if you are just being unclear, ignorant, or cynical here. Martov was a Menshevik Internationalist -- meaning he was the far left wing of the party. We know how most of the Mensheviks behaved between February and October, defending the war (e.g., Chenov, Dan, Tsereteli). As for the rest of the Social Democratic parties in Europe, every one voted en masse for war credits (except the Bulgarian SP). It was and probably remains the greatest betrayal in the history of the workers' movement. It conclusively showed that the Second International was a rotten organization AGAINST whom the revolution would have to be made.

The Bolsheviks had the overwhelming support of the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets by the time October rolled around. And they had so much support in the armed forces that there was no military struggle when they took power. That being said, Soviets, as cool as they are, are not the essence of socialism they are a possible form of workers government, no more, no less -- esp. at a time when socialism is not close to being achieved and the very survival of the dictatorship of the proletariat is threatened by white terror. I bet the word "dictatorship" is not a comfortable one for you, Mr. Confused. And pardon me for saying this, but I would be most unhappy to be fighting next to YOU on a barricade. Oh, wait, I suppose you would be on the other side.

AConfusedSocialDemocrat

14th March 2013, 01:50

when socialism is not close to being achieved and the very survival of the dictatorship of the proletariat is threatened by white terror.

Workers' control came with the February Revolution, Lenin and Trotsky shut them down (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQsceZ9skQI).

And pardon me for saying this, but I would be most unhappy to be fighting next to YOU on a barricade. Oh, wait, I suppose you would be on the other side.

Oh well, you're a Trot, you'd probably switch sides halfway through tbh.

Lucretia

14th March 2013, 04:06

You can hardly call state terrorism 'defensive violence'. And there is a pretty big difference between the violence needed to set up a workers' co-operative, and an NKVD troika.

Overthrowing a bourgeois state is different than "setting up a workers' co-operative," which can actually be done within a capitalist economy, so your trying to compare the violence potentially involved in both is absolutely meaningless. As is your comment about "state terrorism," which is about as vacuous as the charge of "sectarianism" that we often see on this forum. Both are used as substitutes for actual argument, and have this gratingly moralizing tone to them. Not surprising in light of the fact that you're a "confused social democrat." Or is it anarchist? It's so difficult to tell them apart based on their arguments.

Geiseric

14th March 2013, 04:44

True, cmrd. Guthrie; I am not sure anyone would really claim that the Soviet government was infallible. Certainly no one that considers themselves to be a materialist. Even so, I have two questions, concerning your examples.

First: what specific events during the Red Army campaign in the Urals were you referring to? The only "controversial" event I can think of is the execution of the former emperor's family on the order of Beloborodov and others.

Second, concerning the Caucasus and the Georgian affair: my understanding was that the Georgian affair came later, and the only act of violence was Ordzhonikidze slapping someone from the moderate faction. As for the Red Army invasion of Georgia, as I understand it Mensheviks were targeted, but these Mensheviks were not the same as the old, honestly revolutionary branch of the RSDLP - like the Russian KaDets, they had absorbed every party to the right of them, and were engaged in horrible pogroms and massacres of Bolshevik sympathisers when the Red Army arrived. But undoubtedly there were excesses.
Thousands were killed in the red terror in georgia, which you can't distinguish from the Bolshevik party. Dzherinsky organized it, and Stalin's cronies were the main organizers of it. It was fucking brutal, and was an early sign of degeneration. I don't give a shit about mensheviks btw, but their famillies were often targeted during the later terrors, which is no good.

The Urals were basically the line where white controlled areas met red ones, so it was very hazy as to who supported whom. Entire villages were burned down due to miscmmunication, and the commisars received no punishment. You have to be historically illiterate to think that ANY war goes without attrocities, however in the end the brutality was due to the white army's existance and the capitalist intervention.

MP5

14th March 2013, 07:07

The problem with these teenage anarchists that come on this forum is that they still associate democracy with bourgeois electoralism. So in their view, if Lenin undermined that kind of process for strategic reasons, he was "anti-democratic" and even "anti-human" (!!!!). This actually places these anarchists in the exact same camp, making the exact same criticisms almost verbatim, as Karl Kautsky -- who was complicit in suppressing workers in the German Revolution, that unpleasant series of workers' uprisings that were challenging the democratically elected Reichstag in Germany. But I guess because he respected "democracy," he was an a-okay guy. Anarchism: the more stylish fraternal twin of social democracy. :thumbup:

What the shit the kindness has been spewing bears little if any resemblance to Anarchism but rather just to mindless pacifism and it reeks of someone who still thinks that things can still change without there having to be a major upheaval in society. Basically he sounds like a Liberal or a Tory :grin: . I wouldn't be surprised to see him knocking on doors for your local Liberal candidate at all actually :laugh:

Anarchists believe in a violent revolution so i hardly see how kindness is either a Anarchist or a revolutionary. And the notion that say Anarchist Communism is anything like Social Democracy is plain retarded. The last time i checked Anarchists didn't believe in participating in elections and such. Confused teenagers are in a different group altogether and are just as likely to be of any other tendency.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

14th March 2013, 11:35

It's amazing, how this thread brings out the social-democrats and the Tolstoyans.

Knocking off generals and princes isn't terror, using the organs of the state to specifically target individuals of differing viewpoints, whether anarchist, menshevik, or Ukranian farming families, in order to, quite literally terrify the rest of the population to bend to your demands is. And at least the whites were unashemedly doing it for an elite minority, unlike the Bolsheviks, who were repressing the people in the name of the people (they claimed to represent), It's like an obscene joke.

This tired "argument" again? You social-democrats could at least take the time to devise another fallacious argument; this one has been worn down. What "Ukrainian farming families"? You mean the kulaks? Every social-democrat and every petite bourgeois anarchist howls when they hear that word, but it reflects the social reality of the time: there existed a stratum of wealthy peasants that extracted surplus value from the poor peasants and the rural proletariat, that profited on speculation and the general misery of other peasants, and who tried to overthrow the soviet republic.

Calling them "Ukrainian farmer families" is not just sappy sentimentalism; it is a deliberate misrepresentation of the social facts.

And what "anarchists" did the Soviet government target? Serge, who became a Bolshevik? Zheleznyak, a commander in the Red Army? The "anarchists" that were targeted were the Makhnovtsky, the peasant bandits that stopped grain procurement in the southern front, that attacked the Red Army, the cities, and carried out pogroms. Another political group, that has bugger all to do with anarchism, but that the petty bourgeois section of the anarchist movement holds dear to their hearts are, of course, the Esers, the "Social Revolutionaries" ("Social Reactionaries", as Stalin quipped once).

Here one should distinguish between the right Esers, who were part of the White movement from the October Revolution, and the left Esers, a more honest and progressive section, that was part of the coalition government together with the Bolsheviks. Until they decided to drag Russia back into an imperialist war by blowing the German ambassador up, blowing Bolshevik officials up, and so on.

As for the Mensheviks, again, the most honest and revolutionary section of that party left to either join the Bolsheviks (the Mezhrayonka and the Menshevik-Internationalist group) or leave the country (Martov's left Menshevik group). Those that remained were either open social-chauvinists like Plekhanov and his Yedinstvo group, or "social" defensists like Tsereteli and Chkheidze. These supported the White butchers more often than not, and were closed (there was no sense in employing the methods of the Red Terror against the White Mensheviks as a group, since their numbers were comically low) when they refused to stop agitating against the Soviet government in the middle of the civil war.

Workers' control came with the February Revolution, Lenin and Trotsky shut them down (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQsceZ9skQI).

Do you have an actual credible source for any of your claim, or are your only sources the Black Book of Intellectual Dishonestly, and Saint Noam the Potemkin Libertarian?

Oh well, you're a Trot, you'd probably switch sides halfway through tbh.

Don't worry; we Trots would only cross the barricades to storm the positions of the people you support under the cover of a maudlin concern for bourgeois morality.

Marxism is primarily a humanistic philosophy, let's not endorse methods that break human beings, or degrade the individual.

Marxism has precisely nothing to do with the hypocritical bourgeois humanism that sheds crocodile tears whenever a crowned head gets shot and keeps mum about the millions that the crowned head had killed. Revolutionary socialists desire nothing less than the liberation of mankind; if that means breaking and degrading White butchers, oppressors and murderers, so be it.

I just don't understand why you're preaching this pseudo-Christianity to us, and not to the Right. What's the matter; if the capitalists starve and kill people, that is not degrading?

Thousands were killed in the red terror in georgia, which you can't distinguish from the Bolshevik party. Dzherinsky organized it, and Stalin's cronies were the main organizers of it. It was fucking brutal, and was an early sign of degeneration. I don't give a shit about mensheviks btw, but their famillies were often targeted during the later terrors, which is no good.

Hm, I had no idea that the families of Mensheviks were targeted; you mean as hostages or simply imprisoned etc.? If the latter, that is of course an excess worth condemning. Anyway, I thought Dzerzhinsky only set foot in Georgia on a fact-finding mission for the C. C.

AConfusedSocialDemocrat

14th March 2013, 12:58

As is your comment about "state terrorism," which is about as vacuous as the charge of "sectarianism" that we often see on this forum. Both are used as substitutes for actual argument, and have this gratingly moralizing tone to them. Not surprising in light of the fact that you're a "confused social democrat." Or is it anarchist? It's so difficult to tell them apart based on their arguments.

No it's not, a state targeting workers because they refuse war communism or Trotsky's labour armies, the NKVD executing the friends of Martov for no more than denouncing the reintroduction of the death penalty, and Trotsky crushing the Kronstadt sailors (after calling them the flower of the revolution) in the 'name of people' is terrorism. If Hitler did this you would not shirk from calling him out on his state terrorism, but because you have an ideological investment in Marxism-Leninism you refuse to see it, as it would pretty much reveal that you hold the the political views of paranoid sociopaths.

This tired "argument" again? You social-democrats could at least take the time to devise another fallacious argument; this one has been worn down. What "Ukrainian farming families"? You mean the kulaks?

As much as you try to rationalise away bolshevik murder, many common Ukranian peasent were directly targeted, firstly because the Kulak catagories were so fucking vague you could fit any one you like into it, and secondly to cower the rest into towing the bolshevik line.

The "anarchists" that were targeted were the Makhnovtsky, the peasant bandits that stopped grain procurement in the southern front, that attacked the Red Army, the cities, and carried out pogroms.

Ukranian nationalists throwing of the Russian yolk that had dominated them for centuries, but of course we see the Russian chauvanism shining through in the actions of Trotsky and Lenin, just as much as Kerensky.

Do you have an actual credible source for any of your claim, or are your only sources the Black Book of Intellectual Dishonestly, and Saint Noam the Potemkin Libertarian?

This is why I liken you guys to holocaust deniers, you simply argue away sources that don't fit what you already believe as capitalist lies and the like. I've already posted links to the works Brovokin, Chomsky, all first rate historians, and even to Martov, who was witnessing these attrocities as they happened. We can have some Luxemburg too if you want?

Marxism has precisely nothing to do with the hypocritical bourgeois humanism that sheds crocodile tears whenever a crowned head gets shot and keeps mum about the millions that the crowned head had killed. Revolutionary socialists desire nothing less than the liberation of mankind; if that means breaking and degrading White butchers, oppressors and murderers, so be it.

A peversion of Marxism started by Lenin, go back and read the early works, or, even better, read some Dunayevskaya, Lukacs, or Kołakowski.

if the capitalists starve and kill people, that is not degrading?

Oh wow! If I don't support Lenin I must be an apologist for capitalism. Damn, son, you would have made a fine stasi agent with those powers of deduction.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

14th March 2013, 13:30

No it's not, a state targeting workers because they refuse war communism or Trotsky's labour armies, the NKVD executing the friends of Martov for no more than denouncing the reintroduction of the death penalty, and Trotsky crushing the Kronstadt sailors (after calling them the flower of the revolution) in the 'name of people' is terrorism. If Hitler did this you would not shirk from calling him out on his state terrorism, but because you have an ideological investment in Marxism-Leninism you refuse to see it, as it would pretty much reveal that you hold the the political views of paranoid sociopaths.

More outright lies, I see. Who were these "friends of Martov" that were killed for opposing the death penalty? I know of none. It might surprise those that think the cartoonish caricature of the Bolshevik party as a monolithic totalitarian entity is true, but one of those that opposed the death penalty was the Ch-K chairman Dzerzhinsky. As far as I know, he was not taken out and shot, but then again he was no friend of Martov.

As for the Kronstadt mutineers, they were not the ones that Trotsky, in one of his more inspired moments, called the flower of the revolution - those were the old Bolshevik sailors led by Dybenko, not their demoralised peasant replacements.

As much as you try to rationalise away bolshevik murder, many common Ukranian peasent were directly targeted, firstly because the Kulak catagories were so fucking vague you could fit any one you like into it, and secondly to cower the rest into towing the bolshevik line.

Much is made of the vagueness of the definition of a kulak, but in the field there existed clear criteria - kulaks were the speculators, the peasants that employed and exploited the rural proletariat and semiproletariat etc. And, again, this might surprise those that believe the Black Book of Nazi Propaganda, but several parties existed in Ukraine - including the overtly peasant Borotbists. They joined the KP(b)U, the Bolshevik party in Ukraine; and the party that always had a plurality in the Soviets and in the kombeds.

Ukranian nationalists throwing of the Russian yolk that had dominated them for centuries, but of course we see the Russian chauvanism shining through in the actions of Trotsky and Lenin, just as much as Kerensky.

Ukrainian nationalists that attacked the forces of the Ukrainian Provisional C. E. C. of Soviets, moreover; that attacked Ukrainian Soviet authorities because they would not agree to a chauvinist hatred of the Russian S. F. S. R.

This is why I liken you guys to holocaust deniers, you simply argue away sources that don't fit what you already believe as capitalist lies and the like. I've already posted links to the works Brovokin, Chomsky, all first rate historians, and even to Martov, who was witnessing these attrocities as they happened. We can have some Luxemburg too if you want?

I am not familiar with Chomsky, the first rate historian. Is he by any chance related to Chomsky, the linguist? Whose competence in historical matters is on record; particularly his championing of actual holocaust deniers? As for the rest, you must be dreaming - there are no links to any of Martov's works in this thread. That is actually quite convenient to you, since it should be apparent how Martov had degenerated in the direction of Kautskyist centrism and petty moralising at the time.

A peversion of Marxism started by Lenin, go back and read the early works, or, even better, read some Dunayevskaya, Lukacs, or Kołakowski.

Marxism is not the cult of personality of Saint Marx and the Blessed Engels; if the early works of Marx contain some idealist defect, that should be criticised in light of his more mature work - particularly his defense of the Paris Commune, a sore point for every Tolstoyan and pacifist that wants to call themselves a Marxist - not accepted as the sacred gospel that should cause us to suspend our critical abilities.

Oh wow! If I don't support Lenin I must be an apologist for capitalism. Damn, son, you would have made a fine stasi agent with those powers of deduction.

I'd rather be a StaSi agent than a hired mourner for the bourgeoisie. I asked you why you are not preaching this pseudo-Christianity to the bourgeoisie, instead of wasting everyone's time with these maudlin odes to bourgeois morality on a revolutionary leftist forum.

AConfusedSocialDemocrat

14th March 2013, 13:53

Black Book of Nazi Propaganda, but several parties existed in Ukraine

Yeah, because that is the only book in the entire world that is anti-USSR, literally no other historian or communists has claimed that the USSR wasn't a beautiful lolipop republic of puppy dogs.

Whose competence in historical matters is on record; particularly his championing of actual holocaust deniers?

He didn't champion that guy, he merely said he had a right to his oppinion, and it was a matter of protecting free speech, using much of the reasoning that Luxemburg or Paine relied. He is not a holocaust denier himself.

there are no links to any of Martov's works in this thread.

My mistake: http://www.marxists.org/archive/martov/index.htm

Plus, plenty of other great articles by leftists, past and present, with their critiques of Lenin, http://libcom.org/search/apachesolr_search/lenin, http://libcom.org/search/apachesolr_search/bolshevism,

petty moralising at the time.

pffft, bourgoise morals and sentimentality, murder of political opponents is good.

Marxism is not the cult of personality of Saint Marx and the Blessed Engels

No, it appears on revleft it is that of Lenin, Stalin, and Hoxha, or whatever vile 20th century tyrant takes your fancy.

not accepted as the sacred gospel that should cause us to suspend our critical abilities.

And yet again, this translates into the real world as brutal excesses of state violence.

And let us not forget Marx's categorical imperative, that or revolutionising every society that does not view man as man. How do police states, or states that are happy to employ meaningless violence to mould man to their own vision, actually view man?

I asked you why you are not preaching this pseudo-Christianity to the bourgeoisie, instead of wasting everyone's time with these maudlin odes to bourgeois morality on a revolutionary leftist forum.

Because I am a committed leftist myself, just because I don't have hard on for state terrorism doesn't negate this.

Rurkel

14th March 2013, 14:01

Okay, so everyone agrees that Kindness' arguments are bad and the Black Book of Communism is garbage. Let's not return to them in every reply, since they can sabotage that relatively interesting debate.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

14th March 2013, 14:13

Yeah, because that is the only book in the entire world that is anti-USSR, literally no other historian or communists has claimed that the USSR wasn't a beautiful lolipop republic of puppy dogs.

As I recall it, the Beautiful Soviet Socialist Lollypop Republic of Puppy Dogs was further to the east, around Karaganda. You're missing the point. The Black Book of Lies is one of the most prominent examples of charlatan "research" being used as propaganda against communism; the ridiculous caricature that it presents is widely believed in bourgeois circles.

He didn't champion that guy, he merely said he had a right to his oppinion, and it was a matter of protecting free speech, using much of the reasoning that Luxemburg or Paine relied. He is not a holocaust denier himself.

He implied that he was a serious researcher and lied about that Nazi being an "apolitical liberal".

My mistake: http://www.marxists.org/archive/martov/index.htm

I am familiar with Martov's work, which is why I mentioned his sad degeneration from an honest, if at times idealistic revolutionary, to a moraliser a la the late Kautsky (another sad case).

pffft, bourgoise morals and sentimentality, murder of political opponents is good.

"Murder" of political opponents that had tried to destroy the proletarian state through murder and pillage is good. If you can't acknowledge that, I am surprised you consider yourself a revolutionary socialist.

No, it appears on revleft it is that of Lenin, Stalin, and Hoxha, or whatever vile 20th century tyrant takes your fancy.

I am not exactly a fan of Stalin or Hoxha, but even these gentlemen sound appealing when attacked by someone that would have the proletariat throw away its arms and be slaughtered by the reaction.

And yet again, this translates into the real world as brutal excesses of state violence.

It translates into brutal state violence, sometimes accompanied by excesses, that had saved the revolution.

And let us not forget Marx's categorical imperative, that or revolutionising every society that does not view man as man. How do police states, or states that are happy to employ meaningless violence to mould man to their own vision, actually view man?

Marx, reduced to a bourgeois categorical imperative. My head hurts. Again, please read the Marxist defence of the Paris Commune, before talking nonsense about police states and categorical imperatives. I would recommend Trotsky and Plekhanov as well, but they did not worship bourgeois morality (well, the early Plekhanov did not) and the semi-Hegelian young Marx, so I doubt they'd be your cup of tea.

Because I am a committed leftist myself, just because I don't have hard on for state terrorism doesn't negate this.

No one here has a hard-on for terrorism; but there are people that recognise the necessity of revolutionary terror in defending and advancing the revolution, and those that cling to outdated bourgeois concepts, concepts that legitimise the violence of the oppressors and condemn the oppressed fighting back. These people would like to have a revolution without violence - good luck! The rest of the labour movement has shown itself capable of learning from history.

Lev Bronsteinovich

14th March 2013, 15:56

Yeah, because that is the only book in the entire world that is anti-USSR, literally no other historian or communists has claimed that the USSR wasn't a beautiful lolipop republic of puppy dogs.

He didn't champion that guy, he merely said he had a right to his oppinion, and it was a matter of protecting free speech, using much of the reasoning that Luxemburg or Paine relied. He is not a holocaust denier himself.

My mistake: http://www.marxists.org/archive/martov/index.htm

Plus, plenty of other great articles by leftists, past and present, with their critiques of Lenin, http://libcom.org/search/apachesolr_search/lenin, http://libcom.org/search/apachesolr_search/bolshevism,

pffft, bourgoise morals and sentimentality, murder of political opponents is good.

No, it appears on revleft it is that of Lenin, Stalin, and Hoxha, or whatever vile 20th century tyrant takes your fancy.

And yet again, this translates into the real world as brutal excesses of state violence.

And let us not forget Marx's categorical imperative, that or revolutionising every society that does not view man as man. How do police states, or states that are happy to employ meaningless violence to mould man to their own vision, actually view man?

Because I am a committed leftist myself, just because I don't have hard on for state terrorism doesn't negate this.
Free speech for fascists, great -- there's a cause you can support:rolleyes:. To describe the Red Terror as "meaningless violence" indicates the vast divide between your views and revolutionary politics. Give it up, pal. Obviously I have no love for folks like Hoxa and Stalin, but I would certainly stand with them against you and those of your political ilk. In Germany in 1919 you would have been standing with Ebert and Noske against those nasty Spartacists. Yuck.

AConfusedSocialDemocrat

14th March 2013, 19:05

You're missing the point. The Black Book of Lies is one of the most prominent examples of charlatan "research" being used as propaganda against communism; the ridiculous caricature that it presents is widely believed in bourgeois circles.

You're missing the point that the black book of communism isn't the only book that is anti-Soviet, there are plenty of actual historical works in respectable journals and by respectable authors , a fair few of them even Marxist, that condem the soviet experiment.

He implied that he was a serious researcher and lied about that Nazi being an "apolitical liberal".

Errr, no. He never said that Faurisson was anything other than an anti-semitic nutjob, he merely took up his pen to defend everyone's right to freedom of speech, no matter what disgusting views they hold.

"Murder" of political opponents that had tried to destroy the proletarian state through murder and pillage is good. If you can't acknowledge that, I am surprised you consider yourself a revolutionary socialist.

And trade unionist and Mensheviks that had done no more than hold a strike, or took up the pen to call out bolshevik injustices, were they honestly violent terrorists?

I am not exactly a fan of Stalin or Hoxha, but even these gentlemen sound appealing when attacked by someone that would have the proletariat throw away its arms and be slaughtered by the reaction.

You build up some surreal scenario where the only two choices are a failed revolution, or sociopathic mass murder.

It translates into brutal state violence, sometimes accompanied by excesses, that had saved the revolution.

The violence killed the revolution, as Martov said, the beast had tasted blood, and once the mass killings were over the means of production were still not in the hands of the workers, and power was centralised into the hands of a part elite. Pretty much everything Luxemburg predcted in her 1918 letter to Lenin.

Marx, reduced to a bourgeois categorical imperative.

Yup, the thesis on Feuerbach, the eleventh thesis I believe. Summed up by the marvelous guys over at SPGB (http://www.marxists.org/archive/rubel/1982/marx-ethics.htm)

No one here has a hard-on for terrorism; but there are people that recognise the necessity of revolutionary terror in defending and advancing the revolution

Yeah, the supposed revolution at the expense of the individual.

cling to outdated bourgeois concepts

20th century communism rejected the so called bourgeois concepts, 20th century communism was also one of the most vile nightmares in mankinds history. Perhaps 21st communism should be so quick to throw these concepts away.

These people would like to have a revolution without violence - good luck! The rest of the labour movement has shown itself capable of learning from history.

Like I said in an earlier post, this rhetorical flourish sounds nice on paper, but I'll let you explain to children of supposed counter revolutionaries why their father, or mother, isn't coming home tonight.

Free speech for fascists, great -- there's a cause you can support

As the marvelous red Rosa pointed out:

"Freedom only for the members of the government, only for the members of the Party — though they are quite numerous — is no freedom at all. Freedom is always the freedom of dissenters. The essence of political freedom depends not on the fanatics of 'justice', but rather on all the invigorating, beneficial, and detergent effects of dissenters. If 'freedom' becomes 'privilege', the workings of political freedom are broken."

Freedom of speech helps us more than it hurts us. If you ban dissenting voices you make yourself, by your own volition, a slave of your present oppinion, with no chance of changing it, since you have cut yourself off from anything that challenges it.

To describe the Red Terror as "meaningless violence" indicates the vast divide between your views and revolutionary politics. Give it up, pal.

And your utter ease with it just demonstrates what a damaged individual you are. You'd make a good Yezhov come the revolution.

In Germany in 1919 you would have been standing with Ebert and Noske against those nasty Spartacists. Yuck.

Hardly, Luxemburg was my kind of revolutionary, actually had mass support, was a pluralist, understood the humanist aspects of Marxism, actually practised direct democracy in the sense Marx meant, and didn't utilise state terrorism.

Lucretia

14th March 2013, 22:26

What the shit the kindness has been spewing bears little if any resemblance to Anarchism but rather just to mindless pacifism and it reeks of someone who still thinks that things can still change without there having to be a major upheaval in society. Basically he sounds like a Liberal or a Tory :grin: . I wouldn't be surprised to see him knocking on doors for your local Liberal candidate at all actually :laugh:

Anarchists believe in a violent revolution so i hardly see how kindness is either a Anarchist or a revolutionary. And the notion that say Anarchist Communism is anything like Social Democracy is plain retarded. The last time i checked Anarchists didn't believe in participating in elections and such. Confused teenagers are in a different group altogether and are just as likely to be of any other tendency.

On the contrary, both anarchism and social democracy fail to take a materialist understanding of the state, and therefore fail to see not only how a workers' state is possible, but absolutely necessary for the success of any anti-capitalist revolutionary project.

Both of them therefore view the state in a way which leads them not to challenge for political power. On the surface the reasoning appears different: for anarchism, political power in the form of states is bad, bad, bad, very naughty, so workers shouldn't challenge to take it; and for social democrats, who ideally do want to take state power, their approach is to win control over the existing bourgeois state democratically (e.g., through bourgeois elections) rather than smashing it and replacing it one of their own. In other words, social dems ignore the role of bourgeois elections (and the bourgeois state itself) as tools of capitalist hegemony. Both flavors of politics, anarchism and social democracy, clump together "state power" as a generic term that they fail to analyze from a materialist perspective. This cripples them, and leads them to a de facto acceptance of the state in its current form. But as I said, the anarchists are more stylish about it, and dress it up as an ultra-radical rejection of states in general. Ironic, I know.

Lev Bronsteinovich

14th March 2013, 23:04

20th century communism rejected the so called bourgeois concepts, 20th century communism was also one of the most vile nightmares in mankinds history. Perhaps 21st communism should be so quick to throw these concepts away.

COMPARED TO WHAT? How about 20th century capitalism -- a far bigger nightmare -- the folks that gave you WWI, WWII, the Holocaust, The Korean and Vietnam Wars, to name just a few lovelies (oh, how about the partition of India?). You compare the Bolsheviks to some abstract, pure and unsullied imaginary socialists. The SPD by itself might have been able to shorten WWI by a couple of years (had it been actually revolutionary) is that the political tradition you admire? Martov? Come on, the man eventually had almost no following for a reason. Like you, he could not stand the actual messy process of history. Most of your charges against Lenin and the Bolsheviks are either exaggerations or fabrications. But there was a Red Terror. It saved the Revolution. Do you decry the bloody White terror? While we are at it, where do you stand on the French Revolution? Probably against that one too.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

15th March 2013, 09:56

You're missing the point that the black book of communism isn't the only book that is anti-Soviet, there are plenty of actual historical works in respectable journals and by respectable authors , a fair few of them even Marxist, that condem the soviet experiment.

Many "respectable" bourgeois historians that specialise in the Soviet Union would be considered frauds and charlatans in any other field; particularly given their tendencies to correct the official figures to account for their own ideas.

Marxist criticism of the Soviet system is another matter; serious criticism that is not based on sentimentality should always get a fair hearing. But Marxist historians are not trying to sell the standard bourgeois view of Soviet Russia and, later, the Soviet Union as an evil totalitarian empire. Hence my reference to the Black Book of Idiocy - it's an example of the immature, cartoonish view of the Soviet Union that the bourgeoisie actively promote.

Errr, no. He never said that Faurisson was anything other than an anti-semitic nutjob, he merely took up his pen to defend everyone's right to freedom of speech, no matter what disgusting views they hold.

"Putting this central issue aside, is it true that Faurisson is an anti-Semite or a neo-Nazi? As noted earlier, I do not know his work very well. But from what I have read -- largely as a result of the nature of the attacks on him -- I find no evidence to support either conclusion. Nor do I find credible evidence in the material that I have read concerning him, either in the public record or in private correspondence. As far as I can determine, he is a relatively apolitical liberal of some sort." - Chomsky, Some Elementary Comments on the Rights of Freedom of Expression

"The petition simply stated that Faurisson had presented his "finding," which is uncontroversial, stating or implying precisely nothing about their value and implying nothing about their validity."* - ibid

* But it does imply that they are findings, the results of scientific, if possibly shoddy, work, and not the propagandistics scribblings of a Nazi.

None of this demonstrates that Chomsky is a holocaust denier. What it does demonstrate, however, is that he is perfectly willing to ignore the historical reality, and to outright distort the truth, when it suits his agenda; in this case, the agenda against the French intelligentsia. And since Chomsky has an obvious hatred of Leninism, I trust this first-rate historian that is not actually a historian as I would trust Faurisson.

And trade unionist and Mensheviks that had done no more than hold a strike, or took up the pen to call out bolshevik injustices, were they honestly violent terrorists?

What bloody Mensheviks? Those poor friends of Martov that were shot for opposing the death penalty, which you could not prove? As for striking workers, I can recall one or two occasions on which the Red Guards or the Red Army had suppressed strikes. What of it? Strikes in the middle of the civil war are a direct assault on the people that the Red Army protected, including the striking workers themselves. One section of the proletariat should not be allowed to sabotage the rest; that is why strikebreakers in bourgeois states are universally reviled.

You build up some surreal scenario where the only two choices are a failed revolution, or sociopathic mass murder.

Red Terror, or the massacre of the workers - it is not a surreal scenario, but the historical reality. The Entente, the Whites, the peasant bandits would not have been defeated if the Soviet government limited itself to what is considered permissible under bourgeois morality.

The violence killed the revolution, as Martov said, the beast had tasted blood, and once the mass killings were over the means of production were still not in the hands of the workers, and power was centralised into the hands of a part elite. Pretty much everything Luxemburg predcted in her 1918 letter to Lenin.

The means of production were in the hands of the workers' state; but the proletarian class itself was decimated by the war. And yes, that did lead to the bureaucratic degeneration, but this decimation of the proletariat was not due to the Red Terror, but due to the "poor" kulaks, right Mensheviks, Esers of all tendencies, the Whites and the Entente - during the course of this thread, you have expressed your sympathy with half of these people!

Yup, the thesis on Feuerbach, the eleventh thesis I believe. Summed up by the marvelous guys over at SPGB (http://www.marxists.org/archive/rubel/1982/marx-ethics.htm)

The eleventh thesis on Feuerbach is vague ("the point is to change it"), and does not contain any categorical imperative - in fact, a categorical imperative would go against the very foundations of Marxism, since categorical imperatives are above classes and above concrete social processes. And again, why would you focus on vague statements in Marx's earlier works when the entire issue of revolutionary violence is explored in great detail in "The Civil War in France"?

Yeah, the supposed revolution at the expense of the individual.

At the expense of some individuals, as all revolutions are. Or was the French revolution a "supposed" revolution because royalists were killed?

20th century communism rejected the so called bourgeois concepts, 20th century communism was also one of the most vile nightmares in mankinds history. Perhaps 21st communism should be so quick to throw these concepts away.

Cmrd. Bronsteinovich has already addressed this - we are living in a world that is ten times more nightmarish than "20th century communism".

Like I said in an earlier post, this rhetorical flourish sounds nice on paper, but I'll let you explain to children of supposed counter revolutionaries why their father, or mother, isn't coming home tonight.

Congratulations, you have managed to make the thought of grieving children absolutely hilarious by employing it as an obvious appeal to emotions. Of course, actual grieving children would be unfortunate, but is it not better for the children of counter-revolutionaries, as much as we should sympathise for their loss in a purely personal sense, than for the millions of children of the working class to grieve, or to not be able to grieve due to being dead?

Freedom of speech helps us more than it hurts us. If you ban dissenting voices you make yourself, by your own volition, a slave of your present oppinion, with no chance of changing it, since you have cut yourself off from anything that challenges it.

I think most of us would be quite comfortable cutting ourselves off from claims about how Jews run the world or how women should be strapped down and forced to give birth against their will. What Luxembourg missed - which is understandable, since she was talking about something only tangentially related - is how political speech can be damaging, to the state (which is good in the case of bourgeois states and bad in case of workers' states) and to private individuals.

And your utter ease with it just demonstrates what a damaged individual you are. You'd make a good Yezhov come the revolution.

Except that "comrade" Yezhov was not in charge of the security organs during the revolution, was he? More honest, humane comrades - Bonch-Bruevich, Dzerzhinsky etc. - were. That bloody butcher Yezhov presided over security organs in a state that had renounced revolutionary red terror.

I must say, though, your speculation about the personalities of your opponents would be more insulting if they were not so hilariously ridiculous.

Hardly, Luxemburg was my kind of revolutionary, actually had mass support, was a pluralist, understood the humanist aspects of Marxism, actually practised direct democracy in the sense Marx meant, and didn't utilise state terrorism.

It almost seems rude to mention it, but both she and Liebknecht died before the necessity for a red terror arose - and your hero Martov did not write a word on them after their death; he did not attack the degenerate butchers Ebert and Noske at all, while he howled every time the Bolsheviks shot a whiteguard. But if the Spartacist revolution had succeeded, do you thing the Eberts and Noskes would kill themselves? That the Freikorps and the remnants of the Junkertum would disappear? No; Germany was a developed imperialist centre, so the red terror would not be as intense as it was in Russia, but it would have been necessary. And then you "confused" social democrats would hurl insults at Luxemburg and others, and shed crocodile tears for the Eberts, the Noskes, the Scheidemanns, the Pabsts, the Hitlers.

Hands off Rosa Luxemburg.

Red Economist

15th March 2013, 12:42

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

15th March 2013, 18:15

In general, I'd say that lenin was not on the scale of stalin, hitler, pol pot or mao- but by the end of his life, the blueprint which stalin would use was in place. There was a period of social experimentation early on in his reign; worker's councils, factory committees, as well as utopian experiments, art movements (like constructivism) and the sexual revolution that went on as well. so it was comparatively very liberal- and on the subjects of homosexuality, divorce etc it was more liberal than virtually all other countries in the world at the time and was attack for it. But not "Democratic" in the liberal, multi-party sense of the word and still debately so in terms of mass participation through soviets.

As I have already mentioned, several parties existed in the Soviets. Off the cuff, the parties included:

Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), the "Bolshevik Party";
Party of Left Socialists-Revolutionaries, "Left Esers", part of the first coalition government in Soviet Russia, broke after certain members of the LSR Central Committee tried to overthrow the government and drag Russia back into the imperialist war;
Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (United), sometimes mistakenly called RSDRP (Menshevik) the remnants of the Menshevik group of the RSDRP; banned for agitation against the Soviet government in the middle of the Civil War; ban enforced only sporadically;
Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries, the "Right Esers", banned for agitation against the Soviet government in the middle of the Civil War;
Party of Populist Communist and Revolutionary Communist Party, splinters of the PLSR, merged into the RKP(b);
Union of Left Narodnism and the Party of Socialists-Revolutionaries (Minority), splinters of the PSR;
Several other parties - I think Larin's Menshevik-Internationalist group continued to exist in some form for a while, that there were, heavens preserve us, Popular Socialists in the Soviets and so on, and so on.

And this is just in Russia. The number of parties was, as I recall it, even greater in Ukraine and so on and so on.

And the soviets, it is true, were not standard bourgeois-democrat bodies. But this does not mean that they were not democratic; they were in fact more democratic than bourgeois "talk shop" parliaments, since they were to a large extent operative as well as legislative bodies. Although there existed a parallel system of commissars and plenipotentiaries, the Bolshevik leadership always urged the soviets to take a more active role.

However, during the Civil War the proletariat, the class whose dictatorship was exercised in the soviets was decimated, and the remnants were mostly in the Bolshevik Party. The degeneration of the soviet system followed.

That, and calling it Lenin's "reign" is an exaggeration; Lenin was the foremost Bolshevik theoretician and the chairman of the SovNarKom and the STO. But he was not a dictator; measures sponsored by Lenin would often pass with a very tight majority (the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk for example), and he was eventually relieved of duty by the Politburo of the RKP(b).

I'd like to try to actually defend the black book of communism; yes, it's statistics are appauling, and it serves effectively as a work of propagnda.

Oh, the "research" in the Black Book of Chairman Curtois isn't just fucked up when it comes to statistics. The authors manage to get basic historical facts - such as the sequence of events during the October Revolution, or the Polish-Soviet war - completely wrong. And even when they tell the truth, they usually omit parts of it that are unfavorable to their caricature - mentioning Latsis's rash article but neglecting to mention that Lenin publicly called him out for idiotic statement for example.

But if you sit and read it, the way that people died and lived under the regieme was clearly not what any of us would want or was even justifiable using stalinist rhetoric given that it was so random.

"Random" in what sense? The Red Terror was a terror campaign aimed at the enemies of soviet power; in that respect, it was not random at all. It was justified because it saved the revolution; this does not mean that it was pleasant, but if we restrict ourselves to pleasant things only, we won't get very far.

you do start to see behind the thought-terminating cliches of 'class struggle' and 'dictatorship of the proletariat' and see the human cost. A reality check like that isn't a bad thing, as it gets you to stop and think and really crytalises the ethical questions involved.

The class struggle is a cliche? That terminates thought? And here I was thinking that it is an immensely successful explanatory term, as the numerous Marxist analyses of society demonstrate.

I managed to get a third of the way through the black book, and hit 1937, by which point you were dealing with such large figures and groups of people that it would be like watching all your freinds and family dissapearing in one go. I had to stop and start because after a while you loose the sensitivity to the deatils of what happened to people on the page. It did make me sit up and realise how much I took for granted. I didn't finish it after that because I knew the worst was yet to come, but did get through the chapter on Afghanistan and read a bit on Cambodia. yikes!

If there is one thing that all Marxist and anarchist tendencies, sects and splinters from sects can agree on, it would be the exclusion of the "Communist" Party of Kampuchea (an internal name; the public name was "The Higher Organisation") from the ranks of communist parties. Literally nothing in the programme of that racist party of agrarian utopians has anything to do with Marxism.

As for Afghanistan, while the PDR Afghanistan had its problems, it was certainly better than the various Islamist states the United States have created in the region; the "free and democratic" IR Afghanistan being merely the latest.

nevertheless, your still stuck with the fact that capitalism does most of the same things (the exception being ideological controls on individual thought unless your dealing with fascism/right-wing military dictatorships) but because it's the 'market' not the 'state' it's supposed to be "all right" because "no-one" is responsible for it.

I am not familiar with any Leninist state that tried to control individual thought beyond what bourgeois states already do; "Democratic" Kampuchea did, but as per above, that ridiculous statelet had more to do with Nazism than Leninism. In fact, the standing army of journalists, "experts" and the clergy that the bourgeoisie recourse to is not as open and honest as the Leninist propagandist.

DarkPast

15th March 2013, 23:51

Of course Lenin and the Ch-K could make mistakes; they let most of the Kornilovtsy and Black Hundreds escape Petrograd for one thing. But I don't see why everyone has their knickers in a twist about that telegram to Kuraev and Bosh - it commanded the crushing of a kulak insurgency in the middle of the civil war. What could have Lenin written? "Please cuddle the kulaks in accordance with yesterday's telegram"?

The note talks about hanging ~100 bloodsucking, notorious kulaks (in five volosts!), not any Grisha with three cows.

The problems with it are manifold: were these really kulaks, or was the word just being used as a slur, or possibly a deliberate attempt to dehumanize the rebelling peasants? "Bloodsucking" and similar epithets don't really tell us much at all since, like I said before, the category was not precisely defined. For all we know it really could have been peasants who had one or two cows more than their neighbours. There is no mention of how these kulaks were to be selected, no mention of an investigation or trial. In practice, this meant that the local Bolsheviks could hang pretty much anyone they didn't like.

It is unfortunate when the proletarian authorities have to resort to shootings, hangings and terror. Perhaps the messrs. Whites, these darlings of every moral and pacifist liberal in our free West, should have thought about that before trying to overthrow the Soviet government by murder and pillage.

Were these "kulaks" actually Whites, though? Or just peasants resisting grain requisitioning? There were more than two sides in the Civil War. In fact, in Europe at least, the White movement was crushed by the end of 1920, yet the peasant revolts continued for quite some time. There were also numerous worker's strikes, and let's not forget Kronstadt. And destruction of the Black Army.

Further, most western historiography (save one or two hardcore conservatives) do not view the White movement in a favourable light at all. Some try to paint the Reds as worse than the Whites, but that doesn't mean they support the latter; almost all books on the Civil War condemn the White Terror.

If there is one thing that all Marxist and anarchist tendencies, sects and splinters from sects can agree on, it would be the exclusion of the "Communist" Party of Kampuchea (an internal name; the public name was "The Higher Organisation") from the ranks of communist parties. Literally nothing in the programme of that racist party of agrarian utopians has anything to do with Marxism.

A bit OT, but... I agree that the Khmer Rouge were shitty idealist nationalists who had a very poor understanding of what Marxism actually is. However, they were not agrarians in the sense that their goal was not to build an agrarian utopia. Instead, they seem to have thought that a communist society could only be built by completely destroying the existing society and rebuilding it from the ground up. Their plan was to focus exclusively on agriculture, so they can trade the excess produce in order to fund a massive industrial expansion. I recommend you read Cambodia 1975-1982 by Michael Vickery if you're interested in them. The book isn't without its flaws, but it is a good effort to explain what went wrong with that regime and put it into some sort of historical context.

As for Afghanistan, while the PDR Afghanistan had its problems, it was certainly better than the various Islamist states the United States have created in the region; the "free and democratic" IR Afghanistan being merely the latest.

I am not familiar with any Leninist state that tried to control individual thought beyond what bourgeois states already do; "Democratic" Kampuchea did, but as per above, that ridiculous statelet had more to do with Nazism than Leninism. In fact, the standing army of journalists, "experts" and the clergy that the bourgeoisie recourse to is not as open and honest as the Leninist propagandist.

I agree that most "Leninist" states weren't particularly horrible compared to the horrors of capitalism (it's just that the most appealing capitalist crimes happen in Third World countries, so nobody knows about them). But isn't this, in the end, a tu quoque argument?

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

16th March 2013, 10:02

The problems with it are manifold: were these really kulaks, or was the word just being used as a slur, or possibly a deliberate attempt to dehumanize the rebelling peasants?

I doubt that it was, since it was used in a telegram from the SovNarKom chairman to the gubernia executive committee. There was no need for Lenin to persuade Bosh and Kurayev that the Bolshevik line was correct.

"Bloodsucking" and similar epithets don't really tell us much at all since, like I said before, the category was not precisely defined. For all we know it really could have been peasants who had one or two cows more than their neighbours.

There would have been more than a hundred such people in five volosts. And the term "bloodsucking" is clear in the context of the telegram - it refers to the murderers and to the speculators.

There is no mention of how these kulaks were to be selected, no mention of an investigation or trial. In practice, this meant that the local Bolsheviks could hang pretty much anyone they didn't like.

Again, note the context of the telegram. The aim was to swiftly crush the kulak rebellion and to demonstrate to the poor peasants that their kulak oppressors were powerless against the soviet state. Hanging "anyone they (the gubkom? but the gubkom was not a homogeneous organ) didn't like" would not have achieved that. Of course, such a thing could have happened, against instructions from the centre, but that would have been a simple case of abuse of power, and there existed inspectorate, control commissions etc.

Were these "kulaks" actually Whites, though? Or just peasants resisting grain requisitioning? There were more than two sides in the Civil War. In fact, in Europe at least, the White movement was crushed by the end of 1920, yet the peasant revolts continued for quite some time.

Resisting grain requisitioning objectively assisted the Whites and the Entente - while the remnants of Wrangel's army evacuated Russia in the closing months of 1920, European Russia was still threatened by White Finland, proto-fascist Poland, and so on and so on. And the kulaks collaborated with the White and interventionist armies en masse.

There were also numerous worker's strikes, and let's not forget Kronstadt. And destruction of the Black Army.

Well, we certainly can't forget Kronstadt, because someone mentions it every five minutes. What of it? It was an Eser rebellion that aimed to purge the soviets of the Bolsheviks, free imprisoned Whiteguards and restore capitalism. And the Makhnovshchina, in addition to attacking the cities and carrying out pogroms, disrupted the requisition of grain.

Further, most western historiography (save one or two hardcore conservatives) do not view the White movement in a favourable light at all. Some try to paint the Reds as worse than the Whites, but that doesn't mean they support the latter; almost all books on the Civil War condemn the White Terror.

They condemn it in passing while focusing on the supposed horrors of the Red Terror - this rather reminds me of those late bourgeois historians that, spitting in the face of the very revolution that established the bourgeois order, focus on the horrors of the Red Terror in France while only obliquely mentioning the horrors of the Chouannerie and the old regime. Or, to use an example "closer to home", those Croatian "historians" that focus on the supposed crimes of the Partisan movement (they killed Nazis, how horrible) and condemn Nazi crimes only in passing, if at all.

And this rotten attitude is shared by our social democrats, both the alive and confused, and dead like Martov. The latter in particular could bore everyone to tears with detailed dissection of a murder of a Menshevik suspect (in which the perpetrators were not identified, but of course Martov assumes they were Bolsheviks acting on orders from the centre), and fail to mention the crimes, the murders, the pogroms carried out by the Whites, a movement that was partially started by his beloved party with the formation of the Union for the Rebirth of Russia.

A bit OT, but... I agree that the Khmer Rouge were shitty idealist nationalists who had a very poor understanding of what Marxism actually is. However, they were not agrarians in the sense that their goal was not to build an agrarian utopia. Instead, they seem to have thought that a communist society could only be built by completely destroying the existing society and rebuilding it from the ground up. Their plan was to focus exclusively on agriculture, so they can trade the excess produce in order to fund a massive industrial expansion. I recommend you read Cambodia 1975-1982 by Michael Vickery if you're interested in them. The book isn't without its flaws, but it is a good effort to explain what went wrong with that regime and put it into some sort of historical context.

Thank you for the recommendation; even so, the overt ideology of the Khmer "Rouge" seems to have been exclusively agrarian, and the destruction of the cities predates the fall of Phnom Penh. As I recall it, the minutes of the meetings of the Standing Committee admits the exclusively peasant basis of the regime, but I can't find the source now.

I agree that most "Leninist" states weren't particularly horrible compared to the horrors of capitalism (it's just that the most appealing capitalist crimes happen in Third World countries, so nobody knows about them). But isn't this, in the end, a tu quoque argument?

Our confused social democrat had called "20th century communism" a "vile nightmare" or something to that effect; I am simply pointing out that the esteemed social democrat currently lives in an even greater nightmare.

Lev Bronsteinovich

16th March 2013, 13:20

I'm not sure who said this, but it is appropriate to this discussion: Program generates theory. If you are a revolutionary Marxist who wants to see communism established in the world, supporting the Bolsheviks and the Red Terror is a no-brainer. If you are a Social Democrat whose highest aspiration is a European-type capitalist state with decent social programs, then you will be SHOCKED, SHOCKED I TELL YOU, at the brutality of those nasty people defending the USSR. That is the bottom line. The SDs on this thread are using pathetic sources to bolster their argument. Because their real program is that of counter-revolution, like the Mensheviks, but they can't really fess up.

Red Economist

16th March 2013, 15:48

I don't really have much to add as most of the stuff you wrote Semendyaev as it either extends or revises my argument in the direction I would have done had I had the time.

when I reffered to the class struggle and the dictatorship of the proletariat as a 'thought terminating cliche' I meant in the sense that it is sufficiently abstract and generalised that people don't have to think about what the words really mean in terms of human experience and it is a way of silencing their own conscience on the issue. i.e. they don't have a chance to empathise with their victims because they don't really think about it.

On the subject of the random nature of the red terror, a fair summary of the black book's point was that many of the local chekas used their powers to settle old scores and take revenge or simply abused their power, including rape. the level of violence was such that many of them ended up becoming drug addicts and alcoholics as a way to cope with it.
Stalin's purges were worse as central targets were set over the number of people to be arrested, and the local branches of the secret police (NKVD at this point?) would compete against one another to fulfil their targets, pulling people off the street, or arresting them for minor offences.

I am not familiar with any Leninist state that tried to control individual thought beyond what bourgeois states already do; "Democratic" Kampuchea did, but as per above, that ridiculous statelet had more to do with Nazism than Leninism. In fact, the standing army of journalists, "experts" and the clergy that the bourgeoisie recourse to is not as open and honest as the Leninist propagandist.

besides the Soviet Union's offical control of the sciences, arts (socialist realism) etc., the ones noted below are the most extreme I've found.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_reform_in_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session

DarkPast

17th March 2013, 16:21

I doubt that it was, since it was used in a telegram from the SovNarKom chairman to the gubernia executive committee. There was no need for Lenin to persuade Bosh and Kurayev that the Bolshevik line was correct.

There is a further telegram where Lenin admonishes the local committee that they're not acting decisively enough, so...

There would have been more than a hundred such people in five volosts. And the term "bloodsucking" is clear in the context of the telegram - it refers to the murderers and to the speculators.Yeah, but we only have Lenin's word for it.

Again, note the context of the telegram. The aim was to swiftly crush the kulak rebellion and to demonstrate to the poor peasants that their kulak oppressors were powerless against the soviet state. Hanging "anyone they (the gubkom? but the gubkom was not a homogeneous organ) didn't like" would not have achieved that. Of course, such a thing could have happened, against instructions from the centre, but that would have been a simple case of abuse of power, and there existed inspectorate, control commissions etc.See RedEconomists post, he puts it better than I could.

Resisting grain requisitioning objectively assisted the Whites and the Entente - while the remnants of Wrangel's army evacuated Russia in the closing months of 1920, European Russia was still threatened by White Finland, proto-fascist Poland, and so on and so on. And the kulaks collaborated with the White and interventionist armies en masse.I don't think Poland was a threat, since it was in the middle of a famine at the time, while Finland didn't want to intervene - they would have already done so during the siege of Petrograd (when Trotsky was leading the defence). Further, they had just passed through a civil war, and I doubt their army would have felt motivated for an invasion.

Do you really think the grain requisitioning was implemented correctly? I vaguely seem to remember even Trotsky criticizing it once.

Well, we certainly can't forget Kronstadt, because someone mentions it every five minutes. What of it? It was an Eser rebellion that aimed to purge the soviets of the Bolsheviks, free imprisoned Whiteguards and restore capitalism. And the Makhnovshchina, in addition to attacking the cities and carrying out pogroms, disrupted the requisition of grain.And there's a good reason they get mentioned so often. They're representative of the key points of contention between the anarchist and leninist tendencies. A lot was written on this forum on these matter in the past, and the two sides have pretty much irreconcilable interpretations of these events.

They condemn it in passing while focusing on the supposed horrors of the Red Terror - this rather reminds me of those late bourgeois historians that, spitting in the face of the very revolution that established the bourgeois order, focus on the horrors of the Red Terror in France while only obliquely mentioning the horrors of the Chouannerie and the old regime. Or, to use an example "closer to home", those Croatian "historians" that focus on the supposed crimes of the Partisan movement (they killed Nazis, how horrible) and condemn Nazi crimes only in passing, if at all.The historians in Croatia are actually pretty divided over the matter. The left-leaning ones focus on Ustaše Crimes, while the right-leaning ones focus on Partisan crimes, each for their own agendas.

And when you call those killed "Nazis", you're proving my point on what I say above about "kulaks". I think you should know that many of those killed in 1945 were not Nazis; they included conscripted Home Guards and civilians, too. Not to mention that the SS and Ustaše units included many youngsters press-ganged by the desperate Croatian Fascist state. And there was little or no effort made to single out those who actually were responsible for crimes. Ironically, many of the most prominent ustaše leaders actually managed to escape.

Thank you for the recommendation; even so, the overt ideology of the Khmer "Rouge" seems to have been exclusively agrarian, and the destruction of the cities predates the fall of Phnom Penh. As I recall it, the minutes of the meetings of the Standing Committee admits the exclusively peasant basis of the regime, but I can't find the source now.Well saying they were peasant-based is logical - there was practically no working class in Cambodia at the time.

Our confused social democrat had called "20th century communism" a "vile nightmare" or something to that effect; I am simply pointing out that the esteemed social democrat currently lives in an even greater nightmare.I'm not much into lesser evilism. Not to mention that some "communist" countries truly were hellholes at certain times. Would you want to live in the USSR during the Great Purge? I'd sooner take my chances in monarchist Yugoslavia - the king's secret police were amateurs compared to the NKVD. The former killed off some 300, maybe 400 communists. The later killed tens of thousands - possibly much more.

I'm not sure who said this, but it is appropriate to this discussion: Program generates theory. If you are a revolutionary Marxist who wants to see communism established in the world, supporting the Bolsheviks and the Red Terror is a no-brainer. If you are a Social Democrat whose highest aspiration is a European-type capitalist state with decent social programs, then you will be SHOCKED, SHOCKED I TELL YOU, at the brutality of those nasty people defending the USSR. That is the bottom line. The SDs on this thread are using pathetic sources to bolster their argument. Because their real program is that of counter-revolution, like the Mensheviks, but they can't really fess up.

Well you might be surprised, but this is a forum for Revolutionary Leftists, which, among others, includes Anarchists and Left Coms. The former have no reason to support Lenin and the Red terror, while the latter are divided over the matter (though they, too, tend to oppose Lenin).

Illegalitarian

17th March 2013, 21:43

Lenin's rule was plagued with rebellion, post-revolution drama, and civil war. Historically, almost all governments implemented authoritarian measures during similar conditions, as keeping a stable government and a relatively satisfied and safe populace required such. Not to mention there was a world war going on during the rise of the soviet government, making all of this all the more intense.

With that in mind, we can't really judge the Lenin regime fairly, with regards to how democratic or authoritarian the regime would have truly been in a time of peace and stability, the only time we could have truly assessed the intentions of the soviet government under Lenin.

We do know, however, that the soviet worker's councils were democratic worker self-managed entities that played a major role in governing the country, until they were effectively stifled when Bolshevik opposition started to use them to their advantage. Perhaps this is the only window into the true intentions of Lenin and his government that we have.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

19th March 2013, 10:47

On the subject of the random nature of the red terror, a fair summary of the black book's point was that many of the local chekas used their powers to settle old scores and take revenge or simply abused their power, including rape. the level of violence was such that many of them ended up becoming drug addicts and alcoholics as a way to cope with it.

Again, why should anyone take the Black Book, that can't even get a (fairly basic) sequence of events right, seriously? I have already outlined the problems with the "history" that the Black Book presents, to which you haven't responded.

besides the Soviet Union's offical control of the sciences, arts (socialist realism) etc., the ones noted below are the most extreme I've found.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thought_reform_in_the_People%27s_Republic_of_China

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Struggle_session

Bourgeois governments control the sciences and the arts as well; in most cases the control is hidden behind budgetary redistribution and so on, but in fascist states the control is exercised openly - just as it was in the deformed workers' state. And the worst excesses of the thought reform movement and struggle sessions pale in comparison to the religious and other reactionary ideology that the bourgeoisie promotes.

There is a further telegram where Lenin admonishes the local committee that they're not acting decisively enough, so...

Lenin sent hundreds of such telegrams - not to convince people that the Bolshevik line is correct (many of them were sent to senior Bolshevik functionaries like Zinoviev and Stasova), but to urge them to work harder and to dispense with unnecessary administrative minutiae.

Yeah, but we only have Lenin's word for it.

That there was grain speculation? Speculation exists in any region undergoing famine.

I don't think Poland was a threat, since it was in the middle of a famine at the time, while Finland didn't want to intervene - they would have already done so during the siege of Petrograd (when Trotsky was leading the defence). Further, they had just passed through a civil war, and I doubt their army would have felt motivated for an invasion.

Even though Poland had already invaded Soviet territory, and although the proto-fascist faction around Piłsudski was not satisfied with Polish territorial gains, and even though Poland was thoroughly supported by the Entente? And even though the Finish conservatives wanted to intervene in favour of Yudenich, and were just barely blocked due to internal politicking in Finland?

Do you really think the grain requisitioning was implemented correctly? I vaguely seem to remember even Trotsky criticizing it once.

The implementation was the best one could hope for in the middle of a bloody civil war, and if the requisition were to stop, the cities and the army would have starved - and the villages would have been burned to the ground by the Whites and the Entente.

The historians in Croatia are actually pretty divided over the matter. The left-leaning ones focus on Ustaše Crimes, while the right-leaning ones focus on Partisan crimes, each for their own agendas.

The "agenda" of the "left" historians - and the only member of that illustrious group I can think of would be Goldstein - is to stop the falsification of historical fact by the Tuđman school of mytho-history.

And when you call those killed "Nazis", you're proving my point on what I say above about "kulaks". I think you should know that many of those killed in 1945 were not Nazis; they included conscripted Home Guards and civilians, too. Not to mention that the SS and Ustaše units included many youngsters press-ganged by the desperate Croatian Fascist state. And there was little or no effort made to single out those who actually were responsible for crimes. Ironically, many of the most prominent ustaše leaders actually managed to escape.

The Home Guard was a criminal and genocidal organisation, just like the Ustaše Army and the SS. Not to mention that, at the end of the Second World War, the "Independent State of Croatia" had been falling apart for over a year - it was not uncommon for entire units to switch sides. Those that remained in the service of the "Headman" had no excuse. As for civilians, people like the "Independent State of Croatia" premier Mandić were technically civilians.

And yes, many of the Ustaše criminals escaped, but how is that an argument for less repression after the end of the war?

I'm not much into lesser evilism. Not to mention that some "communist" countries truly were hellholes at certain times. Would you want to live in the USSR during the Great Purge? I'd sooner take my chances in monarchist Yugoslavia - the king's secret police were amateurs compared to the NKVD. The former killed off some 300, maybe 400 communists. The later killed tens of thousands - possibly much more.

The comparison might make sense if the populations of the two states were remotely similar. Frankly, I would rather have taken my chances with the comrades Yezhov and Beria than with the Viceroyalty of Croatia, which opened the first concentration camps in the Balkans, and handed every socialist and communist prisoner - more than 400 of them - to the "Independent State of Croatia", where they were killed.

Akshay!

20th March 2013, 09:12

Let's not forget that he came into power in the middle of a World War, in one of the poorest and most undeveloped countries in the world, a country which had been run by a feudalistic system for millennia, and which was going through one of the the worst civil wars in its history in which the opposition was backed by practically all powerful capitalist countries.

I do have sympathy for some types of anarchism, but I don't think anarchists should be so harsh on Lenin. A lot of them tend to confuse 2 things

1) Was Lenin Authoritarian? Yeah, in some ways.
2) Did he have any other option? Not really. Maybe he could have done some things differently but then you can say that about anyone.

Red Economist

20th March 2013, 09:53

Oh, the "research" in the Black Book of Chairman Curtois isn't just fucked up when it comes to statistics. The authors manage to get basic historical facts - such as the sequence of events during the October Revolution, or the Polish-Soviet war - completely wrong. And even when they tell the truth, they usually omit parts of it that are unfavorable to their caricature - mentioning Latsis's rash article but neglecting to mention that Lenin publicly called him out for idiotic statement for example.

I checked wiki in case I missed anything obvious... sure enough.

"Werth can also be an extremely careless historian. He gives the number of Bolsheviks in October 1917 as 2000, which is a ridiculous underestimate. He quotes from a letter of Lenin to Aleksandr Shliapnikov and gives the date as 17 October 1917; the letter could hardly have originated at that time, since in it Lenin talks about the need to defeat the Tsarist government, and turn the war into a civil conflict. He gives credit to the Austro-Hungarian rather than the German army for the conquest of Poland in 1915. He describes the Provisional Government as "elected." He incorrectly writes that the peasant rebels during the civil war did more harm to the Reds than to the Whites, and so on...Mr. Paczkowski, who wrote the chapter on Poland, immediately lost my confidence in his objectivity when he wrote on the second page of his essay: “In the summer of 1920, Lenin launched a Red Army offensive against Warsaw.” It is not simply a matter of opinion, but a fact that it was Pilsudski, the Polish hero of independence, who attacked and the Red Army perhaps inadvisably, pursued the Poles."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Black_Book_of_Communism#Historical_Inaccuracie s

I found the one on the Polish Soviet War (paragraph at the top of the page, p.364, Chapter 19). if wikipedia is more accurate than the book your reading, it's says alot of about academic standards. :rolleyes:

on the issue of selectivity, it is definetely a characture of soviet political rule- as it misses out many of the positive attempts at social reform because it focues on the 'crimes against humanity'.

ok, so I've been taken in by bourgeois propaganda. I was persused by a book the size of a breeze block which deals with complex historical issues in highly emotive ways. my apologies Semendyaev. :blushing:

DarkPast

21st March 2013, 13:18

Lenin sent hundreds of such telegrams - not to convince people that the Bolshevik line is correct (many of them were sent to senior Bolshevik functionaries like Zinoviev and Stasova), but to urge them to work harder and to dispense with unnecessary administrative minutiae.

In this case he was urging them to carry out his orders - there's no proof that 100 kulaks were actually hung. This implies reluctance (at least initially) on part of the local functionaries.

That there was grain speculation? Speculation exists in any region undergoing famine.

I was referring to the claim that those to be executed are all bloodsucking etc. kulaks.

Even though Poland had already invaded Soviet territory, and although the proto-fascist faction around Piłsudski was not satisfied with Polish territorial gains, and even though Poland was thoroughly supported by the Entente? And even though the Finish conservatives wanted to intervene in favour of Yudenich, and were just barely blocked due to internal politicking in Finland?

In 1921 those two countries were no longer in any position to threaten Soviet Russia. The Finnish bourgeoisie had their chance to take Petrograd with Yudenich, but now that his army was defeated that opportunity was gone. The Polish-Soviet war officially lasted until March 1921, but in reality the fighting had completely died down by September 1920, when an armistice was signed. Both sides were exhausted and would not have been able to mount another offensive so soon. Especially since they were both hit by a famine in 1921, as I've mentioned before.

The implementation was the best one could hope for in the middle of a bloody civil war, and if the requisition were to stop, the cities and the army would have starved - and the villages would have been burned to the ground by the Whites and the Entente.

Yes, it worked in the sense that the enemies of the Bolshevik regime were defeated. Thus - if you support the Bolsheviks - the harshness of War Communism can be justified during the War. But the policy continued even after the last Whites in Europe were defeated and after the Allied blockade was lifted (November 1920). And popular dissent against the regime shows this - more than a 100 peasant uprisings erupted in early 1921, plus strikes, Kronstadt etc.

The "agenda" of the "left" historians - and the only member of that illustrious group I can think of would be Goldstein - is to stop the falsification of historical fact by the Tuđman school of mytho-history.

There's others, such as Bilandžić, Jakovina and Klasić. As for Tuđman himself, I agree that he was a crappy historian, though he wasn't a neo-Ustaše as some try to paint him (I'd say he was a right-wing populist who also tried to appeal to nostalgic Titoists - much like Putin sometimes appeals to the Stalinists). Anyway, my point was that not all the historians are rabid pro-Ustaše.

The Home Guard was a criminal and genocidal organisation, just like the Ustaše Army and the SS. Not to mention that, at the end of the Second World War, the "Independent State of Croatia" had been falling apart for over a year - it was not uncommon for entire units to switch sides. Those that remained in the service of the "Headman" had no excuse. As for civilians, people like the "Independent State of Croatia" premier Mandić were technically civilians.

The Home Guard was a militia that, for the most part, showed very little enthusiasm for the Ustaše cause. A Yugoslav report on the crimes of the occupying forces was complied not long after the war (1946 I think?) showed only 15 civilians killed by the Croatian Home Guard. The report only covered around 25% of the population, but it is quite obvious that the Home Guard was nowhere near the level of the Ustaše regarding crimes.

Again you try to equate tens of thousands of civilians and conscripts with the very worst among them. Sure, among the Home Guard and civilians were people responsible for the genocidal policies of the ISC. But these people were a minority (hence the need for investigation and trials).

Finally, I'll mention that, just like at Katyn, most of the executions were performed at remote areas, by the secret police or elite guard units, the bodies were stripped of their clothing and other identifying marks, and even mentioning the incident was taboo. What does that say about those responsible? If they were so proud of having dealt with the "counterrevolutionaries", why did they try to hide their actions?

And yes, many of the Ustaše criminals escaped, but how is that an argument for less repression after the end of the war?

It was just an ironic observation that those most responsible for the Ustaše crimes actually managed to escape despite the repression.

The comparison might make sense if the populations of the two states were remotely similar. Frankly, I would rather have taken my chances with the comrades Yezhov and Beria than with the Viceroyalty of Croatia, which opened the first concentration camps in the Balkans, and handed every socialist and communist prisoner - more than 400 of them - to the "Independent State of Croatia", where they were killed.

Yugoslavia had 16 million people on the eve of WW2. The USSR had 168 million. Do the math.

Tito himself said he felt safer in monarchist Yugoslavia than the USSR. And he, having lived in the USSR during the purges and having suffered beatings and imprisonment in Yugoslavia, should know.

Anglo-Saxon Philistine

22nd March 2013, 05:33

In this case he was urging them to carry out his orders - there's no proof that 100 kulaks were actually hung. This implies reluctance (at least initially) on part of the local functionaries.

Lenin sent three telegrams to the Penza gubkom concerning the insurrection; they were dated, I think, 7., 8., and 11. 8. The first telegram demands the destruction of the insurrection, setting up of detention centres, and instructs the gubkom to guard the printing presses in Penza. The second telegram, which has been quoted in this thread, outlines the measures Lenin thought the GubKom should apply. The last telegram notes that the report given by the GubKom was insufficiently detailed - Lenin did suspect that the GubKom was delaying the implementation of the measures outlined in the first and second telegrams, but due to bureaucratic laziness, rather than humanitarian impulses.

I was referring to the claim that those to be executed are all bloodsucking etc. kulaks.

I don't follow. Lenin ordered the execution of "bloodsucking" kulaks - meaning speculators, oppressors etc. Whether the executed fit the description depends on how well his orders had been carried out.

In 1921 those two countries were no longer in any position to threaten Soviet Russia. The Finnish bourgeoisie had their chance to take Petrograd with Yudenich, but now that his army was defeated that opportunity was gone. The Polish-Soviet war officially lasted until March 1921, but in reality the fighting had completely died down by September 1920, when an armistice was signed. Both sides were exhausted and would not have been able to mount another offensive so soon. Especially since they were both hit by a famine in 1921, as I've mentioned before.

Everything is clearer in hindsight. But the Soviet government had legitimate reasons to suspect both Finland and Poland, particularly the latter; and you ignore the continued Entente intervention in the East.

Yes, it worked in the sense that the enemies of the Bolshevik regime were defeated. Thus - if you support the Bolsheviks - the harshness of War Communism can be justified during the War.

Why do people act as if the Civil War was fought over petty titles or the colour of flags? The sordid histories of the various White directorates, committees and supreme governments demonstrate what would have happened to the proletariat, the only class revolutionary socialists should give a toss about, if the Bolsheviks lost. Military Communism was justified as a measure for preserving the proletariat.

But the policy continued even after the last Whites in Europe were defeated and after the Allied blockade was lifted (November 1920). And popular dissent against the regime shows this - more than a 100 peasant uprisings erupted in early 1921, plus strikes, Kronstadt etc.

You ignore the White movement in the East, the continued possibility of Entente predation, and the necessity of feeding the cities. And why, oh why, do people act as if the peasantry is the final arbiter of the revolution?

There's others, such as Bilandžić, Jakovina and Klasić. As for Tuđman himself, I agree that he was a crappy historian, though he wasn't a neo-Ustaše as some try to paint him (I'd say he was a right-wing populist who also tried to appeal to nostalgic Titoists - much like Putin sometimes appeals to the Stalinists). Anyway, my point was that not all the historians are rabid pro-Ustaše.

Even so, you have not demonstrated that the non-Ustaše historians have any overt agenda, beyond a commitment to historical facts. As for our dear king Franjo the First, his role in the bestial persecution and mass murder of Croatian Serbs is evidence enough of his Nazism.

The Home Guard was a militia that, for the most part, showed very little enthusiasm for the Ustaše cause. A Yugoslav report on the crimes of the occupying forces was complied not long after the war (1946 I think?) showed only 15 civilians killed by the Croatian Home Guard. The report only covered around 25% of the population, but it is quite obvious that the Home Guard was nowhere near the level of the Ustaše regarding crimes.

First of all, that study sounds rather suspicious. The Home Guard was an integral part of the fascist forces engaged in anti-partisan activity; that alone should amount to more than 15 civilians (!). Second, you forget that the Home Guard assisted the crimes of the Ustaše Army and the Wehrmacht. Third, the Home Guard was probably not as prolific as the Ustaše Army was when it came to massacres etc. So what? They were still the fascist army of an illegal, genocidal regime, and at the close of the Second World War, they could have defected a long, long time ago.

They chose their "Headman", and were dealt with accordingly.

Again you try to equate tens of thousands of civilians and conscripts with the very worst among them. Sure, among the Home Guard and civilians were people responsible for the genocidal policies of the ISC. But these people were a minority (hence the need for investigation and trials).

The point was that destroying civilians like the premier Mandić, minister Budak, and so on, was commendable - more such civilians, like Ašner etc., should have been smashed. I am not familiar with any innocent civilians among the beasts the Partisans killed.

Finally, I'll mention that, just like at Katyn, most of the executions were performed at remote areas, by the secret police or elite guard units, the bodies were stripped of their clothing and other identifying marks, and even mentioning the incident was taboo. What does that say about those responsible? If they were so proud of having dealt with the "counterrevolutionaries", why did they try to hide their actions?

They didn't. Ranković openly boasted about the number of destroyed enemies of the people in the Assembly.

Yugoslavia had 16 million people on the eve of WW2. The USSR had 168 million. Do the math.

Again, how many of those millions were members of a communist organisation?