20 years ago democracy destroyed in Russia

[Red_Banner]

The last days of pro-socialist Russia.
Yeltsin attacking the congress that voted him out of office:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9OMhyvcaiU

[Le Socialiste]

The former Soviet Union ceased to resemble anything that could remotely be considered 'pro-socialist' long before its dissolution in the early 1990s, though. Considering the party was in the process of charting a similar path to its Chinese counterparts at the time, I'd hardly say what occurred in 1993 could be classified as the "last days of pro-socialist Russia." I'd extend that date way back, decades even.

[Red_Banner]

Well it was still contitutionally pro-socialist.

Where as today's "Russian Federation" it has no such offical status.

Back then it would have been easier to turn Russia back onto the road towords communism.

Now capitalism is anchored in dry cement in Russia.

[tuwix]

Besides there is unfortunate title of this thread. Democracy meant as rule of people from old-greek was unexistent in Russia since times of primitive communism that means approx. 1000 years...

[Red_Banner]

In that short span from the late USSR until 1993 they still had a representative democracy.

Where as now the system is extremely corrupt and rigged.

[Popular Front of Judea]

Neoliberalism arrives on the back of a Russian tank ...

[Sasha]

nope, neo-liberalism arrived when people had enough of breadlines and enough people saw it an improvement.
you can wine all you want about the current state of russia but all it tells you is what an complete failure what preceded it was..
its not that people woke up one day going, damn i got really fed up with this socialist utopia, get me some vulture capitalism, endless corruption and religious xenophobia!

[Red_Banner]

Besides there is unfortunate title of this thread. Democracy meant as rule of people from old-greek was unexistent in Russia since times of primitive communism that means approx. 1000 years...

As Lenin said "In capitalist society, providing it develops under the most favourable conditions, we have a more or less complete democracy in the democratic republic. But this democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation, and consequently always remains, in effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners. Owing to the conditions of capitalist exploitation, the modern wage slaves are so crushed by want and poverty that "they cannot be bothered with democracy", "cannot be bothered with politics"; in the ordinary, peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is debarred from participation in public and political life."

[Brutus]

As Lenin said "In capitalist society, providing it develops under the most favourable conditions, we have a more or less complete democracy in the democratic republic. But this democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation, and consequently always remains, in effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners. Owing to the conditions of capitalist exploitation, the modern wage slaves are so crushed by want and poverty that "they cannot be bothered with democracy", "cannot be bothered with politics"; in the ordinary, peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is debarred from participation in public and political life."

How does this relate to your championing of the USSR and pre-1993 Russian Federation?

[khad]

Besides there is unfortunate title of this thread. Democracy meant as rule of people from old-greek was unexistent in Russia since times of primitive communism that means approx. 1000 years...
Idolizing the Greeks now? You mean the USSR didn't have slavery and systematic child rape? You got something right, at least.

[Skyhilist]

Idolizing the Greeks now? You mean the USSR didn't have slavery and systematic child rape? You got something right, at least.

Oh come on don't be so obtuse. S/he's obviously not saying that slavery and child rape are acceptable. S/he's saying that they didn't embody the idea of the participation of the people, which s/he feels was founded in Greece. The fact that the Greeks didn't actually practice the abstract democratic ideas that they supposedly founded (because they oppressed so many people) is besides the point. Now if you want to argue that democracy was not conceived in Greece, then fine but that's an entirely different argument.

To say that this person is somehow "idolizing" "slavery and systematic child rape" is absurd and an obvious ad hominem.

[Popular Front of Judea]

As Lenin said "In capitalist society, providing it develops under the most favourable conditions, we have a more or less complete democracy in the democratic republic. But this democracy is always hemmed in by the narrow limits set by capitalist exploitation, and consequently always remains, in effect, a democracy for the minority, only for the propertied classes, only for the rich. Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners. Owing to the conditions of capitalist exploitation, the modern wage slaves are so crushed by want and poverty that "they cannot be bothered with democracy", "cannot be bothered with politics"; in the ordinary, peaceful course of events, the majority of the population is debarred from participation in public and political life."

Some context for that quote would be good. Which democratic republic(s) was he speaking of and when did he speak it?

[Red_Banner]

Some context for that quote would be good. Which democratic republic(s) was he speaking of and when did he speak it?


State and Revolution, Chapter 5

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/

[Delenda Carthago]

Some 56 per cent of Russians still regret the dissolution of the Soviet Union, according to a poll published on the eve of the 90th anniversary of the foundation of the first Socialist state.
However, this is almost 10 per cent less than a decade ago, a survey by All- Russian Public Opinion Research Center (VCIOM) revealed.
A third of Russians do not mourn over the collapse of the Soviet Union 21 years ago. That is 6 per cent more than in 2002.
The majority of respondents who feel nostalgic about the end of the Soviet era are those above 45 years of age, with low education level, non-internet users and residents of capital cities of Russian regions


http://rt.com/politics/soviet-collapse-ussr-poll-059/

So, the more people lived USSR, prefer it over Russia. Enuff said.

[The Intransigent Faction]

I hold the view that the former USSR was never socialist. That said, at least they were compelled to frame things ideologically in terms of the march of the working class towards communism, the greed of capitalists, etc.

Something like the Workers' Opposition could have had a lot of potential...it was just on the losing side of that battle. In the United States on the other hand, the working class and talk of its interests is completely marginalized even in ideological rhetoric along with official politics.

I do think it merits being seen as a tragedy, because it was a success of imposed dismantling of flawed state-run programs for the enrichment of private interests, rather than an autonomous revolt of the working class against bureaucracy and 'nomenklatura' to institute genuine democracy. It is arguable that marginalization in the ideological rhetoric of capitalism adds an even bigger obstacle, because rather than considering an alternative (and more genuine) road to socialism, it abandons even the pretense of that.

Maybe someone who actually grew up there would have more insight, but I've been thinking it would probably have been easier to turn people in the Soviet Union toward a less authoritarian approach to Marx than it is to even mention Marx and be taken seriously in most discussions in the West now.

[tuwix]

Idolizing the Greeks now?

Have you ever heard about old-greek language and what democracy really mean or this knowledge is far from you too?



You mean the USSR didn't have slavery and systematic child rape?

As Marx said, "the system of wage labor is a system of slavery" and thusly the USSR had slavery.

[Raquin]

Have you ever heard about old-greek language and what democracy really mean or this knowledge is far from you too?

In Ancient Greek, demokratia meant a system under which a misogynistic elite class of pederast aristocrats ruled over the ignorant masses of women and slaves.

No wonder that those idolize the Greek demokratia the most are the NAMBLite cockroaches. Here, a barf-inducing essay by Thomas K. Hubbard, professor of Greco-Roman literature and gender studies at UT Austin:

ww w.williamapercy .com/wiki/images/Pederastyanddeomocracy_scanned.pdf

Some highlights:

Any serious historian of the early gay rights movements in England and German cannot doubt the centrality of Greek pederasty as a cultural and intellectual model

Here Hubbard argues that it is a conspiracy of bourgeois culture to classify pederasty as exploitation instead of a supportive relationship of mentor and mentee.

There is an ideological agenda at work here, just as the Victorians’ more enthusiastic appropriation of the Greek paradigm. Rather than an arena for pedagogical mentorship, Greek pederasty has been transformed into an institutional power dynamic no differently from women and slaves, certainly no model for the enlightened, self-accepting gays of the late 20th century liberal bourgeois society. Our past, rather than being an inspiration, is now something we can smugly congratulate ourselves on having transcended and forgotten, or better yet, on never having learned to begin with.

The campaign against German sodomy laws. Of course. You want some wisdom with that dick cheese?


Early academic study of Greek pederasty by classics, where it existed, was positive and non-judgmental. Building on K.O. Müller’s The History and Antiquities of the Dorian Race (1824; English trans. 1839), Erich Bethe published a seminal essay on “Dorian Boy Love” in the venerable academic journal Rheinisches Museum (1907), not only appropriating Mueller’s concept of a manly, militaristic comradeship of older and younger warriors among the Spartans and other Dorian tribes, but attributing to this relationship initiatory significance, with the act of anal insemination as a conduit infusing the developing ephebe with his older lover’s courage, virtue, and wisdom. Written at the high point of the efforts to repeal the anti-sodomy statute in Germany and in a society saturated with Prussian concepts of military discipline, Bethe’s thesis was very much a product of his time, imagining Greek pedagogical eros as a precursor of the Wandervogel movement glorified by Hans Blüher and others in the Community of the Special.




Modern scholarship on Greek pederasty is generally begin with K. J. Dover’s Greek Homosexuality (1978). Wide-ranging, yet scrupulous in its evaluation of source texts and one of the first books to integrate literary and artistic evidence, Dover’s work has become established as the basic reference point for subsequent studies. However, despite the work’s pretensions to objectivity, Dover, himself a happily married heterosexual, frequently draws analogies from modern English heterosexual mores (see especially Dover 1978: 84-90), and his influence has largely been responsible for the dogma that homosexual behavior was generally acceptable among the Greeks as long as adult male citizens retained the dominant role of active pursuer (erastês), and was scored only with reference to the effeminized status of the passive, usually young beloved (erômenos), whom Dover sees as comparable to the “violated” and disgraced maiden in modern times.



And here comes the bashing of women and uppity niggas.


Halperin’s self-conscious trashing of the Greek model forms part of a general overthrow and rejection of classical paradigms by classicists themselves, especially feminist scholars and social egalitarians uncomfortable with the traditional glorification of societies even less progressive than our own in their treatment of women and minorities. Weary of trying to teach grueling courses of study in classical languages and ancient history to attention-deficient students brought up on MTV, many contemporary Classics professors will opt instead for a few neat and easily digested formulae drawn from the social sciences, which seem to provide global explanations of classical cultures by deposing them from their former thrones of academic privilege to be now on a level of interpretative equality with Australian aborigines or Indian tribes of the Brazilian rainforest. To the extent that one can find more “victims” in the classical civilizations, the more grist for the mills of insecure classicists anxious to justify themselves in the eyes of their more contemporary and trendy colleagues. In this ultra-egalitarian context, a form of love based on age difference appears unfathomable and can only be explained as “exploitation.”




Pederasty did not disappear in classical Athens, but over the course of the fifth and fourth centuries became progressively deinstitutionalized and covert. Where it was once central to the city’s self-definition as a moderate democracy under the leadership of an aristocratic elite as Sara Monoson has shown in the legend of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, it came to be seen as an embarrassment in the broader and more radicalized democracy of the fifth and fourth centuries....Robbed of cultural status and its civic mission of providing role models to future citizens, pederasty came to be identified more with male prostitution



And now for the kicker:


Similarly the man-boy love that was acknowledged and even celebrated by early homosexual activists has been marginalized within our own progressively democratic and homogenized society, isolated as the province of “perverts” and “child molesters.” Again, the squeamishness and timidity of gay intellectuals in the face of public hostility have made them tacit collaborators, even as Plato and others sold out the real pederasts by pretending that there could be a chaste, purely spiritual pederasty (never a trend likely to win many converts), gay leaders today sell out their brothers (and in many cases their own repressed desires) by creating the public fiction that most gays are involved in long-term monogamous age- and class-equal relationships, and that the only men attracted to teenage boys are a few sickos in NAMBLA whom they would like to see in prison just as much as straight society does.




The Ancient Greeks can go fuck themselves, them and their demokratia.

[Popular Front of Judea]

Pedophilia is the Godwin's Law of Revleft.

[tuwix]

In Ancient Greek, demokratia meant a system under which a misogynistic elite class of pederast aristocrats ruled over the ignorant masses of women and slaves.

Ignorance rules in some minds...

"democracy, literally, rule by the people."

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/157129/democracy

The aplication of the "rule by the people" was probematic in Greece. Nonetheless it means what it means.

[Invader Zim]

http://rt.com/politics/soviet-collapse-ussr-poll-059/

So, the more people lived USSR, prefer it over Russia. Enuff said.

People in the UK are nostalgic for the wartime government headed by Winston Churchill - that doesn't make their opinion any less fucking stupid and divorced from the reality of life during that period.

It is also worth noting that only relatively few people alive actually are in a position to seriously remember a period that elapsed 60 years ago.

[Invader Zim]

Idolizing the Greeks now? You mean the USSR didn't have slavery and systematic child rape? You got something right, at least.

Well, whether child rape was especially high I do not know - but German expellees certainly suffered rape in vast numbers at the hands of the Red Army (with little in the way of official sanction and, in fact, taciturn approval), and the Soviet Union most definitely indulged in slave labour on a vast scale.

[Ismail]

People in the UK are nostalgic for the wartime government headed by Winston Churchill - that doesn't make their opinion any less fucking stupid and divorced from the reality of life during that period.

It is also worth noting that only relatively few people alive actually are in a position to seriously remember a period that elapsed 60 years ago.More like 30-40 years ago, considering that the question was not just the Stalin period but the entire span of Soviet history.

The fact is that the Soviet revisionists were forced to guarantee a number of benefits to the workers, benefits which originated in the victory of proletarian revolution and the construction of socialism in the time of Stalin. These benefits promptly disappeared with the fall of the USSR. The idea that modern-day Russians allow this state of affairs to continue because what came before was "worse" is akin to saying that modern-day Americans find the social programs and various regulations and policies erected during the New Deal and in the three ensuring decades (and subsequently undermined) "worse" than what now exists, rather than the fact that the vast majority of Russians, like Americans, hold apathetic attitudes towards politics and feel that they have no hope of changing things for the better.

Various persons who were in the GDR from November 1989 onwards noted that many in the East wanted a utopian "best of both worlds," the consumer paradise and "freedom" presented in capitalist propaganda and the economic security presented by the SED.

In April 1990 Alia did point out the demagogy employed by the capitalists and the contrast with reality:

"The economic situation in Rumania, Poland, the GDR, Hungary, and Bulgaria has degenerated. Because of strikes and repeated economic and social organizations and re-organizations, the level of production has fallen below what it was previously, In the Soviet Union the economic situation and the standard of living are worse than they were five years ago when perestroika was announced. In all the Eastern countries the working masses are worried because, with the introduction of new economic rules imposed by international capital, those social gains which they had inherited such as guaranteed jobs, housing, pensions, etc., have been placed in jeopardy.

In no country of Eastern Europe is there political stability. Under the slogan of pluralism, various political parties, groups and associations have been created, are competing with one another, and thinking only of winning votes and occupying positions of power. In Rumania some parties are demanding that the cultivated land and that occupied with buildings should be returned to the former owners; in Poland and Hungary factories and plants which were previously state-owned are being privatized. In this climate, even fascist organizations have begun to appear, while nationalist trends and feuds on this basis have come to the fore....

The situation created is completely new, and is characterized by a general offensive of the international bourgeoisie and opportunist forces against socialist and communist values, against the practice of socialist construction, and the internationalist unity of the workers. This is the most aggressive and most dangerous attack which has been undertaken against the revolution hitherto.

It is beyond any doubt that the socialist alternative for the regulation of human society cannot be quelled, that as long as there are exploiters and exploited, there will also be struggle for the resolution of this contradiction."
(Alia, Ramiz. Democratization of Socio-Economic Life Strengthens the Thinking and Action of the People. Tirana: 8 Nëntori Publishing House. 1990. pp. 35-38.)

[Alonso Quijano]

Well it was still contitutionally pro-socialist.

Where as today's "Russian Federation" it has no such offical status.

Back then it would have been easier to turn Russia back onto the road towords communism.

Now capitalism is anchored in dry cement in Russia.
You know how you call a state where people trust the ruling class blindly and care about declarations and not practice? False consciousness. Some would say reformism in contrast to revolutionism.

I live in a country with many people who grew up, or whose family, in the USSR.

Hearing the hatred in their tone when they hear the words "Marxism", "Socialism" and "Communism" is why the USSR not only didn't achieve anything, but hurt the movement more than any capitalist propaganda. Rosa Luxemburg didn't achieve communism. But thanks to the Soviet Union we have not only to start from scratch, but to deal with antagonism towards us which is a direct result of the Soviet lie.

[Alonso Quijano]

So, the more people lived USSR, prefer it over Russia. Enuff said.
And yet their so-called Communist party is right wing. If your argument is that ex-KGB-man Putin is not better than the USSR, you have a point. Is that your argument?

Ask Russian immigrants to Germany or Israel if they miss Communism. And mind you, in Israel about half of the young generation can't make ends meet.

[Zukunftsmusik]

The aplication of the "rule by the people" was probematic in Greece. Nonetheless it means what it means.

You have a thing for etymology, don't you? Words don't "mean what they mean", i.e. they don't mean something completely devoid of time and stages in class society. Although democracy has its origin in Greek city states, the word has a different meaning now, applied to the current conditions and class relations. On the contrary to your etymological fetish, these words - liberalism, democracy and so on - "are what they are". Liberal democracy is capitalist class society, regardless of these words' origin.

[tuwix]

I think you just confuse a bourgeois meanings of terms with their real meanings. Many (the majority) of terms were distorted by bourgeois media including a communism. According to bourgeois media a communism is political system of Cuba and North Korea and even sometimes of China. Is it really true? :D

A democracy is one of those terms.