To critique the Soviet Union?

[Sabot Cat]

lol that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Basically only ultra-leftists (and some "radical" left liberals) think the USSR was anything but socialist. Nobody buys that shitty "well that wasn't really socialism" argument. It's a backslider's argument like the nazis who try to deny the holocaust.

EDIT:
To be clear I mean bad things happened in our past, so fucking what? The capitalists have already killed ten times what they claim the USSR killed. They don't sit around bemoaning their past, and they certainly aren't so weak as to echo our propaganda. But no keep talking shit on our own history (it's yours whether you want it or not) let's see has many people join your self-deprecating bullshit.

In addition to engaging in critiques of people and not the validity of their claims, and engaging in the fallacy of relative privation, your entire post begs the question. Decrying the USSR would only be "self-deprecating" and "our own history" if we accept the premise that it accorded to the principles of socialism and communism, thus being a part of our movement.

Ironically, the Nazis are a good example to bring up here: they are the National Socialists, but they were not in fact beholden to socialist ideals, and criticizing them is not bad for the revolutionary leftist cause. If Nazi Germany had the kind of power and prestige that the Soviet Union had for several decades, they might have been able to corrupt the definition of socialism for us through sheer historical force, but such was not the case. The USSR was socialist the same way that the United States is a land of the free, and their "Communist" Party is only such in name.

Honestly, we have to denounce state capitalist pretensions to being indicative of what socialism is, or even less people will want to participate in the movement and struggle for their liberation of the proletariat. Ignoring the flaws of nations like the Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China, or even worse, trying to whitewash it, will also get us nowhere.

[The Garbage Disposal Unit]

In addition to engaging in critiques of people and not the validity of their claims, and engaging in the fallacy of relative privation, your entire post begs the question. Decrying the USSR would only be "self-deprecating" and "our own history" if we accept the premise that it accorded to the principles of socialism and communism, thus being a part of our movement.

Ironically, the Nazis are a good example to bring up here: they are the National Socialists, but they were not in fact beholden to socialist ideals, and criticizing them is not bad for the revolutionary leftist cause. If Nazi Germany had the kind of power and prestige that the Soviet Union had for several decades, they might have been able to corrupt the definition of socialism for us through sheer historical force, but such was not the case. The USSR was socialist the same way that the United States is a land of the free, and their "Communist" Party is only such in name.

Honestly, we have to denounce state capitalist pretensions to being indicative of what socialism is, or even less people will want to participate in the movement and struggle for their liberation of the proletariat. Ignoring the flaws of nations like the Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China, or even worse, trying to whitewash it, will also get us nowhere.

OK, I think that the Nazi's are a terrible example to bring up here. Even on the "left" wing of the Nazi party (eg Rohm, and others who got night-of-the-long-knives'd) there was no internationalist, communist, projectuality. Further, the third reich didn't emerge out of a workers' revolution; say what you will about the Soviet Union, but it did kick off with a workers' and peasants' revolution which, well, formed soviets and aimed to put communism into practice.

It is for this reason that we can't whitewash, or, worse, ignore the flaws of the Soviet Union - it is undeniably part of our history, and a defining part of the last century of anticapitalist struggle. I would agree with the analysis that the Soviet Union was state-capitalist, that, in the final analysis, it behaved like any imperialist state, and that it is a model that shouldn't be held up. However, it should be held up as one of our greatest failures - a real attempt to make communism, that while failing to bear fruit, certainly showed that the struggle itself is possible, and that, at worst, it's certainly no worse than the alternative (and, in fact, there's a strong argument that things were better, taken in context, than things are now in much of post-Soviet Eastern Europe).

[reb]

You can critique the soviet union on Marxian terms and not just in moralistic terms. Did capital exist in the soviet union? Under a marxian understanding of capitalism then yes, capital was the dominant mode of production in the soviet union.

[Sabot Cat]

OK, I think that the Nazi's are a terrible example to bring up here. Even on the "left" wing of the Nazi party (eg Rohm, and others who got night-of-the-long-knives'd) there was no internationalist, communist, projectuality. Further, the third reich didn't emerge out of a workers' revolution; say what you will about the Soviet Union, but it did kick off with a workers' and peasants' revolution which, well, formed soviets and aimed to put communism into practice.

The intent of the Bolsheviks was not to put communism into practice, because they destroyed much of the autonomy that the workers had already gained for themselves before the formation of their party, and quelled several actually communist revolutions against them. The Russian Republic and the Provisional Government was the result of the workers' revolution; the Soviet Union and the regime of the Bolsheviks came from the October Revolution, which was essentially an authoritarian, neo-bourgeois coup d'etat and the death of proletarian democracy for one of the largest nations in the world, the effects of which are even now with us. So the Soviet Union was not the result of a revolution of the proletariat, but an insurrection of ideologues who angled to seize power from the increasingly autonomous workers of the Russian Republic.


It is for this reason that we can't whitewash, or, worse, ignore the flaws of the Soviet Union - it is undeniably part of our history, and a defining part of the last century of anticapitalist struggle. I would agree with the analysis that the Soviet Union was state-capitalist, that, in the final analysis, it behaved like any imperialist state, and that it is a model that shouldn't be held up. However, it should be held up as one of our greatest failures - a real attempt to make communism, that while failing to bear fruit, certainly showed that the struggle itself is possible, and that, at worst, it's certainly no worse than the alternative (and, in fact, there's a strong argument that things were better, taken in context, than things are now in much of post-Soviet Eastern Europe).

I'm not sure if you're saying this as if I disagree; I said that we should focus on the USSR and learn from it. We should learn how that even if we get to the point where workers own the means of production, it doesn't mean that the hold on that power is stable, and should be protected at all cost from people like the Bolsheviks.