I hate Leninism. [Archive] - Page 2

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Sinister Intents

9th July 2015, 19:19

Cliff Paul

9th July 2015, 19:28

Again, have you even read Lenin? Besides the discussion of history: Have you even read State and Revolution, What is to be done, imperialism, and so on?

I have. It's pretty mundane shit. 3/10 would not recommend.

PhoenixAsh

9th July 2015, 19:30

I log on to see my thread has become a shit storm of arguing usually involving...
-Youre stupid why dont you constantly read about Lenin, I cant believe you dont know that!
-Yeah Lenin did some bad stuff, but america/Russian empire did worse so Lenin is cool.
-If Lenin didnt do it the world would have exploded!

Can you guys calm down and stop arguing over little footnotes in history like whether someones heart was ripped out or not. Lets just focus on the ideology, and please no more raging.

Aside from the fact you started the shit storm with an obvious tendency bait...this is exactly the discussion that would evolve from that. That discussion stayed civil for a very long time but eventually the debate will revolve around the position of the Bolsheviks and the nature of their government with respect to the advancement of the proletariat.

you however stayed away from this debate and added little to it...either in OP or in subsequent posts (did you even make them?) to explain your position.

And then you return with:

For instance I dislike Leninist State Atheism, I have no troubles with people worshiping as long as it does not involve the government.

Do you understand what State Atheism is? What exactly about it do you dislike? Do you feel the church as a structure uses religion to advance reactionary sentiment and extorts power over the faithful by dictating what and how the faith should be expressed and what this means for various social relations and personal freedoms? How it promotes sexual slavery, submission to a higher authority and resist governments that do not conform to the divine laws?

Rafiq

9th July 2015, 19:44

And let's talk some more about Kamo.

What Kamo did was stage mock captures of his recruits and then questioned them exposing them to torture and mock executions. Those who succumbed and spilled the beans were called traitors and executed as an example. The spy he shot and cut out his heart was not actually a spy but a recruit exposed to this tactic.

This was not standard procedure. Recruits were not tortured, they were simply exposed to mock executions to test their courage. On one occasion, someone unexpectedly revealed themselves to be a spy, so he was shot. Where are you getting that he wasn't a spy? Why do you make shit up? So Kamo tortured people to "spill the beans" as though he was digging for false confessions? Why did this only happen once, then? To be clear, it isn't morally atrocious, what Kamo did. My point was that the bolsheviks were sensitive to such "excesses". The rule that all is permitted was alien to them.

PhoenixAsh

9th July 2015, 20:18

This didn't happen once Rafiq. This happened regularly to such extent that Lenin fired him for the practice. Which...to all extent and purposes was NOT because he executed the man but because he put his recruits through those training methods. And that is the important part of the information...it was about the treatment of recruits.

O and that information is in a biography published in Moscow in 1960 somewhere.... The title being the real name Shaumyan (?) for Kamo.

PhoenixAsh

9th July 2015, 20:24

Either way...a lot of people previously employed by the Okhrana became excellent Chekists.

GiantMonkeyMan

9th July 2015, 22:05

Either way...a lot of people previously employed by the Okhrana became excellent Chekists.
Can you give citations for this, please?

mushroompizza

10th July 2015, 01:00

Sinister Intents

10th July 2015, 01:08

Oh my god youre right! I guess I am stupid! Wow! I will read Lenin now even though I have no money to do so. I guess I am a bourgeoisie kulak capitalist liberal imperialist. Hmmm maybe I should stop hitting my head against the wall and learn to read.

If this is directed at me: Don't put words in my mouth. I never called you any of that and reading would do you a great service because then you could actually make an attempt to criticize it with some knowledge straight from the horse's mouth.

Cliff Paul

10th July 2015, 01:09

Oh my god youre right! I guess I am stupid! Wow! I will read Lenin now even though I have no money to do so.

well shit's public domain so it's all available online, they probably have copies of lenin's works in a library near you, and his writings are generally pretty cheap to buy - there's The Lenin Anthology which you can probably buy online for 5 dollars (and that's including shipping costs)

so no excuses!!!!!!!!!!!

mushroompizza

10th July 2015, 01:12

Oksy lets just end this painful discussion sorry if I insulted anyone. I cant log on and see 50 new posts that are too long for me to read. Can someone just give me a link to a free copy of Revolution and State so then I can finally understand all of this.

Cliff Paul

10th July 2015, 01:14

Cliff Paul

10th July 2015, 01:18

And finally a quote from Mao Zedong

Although my assertion, "No investigation no right to speak", has been ridiculed as "narrow empiricism", to this day I do not regret having made it; far from regretting it, I still insist that without investigation there cannot possibly be any right to speak. There are many people who "the moment they alight from the official carriage" make a hullabaloo, spout opinions, criticize this and condemn that; but, in fact, ten out of ten of them will meet with failure. For such views or criticisms, which are not based on thorough investigation, are nothing but ignorant twaddle.

StromboliFucker666

10th July 2015, 04:29

I have my own criticisms of Leninism but Mushroompizza's argument is really weak. He had potential to say something really intelligent here and he blew it by just insulting it without explaining his criticism.

You cannot just say something is authoritarian and nationalistic without explaining why. I agree with that it is authoritarian, as it's meant to be. It's an authoritarian ideology. So calling it authoritarian is not really criticism because that is just what it is. As for nationalism, I partially agree. There are internationalist Marxist Leninist but I feel like "socialism in one country" (the kind you will find in every M-L country that has existed) is inherently nationalistic. It has to be nationalist for it to function properly. Racism, no. Nationalism, yes.

EDIT: I am sorry, i did not see your post about not wanting more replies Sorry, my mistake.

Rafiq

10th July 2015, 06:24

This didn't happen once Rafiq. This happened regularly to such extent that Lenin fired him for the practice.

The procedure with recruits happened often. Recruits "spilling the beans" and then promptly being executed did not. That was my point: If the goal was to (and why?) torture recruits to the point of "confession", there would be a starkly high number of them who would have confessed. So far, we have one case.

O and that information is in a biography published in Moscow in 1960 somewhere.... The title being the real name Shaumyan (?) for Kamo.

Cite it.

Ismail

10th July 2015, 09:09

O and that information is in a biography published in Moscow in 1960 somewhere.... The title being the real name Shaumyan (?) for Kamo.For the record, Stepan Shaumian was an Armenian Bolshevik who Kamo worked with and who was killed by counter-revolutionaries in 1918. Lev Shaumian (a journalist and Stepan's son) published a biography of Kamo in 1959. Lev was evidently seen as enough of an authority on Kamo to write his entry in the 1970s Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which I shall now quote in English 'cause why not:

Kamo

(party pseudonym of Simon Arshakovich Ter-Petrosian). Born May 15 (27), 1882, in Gori; died July 14, 1922, in Tbilisi. Professional revolutionary. Became a member of the Communist Party in 1901. The son of a trader.

Kamo began to distribute illegal literature in Tbilisi, Baku, Batumi, Kutaisi, Gori, and other cities in 1901 and organized underground printing shops. Arrested in November 1903, he escaped from prison in September 1904. He took part in organizing armed workers’ druzhiny (detachments) in 1905. During the armed clashes between the workers and troops in Tbilisi in December 1905, Kamo led a detachment of worker-fighters and was wounded five times in an encounter with the cossacks. He was arrested and imprisoned in the Metekhi Castle. Tortured, he managed to escape. He came to St. Petersburg in March 1906, where he met V. I. Lenin for the first time. On Lenin’s instructions, Kamo went abroad to arrange for the purchase and transport of arms into Russia. He organized a series of expropriations of money from tsarist agencies from 1905 to 1907, in order to secure funds for the party. Arrested by German police in Berlin in November 1907, he avoided being tried and handed over to the tsarist government by feigning insanity. He was delivered to the Russian police at the end of 1909, imprisoned in the Metekhi Castle, and tried by a military court. He escaped from the prison hospital on Aug. 15, 1911, and went to Paris. On Lenin’s instructions, Kamo arranged for the transport of party literature into Russia. Returning to Russia in 1912, he was arrested and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted by a 1913 amnesty to 20 years at hard labor, which he served in the Kharkov convict prison. He was freed in March 1917.

In December 1917, on the instructions of S. G. Shaumian, Kamo carried a letter from Baku to V. I. Lenin in Petrograd. On Jan. 8, 1918, he returned to Tbilisi with letters from Lenin and the decree of the Council of People’s Commissars of the RSFSR appointing Shaumian temporary extraordinary commissar of the Caucasus. In the summer of 1919, Lenin instructed Kamo to organize a guerrilla detachment for action in the enemy’s rear and wrote to the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic that he knew Kamo “to be a man of absolutely exceptional dedication, courage, and energy …” (Poln. sobr. sock, 5th ed., vol. 51, p. 42). Kamo organized a guerrilla detachment in 1919 that operated near Kursk and Orel and then in the rear of the troops of General Denikin on the Southern Front. Kamo used a fishing boat to deliver weapons and money from Astrakhan to Baku for the underground party organization and the guerrillas of the Northern Caucasus. In January 1920 he was arrested by the Menshevik government in Tbilisi and was exiled. He helped prepare the armed uprising in April 1920 in Baku to transfer power to the Soviets. Kamo came to Moscow in May 1920 and studied at the Military Academy. He worked in the Ministry of Foreign Trade in 1921. In early 1922 he started work in the People’s Commissariat of Finance of Georgia. Later that year he was hit by a motor vehicle and killed.

REFERENCES
Gorky, M. “Kamo.” Sobr. soch., vol. 17. Moscow, 1952.
Bibineishvili, V. E. Kamo. Moscow, 1934.
Arutiunian, A. Kamo. Yerevan, 1957.
Shaumian, L. Kamo. [Moscow, 1959.]

PhoenixAsh

10th July 2015, 10:22

The procedure with recruits happened often. Recruits "spilling the beans" and then promptly being executed did not. That was my point: If the goal was to (and why?) torture recruits to the point of "confession", there would be a starkly high number of them who would have confessed. So far, we have one case.

No. So far YOU have one case...a case which you intentionally misused to try and portray the oversight of the Cheka and the sensibility of the Bolsheviks and it wasn't. Which makes you a fraud :) Rather than being an example of punishment for the cutting out of a heart it was the disgust over the treatment of recruits that got him fired.

Your argument is thereby void.

But you are however quite right that the Bolsheviks used the method of mock executions regularly....mock executions of children as a form of interrogation was not unheard of...in fact Uritsky wrote about it to Dzerzhinsky to protest the method and that letter ended up in the archives.

Cite it.

LoL. Did you just order me?

PhoenixAsh

10th July 2015, 10:24

For the record, Stepan Shaumian was an Armenian Bolshevik who Kamo worked with and who was killed by counter-revolutionaries in 1918. Lev Shaumian (a journalist and Stepan's son) published a biography of Kamo in 1959. Lev was evidently seen as enough of an authority on Kamo to write his entry in the 1970s Great Soviet Encyclopedia, which I shall now quote in English 'cause why not:

Thanx. I stand corrected then it was a biography about Shaumyan published in the 60's.

GiantMonkeyMan

10th July 2015, 11:04

Can you give citations for this, please?

LoL. Did you just order me?
I asked on the other page for a citation regarding former members of the Ohkrana being recruited by the Cheka. The only instance I've heard of was a specialist 'Zybin' who decoded the messages of revolutionaries for the Ohkrana and his work was so useful that the government of Kerensky kept him on in order to decode the messages of reactionaries and revolutionaries alike but I don't know whether he was recruited in turn by the Cheka post-October.

PhoenixAsh

10th July 2015, 11:49

I asked on the other page for a citation regarding former members of the Ohkrana being recruited by the Cheka. The only instance I've heard of was a specialist 'Zybin' who decoded the messages of revolutionaries for the Ohkrana and his work was so useful that the government of Kerensky kept him on in order to decode the messages of reactionaries and revolutionaries alike but I don't know whether he was recruited in turn by the Cheka post-October.

I didn't see your post. The citation is of Solzhenishin and other Cheka survivors who were previously held by the Okhrana. And several books cite a few dozen cases based on sovier archives. Whether it is true or not is another matter but that the Cheka build itself along the same structures, training methods and on the archives of the Okhrana is well known as is Trotsky's willingness to employ Tsarist officers. They used the same internal infrastructure and according to archival documents of foreign intelligencence services at the time they also employed and seriously the same external infrastructure and using the existing personel previously employed by the Okhrana.

The social justice commiserat of the Bolsheviks for example inherited most of its staff from the Tsarist regime.

The employment of former Okhrana employees and Tsarist officers lasted until 1920 when there was a documented purge. Which indicates that it was then suddenly considered a problem and therefore the problem existed to an extent to be considered problematic...and lends more credence to the statements. That purge also indicated that for three years the Bolsheviks were aware of the fact and didn't pursue it.

Ismail

10th July 2015, 12:43

The employment of former Okhrana employees and Tsarist officers lasted until 1920 when there was a documented purge. Which indicates that it was then suddenly considered a problem and therefore the problem existed to an extent to be considered problematic...and lends more credence to the statements. That purge also indicated that for three years the Bolsheviks were aware of the fact and didn't pursue it.Or, much more likely and as should be reasonably obvious, they couldn't pursue it because there was a shortage of proletarian personnel with the knowledge to run not just the intelligence-gathering and other technical aspects of the Cheka, but also the intricacies of the Commissariats, the Red Army, and many other institutions. This also applies to industry where bourgeois specialists were sought after because they were the only ones with the know-how to carry on certain tasks.

The idea that the Bolsheviks didn't mind in the least having avowed Tsarists and supporters of capitalism staffing many important institutions of the Soviet state and its defense is silly. Lenin mentioned numerous times in his writings the fact that the proletariat was forced to rely on these unreliable elements for some time. What's important was that the means existed to compel these elements to work on behalf of the proletariat: the threat of imprisonment on one hand (since their decision to resign meant they were sabotaging production and whatnot solely because they refused to work for Communists), and the promise of certain privileges (most notably higher pay) on the other.

PhoenixAsh

10th July 2015, 13:08

And keeping their families hostage. Yes we know. But that doesn't lend any credence to the argument that therefore the structures and in effect the policies weren't bourgeois in nature.

Spectre of Spartacism

10th July 2015, 16:01

And keeping their families hostage. Yes we know. But that doesn't lend any credence to the argument that therefore the structures and in effect the policies weren't bourgeois in nature.

As bourgeois practices cannot be completely discarded until socialism is achieved as a global mode of production, your observation is not remarkable.

Rafiq

10th July 2015, 16:49

But you are however quite right that the Bolsheviks used the method of mock executions regularly....mock executions of children as a form of interrogation was not unheard of...in fact Uritsky wrote about it to Dzerzhinsky to protest the method and that letter ended up in the archives.

I'd also like a citation for this. You can't just expect to tout wild allegations and expect us all to believe you.

Rafiq

10th July 2015, 16:55

I didn't see your post. The citation is of Solzhenishin and other Cheka survivors who were previously held by the Okhrana.

What is it, PA? Is it Solzhenitsyn, who has already been exposed as a master bullshitter, or was it "other Cheka survivors who were previously held by the Okhrana". Is it Solzhenitsyn, or is it documents leaked from the Soviet archives?

I literally think PA is actually making shit up. If he's referencing Solzhenitsyn, the anti-Semite, then he's also making shit up. Solzhenitsyn, of kulak origin, had such poverty of experience with the Soviet state that apparently he has deep and profound insight about everything of moral consideration about it. I'd like to ask though: Solzhenitsyn touts anti-Semitic conspiracy theories too, that Bolshevism was the revenge by Jews against the Russians for oppressing them. If you cite him in one instance, you must also logically extend his 'credibility' to other claims, namely that in the 1930's "Jewish prisoners were specifically treated softly". If you cannot do this, then you can't consistently cite Solzhenitsyn, because he barely gives external references at all - he makes shit up left and right.

PhoenixAsh

10th July 2015, 18:19

I'd also like a citation for this. You can't just expect to tout wild allegations and expect us all to believe you.

I don't expect you to believe anything that doesn't fit into your preconceived notions of the superiority of your own position Rafiq which blatantly rejects anything that even comes close to challenging them only to use them when it suits your own needs. You have already shown that by a lack of argument that build your case and by arguing emotional sensitivities of the Bolsheviks.

That is how you entered the debate. That is how you will stay.

PhoenixAsh

10th July 2015, 18:30

What is it, PA? Is it Solzhenitsyn, who has already been exposed as a master bullshitter, or was it "other Cheka survivors who were previously held by the Okhrana". Is it Solzhenitsyn, or is it documents leaked from the Soviet archives?

I literally think PA is actually making shit up. If he's referencing Solzhenitsyn, the anti-Semite, then he's also making shit up. Solzhenitsyn, of kulak origin, had such poverty of experience with the Soviet state that apparently he has deep and profound insight about everything of moral consideration about it. I'd like to ask though: Solzhenitsyn touts anti-Semitic conspiracy theories too, that Bolshevism was the revenge by Jews against the Russians for oppressing them. If you cite him in one instance, you must also logically extend his 'credibility' to other claims, namely that in the 1930's "Jewish prisoners were specifically treated softly". If you cannot do this, then you can't consistently cite Solzhenitsyn, because he barely gives external references at all - he makes shit up left and right.

Ow really Rafiq? Because those two do not logically follow at all.

But it is nice to see that you wield the sword of antisemitism very subjectively. Arguing in other debates that in itself it doesn't discredit what is being said when it comes to.politicians and ideologues you like but of course anti semitism is naturally completely discrediting unrelated statements when it comes to information you subjectively don't like. LOL.

And why should it be one or the other?

Fact is Solzhenishin said it. Soviet archives agree. There was a specific purge in the 1920's. to end the involvement of Okhrana personel in the Cheka and executive branches. Other survivors make similar statements. The Cheka archives show it. And Ismail of all people confirmed the statement...and if...by fact of knowledge which far surpasses your and mine of obscure facts...I trust him. Even though we are of a different opinion in this debate.

So yes...obviously the Cheka, Soviet archives, just were anti semitic like Solzhenishin and Ismail must be a raging secret anti-semite as well :rolleyes: :D

So how about instead of being an obstinate blind fool you try to prove they weren't part of the Cheka instead of selectively focusing on one aspect and ignoring all the rest?

The fact of the matter is that the Cheka was brutal and made a whole lot of innocent victims specifically because of the policy and as a direct result of it. There was opposition from communists at the time. The argument that it was necessary in both form and function has not been shown. How it was effective has not been shown. And all of your arguments so far have fluent short, been disproved and do not in any way shape or form manage to untie themselves from a comparison to bourgeoisie morality and tactics.

Rafiq

10th July 2015, 18:45

No, I've asked you to confirm your claims, that's it. Specifically regarding how Kamo regularly executed recruits who "spilled the beans", how Chekists were institutionally condoning of rape, how children were victims of mock executions, and other wild accusations. The utilization of Tsarist officers in the military was commonplace, but using Okhrana agents in the Cheka is definitely news to me, though it could be true. Also, stop trying to regurgitate arguments I've already dealt with previously, PA. The argument has "not been shown" but you literally said "TL;DR" meaning you didn't even read the fucking arguments. We've moved past that, you opportunist shit, the fact that it was drowned out by a few pages doesn't give you the right to incessantly fucking ignore the substantial basis of my points, now the point of concern are the specific allegations you've touted since then (never mind the previous ones which still remain unsubstantiated).

What we now need are citations for specific, wild accusations. I can't "disprove" Chekists "didn't" torture kids as part of protocol anymore than I can "disprove" they rode invisible unicorns that apparently no one talked about.

Arguing in other debates that in itself it doesn't discredit what is being said when it comes to.politicians and ideologues you like but of course anti semitism is naturally completely discrediting unrelated statements when it comes to information you subjectively don't like.

Listen you fucking child, when we're simply supposed to take someone's word for it, like that piece of fucking shit Solzhenitsyn, who told us during the cold war that 60 million were murdered in the Soviet Union and that the archives would most certainly confirm this when they were later shown to completely contradict him, THEN YOU BET YOUR FUCKING ASS THAT THEIR ANTI-SEMITIC CLAIMS ARE JUST AS LEGITIMATE AS THE OTHER CLAIMS THEY'RE GOING TO MAKE. You don't even understand LOGIC, it's PATHETIC. There is nothing anomalous about Solzhenitsyn's anti-semitism, in fact, if you actually read the motherfucker's biography, you'd know that anti-semitism was sincerely the driving force of his anti-Communism, and that when he came to the west he was horrified by how "culturally decadent" it was and so on. The fact of the matter is that Solzhenitsyan makes claims about personal experiences that are uncorroborated, so the only reference point we have are the legitimacy of his individual claims. Now then, it logically follows that if we are to trust him alone, we can't pick and choose what he sais is bullshit! Contra to the idea that he is discredited because of some personal shortcomings, HIS ANTI-SEMITISM WAS A THEORETICAL ELABORATION OF HIS UNDERSTANDING OF THE SOVIET UNION, not some random "outburst" of a personal defect. I swear to fucking god, as of now, there is no one more infuriating, more despicable, more scoundrels than this motherfucker PA. Plain and simple, no one is more dishonest, no one talks out of their fucking ass as much, no one produces the most vomit-inducing posts, no one literally talks like a fucking child, or at the least - and more forgivable - someone inflicted with a grave mental illness.

Does anyone else see his cognitive dissonance? It literally HURTS, how inconsistent, how muddled, how absolutely fucking abominable it is. Motherfucker literally makes shit up and then when they're called out on it, repeats arguments from the discussion two pages ago.

Rafiq

10th July 2015, 19:07

Again, before you respond, PA, let me respond for you:

Ow... You want evidence rafiq? because last time i checked, you dont provide any evidence either. :rolleyes::laugh::laugh::laugh:

That just goes to show how honest you are.... and rafiq, the abuses and atrocities of the cheka are well known and well documented by communsits during the time as well as the soviets en masse who opposed the red terror and the cheka.... as well as information that is in the archives too.. :):laugh::laugh::laugh::lol::lol::laugh:;);):confu sed::laugh::confused::confused::rolleyes:;):):(:la ugh:

ow... the fact is that the cheka were a bunch of mass murdering criminals and this has been well recorded time and time again especially by former chekists, communists at the time and the soviet archives. you still have not even made one argument, you still have not shown why or how it was necessary.. or effective... you still keep using the bourgoeis reactioanry mentality to justify the cheka which is the same thing as what the nazis, the khmer rouge, or what the bourgeois state does. But go on, keep defending terrorism becuase it was necessary for the R-R-R-R-revolution...

O and rafiq, the only reason why you reject the information is because of your subjective dislike of it which i cannot offer any rational explanation for.... rather than being objective, just like how the cheka rounded up and raped babies because of their subjective judgements and the subjective wants of the soviet state... rather than the objective ones... which makes perfect sense... becasue I'm a fucking idiot who thinks that an "objective" assessment or an "objective" action is possible for human.s

GiantMonkeyMan

10th July 2015, 21:00

Rafiq... the whole "I'm going to post what you're going to say next, mwaha!" thing is... well, 'infantile' springs to mind.

PhoenixAsh

10th July 2015, 21:25

Well....since you mentioned the Cheka unicorns...those were pretty brutal bourgeoisie bastards too

http://cdn0.lostateminor.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Child-safety-1-650x913.jpg

See...they totally fit in

Rafiq

10th July 2015, 21:26

The point is simple: No new arguments are ever brought forth, because no arguments are addressed

PhoenixAsh

10th July 2015, 21:43

Perhaps you should start addressing them then. Because you distraction over your refusal to address the validity of your statement that Red Terror as a state policy was effective and necessary led us down this road where you blatantly refuse to accept any sources (many of which I named) contradicting your fantasy narrative in which the cheka were big teddy bears who were so sensitive an all :rolleyes:

So if you refuse to address my points and you can not dish up the backing of your statement about Kamo which turned out to be about something entirely different than you made it out to be....and then simply ignore a whole host of sources I mentioned to focus on one in particular with your idiotic rant or simply twist words and meaning like you usually do to create your straw man....yeah....well...tsk

Fact of the matter is that you are merely distracting from the real issue: Red Terror was not necessary and was ineffective and counter productive. It also meant the ideological bankruptcy of th revolution and led to subjugation of the working class by infantilizing them.

Rafiq

10th July 2015, 21:57

blatantly refuse to accept any sources

"It's in the archives" or "People agree with me" isn't a source, it's talking out of your ass. I ask for citations.

in which the cheka were big teddy bears who were so sensitive

That is a straw man. No one claimed this. Instead, I pointed out that the Bolsheviks were incredibly naive before they took power and sensitive toward the usage of violence. I did not say the heroic Chekists were a peaceful bunch, I said that most of them had trouble doing what they did, many would go on to have mental problems later in life, including Dzerzhinsky:

“Once in Kharkov I dined with Dzerzhinsky and K. Radek. Dz. told the story that during the Red Terror he would sometimes use a subterfuge which consisted in publishing executions that hadn’t taken place. This produced the needed effect and lives were saved. Dz. said: ‘Our Chekists had a bit of the saint and the assassin ...’ Radek abruptly asked him: ‘And you? What do you think you are? Saint or bandit?’ Dz. became pale, his lips tightened, he rose from the table and he left.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1944/notebooks.htm

your statement about Kamo

Which was this: When Lenin heard that Kamo ripped out the heart of a spy in front of Red army trainees, he was immediately removed from his position even though the execution of traitors was a given, as a protocol. And it remains valid. You simply added the platitdue that Lenin also had qualms with Kamo's recruiting methods, which, again, were encapsulated by this incident. If this incident did not happen, there is nothing to suggest Lenin would have had him removed - because as indicated, it was only upon hearing of this specific incident that Lenin had him removed, which then led him to the reality that Kamo's methods were unnecessary and cruel. Why you think this is some grand revelation that dethrones the overall point is beyond me.

But never mind that. This was only one example, the fact that you're so fixated upon it suggests you're argumentatively bankrupt at this point. You might as well start referring to how my incorrect grammar discredits my overall point.

Red Terror was not necessary and was ineffective and counter productive. It also meant the ideological bankruptcy of th revolution and led to subjugation of the working class by infantilizing them.

This was covered in page 12, in case anyone is curious about how well PA engages in discussions.

*Edit - "by infantilizing them"? Are you literally schizophrenic?

StromboliFucker666

10th July 2015, 22:03

This thread is entertaining as fuck

PhoenixAsh

10th July 2015, 22:38

"It's in the archives" or "People agree with me" isn't a source, it's talking out of your ass. I ask for citations.

That is a straw man. No one claimed this. Instead, I pointed out that the Bolsheviks were incredibly naive before they took power and sensitive toward the usage of violence. I did not say the heroic Chekists were a peaceful bunch, I said that most of them had trouble doing what they did, many would go on to have mental problems later in life, including Dzerzhinsky:

“Once in Kharkov I dined with Dzerzhinsky and K. Radek. Dz. told the story that during the Red Terror he would sometimes use a subterfuge which consisted in publishing executions that hadn’t taken place. This produced the needed effect and lives were saved. Dz. said: ‘Our Chekists had a bit of the saint and the assassin ...’ Radek abruptly asked him: ‘And you? What do you think you are? Saint or bandit?’ Dz. became pale, his lips tightened, he rose from the table and he left.”
https://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1944/notebooks.htm

Of course they had...like the Sondercomando's those brutalizing innocent, unarmed people including the elderly, women and children often get severe psychological trauma and damage. Hence they were rewarded exactly for that purpose with rations of wodka and were allowed to keep belongings like gold teeth.

YOU however used it to disprove the structural violent and brutal nature of the Cheka.

What it does is prove that exact nature of the Cheka.

Which was this: When Lenin heard that Kamo ripped out the heart of a spy in front of Red army trainees, he was immediately removed from his position even though the execution of traitors was a given, as a protocol. And it remains valid. You simply added the platitdue that Lenin also had qualms with Kamo's recruiting methods, which, again, were encapsulated by this incident. If this incident did not happen, there is nothing to suggest Lenin would have had him removed - because as indicated, it was only upon hearing of this specific incident that Lenin had him removed, which then led him to the reality that Kamo's methods were unnecessary and cruel. Why you think this is some grand revelation that dethrones the overall point is beyond me.

Why don't YOU source this then? Because that is not what happened. YOUR statement...YOU DIDN'T SOURCE.

Lenin removed Kamo for his training methods and his treatment of recruits in general. NOT for the specific brutality of the incident but because the incident was a general behavior of Kamo.

But never mind that. This was only one example, the fact that you're so fixated upon it suggests you're argumentatively bankrupt at this point. You might as well start referring to how my incorrect grammar discredits my overall point.

Yes...the only example YOU mentioned when you argued how sensitive the Bolsheviks were to show how they weren't intentionally brutal when they said they would make the country overflow with rivers of blood of their enemies. Squeamish bunch those Bolsheviks.

This was covered in page 12, in case anyone is curious about how well PA engages in discussions.

No...the fact that you failed to provide any valid argument was covered during our entire debate and so far you have not provided one which outgrows the childish arguments of the Kindergarten play ground.

Your assessment of the situation amounts to:

It was necessary because the other side did it too....and they were worse

This however does not show necessity. You blatantly chose to support the Red Terror as a necessity...and therefore it was necessary. This is what you are actually arguing.

I am therefore arguing with an immature person who is not capable of looking beyond their preconceived notions and immediately took the infantile position that the debate was abut how evil violence was.

Perhaps if you weren't such a hautain arrogant asshat you would actually be capable of some intelligent debate without the need to resort to over the top straw man bullshit peddling to role play your revolutionary fervor while you justify every single step that led to the actual death of the revolution in favor of a party dictatorship that effectively destroyed the proletarian nature of the revolution and led to a restoration of a state capitalist dictatorship....because fuck the term "deformed worker state"

*Edit - "by infantilizing them"? Are you literally schizophrenic?

Do you have problem understanding what the term means?

https://www.google.nl/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=infantilizing%20definition

Rafiq

11th July 2015, 07:17

What it does is prove that exact nature of the Cheka.

I know it might be much to demand, but let's do a bit of thinking. Were the Bolsheviks ethically reconciled with murder, i.e. was the act of killing integral to the October revolution itself as an acceptable value? No, because the death penalty was abolished, leading Bolsheviks made it their specific prerogative to minimize as much bloodshed as possible, Lenin even openly claimed that he wanted to avoid the course that the French revolution took with the killing of unarmed men, etc. We can also evaluate the reality that even in the later Stalin years, when executions of political officers was taking place in Poland, most of the NKVD operatives who carried out the executions of men who were clearly guilty of being... Officers of a bourgeois military apparatus killed themselves. Bourgeois historians love pointing to the reality that Chekists would later go insane as evidence of their previous depravity, but what they don't understand was the ETHICAL toll the act of taking human lives took on individual chekists. This might haven not been a big deal for the white butchers and the imperialist powers behind them, but it most certainly was for many Chekists, Dzerzhinsky included, who believed they were entering an epoch free from the necessity of murder being integral to power. Again, this is why I claim you're underestimating the sentimentality of the Bolsheviks vis a vis their approach to murder - it wasn't a fucking free for all.

So no, it isn't "proof" of the exact nature of the Cheka who apparently engaged in "brutalizing innocent, unarmed people including the elderly, women and children" (an extrapolation from the Black book of Communism no doubt), it is proof that mass-executions of counter-revolutionaries took a toll on Chekists. Why wouldn't it? Yes they were unarmed, that's the fucking point of the terror itself - otherwise, such "murders" would have been solely reserved for the battlefield, as the Bolsheviks had desired. As far as the death of innocents go, the turbulence of the Stalin years later would prove that the Chekists simply did not kill ENOUGH people. The official death toll was 12,733, this accounts for barely a fraction of the number of active counter-revolutionaries. PA, this fucking dolt, would have us believe that a significant portion of this number were children and elderly women... What the fuck? Even if the Bolsehviks were these evil motherfuckers, WHY would this be the case? WHY would Chekists kill kids and elderly women, from a purely cynical point of view - HOW does this stand to reason at all? You can't provide a source for this, because it's a bunch of FUCKING bullshit.

Why don't YOU source this then? Because that is not what happened. YOUR statement...YOU DIDN'T SOURCE.

But you didn't ask for a source, and I had no reason not assume you'd need one because it's a well known story, since you insist - here, which will effecitvely discredit the BULLSHIT fucking allegations you said previously too:

According to his version, the infinitely suspciious Kamo had already suggested to him in June 1919 that he dress in uniform and surprise the revolutionaries in the town of Lenkoran' and stand them against the wall. "If one of them behaves in a cowardly way, pleads for mercy or starts to rat than execute them," he explained to Mikoyan. Although he did not get permission for staging the action, he still staged the test in a wood close to Moscow. Everybody behaved with courage, except a Polish spy who confessed before the opinted gun that he was agent for Pilsudski. "This action had a terrible effect on one of those present, [...] on Fyodor Alliluyev," adds Mikoyan who is always careful what he writes. Fyodor became "seriously ill" as a result. Several members of the commando left Kamo after this. Drabkina recalled that the news of this sadistic test reached Lenin who was furious and sent a message to Kamo that he never wanted to see him again. But later Lenin seemed to forgive his old favorite.
Stalin: An Unknown Portrait by Miklós Kun, pg. 389 https://books.google.com/books?id=cnGQl1fWE-wC&pg=PA75&dq=russia+tiflis+bank+robbery+stalin&hl=en&ei=xQbeTKLSJMH-8Abnv6iZDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CEEQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=russia%20tiflis%20bank%20robbery%20stalin&f=false

PA claimed: What Kamo did was stage mock captures of his recruits and then questioned them exposing them to torture and mock executions.

This is not true. Recruits were not "exposed to torture", this statement remains uncorroborated.

Those who succumbed and spilled the beans were called traitors and executed as an example. The spy he shot and cut out his heart was not actually a spy but a recruit exposed to this tactic.

This is misleading, and wrong. The spy was most certainly an actual Polish spy, not one of the 'many' recruits who succumbed. The citation I've presented (which you're free to challenge) explicitly states that only one person "succumbed and spilled the beans", you fucking dishonest COWARD, you claim that "those who" as though multiple people fell victim. You do this again regarding the allegation that "many fell victim to mental illness":

Many of those recruits later suffered mental illness because of Kamo's training methods.

This is wrong, the source provided explicitly states that this action had a terrible effect on one of those present, Fyodor Alliluyev.

Finally, the claim that the ripping of the one spy's heart out had nothing to do with Lenin's decision: We can infer, and if you want I can dig up more sources too, that the reason news spread of this "sadistic test" was precisely because of the shock experienced by the members at witnessing someone's fucking heart being torn out, and this is how Lenin heard of the news. Only someone who literally makes it their prerogative to deny this logical conclusion because it would make them look fucking stupid, would ignore this.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2842188&postcount=250

But to be clear, becuaes I know what a fucking idiot you are, you're going to go ahead and say "WELL WHY CANT I CITE THE BLACK BOOK OF COMMUNISM OR DA GULAG ARCHIPELAGO FOR MY CLAImS WITHOUT GETTING SLACK" but my point is that you need to provide a basis for why this anti-Communist author, the one I've provided, would lie about this information. We need a basis of motivation, and you also need to point out problems with the methodology. If the source I've provided isn't sufficient, I can also provide you with the end-notes of where the information was extrapolated from. Contra to the black book of Communism or Solzhenitsyn, I can thoroughly demonstrate the erroneous nature of the methedology and explicitly tell you why it's bullshit, not just because my "subjective opinion disagrees" or some other stupid, infantile, and schizophrenic platitude. Care to point out the problem with my source though? Did the author deliberately conspire to make PA look like a fucking liar and a stupid piece of shit, or what? Because you've LITERALLY MADE CLAIMS WHICH CAME STRAIGHT OUT OF YOUR FUCKING ASS, I SPECIFICALLY ASKED YOU FOR A SOURCE AND YOU REPLIED BY REGURGITATING ARGUMENTS THAT HAVE ALREADY BEEN DEMOLISHED.

said they would make the country overflow with rivers of blood of their enemies.

Robespierre was initially a pacifist. Get over it, the two - this "sensitivity" and the burning desire to annihilate the enemy are one and the same for Communists. If you can't understand this language, you're a counter-revolutionary yourself, plain and simple. You can't have these revolutionary sensitivities without a burning and merciless drive for the destruction of the exploiters, of the toadies of darkness and filth. One cannot exist without the other and remain revolutionary.

This however does not show necessity. You blatantly chose to support the Red Terror as a necessity...and therefore it was necessary. This is what you are actually arguing.

You can tell yourself that, you fucking child - but the fact of the matter is that my argument was never reducible to "they did it too". If the counter-revolution was raping babies, it would not follow that this justifies the Bolsheviks raping babies. I merely pointed out that the counter-revolution wouldn't have been able to be quelled without mass intimidation and the sanctification of the ideas of the revolution with the real excision of power through fear, that these motherfuckers thought the Soviet state weak and paid dearly for it. I explained this in very thorough detail, you fucking coward, this was PAGE 12 and you admitted to not even reading my post. Like is this actually what you think our arguments amount to? That it was justified because "they did it too?" No, you dolt, that was never the argument, the argument was that in order to quell people who only speak in the tongue of violence, you need to speak their language to get this across. For fuck's sake, you don't know how POWER works, and THAT simple. If those inclined to counter-revolution are not SCARED or intimidated into pacification, and if the power of the revolution is not sanctified in violence, it will command the respect of none of the numerous reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries, merely as a DEMOGRAPHIC, who seek to undermine the Soviet state.

Finally, the idea that my thorough argument, made with great consideration, amounts to saying that the red terror was a necessity "because it was necessary" can only ever be TROLLING, because I can't even imagine someone is so fucking stupid, or blatantly impervious to reason, that they would translate what is a complex argument to "durrr ur just sayin durt cuz ur bein tautological". No, that was never my point, I thoroughly demonstrated WHY it was a necessity, I mentioned - among many things - how the Bolsheviks initially made it their prerogative to AVOID the usage of terror, but were forced to for reasons I thoroughly went into detail trying to mention. Because as it happens, unlike for you - this isn't a dick waving contest for me, I ACTUALLY intend to see my points through properly in a manner which anyone who wishes to use the most elementary form of reason can conceive. I'm not being difficult here, a child can understand the basic argument at hand being beyond the idea that it is tautological.

But again, I shouldn't have to REPEAT MY FUCKING ARGUMENTS FOR THE 10th FUCKING TIME. You wnat to discuss this, you shit? Then READ my post on page 12, otherwise, shut the FUCK UP and stop trying to steer this away from our demands that you GIVE SOURCES AND CITATIONS FOR YOUR FUCKING WILD CLAIMS.

proletarian nature

You're just a fucking idiot if you think the terror was anything more than the controlled implementation of what was already an organic lust for blood among actual workers who would, outside the jurisdiction of their state, carry out mob-based murders against counter-revolutioanries. It's as fucking stupid as trying to say that the reign of terror was solely sustained by the Jacobins being power hungry. Matter of fact, you probably actually think that.

Do you have problem understanding what the term means?

Oh no, PA, I just thought it was tacitly understood by people that it demonstrates how fucking intellectually bankrupt you are that you must extrapolate terms which refer to sexual concerns regarding relations of power, to something as infinitely more complex as the relationship between the Soviet state apparatus and the proletariat. The idea that the Bolsheviks "infantilized" the proletariat is literally a prime example of how all of your arguments are stupid abstractions which re-hash from a given vocabulary a very narrow understanding of not only power, of the world on your behalf. Then again, it comes as no surprise that this is also inconsistent, because you can't fucking mass murder a demographic which you have "infantilized". Are you literally this desperate? now that you can't dislocate the basis of power in the Soviet state as being among the proletariat, apparently the Soviet state was 'infantilizing' them all along.

PhoenixAsh

11th July 2015, 12:42

I know it might be much to demand, but let's do a bit of thinking. Were the Bolsheviks ethically reconciled with murder, i.e. was the act of killing integral to the October revolution itself as an acceptable value? No, because the death penalty was abolished, leading Bolsheviks made it their specific prerogative to minimize as much bloodshed as possible, Lenin even openly claimed that he wanted to avoid the course that the French revolution took with the killing of unarmed men, etc. We can also evaluate the reality that even in the later Stalin years, when executions of political officers was taking place in Poland, most of the NKVD operatives who carried out the executions of men who were clearly guilty of being... Officers of a bourgeois military apparatus killed themselves. Bourgeois historians love pointing to the reality that Chekists would later go insane as evidence of their previous depravity, but what they don't understand was the ETHICAL toll the act of taking human lives took on individual chekists. This might haven not been a big deal for the white butchers and the imperialist powers behind them, but it most certainly was for many Chekists, Dzerzhinsky included, who believed they were entering an epoch free from the necessity of murder being integral to power. Again, this is why I claim you're underestimating the sentimentality of the Bolsheviks vis a vis their approach to murder - it wasn't a fucking free for all.

And you don't seem to understand that this is exactly what happened to those working for the Whites, to the Sondercommando's, the SS and every other group of people killing and butchering people....the Bolsheviks were NOTHING special when it comes to mental illness developed from these actions.

This doesn't show their sensitivities or their moral qualms at all. It is well documented and studied behavior that happens and occurs in all groups regardless of the fact if they think their actions are morally warranted. What it shows is the brutality of the actions...because THAT is what pushes them over the edge....the brutality

So no, it isn't "proof" of the exact nature of the Cheka who apparently engaged in "brutalizing innocent, unarmed people including the elderly, women and children" (an extrapolation from the Black book of Communism no doubt), it is proof that mass-executions of counter-revolutionaries took a toll on Chekists. Why wouldn't it? Yes they were unarmed, that's the fucking point of the terror itself - otherwise, such "murders" would have been solely reserved for the battlefield, as the Bolsheviks had desired. As far as the death of innocents go, the turbulence of the Stalin years later would prove that the Chekists simply did not kill ENOUGH people. The official death toll was 12,733, this accounts for barely a fraction of the number of active counter-revolutionaries. PA, this fucking dolt, would have us believe that a significant portion of this number were children and elderly women... What the fuck? Even if the Bolsehviks were these evil motherfuckers, WHY would this be the case? WHY would Chekists kill kids and elderly women, from a purely cynical point of view - HOW does this stand to reason at all? You can't provide a source for this, because it's a bunch of FUCKING bullshit.

Cheka archives. Go look it up.

But you didn't ask for a source, and I had no reason not assume you'd need one because it's a well known story, since you insist - here, which will effecitvely discredit the BULLSHIT fucking allegations you said previously too:

Actually your source proves my claim was right and that you were wrong Rafiq.

According to his version, the infinitely suspciious Kamo had already suggested to him in June 1919 that he dress in uniform and surprise the revolutionaries in the town of Lenkoran' and stand them against the wall. "If one of them behaves in a cowardly way, pleads for mercy or starts to rat than execute them," he explained to Mikoyan. Although he did not get permission for staging the action, he still staged the test in a wood close to Moscow. Everybody behaved with courage, except a Polish spy who confessed before the opinted gun that he was agent for Pilsudski. "This action had a terrible effect on one of those present, [...] on Fyodor Alliluyev," adds Mikoyan who is always careful what he writes. Fyodor became "seriously ill" as a result. Several members of the commando left Kamo after this. Drabkina recalled that the news of this sadistic test reached Lenin who was furious and sent a message to Kamo that he never wanted to see him again. But later Lenin seemed to forgive his old favorite.
Stalin: An Unknown Portrait by Miklós Kun, pg. 389 https://books.google.com/books?id=cnGQl1fWE-wC&pg=PA75&dq=russia+tiflis+bank+robbery+stalin&hl=en&ei=xQbeTKLSJMH-8Abnv6iZDw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CEEQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=russia%20tiflis%20bank%20robbery%20stalin&f=false

PA claimed: What Kamo did was stage mock captures of his recruits and then questioned them exposing them to torture and mock executions.

Yes...and that is exactly what your source shows he did you idiot. How...HOW can you not understand this??

:laugh::laugh::laugh:

This is not true. Recruits were not "exposed to torture", this statement remains uncorroborated.

Yes...Rafiq...they were. It is right in your source. It says right in your source that they were.

YOUR OWN SOURCE JUST PROVED YOU WERE COMPLETELY AND UTTERLY WRONG ON EVERY CLAIM YOU MADE ABOUT KAMO AND THAT I WAS RIGHT.

1). He was fired over the practice how he treated recruits
2). He was fired not for executing the man but for staging mock executions
3). He tortured recruits

Those who succumbed and spilled the beans were called traitors and executed as an example. The spy he shot and cut out his heart was not actually a spy but a recruit exposed to this tactic.

This is misleading, and wrong. The spy was most certainly an actual Polish spy, not one of the 'many' recruits who succumbed. The citation I've presented (which you're free to challenge) explicitly states that only one person "succumbed and spilled the beans", you fucking dishonest COWARD, you claim that "those who" as though multiple people fell victim. You do this again regarding the allegation that "many fell victim to mental illness":

No...actually your citation states that several men succumbed. You need to learn to read.

Many of those recruits later suffered mental illness because of Kamo's training methods.

This is wrong, the source provided explicitly states that this action had a terrible effect on one of those present, Fyodor Alliluyev.

Immediately. Yes. Because the source is also stating that later many men left because of that incident.

Finally, the claim that the ripping of the one spy's heart out had nothing to do with Lenin's decision: We can infer, and if you want I can dig up more sources too, that the reason news spread of this "sadistic test" was precisely because of the shock experienced by the members at witnessing someone's fucking heart being torn out, and this is how Lenin heard of the news. Only someone who literally makes it their prerogative to deny this logical conclusion because it would make them look fucking stupid, would ignore this.

Eh...No Rafiq you CAN NOT INFER THAT SINCE YOUR SOURCE EXPLICITLY STATES HE DID NOT GET PERMISSION FOR THE ACTION AND DID IT ANYWAY

So far your source provided every evidence that you are a fucking liar who tried to use a piece of information to distract from the fact that you have no argument that the Red Terror was necessary. But you have been caught with your pants down.

Thank you for playing but you failed. Utterly.

:laugh:

Robespierre was initially a pacifist. Get over it, the two - this "sensitivity" and the burning desire to annihilate the enemy are one and the same for Communists. If you can't understand this language, you're a counter-revolutionary yourself, plain and simple. You can't have these revolutionary sensitivities without a burning and merciless drive for the destruction of the exploiters, of the toadies of darkness and filth. One cannot exist without the other and remain revolutionary.

Ow...I understand what those arguments mean...perfectly. Reactionary after reactionary made perfectly clear what they meant by those words and the Bolsheviks were no different.

You can tell yourself that, you fucking child - but the fact of the matter is that my argument was never reducible to "they did it too". If the counter-revolution was raping babies, it would not follow that this justifies the Bolsheviks raping babies.

And yet you specifically used that argument to show necessity

I merely pointed out that the counter-revolution wouldn't have been able to be quelled without mass intimidation and the sanctification of the ideas of the revolution with the real excision of power through fear, that these motherfuckers thought the Soviet state weak and paid dearly for it.

And yet you haven't shown that.

I explained this in very thorough detail, you fucking coward, this was PAGE 12 and you admitted to not even reading my post.

I eventually did read your post and no you still did not provide one shred of argument that showed the necessity.

Like is this actually what you think our arguments amount to? That it was justified because "they did it too?" No, you dolt, that was never the argument, the argument was that in order to quell people who only speak in the tongue of violence, you need to speak their language to get this across. For fuck's sake, you don't know how POWER works, and THAT simple. If those inclined to counter-revolution are not SCARED or intimidated into pacification, and if the power of the revolution is not sanctified in violence, it will command the respect of none of the numerous reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries, merely as a DEMOGRAPHIC, who seek to undermine the Soviet state.

And you haven't shown that...you stated that. And with you are entire hordes of bourgeois regimes, leaders and politicians.

Basically what you say is that you have to terrorize the peasants and workers because otherwise you are not deemed a good leader.

I GET WHAT YOU ARE SAYING RAFIQ.

YOU DO NOT SEEM TO UNDERSTAND THAT YOUR CLAIM BOTH IS UNTRUE AND BOTH DOESN"T SHOW NECESSITY OR WHY THIS WAS THE ONLY WAY

Finally, the idea that my thorough argument, made with great consideration, amounts to saying that the red terror was a necessity "because it was necessary" can only ever be TROLLING, because I can't even imagine someone is so fucking stupid, or blatantly impervious to reason,

I am not impervious to reason Rafiq...you however don't manage to make a reasonable or intelligent argument

that they would translate what is a complex argument to "durrr ur just sayin durt cuz ur bein tautological". No, that was never my point, I thoroughly demonstrated WHY it was a necessity,

No. You didn't none of your arguments ever out rise the status of unfounded claim

I mentioned - among many things - how the Bolsheviks initially made it their prerogative to AVOID the usage of terror, but were forced to for reasons I thoroughly went into detail trying to mention.

They weren't forced. They chose to enact that policy.

Because as it happens, unlike for you - this isn't a dick waving contest for me, I ACTUALLY intend to see my points through properly in a manner which anyone who wishes to use the most elementary form of reason can conceive. I'm not being difficult here, a child can understand the basic argument at hand being beyond the idea that it is tautological.

Again...you don't use reason. You use emotional arguments and try to twist them as some kind of fact. You state opinion evaluations without reason and intelligence and then try to paint them as necessary.

But again, I shouldn't have to REPEAT MY FUCKING ARGUMENTS FOR THE 10th FUCKING TIME. You wnat to discuss this, you shit? Then READ my post on page 12, otherwise, shut the FUCK UP and stop trying to steer this away from our demands that you GIVE SOURCES AND CITATIONS FOR YOUR FUCKING WILD CLAIMS.

You don't have arguments Rafiq.

You have opinion. You have emotion. Neither of which shows necessity. You last argument was simply: "Well...it is the only language they understand" for crying out loud.

You don't have reason, you don't have logic, you don't have intelligence.

YOU HAVEN"T MANAGED TO UNDERMINE EVEN ONE OF MY ARGUMENTS AGAINST YOU.

And what is more many of those arguments show how completely and fucking wrong you are....and expose the frequent falsifications, lies, and twisted logic you use.

You're just a fucking idiot if you think the terror was anything more than the controlled implementation of what was already an organic lust for blood among actual workers who would, outside the jurisdiction of their state, carry out mob-based murders against counter-revolutioanries. It's as fucking stupid as trying to say that the reign of terror was solely sustained by the Jacobins being power hungry. Matter of fact, you probably actually think that.

I don't. But I would have had less of a problem with it ...because instead of the Red Terror being state led and sanctifying the dictatorship over the proletariat and spelling the bankruptcy of the revolution...the organic violence would have been proletarian led.

THAT IS THE FUCKING DIFFERENCE RAFIQ.

Oh no, PA, I just thought it was tacitly understood by people that it demonstrates how fucking intellectually bankrupt you are that you must extrapolate terms which refer to sexual concerns regarding relations of power, to something as infinitely more complex as the relationship between the Soviet state apparatus and the proletariat. The idea that the Bolsheviks "infantilized" the proletariat is literally a prime example of how all of your arguments are stupid abstractions which re-hash from a given vocabulary a very narrow understanding of not only power, of the world on your behalf. Then again, it comes as no surprise that this is also inconsistent, because you can't fucking mass murder a demographic which you have "infantilized". Are you literally this desperate? now that you can't dislocate the basis of power in the Soviet state as being among the proletariat, apparently the Soviet state was 'infantilizing' them all along.

This again makes no sense

But the narrow definition of power...which you seem to solely equate with deriving from brutal violence and repression...is yours.

And you can't mass murder a demographic that you infantilized is of course insane to say. That litterally translates as " you can't mass murder children" which by the way...I indeed think you thoroughly believe.

PhoenixAsh

11th July 2015, 12:50

In this thread.....Rafiq making the argument that violence is the only language peasants and workers understand...

And if they don't listen...you just haven't made yourself clear enough and you should shout harder....

Rafiq

11th July 2015, 16:45

....the Bolsheviks were NOTHING special when it comes to mental illness developed from these actions.

If you divorce the situation from its context, you might tout some shit, but actually I beg to differ - former Cheka operatives, regardless of rank, were most likely more predisposed to developing mental illnesses later in life. Again, this isn't because of their remaining "humanity" but because if the inability to reconcile their work with the Communist ethics that he overwhelming majority of them had from the October revolution.

Cheka archives. Go look it up.

What the fuck does that mean? Give us a FUCKING SOURCE! CITE it, provide a LINK. "Uh, dur, its in russia somewhere lul".

Actually your source proves my claim was right and that you were wrong Rafiq.

You know, I would have at least thought you had the decency to admit you were plainly FUCKING WRONG. But let's go on, let's critically evaluate how exactly it "confirms" what you claimed.

No...actually your citation states that several men succumbed. You need to learn to read.

According to his version, the infinitely suspciious Kamo had already suggested to him in June 1919 that he dress in uniform and surprise the revolutionaries in the town of Lenkoran' and stand them against the wall. "If one of them behaves in a cowardly way, pleads for mercy or starts to rat than execute them," he explained to Mikoyan. Although he did not get permission for staging the action, he still staged the test in a wood close to Moscow. Everybody behaved with courage, except a Polish spy who confessed before the opinted gun that he was agent for Pilsudski. "This action had a terrible effect on one of those present, [...] on Fyodor Alliluyev," adds Mikoyan who is always careful what he writes. Fyodor became "seriously ill" as a result. Several members of the commando left Kamo after this. Drabkina recalled that the news of this sadistic test reached Lenin who was furious and sent a message to Kamo that he never wanted to see him again. But later Lenin seemed to forgive his old favorite.

Because the source is also stating that later many men left because of that incident.

PA is trying to tell us that because many men left Kamo's group because of hte incident, they "immediately" developed mental illnesses even though only it was stated that the action had a terrible effect on "one of those present". According to PA, leaving a group because you have qualms with the actions of its leader means you automatically develop a mental illness.

Eh...No Rafiq you CAN NOT INFER THAT SINCE YOUR SOURCE EXPLICITLY STATES HE DID NOT GET PERMISSION FOR THE ACTION AND DID IT ANYWAY

We can most cetainly infer that news reached Lenin because of how he ripped a man's heart out, and why? Firstly, if the Bolsheviks were so bloodthirsty, then MERELY shooting a man on sight shouldn't have much of an effect on anyone. It doesn't follow that people left the group because of this by your own criterion. PA is such a dishonest little shit, that he would actually have us believe that the act of ripping a man's heart out wouldn't have been so significant as to have made an impression on Lenin. He wants to tell us that Lenin was merley told about Kamo's test, and not the act of him ripping someone's heart out. We also know PA's full of shit, because had this been a matter of legality, he would have merely been prohibited from doing it again, or some other measure of punishment. But Lenin PERSONALLY told Kamo he did not ever want to see him again: Now why would he do that over what would otherwise be a harmless "test" that only resulted in the death of one spy? SO YES, WE CAN INFER THAT LENIN HEARING ABOUT WHAT KAMO DID HAD A DISTURBING EFFECT ON HIM, EVEN IF IT WAS COUPLED WITH HIS CONDEMNATION TO KAMO'S METHODS TO RECRUIT PEOPLE. But nevermind that. You claim that Kamo "tortured' these recruits. How did he troture them, PA? You claim my source confirms this... SO QUOTE IT, WHERE does it fucking say that the recruits were exposed to torture you FUCKING lying piece of shit?

And yet you specifically used that argument to show necessity

No, I didn't you FUCKING idiot. Here was the context: Finally, you cited only one Chekist leader, without citing his later "condemnation" of the terror as unnecessary. That is hardly enough to sustain the contention that the red terror amount to indiscriminate mass murder and institutionally accepted rape. Even among anti-Communist historians, I have yet to see the accusation of how rape was actually commonplace among Chekists. Considering the sensitivities of Bolsheviks, it is an affront to reason itself: When Lenin heard that Kamo ripped out the heart of a spy in front of Red army trainees, he was immediately removed from his position even though the execution of traitors was a given, as a protocol.

This was just ONE EXAMPLE of the sensitivities to cruelty of the Bolsheviks, would you like more? I wouldn't even fucking NEED Kamo's test to get this point across anyway, because the fact that the death penalty was abolished, and then later attempts were made by Lenin and Dzerzhinsky to abolish it, shows that the Bolsheivks weren't even fully capable of reconciling with themselves the usage of terror in the first fucking place, it makes no sense at all that they engaged in mass indiscriminate murder against everyone for no fucking reason. But again, you're just talking out of your ass, so it doesn't matter anyway.

And yet you haven't shown that.

I eventually did read your post and no you still did not provide one shred of argument that showed the necessity.

And you haven't shown that..

I seem to get where you're going you rodent, apparently, you're not actually asking for arguments as to hwy the red terror was necessary, which I thoroughly provided, you want me to change the course of history and show you what would have happened had the red terror not commenced at all. Hence why, even after saying "TL;DR" you said that I didn't "show anything" because you know very well that no one could ever show this, that this is an impossible demand, because it would require a fucking time machine or god-like powers. Your qualifications for proof, are illegitimate because they are simply impossible, and you're left with the agnostic position that "no one could have ever known if it was necessary". As it happens, you can't even fucking consistently formulate the usage of terror, its basis of causality in a consistent paradigm of analysis, first you say that it was necessary for the state to secure power over the working masses, then you claimed that it wasn't necessary at all because it in fact weakened the Soviet state. I pointed out that it allowed them to win the civil war, and you said that the civil war was won only three years after the terror: A pretense to the idea that the red terror only lasted one month, which would amount to the argument that in the one month of terror, the Bolsheviks went on a blind murder spree across the country, pillaging and raping everyone for no fucking reason. At least anti-semites TRY to give us a basis of causality, by saying that Jews wanted to punish the Russian population, but you give me nothing to work with. Here's a hint, you fucking idiot: power "Over" the masses would have been IMPOSSIBLE with or without the terror if you were not supported by a substantial base, but historians note the reality that towards the end of the war, even MOST OF THE COUNTRYSIDE had decided to side over the Bolsheviks who promised land reform over the counter-revolution, even if they saw them as a "lesser evil". In addition, throughout the entire war, THE OVERWHELMING MAJORITY OF THE INDUSTRIAL PROLETARIAT WERE BOLSHEVIKS. As already demonstrated:

But never mind this. A quick look at the total agricultural and industrial proletarians tells us that they numbered only around 4.1 million in 1917. After the civil war, the total "working class" compromised only 1.2 millions, almost all of which were industrial proletarians. They were largely concentrated in huge cities such as Petrograd, where such "proletarian strikes" occurred. The population of Petrograd, not counting the soldiers garrisoned there, amounted to 740,000, whom we can assume were almost all proletarians. Did a SUBSTANTIAL number of these, to dominate the class character, coordinate anti-Bolshevik strikes, and furthermore, were these put down "brutally" (i.e. in a massacre?)? The reality is that the SR LEADERS were punished, not the small minority of workers who followed their agitation against the Bolsheviks, who could not think HOLISTICALLY. It is just as significant to look at the strikes as evidence of "workers turning on the Soviet government" (circa ~ 10,000 people) as it is to look at the BNP as some kind of vehicle of working class consciousness because of its working class demographic. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of workers were for the Bolsheviks, and did not participate in such strikes. Tell me now, Ash, when a group of deserters leave an army as a minority, do they constitute the majority of the army? No, they do not, not unless substantial portions are deserting - and the workers who were on strike were hardly a substantial number to make the generalization that they represented the proletariat as a whole.

Even historians who desire to paint the Bolsheviks in a bad light in the situation, note that the events, the "workers's trikes" were sponsored by the SR's and the Mensheviks. The Petrograd Cheka, among the several thousand striking, arrested 266 people, most certainly counter-revolutionary agitators. Yes, what brutality! You claim the red terror was unnecessary, but I repeatively asked you to demonstrate first a justification for your portrayal of it as indiscriminate mass murder of kids and other innocents, and mass rape (which of course isn't necessary, but alas, they were not part of the terror) and then I asked you how PA himself would proceed in the events, I asked:

If we hypothetically pretend that by your infantile standards it would serve a revolutionary purpose, but that the proletariat would be 'directly in charge' - tell me, HOW WOULD THE TERROR BE ANY DIFFERENT? Again:

But nevermind that: You naively underestimate the EXTENT to which the counter-revolution threatened the worker's dictatorship, this does not amount to "strikers" as claimed by the Black book of Communism, but a very real, active and powerful counter-revolution composed of landlords, capitalists, officers and yes - many peasants. It is true that some strikes occurred, and were repressed: but this was HARDLY representative of the prerogative of the industrial working classes as a whole, nay more than a few deserters in the Red Army were representative of the army as a whole. Any idiot can understand that it is a basic proletarian ethics to recognize the treachery of putting immediate interests before the holistic interests of the class, and for that reason the grand majority of the strikes that had to be suppressed were conducted precisely on the lines of immediate egotism, not some kind of holistic assault on the revolution, but literally the inability to act in accordance with the grander picture. Nevermind this though, because the strikes were INEVITABLY tied up to the wider counter-revolution in the countryside itself and the mass withholdment of grain by the peasantry, the sabotage by counter-revolutionaries and the blockades by the allied powers. Indeed in such circumstances, STRIKES would be treacherous, but that does not mean that the counter-revolution in its essential substance amounts to "workers turning against the Bolsheviks": Without the WIDER counter-revolution no such strikes would have occurred in the first place! Not to mention not only the widespread and active counter-revolutionary, but the insuring banditry by the lumpenproletariat who joined them in threatening the worker's dictatorship.

What's fucking hilarious is that the substance of your argument assumes that the Soviet state was some kind of "big bad entity" which simply engaged in mass repressions, when the truth is that mass killings of workers, of party leaders, attempted assassinations and so on were commonplace long before the terror, in fact one marvels at the hesitance of the Soviet government in dealing with these in a swift and properly just manner. The truth is that the Bolshevik government, the worker's dictatorship, was under siege at all sides. But to ask a better question: If the Soviet state was de-classed, according to you, just composed of "tyrannical" monsters and so on, HOW THE FUCK WERE THEY ABLE TO MOBILIZE, RECRUIT AND IMPLEMENT TERROR THEMSELVES? Did Lenin, revolver in hand, personally see to the physical coercion of the whole population or something? What SOCIAL ENTITY formed the bulk, or the substance of the power of the Soviet government? Do you even know what POWER is? You cannot just blindly hold power without some kind of social base supporting you, so who in fact was 'behind' the Soviet government that sustained them?

All of these problems would have been present even if, hypothetically in your mind, the Bolshevik state was legitimate after all. So how would PA have dealt with them, huh? You're just fucking naive, plain and simple, you don't know how power works, you don't know how WAR works. You think it's a fucking game is all - wherein everything is a matter of "choice". The Bolsheviks used terror not because they were forced to, but because they "chose" to terrorize the population into obedience. Why would they do that? Why, PA? To "consolidate" their own power? This shows a striking disparity between the vitality and vigor they showed in defending the revolution in every possible way, ideologically and physically, and the alleged "secret" desire for power that you and every other fucking liberal asserts was present. But any IDIOT with an understanding of the Bolsheviks knows this to be pure fantasy - it doesn't even make any RATIONAL sense by its own merits- what I am telling you si that THIS WASN'T EVEN POSSIBLE.

As Trotsky notes:

The first conquest of power by the Soviets at the beginning of November 1917 (new style) was actually accomplished with insignificant sacrifices. The Russian bourgeoisie found itself to such a degree estranged from the masses of the people, so internally helpless, so compromised by the course and the result of the war, so demoralized by the regime of Kerensky, that it scarcely dared show any resistance. In Petrograd the power of Kerensky was overthrown almost without a fight. In Moscow its resistance was dragged out, mainly owing to the indecisive character of our own actions. In the majority of the provincial towns, power was transferred to the Soviet on the mere receipt of a telegram from Petrograd or Moscow. If the matter had ended there, there would have been no word of the Red Terror. But in November, 1917, there was already evidence of the beginning of the resistance of the propertied classes. True, there was required the intervention of the imperialist governments of the West in order to give the Russian counter-revolution faith in itself, and to add ever-increasing power to its resistance. This can be shown from facts, both important and insignificant, day by day during the whole epoch of the Soviet revolution.

Kerensky’s “Staff” felt no support forthcoming from the mass of the soldiery, and was inclined to recognize the Soviet Government, which had begun negotiations for an armistice with the Germans. But there followed the protest of the military missions of the Entente, followed by open threats. The Staff was frightened; incited by “Allied” officers, it entered the path of opposition. This led to armed conflict and to the murder of the chief of the field staff, General Dukhonin, by a group of revolutionary sailors.

In Petrograd, the official agents of the Entente, especially the French Military Mission, hand in hand with the SRs and the Mensheviks, openly organized the opposition, mobilizing, arming, inciting against us the cadets, and the bourgeois youth generally, from the second day of the Soviet revolution. The rising of the junkers on November 10 brought about a hundred times more victims than the revolution of November 7. The campaign of the adventurers Kerensky and Krasnov against Petrograd, organized at the same time by the Entente, naturally introduced into the struggle the first elements of savagery. Nevertheless, General Krasnov was set free on his word of honor. The Yaroslav rising (in the summer of 1918) which involved so many victims, was organized by Savinkov on the instructions of the French Embassy, and with its resources. Archangel was captured according to the plans of British naval agents, with the help of British warships and aeroplanes. The beginning of the empire of Kolchak, the nominee of the American Stock Exchange, was brought about by the foreign Czecho-Slovak Corps maintained by the resources of the French Government. Kaledin and Krasnov (liberated by us), the first leaders of the counter-revolution on the Don, could enjoy partial success only thanks to the open military and financial aid of Germany. In the Ukraine the Soviet power was overthrown in the beginning of 1918 by German militarism. The Volunteer Army of Denikin was created with the financial and technical help of Great Britain and France. Only in the hope of British intervention and of British military support was Yudenich’s army created. The politicians, the diplomats, and the journalists of the Entente have for two years on end been debating with complete frankness the question of whether the financing of the civil war in Russia is a sufficiently profitable enterprise. In such circumstances, one needs truly a brazen forehead to seek the reason for the sanguinary character of the civil war in Russia in the malevolence of the Bolsheviks, and not in the international situation.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1920/terrcomm/ch04.htm

So first, let's dissect your fucking logic here. You accept that in the beginning, all was well and quiet, for the most part, following the October revolution for the Soviets. Trotsky noted that "In the majority of the provincial towns, power was transferred to the Soviet on the mere receipt of a telegram from Petrograd or Moscow. IF the matter had ended there, there would have been no word of the Red terror." PA probably wouldn't disagree with this, but his allegation is that rather than "resistance of the propertied classes" (or even a good number of the peasantry), the Bolsheviks were met resistance by "the people", which includes the majority of the proletariat and peasantry. I asked him for specific evidence of such instances: I certainly could provide sources for how peasants were flocking to the reds in the midst of the white terror, and we already know that the only thing close to a "proletarian" opposition to the Bolsheviks, orchestrated by bourgeois and petite-bourgeois peasant ideologues, was in 1921, years after the "terror" was in place by PA's qualifications, and certainly years after the terror became "necessary for the Soviet state to gain der power ovr da workers". You allege that the terror was necessary because everyone was becoming disiillusioned by the Bolsheviks, but the terror began in 1918, not 1920 where the argument, while wrong, would have at least not been fucking idiotic. There is no reason for the terror to have occured at the time that it did, if not because the Bolsheviks found it necessary to protect the proletarian dictatorship. Now you claim, that, in retrospect, "It was unnecessary all along", but I fail to see any alternative method by which hte counter-revolution could have been dealt with. The industrial needed grain from the countryside, many peasants wanted to keep it for profit, counter-revolution began to emerge across the whole empire. According to PA, we can only assume that the solution would have been for everyone to hold hands, and walk slowly toward the counter-revolutionaries singing kumbaya, because mass fear wouldn't be necessary. But what PA fails to understand is that the Bolsheviks failed to make it their policy to physically exterminate the class enemies, in fact, they made it their prerogative to rehabilitate them in the early years. That means many class enemies still reigned in the places the Bolsheviks possessed power over, and for the same reason terror was necessary in every revolution in history, it was necessary in Russia: Mass fear and intimidation is necessary to subdue the counter-revolution, because the only events which gave instilled in the reaction such confidence was the allied invasion. The inverse would have been necessary to destroy their confidence, which would be terror. The victims were around 13,000, which hardly even counts for a fraction of the number of counter-revolutionaries in Russia, as far as demographic goes, 10% of the population in Russia consisted of class enemies, yet 13,000 deaths is nowhere near that amount. PA, in the poverty of his analysis, wants to tell us that the majority of those victims of the terror were actually helpless elderly women, rather than the class enemies who had lost their privileges, the various landlords, capitalists, kulaks, ETC.

As Trotsky notes:

If our November revolution had taken place a few months, or even a few weeks, after the establishment of the rule of the proletariat in Germany, France, and England, there can be no doubt that our revolution would have been the most “peaceful,” the most “bloodless” of all possible revolutions on this sinful earth. But this historical sequence – the most “natural” at the first glance, and, in any case, the most beneficial for the Russian working class – found itself infringed – not through our fault, but through the will of events. Instead of being the last, the Russian proletariat proved to be the first. It was just this circumstance, after the first period of confusion, that imparted desperation to the character of the resistance of the classes which had ruled in Russia previously, and forced the Russian proletariat, in a moment of the greatest peril, foreign attacks, and internal plots and insurrections, to have recourse to severe measures of State terror. No one will now say that those measures proved futile. But, perhaps, we are expected to consider them “intolerable”?

[...]

But terror can be very efficient against a reactionary class which does not want to leave the scene of operations. Intimidation is a powerful weapon of policy, both internationally and internally. War, like revolution, is founded upon intimidation. A victorious war, generally speaking, destroys only an insignificant part of the conquered army, intimidating the remainder and breaking their will. The revolution works in the same way: it kills individuals, and intimidates thousands. In this sense, the Red Terror is not distinguishable from the armed insurrection, the direct continuation of which it represents

PA denies the ferocity of the counter-revolution, what he fails to understand when we point out statistics about how brutal the white terror was, was not that this "justifies" the red terror alone, but the degree of FEROCITY of the counter-revolution, how far these were willing to go. But PA wants to deny the ferocity of counter-revolution all together, and claim that somehow, the reaction could have been subdued, in all the various plots, acts of sabotage, insurrections, mass murders, rapes and pogroms, in any other way than through terror. PA, like any bourgeois ideologue, cannot help but be struck with the dilemma that in any circumstance wherein a propertied class is overthrown, terror MUST inevitably follow. This was true for the reformation, the English Civil War, the French Revolution, the American civil war, and the list goes on. Russia here is not only exceptional, the necessity of terror was far greater even than that of the French revolution. PA, who simply wants me to take him on a fucking time machine, cannot grasp this, instead of actually using reason, inductive logic, and thought - he wants me to throw bombs which obstruct his narrow fucking conception of the wrld which wil "force" him to use reason. This is akin to forcing someone to use arithmetic by throwing charts at them. If you fail to actually think things through and use your fucking brain, I can't help you.

Basically what you say is that you have to terrorize the peasants and workers because otherwise you are not deemed a good leader.

PA extrapolates from this: You can tell yourself that, you fucking child - but the fact of the matter is that my argument was never reducible to "they did it too". If the counter-revolution was raping babies, it would not follow that this justifies the Bolsheviks raping babies. I merely pointed out that the counter-revolution wouldn't have been able to be quelled without mass intimidation and the sanctification of the ideas of the revolution with the real excision of power through fear, that these motherfuckers thought the Soviet state weak and paid dearly for it. I explained this in very thorough detail, you fucking coward, this was PAGE 12 and you admitted to not even reading my post. Like is this actually what you think our arguments amount to? That it was justified because "they did it too?" No, you dolt, that was never the argument, the argument was that in order to quell people who only speak in the tongue of violence, you need to speak their language to get this across. For fuck's sake, you don't know how POWER works, and THAT simple. If those inclined to counter-revolution are not SCARED or intimidated into pacification, and if the power of the revolution is not sanctified in violence, it will command the respect of none of the numerous reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries, merely as a DEMOGRAPHIC, who seek to undermine the Soviet state.

That what's being said is that "you need to terrorize peasants and workers because otherwise you are not deemed a good leader." It is a bizarre fucking claim, however, that the terror was by in part exercised against the workers at all. Even in cases where factories would go on strike, the Cheka was not dispatched to mass murder workers, mas intimidation was not used for them. Instead, workers would be promptly fired from their jobs, and be unable to receive any rations, thereby being forced to go back to work. But these workers, as already demonstrated, did not represent the holistic prerogatives of the proletariat attempting to defend its newly conquered state. PA tells us that the workers and peasants were the main victims of the terror. But even if we accept the HIGHEST, most RIDICULOUS an bizarre claim that 2 million were killed in the Red Terror, which is just as methedologically correct as the notion that Mao alone killed 100 million, this is not even close to being enough to the necessary number to account for what would be needed to "terrorize the peasants and workers". And for the record, the October revolution, spear-headed by the Bolsheviks (workers) and the Left SRs (peasants), was supported by the grand majority of the peasants and virtually the whole proletariat. If they thought that the Bolsheviks were "bad leaders", and that this was the basis of the terror (are you an actual fucking child? Literally, how INFANTILE can you be?) there couldn't have been a revolution, and Soviet power itself could not have been sustained. Because first and foremost, there was no policy of mass intimidation for the proletariat, and there were moments where Soviet power seemed all but hopeless to defend during the civil war. So the idea that workers, or even most of the peasants who sided with the Bolsheviks were "complacent" because they were scared to act out makes absolutely no fucking sense, because in such a turbulent time they could have eaten up the fucking Bolsheviks like it wasn't shit, the threshold on power was contingent upon the 3/4ths of the military compromised of peasants, and the other 1/4th compromised of workers. The Red Army, for the record, initially ONLY constituted members of the proletariat, forced conscription became necessary for the peasantry.

PA has a child's understanding of the complex situation that was at play here, he ACTUALLY wants us to believe that the terror, which began in 1918, started because "da workers were turnin against da soviet state" .

No. You didn't none of your arguments ever out rise the status of unfounded claim

Which you did not even come close to demonstrate what was unfounded.

They weren't forced. They chose to enact that policy.

You're right, they could have conceded defeat to the counter-revolution and the allies. They didn't though. So go fuck yourself.

YOU HAVEN"T MANAGED TO UNDERMINE EVEN ONE OF MY ARGUMENTS AGAINST YOU.

That is because the qualifications presented here for being able to "undermine your arguments" amounts to absolutely nothing, because no matter what I fucking say, even if I bring you to 1918 in a time machine, it will never pass the criteria for being able to "undermine" your STUPID fucking arguments. But the reality is that anyone seeing this thread can see very well that not only have I undermined your arguments, I made you look like a fucking idiot in front of everyone, not just vis a vis Kamo, but every single argument you've made. The fact that you still incessantly claim I have "made not one argument" shows this, becasue at teh very least even those who disagree with me will have to admit I've made PLENTY of fucking arguments, and yes - anyone with a pair of fucking eyes can see that your arguments have been completely undermined.

..the organic violence would have been proletarian led.

It was proletarian led you FUCKING idiot, the point is that the proletariat, concerned with actually feeding themselves, already preoccupied was too large to all belong in the Cheka, but make no mistake, proletarians were in the Cheka, both as leaders and as operatives. By 1919, the Cheka compromised 100,000 employees. Where the fuck do you think this irk came from, the intelligetnsia? No, the workers and peasants. But nevermind that, the reality is that he idea that the disorganized proletariat could spontaneously not only penetrate the counter-revolution, but the growing banditry and crime by de-classed elements is fucking idiotic.
This again makes no sense

But the narrow definition of power...which you seem to solely equate with deriving from brutal violence and repression

Like it or not, that's all power means. That's it. All power stems from the barrel of a gun. How many Bolsheviks were there which sufficiently held revolvers to the heads of the 4 million proletarians? You could try to say that, in an act of "demagoguery" they used the soldiers to coerce the proletariat, but then again, this wouldn't make any fucking sense, because the soldiers were only won over insofar as they fought on behalf of the proletariat.

That litterally translates as " you can't mass murder children" which by the way...I indeed think you thoroughly believe.

No it fucking doesn't, because to mass murder children, you do not do so from the pre-requisite of infantilizing them. But forget that. To "infantilize" something, using the most ELEMENTARY usage of the word, is to "protect" something in such a way as to treat them as a child, it is most expicitly referred to power relations vis a vis sexualtiy, how this applies to the relationship between the Soviet state apparatus and the proletariat is just a stupid fucking use of words. According to PA, the soviet state "turned the Proletariat into kids" and then mass murdered them. No wonder! The proletariat decreased from 4 million to 1 million, it was CLEARLY because they were mass murdered, it had nothing to do with famine, migrations to the countryside, or fighting in the civil war - it was the Cheka mass murdering them! This is what PA ACTUALLY Believes.

RedMaterialist

11th July 2015, 18:15

Marx:

[T]he very cannibalism of the counterrevolution will convince the nations that there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.
“The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna,” Neue Rheinische Zeitung', 07 November 1848.

We have no compassion and we ask no compassion from you. When our turn comes, we shall not make excuses for the terror. But the royal terrorists, the terrorists by the grace of God and the law, are in practice brutal, disdainful, and mean, in theory cowardly, secretive, and deceitful, and in both respects disreputable.

The Feral Underclass

11th July 2015, 19:33

Rafiq, please refrain from formatting your posts in that way. It is completely unnecessary. There is no reason for you to type in caps lock or increase your font to such obnoxious sizes.

PhoenixAsh

11th July 2015, 19:49

Rafiq,

I glossed over your massive amount of texts. Nowhere did I find you addressing the premise you posed that the Red Terror as a specific state policy was necessary.

So far we have established that you were wrong on:

1). The Red Terror as a state policy was protested by communists. Both Bolsheviks and those outside the Bolsheviks previous before the state policy was enacted , during and after.
2). The Cheka went unrestricted and this was massively argued against by the Soviets councils. This was at the time reported in both Izvestia and Pravda.
3). The Soviets also argued that the Red Terror was counter effective
4). You were wrong on Kamo...totally, and utterly and you are grasping at straws when you cite a passage that recruits behaved with courage which doesn't actually mean anything....and comfortably ignore all the passages which downright prove you were wrong
5). We have established that the Kamo situation was independent from the Cheka and that you were wrong on that account.
6). You have used the argument which shows the effect of the brutality on the mental state of the Cheka (as this is observed and studied for ALL agencies involved in atrocious brutality) to actually argue their "innocence" (my god...how low can you actually sink). You have now equally argued that the Cheka agents were predisposed to mental illness.
7). That both during and after the Red Terror and Civil War Bolsheviks, former Bolsheviks and communists argued the brutality of the Cheka...a fact which you denied and dismiss. Instead you serve up testimony from people who have EVERY reason to support their own actions.

So far you have managed to raise the following arguments to support your statement:

1). Argued the "higher cause & greater good" narrative (which is something ALL bourgeoisie agencies do)
2). Argued the context of White Terror (which comes down to "they did it to" but you don't seem to realize that nor want to accept the actual meaning of that argument)
3). You have argued the brutality of the Whites (which comes down to "Oh but they were so much worse") but this is an excuse and not an argument
4). You argued that it was the only language "they" understood. They being the pesky little peasants and workers who bore the brunt of the violence (which incidentally is also an argument which you can read in many Bourgeois excuses for their violence)
5). You argued this was necessary for power and that power simply works this way and needs brutal state policies of unrestricted violence (and that everybody who actually understands how power works is wrong...you are a downright adherent of the bourgeois apologists Bierstedt and Boulding....and they have long been proven wrong) and otherwise the state would deemed weak. Again this is a "they did it too" variety

NONE of the "arguments" however show how the Red Terror as a specific policy was necessary nor how the violation and sacrifice of revolutionary principles was unavoidable by state policy.

NOT ONE of these "arguments" go beyond mere subjective conception based on bourgeois culture and reality. In fact in your posts you frequently admit, implicitly, that the policy was in fact reactionary. And you do this because you either succumb to the justifications of the bourgeois or downright say that the policy was "speaking the bourgeois and reactionary" language.

So you make assumptions and try to present them as facts. You did so from the start in your usual arrogant "know it all" manner lacing your posts with the all too familiar straw man arguments addressing and attacking positions which were never made.

You also gloss over the fact that regardless of the content of your arguments you haven't actually touched on the very nature of the debate and why this was brought up. You are completely unaware of the fact that the Red Terror in itself was the death of the proletarian direct involvement within the Revolution and effectually ended the proletarian revolution to supplement workers dictatorship with dictatorship of the party over the working class. And this was an outcome of a series of opportunistic decisions, which separately may have been made with good intentions, but sided quickly down the proverbial slippery slope I mentioned way back in the threat when we were discussing the Bolshevik position and the disbanding of the CA. The specific outcome of political opportunism, lack of ideological grounding and the specific fantasy that the Bolsheviks were the embodiment of the working class were instrumental for the Russian revolution to utterly fail.

You simply assumed, although denying that you were, this Bolsheviks delusion to be the embodiment of the proletarian class on which they based their policy by defending every single step down the ladder of proletarian subjugation to the party whims.....along the line defending beyond reason the specific policy which was the nail in the coffin.

So you can write your long winded posts if they make you feel better and more revolutionary...

But you aren't actually addressing the issues. So when you want to step down your little red cloud and have a decent debate where you are actually prepared to deal with the facts and address the actual arguments rather than your fictive red herrings...you are welcome to finally do so...

Rafiq

11th July 2015, 20:44

Rafiq,

I glossed over your massive amount of texts. Nowhere did I find you addressing the premise you posed that the Red Terror as a specific state policy was necessary.

I seem to get where you're going you rodent, apparently, you're not actually asking for arguments as to hwy the red terror was necessary, which I thoroughly provided, you want me to change the course of history and show you what would have happened had the red terror not commenced at all. Hence why, even after saying "TL;DR" you said that I didn't "show anything" because you know very well that no one could ever show this, that this is an impossible demand, because it would require a fucking time machine or god-like powers. Your qualifications for proof, are illegitimate because they are simply impossible, and you're left with the agnostic position that "no one could have ever known if it was necessary". As it happens, you can't even fucking consistently formulate the usage of terror, its basis of causality in a consistent paradigm of analysis, first you say that it was necessary for the state to secure power over the working masses, then you claimed that it wasn't necessary at all because it in fact weakened the Soviet state. I pointed out that it allowed them to win the civil war, and you said that the civil war was won only three years after the terror: A pretense to the idea that the red terror only lasted one month, which would amount to the argument that in the one month of terror, the Bolsheviks went on a blind murder spree across the country, pillaging and raping everyone for no fucking reason. At least anti-semites TRY to give us a basis of causality, by saying that Jews wanted to punish the Russian population, but you give me nothing to work with. Here's a hint, you fucking idiot: power "Over" the masses would have been IMPOSSIBLE with or without the terror if you were not supported by a substantial base, but historians note the reality that towards the end of the war, even MOST OF THE COUNTRYSIDE had decided to side over the Bolsheviks who promised land reform over the counter-revolution, even if they saw them as a "lesser evil". In addition, throughout the entire war, THE OVERWHELMING MAJORITY OF THE INDUSTRIAL PROLETARIAT WERE BOLSHEVIKS

PA denies the ferocity of the counter-revolution, what he fails to understand when we point out statistics about how brutal the white terror was, was not that this "justifies" the red terror alone, but the degree of FEROCITY of the counter-revolution, how far these were willing to go. But PA wants to deny the ferocity of counter-revolution all together, and claim that somehow, the reaction could have been subdued, in all the various plots, acts of sabotage, insurrections, mass murders, rapes and pogroms, in any other way than through terror. PA, like any bourgeois ideologue, cannot help but be struck with the dilemma that in any circumstance wherein a propertied class is overthrown, terror MUST inevitably follow. This was true for the reformation, the English Civil War, the French Revolution, the American civil war, and the list goes on. Russia here is not only exceptional, the necessity of terror was far greater even than that of the French revolution. PA, who simply wants me to take him on a fucking time machine, cannot grasp this, instead of actually using reason, inductive logic, and thought - he wants me to throw bombs which obstruct his narrow fucking conception of the wrld which wil "force" him to use reason. This is akin to forcing someone to use arithmetic by throwing charts at them. If you fail to actually think things through and use your fucking brain, I can't help you.

1). The Red Terror as a state policy was protested by communists. Both Bolsheviks and those outside the Bolsheviks previous before the state policy was enacted , during and after.

3). The Soviets also argued that the Red Terror was counter effective

Again:

Cite yourself, if it's so fucking easy, show us how exactly the Soviets opposed the red terror, and "en masse' deemed it unnecessary. I'd love to see this. Are you actually trying to spin the fucking argument that the terror, and the formation of the Cheka happened out of nowhere, that it was "unnecessary" and that the Bolsheviks were in a calm position or whatever? You think your shitty fucking morals should get in the way of revolutionary duty? What, would you have it, establish some kind of absolutist morality of "only in cases of self-defense".... Hate to break it to you, but terror IS by definition self defense when implemented by revolutionaries, from France to Russia - if you're talking about the absence of offensives and executions of counter-revolutionaries, as long as they're out of proximity and bounds, that is fucking stupid because that is simply waiting for the enemy to strike first - which they did, thousands of workers being shot by the white guards and all.... !

Again, let me re-quote A FUCKING RE-QUOTE FROM A PREVIOUS POST (LITERALLY, I HAVE TO RE-QUTOE INSTANCES WHERE I HAD TO RE-QUOTE MYSELF! THIS IS HOW THIS FUCKING CHILD RESPONDS TO MY ARGUMENT!):

I asked you, I fucking asked you very plainly to PROVIDE EVIDENCE THAT SUGGESTS THAT THE SOVIETS CONDEMNED THE RED TERROR EN MASSE. You claim that it "pushed people into supporting the white counter-revolution" - really? Did the RED TERROR do this? All we can recall, from the memoirs of American generals:

Semeonoff and Kalmikoff soldiers, under the protection of Japanese troops, were roaming the country like wild animals, killing and robbing the people, and these murders could have been stopped any day Japan wished. If questions were asked about these brutal murders, the reply was that the people murdered were Bolsheviks and this explanation, apparently, satisfied the world. Conditions were represented as being horrible in Eastern Siberia, and that life was the cheapest thing there. There were horrible murders committed, but they were not committed by the Bolsheviks as the world believes. I am well on the side of safety when I say that the anti-Bolsheviks killed one hundred people in Eastern Siberia, to everyone killed by the Bolsheviks.

Others would note that the barbarism of the white counter-revolution in the countryside was pushing more and more people to the Bolsheviks, with generals noting that peasants were joining the Reds en masse. So contra to the notion that the red terror "pushed people to the white counter-revolution", if anything, the entire conglomeration of all events was greatly in the favor of the Bolsheviks and the Red Army - and make no mistake, what you fail to understand is that terror was not exercised against ordinary people, but those who were ACTIVELY attempting to undermine the revolution, this followed logically from mass killings, assassinations, acts of sabotage and the irk from peasants withholding grain, from the bourgeois press spreading lies and slander openly, and yes - marginally, from SOME workers provoked by foreign saboteurs to sabotage the holistic proletarian dictatorship. You're literally just making shit up at this point, and the picture you're trying to paint of the Bolshevik revolution is so hilariously stupid it doesn't even consistently conform to any standard of reason, liberal or otherwise. First the terror was unnecessary, and then lo and behold, it was actually necessary to sustain the "one party dictatorship'. Liberals believe the latter, and naive Communists believe the former. But to believe both suggests a major case of cognitive fucking dissonance, which isn't surprising considering it's you we're talking about after all, who constantly needs to sustain his beliefs with incessant schizohprenic shitposting and apologia that violates Occam's razor in every possible way.

It's hilariously stupid that you keep using the fact that internally many criticized the terror in its expression for the idea that somehow, the terror was holistically condemned. Every bumfuck idiot recognized that the terror was absolutely necessary, what they opposed were the specifialities of how it was ordained in some cases - these were problems that were well known to both Dzerzshinsky and Lenin, who did everything they could to severely punish abusers. The fact of hte matter is that - YES excesses occurred, but what the fuck do you expect? These were severely punished when they could be. You claim that the "party elite" intentionally did not put any limitations on the activities of Chekists, which assumes that they were in a position to more amply deal with the abuses - whihc were hardly "definitive" of the Cheka, by the way, they were mostly MARGINAL. But nevermind that, you're simply living a pure fucking fantasy. I've already addressed this as well:

As it happens, while criticism of the Cheka's methods, and its organization was widespread, no one was so fucking STUPID as to think that the terror was unnecessary. They merely wanted the terror to be exercised in a better manner, which is true - there were excesses which only in retrospect can we recognize could have been avoided, but that doesn't mean that they themselves had any other fucking choice at the time. As I already stated, this was because they were ill-equipped ethically to use terror in a more organized, responsible manner, on account of WANTING TO ABOLISH THE DEATH PENALTY TO BEGIN WITH. When terror became a NECESSITY, they did not use it in the most desirable fashion because they did not know HOW to.

2). The Cheka went unrestricted and this was massively argued against by the Soviets councils. This was at the time reported in both Izvestia and Pravda.

Clearly you know nothing of war if you think violence of the sort that was necessary could have been controlled, NONE THE LESS with the naive pacifist attitude of the Bolsheviks who didn't even know how to ethically reconcile themselves with the terror, which is why most Chekists would become crazy later on. But nevermind that. Your allegation is nothing short of a wild exaggeration, extrapolations straight from the black book of Communism. Such is your reactionary pathological character.

4). You were wrong on Kamo...totally, and utterly and you are grasping at straws when you cite a passage that recruits behaved with courage which doesn't actually mean anything....and comfortably ignore all the passages which downright prove you were wrong

Why do you make shit up? So Kamo tortured people to "spill the beans" as though he was digging for false confessions? Why did this only happen once, then? To be clear, it isn't morally atrocious, what Kamo did. My point was that the bolsheviks were sensitive to such "excesses". The rule that all is permitted was alien to them.

The procedure with recruits happened often. Recruits "spilling the beans" and then promptly being executed did not. That was my point: If the goal was to (and why?) torture recruits to the point of "confession", there would be a starkly high number of them who would have confessed. So far, we have one case.

"O and that information is in a biography published in Moscow in 1960 somewhere.... The title being the real name Shaumyan (?) for Kamo"

Cite it.

I'd also like a citation for this [allegation of mock executions of children]. You can't just expect to tout wild allegations and expect us all to believe you.

[The reality is that, if recruits acted with courage, they couldn't have fucking "succumbed" because the only way to fail the test would have been to give in. Desperation, much?]

5). We have established that the Kamo situation was independent from the Cheka and that you were wrong on that account.

Your assertion that "rape", "unnecessary torture" and arbitrary mass murders remains unsupported by any Bolsheviks, leaders or otherwise. So in fact, it is not so much to infer that you're citing anti-Communist historians in this regard. Finally, you cited only one Chekist leader, without citing his later "condemnation" of the terror as unnecessary. That is hardly enough to sustain the contention that the red terror amount to indiscriminate mass murder and institutionally accepted rape. Even among anti-Communist historians, I have yet to see the accusation of how rape was actually commonplace among Chekists. Considering the sensitivities of Bolsheviks, it is an affront to reason itself: When Lenin heard that Kamo ripped out the heart of a spy in front of Red army trainees, he was immediately removed from his position even though the execution of traitors was a given, as a protocol.

[Why these sensitivities would be different for the infamous doings of Chekists makes no sense.]

6). You have used the argument which shows the effect of the brutality on the mental state of the Cheka (as this is observed and studied for ALL agencies involved in atrocious brutality) to actually argue their "innocence" (my god...how low can you actually sink). You have now equally argued that the Cheka agents were predisposed to mental illness.

I know it might be much to demand, but let's do a bit of thinking. Were the Bolsheviks ethically reconciled with murder, i.e. was the act of killing integral to the October revolution itself as an acceptable value? No, because the death penalty was abolished, leading Bolsheviks made it their specific prerogative to minimize as much bloodshed as possible, Lenin even openly claimed that he wanted to avoid the course that the French revolution took with the killing of unarmed men, etc. We can also evaluate the reality that even in the later Stalin years, when executions of political officers was taking place in Poland, most of the NKVD operatives who carried out the executions of men who were clearly guilty of being... Officers of a bourgeois military apparatus killed themselves. Bourgeois historians love pointing to the reality that Chekists would later go insane as evidence of their previous depravity, but what they don't understand was the ETHICAL toll the act of taking human lives took on individual chekists. This might haven not been a big deal for the white butchers and the imperialist powers behind them, but it most certainly was for many Chekists, Dzerzhinsky included, who believed they were entering an epoch free from the necessity of murder being integral to power. Again, this is why I claim you're underestimating the sentimentality of the Bolsheviks vis a vis their approach to murder - it wasn't a fucking free for all.

So no, it isn't "proof" of the exact nature of the Cheka who apparently engaged in "brutalizing innocent, unarmed people including the elderly, women and children" (an extrapolation from the Black book of Communism no doubt), it is proof that mass-executions of counter-revolutionaries took a toll on Chekists. Why wouldn't it? Yes they were unarmed, that's the fucking point of the terror itself - otherwise, such "murders" would have been solely reserved for the battlefield, as the Bolsheviks had desired. As far as the death of innocents go, the turbulence of the Stalin years later would prove that the Chekists simply did not kill ENOUGH people. The official death toll was 12,733, this accounts for barely a fraction of the number of active counter-revolutionaries. PA, this fucking dolt, would have us believe that a significant portion of this number were children and elderly women... What the fuck? Even if the Bolsehviks were these evil motherfuckers, WHY would this be the case? WHY would Chekists kill kids and elderly women, from a purely cynical point of view - HOW does this stand to reason at all? You can't provide a source for this, because it's a bunch of FUCKING bullshit.

[The point being that the level of ethical suspension was far different for the Bolsheviks, or the standards for doing it. Killing unarmed people is new and dark territory, carried out from an abyss without a "big other". People who kill for god, for fatherland, or for legitimized morality rarely develop mental illnesses later, because for the ruling classes all is permitted, and this is why you'll never find the white terrorists, or Japanese militarists going crazy. The real source of the PTSD was the inability to be ethically reconciled with it, to kill as an ATHEIST without a legitimized 'big other' that which you can do it for.]

7). That both during and after the Red Terror and Civil War Bolsheviks, former Bolsheviks and communists argued the brutality of the Cheka...a fact which you denied and dismiss. Instead you serve up testimony from people who have EVERY reason to support their own actions.

[Such as Victor Serge, who in the 1930's and 40's had nothing to gain from doing so]

[I]As it happens, while criticism of the Cheka's methods, and its organization was widespread, no one was so fucking STUPID as to think that the terror was unnecessary. They merely wanted the terror to be exercised in a better manner, which is true - there were excesses which only in retrospect can we recognize could have been avoided, but that doesn't mean that they themselves had any other fucking choice at the time. As I already stated, this was because they were ill-equipped ethically to use terror in a more organized, responsible manner, on account of WANTING TO ABOLISH THE DEATH PENALTY TO BEGIN WITH. When terror became a NECESSITY, they did not use it in the most desirable fashion because they did not know HOW to.

1). Argued the "higher cause & greater good" narrative

Here we FUCKING go again, as though there is an equivalency in POWER, as though power is sustained by the same forces, for the same reason, across the fucking board. The fact of the matter is that as I already stated before, if you actually, carefully read my fucking post - you cannot draw any level of equivalency because only liberals believe in such myths as the state compromising "those who lead" and "the people". The basis of Nazi power was in the industiral bourgeoisie, war barons and the then privatized banks, and it is BY THEIR WILL that the Nazis exercised power. So even if the Nazis used ALL OF THE SAME METHODS as the Bolsheviks, this would not give them an iota of equivalency, because they are USING THEM FOR ENTIRELY DIFFERENT FUCKING REASONS. Only the bourgeois-morality, the stupid fucking sentimentality will draw a basis of equivalency because it cannot recognize class difference, because, according to this morality of the present state-apparatus, "killing is killing, no matter who does it, or why" - the act itself is absolved from its context, hence, a cowardly emphasis is placed on mere ABSTRACTIONS because they threaten the power of the EXISTING order (i.e. ruptures its foundations) regardless of where they come from.

You keep phrase-mongering BULLSHIT like "bourgeois" and "reactionary mentality" to accommodate for your own conservatism and counter-revolutionary sentimentality, but the truth is that the entire basis of your comparison is thoroughly bourgeois itself, what you fail to understand is that in a true conflict, and not some kind of glorified misunderstanding, each belligerent cannot "morally" criticize the other in the sense of expecting anything different, a true enemy is an enemy in ESSENCE, no matter of I "hear his story out'. According to PA, the class war is some kind of giant misunderstanding wherein all sides are both morally wrong for employing the means of annihilating the enemy, on a universal basis of morality because in the end, they all "objectively want the same thing". But only those in POWER have the privilege of touting such nonsense - the truth is that the proletariat and the bourgeoisie do NOT want the same thing, and therefore, there is no equivalency in their means of sustaining power and suppressing those who threaten them. Now PA will tell us that "reverse sexism" and "reverse racism" are real, because they use the "same arguments and mentality" as sexists and racists, on account for his myopic theoretical insight. It is beyond fucking stupid.

Here Phoenix presents us some kind of universal morality that amounts to the idea that the moral quality of an act is "universal" across class lines. We then follow that the murder of counter-revolutionaries is, exactly the same for us as the murder of revolutionaries. This is an ethics alien to Communism.

The fact of the matter is that it couldn't 'legitimize" acts under any state, because we don't expect anything different from them. The bourgeois state does not constrain itself because it is benevolent, it does so because it would be overthrown in a day. But listen, we don't seek to justify the terror for you, a reactionary. And it's pretty FUCKING disgusting that you mention ethnic genocides as a comparison, because in doing so you approximate the plain of action of revolutionaries as necessarily BEING THE SAME as that of the Nazis or Serbian nationalists. In other words, the idea that "what else were we supposed to do" is EMPTIED of its essential subjective context, and it is merely assumed that everyone in a position of power wants the same thing. For the Nuremberg trials, for example, the argument used was not "what were we supposed to do" but that they were "just following orders". Well, it might very well be a fact that the holocaust was necessary to sustain the power of the NAZIS and that anti-semitism was necessary to sustain the NAZI identity, but what is necessary for the sustenance of power for Nazis, and what is necessary for the sustenance of power for Communists is not identical. I can't fucking believe the red terror is now being abstracted from its context and assumed to be ethically identical to any other violent act - who the FUCK thinks like this if not a bourgoeis ideologue?

The point is the essential question: FOR WHAT PURPOSE is this "terror" being used, who is using it, and so on - without this, there is NO SUBSTANCE to any violent act, and therefore, no legitimate basis for drawing an ethical conclusion from it. I mean, are you fucking kidding me? What's hilarious is that first you tell us that the terror was necessary to sustain the Bolshevik dictatorship, and then you say that it wasn't necessary to defeat the counter-revolution. This pre-supposes a disparity between the rule of the Bolsheviks and the possibility of the revolution being saved, but no such disparity exists - the fate of the revolution was irrevocably tied to the fate of the proletarian dictatorship led by the Bolsheviks, and no matter your incessant abuse of words as "evidence" (WHAT DOES THIS EVEN MEAN?) this is what every anti-Communist historian, the same historians YOU YOURSELF cite, are able to recognize, they merely oppose the revolution all together.

The moral superiority has nothing to do with a moral superiority vis a vis some kind of universal, cosmic, divine morality, or a pretense to "humanity", but amounts to the reality that our morals are not theirs. For them, killing is justified to defend property relations. For us, it is justified to destroy them. How this is conceived is not in regard to the individual preferences of people, but classes. That two enemies both use swords, does not make them the same. It makes them the same, in terms of their willingness to use violence to defeat their enemies, AND THAT IS IT. Let Trotsky speak for me:

“But, in that case, in what do your tactics differ from the tactics of Tsarism?” we are asked, by the high priests of Liberalism and Kautskianism.

You do not understand this, holy men? We shall explain to you. The terror of Tsarism was directed against the proletariat. The gendarmerie of Tsarism throttled the workers who were fighting for the Socialist order. Our Extraordinary Commissions shoot landlords, capitalists, and generals who are striving to restore the capitalist order. Do you grasp this ... distinction? Yes? For us Communists it is quite sufficient."

2). Argued the context of White Terror (which comes down to "they did it to" but you don't seem to realize that nor want to accept the actual meaning of that argument)

You can tell yourself that, you fucking child - but the fact of the matter is that my argument was never reducible to "they did it too". If the counter-revolution was raping babies, it would not follow that this justifies the Bolsheviks raping babies. I merely pointed out that the counter-revolution wouldn't have been able to be quelled without mass intimidation and the sanctification of the ideas of the revolution with the real excision of power through fear, that these motherfuckers thought the Soviet state weak and paid dearly for it. I explained this in very thorough detail, you fucking coward, this was PAGE 12 and you admitted to not even reading my post. Like is this actually what you think our arguments amount to? That it was justified because "they did it too?" No, you dolt, that was never the argument, the argument was that in order to quell people who only speak in the tongue of violence, you need to speak their language to get this across. For fuck's sake, you don't know how POWER works, and THAT simple. If those inclined to counter-revolution are not SCARED or intimidated into pacification, and if the power of the revolution is not sanctified in violence, it will command the respect of none of the numerous reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries, merely as a DEMOGRAPHIC, who seek to undermine the Soviet state.

3). You have argued the brutality of the Whites (which comes down to "Oh but they were so much worse") but this is an excuse and not an argument

PA denies the ferocity of the counter-revolution, what he fails to understand when we point out statistics about how brutal the white terror was, was not that this "justifies" the red terror alone, but the degree of FEROCITY of the counter-revolution, how far these were willing to go. But PA wants to deny the ferocity of counter-revolution all together, and claim that somehow, the reaction could have been subdued, in all the various plots, acts of sabotage, insurrections, mass murders, rapes and pogroms, in any other way than through terror. PA, like any bourgeois ideologue, cannot help but be struck with the dilemma that in any circumstance wherein a propertied class is overthrown, terror MUST inevitably follow. This was true for the reformation, the English Civil War, the French Revolution, the American civil war, and the list goes on. Russia here is not only exceptional, the necessity of terror was far greater even than that of the French revolution. PA, who simply wants me to take him on a fucking time machine, cannot grasp this, instead of actually using reason, inductive logic, and thought - he wants me to throw bombs which obstruct his narrow fucking conception of the wrld which wil "force" him to use reason. This is akin to forcing someone to use arithmetic by throwing charts at them. If you fail to actually think things through and use your fucking brain, I can't help you.

4). You argued that it was the only language "they" understood. They being the pesky little peasants and workers who bore the brunt of the violence (which incidentally is also an argument which you can read in many Bourgeois excuses for their violence)

PA extrapolates from this: You can tell yourself that, you fucking child - but the fact of the matter is that my argument was never reducible to "they did it too". If the counter-revolution was raping babies, it would not follow that this justifies the Bolsheviks raping babies. I merely pointed out that the counter-revolution wouldn't have been able to be quelled without mass intimidation and the sanctification of the ideas of the revolution with the real excision of power through fear, that these motherfuckers thought the Soviet state weak and paid dearly for it. I explained this in very thorough detail, you fucking coward, this was PAGE 12 and you admitted to not even reading my post. Like is this actually what you think our arguments amount to? That it was justified because "they did it too?" No, you dolt, that was never the argument, the argument was that in order to quell people who only speak in the tongue of violence, you need to speak their language to get this across. For fuck's sake, you don't know how POWER works, and THAT simple. If those inclined to counter-revolution are not SCARED or intimidated into pacification, and if the power of the revolution is not sanctified in violence, it will command the respect of none of the numerous reactionaries and counter-revolutionaries, merely as a DEMOGRAPHIC, who seek to undermine the Soviet state.

That what's being said is that "you need to terrorize peasants and workers because otherwise you are not deemed a good leader." It is a bizarre fucking claim, however, that the terror was by in part exercised against the workers at all. Even in cases where factories would go on strike, the Cheka was not dispatched to mass murder workers, mas intimidation was not used for them. Instead, workers would be promptly fired from their jobs, and be unable to receive any rations, thereby being forced to go back to work. But these workers, as already demonstrated, did not represent the holistic prerogatives of the proletariat attempting to defend its newly conquered state. PA tells us that the workers and peasants were the main victims of the terror. But even if we accept the HIGHEST, most RIDICULOUS an bizarre claim that 2 million were killed in the Red Terror, which is just as methedologically correct as the notion that Mao alone killed 100 million, this is not even close to being enough to the necessary number to account for what would be needed to "terrorize the peasants and workers". And for the record, the October revolution, spear-headed by the Bolsheviks (workers) and the Left SRs (peasants), was supported by the grand majority of the peasants and virtually the whole proletariat. If they thought that the Bolsheviks were "bad leaders", and that this was the basis of the terror (are you an actual fucking child? Literally, how INFANTILE can you be?) there couldn't have been a revolution, and Soviet power itself could not have been sustained. Because first and foremost, there was no policy of mass intimidation for the proletariat, and there were moments where Soviet power seemed all but hopeless to defend during the civil war. So the idea that workers, or even most of the peasants who sided with the Bolsheviks were "complacent" because they were scared to act out makes absolutely no fucking sense, because in such a turbulent time they could have eaten up the fucking Bolsheviks like it wasn't shit, the threshold on power was contingent upon the 3/4ths of the military compromised of peasants, and the other 1/4th compromised of workers. The Red Army, for the record, initially ONLY constituted members of the proletariat, forced conscription became necessary for the peasantry.

5). You argued this was necessary for power and that power simply works this way and needs brutal state policies of unrestricted violence (and that everybody who actually understands how power works is wrong...you are a downright adherent of the bourgeois apologists Bierstedt and Boulding....and they have long been proven wrong) and otherwise the state would deemed weak. Again this is a "they did it too" variety

According to PA, we can only assume that the solution would have been for everyone to hold hands, and walk slowly toward the counter-revolutionaries singing kumbaya, because mass fear wouldn't be necessary. But what PA fails to understand is that the Bolsheviks failed to make it their policy to physically exterminate the class enemies, in fact, they made it their prerogative to rehabilitate them in the early years. That means many class enemies still reigned in the places the Bolsheviks possessed power over, and for the same reason terror was necessary in every revolution in history, it was necessary in Russia: Mass fear and intimidation is necessary to subdue the counter-revolution, because the only events which gave instilled in the reaction such confidence was the allied invasion. The inverse would have been necessary to destroy their confidence, which would be terror. The victims were around 13,000, which hardly even counts for a fraction of the number of counter-revolutionaries in Russia, as far as demographic goes, 10% of the population in Russia consisted of class enemies, yet 13,000 deaths is nowhere near that amount. PA, in the poverty of his analysis, wants to tell us that the majority of those victims of the terror were actually helpless elderly women, rather than the class enemies who had lost their privileges, the various landlords, capitalists, kulaks, ETC.

[PA, a literal fucking idiot, again doesn't understand the function of power and the state being built upon violence, that without provoking fear into the class enemies, they will eat it alive, and that the idea that power rests upon violence is somehow unique to the bourgeoisie when in fact I quoted Mao for fuck's sake, when in fact all Marxists recognized that the state is built upon violence and is a mechanism of class repression.]

NONE of the "arguments" however show how the Red Terror as a specific policy was necessary nor how the violation and sacrifice of revolutionary principles was unavoidable by state policy.

But never mind this. A quick look at the total agricultural and industrial proletarians tells us that they numbered only around 4.1 million in 1917. After the civil war, the total "working class" compromised only 1.2 millions, almost all of which were industrial proletarians. They were largely concentrated in huge cities such as Petrograd, where such "proletarian strikes" occurred. The population of Petrograd, not counting the soldiers garrisoned there, amounted to 740,000, whom we can assume were almost all proletarians. Did a SUBSTANTIAL number of these, to dominate the class character, coordinate anti-Bolshevik strikes, and furthermore, were these put down "brutally" (i.e. in a massacre?)? The reality is that the SR LEADERS were punished, not the small minority of workers who followed their agitation against the Bolsheviks, who could not think HOLISTICALLY. It is just as significant to look at the strikes as evidence of "workers turning on the Soviet government" (circa ~ 10,000 people) as it is to look at the BNP as some kind of vehicle of working class consciousness because of its working class demographic. The reality is that the overwhelming majority of workers were for the Bolsheviks, and did not participate in such strikes. Tell me now, Ash, when a group of deserters leave an army as a minority, do they constitute the majority of the army? No, they do not, not unless substantial portions are deserting - and the workers who were on strike were hardly a substantial number to make the generalization that they represented the proletariat as a whole.

Even historians who desire to paint the Bolsheviks in a bad light in the situation, note that the events, the "workers's trikes" were sponsored by the SR's and the Mensheviks. The Petrograd Cheka, among the several thousand striking, arrested 266 people, most certainly counter-revolutionary agitators. Yes, what brutality! You claim the red terror was unnecessary, but I repeatively asked you to demonstrate first a justification for your portrayal of it as indiscriminate mass murder of kids and other innocents, and mass rape (which of course isn't necessary, but alas, they were not part of the terror) and then I asked you how PA himself would proceed in the events, I asked:

If we hypothetically pretend that by your infantile standards it would serve a revolutionary purpose, but that the proletariat would be 'directly in charge' - tell me, HOW WOULD THE TERROR BE ANY DIFFERENT? Again:

But nevermind that: You naively underestimate the EXTENT to which the counter-revolution threatened the worker's dictatorship, this does not amount to "strikers" as claimed by the Black book of Communism, but a very real, active and powerful counter-revolution composed of landlords, capitalists, officers and yes - many peasants. It is true that some strikes occurred, and were repressed: but this was HARDLY representative of the prerogative of the industrial working classes as a whole, nay more than a few deserters in the Red Army were representative of the army as a whole. Any idiot can understand that it is a basic proletarian ethics to recognize the treachery of putting immediate interests before the holistic interests of the class, and for that reason the grand majority of the strikes that had to be suppressed were conducted precisely on the lines of immediate egotism, not some kind of holistic assault on the revolution, but literally the inability to act in accordance with the grander picture. Nevermind this though, because the strikes were INEVITABLY tied up to the wider counter-revolution in the countryside itself and the mass withholdment of grain by the peasantry, the sabotage by counter-revolutionaries and the blockades by the allied powers. Indeed in such circumstances, STRIKES would be treacherous, but that does not mean that the counter-revolution in its essential substance amounts to "workers turning against the Bolsheviks": Without the WIDER counter-revolution no such strikes would have occurred in the first place! Not to mention not only the widespread and active counter-revolutionary, but the insuring banditry by the lumpenproletariat who joined them in threatening the worker's dictatorship.

What's fucking hilarious is that the substance of your argument assumes that the Soviet state was some kind of "big bad entity" which simply engaged in mass repressions, when the truth is that mass killings of workers, of party leaders, attempted assassinations and so on were commonplace long before the terror, in fact one marvels at the hesitance of the Soviet government in dealing with these in a swift and properly just manner. The truth is that the Bolshevik government, the worker's dictatorship, was under siege at all sides. But to ask a better question: If the Soviet state was de-classed, according to you, just composed of "tyrannical" monsters and so on, HOW THE FUCK WERE THEY ABLE TO MOBILIZE, RECRUIT AND IMPLEMENT TERROR THEMSELVES? Did Lenin, revolver in hand, personally see to the physical coercion of the whole population or something? What SOCIAL ENTITY formed the bulk, or the substance of the power of the Soviet government? Do you even know what POWER is? You cannot just blindly hold power without some kind of social base supporting you, so who in fact was 'behind' the Soviet government that sustained them?

All of these problems would have been present even if, hypothetically in your mind, the Bolshevik state was legitimate after all. So how would PA have dealt with them, huh? You're just fucking naive, plain and simple, you don't know how power works, you don't know how WAR works. You think it's a fucking game is all - wherein everything is a matter of "choice". The Bolsheviks used terror not because they were forced to, but because they "chose" to terrorize the population into obedience. Why would they do that? Why, PA? To "consolidate" their own power? This shows a striking disparity between the vitality and vigor they showed in defending the revolution in every possible way, ideologically and physically, and the alleged "secret" desire for power that you and every other fucking liberal asserts was present. But any IDIOT with an understanding of the Bolsheviks knows this to be pure fantasy - it doesn't even make any RATIONAL sense by its own merits- what I am telling you si that THIS WASN'T EVEN POSSIBLE.

NOT ONE of these "arguments" go beyond mere subjective conception based on bourgeois culture and reality. In fact in your posts you frequently admit, implicitly, that the policy was in fact reactionary. And you do this because you either succumb to the justifications of the bourgeois or downright say that the policy was "speaking the bourgeois and reactionary" language.

"Subjective argumentation", please, fuck off with your postmodernist garbage, or are you so fucking stupid as to think that there exists "objective" argumentation that PA is magically equipped with using? Cite yourself, if it's so fucking easy, show us how exactly the Soviets opposed the red terror, and "en masse' deemed it unnecessary. I'd love to see this. Are you actually trying to spin the fucking argument that the terror, and the formation of the Cheka happened out of nowhere, that it was "unnecessary" and that the Bolsheviks were in a calm position or whatever? You think your shitty fucking morals should get in the way of revolutionary duty? What, would you have it, establish some kind of absolutist morality of "only in cases of self-defense".... Hate to break it to you, but terror IS by definition self defense when implemented by revolutionaries, from France to Russia - if you're talking about the absence of offensives and executions of counter-revolutionaries, as long as they're out of proximity and bounds, that is fucking stupid because that is simply waiting for the enemy to strike first - which they did, thousands of workers being shot by the white guards and all.... !

"By subjective judgement" AGAIN WITH THIS POSTMODERNIST FUCKING BULLSHIT! THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS "OBJECTIVE" JUDGEMENT. It boils my fucking blood... When people say "well, you're not being objective here" - I mean shut the fuck up, this is literally a MEANINGLESS platitude. What the fuck is an OBJECTIVE judgement, is there a god after all? Is there some kind of cosmic law inscribed that constitutes an "objective" basis of defining targets or something? The "objective" enemies of god or the universe? Literally, do you FUCKING hear yourself? These Freudian slips are beautiful, because you may very well be a religious conservative who talks about "Now humans are doing things and making moral decisions by their own whims... Societal decay, now everything is permitted" about homosexuality or marijuana.

You also gloss over the fact that regardless of the content of your arguments you haven't actually touched on the very nature of the debate and why this was brought up. You are completely unaware of the fact that the Red Terror in itself was the death of the proletarian direct involvement within the Revolution and effectually ended the proletarian revolution to supplement workers dictatorship with dictatorship of the party over the working class.

The error stems purely from an essentially liberal notion of power, that is to say, that the organs of the party apparatus can serve "itself" for its "own sake". The reality is that every state has a social basis, and in no circumstances is it possible for the state to constitute a "class" in itself, because in case you weren't aware, at the end of the day, no matter their privileges, all of these men were functionaries, who would have absolutely no reason to wake up in the morning if not for a belief that they were serving the proletariat. This is noted by various anti-Communist historians, who were shocked to find that the language used by Bolsheviks in private was exactly as it was used in public. So this fake cynicism has no basis. The last thing you could resort to is try and say that "in the process of thinking they were serving the proletariat, they were really, subconsciously, only serving themselves". That would also be rather fucking stupid, but most of all it conveniently ignores the fact that the contradictions formed between the party apparatus (which was years after the civil war) and the working class formed directly as as result of the a) Physical decimation of the proletariat as a demographic, as already shown, and b) modernization of agriculture, the agricultural revolution. The Soviet state wasn't capable of perpetuating itself in the long term, which is why Bordiga correctly recognized it later as a "bourgeois" state - NOT because the state was literally composed of a "new bourgeoisie", but because they were spear-heading an agricultural revolution which was creating, within the intricacies of its social strata, a bourgeoisie which was struggling to come into existence (but repressed by the state politically). The mechanisms of state repression were indeed formed during the civil war, but what you fail to understand is that these would only be used outside of the will of the proletariat long after their formation. This is why it's easy to lazily make sweeping conclusions about how "DURR DA BOLSHEVIKS WERE TURNING ON DA WORKERS!" The reality was that this was far from the case. Demographically significant opposition to the Bolsheviks by the workers was not commonplace, the Cheka took on almost a popular character among the industrial workers, and what little energy was directed against "workers" is meaningless as far as extrapolating the social character of the events, i.e. "workers' who striked against the Bolsheviks did so only in their myopic inability to see the grander scheme of things at play, to see the reality that their rations simply COULDN'T be increased, and that if their rations did increase, they would fall for the Red Army and thereby destroy the proletarian dictatorship. It's tantamount to anarchists waging war on other anarchists in Spain because they might live closer to the mines, and thereby have better access to raw materials or something. For the success of any revolution, class-wide political discipline is a necessity, and it sais nothing about the social character of the contending class that some of its members engage in counter-revolution, for the grand majority were on the side of the Bolsheviks through and through. Otherwise, again, there would have been no basis of support for the Bolsheviks and the state would have collapsed in a few days. Even in the countryside, American generals noted how the peasants were flocking to the Bolsheviks en masse, how even the allies were making conservative estimates in seeing how the great mass of Russians were being won over to the cause of the revolution.

The trivialities of the minor privileges enjoyed by the party apparatus hardly sustains the idea that they existed "for themselves" as some kind of force of self-aggrandizement. Quite on the contrary, party privileges became more and more prevalent as they had became necessary, almost in the form of bribery, to accommodate for their tireless and demanding work. Indeed, all foreigners who visited the Soviet Union at the time recognized how tirelessly and selflessly the "party entity" was working to secure the revolution, it is just plainly stupid to think that they cynically grabbed power LITERALLY 'for themselves'. No doubt relations of power did develop, but this was a product of nothing more than its ritualistic necessity for the survival of the state (i.e. when the state's survival, and the survival of the proletarian dictatorship became inversely proportional following measures like the NEP and onward). It's easy to be cynical here, but it's so stupid in that even capitalists do not want power "for itself", any idiot knows that capitalists almost self-sacrificially serve CAPITAL, and the process of capital accumulation. Likewise, the bourgeois state does not exist for its own sake, removed from the interests of capital, for how can it? As far as the Bolsheviks were concerned, all that sustained them, and their power, was the industrial proletariat and later mechanisms of state power INDEPENDENTLY of the proletariat developed - because the industrial proletariat largely perished either by starvation, or fighting in the Red Army.

Even after this, it is clear to see that the state's character remained thoroughly proletarian, for this reflected not only ideologically but also in every cultural domain, in art, and so on. All of the real mechanisms of state power which were divorced from the will of the proletariat developed through the process of industrialization and collectivization, it was THIS which changed the nature of the state - not the red terror or the self-aggrandizement of individual party members. Whatever happened as to make disparity between the Soviet working class (a demographic which largely perished, physically in the civil war) and the Soviet state a reality was purely a systemic phenomena.

Rafiq

11th July 2015, 20:51

"but ur no diffrent from da nazis u have a bourgeois subjective rather than objective mentality cuz ur defending baby rape"

Cliff Paul

11th July 2015, 21:31

"but ur no diffrent from da nazis u have a bourgeois subjective rather than objective mentality cuz ur defending baby rape"

That's a signature worthy quote right there

PhoenixAsh

11th July 2015, 22:24

:rolleyes:

Now you are saying I am the one who was arguing that it was necessary.

No Rafiq, YOU were the one who was arguing that it was necessary. YOU were the one ignoring the counter arguments given at the time and swiped them away by insisting it was absolutely positively necessary. YOU. Not me.

NOW you argue that the position you maintained with absolute certainty throughout this thread is impossible to prove?

:laugh:

You should be a comedian. After this stunt why should anybody take you and your massive posts which are now proven to be full of complete bullshitting seriously?

PhoenixAsh

11th July 2015, 22:27

You were wrong Rafiq.

One basically every point you made. And you have now admitted that your main point, the one that started this debate, can not even be proven....

Now you try to weasel your way out of having to admit that.

Rafiq

11th July 2015, 22:28

Rafiq

11th July 2015, 22:30

Rafiq

11th July 2015, 22:32

And here we FUCKING go again, in circles again.

no.. you havent shown that. your argument amounts to

1. they did it too
2. it was necessary becasue it was necessary
3. it had to be done
4. the bolsheviks were sensitive
5. im a brain dead fucking idiot

What's even more fucking hilarious about these stupid questions of "was it necessary" is the IDIOTIC assumption that the Cheka was set up in a top-down manner with the chain of hierarchy extending from Moscow. Except this wasn't true for the Cheka until the latter part of the civil war. The terror wasn't anymore "necessary" than was the October revolution, it wasn't necessary to keep the Earth spinning, but it was an organic and logical consequence of the violence of revolution. PA is trying to spin the story that violence was "ordered" by the central government, but the truth is that violence previously restricted was if anything now permitted. The Chekas that were set up, were set up locally and answerable only to local authorities, which is why there were instances of excess - this is why PA tells us they were "restricted" as though they were fucking hell-hounds unleashed by the state, when the reality is that much of the "depraved" torture methods, for example, were methods that were used by the local peasantry long before the formation of the Cheka. If anything, those acts of "excess" were because the violence was TOO organic, TOO MUCH operated on a grassroots level. But good, PA, I'll fucking fight you on this: Are you going to tell us that the Cheka had a top-down organizational structure, enacting direct orders from the central government? Because this is plainly a fucking lie.

Alet

11th July 2015, 22:41

This thread is entertaining as fuck

Metacommunication at its best.

PhoenixAsh

11th July 2015, 23:36

I'm not even FUCKING surprised anymore, now you're trying to twist this into something else you LYING PIECE OF FUCKING SHIT?

you're not actually asking for arguments as to hwy the red terror was necessary, which I thoroughly provided, you want me to change the course of history and show you what would have happened had the red terror not commenced at all. Hence why, even after saying "TL;DR" you said that I didn't "show anything" because you know very well that no one could ever show this, that this is an impossible demand, because it would require a fucking time machine or god-like powers. Your qualifications for proof, are illegitimate because they are simply impossible, and you're left with the agnostic position that "no one could have ever known if it was necessary". As it happens, you can't even fucking consistently formulate the usage of terror, its basis of causality in a consistent paradigm of analysis, first you say that it was necessary for the state to secure power over the working masses, then you claimed that it wasn't necessary at all because it in fact weakened the Soviet state.

You haven't provided anything. You made a claim and you failed to back it up. I repeatedly shown you arguments which refuted your claims and so far you haven't provided a substantiation for necessity.

The fact of the matter is, Rafiq, you claimed the Red Terror was necessary. you failed to provide this necessity. You gave us reasons for the Red Terror but your did not provide the argument that proves it was, as YOU claimed, necessary.

In fact it wasn't necessary. It was however a knee-jerk reaction that proved, time and time again, counter effective. What is more it proved fatal for the working class democracy your Bolsheviks pretended to fight for. But it was, as I agreed, absolutely necessary to effectuate Bolshevik power over the country, state and working class. Which is WHY I called it reactionary and the grave of the revolution.

YOU seem to have a serious problem differentiating the two...which is why you are at the reactionary side of this debate trying your utmost best to sound so so very r-r-r-r-r-revolutionary.

Comrade Jacob

11th July 2015, 23:39

I just want to apologise to mushroompizza, I don't wish you death, I am a very harsh bastard. Instead of being patient and correcting your ideas I flamed at you, that was a very non-maoist thing to do. And I must make this self-criticism.

PhoenixAsh

11th July 2015, 23:45

Fucking idiot can't even manage to muster up basic reading skills and then tells me that somehow, he's found some kind of basis of inconsistency where I admit that "it can't be proven all along" just because I demonstrate the ILLEGITIMATE NATURE OF HIS QUALIFICATIONS FOR PROOF, which amount to a retreat into agnosticism. This is not only idealism, it is PHILISTINISM. PA, just shut the fuck up. It's over, you've demonstrated you can't engage in a discussion.

No Rafiq, it shows what a goddamned reactionary role playing troll you are.

YOU made a claim which you consistently failed to back up.

NOT ONE of your arguments builds your case.
NOT ONE of your arguments isn't thoroughly reactionary.
NOT ONE of your arguments stands up to muster
NOT ONE of your arguments has its basis in anything but subjective opinionating

Yet your arguments have been thoroughly counter argued and you have weaseled your way down to the minute details that are inconsequential in an attempt to be able to shout triumph...and not have to admit you were basically wrong on just about everything you said.

Hell...even your own sources and quoted prove how wrong you were.

It is pathetic really.

And to think you started this debate by proclaiming your moral superiority...but yet...you now have to claim to can't even provide any coherent argument nor are able to provide prove.

It is VERY simple Rafiq.

YOU claimed it was necessary.

YOU need to show the necessity.

YOU have not done so.

This is not because the question for proof is illegitimate....but because the question is for you providing actual proof.

ANY proof.

And so far you have NOT given any proof.

Armchair Partisan

11th July 2015, 23:53

Look, I have no idea why the two of you, PA and Rafiq, harbor more hatred for each other than any reactionary in your lives. When we live in such a grim world, the last thing that should happen is such bitter infighting between revolutionaries.

But come on. Some moderation, please? Can't some quality control be enforced? Hardly anyone ever gets infracted (what's more, it seems to be selective, I've seen Quail hand out a warning or infraction to some marginally insulting post while ignoring many others in the same thread) and they just don't seem to matter at all. No wonder this forum's atmosphere is so toxic if certain people are freely allowed to drag the quality level of all discussions down to the gutter. I hope it is just Internet anonymity that turns like-minded people into such asshats against each other, otherwise we can all just forget about the idea of communism right now.

PhoenixAsh

11th July 2015, 23:56

And here we FUCKING go again, in circles again.

What's even more fucking hilarious about these stupid questions of "was it necessary" is the IDIOTIC assumption that the Cheka was set up in a top-down manner with the chain of hierarchy extending from Moscow. Except this wasn't true for the Cheka until the latter part of the civil war. The terror wasn't anymore "necessary" than was the October revolution, it wasn't necessary to keep the Earth spinning, but it was an organic and logical consequence of the violence of revolution.

It was a state sanctioned policy.

I argued repeatedly that there were no checks in place on the Cheka and that Moscow refused to do so to the point where the Soviets openly defied Moscow. As was reported in Izvestia and Pravda.

You refused to acknowledge that. Now...you make a 180 and try to make this the central point of your position.

PA is trying to spin the story that violence was "ordered" by the central government, but the truth is that violence previously restricted was if anything now permitted.

Really? Did I do so? Can you quote me on that? Because I didn't.

I said the REd Terror was explicitly created by the state. And it was created in such a way which would guarantee the most vile and brutal violations of people. That it was specifically intended as such. And that eve when confronted with the brutality and the counter arguments by the Soviets to reign in the Cheka...Moscow continued to not do so.

The Chekas that were set up, were set up locally and answerable only to local authorities,

Nope. Outright false.

which is why there were instances of excess - this is why PA tells us they were "restricted" as though they were fucking hell-hounds unleashed by the state,

Yes. They were.

when the reality is that much of the "depraved" torture methods, for example, were methods that were used by the local peasantry long before the formation of the Cheka.

O...but you are definately not using the "they did it too argument" :laugh:

If anything, those acts of "excess" were because the violence was TOO organic, TOO MUCH operated on a grassroots level.

Nope.

But good, PA, I'll fucking fight you on this: Are you going to tell us that the Cheka had a top-down organizational structure, enacting direct orders from the central government? Because this is plainly a fucking lie.

Are you saying that the Red Terror wasn't a central government issued policy now too? :laugh:

PhoenixAsh

12th July 2015, 00:04

Look, I have no idea why the two of you, PA and Rafiq, harbor more hatred for each other than any reactionary in your lives. When we live in such a grim world, the last thing that should happen is such bitter infighting between revolutionaries.

But come on. Some moderation, please? Can't some quality control be enforced? Hardly anyone ever gets infracted (what's more, it seems to be selective, I've seen Quail hand out a warning or infraction to some marginally insulting post while ignoring many others in the same thread) and they just don't seem to matter at all. No wonder this forum's atmosphere is so toxic if certain people are freely allowed to drag the quality level of all discussions down to the gutter. I hope it is just Internet anonymity that turns like-minded people into such asshats against each other, otherwise we can all just forget about the idea of communism right now.

your concern is appreciated.

The mistake is that you seem under the impression that either Rafiq or I think of each other as revolutionaries. I think Rafiq is a reactionary petit bouergeois demagogue and he thinks I am a reactionary liberal idiot.

We are not allies, will never be allies and we do not think of each other as communists at all...nor do we see each other as allies of the working class.

Never have and never will.

Cliff Paul

12th July 2015, 00:20

The mistake is that you seem under the impression that either Rafiq or I think of each other as revolutionaries. I think Rafiq is a reactionary petit bouergeois demagogue and he thinks I am a reactionary liberal idiot.

We are not allies, will never be allies and we do not think of each other as communists at all...nor do we see each other as allies of the working class.

Never have and never will.

So this is how you talk to "non-revolutionaries" irl?

PhoenixAsh

12th July 2015, 00:48

So this is how you talk to "non-revolutionaries" irl?

Did I say he was non-revolutionary? No. I specifically remember me saying he was a reactionary...but I could be wrong and may not have made that crystal clear.

But when it comes to "way of talking" perhaps you should rather direct your post at Rafiq. It is the tone that sets the music....and I remained civil long enough throughout most of his lies, red herrings, straw man, insults, arrogance and downright ridiculous reactionary sentiment in deflecting the simple question for substantiating his argument...

Rafiq

12th July 2015, 01:13

But it was, as I agreed, absolutely necessary to effectuate Bolshevik power over the country, state and working class. Which is WHY I called it reactionary and the grave of the revolution.

Try again you FUCKING liar. Here is what you said:

Your laughable and a-historical argument that a civil war which outlasted the Red Terror by 3 to 4 years was won because of the Red Terror is asinine logic of an infantile mind very much argued in the face of the fact that Bolsheviks at the time and after the civil war argued quite the opposite and blamed the Red Terror for aggravating the Civil War and intensifying resistance against the Bolsheviks.

Don't try to FUCKING flip this argument around and attempt to insinuate that all along, you meant that the terror was necessary after all, but only the "Bolsheviks" to solidify power over the masses. This is not what you meant, what you meant to say was that the terror was UNNECESSARY, and we know this because you INITIALLY already established that you considered the Bolsheviks to have ruled by a "single party dictatorship" since the October "coup" (Chomsky's little running dog, aren't you?), so when you say that the terror was 'unnecessary", and when you directly claim that it actually made things worse for the BOLSHEVIKS, you make the argument that hte red terror was blunderous even as far as the consolidation of the "single-party totalitarian dictatorship" goes, which is itself another myth. But as it happens, this argument as already been thoroughly addressed, and whether you want to fucking grow up and accept the argument or not, it remains unchallenged, unaddressed, and it is for that reason that I'm able to constantly respond to your posts merely be re-quoting myself, and successfully address every substantial point you regurgitate. Isn't that FUCKING pathetic on your part, you little shit?

The trivialities of the minor privileges enjoyed by the party apparatus hardly sustains the idea that they existed "for themselves" as some kind of force of self-aggrandizement. Quite on the contrary, party privileges became more and more prevalent as they had became necessary, almost in the form of bribery, to accommodate for their tireless and demanding work. Indeed, all foreigners who visited the Soviet Union at the time recognized how tirelessly and selflessly the "party entity" was working to secure the revolution, it is just plainly stupid to think that they cynically grabbed power LITERALLY 'for themselves'. No doubt relations of power did develop, but this was a product of nothing more than its ritualistic necessity for the survival of the state (i.e. when the state's survival, and the survival of the proletarian dictatorship became inversely proportional following measures like the NEP and onward). It's easy to be cynical here, but it's so stupid in that even capitalists do not want power "for itself", any idiot knows that capitalists almost self-sacrificially serve CAPITAL, and the process of capital accumulation. Likewise, the bourgeois state does not exist for its own sake, removed from the interests of capital, for how can it? As far as the Bolsheviks were concerned, all that sustained them, and their power, was the industrial proletariat and later mechanisms of state power INDEPENDENTLY of the proletariat developed - because the industrial proletariat largely perished either by starvation, or fighting in the Red Army.

Even after this, it is clear to see that the state's character remained thoroughly proletarian, for this reflected not only ideologically but also in every cultural domain, in art, and so on. All of the real mechanisms of state power which were divorced from the will of the proletariat developed through the process of industrialization and collectivization, it was THIS which changed the nature of the state - not the red terror or the self-aggrandizement of individual party members. Whatever happened as to make disparity between the Soviet working class (a demographic which largely perished, physically in the civil war) and the Soviet state a reality was purely a systemic phenomena.

What you fail to understand, what you fail to conceive is that you keep re-hashing the same historical myth that the Cheka was a natural precursor to NKVD. But this shows what poverty you have of history, and the logic of history. The argument rests upon the presumption that the Russian situation existed in a vacuum, and that all the developments in the former Russian Empire are rationally explicable solely unto themselves. It is true that the state-apparatus formed during the events of the October revolution (i.e. which includes the terror and the civil war) would LATER become a part of the Stalinist state apparatus, but this is not owed to any kind of drive toward "single-party dictatorship" implicit in them, it is owed to the reality that conditions FUNDAMENTALLY BEYOND THE POWER OF THE BOLSHEVIKS, such as the failure of the international revolution and the demographic annihilation of the industrial proletariat, created an inversely proportional relationship between the destruction of the proletarian dictatorship, and the survival of the Soviet state. What's fucking hilarious is that you seem to be under the impression that after the civil war, the Bolsheviks "finally consolidated their grip on power and cynically laughed away while drinking champagne as they became the new bourgeoisie" or whatever bizarre petite-bourgeois fantasies you keep telling yourself, but the reality is that the events surrounding the mid to late 1920's was pure anxiety and a lack of direction about the future. The NEP was instituted out of pure DESPERATION at the situation: The international revolution failed, the proletariat had disappeared, the Soviet state was left with a vast bureaucratic apparatus with mechanisms of state repression while at the same time a large rural population of which a great bulk of was hesitant toward modernization. The Soviet state entered not only a crisis of action, but an EXISTENTIAL crisis about conceiving itself, what KIND of state it was going to be. Either way, the proletarian dictatorship would have fallen, the only difference is that now it wouldn't have fallen at the hands of international capital, or internal reaction (i.e. the counter-revolution). What is utterly fucking hilarious about this, however, is that I've thoroughly covered all of this previously, and guess what, you little rodent: I'm going to keep re-quoting myself until you either shut the FUCK UP, or you actually address the unaddressed arguments at hand. You want to keep playing hte game of re-hashing old arguments? I'm going to keep requoting myself in kind:

If the Soviet state was de-classed, according to you, just composed of "tyrannical" monsters and so on, HOW THE FUCK WERE THEY ABLE TO MOBILIZE, RECRUIT AND IMPLEMENT TERROR THEMSELVES? Did Lenin, revolver in hand, personally see to the physical coercion of the whole population or something? What SOCIAL ENTITY formed the bulk, or the substance of the power of the Soviet government? Do you even know what POWER is? You cannot just blindly hold power without some kind of social base supporting you, so who in fact was 'behind' the Soviet government that sustained them?

The red terror was "exercised" to consolidate power at the EXPENSE of the proletarian, so claims PA, to suppress those "critical" to the Soviet state:

HOW THE FUCK IS THIS DIFFERENT FROM WHAT YOU"RE FUCKING SAYING NOW? HOW IS THERE A SEMBLANCE OF DIFFERENCE IN THE ARGUMENTATION? IF YOU KEEP RE-hASHING THE SAME FUCKING ARGUMENTS, I'M JUST GOING TO RESPOND WITH THE SAME ARGUMENTS TO UNTIL THEY'RE PROPERLY ADDRESSED. But the fact of the matter is that, hilariously, you're completely full of shit, because while those critical of the actions of the state might have been imprisoned under the early Soviet government, they were not imprisoned BECAUSE they were critical, they were arrested and imprisoned for actually engaging, directly and actively, in acts that undermined the worker's dictatorship. Hence why Mensheviks who resigned from political activity, and who remained critical, were not only tolerated, but welcomed in the new Soviet state. Self-criticism was not only an integral part of Soviet rule from the onset, it remained an intregal part of the Soviet state even during the Stalin years! Self-criticism was actively ENCOURAGED too, and this is noted by historians such as Fitzpatrick, etc. You're just MAKING SHIT UP. Did the Cheka arrest the leaders of the worker's opposition, such as Alexandra Kollontai? No, MOST OF THESE people, while being heavily criticized by the central apparatus, were not only tolerated, but continued to actively organize and exist: Those who died would die LATER during the Stalinist purges. So what the FUCK are you trying to say?

But of the several thousand who were killed during the red terror, none compromised anything remotely close to what could encapsulate "warriors of Soviet democracy". The minority of victims who happened to agitate for "Soviets without Bolsheviks" were hardly popular, hardly representative of the holistic prerogatives of the majority of proletarians. It does not follow at all that the terror was exercised so that salaries of Bolshevik leaders could be slightly raised, the error stems purely from a lazy conception of history. But previously, you yourself are forced to admit that the Bolsehviks could have had "good intentions" all the while implementing the "party dictatorship OVER the workers (which I also demonstrated was bullshit). Already in post #237, I expicitly stated that:

The last thing you could resort to is try and say that "in the process of thinking they were serving the proletariat, they were really, subconsciously, only serving themselves". That would also be rather fucking stupid, but most of all it conveniently ignores the fact that the contradictions formed between the party apparatus (which was years after the civil war) and the working class formed directly as as result of the a) Physical decimation of the proletariat as a demographic, as already shown, and b) modernization of agriculture, the agricultural revolution. The Soviet state wasn't capable of perpetuating itself in the long term, which is why Bordiga correctly recognized it later as a "bourgeois" state - NOT because the state was literally composed of a "new bourgeoisie", but because they were spear-heading an agricultural revolution which was creating, within the intricacies of its social strata, a bourgeoisie which was struggling to come into existence (but repressed by the state politically). The mechanisms of state repression were indeed formed during the civil war, but what you fail to understand is that these would only be used outside of the will of the proletariat long after their formation. This is why it's easy to lazily make sweeping conclusions about how "DURR DA BOLSHEVIKS WERE TURNING ON DA WORKERS!" The reality was that this was far from the case.

We must adhere to only a few arguments when pre-supposing the reality that Bolsheviks probably had good intentions (And this is not even up for debate at this point) - that the BASIS of being unable to properly realize these intentions was the reality that they didn't understand that "power corrupts", or that specific events and conditions prompted the character of the state to change in such a way that was outside of the control of the well-intentioned Bolsheviks. But as I've demonstrated several times over the past few years, power DOES NOT corrupt, if power "corrupts", it is owed to implicit systemic predispositions all along, the reality being that the state is thoroughly bourgeois, and its levels of 'corruption' are not contingent upon its degree of actual power. Bourgoeis ideologues, to this day, fail to establish the 'real' motivations behind the Bolsheviks, save for anti-semitic conspiracies or other petite-bourgeois fantasies a la Anthony Sutton. The truth is that the Bolsheviks had no "secret", they were motivated exactly and solely by what they said they were motivated by, they were HISTORICALLY SELF-CONSCIOUS, they had no spontaneous inclination to "turn on the revolution" for most of them were Bolsheviks even when it was, from a egotist perspective, very stupid to be one (i.e a decade before), they had nothing to live for except for the realization of the victory of the proletariat. Even if the bourgeois state, like any state, "corrupts", it cannot do so in a way that undermines the rule of the bourgeoisie, or else it is no longer a bourgeois state. To add, this is a thoroughly unscientific notion, because as it happens, "power" is defined here in an ambiguous way that abides only by its standards in present-day capitalist society. What is most certainly hilarious, for anyone who actually engages in a real study of "power", that it is NEVER about the feelings you get of "control", individual power is only useful insofar as it is in direct proximity to your life, but you will never experience the direct sensation of ruling over thousands of people. Power is, by nature, a burden when exercised by the state, those 'statesmen' who thoroughly enjoy what they do no more represent some kind of intristic desire for "power" as doctors, lawyers and engineers. The reality is that the state is an INSTRUMENT, and can only ever remain an instrumental force (incidentally, the Soviet Union, after industrialization, was simply on life support, inherently temporal and destined for collapse). It cannot exist for its own sake, those INDIVIDUALS directly participating in matters of state, do so only as functionaries, from monarchs to party officials. Never mind that, however. Even if we bought into LIBERAL platitudes about how power works, we can easily demonstrate that this was most certainly not the case as far as having ANY explanatory power for the events which progressed in the Soviet Union. Namely, there was no implicit prerogative for the party to consolidate power over the working masses "for its own sake", for every single measure exercised was done so for the greater holistic good, to sustain the proletarian dictatorship [And onward with your silly comparisons with how ALL ideologues effectively make this claim to "justify" their rule, the difference is that the basis of their rule is always "behind the scenes" in that of a class - the Nazis claimed to be fighting for the greater good of the German nation, on behalf of the German bourgeoisie, not themselves. So on whose behalf did the Bolsheviks fight? Themselves? How and why?]. The paradox that LATER developed was the reality that defending the proletarian dictatorship also meant destroying it - and for this reason it was a tragedy, for because of events outside of their control, the proletarian dictatorship was DOOMED, as Serge knew, for it was confined to the most backward country in Europe, with a decimated proletarian population, with a large peasantry on the brink of outright hostility, surrounded by imperialist powers that more or less, even if willing to sign treaties, was keen on watching the Soviet state be destroyed. And it goes on, had collectivization not been implemented, the Nazis would have absolutely destroyed the Soviet Union, etc. Bolsheviks did not speak in private differently form how they spoke in public, even through the Stalin years. Unless we of course accept that they did so out of some internal, subconscious biological imperative to increase evolutionary fitness, as you and your reactionary friends would have us believe, but we know this to be absolutely fucking ridiculous.

YOU made a claim which you consistently failed to back up.

Are you literally schizophrenic? Is this how you cope with the sudden realization that your'e actually a stupid piece of shit? You're literally spilling words. Because the truth is, PA, to use your infantile language, if that helps:

It is VERY simple

You haven't even fucking thoroughly read my arguments

You've failed to adequately respond to them

You have, time and time again, been called out for not corroborating your wild claims,

It's time to shut the fuck up and stop embarrassing yourself.

You've contradicted yourself in every which possible way from the very beginning, all while demonstrating a pathology inherent only to a bourgeois ideologue, insofar as nothing you say is structurally different from the standard liberal argument that the Bolsheviks "destroyed Russian democracy, were the embryonic manifestation of totalitarianism, disregarded basic human rights" wherein we respond with the best of the liberals, a certain romantic Robespierre: “Peoples do not judge in the same way as courts of law; they do not hand down sentences, they throw thunderbolts; they do not condemn kings, they drop them back into the void; and this justice is worth just as much as that of the courts.” The point, PA, is that the proletarian conception of power's legitimacy is different from that of those scum, hypocritical liberals such as yourself which have time and time again disregarded conceiving class in terms of their understanding of events at hand. Hence, you tell us the Bolsheviks instituted terror against "the people", devoid of any class analysis whatsoever. It amounts to just as much to us Communists, you fucking liberal, as it did to the French and American revolutionaries the notion of divine right to rule and other such cack.

Hell...even your own sources and quoted prove how wrong you were.

So claims PA, without actually explaining to us why this is, or how this is. Literally, ALL you have said is that "your quotes prove I'm write". But you haven't explicitly isolated what about my source "proved how wrong I really was", and all the unsubstantiated claims YOU DID MAKE I addressed and rendered obsolete as arguments.

This is not because the question for proof is illegitimate....but because the question is for you providing actual proof.

No, again, we've been over this in previous threads - because you abide by a bourgeois and unscientific epistemology, your QUALIFICATIONS for proof are known-impossibilities and are illegitimate. That means what constitutes "proof" in your eyes is anything and everything which passively OBSTRUCTS your reality. What that means is that you establish, or designate, what is already a false premise (i.e. "The terror was unnecessary") and thereby enact impossible qualifications for proving otherwise. The same argument can be used for trying to negate the existence of a god: "You haven't offered any proof!" - now, to be clear, BECAUSE I know you're going to use this argument, let me address the fact that even though saying it was necessary, and "god is real" both appear to be affirmative claims, the truth is that saying "the terror was unnecessary" is the real affirmative claim, and why? Because using inductive logic, we already are capable of conceiving the reality that: A) There were specific factors which led to the terror, B) The terror assumed a specific role. Now, to say it was "unnecessary" assumes a point of reference, which is in this case, a defense of the revolution. But you carelessly give yourself the power to skip over dealing with this point of reference because you conflate "protecting the revolution", which you PREVIOUSLY SAID WAS A COUP, with "maximizing the power of the Soviet state". This allows you to flip flop your positions inconsistently about how specifically the terror was necessary for specific reasons. Sometimes, the terror "is necessary to consolidate the Bolshevik dictatorship", other times, "it was completely unnecessary for the revolution", but the reality is that this was never the case. What you fail to understand is that in claiming that the terror was unnecessary, you thereby DESIGNATE an alternative explanation for its' basis, you thereby CLAIM that another route could have been taken to secure the revolution. I haven't asked you to name all of these routes, I asked you, specifically, how the Bolsheviks could have dealt with the very real and brutal counter-revolution without terror, for what they had. You're privileged with ignoring this question because you can just jump back to saying "Well, ti was necessary because they had to consolidate their dictatorship". And on and on this will go, indefinitely.

It was a state sanctioned policy.

I argued repeatedly that there were no checks in place on the Cheka and that Moscow refused to do so to the point where the Soviets openly defied Moscow. As was reported in Izvestia and Pravda.

There you go talking like a fucking liberal. Yes it was a 'state sanctioned policy', which amounts to the fact that the state legally recognized what was largely a spontaneous, organic grassroots mass mobilization of violence. You're right, the Cheka was heavily decentralized, and usually subservient only to local authorities, but this again contradicts the notion that the "excesses" were condoned by the state, they were not - they were simply beyond its control, and almost exclusively confined to the countryside. You claim that the Soviets "openly defied moscow" but this is ambiguous. This is a claim I have repeatedly demanded you corroborate with a single fucking citation, either from Pravda or whatever the fuck you want, but you insist on talking out of your FUCKING ass. As far as we can tell, the Soviets did not "defy" Moscow over the Cheka. I can't disprove they did, again, anymore than I can disprove there were invisible unicorns present - it is an affirmative claim which fails to substantiate, or sustain itself. The reason I can infer it's fucking bullshit, is becasue the Cheka was supported by the working classes throughout its entire existence, as an extension of the GRASSROOTS violence orchestrated by the working class through mechanisms like the Military Revolutionary Committee, which was less effective at CONTROLLING this violence and so on, than the Cheka was.

Really? Did I do so? Can you quote me on that? Because I didn't.

I said the REd Terror was explicitly created by the state.

We are talking about a state sponsored and executed, intentional policyof indiscriminate terror by a small specific elite group exercising power who defined the targets by subjective judgement based on opposinga specific ideology and party by suspending revolutionary democracy in order to secure that parties dominance and rule

Plenty more where that came from. Don't try to FUCKING say you weren't insinuating that that the Cheka was ordered and under the direct control of the central government in Moscow. And for the record, no one denies that the red terror was 'created by the state', but that also must pre-suppose that the state was compromised by the industrial proletariat and revolutionary peasantry, and for that reason the Red terror was NEVER started purely by 'decree', the red terror DEVELOPED in a decentralized fashion, with a basis in legality and an attempt to regulate it.

Nope. Outright false.

Yes. They were.

Nope

Oh, you're right. You convinced me. Good job, I should have known better. Who knew all it took was a "Nope" and a "Yes" to actually constitute a FUCKING ARGUMENT.

O...but you are definately not using the "they did it too argument"

No, because guess what you fucking idiot, the methods of torture were exercised by the rural operatives and peasants THEMSELVES against counter-revolutionaries, such practices were far from alien to the countryside, which is why I explicitly stressed that the Cheka was largely only answerable to local authorities, which - of course led to problems, but there was simply no way to centrally control the Cheka in its early stages of formation. And FYI, it is by in part BECAUSE of the 'excesses' that the Cheka became more and more subservient to a central hierarchy and uniform regulations.

Are you saying that the Red Terror wasn't a central government issued policy now too?

Each local Soviet had set up its own Cheka formation, and many Soviets were slow in following encouragement from Petrograd and Moscow. It is for this reason that it is dubious that the "Soviets" or at least a significant number protested the formation of the Cheka or the red terror, because each Soviet had set up its own local Cheka that was given a degree of autonomy on a local level. The Cheka, at least before the latter part of the civil war, was a very disorganized force. Your claim would make sense, if not for the fact that the structure of the Cheka was set up as a logical extension of previously existing revolutionary formations like the Red guards or the RMC. If Chekists were imported from alien, indigenous tribesmen like the Yakuts to unleash hell on random people, your argument might make sense. And as I might have forgot to mention, the PEASANT BASED Left SR's devoted a lot of energy to the formation of the Cheka and the red terror itself, which demonstrates the bankruptcy of the notion that it was instituted for the consolidation of the "single party dictatorship".

What you're left with is the final, pathetic notion that the terror was merely a mistake. Which again, does not stand to reason, not by any standards.

Rafiq

12th July 2015, 01:25

Look, I have no idea why the two of you, PA and Rafiq, harbor more hatred for each other than any reactionary in your lives. When we live in such a grim world, the last thing that should happen is such

Well, you cannot possibly harbor as much hatred for the reactionaries, because at least they don't pretend to be anything different. When the snakes are among us - and to be clear, PA encapsulates a very common liberal, Chomsky-esque pathology among the left - it is all the more demanding of disgust and hatred. These matters aren't trivialities, though. We are nothing if we do not defend the red terror, just as we are nothing if we do not loudly defend the reign of terror. Without such historic events that command polarization along class lines, there may very well be no left at all. While I appreciate your good intentions (No sarcasm intended), I must stress that it is for this reason that it was Bernstein, not the Kaisar, that Rosa Luxemburg desired to behead, and that it was Kautsky and those phrase-mongerers, not even the Tsar, who was the object of Lenin's immense hatred. The most dangerous rodents are those who carry on the aesthetic of being a leftist without actualizing it in reality, where being a leftist is merely about using the right words, rather than having the right heart.

Those who wish to obfuscate the coordinates of struggle, that is. You cannot desire a revolution without thoroughly recognizing the connotations of it, and this doesn't amount to preparing yourself to not be squeamish before blood - it means, even with all the struggle with one's own faith in themselves, and the ambiguity of revolution, to recognize that the revolution cannot be some perverse abstraction of bourgeois ideology, a bourgeois fantasy that somehow doesn't shake the foundations of the Earth itself. If one cannot, in spirit, reconcile themselves with the inevitability of terror - one must at the very least reconcile themselves with it in theory.

Did I say he was non-revolutionary? No. I specifically remember me saying he was a reactionary...

It's phrase-mongering like this which boils the blood of Communists. Here PA calls me a reactionary to guise his own - in fact- reactionary aversion to the reality of revolutionary terror. Hence his incessant abuse of words, a la "bourgeois mentality" "reactionary subjective rather than objective mentality" and so on, stressing how "no rafiq u try to make urself seem like da revolutionary one but i am". The reality is that I'm not TRYING this, I am doing this. This instills PA with anxiety because it shatters his faux-leftist identity, it places him squarely, in his own words, "in the reactionary camp" and the only way he can assure himself otherwise is project this anxiety onto me.

PA must use 'loaded phrases' to ass-cover what is essentially, and completely a liberal position. Let's not forget, everyone, that he claimed that our ONLY revolution was a "coup".

Cliff Paul

12th July 2015, 01:27

Did I say he was non-revolutionary? No. I specifically remember me saying he was a reactionary...but I could be wrong and may not have made that crystal clear.

But when it comes to "way of talking" perhaps you should rather direct your post at Rafiq. It is the tone that sets the music....and I remained civil long enough throughout most of his lies, red herrings, straw man, insults, arrogance and downright ridiculous reactionary sentiment in deflecting the simple question for substantiating his argument...

ayy don't get sassy with me mr

PhoenixAsh

12th July 2015, 02:06

Try again you FUCKING liar. Here is what you said:

Your laughable and a-historical argument that a civil war which outlasted the Red Terror by 3 to 4 years was won because of the Red Terror is asinine logic of an infantile mind very much argued in the face of the fact that Bolsheviks at the time and after the civil war argued quite the opposite and blamed the Red Terror for aggravating the Civil War and intensifying resistance against the Bolsheviks.

Don't try to FUCKING flip this argument around and attempt to insinuate that all along, you meant that the terror was necessary after all, but only the "Bolsheviks" to solidify power over the masses. This is not what you meant, what you meant to say was that the terror was UNNECESSARY,

I am not Rafiq. You seem to be unable to distinguish a few points. I know it is hard...thinking...you'll get the hang of it eventually.

Here is a quick summary of my points:

1). The Red Terror was unnecessary to secure the revolution
2). The Red Terror was necessary to to secure the Bolshevik domination of the state and over the working class.

These are separate arguments.

and we know this because you INITIALLY already established that you considered the Bolsheviks to have ruled by a "single party dictatorship" since the October "coup" (Chomsky's little running dog, aren't you?),

3). The Red Terror was a next step down the slippery slope the Bolsheviks took to establish single party dominance.

I think everybody can scroll back and see that I argued a process that was intentionally leading to establishing the Bolshevik party dominance. And yes the Red Terror was instrumental in that.

For the revolution however the Red Terror was unnecessary and counter productive.

so when you say that the terror was 'unnecessary", and when you directly claim that it actually made things worse for the BOLSHEVIKS, you make the argument that hte red terror was blunderous even as far as the consolidation of the "single-party totalitarian dictatorship" goes,

No. This is not a conclusion you can draw since they are separate points not are necessary and endangering mutually exclusive when it comes to conflicting interests.

Somebody who claims his intelligence in almost every single post to be so very superior to all on this site should have no problem understanding this simple fact...and by now I have argued the point so openly and often it is hardly something you could have you "aha!" moment over.

The revolution and the interests of the Bolshevik party are two very separate things. It was absolutely necessary for the Bolsheviks to instate the Red Terror. It was not necessary for the protection of the Revolution. That it was necessary for the Bolsheviks does not negate the fact that the move endangered the revolution itself. In fact the policy, as I have argued very, very openly, goes directly against the revolution and proletarian control.

You seem to fail to grasp this.

which is itself another myth. But as it happens, this argument as already been thoroughly addressed, and whether you want to fucking grow up and accept the argument or not, it remains unchallenged, unaddressed, and it is for that reason that I'm able to constantly respond to your posts merely be re-quoting myself, and successfully address every substantial point you regurgitate. Isn't that FUCKING pathetic on your part, you little shit?

No your incessant arrogance in thinking you actually had a valid argument to begin with enables you to rehash the same bullshit over and over and over again.

But unless you were actually arguing that the Red Terror was necessary for the Bolsheviks to gain absolute control over the working class and in doing so ended the revolution and killed worker democracy and working class control (hit: you haven't) you still failed to show how the Red Terror was necessary to protect the revolution and how it was effective in doing so.

The trivialities of the minor privileges enjoyed by the party apparatus hardly sustains the idea that they existed "for themselves" as some kind of force of self-aggrandizement. Quite on the contrary, party privileges became more and more prevalent as they had became necessary, almost in the form of bribery, to accommodate for their tireless and demanding work. Indeed, all foreigners who visited the Soviet Union at the time recognized how tirelessly and selflessly the "party entity" was working to secure the revolution, it is just plainly stupid to think that they cynically grabbed power LITERALLY 'for themselves'.

No. It isn't. In fact they did. You claim "intentions" and I claim "delusions of falsely equating themselves to be the sole representatives of the working class in spite of the working class" the intentions do not matter as the argument is a "for the greater good" narrative which is all to common in groups establishing dominance over others. The greater good argument is a thoroughly reactionary, near religious, sentiment that hinges on self effectuated belief. Ad the sentiment is defied by the reality that the working class did not have power, never gained power and never would gain power. In fact...what little power they managed to gain after the revolution was slowly and gradually taken away from them in favor of the party...and through the Red Terror that power was forcibly and brutally taken away.

No doubt relations of power did develop, but this was a product of nothing more than its ritualistic necessity for the survival of the state (i.e. when the state's survival, and the survival of the proletarian dictatorship became inversely proportional following measures like the NEP and onward). It's easy to be cynical here, but it's so stupid in that even capitalists do not want power "for itself", any idiot knows that capitalists almost self-sacrificially serve CAPITAL, and the process of capital accumulation. Likewise, the bourgeois state does not exist for its own sake, removed from the interests of capital, for how can it? As far as the Bolsheviks were concerned, all that sustained them, and their power, was the industrial proletariat and later mechanisms of state power INDEPENDENTLY of the proletariat developed - because the industrial proletariat largely perished either by starvation, or fighting in the Red Army.

This argument doesn't actually address any point I am making.

Even after this, it is clear to see that the state's character remained thoroughly proletarian, for this reflected not only ideologically but also in every cultural domain, in art, and so on.

Except that the proletariat didn't actually have any power, democracy or influence. It was an artificially created character without any substantial meaning. Kind of like the artificial Germanic culture of the Third Reich.

All of the real mechanisms of state power which were divorced from the will of the proletariat developed through the process of industrialization and collectivization, it was THIS which changed the nature of the state - not the red terror or the self-aggrandizement of individual party members. Whatever happened as to make disparity between the Soviet working class (a demographic which largely perished, physically in the civil war) and the Soviet state a reality was purely a systemic phenomena.

Uhuh.

What you fail to understand, what you fail to conceive is that you keep re-hashing the same historical myth that the Cheka was a natural precursor to NKVD.

I do? I never mentioned the NKVD once. So once again you seem to be creating arguments that aren't there and since I have no intention of addressing one of your insanity fueled combating your own straw man arguments

Every time you attack an argument I didn't make...I am going to assume the rest of your post is basically lies and distortions (as is your habit) that serve the purpose of trying to portray yourself as somebody that is legitimate instead of the complete and utter ridiculous role playing fraud that you are

Now...kindly provide the so far continuously lacking evidence for the necessity of the Red Terror in a short concise post...

If it is over 300 words...I am not going to read your arrogant diatribes.

Rafiq

12th July 2015, 02:41

So, becasue my points STILL FUCKING REMAIN UNADDRESSED, I am going to assume you concede that I was correct. Like don't FUCKING pretend I didn't, in detail, GO OVER THIS. Does everyone see how this little FUCKING rat operates? I pour substantial effort into my posts, only for him to respond to a tiny FRACTION of them, only to repeat the cycle over and over again?

I think everybody can scroll back and see that I argued a process that was intentionally leading to establishing the Bolshevik party dominance. And yes the Red Terror was instrumental in that.

For the revolution however the Red Terror was unnecessary and counter productive.

Don't try to FUCKING flip this argument around and attempt to insinuate that all along, you meant that the terror was necessary after all, but only the "Bolsheviks" to solidify power over the masses. This is not what you meant, what you meant to say was that the terror was UNNECESSARY, and we know this because you INITIALLY already established that you considered the Bolsheviks to have ruled by a "single party dictatorship" since the October "coup" (Chomsky's little running dog, aren't you?), so when you say that the terror was 'unnecessary", and when you directly claim that it actually made things worse for the BOLSHEVIKS, you make the argument that the red terror was blunderous even as far as the consolidation of the "single-party totalitarian dictatorship" goes, which is itself another myth.

You cannot say at the same time that the Red terror was "unnecessary adn counter-productive" for the revolution and yet beneficial to the rule of the Soviet state, because you again DENIED THE EXISTENCE OF THE REVOLUTION ALL TOGETHER intiially, but if not for that, you EXPLICITLY claimed that it hurt the rule of the Bolsheviks by 'turning the population against them." Do you FUCKING deny this? The dishonesty is literally ASTOUNDING, I can't even FUCKING believe someone is capable of bullshitting like this!

Somebody who claims his intelligence in almost every single post

Name one. I love how this motherfucker talks straight out of his ass. Never have I ONCE made any pretense to intelligence.

The revolution and the interests of the Bolshevik party are two very separate things.

No, you don't get off that easy, because as it happens, you explicitly stated that the red terror was unnecessary for the Bolshevik's rule, which was INHERNETLY tied up with the proletarian dictatorship. What revolution was there without the Bolsheviks, huh, PA? The Bolsheivks WERE the proletarian dictatorship, plain and fucking simple - the opposition to their rule had its basis in the peasantry, not the working class. But nevermind that, the fact of hte matter is that I pointed out the inconsistency of how you tried ot explain the terror in terms of the Bolsheviks consolidating "dictatorship", while at the same time saying that it was unnecessary EVEN FROM THE VANTAGE POINT of their rule, mentioning how it was propelling the peasantry to counter-revolution, how they were losing loyalty among the population, how it was prolonging the civil war and so on. I've already THOROUGHLY FUCKING GONE OVER THIS:

The trivialities of the minor privileges enjoyed by the party apparatus hardly sustains the idea that they existed "for themselves" as some kind of force of self-aggrandizement. Quite on the contrary, party privileges became more and more prevalent as they had became necessary, almost in the form of bribery, to accommodate for their tireless and demanding work. Indeed, all foreigners who visited the Soviet Union at the time recognized how tirelessly and selflessly the "party entity" was working to secure the revolution, it is just plainly stupid to think that they cynically grabbed power LITERALLY 'for themselves'. No doubt relations of power did develop, but this was a product of nothing more than its ritualistic necessity for the survival of the state (i.e. when the state's survival, and the survival of the proletarian dictatorship became inversely proportional following measures like the NEP and onward). It's easy to be cynical here, but it's so stupid in that even capitalists do not want power "for itself", any idiot knows that capitalists almost self-sacrificially serve CAPITAL, and the process of capital accumulation. Likewise, the bourgeois state does not exist for its own sake, removed from the interests of capital, for how can it? As far as the Bolsheviks were concerned, all that sustained them, and their power, was the industrial proletariat and later mechanisms of state power INDEPENDENTLY of the proletariat developed - because the industrial proletariat largely perished either by starvation, or fighting in the Red Army.

Even after this, it is clear to see that the state's character remained thoroughly proletarian, for this reflected not only ideologically but also in every cultural domain, in art, and so on. All of the real mechanisms of state power which were divorced from the will of the proletariat developed through the process of industrialization and collectivization, it was THIS which changed the nature of the state - not the red terror or the self-aggrandizement of individual party members. Whatever happened as to make disparity between the Soviet working class (a demographic which largely perished, physically in the civil war) and the Soviet state a reality was purely a systemic phenomena.

What you fail to understand, what you fail to conceive is that you keep re-hashing the same historical myth that the Cheka was a natural precursor to NKVD. But this shows what poverty you have of history, and the logic of history. The argument rests upon the presumption that the Russian situation existed in a vacuum, and that all the developments in the former Russian Empire are rationally explicable solely unto themselves. It is true that the state-apparatus formed during the events of the October revolution (i.e. which includes the terror and the civil war) would LATER become a part of the Stalinist state apparatus, but this is not owed to any kind of drive toward "single-party dictatorship" implicit in them, it is owed to the reality that conditions FUNDAMENTALLY BEYOND THE POWER OF THE BOLSHEVIKS, such as the failure of the international revolution and the demographic annihilation of the industrial proletariat, created an inversely proportional relationship between the destruction of the proletarian dictatorship, and the survival of the Soviet state. What's fucking hilarious is that you seem to be under the impression that after the civil war, the Bolsheviks "finally consolidated their grip on power and cynically laughed away while drinking champagne as they became the new bourgeoisie" or whatever bizarre petite-bourgeois fantasies you keep telling yourself, but the reality is that the events surrounding the mid to late 1920's was pure anxiety and a lack of direction about the future. The NEP was instituted out of pure DESPERATION at the situation: The international revolution failed, the proletariat had disappeared, the Soviet state was left with a vast bureaucratic apparatus with mechanisms of state repression while at the same time a large rural population of which a great bulk of was hesitant toward modernization. The Soviet state entered not only a crisis of action, but an EXISTENTIAL crisis about conceiving itself, what KIND of state it was going to be. Either way, the proletarian dictatorship would have fallen, the only difference is that now it wouldn't have fallen at the hands of international capital, or internal reaction (i.e. the counter-revolution). What is utterly fucking hilarious about this, however, is that I've thoroughly covered all of this previously, and guess what, you little rodent: I'm going to keep re-quoting myself until you either shut the FUCK UP, or you actually address the unaddressed arguments at hand. You want to keep playing hte game of re-hashing old arguments? I'm going to keep requoting myself in kind:

If the Soviet state was de-classed, according to you, just composed of "tyrannical" monsters and so on, HOW THE FUCK WERE THEY ABLE TO MOBILIZE, RECRUIT AND IMPLEMENT TERROR THEMSELVES? Did Lenin, revolver in hand, personally see to the physical coercion of the whole population or something? What SOCIAL ENTITY formed the bulk, or the substance of the power of the Soviet government? Do you even know what POWER is? You cannot just blindly hold power without some kind of social base supporting you, so who in fact was 'behind' the Soviet government that sustained them?

The red terror was "exercised" to consolidate power at the EXPENSE of the proletarian, so claims PA, to suppress those "critical" to the Soviet state:

HOW THE FUCK IS THIS DIFFERENT FROM WHAT YOU"RE FUCKING SAYING NOW? HOW IS THERE A SEMBLANCE OF DIFFERENCE IN THE ARGUMENTATION? IF YOU KEEP RE-hASHING THE SAME FUCKING ARGUMENTS, I'M JUST GOING TO RESPOND WITH THE SAME ARGUMENTS TO UNTIL THEY'RE PROPERLY ADDRESSED. But the fact of the matter is that, hilariously, you're completely full of shit, because while those critical of the actions of the state might have been imprisoned under the early Soviet government, they were not imprisoned BECAUSE they were critical, they were arrested and imprisoned for actually engaging, directly and actively, in acts that undermined the worker's dictatorship. Hence why Mensheviks who resigned from political activity, and who remained critical, were not only tolerated, but welcomed in the new Soviet state. Self-criticism was not only an integral part of Soviet rule from the onset, it remained an intregal part of the Soviet state even during the Stalin years! Self-criticism was actively ENCOURAGED too, and this is noted by historians such as Fitzpatrick, etc. You're just MAKING SHIT UP. Did the Cheka arrest the leaders of the worker's opposition, such as Alexandra Kollontai? No, MOST OF THESE people, while being heavily criticized by the central apparatus, were not only tolerated, but continued to actively organize and exist: Those who died would die LATER during the Stalinist purges. So what the FUCK are you trying to say?

But of the several thousand who were killed during the red terror, none compromised anything remotely close to what could encapsulate "warriors of Soviet democracy". The minority of victims who happened to agitate for "Soviets without Bolsheviks" were hardly popular, hardly representative of the holistic prerogatives of the majority of proletarians. It does not follow at all that the terror was exercised so that salaries of Bolshevik leaders could be slightly raised, the error stems purely from a lazy conception of history. But previously, you yourself are forced to admit that the Bolsehviks could have had "good intentions" all the while implementing the "party dictatorship OVER the workers (which I also demonstrated was bullshit). Already in post #237, I expicitly stated that:

The last thing you could resort to is try and say that "in the process of thinking they were serving the proletariat, they were really, subconsciously, only serving themselves". That would also be rather fucking stupid, but most of all it conveniently ignores the fact that the contradictions formed between the party apparatus (which was years after the civil war) and the working class formed directly as as result of the a) Physical decimation of the proletariat as a demographic, as already shown, and b) modernization of agriculture, the agricultural revolution. The Soviet state wasn't capable of perpetuating itself in the long term, which is why Bordiga correctly recognized it later as a "bourgeois" state - NOT because the state was literally composed of a "new bourgeoisie", but because they were spear-heading an agricultural revolution which was creating, within the intricacies of its social strata, a bourgeoisie which was struggling to come into existence (but repressed by the state politically). The mechanisms of state repression were indeed formed during the civil war, but what you fail to understand is that these would only be used outside of the will of the proletariat long after their formation. This is why it's easy to lazily make sweeping conclusions about how "DURR DA BOLSHEVIKS WERE TURNING ON DA WORKERS!" The reality was that this was far from the case.

We must adhere to only a few arguments when pre-supposing the reality that Bolsheviks probably had good intentions (And this is not even up for debate at this point) - that the BASIS of being unable to properly realize these intentions was the reality that they didn't understand that "power corrupts", or that specific events and conditions prompted the character of the state to change in such a way that was outside of the control of the well-intentioned Bolsheviks. But as I've demonstrated several times over the past few years, power DOES NOT corrupt, if power "corrupts", it is owed to implicit systemic predispositions all along, the reality being that the state is thoroughly bourgeois, and its levels of 'corruption' are not contingent upon its degree of actual power. Bourgoeis ideologues, to this day, fail to establish the 'real' motivations behind the Bolsheviks, save for anti-semitic conspiracies or other petite-bourgeois fantasies a la Anthony Sutton. The truth is that the Bolsheviks had no "secret", they were motivated exactly and solely by what they said they were motivated by, they were HISTORICALLY SELF-CONSCIOUS, they had no spontaneous inclination to "turn on the revolution" for most of them were Bolsheviks even when it was, from a egotist perspective, very stupid to be one (i.e a decade before), they had nothing to live for except for the realization of the victory of the proletariat. Even if the bourgeois state, like any state, "corrupts", it cannot do so in a way that undermines the rule of the bourgeoisie, or else it is no longer a bourgeois state. To add, this is a thoroughly unscientific notion, because as it happens, "power" is defined here in an ambiguous way that abides only by its standards in present-day capitalist society. What is most certainly hilarious, for anyone who actually engages in a real study of "power", that it is NEVER about the feelings you get of "control", individual power is only useful insofar as it is in direct proximity to your life, but you will never experience the direct sensation of ruling over thousands of people. Power is, by nature, a burden when exercised by the state, those 'statesmen' who thoroughly enjoy what they do no more represent some kind of intristic desire for "power" as doctors, lawyers and engineers. The reality is that the state is an INSTRUMENT, and can only ever remain an instrumental force (incidentally, the Soviet Union, after industrialization, was simply on life support, inherently temporal and destined for collapse). It cannot exist for its own sake, those INDIVIDUALS directly participating in matters of state, do so only as functionaries, from monarchs to party officials. Never mind that, however. Even if we bought into LIBERAL platitudes about how power works, we can easily demonstrate that this was most certainly not the case as far as having ANY explanatory power for the events which progressed in the Soviet Union. Namely, there was no implicit prerogative for the party to consolidate power over the working masses "for its own sake", for every single measure exercised was done so for the greater holistic good, to sustain the proletarian dictatorship [And onward with your silly comparisons with how ALL ideologues effectively make this claim to "justify" their rule, the difference is that the basis of their rule is always "behind the scenes" in that of a class - the Nazis claimed to be fighting for the greater good of the German nation, on behalf of the German bourgeoisie, not themselves. So on whose behalf did the Bolsheviks fight? Themselves? How and why?]. The paradox that LATER developed was the reality that defending the proletarian dictatorship also meant destroying it - and for this reason it was a tragedy, for because of events outside of their control, the proletarian dictatorship was DOOMED, as Serge knew, for it was confined to the most backward country in Europe, with a decimated proletarian population, with a large peasantry on the brink of outright hostility, surrounded by imperialist powers that more or less, even if willing to sign treaties, was keen on watching the Soviet state be destroyed. And it goes on, had collectivization not been implemented, the Nazis would have absolutely destroyed the Soviet Union, etc. Bolsheviks did not speak in private differently form how they spoke in public, even through the Stalin years. Unless we of course accept that they did so out of some internal, subconscious biological imperative to increase evolutionary fitness, as you and your reactionary friends would have us believe, but we know this to be absolutely fucking ridiculous.

you still failed to show how the Red Terror was necessary to protect the revolution and how it was effective in doing so.

For someone who OPENLY CLAIMS that they either outright IGNORE my posts, or "gloss over them", that is a rather brazen claim. At any event, I have responded to this SAME PLATITUDE OVER AND OVER AGAIN. There are few posts throughout this ENTIRE discussion which did not contain this platitude, that I have "failed to show it was necessary". I have responded to this. Even if you still think I haven't shown it, YOU NEED TO ADDRESS MY FUCKING REBUTTAL, BECAUSE THAT'S HOW AN ACTIVE PARTICIPANT IN A DISCUSSION, AND NOT A BROKEN FUCKING RECORD, EXPRESSES AN ARGUMENT. Do you FUCKING understand this? You haven't even COME CLOSE to addressing my arguments, you've skimmed over them, botched them, and reduced them to your simplistic philistinism at best.

No. It isn't. In fact they did. You claim "intentions" and I claim "delusions of falsely equating themselves to be the sole representatives of the working class in spite of the working class"

But of the several thousand who were killed during the red terror, none compromised anything remotely close to what could encapsulate "warriors of Soviet democracy". The minority of victims who happened to agitate for "Soviets without Bolsheviks" were hardly popular, hardly representative of the holistic prerogatives of the majority of proletarians. It does not follow at all that the terror was exercised so that salaries of Bolshevik leaders could be slightly raised, the error stems purely from a lazy conception of history. But previously, you yourself are forced to admit that the Bolsehviks could have had "good intentions" all the while implementing the "party dictatorship OVER the workers (which I also demonstrated was bullshit). Already in post #237, I expicitly stated that:

The last thing you could resort to is try and say that "in the process of thinking they were serving the proletariat, they were really, subconsciously, only serving themselves". That would also be rather fucking stupid, but most of all it conveniently ignores the fact that the contradictions formed between the party apparatus (which was years after the civil war) and the working class formed directly as as result of the a) Physical decimation of the proletariat as a demographic, as already shown, and b) modernization of agriculture, the agricultural revolution. The Soviet state wasn't capable of perpetuating itself in the long term, which is why Bordiga correctly recognized it later as a "bourgeois" state - NOT because the state was literally composed of a "new bourgeoisie", but because they were spear-heading an agricultural revolution which was creating, within the intricacies of its social strata, a bourgeoisie which was struggling to come into existence (but repressed by the state politically). The mechanisms of state repression were indeed formed during the civil war, but what you fail to understand is that these would only be used outside of the will of the proletariat long after their formation. This is why it's easy to lazily make sweeping conclusions about how "DURR DA BOLSHEVIKS WERE TURNING ON DA WORKERS!" The reality was that this was far from the case.

I have devoted much time and energy into explaining this.

What you fail to understand, what you fail to conceive is that you keep re-hashing the same historical myth that the Cheka was a natural precursor to NKVD. But this shows what poverty you have of history, and the logic of history. The argument rests upon the presumption that the Russian situation existed in a vacuum, and that all the developments in the former Russian Empire are rationally explicable solely unto themselves. It is true that the state-apparatus formed during the events of the October revolution (i.e. which includes the terror and the civil war) would LATER become a part of the Stalinist state apparatus, but this is not owed to any kind of drive toward "single-party dictatorship" implicit in them, it is owed to the reality that conditions FUNDAMENTALLY BEYOND THE POWER OF THE BOLSHEVIKS, such as the failure of the international revolution and the demographic annihilation of the industrial proletariat, created an inversely proportional relationship between the destruction of the proletarian dictatorship, and the survival of the Soviet state. What's fucking hilarious is that you seem to be under the impression that after the civil war, the Bolsheviks "finally consolidated their grip on power and cynically laughed away while drinking champagne as they became the new bourgeoisie" or whatever bizarre petite-bourgeois fantasies you keep telling yourself, but the reality is that the events surrounding the mid to late 1920's was pure anxiety and a lack of direction about the future. The NEP was instituted out of pure DESPERATION at the situation: The international revolution failed, the proletariat had disappeared, the Soviet state was left with a vast bureaucratic apparatus with mechanisms of state repression while at the same time a large rural population of which a great bulk of was hesitant toward modernization. The Soviet state entered not only a crisis of action, but an EXISTENTIAL crisis about conceiving itself, what KIND of state it was going to be. Either way, the proletarian dictatorship would have fallen, the only difference is that now it wouldn't have fallen at the hands of international capital, or internal reaction (i.e. the counter-revolution). What is utterly fucking hilarious about this, however, is that I've thoroughly covered all of this previously, and guess what, you little rodent: I'm going to keep re-quoting myself until you either shut the FUCK UP, or you actually address the unaddressed arguments at hand. You want to keep playing hte game of re-hashing old arguments? I'm going to keep requoting myself in kind:

the intentions do not matter as the argument is a "for the greater good" narrative which is all to common in groups

You know, ten minutes ago or so I edited my post to EXPLICITLY ADDRESS THIS FUCKING BULLSHIT because I knew you were going to say that. Here's what I added: Namely, there was no implicit prerogative for the party to consolidate power over the working masses "for its own sake", for every single measure exercised was done so for the greater holistic good, to sustain the proletarian dictatorship [And onward with your silly comparisons with how ALL ideologues effectively make this claim to "justify" their rule, the difference is that the basis of their rule is always "behind the scenes" in that of a class - the Nazis claimed to be fighting for the greater good of the German nation, on behalf of the German bourgeoisie, not themselves. So on whose behalf did the Bolsheviks fight? Themselves? How and why?]

So while IT IS TRUE that effectively, EVERY ruling ideology justifies itself on the basis of a "greater good", IT DOES SO IN A WAY THAT LACKS SOCIAL CONSCIOUSNESS. What does that mean, this fucking philistine will ask? It means that they justified themselves in terms of doing it "for god", "for the nation", and so on - but the state does not justify itself in this manner FOR ITS OWN SAKE, for the state is an instrument of the ruling class, the state justifies itself IN THIS WAY insofar as it cannot perpetuate social consciousness without destroying itself. So, unlike "nation", "race", or "god", all ideological mystifications meant to convey social realities, as it happens the proletariat IS a real force, and it is for that reason that unlike in Nazi Germany, this "terminology" entailed a huge project of social transformation which did have real, observable effects for all the apparent classes. Rather than, as some liberal philistines like to put it, "class" being interchangeable with "nation" or "god", class relations can very well do WITHOUT such mystification, while nationalism or religious fanaticism is CONTINGENT upon a lack of consciousness of class realities, i.e. there is no "hidden secret" behind conscious revolutionary struggle, IT IS WHAT IT IS, FOR ITSELF. That is why the Bolsheviks remain an ENIGMA for all historians. This also explains why Tsarist and Nazi conspiracy theories were so effective, they had to attribute to the Bolsheviks some kind of magical force behind them, i.e. the eternal figure of the "Jew". But we know well that no such force was behind the Bolsheviks, while we know very well the classes that were behind the Nazis and the White counter-revolution. This is why I stressed that YOU HAVE A LIBERAL UNDERSTANDING OF POWER which amounts to "men" ruling FOR THE SAKE OF POWER ITSELF. But we all know very well that power does not exist for itself, it exists in a way subordinate to PRODUCTION above all things, thereby class relations to production, which entail the rule of a single class. But again, this argument has ALREADY BEEN THOROUGHLY FUCKING ADDRESSED:

Here we FUCKING go again, as though there is an equivalency in POWER, as though power is sustained by the same forces, for the same reason, across the fucking board. The fact of the matter is that as I already stated before, if you actually, carefully read my fucking post - you cannot draw any level of equivalency because only liberals believe in such myths as the state compromising "those who lead" and "the people". The basis of Nazi power was in the industiral bourgeoisie, war barons and the then privatized banks, and it is BY THEIR WILL that the Nazis exercised power. So even if the Nazis used ALL OF THE SAME METHODS as the Bolsheviks, this would not give them an iota of equivalency, because they are USING THEM FOR ENTIRELY DIFFERENT FUCKING REASONS. Only the bourgeois-morality, the stupid fucking sentimentality will draw a basis of equivalency because it cannot recognize class difference, because, according to this morality of the present state-apparatus, "killing is killing, no matter who does it, or why" - the act itself is absolved from its context, hence, a cowardly emphasis is placed on mere ABSTRACTIONS because they threaten the power of the EXISTING order (i.e. ruptures its foundations) regardless of where they come from.

You keep phrase-mongering BULLSHIT like "bourgeois" and "reactionary mentality" to accommodate for your own conservatism and counter-revolutionary sentimentality, but the truth is that the entire basis of your comparison is thoroughly bourgeois itself, what you fail to understand is that in a true conflict, and not some kind of glorified misunderstanding, each belligerent cannot "morally" criticize the other in the sense of expecting anything different, a true enemy is an enemy in ESSENCE, no matter of I "hear his story out'. According to PA, the class war is some kind of giant misunderstanding wherein all sides are both morally wrong for employing the means of annihilating the enemy, on a universal basis of morality because in the end, they all "objectively want the same thing". But only those in POWER have the privilege of touting such nonsense - the truth is that the proletariat and the bourgeoisie do NOT want the same thing, and therefore, there is no equivalency in their means of sustaining power and suppressing those who threaten them. Now PA will tell us that "reverse sexism" and "reverse racism" are real, because they use the "same arguments and mentality" as sexists and racists, on account for his myopic theoretical insight. It is beyond fucking stupid.

Here Phoenix presents us some kind of universal morality that amounts to the idea that the moral quality of an act is "universal" across class lines. We then follow that the murder of counter-revolutionaries is, exactly the same for us as the murder of revolutionaries. This is an ethics alien to Communism.

The fact of the matter is that it couldn't 'legitimize" acts under any state, because we don't expect anything different from them. The bourgeois state does not constrain itself because it is benevolent, it does so because it would be overthrown in a day. But listen, we don't seek to justify the terror for you, a reactionary. And it's pretty FUCKING disgusting that you mention ethnic genocides as a comparison, because in doing so you approximate the plain of action of revolutionaries as necessarily BEING THE SAME as that of the Nazis or Serbian nationalists. In other words, the idea that "what else were we supposed to do" is EMPTIED of its essential subjective context, and it is merely assumed that everyone in a position of power wants the same thing. For the Nuremberg trials, for example, the argument used was not "what were we supposed to do" but that they were "just following orders". Well, it might very well be a fact that the holocaust was necessary to sustain the power of the NAZIS and that anti-semitism was necessary to sustain the NAZI identity, but what is necessary for the sustenance of power for Nazis, and what is necessary for the sustenance of power for Communists is not identical. I can't fucking believe the red terror is now being abstracted from its context and assumed to be ethically identical to any other violent act - who the FUCK thinks like this if not a bourgoeis ideologue?

The point is the essential question: FOR WHAT PURPOSE is this "terror" being used, who is using it, and so on - without this, there is NO SUBSTANCE to any violent act, and therefore, no legitimate basis for drawing an ethical conclusion from it. I mean, are you fucking kidding me? What's hilarious is that first you tell us that the terror was necessary to sustain the Bolshevik dictatorship, and then you say that it wasn't necessary to defeat the counter-revolution. This pre-supposes a disparity between the rule of the Bolsheviks and the possibility of the revolution being saved, but no such disparity exists - the fate of the revolution was irrevocably tied to the fate of the proletarian dictatorship led by the Bolsheviks, and no matter your incessant abuse of words as "evidence" (WHAT DOES THIS EVEN MEAN?) this is what every anti-Communist historian, the same historians YOU YOURSELF cite, are able to recognize, they merely oppose the revolution all together.

The moral superiority has nothing to do with a moral superiority vis a vis some kind of universal, cosmic, divine morality, or a pretense to "humanity", but amounts to the reality that our morals are not theirs. For them, killing is justified to defend property relations. For us, it is justified to destroy them. How this is conceived is not in regard to the individual preferences of people, but classes. That two enemies both use swords, does not make them the same. It makes them the same, in terms of their willingness to use violence to defeat their enemies, AND THAT IS IT. Let Trotsky speak for me:

“But, in that case, in what do your tactics differ from the tactics of Tsarism?” we are asked, by the high priests of Liberalism and Kautskianism.

You do not understand this, holy men? We shall explain to you. The terror of Tsarism was directed against the proletariat. The gendarmerie of Tsarism throttled the workers who were fighting for the Socialist order. Our Extraordinary Commissions shoot landlords, capitalists, and generals who are striving to restore the capitalist order. Do you grasp this ... distinction? Yes? For us Communists it is quite sufficient."

This argument doesn't actually address any point I am making.

Yes it is, you fucking rodent, the point you're trying to make is that Soviet power "Existed for itself" and that the Bolsheviks were trying to consolidate a dictatorship where "derr da new capitalists". THE POINT IS THAT THE SOVIET STATE COULD NOT, AND DID NOT EXIST FOR ITS OWN SELF.

Except that the proletariat didn't actually have any power, democracy or influence. It was an artificially created character without any substantial meaning. Kind of like the artificial Germanic culture of the Third Reich.

Wrong again. The aesthetic, and artistic movements that sweeped across the Soviet Union were largely outside state control, and they did encapsulate what was a proletarian aesthetics. Soviet constructivism, cubism, futurism, avant-garde ETC. were the organic, SPONTANEOUS art of the revolution and there was NOTHING artificial about them. The idea that the explosive, creative power that followed the October revolution was subordinate to the cynical aspirations of the newly found state is a blatant LIE, and anyone familiar with the history of Soviet art, from architecture to cinema, knows this is not true. Even socialist realism, which you could make an argument for as far as being "artificial", had a spontaneous basis in the aversion toward modern art by the great rural masses, and the emerging bourgeois-humanism of the Soviet state in light of the modernization of the countryside. What's also fucking hilarious is that even though Nazi art was "artificial", it still very much conveyed ideologically the class-nature of the Nazis, which is the POINT of art: Even if it is like a spectacle, as cheap as a fucking movie, it STILL conveys ideological truths, because in the act of trying to say "this is what I will do, when I know full well there is nothing organic about it", your standards of cynical shit-churning has a fundamental ideological basis. The idea that Soviet art, in either of its epochs (proletarian and later bourgeois) was "artificial" makes no fucking sense, because the artificial Nazi art was contingent upon bastardizing the authenticity Socialist realism, like all other Nazi aesthetics.

I do? I never mentioned the NKVD once.

But everyone is in agreement as far as the fact that the Soviet state by the time the NKVD formed, was in fact not a proletarian state. This is not a point of controversy, not at the very least as far as we're concerned. The whole point is the basis of the "original sin", in your mind, being in the October revolution or the "red terror", while my point is that the red terror was NOT an inevitable precursor to Stalinism, that it was thoroughly proletarian in nature.

If it is over 300 words...I am not going to read your arrogant diatribes.

Then DON'T FUCKING RESPOND AS THOUGH YOU"RE ADDRESSING THE SUBSTANTIVE POINTS AT HAND, BECAUSE YOU'RE NOT, INSTEAD YOU'RE RE-HASHING ARGUMENTS THAT HAVE BEEN THOROUGHLY COVERED. You don't want to read my fucking posts? Fine then, fuck off. Don't respond as if you're actually making a point that I didn't already fucking cover, don't respond because you're scared that if you don't get the last word in, you're conceding "victory" to me. Whether you get your last word in or not, you're still fucking wrong.

PhoenixAsh

12th July 2015, 03:26

I am not sure but I think it is more than 300 words in yet another straw man filled argument where Rafiq completely and spectacularly misses the point of this entire debate

Aside from your numerous straw man arguments and lies you make again...aside from your red herrings and false claims ...in that absurd diatribe you call relevant....

You still failed to answer the question. Lets recap:

I said this:

The red terror was not imo a necessity. It was a will full implementation of bourgeoisie tactics and strategy used against the working class and a knee jerk reaction that signaled the bankrupcy of Bolshevik ideology and the revolutionary movement.

This does not mean that violence isn't warranted. That people can't be executed or imprisoned per se. But this means that a specific policy to do so as a matter of fact is simply counter revolutionary.

I also said this immediately after:

It was counter revolutionary and a depraved act that not only intensified the resistance to the revolution, it was an ideological bankruptcy that actually killed the revolution entirely and established a party dictatorship.

Your counter arguments:

all of the "atrocities" committed by the Cheka were absolutely and pivotaly necessary in defeating the counter-revolution

You have yet to show this claim.

And I think after 6 pages of your weaseling I think we finally need to get a satisfactory answer.

Tim Redd

12th July 2015, 05:34

Another thread degraded by the inability of some to carry on a discussion and speak about differences with a modicum of maturity. You would think some people would get a clue that the way they swear too much, use caps and bloviate for paragraph after paragraph is not the behavior of a reasonable person. You would think they would get a clue that their style is unquestionably psychopathic.

Despite what they imagine, these types grossly detract from what should be a productive learning experience on the RevLeft discussion forum.

Now, these people will think I'm the problem for raising the issue, but that just shows the high level of their self-delusion and self-centerdness.

Rafiq

12th July 2015, 06:23

Listen everyone, I'm going to be polite, I want you all to read this post very carefully. This is in spite of the fact that PA previously responded to me about a variety of different things, but is now apparently taking everything back and saying that this whole discussion was useless, save for his "original recap". I'm going to be as civil as possible, and when PA responds to it, you'll be able to see the source of my rage:

PA, you continue to approach this argument as though you're making a reasonable demand and being constantly met with long-winded attempts to beat around the bush, but you know very well this is not the case. The only way that I can "prove" the red terror's necessity is if I establish a definite vantage point from which this necessity is based that you're capable of seeing. But as a bourgeois ideologue, this is an impossibility. I cannot prove to you that the terror was necessary for the survival of bourgeois society, from which your posts emanate a keen foundational expression of. So Phoenix, I, as well as any honest user who has been monitoring this thread, spit in the face of your false attempt to cover your inability to actually, properly engage in the discussion at hand, as well as your keen insistence on dodging our demand that you provide citations and sources for your wild and exaggerated claims - that we now suspect you simply have made up. You make it as though the length of this discussion is owed to the fact that I haven't given you a "satisfactory answer", but the truth is that I've put considerable time and energy to precisely emanate this. We can't ever know if your inability to see this is the reality that your'e such a child that all truth must come to you in the form of hot n' ready fun facts, or your deliberate dishonesty. Your "re-cap" is almost worthy of pity, to say the least.

But on to the wider point, the first error you commit here is assuming that you have a monopoly on encapsulating the basis of this discussion - it is thoroughly dishonest. You've taken a few quotes out of their context to demonstrate the underlying basis of this whole discussion, but I can do this, too:

There it is was argued that the Red Terror negatively impacted the position of the Bolsheviks, support for the revolution and worsened the economic productivity (because of mass arrests and executions) and pushed previously loyal and supporting people towards the White Counter Revolution. They heavily criticized and condemned the Intentional lack of oversight and the continuous refusal by the central party to put effective barriers and oversight in place to halt the indiscriminate, brutal and counter effectual methods the Cheka used as reported by the Soviets.

Now, PA, I know how desperate you are to constantly churn out an entirely new exit from which you can substantially decrease the size of my posts, thereby responding in turn in the most botched and inappropriate manner possible, but I don't mind this game one bit, as it happens. You literally attempted to encapsulate this entire discussion, in all its complexity, in a few lines - taking a few words of mine out of context - words, which, mind you, are thoroughly ambiguous (because again, what I mean by "atrocities" were not the minor excesses that occurred, but the systematized mass executions as a measure to reinforce mass-intimidation against the potential and active counter-revolution, which thoroughly had its basis in the former dethroned classes, officers, and the irk) as though everything I've said throughout this entire thread is reducible to those eighteen words, but anyone who has so much as glanced over the last few pages knows this not to be true, and most of all, PA - you know it not to be true either. You always have the option of admitting your mistakes, you always have the option of being honest. As far as the track record goes for your intellectual honesty, this doesn't seem likely. Nevermind that though. From what we now can read from you, which smacks entirely of ad-hoc and nothing more, the only way we can reconcile this contradictory position of your is by adherence to the following idea, in one way or another:

The Bolshevik state-apparatus sacrificed its own short-term basis of power, as well as the gains of the revolution, so that it could set up the long-term basis for party-state rule over the proletariat and, in the long term, consolidate the party dictatorship

If this is NOT what you are insinuating, then your argument is inherently contradictory, because the above statement is the only way to consistently reconcile the apparent "antagonism" between the survival of the Bolshevik state apparatus, and the survival of the revolution as early as 1918. The reason why I'm calling you out on being inconsistent, is because of the ambiguity of what constituted the "revolution" independent of the Bolshevik party. It certainly wasn't the October revolution, which you previously alleged to be a "coup", but perhaps you might recognize that there was indeed a social revolution which - allegedly - could have happened independently of the Bolsheviks' political prowess (a fantasy, of course - divorcing the social revolution from the political basis from which it was conducted is an impossibility). You accuse me of shortsightedness in being "unable" to see that the survival of the newly formed state, and the revolution, were not only not positively related, they were inversely correlated. But you're the one who hasn't provided a scientific, clear cut distinction between them, instead, you USE this pathology of "soviets without Bolsheviks" opportunistically and whimsically in accordance with whatever argument is thrown at you, but there isn't a degree of consistency in it whatsoever. Because, as it happens: "Negatively impacting support for the revolution, economic productivity, and pushing people to the side of the WHITE counter-revolution" are not positively correlated with the degree of power held or even exercised by the Bolsheviks! So, now you might see where I'm coming from as far as your "inconsistency" goes. The logical conclusion is therefore that the Bolsheviks decided to consolidate power "over" the working class (presumably so that they could have higher salaries - we still have yet to find a consistent basis of causality from you) at the expense of even their grip on power, i.e. that their power ONLY increased as far as it was "OVER" the working class, and not over the situation as a whole. But why would the Bolsheviks do this? At times, you try to portray it as mere incompetence, at other times, you portray it as ruthless maneuvering. But these aren't, again, positively correlated.

The Bolsheviks could not have possibly intentionally weakened their position in the civil war, and in the overall situation, "just because" they wanted to establish rule "OVER" the proletariat. They couldn't have unintentionally done this either (weakened their position) because there was no implicit predisposition to rule "over" the proletariat that wouldn't have had to be prompted much earlier. The red terror wasn't a response to disobedient workers who 'did not like party leaders', it was a response to both agitation by the Cadet-allied Mensheviks and Right SR's in the urban areas, as well as (primarily) the counter-revolution in the countryside. It was supported by the Left SR's, universally acknowledged to represent the revolutionary peasantry, too, so we must also assume you think the Left SR's were also trying to be part of this grand conspiratorial dictatorship too, doing to the peasantry what the Bolsheviks "did to the workers" (as if this cannot get anymore ridiculous!). We now see that the reason this is so bizarre, is because we're trying to consistently frame the events in terms of your logic - that the Bolsheviks took power "from" the workers for reasons unexplained at all beyond the liberal presumption of the nature of power itself. But let's actually examine the events that led to the terror, which I have already covered - but because I have made it my goal to be polite and civil, I will repeat myself. If we are to assume that the state apparatus used the terror to "consolidate power OVER the working class", we need a time for when this happened. Because during the first instances of the terror, not only was it not directed against the proletariat, it was disorganized and local Cheka formations, instruments of terror, were set up by local Soviets and universal protocols almost solely through telegrams. The terror did not begin because of decrees from Moscow, it emerged organically as grassroots, spontaneous violence that was hardly centrally coordinated. The terror, both in the eyes of the state and the press, was if anything acknowledged and recognized, given a basis of legality and acceptance. It was not until later that serious inclinations to make the Cheka vertically coordinated were wrought out, after what you proport to be the period that which the red terror existed. So what constituted the centralized party apparatus that sought to consolidate its dictatorship? Was it a conglomeration of local party officials and Soviets, or was it Moscow itself? It clearly could not have been the latter, and indeed if it was the former, again, there must have been some kind of mass coordination between these various local leaders, obviously mediated through some kind of centralized thing (if not Moscow, then what? It's a closed loop of an argument). It stands more and more an affront to reason, and more and more a violation of Occam's razor that the terror and the Cheka were set up to "consolidate power over the workers and destroy the revolution" when one digs deeper and deeper into an actual critical analysis of the situation. There are too many complex factors at play here, namely, the reality that it would have made much more sense to do everything that was necessary to help the position of the Bolsheviks - and "consolidate power" later, after the real threat, the counter-revolution, was dealt with. We have already ruled out that this drive to "consolidate power" was not an intentional one, because it stands that there is and never will be evidence that there was an implicit desire to 'fool' the workers into getting power. We must assume that what you really mean is that the Bolsheviks destroyed the revolution without even knowing it, and "dug the grave" of the revolution while trying to protect it. But why would they do this? What would prompt them to do this? Again, we're left confused when we evaluate some of your earlier statements:

that leaves us in the very cynical and very twisted situation that the Red Terror served one purpose and one purpose only and did so (very very well) and that is to ensure political dominance over the working class by the Bolsheviks and in that it splendidly succeeded but not without killing the revolution and revolutionary democracy.

So the red terror served this "one purpose", but this is phrased in such a way as to imply that there was intention to it, because we cannot identity the spontaneous basis for how "political dominance over the working class by the Bolsheviks" was some kind of implicit, subconscious process. Why would this happen? Again, we have yet to get a consistent answer. Let us assume however, for your own poor sake, that what you meant was that there was no intentionality - to say otherwise already ends the discussion, because It's been thoroughly shown to be wrong. Let us also take note of the fact that PA claims that "The Bolsheviks established dominance OVER the working class but not without killing the revolution and revolutionary democracy" as if the latter two, "the revolution' and "revolutionary democracy" are mere abstractions. You should be able to insinuate this already implicitly in the act of saying the Bolsheviks established dominance "OVER" the proletariat, but instead, you have to make the linguistic distinction - which shows your idealism, of how you are divorcing the essence-of-the-thing (class) from the thing itself (the consequence of changes in class based power). We might move on from that, however. Because of this, we must assume that your only position amounts to the initial statement - that the Bolsheviks took a huge risk as far as their power went, hurt their position in the short term, just for the chance that they'll emerge victorious in the long term "consolidating power" OVER the proletariat. In order to take such an arduous risk, however, you need to actually be in control of the situation - vis a vis the red terror, which they were not. The red terror would have happened whether or not the party apparatus in Moscow announced it or not. But even if we ignore this fact, and pretend it's false, the only way the Bolsheviks could have taken such a risk would have been through the intentional, conspiratorial desire to establish a party-based dynasty. Who had the most to gain from this situation, however? Following the civil war, you could not find a Bolsheivk functionary who could rest. Let me re-quote myself:

you seem to be under the impression that after the civil war, the Bolsheviks "finally consolidated their grip on power and cynically laughed away while drinking champagne as they became the new bourgeoisie" or whatever bizarre petite-bourgeois fantasies you keep telling yourself, but the reality is that the events surrounding the mid to late 1920's was pure anxiety and a lack of direction about the future. The NEP was instituted out of pure DESPERATION at the situation: The international revolution failed, the proletariat had disappeared, the Soviet state was left with a vast bureaucratic apparatus with mechanisms of state repression while at the same time a large rural population of which a great bulk of was hesitant toward modernization. The Soviet state entered not only a crisis of action, but an EXISTENTIAL crisis about conceiving itself, what KIND of state it was going to be. Either way, the proletarian dictatorship would have fallen, the only difference is that now it wouldn't have fallen at the hands of international capital, or internal reaction (i.e. the counter-revolution). What

There was so much uncertainty about the future of the Soviet state that there couldn't possibly have been a "planned" maneuvering of the "party elite" as early as 1918 to take such drastic risks and measures against its own survival in order to consolidate individual power, which was by no means even desirable in such a situation, at the expense of the rule of the proletariat. It's for this reason that virtually all bourgeois historians agree that the measures taken by the Bolsheviks were effective and necessary in "consolidating their own power". I pointed this out much, much earlier, and you responded in kind by saying they were wrong. Strange, for someone who claims that, as it happens, they were arguing that the Bolsheviks were "effective in consolidating THEIR OWN POWER only". So now we're back to square one, with the same arguments I've already demonstrated thoroughly. Now, keep in mind we are taking your arguments seriously here, when they remain corroborated and not a shred of evidence supports the narrative of intentionality, or even unintentionality either. The casual basis for the "Bolshevik dictatorship" that would later develop as having been in either the October coup, or the Red terror, has not thoroughly been established, and we have no reason to assume one was an inevitable precursor to the other. We have now established a link between your "demands" for proof, and the arguments I have already brought forth, namely, how the Bolsheviks couldn't have consolidated their own power at the expense of the proletariat, because the survival of any proletarian dictatorship, whether it qualifies your impossible criteria for "purity", would have had to take similar measures in order to survive. Over and over again, I have asked you how you would have acted differently - what measures could have been taken that would have been more effective in protecting the "revolution" in 1918, that the Bolsheviks were capable of but did not pursue because of their quest for higher salaries?

In the end, this conglomeration of inconsistencies is laid to rest when we conceive them in terms of an overall obfuscation of the reality that yes - the bureaucratic and repressive apparatus created during the civil war did form the basis of the Soviet state which was no longer proletarian, but that does not imply a casual basis, it implies that these formations were later integrated into the new Soviet state. After all, the initial statement - The Bolshevik state-apparatus sacrificed its own short-term basis of power, as well as the gains of the revolution, so that it could set up the long-term basis for party-state rule over the proletariat and, in the long term, consolidate the party dictatorship, can easily be conceived true of we place the basis of causality in some metaphysical idea of the 'will of history" rather than the Bolsheviks themselves. It might look like events progressed this way, but again, they did not progress this way because anyone willed it to, or was in control of the situation to the point where it could have been avoided. Victor serge, correctly encapsulated this reality by stating that "It is true that the germ of Stalinism was there [in the October revolution] all along, but there were also many other germs, ones that we ought not forget". The proletarian nature of the Soviet state, observed through the domains of culture, art, sexuality and even science, largely endured until the process of collectivization commenced which, while absolutely necessary for the survival of the Soviet state, changed its nature. A consistent casual basis, however, can be established as far as the failure of the international revolution goes, and the necessity of modernizing the countryside. PA cannot seriously put forward the argument that had such events commenced in Germany or the US, they would have taken a similar route as far as the revolution's failure, or that had the revolution spread to any of the advanced countries, the same problems that led to the failure of the revolution would have been present. We can critically evaluate the events at play here and consistently ground them in these realities, because the reality is that one who concerns themselves with a scientific evaluation of the social knows that people do not spontaneously desire 'power' for its own sake, but for the sake of production, to reproduce its condition. I'd love to hear how the revolution could have survived amidst international hostility and isolation, amidst a formidable size of the population being propertied whose interests were inversely correlated with that of the proletariat, had only those "wretched Bolsheviks" not been so motivated by their "authoritarian ideology" to destroy Soviet democracy. And this is all the while discounting the fact that the red terror is so grossly exaggerated by present bourgeois discourse purely as a result of fabricated accounts by White propagandists among others, which have conveniently, unlike their anti-semitic polemics, endured through the ages as legitimate accounts of the "depravity" of the Bolsheviks. True, we have the diaries and testimonies of individual Chekists, but these hardly confirm the "depraved" nature of the Cheka.

Palmares

12th July 2015, 07:54

Rafiq, I have infracted you for ignoring the warnings from the BA team for your questionable post formatting.

Please don't continue in that style.

These arguments between you two is getting out of control. You both need to take a step back, otherwise the ironhammer of the BA team will have to come down! Haha. But seriously, sort it out guys. Nobody wants to read a thread, let alone post in it, when it contains a spiral into the abyss like what has happened in this thread.

On that note, I'm also closing this thread. Had enough of this bullshit.

PhoenixAsh

12th July 2015, 07:55

That doesn't look like 300 words to me Rafiq.