The Soviet Union was AGAINST Socialism

Its their nature, it is what they do. But I guess "spreading of the wealth" is not good enough to call a spade a spade.

 

Who is "they"?

Depends what your spade is.

 

Dear god, how many of the posters in this thread have actually taken a politics class? Let alone read about socialism/communism from a source other than Hannity?

Communism is the redistribution of wealth and labor, worker owned production in a stateless society. The Soviet Union was anything but stateless.

Educate yourselves.

 

What exactly do you mean by party dominated democracy? The party dominates because that is the democratic choice of the people?

I dont understand this sentence, what does it mean?

This is incorrect. For a kickoff the Bolshevik revolution was hardly violent, two people died. Secondly, Marxism was always revolutionary.

Communist Manifesto:

"Of all the classes that stand face to face with the bourgeoisie today, the proletariat alone is a really revolutionary class."

"In depicting the most general phases of the development of the proletariat, we traced the more or less veiled civil war, raging within existing society, up to the point where that war breaks out into open revolution, and where the violent overthrow of the bourgeoisie lays the foundation for the sway of the proletariat. "

It had to be violent because there were no democracies, there was no other way. But in Russia the violence cost just 2 lives.

I dont understand this

Anarchists never did anything. In Spain they refused to take power, on principle, when they could. Later they abandoned those 'principles' and joined an anti-socialist government of capitalists and Stalinists!

In Russia the anarchists were against the state, except their own mini-state they created, a gangster state (with conscription) which robbed trains etc. A gangster-peasant state which had no interest in the workers in the cities. Anarchists fought on both sides, in effect, fighting with the Reds and against them. They never managed to make up their minds who's side they were on, the socialists/workers or the capitalists.

They say the workers state led to the Stalinist one.

Bull shinsen.

Without a workers state here's what would have happened.

The Whites massacre the Reds and reinstate capitalism.

The workers state degenerated because of the impossibility of socialism in a backward country in isolation. No amount of pipe-dreaming by anarchists would change that.

You talk about violence but the anarchists were into terrorism. Lenin's brother was one, and was executed for trying to assassinate the Tsar. I assume you know that? This is maybe why Lenin was so on the ball, he understood from first hand experience ho futile the anarchist line was, it got his brother killed.

Trotsky spent years in jail arguing with the anarchist terrorists, from a young age. Again, he understood:

"All Marxists in Russia began in the historic fight against terrorism".

 

"The Communists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing social conditions. Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
Working Men of All Countries, Unite! "

Communist Manifesto

 

What about this then?

V. I. Lenin
Extraordinary Fourth All-Russia Congress Of Soviets[1]
March 14-16, 1918
"the Congress was attended by 1,232 delegates with a vote; they included 795 Bolsheviks, 283 Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, 25 Socialist-Revolutionaries of the Centre, 21 Mensheviks, and 11 Menshevik-Internationalists."
http://www.marx.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/mar/13.htm

no source, not exactly convincing. Support that they barred non-Bolsheviks from soviets. Bear in mind there was a civil war going on.

As for Tambov and Kronstadt, do a summary of what you think the main points are.

The Cadets were helping the French, US, Japanese and British invading armies to overthrow the R.S.F.S.R. The SR's tried to sabotage the peace deal with Germany, they walked out of government. They assassinated the German ambassador. Millions of lives were at stake.

They established themselves as a government that represented the masses.

there were no other socialist groups, except people like the Workers Opposition, which supported the Bolshevik line on Kronstadt.
The Mensheviks wanted to go back to capitalism.

 

Ah yes, the age old idiot tome that communism was never properly attempted.

But alas, we live in a REAL world where REAL ambitious people use trite talking points to promote their own agendas.....what a shocker eh?

 

It was properly attempted in Russia, and the people who attempted it knew that it would fail if Russia was not backed up by several advanced countries going socialist. The German revolution was crushed by 30,000 troops and the Hungarian one was crushed by Romanian troops. After 1924, Russia's chances were waning. Lenin died, Trotsky got ill, and Stalin was in a position to abuse his 'authority' (he actually had little, but a lot of contacts) and become the leader of the degeneration of the revolution, or to put it another way, leader of a political counter-revolution based on the middle class.

 

The Soviet Union was for authoritarian socialism.
It was antithetical democratic socialism (Orwell) or anarcho-socialism (Chomsky).

It could be argued that the Soviets were anti-communist as they seemed to support authoritarian socialism with no desire to move on to the final stage of communism (some argue that Lenin would have if he lived longer, but who knows?). Also Marx called for socialism to lead to a "dictatorship of the proletariat," which basically means a socialist democracy (under communism, all are assumed to be proletariat-- therefore a dictatorship-- as the term was used then-- of the proletariat is absolute rule by the people).
But still, authoritarian socialism is a form of socialism.

The USSR was anti-democratic and possibly anti-communist, but not anti-socialist.

 

The Soviet Union was not communist. Not even remotely stateless. At no time was an attempt made to make it stateless. Your post is irrelevant to the reality of things.

 

Love how you say soviet union was authoritarian and in the next sentence it was anarcho-socialism

 

I said the exact opposite, so I guess you don't have much to love about it.

 

Love it.

 

Hmm. You're in the right ball park, but still wrong. Have you read all the thread?

Socialism and communism are really the same thing as far as Marxists are concerned. Communism was just the name for the end goal of socialism. Russia never even got as far as socialism.

Lenin said they were nowhere near socialism, and they would not achieve it

a. in their lifetimes, and

b. without the help of advanced countries establishing socialism.

When this failed to happen, socialism was all but impossible, so an inevitable counter-revolution began. But instead of establishing capitalism, it occurred from within, like a cancer. The bureaucrats were not socialists, but they joined the party for career purposes. Lenin kicked loads out but the joined again after he died. Trotsky wrote of the dangers of bureaucratism.

Marxism defines socialism as democratic. A million times more democratic than capitalism, as Lenin said. Russia was democratic in 1918 before the civil war kicked in.

Stalin killed thousands of socialists in purges in the 1930s. It was not a form of socialism, it was a degenerated workers state.

 

Which person will work harder for his cause? someone working for reciprocal altruism or someone
working for self interest? no matter how you cut it, we care more for our own survival then for
others, because it is a survival mode we all have in us.

So you just lost with your hair brain Chomsky summation.


...

 

This criticism also reminds us of where capitalism's flaws are.
Yes, people work harder for individual goods, but if those individual goods carry the opportunity cost of public goods or, worse, are antithetical to public goods, what good is that?

Our goal should not be for people to work harder. It should be for institutions to work more effectively to serve people.

So while communism glosses over some of the realities of human nature, capitalism glosses over humanity.
That's why modern liberalism is more about making capitalism work for all rather than just the few, tweaking the system so that self-iterested, rational behavior benefits the collective... rather than just assuming it will in the current system.

Whatever flaws I find in communism, at least I recognize a humanist goal to make institutions work for people.
No matter how much liberty-talk I hear from conservatives and their semi-libertarian allies, all I see is an ideology that keeps asking how it can make individuals work harder for sacred institutions.

 

Bravo....... someone who "gets" it. ^^

 

We are painfully aware of capitalisms flaws; but are progressive liberals aware of Socialist flaws.

The opportunity cost for individual demand goods is far lower and more efficiently produced in a Capitalist society than in a progressive liberal society where centralized “deciders” make the decisions for you.

That is what occurs in a Capitalist system. Under the progressive liberal system it is nothing more than a misuse of scarce resources based on feel good emotional pabulum and the “deciders” goals and objectives which are typically counter to what the individuals need and want.

Capitalism celebrates humanity by allowing humans to pursue their self interests and to be all they wish to be while protected by a Government with laws and a military.

Once again you ignore the “deciders” in the equation who are smarter than everyone else and think they know best what is good for you rather than YOU making that decision for yourself. It doesn’t work and has been tried over and over and over again and historically shown to be a failure. Why is it liberals can never learn from their ideological failures?

There is nothing humanist in Communism. It abuses its citizens, is forced to pen them in and control their access to the outside, requires/demands the exploitation of its environments and citizens and typically leads to widespread shortages of necessities.

BUT if this is the case, you are only hearing what your biased mind wants you to hear and not seeing the forest for the trees.


The disdain liberals have for liberty is hardly surprising as they will always support a strong central authority with “deciders” making most of our decisions for us; but this ironically only works in the minds of progressive liberals if THEIR “deciders” are in charge. Thank you for illustrating it once more lest we forget what liberals truly disdain; individual choice and competition.


Progressive liberals might want to ask why most of the human misery in the world resides in communist societies. They might want to review the well-intentioned failures of their ideology and why the trillions we have spent over the decades has not eliminated poverty. They might want to ask themselves when street people are taken off the street and placed into institutions or housing they usually end up back on the streets.

I think Progressive liberals are the most arrogant selfish and ignorant people who walk the earth based on the fact that their actions suggest that they are more interested in what makes them feel good about themselves than they are about humanity and truly helping individuals.

 

Once Lenin and Stalin took over, the system became remarkably similar to feudalism.

 

Unfortunately it is you who is ignoring the deciders.
Remember the Rush lyric, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice"?

If the government does not make decisions about the macro-economy, then decisions about the macro-economy are made by a mish-mash of individuals acting without any incentive to think about the macro-economy.

If the economy explodes because of the misuse of financial products for personal gain, a choice has been made for you.
If large corporations are able to ignore quality of life, pollute all they want, mistreat workers, a decision has been made for you.
If you are left to your own non-existent devices when you hit bottom, a decision has been made for you.
If your retirement savings are destroyed by an economic disaster, a decision has been made for you.

There is no magical world where you just make decisions for yourself, unaffected by the decisions of others. The problem with the fiscal right is that they tend to be in positions where they are more protected (or think they are) from decisions made by others... but they see taxes that keep the rest safe and regulations that prevent their decisions from hurting others as a nuissance. And they conflate nuissance with OH MY GOD LOST ALL MY FREEDOM GONNA DIE SOCIALISM AAAARRRRGH!!!!

Decisions are made whether the government makes them or not.
I'd rather see that decisions are made by people who attempt to figure out the problems and are accountable to all groups, as flawed as they may be, then see decisions made by a chaotic mish-mash of people who aren't even looking at the big picture and don't care about the rights of others if they get in the way of their ambition.
An imperfect system beats chaos.

I prefer for the asylum to be run by people we hire to run it, not by the biggest and baddest of the lunatics.

 

reciprocal altruism is how we evolved as humans and it is done in self interest. It is vital to the survival of hunter-gatherers. We only survived and evolved through cooperation and communal action, and reciprocal altruism. Thats whats in our genes. Class based selfishness only emerged very recently, around 7,000 years ago. If you think we survived by being selfish you havent thought about this much.

 

what realities does communism gloss over and what evidence do you have to support?

How is liberalism gonna make capitalism work for all and what evidence do you have to support this?

 

what are socialisms flaws

what is a progressive liberal society?

in your dreams. How do you explain that fact that half the people in the world live on less than $3 per day and that inequality is increasing in America?

clearly you have no idea what communism is. Communism is the exact opposite of what you just said. Communism cannot even begin to form until there is no shortages. Communism exploits nobody. It abuses nobody. It pens nobody in, it stops them going nowhere. Where did you get such ideas from? Try reading some basic Marx and Engels.

eg

"Estranged labor turns thus:

(3) Man’s species-being, both nature and his spiritual species-property, into a being alien to him, into a means of his individual existence. It estranges from man his own body, as well as external nature and his spiritual aspect, his human aspect.

(4) An immediate consequence of the fact that man is estranged from the product of his labor, from his life activity, from his species-being, is the estrangement of man from man. When man confronts himself, he confronts the other man. What applies to a man’s relation to his work, to the product of his labor and to himself, also holds of a man’s relation to the other man, and to the other man’s labor and object of labor.

In fact, the proposition that man’s species-nature is estranged from him means that one man is estranged from the other, as each of them is from man’s essential nature. "

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm

(Marx's theory of alienation).

what communist societies?

I see no communist societies, never have done. Are they hiding?

 

The fact that people are more motivated by rational choice affecting themselves than by rational choices affecting the collective.

The way to get around this, human nature-wise, is to have smaller groups make most decisions.
Theoretically I guess what the Soviets were trying to do is have these smaller groups managed by a top-down federation to avoid the obvious problem of small groups (they will compete against one another by any means necessary when their own resources are scarce).
Basically the same principle as federalism... and equally stuck in the agrarian times.

How do you really keep all these small groups focused together? How do you continually break them up as they grow too big to act as communities?

These are the same problems facing liberal democracy.
But liberal democracy has another tool available: stop trying to create communities and focus on giving individuals incentive. That way you also get more labor mobility, more freedom (tight communities, communists and conservatives alike seem to think they're "free." In reality, if you are not fully in line with them, nothing can be more oppressive. Being dependent on a small community is far more restricting than being interdependent with a huge, anonymous network).

Then we have the whole revolution thing and historical dialectism... That's where Marx seemed to jump from sociologist to ideologue.
The argument is deterministic and idealistic. And history proved it wrong by the creation of liberal mechanisms that decreased the tension between rich and poor.

But even if not, why is it assumed the battle between proletariat and bourgesie is the final big one?

It's worked so far. Neither communism nor laissez faire capitalism has proved sustainable.
And liberalism is all about adapting to change and new information.

I believe at some point, capitalism may be obsolete. There will come a time when the further utility of competition will be fully outweighed by the costs of it. There will come a time when our technological progress effectively levels off and the lack of work available will make any further job creation nothing more than work for the sake of work.
Then capitalism won't make sense anymore.

If any nations survive to see that day in tact, it will be the liberal ones. Because they put adaptation over dogmatic principles.

 

Are they though? To some degree maybe, but not exclusively. We are very collective-minded. People pay their taxes and some of what that goes towards they may never benefit from, or they may even see as a waste, but they may get disproportionate benefits in other areas. Me, I get a lot from the NHS, more than I could afford if I had to pay for it. Most people are happy to do their recycling etc because they understand the need, for the benefit of society. Most people dont commit crimes simply because they think it's wrong. So I dont know how much more people are affected by choices that affect them directly.

But socialism would benefit most people, so why would they not support it?

I'm not sure how much socialism is like that. You have soviets to make local decisions, but whether it's considered a federation I dunno. Socialism is not really managed top down, I wouldnt say that. There has to be central decision making, but the decision makers would be elected from the bottom up.

What incentive do individuals have in a liberal democracy? When you say liberal democracy I assume you mean a bourgeois democracy. What freedom do people have?

Not sure what you mean. Yes he was practical and did what he could to help the cause of the working class. His prediction of revolution was proved right in 1871 in Paris.

I think you mean historical materialism. Or in those days what they called the materialist view of history. But yes, it was employing dialectics. What this means is that it was not just plain materialism, it was a mixture, an interaction, between the subjective and objective. This comes out very clearly in all the best Marxist writing. Essentially it represents the best of materialism combined with dialectics, giving a fully rounded, holistic, comprehensive view which takes all factors into account.

So, history is driven by the material (production) and the subjective (great leaders).

It is neither. Marx was not deterministic about it at all. And as for idealistic, it was the opposite as I just explained. Marx was a materialist and fought long battles against idealism starting in his youth as a Young Hegellian. He used Hegel's dialectics, but rejected his idealism. Idealism is a major strand of philosophy opposed to the other major strand - materialism. Materialism says that our ideas, our consciousness, is rooted in the material world, we are products of nature.

How much has the tension been decreased? A quarter of the world's population want to scrap capitalism. Half say it needs regulation and reform. Only 11% say it works well and more regulation will make it less efficient. 67% want governments to play a greater role in redistributing wealth, compared to 16% who want them to play a less active role in that. Even in America the figure is 59% for redistribution.



BBC global poll
9 November 2009
Wide Dissatisfaction with Capitalism —
Twenty Years after Fall of Berlin Wall

well, if there are no classes, what battle can take place?

communism has never existed

is capitalism not obsolete now? And what comes after it? Chaos?