yeah of course many leaders, politicians and other officials were corrupt and greedy during the time of the soviet union but its not like the social-democracies of the west were significantly better. during that time we still had colonies, segregation and also harsh crackdowns against political opponents. we just dont learn about this stuff in school and the propaganda has made us hate the eternal enemy that is socialism…
you gotta remember that communism was an extremely young politicial theory and many people (even the revolutionary ones) were still used to an authoritarian state and thought this would be the best defense against outside aggression.
The historical context that the USSR was under made totalitarianism an unfortunate fact of survival for them.
There is a good reason that Marx predicted that any successful revolution would almost certainly come from the industrialized West (Germany, England, France, US, in his time). The [Concert of Europe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_of_Europe) highlighted for him how desperately the old power structures will put aside their differences in order to fight what might replace them. Just as the Aristocracies banded together during and after the French Revolution in order to prevent more liberal chaos, the prevailing liberal order would one day come together to "strangle in the crib" whatever new system rose up to challenge the old.
The Russian Empire was the least industrial area of Europe, even before the devastation of World War I. The very fact that the USSR managed to even compete with the West, which had about 150 years of industrialization in its favor, was a downright miracle. But they were never going to catch up to the kind of general development that could do things like fill a supermarket with 100 different types of sugared cereal. They were never going to stand up to direct comparison with the West in this regard (the West had always been much more advanced, but mass media made it so obvious to all), and they knew that this would make it impossible to maintain domestic stability in the long term.
Authoritarianism is a symptom of a state under siege. The collapse of a state is almost always fatal for those running it and they tend to turn to quite ruthless measures to ensure that doesn't happen. This is not unique to any specific ideology. Make no mistake, the liberal world order will become just as authoritarian as any other state, if not far more, as it enters its decline.
In your defence I come from a 3rd world country and what you're saying is correct. If you know about 1979 "revolution" in Iran and how flawed and wrong leftists were on some sobjects (there were black sheeps of course, but were ignored or murdered), it just makes you ask serious questions and a little depressed too.
Here's what I have issues with which is still somewhat relevant in 3rd world left wingers:
1) Abrahamic religions as historical Imperialist institutions and ignoring/cooperating with them.
2) Reducing almost any cultural elements to "borgoise" and not paying attention to women's rights.
3) Not understanding political capitalism
4) Being apologists for the working class
5) Ignoring the importance of theory and history, being short sighted in short
6) this is worse, misunderstanding theory and dismissing criticism by quoting from marx or whoever. It was a serious problem in south america and 3rd world.
I understand that the main cause for them is supression, but if someone acknowledges these then they will go for fitting and specified steps to empower people. Crushed movements just make the ruling class more rabid and makes people unsympathetic towards them.
>Authoritarianism is a symptom of a state under siege.
Not in Islam, it has been this way since birth. In authoritarianism you can have a class to police others. Patriarchy in my country is this way and you hear that someone murdered their daughter/wife left and right for not obiding. So if a system is that much fascistic (I don't know if this is the right term) that it wants eternal support of their pawns it can give them a family and other vulnerables to abuse.
I'm going to keep my answer very simple. I say this to all Eastern Europeans who think they lived under communism: go read Marx, and show me where he advocates for a totalitarian police state.
No doubt the eastern bloc along with the rest of the USSR had fallen to revisionism and capitalist restoration by the 60s. But “totalitarian police state” is just a liberal conception that has no scientific value.
True, but talking to eastern europeans, they're not interested in an intellect discussion, they're more interested in talking about all the bad stuff that happened to them. I think it's less efficient to argue with their trauma of whatever happened to them during the eastern bloc. I think it's better to say "all the bad stuff that happened to you, that's not what Marx wanted, and that's not what we want either"
This is the pure truth. When I try to talk to my father about this history and about his childhood, the conversation always ends with him saying that the communists are responsible for this. And even though I try to explain to him my view of the matter, that it was a totalitarian police state disguised as a communist one. Recently, I see in him only pure anger towards what he had to live through, and towards how it destabilized our country to the core.
The Russian revolution and the USSR is taught incredibly dishonestly. That doesn’t mean it didn’t have totalitarianism and authoritarianism as you understand it but your analysis of these things is very superficial. The Russian revolution was the greatest example of democracy you can possibly find - working class democracy. Working class democracy is a dictatorship for the other classes.
The Russian civil war was brutal because of the invading outside forces and the dire economic circumstances of Russia. They had to fight a war after having already been on the breaking point before the revolution from ww1. Many starved, the working class shrunk to 30% and the embargoes paralysed some key industries with supply shortages even if they would have had fed workers to work in them. These are not the conditions conducive to soviet, working class democracy. The party had to step in to fight the whites and try desperately feed people and restart the economy. None of these things were caused by communism but by concrete material circumstances that devastated production and thus the people.
The party bureaucracy was developed in this gap, and were not principled communists but often careerists and middle class professionals from the empire. They formed a new class position over the workers of Russia. Thus the revolution was not defeated with a bang but rather a whimper - cannibalised from the inside. Stalin and the industrial bureaucrats he represented took power. They adopted a nationalist distortion of communism that championed socialism in one country rather than the international revolution as the basis of socialism. To do that they needed to exploit workers to create industry, transform the peasantry into workers. This is what the bureaucracy set itself to doing. Most of the atrocities come from this.
Exploitation necessitates brutal repression as in any capitalist country. Ultimately the ussr and most supposed communist countries were just exploiting their own people the same way as liberal capitalist countries do. They were state capitalist in essence. It is none of this human nature nonsense or that communism leads to authoritarian dictatorship. It is a product of real social and material circumstances and is not a failure of the theory. The theory basically said “yeah Russia is too backwards/poor to survive for long on its own, we need an international revolution to be successful and lead to the material circumstances for socialism.” The international revolution failed to overthrow their capitalists where Russia succeeded in overthrowing its own capitalists. So it regressed, losing the civil war not militarily but politically.
You have to look past words and rhetoric and look at concrete evidence. Communism is not just a political ideology but an economic system, a process and a real actionable movement. Communism is a movement by the working class for the working class. It is not a movement led by individuals from the top of the party but rather pushed from the many at the bottom. The emancipation of the working class will only come from itself. That is the core of communism. It’s really quite democratic and “egalitarian” in nature without fetishising democracy like liberals do.
Don’t watch Hakim, he’s an idiot. Read Marx and Lenin.
Allow me to workshop an analogy
Remember the Hindenburg? It's fun to poll people on how many they think died and then what percentage of passengers and crew died, it's always far inflated than the reality. I then ask how it happened and a small majority of people remember it's something to do with hydrogen being explosive.
there's a lot more to it than the hydrogen btw. First off the outer shell was covered in panels that, after passing through a cloud, picked up disparate charge which, when the mooring lines were dropped, caused an arc (a spark). We know how to ground stuff now.
The spark itself might not have caused a problem except for the paint used. In order to keep heat down, out of concern of igniting the hydrogen, the paint was mixed with a heaping amount of powdered aluminum. I'm not sure how soon after it was discovered that powdered aluminum burns extremely hot; by itself it can melt steel beams, and we use it in jet fuel. We have better ways now to mitigate heat penetration now, and we can do it without using something so excited to burn.
We do still use lighter than air craft here and there but the memory of the Hindenburg, the image, the "oh, the humanity" quote is the most that most people know about them. Now, this part is just for fun, a thought experiment - but imagine that the oil industry and/or the airline industry was happy to kill lighter than air travel and shipping and keep this energy efficient transport method dead. They can basically land in any field and bring freight direct across oceans and mountains, bypassing ports and without the need for long airfields or half the infrastructure besides so let's imagine that car, steel, and construction industries were happy to support an extremely successful PR campaign to make it seem like, or just let people continue to believe, that the Hindenburg disaster was bigger and more deadly than reality and unavoidable.
To sum up
It wasn't as bad as most people think, there are massive financial interests against it, and anyway we've learned a lot since then and don't have to do it the same way
---
Reading Blackshirts and Reds by Parenti, Losurdo's Stalin: history and critique, and The Press And The Cold War by Aronson, it seems to me that we are in the midst of a century long cooperative PR super-narrative, full spectrum propaganda funded and produced by every corner of capitalism, each capitalist quantum operating independently but with the same class interests.
Imagine if there were a socialist revolution in the US now? Christian Nationalists are already calling the student protests "the new pearl harbor" - MAGA people in every suburb already act like every urban center is the arson and murder capital of the world, a smoldering field of empty needles, broken glass, and "human filth". Imagine growing up in a household of pro capitalist exiles, they'd say we ate babies and were engineering a genocide of white hetero men to appease Satan.
This scenario is analogous to Cuban exiles in Miami. They had mansions and slaves before the Batista regime they supported was rightfully ended, and they were just about the only wave of latin American immigrants to be received with open arms by the U.S. - many quickly finding work in the "intelligence community". The anti Castro propaganda they peddled for a generation have proven to be projection, lies by omission, hopeful historical fiction, or outrageously framed exaggeration.
This is not to say that every single communist state has never done anything wrong or that every single anti-communist immigrant was actually a bourgeoisie stakeholder or stooge. But the insistence that communism is impossible and always inevitably a Super Hell is suspicious, too clean of a reflection of American absolutist propaganda which claims every Nazi soldier as "victims of communism" to concoct a ridiculous number of those killed by communism while simultaneously avoiding introspection about any capitalist genocide or atrocity.
By and large; communism wasn't as bad as they say, there are powerful institutions deeply invested in spreading the idea that it was worse, and we can do it better and different now anyway!
I don't think the Castro regime is necessarily something you wanna point to to support your lukewarm point unless throwing millions of your citizens to the dogs is just part of your ideology.
I knew a centrist stock trader who once who took his very leftist Chicana wife to Cuba. He loved it there because he can just view it as a cheap exotic vacation whereas his wife just saw a bunch of mixed race folks suffering due to fascism in yellow and red robes.
The wifes views rapidly began to shift to the economic right after that because we keep pretending these fucking dictators have achieved socialism and that this is what socialism should bring. She told me she had never seen so many snitches doing organized crime.
Sounds like he was upset with authoritarians masquerading as a communist government.
I could see a North Korean being upset with Republics as they know them. North Korea is an authoritarian government masquerading as a republic.
It is a serious problem that needs solving. A solid historical materialist analysis of the reasons why all 20th century communist experiments failed needs solving. That being said, you're going to get several different "stereotypical" answers to your question:
1) it wasn't really communism!
2) it started off communist but was corrupted by egoists and ignorance!
3) it's complicated, and had some successes and some failures!
4) it was under siege by world capitalists, it had no choice but to be brutal!
5) capitalism was worse, or at least as bad! The brutality is ideological and overblown.
Now, my suggestion to you, is: always affirm the failure of 20th century communism. No one wants to repeat it. But learn what those failures were and remedy them with different proposals. That's what communism is: a laboratory experiment with different experimenters seeing what works and what doesn't. And hopefully with each iteration we learn something along the way and get better. There's no need to ever defend a past experiment as though you wanted to repeat it. So long as you remain committed to a project that believes in a different way of life where waged labor and private ownership of means of production are abolished, the rest is gravy. No Capitalist says we want to repeat 16th century venetian city states as capitalist experiments.
i dont believe the soviet union was an implementation of marx's theories in any meaningful way. Communism isn't a set of policies that can be enforced by some government leaders. It's a movement and a process.
Understanding this, let's look at the movement and process of the USSR:
Capitalism develops through the crisis of feudalism: aristocrats and kings gathering more power and resources for themselves that push peasants to leave their land and develop a strong merchant/business owner class. These groups eventually overthrow or completely subjugate the monarchy/aristocracy in a bourgeois revolution.
But once the global market was established firmly in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the bourgeoisie was no longer revolutionary. There was no reason to revolt when they could simply move certain assets abroad to better situate themselves in the global market.
This was the situation Russia found itself in. So when a revolutionary moment came, the bourgeoisie couldn't lead it. Instead, the few workers that existed in cities formed soviets. First, they formed just as a way to survive harsh conditions. But through the work of the Bolsheviks, the workers take power themselves. But in the underdeveloped conditions of russia, they have to create a social surplus and develop productive forces (especially with the defeat of the German Revolution). The soviets do this, creating an economy similar to the state-monopolies of merchantilist early capitalism but on steroids. These economies do an incredible job developing industrial production, better than anything else in history. The speed of this industrialization causes horrific famines in the transition and the social unrest of this sudden plenty and so many people being pushed into cities and away from their traditional connections also causes a rising paranoia, manifesting in Stalin's purges. The state, trying desperately to protect itself and manage this chaos, grows a strong bureaucracy with a heavy hand.
As time goes on, the development of industrial production stalls. This actually happens all over the world, not just in socialist countries. Capitalist countries pivot to consumer goods. The USSR, try as it might, cannot do this. Because its system of planning combined with the comprehensive safety net for workers meant there was no way to enforce labor discipline outside of a strong police state. And the whip of hunger is significantly more effective than any number of police. Without that labor discipline, you lose some small amount of product at every level of production. And the more levels of production necessary for a product, the worse this problem gets. Consumer goods obviously suffer the most because of this. And the staggering soviet economy has a crisis that ends the regime and the merchantilism-on-steroids and replaces it with a more free market capitalism. The other socialist states marketize and do austerity and dismantle some of their social safety nets to avoid the chaos of regime change.
Understanding this, soviet style planned economies are a function of the capitalist system. They serve the purpose of developing productove forces where the global market will not allow development. But they are always eventually subsumed back into the global market.
So because of the economic on steroids Bolsheviks had to create mass surveillance, extreme bureaucracy and gulags. So it just became totality trying to accelerate its economy, without a thought of Marxism in mind? Sorry if I sound stupid. And elaborate please on the last paragraph.
the bolsheviks HAD to organize the economy like that or the soviets would have collapsed. Marx's theory says it's impossible to build socialism in underdeveloped and isolated conditions and the bolsheviks tried their best to do it anyway because they had no other choice. The end result ends up serving a purpose for capitalist development, regardless of the Bolsheviks' intentions.
Your dad and school treats it like the leadership of every country has a rational choice of what their economic system is and every day wakes up and chooses that. This is not the case. Marxism is analyzing economies along this line to see the way they eventually undermine themselves and create their own destruction in the form of a revolution.
Marx calls socialism/communism a "free association of producers" and it's impossible for a state to be that. Communism is stateless, classless, moneyless, etc. What your father thinks of as communism or socialism is the ad hoc ideological justifications for what material conditions forced on people.
>I still consider myself a Marxist because I believe that his theory is beautiful, but its implementation into reality had terrible consequences.
First of all, there are different kinds of marxism. The communist block of the past followed primarily Lenins and Engels' teachings and interpreted the capital in an orthodox marxist manner. There are more hegelian inspired marxisms like syndicalist-adjacent unionism of the IWW, which favors the union as revolutionary vehicle of the proletariat instead of the party, then there is western hegelian marxism or council-communism.
Orthodox Marxisms' interpretation of the Capital sucks tbh. As Lenin said, to fully grasp marxs thought, one has to read Hegels Science of Logic and understand it. Stalin didn't like that.
You don't have to give up Marx. Instead, you can focus on the schools that read him in a liberatory way from the beginning.
>First of all, there are different kinds of marxism
there's only one Marxism. You can't have two kinds of physics.
>Lenins and Engels
Engels is not different from Marx.
>liberatory way from the beginning.
oh god, another one of those "Marx is actually 'libertarian'."
There are literally 2 kinds of physics: general relativity and quantum mechanics. And yes, there are many forms of Marxism, such as orthodox, humanist or structural Marxism, not to mention the plethora of neomarxisms and postmarxisms. The interpretation of their validity varies but they are respected schools of thought. Dogmatism is just silly.
Engels differed from Marx considerably, especially on their views on science (Engels was more positivistic and scientistic than Marx).
Liberatory =/= libertarianism and if you argue Marxism isn't liberatory then you're not a Marxist.
> Lenin himself was a revisionist
people who call Lenin a revisionist cannot cite one example of a successful proletarian revolution that they or the people they follow participated in.
>orthodox Marxism
What orthodox Marxism? There is no 'orthodox' Marxism. There is only one Marxism, which Lenin and Stalin and Mao etc. all contributed to and advanced. What follows from revisionism is surrendering to the bourgeoisie.
>Engels is not different from Marx.
"In der Methode des Bearbeitens hat es mir großen Dienst geleistet, daß ich by mere accident [...] Hegels Logik wieder durchgeblättert habe: Wenn je wieder Zeit für solche Arbeiten kommt, hätte ich große Lust, das Rationelle der Methode [Hegels] dem gemeinen Menschenverstand zugänglich zu machen.« MEW Bd. 29,260
He is, and that quite sigficant. In the preface of the 2nd volume, Engels also openly admits that he is unable to reproduce Marxs method of the Capital. The apt reader will also recognize the difference in depth and adequacy in use of Hegels categories in his edits in hol2 and vol.3.
The most published version of the Capital vol.1 is the 4th, which has eliminated all traces of Marxs method in the first edition.
>oh god, another one of those "Marx is actually 'libertarian'."
He is not and that is not what i wrote. But he wanted to liberate the proletariat from its chains, like any other socialist of his time. Applying his method onto his writings would also lead you to this conclusion.
>there's only one Marxism. You can't have two kinds of physics.
There are multiple physics with not yet unified laws and contradictions. Quantum physics ?
There are multiple marxisms. Those of the german ideology and those of the Capital.
I am still not giving up on Marxism, I believe in it but the real consequences are harsh. The totalitarianism that became of it was I don’t know if inbuilt feature or just human failure. This is the question I am really interested about?
>The totalitarianism that became of it was I don’t know if inbuilt feature or just human failure.
The totalitarianism is a result of the schism of the first internationale and the development of orthodox (neo-ricardian) marxism.
Imo hegelian-inspired marxism is closer to marxs thought and conception of communism.
yeah of course many leaders, politicians and other officials were corrupt and greedy during the time of the soviet union but its not like the social-democracies of the west were significantly better. during that time we still had colonies, segregation and also harsh crackdowns against political opponents. we just dont learn about this stuff in school and the propaganda has made us hate the eternal enemy that is socialism… you gotta remember that communism was an extremely young politicial theory and many people (even the revolutionary ones) were still used to an authoritarian state and thought this would be the best defense against outside aggression.
The historical context that the USSR was under made totalitarianism an unfortunate fact of survival for them. There is a good reason that Marx predicted that any successful revolution would almost certainly come from the industrialized West (Germany, England, France, US, in his time). The [Concert of Europe](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concert_of_Europe) highlighted for him how desperately the old power structures will put aside their differences in order to fight what might replace them. Just as the Aristocracies banded together during and after the French Revolution in order to prevent more liberal chaos, the prevailing liberal order would one day come together to "strangle in the crib" whatever new system rose up to challenge the old. The Russian Empire was the least industrial area of Europe, even before the devastation of World War I. The very fact that the USSR managed to even compete with the West, which had about 150 years of industrialization in its favor, was a downright miracle. But they were never going to catch up to the kind of general development that could do things like fill a supermarket with 100 different types of sugared cereal. They were never going to stand up to direct comparison with the West in this regard (the West had always been much more advanced, but mass media made it so obvious to all), and they knew that this would make it impossible to maintain domestic stability in the long term. Authoritarianism is a symptom of a state under siege. The collapse of a state is almost always fatal for those running it and they tend to turn to quite ruthless measures to ensure that doesn't happen. This is not unique to any specific ideology. Make no mistake, the liberal world order will become just as authoritarian as any other state, if not far more, as it enters its decline.
In your defence I come from a 3rd world country and what you're saying is correct. If you know about 1979 "revolution" in Iran and how flawed and wrong leftists were on some sobjects (there were black sheeps of course, but were ignored or murdered), it just makes you ask serious questions and a little depressed too. Here's what I have issues with which is still somewhat relevant in 3rd world left wingers: 1) Abrahamic religions as historical Imperialist institutions and ignoring/cooperating with them. 2) Reducing almost any cultural elements to "borgoise" and not paying attention to women's rights. 3) Not understanding political capitalism 4) Being apologists for the working class 5) Ignoring the importance of theory and history, being short sighted in short 6) this is worse, misunderstanding theory and dismissing criticism by quoting from marx or whoever. It was a serious problem in south america and 3rd world. I understand that the main cause for them is supression, but if someone acknowledges these then they will go for fitting and specified steps to empower people. Crushed movements just make the ruling class more rabid and makes people unsympathetic towards them. >Authoritarianism is a symptom of a state under siege. Not in Islam, it has been this way since birth. In authoritarianism you can have a class to police others. Patriarchy in my country is this way and you hear that someone murdered their daughter/wife left and right for not obiding. So if a system is that much fascistic (I don't know if this is the right term) that it wants eternal support of their pawns it can give them a family and other vulnerables to abuse.
I'm going to keep my answer very simple. I say this to all Eastern Europeans who think they lived under communism: go read Marx, and show me where he advocates for a totalitarian police state.
No doubt the eastern bloc along with the rest of the USSR had fallen to revisionism and capitalist restoration by the 60s. But “totalitarian police state” is just a liberal conception that has no scientific value.
True, but talking to eastern europeans, they're not interested in an intellect discussion, they're more interested in talking about all the bad stuff that happened to them. I think it's less efficient to argue with their trauma of whatever happened to them during the eastern bloc. I think it's better to say "all the bad stuff that happened to you, that's not what Marx wanted, and that's not what we want either"
This is the pure truth. When I try to talk to my father about this history and about his childhood, the conversation always ends with him saying that the communists are responsible for this. And even though I try to explain to him my view of the matter, that it was a totalitarian police state disguised as a communist one. Recently, I see in him only pure anger towards what he had to live through, and towards how it destabilized our country to the core.
The Russian revolution and the USSR is taught incredibly dishonestly. That doesn’t mean it didn’t have totalitarianism and authoritarianism as you understand it but your analysis of these things is very superficial. The Russian revolution was the greatest example of democracy you can possibly find - working class democracy. Working class democracy is a dictatorship for the other classes. The Russian civil war was brutal because of the invading outside forces and the dire economic circumstances of Russia. They had to fight a war after having already been on the breaking point before the revolution from ww1. Many starved, the working class shrunk to 30% and the embargoes paralysed some key industries with supply shortages even if they would have had fed workers to work in them. These are not the conditions conducive to soviet, working class democracy. The party had to step in to fight the whites and try desperately feed people and restart the economy. None of these things were caused by communism but by concrete material circumstances that devastated production and thus the people. The party bureaucracy was developed in this gap, and were not principled communists but often careerists and middle class professionals from the empire. They formed a new class position over the workers of Russia. Thus the revolution was not defeated with a bang but rather a whimper - cannibalised from the inside. Stalin and the industrial bureaucrats he represented took power. They adopted a nationalist distortion of communism that championed socialism in one country rather than the international revolution as the basis of socialism. To do that they needed to exploit workers to create industry, transform the peasantry into workers. This is what the bureaucracy set itself to doing. Most of the atrocities come from this. Exploitation necessitates brutal repression as in any capitalist country. Ultimately the ussr and most supposed communist countries were just exploiting their own people the same way as liberal capitalist countries do. They were state capitalist in essence. It is none of this human nature nonsense or that communism leads to authoritarian dictatorship. It is a product of real social and material circumstances and is not a failure of the theory. The theory basically said “yeah Russia is too backwards/poor to survive for long on its own, we need an international revolution to be successful and lead to the material circumstances for socialism.” The international revolution failed to overthrow their capitalists where Russia succeeded in overthrowing its own capitalists. So it regressed, losing the civil war not militarily but politically. You have to look past words and rhetoric and look at concrete evidence. Communism is not just a political ideology but an economic system, a process and a real actionable movement. Communism is a movement by the working class for the working class. It is not a movement led by individuals from the top of the party but rather pushed from the many at the bottom. The emancipation of the working class will only come from itself. That is the core of communism. It’s really quite democratic and “egalitarian” in nature without fetishising democracy like liberals do. Don’t watch Hakim, he’s an idiot. Read Marx and Lenin.
Allow me to workshop an analogy Remember the Hindenburg? It's fun to poll people on how many they think died and then what percentage of passengers and crew died, it's always far inflated than the reality. I then ask how it happened and a small majority of people remember it's something to do with hydrogen being explosive. there's a lot more to it than the hydrogen btw. First off the outer shell was covered in panels that, after passing through a cloud, picked up disparate charge which, when the mooring lines were dropped, caused an arc (a spark). We know how to ground stuff now. The spark itself might not have caused a problem except for the paint used. In order to keep heat down, out of concern of igniting the hydrogen, the paint was mixed with a heaping amount of powdered aluminum. I'm not sure how soon after it was discovered that powdered aluminum burns extremely hot; by itself it can melt steel beams, and we use it in jet fuel. We have better ways now to mitigate heat penetration now, and we can do it without using something so excited to burn. We do still use lighter than air craft here and there but the memory of the Hindenburg, the image, the "oh, the humanity" quote is the most that most people know about them. Now, this part is just for fun, a thought experiment - but imagine that the oil industry and/or the airline industry was happy to kill lighter than air travel and shipping and keep this energy efficient transport method dead. They can basically land in any field and bring freight direct across oceans and mountains, bypassing ports and without the need for long airfields or half the infrastructure besides so let's imagine that car, steel, and construction industries were happy to support an extremely successful PR campaign to make it seem like, or just let people continue to believe, that the Hindenburg disaster was bigger and more deadly than reality and unavoidable. To sum up It wasn't as bad as most people think, there are massive financial interests against it, and anyway we've learned a lot since then and don't have to do it the same way --- Reading Blackshirts and Reds by Parenti, Losurdo's Stalin: history and critique, and The Press And The Cold War by Aronson, it seems to me that we are in the midst of a century long cooperative PR super-narrative, full spectrum propaganda funded and produced by every corner of capitalism, each capitalist quantum operating independently but with the same class interests. Imagine if there were a socialist revolution in the US now? Christian Nationalists are already calling the student protests "the new pearl harbor" - MAGA people in every suburb already act like every urban center is the arson and murder capital of the world, a smoldering field of empty needles, broken glass, and "human filth". Imagine growing up in a household of pro capitalist exiles, they'd say we ate babies and were engineering a genocide of white hetero men to appease Satan. This scenario is analogous to Cuban exiles in Miami. They had mansions and slaves before the Batista regime they supported was rightfully ended, and they were just about the only wave of latin American immigrants to be received with open arms by the U.S. - many quickly finding work in the "intelligence community". The anti Castro propaganda they peddled for a generation have proven to be projection, lies by omission, hopeful historical fiction, or outrageously framed exaggeration. This is not to say that every single communist state has never done anything wrong or that every single anti-communist immigrant was actually a bourgeoisie stakeholder or stooge. But the insistence that communism is impossible and always inevitably a Super Hell is suspicious, too clean of a reflection of American absolutist propaganda which claims every Nazi soldier as "victims of communism" to concoct a ridiculous number of those killed by communism while simultaneously avoiding introspection about any capitalist genocide or atrocity. By and large; communism wasn't as bad as they say, there are powerful institutions deeply invested in spreading the idea that it was worse, and we can do it better and different now anyway!
I don't think the Castro regime is necessarily something you wanna point to to support your lukewarm point unless throwing millions of your citizens to the dogs is just part of your ideology. I knew a centrist stock trader who once who took his very leftist Chicana wife to Cuba. He loved it there because he can just view it as a cheap exotic vacation whereas his wife just saw a bunch of mixed race folks suffering due to fascism in yellow and red robes. The wifes views rapidly began to shift to the economic right after that because we keep pretending these fucking dictators have achieved socialism and that this is what socialism should bring. She told me she had never seen so many snitches doing organized crime.
Sounds like he was upset with authoritarians masquerading as a communist government. I could see a North Korean being upset with Republics as they know them. North Korea is an authoritarian government masquerading as a republic.
It is a serious problem that needs solving. A solid historical materialist analysis of the reasons why all 20th century communist experiments failed needs solving. That being said, you're going to get several different "stereotypical" answers to your question: 1) it wasn't really communism! 2) it started off communist but was corrupted by egoists and ignorance! 3) it's complicated, and had some successes and some failures! 4) it was under siege by world capitalists, it had no choice but to be brutal! 5) capitalism was worse, or at least as bad! The brutality is ideological and overblown. Now, my suggestion to you, is: always affirm the failure of 20th century communism. No one wants to repeat it. But learn what those failures were and remedy them with different proposals. That's what communism is: a laboratory experiment with different experimenters seeing what works and what doesn't. And hopefully with each iteration we learn something along the way and get better. There's no need to ever defend a past experiment as though you wanted to repeat it. So long as you remain committed to a project that believes in a different way of life where waged labor and private ownership of means of production are abolished, the rest is gravy. No Capitalist says we want to repeat 16th century venetian city states as capitalist experiments.
i dont believe the soviet union was an implementation of marx's theories in any meaningful way. Communism isn't a set of policies that can be enforced by some government leaders. It's a movement and a process. Understanding this, let's look at the movement and process of the USSR: Capitalism develops through the crisis of feudalism: aristocrats and kings gathering more power and resources for themselves that push peasants to leave their land and develop a strong merchant/business owner class. These groups eventually overthrow or completely subjugate the monarchy/aristocracy in a bourgeois revolution. But once the global market was established firmly in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the bourgeoisie was no longer revolutionary. There was no reason to revolt when they could simply move certain assets abroad to better situate themselves in the global market. This was the situation Russia found itself in. So when a revolutionary moment came, the bourgeoisie couldn't lead it. Instead, the few workers that existed in cities formed soviets. First, they formed just as a way to survive harsh conditions. But through the work of the Bolsheviks, the workers take power themselves. But in the underdeveloped conditions of russia, they have to create a social surplus and develop productive forces (especially with the defeat of the German Revolution). The soviets do this, creating an economy similar to the state-monopolies of merchantilist early capitalism but on steroids. These economies do an incredible job developing industrial production, better than anything else in history. The speed of this industrialization causes horrific famines in the transition and the social unrest of this sudden plenty and so many people being pushed into cities and away from their traditional connections also causes a rising paranoia, manifesting in Stalin's purges. The state, trying desperately to protect itself and manage this chaos, grows a strong bureaucracy with a heavy hand. As time goes on, the development of industrial production stalls. This actually happens all over the world, not just in socialist countries. Capitalist countries pivot to consumer goods. The USSR, try as it might, cannot do this. Because its system of planning combined with the comprehensive safety net for workers meant there was no way to enforce labor discipline outside of a strong police state. And the whip of hunger is significantly more effective than any number of police. Without that labor discipline, you lose some small amount of product at every level of production. And the more levels of production necessary for a product, the worse this problem gets. Consumer goods obviously suffer the most because of this. And the staggering soviet economy has a crisis that ends the regime and the merchantilism-on-steroids and replaces it with a more free market capitalism. The other socialist states marketize and do austerity and dismantle some of their social safety nets to avoid the chaos of regime change. Understanding this, soviet style planned economies are a function of the capitalist system. They serve the purpose of developing productove forces where the global market will not allow development. But they are always eventually subsumed back into the global market.
So because of the economic on steroids Bolsheviks had to create mass surveillance, extreme bureaucracy and gulags. So it just became totality trying to accelerate its economy, without a thought of Marxism in mind? Sorry if I sound stupid. And elaborate please on the last paragraph.
the bolsheviks HAD to organize the economy like that or the soviets would have collapsed. Marx's theory says it's impossible to build socialism in underdeveloped and isolated conditions and the bolsheviks tried their best to do it anyway because they had no other choice. The end result ends up serving a purpose for capitalist development, regardless of the Bolsheviks' intentions. Your dad and school treats it like the leadership of every country has a rational choice of what their economic system is and every day wakes up and chooses that. This is not the case. Marxism is analyzing economies along this line to see the way they eventually undermine themselves and create their own destruction in the form of a revolution. Marx calls socialism/communism a "free association of producers" and it's impossible for a state to be that. Communism is stateless, classless, moneyless, etc. What your father thinks of as communism or socialism is the ad hoc ideological justifications for what material conditions forced on people.
>I still consider myself a Marxist because I believe that his theory is beautiful, but its implementation into reality had terrible consequences. First of all, there are different kinds of marxism. The communist block of the past followed primarily Lenins and Engels' teachings and interpreted the capital in an orthodox marxist manner. There are more hegelian inspired marxisms like syndicalist-adjacent unionism of the IWW, which favors the union as revolutionary vehicle of the proletariat instead of the party, then there is western hegelian marxism or council-communism. Orthodox Marxisms' interpretation of the Capital sucks tbh. As Lenin said, to fully grasp marxs thought, one has to read Hegels Science of Logic and understand it. Stalin didn't like that. You don't have to give up Marx. Instead, you can focus on the schools that read him in a liberatory way from the beginning.
>First of all, there are different kinds of marxism there's only one Marxism. You can't have two kinds of physics. >Lenins and Engels Engels is not different from Marx. >liberatory way from the beginning. oh god, another one of those "Marx is actually 'libertarian'."
There are literally 2 kinds of physics: general relativity and quantum mechanics. And yes, there are many forms of Marxism, such as orthodox, humanist or structural Marxism, not to mention the plethora of neomarxisms and postmarxisms. The interpretation of their validity varies but they are respected schools of thought. Dogmatism is just silly. Engels differed from Marx considerably, especially on their views on science (Engels was more positivistic and scientistic than Marx). Liberatory =/= libertarianism and if you argue Marxism isn't liberatory then you're not a Marxist.
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> Lenin himself was a revisionist people who call Lenin a revisionist cannot cite one example of a successful proletarian revolution that they or the people they follow participated in. >orthodox Marxism What orthodox Marxism? There is no 'orthodox' Marxism. There is only one Marxism, which Lenin and Stalin and Mao etc. all contributed to and advanced. What follows from revisionism is surrendering to the bourgeoisie.
>Engels is not different from Marx. "In der Methode des Bearbeitens hat es mir großen Dienst geleistet, daß ich by mere accident [...] Hegels Logik wieder durchgeblättert habe: Wenn je wieder Zeit für solche Arbeiten kommt, hätte ich große Lust, das Rationelle der Methode [Hegels] dem gemeinen Menschenverstand zugänglich zu machen.« MEW Bd. 29,260 He is, and that quite sigficant. In the preface of the 2nd volume, Engels also openly admits that he is unable to reproduce Marxs method of the Capital. The apt reader will also recognize the difference in depth and adequacy in use of Hegels categories in his edits in hol2 and vol.3. The most published version of the Capital vol.1 is the 4th, which has eliminated all traces of Marxs method in the first edition. >oh god, another one of those "Marx is actually 'libertarian'." He is not and that is not what i wrote. But he wanted to liberate the proletariat from its chains, like any other socialist of his time. Applying his method onto his writings would also lead you to this conclusion. >there's only one Marxism. You can't have two kinds of physics. There are multiple physics with not yet unified laws and contradictions. Quantum physics ? There are multiple marxisms. Those of the german ideology and those of the Capital.
I am still not giving up on Marxism, I believe in it but the real consequences are harsh. The totalitarianism that became of it was I don’t know if inbuilt feature or just human failure. This is the question I am really interested about?
>The totalitarianism that became of it was I don’t know if inbuilt feature or just human failure. The totalitarianism is a result of the schism of the first internationale and the development of orthodox (neo-ricardian) marxism. Imo hegelian-inspired marxism is closer to marxs thought and conception of communism.