The American haute-bourgeoisie want a leftist form of capitalism.

[Straha]

[Proletarian]

Yes, Lenin saw himself as a socialist.

He also, crucially, did not see the Soviet Union as a socialist society -

Nor, I think, has any Communist denied that the term Socialist Soviet Republic implies the determination of Soviet power to achieve the transition to socialism, and not that the new economic system is recognized as a socialist order.

- and wanted for it to adopt State capitalism, explicitly:

While the revolution in Germany is still slow in “coming forth”, our task is to study the state capitalism of the Germans, to spare no effort in copying it and not shrink from adopting dictatorial methods to hasten the copying of it. Our task is to hasten this copying even more than Peter hastened the copying of Western culture by barbarian Russia, and we must not hesitate to use barbarous methods in fighting barbarism.

Look man, just concede that you don't know enough about this stuff to keep up. There's no shame in it; a lot of it can be difficult to parse.

[Darth Yan]

He wanted to adopt it for a time due to the circumstances; in all likelihood he would have abandoned state capitalism. Lenin was also on board with the cheka, red terror and suppression of free speech.

More importantly you dismiss the idea that humans won't more once they have the ability to produce what they want. That's probably the most naive statement you can make. Look at history. People have ALWAYS tried to screw over people even when they had everything. Kings wanted more land and money. So did rich people. Poor people have screwed over others to get things like food even when they had plenty.

It's just plain human nature to want more than you have. Even if you have plenty. Those asshole billionaires who want more despite having more money than god? That wasn't drilled in by capitalism. That was just human nature.

In that regard communism is like capitalism in that it refuses to accept that people are just assholes at times. Capitalism assumes that people won't game the market for their own selfish short sighted needs. Communism is much the same.

[Straha]

I'm going to repeat my question from the history thread: How much Marx have you read? How many OG, original source, works have you engaged with? And how much of that (if any) was part of a formal course of study?

[Proletarian]

He wanted to adopt it for a time due to the circumstances; in all likelihood he would have abandoned state capitalism.

Individual rulers are not gods, Mr. Yun. This is part and parcel of the materialist method of analysis. Lenin could no more have wilfully "abandoned" State capitalism than he could have not engaged in it in the first place. (This is also why the United States will not miraculously become "socialist" even if a President Sanders wills it thus.)

You badly need to watch Paddy Chayevsky's Network. The essentially capitalist nature of the Soviet Union was recognizable to American audiences in 1976.

https://youtu.be/yuBe93FMiJc

What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state - Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable by-laws of business.

Lenin was also on board with the cheka, red terror and suppression of free speech.

Yes, Lenin was an asshole.

As for the rest, it amounts to little more than a theological critique of Communism: man is Fallen and he can't get up. But - again - Marx had one of the most nuanced conceptualizations of human nature - "species-being" - of any nineteenth-century thinker. Find it yourself; do your own research. It is a profoundly sleepy argument and one I rebutted at length on the last page.

[Proletarian]

And how much of that (if any) was part of a formal course of study?

To be absolutely fair, this is all material I've learned on my own, through a deep reading of the Marxist Internet Archives and time spent on Marxist (non-tankie - e.g. r/marxism_101 or r_shitleftistssay) boards. I've never had the privilege of attending college - but the capitalist mode of production has produced wonders indeed, enabling even a proletarian nothing like myself to become "world-historical" in a sense.

The overwhelming majority of anti-Marxists have no conception of Marx outside of precisely the kind of utopian Communist theologians like Fourier or Saint-Simon he warred against.

[Batman]

I think he was asking Darth Yan

[Straha]

I was.

[Effie]

Let me make a side note that Bolshevism also represented an significant break from existing Marxist theorizing about the nature of socialist revolution. Lenin himself said (early in the post-October Revolution period) that the victory of the Bolsheviks was fundamentally inexplicable. The fact is that the success of Bolshevism and failure of more traditional Marxist revolutionaries (the Spartacists, most dramatically and tragically) and later on the abandonment of open Marxism by Marxian-ideological parties like the German Social Democrats has disguised this by leading to a period of dominance by a kind of discourse of Bolshevism and anarchism. But Bolshevism was also essentially an ad hoc development, rather than an established body of theory being transformed into praxis. One only has to look at the development of Preobrazhenkist economics (and, by contrast, the very different methodologies advocated by Marxists less associated with Bolshevism as such in Guatemala and Japan in the later 1940s and 50s) in order to see that any kind of belief in a predestined Marxian vision of communism which produces a Soviet Union or a People's Republic of China inevitably as a consequence of belief in notions like base and superstructure simply conflicts with the facts.

Adam Tooze's The Deluge has a significant amount of information on this presented almost incidentally.

[Proletarian]

Let me make a side note that Bolshevism also represented an significant break from existing Marxist theorizing about the nature of socialist revolution. Lenin himself said (early in the post-October Revolution period) that the victory of the Bolsheviks was fundamentally inexplicable. The fact is that the success of Bolshevism and failure of more traditional Marxist revolutionaries (the Spartacists, most dramatically and tragically) and later on the abandonment of open Marxism by Marxian-ideological parties like the German Social Democrats has disguised this by leading to a period of dominance by a kind of discourse of Bolshevism and anarchism. But Bolshevism was also essentially an ad hoc development, rather than an established body of theory being transformed into praxis. One only has to look at the development of Preobrazhenkist economics (and, by contrast, the very different methodologies advocated by Marxists less associated with Bolshevism as such in Guatemala and Japan in the later 1940s and 50s) in order to see that any kind of belief in a predestined Marxian vision of communism which produces a Soviet Union or a People's Republic of China inevitably as a consequence of belief in notions like base and superstructure simply conflicts with the facts.

Adam Tooze's The Deluge has a significant amount of information on this presented almost incidentally.

This, the bolded in particular, reminds me of this piece I linked to elsewhere.

I will argue that the “greatness” and “vitality” of Marxian social science that Schumpeter notes derives primarily from its inner logic as a form of open-ended scientific inquiry. Against attempts in the dominant ideology to characterize Marx as a rigid, dogmatic, deterministic, and closed thinker, it is precisely the open-endedness of his “ruthless criticism of all that exists”—an open-endedness inherently denied to liberal theory itself—that accounts for historical materialism’s staying power. This openness can be seen in the Marxism’s ability constantly to reinvent itself by expanding its empirical as well as theoretical content, so as to embrace ever larger aspects of historical reality in an increasingly interconnected world.

This open-endedness of historical materialism has long been understood by the most critical thinkers—Marxists and non-Marxists alike—and has been the basis for extensions of its dialectical vision made by such revolutionary thinkers as V. I. Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Antonio Gramsci, and Che Guevara. However, in the last few decades, the work of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) project, dedicated to publishing Marx and Frederick Engels’s complete manuscripts, has further impressed on scholars the lack of any final closure in Marx’s thought. The MEGA initiative has highlighted as never before the inherent incompleteness of Marx’s critique of political economy—a result not only of the inability of any single person to bring such a vast project to completion, but also of the project’s materialist-scientific character, which required unending historical and empirical research that could not be foreshortened by the imposition of suprahistorical abstractions.

...

Marx drew on aspects of Hegel’s dialectic throughout his work, while also breaking with it. Despite Marx’s famous statement in Capital, this break did not consist of merely inverting Hegel, of putting the latter on his feet since he had been standing on his head. The transformation of an idealist dialectic into a materialist one was no such simple procedure. Rather, it required an interrogation of the very form of conceptual abstraction employed by Hegel. In contrast to an idealist dialectic, where thought is paramount and reality simply conforms to dialectical logic through the complex relations of an identical subject-object, a materialist dialectic places primacy on real-world mediations that have no sufficient a priori basis in pure thought. It was this dilemma that prompted Marx on occasion to refer sardonically to the “theoretical bubble-blowing” of German idealism. If dialectical mediations were meaningful in the sense that they represented the genuine complexity of the universe refracted in thought, a truly dialectical presentation had to await concrete investigations and the working up of the real life of the material. As Marx once wrote, “the dialectic form of presentation is only right when it knows its own limits (Grenzen).”

...

Marx’s seemingly more “deterministic” statements all applied to the more abstract levels of analysis, as in his studies of the pure logic of capital. In its more concrete stages, by contrast, his work took the contingent fully into account as reflecting the force of change in history. Although the analysis of the capitalist mode of production, in accordance with its own internal logic, required a high degree of theoretical abstraction (as in value theory), the understanding of bourgeois society in its full material complexity at the point of historical change—Marx’s real object—demanded the most detailed investigations, for which theory could provide at best the guiding threads. Despite the rigor that he brought to it, at the core of Marx’s theoretical approach, as Fracchia and Ryan explained, was the recognition of “definite limits in theory’s ability to comprehend its object.” Hence, like any serious scientific endeavor, Marxism as a mode of analysis was “in a permanent state of crisis,” dedicated endlessly to “open-ended projects” of investigation into historical processes.

I don't necessarily believe that Bolshevism is "wrong" because it is ad hoc, as you say; Marx's statement that Communism "is not an ideal to which reality will have to adjust itself" but the "Real Movement Which Abolishes The Present State Of Things™" indeed suggests that Communism will be more or less ad hoc, and certainly not the product of mass intellectual conversation to Marxism or the product of a rigorously "established body of theory being transformed into praxis" - in this I tend towards Communization as formulated by Dauvé.

However, the fact that Marxism is so open to various modes of interpretation is a strength. Knowledge in the real-world is indeed open-ended in this way, and concepts like the tendency of the rate of profit to decline and commodity fetishism probably should be treated more as abstract theoretical frameworks for analysis rather than as concrete ontological claims.

[Darth Yan]

You are not debating in good faith. Your insistence I read everything is an attempt to either make me feel small or convert me.

I’ll leave you to your cultish devotion

[Straha]

- Refuses to read or understand Marxist terms and intellectually misrepresents articles he cites
- Accuses other people of debating in bad faith

Some Big Brain Thoughts here.

[Darth Yan]

I did no such thing. I read Robinson's article. The man is a socialist but he also unambiguously condemns marxism. I understood that. You didn't.

What you're doing is pure manipulation; you're insisting that unless someone has read x books or studied x than it doesn't matter what they think. Prolateriat is using the "no true scotsman" fallacy to ignore every disastrous communist regime, and ignores that the ideals of the revolution in the soviet union WERE based on communism and that communism was the end goal they were working towards.

More importantly "dictatorship" has a VERY specific meaning and the idea that if you give the Central Committee all that power without accountability they won't abuse it is the HEIGHT of stupidity and arrogance, require the kind of devotion that can only be described as religious.

You did this in the decolonization thread as well; when I and others pointed out that Jean Jacques Dessalines's logic for murdering the white Haitians was the EXACT same logic that other monsters like John Chivington or the Nazis have used to justify THEIR crimes (namely that they would "give birth to future enemies and so had to die") and that he was a genocidal monster, or that you're logic was based on the idea that the US was uniquely evil you got angry. When people challenged you you harped on minor issues and called them racist.

I'm not playing your game. You don't want good debate; you want to either convert people to your side or bully people into not bothering. If we don't like western civilization or agree that the US is evil than apparently we're just bad people in your mind. Well than

[Proletarian]

I'm not playing your game. You don't want good debate

Hey, Yun.

Have you ever read Marx?

[Straha]

- Declares they understand things better than other people inside the thread
- Declares that being expected to actually read the things they're discussing is something close to offensive

We've gone from big brain to galaxy brain here.

[Darth Yan]

- Declares they understand things better than other people inside the thread
- Declares that being expected to actually read the things they're discussing is something close to offensive

We've gone from big brain to galaxy brain here.

Don't play innocent. There's a difference between "reading" and "understanding". All prolateriat doing is playing the "No True Scotsman" Fallacy and cherrypicking things that agree with him while refusing to read between the lines (it's disgustingly obvious Lenin saw communism as the end goal), along with a healthy dose of blindly assuming that communist governments would NEVER abuse their power or that we can always include all the workers in making decisions (almost like a cult). Hence his refusal to accept that Lenin Mao and others like them DID see themselves as honoring communist doctrines.

you weren't just expecting me to read. You were trying to bully people out of the conversation or convert them to your line of thinking by reading what were essentially propaganda tracts. You pulled that exact shame shit in the decolonization threads, insisting that people needed to read decolonization literature to have an opinion about whether their country could be torn up while assuming anyone raising objections must be a vile racist.

You're not really being reasonable. You're a bully putting on an air of civility while saying that everything western and/or capitalistic must be bad, and a lot of other posters (loomer, Stas Bush, Gandalf) are also going along with it for their own personal reasons (Stas in particular is looking through rose colored glasses)

[Straha]

How, pray tell, do you understand things without having read them?

[Proletarian]

it's disgustingly obvious Lenin saw communism as the end goal

The point is that IT DOESN'T MATTER WHAT THE GODDAMN END GOAL IS BECAUSE OUTCOMES ARE DETERMINED BY MATERIAL CONDITIONS AND NOT GODDAMN THEORETICAL BUBBLE-BLOWING.

the ideals of the revolution in the soviet union WERE based on communism

Both the February and October Revolutions were reactions to events on the ground. They didn't have "ideals". Kerensy rode the first into power, the Bolsheviks the second, but these revolutions were not the products of ideologues.

Hence his refusal to accept that Lenin Mao and others like them DID see themselves as honoring communist doctrines.

assuming that communist governments would NEVER abuse their power

These wouldn't exist.

It doesn't matter what someone sees themselves as. Otherwise democracy is evil because of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

If I'm not responding more in-depth, it's because this is the essential point of materialism. If you genuinely think that rulers can blithely invent whatever systems they wish, or that the name of a thing always correlates to what that thing actually is, then there can be no discussion had.

Oh, yeah: Marxism itself is part of the Western canon.

[Gandalf]

You're not really being reasonable. You're a bully putting on an air of civility while saying that everything western and/or capitalistic must be bad, and a lot of other posters (loomer, Stas Bush, Gandalf) are also going along with it for their own personal reasons (Stas in particular is looking through rose colored glasses)

What are my personal reasons?

[Surlethe]

Simply that these titans of industry are already preparing themselves for the election of a social democrat like Warren or Sanders and getting ready to restructure their interests in a way more amenable to the new period. Formerly this happened behind-the-scenes, as when Bernard Baruch helped the big capitalists of the thirties adjust to the New Deal, but now we can witness it in real-time.

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss - but with a this time.

Progress, however slight, is still progress. I call this a win.

Is it indeed?

Yes

It is my contention that social democracy and conservatism, like the State and the market, are not antagonistic forces; indeed, unlike populists who talk about "corporatism" and "crony capitalism", it is my contention that they never are. And just as the bourgeois State selectively intervenes in the interests of the market, so too does social democracy serve to produce conservatism, abd visa versa.

What do you mean by "conservatism" here? If you mean that social democracy benefits more people in a country and thereby invests them in the perpetuation of that country's existing cultural, social, and political structures, that seems almost self-evident to me. But you could also be making a narrower, empirical claim about e.g. european conservative populism being rooted in redistributive european social democratic apparatuses.

[Darth Yan]

You're not really being reasonable. You're a bully putting on an air of civility while saying that everything western and/or capitalistic must be bad, and a lot of other posters (loomer, Stas Bush, Gandalf) are also going along with it for their own personal reasons (Stas in particular is looking through rose colored glasses)

What are my personal reasons?

If I had to guess resentment over the crappy way indigenous Australians are treated by white Australians both in previous years and to a lesser extent today, and systemic racism still present in Australia. I could very well be wrong but from what I’ve seen of your posts it’s an educated guess. You also described how communists were some of the only ones showing solidarity with anti racists (which I suspect makes you more inclined to be sympathetic).

What do you mean by "conservatism" here? If you mean that social democracy benefits more people in a country and thereby invests them in the perpetuation of that country's existing cultural, social, and political structures, that seems almost self-evident to me. But you could also be making a narrower, empirical claim about e.g. european conservative populism being rooted in redistributive european social democratic apparatuses.

And Surlethe you’re wasting time. Prolateriat sees ANYTHING less than his brand of far left views as conservative.

[Proletarian]

Progress, however slight, is still progress. I call this a win.

Is it indeed?

Yes

It is my contention that social democracy and conservatism, like the State and the market, are not antagonistic forces; indeed, unlike populists who talk about "corporatism" and "crony capitalism", it is my contention that they never are. And just as the bourgeois State selectively intervenes in the interests of the market, so too does social democracy serve to produce conservatism, abd visa versa.

What do you mean by "conservatism" here? If you mean that social democracy benefits more people in a country and thereby invests them in the perpetuation of that country's existing cultural, social, and political structures, that seems almost self-evident to me. But you could also be making a narrower, empirical claim about e.g. european conservative populism being rooted in redistributive european social democratic apparatuses.

Not even in a sociological or economic but in a narrowly historical-poitical sense, I believe that social democracy tends to produce conservatism as a byproduct, as well as the reverse. Or rather, that the logic of each is embedded in the other.

The example I cited was an article claiming that Reagan was FDR's "true heir", not his antithesis, as is often claimed. He probably identified more with the social and aesthetic heritage of the New Deal than did his immediate predecessor, Carter, who himself presided over the inauguration of neoliberalism in the United States - a new ideology whose impetus for being existed as much on the official liberal-left as the Right.

https://reason.com/2018/02/09/what-jimm ... wn-can-te/

"We really need to realize that there is a limit to the role and the function of government," Carter said in his first State of the Union address, in 1978. "Bit by bit we are chopping down the thicket of unnecessary federal regulations by which government too often interferes in our personal lives and our personal business."

If that sounds more like your conception of Ronald Reagan than the peanut farmer from Plains, it may be time to check your premises.

After televised hearings chaired by Democratic Sen. Ted Kennedy, based on academic spade-work by the liberal economist Alfred Kahn, featuring testimony from consumer advocate Ralph Nader, Carter in 1978 signed the death warrant for the Civil Aeronautics Board, thus breaking up the regulatory cartel that had kept the same four national airlines virtually unchallenged the previous four decades.

Thus began a federal assault on "price and entry" regulations, or rules that determine which companies can compete in a given industry and what they're allowed to charge.

Carter also lifted individual prohibitions, most notably (thanks to an amendment by California Democratic Sen. Alan Cranston) on brewing beer at home. Result? You're drinking it. There were fewer than 50 breweries in the United States when Carter deregulated basement beer-making; now there are more than 5,000. In two generations, America went from world laughingstock to leader in the production of tasty lagers and ales.

Such was Carter's conviction about deconstructing chunks of the administrative state that he dwelled on it at length in his only presidential debate with Reagan.

"I'm a Southerner, and I share the basic beliefs of my region [against] an excessive government intrusion into the private affairs of American citizens and also into the private affairs of the free enterprise system," he said. "We've been remarkably successful, with the help of a Democratic Congress. We have deregulated the air industry, the rail industry, the trucking industry, financial institutions. We're now working on the communications industry."

Here in California, then fresh off its Proposition 13 tax revolt, Jerry Brown, in his first stretch as governor, was sounding similar themes. Government must "strip away the roadblocks and the regulatory underbrush that it often mindlessly puts in the path of private citizens," Brown said during his bracingly anti-statist second inaugural address in 1979. "Unneeded licenses and proliferating rules can stifle initiative, especially for small business….[M]any regulations primarily protect the past, prop up privilege or prevent sensible economic choices."

And the reverse is also true. Observe how Trump distinguished himself from his Republican competitors in 2016 by campaigning on such heterodox positions as the preservation of Social Security benefits and Medicare, the better to support the retiree base in the Republican Party. Or how Obama's reign as "Deporter-in-Chief", founded on a basically workerist-populist logic coming out of the Recession, melded seamlessly with Trump's anti-immigrant campaigns. Or, further back yet, how the so-called "Hoover New Deal" blended together with the Roosevelt New Deal, despite their bases in conflicting business interests (demonstrated by my second post in this thread):

https://www.cato.org/publications/brief ... r-new-deal

Pliticians and pundits portray Herbert Hoover as a defender of laissez faire governance whose dogmatic commitment to small government led him to stand by and do nothing while the economy collapsed in the wake of the stock market crash in 1929. In fact, Hoover had long been a critic of laissez faire. As president, he doubled federal spending in real terms in four years. He also used government to prop up wages, restricted immigration, signed the Smoot-Hawley tariff, raised taxes, and created the Reconstruction Finance Corporation—all interventionist measures and not laissez faire. Unlike many Democrats today, President Franklin D. Roosevelt's advisers knew that Hoover had started the New Deal. One of them wrote, "When we all burst into Washington ... we found every essential idea [of the New Deal] enacted in the 100-day Congress in the Hoover administration itself."

I believe that conservatism and social democracy must be understood as a single logic, just as I hold that the market and the State must be understood as a single logic (and this holds good even of systems wherein a cartel of businesses function effectively as the government, i.e. an imagined anarchocapitalism). Rather than looking for cleavages we must look for continuities. We must understand them as one logic, as one system - as Capital. Only by grasping them as a totality, rather than a disparate collection of opposing parts, can you see the logic of how it functions in concert.

[Darth Yan]

Sounds like a load of bullshit. You dismiss social democrats as traitors because they acknowledge that not everything about capitalism is evil and that communism in it's purest form is not really that good. To a cultist like you that's unforgivable

[Proletarian]

Sounds like a load of bullshit. You dismiss social democrats as traitors because they acknowledge that not everything about capitalism is evil and that communism in it's purest form is not really that good. To a cultist like you that's unforgivable

I'm not dismissing social democrats as traitors, because I don't believe that social democrats have a conscious intention to "betray" anything. I am dismissing social democracy as an institution, because it is inextricably bound up in the development of its opposite, conservatism, not merely because it produces a certain level of comfort in the proletariat (Engels' "labour aristocracy" thesis) but because it can only operate in conservative forns. This is confirmed by Reagan's invocations of FDR, which demonstrates in politics what the neoliberal turn out of the post-war consenus proves in economics.

This is born out, again, in the logic of Obama deporting more immigrants than all of his predecessors combined for basically populist, social democratic reasons, or in Franklin Roosevelt's utilization of the quasi-military CCC as a make-work program. The logic of social democracy produces the logic of conservatism, just as the logic of the State produces the logic of the market (and it is now widely recognized that the primary purpose of the government is precisely to create markets where none previously existed).

[Effie]

I disagree with the specifics of Proletarian's analysis but social democracy defines itself on the basis of the creation of out-groups because it's effectively a nationalistic enterprise. In the American context, full social democracy has been largely arrested by our racial context, but overall you can see a pattern wherein the social-democratic state must establish a defended perimeter outside of which are people who cannot benefit from its largesse. It is thus more compatible with conservatism than a truly internationalist ideology.