[Social_Critic]

I found this quote from Keynes while snooping around

Russia ‘exhibits the worst example which the world, perhaps, has ever seen of administrative incompetence and of the sacrifice of almost everything that makes life worth living ...’; it was a ‘fearful example of the evils of insane and unnecessary haste’; ‘Let Stalin be a terrifying example to all who seek to make experiments.’”

What I have observed is that those who try to implement communism all follow similar patterns, and all degenerate into truly horrific dictatorships. As a survivor and refugee from one of those monstrosities, I agree with Keynes.

[Nunt]

I think history has sufficiently shown that you cannot obtain communism by installing a behemoth government. Its time for communists to learn this.

[Rainbow Crow]

Is there a way to attempt communism without a behemoth government?

[The Immortal Goon]

I agree with this. All attempts to remove the aristocracy and create a democratic system based on trade will result in a Cromwell coming to power, taking everyone's rights, ethnically cleansing its neighbors of undesirables, forcing religion down everyone's throats at the point of a sword, and killing millions.

We should stay in feudalism, where a Cromwell—or French Revolution—will never happen again. It's simply too scary to try and move away from that system.

If we can't go back, then we should stay in capitalism because it's too scary to do anything otherwise. After all, should anybody attempt to move us into a new system, the freedom loving capitalists will enthusiastically back Hitler, as Von Mises suggested that they do:

The deeds of the Fascists and of other parties corresponding to them were emotional reflex actions evoked by indignation at the deeds of the Bolsheviks and Communists. As soon as the first flush of anger had passed, their policy took a more moderate course and will probably become even more so with the passage of time.

This moderation is the result of the fact that traditional liberal views still continue to have an unconscious influence on the Fascists...

It cannot be denied that Fascism and similar movements aiming at the establishment of dictatorships are full of the best intentions and that their intervention has, for the moment, saved European civilization. The merit that Fascism has thereby won for itself will live on eternally in history. But though its policy has brought salvation for the moment, it is not of the kind which could promise continued success. Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.

Which is why it's important for the Cato Institute to have people on its board that set up a fascist dictatorship in charge of the libertarian line of thinking.

Only by ignoring the history of capitalist development, and how it stands today, while ignoring the development of the communist movement (don't forget that the capitalists were pushing really hard for Stalin to take out his rivals in the Soviet Union), then you can come to a nice clean ignorant unthinking solution advocated in this thread—Capitalism! Someone said something bad about communism once!

And this thread isn't about communism.

[Travesty]

TIG I think he means that Communism universally (everywhere it has been applied) ends in an indefinite dictatorship of the proletariat where the system gets more restrictive, bureaucratized and totalitarian. It doesn't lead to a better system overall.

[The Immortal Goon]

It's a quote about what the Soviet Union was like after WWII and moved the thread to reflect this.

If he wants to talk about something broader in terms of communism everywhere or something having to do specifically with communism, he's welcome to do so.

[Social_Critic]

It was a quote with my own personal thoughts. I read the Keynes quote and said to myself "aha, he saw what I saw in Cuba and elsewhere, they set out saying they'll build communism and land elsewhere.

I suspect most communists are so convinced it just has to work, they fail to see the built in flaws. It's as if they were trying to erect buildings using a set design which always crumble a bit and turn into derelicts full of drug users and winos. So in my humble way I try to ointment this out, because its possible I can convince a few to change. Otherwise I have to land somewhere and engage them for real, and I'm getting old. Using the Internet is much better.

So if you want to consider it a mere statement about the Soviet Union and thus limit the scope of what I intended, so be it. As a refugee from a worker's paradise I know how to deal with abuses of power.

[KlassWar]

Is there a way to attempt communism without a behemoth government?

You could do it the anarchistic way, I guess... But ain't no collectivizing the economy without systematic application of mass terror, because the bourgeoisie and the reaction ain't about to just bend over and take it. So you'd in fact have a defacto government headed by the unions and militias doing the collectivizing. And all in all it'd have to be every bit as ruthless and authoritarian, but less accountable.

[The Immortal Goon]

So if you want to consider it a mere statement about the Soviet Union and thus limit the scope of what I intended, so be it. As a refugee from a worker's paradise I know how to deal with abuses of power.

If you had said that at the beginning I wouldn't have moved it.

Can the mod of this forum move it back then?

[Andropov]

Good thing Keynes has never lived in nor even visited the Soviet Union.

[Social_Critic]

I visited the Soviet Union during its dying days, later worked in the CIS and Even later moved to the Russian Federation. The job involved a lot of trouble, we moved fast in our own TU134 and I got to talk to lots of people. I also moved into a dacha used formerly by a very high KGB official. This gave me a fairly good idea about the mismanagement and sheer lunacy which prevailed in the USSR. The evil empire deserved to die.

[Soixante-Retard]

Keynes describes the Soviet Union

You should see what Keynes had to say about Nazi Germany...

Also, about von Mises:

Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.

[Potemkin]

Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.

The problem, of course, was that the fascists did not see themselves as a temporary makeshift. As far as they were concerned, they were here to stay. And if Mises and his haute-bourgeois cronies had tried to convince the fascists that their usefulness was at an end and they should hand power back to the bourgeoisie, then Mises and his pals would have found themselves being marched through gates with 'Arbeit macht frei' written over them....

[Soixante-Retard]

Fascism was an emergency makeshift. To view it as something more would be a fatal error.

The problem, of course, was that the fascists did not see themselves as a temporary makeshift. As far as they were concerned, they were here to stay. And if Mises and his haute-bourgeois cronies had tried to convince the fascists that their usefulness was at an end and they should hand power back to the bourgeoisie, then Mises and his pals would have found themselves being marched through gates with 'Arbeit macht frei' written over them....

Hence the phrase "fatal error".

[Potemkin]

The "fatal error" was to give power to the fascists in the first place. Legend has it that when Hitler had just been appointed Chancellor in 1933, he walked onto the balcony of the Reich Chancellery and murmured to himself, "No-one will ever get me out of here alive...." Once they had power, the fascists were never going to relinquish it to anyone. Mises was deluding himself if he thought they ever would, or that anyone could take it away from them short of a devastating war.

[Social_Critic]

Returning to the OP do you realize that indeed the Soviet Union was mismanaged and bound to fail due to its inner conflicts?

[Soixante-Retard]

Mises was deluding himself if he thought they ever would, or that anyone could take it away from them short of a devastating war.

It is easy to say that now after we know what happened.

S_C, are you having a conversation with yourself?

[Social_Critic]

Yes. I put up the OP because I saw how perceptive Keynes had been. It was hijacked.

Returning to the OP, when I started holding discussions with a Russian institute based in Moscow, the intent was to train them and use them as consultants for us and our Russian partners. But I found out that at the most senior levels they lacked a basic understanding of economic principles and risk assessment techniques. They didn't know about the use of stochastics, systems simulations, portfolio management, or rational safety management. They did know the bureaucratic ins and outs very well.

So I set up a brief training seminar to give them the basics. Later, as I gained more experience working within their system, I realized we had a bust. We didn't offer what they wanted, and they didn't have what we had thought they did. So no reasonable deal was possible. This is why today you see so little foreign investment in Russia, and what you see is largely money Russians laundered out and use a foreign vehicle to get some protection. Russia just never changed the right way, it stayed in limbo, and today it's a fascist state.

[The Immortal Goon]

Returning to the OP do you realize that indeed the Soviet Union was mismanaged and bound to fail due to its inner conflicts?

I agree. Lenin was correct:

But we have not finished building even the foundations of socialist economy and the hostile powers of moribund capitalism can still deprive us of that. We must clearly appreciate this and frankly admit it; for there is nothing more dangerous than illusions (and vertigo, particularly at high altitudes). And there is absolutely nothing terrible, nothing that should give legitimate grounds for the slightest despondency, in admitting this bitter truth; for we have always urged and reiterated the elementary truth of Marxism—that the joint efforts of the workers of several advanced countries are needed for the victory of socialism. We are still alone and in a backward country, a country that was ruined more than others, but we have accomplished a great deal. More than that—we have preserved intact the army of the revolutionary proletarian forces; we have preserved its manoeuvring ability; we have kept clear heads and can soberly calculate where, when and how far to retreat (in order to leap further forward); where, when and how to set to work to alter what has remained unfinished. Those Communists are doomed who imagine that it is possible to finish such an epoch-making undertaking as completing the foundations of socialist economy (particularly in a small-peasant country) without making mistakes, without retreats, without numerous alterations to what is unfinished or wrongly done. Communists who have no illusions, who do not give way to despondency, and who preserve their strength and flexibility “to begin from the beginning “ over and over again in approaching an extremely difficult task, are not doomed (and in all probability will not perish).

As things shape up, he explains further:

Comrade Trotsky speaks of a “workers’ state”. May I say that this is an abstraction. It was natural for us to write about a workers’ state in 1917; but it is now a patent error to say: “Since this is a workers’ state without any bourgeoisie, against whom then is the working class to be protected, and for what purpose?” The whole point is that it is not quite a workers’ state. That is where Comrade Trotsky makes one of his main mistakes. We have got down from general principles to practical discussion and decrees, and here we are being dragged back and prevented from tackling the business at hand. This will not do. For one thing, ours is not actually a workers’ state but a workers’ and peasants’ state. And a lot depends on that. (Bukharin : “What kind of state? A workers’ and peasants’ state?”) Comrade Bukharin back there may well shout “What kind of state? A workers’ and peasants’ state?” I shall not stop to answer him. Anyone who has a mind to should recall the recent Congress of Soviets,[3] and that will be answer enough.

But that is not all. Our Party Programme—a document which the author of the ABC of Communism knows very well—shows that ours is a workers’ state with a bureacratic twist to it. We have had to mark it with this dismal, shall I say, tag. There you have the reality of the transition.

And again:

Obviously, what is lacking is culture among the stratum of the Communists who perform administrative functions. If we take Moscow with its 4,700 Communists in responsible positions, and if we take that huge bureaucratic machine, that gigantic heap, we must ask: who is directing whom? I doubt very much whether it can truthfully be said that the Communists are directing that heap. To tell the truth they are not directing, they are being directed.

And again:

...the apparatus we call ours is, in fact, still quite alien to us; it is a bourgeois and tsarist hotch-potch and there has been no possibility of getting rid of it in the course of the past five years without the help of other countries and because we have been "busy" most of the time with military engagements and the fight against famine.

It is quite natural that in such circumstances the "freedom to secede from the union" by which we justify ourselves will be a mere scrap of paper, unable to defend the non-Russians from the onslaught of that really Russian man, the Great-Russian chauvinist, in substance a rascal and a tyrant, such as the typical Russian bureaucrat is. There is no doubt that the infinitesimal percentage of Soviet and sovietised workers will drown in that tide of chauvinistic Great-Russian riffraff like a fly in milk.

I think that Stalin's haste and his infatuation with pure administration, together with his spite against the notorious "nationalist-socialism" [Stalin critised the minority nations for not being "internationalist" because they did want to unite with Russia], played a fatal role here. In politics spite generally plays the basest of roles.

I also fear that Comrade Dzerzhinsky, who went to the Caucasus to investigate the "crime" of those "nationalist-socialists", distinguished himself there by his truly Russian frame of mind (it is common knowledge that people of other nationalities who have become Russified [Like Stalin] over-do this Russian frame of mind) and that the impartiality of his whole commission was typified well enough by Orgonikidze's "manhandling". I think that no provocation or even insult can justify such Russian manhandling...

(For the sake of fairness, you'll note he disses both Trotsky and Stalin at one point or another).

But does this mean Lenin and Social Critic are on the same page?

No.

It means that Lenin was able to work with what he had, look critically upon the work being done, and work with it.

Which brings me back to what, apparently, derailed the conversation: taking things wrong with the Soviet Union as an example and then trying to extrapolate a conclusion based upon that and only that.

It is the same thing as saying capitalism will never work because nobody today would want to live under Cromwell or the French Revolution. Or, more to the point, while Social Critic looks at a single partisan quote to feed to his own bias, we communists had already long since come up with various schools of thought stemming from Lenin and millions of pages of analysis based upon the fact that the Soviet Union wasn't perfect. This is not, and never has been, a revelation to us. The issue isn't now, and never was, to give up and decide that everything must be perfect now; but instead look critically at everything that had happened and understand history and material reality as a result

Which, in turn, brings us back to what Potemkin and Soixante-Retard were discussing.

It is easy to say that now after we know what happened.

We anticipated people like Von Mises dumbly supporting the fascists before it happened. We also used the French Revolution to help explain the rise of capitalism and fascism in the process.

Fascism in power, like Bonapartism, can only be the government of finance capital. In this social sense, it is indistinguishable not only from Bonapartism but even from parliamentary democracy. Each time, the Stalinists made this discovery all over again, forgetting that social questions resolve themselves in the domain of the political. The strength of finance capital does not reside in its ability to establish a government of any kind and at any time, according to its wish; it does not possess this faculty. Its strength resides in the fact that every non-proletarian government is forced to serve finance capital; or better yet, that finance capital possesses the possibility of substituting for each one of its systems of domination that decays, another system corresponding better to the changed conditions. However, the passage from one system to another signifies the political crisis which, with the concourse of the activity of the revolutionary proletariat may be transformed into a social danger to the bourgeoisie. The passage of parliamentary democracy to Bonapartism itself was accompanied in France by an effervescence of civil war. The perspective of the passage from Bonapartism to fascism is pregnant with infinitely more formidable disturbances and consequently also revolutionary possibilities.

So Potemkin is correct, as communists had been saying since the beginning, to say that the fascists should have no power in the first place.

The prolonged domination of finance capital by means of reactionary social demagogy and petty-bourgeois terror is impossible. Having arrived in power, the fascist chiefs are forced to muzzle the masses who follow them by means of the state apparatus. By the same token, they lose the support of broad masses of the petty bourgeoisie. A small part of it is assimilated by the bureaucratic apparatus. Another sinks into indifference. A third, under various banners, passes into opposition. But while losing its social mass base, by resting upon the bureaucratic apparatus and oscillating between the classes, fascism is regenerated into Bonapartism. Here, too, the gradual evolution is cut into by violent and sanguinary episodes. Differing from pre-fascist or preventive Bonapartism (Giolitti, Brüning-Schleicher, Doumergue, etc.) which reflects the extremely unstable and short-lived equilibrium between the belligerent camps, Bonapartism of fascist origin (Mussolini, Hitler, etc.), which grew out of the destruction, the disillusionment and the demoralization of the two camps of the masses, distinguishes itself by its much greater stability.

[Smilin' Dave]

Can the mod of this forum move it back then?

I could but I think I won't. The discussion appears to be rooted more in history than in the theory and general practice of Communism. Even Social_Critic's observations are from times and regimes since past. So I'm keeping it.