Marxism is Oligarch Astroturf - Page 6 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15130666
This is going to be somewhat tangential to the thread topic, but seems to be relevant in the flow of conversation.
Sivad wrote:Right, but I wouldn't call it accelerationist. Destructionist is more accurate. Trump is causing the establishment to self-destruct, the establishment is destroying it's own credibility which is the foundation of its institutional power. That opens a space for new possibilities that prior to Trump were so remote they were barely worth exploring. The reason most "leftists" don't want to keep it going and let it play out is because they're not really on the left, they're fascists that don't want to see theses institutions destroyed because they want to sieze them for themselves and use them to dominate society. They want to be the new class manegerial oligarchs and so they need the public's faith in these institutions to remain intact.

I can agree that Donald Trump was a kind of break in the liberal hegemony which is part of the freakout by liberals, though I am perhaps cynical of whether anyone is in place to make something of that break for the benefit of the majority of Americans. And I'm not sure I really place this break with Trump himself as the primary cause, rather things have been breaking down for liberalism for some time which made Trump possible but he has only a part to play amongst it I speculate.

This issue of destroying institutions or seizing them is interesting as I think in the abstract, this is certainly a tension but the ideas of what destroying and seizing them means really needs to be specific. It does seem in the vein of Marxist Communists and socialists to want to retain the state in some way and to retain a lot the culture as socialism is seen as a development upon capitalist production and culture rather than it's simple removal.
To which a liberal would be shocked and appalled by such 'despotic inroads' on property to certain ends.
https://internationalfriendsofilyenkov.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/artinian-2017-radical-currents-in-soviet-philosophy-vyyggy-ilyenkov.pdf
Writing on the Soviet apparatus and its culture, Lenin noted that although the bourgeois state had been overthrown, the cultural relics of the past had “not yet been overcome” (Lenin 1965: 487). The logic of the state’s functioning still retained the inertia inherited from previous ideological space in which these state structures were immersed. For Lenin, “culture” meant “social life” or “habit,” in other words, everyday life; in Gramsci’s framework, civil and political society fused into the integral state (Thomas 2011). This was a struggle where education, and especially philosophy and its systematic efforts at shaping thinking, become fundamentally important political struggles:

I say culture deliberately, because in these matters we can only regard as achieved what has become part and parcel of our culture, of our social life, our habits. (Lenin 1965: 487–488)

By the end of the Civil war, the question that emerged for Lenin and first-generation Soviet thinkers like Vygotsky was, what to do next? To build the new type of state apparatus, it was not enough to populate it with communist cadres committed to the revolution. What confronted the young Soviet state was the crucial obstacle presented by generalized knowledge of systems of thought and doing that are the result of centuries of learning. Lenin’s focus on “learning” and its connection to culture and building the integral state (the state apparatus) was prompted by the pre-revolutionary conditions of everyday life for the proletariat and the peasantry (those from whose ranks the new state apparatus and cultural spaces will be formed), which were characterized by lack of learning.


But then compared to some anarchists, I imagine even this doesn't go far enough, although I have my skepticism of anarchist tendencies in their individualism and whether it reflects the present anti-social individualism of liberalism itself where its about do not tread on me rather than finding the basis of voluntary association rather than everyone being free to do as they please as long as it doesn't individually harm another.
I feel some aversion to what seems as being bent on destruction in some anarchist tendencies which tend to be more individualistic and seems less about social change than hostility to social order. Which to me seems no sound basis for action or is an underdeveloped form that is yet to find an ideal and aim on which to organize people around.

But then it seems from your viewpoint one could see a continuity between the liberals who ideologically support the capitalist class who run such institutions and those who wish to replace these institutions in some form as being the Soviet bureaucratic/managerial strata of society.
To which this class clearly exists in the US quite prevalently with the middle class in such administrative roles.
So it seems it becomes an issue of the role of the state and the degenerative form which is took in backward nations such as USSR and PRC.

This is of course a major conflict and controversy between different lines of thought. I see Cyril Smith's criticism being based in opposition to the USSR's example by affirming a reading of Marx.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/millenni/smith2.htm
Lenin notes especially the development which Marx was able to make as a result of the experience of the Paris Commune of 1871. Now he could be clear that ‘the precondition for any real people’s revolution on the Continent’ was ‘no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it’.

What was to replace this ‘machine’? Lenin recalls that Marx saw the form of this replacement in the way the Commune organised itself.

1. The standing army was to be suppressed and replaced by ‘the armed people’.
2. The people’s representatives were to be elected by universal suffrage, subject to recall at any time and paid the wages of a workman. Judges were also to be elected.
3. Instead of an executive, inaccessible to electors, ‘the Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time’.
4. Local communes would take over many of the functions of the central government.

When Marx spoke of the violent overthrow of the existing order and the establishment of proletarian dictatorship, this is what he had in mind. In 1917, Lenin agreed with him, seeing the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies as the Russian equivalent of the Commune, as ‘a democratic republic of the Commune type’. But, as the brutality and desperation of the wars of intervention and the Civil War swept away all such notions, these ideas were once more forgotten.

Perhaps with the exception of the April Theses of a few months earlier, Lenin had never written anything like The State and Revolution. As a follower of Plekhanov on nearly all theoretical issues, he had accepted his teacher’s crude interpretation of the phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’, which had been written into the programmes of both Menshevik and Bolshevik wings of the RSDLP. As we have seen, it was Plekhanov who introduced the notion that this ‘dictatorship’ was to be exercised by a devoted minority, in a state form opposed to that of ‘democracy’.

Lenin in 1914-17 was partially rediscovering Marx’s notion of communism, self-critically trying to develop his ideas in the light of the collapse of the International. Returning to the most fundamental issues, he was grappling with their falsification in the movement of which he had been a part. These books are permeated with this deeper understanding of the way forward for humanity to liberate itself through the world socialist revolution. However, they represent the start of work which was never continued, and then forgotten.
#15130669
Wellsy wrote:
This issue of destroying institutions or seizing them is interesting as I think in the abstract, this is certainly a tension but the ideas of what destroying and seizing them means really needs to be specific. It does seem in the vein of Marxist Communists and socialists to want to retain the state in some way and to retain a lot the culture as socialism is seen as a development upon capitalist production and culture rather than it's simple removal.



I think 'destroy' / ['annihilate'] pertains to the (bourgeois) *superstructure*, while 'seizing' refers to the *base*, meaning the means of industrial mass production. These are two different 'levels'.

Yes, a 'workers state' would not depend on the shell / structure / procedures of the overthrown *bourgeois* state.


Wellsy wrote:
I feel some aversion to what seems as being bent on destruction in some anarchist tendencies which tend to be more individualistic and seems less about social change than hostility to social order. Which to me seems no sound basis for action or is an underdeveloped form that is yet to find an ideal and aim on which to organize people around.



Well there's nothing *wrong* with it, either, not that I'm in the habit of defending anarchism. The struggle can be against the bourgeois *superstructure*, and hopefully it will expand into struggle against the *base*, as well.


Wellsy wrote:



1. The standing army was to be suppressed and replaced by ‘the armed people’.

2. The people’s representatives were to be elected by universal suffrage, subject to recall at any time and paid the wages of a workman. Judges were also to be elected.

3. Instead of an executive, inaccessible to electors, ‘the Commune was to be a working, not a parliamentary body, executive and legislative at the same time’.

4. Local communes would take over many of the functions of the central government.



I think with contemporary technological communication developments -- the Internet -- much of this past formalism can be readily superseded by what we're doing *now*, discussing almost in realtime, and then hammering out the particulars of direction and policy, especially as the bourgeois ruling class becomes increasingly crisis-ridden.

Also see my framework model, too, of course, for my own particular *approach* / proposal to such:


Emergent Central Planning

Spoiler: show
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labor credits framework for 'communist supply & demand'

Spoiler: show
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https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/20 ... ost2889338


communist supply & demand -- Model of Material Factors

Spoiler: show
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https://www.revleft.space/vb/threads/20 ... ost2889338
#15130670
Random American wrote:
I must say too many of those progressive Marxists take some of their social justice pet projects too far, that's what I'm saying and they don't realize that they're no longer looking at class enough. My post doesn't refute Marxism as a whole or prove that the whole ideology is unworkable but it wasn't meant to anyway.



Divide-and-conquer, huh? Nice. Nice *try*, anyway.
#15130671
Pants-of-dog wrote:If your socialism is so real and basic, you should be able to provide an example of it.

At this point, you are defining socialism to mean “vague things that Sivad does” instead of the real and actual socialist movements that everyone else is discussing.


No I'm not, I define socialism as an equitable distribution of wealth and power within a free and peaceful society. It's not a dictatorship of the proletariat or state ownership of the means of production or a planned economy, it's not a gulag run by a revolutionary vanguard of new class oligarchs. It's not any of that red fascist shit. The "real and actual socialist movements" that you're discussing aren't socialist by any stretch of the imagination, they're living nightmares of state violence, theft, and oppression that nobody in their right mind would want to wake up in.



So, you do not support any actual socialist movement.


I support every movement going that takes us closer to socialism, whether it's the anti-war movement, the anti-establishment movement, the anti-capitalist movement, the labor movement, the civil liberties movement, the movement to expand and deepen democracy, I support all the pro-social movements. What I don't support is anti-social extremism that calls itself socialism, ie, what you call socialism.




inability to show how any socialist movement was supported by oligarchs.


I don't know what kind of crack you're smoking but just that Spence article alone pretty much makes my case, and that's just scratching the surface because Spence doesn't go into how the Western banksters and industrialists built the Soviet Union as well as the PRC. For that you gotta see Sutton.
#15130681

The Workers' and Peasants' Red Army,[a] frequently shortened to Red Army,[b] was the army and the air force of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and, after 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. The army was established immediately after the 1917 October Revolution. The Bolsheviks raised an army to oppose the military confederations (especially the various groups collectively known as the White Army) of their adversaries during the Russian Civil War. Beginning in February 1946, the Red Army, along with the Soviet Navy, embodied the main component of the Soviet Armed Forces; taking the official name of "Soviet Army", until its dissolution in December 1991.

The Red Army provided the largest land force in the Allied victory in the European theatre of World War II, and its invasion of Manchuria assisted the unconditional surrender of Imperial Japan. During operations on the Eastern Front, it accounted for 75–80% of casualties the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS suffered during the war and ultimately captured the Nazi German capital, Berlin.[1]



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Army
#15130684
Sivad wrote:No I'm not, I define socialism as an equitable distribution of wealth and power within a free and peaceful society.


So, yes, you are using some vague definition that no one else uses. Thank you for admitting it,

It's not a dictatorship of the proletariat or state ownership of the means of production or a planned economy, it's not a gulag run by a revolutionary vanguard of new class oligarchs. It's not any of that red fascist shit. The "real and actual socialist movements" that you're discussing aren't socialist by any stretch of the imagination, they're living nightmares of state violence, theft, and oppression that nobody in their right mind would want to wake up in.


Yes, the usual ad hominems directed at actual socialists. Boring, moving on.

I support every movement going that takes us closer to socialism, whether it's the anti-war movement, the anti-establishment movement, the anti-capitalist movement, the labor movement, the civil liberties movement, the movement to expand and deepen democracy, I support all the pro-social movements. What I don't support is anti-social extremism that calls itself socialism, ie, what you call socialism.


You are still unable to provide a real world example.

Since that is the case, this seems more like you are trying to convince yourself of your socialist cred.

I don't know what kind of crack you're smoking but just that Spence article alone pretty much makes my case, and that's just scratching the surface because Spence doesn't go into how the Western banksters and industrialists built the Soviet Union as well as the PRC. For that you gotta see Sutton.


Do you mean the book review you quoted?

No, that does not cut it. If German financiers wanted to support dissenters in Russia to weaken their enemies (the Tsars), that does not mean that the Germans or the Jews controlled the revolutionaries.

Nor does that say anything about any subsequent socialist movement.
#15130697
Sivad wrote:That's a fake quote.

A fake quote for a fake socialist. It seems only apposite.


:)
Last edited by ingliz on 27 Oct 2020 20:23, edited 1 time in total.
#15130699
skinster wrote: Sivad is full of shit, that's why he can barely explain himself.


With most of these commie kidz it's not even ideological, most of them couldn't grasp the basics of Marxism if their lives depended on it. With most of them it's just pure mindless cultish tribalism, they get in where they fit in and they don't bother with the underpinnings.
#15130719
How Communists in Germany Allied with Nazis to Destroy Democracy

The cooperation between the communist and Nazi parties in Germany to undermine social democracy must be one of the strangest and most extreme partnerships in politics. In the 1920s the Stalinist leadership of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) declared that their main target was the Social Democratic Party (SPD).

The SPD was the dominant political force in the Weimar Republic until the eventual Nazi takeover. In the Stalinist mindset, the only true socialism was Stalinism, and all others were to be opposed. The KPD decided that the way forward in Germany was to do whatever it took to undermine the SPD government, even if this meant working side-by-side with Nazis.

Based on the assumption that the working class would turn to Stalinist communism after the inevitable failure of a Nazi government, the KPD endorsed a referendum to overthrow the SPD government in Prussia. It also supported strikes alongside the Nazis to undermine local SPD power.

Even the KPD’s paramilitary wing, the Roter Frontkämpferbund, often targeted Social Democrats and unions rather than Nazis. Ultimately, this division in the left played a significant role in allowing the Nazis to rise to power. Some Nazi leaders even used it as a tool to drive working-class voters to Hitler.

The divide between the Social Democrats and the Communists in Germany was bitter and long-lasting. Although today social democracy most often refers to the very left-wing of capitalism (sometimes called the “Third Way” between capitalism and socialism), during the 20s and 30s it was wholeheartedly a socialist ideology. However, in contrast to Stalinism, it emphasized democracy, participating in electoral politics, anti-communism, and a reformist path to establishing socialism instead of violent revolution.

In the late 1910s, a revolutionary socialist and member of the KPD, named Rosa Luxemburg, supported a revolution intended to overthrow the newly established SPD government. In response, leaders of the SPD worked with a right-wing paramilitary organization in a series of actions that led to her execution.

In the following years, the divide would only deepen as the communist orthodoxy under Stalin was set in place. Stalin’s purges in the Soviet Union are well known, but similar purges happened in Soviet-backed communist parties around the world, including in Germany. Democratic Socialists, Libertarian Socialists, Anarchists, and Trotskyists were all removed from the party. It was under these conditions that Ernst Thälmann would rise to the leadership of the KPD.

Thälmann, like Stalin, believed that a communist revolution was imminent and that social democracy was all that held it back. In fact, the Communist International’s official position was that social democracy formed “the left-wing of fascism.” Thälmann declared that “today the Social Democrats are the most active factor in creating fascism in Germany,” even more than the actual fascists.

The Comintern soon coined the phrase “Social-Fascism” as an epithet for social democracy and declared that social democracy should be targeted even at the expense of fighting the Nazis. This policy would remain until 1935 when Stalin would declare the need for a “united front” between Communists, Social Democrats, and Liberals. By then Hitler had already risen to power, ended the Republic, and banned both the KPD and SPD.

Perhaps the most significant example of a “red-brown alliance” can be seen in the 1931 Landtag Referendum in Prussia, where the Communist Party endorsed, at Stalin’s behest, a Nazi referendum to overthrow the SPD government.

Soon the KPD was referring to the Nazis as “working people’s comrades.” The justification for this, as Thälmann himself put it, was “After Hitler, Our Turn!” They hoped that it would only be a matter of time before a Nazi government betrayed the working classes and incited a communist revolution. Fortunately, many of the rank-and-file of the KPD rejected this command and voted against the referendum.

Ultimately, the referendum failed to gain enough votes. Nonetheless, other leftists at the time condemned the move. Among the most prominent objectors was Leon Trotsky, an exiled communist from the Soviet Union. He remarked that “In the conduct of the Central Committee of the German Communist Party, everything is wrong: the evaluation of the situation is incorrect, the immediate aim incorrectly posed, the means to achieve it incorrectly chosen.

Along the way, the leadership of the party succeeded in overthrowing all those “principles” which it advocated.” However, these complaints fell on deaf ears, and collaboration between the leadership of the KPD and the Nazis continued.

The red-brown alliance was strong in Berlin where it had been a long-standing strategy. As far back as 1923, the leader of the KPD in Berlin, Ruth Fischer, had given a speech to fascist college students and attempted to appeal to them with abhorrent antisemitism, declaring that, “Those who call for a struggle against Jewish capital are already class strugglers… You are against Jewish capital and want to fight the speculators. Very good. Throw down the Jewish capitalists, hang them from the lamp-post, stomp on them.”

Nazis and communists would continue to collaborate. In 1932, on the eve of Hitler’s rise to power, the two factions united to support transportation and rent strikes which crippled Berlin and led to rioting. In some cases, “Communists and Nazis stood arm in arm collecting money for the strike.” The SPD had traditionally maintained a close relationship with labor unions, but on this occasion, it did not support the strike.

This would later cause the SPD to lose some support among the working classes, despite Berlin having long been an SPD stronghold. Given that the Nazis had little chance of rising to power in the city, some speculate that Nazi support for the strike was a plot to undermine the SPD’s working-class support and make the KPD the most powerful party in Berlin. Regardless of intent, the KPD gained significant support in Berlin in following elections, thus costing the SPD seats in the Reichstag.

At times, the fight between social democracy, communism, and fascism took to the streets in the form of clashes between paramilitaries from each of the parties. Right-wing paramilitary units had existed since shortly after the First World War, often comprised of those veterans who had returned from war and felt that the republic would fail to avenge their loss.

The first of the major party affiliated paramilitaries to form was the infamous Nazi Sturmabteilung, often abbreviated SA, which would later spawn the SS. Several years later both the KPD and the SPD would form their own paramilitary branches, with the Roter Frontkämpfer-Bund (RFB) supporting the KPD, and the Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold being aligned with the SPD.

These forces would all come into conflict with one another. There were frequent fights when one organization would try to disrupt the meeting of another. For example, social democracy was generally popular among labor unions, and both the RFB and the SA would attempt to break up union meetings guarded by Reichsbanner troops. Open conflict between SA, RFB, and Reichsbanner members would often break out when any of the parties held a public rally.

It should be noted that this article primarily focuses on the decisions of the leadership of the parties involved and that all parties involved had conflicting factions. Even after purging its dissenters, the KPD was not totally united when it came to the grassroots membership of the party. This was evident from the KPD members who voted against the Landtung referendum.

In some instances, SPD and KPD members joined together to form neighborhood and shop-floor alliances, and even formed the original Antifa together. Another example is the SPD trade union members who participated in the Berlin strikes, despite the Social Democrats’ official opposition. There were times when the average worker was clearly more aware of the dangers of Nazism than their leaders were.

A few months after the Berlin strikes, the SPD and its coalition of pro-democracy parties were unable to win enough seats in the July 1932 election to form a coalition government. This failure was in no small part due to the decision of the Communist Party of Germany to attack, both violently and rhetorically, social democracy.

The failure to form a government set off a series of elections every few months until the Nazis, through the use of violence, eventually won enough seats to form a government.


When the Reichstag met to pass the Enabling Act that would grant Hitler the powers of a dictator, SA stormtroopers swarmed inside and outside the building to intimidate any potentially reluctant moderate representatives. The KPD’s representatives had already been arrested or fled into exile.

Abandoned by their moderate allies, the Social Democrats stood alone against the Act, providing all 94 votes against it. With 444 votes in favor, democracy had fallen while the left devoured itself. The KPD, and shortly after the SPD, were banned, and so the Third Reich began.


https://www.warhistoryonline.com/histor ... -wwii.html
#15130721
Random American wrote:
Not really, as while I'm culturally conservative, it's not like I have a love affair with capitalism.



So then how do you reconcile your 'yesteryear' (to be diplomatic) social ethos, with a possible material-economic (mode-of-production) *advancement*, beyond capitalism?

In other words if there were to be a proletarian revolution, which you didn't oppose, and you found yourself soon thereafter in a *post*-capitalist, socialist-type social order, would you still be preaching your more-*tribalist* social mores, perhaps for neighborhood-living, once everyone has been fully individually socially liberated -- ? (No more real estate property values, institutional racist redlining, etc.)


G.U.T.S.U.C., Individualism - Tribalism

Spoiler: show
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#15130735
@ckaihatsu Birds of a feather flock together, so that's really how my mores would be preserved. Unless of course, you try to put me crushed for having different cultural views, plus people can form associations that aren't capitalist. Look, I'm not a Marxist (as I've said before), but I'm not undermining it to protect capitalism, which is what you accused me of to begin with. If you don't believe me, then believe what you want to believe.

I was wrong to call it an astroturf before. I just had a small group of them in mind that care more about social progressivism than anything else, though they might just be liberals who just pay lipservice.
#15130756
Random American wrote:
@ckaihatsu Birds of a feather flock together, so that's really how my mores would be preserved. Unless of course, you try to put me crushed for having different cultural views, plus people can form associations that aren't capitalist. Look, I'm not a Marxist (as I've said before), but I'm not undermining it to protect capitalism, which is what you accused me of to begin with. If you don't believe me, then believe what you want to believe.

I was wrong to call it an astroturf before. I just had a small group of them in mind that care more about social progressivism than anything else, though they might just be liberals who just pay lipservice.



Again, i think you're hitting on the specific *arbitrariness* of the liberal-type reformist politics / position -- yes, it's an institutional, standing political-cultural 'regime' of its own, in the power structure of government, and so there *has* to be *some* kind of power-culture, as in 'this' is done, but 'that' isn't, etc., but the relative *arbitrariness* of this in-group culture on any given day is annoying since, to everyone on the 'outside', it just feels like a *placeholder* because it's so disconnected from any bottom-up process, or input, or needs.

That said, though, there is the *relative*-progressivism of it to be considered, as with *any* point on the political spectrum. Many left-wing governmental reforms *are* at least nominally *socially progressive*, so that the official-power-culture has the potential to be *incrementally* better than what we currently have, as with housing reform, or whatever, and that dynamic itself explains all of the typical hype around presidential elections, candidates, etc.

For *you*, since, as a conservative, you don't *give a shit* about government directly benefitting the everyday person, this left-wing stuff doesn't *interest* you at all, and you'd rather see the market mechanism sort everything out. But government-supply *is*, *objectively*, a better, less-expensive, more-direct, and more-beneficial, to more people, potentially, *method* for the distribution of any goods and/or services since it's done through the relatively centralized point of *government* administration, and your position doesn't object when the same government favors *private sector* interests directly, as for the wealthy and/or corporations / military, so the same administrative process could *certainly* be applied to the average person and *their* *humane* needs as individuals.

But your political position would then be at an *impasse* if that happened, because if people are satisfied by *government* programs, directly at the *individual* level, then all of the private-sector bullshit would be *obviated* and you'd be politically *bankrupt* -- so *that's* the social dynamics at the heart of left-versus-right.

In the *meantime* social progressives will be doing social progressivism, since that's a *niche* between the status-quo and full workers-of-the-world control over all social production. Social progressivism is *valid* to the degree that it's *anti-oppression*, which isn't much, but it's definitively more than the politics of any right-wing 'conservative' like yourself.
#15130763
I suspect the last article shared is simply a description of Stalins catastrophic ‘Third Period’.

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057%2F9781403907226_2
At the end of the 1920s, the Communist Party embarked on a destructive shift leftwards. In its policy, the party claimed that the main obstacle to revolution came from other forces within the workers’ movement. The Labour Party and the trade unions constituted ‘social fascism’, an ‘auxiliary apparatus of the bourgeoisie’, which cheated the workers away from revolution. In 1929 it was announced that ‘the Labour Government has already begun to show its Social-Fascist character’, which was illustrated by Labour’s policy of ‘Fascism and violent suppression of the working class’. In its ultra-left practice, the Communist Party isolated itself from ordinary workers within the trade union and labour movement. The party attempted to implement its new politics in industry, through championing break-away red unions, although the unions formed in this way both failed. As Noreen Branson’s official history of the party records, ‘The trade union leaders had tried to destroy the party; ironically “Class against Class” made their job much easier.’1 The fruits of its first ten years of successful political and industrial agitation were thrown away, and the party declined until it had just two and a half thousand members in November 1930. It was by no means obvious that the Communist Party would survive to see the decade’s end.

The zig zagging of the USSR so abrupt and extreme as to give one whiplash seem often explained by domestic problems of the USSR.
#15130793
ckaihatsu wrote:...you'd rather see the market mechanism sort everything out.

That's wrong. If you seen or cared about any of my other posts, you'd know I don't have that view. You think my politics are wrong, then fine, I don't care, but I'm not as pro-corporate as you think. That's just objectively wrong. I'm not someone who supports the GOP platform or anything stupid like that. Hell, you've seen me complain about the problem of wealth inequality and nothing would get the market to fix that without good social programs and strict progressive taxation, something I do support. I wouldn't trust a free market to do anything but make it worse and I cannot stand propagandists who claim it is this golden goose. Hardly someone who wants the market to solve everything and I do think my government helps corporations far too much.

But I get what you're saying, you think I want plutocratic economics alongside some bones thrown to the common people.
#15130814
Random American wrote:
That's wrong. If you seen or cared about any of my other posts, you'd know I don't have that view. You think my politics are wrong, then fine, I don't care, but I'm not as pro-corporate as you think. That's just objectively wrong. I'm not someone who supports the GOP platform or anything stupid like that. Hell, you've seen me complain about the problem of wealth inequality and nothing would get the market to fix that without good social programs and strict progressive taxation, something I do support. I wouldn't trust a free market to do anything but make it worse and I cannot stand propagandists who claim it is this golden goose. Hardly someone who wants the market to solve everything and I do think my government helps corporations far too much.

But I get what you're saying, you think I want plutocratic economics alongside some bones thrown to the common people.



Yes, you're correct -- my apologies again.

I'll have to go back and be a bit more attentive to your particulars, in particular. I think I was mixing you up with Verv over at another thread. It's difficult for me to get a 'read' on your politics because you have more of a 'point cloud' conception of it yourself.

Okay, give me some time and I'll take more time, when I have it, to be more detail-oriented with your 'case', so-to-speak. Usually I can just 'triangulate' based on the linear left-right spectrum. Take care, later.
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