Gulag Archipelago - Will it radicalise me? - Page 5 - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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#15037770
Potemkin wrote:The question is, why doesn't he see it? And why don't you see it in yourself? And why don't I see it in myself? This is what interests me, not screeching defiance and scorn at people possessed by memes which differ from the memes which possess me.


Fair enough. :)

So why do we go along with it anyway, even if we know better?

Pretty sure that's true in both of our cases to a large degree.. but what do you do about the fact that you're ideologically 'possessed'?

How do you personally 'fight' it?

Surely as long as you TRY to use your critical faculties to critically evaluate the 'reality' you see before you, you're doing the best you can in an imperfect world/situation?

The Maoists are pretty hot on the whole self-criticism thung. Are you more aligned with Hoxhaists or neither..?

What is debate except a form of exorcism? :)




Meh, I'm not dogmatic you know. I've got nothing against communists. If you check my profile you'll see my ideology is everything-ism; ie I think all ideologies should be given their right to a fair trial and can maybe coexist. Even neoliberal capitalism... as long as it doesn't expand into our spheres.

In that sense, my 'screeching' is only directed against those who would enforce their tyrannical (my subjective biased idea of it anyway) will on me, and others.

I was variously a marxist leninist, an anarcho-com and a left-com back around '09/2010 so your beliefs are not 'alien' to me.
#15037803
SolarCross wrote:@Reichstraten

Thanks for pointing that out. @quetzalcoatl is also showing us a common flaw in leftist thinking, common but not universal, where the rightness or wrongness of something is determined solely on how one identifies in terms of ideological allegiance, ideological tribalism one might say. He assumes I must reject anything by someone identified as "leftist" because that is what he does with anyone identified as a "rightist".

If an eminent leftist came out and said that recent scientific experiments have proven that 2 + 2 = 5 and that anyone who thinks 2 + 2 is still 4 is a stupid reactionary bigot. He will accept that unquestioningly and begin screeching furiously in the faces of anyone not identified as a leftist for getting the new math wrong because of their anti-leftist thinking.

This is how everyone of the left just accepts people like @Potemkin sitting on a trust fund inherited from a captialist parent and then never working a day in his life but for soaking up luxuries just because now and again he signals how he is "on the left" so that he can get his free pass to do as he pleases. If he did not signal his tribal allegiance then they would screech in his face about privilege and exploitation and all that sort of thing.

I can not tell how many leftists have virtually had a shriek in my face accusing me of all sorts of random crap for no more reason than that I have signalled that I do not identify as a leftist.

I am not saying all leftists are like this but a lot are, a lot. And it is this thing in particular that makes them look like escaped mental patients or just utterly duplicitous.

I would quite like to find out what causes this extremely warped way of thinking, maybe there are answers in the books we are discussing: Gulag Archipelago and Kolyma Tales. Or maybe not. I have a couple of hypothesis. One is that the cause is literal daemonic possession.



Oh @SolarCross so you think that is who @Potemkin is all this time? A trust fund baby who sits on his wealth and privilege? who had a rich Daddy or something?

Aw, hell, I got to laugh now so damn hard I got to go to the bathroom.

You are very very wrong about him. But you don't know him. Potemkin is very hard to get any information out of unless you know him well. And to know him well you need to not be a foe at all.

He is not a trust fund guy with a lot of money with a rich Daddy. That is for sure.

Lol. It goes to show you fight sometimes against people you don't even know on the internet.

All that you wrote about the Left? The right engages in a lot. Hating the Left for not agreeing or because they are following an idoelogy they believe in.....they leave their humanity on the wayside. The first thing to go in a war.


Ay SolarCross you and Potemkin have a lot in common and you don't even see it. It is kind of funny. Both of you don't like certain things for all the right reasons, but you are on opposite ends of the divide.

I got to go to the bathroom. You made me laugh so hard SolarCross. Your descriptions of who you think Potemkin is in real life is so off....I find it hilarious. ;) :lol: :lol:
#15037968
SolarCross wrote:I don't know. What else can I do when righteous indignation boils over? I am just supposed to bottle it up?

According to the commies that was not real communism. That is the perennial excuse. The new followers say it will be betetr this time around. ie venezuela :knife: :knife: :knife: :knife:
#15037971
Julian658 wrote:According to the commies that was not real communism. That is the perennial excuse. The new followers say it will be betetr this time around. ie venezuela :knife: :knife: :knife: :knife:


Yeah that's right. I have even asked them what they would do differently next time. Apparently the answer is nothing, they would do it all again just as their predecessors did if they could, yet somehow by magic it will turn out differently the next time.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
- Albert Einstein
#15037977
Julian658 wrote:According to the commies that was not real communism. That is the perennial excuse. The new followers say it will be betetr this time around. ie venezuela :knife: :knife: :knife: :knife:

I think there is enough theory prior to the USSR the help explain how the USSR didn’t achieve socialism and assertions if such were only propaganda.
The conditions if its failure were even predicted by Trotsky with the necessity of socialist revolutions in the rest of Europe to support them.

Although one would more likely find those that saw it as a authentic effort at achieving as much and sorely failed. Leading to an even greater alienation through state bureaucracy than of capitalist markets.

In fact I see in one of my favourite philosophers only assertion in regards to how the state hadn’t withered away was to reintroduce markets.
[url]caute.ru/am/text/dogstate.html[/url]

Crudely, it did as Marx predicted about barracks communism in simply generalizing private property through the state. Ilyenkov speaks of how it dealt with private property in politico-legal terms but hadn’t actually negated it.

There is an ambivalence in that it was the first workers revolution in the world but that it failed.
There isn’t a motivation to simply dismiss it nor accept it wholly as is the means of dismissal of equating the results of the USSR as the inevitability without means of showing such necessity.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1935/02/ws-therm-bon.htm
The domination of the bureaucracy over the country, as well as Stalin’s domination over the bureaucracy, have well-nigh attained their absolute consummation. But what conclusions would follow from this? There are some who say that since the actual state that has emerged from the proletarian revolution does not correspond to ideal a priori norms, therefore they turn their backs on it. This is political snobbery, common to pacifist-democratic, libertarian, anarcho-syndicalist and, generally, ultraleft circles of petty-bourgeois intelligentsia. There are others who say that since this state has emerged from the proletarian revolution, therefore every criticism of it is sacrilege and counterrevolution. That is the voice of hypocrisy behind which lurk most often the immediate material interests of certain groups among this very same petty-bourgeois intelligentsia or among the workers’ bureaucracy. These two types – the political snob and the political hypocrite – are readily interchangeable, depending upon personal circumstances. Let us pass them both by.

A Marxist would say that the present-day USSR obviously does not approximate the a priori norms of a Soviet state; let us discover, however, what we failed to foresee when working out the programmatic norms; let us, furthermore, analyze what social factors have distorted the workers’ state; let us check once again if these distortions have extended to the economic foundations of the state, that is to say, if the basic social conquests of the proletarian revolution have been preserved; if these have been preserved, then let us find in what direction they are changing; and let us discover if there obtain in the USSR and on the world arena such factors as may facilitate and hasten the preponderance of progressive trends of development over those of reaction. Such an approach is complex. It brings with it no ready-made key for lazy minds, which the latter love so much.

Dismissal are easy, a substantive critique is harder, one that shows it on the terms as not just an external subject but one able to position themselves within the project and criticize them on their own terms, immanent critique.
The USSR has a lot to learn from in its successes and its ultimate failure.

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