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#15182288
Potemkin wrote:his rapid industrialisation of the Soviet Union under centrally-planned Five Year Plans and his collectivisation of agriculture turned Soviet society upside-down. Under Stalin, Russia was in a state of permanent revolution.

It seems wicked to evoke Trotskey's theory of Permanent Revolution in describing Stalin.

Moreover, Stalin's 'Socialism in One Country' doctrine was opposed by Trotskey's permanent revolution (or, vice versa, if you prefer, as I do).

I think I get the sense in which you intended the concept, so it was mostly the first point.
#15182289
Crantag wrote:It seems wicked to evoke Trotskey's theory of Permanent Revolution in describing Stalin.

Moreover, Stalin's 'Socialism in One Country' doctrine was opposed by Trotskey's permanent revolution.

I think I get the sense in which you intended the concept, so it was mostly the first point (or, vice versa, if you prefer, as I do).

It was indeed something of a dig at the Trotskyists (rather than Trotsky himself, for whom I have some degree of respect). After all, with the exception of 'socialism in one country', almost all of Stalin's policy platform in the 1930s was lifted almost directly from the policy platform of the Left Opposition in the 1920s. And, judging by his record, Stalin was one of the least conservative political leaders who has ever lived.
#15182366
@Juin

Uh Oh Juin, new evidence is emerging that it is TRUMP SUPPORTERS that are primarily driving the lower vaccination rates here in the U.S. So, I guess my observations about African Americans, at least in my area, seeming to be willing to get vaccinated, while Trump supporters not getting vaccinated was in line with the now emerging facts and evidence. A big reason why Britian and Canada are ahead of the U.S. in vaccination rates is because Trump supporters in the U.S. refuse to get vaccinated because of politically motivated reasons. So, even though African Americans might have good cause for not wanting to get vaccinated due to being used as experimental guinea pigs in American history, it appears that it is primarily Trump supporters that are dragging down U.S. vaccination rates.

Harry Enten of CNN wrote:A new Angus Reid poll from Canada finds that 86% of Canadians 18 and older have gotten or want a Covid-19 vaccine as soon as possible. The same poll shows that just 8% of Canadian adults do not want a Covid-19 vaccination.

This matches what the real-world data is showing us: Canadians are far more driven to get vaccinated than Americans.

What's the point: Just two months ago, less than 5% of Canadians were fully vaccinated against Covid-19. At the same time, about 40% of Americans were. Today, a little less than 50% of Americans are fully vaccinated, while a little more than 50% of Canadians are.

Among adults, more than 80% of the Canadian population is at least partially vaccinated, while the US has still not reached 70%.

A big reason (though not the only one) why Canada has overtaken the US is pretty clear: Political polarization is playing a smaller role in who is and is not getting vaccinated there. We see a similar phenomenon in the United Kingdom, where more than 50% of the population is also fully vaccinated.

(Note that those ages 12 and above are eligible for a Covid-19 vaccine in Canada and the United States, while, for most, the vaccine-eligible age in the UK is 18.)
In the Angus Reid poll in Canada, 85% of adults who voted for the center-left Liberal Party in 2019 have been at least partially vaccinated. It's a similar 84% for the progressive New Democratic Party.

Those percentages look similar to what we're seeing in the US for progressives. In a late June ​​NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll, 88% of those who voted for Joe Biden in the 2020 election said they had been vaccinated. A July CBS News/YouGov poll showed that 84% of Biden backers were at least partially vaccinated. A June Fox News poll put it at 81%.

But the difference between the two countries becomes clear when you examine conservatives. Among those adults who backed the Conservative Party in Canada's 2019 election, a lower 69% had received at least one dose.

Still, that's far greater than the 52% of Donald Trump supporters who have gotten a dose in an average of the Fox News, Marist and YouGov surveys.
It's worth noting that the US' vaccination patterns don't just differ from Canada's. They also differ significantly from those of another key ally: the United Kingdom.


When we examine the UK, we see that areas that were more likely to back the Conservative Party in the 2019 general election actually have a higher vaccination rate than areas where that support was weaker.

Specifically, let's examine the 533 constituencies in England (the most populated part of the United Kingdom) where we have vaccination data through July 18.

In the constituencies where the Conservatives did better than they did in the median constituency, about 90% of all adults on average have had at least one dose. In the constituencies where they did worse than the median, about 83% of all adults on average have had at least one dose.

(This gap holds even when you control for age, even as voting patterns are highly dependent on age in the UK.)

In the United States, the pattern, of course, is reversed and exacerbated. About 74% of the adult population has received at least one Covid-19 dose in the states Biden won and the District of Columbia, which Biden won too. It's only 59% in the states he lost.

It's not entirely clear why there is a partisan gap in the US and not in Canada or the UK.

It's possible that what we're seeing in the UK is an incumbent effect. That is, the leader in the UK is Conservative Party member Boris Johnson, and therefore Conservatives are more likely to line up behind the leader.

I would point out, though, that Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is a Liberal Party member, and the vaccination gap by party isn't as wide up there as it is in the States.

Further, the gap in vaccine acceptance in the US was evident even when Trump was president and promoting the idea of a vaccine, so this isn't just recent anti-vaccine rhetoric from some on the right. With the exception of a period around the 2020 election (when then-Democratic vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris and others raised questions about the vaccine approval process), Democrats always said they were more likely to get vaccinated than Republicans in Gallup polling.

To be clear, the partisan gap is not the only reason why the US is lagging. For example, the vaccination rate of those under age 30 is far higher in Canada and the UK than in the US. There are also fewer Black and Hispanic residents in Canada and the UK, who are less likely to get vaccinated in the US.

If the US were similar to these two other countries with regard to vaccination rates by age and race and ethnicity, the partisan gap in vaccines could be larger, because younger and minority groups are more likely to be Democrats.

Either way, the partisan gap is huge in the US compared with two of its closest allies with similar access to vaccines. If it didn't exist, we'd be in far better shape when fighting the pandemic.


https://www.cnn.com/2021/07/24/politics ... index.html

However, to be objective, it is true that blacks and likely Hispanics are also vaccine hesitant here in the U.S. partly due to the fact that blacks were used as experimental guinea pigs in the past by the U.S. government. But it still appears, that despite this, it is Trump supporters driving the unvaccinated rate.
#15182401
Juin wrote:
Politics_Observer, whites are human beings like any other. My impression is you simplify far too much a complicated situation. Every society has a progressive/conservative divide. Even if you were to remove all whites from the United States- and everything remaining the same- there will still be a conservative segment, which conservative segment will still resort to same tactics. Same if the United States were to be all white, the same progressive/conservative breakdown will still be there; with both halves doing same thing.



'With both halves doing the same thing' -- this is a *telling* statement, since you're indicating that the distinction may as well be a *narrative* one, since both Republicans and Democrats carry out the same basic class warfare nationalist policies, soundly against the interests of the working class. The term 'reactionary' comes to mind....

I'll offer the following schematic illustration, which shows a difference of 'party politics', yet such bickering is subsumed by *actual events*, meaning objective social reality.


History, Macro-Micro -- Political (Cognitive) Dissonance

Spoiler: show
Image



---


Juin wrote:
I still say it is not as simple as that. The Democratic Party was already a progressive, advocate for worker and lower class Party decades before the Republicans muscled them out of the South. Woodrow Wilson, a real sob when it came to blacks, if you ask me, headed a Democratic Party which was already the arm of the lower class, even as it championed all the Jim Crow business. Racism was a complicated beast. I dont think it was ever a beast that could be blamed soley on conservative whites, or soley on liberal whites.




In this early part of the twentieth century, labeled by generations of white scholars as "the Progressive period," lynchings were reported every week; it was the low point for Negroes, North and South, "the nadir," as Rayford Logan, a black historian, put it. In 1910 there were 10 million Negroes in the United States, and 9 million of them were in the South.

The government of the United States (between 1901 and 1921, the Presidents were Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson)-whether Republican or Democrat-watched Negroes being lynched, observed murderous riots against blacks in Statesboro, Georgia, Brownsville, Texas, and Atlanta, Georgia, and did nothing.

[...]

What was clear in this period to blacks, to feminists, to labor organizers and socialists, was that they could not count on the national government. True, this was the "Progressive Period," the start of the Age of Reform; but it was a reluctant reform, aimed at quieting the popular risings, not making fundamental changes.

What gave it the name "Progressive" was that new laws were passed. Under Theodore Roosevelt, there was the Meat Inspection Act, the Hepburn Act to regulate railroads and pipelines, a Pure Food and Drug Act. Under Taff, the Mann-Elkins Act put telephone and telegraph systems under the regulation of the Interstate Commerce Commission. In Woodrow Wilson's presidency, the Federal Trade Commission was introduced to control the growth of monopolies, and the Federal Reserve Act to regulate the country's money and banking system. Under Taft were proposed the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, allowing a graduated income tax, and the Seventeenth Amendment, providing for the election of Senators directly by popular vote instead of by the state legislatures, as the original Constitution provided. Also at this time, a number of states passed laws regulating wages and hours, providing for safety inspection of factories and compensation for injured workmen.

It was a time of public investigations aimed at soothing protest. In 1913 the Pujo Committee of Congress studied the concentration of power in the banking industry, and the Commission on Industrial Relations of the Senate held hearings on labor-management conflict.



https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/socchal13.html



---


Politics_Observer wrote:
@Juin

There is a solid case for the republican party being the party of white supremacy based on it's actions and it also shows with their attempts at voter suppression which targets African American voters. Republican party needs to understand that black folks and other minorities have just as much right as white folks to vote and stop passing un-necessary laws that target African Americans and other minorities which prevent them from exercising their legitimate right to vote.


Politics_Observer wrote:
Republican just going to have to learn that power is not their birth right and not to interfere with stopping and preventing genuinely fair elections and let the people be heard. The democratic process must be allowed to take it's course and for the will of the people to be heard.



I think you may want to consider that not everyone has identical economic interests as the next person, and that the two factions of the ruling class, Democrats and Republicans, tend to just have different 'flavors' for carrying out the same *kinds* of policies, more-or-less. Look at immigration, tariffs, sanctions, and international relations, Biden versus Trump, to see what I mean.

Nationalism has its own *institutional* interests for the *nation-state*, which is certainly not the same as 'the people' -- just look at Myanmar or Haiti right now.


History, Macro-Micro -- simplified

Spoiler: show
Image
#15183024
[quote="ckaihatsu"]



ckaihatsu >> In this early part of the twentieth century, labeled by generations of white scholars as "the Progressive period," lynchings were reported every week; it was the low point for Negroes, North and South, "the nadir," as Rayford Logan, a black historian, put it. In 1910 there were 10 million Negroes in the United States, and 9 million of them were in the South.

The government of the United States (between 1901 and 1921, the Presidents were Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Woodrow Wilson)-whether Republican or Democrat-watched Negroes being lynched, observed murderous riots against blacks in Statesboro, Georgia, Brownsville, Texas, and Atlanta, Georgia, and did nothing.

[...]

What was clear in this period to blacks, to feminists, to labor organizers and socialists, was that they could not count on the national government. True, this was the "Progressive Period," the start of the Age of Reform; but it was a reluctant reform, aimed at quieting the popular risings, not making fundamental changes.

What gave it the name "Progressive" was that new laws were passed. Under Theodore Roosevelt, there was the Meat Inspection Act, the Hepburn Act to regulate railroads and pipelines, a Pure Food and Drug Act. Under Taff, the Mann-Elkins Act put telephone and telegraph systems under the regulation of the Interstate Commerce Commission. In Woodrow Wilson's presidency, the Federal Trade Commission was introduced to control the growth of monopolies, and the Federal Reserve Act to regulate the country's money and banking system. Under Taft were proposed the Sixteenth Amendment to the Constitution, allowing a graduated income tax, and the Seventeenth Amendment, providing for the election of Senators directly by popular vote instead of by the state legislatures, as the original Constitution provided. Also at this time, a number of states passed laws regulating wages and hours, providing for safety inspection of factories and compensation for injured workmen.

It was a time of public investigations aimed at soothing protest. In 1913 the Pujo Committee of Congress studied the concentration of power in the banking industry, and the Commission on Industrial Relations of the Senate held hearings on labor-management conflict.<<






Thanks for the above. Peoples history of the United States! I have a copy. I am tempted to start reading it all over again. I appreciated what a true ruffian Christopher Columbus was only after reading Zinn
#15183026
[quote="Potemkin"][/quote]



Politics_Observer << For example, some would say Stalin was conservative and he certainly wasn't trying to establish a "superior race" though he was total nutbag.<<


Potemkin << The Tsarist authorities would have been surprised to learn that Stalin was a conservative, given the fact that he was actively trying to overthrow the Tsarist regime, which had ruled Russia for more than four centuries. And even while he was leader of the Soviet Union, Stalin was far from being conservative - his rapid industrialisation of the Soviet Union under centrally-planned Five Year Plans and his collectivisation of agriculture turned Soviet society upside-down. Under Stalin, Russia was in a state of permanent revolution.

His successors, on the other hand, can be described as "conservatives", at least until Gorbachev, since they were trying to conserve the legacy of Lenin and Stalin.<<



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