On the public understanding of Soviet elections, I noticed that the figures wikipedia typically cites in its very sparse documentation of the topic are all from a pair of academics who - if you read the original source text - have fudged their numbers to make it appear that the USSR was one of these cases - the CP are misrepresented as winning control of the Supreme Soviet by 99% over and over again because the authors have deliberately aggregated CP candidates and non-CP candidates into this total figure, calculating only spoiled ballots/re-open nominations/etc as the only votes "against" the CP.
It's equivalent to claiming that the Conservative Party won by 99% in the British election because only 1% of voters spoiled their ballots.
in no way are those equivalent.
Ufuk_Surekli posted:I'm instead suggesting that non-CP members as individuals were elected en masse over and over again to virtually every level of legislature/public office, and some historians actively try and conceal this fact by deliberately misrepresenting the numerical data on these elections. Is there strong evidence that each of these hundreds of individuals were hand-picked/vetted each time? And what sort of vetting criteria - something more serious, or equivalent, to e.g. felony disenfranchisement in the USA?
i encourage you to keep at it until you answer all of these disingenuous rhetorical questions.
With that out of the way, yes, as you said the USSR carried all the features of bourgeois democracy and bourgeois elections that we currently hold "democracy" to mean. A truer definition of democracy that you didn't touch on is sortition, but that's probably for another thread.
The comparison between brutal policing is interesting. We can say that Soviet prisons from the mid-1950s to the 80s were at least no worse than western ones. However, I think you downplay the brutality of the Gulag: while anticommunist propagandists like Conquest like to overstate deaths to the point of stating that more people died in Kolyma than ever were in Kolyma in the first place according to all records, it is undeniable that the Gulag was very brutal—with about a quarter of inmates dying or being killed; endemic disease; ubiquitous torture. While much of the Soviet legacy can be defended on fair grounds, understating the brutality of Kolyma, Stalin's ethnic cleansing of Chechens, Koreans, Crimeans etc., and intra-party killings shouldn't be part of it.
Edited by COINTELBRO ()
also, for the sake of argument, if i were comparing a liberal police state to a socialist police state, i would very much expect the former to require far more security labor, both because i would expect it to have substantially more actual crime due to the material disparities, and because a liberal state's preoccupation with rights and due process will require a certain amount of additional manpower even when they're only being honored inconsistently. i'm sure others could think of more reasons
Ufuk_Surekli posted:Something astonishing which is highlighted in Murphy's research is that at its peak, the total number of personnel involved in ALL police activities (regular police and special departments, prison guards, etc) in the USSR, was never greater than 0.2% of the Soviet population (NB - the figure is actually far lower because 0.2% includes firefighters and reservists, who for statistical purposes were included in the same category). As a point of comparison in the USA today fully 1% of the population (that's 1 in 100 human beings, not just adult workers!) is directly employed in policing activities.
daaang. fucked up if true.
Ufuk_Surekli posted:Maybe I'm just an idiot and police activities in that time completely invalidate the question of democracy. I guess my question would be - do you believe that the democratic electoral procedures of the USSR were basically upheld? As in, with the purges, are we dealing with allegations of an atrocity committed by a democracy (of which there are plenty in all quarters), or some qualitative shift in the institutional nature of the Soviet state?
the 1936 constitution's democratic electoral procedures were not upheld. the constitution guaranteed contested elections which were abandoned in autumn 1937 (getty, state and society). the soviet government reversed at a moments notice its own policy on mass arrests, jurisdiction of the courts vs secret police, torture, and execution (getty, excesses)
anyway your post is basically correct OP but it won't work on liberals because we do not live in a democracy. even left-liberal Noam Chomsky acknowledges that capitalism and democracy are incompatible because a corporation is the most authoritarian institution that has ever existed. of course bourgeois parliamentary republicanism is a form of government which works well to negotiate between different interests of capital, labor aristocracy, and identity coalitions, but it is this condition of imperialist abundance that liberals really mean by democracy, not any kind of bureaucratic structure or legal fiction. when liberals say the USSR wasn't democratic what they really mean was it was poor, it was violent, it was highly political, and it was foreign.
I still think there's a lot to be gained from studying socialist legal structures but I don't think doing it to convince anti-communist labor aristocrats will get you anywhere.
The fifth specific feature of the draft of the new Constitution is its consistent and thoroughgoing democratism. From the standpoint of democratism, bourgeois constitutions may be divided into two groups : One group of constitutions openly denies, or actually nullifies, the equality of rights of citizens and democratic liberties. The other group of constitutions readily accepts, and even advertises democratic principles, but at the same time it makes reservations and provides for restrictions which utterly mutilate these democratic rights and liberties.
They speak of equal suffrage for all citizens, but at the same time limit it by residential, educational, and even property qualifications. They speak of equal rights for citizens, but at the same time they make the reservation that this does not apply to women, or applies to them only in part. And so on and so forth.
What distinguishes the draft of the new Constitution of the U.S.S.R. is the fact that it is free from such reservations and restrictions. For it, there exists no division of citizens into active and passive ones; for it, all citizens are active. It does not recognize any difference in rights as between men and women, "residents" and "non-residents," propertied and propertyless, educated and uneducated.
For it, all citizens have equal rights. It is not property status, not national origin, not sex, nor office, but personal ability and personal labour, that determines the position of every citizen in society.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/11/25.htm
The interesting question is then what is the significance of their being different forms of bourgeois republicanism which have more or less formal freedom. Is this because of working class struggle? Is it historically contingent? Is it derived from the need for a labor aristocracy with some freedom? Is it a genuine struggle between the relations of production and the means of production given legal form? This interests me more than the obscene wealth of the G8 given legal form.
e: obviously this only matters for studying bourgeois law. for communists there is no such thing as freedom, communism will always be violently suppressed by any bourgeois state. the existence of American communists under COINTELPRO and Chinese communists under Japanese fascism (I avoid Nazi comparisons because liberals can't handle them) is not significantly different from a 'rule of law' standpoint.
the dictatorship of the proletariat is inherently and infinitely more "democratic" than any western democracy because it represents the majority of toiling workers rather than the bourgie parasites.
Panopticon posted:actually stalin lied, ex-kulaks, priests and common criminals were denied political rights, and peasants were unable to access the social programmes the constitution laid out (getty, state and society)
Getty is full of shit. It is highly unlikely that the historical documents exists which could support such an assertion, in fact he basically says this:
The decision to restrict the elections is clouded in secrecy. No Soviet publication or currently available archival source documents it. Proceeds to make a bunch of statements based on this lack of evidence p. 32
We already know the problems with using the soviet archives as they currently exist, just mosy on down to the Bloodlies thread. He doesn't even have those. Of course Getty is a historian and crafts a story based on what he has to work with. Many historians of the USSR are stupid and easily dismissed as propaganda, Getty is smart but ultimately still propaganda because the structural conditions of Soviet studies in Western academia force him to be so.
That's not to say you shouldn't try to learn what happened in the USSR. However you have consistently shown to have a predetermined agenda when approaching a highly contentious (to put it mildly) field of scholarship and a dishonest way of absorbing information into your liberal ideological concepts. So I'm just returning the favor and assuming the absolute worst about everything you have to say about socialism.
Ufuk_Surekli posted:babyhueypnewton posted:anyway your post is basically correct OP but it won't work on liberals because we do not live in a democracy. even left-liberal Noam Chomsky acknowledges that capitalism and democracy are incompatible because a corporation is the most authoritarian institution that has ever existed. of course bourgeois parliamentary republicanism is a form of government which works well to negotiate between different interests of capital, labor aristocracy, and identity coalitions, but it is this condition of imperialist abundance that liberals really mean by democracy, not any kind of bureaucratic structure or legal fiction. when liberals say the USSR wasn't democratic what they really mean was it was poor, it was violent, it was highly political, and it was foreign.
I still think there's a lot to be gained from studying socialist legal structures but I don't think doing it to convince anti-communist labor aristocrats will get you anywhere.tears posted:“Democracy” is a capitalist buzzword and should be referred to by its correct name: Dictatorship of the Bourgeoisie. just my 2 cents op.
Oh yeah, I do totally get this guys (and I hope my beliefs came across in the OP) -
a) "democracy" in and of itself - even if we're using it to refer to a literal set of institutions that either exist/function or don't, and not as some moralising buzzword - does not actually tell us which class is in control, and does not really tell us a lot about the justice of a given society
b) in one particular sense (and probably the most important sense), tears and bhpn are right that capitalism is not properly democracy. In the sense in which "democracy" and "dictatorship" are used as terms in e.g. State and Revolution by Lenin, both capitalism and socialism are forms of class-dictatorship. I am totally cool with that
I guess I would characterise Lenin's usage of the terms though (which I do basically approve of), as part of a morally/normatively loaded sense of the terms that I deliberately avoided in the OP.
The core claim, maybe is: EVEN If we were looking at Soviet vs. capitalist democracy through the eyes of someone with literally no class consciousness or interest in which groups in society actually hold control over what, we would still really have to call the USSR a democracy, whatever other negative analysis had to go on.
Also, I don't seriously think these sorts of concepts are going to convince any idealogue anticommunists of anything, I think that the primary use of this kind of analysis is that even many leftists seem to accept "USSR = non-democracy" as a basic ontological category, and then either work backwards trying to explain why it was ok that it was a non-democracy, why it was forced to be a non-democracy, or try and explain that non-democracy itself is actually fine and great, or whatever. I don't think those sorts of concessions or gymnastics are actually necessary. So my hope is that interrogating what non-democracy is, and the ways in which the USSR was not non-democracy, might be useful for those who are already actually sympathetic in clarifying their ideas.
babyhueypnewton posted:how did this thread bring out every anti-communist on the forum? do you guys have a secret IRC?
On which note bhpn you're right, the big backlash to what I was saying on this of all websites was a massive surprise haha, but it's cool I'm happy to answer for my inflammatory statements. Just glad I didn't post this on SomethingAwful dot com, I think it would have gone down a bit worse somehow
you may find this book interesting:
http://www.amazon.com/Soviet-Legal-Innovation-Western-World/dp/0521881749
since it's basically a giant collection of all the ways the USSR 'out-democracyed' the capitalist world and how basically everything that we have which is remotely democratic, like international law, is because the USSR forced it. I know a copy exists online somewhere, I read it in my local library!
Panopticon posted:i think the mass execution of half a million citizens suspected of opposing the government prior to the 1937 elections was a bit undemocratic. is that what you meant by "flawed" democracy
Thank god the USSR investigated the Ezhovshchina and executed the murderers responsible...
babyhueypnewton posted:Panopticon posted:
actually stalin lied, ex-kulaks, priests and common criminals were denied political rights, and peasants were unable to access the social programmes the constitution laid out (getty, state and society)
Getty is full of shit. It is highly unlikely that the historical documents exists which could support such an assertion, in fact he basically says this:
The decision to restrict the elections is clouded in secrecy. No Soviet publication or currently available archival source documents it. Proceeds to make a bunch of statements based on this lack of evidence p. 32
We already know the problems with using the soviet archives as they currently exist, just mosy on down to the Bloodlies thread. He doesn't even have those. Of course Getty is a historian and crafts a story based on what he has to work with. Many historians of the USSR are stupid and easily dismissed as propaganda, Getty is smart but ultimately still propaganda because the structural conditions of Soviet studies in Western academia force him to be so.
That's not to say you shouldn't try to learn what happened in the USSR. However you have consistently shown to have a predetermined agenda when approaching a highly contentious (to put it mildly) field of scholarship and a dishonest way of absorbing information into your liberal ideological concepts. So I'm just returning the favor and assuming the absolute worst about everything you have to say about socialism.
stalin's about-face happened, the author is only unsure about why. there was no democracy in the ussr
swampman posted:Panopticon posted:
i think the mass execution of half a million citizens suspected of opposing the government prior to the 1937 elections was a bit undemocratic. is that what you meant by "flawed" democracy
Thank god the USSR investigated the Ezhovshchina and executed the murderers responsible...
and thank god stalin's fearless leadership exposed the traitors in the leningrad affair, just think, if those people had been in charge of gosplan during the GPW the ussr could have been destroyed!
swampman posted:Panopticon, why don't you help some of us out, by more clearly outlining the primary evidence that shows that Stalin and the Moscow politburo did an "about-face" and restricted elections?
Of course, one might argue that the regime never really intended to expand political participation
or to permit free elections. Indeed, the 1936 Constitution and elections that followed are
usually characterized as an officially sponsored ruse or publicity stunt. Hindsight, however,
allows one automatically to assume that the Moscow regime never seriously entertained the possibility
of expanding political participation solely because the promises of the 1936 Constitution
were ultimately frustrated. Evidence strongly suggests that the central leadership took the constitution
and contested elections seriously until late 1937. First, important issues were in the constitution:
issues that preoccupied the leaders, provoked disagreement among them, and found resonance
in society during the public discussion. In centralization, union republic rights, social
benefits, electoral rights and balance between legislative, executive, and judicial the 1936 Constitution
was an important document with real ramifications for real people then and now. Second,
the constitution was drafted by a commission of the party's top leaders who spent a good
deal of time away from their other duties to work on the document. Stalin also devoted much
time to the document and supervised the process. Moscow carefully organized the all-union discussion,
forced reluctant local officials to carry it out, and scrutinized the results with intense
interest. Finally, had Stalin planned all along only to stage a democratic farce, he would not have
proclaimed one thing for so long (contested elections), only to enact the opposite. It is difficult to
imagine a regime planning to inflict such a glaring contradiction on itself. The sequence of
events discussed above rather suggests a regime that governed by opportunism, improvisation,
and reaction to changing events rather than by adherence to a long-term plan.
To enforce this, BHPN has been made thread monitor and can probate anyone who derails it with shit we've already run into the ground countless times
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1937/12/election/index.htm#3b
relevant to OP:
Further, comrades, I would like to give you some advice, the advice of a candidate to his electors. If you take capitalist countries you will find that peculiar, I would say, rather strange relations exist there between deputies and voters. As long as the elections are in progress, the deputies flirt with the electors, fawn on them, swear fidelity and make heaps of promises of every kind. It would appear that the deputies are completely dependent on the electors. As soon as the elections are over, and the candidates have become deputies, relations undergo a radical change. Instead of the deputies being dependent on the electors, they become entirely independent. For four or five years, that is, until the next elections, the deputy feels quite free, independent of the people, of his electors. He may pass from one camp to another, he may turn from the right road to the wrong road, he may even become entangled in machinations of a not altogether desirable character, he may turn as many somersaults as he likes—he is independent.
Can such relations be regarded as normal? By no means, comrades. This circumstance was taken into consideration by our Constitution and it made it a law that electors have the right to recall their deputies before the expiration of their term of office if they begin to play monkey tricks, if they turn off the road, or if they forget that they are dependent on the people, on the electors.
This is a wonderful law, comrades. A deputy should know that he is the servant of the people, their emissary in the Supreme Soviet, and he must follow the line laid down in the mandate given him by the people. If he turns off the road, the electors. are entitled to demand new elections, and as to the deputy who turned off the road, they have the right to blackball him. (Laughter and applause.) This is a wonderful law. My advice, the advice of a candidate to his electors, is that they remember this electors' right, the right to recall deputies before the expiration of their term of office, that they keep an eye on their deputies, control them and, if they should take it into their heads to turn off the right road, get rid of them and demand new elections. The government is obliged to appoint new elections. My advice is to remember this law and to take advantage of it should need arise.
when I think about Stalin remembering his great friend and comrade Lenin I get really sad 
e: ignore the trot idiot's commentary
babyhueypnewton posted:you may find this book interesting:
http://www.amazon.com/Soviet-Legal-Innovation-Western-World/dp/0521881749
since it's basically a giant collection of all the ways the USSR 'out-democracyed' the capitalist world and how basically everything that we have which is remotely democratic, like international law, is because the USSR forced it. I know a copy exists online somewhere, I read it in my local library!
whoa dude check that link
it's a 4/20 miracle