getfiscal posted:

part of the problem is that resistance almost always uses hegemonic language and communicate their real point through winks and nods. like you need to police the border between rightist-socialism and capitalist restoration, but that's not always obvious when you already concede that rightist-socialism is a legitimate position. a related issue is that rightists have enormous resources in the form of the norms of commodity production and consumption, associated wage differentials and privileges and so on.

This is essentially what happened without the legalization of parties historically, though. Bukharin did exactly that and Stalin conceded that it was a legitimate position to fight Trotsky until Trotsky was defeated and he turned on Bukharin to solidify the total control of the center, which secured central socialist development but wiped out the old Bolsheviks and their different positions. Bukharin, as rightist-socialist, also didn't have those enormous resources or extensive connections to foreign capital such as the later Deng. There's no guarantee he wouldn't have developed into that given enough power and time since he essentially argued for similar developments, but it didn't exist in Reality.

How does this relate to the legalized parties? If Trotsky had his way, would not the Stalinists and the Trotskyites had a fragile unity against the Bukharin right-socialists and avoided the ultimate splits and bloodshed as well as capitalist restoration? could they have not forged a middle road to industrialization through "legal constitutional socialism" rather than the informal structure that partially led them both to compete for the total security of power over the system in order to carry out their own version of the master plan? (simplified, but you get the point)

another issue is that "left" factions are often rightist in practice. trotskyists are a good example of this. for example, most trotskyist groups call for a move towards planning, but they don't believe the average person wants to jump towards a fully planned economy, and that it could cause too much disruption and chaos. this is also why they criticize forced collectivization of agriculture. so if you look at their actual plans they call for most large businesses (or banks and resources, etc.) to be 'socialized under worker's control', but they want to leave small and medium sized businesses under private control. but this isn't actually planning, it's just state capitalism, it's just basically the government running big businesses. and when trotskyists see this happening they usually oppose it anyways for various reasons. this is really, then, a rightist position compared to someone calling for a planned economy.

This may be true for modern Trotskyist factions but is hardly true for historical Trotskyism in the Soviet Union. Trotsky indeed argued for an attack on the Kulaks and rapid industrialization as soon as 1924 and was combatted by Bukharin and Stalin who wanted to continue the NEP and did so until ~1928. Trotsky was a "hyper-planner" and "hyper-collectivizer" hence why Stalin accused him of "hyper-industrialization" and insane targets. Trotsky himself believed that the average person wanted the fruits of planning and collectivization as soon as humanly possible and that the peasantry should have been immediately crushed and formed into a larger working class base. Stalin and Bukharin were the skeptics.

I'm no Trotsky fan and I think Stalin forged the correct course ultimately, but still, this portrayal of modern Trotskyism doesn't relate to party legalization in the way that I'm trying to get at, but perhaps that's my fault.

sources/evidence are here, I can quote specific sections as needed if it's all TL;dr:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/ffyci-2/20.htm
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch02.htm#ch02-2
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1929/12/27.htm
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1928/10/19.htm
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1927/10/23.htm

this is part of why i was saying that marxism is a sort of "literacy test" - because if you think socialist revolution is desirable, there's a lot that follows sort of logically from this and has been tested in history. if you want to maintain a socialist government then you need most people with active political power agreeing on the idea that a planned economy has certain characteristics and so on. but the problem is that people don't agree on that at all, and there are lots of reasons to look away (material incentives, for example).

my point being that even 30s Soviet Russia had everyone except Bukharin and his faction agreeing on this, and yet there were still disagreements on the pace of collective, industrial and planned development and it had little or nothing to do with material incentives of individuals but on the correct implementation of the Plan, with conflict leading to inner-party bloodshed and a misunderstanding of the Party as a monolithic force by both the people and the foreign powers. How would Trotsky's idea have played out and does it have any pertinence for solving this issue you described under similar conditions?

Edited by prikryl (Jan. 6, 2013 00:27:33)

SovietFriends posted:

icw is literally saying something spot on

i mean i don really get if he is saying it as a secret marxist trying to show off a contradiction by doing it from a completely anti marxist position but if you get rid of that second point he is bringing up a valuable point about marxism as a movement and if he isn't then i am just giving him a lot of benefit of the doubt

Well yeah that's kinda my thing but i wouldn't even say it's coming from an anti-Marxist angle.

I was just wondering because Getfiscal has implied a few times he has trouble accepting that the world is in the state it is in when Socialist theory and thought has some excellent explanations and prescriptions. I dunno, it all makes sense to me which is a bit disturbing.

Either way, outside of the university ghettos and a small part of the union movement, there is a clear reluctance of people to engage with Marxism even in this extraordinary crisis of capitalism which every single day illustrates in one way or another that our present system is unequipped to deal with that which it has created.

Whether it's some cultural/traditional/weird human thing or a concerted effort by the liberal state to minimize the influence of such ideas doesn't really matter. It's not that people are oblivious, there is much discontent and disillusionment in the land but all that energy is going towards the Sierra Club or Kiva or critical dissertations about how Tom Joad should have checked his privilege.

Basically what i'm asking in a roundabout way is: how do we make Marxism sexy? I'd say Occupy was a start (despite the libertarians and truthers) not for any theoretical insight but instead for bringing the simple act of collective action back into the public eye.

And it was through that simple act of tent-plantin' old fashioned American showmanship that brought the news cameras, a showmanship that is piped into hundreds of millions of peoples TVs and emails and facebooks each night and might resonate with them in a way that an infinite amount of academics writing at an infinite number of universities for an infinite amount of time never could

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

Basically what i'm asking in a roundabout way is: how do we make Marxism sexy?

truck nutz

elemennop posted:

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

Imagine if Stalin was traveling around Georgia before the revolution rebuking people for their traditions and culture......"your accordion is like, making you a slave maaaaan"



uh, stalin did exactly this with hurdy gurdy players. well, i don't know if he bothered rebuking them as much as just purging them for making insufferable music

yeah but that was after the revolution right?

first you get the money in Tiflis
then you get the power in St Petersburg
then you rush to the yeyo and take a chainsaw to the hurdy gurdy players

If Tony Montana is the story of Marxism (and i'm pretty sure it is) then right now Marxism is waiting under an overpass in Miami, biding it's time until it can fuck the planet like one big pussy

prikryl posted:

How does this relate to the legalized parties? If Trotsky had his way, would not the Stalinists and the Trotskyites had a fragile unity against the Bukharin right-socialists and avoided the ultimate splits and bloodshed as well as capitalist restoration? could they have not forged a middle road to industrialization through "legal constitutional socialism" rather than the informal structure that partially led them both to compete for the total security of power over the system in order to carry out their own version of the master plan? (simplified, but you get the point)

well it would depend on what the specific proposal would be. the important thing is that in marxist theory people draw their political power from a social base, the institutions are largely secondary articulations of that social power. the soviet union after the civil war was basically a peasant country again and it was only for very precarious reasons that there was a socialist authority in charge. so even if you limited the franchise to a range of communists, these communists would be appealing to people beyond the franchise in order to build hegemony.

in that case we know what would happen in the mid-1920s if a "fair" election were held. the right would win an overwhelming majority because of immense pressures from peasant populists. the peasants (especially kulaks and developing capitalist agriculture) would want to be able to access foreign capital and machinery in order to modernize. they would want to sell their grain on a market for convertible currency in order to do so, and to get loans and such. there would probably be a lot of skepticism towards grand industrial projects. it's possible that russia could have become a dependent sort of country, too, rather than industrializing itself. or, possibly, the composition of industrial production probably wouldn't be a good fit for surviving any sort of imperialist attack, since it would focus even more towards light industry producing consumer goods and would be almost completely in western Russia (and through foreign trade).

Petrol posted:

fanny_kaplan posted:
I can't see how someone in favour of revolution would have a problem with Occupy, unless they were perhaps saving themselves for an officially licensed marxist-leninist movement.

What are the bets that any left movement in the foreseeable future would be strongly influenced by (or an offshoot of) Occupy? pretty high I would think.

I don't have a problem with the concept of Occupy and I think it was a net gain for society, especially when you look at the example set by OO. My comment was a little flip (I'm sorry, I do love to flip). The lived experience of many involved in Occupy was pretty negative though, it was all too easily co-opted and destabilised by non-revolutionary interests, and that's what I was referring to.

I guess I'm pretty cynical about the ability of large groups of people to work together for real & positive change even when they have a comic book villain like Wall Street to unite them. Most of the truly revolutionary work I see happens in very small groups and often with no direct publicity whatsoever.

Maybe this comes back to the point about resistance taking on hegemonic language. Remember where the idea for Occupy came from - Adbusters. It was, on some level, little more than a "culture jam" writ large. It produced a lot of great images of kids in V masks getting beaten by rabid cops and so on, but almost no actual change in society beyond setting an example for possible future actions.

I'm completely with the PCR-RCP in this regard, you can't effectively combat a highly organized state and military through a disorganized people's movement. It's necessary to form a party, an army, and gain mass consciousness with the working class.

Ironicwarcriminal posted:

If Tony Montana is the story of Marxism (and i'm pretty sure it is) then right now Marxism is waiting under an overpass in Miami, biding it's time until it can fuck the planet like one big pussy

yeah I llike that

getfiscal posted:

well it would depend on what the specific proposal would be. the important thing is that in marxist theory people draw their political power from a social base, the institutions are largely secondary articulations of that social power. the soviet union after the civil war was basically a peasant country again and it was only for very precarious reasons that there was a socialist authority in charge. so even if you limited the franchise to a range of communists, these communists would be appealing to people beyond the franchise in order to build hegemony.

read this man, it's short and it's a big part of why I Love Stalin: http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/10/22.htm

it actually speaks somewhat to what IWC is saying funnily enough.

I guess the specific proposal in my fantasy USSR is exactly what you mentioned: that the three factions would be """legalized"" by the Monolithic Revolutionary Party of Lenin and that voting would be initially limited to Communist Party members only under the theory of democratic centralism with the goal of expanding the franchise and at a certain date expanding it to broader population, which the Rightists would want right way but the Left and Center would hold back until it was appropriate (possible?) idk man I'm cribbin here, but it's not the worst line to work on, no?.. & is not what happened under the Trotsky - Stalin - Bukharin split.

in that case we know what would happen in the mid-1920s if a "fair" election were held. the right would win an overwhelming majority because of immense pressures from peasant populists. the peasants (especially kulaks and developing capitalist agriculture) would want to be able to access foreign capital and machinery in order to modernize. they would want to sell their grain on a market for convertible currency in order to do so, and to get loans and such. there would probably be a lot of skepticism towards grand industrial projects. it's possible that russia could have become a dependent sort of country, too, rather than industrializing itself. or, possibly, the composition of industrial production probably wouldn't be a good fit for surviving any sort of imperialist attack, since it would focus even more towards light industry producing consumer goods and would be almost completely in western Russia (and through foreign trade).

ofc, if the franchise was open to all non-communists directly in 1924, which is not what I think we're advocating here. It doesn't even seem like there was an open vote on policy between the three factions within the party and including non-factional communists to even build around democratic centralism, even with all the publishing going on, and that the unofficial factions just imposed de facto policy through loose alliances that threatened to crush and did crush the lesser faction, which I'm certainly sure Lenin would not have approved of despite the Crisis Situation. Democracy in the Party, Centralism after Decision, and then build to inclusion. Not sure this was happening or codified in any way during the 20s post-civil war crisis period. This all through hindsight and sitting in a cool, comfortable room millions of miles away from civil war and starvation, naturally

sort of a Monolithic Revolutionary Party that can lead through the crisis and the ensuing Civil War that opens up into a Multi Factional Communist Party that allows for some room for debate and legal process through voting for Devout Communists that then expand the franchise and allow for open factional voting of the Masses with sufficient development of socialism and consciousness and conditions and time (that being the main rub and a tall order)

Edited by prikryl (Jan. 6, 2013 05:48:11)

prikryl posted:

fleights posted:

This I reject, if Trotsky won the power struggle and seized control of the party he would have been just as "bloody thirsty" as Stalin in suppressing parties that spread proletariat ideology and strategy. Stalin did not enjoy killing people, he was simply the leader that the new bourgeois used to maintain the Soviet state. If there was not rapid collectivization, an oppressive state apparatus, and repressive measures against dissenters than the USSR would have collapsed to capitalism (and fascism) very rapidly. The material conditions of "Socialism in one country" simply do not allow for a successful transition into Communism.

you didn't read my post brah. it was nothing to do about the power struggle, ofc trotsky would have been just as bloodthirsty""""", blah nblah blah.. my point was that TROTSKY WANTED RAPID COLLECTIVIZATION AND OPPRESSIVE STTATE APPARATUS and REPRESSIVE MEASURES AGAINST DISSENTERS much faster than even STalin!!!!! it may have detonated the country (it would have) and Stalin's middle course saved it from that imho, but that wasn't the point I was making. I was talking about the power struggle that occurred between Stalin and Trotsky on this matter when they essentially agreed under the surface, but Stalin was forced to use Bukharin against Trotsky's power grab and then destroy Bukharin, and that may have been avoided in a way that could superficially """Involve""" people and deflect ultimate criticism by the People and Foreign Capital of the Monolithic Party and its Policy and Socialism imooo

Are there historical figures that you relate to?

Robespierre. Maybe a bit of Lenin.

Really? Not Trotsky?

In 1918-19, Trotsky was much harsher than Stalin. And I do like this in him. But I will never forgive him for how he screwed it up in the mid-’20s. He was so stupid and arrogant. You know what he would do? He would come to party meetings carrying French classics like Flaubert, Stendhal, to signal to others: “Fuck you, I am civilized!”

getfiscal posted:

well, something i haven't said yet is that lenin and stalin both believed that factionalism wasn't something healthy in a party. factionalism is a sign of contradictions within a party, and society more generally. this is part of why lenin banned factions. the belief was that you could approach a correct decision using marxist science and that the party embodied this scientific approach. party debates weren't supposed to be about fundamental issues of line so much as the details. and there was often a lot of debate about the details, even if the structures were sort of paralyzed by stalinist terror at times.

yes, and the party was indeed moribund at that time, and there were great contradictions within the party and society. i think that the party under Lenin did not have as many contradictions as society had a fairly direct schism at the time between Oppressed and Oppressor until his death, and only after did the Oppressed become the Oppressor in the fashion it was fated (and Meant!) to.. I don't think even Lenin could have navigated it much better.

and that's precisely what the Big Split became about.. that the details of what the Plan would entail, how, when, and where, were not Democratically Decided Upon by Communists, with the Real Existing Factions allowed to Publicly Debate (because it's unhealthy to have factions!) instead letting the factional divisions over details fester underground and rot the Single Party until Stalin was forced to wipe away the entire rotting mass and then they rejected him once he was dead.

but i may be wrong and misreading it, but the discussion is helping me to solidify thoughts and is much appreciated

tpaine posted:

iwc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ulde01Y5rQ&t=31m14s

lmao

swampman posted:

Petrol posted:

Trotsky this, Trotsky that.

He was a great man.

We once heard with interest of the Japanese caste of Samurai, who never hesitate to die for the sake of collective, national interests, the interests of the community as a whole. I must say that in our commissars, our leading Communist fighters, we have obtained a new, Communist order of Samurai who – without benefit of caste privileges – are able to die and to teach others to die, for the cause of the working class.

Crow posted:

Talking about the violent overthrow of the government i find distasteful and unmasterful. The fate of the communist is to live and die by the shining sword of the people. To speculate and fantasize is unbecoming and leads to a breakdown of discipline, despair, and ultimately defeat. It is not our business when socialism will triumph. The only ultimate triumph is death. <<sheathes tiny sword>>