All
capitalistcountries…Fixed it for you
Yep, just slapping a “communist party” sticker on the property owning class doesn’t make a difference
Tbf it’s not that anybody saw that coming. Maybe Bakunin, Kropotkin, Malatesta and all the other anarchists but aside from them, nobody could have known it.
communist party
private property owning class
If there’s no exploitation, and if everyone can voluntarily join the communist party and the unions (and is encouraged to do so), how can you say there was an owning class?
I love how tankies (and in varying degrees most Marxists) have no analysis of (vertical) power structures. As Bakunin so perfectly predicted:
So the result is: guidance of the great majority of the people by a privileged minority. But this minority, say the Marxists will consist of workers. Certainly, with your permission, of former workers, who however, as soon as they have become representatives or governors of the people, cease to be workers and look down on the whole common workers’ world from the height of the state. They will no longer represent the people, but themselves and their pretensions to people’s government. Anyone who can doubt this knows nothing of the nature of men.
But don’t take it from someone who saw it coming, but from Bookchin who was very sympathetic to the USSR:
That the Russian Soviets were incapable of providing the anatomy for a truly popular democracy is to be ascribed not only to their hierarchical structure, but also to their limited social roots.
Nobody in their sane minds argues that there wasn’t overbureaucratisation in the USSR. That’s a well established truth. The question is, if people aren’t only allowed but encouraged to join the party, and if there’s no exploitation of the working class, what’s the argument to suggest that the “bureaucrats were the new owning class”
But we agree that they were the ruling class? Once everything belongs to the state, it really belongs to those who rule the state.
And there is power structure within parties. Being member of the party doesn’t make you an equal to every other member. Many people were not only encouraged but coerced to join the party and do as the higher ups say. Centralism is never democratic.
Once everything belongs to the state, it really belongs to those who rule the state.
Again, not that easy. Khruschev didn’t decide that the iron in the factory #3 would be used in the steel beam factory #7. The planning of the productive forces was an incredibly complex process in which thousands of bureaucrats union members were involved. Calling that amalgam of workers an “owning class”, especially when they’re not extracting surplus value at all from the workers seems a big stretch to me.
Centralism is never democratic.
The fact that the USSR wasn’t as democratic as ideal, doesn’t mean that the existence of a state can’t be democratic. “Centralism” is an umbrella term covering many different possibilities of governance, and a single party ruled by elected leaders of worker councils is a recipe of some sort of centralism that can provide a very reasonable degree of democracy. I’m not arguing this was the case for the USSR. If you want to read on a practical case of the existence of democracy within a Marxist-Leninist single-party regime, I recommend you have a look at a book called “How the worker’s parliaments saved the Cuban revolution”, from Pedro Ross, which describes this exact form of functioning of back and forth between the central government and the worker councils in which millions of Cubans participated to overcome the worst consequences of the “periodo especial” after the illegal and antidemocratic dissolution of the USSR.
I myself am from a country with a rich history of anarchism in the 20th century: Spain. By the 1930s, the CNT, a union of workers which proposed some sort of anarcho-syndicalism (which I bet you’d be happy to agree is a good method of governance), had more than a million members, which for the population of the country at the time was absolutely huge. The lack of centralization of sorts initially among the leftists, and their consequent weakness to respond to threats, is actually the very reason why fascism could trump the democratic government in many places of the country and destroy this anarchist movement and all social progress for the following 40 years. Funnily enough, the dictatorial USSR was the only country which assisted the republicans in their civil war against fascism, other than the admittedly heroic volunteer corps from the brigadas internacionales.
Because there’s always one. Name one county where there isn’t a owning class
Ok, so in the USSR, the country with no exploitation of labor and which promoted membership of party and unions, the owning class was the working class, right? Or are you gonna do some mental gymnastics to say it was the politician class?
I’m looking forward to your mental gymnastics on how the Kronstadt rebellion were the bad guys
Id rather wait for you to answer my comment instead of deflecting
What are you talking about?
I’m talking about bolshevik parties and their bureaucracy becoming the new capitalist or ruling class as Bakunin told Marx would happen
Why do democratically elected government officials constitute a “class?” How would Socialism be Capitalism?
Bakunin himself was incredibly antisemetic, and considered the State itself to be a Jewish Conspiracy, so I’m not sure we should trust the background of his arguments.
The soviets were democratic but the bolsheviks smashed the soviets as soon as they realized they wouldn’t infiltrate them and stayed a Soviet Union in name only. Why wouldn’t they keep the soviets as a decision making body if the were interested in a democratic government?
No, the Bolsheviks did not smash the soviets. The Factory Committees were replaced with the Union system, because the Factory Committees were acting in their own interests irrespective of the needs of the whole. The Union system added the interconnected element to the Soviet Planning system. The Soviet system retained until the collapse of the USSR.
The wikipedia article on Soviet Democracy makes this clear, the Soviets were the main operating organ of the USSR throughout its lifetime. If you believe the Soviets to be democratic, then you believe the USSR to be democratic, or misunderstood the history of the Soviets within the USSR. This is on top of you referencing a wild anti-semite who considered the state itself to be a Jewish conspiracy as reasoning for complete anarchism alone.
I think you need to hit the books for a bit and come back later. Blackshirts and Reds goes over what did work, and what did not work in the USSR. There were definitely issues with it, but it was democratic.
The above commenter is wrong about it being capitalist, but they’re right about there being a ruling class in the USSR. The ruling class was the communist party, the “intelligentsia.” Communist party members pre-selected candidates for all political appointments, and becoming a member of the communist party involved passing through multiple stages of party-administered education and then having your past scrutinized and approved by committees of existing communist party members.
At its’ highest level of membership it never surpassed roughly 3% of the population. That is a politically privileged class that enjoyed better wages, benefits, general living conditions, and political influence than the general population.
The above commenter is wrong about it being capitalist, but they’re right about there being a ruling class in the USSR. The ruling class was the communist party, the “intelligentsia.”
The Bolsheviks and the Communist Party were not the Intelligentsia. The Intelligentsia predated the USSR, and was a cultural term for engineers, mental leaders, and other “educated” classes. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union was made up of various members, not exclusively Intelligentsia. In fact, the close-link to the bourgeoisie that pre-Revolution Intelligentsia had caused distrust towards the Intelligentsia.
Communist party members pre-selected candidates for all political appointments, and becoming a member of the communist party involved passing through multiple stages of party-administered education and then having your past scrutinized and approved by committees of existing communist party members.
This does not make the CPSU a class, nor does iy mean it was not democratic. The US functions in much the same way, outside of fringe areas where third parties win.
At its’ highest level of membership it never surpassed roughly 3% of the population. That is a politically privileged class that enjoyed better wages, benefits, general living conditions, and political influence than the general population.
Yes, Marxism has never stated that people cannot have it better or worse. Anarchists seek full-horizontalism, while Marxists seek Central Planning.
Even at the peak of disparity in the USSR, the top wages were far, far closer than under the Tsars or under the current Russian Federation, and the Workers enjoyed higher democratic participation with more generous social safety nets, like totally free healthcare and education.
The USSR was by no means perfect, but it was absolutely progressive for its time, and would even be considered progressive today, despite the issues they faced internally and externally.
And you know why we’re fucked?
A whole lot of food needs to be pollinated by insects. Those insects have a time when they get out of their eggs in spring. But what if the tree blossoms before the insects are here? No pollination. This means it dies a blossom, never to be turned into food. Continue this for some years and the insects die out, some more and the final plant will die.
It’s always happened, yes, but it’s too fast.
The people will die, the planet recovers.
And what’s a planet if there’s no people to enjoy it.
Never been a democracy
Hey if a bunch of scientists say otherwise then, yah, they know better. But I thought we were basically beyond preventing catastrophic climate disaster?
Also this is the first I’m seeing the big Gritty brain meme format and I love it!
Catastrophic =/= “we all die”.
I meant more of the dictionary version of catastrophic. Sorry if it normally has or implies different meaning when talking about climate change.
The dictionary definition doesn’t imply we all die either.
O, then what does the equal equal thing mean? Yea I thought major climate catastrophe was unavoidable even with a complete and immediate change by the entire world. Not that everyone would die in a climate apocalypse.
It’s how people commonly type “does not equal” when they don’t have quick access to the not equal symbol. Your top level comment seemed to be contesting the meme, which claimed we still have 20 years to change before we all die. I was saying that 20 years before we all die is not the same as 20 years before a climate catastrophe.
Got cha got cha. Thanks. For some reason I thought it meant “about the same”.
I would usually say this is going too far, but this winter didn’t seem nearly as cold as usual, and that was concerning. Feels like in the next two decades the planet might not have winter… And might have a deadly season that was formerly summer.
I remember when it was so cold out that my car overheated in the winter because all of the coolant (rated to below zero Fahrenheit), froze. Now, I’m damn near blasting the AC in winter because it’s so damn warm.
Come change is happening. IDK how much more proof people really need… The argument of winter still being cold isn’t applicable anymore.
Yeah, it was crazy how warm last winter was. I live in Edmonton which is the most northern city with 1 million people in North America, and even through December we would have no snow on the ground when regularly there would be a couple inches to a foot everywhere.
The weather is also much more sporadic than I ever remember it being which is fun. It’s either unusually warm or stupidly cold. We had only about a week of really cold weather and heavy snow last winter
- Climate is changing
- CO2 levels are rising
The more reasonable people against many climate change response policies are skeptical of:
- CO2 is the cause of the rise
- Climate response policies will slow or reverse the warming
- The dangers to humanity of increased temperature outweigh the dangers to humanity of the climate response policies
I get what you’re saying here and bluntly, those people are not scientists. If you neither want to go and earn the knowledge necessary to be an authority on the subject, nor listen to those that are, then maybe you should shut the fuck up.
I’ll be fair in saying that CO2 is not the only contributor to global climate change. The environment is a complex intermingling of a lot of different influences. With that said, this is something we know for a fact, at the very least, does not help. Alternatives exist for almost every case. Why stick with the “clearly not helping” method, than going with the “at least we’re trying” alternative?
Disclaimer, I haven’t earned the title of expert in the subject, I just try to listen to those who have earned that title. I am not nearly as up to date on the subject as some others, so I invite someone to expand and/or correct any of my statements who knows the material better than me. Such is the scientific method. Lively discussion and debate culminating in studies and tests to determine who is wrong… (Spoiler, sometimes everyone is wrong)
Regardless, IMO, anyone denying a change based on the stated reasons, is trying to serve their own interests. Whether that’s enabling them to contribute to make poor decisions, or maybe they have something to gain by trying to block any progress away from fossil fuels. Maybe they own stock in a petrol company. Who knows?
To me, it’s just a bad faith argument.
bluntly, those people are not scientists
I’ll have to look up the names, but those people are literally climate scientists. I’ve heard them interviewed.
I’ll read the rest of your comment later when I have more time but if that’s your starting assumption you can just reconsider your whole position now because the things I reported came from the mouths of scientists.
