The Russian Revolution Disillusionment

After the Russian Revolution and the formation of the USSR a lot of hardcore leftists became disenchanted with revolutionary politics, for example Ralph Chaplin became disillusioned and even later in his life tried to prevent communist infiltration in US labor unions. What exactly caused this to happen? Was it the authoritarianism of the Soviet Union? Or was it because a lot of these leftists we're reformists and the aftermath Russian Revolution was 'proof' to them about the danger of revolutionary politics.

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Because Bolshevism turned out to be just red fascism.

Because the early Comintern was fucking shit
columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/organization/comintern_and_germany.htm

idk if they became disillusioned with revolutionary politics as much as they did bullshit elitist vanguard politics which increasingly just worked on behalf of a specific nation-state rather than the global proletariat, plus many of them saw their friends likely killed by the ussr so on some level it was personal. on the other hand the wider movement was heavily infiltrated by government agents back then so in some cases it could have been informants letting their real politics come to the fore

Can you name a revolutionary movement that did not have a vanguard? A vanguard is not some official position, it is a "natural" phenomenon in a revolutionary situation. The most revolutionary elements will band together and push the less revolutionary elements forward.
Post WW2, the USSR did a lot to forward revolutionary movements all over the world.
The fuck? What are you referring to here?

can you name a genuinely revolutionary movement that did have a vanguard? as opposed to a bunch of opportunists who immediately became the new ruling class

only if it was in their geopolitical interest

trotsky, juliet poyntz, ignace reiss, walter krivitsky, etc, plus pretty much everyone caught up in the great purge and the barcelona may days

We clearly use different definitions of class, you fucking liberal as no productive forces were owned by "the vanguard" in Marxist countries.
World communism was in their geopolitical interest.
I thought you were referring to western leftists, but yeah, I'm not going to defend the excesses of Stalin's purges.

the productive forces were owned by the state, which was run by the vanguard turned ruling class, pretty straightforward

Yes, the productive forces were run by the state, they were not owned by any private individuals. Nationalization is how you put the productive forces to use for the whole population.
Anarchist societies also had soviets that organized industry. Were members of these soviets the new ruling class?

Obviously, yes, fucktard

Alright buddy, you're obviously a completely lost cause.

except in practice this just creates a new elite whose loyalty is not to the whole population but to the party, which is the entity that owns the productive forces and naturally seeks to enrich itself from them

Do you think the party members went into the factories and just took commodities and sold them on the black market or what?

i'm sure that happened plenty but that wasn't what i meant, the point is that production was planned by a single entity in which everyone had their pre-determined place, as opposed to the workers themselves. the closest equivalent i can think of is the feudalism of japan's tokugawa shogunate, which stripped the samurai of their lands and instead paid them a stipend via their daimyo on behalf of the shogun

Yes, this is what millions of workers consciously fought and died for, because they knew that a centrally planned economy would benefit them all, as opposed to the anarchic production of capitalism.
Workers could usually seek jobs in any sectors they want. There was a mechanism that forced university graduates to work in a specific field/place for 3ish years before being free to choose where to work.
This is absurd. The communist party had 19 million members by 1986. Are you saying 19 million workers are basically the same as 1 king because they decide stuff?

i'm not saying that people didn't want to create a better system, or even that the soviet system wasn't better than the tsarist monarchy, just that it wasn't socialist, rather a more advanced form of feudalism

but they remained workers, not a liberated proletariat

mate, i barely know where to start with this but here we go. feudal kings rarely just "decided stuff" without having to contend with the power of the court, church or local lords, and to some degree even guilds and angry peasants. in the same way the soviet union was a fairly rationalised system of social hierarchy; worker to manager to party but it's still the same basic chain of responsibilities based on an abstract ideal that inevitably tore itself apart.

Well, it was by Marxist standards.
Proletariat=workers. And they were obviously liberated.
Yes, I know.
So you really are claiming that being ruling class is when you decide stuff

google "barracks communism"

wrong

basically yeah, but the workers had no real power outside of rubber stamp bullshit

Even if we assume that Marx would've called the USSR barracks communism (which I doubt, except maybe the up until 1921), it would still be communism. Private property was abolished.
Are you drunk?
Look, there's never going to be any individual workers with power. Working class power is exactly exerted through the workers' state.

and yet class still remained

the proletariat is a specific type of worker

and there it is

All of this but also revolutions are exciting and the aftermath simply isn't.

Says the tankfag LOL

Not in any Marxist sense, no.
Please elaborate. And if a prole is a specific type of worker, why did you want a liberated proletariat and not the more encompassing working class?
Heh.

Yes, it did. The bureaucrats became the new ruling class, enforcing their rule over the masses, through censorship, secret police, and propaganda.

Don't push your anarchist ideology onto Marxism. Class in Marxism is about property relations, and none of the bureaucrats owned productive property (and usually not even a home) through which they could exploit labour.
Mhmm, these were all present in Catalonia and The Free Territories as well.
And, proportionally, more government officials were purged than non government officials. Some "class solidarity" among this new spooky ruling class, huh?

pretty basic stuff but okay, the proletariat refers to propertyless wage labourers, as opposed to say, slaves, serfs or smallholders

motherfucker did you really just ask me that


not in the capitalist sense no, but they still held authority within the system that did own productive property and were privileged as such

Since you're on this tired old subject again, why not have an actually interesting and informed take on what the USSR was

libcom.org/library/what-was-the-ussr-aufheben-part-4

No, there was some bands of people who did keep workers working, but this was never centralized, unlike the secret police in the USSR. Secondly This also was right during the revolution, the USSR still kept the secret police even after winning control. Thirdly the bands of men keeping workers in line were way less prominent than that of secret police in the USSR, also free speech was still very much a reality.
There is none today, there never was solidarity among the ruling class, unless it was to try to save there power over the masses, even then not much. The ruling class has always been in competition with one another.

Eh, there definitely has been among the financial class. How do you think they were able to overthrow leaders throughout history like Cleomenes of Sparta or the Gracchi brothers and Caesar in Rome when they attempted debt amnesties? Why do you think they tolerated Augustus?

what do you guys think about christopher hitchens? he was a trot but then for some reason he became a keynsian who support neo cons and war in Iraq

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Trot to neocon pipeline strikes again!

best case opportunist, worst case cop

Trots are traitors and puppets
They will support US invasion to country x if the country x is "stalinist"

Same for Democratic Cops of America

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kill yourself.