The new class is used as a polemic term by critics of countries that followed the Soviet type of Communism to describe...

So, do you have arguments?

That's a bold statement.

And yet, it will not be.

I've yet to see a coherent critique (despite quite a lot of attempts to find one and immense amount of general belief that there is one somewhere). It's always either inane attempt to rewrite Marxism (a-la Wolff), or equally inane substitution of Soviet history with Cold War propaganda - unless it's both, of course.

Also, note that neither OP nor anyone else had provided any arguments.

Attached: stalin.jpg (568x664, 222.13K)

Class/caste distinctions are older than capitalism. Red bourg is a bad term because it invites comparisons with capitalism specifically, this narrowness allows apologists to nit-pick and then dismiss criticism and it misleads the frustrated who can see with their own eyes in daily life that different groups have access to different things, and I don't mean differentiation of the type that you work overtime and have an income bonus, but more fundamental.

What also needs to be considered is that the USSR and it’s form of socialism constitutes a historical aberration: a group of people who dominated political power without actually owning the means of production. Although you can argue that they effectively controlled them even if they didn’t own them officially.

If it is difficult to estimate the numbers of the bureaucracy, it is still harder to determine their income. As early as 1927, the Left Opposition protested that the “swollen and privileged administrative apparatus is devouring a very considerable part of the surplus value.” In the Opposition platform it was estimated that the trade apparatus alone “devours an enormous share of the national income more than one tenth of the total production.” ==After that the authorities took the necessary measures to make such estimates impossible.==
But for that very reason overhead expenses have not been cut down, but have grown.

It is no better in other spheres than in the sphere of trade. It required, as Rakovsky wrote in 1930, a fleeting quarrel between the party and the trade-union bureaucrats in order that the population should find out from the press that out of the budget of the trade unions, amounting to 400,000,000 rubles, 80,000,000 go for the support of the personnel. And here, we remark, it was a question only of the legal budget. Over and above this, the bureaucracy of the trade unions receives from the industrial bureaucracy in token of friendship immense gifts of money, apartments, means of transport, etc. “How much goes for the support of party, co-operative, collective farm, Soviet farm, industrial and administrative apparatus with all their ramifications?” asked Rakovsky. And he answered: “We possess not even hypothetical information.”

Freedom from control inevitably entails abuse of office, including pecuniary malfeasance. On September 29, 1931;, the government, compelled again to raise the question of the bad work of the co-operatives, established over the signatures of Molotov and Stalin, and not for the first time, “the presence of immense plunderings and squanderings and losses in the work of many of the rural consumers’ societies.” At a session of the Central Executive Committee in January 1936, the People’s Commissar of Finance complained that local executive committees permit completely arbitrary expenditures of state funds. If the Commissar was silent about the central institutions, it was only because he himself belongs to their circle. There is no possibility of estimating what share of the national income is appropriated by the bureaucracy. This is not only because it carefully conceals even its legalized incomes. It is not only because standing on the very boundary of malfeasance, and often stepping over the boundary, it makes a wide use of unforeseen incomes. It is chiefly because the whole advance in social well-being, municipal utilities, comfort, culture, art, still serves chiefly, if not exclusively, this upper privileged stratum. In regard to the bureaucracy as a consumer, we may, with the necessary changes, repeat what was said about the bourgeoisie. There is no reason or sense in exaggerating its appetite for articles of personal consumption. But the situation changes sharply as soon as we take into consideration its almost monopolistic enjoyment of the old and new conquests of civilization. Formally, these good things are, of course, available to the whole population, or at least to the population of the cities. But in reality they are accessible only in exceptional cases. The bureaucracy, on the contrary, avails itself of them as a rule when and to what extent it wishes as of its personal property. If you count not only salaries and all forms of service in kind, and every type of semi-legal supplementary source of income, but also add the share of the bureaucracy and the Soviet aristocracy in the theaters, rest palaces, hospitals, sanatoriums, summer resorts, museums, clubs, athletic institutions, etc., etc., it would probably be necessary to conclude that 15 per cent, or, say, 20 per cent, of the population enjoys not much less of the wealth than is enjoyed by the remaining 80 to 85 per cent.

The “friends” will want to dispute our figures? Let them give us others more accurate. Let them persuade the bureaucracy to publish the income and expense book of Soviet society. Until they do, we shall hold to our opinion. The distribution of this earth’s goods in the Soviet Union, we do not doubt, is incomparably more democratic than it was in tzarist Russia, and even than it is in the most democratic countries of the West. But it has as yet little in common with socialism.

Are you that based sabocat poster who describes himself as "basically a Leninist"?

That text is by Trotsky.
That lack of transparency has a lot to do with allocating consumption in kind. If a large part of what individuals consume isn't even paid out of their individual ruble income, even perfectly accurate and timely reports about ruble-income distribution are not very useful. To have both a clear representation of what the state of inequality is and one big slider for adjusting that, personal consumption should be something paid out of individual ruble income. Services that are subsidized or "free" while being rationed by locality should be financed out of land-value tax; and there should be differential rental payments reflecting the different quality of life in different areas. Waiting-list systems for living in the important cities are in effect a rent subsidy for the elites and hide wealth inequality.

Best way to avoid too much bureaucratization of socialism? Could democratic centralism still work with a "small gov" type of socialism? Or is a massive bureaucratic state necessary to a DotP?

Yes, although I'm fully a Leninist. What I usually say is "basically an ML" or "ML lite".

Cybernetics would help quite a bit. The fact is the major bureaucratization is avoidable with a centrally planned economy. The sheer numbers of people necessary to process all that information is going to swell the bureaucracy, unless they can be replaced by computers.
Well its important to distinguish between two types of bureaucratization. Bureaucratization of the civil service (which I described above) and bureaucratization of the decision making apparatus. The former is arguably controllable and tolerable provided the former doesnt occur, however in the USSR and friends both happened. While bureaucratization of the civil service tends to happen under a planned economy, bureaucratization of political power is entirely avoidable. Imo it's simply a question of having the proper democratic mechanisms in check to ensure accountability on the part of decision makers, or even better implement direct democracy to the greatest possible extent. The checks on bureaucratization (and therefore corruption and revisionism) need to come organically from below. Imo the problems the USSR experienced in this area had more to do with the mechanisms set up in response to the civil war and siege socialism than any problem inherent to socialism as such.

Doesn't that make make you more of a Trotskyist than an ML? Trotskyism retains all the core principles of Leninism while adding the criticism discussed here that the USSR and its model states were ruled by a bureaucratic caste that was unaccountable to its citizens.

yeah but it's heretical

Trotsky didn't have a solution for that though.

like you'd know.

I’ve considered that, but I also don’t agree with the Trotskyist assessment of Stalin and the USSR after 1927. Basically I try to eschew labels in general, but “ML lite” is the closest thing I can come up with other than “Leninism with snowflake characteristics”.

In no particular order, numbered simply for convenience:
1. better election methods for one seat (approval voting or range or top-flop)
2. better election methods for committees (Thiele's approval reweighting idea or open list for multiple seats)
3. strict limit on length of delegation chains via single-person elections, longer chains have to use proportional voting or sortition
4. regional and national chambers filled by sortition that any proposed law change has to get through to become law
5. sortition-based juries that determine penalties by median vote (and that can always give a smaller, but no higher, penalty than what the law states)
6. limit on serving consecutive terms for the highest positions (extended to family members of the serving person)
7. individual consumption (including rent) that has to be paid out of individual budgets for reasons stated in
8. maximum salary differential regularly set by direct vote
9. anonymization and standardization to the highest extent possible when it comes to applying for jobs (your chance of getting work at a place shouldn't depend on having friends or family members already working there, same for higher ed)

[after two days of silence]

If that is true, this could disprove Marxism. If.

Hello, Leon. Nice of you to repost your old book.

You might want to start by explaining what is this "bureaucracy" you speak of, and why is it relevant.

Was it truly "swollen"? What are the numbers and what are they being compared to?

Source, please.

Source, please.

Source, please.

Source, please.

Source, please.

Is it implied here? That there was no oversight (how was it found out so soon then?), or that there should be no consumer co-ops?

Source, please.

Also, how the the fact that there was no complaints proves guilt? Not to mention, GosPlan (which is responsible directly to Supreme Soviet) is the highest authority on the expenditures. It is explicitly permitted to be "arbitrary" (define economic policy), unlike local committees.

Source, please.

Source, please.

Source, please.

Source, please.

Source, please.

Source, please.

Where is this count?
Where is anything factual? Where is explanation of mechanism through which exploitation is happening? Why should we trust any of those claims? This is standard anti-Soviet drivel unsupported by anything.

BEST. ARGUMENT. EVER.

Switch to Capitalism. That's how battle against bureaucratization traditionally ends.

You need oversight over economy. Consequently, all the administration (not necessarily specific individuals; I'm talking workplaces here) that worked for private owners needs to be employed by Proletariat.

However, Petit-Bourgeois scum labour aristocracy will chafe under it, and scream about bureaucratization, demanding independence from DotP (freedom to act independently) and trying to sabotage economy to "prove" inefficiency of "rigid centralization" - regardless of actual "rigidity". In fact, the less restraints it has, the freer it is, the more active it will be in attempts to "prove" that economy is over-centralized.

Thus, in reality, you may very well have much less people working in "massive" Socialist bureaucracy than in Capitalist private bureaucracy, but it will still be called "massive".

< a group of people who dominated political power without actually owning the means of production
He said " you can argue that they effectively controlled them even if they didn’t own them officially."
Whether its called ownership or not doesn't matter. If the state controls the MoP, and the state is not actually controlled by the workers, the workers don't control the MoP.

Dunno, claiming that every figure mentioned by Trotsky is actually a lie is going to require some evidence of its own. Like do you think that there's a record available of discussions in central committee meetings or proposed amendments to policy? And questioning Trotsky's claims about the left opposition is a whole new level of pedantry.
Like do you actually have any argument or evidence to the contrary of Trotsky's claims?

It is true, and no it doesn’t. Like I said in that post, it’s easy to argue that there was de facto but not de just control over the MoP. Just because party leaders didn’t have a piece of paper saying they owned x number of factories doesn’t mean they didn’t effectively exercise control over them. If anything they did it by proxy, since the state controlled the economy and the party elite controlled the state.

Are you challenging or refuting anything there?

So far I'm asking for sources of those figures. If there are none, if everything is based on belief, then it needs to be stated openly.

Well, reports of Central Committee to Supreme Soviet were usually printed in books and newspapers. There are quite a lot of documents.

Either way, where did Trotsky learn them? He wasn't even in USSR at this point.

Why?

Trotsky's claims are overly vague, it's impossible to dispute them until they are clarified. I.e. what exactly is meant and how is it relevant.

I would say, it does - if we have political power not based on economic. I.e. conclusive proof of doctrine of force, or what was it called.

I don't care about de jure, but I need to know how it was expressed. Vague "de facto" doesn't explain anything.

Actual mechanisms, please. There are plenty of attempts to claim USSR non-Socialist and explain how "party elite" was somehow "in control". I'm not going to guess which of them you support.

The means of production were literally state property, and operated under appointed one man management. The state had firm control of the MoP, and the party in turn controlled the state. The party itself had numerous internal mechanisms for preventing mass popular control of political power. Chief among these was the ban on factions, but also their particular approach to democratic centralism (ie debate disallowed after a decision reached) as well as the structure of the party itself. This last one specifically refers to the fact that the only time rank and file party members could influence leadership positions was at the party congress, which was only every five years. On top of that they could only influence it indirectly through delegates, and those delegates were themselves subject to the faction ban and democratic centralism, so their freedom to criticize and represent their constituency was highly limited. Add extensive press censorship and you have a system that has no real democracy to speak of.

They literally had two tiers of shops and this guy doesn't believe there was a ruling elite.

Appointed? Are you saying worker collective had no input?
Also, "one man management" ignores that bit called "plan" (developed by agency responsible to the Supreme Soviet, which was democratically elected) and numerous other ways work of "one man management" was overseen. I mean, if that wasn't so, we wouldn't get the whining about rigid centralization, would we?

By the 80s party had ~20 million members. Were they all controlling the state?
If you don't mean the whole party, clarify whom you actually mean.

Factions within the party. You need to explain how this helped to control the government or anything.

What are you talking about? The idea that you aren't permitted to use party's authority to support position that was rejected by the party? Or the fact that result of vote cannot be ignored by party members?

Because I fail to see how you are going to have functioning anything, if party members can claim any position as the one party supports, or if any decision can be ignored (or endlessly returned for new reassessment) by any individual.

Firstly, five-year period was maximum. For example, 1950s had 3 congresses (1952, 1956, 1959).
Secondly, however "authoritarian" party was, this does not explain how it acquired control over economy to control state.
Thirdly, this claim seems kinda weird, as electing representatives every 4-5 years is usually recognized as "sufficiently democratic". Not to mention the right to recall said representatives.

I'm not sure you understand what those words mean.

"Delegates" were the ones who were leadership, right? Or are you implying that was not the case? Because things are getting a wee bit surreal.

Yeah. Socialism is impossible without Fascist propaganda.

Factories often had their own shops too (or, at least, a restaurant). Please, research the situation properly, or don't post rumours.

Your rebuttal is as weak as your intellect. I can do the same with literally any of Stalin's speeches. Watch this:

HURR WHERE'S YOUR SOURCE

SOURCES PLEASE XD

UM YEAH BUT WHERE'S YOUR SOURCE BRAH

SOURCE?

DURR I STILL DON'T SEE SOURCES

fucking kill yourself my man

Adding onto this, you're accomplishing nothing other than rhetorical sophistry when you apply a double standard for you automatically accept all of Stalin's figures as legit and all of Trotsky's figures as evil wrecker fascist deviations.

It’s that style of argument where instead of actually refuting a point, you just endlessly demand sources for your opponents claims, while also holding impossible standards for those sources (everything always denounced as bourgeois/Trotskyist propaganda) in the hopes that your opponent will get fed up with your bullshit and leave, at which point you “win” the debate.

Hard-currency shops in Russia, the GDR, and other Block countries were the reality.

Okay, Leon.

Firstly, you are a fucking retard if you don't see an obvious shitposter who doesn't even bother to note that he is quoting someone (I'm not even talking about linking "Revolution Betrayed").

Secondly, maybe opponents should stop making baseless claims? Trotskyists and the like had almost a century to prepare their position, demonstrate how USSR was akshually run by some vague and undefined "party elite". They had plenty of time, manpower, and access to archives. So where the fuck are their solid and factually supported arguments? Why the fuck Trotsky's ranting is presented as the argument?

So are you saying that all the undefined party elite was paid in dollars and the like? Which proves existence of new class (and bureaucratic mode of production or whatever your position is)?

Because I want to see an actual argument at some point.

...

I'll just leave these quotes here for now. Other anons can discuss.

Faced with an evaluation procedure which is above all concerned with plan fulfillment, and with uncertainty about supply and possible changes in plan, the management understandably tends to seek plans which are easy to fulfill (or avoids the risk of receiving plan orders which may prove unfulfillable) and overapplies for inputs, hoards materials and labour.
Nove, Economics of Feasible Socialism Revisited p74

One reads almost daily of some ministry or department neglecting the interests of some related or complementary activity, because it is beyond its 'departmental barrier.' There is a strong tendency to self-supply. Thus each of twenty-five ministries engaged in construction in the Pavlodar oblast seeks to set up its own quarry and building materials factory. (Pravda, 26 December 1980, to cite an example that happens to be at hand).
Nove, Economics of Feasible Socialism Revisited p68

Associated with this there was no mechanism for enterprises to go bankrupt; the enterprises were state property and the state could not go bankrupt. This led to inefficiencies in the allocation of labour between industries; enterprises and industries that were of diminishing importance to the national economy tended to hoard labour which could have been employed more effectively elsewhere.
Cockshott, Towards A New Socialism p176

Glushkov’s proposal faced opposition on two sides. Industrial managers and government bureaucrats opposed the computerization of economic planning and management because it exposed their inefficiency, reduced their power and control of information, and ultimately threatened to make them redundant.
Gerovitch, InterNyet: why the Soviet Union did not build a nationwide computer network

But the transformation, either into joint-stock companies, or into state ownership, does not do away with the capitalistic nature of the productive forces. In the joint-stock companies this is obvious. And the modern state, again, is only the organisation that bourgeois society takes on in order to support the general external conditions of the capitalist mode of production against the encroachments as well of the workers as of individual capitalists. The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers — proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/ch24.htm

What had been the characteristic attribute of the former state? Society had created its own organs to look after its common interests, originally through simple division of labor. But these organs, at whose head was the state power, had in the course of time, in pursuance of their own special interests, transformed themselves from the servants of society into the masters of society, as can be seen, for example, not only in the hereditary monarchy, but equally also in the democratic republic.
…
It is precisely in America that we see best how there takes place this process of the state power making itself independent in relation to society, whose mere instrument it was originally intended to be. Here there exists no dynasty, no nobility, no standing army, beyond the few men keeping watch on the Indians, no bureaucracy with permanent posts or the right to pensions. and nevertheless we find here two great gangs of political speculators, who alternately take possession of the state power and exploit it by the most corrupt means and for the most corrupt ends – and the nation is powerless against these two great cartels of politicians, who are ostensibly its servants, but in reality exploit and plunder it.
…
Against this transformation of the state and the organs of the state from servants of society into masters of society – an inevitable transformation in all previous states – the Commune made use of two infallible expedients. In this first place, it filled all posts – administrative, judicial, and educational – by election on the basis of universal suffrage of all concerned, with the right of the same electors to recall their delegate at any time.
marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/postscript.htm

The contradictory character of socialist representative government is banally evident. The representatives of the proletariat, through their control of the plan, and thus the method by which unpaid surplus labour is pumped out of the direct producers, become effective controllers, pro tem, of the means of production. As such their individual class position is transformed and their ability to go on representing the proletariat, compromised.
Cockshott & Cottrell, Computers and Economic Democracy p3

In the countries of hitherto existing socialism the decision as to how the social working day was to be divided between necessary and surplus labour time was taken by the government. As, over time, the government became alienated from the working class, the process became exploitative. The state as an alien power was depriving the workers of the fruits of their labour.
Cockshott & Cottrell, Computers and Economic Democracy p15

Cockshott confirmed for liberal Trotskyist fascist anarchist dogmatist revisionist petty bourgeois reactionary wrecker.

poor choice for an OP image tbh

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Kim Jong Il confirmed for liberal Trotskyist fascist anarchist dogmatist revisionist petty bourgeois reactionary wrecker.

And here we have peak anti-Soviet "Left". Not just reasoning, arguments, and evidence are abandoned, even claims and assertions are rejected. It can only be ironically implied that something was something.

I.e. retarded shit that got debunked so hard so often, you no longer dare to present them as actual arguments, but still hope that they will lend some sort of credibility to your position. Good choice. Carry on.

That's not how everyone else remembers your thread ;DDDDD

edit: didn't mean to modpost, tired

Stalin could call on all the statistics and statisticians of the state apparatus to tell him what was going on. Trotsky, being in internal and then external exile, could not.

What do you know about the Bloc? You didn't even know about hard currency shops, calling them rumors. Do you now want to have an open discussion about whether they existed, where we then can agree to disagree? Or can we lock in that fact and move on to the next step, and ask whether these were solely used by tourists (spoiler alert: they were not).

And after that comes the healthcare "discussion", where you will deny that it was a tiered system and will once again demonstrate what a flexible thinker you are, with a flexible standard of evidence that can always shift in reaction to the evidence you get.

More than you, apparently.

I was talking about you speculations about "hard currency" shops, not their existence.

Can we lock in the fact that you don't know much about Soviet shop/service system and are solely relying on rumours to make assumptions about it?

I already pointed out that there were plenty of shops closed to outsiders. I.e. your division of shops into two tier system is patently simplistic.

You mean the part where you copy-paste Cold War propaganda and scream your head off when asked for evidence of your bullshit?

As of yet you presented zero evidence of any kind.

Moreover, your whole argumentation is "some people in USSR lived better than the other people". I.e. you didn't even present your actual position. Are you trying to present evidence of State Capitalism in USSR? Is this evidence of Soviet Feudalism? Of Asiatic mode of production? Or of Communism being inherently anti-egalitarian? In what context should your claims be discussed?

I don't think people understand that the absolute scale of an economic system based on market mechanisms and economic agents without perfect information literally neccessitates a much larger bureaucracy because of the complexity involved in it, not to mention that retaining money or wage labour massively incentivizes the creation of more bureaucracy. Someone that I think talks about this a lot is that guy who does the Cold Dark Stars blog, iirc he's obsessed with Systems Theory.

...

I think you mean the Hyper-Tankies

imagine believing this

In the case of the USSR you could make a case for the party and state apparatus becoming somewhat alienated and self-serving but not to a degree that it could be considered a class society with surplus value appropiation by high ranking party members. However, it did pave the way for the dissolution of the USSR and actual oligarchs.

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Nigger literally nobody beyond unironic Brezhnev bros thinks that the USSR was a genuine worker’s democracy for the entirety of its existence. Even hardcore ☭TANKIE☭s say it was a revisionist oligarchy after Stalin. Don’t fucking sit there and try to tell me that fucking Cockshott and Kim Jong Il of all people are spouting liberal propaganda about the USSR.

Sure. And they also say that Reaganomics works, Gorbachev did nothing wrong, and urge people to vote for Hillary.

Drink some bleach, will you?

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I guess Mao is a liberal propagandist too?

< I want to fight with strawman
Have at it.

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It’s not a straw man. You’re unironically suggesting that the USSR never descended into revisionism, when literally every serious socialist knows they did.

Except I do not and it is.

He didn't, it was all Cornman's fault.

How long ago did you find your way here from r/fullcommunism? I'm genuinely curious. It's insane how much dumber the average Zig Forums poster has become the last few months.

2dialectical4me

Argument: A is different from B because A has quality X
Refutation: but B also has quality X

Is this simple enough for your brains?

I agree that constitutes a refutation. What do you put in for the variables?

How do you write then?

A - "party elite"
B - "subjugated population"
X - access to exclusive shops

just ignore schizo-user. he will demand sources without providing any of his own, attempt to derail, move goalposts to avoid conceding arguments, etc.

Yes. You should ignore everyone who doesn't agree with you. They are obviously insane.

If you want to nitpick and demand sources but then discard sources because they've been "debunked" (but you can't show where) then obviously you're just wasting everyone's time. Go watch anime or something.

Wait a sec, that argument only works for a binary issue, something that either is absolutely the case or absolutely not. It doesn't work for arguing about general trends. What you pretend to be a sensible structure for an argument is this:
Argument: A is different from B because A has quality FOO_AS_COMMON_OCCURRENCE
Pseudo-refutation: but B also has quality FOO_AS_RARE_OCCURRENCE
Example argument: Heavy smokers are different from non-smokers because of the lung-cancer issue.
Pseudo-refutation: Non-smokers can also get lung cancer.
Another example argument: The capitalist class leads longer lives than the working class.
Pseudo-refutation: Here, look at this working-class guy that is older than some dead capitalist, so there!

You don't either have full access or none at all. If you are allowed in, your degree of access depends on how much hard currency you have (duh). Intershop stores in the GDR were like that (first only open to tourists, in the 70s open to the general population, but only those with Westgeld could buy anything, meaning a minority). The Russian hard-currency "Beriozka" stores directly discriminated between important party people, who were allowed to shop there like the tourists, and the majority who were not. Also consider the location of these stores and that people couldn't decide by themselves whether to move to a big city like Moscow.

Schitzo user unironically thinks that if you don’t believe the USSR was a flawless worker’s paradise then you must believe it was a satanic hellscape. Apparently there is not middle ground.

Which is okay, as the argument it refutes is binary - which was the whole point of the refutation (that someone's understanding was overly simplistic; not to mention wrong).

It doesn't. But we don't have an argument about "general trends". Our stable geniuses can't formulate an argument beyond the "since I've read somewhere something about someone getting a bad impression about USSR after reading some unknown book or article, USSR was not real Socialism and all accusations against it are automatically true".

That's not a "pseudo-refutation", but a proper one.
As your example argument did not clarify what "lung-cancer issue" was about, it is perfectly legit to point out that having lung cancer does not make you a heavy smoker.

Much better (as it actually is a "pseudo), but it is a qualitatively different kind of mistake, not the one you are talking about.

So, there were secret Party Elite passes that super-secret Party Elite had been using? News to me.
Some sources would be good.

Consider in what context? What exactly are you trying to prove?