lol I guess that evil, blanquist democratic socialism is a much better organizational tool than she thought huh?
Fuck german socialism bro. After Engels died they all became SPD careerists and "theorists" who didn't really mean a word they said, and talked about real revolutionaries like they were watching them from safe distance in a zoo.
Luxembourg BTFO the Soviets pretty hard. Besides her childish views on national determination and the Russian land question she was 100% correct, see quotes below. Hell, even “muh renegade” Kautsky predicted the course of the USSR pretty accurately
*Luxemburg
I always mispell it
wow those passages that sound like a boring libertarian boomer on facebook sure BTFOs the soviet union
btw did his skills for prediction help the course of socialism in germany at all?
Not an argument. Not all of the Left blindly bowed to Russia as soon as the Bolsheviks took over. Western Marxism as a school of thought exists for a reason.
Rosa was critical of Lenin yet praised him, joined his International and hoped for Bolshevik victory. Nobody blindly bows to the Soviet Union, the most dogmatic response is always of those criticizing it, to the point where you think senile rants about muh Freedom are interesting Marxism.
Fuck cowardly leftists. What Vice (Cheney) film taught me is that all leftists from Germany to Italyx Spain etc were a bunch of cowards and fuck ups. They got afraid to carry out the revolution and tjen perished. I have even more respect for Lenin, Mao, Tito, Fidel now.
Really funny then how butthurt the Soviets got at people like Togliatti for advocating for some degree of indepence from Moscow’s dictates, not to mention CPSU’s behavior towards the JCP during the Sino-Soviet split.
Damn, you know your argument is weak when all you do is throw parrot random pieces of anti-Soviet trivia without even bothering linking them with a coherent system and worldview.
Enjoy the last two or three years of your "radical phase", where you're so radical that even the Soviet Union is too right-wing for me because of their fucking authoritarianism, maaaan! You'll soon graduate college and find inner peace in generic liberal waters.
...
t. I read half of a Chomsky book once
You only mock me and don’t refute anything I’ve said. Engels in his 1891 postscript to hailed the Paris Commune as a true example of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Commune was a truly radical democracy – while Soviet democracy was by-and-large a sham that left a lot to be desired. This doesn’t mean the USSR was complete trash, it did a lot of great things. You can call my arguments “generic” all you like but that doesn’t disprove them.
Read Marx.
plz don’t criticize 20th century socialism! It’s connected directly to my ego and makes me feel funny :(
Okay? I'll refer you back to my previous quote.
Talk about ego.
This is based multi-party systems only serve to normalize civil strife.
I recognize you. Your writing style is familiar and you've been referring to the CCCP as a "nightmare" for quite a few months now in many posts. I don't think you're even capable of describing the Soviet Union without using that word.
Meaningless criticisms if you think the governments of Europe & NA are democratic. I don't know if you do or do not.
You've completely contradicted yourself here. The Bolsheviks are to be condemned for trying to skip over developing capitalism, and also for not skipping over developing capitalism?
Not the guy you're replying to but possible hot take:
Western "democratic" nations are as democratic as the former USSR and the various people's republic governments
The bitch should have took care of herself instead of envy Lenin's penis.
sad!
Peak idealism. In the concrete course of a bloody revolution (and civil war) the ONLY two forces are the pro- and anti-revolutionary ones. If some from the first group start lagging behind, having second thoughts, or start playing "democracy" in the midst of absolutely necessary tyranny, they shall perish.
...
Catalonia.
That’s not a refutation of user’s point though. He never said that he wanted to abolish the state in one stroke, nor did he say that there shouldn’t be authoritarianism or repression of counterrevolution. He said that the Soviet Union failed to build a genuine proletarian democracy, which is a perfectly legitimate criticism.
t. Leninist
Freikorps dindu nuffin
Oh my god are you still trying this shit? You're not fooling anyone any longer, the game is up shill. Stay banned next time please.
At least someone is not a brainlet and understands my point
Based retard
No, his dumb point was "Soviet Union bad, Marx and Engels wanted something like the Paris Commune" which is evidently untrue to anybody who has bothered reading their thoughts about it. Me and the other user just picked examples of their writings where they state why they considered the Commune a historically limited and flawed experiment, and how all their criticism point to a direction closer to Soviet Union's authoritarianism and use of state machinery to crush dissent, instead of fetishizing Utopian experiments about Freedom and Democracy.
And saying the Soviet Union "failed to build a genuine proletarian democracy" is a dumb liberal take, Democracy is not an ideal for Marxists but a historical stage that requires the right material and political conditions.
No he was right, you're not fooling anyone.
??? the movie barely showed any leftists.
Democratic Socialists are playing the long game.
Lenin saw the opportunity and took it.
So many of you are so impressively stupid that it suggests the universe is designed, just for the output of intellectual malfunction.
The idea that the Soviet Union was a failure, a "50% failure", or a "70% failure", or any other retarded percentage mix is so stupid it mutilates reason.
The Soviet Union is one of the only societies to have ever come close to eliminating exploitation. Of them, it was the first truly lasting and globally effective Socialist state.
The Soviet Union came out of a literal Tsardom Monarchy. The idea that Lenin or Stalin supressed human rights, democracy, etc… is an extremely mass produced example of anti-communism. They had no actual rights to suppress. They gained everything and lost nothing through the Soviet Union.
Not to mention the fact that they were actually making an alternative to Capitalist society, which kills literal millions every year. Every single year, millions of people die preventable deaths that would not occur in a Socialist society. And yet, you, the big brains of the world, have the wherewithal to criticize the Soviet Union because of a fraction of those deaths happening.
My overall point here is that the Soviet Union was one of the few societies to have ever come close to eliminating the endless exploitation, death, and destruction that has pervaded all of human society. By supporting these "good" exploiters, even tacitly, you are morally a gigantic piece dogshit. By perpetrating insane moralistic arguments about Soviet Union excesses in the face of the absolute insane excesses of Capitalism, you are not being enlightened, you are being a piece of shit.
Nigger what? Marx and Engels didn’t like the Paris Commune? They were certainly not uncritical but they were huge supporters of it
PLZ DON’T CRITICIZE THE USSR AT ALL
Fuck ☭TANKIE☭s, jesus
No, it's about doing what needs to be done. Leftists, a lot of times, are unable to do so.
M8 democracy is literally the lifeblood of socialism, and every serious socialist leader and theorists from Marx to Stalin saw it as necessary in the long term, even if they thought it was not viable at the current moment. How can there be a dictatorship of the proletariat without proletarian democracy? How can you have socialism without the workers as a whole operating as the ruling class? Without proletarian democracy you just replace the bourgeoisie with an unaccountable class of bureaucrats and party bosses, something numerous ML leaders have warned against.
t. Lenin
Openly advocating against democracy as a virtue, rather than simply acknowledging that its limitation may be called for in some situations, is just plain reactionary. I understand why the Soviets implemented undemocratic measures like the faction ban, given that the situation was desperate and unity was imperative, however at the same time you’d have to be a brainlet to not understand how these decisions damaged the Soviet Union in the long term.
Saying that the Paris commune should have been harsher on reactionaries isn’t the same thing as saying it should have eliminated all dissent and scrapped democracy altogether you brainlet.
Lots of smaller successes don’t make up for the fact that the USSR not only failed to dislodge capitalism as a dominant system globally, but it failed to prevent capitalist restoration within its own borders. In the grand scheme of things it was a failure, even if that failure came after a long and valiant struggle full of successes.
The USSR and various state socialist projects eliminated some features of capitalism but not all of them. You can call them whatever you like but at the end of the day attempts to abolish capitalism within the Soviet Union were incomplete and ultimately unsuccessful. Furthermore, Marx critiqued explicitly this kind of 'piecemeal' attempt at socialism, and expressed real doubts that an incomplete movement could ultimately be successful.
Fuck off, no one is buying your own shitty moralism. If you want to be a socialist, then understand the social relations of capitalism, where they exist and where they do not. If you want to jerk off over poverty reduction and literacy rates like a red liberal, then move to Singapore.
That fucking quote again.
The USSR and the Eastern Bloc was okay, it was a solid counterpower to Western liberal capitalism and their leaders made China and Russia what they are today, but it ultimately failed, and I believe we should go beyond 20th-century Leninism if we want to be successful today.
Also, reminder that Debord thought the East was a "spectacle" as much as the West, and I trust him more than edgy teenage Americans nostalgic for an era they never knew.
There's absolutely nothing worse than someone who has never read Marx but tries to pretend that he has, and does so by "reconstructing" Marx's worldview based on a few isolated quotes he encountered, probably on r/socialism or some other online shithole. It's the same way brainlets of the Right approach him, and it's pitiful to watch because they're really believe they're fooling anyone.
You're arguing against points nobody made. And you do so because you simply can't understand the (very elementary) concept of social institutions not being an ideal to be attained, but as part of a superstructure with material origins, of the presence and development of said material origins being predicated on a number of factors and circumstances that can be outside the boundaries of a state's power, and the revolutionary state having to develop them not according to a pre-established blueprint of "ideal society" (which would be Utopianism) but according to the rhythm allowed by its geopolitical and economic context. This simply cannot penetrate your skull, because you can only interpret it as binary "pro-democracy or anti-democracy" positions, detached from historical context. And you're also completely ignorant of Socialist tradition, because plenty of famous Socialists, several more famous than Marx in his own time, made arguments for dictatorship, but that's besides the point.
My advice is: go read. Stop wasting your time (and making us waste our time) trying to save face on an anonymous board just because your dumb argument was shot down, and actually start reading Marx. The frankly pathetic "even Kautsky said! Even Lenin said! Even Rosa said! Even so and so said!" thing as if you had encyclopedic knowledge of the Marxist tradition is ludicrous and reeks of teenage posturing, because your understanding of Marxism is shit and we can see through your attempt of acting otherwise. And don't be encouraged by the other couple of idiots ITT agreeing with you, they're just as dumb and misinformed. You don't have to come back to this thread every time you think of a counter-argument to show those nasty MLs that you know Marx too! because your fragile ego is keeping you away from more important tasks. Go read. Not find quotes, actually read a book.
You’re a retard who is conflating dialectics with Utopianism. It’s not Utopianism to suggest that the oppression of workers under capitalism generates the seeds of proletarian revolution, whereby the workers as a class will take control of their destiny. As a class, meaning they implement a state which serves as the representatives for the interests of the class as a whole. You tell me to read Marx but judging by your posts you haven’t even read the basics.
t. Engels in “The Principles of Communism.”
t. Marx and Engels in the manifesto
The statement that democracy is the lifeblood of socialism isn’t Utopianism, it’s a direct conclusion drawn from the logic of dialectics. If the bourgeois state and bourgeois democracy are inherently antagonistic to the proletariat as a class, then it stands to reason that the dialectical process must necessarily produce proletarian states and proletarian democracy as their logical antithesis. This is a position borne out and supported by pretty much every actual theorist out there.
From “The Dictionary of Marxist Thought”
t. Lenin in The State and Revolution
TLDR: Eat my ass and actually read theory. Democracy and socialism are inexorably linked, and to deny otherwise is to go against the position of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. If you want to do that then fine, but don’t call yourself a Marxist.
Debord's description of the Spectacle was good but the Situationists' take as a whole on the USSR was fucking garbage, and his views on organization I remember being incredibly inconsistent. He criticized organs of power to solidify control of the proletariat with the USSR but then criticized anarchists for not using any organ. His stance on worker councils was a cop-out and throughout reading it I could not find the categorical difference between worker's councils with more upper centralization (Soviet Union) and the ones the leftcoms claim to advocate for. Federation versus Centralization is an issue that does not disprove the control of workers, it's a question of what is the effective form of expression for workers, at least imo. Lenin and Luxemburg had far more educated stances on worker's organization and Debord's cultural critique was entirely insufficient on making a serious comment on political practice. I might be wrong on some specifics that he said (correct me if I am), but you should read better theory on social organization.
Again, you just don't have the foundations to even properly interpret loose passages. This conversaiton is useless. Go read, stop getting offended like a bitch and educate yourself.
Make an actual argument any time m8. You’re dismissing the emphasis on democracy as the basis of the DotP as “Utopianism” and yet you’re ignoring the fact that Marxism very clearly states that the DotP must be based on proletarian democracy. This is inherent in the logic of Marxism, the proletariat cannot be the ruling class unless it rules as a class.
I predict Venezula will fail because Maduro gay . I also predict one big US military base in Syria will fail because they fucking dumb af. And America will not have socialism in the next 50 years because reasons. In fact you dont have to do anything or attempt anything at all
Don't you see that by saying "you're a faggot, go read" in complete disregard with proper internet debate etiquette I'm humbly giving you permission to just fuck off without having your pride hurt? That's because explaining things to you is currently pointless, and will be until you have actually made a dedicated effort to understand Marxist theory. Cut the desperate googling and quoting of passages from books and texts you haven't read, and chill. I'm not interested in continue this debate with you. You're given a free pass to leave this thread feeling like your ego is intact, on the condition that you'll no longer try to teach Marxists here about Marxism without having read something first. Now go, little one, get this thread out of the back of your head for the first time in two days and go make a study plan. Once you read your way out of the "total faggotry" stage, your sins will be forgiven.
Lol what are you gonna post next the US navy seal past you faggot?
Yikes
Except you haven’t made any arguments, let alone any supported by actual citations from theory. You said that it’s utopianism to try to plan ahead with the practical application of socialism rather than responding to the actual conditions at hand, which is largely true, and thats why I said I’m fine with the suspension of democracy under certain conditions. But the fact is that Marxist theory is abundantly clear when it says that the long term transition from capitalism to socialism must necessarily be built on the foundation of proletarian democracy. Do you dispute that point? If so what is your reasoning?
SO THIS IS THE POWER OF LEFTCOMS
Oh my god the brainlet mutual support force ITT
I extend my advice to all of you
Sounds kinda like a certain imageboard I know.
Not him but i despise you little ass ravaged faggots who beg for daddy mods for impose the boot on anyone of dissenting opinion. Your arguments and conclusions should he sufficient to btfo him but your too much a brainlet to even try
