Hey Zig Forums, I don't really post much here due to my political beliefs, but there's a few questions that I really want to know to try and expand my worldview a bit.
1) What do you think of the People's Republic of China (and by extension, Nationalist China then and the Republic of China now)? I know that they are definitely NOT a communist nation, but what about the past? 2) Is Stalinism just Nazism painted red, with the subsequent and preceding forms of Communism striving to be the actual thing? 3) What do you know about the War of Russian Intervention (1918-1920) when the League of Nations plus the then defeated Imperial Germany attacked the Soviet Union well into their Asian regions, then kind of forgot why they were there and got attriotion'd to the death? 4) What are your thoughts on Corbyn, Sanders and Yang? Are they actual socialists or are they just a bunch of the usual political nutjobs that try to swindle votes in their favor (like it happened with Trump and the Clintons with whites and minorities respectively)? Is there hope for a non poz'd ideology in the world? 5) How is an classless society any sustainable? Does it have to be a global society or can it work on single nations as well? How does such a society get rid of "elected officials" embezzling and being corrupt and all that jazz?
Thanks to Deng unemployment has increased, the country is a disgusting mix of socialism and capitalism. Not at all, Stalin and Lenin didn't have a lot of disagreements, the biggest problem Lenin had with Stalin was all the power he was accumulating and how "harsh" he was for a secretary. The purges were unnecessary and they only weakened the red army, the gulags gave profit during stalinism but proved to be non-profitable later. This i don't know Corbyn and Sanders do proclaim themselves as socialists, Yang is a capitalist with a happy face that says we don't need left or right but a mix of the two, a fucking centrist nigger. As Lenin noted, "It will take decades to overcome the evils of bureaucracy. It is a very difficult struggle, and anyone who says we can rid ourselves of bureaucratic practices overnight by adopting anti-bureaucratic platforms is nothing but a quack with a bent for fine words."
It all depends on making the government accountable to the citizens, of which efforts in the USSR were obviously insufficient.
Joseph Butler
Can you elaborate on points 1) and 2)? America (Wilson moreso but the growing lobbies in general) hated Socialism's guts because it could lead to a "Communist uprising" in the States (when at best it would have given it a few more social reforms in support and a non two-parties election cycle every once in a while), so he and Britain personally ordered the attack right after the German police culled the Bavarian uprisings. The supposed reason though was to liberate some Czech troops who fought in Russia and had to traverse most of the continent to get back to their home country, this was obviously just a pretext though, they couldn't care the less about the men. Didn't the USSR actually INCREASE the bureaucracy though?
Christopher Ward
I'm not that well read on most of those but i can discuss about how Stalinism was or was not nazism, what leads you to believe that? as horrible as the stalinist era was there weren't any racial cleansings. Also are you asking only about the Stalin era or do you think Lenin, Mao or even Cuba's final phase is full-on nazism?
Also yes Stalin did centralize a lot of power into the communist party.
Levi Wright
what about German POWs, Jews and Romas? Albeit you can point out the fact that he was paranoid about being sold out by either of them. None of the last three were anything of the sort, Cuba's case in particular was necessary due to all the assassination attempts.
Jace James
China is pretty controversial here; I'd consider it a mixed economy, in that both the bourgeoisie and the proletariat have a substantial amount of power and I don't think either can be said to totally control the economy. Mao was based. Nationalist China was better than what came before it. No, Stalin was also based. I'm glad the socialists won. They're just left-liberals. I don't think a classless society in one country is really possible. If not worldwide it would have to at least cover most of the planet. Corruption wouldn't be much of a problem in a classless society since there wouldn't be any funds to embezzle.
Christopher Robinson
By the jews do you mean the doctor's plot? it was a fabrication. According to Stalin's daughter, as well as historian Zhores Medvedev, Stalin himself didn't believe the charges and was going to stop the case till death intervened, whereupon the post-Soviet leaders stopped it in his absence, declaring it a fabrication. I've seen nothing indicating it was true.
There was an increase in anti-Semitic phenomena and a general wave of repression and suspicion during the last years of Stalin's life (caused in large part by fears of Zionist influence among Soviet Jews), but Stalin himself privately criticized instances of anti-Semitism during this time, and when Lev Mekhlis (the second most prominent Jewish official associated with Stalin) passed away a month before Stalin himself, an elaborate funeral was ordered.
Josiah Hernandez
All people have ethnicities. No one was killed for their ethnicity, so there was no ethnic cleansing. It'd be like saying people were killed for having eyes and legs.
Aiden Taylor
of course not, nazis were against collectivization and based their ideology on racial supremacy
social democratic policies, but decent foreign policy
either will get cheated out of the primaries, or if he does win he won't be able to pass what he wants with the entire congress against him
meme candidate
maybe outside the anglosphere
it's an idea for the distant future, can't be done now
yes, communism can only be global
there are different ideas, like a combination of cybernetics, sociocracy, and direct democracy to render government officials obsolete. but none of those have been implemented and are likely not to occur until long after we're dead
Lincoln Wood
not socialist currently, but I want to believe that comrade Xi has a hidden bag of tricks both are authoritarian, but ideologically, are leagues apart LoN was busy being useless and imperial Germany were a bunch of retards he himself is unlikely to be massively far left (though I suspect he has hidden power levels) he more will facilitate a move leftward the idea being that all borders are eventually dissolved, corruption is removed by eliminating currency and addressing the material conditions that give rise to them
Josiah Lee
The Chinese government abandoned efforts to develop socialism and brutally lowered standards in order to attract foreign investment and get better relations with the west. They maintain an aesthetic facade of marxist theory in order to present as contiguous with the PRC's history. Some people choose to believe in them actually being sincerely communist in their hearts and minds and just putting off the implementation till the time is right. Its a comforting notion so i get why people hold it but i'll remain sceptical till they actually do it. The KMT remnants are just a pathetic historical curiosity tbh and its just nice to laugh at their continued ambitions and claims to mainland China, although the green bloc parties seem to be taking control more in recent years. Their real role is just being one of many american satellite states in Asia and an instrument of american foreign policy. No, Stalinism and Nazism are basically incomparable aside from the most shallow position of vague reference to supposed 'authoritarianism'. As for Stalinism's relation to Bolshevism/Leninism, it wasn't necessarily any less genuine in pursuing communism (although it is impossible to tell, who can know the content of men's hearts) but simply a consequence of the USSR dealing with the situation it was in. What was intended as a world revolution got corralled and encircled by hostile powers within a vast but overwhelmingly underdeveloped territory. Once hope was lost for reinforcements all that remained was turtling up and developing industry in the hope that they will be able to resist the enemy assault when it comes and outlast the enemy till relief arrives. 'Stalinism' was pretty much a necessary change of plans brought about by a change of circumstance. All the leading nations of the world were surprised to find that a communist revolution had erupted and was being successful in russia so they intervened to try to crush it before the situation got out of hand. The British, Americans, Japanese, Germans, Poles, Czechs, Greeks, Romanians and Finns all contributed what they could to try and weaken the fledgling soviet government and/or support the white forces in the hope of reestablishing a friendly bourgeois russian government and stopping the red menace from becoming a threat at home and abroad. They all gave up and withdrew cutting their losses when it became obvious the soviets were far stronger than anticipated and would smash the whites, and instead they just refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the soviet government for the next decade or two till it became necessary for them to.
Xavier Martinez
Corbyn is a well-meaning bennite grandpa who wants to restore social democracy in britain and maybe also set the foundations for socialism, he's surrounded himself with firm marxists like mcdonnell, milne, murray et al. who are 100% on a quest to build british socialism. Sanders from what i can see is pretty genuinely leftist at heart seeing from his political past, and probably does want socialism but knows full well that he has to play the game of burger politics and stay in his lane if any leftward movement in american politics is to be achieved within constitutional means. So he moderates himself, normalises words like socialism even if he misattributes them, its the sugar to make the medicine go down. He's doing an admirable task but it is a sort of self-sacrifice on his part. Yang i don't know much at all about but he seems to just be a liberal faggot who wants to speed up america's decline into a technocratic corporate hellscape dystopia. What exactly do you mean sustainable? Class society seems eminently unsustainable, given that it breeds class struggle, classless society at least has that sorted. I mean i can declare my house to be a classless society, but it would hardly be significant. Of course in a hypothetical scenario sure you could have a communist society in a village, in a single country or whatever, but that's not how economics works in reality. A single nation's economy is not an independent entity, it is dependant on the whole rest of the world. Capitalism doesn't work within a single nation, it operates planet-wide and communism will similarly operate only as a planet-wide system. Depends on the political model of that society. Most communists are ambivalent at best about representative democracy, so what's to say there'd be elected officials to abuse their stations, if no such stations or officials existed. Models closest to representative/electoral democracy like soviet democracy have elements like the power of instant recall of a delegate which makes it easy to remove officials who do abuse their stations. But most communists tend towards more direct democratic models of political organisation or even the abolition of political life as such, with communist society being sufficiently self-regulating that there is no need for special people being selected as 'decision-makers' or 'resource-allocators' anymore.
Elijah Watson
Can you elaborate? Because IIRC he fought the Soviets who wouldn't let him in power but this may be from a meme historian. So you mean they're milquetoast leftists who would gladly sell out their parties if given the chance to? I see. Much more interesting thought experiment than I thought.
On that note, was the displacement of people to protect the borders a necessity?
Not that good of a metaphor but I get it.
Do you think that had he won the primaries and then the elections, Congress would have done the same things they did to Trump (as in, forced a million scandals just to stop him from doing anything)? I'm not factoring in Trump's idiocy though, so don't think I'm defending him or whatever. Why exactly, in your own opinion?
Aaron King
Smh, these authoritarian CNT death squads in Catalonia
Jacob Young
You mean the ingush and chechens? there were reports of widespread treason (i.e. armed uprisings) by those populations. Hence, the decision was made to deport them as the most "humane" decision possible in wartime (since the other option was mass executions of any suspected males, which could have meant demographic catastrophe.)
On the other hand there were many Chechens and others from the deported nationalities who fought in the ranks of the Red Army.
After 1956 the deportations were condemned as unjust and the reports of mass treason considered unfounded. The Chechen-Ingush ASSR was reestablished in 1957.
Nathaniel Miller
That's always puzzled me about communism. Not the part about embezzling or corruption. I think a classless society would make it easier to deal with corruption if anything. I mean look at virtually any non socialist country today, they're rife with corruption. But my confusion about a classless society is how would it develop? Maybe it can keep itself afloat but without some kind of delineation in skill, training, or compensation between people can a society innovate or improve any kind of technology ever? I just don't get how that works.
Samuel Lewis
its not as if first class had to be developed and then technology - humans lived in primitive communes and were inventing all sorts of things from fire to tools to agriculture
Cooper Perez
You do realise communism/classless society doesn't mean everyone is the same or something in some mathematical or clone-tier way right? People would still specialise in things, doctor or carpenter or astrophysicist aren't classes and a classless society would still have and produce those. 'Development' in the sense of technical progress doesn't happen because of capitalism or any sort class society, as long as humans live and learn they will be discovering new things about the natural world, innovating new, more efficient, methods of production and generally doing what technological development always does, ie. making life easier for people. In fact classless society by securing education and freedom for every person allows many more people to dedicate themselves to innovating and scientific/technical work which in class societies has often been left to a small section of the ruling leisure class which had the means to spend time trying to invent things.
Connor Wood
That makes sense. But the ratio between intellect and survival at the time was quite low.
My impression was more so in terms of compensation may be too similar. But the problem is your explaining innovation in a kind of out of the goodness of their own hearts kind of way. Some people will strive to better the world and their nation out of kindness, but we both know most won't. I don't necessarily think the STEM lords that attempt to carve out the future need all the wealth and power in the world. But what's the most sustainable and least violent way to motivate them?
Andrew Hill
social status. people already judge eachother by accomplishments, loser NEETs garner less respect than astrophysicists and engineers. when everyone is freed from the base need to work to survive and is competing for respect, it creates its own motivation. in the end humans are social creatures who desire the approval of other members of their species
David Green
Mao is generally considered a significant communist figure, though his legacy is controversial even among the far left. Adopting capitalism was arguably inevitable, since it establishes the material conditions for post-scarcity society, but most people doubt that the modern Chinese government is committed to moving on when it is no longer a necessary evil. Of course not. Communism is a process, not something instant like adopting liberal capitalism. Stalinism was a communist ideology, if a very hamfisted and arrogant one. Serves the faggots right. For all of the USSR's flaws, it was extremely better off than getting sodomized and stunted by early capitalism. Look at Brazil if you want to know what Russia would be like if the White Army won. Corbyn and his buddy McDonnell are cool guys. Sanders is just a social democrat these days, but very much a lesser evil in US politics, while Yang is a shameless neoliberal abusing UBI for populist points. Classless society is not some magical utopia where societal issues solve themselves, it merely means that class does not exist because private property (in an economic sense) is abolished. The exact details of how government will work in a communist society are purely speculative, but as you can probably guess, we believe it would be a substantial improvement.
Ryder Campbell
Okay, well we agree cause I would love nothing more to live in a world like that. But is it possible for the state or whatever entity is present to provide a base network for survival without capitalism or neo-liberalism or similar faggotry?
Owen Lopez
'Compensation' doesn't matter in a society where currency doesn't exist and everyone's livelihood is guaranteed. It is past the stage of human development where the paramount concern is making sure there is food on the table every day, rather all people are free to spend their time as they wish. Innovations are the not the product of paying people more that some other people. Innovations will always happen because we will always be curious about the world around us and we will always be looking for ways to simplify and make easier our tasks. Throughout human history innovation has not come out of some elite group of stemfags who do the sciences and gt lots of money, merely by people typically born into wealth or subsidised by wealth developing discovering new things because they want to. Its not a case of 'wanting to better the world' or kindness at all, quite simply stemfags will be stemfags, the scientists at CERN will want to keep doing their research, they aren't doing it for the limousines and private yachts. Scientific endeavours will be funded and people, many more people who today are blocked from being able to pursue the sciences, will be able to participate in research that interests them.
Alexander Martin
It's true that Mao split China from the USSR unnecessarily (although some of his criticisms of the USSR were valid) and later did even worse things like funding anti-Soviet groups allied with the US in Afghanistan and Angola, but he also massively increased the quality of life in China and set it on its road to become a world power. I believe the good outweighs the bad. There's nothing to "sell out"; the Democrats and Labour are both bourgeois imperialist parties.
Isaac Morales
1. Mao was a great anti-imperialist and strategist who ended the century of humiliation and the PRC saw some of the fastest increase in living standards in recorded history. I don't really know about the Cultural revolution and beyond. 2. No, Stalinism is what some leftists and most liberals call Marxism-Leninism, Stalin's synthesis of Leninism and the official ideology of the USSR and the Eastern bloc in the 20th century. 3. The good side won. The Allies were fighting to turn Russia into a semi-colony as they had intended, the Germans (before they surrendered) were fighting to colonize Eastern Europe, and the Whites were fighting to have a reactionary military dictatorship over Russia, as Kornilov had attempted in 1917.
Andrew Sullivan
Just a generic Appalachian woobly, I'll anser as I can though I think they're a good example of a third world country being raised up in terms of living conditions by central planning. My main problem with them is that they don't have any genuine interest in class conflict, they just replaced the previous war/land lord class with a political ruling class. How would it be? Stalin didn't fuck things up in Ukraine because he outlawed food or anything, most of his "atrocities" are the result of multi-partied conflicts he had with local ruling classes. All I know is that Makhono was a big-dicked boss. They're regular politicians whose only good contribution, if you're less jaded than i am, is that they do shift the overton window to the left. American politics are actually uniquely right-wing, that's why all our issues are cultural with almost no discussion in terms of labor rights. Any attacks on the ruling class are always in the form of taxes, which even those are easily avoided if you know how to read legalese. I think it has to be worldwide, and it would have to have a really weak state, maybe existing to the extent that one can keep territory safe. Like I said, I'm more of a DemSoc union-guy, that's something I think we'd have to discuss with a theoretical military, infrastructure maintenance, and all the other things societies need for the most part.
Mao suffered the same affliction Maduro is suffering from now, of being kind of a dumbass with no idea how to properly administer a socialist or aspiring socialist nation without the changes fucking up things. See how Mao killed all the sparrows so the unchecked locusts ate all the food. The road to hell is paved with good intentions, after all, and no one walked that road with quite as much confidence as the PRC. I have no love to lose for Stalinism, if you ask me the Soviets betrayed the ideals of Marx and the October Revolution so I hope whatever hell they're burning in is especially hot. I wouldn't call it Nazism painted red, though, fascism is by nature capitalistic and right-wing with heavy influences from racist lines of thought which I never perceived to be as influential in the USSR. Literally nothing. Never heard of it before. I don't know enough about Corbyn and Yang to properly have an opinion about them, but I'm willing to bet that they're like Sanders in that they're not socialists but are sincere in their beliefs that are as close to socialism as the current Overton window will allow. Given how many tenets of libertarian ideals appeal to me, that government isn't to be trusted, I'd say that in an ideal classless society a representative democracy would be abolished in favor of a direct democracy. If the workers collectively own the means of production, then the workers would collectively decide what to do with it, which is what a direct democracy is. Therefore, the number of elected officials who can go around embezzling and being corrupt decreases dramatically. While a global classless society would be ideal, I think it has a solid chance of working out on a nation-by-nation basis, for the time that nations still exist.
