MarxMadness [comrade/them]

When you need multiple attempts to replicate something that’s existed for decades… maybe what you’re trying to do doesn’t work!

Imagine trying to vibe design something complex.

The surveillance and repression apparatus was much more developed in Tsarist Russia than it was in the US at that time… and the emptiness and sparse population of most of the US made it hard to police.

I’m no expert, but I’ve read enough about internal repressions in the U.S. that I don’t think it can be taken for granted than Tsarist Russia was more effective. In that 1916-1920 window you had Pinkertons and other private detectives in every possible meeting (and working closely with official law enforcement), you had frequent arbitrary arrests and at least occasional lynchings of labor leaders, and you had political action from the highest levels of the federal government aimed at quashing dissent. You had widespread censorship, surveillance of mail and phone communications, torture, mass arrests, and deportations.

Unlike Russia, you did not have a segment of the ruling class in favor of wholesale changes to the national government (or when you did, they were in favor of proto-fascist changes). And while I really don’t know how this would compare to Russia, all of the above repressive forces could be (and often were) supplemented by vigilante violence at least tacitly supported by the state. Any argument about the U.S. being large and difficult to police would apply to Russia as well.

I think the real explanation lies in two factors: one is instability and the other is ability to externalize societal contradictions.

I agree these are big factors, too. As you suggest, I think instability is probably the biggest, but of course all of these affect each other.

In Germany there was the Bavarian Soviet and the Spartacist Uprising, and it took the betrayal of the SPD and their enlisting of proto-fascist paramilitaries to crush the revolution… They had the spontaneous energy from the masses but the revolutionary organizations were too weak to lead the masses decisively.

Leftist parties being too weak and the repressive organs of the state being too strong are two sides of the same coin, right? And at the risk of overgeneralizing, I’d lump the German paramilitaries in with the armed vigilantes of the U.S. and the Whites who would fight in the Russian Civil War. Maybe the main reason the Bolsheviks won in Russia is the ultimate tool of state repression – the army – had been degraded so much that you had significant defections, all the way up to the garrisons of major cities during the October Revolution. I agree, though, that no small part of this was due to “the Bolsheviks [being] disciplined, organized and ready, having spent years building up connections with the working class base and winning credibility.”

you reject the “labor aristocracy” theory and the theory of superprofits as an explanation for why we have so far only observed successful revolutions outside of the imperial core. You say this is liberal moralizing. Ok. What is your alternative explanation?

One alternative explanation is that there were seeds of revolution throughout the imperial core around the time of the October Revolution, they were just successfully rooted out before they could grow.

Take the U.S. as an example. I don’t know nearly enough about the U.S. and Imperial Russia in the 1910s to fully compare their domestic surveillance and repression capabilities. But it seems reasonable to infer that that the U.S. – no lengthy war on its front porch; a more modern country; a long history of repressing sizeable black, indigenous, and immigrant communities; recent colonial counterintelligence experience in the Phillipines and elsewhere – was in a much stronger position to bring the hammer down on leftists at the end of the decade. They did, they never let up, and the weight of the internal security state only increased.

Maybe that’s why the left never got off the ground in the U.S.: they got beat by a stronger state than the Bolsheviks faced, then kept getting punched when they were down.

the South China Morning Post - a propaganda outlet in China operating under the Chinese Communist Party’s censorship regime - is more critical about the Chinese bond market that Reuters

When the SCMP praises something China does, it’s evidence of censorship. When it’s critical? You guessed it, also evidence of censorship.

During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence. If the Soviets refused to negotiate a point, they were intransigent and belligerent; if they appeared willing to make concessions, this was but a skillful ploy to put us off our guard. By opposing arms limitations, they would have demonstrated their aggressive intent; but when in fact they supported most armament treaties, it was because they were mendacious and manipulative. If the churches in the USSR were empty, this demonstrated that religion was suppressed; but if the churches were full, this meant the people were rejecting the regime’s atheistic ideology. If the workers went on strike (as happened on infrequent occasions), this was evidence of their alienation from the collectivist system; if they didn’t go on strike, this was because they were intimidated and lacked freedom. A scarcity of consumer goods demonstrated the failure of the economic system; an improvement in consumer supplies meant only that the leaders were attempting to placate a restive population and so maintain a firmer hold over them.

If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.

-Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds

It’s not a dilemma at all. If they do it, they’re either complicit or too cowardly to refuse an illegal order.

We’ll talk about material conditions until we’re blue in the face, and then when material conditions change it becomes “well people are only receptive to this because it’s hitting their wallets!”

No shit! That’s the whole leftist argument! Material conditions drive politics more than ideology!

Wonder what the real death/casualty count is, and how long they can keep it under wraps.

It’s a really easy idea to drop in a conversation with libs and have them shrug and say “yeah, shit, I guess you’re right.”

Not a fan of this for a couple of reasons.

1. I have poor handwriting, especially if I’m trying to jot down a bunch of stuff for ~1 hour straight. Being able to read your notes later is pretty important.
2. Sometimes a lecture or discussion goes over a topic it initially covered 10 minutes earlier. Being able to go up the page and add another line on a word document makes notes far easier to follow than drawing arrows or filling in the margins on a real page.
3. A big part of education is learning how to learn – stuff like paying attention and self-discipline. Today, that includes learning how to manage your interactions with devices.
4. I can space out just fine without a computer anyway.

Spitballing here:

• If a variety of people with various degrees of leftist credibility all raise a similar idea, it at least shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand.
• How easy is it to fool someone who’s 17 or 18?
• “I was propagandized” is not an absolution from all personal responsibility, but when the vast majority of entertainment and cultural/political/religious leaders in the U.S. tell people joining the military is fine (or even noble), that carries some weight.
• Education is a huge part of building a political movement, and education implies your audience doesn’t have all the right answers to start.
• It’s really hard to think of revolutionary movements that did not have a lot of help from people who once worked for the enemy. Maybe Cuba?
• It’s really easy to think of examples of revolutionary movements that took revolutionary stances on how they treated even potential enemy turncoats. Mao: “Our policy towards prisoners captured from the Japanese, puppet or anti-Communist troops is to set them all free, except for those who have incurred the bitter hatred of the masses and must receive capital punishment and whose death sentence has been approved by the higher authorities.”
• There’s a contradiction between identifying structural problems and attributing them to the capitalist class, but also insisting on harsh treatment of low-level individual servants of the capitalist class.
• There’s a contradiction between leftist views on criminal justice generally and an insistence on harsh treatment of those same low-level servants of capitalism.
• Telling a bunch of guys with guns that they deserve to die and there’s nothing they can do to change that will get them to continue to fight. The way to get them to quit is to tell them there’s a way they can go home.
• The gap between the harshest rhetoric and actually trying to build a real-world movement reminds me of this line from Parenti: “They do not explain how the manifold functions of a revolutionary society would be organized, how external attack and internal sabotage would be thwarted, how bureaucracy would be avoided, scarce resources allocated, policy differences settled, priorities set, and production and distribution conducted.”

I “get” the genocide denial in that I understand the vast, decades-long propaganda effort that led to it.

But claiming Pahlavi was somehow chosen by Iranians? What? Monarchs don’t devise their claim from popular support, the last time his family was in control the populace revolted… even if you’re in the camp that the legitimate government must be overthrown, it’s a head scratcher.

Ha great point.

For minor personal computing, “eh it partially works OK” is extremely annoying, but maybe worth it if it’s dirt cheap. For anything more complex or important, that level of unreliability is an enormous net negative no matter how low the cost.

I’m closing the Delaware River to gabagool shipping

http://foodnotbombs.net/new_site/

I’m not an anarchist, but this is plainly wrong, and a poor response even if it applies to twitter anarchists. There’s plenty to say here about how anti-imperialists should view imperfect leaders in states being actively targeted by imperialists. Ham-handed leftist infighting misses the mark.

Democrats will scream “you killed people” at potential voters before turning around and voting for a candidate who promises to kill the exact same people. They’ll then wonder why a morally bankrupt party failed to successfully browbeat voters with a (piss poor) moral argument.

You don’t give a shit about Palestinians (or you’d be disgusted by voting for Harris), but at least recognize how bad of politics this is.

May have been part of internal deportations around WWII, and they’re being loose with the subject matter. Or maybe they’re from children who in fact committed violent crimes.

“Imprisoned” does not imply children were forced to do hard labor, and children have been forced to do hard labor in all sorts of contexts, so the concept isn’t outlandish. It does seem very likely that there’s some important context missing.

They care about the economy and being racist; this is just a contradiction in their belief system.

I’m not saying this should be reflexively opposed. I’m saying that if a movement is accepting help from some of the worst people in the world, that movement deserves a great deal of skepticism.