# Against Trotskyism: A Reading Guide



## ernestolynch (Aug 9, 2010)

I will serialise this reading guide in order that you can digest the information. The question of Trotsky  is not merely a historical question. Firstly and most importantly it is a question of political line. There are significant political reasons that Trotskyism has failed to ever lead a successful revolution. It is a fact that Trotsky, on the one hand, and Lenin and Stalin on the other, put forward two very different and opposing lines on almost every major question for the international communist movement. Rejected by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and by the Soviet people as well, Trotsky then turned bitterly to the organization of counter-revolution, both within the Soviet Union and internationally.

The first to be read is presented below.
Trotskyism: Counter-Revolution in Disguise by M. J. Olgin


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## little_legs (Aug 9, 2010)

what's next? - The Lessons of October by Nadezhda Krupskaya

the rest of the garbage can found here http://marxistleninist.wordpress.com/2009/12/24/against-trotskyism-a-reading-guide/


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## ymu (Aug 9, 2010)

Yeah, you need some quotes in that OP ern, or it might look like you're presenting someone else's work as your own. It ain't your blog it's stolen quoted from, unless you've emigrated to seppo-land recently.


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## ernestolynch (Aug 9, 2010)

I denounce you all!


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## ska invita (Aug 9, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> Rejected by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union *and by the Soviet people as well,*[/URL]


 - nice stalinist disclaimer

*that link goes to a book - way to much stuff to read on the net. how do you intend to serialise it?


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## Spion (Aug 9, 2010)

You're a colossal moron, Ern, and a very sad individual to boot


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## ernestolynch (Aug 9, 2010)

Trot louse.


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## Pickman's model (Aug 9, 2010)

will you be putting up denver walker's fine work 'quite right, mr trotsky'?


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## ernestolynch (Aug 9, 2010)

I only have a printed copy, it needs putting online.


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## Proper Tidy (Aug 9, 2010)

Bloody Goldstein


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## Spion (Aug 9, 2010)

Isn't there an Old Tankies Club for the likes of Ern where like-minded souls can ride around on a T-34 and vicariously remenisce about destroying the working class in the name of Socialism in One Country?


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## Proper Tidy (Aug 9, 2010)

Yes, one or two.


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## DotCommunist (Aug 9, 2010)

*icepicks thread*


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## krtek a houby (Aug 9, 2010)

Actually, I'm quite happy for plastico to eulogise Stalin et al. At least it keeps him busy and out of harms way.


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## ernestolynch (Aug 9, 2010)

Fuck the Blueshirts.


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## krtek a houby (Aug 9, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> Fuck the Blueshirts.


 
I couldn't agree more. I have never voted for them (I'd be getting on a bit, if I had) nor have I voted for Fine Gael. Perhaps you could explain your frequent non-sequitur blueshirt outbursts to the wider audience, mr wevolutionary?


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## Idaho (Aug 9, 2010)

I don't understand all this Trotsky stuff that always gets bandied about. Is Ernesto still cross that Trotsky said nasty things about that nice man Stalin?


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## krtek a houby (Aug 9, 2010)

Idaho said:


> I don't understand all this Trotsky stuff that always gets bandied about. Is Ernesto still cross that Trotsky said nasty things about that nice man Stalin?


 
Plastico lives in the dim and distant past; he refers to the Republic of Ireland as the _Free State _and political opponents as _Blueshirts_


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## treelover (Aug 9, 2010)

Schnews did a very good expose of the SWP wing of Trotskyism


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## Spion (Aug 9, 2010)

Idaho said:


> I don't understand all this Trotsky stuff that always gets bandied about. Is Ernesto still cross that Trotsky said nasty things about that nice man Stalin?


In his case, yeah it is. He's like a one-man Sealed Knot Society, but set in 1936 and with less relevance to today


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## Spion (Aug 9, 2010)

treelover said:


> Schnews did a very good expose of the SWP wing of Trotskyism


You and JHE should get together for a circle jerk. You're both obsessed


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## ernestolynch (Aug 9, 2010)

jer said:


> Plastico lives in the dim and distant past; he refers to the Republic of Ireland as the _Free State _and political opponents as _Blueshirts_


 
No, only you, Jerry.


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## krtek a houby (Aug 9, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> No, only you, Jerry.


 
Yes, yes but seeing as I don't vote for them or follow their political raison d'etre - perhaps you could explain why? Or is it easier to have a pop at me than my missus, now, seeing as that's a no no.


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## Orang Utan (Aug 9, 2010)

what's trotskyism again?
please answer in 140 characters or less or i won't read it


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## ernestolynch (Aug 9, 2010)

jer said:


> Yes, yes but seeing as I don't vote for them or follow their political raison d'etre - perhaps you could explain why? Or is it easier to have a pop at me than my missus, now, seeing as that's a no no.


 
What are you on about with your missus, you paranoid freak? Are you retired?


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## krtek a houby (Aug 9, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> What are you on about with your missus, you paranoid freak? Are you retired?


 
Oh, I think you know. "Concubine" and "paid for" and other such delightful epithets. You really want to keep track of that twitchy mouth of yours.

But anyways, comrade, we digress. Can you explain all the Blueshirt innuendo. No more weasel words; lay it on the line.


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## ernestolynch (Aug 9, 2010)

orang utan said:


> what's trotskyism again?
> Please answer in 140 characters or less or i won't read it


 
occupation of the student union bar to support the taliban - speakers include prof callinicos - a worker - tabitha st mungo (nus prez) - buy the paper - give out leaflets - eat veg


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## ernestolynch (Aug 9, 2010)

jer said:


> Oh, I think you know. "Concubine" and "paid for" and other such delightful epithets. You really want to keep track of that twitchy mouth of yours.
> 
> But anyways, comrade, we digress. Can you explain all the Blueshirt innuendo. No more weasel words; lay it on the line.


 
links or stfu


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## krtek a houby (Aug 9, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> links or stfu


 
Of course. All mouth and no trousers. You call me Blueshirt on any thread you reply to me. And the concubine comments, this ring a bell?

_One imperialist concubine's opinion does not equal the whole population's.

Silly Jerry. _ 

From this thread http://www.urban75.net/vbulletin/threads/325201-North-Korea-threatening-quot-all-out-war-quot/page12?highlight=imperialist+concubine


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## Fedayn (Aug 9, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> occupation of the student union bar to support the taliban - speakers include prof callinicos - a worker - tabitha st mungo (nus prez) - buy the paper - give out leaflets - eat veg


 
As opposed to this drooling Welsh prick who wanks himself silly at Stalinist terror and slaughter. Ern is the Monica Lewinsky to a modern Stalin, all eager to please if a tad given to unfortunate and incriminating drooling.


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## Orang Utan (Aug 9, 2010)

you take ern too seriously


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## Spion (Aug 9, 2010)

Fed's like that


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## Fedayn (Aug 9, 2010)

Orang Utan said:


> you take ern too seriously


 
Seriously pathetic yes.


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## Fedayn (Aug 9, 2010)

Spion said:


> Fed's like that


 
Like what?


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## Orang Utan (Aug 9, 2010)

he's just having a laugh. you should try it some time


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## Orang Utan (Aug 9, 2010)

Fedayn said:


> Like what?


 
grumpy and somewhat uncomprehending of humour perhaps?


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## ernestolynch (Aug 9, 2010)

Aspergic Trots lol


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## krtek a houby (Aug 9, 2010)

Orang Utan said:


> he's just having a laugh. you should try it some time


 
Racially abusing one's partner doesn't tickle my funny bone, I'm afraid


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## Orang Utan (Aug 9, 2010)

i suspect you've tabloided that a bit


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## ernestolynch (Aug 9, 2010)

Fuck he's playing the race card now. Silly blueshirt.


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## Fedayn (Aug 9, 2010)

Orang Utan said:


> you take ern too seriously


 
I don't think anyone takes the frothing moron seriously. As for humour, if he ever displayed some I might laugh. But he's about as funny as he is working-class......


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## krtek a houby (Aug 9, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> Fuck he's playing the race card now. Silly blueshirt.


 
I am not a blueshirt - and you have yet to explain why you see me as such, or whether you even understand the term.

And you are the one who played the race card by referring to my Japanese other as "paid for" and a "concubine"... now maybe that kind of causal racism against East Asians and how they can be "bought" is amusing and somehow acceptable in your world but not in mine.


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## ernestolynch (Aug 9, 2010)

Dunno who's the best fish, the aspie scouse trot or the paranoid blueshirt expat..


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## krtek a houby (Aug 9, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> Dunno who's the best fish, the aspie scouse trot or the paranoid blueshirt expat..


 
What exactly do you contribute to this community, besides following people around making baseless, assinine and unpleasant remarks?

You can't even back them up?

Insults, racism, bitterness and schoolyard taunts. That's pretty much the sum of you.


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## ernestolynch (Aug 9, 2010)

You're the nutter on my thread, blueshirt, following you around lol. Smoke dope a lot?


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## Fedayn (Aug 9, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> Dunno who's the best fish, the aspie scouse trot or the paranoid blueshirt expat..


 
WHo is this 'aspie scouse trot' that you the Welsh nonce speaks of?


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## krtek a houby (Aug 9, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> You're the nutter on my thread, blueshirt, following you around lol. Smoke dope a lot?


 
Ah yes, stock reply. You get caught out and can't reply other than "nutter".

Now, can you explain your use of the word "blueshirt" and will you apologise for your racist remarks?


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## Proper Tidy (Aug 9, 2010)

Orang Utan said:


> i suspect you've tabloided that a bit


 
Definitely


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## Orang Utan (Aug 9, 2010)

Fedayn said:


> I don't think anyone takes the frothing moron seriously.


 
then why rise to it?


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## krtek a houby (Aug 9, 2010)

Orang Utan said:


> i suspect you've tabloided that a bit


 
Sorry, who's that aimed at?


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## Orang Utan (Aug 9, 2010)

jer said:


> Sorry, who's that aimed at?


 
YOU


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## Proper Tidy (Aug 9, 2010)




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## ernestolynch (Aug 9, 2010)

I reckon the Great Show Trials were as fun as this.


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## krtek a houby (Aug 9, 2010)

Orang Utan said:


> YOU


 
Indeed. So, a known troll makes racist remarks about my missus & I'm exaggerating? Of course... what else could it be? Ah, sure, it's only a bit of a laugh... it's a joke, grow a thicker skin, ignore it etc.


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## Fedayn (Aug 9, 2010)

Orang Utan said:


> then why rise to it?


 
You never take people up when they're being cunts then?


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## Fedayn (Aug 9, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> I reckon the Great Show Trials were as fun as this.



No, they were much more fun.


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## Proper Tidy (Aug 9, 2010)

jer said:


> Indeed. So, a known troll makes racist remarks about my missus & I'm exaggerating? Of course... what else could it be? Ah, sure, it's only a bit of a laugh... it's a joke, grow a thicker skin, ignore it etc.


 
Thing is, you go on about it an awful lot, and cross post bollocks about it in other threads. It is tedious as fuck. Ern made some jibes about ordering your wife out of a catalogue, which isn't very nice. We get it.


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## Orang Utan (Aug 9, 2010)

jer said:


> Indeed. So, a known troll makes racist remarks about my missus & I'm exaggerating? Of course... what else could it be? Ah, sure, it's only a bit of a laugh... it's a joke, grow a thicker skin, ignore it etc.


 
link?


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## Orang Utan (Aug 9, 2010)

Fedayn said:


> You never take people up when they're being cunts then?


 
of course, but i try not to rise to someone obviously on a wind-up


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## krtek a houby (Aug 9, 2010)

Orang Utan said:


> link?


 
You're shitting me? Are you reading this thread or what? Post 29 has the link.


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## Orang Utan (Aug 9, 2010)

jer said:


> Of course. All mouth and no trousers. You call me Blueshirt on any thread you reply to me. And the concubine comments, this ring a bell?
> 
> _One imperialist concubine's opinion does not equal the whole population's.
> 
> ...


 
that's not an insult to your partner, it's just a blatant wind up of yourself


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## Spion (Aug 9, 2010)

I think he is shitting you. You seem easily, err, shitted


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## Fedayn (Aug 9, 2010)

Orang Utan said:


> of course, but i try not to rise to someone obviously on a wind-up


 
Perhaps, but he is a particularly odious cunt.


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## krtek a houby (Aug 9, 2010)

Orang Utan said:


> that's not an insult to your partner, it's just a blatant wind up of yourself


 
OU; he can mindlessly call me "blueshirt" until someone educates him what one is but when it comes to my missus, all bets are off. If my wife was black, would slave be acceptable, in that instance? Of course not. Saying she's a concubine or paid for (with all it's underlying connotations about East Asian women) is not on. Even in "jest".

Yeah, so I'm being wound up and reacting a bit precious but you have to draw the line somewhere.


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## Proper Tidy (Aug 9, 2010)

But do you have to keep drawing the line again and again and again, over and over and over?


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## ernestolynch (Aug 9, 2010)

Not for the first time in history are the extreme right working with the Trots in a sabotage attempt against Socialism in one Thread.


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## Orang Utan (Aug 9, 2010)

Fedayn said:


> Perhaps, but he is a particularly odious cunt.


 
nah, i reckon he's just underemployed. boredom makes you do that.


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## Proper Tidy (Aug 9, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> Not for the first time in history are the extreme right working with the Trots in a sabotage attempt against Socialism in one Thread.


 
Lol


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## Fedayn (Aug 9, 2010)

Orang Utan said:


> nah, i reckon he's just underemployed. boredom makes you do that.


 
He's a teacher is he not? If so he's just whiling away the hours 'til he's in a classful of under 16's again, where he's at his happiest.


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## Spion (Aug 9, 2010)

Orang Utan said:


> nah, i reckon he's just underemployed. boredom makes you do that.


add in a personality disorder and you've got an Ern


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## ernestolynch (Aug 9, 2010)

Here's a Cliffite now, bang on time.


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## Proper Tidy (Aug 9, 2010)

Is Alexi Sayle still a Maoist?


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## krtek a houby (Aug 9, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> Thing is, you go on about it an awful lot, and cross post bollocks about it in other threads. It is tedious as fuck. Ern made some jibes about ordering your wife out of a catalogue, which isn't very nice. We get it.


 
Lynch made 2 separate racist remarks, don't diminish it. But yeah; maybe it's tedious but he calls me a fucking blueshirt on every other thread & doesn't even understand what one is. That's tedious, too.

If someone abused your significant other, you'd be a bit pissed off and wouldn't accept his "race card" weasling out of it, I'm sure.

Anyways, end of derail. Some info has come to light.


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## Orang Utan (Aug 9, 2010)

he just abused you, though, dingwad


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## Spion (Aug 9, 2010)

jer said:


> Anyways, end of derail. Some info has come to light.


IE, Ern's a colossal twat and you're easy to wind up


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## krtek a houby (Aug 9, 2010)

Orang Utan said:


> he just abused you, though, dingwad


 
Sigh, by making racist remarks about the other half.

Y'see? I can take the personal abuse but not the other stuff.


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## krtek a houby (Aug 9, 2010)

Spion said:


> IE, Ern's a colossal twat and you're easy to wind up


 
Yes. And yes, when it comes to my nearest and dearest.


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## Orang Utan (Aug 9, 2010)

i'm sure she appreciates your valiance


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## krtek a houby (Aug 9, 2010)

Orang Utan said:


> i'm sure she appreciates your valiance


 
I'm not worthy of her, frankly. 

Anyway, I have to leave these realms for today. Have a pleasant evening, etc.


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## Proper Tidy (Aug 9, 2010)

This has gone well anyway.


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## discokermit (Aug 9, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> This has gone well anyway.


 
i'm quite disappointed. i'm only posting just to show my face.


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## Louis MacNeice (Aug 9, 2010)

Spion said:


> In his case, yeah it is. He's like a one-man Sealed Knot Society, but set in 1936 and with less relevance to today



Possibly the irony free quote of 2010 so far.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


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## Spion (Aug 9, 2010)

Louis MacNeice said:


> Possibly the irony free quote of 2010 so far.
> 
> Cheers - Louis MacNeice


I hope you checked with a focus group before posting that.

Fuck you - Spion


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## Pickman's model (Aug 9, 2010)

Spion said:


> I hope you checked with a focus group before posting that.
> 
> Fuck you - Spion


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## steeplejack (Aug 9, 2010)




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## audiotech (Aug 9, 2010)

Beginning in 1934, Stalin began his purges of the Party through a series of show trials. In 1936, as the trials proceeded, Khrushchev expressed his support thus:



> Everyone who rejoices in the successes achieved in our country, the victories of our party led by the great Stalin, will find only one word suitable for the mercenary, fascist dogs of the Trotskyite-Zinovievite gang. That word is execution.



Then came the 'Secret Speech' or the 'Khrushchev Report'. Khrushchev criticised Stalin, particularly the purges and of Stalin's personality cult, while maintaining support for the ideals of Communism by invoking Lenin.

Difficult one for ern to get his head around I would have thought?


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## ernestolynch (Aug 10, 2010)

audiotech said:


> Beginning in 1934, Stalin began his purges of the Party through a series of show trials. In 1936, as the trials proceeded, Khrushchev expressed his support thus:
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
How? NK was a snake.


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## Red Paul (Aug 10, 2010)

The socialist system will eventually replace the capitalist system; this is an objective law independent of man's will. However much the reactionaries try to hold back the wheel of history, sooner or later revolution will take place and will inevitably triumph.
           Chairman Mao 40th Anniversary of the Great October Socilist Revolution [1957]


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## ernestolynch (Aug 10, 2010)




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## audiotech (Aug 10, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> How? NK was a snake.



In 1936 he would have been a hero to you surely?


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## ernestolynch (Aug 10, 2010)

audiotech said:


> In 1936 he would have been a hero to you surely?


 
Do you have the same opinions you had when you were 10?


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## Spion (Aug 10, 2010)

I reckon you do


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## ernestolynch (Aug 10, 2010)

You're the one suffering from an infantile disorder though.


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## Spion (Aug 10, 2010)

That's pretty good for you


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## ernestolynch (Aug 10, 2010)

Maybe what most Trots need is a makeover and some advice on relationships.

Spoon, do you have a girlfriend?


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## Spion (Aug 10, 2010)

Sorry Ern. I'm sure you're lovely but I don't think we're compatible

And I already have a GF


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## ernestolynch (Aug 10, 2010)

How long have you been together?


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## Spion (Aug 10, 2010)

LOL This is getting v silly

Start a thread in nob/sob if you're that interested.

"Ask Ern. Stalinist relationship advice - Your BF/GF: are they ready for the Gulag, or Red Square on a white horse?"


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## Fedayn (Aug 10, 2010)

Spion said:


> "Ask Ern. Stalinist relationship advice - Your BF/GF: are they ready for the Gulag, or Red Square on a white horse?"



A new book out...??

'Relationships the Lavrentia Beria way'


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## ernestolynch (Aug 10, 2010)

Spion said:


> LOL This is getting v silly
> 
> Start a thread in nob/sob if you're that interested.
> 
> "Ask Ern. Stalinist relationship advice - Your BF/GF: are they ready for the Gulag, or Red Square on a white horse?"



Hmmm. I sense problems. Do you fear commitment?


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## Spion (Aug 10, 2010)

No, but the kind of unchanging rigidity that seems to govern your existence is alien to me.

Your commitment is like that of a sailor in a storm hanging onto a mast as the gales try to blow him to his death. Anything solid will do. What you hang onto are your ante-diluvian political mantras. I sense a fear of change


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## Idaho (Aug 10, 2010)

Spion said:


> No, but the kind of unchanging rigidity that seems to govern your existence is alien to me.
> 
> Your commitment is like that of a sailor in a storm hanging onto a mast as the gales try to blow him to his death. Anything solid will do. What you hang onto are your ante-diluvian political mantras. I sense a fear of change


 
It's a male pride thing. People with a high pride threshold will stick with ideas until the bitter end. Any change of heart/opinions is seen as an admission of failure. 

Of course this is an unhealthy outlook as change and flexibility are essential for lots of reason.


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## Spion (Aug 10, 2010)

I think it depends to what extent you've painted yourself into a corner.

I also think that everyone craves some means of stability in a changing world, but that this can become almost 'addictive' in nature, a way of effacing a reality that is uncomfortable/painful


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## barney_pig (Aug 10, 2010)

any serious critique of Trotskyism would, I fear, not be to dear Ern's taste. 'Trotskyism' is of course simply the _idealisation_ of Leninism, which Ern is a stalwart of, albeit in its practical incarnation of 'Stalinism'. 
 This can be seen clearly in the history of trotskyist organisations, who are purest the further from any possible practical application of their politics and adopt clearer and clearer Stalinist positions the closer they get to power.
 this also allows Trotskyism to remain pure. as any attempt to criticise it for its actions will immediatly be discounted as actually not trotskyism at all but the actions of 'renegades'.


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## ernestolynch (Aug 10, 2010)

Tl;dr


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## Orang Utan (Aug 10, 2010)

you guys are always arguing amongst yourselves. at least capitalists can co-operate in screwing everyone else.


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## Idaho (Aug 10, 2010)

Orang Utan said:


> you guys are always arguing amongst yourselves. at least capitalists can co-operate in screwing everyone else.


 
This is the fundamental problem with leftism. It's all about disagreeing with infinitessimal points of theory, and yet in the few times leftists get any power they justify everything as pragmatism.


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## Spion (Aug 10, 2010)

Orang Utan said:


> at least capitalists can co-operate in screwing everyone else.


Yeah, there have been no (world) wars between capitalist states or invasions of poor countries to secure resources that I can think of


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## Orang Utan (Aug 10, 2010)

Spion said:


> Yeah, there have been no (world) wars between capitalist states or invasions of poor countries to secure resources that I can think of


 
but at least they get on with it


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## Idaho (Aug 10, 2010)

Spion said:


> Yeah, there have been no (world) wars between capitalist states or invasions of poor countries to secure resources that I can think of


 
I don't think anyone has had a historical monopoly on those activities.


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## Spion (Aug 10, 2010)

Idaho said:


> I don't think anyone has had a historical monopoly on those activities.


No period in history has been as deadly and destructive as that of the capitalist era.


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## krtek a houby (Aug 10, 2010)

How many millions perished during the reign of Stalin or Pol Pot? I'd say that was fairly deadly and destructive.


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## Mallard (Aug 10, 2010)

Lol. You've got 5 pages out of this wind up Ern. Congrats!


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## Orang Utan (Aug 10, 2010)

and we're still repeating the same old shite!


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## krtek a houby (Aug 10, 2010)

Orang Utan said:


> and we're still repeating the same old shite!


 
As in life; so it is here. There are no new ideas.


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## Mallard (Aug 10, 2010)

jer said:


> As in life; so it is here. There are no new ideas.



There better be. I'm hoping for an alternative to Dubstep soon.


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## Orang Utan (Aug 10, 2010)

witch house is here, mallard!


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## Mallard (Aug 10, 2010)

Orang Utan said:


> witch house is here, mallard!



Sounds great. Link please!


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## ernestolynch (Aug 11, 2010)

New batch of trots, liberals and blueshirts to rip.


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## Captain Hurrah (Aug 11, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> How? NK was a snake.



He certainly was as party boss in the Ukraine SSR, helping out in the sending of thousands to their deaths for his mate Joseph.


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## Captain Hurrah (Aug 11, 2010)

jer said:


> OU; he can mindlessly call me "blueshirt" until someone educates him what one is but when it comes to my missus, all bets are off. If my wife was black, would slave be acceptable, in that instance? Of course not. Saying she's a concubine or paid for (with all it's underlying connotations about East Asian women) is not on. Even in "jest".
> 
> Yeah, so I'm being wound up and reacting a bit precious but you have to draw the line somewhere.



My current squeeze has dark yellow skin and has epicanthic folds located on her face.  You don't hear me banging on about it all the time.


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## Spion (Aug 11, 2010)

jer said:


> How many millions perished during the reign of Stalin or Pol Pot? I'd say that was fairly deadly and destructive.


Trying to argue that those events have nothing to do with the capitalist era is like arguing the behaviour of the moon has nothing to do with the earth


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## JimW (Aug 11, 2010)

Always thought Paul Mattick had his number.


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## Idaho (Aug 11, 2010)

Spion said:


> No period in history has been as deadly and destructive as that of the capitalist era.


 
You could say that no period in history has been as deadly and destructive as the mechanised era. Especially if you are referring to total amount of deaths - as there are far, far more people in the mechanised era, and hence larger scale wars and famines. It would be interesting to know whether, as a percentage of extant population, the mechanised era is more deadly than previous eras. When you think that the black death killed over 60% of all Europeans in the 14th century, I would be inclined to think it wasn't the most deadly.



Spion said:


> Trying to argue that those events have nothing to do with the capitalist era is like arguing the behaviour of the moon has nothing to do with the earth



It's an impossible position to argue as there is no case control.


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## Pickman's model (Aug 11, 2010)

Idaho said:


> You could say that no period in history has been as deadly and destructive as the mechanised era. Especially if you are referring to total amount of deaths - as there are far, far more people in the mechanised era, and hence larger scale wars and famines. It would be interesting to know whether, as a percentage of extant population, the mechanised era is more deadly than previous eras. When you think that the black death killed over 60% of all Europeans in the 14th century, I would be inclined to think it wasn't the most deadly.
> 
> 
> 
> It's an impossible position to argue as there is no case control.


 
yeh? the black death's estimated to have killed 75-100M (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death). how many people died in wars in the twentieth century? more than that, i think you'll find.


----------



## Spion (Aug 11, 2010)

Idaho said:


> It's an impossible position to argue as there is no case control.


What does that mean?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Aug 11, 2010)

Spion said:


> Trying to argue that those events have nothing to do with the capitalist era is like arguing the behaviour of the moon has nothing to do with the earth



Indeed.  It was US connivance in elite politics and the awesome air strike power wielded by the USAF which facilitated the latter.


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## Idaho (Aug 11, 2010)

Pickman's model said:


> yeh? the black death's estimated to have killed 75-100M (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death). how many people died in wars in the twentieth century? more than that, i think you'll find.


 
But there are 1000x more people living today than in the 14th C. I think it's pretty meaningless to count total numbers rather than look at percentage deaths.


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## Idaho (Aug 11, 2010)

Spion said:


> What does that mean?


 
How can you compare the situation we have with an alternative. We only have one history.


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## Spion (Aug 11, 2010)

Idaho said:


> How can you compare the situation we have with an alternative. We only have one history.


So you compare to other periods of history. I'm saying the capitalist era has been the most bloody and destructive ever in terms of human conflict. 

You seem to be disputing that (even tho your only counter example fails to compare like with like - a disease is not a human political phenomenon)


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## JimW (Aug 11, 2010)

In terms of percentage of people affected/killed (as opposed to raw totals due to increased overall population) you can make a case for the pre-modern being as bloody i reckon. Same's true for the link between the effects of disease and human political arrangements - it was agricultural and trade practices that incubated and spread the great epidemics. Capitalism's mechanisation of slaughter is particularly damning - aerial bombardment or nuclear deterrent, but that's as much a question of technology surely - we all know capitalism's shit but not because it's retrogressive on previous class societies.


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## Spion (Aug 11, 2010)

I am specifically arguing that capitalism is the most bloody/destructive in absolute terms and in its global extent.

I'm not arguing it is retrogressive compared to previous socio-economic formations. With the ability to destroy the world comes the seed of possibility to feed and enrich the world, but not with this system, IMO.

My original point was to counter the idea that only the left fights among themselves, which seems a silly point when viewed against the wars prosecuted by capitalist state in the last couple of centuries


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## dylans (Aug 11, 2010)

Stalinists trying to build a case against Trotskyism is absurd given they both share roots in the events of October 1917. They both claim to stand in the same tradition and interestingly they both take as the basis for their critique of the other their deviation from their Leninist roots. There is space for a legitimate critique of Trotskyism but it is worthless if it doesn't encompass a critique of its Leninist roots. Something, I suspect our Ernesto is loathe to do. 

Any serious critique of the revolutionary left has to take as its starting point the Leninist idea of the party. Particularly it's view that parties always and only represent class interests and that the interests of the party as synonymous with the interests of the class.  Such a critique also need to look at the leninist concept of a workers state and the idea that a single party vanguard can rule for the class. This raises serious questions about elite or bureaucratic interests arising within post revolutionary regimes particularly in times of civil war and counter revolution etc.

 IMO these questions and the responsibility of the Leninist party for the later degeneration of the Soviet Union have never really been satisfactorily addressed and instead Trotskyist left tends to become a cult of action substituting the methods and strategies of struggle for an analysis of the character of the workers state they are fighting for. In particular I think Trotskyism is built on an essentially anti democratic vanguardist model that developed into Stalin from roots that are found in the Leninist concept of the party. Trotskyism can present itself as unsullied by the crimes of Stalin because they became the victims of the purges but nothing in the history of Trotsky in power suggests he was any more democratic than the Stalinists. Kronstadt, his position on independent trade unions etc all preceded Stalin and were in many ways more authoritarian than Lenin himself.

The absurdities of splits and factionalism that have plagued the revolutionary left are well known but I would argue they arise from a Leninist model that frames all debate and factional disputes in terms of class positions. So honest disagreements about a particular policy or direction are quickly transformed into disputes of fundamental significance and labelled in terms of being reformist or revisionist or centrist, or ultra leftist or petty bourgeous deviations from the "pure" revolutionary line" (the very language itself is indicative of this dogmatic and undemocratic flaw IMO) In opposition this leads to familiar splits etc, in power it leads to the firing squad and the gulag with the true line belonging to the faction with power.

The tragedy is, the marxist analysis of history remains as powerful and as relevent as it always did. I agree 100% with the Trotskyists that the crisis of mankind is caused by an economic system that can not deliver a society in the interests of humanity and that it is only in the revolutionary overthrow of that system that a better world can be built.  It is in the revolutionary lefts solution to this economic system that they fall down, trapped in a dogmatic and incoherent tradition that fails to deliver and a historical tradition the faults of which that they are incapable of honestly addressing


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## audiotech (Aug 11, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> Do you have the same opinions you had when you were 10?



I hated fucking tories even then.


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## Spion (Aug 11, 2010)

dylans said:


> Stalinists trying to build a case against Trotskyism is absurd given they both share roots in the events of October 1917. They both claim to stand in the same tradition and interestingly they both take as the basis for their critique of the other their deviation from their Leninist roots. There is space for a legitimate critique of Trotskyism but it is worthless if it doesn't encompass a critique of its Leninist roots. Something, I suspect our Ernesto is loathe to do.
> <snip>


I can't see any alternative to the political party as the means for people who think like-mindedly about how society should be organised to maximise their impact. What's your alternative?


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## Captain Hurrah (Aug 11, 2010)

dylans said:


> The absurdities of splits and factionalism that have plagued the revolutionary left are well known but I would argue they arise from a Leninist model that frames all debate and factional disputes in terms of class positions. So honest disagreements about a particular policy or direction are quickly transformed into disputes of fundamental significance and labelled in terms of being reformist or revisionist or centrist, or ultra leftist or petty bourgeous deviations from the "pure" revolutionary line" (the very language itself is indicative of this dogmatic and undemocratic flaw IMO) In opposition this leads to familiar splits etc, in power it leads to the firing squad and the gulag with the true line belonging to the faction with power.



I would assume anarchists have bitch fights too.  Although anarchism was moribund the world over and irrelevant to most working class people before the discrediting of Leninism and the collapse.


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## dylans (Aug 11, 2010)

Spion said:


> I can't see any alternative to the political party as the means for people who think like-mindedly about how society should be organised to maximise their impact. What's your alternative?


 
I don't claim to have all the answers and it is something I have honestly struggled with for years. However, a workers state that guarantees multi parties and a constitution that guarantees independent working class institutions, soviets, unions etc. Abolishment of the death penalty always and in all circumstances. Guarantees of factional democracies. A separation of powers. An independant workers judiciary .A dose of old fashioned liberal individual liberty as a goal in itself. Most of all a recognition of the anarchist critique of ALL STATES and ALL AUTHORITY as inherantly undemocratic and the arming of individuals with the political principle of individual freedom as something that individuals have to defend and guard against the state.  A rejection of this idea that the party always represents the class interests and a recognition that bureacratic and elite and even individual interests may not be synonymous with the interests of the working class. An honest historical account of the Leninist party in power and Trotsky's role in it. All of these are dismissed or downplayed by the Leninist tradition in general and the Trotskyist tradition in particular imo and all of these are seeds of tyranical party dictat.


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## dylans (Aug 11, 2010)

In short. I think if we are to have any real chance to replace capitalism with a system based on human need we have to convince people that it will be 1000 times more democratic than anything we have now and that doesn't just mean economically fairer, it means politically fairer too. It must mean that individual liberty and space for individual expression is not only guaranteed but is part of the goal and not something that is dismissed as "petite bourgeous"or "individualist" etc


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## Spion (Aug 11, 2010)

dylans said:


> In short. I think if we are to have any real chance to replace capitalism with a system based on human need we have to convince people that it will be 1000 times more democratic than anything we have now and that doesn't just mean economically fairer, it means politically fairer too. It must mean that individual liberty and space for individual expression is not only guaranteed but is part of the goal


I agree with that, but I still think a party is what's needed to promote the goal of achieving that type of society.


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## dylans (Aug 11, 2010)

Spion said:


> I agree with that, but I still think a party is what's needed to promote the goal of achieving that type of society.



I think this is the heart of my dilemma and one I haven't satisfactorily answered tbh. I don't believe political ideas arise automatically, I think there is a need for political ideas to be injected into economic striuggles, answers must be given and nationalistic or reactionary answers fought. In my experience class answers can work, sometimes quite dramatically. Do you recall when i posted about a debate I had with a soldier who asked the question "what am i fighting for?" and had racist answers. I asked him who he had more in common with, the Asian guy in his regiment or the bankers and Camerons friends from Eton? Immediately I could tell that he got it.  Class answers hit a chord with him. They are answers that really address the cause of peoples distress.  I accept that those answers must be given and that that requires a vanguard party and revolutionaries armed with answers. I see no alternative. At the same time I think the left deifies the party far far too much and that that deification has become dogmatically part of its ethos. I think that replacing that with a healthy libertarian  distrust of authority (for it's own sake )would be a good thing


----------



## Idaho (Aug 11, 2010)

Spion said:


> I am specifically arguing that capitalism is the most bloody/destructive in absolute terms and in its global extent.
> 
> I'm not arguing it is retrogressive compared to previous socio-economic formations. With the ability to destroy the world comes the seed of possibility to feed and enrich the world, but not with this system, IMO.
> 
> My original point was to counter the idea that only the left fights among themselves, which seems a silly point when viewed against the wars prosecuted by capitalist state in the last couple of centuries



This system is feeding and enriching people in ever increasing amounts, and always has done. It's just that it also stitches lots of people up on the way, and creates massive wealth disparity.

The point of the left fighting among itself is more to do with the sub-culture of left politics. When people define themselves as being a part of one niche group or other. "Trots", "tankies", etc. It's all nonsense to the uninitiated (98% of the population) and of absurdly exaggerated importance to the other 2%.


----------



## dylans (Aug 11, 2010)

Idaho said:


> This system is feeding and enriching people in ever increasing amounts, and always has done. It's just that it also stitches lots of people up on the way, and creates massive wealth disparity.
> 
> .


 Capitalism enriches some, but vast areas of the globe live in increasingly hellish conditions. I don't have stats to hand but I would guess there are more people in abject poverty now than ever before and that is increasing.  Terms like "enriching people" or enriching societies etc obscure the reality that even in wealthy societies like the UK or the USA enormous poverty exists. When it comes to developing countries we are faced with a breathtaking apartheid of wealth and an impossibility of opportunity to escape. If you are born poor in India you are going to die poor and that is the reality for most of the globe


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## Pickman's model (Aug 11, 2010)

Idaho said:


> This system is feeding and enriching people in ever increasing amounts, and always has done. It's just that it also stitches lots of people up on the way, and creates massive wealth disparity.


 so what you're saying is that the poor should be happy because they're less poor than before but the rich are richer than ever before too.


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## Spion (Aug 11, 2010)

Idaho said:


> This system is feeding and enriching people in ever increasing amounts, and always has done.


I don't agree that that is a uniform process - sure, some may gain, but many lose and lives are ruined by the rapacious appetite of the world market. Peasant farmers becoming tied into the world market makes them dependent on markets that are ultimately investment vehicles for the super-rich - being locked into cash crop production has had disastrous consequences from the Irish famine to the Structural Adjustment Programs of today.


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## Spion (Aug 11, 2010)

Idaho said:


> The point of the left fighting among itself is more to do with the sub-culture of left politics. When people define themselves as being a part of one niche group or other. "Trots", "tankies", etc. It's all nonsense to the uninitiated (98% of the population) and of absurdly exaggerated importance to the other 2%.


it's always the way in the early days of important ideas.


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## dylans (Aug 11, 2010)

Spion said:


> it's always the way in the early days of important ideas.


 
Hardly early days though Spion. We seem to be stuck in a rut for nearly a century. I don't think the left has much to lose by trying something new and jettisoning some of the old dogmas


----------



## Idaho (Aug 11, 2010)

dylans said:


> Capitalism enriches some, but vast areas of the globe live in increasingly hellish conditions. I don't have stats to hand but I would guess there are more people in abject poverty now than ever before and that is increasing.  Terms like "enriching people" or enriching societies etc obscure the reality that even in wealthy societies like the UK or the USA enormous poverty exists. When it comes to developing countries we are faced with a breathtaking apartheid of wealth and an impossibility of opportunity to escape. If you are born poor in India you are going to die poor and that is the reality for most of the globe


 
Average standards of living in India and China - effectively half the humans on the planet, have risen considerably in the last 15 years. That doesn't mean there isn't massive wealth disparity, or large areas of abject poverty and exploitation, but if can't acknowledge what actually has happened then my faith in what you think should happen, is greatly diminished.


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## Idaho (Aug 11, 2010)

Spion said:


> I don't agree that that is a uniform process - sure, some may gain, but many lose and lives are ruined by the rapacious appetite of the world market. Peasant farmers becoming tied into the world market makes them dependent on markets that are ultimately investment vehicles for the super-rich - being locked into cash crop production has had disastrous consequences from the Irish famine to the Structural Adjustment Programs of today.


 
The numbers of small farmers are diminishing, as is the lot of such farmers.

Not so sure about the Irish famine reference. Potatoes weren't a cash crop. They were effectively a subsistence crop.


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## Idaho (Aug 11, 2010)

Pickman's model said:


> so what you're saying is that the poor should be happy because they're less poor than before but the rich are richer than ever before too.


 
I'm not saying who should be happy with what. I just think it's pretty damn important to see the situation as it is, rather than downplaying critical processes in our world because they don't fit into your pre-set narrative.


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## Spion (Aug 11, 2010)

Idaho said:


> Not so sure about the Irish famine reference. Potatoes weren't a cash crop. They were effectively a subsistence crop.


 The potato was the subsistence crop, introduced to feed a peasantry locked into grain and cattle production for the landlord class


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## Spion (Aug 11, 2010)

Idaho said:


> Average standards of living in India and China - effectively half the humans on the planet, have risen considerably in the last 15 years.


have you got figures on that?


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## Spion (Aug 11, 2010)

Idaho said:


> The numbers of small farmers are diminishing


is that good? what happens to the ex-farmers and their families?


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## dylans (Aug 11, 2010)

Idaho said:


> Average standards of living in India and China - effectively half the humans on the planet, have risen considerably in the last 15 years. That doesn't mean there isn't massive wealth disparity, or large areas of abject poverty and exploitation, but if can't acknowledge what actually has happened then my faith in what you think should happen, is greatly diminished.



I am prepared to accept this if it is true. but I would like to see statistics and also a clear definition of what is meant by rising living standards. Farmers making more money is of little use if the cost of living has spiralled out of control etc


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## Spion (Aug 11, 2010)

dylans said:


> Hardly early days though Spion. We seem to be stuck in a rut for nearly a century. I don't think the left has much to lose by trying something new and jettisoning some of the old dogmas


You're so impatient  This thing could take centuries


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## Spion (Aug 11, 2010)

or it could take place next decade. There'll be another world war at some point in the next 20-30 years I reckon and 1 out of 2 of those previously provided great opportunities


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## Catherine Lech (Aug 11, 2010)

Spion said:


> or it could take place next decade. There'll be another world war at some point in the next 20-30 years I reckon and 1 out of 2 of those previously provided great opportunities




Unfortunately, the next world war will be our last.


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## Orang Utan (Aug 11, 2010)

not necessarily


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## Catherine Lech (Aug 11, 2010)

Idaho said:


> Average standards of living in India and China - effectively half the humans on the planet, have risen considerably in the last 15 years. That doesn't mean there isn't massive wealth disparity, or large areas of abject poverty and exploitation, but if can't acknowledge what actually has happened then my faith in what you think should happen, is greatly diminished.




You can't simply judge human well-being from the statistics that say living standards are rising because earnings have increased. Vast numbers of Chinese and Indians moving from the countryside to the city actually exist in greater squalor and plagued by more crime that they did before. Just because they are earning a better wage (or earning a wage when they didn't previously have one), it doesn't necessarily mean they're better off. It was a similar situation when the western countries industrialised, except India and China will probably see their luck run out far sooner than ours did, if only because of the impact of their industrialising on the planet's resources (and their precarious symbiotic economic relationship with the West.)


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## Idaho (Aug 11, 2010)

Spion said:


> is that good? what happens to the ex-farmers and their families?


 
They sell their land and work for a pittance on someone else's land probably.


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## Catherine Lech (Aug 11, 2010)

Orang Utan said:


> not necessarily




But more than likely.


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## Idaho (Aug 11, 2010)

Spion said:


> or it could take place next decade. There'll be another world war at some point in the next 20-30 years I reckon and 1 out of 2 of those previously provided great opportunities


 
Between who? Why?


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## Catherine Lech (Aug 11, 2010)

Idaho said:


> They sell their land and work for a pittance on someone else's land probably.




With loss of whatever control they had over their lives before, and possibly in greater squalor.


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## Idaho (Aug 11, 2010)

Catherine Lech said:


> With loss of whatever control they had over their lives before, and possibly in greater squalor.


 
No doubt.


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## Spion (Aug 11, 2010)

Idaho said:


> Between who? Why?


The US and allies vs China and/or India. Global political/military power tends to keep step with a power's economic might. It certainly seems to have done in the periods when the British Empire then the US were the dominant powers. Now we have new economic powers (In/Ch) on a long upward rise, but whose military/political power is a shadow of their economic potential. It seems to me this must correct itself at some point.


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## Spion (Aug 11, 2010)

Catherine Lech said:


> Unfortunately, the next world war will be our last.


 yeah, we know you're depressed thanks


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## Catherine Lech (Aug 11, 2010)

Spion said:


> yeah, we know you're depressed thanks




Well as you've just said, the next world war will involve nuclear powers. 

Being depressed has nothing to do with it. (I'm not, by the way; in fact I sometimes find that those of a wildly optimistic bent are the ones masking their despair.)


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## krtek a houby (Aug 11, 2010)

Spion said:


> Trying to argue that those events have nothing to do with the capitalist era is like arguing the behaviour of the moon has nothing to do with the earth


 
So the genocides were down to capitalism and had nothing to do with the aforementioned dictators?

Bollocks, sir. Absolute bollocks.


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## Captain Hurrah (Aug 11, 2010)

jer said:


> So the genocides were down to capitalism and had nothing to do with the aforementioned dictators?
> 
> Bollocks, sir. Absolute bollocks.



Did genocide occur during those two periods of rule?  The latter one was actually a never-finished and bloody process of establishing a dictatorship.


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## krtek a houby (Aug 11, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Did genocide occur during those two periods of rule?  The latter one was actually a never-finished and bloody process of establishing a dictatorship.


 
Reads like genocide to me.


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## Captain Hurrah (Aug 11, 2010)

jer said:


> Reads like genocide to me.



You probably need to do more reading then.


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## Spion (Aug 11, 2010)

jer said:


> So the genocides were down to capitalism and had nothing to do with the aforementioned dictators?


Did I say that? No

Bollocks to you too then


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## Catherine Lech (Aug 11, 2010)

jer said:


> How many millions perished during the reign of Stalin or Pol Pot? I'd say that was fairly deadly and destructive.




Yes-and took place in the era of capitalism. They were a response to the injustices of capitalism, albeit a barbarous response, shaped by the political and cultural conditions of the countries in which they came to power.

Attempts at establishing socialism usually happened, ironically, where conditions were least ripe for them. But if they were merely attempts by would-be dictators to try out abstract ideas on innocent populations they wouldn't have got off the ground. They came to power on the back of mass discontent with a deeply unjust and often barbarous capitalist system.

You have to be a bit more sophisticated than 'gosh aren't dicatators nasty.'


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## Proper Tidy (Aug 11, 2010)

jer said:


> So the genocides were down to capitalism and had nothing to do with the aforementioned dictators?
> 
> Bollocks, sir. Absolute bollocks.


 
But they are products of capitalism. Without imperialism, competing economies, economically beneficial territories to invade, and the rampant nationalism and jingoism that is a byproduct of capitalist nation-states, then the history of the last few hundred years would be very different indeed. Competition is at the root of all conflict, and capitalism is the ideology of competition.


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## Spion (Aug 11, 2010)

/\/\/\/\ Two posters with more patience than me right now. Jer, you might want to reflect on why I was careful to use the term 'capitalist era'. It's all about context, as PT and CL have pointed out


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## krtek a houby (Aug 11, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> But they are products of capitalism. Without imperialism, competing economies, economically beneficial territories to invade, and the rampant nationalism and jingoism that is a byproduct of capitalist nation-states, then the history of the last few hundred years would be very different indeed. Competition is at the root of all conflict, and capitalism is the ideology of competition.


 
And the alternatives to capitalism that work? How many are there?

Competition is an inherent human trait - be it under the guise of capitalism or any other ideology.


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## Spion (Aug 11, 2010)

jer said:


> Competition is an inherent human trait.


So, what you're saying is that all people at all times have competed with all other people about everything? If so, you need to develop a more sophisticated view of humanity that reflects reality a bit better, or look beyond your own personality traits


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## Captain Hurrah (Aug 11, 2010)

Catherine Lech said:


> Yes-and took place in the era of capitalism. They were a response to the injustices of capitalism, albeit a barbarous response, shaped by the political and cultural conditions of the countries in which they came to power.
> 
> Attempts at establishing socialism usually happened, ironically, where conditions were least ripe for them. But if they were merely attempts by would-be dictators to try out abstract ideas on innocent populations they wouldn't have got off the ground. They came to power on the back of mass discontent with a deeply unjust and often barbarous capitalist system.
> 
> You have to be a bit more sphisticated than 'gosh aren't dicatators nasty.'



Yes, you're right, and the last one he referred to happened in a largely pre-capitalist society, and what little capitalist development there was, ended up being destroyed by the military might of the leading power of the advanced capitalist world.  No doubt, it would be utopian to suggest that no attempts at establishing socialism have ever taken place, and that the revolutionaries thought that they were genuinely trying to establish it by restructuring the state and society in order to change the ways in which power is articulated, but when trying to adapt the body of theory distilled through a particular political program (Bolshevism and its 57 varieiies) with the conditions they actually found themselves in,  it was cutting the feet to fit the shoes.


----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 11, 2010)

Spion said:


> So, what you're saying is that all people at all times have competed with all other people about everything? If so, you need to develop a more sophisticated view of humanity that reflects reality a bit better, or look beyond your own personality traits


 
Yes. Down to the slightest grain of crop. Oh, would that I could attain your level of enlightenment and sophistication, to embrace reality as you have done. But I fear, I see humanity beyond the isms and romanticised ideologies that hold sway with you thinkers and makers of "fact".

Woe, simple me for telling it as it is


----------



## Catherine Lech (Aug 11, 2010)

jer said:


> Competition is an inherent human trait - be it under the guise of capitalism or any other ideology.





Indeed it is-and should be confined to those spheres of activity such as sport, for which it is most appropriate. Economic competition leads inexorably to war, each one worse than the last.


----------



## Catherine Lech (Aug 11, 2010)

jer said:


> Yes. Down to the slightest grain of crop. Oh, would that I could attain your level of enlightenment and sophistication, to embrace reality as you have done. But I fear, I see humanity beyond the isms and romanticised ideologies that hold sway with you thinkers and makers of "fact".
> 
> Woe, simple me for telling it as it is




Yes, simple you if you think (badly) articulating your own prejudices and complacency amounts to 'telling it like it is.'


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 11, 2010)

jer said:


> And the alternatives to capitalism that work? How many are there?
> 
> Competition is an inherent human trait - be it under the guise of capitalism or any other ideology.


 
The whole line of argument of 'capitalism creates hunger and conflict and poverty and inequality but we will always have these things because it is our nature' is utter shit. It was the same thing people said under feudalism, or absolute monarchies, or as slaves.

The earliest people lived cooperatively, btw.


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## Catherine Lech (Aug 11, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> The earliest people lived cooperatively, btw.



That was before the genie of class distinction escaped from the bottle and led us down the path to our ultimate destruction.


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## Spion (Aug 11, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> The earliest people lived cooperatively, btw.


there's a can of worms


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## Proper Tidy (Aug 11, 2010)

Spion said:


> there's a can of worms


 
I know, but thought I'd chuck it in there. I'm firmly in the 'they fucking well did, alright' camp myself.


----------



## Spion (Aug 11, 2010)

Catherine Lech said:


> That was before the genie of class distinction escaped from the bottle and led us down the path to our ultimate destruction.


----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 11, 2010)

Catherine Lech said:


> That was before the genie of class distinction escaped from the bottle and led us down the path to our ultimate destruction.


 


It does raise a smile to read that some of the intelligensia here reckon we lived in some leftopian co-op and all was bliss and harmony at the dawn of time...


----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 11, 2010)

Catherine Lech said:


> Yes, simple you if you think (badly) articulating your own prejudices and complacency amounts to 'telling it like it is.'


 
Would that I was as elegant, erudite and knowledgeable as thou


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## Proper Tidy (Aug 11, 2010)

jer said:


> It does raise a smile to read that some of the intelligensia here reckon we lived in some leftopian co-op and all was bliss and harmony at the dawn of time...


 
Nobody is saying that though. Life would obviously have been extremely hard. The point is that in order to ensure survival for as many as they could, they behaved cooperatively not competitively.

As Spion has touched upon, there is some dispute, but that is understandable given it was a long fucking time ago. There is also the argument that it was more competition between species than within the human species that some academics cite.

You seem to think that many of the consequences of capitalism are an inevitability of human nature. It is a popular misconception held by many, but only because so much ignorance abounds about how man lived in the past. It doesn't stand up to scrutiny.


----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 11, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> Nobody is saying that though. Life would obviously have been extremely hard. The point is that in order to ensure survival for as many as they could, they behaved cooperatively not competitively.
> 
> As Spion has touched upon, there is some dispute, but that is understandable given it was a long fucking time ago.
> 
> You seem to think that many of the consequences of capitalism are an inevitability of human nature. It is a popular misconception held by many, but only because so much ignorance abounds about how man lived in the past. It doesn't stand up to scrutiny.



Capitalism = greed; yeah I get that. But greed has been with us since the beginning. It was only a matter of time before it consumed mankind. It just wears a suit & air of respectability. I just don't agree that the alternatives were any better - and when said alternatives failed (Stalin etc) it just _had_ to be the fault of capitalism and not, as I maintain, man's inherent nature.


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## Proper Tidy (Aug 11, 2010)

jer said:


> Capitalism = greed; yeah I get that. But greed has been with us since the beginning. It was only a matter of time before it consumed mankind. It just wears a suit & air of respectability. I just don't agree that the alternatives were any better - and when said alternatives failed (Stalin etc) it just _had_ to be the fault of capitalism and not, as I maintain, man's inherent nature.


 
Greed isn't inherent. Greed is a product of competition for resources. What would be the point of greed, of the accumulation of material wealth, if we all had access to whatever we need whenever we need it? It would remove the motive for greed; it would render greed unnecessary.

By the by, there is a wealth of anecdotal evidence available about the links between poverty and generosity; it is frequently the poorest who demonstrate the greatest hospitality and give the most, proportionally at least. So why does the accumulation of material wealth lead to a hoarding, greedy mentality? Is that human nature? Is it fuck. It is a by product of a system that doesn't just accept greed as legitimate but promotes and encourages greed as noble, sensible, entrepreneurial, etc.


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## discokermit (Aug 11, 2010)

if it wasn't for co-operation we'd have all been eaten by lions two hundred thousand years ago.


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## discokermit (Aug 11, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> New batch of trots, liberals and blueshirts to rip.


 
you couldn't rip a paper hanky.


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## Spion (Aug 11, 2010)

He frequently moistens one, over his Enver Hoxha portraits


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## dylans (Aug 11, 2010)

jer said:


> So the genocides were down to capitalism and had nothing to do with the aforementioned dictators?
> 
> Bollocks, sir. Absolute bollocks.



I am no authority on Stalin but I think it's fair to say I have a better than average understandiing of Cambodia.Well first I would argue that what occurred there wasn't genocide. It was revolutionary violence put to the goal of  an impossibly utopian modernisation drive dictated with ferocious speed and extreme brutality and regardless of the human cost.  Genocide is an emotional and rhetorical term in this context not an accurate political or legal term. For a start Pol Pot was Khmer as were most of the dead. (true 100.000 Cham Muslims died too and that certainly fits the definition of genocide) But with that exception I would argue that the term genocide is not helpful in understanding the tragedy of Democratic Kampuchea. 

Pol Pot is inexplicable without understanding the crisis of US imperialism in indochina at this time. The US was engaged in a vicious war with Vietnam. It was secretly bombing Laos and Cambodia and it supported the Lon Nol Regime during the civil war. Everyone focusses on the 5 years of the DK regime but it must be remembered that Pol Pot came out of a brutal 5 year civil war which tore Cambodian society apart. A civil war prosecuted with gusto by the USA. Attempts to explain the tragedy of tge DK revolution without making reference to what caused the insanity are dishonest and doomed to leave us baffled.


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## dylans (Aug 11, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> it was cutting the feet to fit the shoes.



Indeed an in this Pol Pot was not alone. "Socialist" or or more accurately leninist type ideas were held by many national liberation  movements in the post colonial period. From Cuba to Mozambique Algeria to South East Asia, revolutionary leninist parties did particularly well in winning the leadership of anti colonial movements. Something that could be backed up with hard economics by the support of the soviet union or china.

To be sure they all have their own distinctive characteristics. Cambodia more than most consciously attempted to model their revolution in a fashion unique to themselves and seperate and distinct from other revolutionary regimes. Particularly their neighbours. Nevertheless. It could be argued that the greatest success for the Leninist party model was in winning the leadership of national liberation movements in developing countries and rural revolutionary struggles. Something incidentally that has been increasingly replaced by religious nationalisms in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union. Pol Pot aside I know which I prefer


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## Proper Tidy (Aug 11, 2010)

Eight pages and not nearly enough mocking of the arse-end of the Stalinist rump in the UK btw.


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## dylans (Aug 11, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> Eight pages and not nearly enough mocking of the arse-end of the Stalinist rump in the UK btw.


 
I think its turned into quite a good thread. I find myself fighting on two fronts. On the one hand defending the Marxist analysis of capitalism and of the necessity of revolutionary struggle and on the other hand attacking the 1917 leninist tradition as bearing a major responsibility for its own failures and excesses. I feel like i'm walking a tightrope.


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## discokermit (Aug 11, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> Eight pages and not nearly enough mocking of the arse-end of the Stalinist rump in the UK btw.


hardly worth it, is it?


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## discokermit (Aug 11, 2010)

dylans said:


> I feel like i'm walking a tightrope.


or maybe you're just confused and contradictory.


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## Proper Tidy (Aug 11, 2010)

discokermit said:


> hardly worth it, is it?



True.


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## dylans (Aug 11, 2010)

discokermit said:


> or maybe you're just confused and contradictory.



You know what. I just wrote a fairly long post in reply to you but on second thoughts I think it better If I  just tell you to fuck off you sneery nasty vicious cunt.


Fuck off.


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## discokermit (Aug 12, 2010)

dylans said:


> You know what. I just wrote a fairly long post in reply to you but on second thoughts I think it better If I  just tell you to fuck off you sneery nasty vicious cunt.
> 
> 
> Fuck off.


 
hahaha! is it cos i beat you at chess?

as for the long reply, thank fuck.


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## ViolentPanda (Aug 12, 2010)

Spion said:


> The US and allies vs China and/or India. Global political/military power tends to keep step with a power's economic might. It certainly seems to have done in the periods when the British Empire then the US were the dominant powers. Now we have new economic powers (In/Ch) on a long upward rise, but whose military/political power is a shadow of their economic potential. It seems to me this must correct itself at some point.


 
You've been at the Tom Clancys again, haven't you?


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## ViolentPanda (Aug 12, 2010)

Catherine Lech said:


> Well as you've just said, the next world war will involve nuclear powers.
> 
> Being depressed has nothing to do with it. (I'm not, by the way; in fact I sometimes find that those of a wildly optimistic bent are the ones masking their despair.)


Which doesn't necessarily mean that nuclear weapons will be used, given that M.A.D. is still on the cards, whoever starts the clusterfuck.


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## ViolentPanda (Aug 12, 2010)

jer said:


> And the alternatives to capitalism that work? How many are there?
> 
> Competition is an inherent human trait - be it under the guise of capitalism or any other ideology.


Competing for resources to facilitate survival is a "human trait", but competition _vis a vis_ Capital has very little to do with facilitating survival, and an awful lot to do with amassing surplus value purely for the purpose of, at base, amassing surplus value.


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## dylans (Aug 12, 2010)

discokermit said:


> hahaha! is it cos i beat you at chess?
> 
> as for the long reply, thank fuck.



Oh is this the part where we get to swear at each other mindlessly in barely concealed old and bitter grievances that have been nurtured and picked and stewed over for months. OK. 

I think next you should call me a child employing prick

I give you the chess. You are better than me it's true. You played well and I was outclassed. I enjoyed the first game and you played well. I told you at the time, you were relentless and you didnt forgive my errors of which there were some I know. The game was yours from the beginning and I never found an opportunity to move away from the defensive. How's that? I have no problem admitting that you are a better player than me. These things carry no ego for me.  In fact playing with you you almost came across as a human being, almost. We almost communicated ..for a brief moment. 

So it's a shame you have to revert to mr bitter snipey, snarley growley ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO SAY vicious, negative, barely concealed contempt and dislike for no apparent reason, one liner man as soon as you get back on these boards. What's is wrong with you? You still haven't forgiven me for making a joke about your great leader ? Grow up. 
I think the most obvious and telling thing about the snipey little pops you tend to make at me is that you say nothing of substance. So please either address what I have said or FUCK OFF 
On second thoughts forget the address what I said bit, I have nothing to learn from you whatsoever. Just fuck off you nasty childish vindictive cunt. 

I'm not replying to any more of your vacuous and pointless snipes anymore. This is a good thread and there are issues I would like to discuss and contribute to without this childish bollocks spoiling either the thread or my mood. So what do you say you just continue thinking I am a complete wanker in your head and we stay out of each others way. You can even have the last word. hows that? 

 Either that or you could contribute something of value to a pretty good thread.


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## ViolentPanda (Aug 12, 2010)

jer said:


> Yes. Down to the slightest grain of crop. Oh, would that I could attain your level of enlightenment and sophistication, to embrace reality as you have done. But I fear, I see humanity beyond the isms and romanticised ideologies that hold sway with you thinkers and makers of "fact".
> 
> Woe, simple me for telling it as it is



Sorry, but you're talking a load of absolutist bollocks about competition. If what you say were true, the concept of altruism wouldn't exist, and the practice of mutual aid wouldn't either, because it rarely offers a competitive advantage.


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## ViolentPanda (Aug 12, 2010)

discokermit said:


> you couldn't rip a paper hanky.


Depends whether he's whipped his worm over a picture of uncle Joe and moistened the paper hanky first, I suspect.


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## ViolentPanda (Aug 12, 2010)

Spion said:


> He frequently moistens one, over his Enver Hoxha portraits



He's a Hoxhaite now, is he?


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## ViolentPanda (Aug 12, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> Eight pages and not nearly enough mocking of the arse-end of the Stalinist rump in the UK btw.


To be fair, their very existence is sufficient mockery in and of itself.


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## Captain Hurrah (Aug 12, 2010)

dylans said:


> I am no authority on Stalin but I think it's fair to say I have a better than average understandiing of Cambodia.Well first I would argue that what occurred there wasn't genocide. It was revolutionary violence put to the goal of  an impossibly utopian modernisation drive dictated with ferocious speed and extreme brutality and regardless of the human cost.  Genocide is an emotional and rhetorical term in this context not an accurate political or legal term. For a start Pol Pot was Khmer as were most of the dead. (true 100.000 Cham Muslims died too and that certainly fits the definition of genocide) But with that exception I would argue that the term genocide is not helpful in understanding the tragedy of Democratic Kampuchea.
> 
> Pol Pot is inexplicable without understanding the crisis of US imperialism in indochina at this time. The US was engaged in a vicious war with Vietnam. It was secretly bombing Laos and Cambodia and it supported the Lon Nol Regime during the civil war. Everyone focusses on the 5 years of the DK regime but it must be remembered that Pol Pot came out of a brutal 5 year civil war which tore Cambodian society apart. A civil war prosecuted with gusto by the USA. Attempts to explain the tragedy of tge DK revolution without making reference to what caused the insanity are dishonest and doomed to leave us baffled.



Indeed, it was not only Le Duan of the Vietnam Workers' Party, but Henry Kissinger who warned of grave consequences, if the Cambodian revolutionary movement refused to join the negotiating table at the Paris peace talks in December 1972.  Almost immediately after ink was put to paper in January 1973, the USAF began a round-the-clock saturation bombing campaign to halt the advance of the revolutionary army, which over eight months saw more than a quarter of a millions tons of bombs dropped on the Cambodian countryside.  This intense bombardment was also after bombing that had been going on for years.


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## dylans (Aug 12, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Indeed, it was not only Le Duan of the Vietnam Workers' Party, but Henry Kissinger who warned of grave consequences, if the Cambodian revolutionary movement refused to join the negotiating table at the Paris peace talks in December 1972.  Almost immediately after ink was put to paper in January 1973, the USAF began a round-the-clock saturation bombing campaign to halt the advance of the revolutionary army, which over eight months saw more than a quarter of a millions tons of bombs dropped on the Cambodian countryside.  This intense bombardment was also after bombing that had been going on for years.



The insanity of the Democratic Kampuchea years are a perfect example of the kind of madness that raining a quarter of a million tonnes of  of bombs onto a country can cause. The US destroyed Cambodian civil society and  tore apart the very fabric that held peoples lives together.They forced  one of the most brutal and merciless civil wars of the twentieth century onto a people who wanted nothing more than to live peaceful village lives and in doing so they made revolution inevitable. Everything else that followed must be seen as a consequence of US imperialism. Therefore the tragedy is a major  responsibility of the US (though not itmust be said the sole responsibility.##in the same way that a polluter is responsible for the side effects of the toxic waste. The US polluted Cambodia with war. To this day the US has not recognised its grave responsibility for the tragedy of that beautiful country. It should and it should pay compensation in the same way a polluter is obliged to pay for their environmental damage. It is absurd however in the extreme to try to claim that the DK revolution was not caused by the wider crisis of American imperialism. That much is obvious.

##
Note 
Khmers it must be said, have to bear some responsibility too, particularly for the brutality and callous disregard for lives that was shown by DK and the compliance with which the regime was recieved. In short the US is primarily responsible for the tragedy but the form and intensity that the tragedy took owes its explanation to other domestic factors too.  These are factors that have their roots in the domestic history and hierarchical sociology of Cambodian society. Factors that exist quite separately to the war and US involvement. Though of course exacerbated and intensified by the war.On taking power the  Cambodian urban elites for example behaved like robber barons and exploited the rural poor ruthlessly and without mercy or apology.  In doing so they were behaving in a fashion that all elites in Cambodia have behaved. Including the present regime. All elites pursue their own class interests but I think it fair to say that in Cambodia, the  elites did so with a relish and an almost blind disregard for the consequence of their oppressive behaviour that is uniquely Khmer in its single mindedness and shortsighted idiocy . For by feeding the resentments of the poor they were cutting their own throats.


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## Captain Hurrah (Aug 12, 2010)

dylans said:


> Indeed an in this Pol Pot was not alone. "Socialist" or or more accurately leninist type ideas were held by many national liberation  movements in the post colonial period. From Cuba to Mozambique Algeria to South East Asia, revolutionary leninist parties did particularly well in winning the leadership of anti colonial movements. Something that could be backed up with hard economics by the support of the soviet union or china.
> 
> To be sure they all have their own distinctive characteristics. Cambodia more than most consciously attempted to model their revolution in a fashion unique to themselves and seperate and distinct from other revolutionary regimes. Particularly their neighbours. Nevertheless. It could be argued that the greatest success for the Leninist party model was in winning the leadership of national liberation movements in developing countries and rural revolutionary struggles. Something incidentally that has been increasingly replaced by religious nationalisms in the wake of the fall of the Soviet Union. Pol Pot aside I know which I prefer



The modern idea of revolution came to literate Khmers from either the old French school syllabus, or its Bolshevised version from the international Communist movement.  They claimed to be Marxist-Leninists, and the voluntarism offered by it was attractive, but getting to basics here, for Marx, a new society simply cannot emerge until all the productive forces within the existing society have been exhausted, and until the sufficient conditions for the new society already exist, or are in mature state of development.  And for socialism, during a particular mode of production.  According to these criteria, the country was not ready for the revolution that occurred,  and despite the apparent popular support, theirs was not a genuine class-based movement which had grown inexorably out of the the objective structural contradictions inherent in Cambodian society's evolution.  

The rural masses saw the 1970 coup and the removal of the Prince as a supreme act of blasphemy which removed the merit which had justified the elite's privileged rights to rule.  Nothing, however, was more likely to win the support of the peasantry than the Communists' decision to evacuate all the towns and to close all current markets, for at a stroke it wiped out peasant debt.  Yes, it was bad for the former urbanites, but I am sick and tired even now of hearing only the _Readers Digest_ elitist version of events.  The rural put-upon majority, the bombed out and illiterate, what was it like for them, how did they see it all?  The peasants participated in the revolution for their own personal benefit, and just as the peasants of France, Russia and China and other revolutionary states had before them, initially without being converted to radical visions of constructing a new society.  It is true that the Communists had success in their collectivisation of property and their efforts to mobilise farmers collectively during the war years, but it largely made sense to the peasants when faced with adversity, and the organisational strategies the revolutionaries offered them to cope in wartime.  After the war they were attracted, more than the idea of communism, by the prospect to have access to more land, raise their material level by way of it, and particularly an abundance of food, with no outside claims on their surpluses (the towns), to have the opportunity to exploit the former town dwellers for their own benefit and to be _left the fuck alone_.  Anything more radical was seen as absurd.  

Pol Pot's revolution, with its sincere attempt to rapidly modernise the country within a compressed time-scale, building society anew from a very low base and creating a fully-functioning socialist state by the 1990s failed just as much because of the triumph of peasant conservatism (aside from the popular decision to get rid of the towns) than the Communists' moves to then control land and lay their own claims to the food the peasants produced, for the needs of their warped Maoist-inspired development.  The peasantry couldn't have cared less about Plan after Plan to make the country in some respects an approximation of Kim Il Sung's North Korea, or Enver Hoxha's Albania.  What support they had among the masses was quickly lost, and not just because of the brutality of the regime.


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## dylans (Aug 12, 2010)

Recognising the danger of this thread becoming too insular and obscure vis a vis Cambodia etc I think it is a good idea to widen the context a little and  remind ourselves what we are talking about. Thiis is a thread about Trotskyism or more accurately about the revolutionary marxist tradition and the tradition that traces its roots back to the october revolution of 1917. 

All arguments come back to this event. Whatever else they disagree with all  revolutionary marxists of whichever variety, trotskyist, Stalinist, maoist etc, They all salute this event.It is probably the only thing that trots and Stalinists can agree on.

. Whatever the arguments around that. There is no doubt that that event.the Russian revolution shaped a century. It was its most significant act. The act with which the 2oth cenitury was defined in so many ways. 

But there was always a a competing ideology and an alternative discourse that has marched side by side with socialism  throughout the 20th century. and it is arguably the one ideology that is more influential and more popular than socialism and that is nationalism. The most dangerous, changeling like movement of a thousand faces and an incredible ability to cloak itself and adopt  the language and  symbols of the  various movements who have waved  the banner of nationalism.

 It is at the same time the most inspiring and hateful ideology of them all and one that stubbornly refuses to go away. It is as strong today as it ever was if not stronger and it's potential for radicalisation as well as its potential to ignite horrific reactionary events such as blind rush to war and even participation in genocide is unquestionable. 

It is an ideology that still has the power to inspire and to stir in the hearts of people an almost animalistic tribal passion that can overide all the usual humanitarian concerns and values  that people usually live their lives by and drive men to acts that defy reason itself. Nationalism is in my opinion the evil of the 20th century and sociailist ideas have proved their value if they only mitigated that evil.

 Not any more.

 It is arguable that soviet inspired socialism and its associated internationalism and appeal to workers to unite across nations, was the only counter weight to nationalism and national movements throughout the 20th century. The leninist party model, in  particular managed to graft itself onto movements that we essentially nationalist. National liberation movements were highly influenced by socialist ideas, and the leninist argument that only a working class struggle can truly guarantee national independence and freedom from neo colonial servitude. Iet was a huge success in the very countries where it was not meant to occur. Rural peasant struggles within anti colonial or national independence movements. As such it could be argued that socialist ideas prevented reactionary ideas from coming to the forefront of these movements. 

This is my point, The Soviet union is dead and that has had an enormous effect on the ideologies of national independence movements indeed all political movements the world over. Where once they were obvious candidates for leftist leaderships now the same nationalist movements are now naked and lost.  They stand raw and open for more locally appropriate ideas to take over the leaderships. Islamism of course flls this gap. Islamism is only possible because of tghe events of 1989. Its rise is directly related to the death of the Soviet union

. Islamism isnt new, in form it is nothing but another form of nationalism. In fact it mirrors its enemy zionism in its language. Religion defined as nation. is nationalism with frills and whistles. All muslims are a nation.This is a classic nationalist argument. The defining of a group as nation and everything follows.The interests of the nation are defined as the same against a  world defined as other. 

 I think if the 20th century was framed by the events of october 1917 then it ended in 1989 with the fall of that great experiment . End and beginning.. 
Of course if it ended in 1989 the 21st centuriy was born in the unforgettable events of 911. Goodbye Soviet Union hello anti modernist religious nationalism. That such an ideology should be the defining act of the 21st centuriy was something that no science fiction writer even dreamed of. What a reply to dreams of global modernity and the end of history myths of neo liberal wet dreams. You couldn't make it up.

Expect a multivariety of bizarre twists on the nationalist discourse over the next few years as people attempt to replace socialism with religious and ethnic cultural based national ideas.to answer their struggles and demands and new nations are announced and fought over and yes unfortunately more commonly, killed over
My fear is that nationalism unchecked will run riot in this century with all the ugly and vicious consequences that come with it and this time  there is no internationalist ideology to counter it. Nationalism has no ideological predators any more and I really fear for the future.


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## Captain Hurrah (Aug 12, 2010)

We should have one once a month.  

Will probably be best when I start university, with less time to post here.


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## Catherine Lech (Aug 12, 2010)

jer said:


> It does raise a smile to read that some of the intelligensia here reckon we lived in some leftopian co-op and all was bliss and harmony at the dawn of time...





Did I say it was once all bliss and harmony?


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## Catherine Lech (Aug 12, 2010)

Spion said:


>


 
Where else do you see it all leading?


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## Catherine Lech (Aug 12, 2010)

jer said:


> Would that I was as elegant, erudite and knowledgeable as thou





It would be a start if you stopped posting platitudious apologia for capitalism all the time and started thinking a bit.


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## Catherine Lech (Aug 12, 2010)

ViolentPanda said:


> Which doesn't necessarily mean that nuclear weapons will be used, given that M.A.D. is still on the cards, whoever starts the clusterfuck.




It doesn't necessarily mean they will, no, but when we have the unprecedented situation of nuclear powers fighting each other, probably over access to dwindling resouces and shrinking markets, I wouldn't like to bet on them not being used.


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## Idaho (Aug 12, 2010)

Catherine Lech said:


> It doesn't necessarily mean they will, no, but when we have the unprecedented situation of nuclear powers fighting each other, probably over access to dwindling resouces and shrinking markets, I wouldn't like to bet on them not being used.


 
What would be the point of using them?


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## Catherine Lech (Aug 12, 2010)

Idaho said:


> What would be the point of using them?



The search for tactical advantage, which could then escalate into all-out war. We've come close before. Or the idea that a limited nuclear war is winnable. After all, it isn't as if maniacs pushing the idea didn't gain a lot of influence in the US defence establishment not long ago.


Or, in an escalating conflict, world leaders could simply drift into it, almost against their will. All nuclear powers are committed to actually using them in theory. All we've lacked so far is a serious enough crisis. A desperate war over resources and markets, with major nuclear powers participating, would seem to be pretty serious. Rationality may go out of the window. 

And then you have the possibility that a minor, unstable, nuclear power could set the ball rolling.


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## dylans (Aug 12, 2010)

Idaho said:


> What would be the point of using them?


 
I dont think it is commonly realised that US strategic planning has long since moved beyond concepts of MAD and advocate first strike in numerous scenerios. 

Vietnam came close to being nuked by Niixon. and as governer Reagan campaigned for nuclear strikes on North Vietnam. Even before US involvement the French requested nuclear strikes against the Vietminh (they were turned down but the fact remains they  seriously considered it as a military  option in the face of conventional defeat) and it is clear that a nuclear strike on Iran is one of a variety of options that are seriously considered by Israel at least and I wouldnt rule out a nuclear strike by Israel .

 As far as the new players, I wouldnt rule out first use in situations of existential obliteration . An indian military victory against Pakistan and the possibility of invasion could be such a scenario that could see a launch by Pakistan


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## Catherine Lech (Aug 12, 2010)

Plus, the more nuclear weapons are allowed to proliferate, the greater then chance that somebody, somewhere will use them.

And there doesn't seem to be a failsafe way of halting proliferation, especially as detailed knowledge of such matters is much more easily available than it used to be, as are the materials, due in large part to the West's complacency (and that's being kind) in encouraging the near-destruction of the Soviet state in the early 1990s.


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## dylans (Aug 12, 2010)

Catherine Lech said:


> Plus, the more nuclear weapons are allowed to proliferate, the greater then chance that somebody, somewhere will use them.
> 
> And there doesn't seem to be a failsafe way of halting proliferation, especially as detailed knowledge of such matters is much more easily available than it used to be, as are the materials, due in large part to the West's complacency (and that's being kind) in encouraging the near-destruction of the Soviet state in the early 1990s.


 
not while the nuclear powers proceed with the massive hypocricy of preaching non proliferation while clinging on to their own stockpiles no. There are various agreements that could be used to prevent proliferation, the nuclear free middle east pact for example, a policy supported by every middle east and Arab country and Iran.It could be used as a basis for avoided confrontation on the Iran nuclear issue however there is one objection,. The sole objector? Any guesses?


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## Captain Hurrah (Aug 12, 2010)

On the subject of Trotskyists and nuclear war, remember the bomb-loving Posadists?


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## rioted (Aug 12, 2010)

The Workers Bomb is a good bomb. Ern knows that.


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## ViolentPanda (Aug 12, 2010)

Catherine Lech said:


> The search for tactical advantage, which could then escalate into all-out war.


The only tactical advantage that nukes provide is area denial, and even then it's a two-edged sword because the territory is denied to *all*, and worthless for resource appropriation etc. 


> We've come close before. Or the idea that a limited nuclear war is winnable. After all, it isn't as if maniacs pushing the idea didn't gain a lot of influence in the US defence establishment not long ago.


They also proved that, except in the gaming labs of the Pentagon and the Kremlin, the idea of "limited nuclear war" is essentially a busted flush. It always leads to the same conclusion: A massively-enhanced threat of escalation to full-blown war.


> Or, in an escalating conflict, world leaders could simply drift into it, almost against their will. All nuclear powers are committed to actually using them in theory. All we've lacked so far is a serious enough crisis. A desperate war over resources and markets, with major nuclear powers participating, would seem to be pretty serious. Rationality may go out of the window.
> 
> And then you have the possibility that a minor, unstable, nuclear power could set the ball rolling.


Which is, to be blunt, the more likely ignition factor, more likely than a nuclear-backed resource war between states that'd run a very large risk of contaminating those resources (directly *or* indirectly), anyway.


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## ViolentPanda (Aug 12, 2010)

dylans said:


> I dont think it is commonly realised that US strategic planning has long since moved beyond concepts of MAD and advocate first strike in numerous scenerios.


If you read up on some of the Cold War-era gameplans for first strike, they mostly have a similar conclusion, which is that given how fluid ties between nation-states are, it's almost impossible to judge (even with full knowledge of various pacts and alliances between states) whether a first strike on a state will cause retaliatory strikes by third states.


> Vietnam came close to being nuked by Niixon. and as governer Reagan campaigned for nuclear strikes on North Vietnam.


Not least because the missile and warhead manufacturers just happened to have rather large production facilities in his state. 


> Even before US involvement the French requested nuclear strikes against the Vietminh (they were turned down but the fact remains they  seriously considered it as a military  option in the face of conventional defeat) and it is clear that a nuclear strike on Iran is one of a variety of options that are seriously considered by Israel at least and I wouldnt rule out a nuclear strike by Israel .


It wouldn't be sensible, given that they have little way of knowing whether they'd be subject to radioactive fallout from any such strike. 


> As far as the new players, I wouldnt rule out first use in situations of existential obliteration . An indian military victory against Pakistan and the possibility of invasion could be such a scenario that could see a launch by Pakistan


Entirely possible.


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## Spion (Aug 12, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> On the subject of Trotskyists and nuclear war, remember the bomb-loving Posadists?


Weren't they the aliens lot?


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## Catherine Lech (Aug 12, 2010)

ViolentPanda said:


> The only tactical advantage that nukes provide is area denial, and even then it's a two-edged sword because the territory is denied to *all*, and worthless for resource appropriation etc.
> 
> They also proved that, except in the gaming labs of the Pentagon and the Kremlin, the idea of "limited nuclear war" is essentially a busted flush. It always leads to the same conclusion: A massively-enhanced threat of escalation to full-blown war.
> 
> Which is, to be blunt, the more likely ignition factor, more likely than a nuclear-backed resource war between states that'd run a very large risk of contaminating those resources (directly *or* indirectly), anyway.




As usual, though, you are basing your assumptions on everybody behaving rationally at all times. We have plenty of examples where, due to whatever kind of pressures, those at the highest level prove themselves incapable of this. Is it really hard to imagine a situation where, in a world of dwindling resources or some other kind of crisis that takes us into world war, they are persuaded by increasingly ruthless advisors, themselves made reckless by the pressures, to take a calculated gamble? 

And then we have, as already noted, the growing threat from the unstable minor nuclear powers.


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## Catherine Lech (Aug 12, 2010)

rioted said:


> The Workers Bomb is a good bomb. Ern knows that.



It is actually a good job the USSR developed it, and not just for the USSR.


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## krtek a houby (Aug 12, 2010)

Catherine Lech said:


> It would be a start if you stopped posting platitudious apologia for capitalism all the time and started thinking a bit.


 
Please link to said apologia for capitalism all the time & desist with your _oh so superior attitude_, cheers.

Maybe people might have more time for the far left if they weren't so condescending? Who knows?


----------



## Catherine Lech (Aug 12, 2010)

jer said:


> Please link to said apologia for capitalism all the time & desist with your _oh so superior attitude_, cheers.
> 
> Maybe people might have more time for the far left if they weren't so condescending? Who knows?




I'm not 'far-left'. The 'far-left' barely exists nowadays. 

There's no need to link to anything, when it's plain to see that nearly everything you write seems to consist of no more than crocodile tears for the victims of evil leftist dicatators. You need to changing the boring record and ditch the straw men.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 12, 2010)

jer said:


> Please link to said apologia for capitalism all the time & desist with your _oh so superior attitude_, cheers.
> 
> Maybe people might have more time for the far left if they weren't so condescending? Who knows?


 
Oh come on. Greed is inherent, competition is our nature, we would still have all these problems with or without capitalism, etc. Phrasing it as apologia for capitalism might be a bit pompous but it is certainly accurate.

And all this far left bollocks - I'm on the far left, and I'm sick of being told that we should wear a nice smile and a patient attitude at all times, as if we're fucking salespeople. You either agree with the way the world is or you don't, irrespective of others 'condescending' attitudes.


----------



## Catherine Lech (Aug 12, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> Oh come on. Greed is inherent, competition is our nature, we would still have all these problems with or without capitalism, etc. Phrasing it as apologia for capitalism might be a bit pompous but it is certainly accurate.



There's nothing wrong with pompous, especially when dealing with ignorance and hypocritical self-righteousness.


----------



## Spion (Aug 12, 2010)

I wouldn't indulge the dullard


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Aug 12, 2010)

Spion said:


> Weren't they the aliens lot?


 
Yes.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Aug 12, 2010)

rioted said:


> The Workers Bomb is a good bomb. Ern knows that.



If Sergei Korolyov hadn't been released from a GULAG camp to tinker with some captured German V-2s, the snake revisionist Khrushchev wouldn't have had his glory for taking the USSR into the Space Age.  Nor had the opportunity to take a gamble in trying to hide medium-range nuclear missiles on Cuba by disguising them as palm trees.


----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 12, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> And all this far left bollocks - I'm on the far left, and I'm sick of being told that we should wear a nice smile and a patient attitude at all times, as if we're fucking salespeople. You either agree with the way the world is or you don't, irrespective of others 'condescending' attitudes.


 
And I'm sick of you lot, looking down your noses and sneering when there's something said that you don't agree with.

Or being called a tory simply because I don't agree with certain ideas or statements contained within these threads.

The responses here boil down to name calling and schoolyard tactics - hardly endearing one to the cause, is it?


----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 12, 2010)

Catherine Lech said:


> I'm not 'far-left'. The 'far-left' barely exists nowadays.
> 
> There's no need to link to anything, when it's plain to see that nearly everything you write seems to consist of no more than crocodile tears for the victims of evil leftist dicatators. You need to changing the boring record and ditch the straw men.


 
I've been posting here for several years, you have no idea of my politics or how I feel about individual cases. You arrived 5 mins ago to a warm welcome from the uber left because you make all the right noises, without backing up your accusations. Straw men? Take a look in the mirror.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Aug 12, 2010)

jer said:


> And I'm sick of you lot, *looking down your noses and sneering* when there's something said that you don't agree with.
> 
> Or being called a tory simply because I don't agree with certain ideas or statements contained within these threads.
> 
> The responses here boil down to name calling and schoolyard tactics - hardly endearing one to the cause, is it?



Be thankful you're not poor, white and working class.  Far lefties hate 'em.


----------



## Spion (Aug 12, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Be thankful you're not poor, white and working class.  Far lefties hate 'em.


Do they? Where do you get this from?


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 12, 2010)

jer said:


> And I'm sick of you lot, looking down your noses and sneering when there's something said that you don't agree with.
> 
> Or being called a tory simply because I don't agree with certain ideas or statements contained within these threads.



You talk a lot of shit. That is your problem, not anybody elses.



jer said:


> The responses here boil down to name calling and schoolyard tactics - hardly endearing one to the cause, is it?


 
Oh noes. We've missed a golden opportunity to recruit somebody to The Cause. Get to fuck, we're not 24/7 propaganda machines.


----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 12, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Be thankful you're not poor, white and working class.  Far lefties hate 'em.


 
They hate anyone who disagrees with them/or perceive to be the enemy.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Aug 12, 2010)

Spion said:


> Do they? Where do you get this from?



The central committee of the SWP.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 12, 2010)

jer said:


> I've been posting here for several years, you have no idea of my politics or how I feel about individual cases. You arrived 5 mins ago to a warm welcome from the uber left because you make all the right noises, without backing up your accusations. Straw men? Take a look in the mirror.


 
I don't think Catherine has had a 'warm welcome' from the 'uber left', whoever they are. Quite the opposite, in fact.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 12, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> The central committee of the SWP.


 
And of course the SWP is the far left. SWP = Trots = Far Left. Of course.

I don't know why people don't just say swappie when they mean swappie.


----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 12, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> You talk a lot of shit. That is your problem, not anybody elses.



It is your opinion that what I say is a lot of shit. Subjectivity. No wonder you lot will never change the world. Too busy infighting an alienating those who have similar views.

That's why I know longer class myself as left leaning. Reading the threads here over the years convinced me that nothing will ever change; you couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery - too busy sneering, smearing, belittling real people.

Yeh, man... if there's one thing that reeks more than the right wingers - it's the far left wingers....


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 12, 2010)

jer said:


> It is your opinion that what I say is a lot of shit. Subjectivity. No wonder you lot will never change the world. Too busy infighting an alienating those who have similar views.
> 
> That's why I know longer class myself as left leaning. Reading the threads here over the years convinced me that nothing will ever change; you couldn't organise a piss up in a brewery - too busy sneering, smearing, belittling real people.
> 
> Yeh, man... if there's one thing that reeks more than the right wingers - it's the far left wingers....


 
Yes, I am the representative of the Far Left in all its glory. You're mad.

How would you like it if my every response to you was 'oh well you're not doing very much for the Irish cause. I'm not sure I like the Irish because you were rude to me. If this is how the Irish behave then they can go fuck themselves' etc?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Aug 12, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> And of course the SWP is the far left. SWP = Trots = Far Left. Of course.
> 
> I don't know why people don't just say swappie when they mean swappie.



People from my background have erroneously been the fifth column of identity politics for ages.  It's where the liberals and far left meet, say hello and share a sun-dried tomato ciabatta.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 12, 2010)

I do like ciabatta


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Aug 12, 2010)

Me too.  But I eat McCain microchips apparently.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 12, 2010)

I like them too. Combine the two and that's a cracking chip butty.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Aug 12, 2010)

Washed down with a can of Dandelion and Burdock.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 12, 2010)

Ace. I do get irritated though, when people say 'the far left despises poor white working class people', given I am poor, white and working class. There are of course people on the far left who do seem to despise the white working class, but I've got no truck with them.


----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 12, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> Yes, I am the representative of the Far Left in all its glory. You're mad.
> 
> How would you like it if my every response to you was 'oh well you're not doing very much for the Irish cause. I'm not sure I like the Irish because you were rude to me. If this is how the Irish behave then they can go fuck themselves' etc?


 
According to the far left here I'm

Mad
Thick
Inarticulate
Live in a bedsit
Vote tory
Buy women

and so on and so forth.

I'm sure you're a wonderful individual but who are you to say I am wrong and vice versa?

You can say whatever you like about the Irish; we are a people, not an ideology.

I have been singled out for abuse because I made the cardinal sin of commenting on beloved leftopian icons, like Castro, Stalin, Pol Pot and so on.

Because I want my country united but not through violence.

Because I'm an easy target, I guess... posted here for years, mostly avoiding the politics threads, as they depressed me. I was idealistic for many years, I went on the marches/demos, I believed in a future where there was justice and equality.

Now I see it's all part of the game. I used to despair of the cynics, the lethargic and apathetic. But now I understand them. Nothing changes - so why bother?

I can rail all I like about racism and injustice until I'm in tears - where does it get me or anyone else? People are cunts, simple as that. It's in our nature, so why not surrender to it?


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 12, 2010)

jer said:


> According to the far left here I'm
> 
> Mad
> Thick
> ...


 
You don't get it, do you? People have said that about you, not the far left.

Everytime you say something daft, I don't say 'The Irish say x' do I? You mentalist.


----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 12, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> You don't get it, do you? *People have said that about you*, not the far left.
> 
> Everytime you say something daft, I don't say 'The Irish say x' do I? *You mentalist*.



People have said all these things because I have asked questions. 

As for the last bit? I rest my case. Does it help to call people mental, do you think? Because they disagree with you and so you drive them into a corner and screw with their heads, for a bit of sport?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Aug 12, 2010)

jer said:


> According to the far left here I'm
> 
> Mad
> Thick
> ...



Stop whinging. You live in a bedsit? I used to be denounced as posh and middle class all the time before I had a very illuminating drink with an associate of my detractors, even slagging off a lot of them. Privately educated children of lecturers, doctors and millionaire property owners. Play them at their own game, especially with this radical class analysis business, proper pisses the privileged scum off. Reading a pamphlet written by an anarchist no one cares about doesn't make you working class.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Aug 12, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> Ace. I do get irritated though, when people say 'the far left despises poor white working class people', given I am poor, white and working class. There are of course people on the far left who do seem to despise the white working class, but I've got no truck with them.



Fair does.  But it is counter-productive.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 12, 2010)

Ooh, name names! I want to know who the secret toffs are


----------



## discokermit (Aug 12, 2010)

dylans said:


> Oh is this the part where we get to swear at each other mindlessly in barely concealed old and bitter grievances that have been nurtured and picked and stewed over for months. OK.
> 
> I think next you should call me a child employing prick
> 
> ...


you really are mental. if a jokey one liner can send you into a froth like this, i suggest you seek professional help. also, you are massively paranoid if you think i remember any of the stuff you're going on about. i have no beef with you and i don't think you're a wanker. you're just pompous and really, really boring.

have a cuppa. relax a little.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 12, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Fair does.  But it is counter-productive.


 
What is?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Aug 12, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> What is?



Class-based social prejudice against white proles.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 12, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Class-based social prejudice against white proles.


 
I agree. I thought I'd made that clear.


----------



## rioted (Aug 12, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Reading a pamphlet written by an anarchist no one cares about doesn't make you working class.


You've got to read more than one!


----------



## discokermit (Aug 12, 2010)

jer said:


> According to the far left here I'm
> 
> Mad
> Thick
> ...


you missed off 'whining like a big baby'. or hasn't that been mentioned yet?


----------



## dylans (Aug 12, 2010)

jer said:


> Now I see it's all part of the game. I used to despair of the cynics, the lethargic and apathetic. But now I understand them. Nothing changes - so why bother?
> 
> I can rail all I like about racism and injustice until I'm in tears - where does it get me or anyone else? People are cunts, simple as that. It's in our nature, so why not surrender to it?



Everything was going so well until you get to this defeatest cowardly manifesto.Defeatest because  it sees no point in challenging racism or fighting injustice.  I would challenge racism if it doing  so was  guaranteeed to do no good whatsoever. If it was completely useless to oppose it I would still challenge it because by silence we offer approval. Its the right and only thing to do if we are not to share in its acceptability. We should challenge ideas that oppress because its the right thing to do and  I think you know that really. 

Cowardly because you have the luxury of surrendering. Some Asian kid called a P**ki by a gang of   EDL thugs doesn't have the luxury of being cynical.  Worldwide we know that crimes are being carried out in places like Gaza. Once we know we have a moral duty to speak and to act to stop them. To do otherwise  is moral cowardice and complicity by default. contemptible when said from the relative comfort of the UK.


----------



## discokermit (Aug 12, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> I agree. I thought I'd made that clear.


 
i sorta like it. helps in identification.


----------



## dylans (Aug 12, 2010)

discokermit said:


> you missed off 'whining like a big baby'. or hasn't that been mentioned yet?



I hate to agree with my new nemesis but,, this. If  you have nothing to offer but demoralising whining and defeatism please get out of the way.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 12, 2010)

Innit.


----------



## discokermit (Aug 12, 2010)

dylans said:


> I hate to agree with my new nemesis but,


i'm not your nemesis, you div. you need to let it go.


----------



## Catherine Lech (Aug 12, 2010)

jer said:


> I've been posting here for several years, you have no idea of my politics or how I feel about individual cases. You arrived 5 mins ago to a warm welcome from the uber left because you make all the right noises, without backing up your accusations. Straw men? Take a look in the mirror.




If you think I've had a warm welcome from the 'uber left' (snigger) you haven't read many of my posts. I've read quite a few of yours though, and like I said, they're mostly the same crocodile tears bollocks about the victims of left wing 'dictators.' Tedious, empty and self-righteous piffle.


----------



## dylans (Aug 12, 2010)

discokermit said:


> i'm not your nemesis, you div. you need to let it go.



it was a joke you div and I have. 
Peace


----------



## discokermit (Aug 12, 2010)

dylans said:


> it was a joke you div and I have.
> Peace


 
hugs.


----------



## Catherine Lech (Aug 12, 2010)

jer said:


> According to the far left here I'm
> 
> Mad
> Thick
> ...




Get some fucking backbone.


----------



## sleaterkinney (Aug 12, 2010)

Catherine Lech said:


> If you think I've had a warm welcome from the 'uber left' (snigger) you haven't read many of my posts. I've read quite a few of yours though, and like I said, they're mostly the same crocodile tears bollocks about the victims of left wing 'dictators.' Tedious, empty and self-righteous piffle.


 
So he shouldn't draw on what the far left has been like in power when discussing the far left?.


----------



## Catherine Lech (Aug 12, 2010)

sleaterkinney said:


> So he shouldn't draw on what the far left has been like in power when discussing the far left?.


 
He can do what he wants, but it's no use blubbering on about the crimes of evil dictators ripped out of their time, place and historical context, and trying to associate them with everybody he doesn't like on here. I don't much care for his guff, for instance, but wouldn't associate him with (insert the name of appropriate paranoid wimp as portrayed in film or literature) despite the distant resemblence.


----------



## sleaterkinney (Aug 12, 2010)

Catherine Lech said:


> He can do what he wants, but it's no use blubbering on about the crimes of evil dictators ripped out of their time, place and historical context, and trying to associate them with everybody he doesn't like on here. I don't much care for his guff, but wouldn't associate him with (insert the name of appropriate paranoid wimp as potrayed in film or literature) despite the distant resemblence.


Isn't it relevant though as examples of what the far left are like in practice as opposed to theory?.


----------



## Spion (Aug 12, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> People from my background have erroneously been the fifth column of identity politics for ages.  It's where the liberals and far left meet, say hello and share a sun-dried tomato ciabatta.


Ah, I see, some kind of middle class self hate with a healthy dose of projection. You toffs!


----------



## Spion (Aug 12, 2010)

jer said:


> According to the far left here I'm
> 
> Mad
> Thick
> ...


Jesus, what a self-pitying windbag. 

Come back when you're interesting


----------



## Catherine Lech (Aug 12, 2010)

sleaterkinney said:


> Isn't it relevant though as examples of what the far left are like in practice as opposed to theory?.




It might be. But, as I say, you can't look at, say, Stalin without understanding the specific political culture that saw him elevated to power, a culture unique to that country and empire. Furthermore, there are plenty of examples of radical left movements achieving power having killed nobody, or at least far fewer people than their opponents did. When it comes to the killing, you have to look at that in the context of what was happening, too. That is not to make excuses for it, but the USSR immediately after the revolution, for example, was a pretty barbaric place, with the revolution's opponents as much prepared to spill blood as were the Bolsheviks. Other places, such as Nicaragua, saw a relatively benign regime come under attack from ruthless mercenaries armed and financed by a superpower. Even the USSR and its off-shoot regimes weren't especially bllodthirsty by world-historical standards once society had stabilised and ditched the cult of personality etc. 

Not that you have to worry about any of this, as the far left's time has been and gone. You should look in other directions if you fear political bloodshed in future.


----------



## dylans (Aug 12, 2010)

Spion said:


> Jesus, what a self-pitying windbag.
> 
> Come back when you're interesting


 
once again bob has the answer.

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
*Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled*
There's a battle outside ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
*Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'*.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.


----------



## dylans (Aug 12, 2010)

Catherine Lech said:


> It might be. But, as I say, you can't look at, say, Stalin without understanding the specific political culture that saw him elevated to power, a culture unique to that country and empire. Furthermore, there are plenty of examples of radical left movements achieving power having killed nobody, or at least far fewer people than their opponents did. When it comes to the killing, you have to look at that in the context of what was happening, too. That is not to make excuses for it, but the USSR immediately after the revolution, for example, was a pretty barbaric place, with the revolution's opponents as much prepared to spill blood as were the Bolsheviks. Other places, such as Nicaragua, saw a relatively benign regime come under attack from ruthless mercenaries armed and financed by a superpower. Even the USSR and its off-shoot regimes weren't especially bllodthirsty by world-historical standards once society had stabilised and ditched the cult of personality etc.
> 
> Not that you have to worry about any of this, as the far left's time has been and gone. You should look in other directions if you fear political bloodshed in future.



Venezuela is the one shining light in a world awash with ugly movements offering ugly answers. Viva Chavez


----------



## sleaterkinney (Aug 12, 2010)

Catherine Lech said:


> It might be. But, as I say, you can't look at, say, Stalin without understanding the specific political culture that saw him elevated to power, a culture unique to that country and empire. Furthermore, there are plenty of examples of radical left movements achieving power having killed nobody, or at least far fewer people than their opponents did. When it comes to the killing, you have to look at that in the context of what was happening, too. That is not to make excuses for it, but the USSR immediately after the revolution, for example, was a pretty barbaric place, with the revolution's opponents as much prepared to spill blood as were the Bolsheviks. Other places, such as Nicaragua, saw a relatively benign regime come under attack from ruthless mercenaries armed and financed by a superpower. Even the USSR and its off-shoot regimes weren't especially bllodthirsty by world-historical standards once society had stabilised and ditched the cult of personality etc.
> 
> Not that you have to worry about any of this, as the far left's time has been and gone. You should look in other directions if you fear political bloodshed in future.


It's gone and not missed by many - what was the point of this thread again?


----------



## dylans (Aug 12, 2010)

sleaterkinney said:


> It's gone and not missed by many - what was the point of this thread again?



the fact that this thread has been a success says a lot i think. I think there is a recognition that we are in  political wilderness now.


----------



## sleaterkinney (Aug 12, 2010)

dylans said:


> the fact that this thread has been a success says a lot i think. I think there is a recognition that we are in  political wilderness now.


It's a success?.

We as in the far left or we generally?


----------



## Catherine Lech (Aug 12, 2010)

sleaterkinney said:


> It's a success?.
> 
> We as in the far left or we generally?



The far left is in the wilderness and we generally are right in the shit, although most people don't recognise it.


----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 12, 2010)

Catherine Lech said:


> Get some fucking backbone.


 
Ah yes, grow a pair, man up etc.

Easy to say when you've got the pack mentality on your side.

Lookee there, comrades - the leftists in all their magnificent glory; circling like vultures, ready to swoop on any perceived weaknesses.

It seems you can't diss anything that is considered the domain of the left; for they will cut you down and belittle you until you have been vanquished.


----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 12, 2010)

Spion said:


> Jesus, what a self-pitying windbag.
> 
> Come back when you're interesting


 
I reply and what next?

More insults? They should call you spineless; that's more the mark of you.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 12, 2010)

I don't think backbones are a man only thing tbh. Neither is not being so self-pitying its nauseous.


----------



## Catherine Lech (Aug 12, 2010)

jer said:


> Ah yes, grow a pair, man up etc.
> 
> Easy to say when you've got the pack mentality on your side.
> 
> ...




Whatever you say, you soft-arsed paranoid cretin.


----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 12, 2010)

Catherine Lech said:


> Whatever you say, you soft-arsed paranoid cretin.


 
You leader of men. You shining beacon of honesty and truth. You purveyor of hope and dreams. O, to be in your shadow, the honour is mine, all mine.

One month in the forums and you're as wonderful as your predecessors.

I am your new hate figure, concentrate all your ire and disdain unto me.

What doesn't kill me will only make me weaker.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 12, 2010)




----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 12, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> I don't think backbones are a man only thing tbh. Neither is not being so self-pitying its nauseous.


 
Ain't it just, brother? I mean, fuck a doodle do, imagine. Having an opinion and then being cut to shreds for the audacity to share it.

And having those shreds pureed by the forum's bravest.

Fuck, I'm in awe of ye all.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 12, 2010)

"What doesn't kill me will only make me weaker" lol. Turn off the fucking computer if you're that arsed.


----------



## Catherine Lech (Aug 12, 2010)

jer said:


> You leader of men. You shining beacon of honesty and truth. You purveyor of hope and dreams. O, to be in your shadow, the honour is mine, all mine.
> 
> One month in the forums and you're as wonderful as your predecessors.
> 
> ...




Catch yourself on, for Fuck's sake.


----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 12, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> "What doesn't kill me will only make me weaker" lol. Turn off the fucking computer if you're that arsed.


 
Ah, the left's love of censorship and silencing perceived opponents.


----------



## Catherine Lech (Aug 12, 2010)

jer said:


> Ah, the left's love of censorship and silencing perceived opponents.




Where did that straitjacket go?


----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 12, 2010)

Catherine Lech said:


> Catch yourself on, for Fuck's sake.


 
You can go pop your zits, sister. I got bigger fish to fry than some poster girl for post modern leftist irony fests.

Why, right now, I have to attend to my realms.

And quell the harsh language, why don't you? It doesn't wash.


----------



## Catherine Lech (Aug 12, 2010)

jer said:


> You can go pop your zits, sister. I got bigger fish to fry than some poster girl for post modern leftist irony fests.
> 
> Why, right now, I have to attend to my realms.
> 
> And quell the harsh language, why don't you? It doesn't wash.




Take a break, you big Jessie loon.


----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 12, 2010)

Catherine Lech said:


> Where did that straitjacket go?


 
Ah, yes, the "you must be mad" retort. How original. For someone who claims to have read all my posts, you don't seem to be very au fe with public engagement. 

Here's one right back at you; the straightjacket didn't go anywhere - you're still wearing it.

HAW HAW HAW HAW


----------



## Catherine Lech (Aug 12, 2010)

jer said:


> Ah, yes, the "you must be mad" retort. How original. For someone who claims to have read all my posts, you don't seem to be very au fe with public engagement.
> 
> Here's one right back at you; the straightjacket didn't go anywhere - you're still wearing it.
> 
> HAW HAW HAW HAW



I haven't read all your posts. Just a few was enough to realise you simply post an endless stream of repetitive drivel. 

Anyway, can't you shut it for a bit? You're beginning to get on my tits.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 12, 2010)

Lol are you some sort of political martyr now Jer? Shall I call Amnesty?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 13, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> And of course the SWP is the far left. SWP = Trots = Far Left. Of course.
> 
> I don't know why people don't just say swappie when they mean swappie.


 
Truth is, of course, that the swappies are about as "far left" as my right testicle, and the C.C. with it's bunch of careerists who adapt their core ideology at the drop of a hat (or the sniff of a paper sale) are proof of that.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 13, 2010)

Catherine Lech said:


> As usual, though, you are basing your assumptions on everybody behaving rationally at all times.


I'm not making assumptions, I'm  presuming that *most* though perhaps not all[/b] have a plethora of governmental and military safeguards to the deployment of nuclear weapons that means you'd actually need a *chain* of people listening to rogue advisors.


> We have plenty of examples where, due to whatever kind of pressures, those at the highest level prove themselves incapable of this.


Which is why, in most countries, the military cannot act without governmental approval, and the military have the power of refusal on orders from a government whose orders don't make sense or contravene a whole plethora of regulations, accords and conventions.
I'm not saying that safeguarding is perfect, but that unless a chain of the sort I mentioned occurs, then the problem won't originate from one of the older members of the "nuclear club".


> Is it really hard to imagine a situation where, in a world of dwindling resources or some other kind of crisis that takes us into world war, they are persuaded by increasingly ruthless advisors, themselves made reckless by the pressures, to take a calculated gamble?


Given that I believe that around 90% of all politicians are venal and self-serving, then no, but use of nuclear weapons makes little sense if resource acquisition is a primary goal.


> And then we have, as already noted, the growing threat from the unstable minor nuclear powers.


Of course. AS I said, they're actually the more likely threat, and not because of resource acquisition, but good old-fashioned antipathy.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 13, 2010)

jer said:


> According to the far left here I'm
> 
> Mad
> Thick
> ...



I'd hardly count ern the _faux_-left clown as "far left".


----------



## JimW (Aug 13, 2010)

Our millet plus rifles will beat your planes plus the A-bomb.


----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 13, 2010)

Catherine Lech said:


> I haven't read all your posts. Just a few was enough to realise you simply post an endless stream of repetitive drivel.
> 
> Anyway, can't you shut it for a bit? You're beginning to get on my tits.


 
So, in fact your claim that I post an endless stream of drivel is not based on 7 years of in depth analysis, rather a causual cherry picking skim read based on one month's experience here.

And no, I won't "shut it". This is a democracy, with all it's unpalatable truths.


----------



## dylans (Aug 13, 2010)

jer said:


> So, in fact your claim that I post an endless stream of drivel is not based on 7 years of in depth analysis, rather a causual cherry picking skim read based on one month's experience here.
> 
> And no, I won't "shut it". This is a democracy, with all it's unpalatable truths.


 
the claim that you post an endless stream of drivel is based on the fact that you post an endless stream of drivel

Childish, bratish, self indulgent, me, me, me, drivel consisting of inane whining about nasty things nasty people said and a tedious fake world weary "why bother" shrug at the world. Your like a sulky teenager who wears black, listens to morrisey and talks about suicide to impress his mates.  It is pathetic


----------



## rioted (Aug 13, 2010)

Not that I want to join in the bullying... But then again you tossers won't see it like that, will you?


----------



## Pickman's model (Aug 13, 2010)

jer said:


> So, in fact your claim that I post an endless stream of drivel is not based on 7 years of in depth analysis, rather a causual cherry picking skim read based on one month's experience here.
> 
> And no, I won't "shut it". This is a democracy, with all it's unpalatable truths.


anyone checking your posts over a sample period of one month will not need an in-depth analysis of seven years of posts: they would, as dylans says, know you post an endless stream of steaming drivel.

as for this being a democracy, i expect editor would beg to differ with you, this is a benevolent and tolerant site, but still a dictatorship.


----------



## Streathamite (Aug 13, 2010)

actually, fair play to ern. he's managed to ignite a 13-page thread which has got an awful lot of good stuff on it


----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 13, 2010)

Pickman's model said:


> anyone checking your posts over a sample period of one month will not need an in-depth analysis of seven years of posts: they would, as dylans says, know *you post an endless stream of steaming drivel*.
> 
> as for this being a democracy, i expect editor would beg to differ with you, this is a benevolent and tolerant site, but still a dictatorship.



Can you detail for the audience please, what you consider endless steaming drivel? 

I know you folks need a pantomine villain to boo and hiss, otherwise it gets a bit stale but I'd dearly love to know why my contributions are deemed the work of a thick madman as opposed to the sound, level headed content generated by my tormentors.

Ta muchly x


----------



## Pickman's model (Aug 13, 2010)

jer said:


> Can you detail for the audience please, what you consider endless steaming drivel?
> 
> I know you folks need a pantomine villain to boo and hiss, otherwise it gets a bit stale but I'd dearly love to know why my contributions are deemed the work of a thick madman as opposed to the sound, level headed content generated by my tormentors.
> 
> Ta muchly x


what i consider endless steaming drivel? your self-serving, rather hysterical posts on this thread should suffice.


----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 13, 2010)

Pickman's model said:


> what i consider endless steaming drivel? your self-serving, rather hysterical posts on this thread should suffice.


 
Ah, so - you're only as good as your last post, then? Never mind me replying to the hyenas here - what endless drivel are you referring to, in particular?

You used to be quite a decent sort when you first started posting here, btw. Before you jumped on the villain of the week bandwagon.


----------



## Pickman's model (Aug 13, 2010)

jer said:


> Ah, so - you're only as good as your last post, then? Never mind me replying to the hyenas here - what endless drivel are you referring to, in particular?
> 
> You used to be quite a decent sort when you first started posting here, btw. Before you jumped on the villain of the week bandwagon.


i used to be quite a decent sort before i started work, is what you mean.


----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 13, 2010)

Pickman's model said:


> i used to be quite a decent sort before i started work, is what you mean.


 
If you say so. My only crime here was to defend myself after a particulary nastly slew of abuse because I happened to disagree with a handful of peeps on the political threads. 

Lots of people post things that I disagree with, I've never abused them or turned it into a vendetta. Is there no such thing as decorum here, or reasonable debate?


----------



## Pickman's model (Aug 13, 2010)

jer said:


> If you say so. My only crime here was to defend myself after a particulary nastly slew of abuse because I happened to disagree with a handful of peeps on the political threads.
> 
> Lots of people post things that I disagree with, I've never abused them or turned it into a vendetta. Is there no such thing as decorum here, or reasonable debate?





jer said:


> People are cunts, simple as that. It's in our nature, so why not surrender to it?


----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 13, 2010)

Pickman's model said:


>


 
With that statement above, which of course, is open to interpretation depending on one's disposition, it's hardly singling out an individual for abuse, now is it?


----------



## Pickman's model (Aug 13, 2010)

i don't see how it's 'open to interpretation', you seem to have made yourself very clear: you're all a bunch of cunts.


----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 13, 2010)

Pickman's model said:


> i don't see how it's 'open to interpretation', you seem to have made yourself very clear: you're all a bunch of cunts.


 
No, I said "people" are. And it's a subjective view, depending on one's mood and ongoing experiences. Of course it's open to interpretation. As I've said above, it's not singling out an individual for abuse or pursuing a vendetta.


----------



## Idris2002 (Aug 13, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> If Sergei Korolyov hadn't been released from a GULAG camp to tinker with some captured German V-2s, the snake revisionist Khrushchev wouldn't have had his glory for taking the USSR into the Space Age.  Nor had the opportunity to take a gamble in trying to hide medium-range nuclear missiles on Cuba by disguising them as palm trees.


 
At least the SU didn't have to rely on a former SS man like Von Braun to win the race to be First into Space.


----------



## dylans (Aug 13, 2010)

jer said:


> No, I said "people" are. And it's a subjective view, depending on one's mood and ongoing experiences. Of course it's open to interpretation. As I've said above, it's not singling out an individual for abuse or pursuing a vendetta.


 
I took it as meaning people in general are cunts. Its all part of his image of the heroic cynic,  battered and defeated by life and too wise for his years, prophetic but tragically misunderstood by the shallow souls who surround  him. The fools the fools they could not see. They were just not ready for his message. He probably  practices his bored but deep poses in front of the mirror.


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 13, 2010)

I think we can all agree that the plundering of german rocketry science brains was pretty morally dubious.


----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 13, 2010)

dylans said:


> I took it as meaning people in general are cunts. Its all part of his image of the heroic cynic,  battered and defeated by life and too wise for his years, prophetic but tragically misunderstood by the shallow souls who surround  him. The fools the fools they could not see. They were just not ready for his message. He probably  practices his bored but deep poses in front of the mirror.


 
Mom?


----------



## discokermit (Aug 13, 2010)




----------



## Catherine Lech (Aug 13, 2010)

ViolentPanda said:


> I'm not making assumptions, I'm  presuming that *most* though perhaps not all[/b] have a plethora of governmental and military safeguards to the deployment of nuclear weapons that means you'd actually need a *chain* of people listening to rogue advisors.
> 
> Which is why, in most countries, the military cannot act without governmental approval, and the military have the power of refusal on orders from a government whose orders don't make sense or contravene a whole plethora of regulations, accords and conventions.
> I'm not saying that safeguarding is perfect, but that unless a chain of the sort I mentioned occurs, then the problem won't originate from one of the older members of the "nuclear club".
> ...




As with certain other things, we can only hope that you are more right than I am, Mr Optimist.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Aug 13, 2010)

DotCommunist said:


> I think we can all agree that the plundering of german rocketry science brains was pretty morally dubious.



The Americans didn't just do that, but made sure the the Japanese army doctors involved in some of the grimmest crimes in the Far East during the war were given immunity from prosecution, so they could get their hands on the human-tested research that led to them better developing their won biological weapons.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Aug 13, 2010)

rioted said:


> You've got to read more than one!



Yeah, I forgot a crap newspaper with a fundamentally patronising tabloid format, and lots of swearwords.


----------



## cantsin (Aug 13, 2010)

jer said:


> Ah yes, grow a pair, man up etc.
> 
> Easy to say when you've got the pack mentality on your side.
> 
> ...



is this whole victim thing your schtick ? it's kinda nauseating


----------



## Bakunin (Aug 14, 2010)

DotCommunist said:


> I think we can all agree that the plundering of german rocketry science brains was pretty morally dubious.


 
It wasn't half as morally dubious as the US Army Chemical Warfare Laboratory at Fort Detrick taking a large number of chemical and biological warfare experts from Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army and using them to found and establish the American chemical and biological warfare capability. The really lovely thing about their doing that being that those selfsame Japanese scientists slaughtered a couple of hundred thousand Chinese, British, American and Australian prisoners of war in some 'scientific experiments' that were as bad as anything the Nazis ever accomplished.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Aug 14, 2010)

Already mentioned it.


----------



## JimW (Aug 14, 2010)

US complicity in post-Korean war massacres propping up a regime full of collaborators:





> ...more importantly, the ROK under Syngman Ree in 1950 was in large part a congerie of Japanese collaborators and borderline fascists, the most viable allies the U.S. could come up with to counter a peninsula-wide explosion of revulsion against the 35-year Japanese occupation, political division, and archaic land-holding system that Kim Il-sung, an anti-Japanese guerilla and communist, was in an excellent position to exploit...
> 
> The U.S.responded to "people's war" on the ground with total war from the air executed in a primitive, almost atavistic manner against an Asian enemy that seemed to be treated as less than human.
> 
> There were no hearts and minds to win in this counterinsurgency; there were only ashes.


----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 14, 2010)

Thank you to all students of Marxism-Leninism thought for all the subsequent posts.

Second part of your reading is:

The Lessons of October by Nadezhda Krupskaya

Let's have another nine pages of discussion on this important work!

_Trotsky says a great deal about the Party, but for him the Party is the staff of leaders, the heads. _

I say - off with his head!


----------



## Spion (Aug 14, 2010)

DotCommunist said:


> I think we can all agree that the plundering of german rocketry science brains was pretty morally dubious.


No. I can't agree with such blanket moralism. I'd want a workers' republic to develop militarily if it faced a military threat, and tapping existing technology is one way it'd need to be done.


----------



## Spion (Aug 14, 2010)

JimW said:


> US complicity in post-Korean war massacres propping up a regime full of collaborators:


And didn't the French/US let the Japanese re-take control in Vietnam after the nationalists there had liberated the country in 1945?


----------



## discokermit (Aug 14, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> Nadezhda K. Krupskaya


stalin poisoned her with a birthday cake.


----------



## Spion (Aug 14, 2010)

on purpose or was he a shit cook?


----------



## discokermit (Aug 14, 2010)

Spion said:


> on purpose or was he a shit cook?


 
both. he would get angry at his own ham fisted stupidity and beat shit out of the oven with all the pots and pans in a paranoid rage. then he'd nick someone elses dinner.


----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 14, 2010)

cantsin said:


> is this whole victim thing your schtick ? it's kinda nauseating


 
Daddy?


----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 16, 2010)

Many thanks for all your contributions! Part 3 of your reading guide will come soon.


----------



## Spion (Aug 16, 2010)

No-one's the slightest bit interested in the dead, dusty, treacherous rubbish you're posting


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 16, 2010)

Spion said:


> No-one's the slightest bit interested in the dead, dusty, treacherous rubbish you're posting



Or, for the most part, in ern's increasingly desperate attempts to get attention.


----------



## Idaho (Aug 16, 2010)

Maybe we should all declare our love for Trotsky?

I'll go first. 

I love Trotsky and all his works. He was a lovely man. So much nicer than that nasty Stalin.


----------



## Teaboy (Aug 16, 2010)

Spion said:


> No-one's the slightest bit interested in the dead, dusty, treacherous rubbish you're posting


 
I dunno, are there not times in your life when the right path is not always obvious?  When judgments become clouded?  At times like this do you not pause to think 'What would ern do?'


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 16, 2010)

Idaho said:


> Maybe we should all declare our love for Trotsky?
> 
> I'll go first.
> 
> I love Trotsky and all his works. He was a lovely man. So much nicer than that nasty Stalin.


 
Trotsky was well fit


----------



## Catherine Lech (Aug 16, 2010)

Idaho said:


> I'd rather have  a Trotsky job than work down the pit.


.


----------



## audiotech (Aug 16, 2010)

He was 'Snowball' and the good pig in Orwell's Animal Farm.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 16, 2010)

And what a fine figure of a pig


----------



## Idaho (Aug 16, 2010)

Catherine Lech said:


> Originally Posted by Idaho
> I'd rather have a Trotsky job than work down the pit.


 
What is that supposed to mean?


----------



## Catherine Lech (Aug 16, 2010)

Idaho said:


> I'd rather mean nothing than work down the pit


.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 16, 2010)

I'm confused too.

Admit it, you all wanted Goldstein to win in 1984.


----------



## Spion (Aug 16, 2010)

Me too. CL's had a lunchtime ale or two maybe?


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 16, 2010)

Or a member of Uncle Joe's fan club


----------



## Spion (Aug 16, 2010)

She's demoralised enough to be


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 16, 2010)

It's all a CIA Trotskyite plot


----------



## audiotech (Aug 16, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> And what a fine figure of a pig



Unlike this fat capitalist pig.


----------



## Bakunin (Aug 16, 2010)

It seems that many of the Communist 'greats' were busy enjoying themselves while the proletariat slaved away in lead mines, starved under flawed agricultural policies or were summarily neckshot for even thinking aloud the words 'You know, I really don't think it was meant to turn out quite like this.'

Here's pictorial evidence of their carefree debauchery as their grand plan disintegrated under the weight of its own hypocrisy and bullshit:






Apparently, the only reason Che doesn't appear is that he was already so hammered he'd started boking up into the punchbowl.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 16, 2010)

Bakunin said:


> It seems that many of the Communist 'greats' were busy enjoying themselves while the proletariat slaved away in lead mines, starved under flawed agricultural policies or were summarily neckshot for even thinking aloud the words 'You know, I really don't think it was meant to turn out quite like this.'
> 
> Here's pictorial evidence of their carefree debauchery as their grand plan disintegrated under the weight of its own hypocrisy and bullshit:
> 
> ...


 
Viva capitalism


----------



## audiotech (Aug 16, 2010)

Bakunin said:


> It seems that many of the Communist 'greats' were busy enjoying themselves while the proletariat slaved away in lead mines, starved under flawed agricultural policies or were summarily neckshot for even thinking aloud the words 'You know, I really don't think it was meant to turn out quite like this.'
> 
> Here's pictorial evidence of their carefree debauchery as their grand plan disintegrated under the weight of its own hypocrisy and bullshit:
> 
> Apparently, the only reason Che doesn't appear is that he was already so hammered he'd started boking up into the punchbowl.



Marx, whilst living in London, had boils and wrote to Engels asking for money.
Mao was on a long march.
Lenin lived in a straw hut for a while and was a modest man.
Trotsky saw most of his family murdered by Stalin's henchmen, before he himself had an icepick rammed into his head.
Stalin launched a massive purge of revolutionary Bolsheviks, with rigged show trials, ending with executions, or imprisonment in Siberian gulags, including Bukharin, 
Most of the Polish Communist leaders were shot, or sent to the Gulags.
Stalin killed more leaders of the German Communist party than Hitler.

Living the high life was Stalin, along with his lackey's, including that thug Beria. They were no Communists.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 16, 2010)

Tbf, Marx wrote to everybody for money.


----------



## audiotech (Aug 16, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> Tbf, Marx wrote to everybody for money.



Everybody?


----------



## discokermit (Aug 16, 2010)

audiotech said:


> Everybody?


 
he still owes me three pounds fifty.


----------



## audiotech (Aug 16, 2010)

discokermit said:


> he still owes me three pounds fifty.



In today's money?


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 16, 2010)

He was perpetually skint, partly through lack of income but mostly because he spent like fuck and kept quitting his newspaper jobs. He did owe every fucker money. Great dad though apparently.


----------



## Catherine Lech (Aug 16, 2010)

Spion said:


> She's demoralised enough to be



Not demoralised, just astute enough to recognise where we've landed.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Aug 16, 2010)

audiotech said:


> They were no Communists.



This is the big mistake that other Communists make.  Blurting out utopianisms.


----------



## Idris2002 (Aug 16, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> He was perpetually skint, partly through lack of income but mostly because he spent like fuck and kept quitting his newspaper jobs. He did owe every fucker money. Great dad though apparently.


 
Though as a provider of employment to dought servant lasses. . .


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 16, 2010)

Idris2002 said:


> Though as a provider of employment to dought servant lasses. . .


 
Yeah there was that.

His secret son ended up as a trade unionist and a Labour member iirc.


----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 17, 2010)

ViolentPanda said:


> Or, for the most part, in ern's increasingly desperate attempts to get attention.



.


----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 17, 2010)

Part Three: Trotsky's Day in Court, by Harry Haywood
Source: Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist, Chapter 6; Liberator Press, Chicago: 1978.

http://www.marxists.org/archive/haywood/black-bolshevik/ch06.htm


----------



## Idaho (Aug 17, 2010)

It seems rather ridiculous to turn an historically interesting spat into a contemporary political position. 'Trotskyism' seems little more than a leading Russian communist being critical of Stalin. Only in the mind of someone as paranoid as Stalin could it take on such grand ideological and treacherous proportions.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 17, 2010)

Idaho said:


> It seems rather ridiculous to turn an historically interesting spat into a contemporary political position. 'Trotskyism' seems little more than a leading Russian communist being critical of Stalin. Only in the mind of someone as paranoid as Stalin could it take on such grand ideological and treacherous proportions.


 
Not really though.


----------



## audiotech (Aug 17, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> This is the big mistake that other Communists make.  Blurting out utopianisms.



Free market utopianism's have been around a while now and increasingly seen as a Mickey Mouse comic book. Whereas communism is based on real historic events, like for example the Paris Commune and the workers soviets (councils).


----------



## audiotech (Aug 17, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> Part Three: Trotsky's Day in Court, by Harry Haywood
> Source: Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist, Chapter 6; Liberator Press, Chicago: 1978.
> 
> http://www.marxists.org/archive/haywood/black-bolshevik/ch06.htm



I'll raise you Lenin's Testament (1922).

http://www.historyguide.org/europe/testament.html


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Aug 18, 2010)

audiotech said:


> Free market utopianism's have been around a while now and increasingly seen as a Mickey Mouse comic book. Whereas communism is based on real historic events, like for example the Paris Commune and the workers soviets (councils).



I'm talking about Communists, or wannabe Communists, separating off certain people from their historical context , polishing others like big brass mantle piece ornaments, and saying what is and what isn't 'genuine.'  Stalin was a cunt, but he was also a Communist and the Soviet project undertaken before and under him was a controversial attempt to establish socialism.  Something which mobilised millions, enjoyed a global scope and coherency and saw other regimes try to emulate its achievements.  You want the pure, unsullied version, where the immutable will of history will provide for something that has not and will never exist except in a student's wank stain.  It's perhaps better to try and understand why it went pear-shaped than to try to deny, or pretend, that no such thing has ever been tried.


----------



## Catherine Lech (Aug 18, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> I'm talking about Communists, or wannabe Communists, separating off certain people from their historical context , polishing others like big brass mantle piece ornaments, and saying what is and what isn't 'genuine.'  Stalin was a cunt, but he was also a Communist and the Soviet project undertaken before and under him was a controversial attempt to establish socialism.  Something which mobilised millions, enjoyed a global scope and coherency and saw other regimes try to emulate its achievements.  You want the pure, unsullied version, where the immutable will of history will provide for something that has not and will never exist except in a student's wank stain.  It's perhaps better to try and understand why it went pear-shaped than to try to deny, or pretend, that no such thing has ever been tried.



What many of the kind of people who post on here don't seem able to realise is that, even if they somehow were to get the kind of society they'd like to see, as soon as things start to go awry, as they inevitably will, it will immediately have to be declared not the genuine thing. 

Nothing will ever be considered the genuine thing.


----------



## Idaho (Aug 18, 2010)

Catherine Lech said:


> What many of the kind of people who post on here don't seem able to realise is that, even if they somehow were to get the kind of society they'd like to see, as soon as things start to go awry, as they inevitably will, it will immediately have to be declared not the genuine thing.
> 
> Nothing will ever be considered the genuine thing.



Because the genuine thing is, by definition, perfect, therefore how can it go awry? 

From the outside people can say it's not the genuine thing. From the inside no-one would be allowed to say it.


----------



## Catherine Lech (Aug 18, 2010)

Idaho said:


> Because the genuine thing is, by definition, perfect, therefore how can it go awry?
> 
> From the outside people can say it's not the genuine thing. From the inside no-one would be allowed to say it.




Of course people 'on the inside' would be allowed to say it (who could stop them?) Look at the Soviet bloc: if the leaders hadn't started to at first criticise the system and then begin dismantling it, it would probably be still here.


----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 18, 2010)

I can see that many former doubters are now understanding the philosophy our dear teacher and inspiration, JV Djugashvili.

Today's reading comes from 1914, a prescient piece by Lenin criticising Trot for his pompous showboating.

Disruption of Unity Under Cover of Outcries for Unity by V. I. Lenin
_


"Trotsky is fond of high-sounding and empty phrases."_ - Lenin



> * Trotsky’s “workers’ journal” is Trotsky’s journal for workers, as there is not a trace in it of either workers’ initiative, or any connection with working-class organisations. Desiring to write in a popular style, Trotsky, in his journal for workers, explains for the benefit of his readers the meaning of such foreign words as “territory”, “factor”, and so forth.*
> 
> Very good. But why not also explain to the workers the meaning of the word “non-factionalism”? Is that word more intelligible than the words “territory” and “factor”?
> 
> No, that is not the reason. The reason is that the label “non-factionalism” is used by the worst representatives of the worst remnants of factionalism to mislead the younger generation of workers. It is worth while devoting a little time to explaining this.



_All that glitters is not gold. There is much glitter and sound in Trotsky’s phrases, but they are meaningless. _ - Lenin


----------



## Spion (Aug 18, 2010)

Catherine Lech said:


> Of course people 'on the inside' would be allowed to say it (who could stop them?) Look at the Soviet bloc: if the leaders hadn't started to at first criticise the system and then begin dismantling it, it would probably be still here.



It's possibly more surprising it lasted as long as it did. If you intend to plan an economy it can only work in the long term with the maximum possible feedback from producers and consumers. The USSR lacked this. Bureaucrats planned blind because their privilege depended on the mass of people not being allowed to see the inner workings of the plan. That worked for so long -- while the economy rapidly caught up in terms of huge infrastructural projects -- but as soon as that was achieved and keeping pace with the world demanded a wide range of consumer products the USSR's economy inevitably slipped behind. It's easy to guess how many steelworks and railways a country needs, but to satisfy demand for the everyday details you have to have feedback from the consumer, either via democratic planning mechanisms or the market. The bureaucratised USSR didn't have the latter or the former, so was an unstable socio-economic formation and had to move one way or the other. The reasons behind the collapse of the USSR in a nutshell.


----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 18, 2010)

Spion said:


> It's possibly more surprising it lasted as long as it did. If you intend to plan an economy it can only work in the long term with the maximum possible feedback from producers and consumers. The USSR lacked this. Bureaucrats planned blind because their privilege depended on the mass of people not being allowed to see the inner workings of the plan. That worked for so long -- while the economy rapidly caught up in terms of huge infrastructural projects -- but as soon as that was achieved and keeping pace with the world demanded a wide range of consumer products the USSR's economy inevitably slipped behind. It's easy to guess how many steelworks and railways a country needs, but to satisfy demand for the everyday details you have to have feedback from the consumer, either via democratic planning mechanisms or the market. The bureaucratised USSR didn't have the latter or the former, so was an unstable socio-economic formation and had to move one way or the other. The reasons behind the collapse of the USSR in a nutshell.


 
So your beloved Trot's version would resemble a mix between amazon.com, dooyoo.co.uk and a fucking Argos catalogue?


----------



## Spion (Aug 18, 2010)

Ern's posts on this thread could be seen as an example of a zero-feedback planning mechanism, so I guess he's being true to type


----------



## Catherine Lech (Aug 18, 2010)

Spion said:


> It's possibly more surprising it lasted as long as it did. If you intend to plan an economy it can only work in the long term with the maximum possible feedback from producers and consumers. The USSR lacked this. Bureaucrats planned blind because their privilege depended on the mass of people not being allowed to see the inner workings of the plan. That worked for so long -- while the economy rapidly caught up in terms of huge infrastructural projects -- but as soon as that was achieved and keeping pace with the world demanded a wide range of consumer products the USSR's economy inevitably slipped behind. It's easy to guess how many steelworks and railways a country needs, but to satisfy demand for the everyday details you have to have feedback from the consumer, either via democratic planning mechanisms or the market. The bureaucratised USSR didn't have the latter or the former, so was an unstable socio-economic formation and had to move one way or the other. The reasons behind the collapse of the USSR in a nutshell.



I know, but that's a separate, if connected, issue from whether people criticised the system (or, to get back to the point, whether people would be allowed to criticise an hypothetical future communism or whatever-discussion of which is always an opportunity for people to dust off their copies of Totalitarianism for Infants.)


----------



## Spion (Aug 18, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> So your beloved Trot's version would resemble a mix between amazon.com, dooyoo.co.uk and a fucking Argos catalogue?


Except with private property abolished and production carried out for need. As determined by the most comprehensive possible mechanisms for determining design, numbers, modifications etc of goods produced.

That's in part the role soviets/workers councils were intended for. I suspect we have many ways to improve on simple shows of hands with today's means of handling information.

It's telling that you're incapable of thinking outside this current society for your examples.


----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 18, 2010)

It would have been totally democraticised had Stalin not been murdered in 1953 and The Snake Khrushchev come to power...


----------



## Spion (Aug 18, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> It would have been totally democraticised had Stalin not been murdered in 1953 and The Snake Khrushchev come to power...


Evidence?


----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 18, 2010)

Spion said:


> Evidence?


 
Burnt by The Snake Khrushchev and his CIA-Trot operatives.


----------



## Spion (Aug 18, 2010)

Oh, right. So, it's just in your head? Get. Some. Help


----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 18, 2010)

Spion said:


> Oh, right. So, it's just in your head? Get. Some. Help


 
Evidence it didn't happen?


----------



## Spion (Aug 18, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> Evidence it didn't happen?


No, evidence that Stalin planned to democratise the USSR


----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 18, 2010)

Spion said:


> No, evidence that Stalin planned to democratise the USSR


 






Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform


----------



## Spion (Aug 18, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform


Can you point me straight to the primary sources on this?


----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 18, 2010)

Spion said:


> Can you point me straight to the primary sources on this?


 
See the references, fool.


----------



## Idaho (Aug 18, 2010)

He certainly democratised most of these lot:


----------



## Idaho (Aug 18, 2010)

Early airbrushing


----------



## Spion (Aug 18, 2010)

I want you to tell me the what you consider the compelling primary source evidence for Stalin's supposed plan to democratise the USSR. Surely you've read the thing and could tell me that in a flash,  no?


----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 18, 2010)

Idaho said:


> Early airbrushing


 
CIA Propaganda.


----------



## Idaho (Aug 18, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> CIA Propaganda.


 
Now you are getting into Jazzz territory


----------



## Idaho (Aug 18, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform


 
Written by Grover Furr   Even Jazzz's sources are better than that!


----------



## Spion (Aug 18, 2010)

Great name for a loonspud


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Aug 18, 2010)

"Rest assured that Comrade Stalin will do his duty by the people: the working class; the peasantry; and the intelligentsia."

Applaud you swines!


----------



## audiotech (Aug 19, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> I'm talking about Communists, or wannabe Communists, separating off certain people from their historical context , polishing others like big brass mantle piece ornaments, and saying what is and what isn't 'genuine.'  Stalin was a cunt, but he was also a Communist and the Soviet project undertaken before and under him was a controversial attempt to establish socialism.  Something which mobilised millions, enjoyed a global scope and coherency and saw other regimes try to emulate its achievements.  You want the pure, unsullied version, where the immutable will of history will provide for something that has not and will never exist except in a student's wank stain.  It's perhaps better to try and understand why it went pear-shaped than to try to deny, or pretend, that no such thing has ever been tried.


 
Stalin was a national socialist. Socialism in one country and all that.


----------



## audiotech (Aug 19, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> [video=youtube;_NG7UdQHH2w]
> 
> Applaud you swines!



I can imagine a note being passed to the scrutineers stating: 'Make note of those that don't.'


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Aug 19, 2010)

audiotech said:


> Stalin was a national socialist. Socialism in one country and all that.



How else was the revolution to continue?  Like Plekhanov's earlier prediction of isolation forcing the revolutionaries to look inward and create an "Inca Communism."


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Aug 19, 2010)

audiotech said:


> I can imagine a note being passed to the scrutineers stating: 'Make note of those that don't.'



The foundations for Socialism had been laid.  Build and build upon them, but paradise on earth can be subject to Party postponement.  He was also carrying on from the earlier unveiling of the Soviet Union's constitution.  The writer of that was languishing in a cell of the Lubyanka at the time.


----------



## Spion (Aug 19, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> The foundations for Socialism had been laid.


Only in the sense that capitalism had been destroyed. The only force that could 'build socialism' by democratic planning -- ie the working class -- was utterly deprived of the means to control society, usurped by a brutal dictatorship. For that reason the USSR was stuck, unstable and doomed to fail.

See my summary from earlier:



Spion said:


> It's possibly more surprising it lasted as long as it did. If you intend to plan an economy it can only work in the long term with the maximum possible feedback from producers and consumers. The USSR lacked this. Bureaucrats planned blind because their privilege depended on the mass of people not being allowed to see the inner workings of the plan. That worked for so long -- while the economy rapidly caught up in terms of huge infrastructural projects -- but as soon as that was achieved and keeping pace with the world demanded a wide range of consumer products the USSR's economy inevitably slipped behind. It's easy to guess how many steelworks and railways a country needs, but to satisfy demand for the everyday details you have to have feedback from the consumer, either via democratic planning mechanisms or the market. The bureaucratised USSR didn't have the latter or the former, so was an unstable socio-economic formation and had to move one way or the other. The reasons behind the collapse of the USSR in a nutshell.


 
You Stalinists just have zero faith in the working classes


----------



## invisibleplanet (Aug 19, 2010)

Spion said:


> Can you point me straight to the primary sources on this?


 


ernestolynch said:


> See the references, fool.


 


Communicating with ernestolynch is like communicating with a stroppy 15-yr old


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Aug 19, 2010)

Spion said:


> You Stalinists just have zero faith in the working classes



I am not a Stalinist.


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 19, 2010)

They did defeat the Nazis and put the first man in space though, so that is 2-nil for the glorious USSR


----------



## Idaho (Aug 19, 2010)

DotCommunist said:


> They did defeat the Nazis and put the first man in space though, so that is 2-nil for the glorious USSR


 
It's true. But I am still glad I never had to live there.


----------



## Bakunin (Aug 19, 2010)

Idaho said:


> Written by Grover Furr   Even Jazzz's sources are better than that!



A leading Communist theoretician discussing their onward march towards world domination, yesterday:


----------



## Catherine Lech (Aug 19, 2010)

Idaho said:


> It's true. But I am still glad I never had to live there.



I did for a while. In most respects it wasn't that bad, at least prior to the complete collapse brought about both by internal problems inadequately addressed and listening to the advice of the kind of wild-eyed ideologues who have been in the process of wrecking the western economies too for the past thirty years. As a result they have the worst of both worlds: dictatorship of the oligarchs and relative (and in many cases absolute) poverty. 

Certainly there were many, many worse places in the world to live than what the USSR became after the madness of the Stalin period.


----------



## Catherine Lech (Aug 19, 2010)

Spion said:


> Only in the sense that capitalism had been destroyed. The only force that could 'build socialism' by democratic planning -- ie the working class -- was utterly deprived of the means to control society, usurped by a brutal dictatorship. For that reason the USSR was stuck, unstable and doomed to fail.


 
The trouble is that nobody ever spells out how the democratic planning of an entire economy is supposed to work.


----------



## Idaho (Aug 19, 2010)

Catherine Lech said:


> The trouble is that nobody ever spells out how the democratic planning of an entire economy is supposed to work.


 
There are two versions. 

The magic robots version where magic robots do everything and we live in socialist luxury watching them.

The vote on everything version - where we vote on 200 things a day from the size of wooden spoons to the siting of a zebra crossing in Norwich.


----------



## Spion (Aug 19, 2010)

Every workplace and every w/c community would have an organisation in which people can have a say/vote in what they produce/consume. Those feed up to regional and national bodies with representatives (fully recallable and accountable and on an average wage) staffing higher level bodies to make more strategic decisions based on what the base level organisations want. 

Really it's not difficult to flesh out, with some imagination. It's just democracy applied to much more of life - ie economic democracy - than voting every four years for someone who ignores your will anyway.

In reality, given a situation of great upheaval and workers wielding greater control, much of this would be resolved by practical necessity


----------



## Spion (Aug 19, 2010)

Idaho said:


> There are two versions.
> 
> The magic robots version where magic robots do everything and we live in socialist luxury watching them.
> 
> The vote on everything version - where we vote on 200 things a day from the size of wooden spoons to the siting of a zebra crossing in Norwich.


You're such a tit when it comes to thinking about society


----------



## Catherine Lech (Aug 19, 2010)

Spion said:


> You're such a tit when it comes to thinking about society



It is difficult, however, to imagine the mass enthusiasm required for democracy of this kind being maintained indefinitely, even if it can be created in the first place.


----------



## Spion (Aug 19, 2010)

Catherine Lech said:


> It is difficult, however, to imagine the mass enthusiasm required for democracy of this kind being maintained indefinitely, even if it can be created in the first place.


It *is *difficult to imagine having control over our work, over the things we consume, over the direction of our society, given the experience we have of having little to no control over our lives right now, basically being taken along a track governed by big business interests. That's not to say there isn't another way or that it hasn't happened on occasion either


----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 19, 2010)

Spion said:


> Every workplace and every w/c community would have an organisation in which people can have a say/vote in what they produce/consume. Those feed up to regional and national bodies with representatives (fully recallable and accountable and on an average wage) staffing higher level bodies to make more strategic decisions based on what the base level organisations want.
> 
> Really it's not difficult to flesh out, with some imagination. It's just democracy applied to much more of life - ie economic democracy - than voting every four years for someone who ignores your will anyway.
> 
> In reality, given a situation of great upheaval and workers wielding greater control, much of this would be resolved by practical necessity


 
You disagree with giving people the say over bringing back hanging though, don't you?


----------



## Pickman's model (Aug 19, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> You disagree with giving people the say over bringing back hanging though, don't you?


 
the guillotine


----------



## sleaterkinney (Aug 19, 2010)

DotCommunist said:


> They did defeat the Nazis and put the first man in space though, so that is 2-nil for the glorious USSR


 
Defeated them after they were knocked back when they asked to join... -1


----------



## Spion (Aug 19, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> You disagree with giving people the say over bringing back hanging though, don't you?


No, I'm not against people having their say about that. I am against the death penalty in capitalist society. They're two different things.

Some socialist you are, wanting the boss class to have right to kill people. Shame on you


----------



## Sgt Howie (Aug 19, 2010)

Great to see Trots on this thread displaying their customary sense of humour and self-awareness.


----------



## discokermit (Aug 19, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> You disagree with giving people the say over bringing back hanging though, don't you?


 
haha! you useless fucking middle class cunt. you're embarrassing.


----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 19, 2010)

discokermit said:


> haha! you useless fucking middle class cunt. you're embarrassing.


 
Shut it you fucking bedsit cowboy.


----------



## discokermit (Aug 19, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> Shut it you fucking bedsit cowboy.


 
that's 'proletarian bedsit cowboy' to you, teach. you middle class prick.


----------



## Orang Utan (Aug 19, 2010)

!


----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 19, 2010)

discokermit said:


> that's 'proletarian bedsit cowboy' to you, teach. you middle class prick.


 
You've not done a day's graft in your life you fucking druggie.


----------



## Orang Utan (Aug 19, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> You've not done a day's graft in your life you fucking druggie.


 
wrong


----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 19, 2010)

Orang Utan said:


> wrong


 
I can only go by his posts, he sounds like some Withnail sort.


----------



## discokermit (Aug 19, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> You've not done a day's graft in your life you fucking druggie.


 
haven't stopped since i was sixteen, teach. time served fitter/fabricator/welder (can't really call myself a fitter though as i still have all my fingers). 

when did you leave school? never?


----------



## Spion (Aug 19, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> You've not done a day's graft in your life you fucking druggie.


I'm ex West Mids factory worker. Disco still works in one. Get a fucking clue you soft twat


----------



## discokermit (Aug 19, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> I can only go by his posts, he sounds like some Withnail sort.


 
lol!


----------



## Spion (Aug 19, 2010)

discokermit said:


> haven't stopped since i was sixteen, teach. time served fitter/fabricator/welder (can't really call myself a fitter though as i still have all my fingers).


I was a toolmaker. Half my workmates had lost fingers in presses


----------



## discokermit (Aug 19, 2010)

Spion said:


> I was a toolmaker. Half my workmates had lost fingers in presses


 
ouch!

in the foundry maintenance shop where i did my apprenticeship, three of the fitters out of ten had lost fingers.


----------



## Spion (Aug 19, 2010)

discokermit said:


> ouch!
> 
> in the foundry maintenance shop where i did my apprenticeship, three of the fitters out of ten had lost fingers.


How did they lose em - drop forging presses? (if that's what they're called)

In press toolmaking there were far too many opportunities to leave a bit of hand in when you were setting up a tool for testing


----------



## discokermit (Aug 19, 2010)

Spion said:


> How did they lose em - drop forging presses? (if that's what they're called)
> 
> In press toolmaking there were far too many opportunities to leave a bit of hand in when you were setting up a tool for testing


 
one lost one when a barrel furnace (a few tons) he was working on dropped on his finger, it was chocked up with wood at the time which gave way.

another lost one hammering a chisel with a two pound hammer and missed. crushed his finger so bad it had to be removed.

another lost a tip trying to line up a bolt hole on the furnace door lifting mechanism when it dropped.

my dad was in the local paper when the arc furnace he worked on exploded, burning all his arm. one bloke burnt both legs and another his whole back. i don't think either of them worked again.


apart from breaking my thumb on a lathe and an assortment of burns i've been pretty lucky.


----------



## Spion (Aug 19, 2010)

Luckily I've got only one little scar, from slipping and taking a chunk of skin off on the sharp edge of a press tool, but then I got out of it long before the odds really shortened on doing myself any proper damage. Happy days tho, but glad not to be doing it any more.


----------



## discokermit (Aug 19, 2010)

Spion said:


> Luckily I've got only one little scar, from slipping and taking a chunk of skin off on the sharp edge of a press tool, but then I got out of it long before the odds really shortened on doing myself any proper damage. Happy days tho, but glad not to be doing it any more.


 
anyways, back to ern. due to our engineering backgrounds, it does mean we're qualified to spot a tool when we see one!


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 19, 2010)

Sgt Howie said:


> Great to see Trots on this thread displaying their customary sense of humour and self-awareness.


 
Do you want me to lapdance for you?


----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 19, 2010)

discokermit said:


> one lost one when a barrel furnace (a few tons) he was working on dropped on his finger, it was chocked up with wood at the time which gave way.
> 
> Another lost one hammering a chisel with a two pound hammer and missed. Crushed his finger so bad it had to be removed.
> 
> ...


 
bullshitter


----------



## Orang Utan (Aug 19, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> I can only go by his posts, he sounds like some Withnail sort.


 
disco's the most earnest and genuine red, nay, person i know. i'd trust him with my life 
whereas i can never tell whether your beliefs are genuinely held or not.


----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 19, 2010)

He comes across as a tool online. So do I though lol.


----------



## Orang Utan (Aug 19, 2010)

don't we all


----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 19, 2010)

Orang Utan said:


> don't we all


 
Well indeed. It's all part of the act, if we didn't, it'd just be different.


----------



## Spion (Aug 19, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> Do you want me to lapdance for you?


----------



## discokermit (Aug 19, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> bullshitter


 
lol! have some cake,








see that face i'm pulling? that's for you.


----------



## discokermit (Aug 19, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> He comes across as a tool online. So do I though lol.


 
we're both tools. difference is i'm a miller aerowave tig welding set and you're a box of chalk.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 19, 2010)

Is chalk really a tool?


----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 19, 2010)

Bless, you remind me of montevideo. Still re-enacting your childhood, not realising people grow up.


----------



## discokermit (Aug 19, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> Is chalk really a tool?


 
if you're a teacher i suppose it is.


----------



## Belushi (Aug 19, 2010)

Orang Utan said:


> disco's the most earnest and genuine red, nay, person i know. i'd trust him with my life


 
Much as it pains me to defend a trot, this.

He's even more aggro irl


----------



## discokermit (Aug 19, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> Bless, you remind me of montevideo. Still re-enacting your childhood, not realising people grow up.


 you haven't. you haven't even left school.


----------



## discokermit (Aug 19, 2010)

Belushi said:


> He's even more aggro irl


----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 19, 2010)

I'm not the one whose mind is still thinking he's 13.


----------



## discokermit (Aug 19, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> I'm not the one whose mind is still thinking he's 13.


 
another astounding insight from urbans very own mind reader. thirteen year old withnail. lol.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 19, 2010)

discokermit said:


> if you're a teacher i suppose it is.


 
True. It's a shit tool though. I'd rather have a digger or a dog or something.


----------



## discokermit (Aug 19, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> True. It's a shit tool though. I'd rather have a digger or a dog or something.


 
i used a twenty eight pound sledgehammer once. it was ace. fourteen pounders seem a bit delicate after using that though.


----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 19, 2010)

'ardest game in the world.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 19, 2010)

I don't think I've ever used a slegehammer. I've not lived.

Eta - mind you, I got to smash a load of paving slabs with a hammer in my garden the other day. It was fun.


----------



## discokermit (Aug 19, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> 'ardest game in the world.


 
go.

the rules are simple but the strategy is unbelievably complex.


----------



## discokermit (Aug 19, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> I don't think I've ever used a slegehammer. I've not lived.
> 
> Eta - mind you, I got to smash a load of paving slabs with a hammer in my garden the other day. It was fun.


 
hammers are great.


----------



## Orang Utan (Aug 19, 2010)

my hands are as soft and unmarked as an eloi's


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 19, 2010)

If I had a hammer


----------



## Orang Utan (Aug 19, 2010)

we used to sing that in woodcraft folk


----------



## discokermit (Aug 19, 2010)

i sing it at work. amuses me no end.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 19, 2010)

Orang Utan said:


> we used to sing that in woodcraft folk


 
Is that a cult?


----------



## Orang Utan (Aug 19, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> Is that a cult?


erm, sort of


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 19, 2010)

Tidy


----------



## discokermit (Aug 19, 2010)

proper.


----------



## Orang Utan (Aug 19, 2010)

it's like the cubs in that it indoctrinates kids into established ideologies, but it's unisex and pacificist/socialist.
and they let us smoke weed when we went camping.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Aug 19, 2010)

That actually does sound quite tidy. I went to cubs and it was wank.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Aug 19, 2010)

Spion said:


> It *is *difficult to imagine having control over our work, over the things we consume, over the direction of our society, given the experience we have of having little to no control over our lives right now, basically being taken along a track governed by big business interests. That's not to say there isn't another way or that it hasn't happened on occasion either



He's right, and if you knew your history outside the Party, you'd know that many simply couldn't have given a flying fuck about it, although they were always pushing against it, taking back as much as they could, of what had been stolen.  Even when the state had appropriated the ideology and language of class war.  When Tomsky was giving himself a bullet, the established and migrant workers (full of contradictions themselves) had already forced the state to transform the the once-redundant trade unions into outlets of social welfare.  _If you want your big shiny cities, you can fucking well provide my family with a decent roof over our heads._  If it had been Trotsky's Big Push, instead of Stalin's, what would he have made of wildcat strikes against it?  Counter-revolutionary?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Aug 19, 2010)

discokermit said:


> lol! have some cake,
> 
> 
> 
> ...



I'm an unskilled prole in the service sector, so get more oppression points than you.


----------



## discokermit (Aug 19, 2010)

i tip my hat.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Aug 20, 2010)

Idaho said:


> Written by Grover Furr   Even Jazzz's sources are better than that!



Don't you think (given you're a left leaning academic) it is dangerous to align yourself with rightwing shitstirrers trying to get a leftwing academic sacked?


----------



## Spion (Aug 20, 2010)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Don't you think (given you're a left leaning academic)


It's nice to start the working day with a LOL


----------



## Idaho (Aug 20, 2010)

Is he saying that I am a left-leaning academic?


----------



## Spion (Aug 20, 2010)

That's how I read it.

Dead wrong on both counts, eh?


----------



## Streathamite (Aug 20, 2010)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Don't you think (given you're a left leaning academic) it is dangerous to align yourself with rightwing shitstirrers trying to get a leftwing academic sacked?


I'm pretty sure Idaho works for a 'big 4' accountancy firm...


----------



## Idaho (Aug 20, 2010)

Streathamite said:


> I'm pretty sure Idaho works for a 'big 4' accountancy firm...


 
Ah.. so you must be the artist formerly known as Silicon?

And for the record I am a professional wrestler.


----------



## Idaho (Aug 20, 2010)

Spion said:


> That's how I read it.
> 
> Dead wrong on both counts, eh?


 
Politically agnostic is how I feel these days. Unconvinced by any of them.


----------



## Spion (Aug 20, 2010)

Idaho said:


> Politically agnostic is how I feel these days. Unconvinced by any of them.


Sort of above of them all, elder statesman-like


----------



## Idaho (Aug 20, 2010)

Spion said:


> Sort of above of them all, elder statesman-like


 
More like a scary uncle that you don't let babysit.


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 20, 2010)

Streathamite said:


> I'm pretty sure Idaho works for a 'big 4' accountancy firm...


Surely he's not *that* big a cunt?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 20, 2010)

Spion said:


> Sort of above of them all, elder statesman-like



Tony Blair-like "elder statesman" or Tony Benn-like "elder statesman", though?


----------



## ViolentPanda (Aug 20, 2010)

Idaho said:


> More like a scary uncle that you don't let babysit.



Why don't they let you babysit, and what makes you scary, those are the questions!


----------



## Idaho (Aug 20, 2010)

ViolentPanda said:


> Why don't they let you babysit, and what makes you scary, those are the questions!


 
They think I might be a padeotrician.


----------



## Spion (Aug 20, 2010)

ViolentPanda said:


> Why don't they let you babysit, and what makes you scary, those are the questions!


Not without a question mark they're not


----------



## Idaho (Aug 20, 2010)

Spion said:


> Not without a question mark they're not


 
They are quizzical statements? (rising intonation at the end)


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Aug 20, 2010)

Idaho said:


> Is he saying that I am a left-leaning academic?


 
It was early and I thought it was Idris who made that post, massive apologies to the Irish prof who is sound and not a cunt.


----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 20, 2010)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> It was early and I thought it was Idris who made that post, massive apologies to the Irish prof who is sound and not a cunt.


----------



## Orang Utan (Aug 20, 2010)

nah idris is that cunt who chucked all of the indians out and ate bishops' brains


----------



## Idris2002 (Aug 29, 2010)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Don't you think (given you're a left leaning academic) it is dangerous to align yourself with rightwing shitstirrers trying to get a leftwing academic sacked?


 
Thank you for the kind remarks above. I happen to agree with you that it is particularly dangerous in the current climate to give the managers new sticks to beat us with - but Grover Furr is still a 24-carat arsehole. That paper of his defending the Soviet invasion of Poland after 17th September 1939 - I'd dearly like to see him repeat that to the face of a Polish person.


----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 29, 2010)

Idris2002 said:


> Thank you for the kind remarks above. I happen to agree with you that it is particularly dangerous in the current climate to give the managers new sticks to beat us with - but Grover Furr is still a 24-carat arsehole. That paper of his defending the Soviet invasion of Poland after 17th September 1939 - I'd dearly like to see him repeat that to the face of a Polish person.


 
Saved shit loads of Jews, Gypsies and Polish communists from the Fascist.


----------



## Idris2002 (Aug 29, 2010)




----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 29, 2010)




----------



## Fuchs66 (Aug 30, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> Saved shit loads of Jews, Gypsies and Polish communists from the Fascist.



Quantify "shit loads"

also:







> Since Poland's conscription system required every unexempted university graduate to become a reserve officer,[6] the NKVD was able to round up much of the Polish intelligentsia, and the Russian, Ukrainian, Protestant, Muslim Tatar, *Jewish, *Georgian,[7] and Belarusian intelligentsia of Polish citizenship.[8]


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katyn_Massacre


----------



## audiotech (Aug 30, 2010)

Drum roll....










'CIA'.


----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 30, 2010)

Wiki-fucking-pedia LOL


----------



## DotCommunist (Aug 30, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> True. It's a shit tool though. I'd rather have a digger or a dog or something.


 
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.'


----------



## Fuchs66 (Aug 30, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> Wiki-fucking-pedia LOL


 
I thought I'd keep it relatively simple for you, but there are other links

How about you providing some accurate numbers of these shed loads of Poles, Jews and "Gypsies" that were saved by the heroic Soviet forces.

True many did initially welcome the forces entering the Eastern parts of the country (as many Eastern Europeans initially welcomed the Nazis), but soon found out they were jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.


----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 30, 2010)

Bollocks, you CIA propagand.


----------



## Fuchs66 (Aug 30, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> Bollocks, you CIA propagand.


 
So you are just making it up then

E2A nice bit of paranoia there, Uncle Josef would have been proud


----------



## ernestolynch (Aug 30, 2010)

Not a real photo is it?


----------



## Fuchs66 (Aug 30, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> Not a real photo is it?


 
Probably not, I'm sure the Soviet forces were (with reason) a bit shy about getting photographed at Katyn, are you saying it doesn't represent  what occurred in the Soviet occupied areas of Poland during the initial stages of WW2?


----------



## krtek a houby (Aug 30, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> Wiki-fucking-pedia LOL


 
ermesto-fucking-lynch LOL


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 18, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform


 
LOL now i know you are trolling, if any confirmation was needed !!! 
hate to break the sad news to you btw 

btw the other day I saw a girl in a Stalin Tshirt lol - i thought of you.


----------



## invisibleplanet (Sep 18, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> Saved shit loads of Jews, Gypsies and Polish communists from the Fascist.


 
безродный космополит


----------



## dynamicbaddog (Sep 18, 2010)

frogwoman said:


> the other day I saw a girl in a Stalin Tshirt lol - .


 I've got a t-shirt that has an image of the soup-nazi from Seinfeld on it, but everyone keeps thinking it's Stalin.
-  embarrassing


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 18, 2010)

no but, this was definitely stalin - she was in this Communist Party of Great Britain-marxist leninist smal groujp on the tuc demo and she had a picture of uncle joe surrounded by his entourage 
she had a lot of dirty looks and disbelieving stares  especially because quite a lot of us there were trots, but even so, not the sort of thing you expect  

weird thing was she looked about the same age as me ...


----------



## Proper Tidy (Sep 18, 2010)

On the Unite for Jobs march in Brum last year, the Stalin Society (I think) had a giant banner of Uncle Joe. The rest of the march sped up until they were about a hundred yards behind everybody else.

Stalin lol.

Ironic veneration or lunacy?


----------



## dynamicbaddog (Sep 18, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> On the Unite for Jobs march in Brum last year, the Stalin Society (I think) had a giant banner of Uncle Joe. The rest of the march sped up until they were about a hundred yards behind everybody else.
> 
> Stalin lol.
> 
> Ironic veneration or lunacy?


  well I suppose he did win world war 2....


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 18, 2010)

oh jesus - there's actually an org called the stalin society?


----------



## dynamicbaddog (Sep 18, 2010)

frogwoman said:


> oh jesus - there's actually an org called the stalin society?


 
aye
http://www.stalinsociety.org.uk/


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 18, 2010)

Oh Jesus at first i thought it was a joke 



> The Stalin Society was formed in 1991 to
> defend Stalin and his work on the basis of fact and to refute capitalist, revisionist, opportunist and Trotskyist propaganda directed against him.



but they are actually serious  there's a meeting in September ....  



the lapst pamphlet dates from 2003 tho lol. holy shit


----------



## Proper Tidy (Sep 18, 2010)

Stalin Society are mostly CPGB M-L, think Harpal Brar is still the chief though and he's head of that Proletarian lot.

E2a - turns out Brar is still in the CPGB M-L, chair in fact.


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 18, 2010)

Yea this woman was from CPGB M-L, they had a tiny amount of people there, mostly grannies ... old stalinist grannies


----------



## Proper Tidy (Sep 18, 2010)

frogwoman said:


> Yea this woman was from CPGB M-L, they had a tiny amount of people there, mostly grannies ... old stalinist grannies


 
They're all fucking old, same with the CPB really.

Mind you, there's a tanky CPB woman from around here that I quite fancy.


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 18, 2010)

What about the cpgb (not m-l)? i knew a girl at uni who was in that


----------



## Proper Tidy (Sep 18, 2010)

frogwoman said:


> What about the cpgb (not m-l)? i knew a girl at uni who was in that


 
Yeah, weekly worker lot have quite a few youngsters I think, fair few student societies etc. I only know one CPGB bod mind.


----------



## dynamicbaddog (Sep 18, 2010)

frogwoman said:


> What about the cpgb (not m-l)? i knew a girl at uni who was in that


 
they used to be a Trotsyist faction in the real CPGB. (orginally producing a paper called The Leninist - they got kicked out around the same time some of the Morning Star people did)


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 18, 2010)

dynamicbaddog said:


> they used to be a Trotsyist faction in the real CPGB. (orginally producing a paper called The Leninist - they got kicked out around the same time some of the Morning Star people did)


 
The Leninist is the CPGB/WW - they weren't trots. They were stalinists influenced by Turkish Stalinism.


----------



## dynamicbaddog (Sep 18, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> The Leninist is the CPGB/WW - they weren't trots. They were stalinists influenced by Turkish Stalinism.



yeah I know they are the WW but I always thought they were trots


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 18, 2010)

yeh the weekly worker !! 

the girl i knew wasn't a trot i don't tihnk but she didnt like stalin


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 18, 2010)

Nope, hard line stalinists.


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 18, 2010)

how come the gal and other people in the party (and i was with her on a few demos btw) would get pissed off about leaflets of stalin being handed around?  unless she was lying and was actually a secret trot, but I dont think she was


----------



## Proper Tidy (Sep 18, 2010)

Nah, I mean you are right Butchers that they were influenced by Turkish Stalinism, but they now hold a very critical line on the USSR. Fuck knows what they do stand for, but they're not Stalinists any more. They had a lot to do with the Sparts and nowadays AWL.


----------



## dynamicbaddog (Sep 18, 2010)

frogwoman said:


> how come the gal and other people in the party (and i was with her on a few demos btw) would get pissed off about leaflets of stalin being handed around?  unless she was lying and was actually a secret trot, but I dont think she was


 
The Leninist used to printed on pink paper just like the FT


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 18, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> Nah, I mean you are right Butchers that they were influenced by Turkish Stalinism, but they now hold a very critical line on the USSR. Fuck knows what they do stand for, but they're not Stalinists any more. They had a lot to do with the Sparts and nowadays AWL.


 
fuck, the awl??! really? This girl was always going on demos about the iraq war and Palestine, she was really politically aware, doesn't strike me as someone would get involved with that lot at all ..


----------



## Proper Tidy (Sep 18, 2010)

> The party has been involved in a rethinking of the class nature of the former USSR. Despite its origins in the NCP, the CPGB (PCC) developed an account critical of the former Soviet Union, seeing it as a bureaucratic collectivist society.
> During the Kosovo War of the late 1990s, the party supported the ethnic-Albanian Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) and supports the complete secession of Kosovo from Serbia. The party refers to the Serbian province as "Kosova", the Albanian and Ottoman Turkish name for Kosovo.[6]
> The party calls for the abolition of age of consent laws arguing for "the right of individuals to enter into the sexual relations they choose provided this does not conflict with the rights of others. Alternative legislation to protect children from sexual abuse."



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_Great_Britain_(Provisional_Central_Committee)

'What we fight for' isn't very illuminating tbh:

http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/whatwefightfor.php


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 18, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> Nah, I mean you are right Butchers that they were influenced by Turkish Stalinism, but they now hold a very critical line on the USSR. Fuck knows what they do stand for, but they're not Stalinists any more. They had a lot to do with the Sparts and nowadays AWL.


 
I'm on about then not now. i.e when they were a faction in the old CPGB.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Sep 18, 2010)

frogwoman said:


> fuck, the awl??! really? This girl was always going on demos about the iraq war and Palestine, she was really politically aware, doesn't strike me as someone would get involved with that lot at all ..


 
Dunno how close they are now, but at one time CPGB and AWL were on about merging their newspapers - so AWL would have had the weekly worker


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 18, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communist_Party_of_Great_Britain_(Provisional_Central_Committee)
> 
> 'What we fight for' isn't very illuminating tbh:
> 
> http://www.cpgb.org.uk/worker/whatwefightfor.php


 
 Seriously??!!


----------



## Proper Tidy (Sep 18, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> I'm on about then not now. i.e when they were a faction in the old CPGB.


 
Oops


----------



## Proper Tidy (Sep 18, 2010)

frogwoman said:


> Seriously??!!


 
Aye - they don't much like SP either, no sure why. Had a CPGB lad screaming I was a nationalist in my face at the same march in Brum as the Stalin Society. Odd day. Anyway, CPGB always go in studs up on SP campaigns - CNWP, YFfJ, etc. Mind you, they wanted in on TUSC.


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 18, 2010)

the gal i was friends with liked the SWP though  you're a nationalist?? erm, why  was this because of the no2eu thng, or does it go further than that ? x


----------



## dynamicbaddog (Sep 18, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> Aye - they don't much like SP either, .



but to be fair the SP does hate all the other groups on the left


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 18, 2010)

so does everyone else though


----------



## Proper Tidy (Sep 18, 2010)

frogwoman said:


> the gal i was friends with liked the SWP though  you're a nationalist?? erm, why  was this because of the no2eu thng, or does it go further than that ? x



Aye, no2eu.



dynamicbaddog said:


> but to be fair the SP does hate all the other groups on the left



No no no, not _all_ of them. Just best to avoid the loons, innit...



frogwoman said:


> so does everyone else though


 
See, common sense.


----------



## dynamicbaddog (Sep 18, 2010)

frogwoman said:


> so does everyone else though



not an excuse.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Sep 18, 2010)

dynamicbaddog said:


> not an excuse.


 
I don't think it is actually true though. SP has always been open to working with other groups, and there are countless examples of us joining forces with other groups for campaigns or electoral fronts. It's easy to say the left groups should just work together, but the reality - as SA & Respect demonstrated - isn't so simple.


----------



## ernestolynch (Sep 18, 2010)

The Weekly Wanker lot are Trot degeneRATs.


----------



## Idaho (Sep 19, 2010)

Been doing some actual reading about Trotsky this last week and it's made me realise how weird ernesto is.

Basically Stalin takes over the USSR and in a fit of paranoia starts marginalising and killing off political opponents. Trotsky buggers off and starts slagging him off and Uncle Joe get's uber paranoid and kills all his family and anyone who spoke to him.

Hardly the basis for a political position really.


----------



## ernestolynch (Sep 19, 2010)

'Doing some actual reading' LOL

Question the source, buffoon.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Sep 19, 2010)

Idaho said:


> Been doing some actual reading about Trotsky this last week and it's made me realise how weird ernesto is.
> 
> Basically Stalin takes over the USSR and in a fit of paranoia starts marginalising and killing off political opponents. Trotsky buggers off and starts slagging him off and Uncle Joe get's uber paranoid and kills all his family and anyone who spoke to him.
> 
> Hardly the basis for a political position really.


 
Have you actually read any theory or is it just biographies?


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 20, 2010)

> The party calls for the abolition of age of consent laws arguing for "the right of individuals to enter into the sexual relations they choose provided this does not conflict with the rights of others. Alternative legislation to protect children from sexual abuse."



Im really surprised at this I have to say from the CPGB, I wouldn't have thought the girl I knew or others in the party I came across would have any tolerance for noncery ...


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 20, 2010)

Idaho said:


> Been doing some actual reading about Trotsky this last week and it's made me realise how weird ernesto is.
> 
> Basically Stalin takes over the USSR and in a fit of paranoia starts marginalising and killing off political opponents. Trotsky buggers off and starts slagging him off and Uncle Joe get's uber paranoid and kills all his family and anyone who spoke to him.
> 
> Hardly the basis for a political position really.


 
Its not just that though, it's trotter's analysis of fascism and the "degenerative workers state", lol, and other concepts that got Stalin pissed off with him, and of coure that Stalin was a paranoid cunt who did kill a fuck of a lot of people, most of whom for absolutely no reason. I need to do some more readong about this too tbf as I know rather little about it.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2010)

Trotsky was the anti-pope of medieval times. Stalin was the pope.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Sep 20, 2010)

frogwoman said:


> Im really surprised at this I have to say from the CPGB, I wouldn't have thought the girl I knew or others in the party I came across would have any tolerance for noncery ...


 
One of them, can't recall if its AWL or CPGB, has links with some American group with very strong views on 'inter-generational sex'.

See, when people glibly call for left unity at all costs, this is the sort of shit they should bare in mind.


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 20, 2010)

Fucks sake CPGB !!


----------



## Proper Tidy (Sep 20, 2010)

North American Man-Boy Love Association or something. I kid you not. I just can't remember who it was who supported them - might even have been the sparts.


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 20, 2010)

fucking nambla? i'd be interested if anyone had any links to back this up, I thougt it was just hakim bey's lot which were into this ...


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2010)

I think it was the SWP


----------



## Proper Tidy (Sep 20, 2010)

Was the sparts:



> Their publications frequently criticize the Christian Right's opposition to abortion and homosexuality as examples of an attempt to establish a "sex police." Less popularly, the Spartacist League has defended groups like the North American Man-Boy Love Association on civil libertarian grounds and have called for an end to age of consent laws.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Communist_League_(Fourth_Internationalist)

Erm, sorry AWL & CPGB...


----------



## Idaho (Sep 20, 2010)

frogwoman said:


> Its not just that though, it's trotter's analysis of fascism and the "degenerative workers state", lol, and other concepts that got Stalin pissed off with him, and of coure that Stalin was a paranoid cunt who did kill a fuck of a lot of people, most of whom for absolutely no reason. I need to do some more readong about this too tbf as I know rather little about it.


 
I thought he said that the USSR had become a degenerated worker's state which would either undergo another revolution, or the political elite would become a capitalist elite. The latter proving to be the case.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2010)

Idaho said:


> I thought he said that the USSR had become a degenerated worker's state which would either undergo another revolution, or the political elite would become a capitalist elite. The latter proving to be the case.


 He was right on that reading then. Or was he not idaho?


----------



## Proper Tidy (Sep 20, 2010)

Idaho said:


> I thought he said that the USSR had become a degenerated worker's state which would either undergo another revolution, or the political elite would become a capitalist elite. The latter proving to be the case.


 
Pretty much.

Essentially, a degenerated workers' state is a transition between capitalism and socialism (closer to capitalism, mind) and would therefore either enter a new revolutionary period, or a capitalist counter-revolution. By degenerated workers' state, it is meant a state in which the working class have seized power and the means of production, but power has been co-opted by an undemocratic and unaccountable bureaucracy. Not to be confused with a deformed workers' state...


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2010)

...and total bollocks. Don't forget that.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Sep 20, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> ...and total bollocks. Don't forget that.


 
Away with you


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 20, 2010)

Idaho said:


> I thought he said that the USSR had become a degenerated worker's state which would either undergo another revolution, or the political elite would become a capitalist elite. The latter proving to be the case.


 
however, it is worth mentioning that (imo anyway) although the ussr defo wasn't "real communism", it certainly wasn't entirely capitalist either and thus it is a mistake to see its collapse as one type of capitalist regime switching to another ... for many people, although certainly not all, it was more equal than capitalist regimes and offered a higher standard of living ...


----------



## Proper Tidy (Sep 20, 2010)

frogwoman said:


> yeah, what proper tidy said basically
> however, it is worth mentioning that (imo anyway) although the ussr defo wasn't "real communism", it certainly wasn't entirely capitalist either and thus it is a mistake to see its collapse as one type of capitalist regime switching to another ... for many people, although certainly not all, it was more equal than capitalist regimes and offered a higher standard of living ...


 
Precisely. Baby and bathwater.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> Away with you


 
Amazing predictive powers he had: either the USSR will become communist or it won't. How many lotteries did he win?


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2010)

frogwoman said:


> however, it is worth mentioning that (imo anyway) although the ussr defo wasn't "real communism", it certainly wasn't entirely capitalist either and thus it is a mistake to see its collapse as one type of capitalist regime switching to another ... for many people, although certainly not all, it was more equal than capitalist regimes and offered a higher standard of living ...


 
Already?


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 20, 2010)

i've never really had much sympathy for the view that stalinism is exactly the same as the way the Soviet Union was after stalin died and through the rest of its history as well ... 

but the "sparts" sound like fucking mentalists: 




> The Spartacists also devote much attention to polemicizing against other communist and socialist groups. These polemics are usually exceptionally forceful and are often seen by the groups being attacked as unnecessarily disruptive of their activities. The Spartacist League is also highly critical of groups associated with the reunified Fourth International, whose politics they characterize as Pabloite. The International Bolshevik Tendency (IBT), a split from The Spartacists, are targeted frequently, with Spartacist members attending IBT public meetings regularly to oppose their organisation. It has been reported that at times, The Spartacists will not even engage in political debate regarding the issue of the meeting, but rather criticise the history of other organisations.
> In a book entitled Death Agony of the Fourth International, Workers Power and the Irish Workers Group claim the iSt's strategy was/is based on, and they quote from an iSt document, "destroying" other left wing groups. They claim this involves occupying rooms where other left groups are due to have meetings as well as other methods. Furthermore, they argue that the Spartacists, while developing a correct position that the SWP were centrist, did not recognise that the Fourth International had degenerated before it split, and therefore were more critical of one section than of the other.



devoting most of their energy to criticising a tiny left wing group which split from them and prob only has about 8 members ...


----------



## Proper Tidy (Sep 20, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> Amazing predictive powers he had: either the USSR will become communist or it won't. How many lotteries did he win?


 
I'm sure he was a champion down the dog tracks.

He was right.


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 20, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> Already?


 
 

Not if that's what you're thinking


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> I'm sure he was a champion down the dog tracks.
> 
> He was right.


 
We all were.


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 20, 2010)

that's a good point actually


----------



## Proper Tidy (Sep 20, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> We all were.


 
Not everybody, or it would have turned out a-ok.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2010)

Yep, everybody, apart from those who had illusions about maintaining the socialist economic base by a political revolution. What did they call them? Trotskyists i think.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Sep 20, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> Yep, everybody, apart from those who had illusions about maintaining the socialist economic base by a political revolution. What did they call them? Trotskyists i think.


 
Wait, how could we both know and not know? And how is something 'bollocks' if it is also true and accepted by 'everybody'?


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 20, 2010)

to be honest, i think the "other revolution" stuff was probably wishful thinking on trotsky's part.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> Wait, how could we both know and not know? And how is something 'bollocks' if it is also true and accepted by 'everybody'?


 
How could you both know and not know what? The bollocks bit is that you think it took till 89/91 to happen. The everybody bit is - well who didn't think that? Who didn't think the USSR would either collapse into capitlaism, or really gen become communist?


----------



## Idaho (Sep 20, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> He was right on that reading then. Or was he not idaho?


 
I'm sure this is meant to be very witty, but I haven't a clue what you are talking about.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2010)

idaho said:
			
		

> I thought he said that the USSR had become a degenerated worker's state which would either undergo another revolution, or the political elite would become a capitalist elite. The latter proving to be the case.



help?


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 20, 2010)

Btw, communism is still very popular in parts and among a certain section of society in the former USSR, which is why i'm saying this, not because of some trotskyist propaganda I've read - when I was in Moldova, which is in the strange situation where the state is very weak and where, after 1991, the country was basically asset-stripped by many of those in power, they have a public health system that has been left largely untouched since Soviet times (although woefully underfunded tbf, and they did introduce a system of state healthcare insurance), although a lot of private healthcare companies do exist. there are some state owned companies which may have been "privatised" but are basically owned by people in thegovernment or which are very heavily regulated, and have a monopoly on almost everything (there are no other private trolleybus companies for example). However, in some areas there is almost no regulation either, and I'm espeically talking about stuff like the TU laws, the property market and the almost total lack of welfare provision which is repeated across the countries of the former USSR and was encouraged by the IMF. 

Then again, i went to areas in the villages where life has continued almost exactly the same for about 250 years (apart from the addition, in some places, of sattelite tv ...) i was mainly referring to that tbh


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 20, 2010)

i don't think it took till 89 to happen butchers, it was happening (albeit in a less drastic form) before that, especially with kruschchev's reforms and gorbachev etc arriving on the scene - i'll come back to this though later (and i will) as it deserves a longer reply and right now im in the middle of all sorts of stuff


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2010)

In all honesty i wouldn't bother. No offence.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Sep 20, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> The bollocks bit is that you think it took till 89/91 to happen.



Well, the characterisation of degenerated workers' state refers to a model closer to capitalism than it does to a genuine workers' state, so I'm not convinced of the assertion that _we_ (or not universally, anyway) think it took til '89 to happen. It took until '89 to become a wholly capitalist state, but it became an unnaccountable and oppressive bureaucracy long before. Nobody's fooling themselves that it was a workers' utopia, however it must also be acknowledged that gains were made which deserved to be defended.



> The everybody bit is - well who didn't think that? Who didn't think the USSR would either collapse into capitlaism, or really gen become communist?



It wasn't just a prediction, it was a critique of how and why. Trotskyism isn't just 'degenerated workers' state' and that's it. In terms of his critique of the SU, he got it all pretty bang on, didn't he?



> How could you both know and not know what?


 
All this lot:




Proper Tidy said:


> He was right.


 


butchersapron said:


> We all were.


 


Proper Tidy said:


> Not everybody.


 


butchersapron said:


> Yep, everybody, apart from those... Trotskyists.


----------



## butchersapron (Sep 20, 2010)

Yeas, and go on...


----------



## Proper Tidy (Sep 20, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> Yeas, and go on...


 
I don't know where to go


----------



## Idaho (Sep 21, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> In all honesty i wouldn't bother. No offence.


 
His cup of knowledge is already full.


----------



## Spanky Longhorn (Sep 21, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> I don't know where to go


----------



## ernestolynch (Sep 29, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> I don't know where to go


 
Mexico


----------



## Proper Tidy (Sep 30, 2010)

Chase me, chase me


----------



## Idris2002 (Sep 30, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> Mexico


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 30, 2010)

the fuck, is that real?


----------



## Idris2002 (Sep 30, 2010)

frogwoman said:


> the fuck, is that real?


 
No of course it's not real.


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 30, 2010)

OK.   
im slightly worried bout his trousers lol


----------



## Idris2002 (Sep 30, 2010)

frogwoman said:


> OK.
> im slightly worried bout his trousers lol


 
Yes, it looks like 'malenky Iosif' wants to join in the Yalta fun.


----------



## LiamO (Sep 30, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> The Leninist is the CPGB/WW - they weren't trots. They were stalinists influenced by Turkish Stalinism.



I would LOVE to see some of the lenny-bennies I knew choke on their cornflakes at the THOUGHT of their being called (or even thought of) as Trots 

Tankies to their core.

And does the WW stand for Welsh Wankers?

btw no national slur intended PT - it's just that til I met this firm I had never met anyone on the left from Wales who wasn't basically sound .... I suppose these 'Jehovas Witnesses of the left' were the exceptions that prove the rule. Actually that's unfaitr to JW's ... the Leninist were more like the Moonies!


----------



## frogwoman (Sep 30, 2010)

The girl i knew at uni was part of the Weekly worker lot but she didn't like Stalin  I don't think she was a trot though although that was a few years ago when I didn't know what any of these terms meant (and still don't entirley, seems to be a case of the more you know the less you understand tbh) 

last night i heard a very interesting, if you can call it that story about the Spartacus League lol and their split  between "workers hammer" and "workers anvil" who split (both of whom had about four members each) and their papers' slogans were just a sectarian battle against each other, the slogan of the "workers anvil" was "because the hammer will break before the anvil will"


----------



## Proper Tidy (Sep 30, 2010)

LiamO said:


> I would LOVE to see some of the lenny-bennies I knew choke on their cornflakes at the THOUGHT of their being called (or even thought of) as Trots
> 
> Tankies to their core.
> 
> ...


 
Ooh harsh! Robert Owen, Nye Bevan...


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Sep 30, 2010)

Idris2002 said:


>


----------



## Idris2002 (Sep 30, 2010)

Joe: 'Winston, with my new Rabbit costume, children around the world will have a special place in their hearts for their Uncle Joe'.

Winston (thinks): 'I think I'll have an extra bottle of brandy with supper'.


----------



## Idris2002 (Sep 30, 2010)




----------



## Proper Tidy (Sep 30, 2010)

Be funnier if Churchill was also dressed as his namesake.


----------



## Idris2002 (Sep 30, 2010)




----------



## LiamO (Sep 30, 2010)

LiamO said:


> I would LOVE to see some of the lenny-bennies I knew choke on their cornflakes at the THOUGHT of their being called (or even thought of) as Trots
> 
> Tankies to their core.
> 
> ...


 




Proper Tidy said:


> Ooh harsh! Robert Owen, Nye Bevan...




Taking a mad guess, I 'd say you are quite justifiably fond of these two gents... in which case maybe my post was not clear enough. 

I was saying the two twats I knew from The Leninist were the ONLY welsh socialists/commies/anarchists I had met who were not worth a fuck - everybody else I had come across (from whichever of the 57 Varieties) was pretty down to earth and sound. 

Happy to clarify that I meant no slur on the good people of Cymru.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Sep 30, 2010)

Ooops.


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Oct 1, 2010)

LiamO said:


> Taking a mad guess, I 'd say you are quite justifiably fond of these two gents... in which case maybe my post was not clear enough.
> 
> I was saying the two twats I knew from The Leninist were the ONLY welsh socialists/commies/anarchists I had met who were not worth a fuck - everybody else I had come across (from whichever of the 57 Varieties) was pretty down to earth and sound.
> 
> Happy to clarify that I meant no slur on the good people of Cymru.


 
Was one of them Mark Fischer by any chance?

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## Spion (Oct 1, 2010)

Or Dewi?


----------



## LiamO (Oct 4, 2010)

Louis MacNeice said:


> Was one of them Mark Fischer by any chance?


 



			
				Spion said:
			
		

> Or Dewi?



I think that it would be entirely reasonable to deduce that would be an entirely reasonable assumption, although I could not really comment.

And that is probably the first time either of them two cunts have ever been referenced in a sentence that included the words 'entirely reasonable'. 

Maybe we should start a seperate "The Leninist" thread as they did seem to set a new benchmark for complete and utter lefty bolloxology. But then their python-esque antics also provided some much-needed light relief.

As they apparently still exist - I think young people should be warned. The Moonies would be preferable to the Lennies.


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 4, 2010)

Who are they, are they trots? Dont think ive ever come across them  whats the group called?


----------



## LiamO (Oct 4, 2010)

frogwoman said:


> Who are they, are they trots? Dont think ive ever come across them  whats the group called?



No but I sometimes enjoyed calling them trots just to set them off. 




LiamO said:


> I would LOVE to see some of the lenny-bennies I knew choke on their cornflakes at the THOUGHT of their being called (or even thought of) as Trots
> 
> Tankies to their core.
> 
> ...




They were called 'The Leninist' I think. Most people just called them dickheads though. 

In many ways they were the british equivalent of the Spartacist League - all cold-shower revolutionary fervour and puritanical personal and political regimes. You know the craic.... when the lennies brushed their teeth they did it with revolutionary fervour... the way a true cadre would... when they had a dump... etc


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 4, 2010)

ah ok i assumed the leninist was the name of the paper rather than the actual group ! yes i know - "revolutionary furvour" bollocks! lol!


----------



## Belushi (Oct 4, 2010)

Did anyone ever get round to drawing up a Trot family tree?


----------



## Proper Tidy (Oct 4, 2010)

frogwoman said:


> Who are they, are they trots? Dont think ive ever come across them  whats the group called?


 
CPGB, Leninist was forerunner to Weekly Worker.


----------



## Proper Tidy (Oct 4, 2010)

Belushi said:


> Did anyone ever get round to drawing up a Trot family tree?


 
Would be a lifetime's work.


----------



## audiotech (Oct 4, 2010)

Belushi said:


> Did anyone ever get round to drawing up a Trot family tree?


 
I knew a bloke that did and to be clear it wasn't me.


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 4, 2010)

I know a bloke that probably would to be fair !!


----------



## ernestolynch (Oct 4, 2010)

Belushi said:


> Did anyone ever get round to drawing up a Trot family tree?


 
There's a good one in 'Quite Right Mr Trotsky' by Denver Jones.


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 4, 2010)

Here:

http://www.trashfiction.co.uk/trot_tree2.html


----------



## audiotech (Oct 15, 2010)

CIA propaganda from 'Public Service Broadcasting' and the 'Lovell Institute'.

http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/communism/


----------



## dylans (Oct 16, 2010)

Idris2002 said:


> Here:
> 
> http://www.trashfiction.co.uk/trot_tree2.html



How about this bunch of lunatics. 


> The Revolutionary Workers Party, the group that every other Trotskyist ridicules. Tiring, perhaps, of industrial disputes that were pre-destined to betrayal by right-wing union bureaucrats, the RWP (or Posadists, as we knew them, after their founder Juan Posadas) turned their attention to UFOs and possible Chariots of the Gods-type visitors to Earth. They theorised that:
> 
> (1) only an advanced civilization could master inter-planetary travel;
> (2) an advanced civilization is, by definition, a socialist civilization;
> ...



http://www.trashfiction.co.uk/trot.html


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 16, 2010)

dylans said:


> How about this bunch of lunatics.
> 
> 
> http://www.trashfiction.co.uk/trot.html


 
Surely thats not real is it?


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 16, 2010)

OMFG it is !! 

http://thoughts-of-chairperson-mikey.blogspot.com/2006/11/trotskyists-in-space.html




> A combined “War–Revolution” to “settle the hash of Stalinism and capitalism” 6 was orthodox doctrine among the Pabloist Trotskyites. But in the hands of Posadas it became a full-blown Doomsday obsession, complete with its own Last Judgement – sinisterly referred to as “the final settlement of accounts of Socialism against the capitalist system.”
> Posadist “atomic war” theory emerged at the first congress of the fully independent Fourth International (Posadist), held shortly after its definitive split with all other versions of the International in 1962. At this meeting – appropriately titled “Extraordinary Congress” – Posadas announced: “Atomic war is inevitable. It will destroy half of humanity: it is going to destroy immense human riches. It is very possible. The atomic war is going to provoke a true inferno on Earth. But it will not impede Communism.”


----------



## Neutron (Oct 18, 2010)

Trotsky was a clever man.  This is undeniable.

His aims and actions during his life, and during the Russian revolution of 1917 (and beyond) are up for debate.

This is a short pamphlet written in his later life that illustrates his intellectual Marxism and commitment to the advancement of human society:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1933/330610.htm


----------



## dylans (Oct 18, 2010)

> =Neutron;11155724]Trotsky was a clever man.  This is undeniable.
> 
> His aims and actions during his life, and during the Russian revolution of 1917 (and beyond) are up for debate.
> 
> ...



Brilliant. Prophetic even. Written in 1933.  



> The sudden turn of the Nazi leaders to peaceful declarations could deceive only utter simpletons. What other method remains at Hitler’s disposal to transfer the responsibility for internal distresses to external enemies and to accumulate under the press of the dictatorship the explosive force of nationalism? This part of the program, outlined openly even prior to the Nazis” assumption of power, is now being fulfilled with iron logic before the eyes of the world. The date of the new European catastrophe will be determined by the time necessary for the arming of Germany. It is not a question of months, but neither is it a question of decades. *It will be but a few years before Europe is again plunged into a war, unless Hitler is forestalled in time by the inner forces of Germany.*



November 2, 1933


----------



## Idaho (Oct 18, 2010)

I still don't understand what being a Trotskyist means, other than you think Stalin was a very bad man. And no I don't want a link to either some ranting nutter or a series of tedious papers on left wing theory.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 18, 2010)

You're quite odd aren't you?   A bit lazy too.


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 18, 2010)

that you agree with trotsky's ideas on things I guess  the deformed workers state and all of that. you should read the left wing theory stuff btw, it might seem boring but a lot of it is quite interesting when you start reading it, and not difficult to understand (not to me anyway).


----------



## Idaho (Oct 18, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> You're quite odd aren't you?   A bit lazy too.


 
A tick in both columns.

But why do people get so upset about deformed workers states? It's all done and dusted now anyway.


----------



## Spion (Oct 18, 2010)

Idaho said:


> I still don't understand what being a Trotskyist means, other than you think Stalin was a very bad man. And no I don't want a link to either some ranting nutter or a series of tedious papers on left wing theory.


I'll condense it into a few points later when I get time


----------



## Idaho (Oct 18, 2010)

Ok - I just read the first paragraph in Wikipedia:



> In Trotskyist political theory, deformed workers' states are states where the bourgeoisie has been overthrown through social revolution, the industrial means of production have been largely nationalized bringing benefits to the working class, but where the working class has never held political power (as it did in Russia shortly after the Russian Revolution). These workers' states are deformed because their political and economic structures have been imposed from the top (or from outside), and because revolutionary working class organizations are crushed.



So why isn't that right? The USSR was completely undemocratic and didn't allow non-party organisations.


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 18, 2010)

Because trotskyists believe (for the most part) that there should be democracy and dissent allowed in the state. And also because that stuff wasn't being controlled by the people themselves but by some bureaucrats giving orders, who still held most of the power (and often wealth!) in the regime. hopefully someone will be along to explain it better.


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 18, 2010)

Idaho said:


> A tick in both columns.
> 
> But why do people get so upset about deformed workers states? It's all done and dusted now anyway.


 
because the way you want the state to be is pretty central to a political theory no? and so its quite important whether you make it clear that you don't want to be living in some north korea-like hellhole


----------



## Idaho (Oct 18, 2010)

frogwoman said:


> Because trotskyists believe (for the most part) that there should be democracy and dissent allowed in the state. And also because that stuff wasn't being controlled by the people themselves but by some bureaucrats giving orders, who still held most of the power (and often wealth!) in the regime. hopefully someone will be along to explain it better.


 
Er.. I fail to see what is outragous or wrong in that. Dissent and democracy _should_ be allowed in the state.


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 18, 2010)

I agree


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 18, 2010)

Good. Then we're all agreed.







_(L: Vyacheslav Molotov, R: Anthony Eden)_


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 18, 2010)

he looks a bit like trotsky in that pic


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 18, 2010)

Neither of them look anything like Lev Davidovich.


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 18, 2010)

No they do not. I hope Froggers is not going to morph into a trotskyer. 

_Oi you! Have you heard of a man called trotsky?_


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 18, 2010)

i didnt know those were politicians, i thought that one of them was basil fawlty at first


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 18, 2010)

Ah to be young.


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 18, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> _Oi you! Have you heard of a man called trotsky?_



oi !! 
ill never do that  

or following people aroiund with a megaphone accusing them of "bourgoise degeneracy"


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 18, 2010)

Women. Know your limits.


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 18, 2010)

Actually a the weekend there was a guy who was ACTUALLY standing on a soap box yelling at people about the big bang, and richard dawkins, with a load of bookshelves behind him - im about as likely to yell at people about trotsky than i am to do that


----------



## Idaho (Oct 18, 2010)

Can someone give some more Trotskyst ideas?


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Oct 18, 2010)

frogwoman said:


> I agree


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 18, 2010)

im surprised nobody posted a pic of an ice pick yet tbh


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 18, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


>


 
Furries: a global threat.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Oct 18, 2010)

It's quite good detail, the bunny suit with the texture of a rough army great coat.


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 18, 2010)

anyway butchers, you might laugh, but i could have done a lot worse


----------



## frogwoman (Oct 18, 2010)

Actually forget it, *shudders*


----------



## Idaho (Oct 19, 2010)

Come on someone. Put down some more wrong-headed Trotskist beliefs. So far we have had two that no-one seems to much disagree with. 

I'm starting to suspect this is more about leftist subculture than anything material.


----------



## dennisr (Oct 19, 2010)

Idaho said:


> I still don't understand what being a Trotskyist means, other than you think Stalin was a very bad man. And no I don't want a link to either some ranting nutter or a series of tedious papers on left wing theory.


 
'Trotskyist' was a term invented as a bogeyman by the growing Stalinist bureaucracy to try and distort the reality of opposition by revolutionary communists/marxists/socialists* (to that same bureaucracy) as some sort of conspiracy led by you know who and a supposed secret cabal of fellow 'counter-revolutionaries' (to use their "1984"-style lingo - 'war is peace' etc etc etc).

* delete as you feel is most appropriate


----------



## ernestolynch (Oct 19, 2010)

Trotzkyism exists only in the students union bars of the 1st World.


----------



## Spion (Oct 19, 2010)

Idaho said:


> Can someone give some more Trotskyst ideas?



OK, here's some. 

* Permanent revolution - At around the time of the 1905 revolution most revolutionary socialists thought Russia had to pass through a stage of bourgeois democracy before it could get anywhere near a workers revolution. Trotsky argued that despite Russia being backward and 'semi-feudal' that there were sufficient social forces to carry it through a workers revolution sustained by workers democracy (ie, Soviets or workers councils) without stopping at a bourgeois democratic phase. This was the essence of the big split between bolsheviks and mensheviks and arguably also supplies the root  belief for his clash with the stalinist bureacracy who imagined they could put a brake on the necessarily international nature of revolution by sticking at 'Socialism in one country'. 

* His analysis of the USSR as a degenerate workers state. I think we already discussed this one here.

* The transitional programme/method. In the late 30s Trotsky criticised other leftists for not developing programme (ie, 'policy') that put workers' self organisation at its core. For him, a policy had to have two elements a) a solution to the problem faced (eg, 'For a programme of public housing paid for by taxing the rich . . . ') and b) an element which built in workers' development of self conscious organisation in society (eg '. . . under workers control'). Relevance today? Very - almost no left wing group tries to put forward policy/programme in this way, AFAIK.

* His analysis of fascism - that it is/was a mass/plebian movement aimed at cutting the throat of the workers' movement which needed to be tackled physically by a united front of workers' organisations/TUs etc. Relevance today? - very. The likes of Unite Against Fascism today cut their cloth according to the Tory/Lib Dem allies they hope to get on board to their 'respectable' campaigning.

* The revolutionary party. His ideas are more or less the same as Lenin's - that there needs to be a democratic centralist and internationally organised democratic centralist workers' party that responds to the situations it faces with a programme based on the transitional method of developing a programme.

That's all for now. I thought I'd get away with a few bullet points


----------



## Idaho (Oct 19, 2010)

Can't really see the problem with most of that, except for the last one - the revolutionary party. It's impossible to have a single party democratically responsible for everything. That's a contradiction.


----------



## Spion (Oct 19, 2010)

Idaho said:


> Can't really see the problem with most of that, except for the last one - the revolutionary party. It's impossible to have a single party democratically responsible for everything.


It doesn't mean that. I'm referring to party organisation in pre-revolutionary times. You're thinking of what happened in the USSR in particular in the Stalin period. The aim isn't that a single party should control society but that the soviets should.


----------



## Idaho (Oct 19, 2010)

Even in political organisation there needs to be plurality and the acceptance of plurality. Otherwise you get the kinds of schisms outlined by this thread surely?


----------



## Spion (Oct 19, 2010)

Idaho said:


> Even in political organisation there needs to be plurality and the acceptance of plurality.


Sure. But the idea of democratic centralism is that all differences are debated internally but the majority decision is the one the public outside the party gets to hear about as official policy.


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 19, 2010)

Spion said:


> It doesn't mean that. I'm referring to party organisation in pre-revolutionary times. You're thinking of what happened in the USSR in particular in the Stalin period. The aim isn't that a single party should control society but that the soviets should.


 
Hang on a minute, didn't Lenin have other parties banned from the Soviets at a very early point?


----------



## dennisr (Oct 19, 2010)

Spion said:


> Sure. But the idea of democratic centralism is that all differences are debated internally but the majority decision is the one the public outside the party gets to hear about as official policy.



The plurality is intended to remain internal to the party - specifically a party organising in semi-clandestine conditions. The idea is that it presents as united a voice as possible externally. 
And - as Spion has already pointed out - this is about the nature of organisation prior to revolution. A soviet/workers council system of control brings that plurality to society


----------



## dennisr (Oct 19, 2010)

Idris2002 said:


> Hang on a minute, didn't Lenin have other parties banned from the Soviets at a very early point?


 
Not initially. And I would not see that as in any way possible after a revolution in the society that we now live in (and with the retrospective experience/knowledge of the dangers of such a turn). The ex-capitalists would be welcome to sell 'capitalist bastard' on the street


----------



## audiotech (Oct 19, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> Trotzkyism exists only in the students union bars of the 1st World.



The British Cabinet discusses the Trotskyists.



> District Committees exist in London, Scotland, Tyneside, Merseyside, Yorkshire and the Midlands, but do not act without close consultation with Headquarters. No figures of the total membership are available, but in London, where the movement is strongest, there are 152 members, of whom thirty-two are in the forces. Outside London the party has about twenty branches. A branch rarely has more than twenty members and sometimes has less than ten, and the total number of members in the forces is unlikely to be more that a hundred. On this basis the total membership is probably well below a thousand. ...the number of active Trotskyists in the country is very small. The party is strongest, outside London, on Clydeside, and the weakest in the Midlands and South Wales. It hardly exists outside the larger industrial areas.



http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/britain/brit01.htm


----------



## dennisr (Oct 19, 2010)

Idaho said:


> Can't really see the problem with most of that



Ultimately, you could argue that these are simply communist/marxist/socialist ideas rather than specifically 'trotskyist'

As I said previously:


dennisr said:


> 'Trotskyist' was a term invented as a bogeyman by the growing Stalinist bureaucracy to try and distort the reality of opposition by revolutionary communists/marxists/socialists* (to that same bureaucracy) as some sort of conspiracy led by you know who and a supposed secret cabal of fellow 'counter-revolutionaries' (to use their "1984"-style lingo - 'war is peace' etc etc etc).
> 
> * delete as you feel is most appropriate


----------



## Spion (Oct 19, 2010)

Idris2002 said:


> Hang on a minute, didn't Lenin have other parties banned from the Soviets at a very early point?


Only after they'd started using violence to further their aims. Call me authoritarian but once you start shelling city centres and taking over public buildings you lose your right to free political organisation


----------



## Idaho (Oct 19, 2010)

Ok - I'm still not seeing massive ideological differences here. I think, unless there are some masterstrokes waiting in the wings, the difference is really about left sub-culture.


----------



## Idaho (Oct 19, 2010)

Spion said:


> Only after they'd started using violence to further their aims. Call me authoritarian but once you start shelling city centres and taking over public buildings you lose your right to free political organisation


 
Bit rich coming from a revolutionary party though. Pulling the ladder up, if you will.


----------



## dennisr (Oct 19, 2010)

Idaho said:


> Bit rich coming from a revolutionary party though. Pulling the ladder up, if you will.


 
And thats another popular myth - that a revolutionary party would try and impose its minority view by force - rather than through the will of the majority, with the exception maybe of being willing to using violence as part of self-defense (countering violence used against that organisation)

Of course there are some 'revolutionaries' who would argue for use of force - but they are kind of missing the point of the idea of working class liberation imo


----------



## butchersapron (Oct 19, 2010)

Idaho said:


> Ok - I'm still not seeing massive ideological differences here. I think, unless there are some masterstrokes waiting in the wings, the difference is really about left sub-culture.


 
Ideological differences between who?


----------



## Spion (Oct 19, 2010)

Idaho said:


> Bit rich coming from a revolutionary party though. Pulling the ladder up, if you will.


Why is it? If the majority has acted to achieve collective control over politics and resources why on earth would you tolerate violence by a minority against that?


----------



## Spion (Oct 19, 2010)

Idaho said:


> Ok - I'm still not seeing massive ideological differences here. I think, unless there are some masterstrokes waiting in the wings, the difference is really about left sub-culture.


I think you've totally failed to understand or think through what's been said here


----------



## Spion (Oct 19, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> Ideological differences between who?



Good question. Idaho - if you want to understand the import of these issues you have to compare Trotsky's ideas against those of others


----------



## kyser_soze (Oct 19, 2010)

Great thread. Humour, edumacation, and jer whining.


----------



## Idaho (Oct 19, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> Ideological differences between who?


 
Between the 'trots' and the people who obsess about 'trots'.


----------



## Idaho (Oct 19, 2010)

Spion said:


> I think you've totally failed to understand or think through what's been said here


 
Well yes, that's clear. What's not clear is what the differences are between 'trots' and 'non-trots'.


----------



## Spion (Oct 19, 2010)

Idaho said:


> Between the 'trots' and the people who obsess about 'trots'.


Well, the Stalinoids think the USSR was heaven on earth and Trotsky was a counter-revolutionary trouble maker; lots of people (from anarchs to the likes of butchers) are against the idea of a revolutionary party; the SWP think you need a party don't think a party needs a programme; obv those who are against the idea of a party don't believe in setting out your goals in a programme either; and then there's a hell of a lot of noise from those who identify Trotskyism with the behaviour of one brand of supposedly Trotskyist-derived practice (eg the SWP's, no matter how much it diverges from what can reasonably be argued is Trotskyism)


----------



## Spion (Oct 19, 2010)

Basically, those who bang on about 'trots' are generally a bunch of ponces who don't know what they're talking about


----------



## kyser_soze (Oct 19, 2010)

So what you're saying is that, unless you're Ern or a similar 'type', it doesn't really matter?


----------



## Spion (Oct 19, 2010)

I'm not sure I understand the question, squire.


----------



## dennisr (Oct 19, 2010)

kyser_soze said:


> So what you're saying is that, unless you're Ern or a similar 'type', it doesn't really matter?



yep, generally a bit of a straw man

i guess that is not helped by some folk behaving like straw men though...


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Oct 19, 2010)

Spion said:


> Basically trots are generally a bunch of ponces who don't know what they're talking about



It seemed rude not to.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## Spion (Oct 19, 2010)

Did you think of that yourself or was it the result of one of your focus groups?


----------



## Louis MacNeice (Oct 19, 2010)

Spion said:


> Did you think of that yourself or was it the result of one of your focus groups?


 
I canvassed opinion door to door. It's what the community wanted Spion; I had to bow before the demands of the mob.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Oct 19, 2010)

Idris2002 said:


> Hang on a minute, didn't Lenin have other parties banned from the Soviets at a very early point?



Used democratic centralism to 'temporarily' ban factionalism.


----------



## Captain Hurrah (Oct 19, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> Trotzkyism exists only in the students union bars of the 1st World.



lol.


----------



## sleaterkinney (Oct 19, 2010)

Idaho said:


> Well yes, that's clear. What's not clear is what the differences are between 'trots' and 'non-trots'.


 
There might be a deeply felt rift based on what Lenin really meant in his speech to the workers in vladivostok in 1913, but to the rest of us it's meaningless, they are one and the same. Anyone on the far left is a trot.


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 19, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Used democratic centralism to 'temporarily' ban factionalism.


----------



## kyser_soze (Oct 19, 2010)

Idris2002 said:


>


 
The Communists really missed a whole merchandising trick with Lenin. Action figures, mugs, keyfobs...


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 19, 2010)

That's what you think.


----------



## Idris2002 (Oct 19, 2010)




----------



## Captain Hurrah (Oct 20, 2010)

Idris2002 said:


>



I can't find those Lenin-Stalin LOL/WTF pics.  There was one where Stalin points to Molotov and says "Gay!"


----------



## invisibleplanet (Oct 20, 2010)

dennisr said:


> 'Trotskyist' was a term invented as a bogeyman by the growing Stalinist bureaucracy to try and distort the reality of opposition by revolutionary communists/marxists/socialists* (to that same bureaucracy) as some sort of conspiracy led by you know who and a supposed secret cabal of fellow 'counter-revolutionaries' (to use their "1984"-style lingo - 'war is peace' etc etc etc).
> 
> * delete as you feel is most appropriate


 


Spion said:


> OK, here's some.
> 
> * Permanent revolution - At around the time of the 1905 revolution most revolutionary socialists thought Russia had to pass through a stage of bourgeois democracy before it could get anywhere near a workers revolution. Trotsky argued that despite Russia being backward and 'semi-feudal' that there were sufficient social forces to carry it through a workers revolution sustained by workers democracy (ie, Soviets or workers councils) without stopping at a bourgeois democratic phase. This was the essence of the big split between bolsheviks and mensheviks and arguably also supplies the root  belief for his clash with the stalinist bureacracy who imagined they could put a brake on the necessarily international nature of revolution by sticking at 'Socialism in one country'.
> 
> ...


 


Idaho said:


> Can't really see the problem with most of that, except for the last one - the revolutionary party. It's impossible to have a single party democratically responsible for everything. That's a contradiction.


 


Spion said:


> It doesn't mean that. I'm referring to party organisation in pre-revolutionary times. You're thinking of what happened in the USSR in particular in the Stalin period. The aim isn't that a single party should control society but that the soviets should.


 


Idaho said:


> Even in political organisation there needs to be plurality and the acceptance of plurality. Otherwise you get the kinds of schisms outlined by this thread surely?


 


Spion said:


> Sure. But the idea of democratic centralism is that all differences are debated internally but the majority decision is the one the public outside the party gets to hear about as official policy.


 


Idris2002 said:


> Hang on a minute, didn't Lenin have other parties banned from the Soviets at a very early point?


 


dennisr said:


> The plurality is intended to remain internal to the party - specifically a party organising in semi-clandestine conditions. The idea is that it presents as united a voice as possible externally.
> And - as Spion has already pointed out - this is about the nature of organisation prior to revolution. A soviet/workers council system of control brings that plurality to society


 


dennisr said:


> Not initially. And I would not see that as in any way possible after a revolution in the society that we now live in (and with the retrospective experience/knowledge of the dangers of such a turn). The ex-capitalists would be welcome to sell 'capitalist bastard' on the street


 


dennisr said:


> Ultimately, you could argue that these are simply communist/marxist/socialist ideas rather than specifically 'trotskyist'
> 
> As I said previously:


 


Spion said:


> Only after they'd started using violence to further their aims. Call me authoritarian but once you start shelling city centres and taking over public buildings you lose your right to free political organisation


 


Idaho said:


> Ok - I'm still not seeing massive ideological differences here. I think, unless there are some masterstrokes waiting in the wings, the difference is really about left sub-culture.


 


Idaho said:


> Bit rich coming from a revolutionary party though. Pulling the ladder up, if you will.


 


dennisr said:


> And thats another popular myth - that a revolutionary party would try and impose its minority view by force - rather than through the will of the majority, with the exception maybe of being willing to using violence as part of self-defense (countering violence used against that organisation)
> 
> Of course there are some 'revolutionaries' who would argue for use of force - but they are kind of missing the point of the idea of working class liberation imo


 


Spion said:


> Why is it? If the majority has acted to achieve collective control over politics and resources why on earth would you tolerate violence by a minority against that?


 


Spion said:


> I think you've totally failed to understand or think through what's been said here


 


Spion said:


> Good question. Idaho - if you want to understand the import of these issues you have to compare Trotsky's ideas against those of others


 


Idaho said:


> Well yes, that's clear. What's not clear is what the differences are between 'trots' and 'non-trots'.


 


Spion said:


> Well, the Stalinoids think the USSR was heaven on earth and Trotsky was a counter-revolutionary trouble maker; lots of people (from anarchs to the likes of butchers) are against the idea of a revolutionary party; the SWP think you need a party don't think a party needs a programme; obv those who are against the idea of a party don't believe in setting out your goals in a programme either; and then there's a hell of a lot of noise from those who identify Trotskyism with the behaviour of one brand of supposedly Trotskyist-derived practice (eg the SWP's, no matter how much it diverges from what can reasonably be argued is Trotskyism)


 


kyser_soze said:


> So what you're saying is that, unless you're Ern or a similar 'type', it doesn't really matter?


 


dennisr said:


> yep, generally a bit of a straw man
> 
> i guess that is not helped by some folk behaving like straw men though...



I'm enjoying this discussion - very informative


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## kyser_soze (Oct 20, 2010)

From this thread, this is how it looks to me:

Stalinists created the term 'Trotskyite' in order to identify a threat to themselves. Trotsky's ideas aren't unique, and represent one sub-strand of thought in communism and it is possibly useful as an identifier for someone who agrees with his ideas, but is basically a meaningless label outside of the left; so to answer Idaho's question, it's a left sub-culture thing not something everyone else will be bothered about.


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## Spion (Oct 20, 2010)

It's like any form of knowledge. Stay stuck at a particular level of abstraction and fail to go deeper and understand things, and for eg fission and fusion are just nuclear reactions and the difference is not apparent, becomes meaningless, why bother distinguishing the two. But the reality is quite different.

That's what you're doing here - glossing over the distinctions and stripping them of meaning.

Trotsky wasn't killed because of a 'sub-cultural' difference of opinion with Stalin. He was killed because his ideas carried a mortal threat to the Soviet bureaucracy's modus operandi. That's just one example.


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## dennisr (Oct 20, 2010)

kyser_soze said:


> From this thread, this is how it looks to me:
> 
> Stalinists created the term 'Trotskyite' in order to identify a threat to themselves. Trotsky's ideas aren't unique, and represent one sub-strand of thought in communism and it is possibly useful as an identifier for someone who agrees with his ideas, but is basically a meaningless label outside of the left; so to answer Idaho's question, it's a left sub-culture thing not something everyone else will be bothered about.



You could argue that, in developing marxist understanding of what actually happened in the USSR - how the bureaucracy came to power - Trotsky's writings were a significent development of communist ideas. I would - I am biased though - others on the left disagree. But yep, trotsky's ideas are a sub-strand - imo, an important one - in communist/marxist/socialist/left thought.

On the other hand - the dribble that came from the followers and apologists for the Stalinist bureaucracies - while sold as "communist" thought never was. It was always an apology for mass-murderers and dictators using, of all things, the superficial language of 'marxism' but devoid of any marxist thought or content. Doing one thing and saying another - a bit like capitalist marketing where 'freedom' is packaged as 'choice' - but more obviously brutal.


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## Spion (Oct 20, 2010)

Tho I will concede that the overall picture is clouded by the label of 'trot' being applied to things that it simply doesn't fit. EG, the SWP's practice with the UAF which bears all the hallmarks of the Stalinist 'popular front' approach of the 30s than anything to do with Trotskyism


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## Proper Tidy (Oct 20, 2010)

Spion said:


> Tho I will concede that the overall picture is clouded by the label of 'trot' being applied to things that it simply doesn't fit. EG, the SWP's practice with the UAF which bears all the hallmarks of the Stalinist 'popular front' approach of the 30s than anything to do with Trotskyism


 
SWP generally hardly fit the trotskyist tag. It's a wonder that they still claim it.


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## kyser_soze (Oct 20, 2010)

Indeed. From the summaries of Trotsky's thinking on this thread some of his ideas chime with me as being more in the spirit of communism. Altho perhaps that's where the criticism (which is mentioned somewhere in the thread) of the theory-practice comes in - in theory it's all wonderful, in practice it's not. Agree with you about the bureaucracy too.


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## dennisr (Oct 20, 2010)

Spion said:


> Trotsky wasn't killed because of a 'sub-cultural' difference of opinion with Stalin. He was killed because his ideas carried a mortal threat to the Soviet bureaucracy's modus operandi. That's just one example.



There is that of course 

And the tens of thousands of communists/bolsheviks murdered and silenced as the bureaucracy built its powerbase.

One thing lost on many critics of bolshevik ideas - those who equate the stalinist bureaucracy with 'socialism' in any case - is that the first people to be show trialed and eventually physically wiped out by the bureaucracy were the bolsheviks themselves


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## Captain Hurrah (Oct 20, 2010)

When did he shake away his view that because forced labour in other modes of production, such as classical slavery and Asian despotism, had seen such labour play a 'progressive' role, that him wearing a uniform and ordering folk about was pretty cool?


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## Idris2002 (Oct 20, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> When did he shake away his view that because forced labour in other modes of production, such as classical slavery and Asian despotism, had seen such labour play a 'progressive' role, that him wearing a uniform and ordering folk about was pretty cool?


 
Never, as far as I know - but I'm happy to defer to the greater knowledge of others on here, if I've got that one wrong.

A wider question for Lev Davidovich's followers: what if anything, do you regard as being a) defects in his thought, and/or b) elements in his thought that were relevant in their time but are outdated and obsolete today?


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## dennisr (Oct 20, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> When did he shake away his view that because forced labour in other modes of production, such as classical slavery and Asian despotism, had seen such labour play a 'progressive' role, that him wearing a uniform and ordering folk about was pretty cool?



witty stuff. do you do barmitzahs, weddings, funerals as well? (in case i need a light-weight but hilarious comedian to entertain folk)


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## Random (Oct 20, 2010)

dennisr said:


> One thing lost on many critics of bolshevik ideas - those who equate the stalinist bureaucracy with 'socialism' in any case - is that the first people to be show trialed and eventually physically wiped out by the bureaucracy were the bolsheviks themselves


 No, it was the other independent socialists, like the left SRs and left Mensheviks, and of course the anarchists, who were filling the USSR's jails by the 1920s. Bolshevisk (often especially those who had only joined in 1917) were only targeted years later.


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## Captain Hurrah (Oct 20, 2010)

dennisr said:


> witty stuff. do you do barmitzahs, weddings, funerals as well? (in case i need a light-weight but hilarious comedian to entertain folk)



It's a valid question.


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## Random (Oct 20, 2010)

Spion said:


> Trotsky wasn't killed because of a 'sub-cultural' difference of opinion with Stalin. He was killed because his ideas carried a mortal threat to the Soviet bureaucracy's modus operandi. That's just one example.


 One doesn't follow the other. Assassination doesn't prove deep political differences. Plenty of emperors have killed former courtiers because of lesser political diferences.


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## dennisr (Oct 20, 2010)

Idris2002 said:


> A wider question for Lev Davidovich's followers: what if anything, do you regard as being a) defects in his thought, and/or b) elements in his thought that were relevant in their time but are outdated and obsolete today?



I'm sure his ideas were limited by the knowledge then available as were anybodies. Certainly, his perspectives for the overthrow of the bureaucracy in the soviet union were not borne out. He could not have predicted the stabilisation (for a period) and expansion of the soviet bureaucracy and how this would effect world relations. Say, for example, how a whole series of distorted 'revolutions' (supported by and/or leaning on the soviet bureaucracy) could come to power in the name (only...) of 'communism'. I don't know if that is a fair criticism of him though - I would argue that, the method used by him could still assist others in developing an understanding of these events (its a shame many opposition 'trotskyists' - were unable to use those methods). Maybe is is fairer to say my criticisms would be less of trotsky himself and more of his followers. Would I have been any clearer - isolated and beaten - probably not...

Did he make mistakes during the revolution. Things that, in retrospect, could have or should have been done differently? - Yes of course he did.


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## dennisr (Oct 20, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> It's a valid question.


 
no its not. its a foolish remark


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## kyser_soze (Oct 20, 2010)

Got any 'quick enough to read at work' reccs, dennisr?


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## dennisr (Oct 20, 2010)

Random said:


> One doesn't follow the other. Assassination doesn't prove deep political differences. Plenty of emperors have killed former courtiers because of lesser political diferences.



did they then go on to purge tens of thousands in the name of those 'lesser differences' and spend the following decades continuing to vilify those long dead courtiers and their 'lesser differences'?


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## Captain Hurrah (Oct 20, 2010)

dennisr said:


> no its not. its a foolish remark



It is a valid question.  Was it just a phase he was going through, as a result of the disorientating effects of the civil war period and it's terrible exigencies in order to keep a fluctuating Sovdepia (as the White Guard counterrevolutionaries sneeringly called it) alive, or did state compulsion of workers inform his views on how to create socialism beyond that conflict?


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## dennisr (Oct 20, 2010)

Random said:


> No, it was the other independent socialists, like the left SRs and left Mensheviks, and of course the anarchists, who were filling the USSR's jails by the 1920s. Bolshevisk (often especially those who had only joined in 1917) were only targeted years later.


 
Please point me to the evidence of the systematic evidence-free mass show trials and gulaging of these people


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## Spion (Oct 20, 2010)

Random said:


> No, it was the other independent socialists, like the left SRs and left Mensheviks, and of course the anarchists


The left SRs. The party whose land reform programme was taken on wholesale by the bolsheviks and who still launched numerous armed rebellions and even shot Lenin because he was 'a traitor to the revolution' for getting Russia out of the war.


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## dennisr (Oct 20, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> It is a valid question.  Was it just a phase he was going through, as a result of the disorientating effects of the civil war period and it's terrible exigencies in order to keep a fluctuating Sovdepia (as the White Guard counterrevolutionaries sneeringly called it) alive, or did state compulsion of workers inform his views on how to create socialism beyond that conflict?



no its childish jibberish mixed with half-baked knowledge and heavy innuendo from the priviledge of 70+ years retrospective and a world away perspective  ("anarchists" ehh...)
you are confusing my defence of trotsky's writing with some sort of desire to defend every tactic used in a brutal civil and class war 70+ years ago in a very different place. 
I wish I had your moral sense of certainty but I don't.


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## Captain Hurrah (Oct 20, 2010)

Spion said:


> The left SRs. The party whose land reform programme was taken on wholesale by the bolsheviks and who still launched numerous armed rebellions and even shot Lenin because he was 'a traitor to the revolution' for getting Russia out of the war.



On the question of land, is there a lot of history writings (I've only read a few bits and pieces) beyond a Bolshevik one, that goes into their relationship with the largest social group in the country at the time, the peasantry?  After the Communists captured state power, with their ambitions to nationalise and socialise the economy, would it b fair to say that the rural areas would prove to pose a particularly troublesome problem, for with the thousands upon of thousands of tiny individual plots coveted by the peasants who had enacted radical change as they understood it in myriad ways, on the question of controlling land the Communists would come to be viewed as counter-revolutionary?


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## Captain Hurrah (Oct 20, 2010)

dennisr said:


> no its childish jibberish mixed with half-baked knowledge and heavy innuendo from the priviledge of 70+ years retrospective and a world away perspective  ("anarchists" ehh...)
> you are confusing my defence of trotsky's writing with some sort of desire to defend every tactic used in a brutal civil and class war 70+ years ago in a very different place.
> I wish I had your moral sense of certainty but I don't.



I'm not an anarchist, and let's face it, these days anarchism has become little more than a privileged middle class youth subculture.  Practically irrelevant to me.

I'm not asking you to defend anything.  I'm asking for your opinion on whether that particularly disturbing intellectual justification had much mileage in his views on how to construct a socialist society.  Surely the militarisation of labour and its implications is a little bit more than a tactical matter.


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## Random (Oct 20, 2010)

dennisr said:


> Please point me to the evidence of the systematic evidence-free mass show trials and gulaging of these people



I hope you're not being so crass as to demand an exact replica of the show trials - a form of trial specifically designed for the internal purges? Because that would make your original post about the bolsheviks being the first victims meaningless.

Here's red emma



> It is a sad, heartbreaking commentary upon the situation in Russia to speak of political prisoners in the land of the Social Revolution! Yet such is the fact, unfortunately. Nor do we refer to counter-revolutionists who might be, conceivably, prisoners of the Revolution. Incredible as it may seem, the jails and prisons of Russia are today densely populated by the best revolutionary elements of the country, by men and women of the highest social ideals and aspirations. Throughout the whole vast country, in Russia proper as in Siberia, in the prisons of the old régime and in those of the new, in the incommunicado dungeons of the Tche-ka’s Ossoby Otdell (Special Section), there languish revolutionaries of every party and movement : Social Revolutionists of the, Left, Maximalists, Communist followers of the “Labour Opposition,” Anarchists, Anarcho-Syndicalists, and Universalists - adherents of various schools of social philosophy, but all of them true revolutionists, and most of them enthusiastic participants in the November Revolution of 1917.


http://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/9s4nrq


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## Random (Oct 20, 2010)

Spion said:


> The left SRs. The party whose land reform programme was taken on wholesale by the bolsheviks and who still launched numerous armed rebellions and even shot Lenin because he was 'a traitor to the revolution' for getting Russia out of the war.


 'Getting Russia out of the war' involved giving up the vast peasant population of the Ukraine to the Germans, who enforced the rule of the landlords with incredible brutality; probably contributing to the cycle of grain requisitions which made the civil war so bitter.

I'm not saying the left SRs were right, just that they weren't simply war-mad as you seem to think.


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## dennisr (Oct 20, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> On the question of land, is there a lot of history writings (I've only read a few bits and pieces) beyond a Bolshevik one, that goes into their relationship with the largest social group in the country at the time, the peasantry?  After the Communists captured state power, with their ambitions to nationalise and socialise the economy, would it b fair to say that the rural areas would prove to pose a particularly troublesome problem, for with the thousands upon of thousands of tiny individual plots coveted by the peasants who had enacted radical change as they understood it in myriad ways, on the question of controlling land the Communists would come to be viewed as counter-revolutionary?



The revolution was carried through on the basis of majority support from an armed working class and poor peasants the simple slogans "Bread, Peace and Land".

Yes, the working class were a small minority - they could have achieved little on their own. This was a revolution to end the massacre in the trenches. The cannon fodder had had enough of dying for the Tsar and the big landowners. Yes, this was a revolution in an economically and socially backward country. It depended (in the words of the likes of of Lenin and Trotsky) on the spread of hat revolution to advanced capitalist countries. Germany was seen as the key. The isolation of that revolution, the physical wiping out of that small working class minority (while defending their new-found power tooth and nail in the resulting civil war), the defeat of the revolutionary waves across europe (in particular), the worn out peasantry desiring final 'peace' were the basis of the isolation of the revolutionaries in the soviet union and the growth of the bureaucrats. The fact is they (added: I mean the up-coming bureaucrats and 'socialism in one country' types...) had genuine passive support for a period (weather those on the left like to admit this or not). The growing bureaucracy used both divisions within the peasant classes - against the better off kulacks for example at one point - leaning on the peasantry to build their power base.

I would not get too dewy eyed about the peasants as a class or classes if you want to get an understanding of what actually happened. It was never a simple case of bad bolshies v peasents.


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## dennisr (Oct 20, 2010)

Random said:


> I hope you're not being so crass as to demand an exact replica of the show trials - a form of trial specifically designed for the internal purges? Because that would make your original post about the bolsheviks being the first victims meaningless.



Only as crass as someone who tries to equate the imprisonment of a few ultra-lefts (during a civil war) to the systematic and mass terrorisation later carried out by the bureaucracy. I was referring to the mass purges etc etc of the stalinists in power - of which the bolsheviks were the first group to go. Sorry if I did not make that clear enough for you.

The comedy ultra-lefts that 'red' emma cried for were not part of and organised bureaucratic power struggle - regardless of the rights or wrongs of their imprisonment (and if some left SR chucked a bomb at me - I'd have them imprisoned) and regardless of your desire to make out that this small group of critics had any real influence or support from almost anyone else in the events of the time. The old SR movement was all over the place - it was ideologically bankrupt and fighting its own war in the middle of a civil war - not clever.

To be pedantic the first folk to be imprisoned would have been the old ruling class. But it was not the point being made.


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## Captain Hurrah (Oct 20, 2010)

dennisr said:


> The revolution was carried through on the basis of majority support from an armed working class and poor peasants the simple slogans "Bread, Peace and Land".
> 
> Yes, the working class were a small minority - they could have achieved little on their own. This was a revolution to end the massacre in the trenches. The cannon fodder had had enough of dying for the Tsar and the big landowners. Yes, this was a revolution in an economically and socially backward country. It depended (in the words of the likes of of Lenin and Trotsky) on the spread of hat revolution to advanced capitalist countries. Germany was seen as the key. The isolation of that revolution, the physical wiping out of that small working class minority (while defending their new-found power tooth and nail in the resulting civil war), the defeat of the revolutionary waves across europe (in particular), the worn out peasantry desiring final 'peace' were the basis of the isolation of the revolutionaries in the soviet union and the growth of the bureaucrats. The fact is they had genuine passive support for a period (weather those on the left like to admit this or not). The growing bureaucracy used both divisions within the peasant classes - against the better off kulacks for example at one point - leaning on the peasantry to build their power base.
> 
> I would not get too dewy eyed about the peasants as a class or classes if you want to get an understanding of what actually happened. It was never a simple case of bad bolshies v peasents.



Well, I've read a bit of (non-socialist/Communist/anarchist-tinged) research on peasants who having survived the 1920s, were very much a part of building socialism in the 1930s.   A complex and resourceful bunch, with many building that socialism while not caring a fig for it.  Or rather, they understood their own place in it, and used old pre-revolutionary family, regional, other social networks and ways of informal self-organisation, at workplaces and in their neighborhoods, in order to impose their own demands on the industrialising state.  There's nothing to be dewy-eyed about, with regard to baggy-trousered country bumpkins.  Even though in the eyes of some they constituted an historically backward social force.


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## Random (Oct 20, 2010)

dennisr said:


> The comedy ultra-lefts that 'red' emma cried for were not part of and organised bureaucratic power struggle


 The left SRs were once in the government. How bureaucratic do you want? And now I see you're sinking to falsifying the level of support that any socialist enemies of the bolshevisk had. 

Welcome to Pravda circa 1921. And you've not even got a civil war going on in your flat to excuse this! Come off it.


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## dennisr (Oct 20, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> I'm not asking you to defend anything.  I'm asking for your opinion on whether that particularly disturbing intellectual justification had much mileage in his views on how to construct a socialist society.  Surely the militarisation of labour and its implications is a little bit more than a tactical matter.



If you are going to ask someone's opinion i would suggest that you do not try and imply you already know the answer in advance.
It was a tactical matter - It may well have been an incorrect tactic - retrospectively - but it had a) nothing to do with trotsky's fashion sense and b) does not neccessarily show that everything else trotsky wrote about is, in any way, invalid.

He was the leader of the Red Army - there are even a series of volumes on his military writings. He turned a chaotic, worn out, armed population desperate to end one war (the trenches of WW1 - only to find themselves in another...) into a modern mass army that defeated 21 invading armies and white russian forces. He developed ideas on how that army could maintain itself. On the basis of how this was all achieved - alone - his views are worth reading about even if you do not agree with tactical decisions he took at the time


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## Captain Hurrah (Oct 20, 2010)

Granted, the dire situation had its priorities, for preventing the destruction of a revolutionary state by the White Guard counterrevolution and its foreign interventionist allies.   But I'm not so sure that post-war Pharaonic endeavors for the cake and lulz are my bag.


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## dennisr (Oct 20, 2010)

kyser_soze said:


> Got any 'quick enough to read at work' reccs, dennisr?



I wish I could mate  

On how the bureaucracy seized power: http://www.socialistalternative.org/publications/bureaucracy

Marxist (Trot...) view of the Russian Revolution: http://www.socialistalternative.org/literature/rus-rev

On Trotsky: http://www.socialistalternative.org/literature/trotsky

Was lenin a Dictator: http://www.socialistalternative.org/literature/lenin

Stalinism v Bolshevism: http://www.marxist.net/trotsky/russia/r2frame.htm?stalin.html


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## frogwoman (Oct 20, 2010)

is it true that trotsky turned down an offer of power in 1923 (I think the article i read said it was then, but im not sure) because he was scared of fucking up / the revolution getting fucked up (for want of a better term) under his watch? i read this the other day, and wondered whether it was right (or perhaps im not remembering it right)?


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## Random (Oct 20, 2010)

Where did you read it?


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## frogwoman (Oct 20, 2010)

i **think** it was on the socialist party website, but i might be wrong so dont quote me on that (and i might have got the details of why he turned it down wrong to). He basically iirc turned down power because he thought there was a chance of it going wrong if he did. I have to say I dont know much about that period of history tho so I probably seem really thick.


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## Random (Oct 20, 2010)

Yes you do. God I'm disgusted with you even mentioning it in front of us knowleagable types.


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## kyser_soze (Oct 20, 2010)

Ta d. Think I'll be printing those off and reading them on the bus...


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## Spion (Oct 20, 2010)

Random said:


> I'm not saying the left SRs were right


Well that's OK then. I mean, you'd have a hell of a job - the Left SRs military forces bombarded the Kremlin for two days, took over important public buildings in Moscow and claimed they'd seized power while their comrades launched armed insurrections in towns across the country. They also stuck 3 bullets in Lenin and assassinated the German ambassador in a bid to spark war. All against the backdrop of a war against foreign armies sent to crush the revolution. Left SRs involved in any of that that just got a prison sentence were pretty leniently treated really


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## Captain Hurrah (Oct 20, 2010)

Their forces in the capital were pretty feeble, and anyway they unsuccessfully attempted to fight their way to the Kremlin, but were easily contained a few  hundred metres away, in Moscow's old Chinatown district.


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## Random (Oct 20, 2010)

Spion said:


> Well that's OK then. I mean, you'd have a hell of a job - the Left SRs military forces bombarded the Kremlin for two days, took over important public buildings in Moscow and claimed they'd seized power while their comrades launched armed insurrections in towns across the country. They also stuck 3 bullets in Lenin and assassinated the German ambassador in a bid to spark war. All against the backdrop of a war against foreign armies sent to crush the revolution. Left SRs involved in any of that that just got a prison sentence were pretty leniently treated really


 That doesn't say anything about whether they were _right_, though, does it? You're confusing two things there, probably without knowing it.


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## Spion (Oct 20, 2010)

Random said:


> That doesn't say anything about whether they were _right_, though, does it? You're confusing two things there, probably without knowing it.


In my book all the things I listed are dead wrong and they deserved what they got. But go on, enlighten me


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## Spion (Oct 20, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Their forces in the capital were pretty feeble, and anyway they unsuccessfully attempted to fight their way to the Kremlin, but were easily contained a few  hundred metres away, in Moscow's old Chinatown district.


So, like the SRs were only joking and the Bolsheviks didn't get it and were awful to them in response?


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## Random (Oct 20, 2010)

Spion said:


> In my book all the things I listed are dead wrong and they deserved what they got. But go on, enlighten me


 Insurrection and assassination are wrong?  What you _mean _is that they're wrong if done for the wrong reasons - which is something you've not touched on, apart from claiming vaguely that the left SRs simply wanted more war.


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## Spion (Oct 20, 2010)

Random said:


> Insurrection and assassination are wrong?  What you _mean _is that they're wrong if done for the wrong reasons - which is something you've not touched on, apart from claiming vaguely that the left SRs simply wanted more war.


and that they launched these actions against a backdrop of foreign military intervention against the _revolution_. It's all in there a few posts up.

Anyway, I'm still waiting for you to tell me why these Left SRs were harshly treated, given what they got up to. So, go on . . .


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## Random (Oct 20, 2010)

Spion;11163073]and that they launched these actions against a backdrop of foreign military intervention against the [I]revolution[/I]. It's all in there a few posts up.[/QUOTE] the bolsheviks launched an insurrection while there were German troops in Russia said:


> Anyway, I'm still waiting for you to tell me why these Left SRs were harshly treated, given what they got up to. So, go on . . .


 Why should I write something on that, given that I've not claimed that they were 'harshly' treated? What I've said is that the bolsheviks do not have the honour of being the first left socialists to be imprisoned by the new regime.


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## Spion (Oct 20, 2010)

Random said:


> Your position is that this is ok because the revolution was right. Be honest.


Err, yeah. I don't think there's anyone but you who doubts that I think that.



Random said:


> What I've said is that the bolsheviks do not have the honour of being the first left socialists to be imprisoned by the new regime.


Oh, right. OK. See ya then. Zzzzzzz


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## Random (Oct 20, 2010)

kthanksbai


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## Idaho (Oct 20, 2010)

Random said:


> kthanksbai


 
Bless you.


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## Proper Tidy (Oct 20, 2010)

Random said:


> Insurrection and assassination are wrong?  What you _mean _is that they're wrong if done for the wrong reasons - which is something you've not touched on, apart from claiming vaguely that the left SRs simply wanted more war.


 
Did the SR's have majority - or even a significant minority - of support?

Also, what was the likely outcome at that time if the SR's had succeeded in their terrorism?

Btw: http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1911/11/tia09.htm


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## ernestolynch (Oct 20, 2010)

The Trot was executed as he was working with the Fascist to attack the USSR.


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## audiotech (Oct 20, 2010)

This non-trot is shaking hands with?


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## frogwoman (Oct 20, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> Trotzkyism exists only in the students union bars of the 1st World.


 
unlike stalinism, which exists only in the hearts of middle-aged history teachers


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## Proper Tidy (Oct 20, 2010)

frogwoman said:


> unlike stalinism, which exists only in the hearts of middle-aged history teachers


 
Not even there really


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## discokermit (Oct 20, 2010)

frogwoman said:


> middle-aged history teachers


fuck! ern teaches history? i thought he taught drama or summat.


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## Idaho (Oct 20, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> The Trot was executed as he was working with the Fascist to attack the USSR.


 
I thought he and his family were killed because Stalin was paranoid about people saying anything bad about him.


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## Captain Hurrah (Oct 20, 2010)

Spion said:


> So, like the SRs were only joking and the Bolsheviks didn't get it and were awful to them in response?



They weren't all that, in your attempt to paint a picture of Bolsheviks imperiled.  If I remember correctly, when they launched their botched attempt to take the Kremlin, the weather conditions made it even more difficult, thick fog, making it easier for the crack Latvian troops who had sided with the Bolsheviks to keep them pinned down.  It was an embarrassment.  So close, yet so far.


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## Captain Hurrah (Oct 20, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> Did the SR's have majority - or even a significant minority - of support?
> 
> Also, what was the likely outcome at that time if the SR's had succeeded in their terrorism?
> 
> Btw: http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1911/11/tia09.htm





Well, as for the (individual terrorist, lame insurrectionist) behaviour and limited influence they had in the capital, they still had a considerable base of support among Russia's poor peasants.  Outside of the confines of formal power set by the Communists.   And the conflicting interests, and understood aims of what social revolution was about among the peasants, came to a head as the terrible exigencies of a growing civil war (Bolshevik survival) became clear, and the hated policy of _Prodrazvyorstka_.



> By mid-spring, grain acquisition mechanisms, customary as well as new, were grinding to a halt. The government urged factory workers to form armed detachments and set out into the countryside to obtain foodstuffs by force. Unsurprisingly, peasants violently resisted the onslaught. Meanwhile, in protest of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty the Left Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) withdrew from the government. The entire government apparatus, including the Commissariat of Agriculture, now passed under Communist control. The final Left SR bastion was the All-Russian Executive Committee of Soviets’ Peasant Section, chaired by Maria Spiridonova. Even as armed worker detachments set out into the countryside, peasant soviets were passing former noble and state land to peasant communes. The Great Land Redistribution (_Chernyi Peredel_), the age-old peasant dream, had finally entered its decisive stage. This was a remarkable conjuncture. The Left SRs vociferously opposed armed seizures of grain and maintained a base of support within peasant soviets. In May 1918 the Soviet government proclaimed a food supply dictatorship consisting of a state grain monopoly and fixed grain prices.





> Into these troubled waters, the Leninist government launched the committees of the poor aimed at supplanting the principal functions of the peasant soviets and helping the government locate grain reserves allegedly hoarded by kulaks. The Left SRs, with broad peasant support, opposed the concept of village class war implied by the committees of the poor. As the Fifth Congress of Soviets approached (July 4, 1918), the government proposed abolishing the All-Russian Executive Committee of Soviets’ Peasant Section and, in fact, the congress reduced its status to that of a department. Since it had divested peasant soviets of many functions, this made perfect sense from the government’s viewpoint. As for the peasants, this denoted the abrupt end of the worker-peasant state since peasants as such no longer shared Soviet power. None of this helped collect grain, nor did other events surrounding the Fifth Congress of Soviets, which led to the exclusion of Left SRs from soviets. Again, for the Communist leadership, the removal of Left SRs from central and local reins of power simplified governance, a view implicitly shared by historical commentators when they pass over the matter’s significance. It also deepened the political rupture between state and peasant, the latter of whom looked primarily to Left SRs for representation. (Post-October policies had already alienated much of the significant but transient peasant support won by Lenin’s October land decree and the truce with Germany.)





> Another set of weighty events, also largely unnoticed in existing histories, contributed heavily to the mid-1918 food crisis. The October land decree set off round after round of land confiscations from nobles, a process that continued throughout 1918. Confiscation, however, was merely the first step in a far-reaching process. During winter 1918 the new Soviet state produced its land law written by Left SRs at a time when they still held significant positions in the government and soviets. On the basis of the new land law, local soviets, as mentioned, began passing noble and other confiscated land to peasant communes, where it would be subdivided among households according to established formulas. Over time this would presumably have led to increased peasant production of grain. It also meant that precisely in the middle of an acute food supply crisis, noble lands—heavy producers of grain for the market, as opposed to peasant production that largely fed local populations—underwent subdivision. Some land remained unsown. Estates scheduled for later subdivision or to become state farms (_sovkhozy_) suffered from widespread marauding of tools, seed stock, and livestock, and from general despoliation. A dense web of dimly understood circumstances placed the new Soviet Republic under the threat of hunger.



_Our backward country cousins need a dose of War Communism._

Get the whole article here.


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## Spion (Oct 21, 2010)

Proper Tidy said:


> Did the SR's have majority - or even a significant minority - of support?


 At the 5th All-Russia Congress of Soviets of July 4, 1918 the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries had 352 delegates compared to 745 Bolsheviks out of 1132 total



Proper Tidy said:


> Also, what was the likely outcome at that time if the SR's had succeeded in their terrorism?


War with Germany and famine in the cities?


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## dennisr (Oct 21, 2010)

So we are back to beard-stroking over the tactical details of events in 1917-23 ?

Oh well. I thought the bigger questions being discussed - what 'trotskyism' was, what stalinism was etc was a bit more fruitful than this commie wargamers discussion *throws dice despondantly*


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## Captain Hurrah (Oct 21, 2010)

Your wargaming name is Operetta Commander.


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## dennisr (Oct 21, 2010)

Idaho said:


> I thought he and his family were killed because Stalin was paranoid about people saying anything bad about him.



It may have been because stalin had a small willy etc but i don't think that can really begin to explain the scale of events. It sounds similar to putting Hitler's genocidal tendancies down to his being an angry failed artist with piles 
The fella really took paranoia to extremes given the mass purges etc later. Some of the material is, only now, coming out - a recent book by russian historian Vadim Rogovin - 1937 - Stalin's Year of Terror - makes for a depressing read.


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## dennisr (Oct 21, 2010)

Captain Hurrah said:


> Your wargaming name is Operetta Commander.


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## Neutron (Oct 22, 2010)

ernestolynch said:


> Trotzkyism exists only in the students union bars of the 1st World.



Saor Éire (IPA: [s̪ˠɯɾˠ eːɼə] / [s̪ˠiːɾˠ eːɼə]) (Irish, meaning Free Ireland) was an armed, radical Irish Republican organisation composed of Trotskyists and ex-IRA members. It took its name from a similar organisation of the 1930s.[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saor_Éire_(1967-1975)

Who were these "comrade" O'Lynch?


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## Neutron (Oct 22, 2010)

*Trotskyism.*



Spion said:


> * The transitional programme/method. In the late 30s Trotsky criticised other leftists for not developing programme (ie, 'policy') that put workers' self organisation at its core. For him, a policy had to have two elements a) a solution to the problem faced (eg, 'For a programme of public housing paid for by taxing the rich . . . ') and b) an element which built in workers' development of self conscious organisation in society (eg '. . . under workers control'). Relevance today? Very - almost no left wing group tries to put forward policy/programme in this way, AFAIK.



Nothing wrong with this, even from a libertarian socialist POV.



> * His analysis of fascism - that it is/was a mass/plebian movement aimed at cutting the throat of the workers' movement which needed to be tackled physically by a united front of workers' organisations/TUs etc. Relevance today? - very. The likes of Unite Against Fascism today cut their cloth according to the Tory/Lib Dem allies they hope to get on board to their 'respectable' campaigning.




INCORRECT - Trotsky analysed Fascism/Nazism as being based upon the lower-middle class/petit bourgeoisie.

The German workers in overwhelming numbers in post 1914-18 war supported SDP and Communists.

Origin of clenched fist salute:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotfrontkämpferbund



> * The revolutionary party. His ideas are more or less the same as Lenin's - that there needs to be a democratic centralist and internationally organised democratic centralist workers' party that responds to the situations it faces with a programme based on the transitional method of developing a programme.



Of course Lenin was a more dogmatic authoritarian than Trotsky - but to the ultra-left this may be of little importance.


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## The39thStep (Oct 22, 2010)

Neutron said:


> Nothing wrong with this, even from a libertarian socialist POV.
> 
> 
> 
> ...


 
Are you saying that the fascistmovement in Germany was  composed of  lower-middle class/petit bourgeoisie?.


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## Louis MacNeice (Oct 22, 2010)

The39thStep said:


> Are you saying that the fascistmovement in Germany was  composed of  lower-middle class/petit bourgeoisie?.



That's how I read it but...

More contentious has been the relationship between workers and the Nazi Party. Recent research has revised the impression of working-class immunity to Nazism: around 55 per cent of SA stormtroopers came from working-class backgrounds and the Nazis made substantial gains from working-class communities in parts of Saxony, especially around Chemnitz. Around 40 per cent of members of the Party seem to have been of working-class origins; similarly 40 per cent of the Nazi vote came from workers and one worker in every four voted for Hitler in July 1932.

There is little correlation between the percentage of workers in a community and the level of support for the NSDAP, though there is a slight positive correlation between the percentage of

employed workers and the size of the Nazi vote. In 1930 some 3 per cent of Nazi votes came from former KPD and 14 per cent from former SPD voters (July 1932, 2 per cent and 10 per cent respectively); and the number of workers voting for the National Socialists in the first Reichstag elections of 1932 was greater than the number of workers voting for the SPD or the KPD individually (though not than the number voting for SPD and KPD combined).

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


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## Spion (Oct 22, 2010)

What would have been the outcome of an IWCA doorstep questionnaire with those workers? "Smash the jews/marxism and colonise the east, please!"


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## Louis MacNeice (Oct 22, 2010)

Spion said:


> What would have been the outcome of an IWCA doorstep questionnaire with those workers? "Smash the jews/marxism and colonise the east, please!"


 
My German wouldn't really be up to it. Also you might find an answer for if you read the article linked to.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


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## Spion (Oct 22, 2010)

I will. Looks an interesting read. Ta


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## past caring (Oct 22, 2010)

dennisr said:


> So we are back to beard-stroking over the tactical details of events in 1917-23 ?
> 
> Oh well. I thought the bigger questions being discussed - what 'trotskyism' was, what stalinism was etc was a bit more fruitful than this commie wargamers discussion *throws dice despondantly*


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## Captain Hurrah (Oct 22, 2010)




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## The39thStep (Oct 22, 2010)

Louis MacNeice said:


> That's how I read it but...
> 
> More contentious has been the relationship between workers and the Nazi Party. Recent research has revised the impression of working-class immunity to Nazism: around 55 per cent of SA stormtroopers came from working-class backgrounds and the Nazis made substantial gains from working-class communities in parts of Saxony, especially around Chemnitz. Around 40 per cent of members of the Party seem to have been of working-class origins; similarly 40 per cent of the Nazi vote came from workers and one worker in every four voted for Hitler in July 1932.
> 
> ...


 
There is an interesting if somewhat academic book called something like  'Beating the fascists- a study of political violence' about the KPD and the Nazis  which tackles this issue. The book tells a horrifying story of what was and what was to be a day to day violent struggle for control in working class areas. There was a review in SWorker or SReview in which the main point was that there was no mention of Trotsky.


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## frogwoman (Oct 31, 2010)

oh dear  

im quite interested in getting a copy of "quite right mr trotsky" actually, just for the lolz.


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## ernestolynch (Oct 31, 2010)

It's a good book.


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## frogwoman (Oct 31, 2010)

i thought you'd say that  where can i buy it tho? other than www.unclejoesgiftshop.com or whatever.


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## butchersapron (Oct 31, 2010)

It's a very funny book and people on here not too far from where i'm sitting used to know him. In the labour party.


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## ernestolynch (Oct 31, 2010)

Herman who used to post here for a while knew him too.


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## frogwoman (Oct 31, 2010)

i might order it off of amazon when i've got the money. that's an awesome cover.


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## ViolentPanda (Oct 31, 2010)

The39thStep said:


> There is an interesting if somewhat academic book called something like  'Beating the fascists- a study of political violence' about the KPD and the Nazis  which tackles this issue. The book tells a horrifying story of what was and what was to be a day to day violent struggle for control in working class areas. There was a review in SWorker or SReview in which the main point was that there was no mention of Trotsky.


 
Do you mean Eve Rosenhaft's "Beating the Fascists: The German Communists and Political Violence 1929-1933"?


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## Louis MacNeice (Oct 31, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> It's a very funny book and people on here not too far from where i'm sitting used to know him. In the labour party.



Never new him in the LP but I did know him; I didn't think he was that funny in real life...at least not as funny as he thought he was.

Cheers - Louis MacNeice


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## butchersapron (Oct 31, 2010)

John Sullivan was the other bristol based lefty funny type. I noticed his name/pamphlet when flicking though the AFA book earlier btw


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## JHE (Nov 1, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> It's a very funny book and people on here not too far from where i'm sitting used to know him. In the labour party.



Labour?  I thought the Tanky author, Denver Walker, was in the NCP.

This little obit says he was too, but also says that he left the National Car Parks in the 1990s and joined the CPB:
http://79.170.40.183/grahamstevenso...&view=article&id=603:denver-walker&catid=23:w



butchersapron said:


> John Sullivan was the other bristol based lefty funny type. I noticed his name/pamphlet when flicking though the AFA book earlier btw


 
As well as being very good at taking the piss out of various sorts of foolishness on the British left ( http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/critiques/sullivan/pub-index.html ), John Sullivan was also extremely expert on the subject of Basque nationalism and ETA.


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## Louis MacNeice (Nov 2, 2010)

JHE said:


> Labour?  I thought the Tanky author, Denver Walker, was in the NCP.
> 
> This little obit says he was too, but also says that he left the National Car Parks in the 1990s and joined the CPB:
> http://79.170.40.183/grahamstevenso...&view=article&id=603:denver-walker&catid=23:w
> ...



Denver Walker was in the NCP and then the CPB. On a personal level I found him better company than the by turns, over bearing, self righteous and bullying, John Sullivan. 

Louis MacNeice


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## Nigel Irritable (Nov 5, 2010)

Louis MacNeice said:


> Denver Walker was in the NCP and then the CPB. On a personal level I found him better company than the by turns, over bearing, self righteous and bullying, John Sullivan.
> 
> Louis MacNeice


 
Sullivan was very much funnier in print than Walker. I never met either of them, so I can't say who was more fun to have a pint with.

I noticed that Sullivan's "As Soon As This Pub Closes..." is descibed as a "vicious and disgusting" pamphlet in "Beating the Fascists". Red Action had many positive qualities, but a sense of humour about themselves does not seem to have been amongst them.


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## LiamO (Nov 5, 2010)

Nigel Irritable said:


> I noticed that Sullivan's "As Soon As This Pub Closes..." is descibed as a "vicious and disgusting" pamphlet in "Beating the Fascists". Red Action had many positive qualities,* but a sense of humour about themselves does not seem to have been amongst them*.



I would question the veracity of this statement. Indeed one of the accusations most often thrown at Red Action by trendy lefties was that the black humour RA people displayed did not fit in with their PC, right-on worthiness._ Anybody_ around RA (at any level) was likely to be ripped to pieces verbally and if they got flouncy then it would make it all the worse.

Political attacks may be another matter.


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## butchersapron (Nov 5, 2010)

JHE said:


> Labour?  I thought the Tanky author, Denver Walker, was in the NCP.
> 
> This little obit says he was too, but also says that he left the National Car Parks in the 1990s and joined the CPB:
> http://79.170.40.183/grahamstevenso...&view=article&id=603:denver-walker&catid=23:w
> ...


 
I'm sure he told a story about something daft one of the entryists said at a CLP meeting. I'll check when home later. I may well have misremembered.


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## dennisr (Nov 5, 2010)

LiamO said:


> "trendy lefties" ... "did not fit in with their PC, right-on worthiness"



A tendancy to parade themselves as 'say-it-like-it-is-warts-n-all-salt-of-the-earth' proles didn't help. ;-)


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## LiamO (Nov 5, 2010)

Objecting to this pure unadulterated bullshit is hardly 'lacking a sense of humour' is it?

This is a lie. The author either knew it was a lie and chose to repeat it, or he is a fool who would take the word of some rancid old SWP Fuhrer without checking it out.

*Red Action
(aka the Squaddists)​*
_IN the early 1980s, as Tony Cliff was walking through Islington market, he stopped to watch some of his supporters battling it out with the National Front, when something struck him as odd. His followers were on suspiciously good terms with the ‘enemy’, and the battle was obviously being conducted according to recognised rules. When the whistle blew for half time, the antagonists bowed to each other and went off to drink in the same pub (admittedly in separate bars).

Cliff, a near-teetotaller who genuinely detests Fascists, ordered an inquiry fearing that the local SWP had been infiltrated by the Sealed Knot Society, who dress up and re-enact historic battles. It transpired that, on a previous occasion, a rising young SWP intellectual had been recognised by his own comrades and beaten up when he refused to join in the fun._

Total bollocks. This _entire_ passage is a complete fabrication, constructed (probably) by the CC of the SWP to 'justify' their political and personal cowardice. It is not just an attack on Red Action.  Far worse than that, it is an attack on, and dismissal of, militant anti-fascism per se. That is why it should be challenged. Not because of a humour by-pass. 

This was just another example of a lazy writer trotting out the same old tired lies of the tired old left. 

Anybody who was around at the time will know that. Other people reading it won't and might actually believe it.

To this day (and I'm a fat old man) if I met the author of this and he attempted to defend his slurs - I would slap the cunt.


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## butchersapron (Nov 5, 2010)

You'd have to get your spade out of the shed.


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## LiamO (Nov 5, 2010)

dennisr said:


> A tendancy to parade themselves as 'say-it-like-it-is-warts-n-all-salt-of-the-earth' proles didn't help. ;-)


 
would you care to expand on this Dennis? I would like to reply, but would appeciate you 'expanding' a little to clarify _exactly_ what you mean.


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## LiamO (Nov 5, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> You'd have to get your spade out of the shed.



Right then. I can now slowly shuffle off back to my retirement home, instead of shaking my aged, arthritic fist at dead people.


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## Nigel Irritable (Nov 5, 2010)

LiamO said:


> Objecting to this pure unadulterated bullshit is hardly 'lacking a sense of humour' is it?
> 
> This is a lie. The author either knew it was a lie and chose to repeat it, or he is a fool who would take the word of some rancid old SWP Fuhrer without checking it out.
> 
> ...



Liam, "As Soon As This Pub Closes" is satire.

The reader isn't intended to believe that Red Action and National Front streetfighters would ritually bow to each other after combat any more than they are supposed to actually believe that David Yaffe, the guru of the Revolutionary Communist Group, invented a  machine which measures the tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Although at least Yaffe saw the funny side and joked about it when the issue came up in a newspaper, rather than writing a po faced denunciation of a dead man's joke some decades later.

It slags off everyone on the left and makes stuff up about all of them.


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## audiotech (Nov 5, 2010)

> The "Squaddists" insisted that they were the only authentically working class group on the Left and that they were particularly eager to assist all genuine struggles for national liberation. Such a juxtaposition is confusing only to those unable to decode the message. A group which wants to hire itself out always makes such a declaration. When dropping their jeans to display their charms it is important to emphasise to potential customers that these exquisitely shaped buttocks are proletarian.
> http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/sectariana/Pub.html#Squaddists



Ho, ho.


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## LiamO (Nov 5, 2010)

Nigel Irritable said:


> Liam, "As Soon As This Pub Closes" is satire.
> 
> It slags off everyone on the left and makes stuff up about all of them.



I don't give a fiddlers. The stuff he followed this with (quoted by audiotech above) is legitimate piss-taking. the bit I quoted is naughty.


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## butchersapron (Nov 5, 2010)

Liam - it's expressly made up, a little comedic fantasy that he thinks illustrates RA. It's not entered into the record.


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## Spanky Longhorn (Nov 5, 2010)

Actually if anything he is poking fun at the times SWPers made stuff up to hint that RA were a bit too cosy with the fash. I cringed when I read that passage in the BTF book.


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## Nigel Irritable (Nov 5, 2010)

Spanky Longhorn said:


> Actually if anything he is poking fun at the times SWPers made stuff up to hint that RA were a bit too cosy with the fash. I cringed when I read that passage in the BTF book.


 
I'm particularly fond of one of the footnotes to his other pamphlet "Go Fourth and Multiply"
;
"1. Kaur’s Law states that where there is an idiocy unvoiced a left group will step into the vacuum."


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## butchersapron (Nov 5, 2010)

Have you ever seen this other pamphlet?


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## Nigel Irritable (Nov 5, 2010)

butchersapron said:


> Have you ever seen this other pamphlet?



It was bunged in with the much longer "As Soon As This Pub Closes" when it was republished a few years ago.

And it's online here: http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/critiques/sullivan/fourth-index.htm

The subtitles to the groups are amazing: "If you enjoyed the 1950s, you'll love the NCP".

http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/critiques/sullivan/fourth-index.htm


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