someone also replied with this
>My grandparents are like that, they have photos of Abdel Nasser and his family in their living room, treating him like a Saint. But if you were to ask them anything about actual Arab nationalist philosophy, they wouldn't know. All my grandparents know is that things were better back then, my Granddad would be provided a job that supported his family and there wasn't any filth on the streets. To a large extent, things were indeed better back then and that's just how it is for most people, these people believe and worship the State and the Leader, they don't give a shit about Ideology. As long as it's not openly 'heretical' to the values of people, the masses will believe in it
77 posts and 19 image replies omitted.>>2207703The usage of specialists in the military and other fields was why the Soviets had a system of commissars/ political officers to sniff out treason and act as a shield against betrayals. Setting up party officials alongside specialists professionalized the army and allowed them to function as a state in the transitional period.
It's super interesting how this strategy lines up with the dual power strategy employed by the Bolsheviks to set up a political base in the Soviets while participating in elections, only to eventually disavow the liberal government and draw on soviet council support. Similar to this early military strategy and early political strategy, western experts were employed beyond the war in industrial capacities as experts until the Soviets were able to develop their own talent. (The soviet union was a great place for german factory managers during the great depression)
>>2213033One advantage of the countryside metallurgical experiments was that there was a now a practical understanding of metallurgy among the general population
In fact when Xi Jinping was sent down to the countryside as a youth he volunteered to do some blacksmithing and declared that it was hard work
>>2271400 (me)
I realize I said "woke" on autopilot, but fill in the idpol of the moment. Plenty of the opposite is around as well. It's the performative aspect of it which sucks. And we are stuck of a back and forth of pointless cruelty and pointless "harm reduction" for the sake of spectacle. Without going anywhere, overtly. As far as the resulting worldview, no matter how much right wing things get it is and was always the center.
>>2271390>>2168092There are loads of people in Eastern Europe that have a positive view of Communism and the Soviet era.
And they're not totally wrong. I mean, would you rather live in 1970s East Germany, or Modern Cambodia or Somalia?, It wasn't anything close to real Communism but compared to the world that came after, it was pretty decent. Nobody starved, or faced unemployment. Everybody got (mediocre) education. Of course KGB agent might beat you for wearing blue jeans, so … y'know. It was alright.
>>2272033Soiet education was the best in the world thoughbeit
It's why the entire imperialist bloc poached their intellectuals after the war
>>2168075People care about their std. of living and it was better during socialist times or times where there was heavy government intervention in the economy & society.
Hey look materialism proven correct once again.
>>2194114Great post. Mao's development as a Marxist leader was very unconventional, because while he was highly educated, very little of that education was properly Marxist until the late 1930s. Most socialist revolutionaries in China shunned classic Chinese literature and read Marxist theorists instead in foreign languages; Mao on the other hand could speak solely Chinese, and was brought up on classical Confucian philosophy, classic Chinese
Youxia novels, and modern Confucian takes on western liberalism (Yang Changji).
He only took up Marxism in the winter of 1919. The three books you mentioned were the Communist Manifesto (which I think had been translated before 1919), a mutilated Chinese translation of the mutilated English translation of Karl Kautsky's
The Class Struggle, and Thomas Kirkup's Fabian take on the
History of Socialism. He didn't do a whole lot of Marxist reading after that - not only because he was actively engaged in political and military activities, but because almost no Marxist books were even translated into Chinese back then. Mao didn't seriously study Marxist theory until the power struggles in the CPC of the late 1930s, wherein he mixed Stalin with the kind of Chinese dialectical philosophy he was familiar with. Furthermore, he admitted that he had never read Marx's Capital until his Great Leap Forward plan started to fail.
My source for all this is Wang Fanxi's
Mao Zedong Thought, which I recommend to everyone. PDF attached.
>>2305015>>2305021 (not me)
>>2305022Good question. I don't know enough about philosophy to write a respectable answer, so you'll have to consult Wang Fanxi's book on that. Going from memory, Mao's understanding of Marxism from the late 1930s onward came mostly from Joseph Stalin's writings (and other "Stalinist" sources from the USSR), and Mao felt at home specifically in the field of philosophy because of his grounding in Chinese classics (again, which exactly I don't remember).
>>21682921000% this.
Representative "democracy" is really just aristocracy with a friendly face, and vangardism is the epitome of that. The people will never truly be free until they govern directly.
>>2307126>and other "Stalinist" sources from the USSRright thats why the question is stalin AND mao
i think mao accurately represents marx's dialectic, because stalin did too, and wang fanxi is just mad because he got kicked out of the cpc for being a trot
>>2168092As insane as it sounds, the Polish Peoples Republic had straight Nazbol elements, and there were outright Natsoc elements in the government.
Take the case of Bolesław Piasecki. This was the leader of the National-Radical movement(A Fascist inspired party) before the war. He was imprisoned for that. After the war, he came to an arrangement with the Communist, and was actually a leader of a fairly sizeable, state sanctioned political movement, the nationalist PAX society. He was even a member of the council of state (communist polish collective office of the head of state). Also, don't forget Grunwald, another state sanctioned, outright nationalist movement that came to importance in later years of communist Poland.
I'm no fan of the Polish Communists, nor the National-Radicals, but I always found this dissonance highly interesting. If you draw PRL to its logical conclusion, you basically get a Baathist state.
>>2333904you cannot seriously compare a Warsaw Pact member's parade with fucking Murican parades
cmon now be serious
And stop calling it 'trump's parade'. It is USA's embarrassment, not just trump. If for whatever reason democrackkas had to hold a parade, it would be at least as cringe (I suspect it would be worse).
>>2168075People aren't theorycels, they're not educated into ideology, they simply subjectively experience the social whole of society. If that society functions well for them they will appreciate it and think of that formation of the state or whatever leader they feel embodied that society at the time, fondly when it is gone. Especially when what comes after sucks balls in comparison, like neo liberalism
It's really not very complicated
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