/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

>lack of genuine freedom of ideas
These restrictions didn't even succeed in protecting the party from bad actors. Eventually they still got to the top, because in a system where everyone has to pretend like they agree, the people and state can only elect/appoint candidates due to bureaucratic competence, instead of their actual political positions. All liberals had to do is conceal their views and rise through the ranks, until they occupy enough positions of power to overthrow the state.

they should have had two communist parties which were as similar as possible

They weren’t communist for one. If they were, they’d have more of a modern day presence, and many more diehard supporters.

The fact that they failed to implement socialism and couldn't get past state capitalism

>>2193289
Read Albanian and Chinese texts on "limited sovereignty." Here's an image to illustrate how they felt about it.

>what are the biggest flaws and failures of old socialist countries
Not doing socialism and calling their state managed capitalism, "AES" which has permanently poisoned the "idea" of socialism or communism.

I don't believe it was the biggest "betrayal" or whatever to do this state managed capitalism, but actually "calling" it socialism is what killed socialism when the USSR collapsed. Now, with idiots calling China an actual communist country, when its practically libertarian compared to the USSR, there's just no going back. You can't convince millions of people that their mental image of something is wrong. Now, you have to find a way to talk about theory without mentioning Marx or even mentioning socialism at all in most cases.

The result of this is socialism being reduced to just "being nice" and communism forever being synonymous with a dictatorship with permanent war-time provisioning. The intellectual interest in it is almost dead, with it being taken over by ideological performance artists fighting boredom by larping with shit like Stalinist vs Trotskyist or Marxist vs Bakuninist. It's as if they're permanently stuck in time, and in my eyes, it looks more like just another fandom, like in pop culture. It loses any sort of revolutionary identity.

>>2193449
Do you have any actual historical evidence point it out to some "liberal coup" inside of the USSR?

>>2193536
Have you tried finding the USSR on a map recently?

>>2193601
That doesn’t answer the question, only indicates the USSR is no more

>All liberals had to do is conceal their views and rise through the ranks, until they occupy enough positions of power to overthrow the state

'''"The Soviet totalitarian regime could be destroyed only through glasnost and totalitarian discipline of the party, while hiding behind the interests of improving socialism. Already at the beginning of perestroika, dozens of previously banned books were published: "The Golden Cloud Spent the Night" by Pristavkin, "White Clothes" by Dudintsev, "Children of the Arbat" by Rybakov and many others, about 30 films, also previously banned, were released, including "Repentance" by T. Abuladze. A free press appeared.
Brilliant economists and publicists - the late Vasily Selyunin, Nikolay Shmelev, Gavriil Popov, Larisa Piyasheva, Nikolay Petrakov, Anatoly Streljany and others, at first in a tongue twister, and then in full voice, began to talk about the market, commodity-money relations, cooperation and so on.
Costs, i.e. the pathological inefficiency of the planned, administrative-command economy, sat in the liver of every sane person. A terrible commodity famine and incredible resource costs, corruption, deficit, semi-mythical money that could not be used to buy anything, vodka and tobacco riots…

In defense of the "gains of socialism" against the reforms, "the entire Stalinist army" of the nomenklatura, headed by the leaders of Bolshevism, immediately rose up. The newspaper "Soviet Russia", the main publisher of slander against me to this day, in March 1988 published an article by Nina Andreeva "I Can't Compromise My Principles". This was a kind of anti-perestroika manifesto, a battle cry of neo-Stalinists.

In response, the anti-Stalinist discussion was sharply tightened under the motto "Facts are above principle". Lenin's turn quickly came: the facts of his activities shocked people who knew nothing about the mega-criminality of the leader.
Looking back, I can proudly say that the cunning but very simple tactics — the mechanisms of totalitarianism against the system of totalitarianism — worked. We had no other way of political struggle; Bolshevism completely rejected any democratic reforms, any dissent.
For example, my works and speeches in 1987-1988, and partly in 1989, were densely stuffed with quotations from Marx and especially from Lenin. Fortunately, one can find in Lenin any number of mutually exclusive statements and on practically any fundamental issue.

Was it possible to be a more radical reformer in those years? No, head-on, battering ram reformism would have been immediately ostracized, destroyed, isolated in prisons and camps"''' - Alexander Yakovlev

>>2193658
A shame these guys were even allowed to breathe. I honestly think massive purges are necessary, and they also should be happening nonstop. At the same, completely remove material privileges, also have much more strict vetting. Basically reduce the party massive in size, but make those remaining much more dedicated. Ruling over people should not be a privilege but a sacrifice.

>>2193718
How do you 'make' people 'more dedicated'? Moreover since they are the ones making the decisions about who gets purged and when, as well as whether they get material privileges and how muc, how do you remove them? There's no magic ideological indoctrination that will make state officials and managers vote and act against their own material self-interest. They will always eventually vote to work less, be paid more, never be purged or disciplined, and only ever to purge those who stand in the way of their own career and graft, and ultimately to hold a fire sale on state assets once the wheels start falling off.

>>2193718
And this is the same thing we accuse fascists of doing

>>2193519
>Not doing socialism and calling their state managed capitalism, "AES" which has permanently poisoned the "idea" of socialism or communism.
It was socialism. Where was the capitalist class in the Soviet Union?

>>2193750
Capitalism is defined by the predomination of the capitalist mode of production (wage-labour relations of production), whether capital is concentrated under a single capitalist (the state as employer) or many doesn't change the fact that wage labour and surplus extraction predominates.

>>2193754
>whether capital is concentrated under a single capitalist
So your issue is with it being a state? Even you saying that the Soviet state itself was capitalist is ridiculous
>but actually "calling" it socialism is what killed socialism when the USSR collapsed.
That is false and you would know this with socialism pre-1917. Whatever you are envisioning as socialism would be demonized in the same way as the USSR.

>>2193762
>The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage-workers – proletarians. The capitalist relation is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head. But, brought to a head, it topples over. State ownership of the productive forces is not the solution of the conflict, but concealed within it are the technical conditions that form the elements of that solution.
t. Engels
The issue is not the state itself, it is the wage-labour relationship which is perpetuated. The proletariat was invariably and unavoidably exploited in the USSR given the failure of the revolution and reorientation towards national ends, and as a further disservice it called itself socialism while it inflicted all the brutality of capitalist accumulation on the toiling masses.
As for the second quote I'm not that anon.

>>2193473
What a dogshit image.
Whoever made it never even read Bordiga.
>Pannekoek (Infantile, as criticized by Lenin - Bordiga stood with Lenin)
>Communization (Modernizers, criticized by A.B. and the ICP)
>Luxemburg (Wrong on the national question, Bordiga stood with Lenin)
>Spontaneous revolution (Deniers, criticized by A.B.)
>Pancakes (Pannekoek inside-joke, again, infantile)
On the left side.
>USSR (which Bordiga supported until Stalin)
>gulags (again, Bordiga was never against labor camps)
>State capitalism (Bordiga saw as necessary as did Lenin in the transitionary stage, Bordiga never "updated" theory to exclude the intermediate stages)
>dictatorships (At this point it becomes apparent a liberal ideology shopper made the image, because A.B. the Italian school, leftcoms - even Pannekoek and the councilcucks do not reject the necessity of the dictatorship of the proletariat)
https://www.international-communist-party.org/basictexts/english/52HistIn.htm
On another thread awhile back I noted that nearly all the users who post under the "leftcom" flag are aesthetic LARPers and that becomes more and more evident with each new post.

>nothing is perfect

It's not about perfection, it's the scientific FACT that the USSR was the pinnacle of humanity and the fact that you're suggesting it wasn't makes you very likely to be a wrecker

>>2194150
>it's the scientific FACT that the USSR was the pinnacle of humanity
The pinnacle of humanity is what capitalism snuffs out everyday. The USSR wasn’t pinnacle, merely a problem.

the biggest flaw and economist agree is management incentive. They had an inncentive to serm needy and inneficient.

>>2193779
Infantile disorders only use bordiga to facilitate attacks agaisnt stalin, and i am siding with stalin on this one btw.

>>2194154
8/8 b8

>>2193289
Real Existing Socialism was perfect
stop finding flaws in them

>>2193779
>USSR (which Bordiga supported until Stalin)
there's his problem
had he shut the fuck up about stalin, got his greasy Italian ass of the couch, and towed the Stalinist line, we would have Bella Communisti Italia today

We've already had a century of marxists analyzing the USSR. Even Lenin before the DotP fell already said it was doomed if revolutions didn't also happen in Europe.

Move on.

>>2193289
They called regimes built on wage labor, surplus value extraction, labor discipline, and capital accumulation “socialist” for starters
They championed the achievements of the bourgeoisie revolution (industrialization, electrification, “modernization”, etc) and social democracy (mass literacy, “free” education, housing at a low fixed price, “free” healthcare, etc) as the achievements of socialist revolution
Thereby making it easy for the Western states to propagandize against socialism

>>2194150
>Social democracy is the pinnacle of humanity
Indeed
Long live Eduard Berstein
Towards an evolutionary socialism

>>2227125
do you understand that you're getting mad at colonized countries actually doing an anticolonial revolution? it's like horkheimer seething about the soviets not abolishing the state quickly enough in 1942. the october and chinese revolution were anticolonial socialist revolutions. they had completely different goals than what a possible socialist revolution in germany or italy or france could've been

>>2227299
>the 1917 revolution because of "anticolonialism"
Brah.

>>2193289
Not enough consumerism. They focused so hard on heavy industries that they forgot to put resources into superfluous shit like televisions and shit. Also I’ve seen videos of retards who say that in the Soviet Union it cost a lot for a car or whatever, yeah motherfucker because first a car was a luxury good and second the Soviet Union was in many ways the ultimate protectionist block. Inevitably when you keep production domestic, the cost of goods will be higher. In the Soviet Union taxes were also low because basically the state subsidized wages so a lot of basic goods and necessities were met. All protectionist countries will always and inevitably have higher costs for goods, it’s basic economics and yet libs ignore this fundamental economic reality. When the US was largely industrialized the cost of goods was also higher basic a lot of manufacturing happened in the US, the only way to drive the cost down was through state subsidies or through importation of cheaper goods.

I find it so funny that the people who criticize the Soviet Union also ignore basic economic fundamentals that they ascribe to and instead blame le evil socialism or communism. Let’s also not forget that the Russian and Chinese alliance was quintessential in terms of trade. When the Sino-Soviet split happened it really hurt Russian consumers if not in the short term in the long term it definitely did. I swear mother fuckers out here don’t know how to do analysis and throw shit out there like it is fact.

>>2227299
even if you take this argument at face value, it just supports the leftcom angle of the great socialist revolutions of the 20th century being ultimately liberal in nature
I agree with this take actually Bukharin & Chen Yun were right

>>2193658
>The newspaper Soviet Russia
These guys were based unfortunately people didn't listen
An enormous, unforeseen calamity has taken place. Motherland, our land, a great power, given to us to ward with the nature, glorious ancestors, it is perishing, breaking apart, falling into darkness and nonbeing. And this collapse takes place at our silence, toleration and accord.<…>
Brethren, too late are we waking up, are observing the misery when our home is already burning in four corners, when extinguishing this has to be done not by water, but by our own tears and blood. Do we allow for the second time during this century civil discordance and war, again throw ourselves into merciless millstones, set started not by us, that will be grinding the bones of the people, breaking in two the backbone of Russia? <…>
Let us unite, so as to stop the chain reaction of the disastrous collapse of the state, economy, human personality; in order to contribute to the strengthening of the Soviet power, to the transformation of it into a genuinely people's power, and not some manger for the hungry nouveaux riches, who are ready to sell off everything for the sake of their insatiable appetite.<…>
Soviet Union, this is our home and stronghold, built with enormous efforts of all the peoples and nations, that has saved us from disgrace and slavery at the times of hideous invasions! Russia - unique, beloved! - she is crying for help.