/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

they're not purges, they're political power struggles

>>686573
then what was the cultural revolution, and stalin great purges tho?

>>686574
…..power struggles

>>686575
power struggles where mao who was in the top politically and he and his allies who were also in the top(cough gang of four) while at the same time amassing huge numbers of out of control students(red guards) purged people that they thought were capitalist insiders and etc

and in the case of russia, where stalin who was top politically, and one that took place after stalin and his faction won the political struggles during the 1920s and involved getting rid of people that became politically insignificant like burkharin

>>686576
there can be power struggles between the central committee and mid-level bureaucrats which happened under stalin and mao, exacerbated by their paranoid, controlling personalities

Open debate where positions are made clear and incorrect ideas are corrected. If a "revisionist clique" has formed in the first place, there needs to be equal investigation into the conditions which allowed it to form as well as the clique itself. So too must effort made to stifle the development of revisionism through proper education.

When a violent purge is needed, then you know something has really fucked up.

Read Bordiga

>how exactly is purging revisionists going to work
Simple, it doesn't. In case there was any doubt about it in the case of Stalin and the USSR, the case of Albania proved it definitively. 40 straight years or hardline ML doctrine, regular purges, and a handpicked successor didn't stop them from going full Gorby before Hoxha was even cold in the ground. This is because revisionism is a clear product of the social contradictions of 20th century socialism, and purging revisionists without resolving or mitigating those contradictions is just treating the symptom rather than the disease.
>>686580
>Open debate where positions are made clear and incorrect ideas are corrected.
This. Mao was on the right track when he laid out some guidelines for this in "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People," which he then failed to implement. Effective checks on revisionism can only come from below rather than above.

>>686571
>then wouldnt purging them give these revisionists political justification to take over

<if you purge me for wanting to take over USSR and for assassinating communist leaders through straight up murders, for conspiring with Nazis and imperialists abroad and sabotaging the industry, it will give me a valid reason to oppose you!

Holy shit

>yet these "traitors" came back and merely used the purges as justification for the soveit union to go to a different route

After how many years of struggle, you fool? It took almost 10 years after Stalin's death, 10 years of silent purges (apparently 70% of Party's membership was changed in 10 years after Stalin), book burning in libraries and propaganda to start going that different route. And even then there was a huge opposition to that course, always and at all times. It's less the matter of opportunists coming to power BY ITSELF, it's more of the LUCKY STREAK they got. Oh, and USSR was the first socialist country in the world. China didn't experience anywhere similar amounts of this bullshit, they effortlessly purge traitors, and traitors themselves seem to be very bad at conspiring. After USSR's problem with trotskyists/khruschevites/opportunists, all other socialist nations that are here and that are yet to come, won't have problems with traitors - simply because history already happened and everyone took their lessons.

>>686613
>Effective checks on revisionism can only come from below rather than above.

Gee, you think? Do I need to remind you that the whole Party voted against Trotsky on the matter of factionalism? Or that the first thing Khruschev did was to declare councils not the source of power in Soviet Socialst state, but rather as "yet another worker organization" like trade unions, lol?

>>686628
>Do I need to remind you that the whole Party voted against Trotsky on the matter of factionalism?
And ironically secured the long term success or revisionism by doing so lmao.

>>686647>>686628

in my time here in leftypol, ive noticed one major thing

you two fucks keep arguing with each other, and its honestly funny

Anti-Revisionism is such a fucking meme. Mao starts his
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, whole country goes batshit insane looking for revisionists everywhere. Then he fucking dies and almost immediately said revisionists take over the country. What a joke.

>>686674
>Then he fucking dies and almost immediately said revisionists take over the country. What a joke.
This literally happens to every single "anti-revisionist" ML country ever. The DPRK is probably the only exception.

>>686647
How so? You keep on coming here with your bizarre take that destroying the movement is somehow makes it stronger. It's like Kazakh protesters claiming that internet getting turned off makes protests stronger. It doesn't make sense however you twist it.

>>686674
>almost immediately said revisionists take over the country

Who and where? Deng was Mao's successor, all the policies Deng is attributed with (and twisted as if they were capitalist policies) were first started under Mao or by Mao. Deng never REVISIONED Mao, Stalin or Lenin.

Why the fuck you people with flags are the worst?

>>686756
>>686754
>You keep on coming here with your bizarre take that destroying the movement is somehow makes it stronger.
That isn't what I'm saying. I'm saying that repression doesn't actually destroy the revisionist tendencies because they stem from the contradictions of AES itself. I'm also arguing that in trying to repress these things from above, the ability of the party rank and file to control the leadership is generally also sacrificed, which in turn makes it easier for revisionists to seize power and wield it without accountability. In other words purges don't kill revisionism, they kill proletarian democracy and empower revisionism. It's literally like trying to treat a disease by suppressing the immune system. It makes no sense and doesn't work.
>>686756
>Deng was Mao's successor,
No he wasn't, they were in rival factions of the party. Deng was purged twice and Red Guards assaulted his son. After Mao's death Deng engaged in his own purge which targeted Mao's closest associates, including his wife. You might as well say that Stalin was the successor of Trotsky.

>>686762
>That isn't what I'm saying. I'm saying that repression doesn't actually destroy the revisionist tendencies

Except they fucking do. Stop the purges, and revisionists start winning. Stalin's mistake was in NOT having a purge immediately after the war. Hell, did you know that Zhukov managed to get himself downgraded two times before Stalin's death due to stealing works of art from Germany and having "many wives"? Funny how official history, written by revisionists, fails to mention those facts in order to portray split as stupid, and revisionism as a normal discussion.

>Deng was purged twice and Red Guards assaulted his son.

Stop being retard for believing anti-communist propaganda. Whenever Deng was purged, for some reason he always kept coming back to the very top whenever there was some big celebration, or American or Soviet high ranked official were coming, or when discussing the economy and politics, etc etc. Deng's son is not Deng, it doesn't fucking matter.

>>686762
>No he wasn't, they were in rival factions of the party
<rival factions
<of the party

Are you insane? Are those factions in the room with us right now?

>>686771
What's insane is thinking that factions stop existing just because the party says so. If you actually look at the history of conflicts within the party its obvious that they continued to exist. If they didn't then Deng wouldn't have been purged, neither would the gang of four. All social contradictions produce political manifestations, even in a one party state.

>>686768
>Except they fucking do.
Anon would you hire an exterminator if he told you that the only way to get rid of pests was to fill your house with poison gas forever? Clearly they don't work, they just help revisionists keep their heads down, without actually preventing them from rising to top posts in the party and supplanting the "anti-revisonist" faction. It happened in the USSR, it happened in Albania. How much more does it need to fail before you admit that it is not an effective tactic?
>Whenever Deng was purged, for some reason he always kept coming back to the very top
Yeah after publicly renouncing all his previous positions. The fact that it happened twice, and the fact that he immediately came into conflict with Mao's closest associates after his death pretty clearly shows that he only did it to get back into an influential position. Not to mention the actual major shifts in policy that he oversaw. Shit, Deng's departures from Mao in terms of actual policy were considerably larger than Khruschev's departures from Stalin.

>>686571
Yeah, when you kill your enemy they win

>>686571
If revolution against all odds is possible than so is counter revolution, it is virtual eternal until socialism is consolidated

>>686773
Yep, yet another crazy idea of yours, that purged faction continues to exist. Yeah, dude, being forbidden from ever saying their agenda out loud, from associating freely, from myriad other things that allow communication with each other, it's all pose no barriers to the factionalism whatsoever.

>>686778
>Anon would you hire an exterminator if he told you that the only way to get rid of pests was to fill your house with poison gas forever?

Wut, why are you comparing higher amounts of democracy, because that's what anti-factionalism is, to a poison?

>Yeah after publicly renouncing all his previous positions.

Lolno, Trotsky publicly renounced his previous positions, Deng didn't.

Also, why the fuck are you saying that Gang of Four was Mao's closest associates?

Name those actual major shifts in policy. You are yet to name any of them, yet you keep on spouting your bullshit views over and over ad nauseum, without providing any proof.

>>686783
I know, right? Yet flagfags are adamant that banning factions doesn't work.

>>686807
>Yep, yet another crazy idea of yours, that purged faction continues to exist.
If factions don't exist after they are purged then how did revisionists survive the purges in both Albania and the USSR? If factions don't exist then why do Chinese Marxists like Cheng Enfu describe multiple distinct movements within the CPC? The only way factions could cease to exist altogether is if there were no social/material contradictions to produce political contradictions.
>it's all pose no barriers to the factionalism whatsoever
Of course it poses barriers, but clearly these are not sufficient. Purges didn't stop Khruschev and his friends from ascending to top posts in the CPSU. They didn't stop Alia from succeeding Hoxha and doing his own version of Glasnost. So not only to they not prevent revisionism in the long term, they don't even prevent it from gathering power while they are going on.
>Wut, why are you comparing higher amounts of democracy
What higher amounts of democracy? How can you have higher amounts of democracy when criticism of the party line is basically impossible since it can get you banned for "factionalism"?
>Name those actual major shifts in policy
Taking an active role in aiding anti-comminist forces abroad, introducing profit-seeking to SOEs, ending the GPCR, and expanding the role of the private sector to eventually outstrip the state sector.

>>686813
>How can you have higher amounts of democracy when criticism of the party line is basically impossible since it can get you banned for "factionalism"?
Sabocat strikes again with his retarded opinions.

Fractionalism means that fractions do not have to actually follow through decisions made democratically at party congress. That is what Trotsky advocated for, because he was often assblasted by Lenin and later Stalin on those party congresses and couldn't persuade majority to agree with him. Where you even get your retarded "criticism of the party line is basically impossible" from?

>>686818
>Fractionalism means that fractions do not have to actually follow through decisions made democratically at party congress.
In practice the ban on factions didn't just include bans on such activity, but also criticism of the party line adopted at the congress and the organization of any opposition to it.
>Where you even get your retarded "criticism of the party line is basically impossible" from?
Because that's how it worked in practice. Otherwise you should be able to point to examples of prominent criticisms of the party line being openly made during periods between party congresses (which grew increasingly rare under Stalin anyway.)

>>686823
>In practice the ban on factions didn't just include bans on such activity, but also criticism of the party line adopted at the congress and the organization of any opposition to it.
Have you ever fucking read trasncripts of party meetings? Plenty of criticism all around. Well, remembering your last argument which boiuled down to "i will not read court trasncripts i will just believe what Getty says even after he was caught lying", i highly doubt you read anything of value on the subject.

>Because that's how it worked in practice.
Do you have any proofs to this idiotic bullshit?
>which grew increasingly rare under Stalin anyway.
You mean that they were synced with 5 year plans and had a gap because of wwii and period of restoration after it? Yeah, sure it was evul Stalin's plan.
>Otherwise you should be able to point
So "i can't prove anything, so i will instead declare that you should prove me wrong" argument? Not much even if i didn't expect anything intelligent from a shitlib like you in the first place.

>>686829
>Have you ever fucking read trasncripts of party meetings?
Sure, CC members criticize each other in closed meetings, people may offer criticism at local party meetings maybe. At party congresses themselves there was often room for significant discussion. But I'm talking about open, public criticism of the party line by actually relevant members and officials between congresses.
>Do you have any proofs to this idiotic bullshit?
The proof is the total lack of criticism I described. If such criticism seems to not exist then this either means that the party membership was totally disciplined and harmonious with the leadership, or that dissent was being suppressed.

This isn't even getting into the fact that the party itself only constituted a small party of the Soviet population, and its composition did not match it either. So in other words even if there was room for proper criticism of the party line, it would still leave us with the issue of party policy being determined entirely by a small segment of the population which does not actually reflect the demographics of the USSR, and even then only indirectly through delegates to the congresses. Some proletarian democracy.

>>686831
>CC members criticize each other in closed meetings
Congress of the party is a closed meeting? You know everything was published in newspapers? Are you pretending to be retarded or are you actually are? You haven't read anything, so stop bullshitting me.

>But I'm talking about open, public criticism of the party line by actually relevant members and officials between congresses.
Have you read any actual newspaper from that time? Plenty of criticism there.

>This isn't even getting into the fact that the party itself only constituted a small party of the Soviet population, and its composition did not match it either
<If it's not porky "democracy" with pandering to every minority about representation than it's not socialism.
So you stopped even pretending that you are actually anything but a lib.

>it would still leave us with the issue of party policy being determined entirely by a small segment of the population which does not actually reflect the demographics of the USSR
How much would not be considered "small"? Exactly. And try to present an argument why. Also explain how exactly those delegates were not representing interests of the people even though most of them worked regular jobs and were usually sent after local wroker meetings.

What has representation of ethnicities in ruling body have anything to do with actual interests of the working people? I would definitely prefered to be represented by someone like Sankara than by a lib faggot like you, for example.

>Some proletarian democracy.
Yes. Proletarian is the key word there.

Revisionism doesn't fucking exist in the way that Anti-Revisionists pretend it does. Instead what you have is the time old story of the Jacobin Mountain and the go-with-the-flow apolitical Swamp. The Mountain is where the revolutionary passion, ideologising and theory are all centered, but it is not a unified beast and due to the passions of all its members it is extremely prone to bloodletting in its ranks for the honour of the "true" ideological path. Meanwhile the Swamp sits there with a sucked thumb and measures where the wind is blowing as to not get chobbed. Eventually, one bloodied axman will emerge from the Mountain, who will then either be asskissed by the Swamp until their death, when all the passion of the Mountain dies with them or their heirs as the Swamp takes over, or they shit their pants that the axeman is now heading for the Swamp and promptly chobb the maniac first.
Rovespierre, Stalin, Mao - the axemen
Khruschev and Jian Qing - the bullied out heir
The Consulate, Brezhnev and Deng - the Swamp

>>686835
>You know everything was published in newspapers?
I was talking about regular meetings between CC members or other officials, not party congresses.
>Have you read any actual newspaper from that time? Plenty of criticism there.
Please cite it then. Note I'm talking specifically of criticism of the party line itself, ie not within the bounds of the party line.
>How much would not be considered "small"?
In 1986, CPSU membership was about 19 million, in a country of about 286 million. That means only about 6-7% of the population were party members, determining national policy for everybody else, and even then only indirectly, and even then only once every five years when the congress was held. The aim of socialism should be to constantly and consistently remove barriers between state power and the workers, however these seem like a lot of obvious and unnecessary barriers to me. No wonder social climbers, careerists, etc flourished in such an environment.
>What has representation of ethnicities in ruling body have anything to do with actual interests of the working people?
I'm talking about demographics in terms of occupation. White collar workers and bureaucrats were heavily overrepresented, and it is from this exact strata that revisionism emerges.

I'll also ask you this Anon, if the USSR was a proletarian democracy, then why was the population unable to stem the tide of revisionism through democratic means?

>>686756
>Deng was Mao's successor
Did you forget about Hua Guofeng? I’m not saying Hua wasn’t some form of reformist, just that Deng’s ascension wasn’t that clear cut.

>>686851
>I was talking about regular meetings between CC members or other officials, not party congresses.
So you were avoiding directly responding to my question. Good to know.

>Note I'm talking specifically of criticism of the party line itself
Define what the fuck "party line" is so i woudln't need to go back and forth with you screeching "that's not what i talked about".

>That means only about 6-7% of the population were party members, determining national policy for everybody else, and even then only indirectly

Is this too much or is this too little? How much exactly do we need? You didn't respond to my question again and only wrote meaningless drivel about "remove barriers between state power and the workers". In USSR worker chose delegates from among themself no party was in control of this. In fact Yeltsin was chosen as people's deputy which shows that "democracy" that is not controlled by proper vanguard leads exactly to what you claim it is supposed to avoid, after all congress of people's deputies was not part of the party but for some reason (that should be abvious to any actual marxist) the most democratic democracy that yet existed was the reason "social climbers, careerists, etc" got into power.

>White collar workers and bureaucrats were heavily overrepresented
No they weren't. Got any proofs of that? Alkso, the whole "white collar/blue collar" is jsut bullshit. Blue collar can be labor arostocrat (a lot fo engineers were at the time for examples) and white collar most often wouldn't be.

>if the USSR was a proletarian democracy, then why was the population unable to stem the tide of revisionism through democratic means?

Because military coup tends to ignore "democratic means" (ffs sake dissolution of USSR was voted against by absolute majority of the people) and people were not class conscious enough and not organizaed enough to resist it since the party stopped being a proper vanguard for the proletariat and there wasn't any other organization to put a proper resistance. People who performed counterrevolution were actually elected by democratic means, it's just when people wanted to remove them, they just used several loyal police and army forces to put unarmed people down.

You do not understand how politics work, that is quite obvious.

>>686756
As >>686853 said Deng was not Mao's successor and did not come to power until some 5 years after Mao died. Hua was very much a "moderate rightist" in the party and was the man responsible for purging "the gang of four". That Hua was personally chosen by Mao as his successor & groomed up for power demolishes the "Mao makes 5" narrative. The shift "rightwards" in foreign and economic policy etc occurred while Mao was still very much alive and sound of mind, narratives about "Deng seizing control of the foreign ministry" are absolutely ridiculous and even more so when combined with the narrative that the GPCR supposedly continued post-1969.

Mao himself was an unstable narcissist with a flimsy understanding of Marxism who was prone to petty, vindictive personal drama which usually resulted in opponents (both left and right of him) being destroyed for no other reason than that they offended him over some bullshit issue or they were getting too popular. The way he treated his own family was absolutely fucked too, ie fucking over He Zhizhen and totally abandoning their children together get with a hot movie star literally half his age (22 and 44), then subsequently disrespecting Jiang (In a country still gripped by age worship where he damn well knew this sort of thing is going to be deeply embarrassing) when she got older by openly cheating on her with way younger women again. What he did to Yang Kaihui was also pretty fucked but that's a whole different story. That's a big part of the contradiction of Mao though: He is undoubtedly the greatest revolutionary in history - It's likely that no other human being in history has done as much good for as many people as Mao, but at the same time he was also a giant self-absorbed narcissistic womanizing/deadbeat dad and a cunt who treated everybody around him horribly, had no sense of personal loyalty to anybody and was a source of continual instability in the party/country.

Can we keep this larp trash in the anti-revisionist general? Thanks.

>>686881
Also he was already trying to cut a deal with USA in '49. So i am not even sure about "greatest revolutionary" since his alliance with soviets existed only because capitalists rejected China.

>>686571
Anti-revisionism is the ideology of failure. Instead of learning from history and mistakes they stick on old dogma that has proven to fail over and over again.

>>686898
Socialist Albania outlasted IMF's Yugoslavia.
C O P E

>>686873
>Define what the fuck "party line" is
The policies agreed upon at the congress.
>Is this too much or is this too little?
Too little obviously. Do you consider it a democracy when almost nobody in the country has a say in national policy?
>In USSR worker chose delegates from among themself no party was in control of this
Only party members had a say in sending delegates to the congresses, and the vast majority of people weren't party members.
>In fact Yeltsin was chosen as people's deputy which shows that "democracy" that is not controlled by proper vanguard leads exactly to what you claim it is supposed to avoid
Success of people like Yeltsin is precisely a product of insulating party officials from accountability to almost the entire country.
>No they weren't. Got any proofs of that?
The party's own stats say so:
<The period under review has seen further growth of the Party ranks and qualitative improvement in the composition of its membership. At present the CPSU membership is 14,455,321, or nine per cent of the country's adult population. The membership composition is as follows: workers, 40.1 per cent; farmers, 15.1 per cent; and office employees, 44.8 per cent. It should be noted that over two-thirds of these office employees are engineers, agronomists, teachers, doctors, scientists, and workers in the field of literature and art.
PDF related, p. 20
>Blue collar can be labor arostocrat (a lot fo engineers were at the time for examples) and white collar most often wouldn't be.
The labour aristocrat issue is only relevant in capitalist countries. In the USSR white collar workers were generally better paid and more influential than blue collar workers, and were well positioned to benefit from market reforms and capitalist restoration. They were also complacent in the sense of having no interest in deepening proletarian democracy or even the success of socialism as such. Today, some of the biggest porkies in Russia were drawn from this stratum.
>People who performed counterrevolution were actually elected by democratic means, it's just when people wanted to remove them, they just used several loyal police and army forces to put unarmed people down.
You know what else they used? The faction ban, to browbeat opposition and suppress dissent. Hence my original comment that it actually helped revisionists in the long term. Moreover, if the coup by Khruschev was the end of Soviet democracy, then you should be able to point to what new mechanisms of repression were introduced to prevent the supposedly democratic party apparatus from being used to unseat the revisionists.

>>686898
>Anti-revisionism is the ideology of failure.
Anti-revisionism isn't really an "ideology" but a policy or position which doesn't make sense outside the context of mid-late 20th-century geopolitics. It's a bit like the argument between "socialism in one country" vs "permanent revolution". Neither position is any kind of ideological tenant, they are political and strategic policies with no real relevance to anything outside pre-WW2 USSR. Perhaps worse though, the term "anti-revisionism" doesn't really mean anything anymore. Most people can't agree on what "revisionism" means, the most concrete definition arguably being the vague "revising the essence of the ideology" aka "Waving the red flag to oppose it" or whatever but there's no real way of even measuring or understanding this and people who sperg out about it are usually trapped in the realm of surface tier politics & literal interpretations of half a century old agitprop/party media and public statements which often existed purely as a way of explaining away and giving cover to political half measures, temporary policies or personality or Guanxi based factional court politics, etc. This is of course bogged down even further with concepts like "social fascism" or whatever which lack even the flimsy definition of terms like "revisionism".

We're trapped in a hell of endless infighting and bickering over terminology and concepts based in century-old geopolitics, long since stripped of any meaningful definition and reduced to the level of weird protestant-style quasi-religious morality play. You're going to win over way more ordinary people, or at the very least come across as less deranged speaking outright preacher talk calling people Satanists and heretics than using Maoist or Leninist or Trotskyist WSWS style wizard speak and rambling about social-fascists and revisionists and pabloite renegades or whatever.

>>686952
Based and realitypilled.

>>686881
>Mao himself was an unstable narcissist with a flimsy understanding of Marxism who was prone to petty, vindictive personal drama which usually resulted in opponents (both left and right of him) being destroyed for no other reason than that they offended him over some bullshit issue or they were getting too popular. The way he treated his own family was absolutely fucked too, ie fucking over He Zhizhen and totally abandoning their children together get with a hot movie star literally half his age (22 and 44)

Replace "Mao" with "Stalin", get the same anticommunist propaganda message, basically. Grow up.

Thank you for the first part, though.

>>686970
>Replace "Mao" with "Stalin", get the same anticommunist propaganda message, basically. Grow up.

If your faith in a movement or ideology is shaken by the revelation that a leader isn't a perfect christlike living symbol of purity as depicted in party propaganda then you're not serious about your commitment to the movement in the first place. Humans are flawed, socially complex & dirty creatures, and even the greatest men and women have to shit.

Mao was on a personal level a pretty shitty, garbage person who treated those closest to him like trash. Mao was also a product of a deeply reactionary society that was literally in the process of collapsing into a medieval/feudal post-apocalyptic warlord hell. We can't expect an imperfect superstructure to socially reproduce flawless people (if such a thing is even possible). For me, there is no contradiction in saying Mao was - on a personal level, a shitty person, but on a grand historical level one of the single greatest human beings to have ever lived. To say his deep personal flaws and vices are overshadowed by the incalculable level of the good he did for humanity is a tremendous understatement. Reality isn't black and white people, movements, events aren't reducible to religious platitude tier examples of "either good or evil".

On a different note though, Stalin and Mao had totally different personalities. Stalin was on a personal level a kind of shy, very lonely introverted man who struggled to cope in the spotlight and who absolutely despised praise/flattery & was known to be extremely humble. Mao was really a textbook example of either somebody with strong narcissistic tendencies or an outright narcissist who absolutely needed to be in the spotlight, and who thrived on narcissistic supply. It's pretty clear that his destruction of major political opponents (including a bizarre fixation on them often well after they were deprived of any kind of power, the total revising of their life stories and painting of them as "totally black, and without a single virtue") from Wang Ming to Liu Shaoqi to Lin Biao was based less on political or policy-based disagreements and more on a perceived threat to his ability to procure narcissistic supply. There's no other way to make sense of Mao's insane political zigzagging other than the "Mao lost his mind/got dementia in his late-life and was being controlled by "the rightists"". In my opinion this narrative is pretty clearly indefensible if you spend any amount of time reading transcripts of conversations between Mao and foreign dignitaries, direct cables etc from '75 and '76. It's pretty clear to me that while he was physically weak & his body was clearly giving out, up until the last months of his life he was mentally still very much the same witty, highly intelligent person he always was, to the point that he was actively teaching himself English and other languages up until just before his passing (Him as an old man excitedly showing off his progress in learning English, loudly & randomly blurting out Marxian terminology in English to Pol Pot during a meeting with him & Kampuchean leadership in '75 is one of the sweeter, most "humanizing" things I've ever read) and was keeping up with and reading about even fairly obscure news from around the world. Mao in '75 and '76 doesn't strike me at all as somebody who was supposedly in an advanced stage of mental deterioration.

>>687020
>Liu Shaoqi
Disagree with most of your post, but Mao disliked not only on a personal level, but on a political level as well. The main struggle in the early PRC was between Mao's "Socialist Revolution" and Liu's "New Democracy and the synthesized economic base". I think we should point that out, before saying Mao only had personal quarrels with him

>>687024
agree with most of your post* lmao

>>686944
>The policies agreed upon at the congress.
You said yourself that they were subject to discussion and criticism. Like i said, read any newspaper of that time and you will find plenty.
>Too little obviously. Do you consider it a democracy when almost nobody in the country has a say in national policy?
10% of the adult population is "almost nobody"? Also, you seems to know little about USSR political structure since a lot of decisions were made not by party but by elected officials. Shitlib is a shitlib no motter what.

>Success of people like Yeltsin is precisely a product of insulating party officials from accountability to almost the entire country.
This just proves my previous point since you are mixing up party and people's soviet. You are so illiterate, it's fucking stupid.

>The party's own stats say so:
The proof needed was that it wasn't representative to population. If engineers and FUCKING AGRONOMISTS (occupation that often includes spending time in the fields knee deep in fertilizer which i know from first hand experience) were put into "office employees" than it certainly doesn't mean that 40+% of the party consisted of careerists beraucrats. Or do you think that like 90% of USSR population worked in the mines or factories or something?

You are full of shit. As always, you just quote something you don't even understand a meaning of.

>The labour aristocrat issue is only relevant in capitalist countries.
Not really. Read about Industrial Party.

>In the USSR white collar workers were generally better paid and more influential than blue collar workers
If you mean that doctors, scientists and engineers were better paid than yes, though not by much. And how that means that the population was not properly represented i don't even fuycking know. You got way off your intial argument because you can't provuide a lick of proof to your asinine claims and have to constantly move the goalposts.

>Today, some of the biggest porkies in Russia were drawn from this stratum.
Lol fucking no. The biggest ones are those who engaged in illegal activities like speculation because they were the ones with initial capital to profit from privatization. Fucking doctors and engineers are definitely did not became biggest porkies in modern Russia. Ты блять такую хуйню несешь, что у меня аж волосы на жопу кукрыжаться. Откуда ты такой ебанутый взялся вообще? Ты ж вообще нихуя не знаешь про мою страну, дегенерат.

>You know what else they used? The faction ban, to browbeat opposition and suppress dissent. Hence my original comment that it actually helped revisionists in the long term.
<Capitalist supress workers movement, so supressing capitalists in workers country is helping capitalists.
Take your fucking meds already, dumbass, and read something from Marx and Engels.
>you should be able to point to what new mechanisms of repression were introduced to prevent the supposedly democratic party apparatus from being used to unseat the revisionists.
I think your liberal brain still doesn't understand the main point. Cornman didn't need to introduce some repression mechanism, all he needed to do was to weaken party as vanguard of proletariat and introduced MORE democracy that would not be controlled by vanguard and then the societal processes would lead to counterrevolution since without actively working to abolish commodity form socialism will eventually return to capitalism. Without vanguard and changes in the mode of production wide and open democratic institutions will work against proletarian interests.

>>687024
>>687025

>Disagree with most of your post, but Mao disliked not only on a personal level, but on a political level as well.

I agree that in all of these struggles there was a legitimate political/policy-based disagreement. I think though that the political disagreement was overshadowed by a stronger personal disagreement or grudge though (hence "based less on"). Concrete political/policy disagreement forming the basis, or at least the beginning of the feud was especially so the case with Wang Ming. Whereas his disagreements with Liu/Lin were far more "grey" (IMO Liu/Lin were at least 50% correct each, the former in economic policy and the latter in foreign policy/geopolitical orientation) Wang Ming & the Bolshevik faction's entire strategy proved disastrous to the extent it wiped out something like 90% of the party and lead to the destruction of the first Chinese socialist state - later on though, particularly during the 40's it's clear that his opposition and bizarre fixation on attacking and bullying Wang was based purely in weird interpersonal drama. Wang absolutely fucked up, but serious errors aside the man was a serious Marxist, and the bullying got severe enough that the man was on the verge of suicide & the COMINTERN had to physically intervene and tell Mao to knock it off.

It's not totally clear what Mao "actually believed in".. He was an extremely intelligent man, although I think it's pretty clear Stalin/Molotov were correct in their assessment of him as a non-marxist and "Utopian agrarian socialist" Stalin seemed to think more highly of Liu Shaoqi than he did Mao. I think Mao saw himself was somebody who was "riding ocean currents" or playing 4D chess towards some kind of end. He was a Machiavellian genius, which is exactly what you want out of a revolutionary leader, albeit whose ability to act toward a long term vision was crippled by his deep personality/psychological flaws. I don't want to get too deep into armchair psychoanalysis here, but unfortunately, its necessary to have these discussions due to the cripplingly low level of discourse/historical literacy, particularly among self-described "Maoists".

>>687020
>
If your faith in a movement or ideology is shaken by the revelation that a leader isn't a perfect christlike living symbol of purity as depicted in party propaganda then you're not serious about your commitment to the movement in the first place.

Sure, but you are spouting anticommunist propaganda in the first place. You are without any hint of a doubt repeat the ridiculous claims that China was run not democratically, but by a dictator, with politics running according to his whims. Stop and think about your beliefs, for fuck's sake. It's not about christlike symbols, it's about having a basic degree of critical thinking.

>Mao was on a personal level a pretty shitty, garbage person who treated those closest to him like trash.

Again, replace with Stalin, and it's one-to-one carbon copy - despite well-documented facts that Stalin was, in fact, a rather kind-hearted person loved by his friends. You are spouting anticommunist propaganda, deal with it like an adult and correct your misconceptions.

>>687054
>He was an extremely intelligent man, although I think it's pretty clear Stalin/Molotov were correct in their assessment of him as a non-marxist and "Utopian agrarian socialist"

Idk if I agree with this statement by Molotov. The USSR's position concerning peasants was deeply eurocentric and any deviation from their position was seen as non-marxist. Frankly, I think it should be ignored what the Comintern thinks of of movements like Titoism and Maoism. It's not that important to the discussion though, and we can agree to disagree on this issue

>Stalin seemed to think more highly of Liu Shaoqi than he did Mao

Tbh I do too, but this is more because of my biases and me being influenced by Samir Amin's views, who are somewhat in line with Bukharins.

>>687066
>
Sure, but you are spouting anticommunist propaganda in the first place. You are without any hint of a doubt repeat the ridiculous claims that China was run not democratically, but by a dictator, with politics running according to his whims. Stop and think about your beliefs, for fuck's sake. It's not about christlike symbols, it's about having a basic degree of critical thinking.

This is the contradiction though. Mao was, especially during the cultural revolution, willing to grant the people more power and democracy than ever seen before even in the USSR, but when push came to shove and the Shanghai commune rebellion was getting out of hand for the party, he declared martial law and squashed it. What does that tell you?

>>687066
>Sure, but you are spouting anticommunist propaganda in the first place. You are without any hint of a doubt repeat the ridiculous claims that China was run not democratically, but by a dictator, with politics running according to his whims. Stop and think about your beliefs, for fuck's sake. It's not about christlike symbols, it's about having a basic degree of critical thinking.

I think you're getting confused here. I did not mean to imply that Mao was any kind of "absolute dictator". In fact the very idea of an "absolute dictator" exercising total control over a state and micromanaging every detail of a country is an impossibility - a weird liberal myth. If it were a possibility, if Mao/Stalin were somehow godlike absolute dictators capable of omnipotence/omnipresence and micromanaging of absolutely anything and everything that happened in the USSR and China from the implementation of policy to personally reviewing, censoring/approval media then both states would have almost certainly been better off. I absolutely welcome the idea of godlike omnipotent Stalin descending from the clouds and physically purging his enemies with a comically large spoon.

The real problem in China and the USSR both was not "too much centralization" but a lack of centralization.. A kind of malformation of authority. In China, this was particularly so the case, with the country dominated from the lowest levels up by personality & familial based politics. Even well into the GPCR Mao was still very much a "clay buddha" figure whose words were strawmanned and evoked out of context by various factions over both political and personal disagreements. The GPCR was not the kind of organized anti-revisionist purge which people imagine, and more a chaotic mix of mini civil wars. Even the "Red Guards" themselves were not a coherent "faction" and spent as much time stealing weapons from the PLA to kill each other off in street fights as they did fighting perceived or legitimate non-RG revisionists & counter-revolutionaries.

Mao's strange political zigzagging and bizarre personal grudges were based on trends, tendencies and ideas emerging from the ground up or at a minimum not based on whims or fancies originating in his head. The same is true of all personality politics when observed beyond the surface level though.

As for whether or not China "under Mao" was run democratically, this was certainly the case at the lowest levels, although less so the case at the top. The average person in the PRC had a far greater say in shaping local politics, effecting day to day policy in a meaningful way than anybody in so-called bourgeois democracy, sure. The mid and top levels of the CPC and the Chinese state were a clusterfuck, with debates on policy retarded by personal and interpersonal drama, political alliances more often determined by familial loyalty and with arranged marriages forming the basis of political alliances. Mao himself was always a kind of clay buddha, and political opponents became footballs to be "thrown at" or pinned on the other side regardless of whatever they actually stood for, which is how you get Lin Biao being portrayed as an ultra-leftist or an ultra-rightist back and forth in public discourse, one moment Jiang's greatest ally, the next a protege of Liu and ally to deng, the next once again early co-conspirator with the shanghai Maoists/"GO4" (referred to in China as the Lin Biao-Jiang Qing clique).

Critical thinking does not mean accepting at face value surface tier public narratives.

>>687107
>out of context by various factions
Oh you said the f-word. He's gonna come for you now lol

>>686807
I kind of get what he’s saying.
You’ve got to negate the revisionist critique itself and synthesize it within the current order of things, otherwise the conditions that it sprung from reproduce itself. I don’t really think that’s possible in every instance, of course.

>>687032
>You said yourself that they were subject to discussion and criticism.
I said they were discussed in very limited and specific capacities and circumstances, ie at the congress itself, or in closed meetings of officials, etc.
>10% of the adult population is "almost nobody"?
Yes, since that means that 90% of the adult population has no representation. Again, you consider this to be democratic?
>Also, you seems to know little about USSR political structure since a lot of decisions were made not by party but by elected officials.
Are there any cases where party decisions were overridden by elected officials in the legislature? The legislature was a rubber stamp, internal CPSU politics was where the real decisions were made.
>This just proves my previous point since you are mixing up party and people's soviet.
Yeltsin was still a party member.
>The proof needed was that it wasn't representative to population.
Well the source on the 24th congress use the terms "workers" and "employees" to refer to factory etc. workers and office workers respectively. According to Soviet statistics compiled by some Japanese economists, "workers" constituted 59.8% of the working population in 1972 just after the 24th congress was held, which is a significant underrepresentation in party membership. Moreover, the same statistics list "Workers & Employees" as constituting just over 80% of the population. Subtracting the "workers" from that statistic leaves us with just over 20% of people in the "employees" category. This indicates that such people were significantly overrepresented in the party's composition.
https://src-h.slav.hokudai.ac.jp/database/SESS.html#USSR-S4
The info can be found under "Section 4: Population, Labour, and Wages," subheading "Social class, composition of the population."
>You got way off your intial argument.
Not at all, my argument is that revisionism stems from the ranks of the bureaucracy. The issue is not one of "white" vs "blue" collar workers as such, but the emergence of contradictions between people at the higher vs lower end of the social hierarchy that emerged in the Sovet union in terms of pay, prestige, and most importantly decision making capacity in the productive process. Bureaucrats of course sat higher in this hierarchy, alongside other professions such as engineers, politicians, etc. The overrepresentation of these people in the party and the inability of the general public to control the internal politics of the CPSU led to a party which was disproportionately governed by a smaller segment of the population, which had no strong commitment to socialism (certainly not to anything like the abolition of the state or commodity form), and which eventually destroyed the USSR from the top down. I'm simply trying to determine the social-material basis of revisionism instead of attributing it to idealist causes.
>Fucking doctors and engineers are definitely did not became biggest porkies in modern Russia.
Really? Let's look at some of the richest people in Russia and what their profession was in the Soviet era:
>Alisher Usmanov
Diplomat
>Andrey Melnichenko
Was studying physics in uni when the USSR collapsed. No doubt on a path to an engineering or science career.
>Alexei Mordashov
Engineer
>Vladimir Potanin
Diplomat
>Vladimir Lisin
Engineer
>Vagit Alekperov
Engineer
>Leonid Mikhelson
Engineer
>Gennedy Timchenko
Engineer
I'm noticing a pattern here.
>Capitalist supress workers movement, so supressing capitalists in workers country is helping capitalists.
Make up your mind Anon. Was the post-Stalin USSR a worker's democracy or not? If not, then you would have to admit that the faction ban would be abused to shield the revisionist leadership from accountability to the workers, which is easy to do when you have sweeping powers to expel people for factionalism, like people who call you out for revisionism.
>Cornman didn't need to introduce some repression mechanism, all he needed to do was to weaken party as vanguard of proletariat and introduced MORE democracy that would not be controlled by vanguard
That makes no sense, unless you unironically think that the workers can't be trusted to safeguard socialism on their own. The role of the vanguard isn't to control the workers or tell them what to do, it's to provide a means of organizing them and introducing revolutionary consciousness so that they can themselves take the reigns through proletarian democracy. Lenin specifically says in the State and Revolution that the task of the vanguard is to secure "an immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people…"
The entire point of the party is to serve as the agent rather than the overlord of the workers, to help them achieve class consciousness and to provide them with an organizational mechanism once they do so. Lenin was not a paternalist who believed that workers could not be trusted to govern a socialist society themselves. Your entire formulation begs two obvious questions: first, how does one ensure that the vanguard maintains its ideological integrity and thus remains a genuine vanguard, and second, what is the material source of those who seek to cause it to deviate from this role? In other words, what are the respective social-material basis of revisionism and anti-revisionism? My position is that the social basis of revisionism is the bureaucracy, apparatchiks, upper crust of workers, etc., and the social basis of anti-revisionism is the broader mass of workers and peasants. If this is the case, then the problems faced by the USSR were a result of insufficient control of the former by the latter. A problem that was exacerbated by mechanisms such as the faction ban, infrequency of party congresses, impotence of the legislature, etc, and anything else which stood as a barrier between the workers and direct control of state policy.

>>687112
Political/social factions are just a reality in a grouping of humans beyond half a dozen people. It's like both cultism and social hierarchy in that it's just an organic thing which is going to evolve, you either acknowledge this and set up formal systems of accountability & means of keeping it in check - ideally exploiting in such a way that it becomes useful, or you're going to be destroyed by it.

Factionalism is destructive, yes, but the existence of "factions" or inner tribalism whether on the basis of personality, ethnic/religious tribalism or political/policy/strategic based disagreements are always going to be a thing when dealing with organizing humans in any form.

*edit for clarity/repost.

>>687126
Oh I don't disagree with you, but the other anon obviously doesn't think that factions even existed in the USSR

>>686594
Something something organic centralism?

>>686915
…

>>686571
People call China revisionist yet China uplifted 700 million people out of poverty, developed the most modern infrastructure in the world and is arguably going to surpass the US economically. Does revisionism work?

>>687124
>Yes, since that means that 90% of the adult population has no representation
No, that's retarded. Participation and representation are different things. You don't even understand the meaning of the words you are using.

>The legislature was a rubber stamp, internal CPSU politics was where the real decisions were made.
Lul yes. I made Yeltsin an example not without reason. You are just uneducated faggot who knows nothing abou this topic and tries to deflect when people point it out. You are discussing USSR politics without knowing about existence of congress of people's deputies. God, this is so stupid, why am i even tryin to talk with you? It's like as if i was talking about USA polkitics wityhout knowing who are democrats and republicans.
>Yeltsin was still a party member.
So fucking what?
>Well the source on the 24th congress use the terms "workers" and "employees" to refer to factory etc. workers and office workers respectively
It's a shit translation (trasnlating kolkhoz workers as farmers is a retardation on another level). The one you were citing previously in the original russian referred to wrokers as spoecifically factory workers, those are the ones who constituted 40%. Just because someone is not a factory worker doesn't mean it muh white collar worker. Construction workers are not factory workers, sovkhoz workers would be classified as "office employees" (despite doing basically same shit as kolkhoz workers). Your whole argument is based on the grounds of arguing semantics by using shitty translation from russian to english and then comparing it to translation from a japanese stupy to english while hopin those terms would mean same thing.

>Not at all, my argument is that revisionism stems from the ranks of the bureaucracy.
So, doctors, engineers, agronomists, writers etc are bureaucracy?
>but the emergence of contradictions between people at the higher vs lower end of the social hierarchy that emerged in the Sovet union in terms of pay, prestige, and most importantly decision making capacity in the productive process
Yet you did not prove anything of the sort. Neither the representation, not difference in pay and decision making.

>Really? Let's look at some of the richest people in Russia and what their profession was in the Soviet era:

AHAHAHAA. God, you are so fucking dumb it hurts. Mordashov worked as economist on Cherepovets' ironworks and you are trying to pass him off as engineer. His education was that of economist too. Fucking hell you are a fucking liar. Yes, it was engineers who at fault of dissolving soviet union. How fucking insane you have to be.

>Make up your mind Anon. Was the post-Stalin USSR a worker's democracy or not?
Point where i said it wasn't or eat shit you retarded monkey. I am not even discussin this in retarded terms like "democracy" or whatever because it's nothing but a buzzaword anyway. Not to mention that in this sentence i wasn't even talking about specifically USSR even but about general notion that supressing the opposition is something "bad" and it will help capitalists. I was just wondering how do you even live with all that liberal rot in your brain.

>ou would have to admit that the faction ban would be abused to shield the revisionist leadership from accountability to the workers
I would have to admit that state power when not in the hands of proletarian vanguard would be used for capitalists? Yes, that is what i claimed from the first post, you dumb faggot. What i was arguing against is that you can prevent it by "democracy" or whatever liberal brain of your thinks of. How exactly would be useful for protecting USSR if party memebers would be allowed to ignore decision made by the whole party voting? Because that is what fractionalism is, you shitstain of a human being.
>That makes no sense
Not for a liberal, no.

>The role of the vanguard isn't to control the workers or tell them what to do, it's to provide a means of organizing them
Kek. That one is the best so far. Continue with your retardation and explain how do you organize someone without ever telling them what to do. I am expecting to hear something exceptionally retarded.
>Lenin specifically says
You never read this book and can only quotemine it otherwise you would remember that from the start he specfiically arguing against your position.

>>687398
>Participation and representation are different things.
Participation without representation is essentially just petitioning and begging. It's not the same as direct control over decision making, or at least over decision makers.
>You are discussing USSR politics without knowing about existence of congress of people's deputies
The congress is pretty irrelevant considering it was established literal decades after you yourself argue that revisionism was established.
>Your whole argument is based on the grounds of arguing semantics
Feel free to provide contradictory evidence then.
>So, doctors, engineers, agronomists, writers etc are bureaucracy?
They are strata with similar tendencies.
>Yet you did not prove anything of the sort.
I showed that the party itself only consisted of a small segment of the population, and also that there is a pretty clear pattern in who won out from the destruction of Soviet socialism.
>Mordashov worked as economist
You're right, my mistake. Unfortunately this doesn't detract from my point since economists are part of the same strata I was talking about.
>"democracy" or whatever because it's nothing but a buzzaword anyway
Lenin sure used it a lot and considered it pretty important for a buzzword.
>general notion that supressing the opposition is something "bad" and it will help capitalists
Suppressing worker's opposition is bad because it empowers the bureaucratic and adjacent strata to do the same in defense of revisionism.
>How exactly would be useful for protecting USSR if party memebers would be allowed to ignore decision made by the whole party voting?
It would be useful if workers were free to criticize party leadership openly, and to organize opposition against them if they deviate towards revisionism.
>explain how do you organize someone without ever telling them what to do
There's a massive difference between introducing people to communist ideas and helping them them form committees, Soviets etc and dictating policy to them. One is collaborative, and designed to empower workers to take the lead. Then other is paternalistic.
>otherwise you would remember that from the start he specfiically arguing against your position
Please, cite a passage where Lenin says that party officials should dictate policy and ideology to workers in a paternalistic fashion, instead of acting as their agents.

>>687213
the people's socialist republic of albania wasn't abolished until 1998, he's technically correct

>>687398
>>687451
I'm also wondering Anon, what do you think was the social basis of revisionism if not the bureaucrats and professionals? Surely you don't think it was a purely ideological phenomenon without a materialist explanation right? You aren't an idealist are you?

>>687486
>Participation without representation is essentially just petitioning and begging
At this point i start to believe you are some sort of chatbot because it seems you can't even remember your own claims.

And you never proved any of them anyway, so whatever.

>The congress is pretty irrelevant considering it was established literal decades after you yourself argue that revisionism was established.

It is not irrelevat just because you want it to be, faggot. And no amount of cope will change the fact that you know shit about political structure of USSR.

>Feel free to provide contradictory evidence then.
Evidence of what? Of shitty translation? Easy. Jusdt read hte original or even the wiki page that referres to БСЭ
https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%BC%D0%BC%D1%83%D0%BD%D0%B8%D1%81%D1%82%D0%B8%D1%87%D0%B5%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%8F_%D0%BF%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%82%D0%B8%D1%8F_%D0%A1%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%82%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%BE%D0%B3%D0%BE_%D0%A1%D0%BE%D1%8E%D0%B7%D0%B0#cite_ref-%D0%91%D0%A1%D0%AD-%D0%9A%D0%9F%D0%A1%D0%A1_16-2

It specifically talks about FACTORY workers as separate cathegory, not just any workers. Though if you had half of an autism score necessary to be considered a human being you would be tipped of by "farmers" since USSR didn't actually had any farmers, not since dekulakization anyway, they had kolkhoz and sovkhoz workers and only kolkhoz workers were put into separate cathegory in the statistics you mentioned. So you failed to prove anything about you representation claim that was retarded anyway.

>I showed that the party itself only consisted of a small segment of the population
10% of the adult population is not even close to be a small segment. That's actually a lot. Also, representation of interest has nothing to do with size. If anything the bigger party grew the less socialist USSR became. Correlation does not mean causation, but it definitely disproves necessity of a big party for a proper socialist country.
>They are strata with similar tendencies.
They are not the same strata. Working as engineer and being an upper management on a factory is a big difference.
>Lenin sure used it a lot and considered it pretty important for a buzzword.
He also explained it very thoroughly that he doesn't use it in the same way as you liberals do. Like, it's obvious you never read that book otherwise you wouldn't dare to use it as an argument since Lenin argued there from exactly the opposite position from yours.
>Suppressing worker's opposition is bad because it empowers the bureaucratic and adjacent strata to do the same in defense of revisionism.
You just engaging in rethorics. You claim any opposition as "worker's opposition" to get legitimacy to your asinine claims. Trotsky wasn't representative of the workers, so how exactly purging him from party empowered the revisionists? How exactly making party memebers required to follow on party decision that were made democratically (since you like this word) empowers revisionists? You have never showed it nor even tried to explain how it works.
>It would be useful if workers were free to criticize party leadership openly
They were, at the very least before the coup just read half the newspaper made durin the period of collectivization or read about what Sholokhov did (since you wanted an example of specific public figure). But even after criticism existed. You are just regurgitating usual anticommunist drivel about everything being censored.

>There's a massive difference between introducing people to communist ideas and helping them them form committees, Soviets etc and dictating policy to them
Yes, one is absolutely ineffective and the other one can actually achieve something. A party must act according to worker's interests but not necessarily to what they want, since not everyone is class conscious and understands it's own interests. There is a thin line between being absorbed by masses and loosing sight on communist goals and being completely alienated from masses and loosing their support. It's always a compromise between long term goal of establishing a new kind of society and short term goal of appeasing workers and making their lives better. Your ideas of "just make everybody vote and make decisions before there is even an economical basis that would be able to support that kind of societal superstructure" were discredeted even by Marx and Engels and of course by Lenin ad are not anything new. They are just stupid and shows lack of understanding of how society works. People who whine about "lack of democracy" are nothing but retarded libs or succdems.

>social basis of revisionism if not the bureaucrats and professionals
There is an economic basis for it. And until the commodity form is abolished there is no protection from revisionism and danger of counterrevolution. I already mentioned it several times, but i guess you read my posts as shittily as you read Lenin.

>>687569
>It is not irrelevat just because you want it to be
Explain how a body established in 1989 is relevant to a political transition which took place in the 50s.
>Evidence of what?
Evidence that the party's composition was representative of the general population. That wiki article cites a completely different source, and the source I cited was literally published by a Soviet state media outlet. I'm willing to rely upon that translation, unless you can provide better proof that it's wrong than a wiki article.
>10% of the adult population is not even close to be a small segment. That's actually a lot
No it isn't, it means that 90% of people were playing no direct role in the selection of delgates to party congresses where policy was decided upon. An overwhelming majority of people literally had no direct input into policy. This is anti-democratic by definition.
>They are not the same strata.
I didn't say that, I said they are strata with similar tendencies.
>He also explained it very thoroughly that he doesn't use it in the same way as you liberals do.
Please, explain what he meant then, and back your claims with quotes and citations.
>Trotsky wasn't representative of the workers, so how exactly purging him from party empowered the revisionists?
I never said he was, I'm talking about the practice of purges, faction bans etc. in general. Frankly I'm not all that concerned with Trotsky specifically.
>How exactly making party memebers required to follow on party decision that were made democratically (since you like this word) empowers revisionists? You have never showed it nor even tried to explain how it works.
Yes, as a communist I like the word democracy, as does every other communist, so much so that ML states even put it in their names (GDR, DPRK, DRV, etc), enshrine it in their constitutions, and use it to describe their political system. For all your attacks on "revisionism," openly dismissing democracy is one of the most openly revisionist positions you can take. To answer your question, if workers are not able to organize independently of the party, if they are not able to freely and openly criticize the leadership and their policies at all times, if they are not able to develop their own media, labour, and political associations, then this leaves them helpless in the event that anti-communist forces or revisionists take control of the party apparatus, (an event which historically speaking, seems to happen more often than not, even in spite of decades of regular purges like in Albania). You admitted as much when you said that workers were unable to resist Khruschev's coup because "the party stopped being a proper vanguard for the proletariat and there wasn't any other organization to put a proper resistance." Think about this for a moment. If the party apparatus falls into the hands of revisionists, then so do the instruments of party discipline. Mechanisms like the faction ban, which you are fine with when deployed against people you don't like, are now deployed against the workers and anti-revisionists, who are now left powerless because the entirety of their organization was tied up in the party which is now controlled by people hostile to their interests. Now the revisionist-led party issues revisionist policies, and can expel those who resist them for "factionalism," thus locking them out of policymaking altogether. In other words, we see from the case of Khrushchev (and others) that these mechanisms fail to prevent the ascension of revisionism, and yet are effective in suppressing anti-revisionism. In the long term they accomplished the literal opposite of what they set out to do.
>They were, at the very least before the coup just read half the newspaper made durin the period of collectivization
Then cite me a newspaper that was openly critical of a set of policies adopted at a party congress. Cite me evidence that such criticisms and dissenting opinions were widely published.
>read about what Sholokhov did
All he did was say that collectivization was being carried out poorly, he didn't reject or criticize the policy as a whole. He also issued his criticisms in private letters to Stalin rather than publicly.
>Your ideas of "just make everybody vote and make decisions before there is even an economical basis that would be able to support that kind of societal superstructure"
So what, you think that workers were too backwards and ignorant to govern themselves, that they needed to be ruled by an enlightened elite of intellectuals? Lmao, the nerve of you calling me a lib while saying such anti-proletarian nonsense. The aim of socialism is to establish the workers as the ruling class, not as a subordinate caste. Lenin specifically writes in The State and Revolution about officials and functionaries that
<We, the workers, shall organize large­scale production on the basis of what capitalism has already created, relying on our own experience as workers, establishing strict, iron discipline backed up by the state power of the armed workers. We shall reduce the role of state officials to that of simply carrying out our instructions as responsible, revocable, modestly paid "foremen and accountants" (of course, with the aid of technicians of all sorts, types and degrees). This is our proletarian task, this is what we can and must start with in accomplishing the proletarian revolution. Such a beginning, on the basis of large­scale production, will of itself lead to the gradual "withering away" of all bureaucracy, to the gradual creation of an order, ­­an order without inverted commas, an order bearing no similarity to wage slavery, ­­an order under which the functions of control and accounting, becoming more and more simple, will be performed by each in turn, will then become a habit and will finally die out as the special functions of a special section of the population.
So clearly Lenin thought that workers were capable of governing themselves, and that party and government officials must carry out the instructions of the workers, not the other way around. It should be obvious how such an arrangement, if implemented according to Lenin's description, would run up against the narrow interests of these very same functionaries. Herein lies the source of the antagonism between the workers and the bureaucrats, managers, professionals, etc. Obviously, if the latter group secure positions of prestige, increased wealth and privileges, authority, etc. they aren't going to be too keen on these advantages being taken away. They have an interest in actively resisting the withering of the state, and are thus inherently conservative, having no desire to push socialist society to more advanced levels, and and a weak commitment to socialism altogether.
>There is an economic basis for it. And until the commodity form is abolished there is no protection from revisionism and danger of counterrevolution.
That's extremely vague. What specific segments of the Soviet population supported revisionism? Why was doing so in their interests? What was the nature of their antagonism with those segments which opposed revisionism? These are questions which have to be answered if "revisionism" as a concept is to have any value as a Marxist concept.

>>687697
>>687569
I also made this for you Anon, hope you enjoy it.

>>686571
It won't work. This is why a communist society needs to have a strong rule of law and a separation of powers to prevent this sort of thing from happening.

>>687697
>Explain how a body established in 1989 is relevant to a political transition which took place in the 50s.
They were created in '36, in '89 they were restructured. That is probably why i will not even respond to the rest of your bullshit, i shouldn't take you retardation too seriously after all.

>>687781
>They were created in '36
<The Congress of People's Deputies of the Soviet Union (Russian: Съезд народных депутатов СССР, romanized: Sʺezd narodnykh deputatov SSSR) was the highest body of state authority of the Soviet Union from 1989 to 1991.[1]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Congress_of_People%27s_Deputies_of_the_Soviet_Union
Are you sure you aren't thinking of the Supreme Soviet? That one actually was established in 1936. Besides, I already addressed that. It was a rubber stamp, as shown by the fact that nobody seems to be able to identify any instances of it overriding, reversing, or even seriously obstructing the executive or the party.

>>687805
No use in trying to save face and pretend you actualy knew about it.

>It was a rubber stamp
Then you should know about instances when party overrided, reversed or seriously obstructed soviet's decisions, right? Right back at ya.

In fact that is an idiotic claim since their functions were different so most of their legislatures couldn't intersect even in theory.

>>687815
>Then you should know about instances when party overrided, reversed or seriously obstructed soviet's decisions, right?
Except that the vast majority of legislators were CPSU members, meaning that they were bound by party discipline and rules not to oppose the decisions made during the party congresses. Doing so would constitute factionalism and be grounds for expulsion. Moreover some searching also reveals a lot of sources claiming that it only met a few times a year for a few days at a time, its decisions were almost always unanimous, and it never once demanded the resignation of a minister or the dissolution of a government.
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-06086-3_6
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-political-science/article/abs/supreme-soviet-and-budgetary-politics-in-the-ussr/890701DAD18BB4F6E0F92FA4EC1A6B85
https://books.google.ca/books?id=ZH9nkBOxrZQC&q=presidium+of+the+supreme+soviet+collective+head+of+state&pg=PA165&redir_esc=y#v=snippet&q=presidium%20of%20the%20supreme%20soviet%20collective%20head%20of%20state&f=false

If you can find anything contradicting this I'd appreciate it since I'm just doing a cursory search here. However if this is true then it pretty clearly demonstrates the impotence of the Soviet as a body.
>In fact that is an idiotic claim since their functions were different so most of their legislatures couldn't intersect even in theory.
Except they obviously did intersect since most Soviet members were party members.

>>687848
Links to some retarded anticommunist bullshit as expected
>https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-1-349-06086-3_6
>There is no choice of party or even of candidate at the poll itself
Yeah the usual dribble. Yes, usually there was s single candidate to vote for. Why? Because candidates were appointed not by party, but bby consensus among specific party/union/public orgs/other worker or military organizations after deliberation, so the result most of the time was one person and voting intself was just a final check on the previous process of selection. Which is what real democracy looks like. Not that you know anything about it, shitlib.

Not even gonna read the rest of them, since they are the same shit.

Basically all that shit shows (again) that you understand nothing about USSR political system and just repeating what was told to you by decades of antisoviet propaganda.

>Except they obviously did intersect since most Soviet members were party members.
Do you understand the difference between intersecting legislature and intersecting memebrhip? Are you really that dumb?

>>687848
Probably not gonna waste any more time on you, so eat shit and die, liberal.

>>687116
He is just saying bullshit. Where did the feudal ideas go in bourgeois society? Well, they are still here, they just lessened by a lot. Are there MATERIAL CONDITIONS for feudal ideas in bourgeois society? Hell fucking no. Yet this retard keeps on rambling about revisionism being the product of a socialist society. No, it's not, it's merely a remnant of a previous society. Just like in France there was a counter-revolution which has put up Napoleon on the throne, so USSR had it's own counter-revolution - with USSR being super-fucking-paranoid about Bonapartism, it being brought up constantly, with every action taken to prevent Napoleon from happening. Different thing happened, revisionism. All the future socialist states will take note of this and take measures against it - China, Vietnam, Cuba, DPRK, Laos, none of those got revisioned out of reality - and there will be no threat of revisionism in a socialist society anymore, just like there were no more Napoleons for bourgeois revolutions.

So, what the fuck this madman is rambling about? There's no substance to his retarded ideas.

>>687107
>I think you're getting confused here. I did not mean to imply that Mao was any kind of "absolute dictator". In fact the very idea of an "absolute dictator" exercising total control over a state and micromanaging every detail of a country is an impossibility - a weird liberal myth.

Orly?

>>686881

>Mao himself was an unstable narcissist with a flimsy understanding of Marxism who was prone to petty, vindictive personal drama which usually resulted in opponents (both left and right of him) being destroyed for no other reason than that they offended him over some bullshit issue or they were getting too popular. The way he treated his own family was absolutely fucked too, ie fucking over He Zhizhen and totally abandoning their children together get with a hot movie star literally half his age (22 and 44), then subsequently disrespecting Jiang (In a country still gripped by age worship where he damn well knew this sort of thing is going to be deeply embarrassing) when she got older by openly cheating on her with way younger women again. What he did to Yang Kaihui was also pretty fucked but that's a whole different story. That's a big part of the contradiction of Mao though: He is undoubtedly the greatest revolutionary in history - It's likely that no other human being in history has done as much good for as many people as Mao, but at the same time he was also a giant self-absorbed narcissistic womanizing/deadbeat dad and a cunt who treated everybody around him horribly, had no sense of personal loyalty to anybody and was a source of continual instability in the party/country.

<was a source of continual instability in the party/country.

>>687020

>It's pretty clear that his destruction of major political opponents (including a bizarre fixation on them often well after they were deprived of any kind of power, the total revising of their life stories and painting of them as "totally black, and without a single virtue") from Wang Ming to Liu Shaoqi to Lin Biao was based less on political or policy-based disagreements and more on a perceived threat to his ability to procure narcissistic supply.

How will you weasel out of your own words? Holy shit, imagine first saying EXACTLY what liberal myth says, and then PRETENDING that you are not repeating the myth, lol.

>>687864
>Yes, usually there was s single candidate to vote for.
I didn't mention anything about candidate selection, I mentioned the infrequency of their meetings and their apparent constant unanimity. Do you have any sources which contradict this or not?
>Do you understand the difference between intersecting legislature and intersecting memebrhip?
If the legislature is dominated by a single party, and that party is capable of constraining the political activities of its members, then it really doesn't matter where the official powers of one or the other begin or end on paper. It means that the party leadership controls the legislature, because they control its members.
>>687874
>rambling about revisionism being the product of a socialist society
Marxism tells us that political contradictions are the products of material contradictions, ie of contradictions between and within classes. Clearly then if there is a political contradiction between revisionism and anti-revisionism in Soviet society, then, thus must necessarily be a manifestation of a material contradiction. Remember what Marx writes in the German Ideology:
<The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships.
In other words, ideology is always the expression of the interests of one group or another as determined by their position within a division of labour. Not only this, but in order for an idea to be elevated to dominance and state power it needs to be the idea of the dominant stratum or class. Not that the professionals constituted a "class" in the formal sense, however the difference between two classes and two strata are ultimately qualitative vs quantitative differences in the same phenomenon, that is differences within the division of labour. If revisionism then emerges as a distinct ideological phenomenon, and one capable of elevating itself to the status of the ruling idea, it must necessarily be the idea of a particular class or stratum, and a ruling one at that. To say otherwise is to attribute an idea with a power completely independent of material forces, it's blatant idealism. In doing so you're rejecting the very foundations of Marxist analysis, mostly because you just dont want to admit the existence of social contradictions that eventually destroyed AES. Revisionism is a symptom, not a cause, just as all ideologies are symptoms of material causes.
>No, it's not, it's merely a remnant of a previous society.
Yeah except feudal ideas have zero chance to actually retake control of bourgeois society precisely because there is no material basis for them. Remnants of past societies always persist into new eras, but they don't retain anything approaching the same potency as they did before, and they certainly don't seize state power without a material basis. People may still study Homer in school, but they sure as shit aren't about to recreate ancient Greek slave society because of it.

Also just to cap off the thread, in regards to the issue of the USSR even under Stalin being a genuine proletarian democracy, Domenico Losurdo in "Stalin: The History and Critique of a Black Legend" repeatedly refers to Stalin's government as culminating in "autocracy". Some examples:
<Let’s start with a preliminary question: at what point could we refer to Soviet Russia as a personal and absolute dictatorship? Respectable historians appear to be in agreement on an essential point: “At the start of the 1930s Stalin was not yet an autocrat. He was not free from criticism, dissension, and authentic opposition within the communist party." The absolute power of a leader shielded by a cult of personality had not yet emerged: the Leninist tradition of the “dictatorship of the party” and oligarchic power persisted.386 The historians cited here use the two terms interchangeably; by all measures the second poorly describes a regime that encourages an incredibly strong level of social mobility for the subaltern classes and that opens political and cultural life to social strata and ethnic groups that were totally marginalized up until then. It seems evident that, at least starting from 1937, and starting with the outbreak of the Great Terror, the dictatorship of the party gives way to autocracy.
<In the three decades of Soviet history led by Stalin, the principal aspect is not the transition from dictatorship of the party to autocracy, but more precisely the repeated attempts to transition from the state of emergency to a state of relative normality, attempts which fail for reasons both internal (abstract utopianism and millenarianism that prevent the recognition of what has been achieved) and international…With the outbreak of the third civil war (within the ranks of the Bolsheviks) and with the approach of the Second World War (breaking out in Asia before Europe), this series of failures finally results in the arrival of autocracy, exercised by a leader who’s the object of a genuine cult of personality.
<In other words, only with the arrival of autocracy does Soviet power achieve full control over its territory and the state apparatus; and the terror is, firstly, a response to an unprecedented, acute and long lasting crisis.
I fucking dare anybody here to call Losurdo a liberal.

>>687938
He also says this
<1937 and 1938 are the biennium of the Great Terror. Not even in “its worst phase” does Stalin’s regime lose its base of social consensus and its “enthusiastic supporters”, who continue to be motivated by both ideology as well as the opportunity for social advancement: it’s a “mistake” to read this permanent consensus “as merely an artifice of state censorship and repression."
So, apparentely, even this supposed autocratic regime is based on social consensus and your claim about lack or representation falls flat on it's face.

You just took two quotes out of context and even they do not really support position that you wanted them to support. Fuck off.

Also Losurdo is allright but it doesn't mean he is alway right. He calls so called "great terror" a third civil war which is fucking laughable given that most people in USSR didn't even noticed it was happening.

>>687927
>Marxism tells us that political contradictions are the products of material contradictions, ie of contradictions between and within classes

Oh, so, in USSR, bureaucracy was a class, huh?

See, folks? Every fucking time it boils down to Trotsky. Every fucking time everything that is not ML is always trotskyism.

What fucking contradictions under socialism? There can be no contradictions within the same class, for fuck's sake. That means you are implying that USSR had a separate class of bureaucracy.

>it must necessarily be the idea of a particular class or stratum, and a ruling one at that

You are forgetting the foreign ruling class.

>>688020
Quick question. Why do we always have to a priori assume that Trotsky is wrong? Yeah, he maybe wrong on the "degenerated workers state issue" but he could have something to say (in theory at least) on other questions?

>>688020
>There can be no contradictions within the same class, for fuck's sake.
But there was? Idk where you're from, but I can tell you that most people in the former eastern bloc country I am from, felt that there was some sort of distinction between party officials and the urban workers in terms of privileges. Not saying that this constituted a new class, but the division of labour sucked in the eastern bloc. Just facts

>>688035
Is there a difference between suck-ups to the bourgeoisie from the working class and independent pro-worker workers? First, does it constitute THE ESSENSE OF SOCIALISM? Are we assuming that socialism will ALWAYS have revisionism, like the flagfag claimed? Second, we are talking about the RULING CLASS, don't we? So even having multiple classes in a country doesn't guarantee there will be a representation on the top, lol.

Of course, you can fall into denial and come to conclusion that no action whatsoever can change the society, only the society can move somewhere - and immediately come to the conclusion that coup can never work simply because there needs to be an underlying class conflict, lol. Or that propaganda may never work because you can't change society, meaning there's no point in capturing radio and tv stations to influence the populace, because said populace will work off their class interests anyway.

>but the division of labour sucked in the eastern bloc. Just facts

What the fuck does that even mean. Everyone can't be a paper pusher, so life sucks? That's not a fact, that's an opinion.

>>688028
It comes from looking into Trotsky's history. He was an opportunist piece of shit who changed his opinions two times a day, hell-bent on opposing everything Lenin/Stalin did. It's not a sane policy - unless you assume that his goals were the destruction of socialism.

Trotsky is self-contradictory. Flagfags are as well. It's all very easy to prove from their own words, as you can see.

>>687965
>So, apparentely, even this supposed autocratic regime is based on social consensus
I never said it wasn't. On the contrary Stalin's popularity among the common worker was never in doubt. That's beside the point as to whether or not Soviet citizens were able to hold their officials to account through democratic means.
>your claim about lack or representation falls flat on it's face
No it doesn't, when talking about "representation" in that context I was referring to the ability of Soviet citizens to directly choose their own representatives in the policymaking process, which is something that by definition doesn't exist in an autocracy. The thing about autocratic governments is that they can and often are genuine expressions of the popular will, but without actual mechanisms for the population to directly control them (again, something that an autocracy lacks by definition), there's nothing to prevent popular and "benevolent" (for lack or a better word) autocracy from being succeeded by a tyrannical one.
>Also Losurdo is allright but it doesn't mean he is alway right.
But Anon, I thought everybody who says that the Soviet government was undemocratic was a liberal and anti-communist? That's what you've been calling me this whole time. So I guess Losurdo must be a liberal too right?
>>688020
>Oh, so, in USSR, bureaucracy was a class, huh?
They aren't, I said this specifically and very clearly. Reading comprehension.
>What fucking contradictions under socialism? There can be no contradictions within the same class,
Yes there can. Read Mao:
<The unification of our country, the unity of our people and the unity of our various nationalities – these are the basic guarantees for the sure triumph of our cause. However, this does not mean that contradictions no longer exist in our society. To imagine that none exist is a naive idea which is at variance with objective reality. We are confronted with two types of social contradictions – those between ourselves and the enemy and those among the people. The two are totally different in nature.
<The contradictions between ourselves and the enemy are antagonistic contradictions. Within the ranks of the people, the contradictions among the working people are non-antagonistic, while those between the exploited and the exploiting classes have a non-antagonistic as well as an antagonistic aspect. There have always been contradictions among the people, but they are different in content in each period of the revolution and in the period of building socialism. In the conditions prevailing in China today, the contradictions among the people comprise the contradictions within the working class, the contradictions within the peasantry, the contradictions within the intelligentsia, the contradictions between the working class and the peasantry, the contradictions between the workers and peasants on the one hand and the intellectuals on the other, the contradictions between the working class and other sections of the working people on the one hand and the national bourgeoisie on the other, the contradictions within the national bourgeoisie, and so on.
https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-5/mswv5_58.htm
Not only that, but the notion of contradictions among various strata of the working class is implicit in concepts like the labour aristocracy. As Lenin writes,
<This, in fact, is the economic and political essence of imperialism, the profound contradictions of which Kautsky glosses over instead of exposing.
<The bourgeoisie of an imperialist “Great” Power can economically bribe the upper strata of “its” workers by spending on this a hundred million or so francs a year, for its superprofits most likely amount to about a thousand million. And how this little sop is divided among the labour ministers, “labour representatives” (remember Engels’s splendid analysis of the term), labour members of War Industries Committees,[5] labour officials, workers belonging to the narrow craft unions, office employees, etc., etc., is a secondary question… the desertion of a stratum of the labour aristocracy to the bourgeoisie has matured and become an accomplished fact; and this economic fact, this shift in class relations, will find political form, in one shape or another, without any particular “difficulty”.
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/oct/x01.htm
The existence of contradictions within strata of the working class, and new contradictions which emerge under socialism, shouldn't really be in dispute. AES was not a higher stage communist society, obviously contradictions will persist until this era is reached, and new ones will emerge. That's how dialectics works.
>You are forgetting the foreign ruling class.
So what, the USSR after Stalin was governed by a foreign capitalist class? Pretty weird they still waged proxy wars against them, almost nuked each other on several occasions, etc..

>>688069
>Are we assuming that socialism will ALWAYS have revisionism, like the flagfag claimed?
I never claimed this, I'm just trying to diagnose the cause of revisionism in AES by identifying the social contradictions that produced it. That's how you are supposed to analyze things using Marxist methodology.

>>688344
><The contradictions between ourselves and the enemy are antagonistic contradictions. Within the ranks of the people, the contradictions among the working people are non-antagonistic, while those between the exploited and the exploiting classes have a non-antagonistic as well as an antagonistic aspect.

Obviously, I meant antagonistic contradictions. Because why the fuck do you want to talk about petty disagreements between people in day to day life - as opposed to antagonistic contradictions between people having a different relationship to the means of production?

>the desertion of a stratum of the labour aristocracy to the bourgeoisie has matured and become an accomplished fact; and this economic fact, this shift in class relations, will find political form, in one shape or another, without any particular “difficulty”.

I said as much in my post? USSR didn't have an internal capitalist class to create a labour aristocracy to protect it's interests, though, making only traitors who surrendered to the foreign capitalist class possible. That's not an internal contradiction, again.

>So what, the USSR after Stalin was governed by a foreign capitalist class

No. That's fucking why traitors were so hell-bent on destroying USSR and sabotaging it's economy - to make sure foreigners COME INTO CONTROL. AGAIN, it's not an internal contradiction reinforced by some internal societal mechanism.

You CANNOT spout your nonsense without taking the next logical step and declaring that USSR had a bureaucratic class separate from the workers. It was sell-outs on USSR's side who were advancing interests of the foreign ruling class. Opportunism as a term from it's very conception meant exactly that - leftists who try their fucking best to lose to the enemy. Trotskyism/revisionism is opportunism.

>>688347
>identifying the social contradictions that produced it

Oh, do identify those social contradiction. Which fucking part of socialism produces traitors who want their country to be ruled by foreign capitalist class?

>>688387
>>688344
Oh, and also (an idea that came a couple of hours later) are you implying that in USSR the non-antagonistic contradictions between the workers and peasants create revisionists who destroy communism? Labour aristocracy, obviously, didn't exist in USSR, so, the only class contradiction that could have been was peasant/worker divide. Funnily enough, that's yet another ultraleftist take, this time, it was mensheviks' idea that peasants are baaaaad, and Trotsky entertained it for quite a while.

And to stop revisionists, you need to let them win and have their own faction. So, in other words, you either want us to let peasants have a faction in ML party, or to let labour aristocracy have their faction. Either way - retarded.

For those of us who actually have a clue what democracy is (we seem to be a vanishing minority on this board these days), it really comes as no surprise that the oligarchic institution of elections produces classes of its own and whose interests can oppose one another. Disappointing how little recognition of this there is in this thread.

>>686571
true transparency and more direct democracy / checks from below are needed for this.
Technological advances have made this easier too.

>>688344
>But Anon, I thought everybody who says that the Soviet government was undemocratic was a liberal and anti-communist?
Then you are retard who misses the point by a mile and also doesn't even uinderstand what Losurdo wrote. Which is not really surprising.

>>688638
Okay that's very based but then what?
Should we be pro lottocracy or not? Why didn't previews communist movements advocate for lottocracy?

>>688856
>lottocracy

Unless you have a ancient era fetish, just call it 'direct democracy'

>>686881
Based aus juche

>>688638
What's the source? I'm interested in hearing the whole lecture.

>>688856
It's called sortition