- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmygrad.ml
- news@hexbear.net
- cross-posted to:
- worldnews@lemmygrad.ml
- news@hexbear.net
The western values Ukraine is defending are becoming more apparent by the day.
The western values Ukraine is defending are becoming more apparent by the day.
Correction: by the need to disarm and pacify the proletariat, when class rule becomes too threatened. German Empire is a good example. Nobody would dare to call Bismarck’s rule “democratic”
And you’re still describing welfare. Most SocDems I know support things like this or similar ones, and food subsidies are done by many liberal governments, irrelevant of the democratic status.
I agree, MLs have long abandoned what communism was supposed to mean.
I mean, your schpiel about welfare implying democracy is kinda it. You still haven’t made neither communist ties to mode of production, nor more liberal ties to the electoral structure. You’re only pushing the welfare angle.
Monarchs wanting to keep the populace docile, like in modern Saudi Arabia or in the German Empire would often implement welfare, and it would be ridiculous to call that in any way a democracy. However fascists often define “democracy” as the ruler following the will of the people, which is shown through fulfilling certain needs of the population, like food, healthcare, housing. Your “welfare implies democracy” take runs parallel to that idea, and can be argued to be a slight repackaging of the reactionary concept.
That is not how it works. It is possible to believe fascist things while being a liberal and to believe liberal and fascist things while being a socialist. The point is not that you are that shitty thing, but that you should change your position from the wrong one to the right one.
You have managed to miss both the point of the joke and my explanation of it. I was being sarcastic in my comment and not writing a thesis on democracy. The joke was never meant to accurately define democracy. As for my explanation, you have somehow missed the fact that I explicitly say that welfare is an indicator for the strength of democratic forces, and not “proof” that a country is a democracy.
Are you being purposefully obtuse?
Oh, was the USSR under Stalin fascist then? Was it simply “placating” and “disarming” the working population? Or was it liberal or monarchist? Because that is the original topic I replied to. Nobody but the most dumbass of ultras can pretend that the USSR under Stalin was not socialist. Certainly did not achieve higher stage communism as it still had a large peasant class.
I know you were sarcastic in the original comment, which is why I asked you to make an actual point.
They key points of your response were:
The first point you’re wrong on, as I have explained.
The second point I agree on.
The third point you are again wrong on, as examples I’ve provided demonstrate.
Both proofs and indicators serve similar goals rhetorically, I don’t see the point of your distinction here. I also didn’t say “proof” when criticizing your point:
Now going further.
I have no idea what led you to think I’m saying this, stop being defensive. It did do some things that, if were done by a western liberal government, would’ve lead to accusations of fascism, but that is beside the point.
That is correct, however; both figuratively and literally.
Now you’re just posturing. Please stop.
No you haven’t. Bismark only implemented his policies to placate a working class as you yourself claim. You only need to placate and disarm a class if they become a threat to your power. Your examples only further reinforce my point that states in general have to be compelled to provide welfare policies. It takes some level of success in class conflict to win concessions.
They do not at all. If you drank a soda that tasted sweet, that would be an indicator that it had fructose in it. But it would not be proof as the soda could have artificial sweetners like sacharine instead. The implementation of welfare policies are the result of an intermingling of factors, and each country has its own circumstances.
So far, you have yet to explain how exactly the USSR under Stalin was not democratic, which was the whole thing I was mocking your views over.
Or you want to push them further to achieve your goals.
Or there’s a threat of external forces using internal disorder for their purposes.
Why is this important?
Your original statement - “compelled to by democratic forces” - was implying (maybe accidentally), that those forces have at least partial power in the government. It sounded similar to the social democratic idea of “The workers have a say in the government, so they vote for things they desire”.
Your newer statement - “become a threat to your power” - is then paralleled with “success in class conflict”. Both imply there’s a strong workers’ movement making demands. What I want to point out is that it is not necessarily the case, as there are often other pressures at play which don’t directly involve the labor movement.
USSR had both a need for a compliant workforce to simplify the execution of economic plans and a great threat of external hostile forces leveraging internal strife, both of which made it a very appealing option to keep the working class as non-threatening as possible.
You don’t need to explain to me how formal proofs work. However, I was talking about rhetoric, not logic.
When you are talking to a person or a group of people and say things like:
All of these serve the same goal in your speech. It tells people around:
“Because of X you should believe that person is a fascist”.
My point is that it doesn’t matter whether you used “proof” or “indication”, that either of them would be there to have a person read about the USSR’s welfare policies and go “Hm, I guess USSR was actually democratic”.
Your original sarcastic comment had other possible interpretations: “democracy is a meaningless term”, or “democracy is secondary to well-being of the populace”, but these are even more reactionary than the welfare-democracy one, and your following response suggested that was the one you intended.
I’ve been waiting for you to explain the contrary, as your only point to that so far was the welfare one. You also haven’t yet explained what meaning of “democracy” you subscribe to, as you have suggested you don’t believe the welfare explanation. It would be a waste of time for me to present a refutal, only for you to not believe in its core, thus rendering all the work futile.
In the case of the USSR, it was almost entirely workers. Workers (and non-working lower class folk) who voted in representatives for their local soviets, the local soviets who then voted in representatives for higher soviets and so on. The soviet structure, which existed for the workplace as well, although higher level government bodies still had some say in how the workplace was run (necessary to ensure coherence in the economic plan). It was common for people to personally write letters to Stalin or other officials, who would then be required to respond to their requests. I have even heard stories from non-communist eastern europeans who say things like “my grandmother once wrote to Stalin to ask him to transfer her to a new unit because she thought the commander was hot. And that’s how my father was born”. This level of extreme intermingling between the citizenry and the leadership is surely a strong mechanism of democracy. Another democratic mechanism existed in the USSR whereby the 1936 constitution was crafted with suggestions from the populace and had to be approved by a vote from the population. It is in the context of these democratic mechanisms that my comments about welfare become “proof” for the USSR being democratic. If it wasn’t democratic and all of the mechanism I listed above are lies, how would that square with the USSR working to abolish surplus value or having income distributions orders of magnitudes more equal than countries with comparable levels of industrialisation. It wouldn’t.
No it didn’t. It went “In the despotic east, the people are forced to …, in the democratic west, the people choose to starve in the streets”. The idea that in a democracy, a population would choose to impoverish and immiserate itself is the whole joke to begin with. When I was writing that comment, I was operating under the assumption that you were the type who would defend western “democracies”.
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Fucking hell, the editor did not save my message again.
TL;DR
Having a referendum to ratify constitutional changes is a thing in a large number of countries. It’s not out of the ordinary.
The Congress of Soviets was removed with the 1936 constitution. Supreme Soviet took its place. Supreme Soviet was elected directly, but all ballots had only a single candidate. You can try to look up a picture of a ballot - they all have a single name on them. There is one picture of a ballot template with 3 names, but that’s it.
The candidates in the ballots would be nominated on meetings of industrial plant and factory staff. Meetings are not elections. Meetings is when you sit and listen to the management read out their decisions.
There Supreme Soviet would convene a few times per year for a week or less. All other time there would be ~40 guys from the Presidium who would take on its duties.
There are stenograms of sessions available in Russian.. I can read Russian. What I’m reading is:
Supreme Soviet was officially the highest legislative authority in the country. It was an undemocratic sham.
It did, but I don’t want to argue about that. It’s all semantics and sophistry and we’re past that anyway.
Does a mechanism need to be out of the ordinary to be democratic?
Apologies, I had gotten confused since that period of soviet history saw many restructurings in the government. But this only means that all along, you knew a little about how the soviet government worked, and yet you still have many comments wasting everyone’s and your own time with nonsense and tangents.
I know this
Yes, that is the point. The bolsheviks explicitly abandoned liberal parliamentarianism. Despite calling other people liberals and saying that I had liberal ideas about democracy, are you now going to turn around and say that elections, the most liberal of liberal ideas about democracy are the way to go? Anyone who is not a liberal can easily recognize that electoral systems are undemocratic. Even the best of electoral “democracies” have elected representatives that are deeply unrepresentative of their constituents. I would not say that the system of meetings was the best choice exactly, but it was both the result of the democratic centralist philosophy (evolved partly as a result of the needs of the civil war) and of seeing electoral systems utterly fail both in liberalised Russia and the other parliamentary countries.
Yeah … totally. All of the gains in the worker’s rights and living standards happened despite the workers having no input. By some miracle, the democratic mechanism which was just for show produced one of the most equal and highly industrialized societies of all time. By arguing that the USSR wasn’t democratic, the only thing you are arguing for is the idea that democracy is not necessary to achieve equality and standards of living. No matter how much you deride welfare as an indicator of democracy, your whole narrative doesn’t make sense. It also doesn’t make sense how the Russian working class, which had very recently launched a revolution could be disarmed so easily, or at all.
As opposed to doing what? Representatives cannot manage the day to day affairs of the government. No government on earth does that.
And I cannot comment on whether or not you are cherry picking or misrepresenting anything from the reports.
Can’t comment on this, even though I smell bs.
This is a problem because?
I neither trust that you have actually read and remember the contents of that many speeches, or that you understand the all of the contexts or nuances of those speeches. Furthermore, during conditions of wartime or near wartime (as your only example is in), there naturally tends to be less disagreement. You can see how quickly factions unite under external threats.
What is this supposed to mean? I assume you bring this particular point up specifically to play on the “USSR collaborated with nazis” trope (straining your credibility), but what does “talking about” mean exactly? For example, if he mentions that the government has stabilized the situation (stating facts), why would that generate dissent (unless he was factually incorrect)?
Have you been to meetings with management? I used to work at a government-run place in Belarus. The meetings were precisely as what I described them. I had a longer explanation typed out, but then lost it; I might redo it at a later date.
I wanted to know the reason behind you thinking it was democratic. The first reason you gave was the welfare. I’ve provided several reasons which were true for USSR at the time for why they would want to keep the proletariat pacified and disarmed. Speaking of which, the proletariat was literally disarmed in 1924.
The second reason you gave is the electoral system. So now we’re talking about the electoral system.
US House and Senate are in session approximately 150(+/-20) days a year, for most weeks there’s at least one day they’re in session. There’s also not a separate group which makes decisions for the rest of the parliament in the meantime.
You have the link now. You can always ask someone else to look through them for you to verify if I’m right or wrong. You can also ask me - pick out any session of any convocation out there and I will get you a translation of at least the key points, the votes, stuff like that.
Ok, I think I was vague here. There are reports, there are congratulations, there are suggestions. I don’t see any discussions, nor appeals, nor debates. I don’t see disagreement. What I see is a lot of self-congratulation. Even if I can’t prove it by giving you an authoritative translation here and now, you will remember this characterization and it will sit there in your head when you’ll hear similar things in the future.
You would be right to do so, as what I meant and keep meaning when I talk here was only the speeches I looked through, which is only like 5 or 6, picked randomly from random sessions of the 1st convocation (I think we’re both would be mostly interested in the 1st convocation, as that is the one which lasted from 1937 to 1945). One of the sessions I clicked was the 7th session, which had the Molotov’s speech - I stumbled upon it mostly by chance. Being friendly with the Nazi state would be an obviously contentious topic among leftists, so it piqued my interest to see the Soviet’s reaction to the report. Which is also why I mentioned it to you - it’s much easier to disregard absence of dissent on a matter of industrial or agricultural administration than on this topic.
I will try to summarize the part of the speech which pertains to the Nazis here. You’re free to disregard it as me bs-ing you.
This is only a part of the larger report on foreign policy, but I would still expect there to be some voices of concern regarding the shit Nazis were doing, or the fact that the report puts the blame for the war and its continuation on primarily UK and USA and their “imperialist ambitions”. The “peace or destruction” threat from Hitler’s July 19th speech is framed as a humble peace offer, which the greedy Britain has unreasonable refused. The cutting ties with the Nazi puppet Vichy is framed as Britain abandoning its former ally. No mention of persecution of Jews by the Nazis. Also neither terms “Nazi”, “National Socialist”, nor Hitler’s name appear in the report - he’s referred to as “the reichschancellor”.
Not all of these things I would expect from Molotov’s report itself - but I would be appalled if there was no other delegates to point at least one of the things I’ve outlined.
Instead, the report was accepted unanimously and without any debate.
The stenogram link for that place precisely
This phrase is everywhere in those stenograms. No against, no abstentions, accepted.
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