/lit/ - Literature

>>22957270
It was deboonked by the freikorps. There was no practical application of marxism in russia. Marxism requires an industrialized capitalist society to be overthrown by a mass movement of the people.

>>22957275
This, Lenin's plan was basically "let's speedrun Russia through 150 years of industrialization to get up to where Marx said we should be as a precondition for the revolution we already just had"

It made sense in a strange sort of way but the only thing that held the USSR together in the earliest phases was the classic elan vital of any great revolution, plus Lenin's vision. And remember, Lenin was not totalitarian - he thought that a communist society was so obvious to all and so imminent, that he gave the nationalities of the Russian empire the right to carry out their own national policies (i.e., to form nations) and to secede from the USSR if they wished. They had to join the USSR VOLUNTARILY for Lenin.

It was Stalin who then came in, after this dream was fading, and saw that all that could now be done was: (A) let the Russian empire fragment, or (B) re-impose the empire with a new mandate and a new religion, "Communism." Anyone less psychopathic and ruthless than Stalin wouldn't have been able to do option (B) with sufficient intensity, because it required murdering many millions of people and destroying entire nationalities by deporting half of them to Siberia to die in work camps, then turning around and killing half of his own people for 15 straight years to ensure loyalty internally, then killing half the Russian people in a war against Germany as an attack dog for Churchill and American (i.e. Jewish) finance and business interests.

The USSR after 1945 had no dynamism, it had no civilizational mandate or center of gravity, and everybody knew this. It had been "used up" for its purposes, by the Anglo-American establishment, in WW2. The last great rebellion against capitalism was fascism.

>>22957270
Marx was a retard, it was debunked by decades of social progress in the west and now zoomers can't work a 9-5 thanks to tiktok

>>22957270
It was deboonked by Lenin himself already. Unless you want to cherry pick what the real marxism is.

>>22957275
How utopian.
>>22957284
How counterrevolutionary

Try communism instead, next time.

>>22957275
>requires an industrialized capitalist society
Russia had been rapidly industrializing for years, almost two decades, before communists overthrew the first democratic government of Russia.
• https://bootsector.livejournal.com/86838.html — This is a selection of color photographs of Imperial Russia taken by Prokudin-Gorsky at the turn of the century. Photographs of beautiful trains, hydroelectric dams, dredging boats, railway bridges, even a car.
• Gatrell, P. (1982). Industrial expansion in Tsarist Russia, 1908-14. The Economic History Review, 35(1), 99. https://doi.org/10.2307/2595106
>mass movement of the people
Then I guess Russia doesn't match this, since the communists didn't have any kind of popular support. They recruited village alcoholics to form kombeds and gave them guns so that they could disabuse of property the men who worked before the coup. There was a Russian artist, Ivan Vladimirov, who lived through the Revolution and created a series of sketches documenting it. Have a look at the intellectually blessed visages of the revolutionaries. Doesn't quite fit the later communist-commissioned mythology, does it? https://www.wikiart.org/en/ivan-vladimirov/all-works#!#filterName:Series_cycle-of-documentary-sketches-of-1917-1922

>>22957270
>random American grocery store
Nearly all of this was available in the USSR so long as you were good at memorizing Marxist–Leninist slogans for your political exams and at the Marxist "praxis" of tonguing your superior's anus. Card-carrying nomenklatura could shop at Beryozka retail stores, where they could buy western produce from chocolate to cheeses and champagne. Have a look at this Beryozka catalog: https://maxim-nm.livejournal.com/454962.html

>>22957284
>Lenin was not totalitarian
>t. I'm 16 and fuck the Russians, Lenin rulz lololol!

>There is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terror.
— Karl Marx, 1848
>Comrades! The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity ... You must make example of these people. (1) Hang (I mean hang publicly, so that people see it) at least 100 kulaks, rich bastards, and known bloodsuckers. (2) Publish their names. (3) Seize all their grain. (4) Single out the hostages per my instructions in yesterday's telegram. Do all this so that for miles around people see it all, understand it, tremble, and tell themselves that we are killing the bloodthirsty kulaks and that we will continue to do so ... Yours, Lenin. P.S. Find tougher people.
— Vladimir Lenin, 1918

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror#Affected_groups
>crucified, thrown into cauldrons of boiling tar, scalped, strangled, given Communion with melted lead and drowned in holes in the ice.
>slowly fed them into furnaces or tanks of boiling water
>rolled naked people around in barrels studded internally with nails

>>22957284
>The last great rebellion against capitalism was fascism.
I think fascism was a system of contradictions that combined tendencies to preserve capitalism with tendencies to destroy capitalism, and a product of a particular stage in the history of capitalism.

>>22957358
>Russia had been rapidly industrializing for years, almost two decades
>Russia
>rapidly
>industrializing
Stopped reading there.

>>22957270
US farm subsidies are an interesting form of state control over agriculture, somewhere around 40% of the average income for farmers is from the government itself.

>>22957358
Marx's justification of Robespierre style terror in 1848 has nothing to do with the barbarism of the Soviet terror. Marx meant a temporary police state, not inhuman torture. Marx was an effete Berlin intellectual at heart.

>>22957428
>He stopped reading
I didn't read his post, but these are some facts you could easily read up on. These people defeated Hitler's war machine and put people in space not long after.

>>22957275
>>22957284
Absolute state of marxoid trannies.

>>22957288
Damn, guess China won in the end after all.

>>22957450
lol no they didn't

>>22957448
Not an argument, illiterate /pol/tard

>Not an argument,illiterate /pol/tard

>>22957456
It ends all arguments Mister.

>>22957428

>>22957447
Yeah...after the soviets took over, not before.

>>22957479
Do you also still believe the tales of kindly grandpa Lenin your mommy read to you as a kid?

Lots of 10 dollar words and yip-yapping in this thread, just get to the point already.
Marxism: Based or Cringe?

>>22957641
Neither. It's just a political bludgeon. Communist works great if you want to subvert an existing place, turn it into a shithole and then install whatever you want after. The problem is it only enables the absolute worst kinds of people: pragmatic sociopaths who hang out in the back until all the bloodshed is done, and navel-gazing weenies who concoct elaborate theories that don't work out in practice and they never actually survive.

>>22957641
>Lots of 10 dollar words
10 dollars unironcally had the same value as gold in the Soviet union thats how shit it was.

>>22957656
Some guy I talk to online is now the Argentinian equivalent of a rich silicon valley bro in his country because he figured out how to buy Fortnite v-bucks cheap (with his native currency), then sell them to Americans for significantly less than their official price in USD. It seems like the folly of this whole fabricated money scam (like what the federal reserve is constantly working to reinforce) is that all these nonphysical items with "a set price in USD" can just be undercut by clever thirdies who then use that cash to live like kings domestically.

>>22957672
My point exactly, if ur socialist utopia/empire or whatever can be cucked by a foreign currency like the american dollar that easily then honestly it deserves to crash and burn.

>>22957672
All this proves is that the people really running the show are laughing orders of magnitude harder at how fake it is, this random black spic doing it is just an occasional leak of a single drop from the pipe that normally serves them

>>22957270
the idea that you could realistically describe and delimit the complexity of nations and their interactions with something as simple and binary as "marxism vs capitalism" is just cope for people who want reality to be as simple as rooting for the right team

>>22957270
>a random American grocery store
Calling my boy Randalls at its prime a "random American grocery store" feels insulting.

>>22957690
I don't think you understand what I wrote. The Americans are the ones expected to overpay for virtual "products" whose only limitations on production are whether or not the servers are working. If I pressed a button and gave you 66 billion v-bucks it would cost nothing except the three cents of electricity necessary to run my game servers. These aren't panama straw hats where someone has to learn the trade, get the materials and produce the product. There is no reason v-bucks cost the American 20 USD except that's what the game developer decided he must pay. The American is the one getting cuckolded. Meanwhile the guy in Argentina has his prices adjusted accordingly (because if v-bucks cost 20 USD over there nobody in the entire country could ever afford it), so if he drops 20 pesos on that same virtual thing the American wants then... there's no difference. He has the same virtual token the American does. And now he can resell that virtual item to the American for 10 USD, which naturally the American will buy because why wouldn't he? Now the billionaire video game purveyor is the one getting cuckolded because he's receiving less money while the American totally undercuts him, and the Argentinian is propelling himself to the upper class of his nation. My point is if you get a little too jewish then the people beneath you will get clever and fuck you over.

>>22957284
Yup
>>22957408
that statement is so vague it could apply to any ideology in history

>>22957497
I believe you're retarded.

>>22957641
>Lots of 10 dollar words and yip-yapping in this thread, just get to the point already.
>Marxism: Based or Cringe?
Marxism: Cringe.
Stalinism: Based AND Cringe.

>>22957700
American nostalgia just keeps getting sadder

>>22957284
Any good books on the soviet union that go over this history?

>>22957270

>>22959237
God damn trump is just one iconic guy, truly boomer idealogy turned into a man, beautiful.

>>22959218
A friend once told me that all the books on the Soviets are insanely controversial, especially Stalin/Trotsky type stuff, because everybody has their contradictory interpretations. I remember Robert Service coming up a lot and both seeming very interesting and being controversial.

>>22957270
that food is filled with trans fat though. now americans are the trans fats. the proletariat is better off in breadlines than being pumped full of cord syrup

>>22957270
>They stuff themselves to death so they're more successful!

>>22957275
>Marxism requires an industrialized capitalist society to be overthrown by a mass movement of the people.
except that would require setting up a centrally planned economy (endorsed by both Marx and Engels) and as we now know, centrally planned economies always fail, spectacularily

>>22957275
>Marxism requires another system to build everything for it first
lmao

>>22957440
The reason is that food supply is too important to be left to market forces. Even if a purely free-market policy is more efficient and doesn't overproduce to the extent of subsidized agriculture, the risk of a famine due to unpredictable circumstances is too high. Better to just overproduce like crazy and subsidize the farmers.

>all the comments in this thread
This is all fixed by ending the corn subsidies. Then no more high fructose corn syrup, no more cheap fatty sweets, no more shitty corn chips, or at least they all have a higher price so less people will buy them. The only down side is that meat will increase in price.

>>22959413
except they're paying farmers to overproduce corn to turn into ethanol not to make the food supply secure.

>>22959424
IF there was actually a crisis they would obviously stop ethanol production. It seems to me like a way to at least get *some* use out of the oversupply of corn.

>>22957284
TL;DR: Communism does not work in theory nor in practice.

>>22957358
>crucified, thrown into cauldrons of boiling tar, scalped, strangled, given Communion with melted lead and drowned in holes in the ice.
>slowly fed them into furnaces or tanks of boiling water
>rolled naked people around in barrels studded internally with nails
>wikipedia
So fucking sick of hearing about 5 gorillion kulaks and the Acme bag of tricks they had for killing people -inefficiently, it should be noted, which seems odd for an otherwise stone cold real politik regime.

>>22957270
You guys understand that capitalism in OP pic is a fluke right? neither capitalism nor communism really work in the end. humans are supersmart but parasitic apes that will consume and destroy everything. in a hundred years there won't be any supermarkets with abundant food. capitalism just has a slightly longer shelf life, so it seems better than communism.

>>22957270
wym China raised a billion out of poverty and they're doing great while the US stagnates. Marxism won lil bro

being able to buy corn dogs and jello at happy funtime wow wow world before sliding over to the theater to catch "anthropromorphic inanimate object with a nuclear family goes through a mid life crisis and makes scatological humor, the animated movie" doesn't FEEL like winning, but you totally dunked on those commies that have been extinct for 40 years, so keep being a winner winner like in that country song about the catfish dinner OP, gg

>>22957270
>Look at all that carcinogenic diabetes causing goy slop! That's capitalism baby!

>>22959409
Yes.

>>22959417
>no more shitty corn chips
Hey, watch ya language ya fazool.
It's the potato chips that I wouldn't care much about going away. Though I don't honestly snack much anyway because I'm trying to keep my girlish figure below 230.

>>22959413
At least you are not trying to pass yourself off as some sort of capitalist.

>>22957275
Wouldn’t that be an artificial revolution? Why not just make the economy as it’s supposed to be right away instead of faking a revolution? Wow I’m sleepy….

>>22957448
You replied to the wrong post.

>>22959586
I like how your claim has no proof to back it up by definition.

>>22959570
>>crucified, thrown into cauldrons of boiling tar, scalped, strangled, given Communion with melted lead
>bag of tricks they had for killing people
Take a moment to contemplate these circumstances: your friends hold an old man down while you pry his mouth open and pour molten lead on his quivering tongue. Imagine the smell of burnt human flesh. Consider how deeply rotten any kind of Marxist is, and this anon in particular, to dismiss this and the fact that Marxist hatred reliably produced this kind of atrocity, over and over again. (Also reminding the less astute reader that "kulak" is an insult for the more bright and entrepreneuring 5% of peasants who, following the emancipation of 1861, attempted to improve their lot in life unlike obschina alcoholics. This is who Marxists wanted and evidently want dead.)

>>22959218
Just read the paper "New Russian Economic History" by Zhuravskaya, Guriev, and Markevich, forthcoming in the Journal of Economic Literature. A draft is available at: https://sciencespo.hal.science/hal-03874282v1/file/2022_zhuravskaya_guriev_markevich_new_russian_economic_history.pdf

It summarizes the state of the art in modeling the effect of communism on the Russian economy. These are hard numbers, and hard models whose assumptions and machinery you can adjust yourself and see if that drastically changes the conclusion, assuming you aren't entirely a /lit/cel and know at least some programming. Point being, there isn't as much "controversy" as supporters of mass murder would like you to think, not any more than evolutionary biology merited "teaching the controversy" in the early 2000s.

>>22960613
It didn't happen that's the point dumb fuck. You got baited by the cia. Vlad wasnt driving around with a blast furnace and melting beer cans to own the kulaks you stupid ignorant fucker. Tell me about the mommy dom nkvd agents smashing testicles next or whatever else that old coomer solzynitzen came up with. Holy shit you are retarded.

>>22960568
What does artificial have to do with politics? Everything.
Capitalism was seen as a natural progression from Feudalism, and Communism was supposed to be the natural progression from capitalism. Simple as.
In Russia in China you had an entire segment that was skipped, and you go straight from Feudalism to "Communism" which is retarded. It's like trying to give birth without getting pregnant.

>>22957275
>Marxism requires an industrialized capitalist society to be overthrown by a mass movement of the people.
And where is a guarantee, that under communism in 70 years this industrialized society will not become a shitty totalitarian cloaca with shortages?

>>22960657
The only guarantee is experience, and that experience has never happened.

>>22957270
Global education and life expectancy scores deboonked the maximum market American meme

>>22960676
There are tons of experience of different sorts. Extrapolate.
The USSR was industrialized in 1930s. Communist China is industrialized now. Where is my communist heaven on earth?

>>22960697
You fail at basic reading comprehension. It's over for you.

>>22960708
Communism is shit, because rich nations don't want it, and it doesn't work with poor nations. Right?

>>22960710
Hello, braindead nigger department? I have your new CEO on the line.

>>22960723
Is this everything you have? Show me a successful case of communism.

>Communism has fucked up a half of the world
>Let's try it in the developed West, maybe it will work

The US isn't an industrialized enough society for communism in 3... 2... 1...

>>22960710
Communism is shit because it's just glorified NEET cope

>>22960871
Actually though lol, literally nothing is made in america, this county is the worlds office building, how is it even an argument that communists need america

>>22960888
So, the only country in the world, where communism could work, is China. Why doesn't it work there anymore?

>>22960899
It's too developed now

>>22957270
>commodity producing society produces a lot of commodities, communism debooonked
kek

>>22960921
Damn I wish I lived in a shit hole like Russia

>>22960921
Commies be like
>people don’t NEED food you food fetishist

>>22960924
well there is always baltimore

>>22960550
Capitalism IS more efficient in general, and this is true in agriculture too, but like I said it's just too risky to allow the chance of a market failure in this particular case. The US has had a number of crises of overproduction in agriculture BEFORE the Green Revolution. In most other markets overproduction and market failure is no big deal in the grand scheme of things. Not so in agriculture.

>>22961108
Capitalism would never see anyone starve quit your griping

>>22961114
Starvation is commonplace outside the 20-30 leading powers. Thailand having rice shortages recently and Pakistan with flour rationing because their surplus was sold to richer markets, China mainly.

>>22957408
>I think
(You) didn’t think this and (You) have never had a thought in your life

>>22961108
Capitalism is only efficient with respect to making profit or, more generally, accumulating wealth. For any metric based on the real resources involved or the real social needs behind production it is horribly inefficient.

It debunks itself. Marx didn't understand logistics, marketing, design or service work, etc.; so many important jobs in which no literal material product results. He literally thought a bunch of base materials appeared in front of a machine-operating wagie like magic, became [product], dispersed and sold itself. The ignorance of this effete pseud had no limits, so much so that he continues to share it generously with his followers today. Grow up lmao

>>22961311
Embarrassing cope from an adherent to the most impotent ideology of the modern world.

>>22961311
He didn’t understand anything, he just rehashed smith and ricardo and inherited all of their faults

>>22961311
And you, ofcourse, as the supreme capitalist that you are would've succeded if it weren't for the COMMUNISTS in the goverment!!

>>22961311
>Marx didn't understand logistics, marketing, design or service work

An american wrote this.
Have you actually read any of Marx text?

>>22961402
Sure m8 its not like Marx dedicated an entire chapter in Capital on how wrong Ricardo was.

>>22960732
communism is a revolutionary force. it's not supposed to be a static state of affairs, and that's why it fails. communism was based on the idea rich nations would eventually adopt it, and that would set off a chain of events that dismantled the state system. here is the demarcation argument for what revolutions count as being the harbingers for the fall of the state system.

>>22961424
lol have YOU?

>>22957428
communists are not only retarded but also are demoralized, Yuri Bezmenov was right

>>22961360
Not an argument

>>22961419
I've never gone to bed hungry, I've got a warm bed, an 85-inch tv, I have a car made less than six years ago, a computer made less than two, and pretty much everything else I could conceivably want in material terms. I'm plenty successful and it's more like "in spite" of the communists and bureaucrats in the government.

this isn't bait and there's probably a good answer, i hope. why are left leaning people pro-taxes? why is it fine for the state to take 50% of my income as an employee, then tax me further when buying goods and services. Then they tax the risk I take via capital gains tax. Why is this okay in their mind but an employer making profit is bad?

They will probably claim some nonsense about "supporting the good of society" via taxes, but countries with low taxes or zero taxes get along fine.

>>22961788
>look at all my middle-class comfort! surely this is success…

>>22961938
3 Points:
1) Taxes in some form are and will always be necessary as a regulatory tool for the government to take money out of the economy (especially if there has been government spending in the past which there always will be even with a minimal government) or to selectively reduce purchasing power. The latter is important if, for example, there is inflation on the demand side, i.e. when demand grows quicker than productivity.
2) The main reason why many on the left demand higher taxes (especially for the rich) is that most don't know anything about economy and thus still believe the neo-classical myth that the government first needs to earn money via taxes in order to spend it (for example to strenghten wellfare problems or to expand the infrastructure). Of course, this is factually wrong. In the same way as banks do not need the savings from people to grant loan, the state does not need taxes in order to spend money.
3) As a leftist who knows about economics you still want steep progressive taxes because a) point 1 becomes more and more important if you're in favor of higher government spending (of course always according to the actual state of the economy and not just willy nilly), b) you want to allow the low-paid workers to negotiate higher wages without it beaing eaten away by mirrored price raises and c) taxes are still one of the best ways to combat income inequality within the current system.

>>22961938
what answer do you actually want?

>why are left leaning people pro-taxes? why is it fine for the state to take 50% of my income as an employee, then tax me further when buying goods and services. Then they tax the risk I take via capital gains tax.
Well, we use taxes to pay for important things like school and roads. For you to have that job you like so much, you would have had to have been enjoying goods and services the government has provided for years. Even the existence of the Internet itself would have been impossible without taxes. If you think the taxes are being spent inefficiently then you can either vote to change them or leave.