#class struggles in the ussr

[perestroika-hilton]

"The undeniable economic successes achieved by the USSR, especially in the industrial field (from the five year plans onward), the Red Army's victory over Hitlerism, the rapidity with which economic reconstruction was carried out after the war, the improvement in the Soviet people's standard of living, the help rendered by the government of the USSR to socialist China, all seemed, moreover, to confirm the appreciations and forecasts I have mentioned, even though the social inequalities that developed during the first five year plans were tending not to diminish but rather to intensify.

    The Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, although it offered no analysis of the difficulties and contradictions that had led to the acts of repression committed indiscriminately and on a large scale during the preceding years, but confined itself to substituting for such an analysis personal accusations against Stalin (who was made solely "responsible" for the "negative" aspects of the past period), seemed to confirm that the Soviet Union, having reached a certain level of economic development, was now about to enter upon a phase of greater socialist democracy, thus opening up vast opportunities for working-class initiative. This congress seemed to show, too, that the party had retained -- or rather, had recovered -- the capacity for self-criticism that was essential if errors were to be rectified.[4]

    Actually this was not at all the case. The contradictory reality of Soviet history and Soviet society was not subject to the least analysis. The aspects of reality which needed to be condemned and transformed were not explained in relation to the inner contradictions of the Soviet Union. They were presented as being "perversions" due to the actions of a certain "personality," namely, Stalin. The acceptance by the Soviet Communist Party of such a pseudoexplanation testified to its abandonment of Marxism as a tool of analysis. This made the party incapable of helping to transform the social relations that had given rise to that which was being condemned in words. The pseudoexplanation given thus fulfilled its task of consolidating the class relations which concentrated economic and political power in the hands of a minority, so that the contradictions engendered by these class relations, far from diminishing, were actually deepened.

    Among many other consequences, this deepening of the social contradictions resulted in a worsening of the conditions in which the USSR's economy functioned. The same thing happened in those countries linked with the USSR whose leaders followed the same political line. Instead of an attack being launched on the social contradictions themselves, "economic reforms" were introduced which were attempts to make the economic system "work better" by increasing the powers of factory managers and giving ever-greater scope to capitalist forms and criteria of economic management.

    Contrary to the hopes of the leaders of the Soviet Union and the "fraternal countries," the various "reforms" have not radically solved any of the difficulties with which these leaders are faced. To be sure, momentary successes have been obtained in limited fields, but failures predominate: there is greater dependence on foreign techniques, increased foreign indebtedness, a marked reduction in the rate of industrial growth, and difficulties in the field of food supplies. Signs of discontent on the part of the working people with their situation and with the impact of the "economic reforms," become more and more apparent."

Charles bettelheim, class struggles in the ussr (1974)

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

I'm grateful that the anniversary of the 1917 socialist revolution in Russia always falls just after election day - Nov. 7 (Oct. 25 on the old Russian calendar. It's a reminder that there is a path forward, even when everything seems stacked against us.

"We have made a start. When, at what date and time, and the proletarians of which nation will complete this process is not important. The important thing is that the ice has been broken; the road is open, the way has been shown."

V.I. Lenin, "Fourth Anniversary of the October Revolution"

[fedele-alla-linea]

Mi mette un dito nel culo, è il covo delle br

[mesetacadre]

What might decolonization in the US after a successful socialist revolution look like? Would there be one big government still? A sort of union of socialist republics? Something else entirely? Honestly I don't know how to ask.

Post-revolutionary decolonization (and realistically, the only kind of meaningful decolonization that is ever happening) in the US is a complicated matter given the relative success of the USAmerican genocidal project. The native population is 1.1% of the total population as of the 2020 census, this means that unlike in other, incomplete, settler projects such as the Sahrawi Republic or Palestine, it isn't feasible to restore the relation of the native population to the totality of the country. Regardless of population proportions though, the main focus of socialist decolonization is the struggle against any conflict between nationalities by removing the economic basis of that antagonism, which would then allow to also begin to remove the cultural elements that reinforced that dynamic of oppression. The focus is not to create more landlords but native, it's to remove the structure around private property in general, and make sure every worker, native or otherwise, receives as is needed. Taking into account the already relative dispossession of native people even before a pre-revolution context, there will have to be a great effort to bring the conditions of native people at the same level of non-native people.

Regarding the form of the new state, this will evidently depend on the form of the US state as the revolution happens. In other countries this would not be such a pressing question, but given the role and strength of the USAmerican bourgeoisie, it's not hard to believe that for any revolution to take place, the US state would need to be considerably weakened. Keeping this in mind, the strategy followed by all hitherto socialist revolutions is to not further fragment the new state. Given the complexity of navigating the construction of the first elements of a socialist economy, with the simultaneous effort needed for security, it would be both counterproductive and hypocritical to explicitly seek the independence of a portion of the population, as a part of the political program, it would be taking two steps forward and one step back. The communist revolution is national in form, because it happens within the structure of the capitalist state, but it is also international in content, because it explicitly repudiates the division of the proletariat along national lines.

We must understand that nationality, as much as it is relevant today and as much as it influences the course of history, is a byproduct of the development of capitalism, and that since it arose from the infrastructure to justify and protect it, it will also have to seize to exist and be replaced with proletarian internationalism for the duration of the transition to socialism-communism. Keeping this in mind, it would be hypocritical and regressive to, after taking control of the state and beginning the transition away from capitalism, to then turn around and divide the working class of the new country into even more national categories than they already are divided into.

The early USSR is a good comparison because of the sheer quantity of national diversity contained within the bounds of the corpse of the Tsarist Empire. The policy of the bolsheviks was neither of Russian supremacy or of immediate splintering into hundreds of nation states. Even during the very complicated and desperate context of the civil war, Finland was allowed its independence without much fuss from the CC, even if they were immediately incorporated into the German sphere via Von Mannerheim. When the 1936 constitution was being discussed, it was Stalin himself who went against the wishes of many bolsheviks to prevent the republics from gaining independence if they wished. No republics requested this however, because the oppressive mechanisms of capitalism and feudalism that had kept them under the Tsar's thumb for centuries had been replaced with an economic system that assured the equal development of all peoples within the USSR. The USSR itself was also not absolutely centralist, and the many constituent republics had varying degrees of autonomy, reflecting in some aspects the structure of democratic centralism.

I don't think the answer is to replicate the USSR, of course. The context and general state of things are very different, but there are lessons to be learnt from this successful, albeit flawed, tackling of the national question. Again though, we can't really speculate on the way that the US will look right before a revolution, and consequently the structures and problems a revolutionary government will have to start from.

[read-marx-and-lenin]

heyo- a friend is trying to get me to read 1984 because 'it'll totally change your worldview on government and anarchism', but i've heard some bad things about the book itself/george orwell. should i read it? is there anything similar/more theorylike i could read instead?

thank you! your blog rocks <3 <3

Go ahead and read it if you want. It's a classic entry into the genre of dystopian science fiction and it has spawned many imitators since its publication. However, if you're looking for actual theory or history, you won't find it there. I would recommend Pat Sloan's "Soviet Democracy" or Anna Louise Strong's "The Soviets Expected It" and "The Stalin Era" if you want real accounts of the Soviet Union under Stalin.

Orwell never actually visited the Soviet Union, and 1984 is based not on his own personal experience with the country but instead on Western propagandistic views of the country and his own displeasure towards the fact that during World War II, when the UK and the USSR were allies, the British press was much less keen to publish anti-Soviet works right at the same time he was trying to get Animal Farm published. You must also understand that his wife worked for the UK's Ministry of Information as a censor and Orwell himself worked at the BBC producing wartime propaganda. It is not a coincidence then that the main character of 1984, Winston Smith, is a censor and propaganda official working with the fictional "Ministry of Truth" and eventually finding himself battling against state control of information.

Ironically, after stylizing himself so much as a defender of liberty and freedom against the "totalitarianism" of the time, Orwell would write up a list of alleged subversive writers for the British Information Research Department, a secret department tasked with publishing anti-communist propaganda during the Cold War. Some of this propaganda would end up being a comic strip version of Orwell's Animal Farm. There is a significant throughline in both Animal Farm and 1984 that clearly betrays Orwell's political views. In both works, the proletariat are depicted as nothing more than idiots and sheep who follow the orders of anyone willing to give them work and are easily duped by intellectuals. In 1984, he phrases it as the proletariat being more "free" simply because they're so insignificant as to warrant no government surveillance.

In 1984, the fictional society of "Oceania" is a far cry from a dictatorship of the proletariat. The proletariat have no political power, they all live in slums and are mollified by bread and circuses. How is the building of the slums organized? Where does the money go when one buys their bread? We are not told anything about this except that the process is slow and inefficient. The story isn't interested in material concerns. The "proles" do their work, we are told, but we are never shown much more than informal labor. We don't know who is telling them to work or how they are getting paid. The "Outer Party" is supposedly the white collar "middle" class of Oceanic society, but despite the amount of focus the story has on this class, we are never shown a single Party member managing a workplace or poring over receipts. We are to believe that the proletariat are simultaneously left to their own devices and unmolested by the state, while also completely under the control of the state through invisible mechanisms that are never elaborated upon. While Winston will complain endlessly about his own quality of life, not once does a single prole gripe about their job. The cost and quality of goods come up sporadically and only to illustrate the deterioration of English society under Party rule, never to illustrate any material basis of said rule.

Even more at the periphery are the colonized peoples (although never described as such) within the war-torn areas never under the permanent control of any world power. All three of the global superpowers are said to be in a constant struggle over the control and enslavement of these super-exploited workers and the resources of their nations, which are said to make up a significant proportion of the material resources of each superpower, however at the same time they are not considered to be part of the proletariat and are dismissed as entirely disposable and unnecessary for the maintenance of any of these superpowers. To Orwell, it seems, colonialism is simply a thing the colonizers do out of habit and not a phenomenon with an actual material basis or actual material effects. In turn, the colonized are not actual people who might take umbrage with the constant conflict imposed upon them, but rather chattel that is perfectly content to be traded back and forth among the colonizers.

The importance of the middle class in society is a recurring theme in 1984. For example, the Trotsky-esque political treatise Winston reads within the story, "The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism", begins with a twist on Marxist historical materialism - while it recognizes the role of class conflict in human history, it asserts a transhistorical narrative of the eternal existence of three separate classes within society since "Neolithic times": the upper, middle, and lower classes. It is then asserted that it is the middle and only the middle class that is ever revolutionary, and that when it appeals to the lower classes it does so only to use them as a cudgel against the upper classes and never out of a genuine concern for their wellbeing. The treatise, idealistic as it is, provides little definition of these classes. The lower classes are described as "crushed by drudgery" and in a constant state of servitude that places them incapable of achieving political consciousness, something reserved solely for the upper and middle classes. The upper class is defined simply as the "directing" class, and the middle as the "executive" class. The identity of the middle class within Oceania is made clear: they are the "Outer Party", the white collar intelligentsia and managerial class which Winston and Julia belong to. One must assume Orwell viewed himself as a member of the middle class as well. If this section of the book is at all reflective of Orwell's own views (and to be clear no part of the book refutes this outlook,) then Orwell's rejection of Marxism-Leninism is rooted in his view of the vanguard party as simply a mechanism for the intelligentsia and bureaucrats to trick the stupid proles into overthrowing the bourgeoisie, rather than as a genuine means of proletarian liberation.

The politics of the Party are entirely idealistic in nature. "Big Brother" dominates through control of ideology and speech. The goal of Ingsoc, the ruling ideology of Oceania, is to make dissent impossible through the thorough alteration of language and the removal of words which could represent ideas that are not in line with Ingsoc, a process called "Newspeak". It is explicitly stated, however, that none of this ideological control is directed towards the proletariat, which is said to make up 85% of Oceania's population. The proles are not expected to learn Newspeak, they are not monitored by the telescreens, because as is stated quite frankly in the book, "the masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed." That this line is given by the villain of the story is unimportant, because the story never refutes it.

While Winston routinely repeats his belief that "hope lies in the proles", he is consistently met with scenes that challenge his faith whenever he winds up interacting with the proletariat. His conversations with proles reveal their total lack of concern with politics or history. He hears a crowd erupt into chaos and briefly hopes it's the proletarian uprising he is waiting for, only to find it's simply a riot over consumer goods. They are more than once compared to animals. While it is said in exposition that intelligent members of the proletariat who might end up fomenting dissent are eliminated, this is never actually depicted. We don't see Winston meeting with a single intelligent and politically conscious prole. The most intelligent prole he meets turns out to be a secret member of the "Thought Police". And so, the concept remains theoretical.

Winston is depicted as an ardent materialist, desperately defending the notion of external reality against deranged idealists who believe that through control of thought, control of reality becomes possible. But the world he lives in is not material. It is fictional, of course, but more than that, the fictional world described operates on idealistic principles even from Winston's own perspective. Winston's worldview is a faith based one, appealing not to any material basis for liberation but purely to emotion. It is love and the spirit of humanity that is the basis of freedom, and material freedom springs forth from it. Anyone who thinks otherwise is merely a trickster trying to control the masses.

Orwell rejected the material basis of history because he rejected the idea of a revolution on a material basis. To him, the revolution must be an ideological one, and the problem lie not in how society and the economy are organized but in the existence of hateful "authoritarian" ideologies governing the world. He believed the material basis was already here, that industry alone was the solution to material inequality, and so we must concern ourselves now only with the idea of equality and freedom, and from an abstract and universal viewpoint to boot. It is intolerable to him that a revolution be fought against an actual enemy in the real world. The problem is not that the capitalists are in control of the means of production, the problem is that the workers are too stupid to disobey them. A real revolutionary class would spontaneously throw off its own shackles through thought alone. It doesn't matter that Orwell was a lackey and a snitch, because in his mind he was freer and smarter than everyone else.

The bravery of Winston Smith was in recognizing the existence of a material reality that lies and propaganda could never destroy even while being tortured into believing such absurd notions as "two plus two equals five". But Orwell was never tortured into any of his incorrect beliefs. His incorrect beliefs stem purely from accepting the official narrative that he was fed and refusing to investigate its veracity for himself. Orwell's writing was used as propaganda against the designated enemy of the UK throughout the Cold War, adapted countless times in the forms of radio plays, TV shows, movies, and comic books. He never made an effort to actually travel to the Soviet Union to find out if what he was told about the country was true. All the other upper middle class "left-wing" intellectuals he hung out with seemed to be just as concerned as he was with the rising tide of "totalitarianism" and the supposed excesses of the Soviet Union, so why shouldn't he agree? He was in this regard no different than the Western "socialists" of the modern day who have no shortage of vitriol towards China or North Korea. Yes, he might performatively rail against chauvinism and nationalism, but only enough to ensure that he wouldn't be seen as a conservative. He still knew in his heart that his country was surely better than those barbarous communists in the East.

Yes Orwell was sexist and homophobic, and despite his best efforts he remained plagued by racist and antisemitic attitudes, but in addition to all that his books promulgated a view of the world entirely in line with British bourgeois values, which is why they were so eagerly used as propaganda by the British government. The Nazis were bad and the Soviets were bad because they were both authoritarian, and the differences between them were negligible and unworthy of mention. The references 1984 makes to the shifting alliances in Oceania, "we are at war with Eurasia" becoming "we are at war with Eastasia" and vice-versa, are most likely allegories for the shifting alliances of Britain at the time, how they viewed the Soviets as an enemy before the war, as an ally during the war, and as an enemy again once the war was over. Orwell viewed himself as above all of this simply because his view of the Soviets never changed at any point throughout this.

[communistkenobi]

I love finding new communists blogs because you immediately have to scroll through all the posts to see if you wanna follow them or block them lmao. Anyway from what I understand you work in western academia to some degree and as a student taking some classes in the social sciences it’s such a pain in the ass trying to even bring up a Marxist perspective. How do you deal with how much pushback socialism has in academia?

I’m doing a PhD in sociology ! And please feel free to block me, we are all annoying etc 

I would say that resistance to socialist ideas is a major source of frustration for me in academia - a learning curve for me has been gearing my writing & research to work around that type of institutional hostility. It depends on the discipline as well. Given that Marx is such a titanic figure in sociology I find it easier to engage with his work openly (although you will be mocked for it lol - it’s viewed as a dead-end project in the West since the USSR collapsed), whereas more history- or politics-based courses I’ve taken have been extremely hostile to even tepid Marxist analysis. I have friends to vent to and have found other people in my discipline who are like-minded, which has helped. You will need to do a lot of tactical retreats - I’ve found that tying your analysis to state policy helps a lot, it helps you get grants, and academics trade in policy-talk across disciplines so it will prepare you for that if you want to stay in academia.

I have also been making peace with the fact that academia is not really the place to “do” socialism - it is a deeply political job, and my ideological commitments motivate me to do work and research that I hope are beneficial to the world, but I think the authority and privileges afforded to academics, not academia itself, is the better avenue to conduct political activity - participating in student & left-wing actions, giving money and resources to activist groups, using your prestigious position to publicly speak on issues, sign important documents for vulnerable people (profs are counted as authorities to sign off on name change documents for trans people in Canada for example, as well as visa and citizenship proof I believe?), things like that. There was that Canadian doctor, Dr. Yipeng Ge, who was suspended from his university position for speaking out against Israel and went to Palestine on a medical mission, Engels used his family’s money to fund Marx & socialist actions, Lenin went to law school, etc (i am NOT remotely comparing myself to any of them to be clear lol, just demonstrating that there is historical precedent for this way of thinking). I’ve done a decent amount of union + community work and the reoccurring lesson I keep learning is that there are many little, vacant positions of power sprinkled throughout the world that will help you organize and agitate above and beyond your individual capabilities. And the right wing knows this! They take over local school board committees and town halls and run for office in their local neighbourhoods all the time, often unopposed, and use that to exert terrible political influence.

I try very much to resist the “one of the good ones” mindset re: my own career in academia and is one I struggle with pretty often. being pragmatic about what academic research actually does in the world is still something I’m grappling with. Academia has provided me with an incredibly prestigious education and a lot of social capital that I hope to use for some amount of good. I’m also betting on what is essentially a lottery ticket, given how rare tenure-track university positions are, so maybe all of this will be irrelevant anyway lol. I’m not sure if that’s helpful but it’s not a settled issue for me either, so if this reads as vague or wishy-washy that’s why!

[girls--complex]

hi, love your work a lot! it manages to blend coherence with layers of esoterica, in a fun & meaningful way. do you have any big influences with your style?

Writing this as a narrative because my whimsicall mind can't seem to organize information logickally otherwise

So

When I was a child my Dad would show me a lot of comics/cartoons in all different styles/eras and so I was internalizing comic book logic from the very beginning. He really liked American comix both capes and Indie stuff but was also into franco belgian artists and let's be clear my papa has good taste so I was readying good stuff though I couldn't remember it all too reliably... Also Comics Journal, so I was reading comics & meta about comics. So basically I have like a deep archetypal brain stem dark spring of mind that spits out raw comic information like a dream that I can't place until I rediscover them, and a lot of deep unremembered imprintations that R kinda roiling around under the surface #Stupidsoldier

N then I was a deviantart kiddo and a reading manga at barnes and noble kiddo, and then I went and got a formal art education and learned about all these artists that sort of did pseudo comics or cartoons but didnt articulate it that way-- The German xpressionists are a big example of this -- and also about overall principles of like scale and hierarchy and time and presence -- and also just that I really like drawin the human figure in particular :)

I'm really grateful that my parents especially my dad were actually really supportive/invested in me being an artist even though they had very little faith in my character or overall competence. so I was always doing art activities to make me better at drawing because that was like the one redeeming quality I had, a lot of household resources went into me having art tutoring or doing community classes, and I was really strongly encouraged to get ma BFA

So 4 influences well I like things that are very stylish but very specific in how they represent figure N physiognomy... Naoki Urosawa & Jeff Smith were fascinations 2 me along this line... Arakawa is good too... I feel like this is a strength of American and British cartoonists generally but struggling to think of names

My favorite painter is tied between two commies: Siqueiros, who was a Mexican muralist and chaotic socialist, really specific markmaking and texture, pathos drenched figuration, charged epic landscapes, and Petrov-Vodkin, Russian ikonographer who became a propagandist for the USSR, semi-social-realist, semi-ikonographic compositions in which space is wrapping around itself to organize human figures according to a mythological logic, flattish, very cartoons/comics aligned, strange treatment of color but all really effective

History painting overall is everything to me it really doesn't show in Coward but I think it shows elsewhere some of my other dramatic sensibility is a lot from 00s action movie shlock which I would always enjoy to go see when I was younger and was somehow fascinated with the environment of government buildings and prisons and secret operations happeningunder the surface of every day life erupting into wet violence of men punching each other

I love the movie THE RAID redemption !!!!

I learned a lot of the logic of pacing N building pages around Tezuka's work as well as FMA N Death Note I think were big 1s to teach me that logic. Tezuka is a really good artist to look at for how to compose a page that supports the energy of the events that are happening on it, not that that's something I personally am good at. Favorite mangaka for tone and environment and visual identity are Katsuhiro Otomo, Tustomu Nihei, Suehiro Maruo, Nishioka siblings, Hideshi Hino

A lot of my sense of timing is also from news paper strips tbh. It's just a gut thing to me at this point hehe , Character design is also a gut thing for me I draw a little thing and I can either ensoul it with psychosexual fixation or I can't

I was born in the hospital Henry Darger worked at St. Joe's he's an ancestor to me but ofc inimitable by virtue of GOD being his sole audience

As for the esoterickal dimensions I feel like it's all it's own post let's just say I lack the inclination and ability for systematic and rigorous study but I am really interesting in gathering little packets of information and arranging them into dioramas and the longer I do it the more packets I accrue

I want to make a list of artists on here that I like/admire sometime too but that's too much for me rn. I also suspect a lot of people R mad at me for arbitrary reasons just as I also am mad at a lot of people for arbitrary reasons so I dont wanna bother no one ...

Oh well so I'm intentionally reorganizing how I draw right now because I sense a shift in my trajectory again so thanks for making me reflect

[qqueenofhades]

What are tankies?

They are the truly insufferable Online Leftists whose one and only political theory is "America is responsible for all the bad things in the world ever and no other country, government, or group of people has any agency at all, this is very progressive of me." If that sounds like a vast oversimplification, it's actually not. They have, at best, a middle school grasp of history, social studies, civics, politics, etc; it's like they learned about American imperialism in ninth grade and can't shut up about it or adapt any more nuanced or complicated view of the world. They are often also big fans of not voting and/or encouraging other left-leaning young people not to vote because in their view, the Democrats are as bad as or actually worse than the Republicans. Needless to say, the Kremlin is extremely vested in continuing to support and promote all of this.

I have likewise written posts about how the American left has a problem with denouncing Russia, since they still have an old-school, unreconstructed view of the USSR as the "triumph of socialism" and which is wrong on about 800 different levels. Tankies likewise tend to subscribe to old-school Marxism or Communism (you know, as if the entire twentieth century didn't happen) and have some jumbled Baby's First Commune idea of how society would work, thus revealing that they actually know nothing about globalism and capitalism while pretending to oppose both. They are often virulently misogynistic and think that race, gender, religion, etc are irrelevant; the only valid struggle is The Class Struggle. Some of them, particularly Glenn Greenwald and that horrible Briahna Joy Gray chick who used to work for Bernie and was a big proponent of "don't vote for Hillary Clinton because SCOTUS isn't important," have gone full-fledged Russian fascist cheerleaders, because Putin hates America, they hate America, and therefore they must be friends! Which, you'll note, is functionally identical to the GOP extreme-right Lunatic Caucus buddying up to Putin for the same reasons.

Anyway: tankies suck, they are wrong about literally everything, they're an insult to every actually progressive or historical-minded person with a basic grasp of reality, and the fact that their rhetoric has pervaded so far into young left-identifying political and social spaces, and is often taken as gospel by the members of those spaces, constantly drives me crazy. So yes.

[revolutionary-marxism]

"Of course, I know what they say. They read me newspapers. And I hear incredible things. But what is happening in our Soviet Union? First they deny Stalin, now, little by little, they come to try socialism, the October revolution, and in no time at all they will want to put Lenin and Marx on trial too. If we want to call everything into question, however, we would need to address our history globally, within the history of human thought, the history of class struggle, the history of revolutions. Today, however, everything is mixed up, dejected, bourgeois arguments and communist reasons, schizophrenic discussions in which only nonsense is spoken."

Lazar Kaganovich, speaking to La Repubblica on the political situation within the USSR in 1990

[dragoneyes618]

In the more than one hundred years since Marx and the French socialists, there have been some other socialist responses to the Jews. Social Democrats, for example, have been among the strongest supporters of Jewish rights in the world. Between 1948 and 1977, Israel itself was governed by the Labor Party, which was founded on socialist principles.

But the further Left one goes, the greater the antisemitism. Wherever Marxists have come to power they have initiated government-supported antisemitism. Before the fall of communism in 1989-91, the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe expressed antisemitism against native Jews and supported those seeking to destroy Israel. And Third World Marxist countries in which no Jews live (such as China and Vietnam) also have supported groups seeking to destroy Israel and deny Jewish national rights. For example, China voted for the 1975 UN resolution delegitimizing Israel by equating Zionism with racism; in 2002, China refused to permit a long-planned exhibition about Albert Einstein to open unless references to Einstein's being a Jew and a Zionist were eliminated (the exhibition was withdrawn). Leftists in democratic societies also generally oppose Israel, Zionism, and Jewish nationalism.

From its inception in 1917, the Soviet Union was implacably hostile toward Jewish religious and national expressions. As early as 1919 Zionism was designated a counterrevolutionary movement and prohibited.

The Soviet Union's campaign to destroy the Jewish religion in the country was largely successful. Between 1956 and 1965 the number of synagogues in the USSR declined from an already very low 450 to 60. By the 1980s, there were fewer than five rabbis for the more than two million Soviet Jews. In many parts of the Soviet Union it was illegal for a male to pray in a synagogue until he had completed military service, and Soviet Jews were forbidden to take classes in Judaism or even the Hebrew language.

The only permitted books on Judaism were those printed by party-controlled publishers, and they depicted Judaism as a vulgar and immoral anachronism. Characteristic of the material about Judaism legally available in the Soviet Union was this perspective in Trofim Kichko's Judaism and Zionism (Kiev, 1968): "The chauvinistic idea of the god-chosenness of the Jewish people...the idea of ruling over the peoples of the world....Such ideas of Judaism were inculcated into the Jews first by priests an later by the Rabbis...and are inculcated today by Zionists, educating the Jews in the spirit of contempts and hatred towards other people....The ideologists of Judaism, through the 'Holy Scriptures' teach the observant Jew to hate people of another faith and even to destroy them."

While the government published and disseminated such antisemitic material, the Jewish community was forbidden to operate a single Jewish school, let alone publish pro-Jewish books. The government's attempts to annihilate Judaism was almost without precedent in Jewish history. Christian and Muslim antisemites, and for that matter even the Nazis during the 1930s, permitted Jewish schools. Because of the Soviet Communists' prohibition of Jewish education, Soviet Jews became the Judaically most ignorant Jews in history, until the renaissance of Jewish life that began in the former soviet Union with the fall of communism in 1991.

Having succeeded in stifling the ideological (I.e. God-related) and legal components of Judaism, Soviet antisemitism subsequently focused most of its attacks on Jewish nationalism. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia of 1952 defined "Zionism" as "a reactionary movement...which denies the class struggle and strives to isolate the Jewish working masses from the general struggle of the proletariat."

The Soviets attempted to destroy the Jewish national identity in a variety of ways. For example, well before neo-Nazi "historical revisionists" arose to deny the Holocaust, Soviet books and films on World War II ignored, virtually to the point of denying, the Holocaust. To cite a typical instance, in a forty-minute Russian-language film shown to Soviet visitors to Auschwitz, Poland, where over a million and a half Jews were murdered, the Jews were not mentioned.

To obliterate Jewish nationalism, Soviet propaganda went one step further and charged that Zionists worked with the Nazis. In 1979, a Soviet art exhibit "featured a grotesque painting of Russian corpses being gloated over by a grinning Nazi soldier and a grinning Jewish prisoner wearing a Star of David. The message: Nazis and Jews were collaborators." Thus, the Soviets not only denied (by omission) the Holocaust, they also used Nazi atrocities to increase antisemitism in the Soviet Union by identifying Zionism with Nazism.

After the Six-Day-War in 1967, Soviet media constantly referred to the Jewish state as a Hiterlian state. The tone for this campaign was set by the Soviet president and general secretary of the Communist Party, Leonid Brezhnev, on July 5, 1967: "In their atrocities against the Arabs it seems they [the Israelis] want to copy the crimes of the Hitler invaders."

Two years later, Yuri Ivanov published Beware Zionism, which was hailed by Komsomolskaya Pravda as "the first scientific and fundamental work on this subject." In this book, Ivanov described Zionism as an ideological offshoot of Nazism.

Both of the authors visited the Soviet Union (Dennis Prager, 1969, 1981, 1990; Joseph Telushkin, 1973) and personally witnessed its antisemitism. When Prager was asked to smuggle out material by Russian Jews detailing governmental antisemitism, he asked one writer, Tina Brodetskaya, "If these letters are published in the West, won't you be sent to prison?" "Where do you think I am now?" she responded.

In 1973, Telushkin danced with Russian Jews in front of the largest Moscow synagogue on Simchat Torah, a joyous Jewish holiday. The dancing was violently stopped by the KGB, the Soviet secret police. A Russian Jew, Dmitri Ramm, who had accompanied Telushkin to the synagogue, was beaten and his leg was fractured.

Both of us met Soviet Jews who had served long prison terms solely for seeking to learn about Judaism and/or desiring to emigrate to Israel. In one noted case, Joseph Begun, a Jewish mathematician who taught an underground Hebrew class, was fired from his job, then convicted for not working and exiled to Siberia...

Government-inspired antisemitism, coupled with renewed Jewish pride after the Six-Day War, led to a large migration of Soviet Jews, many of whom risked their lives to emigrate. Others did not succeed.

In Novosibirsk, Siberia, in 1973, Telushkin met a local Jew, Dr. Isaac Poltinnikov, who had been without work and, along with his wife, Irma, and daughter, Victoria, had been terribly harassed for the three years since hand his family had applied for a visa to Israel. Finally, in 1979, after nine years of refusals, the Poltinnikovs were given permission to emigrate. But Irma Poltinnikov and Victoria, believing it was just a KGB trick, refused to go (on previous occasions, the KGB had arrested them, subjected them to long interrogations, and killed their dog). Dr. Poltinnikov did go, and flew to Israel. The Soviets then refused Mrs. Poltinnikov and Victoria permission to join him. Irma soon thereafter died of malnutrition, and Victoria then committed suicide.

In Eastern Europe, Communist antisemitism persisted even though few Jews remained there following the Holocaust. For example, in the early 1950s, thirteen leaders of the Czech Communist Party, ten of them Jews, were accused of being "Zionist agents" and hanged. These trials were ordered as one of a series of antisemitic show trials culminating in 1953 with Stalin's "Doctor's Plot," as mentioned above. Stalin charged a group of physicians, mostly Jews, with plotting to poison to Soviet leadership. He died before the trial, but it was subsequently revealed that he was preparing to use the Doctors' Plot as a pretext to expel over two million Jews to Siberia.

In 1968, Poland's media was dominated by "the unmasking of Zionists in Poland," though fewer than one out of every fifteen hundred Poles was Jewish.

Aside from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, few Jews lived in Communist-ruled societies. Yet Leftists anti-Jewish hostility remained a worldwide phenomenon. The most serious antisemitic act of the 1970s, the UN General Assembly resolution declaring Zionism to be racism, was the product of an Arab, Muslim, and Communist alliance. Whereas almost the only countries opposing the resolution were democracies, every Communist government in the world (with the exception of Romania, which absented itself from the vote) declared the Jews' national movement racist and therefore illegitimate. the idea for the resolution was originally the Soviets, and among the resolution's sponsors was Cuba.

- Why the Jews? The Reason for Antisemitism, Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin, pages 128-133

[elbiotipo]

y'know, I think a lot of why people really get into "we should focus on solving problems here instead of dreaming of space" is as a reaction to rich nutcases who convince themselves of shit like "if I put humanity on mars that's better than paying taxes or solving hunger right". so I kinda can't blame the sentiment sprouting and growing beyond its most useful context but it's also kinda like... when did we let rich nutcases take over that entire conversation anyway? they don't even actually succeed at getting into space at all, national space agencies are still winning every single time there

Rich assholes aren't ever gonna "solve world hunger", that's another big fallacy. If someone like Bezos or Musk tried to donate all their money into "solving world hunger" they would either get kicked from their companies, or create agrobusiness megacorporations and being from Argentina I'm well aware on how they work.

But I digress. The reason why there is so much private interest in space lately is because there are market forces pulling up there, and those market forces exist, in my opinion, because there is a future in space. Because there are recent technological changes (most notably reusable rockets) that are creating new possibilities from communication to manufacturing to mining to tourism, there is a lot of potential in space. Not to mention the drive to understand how the universe works, which I think is a worthwhile endeavor on itself.

Why are countries like China also investing so much in space? Because that's where the future is. China has plans for space-based solar panels, international lunar bases, and space science and research. You don't hear much about that, do you? Why would China invest so much in space, just to compete with other countries? No, it's because there are real tangible benefits, from the scientific to the technological to the purely economical, into having a strong space industry.

The USSR knew about this. Much of the Space Race was also a weapons race, this is a sad fact. But when you read about so many of the experiments in Saluyt and Mir, most of them were from the perspective of securing a real presence in space that could bring benefit to people on Earth. From Earth imaging (now mostly done by satellites, to communications, to outright manufacturing. Same with lunar base plans. It all had the intention of not only stroking egos, but bringing real benefits to Earth and building steps into a permanent human presence in space. This wasn't utopian, and in fact, it was military meddling (much like corporatization in the US right now) that prevented the Soviet space program to reach even greater heights.

But my point here is that there isn't only a "wacky billionarie ego trip" push here. Space exploration can and will benefit the people of Earth, and becoming an interplanetary and one day interstellar society will be a great accomplishment. We are in the technological threshold to achieve this, and I believe that as society progresses through class struggle, space exploration will be a pride of a united and peaceful world, something, much like art, much like sports, much like science, much like those things humans do because we can, we can all participate and appreciate.

[forevergulag]

Yo! I’ve been developing my class conscience a good deal in the past year, I think I’ve gotten a decent understanding of different economic systems and the horrors if imperialism and ways to combat that. Something I’m very uneducated on is china and if it’s “good” or not. It’s not your job to do this but could you give me the rundown on chinas role in global communism? Are their efforts truly beneficial to the modern proletariat? Thank you for your time much love ❤️

sure! thx for asking.

the PRC is a socialist state, i.e. a dictatorship of the proletariat, that follows marxist-leninist principles, such as internationalism, dialectical materialism, a strong connection to the working classes, etc. it was formed after several decades of a protracted people's war with the former republic of china and Kuomintang, with the aid of the ussr. Pre-revolution, however, it was semi-feudal, poor, and otherwise backwards economically, also meaning that the proletariat as a class was underdeveloped.

to build the proletariat, increase capital, build a broad industrial base, etc., the policy of state capitalism was determined to be the only way forward, with the experience of the USSR and materialist analysis. state capitalism utilizes the benefits of the development of capitalism, such as socialized production, desperately needed capital, the building of factories, etc., while still maintaining itself as a proletarian state, and controlling the bourgeois. state capitalism, as i stated in the first draft of my essay (shameless self plug), is not a defined economic mode such as capitalism or socialism, it is simply a set of policies to be executed by a socialist state. its niche is in general modernization of tech, production, etc., and especially of the proletarian class. the reason it is used by semi-feudal countries is for that purpose, and a socialist state with an already developed proletariat, i.e. one in which capitalism has been allowed to fully develop, would not have much use for it.

State capitalism in the PRC consists of multiple things, namely a sort of "allyship" between private enterprises and the state, which Chairman Mao Tse-tung goes into in great detail in this, which i highly reccomend.

The policy allowed the construction of their extremely powerful industrial base, and with it public health, a developed class structure, the flourishing of the cultures of minority nationalities, its disciplined and valiant PLA, and the ability to resist imperialist intervention.

It has been working to build a united front against western imperialism, it provides massive humanitarian aid to periphery countries, has powerful allyships, etc. for these reasons, it is currently the vanguard of proletarian struggle worldwide.

Of course, it does have its flaws, most of which will be immediately rectified via demcent and contact with the masses, some of which were the "growing pains" of the new socialist state, and some of which were genuine errors. but above all, it is a marxist-leninist internationalist DotP.

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

Today, on the 105th anniversary of the baptism of fire of the Red Army, the communist and left-wing organizations of Moscow held a solemn march and laying of flowers at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Lenin's Mausoleum and at the burial places of Soviet military leaders near the Kremlin wall. February 23, 2023

Via Communist Dawn

[conceptofjoy]

Tbh I don't understand the problem with destroying confederate statues. For context, I'm from Poland, and during the time when my [and many other] country was communist, there were many statues or streets named after our "dear friends from ussr" or poles that decided that "ussr isn't bad, they are cool actually", but after the fall of communism, the statues were destroyed and streets were renamed, because at the end of the day, many of those people after whom those streets were named or statues were build, did not care for the wellbeing of Poland [and all past eastern bloc countries], and were often times murderers or rapists or whatever else, and they DID NOT deserve to have those things build in their "legacy".

TLDR: Things build in the name of oppressors should be destroyed.

Ps. Hope that you will have a good week and.

That One Polish Anon [yes, the same from those Cal asks]

OMG THE POLISH ANON'S BACK. hii lol.

poland has fuckin struggled in the 1900s holy shit. i think the reason why this is even still a debate in the US is because those confederate statues are still representative of people in power today. despite lower economic class white people not seeing a lick of said power due to capitalism and because of the mantra of the american dream being repeated since the birth of the nation, they see said racist leaders as some one to look up to. wealth, power (over minorities), superiority, its all something that they think belongs to them in the first place. why not have the symbol of those things around if its a "good thing".

more centrist leaning white people get blinded by the talking point of "well its their heritage, plus its of historical value" that they dont fuckin register the reason of why said statues were erected in the first place. its sooo fucking stupid. "of historical value" we're still living in a white supremacist society. the general lee statue is still relevant.

[mesetacadre]

In April 15th, 1920, the National Committee of the Federation of Socialist Youths met in Madrid to, taking the initiative over the PSOE, take the decision of joining the Third International, founded by the Bolshevik party. After a convoluted process that lasted until the 14th of November of 1921, the Communist Party of Spain (Spanish Section of the Communist International) was born, pejoratively called "The party of the 100 children" by its opponents.

The Komintern's policy in its early days was one of the "only front", stating that capital could only be beat via the united effort of all communists in all spheres of life. Its motto became "Towards the Masses!". In Spain, this period was marked by Primo de Rivera's dictatorship between 1923 and 1930, during which almost every political group was banned. The social-democratic PSOE and UGT avoided this by remaining "neutral" towards the dictatorship. Some members of the PSOE even collaborated, like Largo Caballero, who became Rivera's Minister of State. The Communist Party maintained its sole struggle during this time, gaining popularity among the Spanish proletariat.

When the dictatorship ended and the Second Republic was proclaimed in April of 1932, in the midst of the effects of the 1929 capitalist crisis, the 1931 strike in Sevilla and 1932 general strike, the PCE had found itself unable to work outside the dynamics imposed by the dictatorship's repression, and only began to regain its force after the selection of José Diaz as general secretary in September of 1932. The party corrected some of the left-communist and sectarian mistakes that characterized the period of the dictatorship.

The PCE took on an even bigger role in the organization of our class after its crucial role in the October insurrection of 1934 in Asturias, during which the proletariat took power in the mining basin and most of Oviedo, via the Peasant and Worker Alliances, expressions of the aforementioned only front strategy decided by the Third International. The government of the Second Republic, carrying out the needs of a section of the Spanish bourgeoisie, brutally repressed the Asturian revolutionaries, with general Francisco Franco at the helm of the military's intervention. Among the victims was Aida Lafuente, a militant of the Communist Youth and an example of bravery.

This glimmer of worker power was contextualized in the Black Biennium (1933-1935), a period of the Republic when reactionaries accessed the government and expressed the most violent tendencies of the Spanish bourgeoisie against the more than 30,000 political prisoners they took, and against the rapidly developing workers' movement.

It was during this time in Spain and the whole world, when the Third International identified the generalized rise of fascism and reactionarism, and adopted in its 7th Congress, during the summer of 1935, the policy of the Popular Front, failing to link the anti-fascist struggle with the struggle for workers' power, instead advocating for alliances with "socialist" parties and other bourgeois-democratic parties, placing the fight for socialism-communism in the background.

Half a year after this decision, the Popular Front alliance won the elections in the 16th of February, 1936. Shortly after, and only a year after the 7th Congress, sections of the Spanish and international bourgeoisie countered this victory with a failed coup d'etat by fascist generals in the 18th of July, 1936. They had the backing of the nazi-fascist powers in Europe and the complicity of the "democratic" capitalist powers, who were anxious about the strengthening proletariat in Spain. Curiously, the plane that carried Franco from his exile in the African colonies to Tetuán in north Africa, the Dragon Rapide, originally took off from London.

The biggest supporter of the Spanish Republic was the USSR, that, through the enormous effort of the Third International and the Communist Parties in 52 countries, against the banning of volunteering by many of those 52 countries, organized the enlistment, falsification of documents, logistics, arrival and other matters for the arrival of around 35,000 workers, peasants and intellectuals from all over the world. Under the single banner of the International Brigades, and for the first time materializing the historic slogan Workers of the World, Unite!, the Volunteers of Liberty, as they also came to be known, gave their mind and their body to the cause of the Spanish people, armed with the teachings of marxism-leninism. They knew that it was no longer a fight for only the Spanish. As J. V. Stalin put it in October of 1936:

The workers of the Soviet Union are merely carrying out their duty in giving help within their power to the revolutionary masses of Spain. They are aware that the liberation of Spain from the yoke of fascist reactionaries is not a private affair of the Spanish people but the common cause of the whole of advanced and progressive mankind.

In July of 1936 there already were Brigadiers present in Spain, for the occasion of the Popular Olympics (in boycott of the Berlin Olympics) organized by the Red Sport International and the Socialist Worker Sport International in Barcelona, they were among the first to take up arms against the coup d'etat. The Executive Committee's Secretariat of the Third International formalized in the 18th and 19th of September the creation of the International Brigades, which began to arrive in Spain the 14th of October of 1936. Despite the propaganda levied by fascists and bourgeois historiography, the importance of the International Brigades is undeniable today.

After the integration of the Brigades into the Popular Militias in the 22nd of October, the Brigadiers began their training in Albacete and saw action for the first time the 8th of November in Madrid, with the 11th and 12th Brigade. Militarily, the Brigades were present and indispensable in every major battle of the war, but they also played a moral role. After every capitalist power had abandoned the Spanish people to their fate with the policy of non-intervention, the compact and disciplined columns that marched through the streets of Madrid singing songs like The Internationale, Young Guard, or The Marseillaise, made up of workers who barely knew the language but were willing to make the ultimate sacrifice, decidedly improved the morale of every militia and civilian in Madrid and in Spain.

But even greater than the support of the Brigades were the more than 300,000 strong military detachments sent by Germany and Italy, with the implicit approval of capitalist democracies, including the Popular Front in France, whose efforts of non-intervention focused exclusively on the republic. And it was the strategy of the popular front that forced the PCE to sideline the revolutionary potential of the hundreds of thousands of militants, instead preserving the legitimacy of the bourgeois republic.

By 1938, the republic was on its last legs and, wishing to evidence the foreign involvement on the fascist side, declared to the League of Nations in the 21st of September that they would disband all volunteers enlisted after the 18th of July, 1936. The 16th of October, 2 years and 2 days after the arrival of the Brigades, the League of Nations' International Committee arrived in Spain to verify the disbandment and departure of the Brigadiers. No such inspection was ever made on the fascist side.

According to the International Committee's report published on the 18th of January, 1939, there were a total of 12,673 Brigadiers in Spain, less than half of the total number of volunteers at around 35,000. They began to depart Spain on the 2nd of November, 1938, through the French border. During the process of departures, some Brigadiers were murdered in Spain, others died protecting the fleeing republicans and hundreds of thousands of refugees at the crossing in France. This was when Mexico, and especially the Communist Party of Mexico which pressured the government, took on around 1,600 brigadiers, mainly Germans, Poles, Italians, Austrians, Czechoslovaks and Yugoslavians, who could not safely return to their homes due to the advance of fascism within their countries. The debt owed by the workers of the world, especially the Spanish, to the Communist Party of Mexico is immeasurable, along with every other Communist Party that helped and the Third International.

The dissolution of the International Brigades did not achieve the result desired by the Republic. Instead, their retreat towards the end of the Battle of the Ebro only accelerated the morale defeat of the republican militias. Most of the brigadiers who survived the war but could not be repatriated in time did not have a pleasant fate. Most of those ended up in the French concentration camps of Gurs, Argèles-sur-Mer, Saint-Cyprien and Barcarès, Septfonds, Riversaltes, or Vernet d'Ariège.

Their fight was not in vein. The experience gained by the few who survived at a high cost proved essential in the development of their own parties, and soon enough, anti-fascist resistance. Everywhere that people took up arms against the fascist occupation, whether inside or outside the concentration camps, ex-Brigadiers were present, continuing the fight they started in the 18th of July, 1936, well after the war that had began that day was history.

Back in Spain, while the moribund republic thrashed for the last few times, the bourgeois republican government, headed by the social-democrat Juan Negrín, began to isolate the PCE with the support of the trotskyists and anarchists. It came to a close after the coup d'etat by the republican general Casado, during and after which the communist militancy was oppressed, and the fascist fifth column that had remained in Madrid opened its gates to the fascist military. This is how the fascist dictatorship began in Spain, with a betrayal by the Popular Front's social-democrats and by the democratic-bourgeois powers of the world. They couldn't help but mirror the collaborationism happening on the world stage; the UK was actively looking for an alliance with Germany, and every other capitalist country was making business with the looted property. All for one purpose that united them; the destruction of workers' power in the form of the marxist-leninist parties that around the world were beginning to challenge the capitalists, with the Third International at the helm.

These are the lessons that Spain and the world learnt during and after its fierce resistance against fascism. No popular front with bourgeois-democrats is sustainable, and their class character will always prevail above the superficial differences with fascism. The only viable tool is the organization of the social majority within the Communist Party, with proletarian internationalism and an altruist disposition as principles. No matter how much social-democracy may fear fascist privatization, and no matter how much they disrespect bourgeois democracy, the class interests that guide them will always prevail when faced with a capable mass of organized workers.

The progressive Popular Front in France, the "appeasing" government in the UK, and the nominally anti-violence liberal democracies, did not ever attempt to do anything else than giving carte blanche to the fascists and hindering their rivals. The betrayal of Spain, Austria, Czechoslovakia and Poland were all made with the same reasoning: the alliance with fascism to destroy communism. There are no reasons that make the opposite possible today. When reactionarism picks up traction in lockstep with the deepening capitalist crises, all of these bourgeois-democrats some "leftists" like to place their hope in will not vary substantially from the script they followed 85 years ago.

Quedad, que así lo quieren los árboles, los llanos, las mínimas partículas de la luz que reanima un solo sentimiento que el mar sacude. ¡Hermanos! Madrid con vuestro nombre se agranda e ilumina

Rafael Alberti, A las Brigadas Internacionales

[read-marx-and-lenin]

Hi, so genuinely sorry if this has been asked before, but is Lenin's Tomb by David Remnick a good resource to learn about the Soviet Union? I would greatly appreciate it if there are any other works that you would recommend. Thank you 🙏

I have never read it, but it looks like your typical Western anti-communist historiography to me.

I'm afraid I'm not well read on post-Soviet historical accounts of the Soviet Union myself. I've read some contemporary accounts (Pat Sloan's "Soviet Democracy", and Anna Louise Strong's "The Stalin Era" and "The Soviets Expected It".) If anyone wants to recommend any particular works, feel free to leave your suggestions in the notes.

Books I've had on my "to read" list but that I haven't read yet include Alec Nove's "Economic History of the USSR", Walter Rodney's "Russian Revolution: A View from the Third World", Charles Bettelheim's "Class Struggle in the USSR", and Victor Serge's "Year One of the Russian Revolution". I can't tell you how good any of them are but they came well-recommended to me.