#stalinist system

[sanguinosa-blog]

The Establishment of a Stalinist System in China

From 'The Stalinist System' (1972) Translated by Roy West

Chapter 1: The Nature of the Chinese Revolution: A New Socio-Economic System

I. The Bearers of the Chinese Revolution II. Peasant Land Revolution III. Big Capital and Nationalization IV. The Rule of a Petty Bourgeois Economy and the Historical Tasks of the Revolutionary Government

I. The Bearers of the Chinese Revolution

The 1949 Chinese Revolution was, first of all, a victory for the peasant class in their thoroughly revolutionary struggle against the feudalistic landlord class. The peasant class in China dissolved feudalistic land ownership and established peasant land ownership. At the same time, through this revolutionary struggle, the imperialistic interests tied to, and living off of the rule of the feudalistic land owners also were swept away. In their revolutionary struggle, that is the revolutionary struggle to establish the foundation to make the development of commodity production and capitalistic production possible in China, the Chinese peasants battled against the ruling power of the bourgeoisie (comprador=bureaucratic bourgeoisie), and the revolution also swept their power away.

The peasants led this revolutionary struggle, and the Chinese Communist Party represented the interests of the revolutionary peasantry. Since Mao Tse-tung gained control of the leadership, the Communist Party was dependent on the peasantry in its struggles, and fought to protect the interests of the revolutionary peasantry against the bourgeois opportunists represented by the Kuomintang.

The Chinese working class was concentrated in cities in the coastal areas, but its power was extremely weak, and after the defeat at the beginning of the Chinese revolutionary movement (defeat of the Guangdong uprising) an independent class struggle became impossible. The Chinese working class didn't fight to rally an independent workers party, but rather struggled under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party whose character as a revolutionary party of the peasantry was strengthened under the leadership of Mao and in fact developed into this type of political party. This was the unavoidable outcome of the situation in China at that time, as well as in the international communist movement under the rule of Stalin. The revolutionary movement in China was the opposite of that in Russia: the revolutionary struggle of the working class did not gain hegemony over the revolutionary struggle of the peasants, but rather, based on the struggle of the peasants which they led, the Chinese Communist Party also led the struggles of the working class.

The Chinese Revolution led by the revolutionary struggles of the peasantry resulted in the sweeping away of the landowning class and imperialistic interests, and in the process of this struggle the bourgeoisie represented in the Kuomintang were banished. This fundamental character of the Chinese Revolution determined new production relations in Revolutionary China, and the nature of its following development.

II. Peasant Land Revolution

The socio-economic content of the Chinese Revolution was first of all the dissolution of the feudalistic landlord system of land ownership and the redistribution of their land to the peasants. This land reform began in the liberated zones, and spread throughout the country by means of the Central Committee's 1946 "4 May Directive", the 10 October 1947 "Land Law Policy" , and the 30 June 1950 "Land Reform Law". By 1952 the reform had been fundamentally completed. From the beginning land reform in China was definitely not carried out along consistently principled lines. A zigzagging path was taken where, at times, the confiscation of land was baned in order to make them "work together" to fight againt Japan, or the protection of rich peasant's property was considered. However, the struggle of the peasants inevitably led towards the confiscation of the landlords' property and the redistribution of land to the peasants.

Concerning the relation of land ownership before the Revolution, the landlord system of ownership was still dominant, but in the process of the gradual penetration of commodity production, independent peasants and peasants heading towards capitalistic management (so-called "middle" or "rich" peasants) were already playing a certain role. Although there are no overall statistics concerning the national relations of land ownership in China, the relations of land ownership according to a 1934 survey can be seen in Chart 1. (Chart is not included in this translation)

According to this survey, the landlords only comprised 5% of the total number of households, but owned 50% of the area of cultivated land, whereas the poor peasants and farm workers comprised 70% of the total households, but only owned 17% of the cultivated land.

Further, even in the "New Liberated Zones" where a very belated land reform policy was carried out, according to a Chinese government survey the landlord class which included 3 to 5% of the population of a farm village owned between 30 to 50% of the land, and in a small number of districts they owned between 70 to 80%. By contrast, the poor farmers who comprised somewhere between 50 to 60% of the population only possessed around 5 to 15% of the land. Moreover, in addition to the production relations between the landlords and the poor peasants there were other examples, such as the rich peasants who comprised between 4 to 6% of the village population, or the middle peasants who made up between 20 to 30% of the population and possessed between 15 to 25% of the land. Finally there are the farm laborers who were employed by the rich peasants and others and who comprised about 5% of the population and possessed between 2 to 3% of the land. (The Agricultural Taxation System in Modern China; The Asian Economic Research Institute pp. 114-116)

The dominant class relations in Chinese villages before the revolution, as we have seen, was the relation between the landlords and the subordinate poor peasants who had almost no land and paid a large sum of rent on the landlord's land which they cultivated.

The landlord class did not cultivate the land it owned, but rather divided it into trifling plots of land which were cultivated for them by the peasants who didn't have any land (poor peasants). This tenant system accounted for up to 90% of the land possessed by the landlords. Tenant farmers in the southern provinces cultivated on average 7.8 mu (畝) (Mu was a unit of measurement in old China, 1 mu is about 667 m*m) per household, while in the northern provinces the average was 16.3 mu per household. The tenant rent was extremely high. There was a fixed rate or share renting system and for the most part it was payment in kind amounted to about 50 to 60% of the harvest. The peasants were serfs exploited by the feudalistic landowners. In addition to the large sum of rent payable in kind, they had to pay a large security fee, and were forced to perform hard labor.

The landlords entrusted the collection of rents to clerks, and spent their lives in the cities. "Even in their absence they were collecting 50% of the tenant rent (payable in kind), and on the other side through money lending and running business they were exploiting them doubly and trebly. Those of ability advanced in the government and became officials, while others became district heads." (Economic Theory of Modern China; pp. 36-7)

Starting from these production relations, the struggle of the Chinese peasants against the landlord class inevitably became a struggle to transfer the ownership of the farmland which they were cultivating from the landlords to themselves. The goal of the peasants' class struggle was to transform themselves from feudalistic serfs to independent peasants and the dissolution of feudalistic land ownership and the establishment of the division of land ownership among the peasants.

The "4 May Directive" of the Central Committee of the Communist Party reflected the demands of the peasantry, "(1) The land of middle peasants will not be infringed on; (2) In general the land of rich peasants will not be changed; (3) The lives of minor landlords will be considered; (4) Struggle against traitors, local tyrants, evil gentry, and bosses; (5) The equal distribution of land; (6) The security of the right of land ownership."(p. 145)

The October 1947 "Land Law Program" directed an even more thorough struggle against the landlords and rich peasants, "Based on the poor peasants and an alliance with the middle peasants abolish the exploitative system of the landlords and formerly rich peasants, their land and fortunes will not be any greater than that of the peasant mass". The radical distribution of land was carried out, "The requisitioned land will all be distributed equally among the entire native population irregardless of age or sex."

The June 1950 "Land Reform Law" resurrected the policies from the "4 May Directive". The land of rich peasants and the land property of cultivating landlords was protected. Through this "Land Reform Law" by the autumn of 1950 the land reform was put in place in the remaining liberated zones.

Along with the distribution of land, the peasants land struggle was at the same time carried out through the distribution of the landlord's agricultural tools and important means of production such as horses and cattle. In this way the landlord system of ownership was completely dismantled. With small land ownership as the foundation a small peasant economy became the dominant production relations for agriculture in China.

If we look at changes in the relations of land ownership in the farm villages in the newly liberated districts through the "Land Reform Law": the former landlords who comprised about 4% of the population owned only about 4% of the land. The former landlords share of the ownership decreased relative to its share of the population, going even below the average of the peasants land ownership. The rich peasants were also weakened. The rich peasant layer which made up about 5% of the population had only less than 10% of the ownership. Still, as before, this layer's land ownership exceeded the average for land possession. The middle peasants comprised between 20 to 40% of the population. The land ownership for this sector either barely changed at all or increased. The land they possessed totaled between 22% to 44%. The ratio of their population corresponded to the ratio of their land ownership. The poor peasants were the class to which most of the landlords' property was distributed. They comprised between 50 and 60% of the population and owned between 40 and 50% of the land. Land was also distributed to the former agricultural laborers who comprised about 5% of the population and owned about 5% of the total amount of land. Not only was the relation between the landlords and serfs abolished, the rural proletariat made up of agricultural laborers were also transformed into small land holders or self-sufficient peasants. If we look at the average land ownership of each class per person, we can see that the former landlord class average was 80 to 90% that of the total peasantry, the average for the rich peasants was 1.5 to 2 times that of the average, the middle peasants was about at the average or just over, while the average for the poorer peasants was at or below the average. Already the differences between each class essentially ceased to be such a decisive thing. Through the Chinese Revolution China was transformed into a country of small peasants, and an extremely egalitarian small peasant country at that.

The small peasants who were created through this land revolution carried out cultivation using extremely miniscale, individual or familial means of production. The extremely poor means of production owned by the average peasant were the following:

"The national average of cultivated land per peasant the equivalent of about 0.3 hectares, while the average for each peasant family was only about 0.94 hectares. In the south the scale was even more miniscale. The statistics for 1954 concerning the ownership of the means of production show that there was only one draft animal per peasant household, one plow per two households, and one water wheel for every ten households." (Theory of Socialist Economics p. 116)

The new production relations in the farm villages created through the Chinese Revolution, the small peasant economy based on the division of land, form a transition between the natural economy based on the feudalistic ownership of land and the overall development of capitalistic production, but is itself nothing but the product of semi-development of commodity production and capitalistic production. Marx wrote the following on the peasant division of land:

"Like the earlier forms, this form of land ownership presupposes that the agricultural population has a great numerical preponderance over the urban population, i.e. that even if the capitalist mode of production is dominant it is relatively little developed, so that the concentration of capitals is also confined to narrow limits in the other branches of production, and a fragmentation of capital prevails. By the nature of the case, a predominant part of the agricultural product must be consumed here by its producers, the peasants, as direct means of subsistence, with only the excess over and above this going into trade with the towns as a commodity." (Capital Volume 3; Penguin Classics pp. 940-41)

Even though the establishment of peasant land ownership achieved by the Chinese Revolution was an expression of the remarkable tardiness of commodity and capitalistic production in China, the creation of this peasant land ownership signifies a great historical development which established the foundation for the development of Chinese agriculture, and thus likewise the development of commodity production. Marx speaks of the historical meaning of peasant land ownership in the following way:

"The free ownership of the peasant who farms his land himself is evidently the most normal form of landed property for small scale cultivation, i.e. for a mode of production in which possession of the land is a condition for the worker's ownership over the product of his own labor, and in which, whether he is free or a dependent proprietor, the tiller always has to produce his means of subsistence himself, independently, as an isolated worker with his family. Ownership of land is just as necessary for the full development of this activity as is ownership of the instrument of labor for the free development of the handicraftsman's trade. It forms here the basis for the development of personal independence. It is a necessary transition point in the development of agriculture itself. (Ibid p. 943)

III. Big Capital and Nationalization

The peasant power established by the Chinese Revolution did not merely expropriate the feudalistic landowners. This power also expropriated and nationalized the capital of the imperialistic and bureaucratic bourgeoisie who had parasitically lived off China and exploited the peasants and workers. With the defeat of Japan and the end of the Second World War, the bourgeois Kuomingtang government confiscated some Japanese, German and Italian business, but after the Chinese Revolution starting with these businesses, all of the bureaucratic bourgeoisie's capital was confiscated.

By 1949 the revolutionary government had confiscated 2,858 industrial business, and the number of workers employed in these businesses had reached morethan 750,000. The nationalized economic system included 58% of electricity generated, 68% of the coal production, 92% of pig iron production, 97% of steel production, 68% of cement production, and 53% of cotton yarn. The nationalized economic system further controlled the national railways, the majority of modern transportation, transportation work, banks, commerce and almost all of the foreign trade. (Theory of Socialist Economy p. 114)

The revolutionary government also continued to requisition businesses owned by U.S. and British imperialist capital. At that time about one thousand businesses owned by foreign imperialists existed, but the majority of them belonged to U.S. and British monopoly capital. Directly after the revolution New China immediately took measures to do away with special privileges for foreign companies, and so these companies could no longer continue the arbitrary business activities of the past and the situation become nearly paralyzed. Therefore, some of the businesses applied with the government to close down, or voluntarily transferred or abandoned their operations, or were purchased by the Chinese government. The companies of both countries were either frozen or commandeered. In this way the foreign imperialist companies in China for the most part disappeared, while one part through nationalization formed the socialistic state-owned economic system." (ibid p. 115)

Thus the revolutionary government nationalized the large scale companies, but this small number of large companies stood on a foundation comprised of an enormous number of handicraft methods of production. Even though the large scale industries confiscated by the revolutionary government included the majority of the manufacturing and mining production in China, prior to the revolution these large scale industries had exploited the Chinese workers as imperialist capital, and the production was not based on the Chinese domestic market, but rather belonged to the economic sphere of foreign imperialism. This capital leeched off of China and was sucking huge profits from China for the sake of foreign imperialism. The products of this capital were mainly sent to foreign countries or were mutually traded between imperialist capital.

The Chinese domestic market, by contrast, was formed on the base of exchange between the handicraft capital which sprouted up naturally in the farming villages and provincial towns and the small peasants. The ratio of products becoming commodities was extremely low, and commodity production didn't break through local limits. Therefore, the accumulation of capital was on a remarkably small scale, and the "national capital" in China was extremely weak.

IV. The Rule of a Petty Bourgeois Economy and the Historical Tasks of the Revolutionary Government

At the time of the 1949 Revolution, industrial production in China totaled 14 billion Yuan; Out of this total, modern factory production was 7.9 billion Yuan, production in handicraft factories was 1.1 billion Yuan, and individual handicraft production totaled 3.2 billion Yuan. Moreover, looking at the management of companies: there were only 2,900 state run companies in comparison with a vast majority (1,113,000) of small scale privately run businesses. The workers working in state run factories amounted to roughly 1,500,000, while the workers in privately run factories was 1,600,000; for a total of only 3,100,000. By contrast, the number of individual craftsmen amounted to 5,800,000 (this figure is quoted from the Chinese Communist Party's Analysis of Economic Growth).

These figures show to what extent Revolutionary China was a country with a late development of capitalism. Pre-capitalistic handicraft manufacture made up an extremely large proportion of overall manufacturing production.

Commodity and capitalistic production had yet to reach society as a whole, and could only be seen in the state owned mining and manufacture companies and in some of the large scale privately managed enterprises. According to the June 1953 population survey, 86.74% of the population or 505 million people, lived as farmers. The city population was 13.25% of the total population which amounted to 77 million people. The ratio of agriculture to the overall national production was also extremely high. Out of the 1949 overall national production of 46.6 billion Yuan, agricultural production was about 70% or 32.6 billion Yuan, while manufacturing production was 30%, out of which close to 7% was handicraft production. The proportion of products which were commodities was also low. In 1950, out of an overall national production of 57.5 billion Yuan, commodity retail... amounted to 17.1 billion Yuan, and the commodity ratio was only 20%. The ratio of agricultural products becoming commodities was even lower. Peasants were carrying out self-sustaining production. Total agricultural production in 1952 was 48.4 billion Yuan. Out of this total, crops and stock breeding totaled 38.5 billion Yuan, while the remaining 9.9 billion Yuan was subsidiary production for personal use. Manufacture had not yet completely separated from agriculture, and the development of large industry could not even be seen. Peasant ownership of land and the accompanying agrarian domestic manufacture was dominant.

These economic relations were the starting point for revolutionary China. However, this is not such a strange thing. This is because the Chinese Revolution was not the product of the development of capitalistic production. Rather it was a nationalistic peasant and democratic revolution which completely destroyed feudalistic land ownership, broke the rule of foreign imperialism, and for the first time in Chinese history laid the foundation for the beginning of bourgeois development. We must start from a clear recognition of the class and historical meaning of the Chinese revolution. If we are dazzled by the ideology of revolutionary China embodied in Mao Tse-tung and his fantasy of peasant socialism, we will lose sight of the historical character of this revolution. We shouldn't use terms such as "new democratic revolution" or "proletariat revolution" to serve as a veil to obscure this revolution. We don't attempt to understand the Chinese Revolution through Maoism. Rather, when we understand Maoism by starting from the historical and class relationships in present day revolutionary China. In this way, we are able to grasp for the first time the real meaning of this revolution, as well as understanding why the fantasy of Maoism was necessarily created.

The bourgeois nature of the Chinese revolution is clearly expressed in the common program adopted at the first comprehensive meeting of the Chinese People's Government Entente Meeting of 29 September 1949. The first article of the common program states that the People's Republic of China "is opposed to imperialism, feudalism, and bureaucratism," and the state "will fight for Chinese independence, democracy, peace, wealth and power." The number one determining goal is to establish an independent national state and the unity of China through this state, as well as the wealth and power of this state.

The third article of the common program defines the tasks of the Chinese Revolution and the changes in property relations in the following way:

"the People's Republic of China will abolish all special privileges of imperialism, confiscate bureaucratic capital, shift ownership to the people's state, change from a feudalistic or semi-feudalistic system of land ownership to a peasant system of land ownership, protect public and cooperative property of the state, protect the economic interests and private property of the workers, peasants, petty bourgeoisie and national bourgeoisie, develop a people's economy of new democracy, and steadily change from an agricultural country into an industrial country."

Here the protection of private property is clearly declared. The ownership of land is converted to peasant ownership as a necessary point in the progress towards bourgeois development, and with private ownership as the foundation the capitalistic development from an agricultural to an industrial nation is proposed. Not only is there no mention of the working class struggle against capitalistic ownership, but as private property owners they are treated on the same level as peasants and the bourgeoisie.

In this document, revolutionary China's protection of private property is openly proclaimed, along with a clear declaration that the revolution established the foundation for the development of commodity and capitalistic production, and that the task of revolution hereafter would be to transform China into an industrial nation, in other words, the creation of capitalistic large scale industry.

The program also proclaims all of the bourgeois freedoms such as political freedom, an electoral system, sexual equality, and racial equality.

Another thing that should be noted is article 27, which states that land reform "is a necessary condition to develop the productive power to industrialize the country." We don't have space here to discuss the significance of land reform for China's capitalistic development.

As we have seen above, the Chinese Revolution gave birth to a colossal petty bourgeois economy. Almost the entire economy of the country had been based on individual and family labor. The revolution transformed the relations of ownership which corresponded with the developmental stage of this productive power and the character of labor, that is to the rule of private ownership based on one's own labor. From a historical perspective, the revolution for the first time established a united national state as well as creating the foundation for the development of the domestic market.

However, even though the revolution carried through changes in the relations of ownership which were a necessary condition for the development of commodity and capitalistic production, this alone could not realistically lead to their overall development. This is because private ownership based on one's own labor, in other words in this sense the agreement between production and ownership, had only just reached the beginning of commodity production-only the small amount which exceeded personal consumption little by little became commodities. Therefore this signifies that under the dominant relations of production were not commodity production, but the relations dominant under the previous natural economy.

The overall development of commodity production is only possible under capitalistic means of production, and capitalistic production is simply a product of the historical sublation of private ownership based a person's own labor. Capitalistic means of production are an indispensable pre-condition for commodity production, however the two are not identical.

The additional historical and social precondition for the development of capitalistic production is the concentration of the social means of production on one side, and free workers in the double sense that they are the free owners of their own labor power, as well as workers who have been freed (separated) from all of the important means of production, on the other side.

Seen from the perspective of the developmental stage of productive power, or the created production relations, there is little room to doubt that the development of revolutionary China merely made possible the development of capitalistic means of production. But for this purpose the historical separation of the direct producer from the means of production and the concentration and monopolization of the broken up means of production was necessary. But the development of the Chinese national economy from a small peasant economy could not have happened without opening the path to large scale capitalistic industry through the social concentration of the means of production. To promote this historical development, and create the historical conditions essential to the development of capitalistic production-these were the historical tasks for the revolutionary government in China.

To Contents

[warningsine]

I keep seeing such comments on my notes which makes me wonder: what did I miss?

"The Handmaid's Tale" draws on global histories.

Atwood was inspired by what happened:

during the Iranian Revolution (1978-1979),

in Philippines under Ferdinand Marcos,

in Germany (The Lebensborn project),

in Romania under Nicolae Ceaușescu,

in Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge,

in Stalinist Russia.

She was also inspired by what happened to Argentinean women during Jorge Rafael Videla's military dictatorship which was backed by the US.

But killing the pregnant women was a crime that even Argentina’s military men – who referred to themselves in self-aggrandising speeches as defenders of “western and Christian civilisation” – couldn’t bring themselves to commit. Instead, they kept pregnant activists alive until they gave birth, murdering them afterwards and handing their babies to childless military couples to raise as their own. It was, in a macabre sense, the military’s ultimate victory against a despised enemy they had decided to annihilate completely. It is estimated some 500 children were born under these circumstances.

(x)

And what happened to Spanish women under Franco.

Known as the lost children of the Franco-era, as many as 300,000 babies are estimated to have been abducted from their mothers under General Francisco Franco, who ruled Spain from 1939-75, and in the decades after.

The theft of newborns began in the 1930’s after the Spanish Civil War as an ideological practice, stripping left-wing parents or Franco-opponents of their children as a way of ridding Marxist influence from society. But in the 1950’s, the practice expanded to poor or illegitimate families who were seen as economically or morally deficient, Agence France-Presse reports.

New mothers were often told their babies had died and the hospital had taken care of the burials. These babies were allegedly sold for adoption and involved a wide network of doctors, nurses, nuns and priests, according to AFP. The system carried on after Franco’s death in 1975 until 1987, when a new law was implemented regulating adoption.

(x)

"When I wrote 'The Handmaid's Tale', nothing went into it that had not happened in real life somewhere at some time," she said.

[anarchywoofwoof]

Hi this is so dumb what are tankies, specifically

let me preface this by saying that this is not dumb. not asking questions when you don't understand something is dumb and i'm proud of you for being inquisitive, anon.

so in a nutshell... 'tankies'—it's slang in leftist circles for folks who get all hot and bothered for authoritarian regimes that claim to be communist, like stalin's soviet union or mao's china. these were governments that, yeah, talked a big game about socialism and the working class but ended up crushing a lot of the freedoms and rights that are pretty essential to true socialism, and definitely to anarchy.

keep in mind: the word "tankie" has absolutely nothing to do with the left-right axis, but with the authoritarian-antiauthoritarian axis.

when i, as someone who identifies as a leftist anarchist, refer to someone as a tankie, it's because they are *as left as me*, but too authoritarian to be safe for me, after a whole century of authoritarian communist regimes persecuting anarchists.

from an anarchist pov, which is all about getting rid of unjust hierarchies and giving power back to the individual, the whole tankie mindset and way of thinking is counterproductive. anarchism is about flat structures, deconstructing unjust and unfair systems, and definitely no secret police or labor camps, which were a huge part of the stalinist-era soviet and chinese maoist playbook.

supporting governments that use force and repression to control their people kinda goes against the whole ethos of fighting for a fairer, freer society. it's kind of like cheering for the underdog and then also celebrating when the underdog becomes the bully once they've got power. it trades one form of oppression for another, which is exactly what anarchists and most reasonably informed socialists wanna avoid.

it's important to understand the past to build a better future, and the history of these authoritarian regimes show that concentrated power is risky business. what starts with the promise of equality often ends up with just a new set of gods and masters. freedom and respect for individual rights are obviously vital to the anarchist viewpoint and tankies generally espouse views directly in contrast to these beliefs.

[txttletale]

hi miss healed, could you elaborate what you mean by dictatorship/authoritarian not being useful/meaningful terms? i know they're terms the west likes to tack on its political enemies, but i thought it might be a case of just misuse of terms that can still be useful, rather than outright a problem with the concept itself, so id be interested to understand your opinion. thanks!

so i don't think 'authoritarian' has any useful analytical value because every state is 'authoritarian' -- the only metrics by which one state might be seen as less 'authoritarian' than another are the metrics which privilege liberal democracy and a free market as a meaningful sort of 'freedom', which as a marxist, i don't! every state is an institution for class suppression--in the state and revolution, lenin quotes engels as saying:

[...] it is sheer nonsense to talk of a 'free people's state'; so long as the proletariat still needs the state, it does not need it in the interests of freedom but in order to holddown its adversaries, and as soon as it becomes possible to speak of freedom the state as such ceases to exist.

every state uses violence to perpetuate and legitimize itself. there is no state that would let you march into the capital and declare its dissolution without deploying armed men against you -- every state is authoritarian, it excercises authority, this is a tautological statement about how states maintain their own existence.

and sure, you could then say 'well we can just call all states authoritarian', but i don't think that makes any sense. the criticism of a state 'authoritarian/totalitarian' implies that there is an alternative, a point of comparison against which the state comes short--and i simply don't think it's possible to use 'authoritarian' as a cogent criticism without having such a point of comparison (usually the US or some european liberal democracy) which in turn means buying into liberal & capitalist ideas about 'freedom'.

as for 'dictator', i have a different criticism of that, also stemming from my marxist perspective. basically, i just think it doesn't describe anything useful in terms of political analysis and massively overemphasizes the role of individual psychology and personality. i frequently criticize both anticommunist and 'stalinist' views of stalin by joking that he must have been a very busy man if he singlehandedly ate all the grain or killed all the nazis. which is obviously a glib way of putting it--but my point is that any dictator who has ever 'done anything' could only do it because they could order a government official to do it who in turn could order a department to do it that could in turn mobilize hundreds or thousands of soldiers/construction workers/bureaucrats/etc. in order to make that happen.

sure, the leaders of countries might make decisions, and in some systems an individual leader might have greater leeway than others. but there are always very clear hard limits about what they must do and what they cannot do. i am sure i can say pretty uncontroversially that mohammad bin salman has an extreme level of political control over the economy and government of saudi arabia, but if he woke up tomorrow and said 'good news everyone, we're converting the country to wicca and donating all our oil to iran' then that would not happen and he would be deposed instantly. for a more realistic example, imagine any 'dictator' of your choice saying 'well, it's time to massively defund the military' -- this would be completely fucking impossible without some kind of loyalist paramilitary organization (which then exerts its own forces upon the 'dictator'.)

and of course all that leaves aside the massive extent to which 'dictator' is politically charged. do i think that vladimir putin was democratically elected? obviously not! but i don't think that any US president has been in any meaningful sense 'elected' by anything other than capital either, and two of the last four straightforwardly lost a popular vote even by the standards of liberal democracy! i think that any political system is best analyzed in class terms, in terms of what interests the government serves in terms of class struggle and competition between global capitalists, rather than in terms of individuals or what formal power structures give out the fancy titles

tldr: as a marxist, i think that 'authoritarian' is a useless distinguisher because excercising authority is the sole purpose and function of a state -- 'dictator' is a useless distinguisher because even the most autocratic fiefdom-state is ultimately a class dictatorship first and foremost

[dailyanarchistposts]

Abolishing Capitalism

None of these options are long-term solutions. We live in a civilization based on the separation of society into haves and have-nots. This cannot be allowed to continue.

The entirety of potential political and social structures don’t balance on the axis of capitalism (and democracy, somehow always lumped with capitalism) and state communism. Capitalists would love for you to believe that, of course, because state communism is so clearly a terrible idea; they would love for people to think capitalism is the only alternative to Stalinist atrocity.

Capitalism is an atrocity, however, as a quick survey will let us know. Capitalism (the idea of not working for your money, but instead siphoning the wealth produced by others) has led us to the very brink of planetary ecocide with its mindless search for profit (a feature included even in the dictionary definition!).

Many people have theorized ways of eradicating the rampant criminality of capitalism. Socialism isn’t actually a dirty word, and can mean a whole host of things, many of which are as far from Stalinism as a system could possibly be.

But the simplest one is this: we, as small communities (often overlapping ones), can make decisions for ourselves by the means we best see fit. We can feed and care for ourselves and each other. We can work in ways that make us happy, we can work for projects that actually concern us. If we don’t let the ruling class rule us, we won’t be ruled. If you ask me, I’d call this system anarchism. Other people might call it different things like autonomism or horizontalism or just decentralization, direct democracy, or common sense.

But in order to do this, we have to take back the means of production. The rich have the things they have because they are dirty stinking thieves, whether they know it or not.

just a friendly word from some anarchists

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Private equity finally delivered Sarah Palin's death panels

Tonight (Apr 26), I’ll be in Burbank, signing Red Team Blues at Dark Delicacies at 6PM.

Remember “death panels”? Sarah Palin promised us that universal healthcare was a prelude to a Stalinist nightmare in which unaccountable bureaucrats decided who lived or died based on a cost-benefit analysis of what it would cost to keep you alive versus how much your life was worth.

If you’d like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here’s a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/26/death-panels/#what-the-heck-is-going-on-with-CMS

Palin was right that any kind of healthcare rationing runs the risk of this kind of calculus, where we weight spending $10,000 to extend a young, healthy person’s life by 40 years against $1,000 to extend an elderly, disabled person’s life by a mere two years.

It’s a ghastly, nightmarish prospect — as anyone who uses the private healthcare system knows very well. More than 27m Americans have no health insurance, and millions more have been tricked into buying scam “cost-sharing” systems run by evangelical grifters:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/02/health/christian-health-care-insurance.html

But for the millions of Americans with insurance, death panels are an everyday occurrence, or at least a lurking concern. Anyone who pays attention knows that insurers have entire departments designed to mass-reject legitimate claims and stall patients who demand that the insurer lives up to its claim:

https://kffhealthnews.org/news/article/khn-podcast-an-arm-and-a-leg-how-to-shop-for-health-insurance-november-24-2021/

The private healthcare sector is designed to deny care. Its first duty is to its shareholders, not its patients, and every dollar spent on care is a dollar not available for dividends. The ideal insurance customer pays their premiums without complaint, and then pays cash for all their care on top of it.

All that was true even before private equity started buying up and merging whole swathes of the US healthcare system (or “healthcare” “system”). The PE playbook — slash wages, sell off physical plant, slash wages, reduce quality and raise prices — works in part because of its scale. These aren’t the usual economies of scale. Rather the PE strategy is to buy and merge all the similar businesses in a region, so customers, suppliers and workers have nowhere else to turn.

That’s bad enough when it’s aimed at funeral homes, pet groomers or any of the other sectors that have been bigfooted by PE:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/16/schumpeterian-terrorism/#deliberately-broken

But it’s especially grave when applied to hospitals:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/21/profitable-butchers/#looted

Or emergency room physicians:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/03/14/unhealthy-finances/#steins-law

And if you think that’s a capitalist hellscape nightmare, just imagine how PE deals with dying, elderly people. Yes, PE has transformed the hospice industry, and it’s even worse than you imagine.

Yesterday, the Center for Economic and Policy Research published “Preying on the Dying: Private Equity Gets Rich in Hospice Care,” written by some of the nation’s most valiant PE slayers: Eileen Appelbaum, Rosemary Batt and Emma Curchin:

https://cepr.net/report/preying-on-the-dying-private-equity-gets-rich-in-hospice-care/

Medicare pays private hospices $203-$1,462 per day to take care of dying old people — seniors that a doctor has certified to have less than six months left. That comes to $22.4b/year in public transfers to private hospices. If hospices that $1,462 day-rate, they have lots of duties, like providing eight hours’ worth of home care. But if the hospice is content to take the $203/day rate, they are not required to do anything. Literally. It’s just free money for whatever the operator feels like doing for a dying elderly person, including doing nothing at all.

As Appelbaum told Maureen Tkacik for her excellent writeup in The American Prospect: “Why anybody commits fraud is a mystery to me, because you can make so much money playing within the guidelines the way the payment scheme operates.”

https://prospect.org/health/2023-04-26-born-to-die-hospice-care/

In California, it’s very, very easy to set up a hospice. Pay $3,000, fill in some paperwork (or don’t — no one checks it, ever), and you’re ready to start caring for beloved parents, grandparents, sisters, brothers, aunts and uncles as they depart this world. You do get a site inspection, but don’t worry — you aren’t required to bring your site up to code until after you’re licensed, and again, they never check — not even if there are multiple complaints. After all, no one at the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) has the job of tracking complaints.

This is absolute catnip for private equity — free government money, no obligations, no enforcement, and the people you harm are literally dying and can’t complain. What’s not to like? No wonder PE companies have spent billions “rolling up” hospices across the country. There are 591 hospices in Van Nuys, CA alone — but at least 30 of them share a single medical director:

https://auditor.ca.gov/reports/2021-123/index.html#pg34A

Medicare caps per-patient dispersals at $32,000, which presents an interesting commercial question for remorseless, paperclip-maximizing, grandparent-devouring private equity ghouls: do you take in sick patients (who cost more, but die sooner) or healthy patients (cost less, potentially live longer)?

In Van Nuys, the strategy is to bring in healthy patients and do nothing. 51% of Van Nuys hospice patients are “live discharged” — that is, they don’t die. This figure — triple the national average — is “a reliable sign of fraud.”

There are so many hospice scams and most of them are so stupid that it takes a monumental failure of oversight not to catch and prevent them. Here’s a goodun: hospices bribe doctors to “admit” patients to a hospice without their knowledge. The hospice bills for the patient, but otherwise has no contact with them. This can go on for a long time, until the patient tries to visit the doctor and discovers that their Medicare has been canceled (you lose your Medicare once you go into hospice).

Another scam: offer patients the loosest narcotics policy in town, promising all the opioids they want. Then, once their benefits expire, let them die of an overdose (don’t worry, people who die in hospice don’t get autopsies):

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/12/05/how-hospice-became-a-for-profit-hustle

You can hire con artists to serve as your sales-force, and have them talk vulnerable, elderly people into enrolling in hospice care by convincing them they have nothing to live for and should just die already and not burden their loved ones any longer.

Hospitals and hospices also collude: hospitals can revive dying patients, ignoring their Do Not Resuscitate orders, so they can be transfered to a hospice and die there, saving the hospital from adding another dead patient to their stats.CMS’s solution is perverse: they’re working with Humana to expand Medicare Advantage (a scam that convinces patients to give up Medicare and enrol in a private insurance program, whose private-sector death panel rejects 13% of claims that Medicare would have paid for). The program will pay private companies $32,000 for every patient who agrees to cease care and die. As our friends on the right like to say, “incentives matter.”

Appelbaum and co have a better idea:

Do more enforcement: increase inspections and audits.

Block mergers and rollups of hospices that make them too big to fail and too big to jail.

Close existing loopholes.

They should know. Appelbaum and her co-authors write the best, most incisive analysis of private equity around. For more of their work, check out their proposal for ending pension-plan ripoffs by Wall Street firms:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/05/mego/#A09948

Catch me on tour with Red Team Blues in Burbank, Mountain View, Berkeley, San Francisco, Portland, Vancouver, Calgary, Toronto, DC, Gaithersburg, Oxford, Hay, Manchester, Nottingham, London, and Berlin!

[Image ID: An industrial meat grinder, fed by a conveyor belt. A dead, elderly man is traveling up the conveyor, headed for the grinder's intake. The grinder is labelled 'HOSPICE' in drippy Hallowe'en lettering. It sits in a spreading pool of blood.]

Image: Seydelmann (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GW300_1.jpghttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:GW300_1.jpg

CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.en

[zarya-zaryanitsa]

Stalinist attitudes towards homosexuality and the events surroudning criminalization of homosexuality in Soviet Union in 1934 - excerpts from professor Dan Healey’s book „Russian homophobia from Stalin to Sochi”

In the same chapter I analyze the Soviet return to a ban on “sodomy” in 1933-34. It was a Stalinist measure, proposed by the security police and backed with relish by Stalin and his Politburo. Stalin personally edited the new penal article. This was the moment when the Soviet state adopted a modern anti-homosexual politics, the birth of modern Russian political homophobia. (…)

On September 15, 1933, deputy chief of the OGPU (secret police) Genrikh Yagoda proposed to Stalin that a law against “pederasty” was needed urgently. Stalin and Yagoda used the crude term pederastiia to discuss male homosexuality; but government lawyers revived the tsarist term muzhelozhstvo (sodomy) for the published law that was eventually adopted in March 1934. Yagoda reported that in August-September 1933, OGPU raids had been conducted on circles of “pederasts” in Moscow and Leningrad, and other cities of the Soviet Union. Yagoda wrote that these men were guilty of spying; they had also “politically demoralized various social layers of young men, including young workers, and even attempted to penetrate the army and navy.” From a recent collection of FSB archive documents of political cases against young Communists, it is clear that during the early 1930s, the secret police were obsessed with detecting counterrevolutionary moods among young people. Stalin forwarded Yagoda’s letter to Politburo member Lazar Kaganovich, noting that “these scoundrels must receive exemplary punishment” and directing a law against “pederasty” should be adopted. In the months that followed, Yagoda the secret policeman steered its passage through the various legislative drafts. (…)

When in mid-September 1933 Yagoda wrote to Stalin, recommending the adoption of a formal law against sodomy, he apparently cited a figure of 130 arrests of “pederasts” for the operations in “Moscow and Leningrad.” According to Ivanov, the archives of the St. Petersburg FSB reveal that during August-September 1933, 175 men were arrested on grounds of homosexual relations in Leningrad alone. The raids on “pederasts” continued and probably expanded to the principal “regime” cities, including Kharkov and Kiev. It appears that somewhere inside the central secret police machinery, an order originated in late July or early August 1933 to begin arrests of “pederasts” known to the authorities on their card-indexes either as “anti-social” or “declassed” elements, or as a security threat with international dimensions. (…)

In the 1993 release of correspondence between Yagoda and Stalin leading to the sodomy ban, one other significant document was published from the same file in the Presidential Archive. It is a sixteen-page letter to Stalin, from a homosexual British Communist, Harry O. Whyte (1907-60), an ex­ patriate journalist living in Moscow who loved a man who was a Soviet citizen. His Soviet lover was arrested sometime during late 1933 or early 1934. The release of the Whyte letter said little about its provenance and the author. It was typical of the 1993 publication that this document also appeared without commentary, but was labeled “Humor from the Special Collections” by archivists or editors who failed to show any historical empathy or intellectual curiosity.

Whyte, who worked for the English-language Moscow Daily News, wrote to Stalin, in May 1934, asking him to justify the new law. The journalist boldly explained why it violated the principles of both Marxism and the Soviet revolution. He argued that persecution of the law-abiding homosexual was typical of capitalist regimes and fascist ones: Nazi Germany’s “racial purity” drive was just the most extreme example of the push in both systems for “labor reserves and cannon fodder.” “Constitutional homosexuals, as an insignificant portion of the population . . . cannot present a threat to the birth rate in a socialist state.” Their position was analogous to that of other unjustly persecuted groups: “women, colored races, national minorities” and the best traditions of socialism showed tolerance of the relatively insignificant number of naturally occurring homosexuals in the population. He asked Stalin, “Can a homosexual be considered a person fit to become a member of the Communist Party?” In a revealing reaction, Stalin scrawled across the letter, “An idiot and a degenerate. To the archives.” Whyte got a blunt answer to his question: he was expelled from the Communist Party; he hastily left the Soviet Union for England in 1935. (…)

The dictator turned to his cultural spokesman Maxim Gorky, to explain the law’s rationale for Soviet and European readers. Gorky wrote an article that appeared in Izvestiia and Pravda on May 23, 1934, and later in a German-language socialist newspaper in Switzerland, in which he compared healthy Soviet youth to the degenerate youth of Nazi Germany. “Destroy the homosexuals - and fascism will disappear” he concluded, propounding the genocide of a social group on the grounds of sexuality. Later in 1936, People’s Commissar of Justice Nikolai V. Krylenko gave a speech to the central Soviet legislature in which he explained that the law was necessary because homosexuals were not healthy workers but “a declassed rabble, or the scum of society, or remnants of the exploiting classes.”

[anarchistin]

Stalinists and their ilk did not kill because they dreamed great dreams—actually, Stalinists were famous for being rather short on imagination—but because they mistook their dreams for scientific certainties.

This led them to feel they had a right to impose their visions through a machinery of violence.

Anarchists are proposing nothing of the sort, on either count. They presume no inevitable course of history and one can never further the course of freedom by creating new forms of coercion.

In fact all forms of systemic violence are (among other things) assaults on the role of the imagination as a political principle, and the only way to begin to think about eliminating systematic violence is by recognizing this.

– David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology

[hussyknee]

If y'all want to feel sympathy for the Israelis, you better have it for every single genocider. Slavers and settlers that scalped Natives and Nazis and Imperial Japan and Stalinists and Serbs and the British East India company and white nationalists and Islamic fundamentalists and Hindutvas and Assad's forces and and and.

People do not become genociders because of victimhood. The majority of the worst colonial empires were people who hadn't been oppressed themselves in centuries. Groups become genocidal because they have power and want to take their trauma or paranoia out on someone weaker than they are. Even the ones who aren't gleefully enthusiastic go along with it because the benefits and risks of dissent outweigh your moral conscience. You're not forced to make those choices. That's not what indoctination is. Indoctrination helps dehumanization. It's making it easy to silence every doubt and qualm and instinct for empathy and compassion. But you still choose. You make a conscious decision to see a human being as a vermin to be eradicated. It's easy to do that when you have no incentive to see them as human and no consequences for treating them accordingly.

For fuck's sake, stop using the Holocaust as an excuse for Zionists. Half of them are converts or the children of converts who never lived the Jewish generational legacy of persecution. Most of their families migrated from places where they had a perfectly comfortable lives, and the other half was born in Israel and never knew what being a marginalized minority was like. Israelis are literally the least oppressed Jews in the known world. They victimize Palestinians because colonizers and oppressors live in mortal fear of the people they colonize and oppress, because they KNOW that they're crushing them and have to manufacture all sorts of narratives to rationalize and justify that they're actually the good guys.

Colonization and genocide is a result of power. I and a lot of other BIPOC have been traumatized by Zionists before we ever knew the word for them, because they keep taking out their paranoia of Jewish hate on Black people, Natives, immigrants, Muslims and Arabs and every kind of racial minority that have no systemic power to hurt them. They have such a foothold in the Jewish communities of Europe and its settler colonies (Australia, the Americas), because white Jews have assimilated into whiteness. However conditional their acceptance among white Christians, they have the same racial and institutional power over Black and brown colonized people. Which makes it easy for them to choose Zionism— the legitimizing of white colonial anxiety in place of fear of their oppressor. Antisemitism is their ready and convenient way to rationalize the racism and Islamphobia and racial superiority they already have.

Do you think Jews are the only people who have ever been genocided? The Holocaust was not exceptional, it was exceptionalized by the Western powers to launder their own atrocities that far outstripped Nazi Germany. Look at what they're doing with Ukraine. They're being genocided and colonized and they deserve empathy and help against Russia. But the West isn't concerned about Armenia the same way even though it's also an Eastern European country. They definitely weren't concerned about any of the other countries Russia has attacked or helped genocide (like Syria). Including Ukraine itself before all this. Putin has been attacking Donbas since 2014.

So why now? They care about who's genociding Ukraine, not about Ukrainians. Russia under Putin is very much a threat to NATO and Ukraine is bordered by NATO countries. The Western PR machine still had to make Ukrainians white, because Slavs are ethnically marginalized in Western Europe, and even North America to a lesser degree. They have white privilege over all Asians and Africans and Indigenous people because the colour system of race is based on European colonization, but they have only conditional whiteness in the imperial sphere of both the US and Russia. But because they're ethnically European, the US and Western Europe was able to launch a PR "Look They're Just Like Us!" campaign to elevate them to full whiteness, so that their own citizens would actually give a shit about this country they'd barely heard of before. That's why we're all more concerned about Ukraine than any other Eastern Europeans (we're all conditioned into white supremacy). After that, the US went around thumping its own chest for a full year and half, trying to launder its military image after the twenty year Muslim genocide that was the War on Terror (still ongoing).

This is exactly what they did with European Jews. High-ho, somebody victimized by the Enemy! Dust them off and lookie! They're European! People will give a shit that we liberated them if we make them all white! But uh, do we really want five million Jewish refugees in here? Oh I know, we'll thrown in with those crazy Jewish terrorists that were giving the Brits so much trouble, and give them a state! They're also from Europe after all, and Civilized™, unlike the savages!

And then the liberated Jews accepted doing exactly what the Nazis did to them. Not because they had to! They could have just lived in Palestine, that whole region of the Levant was pretty secular and multicultural. But they didn't see Arabs as human beings! Because Europeans are taught to see Black and brown people as servants and savages! They massacred Palestinians and took the place over because they could and then called it the War of Independence. The first people they victimized after that? Were Arab Jews. They colluded with Arab nationalists to have them ethnically cleansed entirely out of their countries and scooped them up to create a labouring underclass! Put them up in such squalid conditions that scores died!

And did those people look around and realize white Jews were their oppressors and they had far more in common with Palestinians? No. They threw in with their oppressors to help make Palestinians lives a generational nightmare. Because power and assimilation! This is the exact same reason why Zionists has been trying to cosy up to Nazis since before Hitler.

(Oh and by the way? Germans never regretted the Nazis or the Holocaust. The Americans "denazification" was a dead fail. They just used Israel to make a whole dog and pony show of how very sorry they were and how it was a Dark Moment in Their History™ (because nothing they've ever done to colonized people counts). They paid reparations because the West made them, but they never got over the massive post-war genocide the Allies subjected their people to, or the way they carved up the country like a Christmas turkey. But again, did they hold Britain, France, US and Russia responsible for it? Did they acknowledge that the most severe cases of post-war violence came from American GIs? Of course not. Obviously the biggest threat was...the Poles.)

If you really see all those TikTok videos of families dancing to their genocide songs, taunting starving and dehydrated Palestinians and teens lampooning Palestinian mothers grieving their dead children and think "they're also victims because Western imperialists exploited their fear and made them into monsters" then I don't even know what to say to you. That level of infantilization, wilful ignorance and need to turn sadism into victimhood is breathtakingly racist and paternalistic. Even if you believe #Not All Israelis, the point is there's enough Israelis. Also what is even there to feel sorry for?? Are Israelis about to be turned out and shot in the streets? Starve to death? Have their limbs amputated without anesthetic and still die of sepsis? Literally what??

Emotions are signifiers of your own internal biases and perspectives. They aren't indicative of justice or morality. We can't move through a deeply unequal world and believe that compassion is having the same responses, judgements and feelings for everyone. It's not empathy you're feeling for Israelis, it's conditioned philosemitism and casual racism against Palestinians. If you actually followed the videos and images and news coming out of Palestine, you would feel about as sympathetic towards them as Nazis. You would understand that this kind of atrocity doesn't come from trauma or having been victims. It comes from having zero consequences for doing them. It comes from unchecked, gleeful, sadistic power.

[warsofasoiaf]

I kept wanting to post my ideas on what a full term gus hall presidency would look like and yet I never had the energy or time to do it. so basically I think the best description of him would be something like an american robespierre. Initially targeting groups genuinely hated and for some, justly so, by the general american public. like american fascists and nazi sympathizers as well as the cia and fbi for their roles in targetting the civil rights movement. Though using lies and manipulative tactics to get rid of threats and push forward radical policies and that are initially favored as well as putting supporters into power so he can rule by decree. like better rights for those historically discriminated. though as time goes on he then targets less "just" enemies like moderates on both sides, and those who while sympathetic to what he's trying to do, are opposed to his methods like harrington or labor unions until he's going full stalinist, killing even other leftists and anyone who isn't sufficiently loyal. If he succeeds in keeping power then his US is just an american USSR with all the implications that brings. if he fails and overplays his hands he gets removed and risks a civil war or opening up the US to a military dictatorship or a future demagogue.

While this is a lot better than what the Hall writers seem to have come up with, this doesn't really mesh with Gus Hall as he was in real life.

In our own history, Gus Hall was a dedicated vanguardist who offered his full-throated support for the Soviet invasions of Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Domestically, he demanded the New Left fall in line and refused to even deign any of their criticism of the Soviet Union. He facilitated Soviet espionage through the CPUSA, laundered Soviet money, and was openly pro-authoritarian. The Hall writers, in this thread, largely ignored Hall's support of the Soviet invasions into Eastern Europe and Hall's own parroting of the Soviet line in favor of portraying him as a sort of well-meaning extremist and someone who regularly broke with the Soviets (ignoring that 90% of the time, he didn't). They portray his domestic policy using the CPUSA's policy from the 1990's after the Soviets fell, before that they were unflagging supporters of the Leninist model.

Hall in the TNO-verse would be uncompromising and brutal, regularly throwing any suspected counter-revolutionaries into prison. Hall (and one of the prominent people in his arc, Angela Davis) talked a big game criticizing the US's prison-industrial complex but issued glowing statements about the USSR's system of prison labor for dissidents - there's no reason to think that this wouldn't be the case in a Hall USA. Prison camps, extrajudicial violence, these would be as commonplace in a Hall USA as they would be in a Yockey USA.

Heck, given the TNO-verse, which has the Soviet Union collapse due to following Bukharinist thought, Hall should be even more extreme. The prevailing idea among TNO-verse Communists is that the Lenin NEP the reason that the Soviets failed against the Nazis, so they'd look to purge that sort of weakness from the nation that would cause it to collapse in the face of an ascendant Reich.

I don't know why the writers dropped the ball so spectacularly with Hall. The writers largely found the Hall they want to portray and worked backwards to justify it, ignoring all countervailing evidence, and it's honestly very disappointing. My theory is that there was pushback from his earlier portrayal, which definitely had its problems (the Lavender Scare) , which led them to overcorrect.

Thanks for the question, Anon.

SomethingLikeALawyer, Hand of the King

[sanguinosa-blog]

The Stalinist System (The Internal "Evolition" Towards "Liberalization")

Written by Hiroyoshi Hayashi (1972) Translated by Roy West

Economic reform ("liberalization") in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, which was debated in the first half of the sixties and implemented in the second half of the same decade, sharply raised the question of the essence of "socialism". Already in the twenties, some extreme-left communist factions in Germany and other countries, defined Soviet society as state capitalist and denounced the Stalinists, who had mercilessly oppressed the Trotskyists and revolutionary workers factions, as the political bearers of state capitalism. However, Trotsky and the Fourth International were satisfied to simply describe the Soviet Union as a "degenerated workers' state", and Stalinists as a "degenerated caste of workers". This ambiguous and compromised definition was in striking contrast to what could be called their bitterly emotional accusation of Stalin and the Stalinists. Trotsky's criticism of Stalin was emotional and moralistic, not historical. As a result, he was unable to correctly define the essence of Stalin's rule, and instead glorified the USSR as a "workers' state". Even after all trace of the Soviet Union as a workers' state had substantially disappeared, Trotsky obstinately stuck to this view on the grounds that the means of production were "nationalized". In reality, his dogma was not very different from the Stalinists' views of "socialism".

With economic reform, the debate has arisen again on a worldwide scale over the nature of the socio-economic system in the "socialist" bloc. The "leftwing faction" (Chinese Communist Party) within the international Communist movement, is denouncing the Soviet Union for "reviving" capitalism, while the "rightwing faction" (Togliattists or the Japanese Structural-Reformists) has evaluated the reforms as a process towards a Yugoslavian-style "market socialism". The Structural Reformists (read: liberal intellectuals) refuse to recognize the essential difference between capitalism and socialism. They define the Soviet Union and China as "bourgeois socio-economic systems without the bourgeoisie", but they still call these societies socialism, and say that socialism is also a bourgeois society. Consequently, they imply that actual bourgeois societies (state monopoly capitalism in the U.S., Western Europe and Japan) are also socialism. The bourgeoisie, on the other hand, has enthusiastically welcomed economic reform ("liberalization"), since it seems to demonstrate the superiority of bourgeois production and justify their long-held view that socialism is "unproductive and inefficient" because it oppresses individual autonomy and difference. They conclude that ultimately "socialism" must become capitalism, thereby leading to the appearance of a re-united capitalistic world.

The JCP, with their self-proclaimed "autonomous-line", have yet to publicize any official party view on the economic reforms. They seem to think that this problem is not that important. But intellectuals affiliated with the JCP, although there is no agreement among them, have closed their eyes to reality in order to salvage "socialism" in the Soviet Union, and are playing around with socialism as an "ideal". The "autonomous-line" JCP cannot fully embrace official Soviet economics which claims that "communism" can be built through the overall development of the commodity=value relationship. The JCP, on the contrary, claims that it is necessary for the commodity=value relationship to "gradually" disappear. Thus, the JCP at best can only shut their eyes and ignore the reforms, while talking about "socialism as an ideal", thereby diverting the attention of the masses from Soviet society.

Today a specter of capitalism is haunting the "socialist" bloc, and no one can ignore this reality. Of course, this "specter" is not the opposite of the Stalinist system, but its inevitable, developed or "evolved" form that clarifies the hidden reality of this system. We understand the bourgeois transformation and liberalization of the "socialist" system as this sort of inevitable "evolution" of the Stalinist system, not as the "restoration of capitalism", in the manner of the Chinese Communists. This alone is the dialectical viewpoint.

A. The Laws of Commodity Exchange and Socialism The Law of Value and Socialism

Beginning in the early forties, the official view emerged in the Soviet Union that the law of commodity exchange is not the law of capital, and hence there is nothing strange about the existence of the law of commodity production (law of value) in socialist society. This was later systematized in 1952 with Stalin's 'Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR'. Subsequently, some of Stalin's ideas advanced in this essay were "developed" further, and "evolved" to the point where "socialist" economics today claims that socialism and commodity production are necessarily linked. Therefore, we need to begin with the most abstract theoretical problem of the mutual relationship between commodity production and socialism. This provides a basis for the realistic analysis of Soviet society, as well as being the theoretical starting point that determines this reality. The official view of "socialist" economics on this matter is the following. For example, the third edition of the Soviet 'Textbook on Economics' states:

Commodity production under socialism is of a special kind. This is commodity production without private ownership of the means of production, and without capitalists.

[Keizaigaku kyokasho [Textbook on Economics], p. 759.]In the fourth edition there is the following passage:As long as commodity production and commodity circulation exist under socialism, the law of value continues to operate. Money expresses socialist relations of production.

[Ibid., p. 788.]However, is the law of commodity=value truly compatible with socialist society? What does it mean for a product to take the form of a commodity and labor to take the form of value? We must first consider this question, which is the theme that Marx clarifies at the beginning of the first volume of Capital.

The commodity form of products itself expresses certain historical relations of production. That is, it expresses relations of production in which individuals cannot form mutual social relations without exchanging their own products as commodities. The starting point is private labor, which private individuals expend independently from each other. This private labor is congealed as value in commodities, and it is only through their mutual exchange that this private labor becomes one part of the total social labor. Thus, the relationship between people appears as a relationship between things, i.e. a relationship between commodities. Products can only take the form of commodities at a certain stage in the development of human history on the basis of the division of labor and private ownership. As Marx says:Objects of utility become commodities only because they are the products of the labour of private individuals(*) who work independently of each other. The sum total of the labour of all these private individuals forms the aggregate labour of society. Since the producers do not come into social contact until they exchange the products of their labour, the specific social characteristics of their private labours appear only within this exchange. In other words, the labour of the private individual manifests itself as an element of the total labour of society only through the relations which the act of exchange establishes between the products, and, through their mediation, between the producers. To the producers, therefore, the social relations between their private labours appear as what they are, i.e. they do not appear as direct social relations between persons in their work, but rather as material [dinglich] relations between things.[Marx, Capital vol. 1, pp. 165-6.]

(*) Hayashi's note: "In the English edition edited by Engels, this is rendered "private individuals or groups of individuals". See Capital, vol. 1 (Moscow: Progress, 1996), p. 83.Under a socialist system, where the labor of each individual is directly expended as social labor (as one part of social labor), and the social connection of each person's labor appears as "the direct social relationships of people in their work", products do not become commodities, nor is there any necessity for them to do so. Marx defines the historical production relations of commodity producers in the following way:[A] society of commodity producers, whose general social relation of production consists in the fact that they treat their products as commodities, hence as values, and in this material [sachlich] form bring their individual, private labours into relation with each other as homogeneous human labor.

[Ibid., p. 172.]For Marxists, only one answer is possible to the question of whether "value" exists in socialist society. Needless to say, the law of value is the law of commodity=capitalist society, and the opposite extreme of socialist relations of production. Products of labor only become value in a society where objects of utility are the product of "the labor of private individuals who work independently of each other". In a society based on the division of labor and private property, social relationships can only be established between people in the form of the exchange of products (i.e., in a material form). The social character of the producers first appears through this exchange of products, and the labor of each individual can be seen as one part of the total labor of society. Thus, value (i.e. the commodity form of labor products) itself expresses certain historical relations of production. In a society where the labor of each individual directly forms one part of the total labor of society, it does not appear as exchange-value and consequently products do not become commodities. Value is a concept specific to the historical society of commodity production, while socialist society is the sublation of the production relations represented by value (although the significance of socialism is not limited to this alone).

The question of whether value or the law of value exists under socialism led to a worldwide debate in the forties. This debate ultimately came down to the question of how to evaluate the Soviet socio-economic system. The Stalinists justified this system with the excuse that value=money relations in the Soviet Union were "essentially different" from that of bourgeois society and represented "something totally new". Unable to explain why commodities were produced in a society whose means of production had shifted to "socialistic ownership", they were forced to come up with the strange theory of "higher" and "lower" forms of ownership. Social democrats and intellectuals, on the other hand, made various objections to this official Soviet view, but they also considered the nationalization of the means of production, not the question of commodity production, to be the most essential factor in determining socialism, and therefore concluded that the Soviet Union was in fact socialist because the means of production were nationalized. (This is essentially close to the view of Trotsky.) Only Raya Dunayevskaya, the American New Leftist, opposed the view of the USSR as socialism, and argued that the acceptance of the law of value represented an acceptance of capitalist exploitation. She criticized the apologists of the USSR, but could not make a clear conceptual distinction between commodity production and capitalist production and was unable to explain their relationship. 1

https://wpll-j.org/english/e-theory/sc/stasys-1.html

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Only an unabashed acceptance of the similarities between the Nazi and Soviet systems permits an understanding of their differences. Both ideologies opposed liberalism and democracy. In both political systems, the significance of the word party was inverted: rather than being a group among others competing for power according to accepted rules, it became the group that determined the rules. Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were both one-party states. In both the Nazi and Soviet polities the party played a leading role in matters of ideology and social discipline. Its political logic demanded exclusion of outsiders, and its economic elite believed that certain groups were superfluous or harmful. In both administrations, economic planners assumed that more people existed in the countryside than was really necessary. Stalinist collectivization would remove superfluous peasants from the countryside and send them to the cities or the Gulag to work. If they starved, that was of little consequence. Hitlerian colonization projected the starvation and deportation of tens of millions of people.

—Timothy D. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (2010)

[Robert Scott Horton]

[newhistorybooks]

“The Gulag Doctors confronts a central paradox of the Stalinist Gulag: brutal exploitation of prisoners coexisted with a substantial health care apparatus intended to preserve their labour power. Using personal narratives, Healey leads us into the heart of this paradox and paints a profoundly human picture of an inhumane system.”

[f1ghtsoftly]

I’m becoming suspicious of the entire concept of indigeneity and I wonder if there is a better framework to protect the lifestyles of indigenous peoples without also, backwardly, supporting the weird race science of who is indigenous to where and when. Am I indigenous to Ireland despite never setting foot there? Are jewish people indigenous to Israel? Are the descendants of slaves, indentured servants in the southeast-who’ve lived off the land for 400 years not indigenous? How many years does it take? 100, 500 , 1000? What seperates

Not only are these uncomfortable questions, I think they’re mostly a waste of time. I struggle to see a moral difference between a white person who loves the land they grew up on and endeavors to protect it, and may have been there for generations already, and an indigenous person. Of course, governments and our economic system treat those people differently but claiming indigenous people have some woo woo magic ties to the land is uh…I don’t know it strikes me as a modern version of the noble savage trope. This doesn’t even factor in that most indigenous people were subject to forced relocation multiple times so a tribe could be headquartered in the Dakotas or Oklahoma now but they’re originally not even from that area. That doesn’t even count historical, more voluntary, migrations of peoples which occurred during the Pre-Columbian period. I’m open to being schooled on this but I have a suspicion I’m onto something.

I think one’s relationship to the land-not blood quantum is what counts. Do you love your home and are you trying to protect it? Do you see god in the hawks and the rushing rivers? Or do you only see what you can extract and make profitable.

I’m also suspicious that this concept of indigeneity is really compatible with Marxism. I would turn to Marxist, Leninist and Stalinist discussions of Nationalism and it’s utility for more information, I might return to this post to do just that but certainly, this idea of “being indigenous” is not an economic relationship, it doesn’t describe one and in that way….I think

This isn’t at all to delegitimize the struggles against, my intention is to clarify in order to root out grifters. The real work indigenous people do everyday to fight against the destruction of their homes and to try to preserve their traditions and escape the persecution of a government that wants to force them to be assimilated workers without place or culture is good. An international network of indigenous people doing that is great and it’s a benefit of the concept I’m critiquing. But the issue isn’t “the oppression of indigenous people” as like a static, blood determined identity, the issue is proletarianization and the resistance by peoples not yet subject to capitalism’s social discipline. There was once a time when my ancestors were “indigenous” too and they were thrown off their land and forced into the factories to work or starve. The land taken became playgrounds for the rich to turn into magnificent gardens and hunting, meanwhile the peasants of Europe starved and choked to death in factories, their means of subsistance robbed of them.

What is the oppression of indigenous people if not forced proletarianization? What separates the boarding school from the workhouses or homes for wayward mothers? How does settling differ from enclosure? Temporally yes, in brutality maybe but not in motivation. The forces that starved my ancestors in Europe are the same forces that killed the Buffalo to starve the plains Indians and the same forces that tried to “kill the Indian and save the man”.

Indigeneity as a blood inheritance and not a social position/of perspective also opens left wing peoples up to the justifications of ethnostates, ethnic cleansing and settler colonies based around this decidedly immaterial thing called “being indigenous” which is easy to manipulate without staying in line with the principles that I believe this concept is supposed to convey and leaves out potential allies from the fight.

Anyways, I’m going to amend this tomorrow but basically indigenous is a social positon relating to a refusal to become assimilated into capitalism and not a racial or ethnic category.

[howieabel]

“The closest that most of us come to a direct experience of the centerlessness of capitalism is an encounter with the call center. As a consumer in late capitalism, you increasingly exist in two, distinct realities: the one in which the services are provided without hitch, and another reality entirely, the crazed Kafkaesque labyrinth of call centers, a world without memory, where cause and effect connect together in mysterious, unfathomable ways, where it is a miracle that anything ever happens, and you lose hope of ever passing back over to the other side, where things seem to function smoothly. What exemplifies the failure of the neoliberal world to live up to its own PR better than the call center? Even so, the universality of bad experiences with call centers does nothing to unsettle the operating assumption that capitalism is inherently efficient, as if the problems with call centers weren’t the systemic consequences of a logic of Capital which means organizations are so fixated on making profits that they can’t actually sell you anything. The call center experience distils the political phenomenology of late capitalism: the boredom and frustration punctuated by cheerily piped PR, the repeating of the same dreary details many times to different poorly trained and badly informed operatives, the building rage that must remain impotent because it can have no legitimate object, since – as is very quickly clear to the caller –there is no-one who knows, and no-one who could do anything even if they could. Anger can only be a matter of venting; it is aggression in a vacuum, directed at someone who is a fellow victim of the system but with whom there is no possibility of communality. Just as the anger has no proper object, it will have no effect. In this experience of a system that is unresponsive, impersonal, centerless, abstract and fragmentary, you are as close as you can be to confronting the artificial stupidity of Capital in itself. Call center angst is one more illustration of the way that Kafka is poorly understood as exclusively a writer on totalitarianism; a decentralized, market Stalinist bureaucracy is far more Kafkaesque than one in which there is a central authority. Read, for instance, the bleak farce of K’s encounter with the telephone system in the Castle, and it is hard not to see it as uncannily prophetic of the call center experience.” ― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

[dailyanarchistposts]

E.1.1 Is industry the cause of environmental problems?

Some environmentalists argue that the root cause of our ecological crisis lies in industry and technology. This leads them to stress that “industrialism” is the problem and that needs to be eliminated. An extreme example of this is primitivism (see section A.3.9), although it does appear in the works of “deep ecologists” and liberal greens. However, most anarchists are unconvinced and agree with Bookchin when he noted that “cries against ‘technology’ and ‘industrial society’ [are] two very safe, socially natural targets against which even the bourgeoisie can inveigh in Earth Day celebrations, as long as minimal attention is paid to the social relations in which the mechanisation of society is rooted.” Instead, ecology needs “a confrontational stance toward capitalism and hierarchical society” in order to be effective and fix the root causes of our problems. [The Ecology of Freedom, p. 54]

Claiming that “industrialism” rather than “capitalism” is the cause of our ecological problems allowed greens to point to both the west and the so-called “socialist” countries and draw out what was common to both (i.e. terrible environmental records and a growth mentality). In addition, it allowed green parties and thinkers to portray themselves as being “above” the “old” conflicts between socialism and capitalism (hence the slogan “Neither Right nor Left, but in front”). Yet this position rarely convinced anyone as any serious green thinker soon notes that the social roots of our environmental problems need to be addressed and that brings green ideas into conflict with the status quo (it is no coincidence that many on the right dismiss green issues as nothing more than a form of socialism or, in America, “liberalism”). However, by refusing to clearly indicate opposition to capitalism this position allowed many reactionary ideas (and people!) to be smuggled into the green movement (the population myth being a prime example). As for “industrialism” exposing the similarities between capitalism and Stalinism, it would have been far better to do as anarchists had done since 1918 and call the USSR and related regimes what they actually were, namely “state capitalism.”

Some greens (like many defenders of capitalism) point to the terrible ecological legacy of the Stalinist countries of Eastern Europe and elsewhere. For supporters of capitalism, this was due to the lack of private property in these systems while, for greens, it showed that environmental concerns where above both capitalism and “socialism.” Needless to say, by “capitalism” anarchists mean both private and state forms of that system. As we argued in section B.3.5, under Stalinism the state bureaucracy controlled and so effectively owned the means of production. As under private capitalism, an elite monopolised decision making and aimed to maximise their income by oppressing and exploiting the working class. Unsurprisingly, they had as little consideration “first nature” (the environment) as they had for “second nature” (humanity) and dominated, oppressed and exploited both (just as private capitalism does).

As Bookchin emphasised the ecological crisis stems not only from private property but from the principle of domination itself — a principle embodied in institutional hierarchies and relations of command and obedience which pervade society at many different levels. Thus, ”[w]ithout changing the most molecular relationships in society — notably, those between men and women, adults and children, whites and other ethnic groups, heterosexuals and gays (the list, in fact, is considerable) — society will be riddled by domination even in a socialistic ‘classless’ and ‘non-exploitative’ form. It would be infused by hierarchy even as it celebrated the dubious virtues of ‘people’s democracies,’ ‘socialism’ and the ‘public ownership’ of ‘natural resources,’ And as long as hierarchy persists, as long as domination organises humanity around a system of elites, the project of dominating nature will continue to exist and inevitably lead our planet to ecological extinction.” [Toward an Ecological Society, p. 76]

Given this, the real reasons for why the environmental record of Stalinist regimes were worse that private capitalism can easily be found. Firstly, any opposition was more easily silenced by the police state and so the ruling bureaucrats had far more lee-way to pollute than in most western countries. In other words, a sound environment requires freedom, the freedom of people to participate and protest. Secondly, such dictatorships can implement centralised, top-down planning which renders their ecological impact more systematic and widespread (James C. Scott explores this at great length in his excellent book Seeing like a State).

Fundamentally, though, there is no real difference between private and state capitalism. That this is the case can be seen from the willingness of capitalist firms to invest in, say, China in order to take advantage of their weaker environmental laws and regulations plus the lack of opposition. It can also be seen from the gutting of environmental laws and regulation in the west in order to gain competitive advantages. Unsurprisingly, laws to restrict protest have been increasingly passed in many countries as they have embraced the neo-liberal agenda with the Thatcher regime in the UK and its successors trail-blazing this process. The centralisation of power which accompanies such neo-liberal experiments reduces social pressures on the state and ensures that business interests take precedence.

As we argued in section D.10, the way that technology is used and evolves will reflect the power relations within society. Given a hierarchical society, we would expect a given technology to be used in repressive ways regardless of the nature of that technology itself. Bookchin points to the difference between the Iroquois and the Inca. Both societies used the same forms of technology, but the former was a fairly democratic and egalitarian federation while the latter was a highly despotic empire. As such, technology “does not fully or even adequately account for the institutional differences” between societies. [The Ecology of Freedom, p. 331] This means that technology does not explain the causes for ecological harm and it is possible to have an anti-ecological system based on small-scale technologies:

“Some of the most dehumanising and centralised social systems were fashioned out of very ‘small’ technologies; but bureaucracies, monarchies, and military forces turned these systems into brutalising cudgels to subdue humankind and, later, to try to subdue nature. To be sure, a large-scale technics will foster the development of an oppressively large-scale society; but every warped society follows the dialectic of its own pathology of domination, irrespective of the scale of its technics. It can organise the ‘small’ into the repellent as surely as it can imprint an arrogant sneer on the faces of the elites who administer it … Unfortunately, a preoccupation with technical size, scale, and even artistry deflects our attention away from the most significant problems of technics — notably, its ties with the ideals and social structures of freedom.” [Bookchin, Op. Cit., pp. 325–6]

In other words, “small-scale” technology will not transform an authoritarian society into an ecological one. Nor will applying ecologically friendly technology to capitalism reduce its drive to grow at the expense of the planet and the people who inhabit it. This means that technology is an aspect of a wider society rather than a socially neutral instrument which will always have the same (usually negative) results. As Bookchin stressed, a “liberatory technology presupposes liberatory institutions; a liberatory sensibility requires a liberatory society. By the same token, artistic crafts are difficult to conceive without an artistically crafted society, and the ‘inversion of tools’ is impossible with a radical inversion of all social and productive relationships.” [Op. Cit., pp. 328–9]

Finally, it should be stressed that attempts to blame technology or industry for our ecological problems have another negative effect than just obscuring the real causes of those problems and turning attention away from the elites who implement specific forms of technology to further their aims. It also means denying that technology can be transformed and new forms created which can help produce an ecologically balanced society:

“The knowledge and physical instruments for promoting a harmonisation of humanity with nature and of human with human are largely at hand or could easily be devised. Many of the physical principles used to construct such patently harmful facilities as conventional power plants, energy-consuming vehicles, surface-mining equipment and the like could be directed to the construction of small-scale solar and wind energy devices, efficient means of transportation, and energy-saving shelters.” [Bookchin, Op. Cit., p. 83]

We must understand that “the very idea of dominating first nature has its origins in the domination of human by human” otherwise “we will lose what little understanding we have of the social origin of our most serious ecological problems.” It this happens then we cannot solve these problems, as it “will grossly distort humanity’s potentialities to play a creative role in non-human as well as human development.” For “the human capacity to reason conceptually, to fashion tools and devise extraordinary technologies” can all “be used for the good of the biosphere, not simply for harming it. What is of pivotal importance in determining whether human beings will creatively foster the evolution of first nature or whether they will be highly destructive to non-human and human beings alike is precisely the kind of society we establish, not only the kind of sensibility we develop.” [Op. Cit., p. 34]