Anti-Socialism Thread

[Theberstan]

Welcome all!

(Image)

This thread is dedicated to advancing and providing a space for anti-socialist, anti-communist, and anti-Marxist discussion. Anti-socialism is opposition to socialism, but first it's important to understand what socialism is and isn't. In the broadest of terms, socialism (in theory) is an economic and social model that advocates for collective ownership of the "means of production" (basically things that make things). Most often, this "collective ownership" is really just state ownership with the veneer of popular ownership tacked on.

Socialism is opposed to capitalism, whose proponents believe that the means of production should be owned by individuals. Capitalists believe that, by voting with their money, individuals should decide what goods are produced in the free market. In this way firms that are the most efficient, cost-effective and practical for the consumer will rise to the top. Capitalism has coexisted with freedom and liberal democracy since its inception, and greater social/political freedom is exoribly tied to greater economic freedom. Socialists believe that production should be determined by the state, usually through economic planning. The core objective of socialism is the abolition of private property.

It's important to remember that socialism is not universal healthcare, public roads, free public education, taxes, unions, or "the government doing stuff." These are social policies, not socialist policies, and they are all perfectly compatible with capitalism.

Communism is the ultimate objective of socialism, which (again, in theory) is a movement whose ultimate objective is the creation of a classless, cashless worker-run society. It bears mentioning that, despite many regimes attempts to create such a society, a communist society has never truly existed and never will, as the ideas of communism are fundamentally impractical. Socialism is the vector through which communism is supposedly to be brought about.

There are different gradations of socialism. More standard fare revolutionary socialists believe that capitalism can only be overthrown by a popular revolution. Socialists of this stripe resort to authoritarian and illiberal actions to fulfill their goals. "Democratic" socialists believe that socialism may be brought about by democratic processes, particularly by electoral democracy. It's important to note that democratic socialists and revolutionary socialists do not differ in their ends. They both seek to establish a socialist society. They only differ in that they have different means to that end.

Of course, it's important to remember that there really is no such thing as "democratic" socialism, because the tenants of socialism are fundamentally anti-democratic. Democracy only exists as long as it respects individual liberty. You cannot strip people of their right to property and still call yourself a democracy. This is of course not to mention that all socialist regimes have been authoritarian hellholes whose economic plans have wreaked incalculable havoc upon the world and resulted in millions of people's needless deaths. Socialism is just an excuse for authoritarianism that has never nor will ever accomplish the goals it sets for itself.

---

So, anti-socialists of NationStates, here are a few questions:

1. Does socialism still present a threat to the world? To your country?
2. Should liberals and conservatives do more to square their differences and rally against socialist tides, wherever they may spring up?
3. At what point is armed resistance against socialism called for?

FINALLY! A beacon in the middle of what seems like an overly leftist website! Also nice image.

[The Greater Ohio Valley]

And a lot of gun control. No equal Second Amendment right for all people. Only select people are allowed, in practice, to have any, and these are the ones vetted by the government

Probably because they don’t have the kind of societal relationship with guns or the kind of pervasive gun culture that we have in the US so they don’t care much for guns or having a codified right to them, which is their prerogative, they aren’t any less free because they as a society don’t like guns as much as we do.

and who support the existing regime.

Sounds like conspiratorial nonsense.

[Communal League]

Hot take on the extended USSR discussion: the only thing worse than recapitulating the debate about the 2016 US election is recapitulating 1970's academic debates about an ideology and state that are both now very thoroughly dead and irrelevant to actually existing socialist movements today.

This, pretty much. The history of the USSR is irrelevant to the socialism of today, and takes far too much time and energy. There are much better things to discuss.

[Sicilian Imperial-Capitalist Empire]

terror and fear.

uh based department?

Read the thread, I've proven why I don't believe any of your claims about stalin are true.

You believe Grover Furr, a chiefly known historical denialist and revisionist.

Grover Furr whitewashed Stalin's actions and attempted to justify his horrific crimes by either blaming someone else (the Nazis did the Katyn Massacre according to him) or claiming there was an outright conspiracy against Stalin (the Great Purge).

You know what makes this worse? He's not even qualified to do this. He specializes in medieval English literature, not Soviet historiography. On top of that, he hasn't exactly been cited by any sources, and none of his work has been peer-reviewed. In essence, he's lying. Go get a better source, because I'm not going to read what amounts to nothing more than a crazed rant with the appearance of professionalism.

[Kowani]

Hot take on the extended USSR discussion: the only thing worse than recapitulating the debate about the 2016 US election is recapitulating 1970's academic debates about an ideology and state that are both now very thoroughly dead and irrelevant to actually existing socialist movements today.

The worst thing the USSR did for socialism was calling itself socialist.

[Duvniask]

Remind yourself to never lecture anyone about someone whose work you haven't read.


In the same way someone sending messages to my mom that they should bang means she's being unfaithful to my dad?

As for this conspiracy, I'm sure it was necessary to purge the army, including of some of its best and most forward-looking commanders, like Tukhachevsky and Rokossovsky. Now Rokossovsky luckily survived, because he proved the charges against him were completely baseless and because he refused to confess under torture; btw explain how there wasn't torture, considering the guy had his fucking teeth knocked out (he was reluctant to smile, thus showing his steel teeth), his ribs broken and had to suffer several mock executions, and then only released because the military was in need of skilled officers.


And how are we supposed to measure that against the claim that Trotsky was working for the Nazis to carve up the USSR?


I have read enough of it to know its horseshit.


This is hardcore mental gymnastics.

Whatever you mean by "normal wages", it's pure nonsense, as you've already been shown. Wages are the price of labor power that employers pay out, and its commodification in the USSR should be clear to anyone who has not buried their head in the sand. The USSR had a labor market like anywhere else: you look for a job offer, sign a contract or whatever that specifies your rate of wages, either piece-wise or based on work-time, and then you go work for a state firm which has its own revenue stream and profits, a substantial part of which is, firstly, absorbed by enterprise managers in the form of bonuses and by other party-parasites before going to the state to be reinvested back into the economy through the designs of state planners* - it's an accumulation of capital, and the worker just described is producing the surplus value appropriated by the firm and state.

The worker then goes about his or her day, to spend their wages on the "market for consumer goods", to paraphrase Stalin. Now you can harp on all you want about the prices being controlled by the state, like some MLs do, but all that does is, in effect, to distort information about the value of goods. Suppression of monetary forms in general and the fact that firms under Stalin didn't need to be profitable only ensured that the economy had a chronic utilization and waste problem. Predictable efforts to rationalize production then occurred under subsequent Soviet leaders, because the law of value asserts itself independently of the will of state bureaucrats and captains of industry. There's a reason the USSR had a state bank that could lend money to people, including for the purposes of starting their own enterprise-operation, and also the fact that you could buy government stock which would earn you interest. And I have as of yet said nothing about the private household plots of the kolkhozes, from which farmers could sell their own produce to market prices.

*To even call the Soviet economy planned is a misnomer. The "plans" were bullshit, adopted ex post and constantly revised: see for example Nove, The Soviet Economic System (1977). The plans were, aside from an expression of political objectives, mere descriptions of the process of competition and bargaining for resources and easy quotas that took place between the various ministries and state firms. Enterprises were run like personal fiefs, with managers engaging in autarky via total vertical integration, because the "planning" system was anarchic and didn't properly guide production at all, thus forcing them to produce outside the plan and use semi-official expediters to get their hands on the necessary materials.

No, in the same way sending messages to someone and then claiming you weren't while wiping your archive of any evidence apart from some mailing receipts you forget to get rid of indicates something funny might be going on.

Goodness, it's almost like you wouldn't want to be endangering the lives of other people by publicly acknowledging your correspondence with them, especially considering a paranoiac like Stalin.

Tukhachevsky was an actual fascist sympathizer and had said extremely alarming stuff in the past. What got him in trouble was making anti-semetic and pro-german remarks while drunk in Czechoslovakia. It was the Czechs that started the chain of events that lead to his execution.

There is no credible evidence that suggests Tukhachevsky was a fascist working with Germany.

Tukhachevsky's actual confession in the archives is covered in dried blood from his torture.

There were abuses by the NKVD against people like Rokossovsky, but you neglect to mention that Rokossovsky himself did not blame Stalin nor the soviet government as a whole for what the NKVD did and believed the moscow trials as a whole were legitimate.

Rokossovsky's simping for Stalin aside, his torture pointed to deep seated problems within the Soviet state, especially considering that he (seemingly?) never got any justice for it. If there was torture of prominent generals of the army, it could easily have occurred against political opponents as well, and it did.

3. Because it's true? The Germans had military and political relations with the USSR at the time as both had been cooperating under the Wiemar government to develop new weapons. It's not at all unreasonable to say that they would have known about a planned coup that involved significant parts of the military. In fact, it's more unreasonable to say they wouldn't have.

German officers thinking they could mess with the Soviet leadership and gaslight others into believing the existence of a conspiracy does not mean the Red Army was actually in cahoots with them.

4. Obviously not if you can't make a sensible argument against it.

I can, you're just stubborn as a mule.

5. Getting a job and doing work does not equal wage labor.

Do you understand what a job is in this sense? I mean do you really not? It's working in exchange for payment, i.e. a wage.

There was no change in wages with supply and demand or any type of labor market.

You are wrong on both counts.

Labor power exists as a commodity (and the commodification of labor ipso facto implies a labor market) whenever labor power is sold by the laborer to an individual employer, regardless of how the wage is specified, be it spontaneously or via administrative decree. Otherwise you can reach absurd conclusions like Denmark lacking a labor market because the government has carried out labor market policies like intervening to keeping wages stable, thus intruding on the holy domain of supply and demand. It goes with all commodities that their value-form appearance need not correspond to how their prices are actually determined.

Wage laborers in the USSR were, like all others "free" in relation to individual capitals, free to choose their own "master" in other words. They were free to work for whatever enterprise or ministry of their choosing, provided their employers would have them. The fragmented nature of Soviet capital, despite its singular juridical nature, was a fact of life, as enterprises and ministries competed against each other regularly, including for laborers. Wages were supposedly centrally determined by the state, but in practice unplanned wage inflation occurred anyway, because "these scales presented no obstacle to wage inflation because of the widespread upgrading, illegitimate use of bonus money, and other such devices. The labor market was in such a turmoil that in 1930, for example, workers in large scale industry changed jobs, on the average, more than one and one-half times a year.." (see page 176-177 of Franklyn D. Holzman (1960): "Soviet Inflationary Pressures, 1928-1957: Causes and Cures").

Such competition for wages in a market for labor was also acknowledged by other people within the Eastern Bloc: "[The] laborer enters into a contract not with the state but the enterprise... [which] can compete for labor [with other enterprises] even if the central regulation is very rigid, inasmuch as it is only the basic wage which can be determined by the planner... Wage formation is a consequence of bargaining between the workers and the enterprise management" (Péter Galasi and Endre Sík (1982): "Allocation du travail dans l'économie socialistie")

In general I would recommend you read The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience by Paresh Chattopadhyay (1994) as a step on the road to clearing up all your weird misconceptions about the economic system actually prevailing in the USSR. Certain rascals might consider looking for it on Z-Library.

If you'd read some of the stuff I've linked, you'd know that production norms were set with a great deal of influence from the workers doing the actual work. There was no wage labor market in the USSR and you have failed to provide evidence their was.

You're committing yourself to the crypto-liberal meme of workplace democracy, which is all too often emphasized by people who feel they have something to prove to liberals; in other words, those that emphasize changing who is in charge and not the actual rules of the game. It's immaterial to the existence of capital or wages.

Lastly you simultaneously criticize the USSR for not doing enough economic planning and doing too much.

I think you have thoroughly confused yourself as to anything I said.

You criticize the USSR for allowing the purchase of "government stock", which didn't happen and I challenge you to find evidence it did,

This one is an error on my part due to reading a text that was mistranslated. Properly said, what was meant was that you can buy securities, bonds, hence you could accrue interest. It was one of the regular functions of the state banks in the Soviet Union, so I feel little need to source it, but if you don't believe me...

while also criticizing the USSR for not mandating that state enterprises be profitable. What are you even doing?

You once again demonstrate a lack of understanding for anything I am saying. What I am saying is that because the USSR still followed the law of value, the arbitrary pricing of goods meant a whole host of tumors in the production process. Responses like the 1965 reform came about to address genuine problems of waste and mismanagement - problems which had resulted from the fundamentally capitalist character of production; despite attempts by Stalin at suppressing monetary forms, the law of value came right around his back and made itself known by the cracking facade.

Did the USSR plan too much or too little? Were they too socialist or not socialist enough?

You didn't understand a single thing I said, evidently.

You switch between maintaining the USSR couldn't be socialist because of the law of value doing what it wanted despite their best efforts to plan and saying that the USSR was too socialist by trying to plan their economy against economic laws.

Are black hole singularities really the densest things in the Universe? I have never, in any way whatsoever, said the USSR was "too socialist" or "planned too much", only the contrary.

[Orostan]

The USSR made the greatest leap in standard of living in history and was democratic until the fifties, and remained with democratic elements until the moment it fell. The USSR did copy stuff it's enemies did right, but that is what you do when you're behind the other guy. Both sides of the cold war were very interested in the other's technology, and you forget the USSR was the first to put a man in space, send a probe to mars, and make almost every major space race milestone. They didn't steal Sputnik from the west.

I think you ought to read this and disabuse yourself of your biased misnotions.

This is wrong and I can give you an entire book on why called Farm to Factory: A Reinterpretation of the Soviet Industrial Revolution. The USSR's economic improvements were incredible by Western estimates, and life in the USSR was hardly misery compared to what they have before and what they have today. Go sell your factually wrong propaganda to someone else.

uh based department?

Read the thread, I've proven why I don't believe any of your claims about stalin are true.

Yeah and Nazis don't believe in the Holocaust. Why should any murderous dictator fanatic's opinions of said murdering dictator be taken seriously?

Because they're facts. While there is immense evidence of the Holocaust, there is no evidence that Stalin was a 'murdering dictator'.

uh based department?

Read the thread, I've proven why I don't believe any of your claims about stalin are true.

You believe Grover Furr, a chiefly known historical denialist and revisionist.

Grover Furr whitewashed Stalin's actions and attempted to justify his horrific crimes by either blaming someone else (the Nazis did the Katyn Massacre according to him) or claiming there was an outright conspiracy against Stalin (the Great Purge).

You know what makes this worse? He's not even qualified to do this. He specializes in medieval English literature, not Soviet historiography. On top of that, he hasn't exactly been cited by any sources, and none of his work has been peer-reviewed. In essence, he's lying. Go get a better source, because I'm not going to read what amounts to nothing more than a crazed rant with the appearance of professionalism.

Irrelevant. Stop making personal attacks on the guy and address his argument, criticizing him for not having a history degree is nonsense when he can clearly put together a fact based argument better than you can. He's not a historian and he doesn't write like one but he does have the facts on his side and can prove that to you very well if you'd just read him.

[Nilokeras]

Hot take on the extended USSR discussion: the only thing worse than recapitulating the debate about the 2016 US election is recapitulating 1970's academic debates about an ideology and state that are both now very thoroughly dead and irrelevant to actually existing socialist movements today.

The worst thing the USSR did for socialism was calling itself socialist.

Eh. It's done worse things. By far now its most prominent gift to us is the small cadre of dead-enders, LARPers and *shudder* academics who apparently have nothing more productive to do in order to advance the cause of socialism than argue about 1930's wheat production yields.

[Kowani]

The worst thing the USSR did for socialism was calling itself socialist.

Eh. It's done worse things. By far now its most prominent gift to us is the small cadre of dead-enders, LARPers and *shudder* academics who apparently have nothing more productive to do in order to advance the cause of socialism than argue about 1930's wheat production yields.

...Yeah, fair point.

[Suriyanakhon]

Because they're facts. While there is immense evidence of the Holocaust, there is no evidence that Stalin was a 'murdering dictator'.

Katyn Massacre.

There's a ton of others, but I don't really care to get into them.

[Sicilian Imperial-Capitalist Empire]

Because they're facts. While there is immense evidence of the Holocaust, there is no evidence that Stalin was a 'murdering dictator'.

So those Siberian labor camps are all just fake, right?

Regardless, it seems you've forgotten the existence of the gulags. And there were many that Stalin sent political prisoners to.

Also, I'm not going to waste my breath on historical denialism, because it's clear I'm not going to change your mind with facts.

[Neanderthaland]

Because they're facts. While there is immense evidence of the Holocaust, there is no evidence that Stalin was a 'murdering dictator'.

So those Siberian labor camps that you can go to are all just fake, right?

Regardless, it seems you've forgotten the existence of the gulags. And there were many that Stalin sent political prisoners to.

All those guys who disappeared from photos were just tricks of the light.

[Sicilian Imperial-Capitalist Empire]

So those Siberian labor camps that you can go to are all just fake, right?

Regardless, it seems you've forgotten the existence of the gulags. And there were many that Stalin sent political prisoners to.

All those guys who disappeared from photos were just tricks of the light.

And all those poets that went to the gulags are all lying about their brutal prison experiences.

[Duvniask]

It really is like someone asking us to take David Irving seriously...

[Cordel One]

Not being capitalist doesn't put them on the left, Monarchists are authright too. Technocracy is on the authright and agrarianism is libleft. The political compass is extremely flawed and inaccurate but these ideologies aren't ascended. The right-left scale isn't 2-D.

Then parry this, you filthy casual: NazBol.

Auth-center-right

[Kowani]

Because they're facts. While there is immense evidence of the Holocaust, there is no evidence that Stalin was a 'murdering dictator'.

So those Siberian labor camps are all just fake, right?

Regardless, it seems you've forgotten the existence of the gulags. And there were many that Stalin sent political prisoners to.

Also, I'm not going to waste my breath on historical denialism, because it's clear I'm not going to change your mind with facts.

Not fake, just a mandatory vacation.
If they didn’t like it, they were always free to go!

(Never mind the below 0 temperature and certain death)

[Cordel One]

FINALLY! A beacon in the middle of what seems like an overly leftist website! Also nice image.

I hate to break it to you but this "beacon" has been siezed by the proletariat.

[Orostan]

No, in the same way sending messages to someone and then claiming you weren't while wiping your archive of any evidence apart from some mailing receipts you forget to get rid of indicates something funny might be going on.

Goodness, it's almost like you wouldn't want to be endangering the lives of other people by publicly acknowledging your correspondence with them, especially considering a paranoiac like Stalin.

Tukhachevsky was an actual fascist sympathizer and had said extremely alarming stuff in the past. What got him in trouble was making anti-semetic and pro-german remarks while drunk in Czechoslovakia. It was the Czechs that started the chain of events that lead to his execution.

There is no credible evidence that suggests Tukhachevsky was a fascist working with Germany.

Tukhachevsky's actual confession in the archives is covered in dried blood from his torture.

There were abuses by the NKVD against people like Rokossovsky, but you neglect to mention that Rokossovsky himself did not blame Stalin nor the soviet government as a whole for what the NKVD did and believed the moscow trials as a whole were legitimate.

Rokossovsky's simping for Stalin aside, his torture pointed to deep seated problems within the Soviet state, especially considering that he (seemingly?) never got any justice for it. If there was torture of prominent generals of the army, it could easily have occurred against political opponents as well, and it did.

3. Because it's true? The Germans had military and political relations with the USSR at the time as both had been cooperating under the Wiemar government to develop new weapons. It's not at all unreasonable to say that they would have known about a planned coup that involved significant parts of the military. In fact, it's more unreasonable to say they wouldn't have.

German officers thinking they could mess with the Soviet leadership and gaslight others into believing the existence of a conspiracy does not mean the Red Army was actually in cahoots with them.

4. Obviously not if you can't make a sensible argument against it.

I can, you're just stubborn as a mule.

5. Getting a job and doing work does not equal wage labor.

Do you understand what a job is in this sense? I mean do you really not? It's working in exchange for payment, i.e. a wage.

There was no change in wages with supply and demand or any type of labor market.

You are wrong on both counts.

Labor power exists as a commodity (and the commodification of labor ipso facto implies a labor market) whenever labor power is sold by the laborer to an individual employer, regardless of how the wage is specified, be it spontaneously or via administrative decree. Otherwise you can reach absurd conclusions like Denmark lacking a labor market because the government has carried out labor market policies like intervening to keeping wages stable, thus intruding on the holy domain of supply and demand. It goes with all commodities that their value-form appearance need not correspond to how their prices are actually determined.

Wage laborers in the USSR were, like all others "free" in relation to individual capitals, free to choose their own "master" in other words. They were free to work for whatever enterprise or ministry of their choosing, provided their employers would have them. The fragmented nature of Soviet capital, despite its singular juridical nature, was a fact of life, as enterprises and ministries competed against each other regularly, including for laborers. Wages were supposedly centrally determined by the state, but in practice unplanned wage inflation occurred anyway, because "these scales presented no obstacle to wage inflation because of the widespread upgrading, illegitimate use of bonus money, and other such devices. The labor market was in such a turmoil that in 1930, for example, workers in large scale industry changed jobs, on the average, more than one and one-half times a year.." (see page 176-177 of Franklyn D. Holzman (1960): "Soviet Inflationary Pressures, 1928-1957: Causes and Cures").

Such competition for wages in a market for labor was also acknowledged by other people within the Eastern Bloc: "[The] laborer enters into a contract not with the state but the enterprise... [which] can compete for labor [with other enterprises] even if the central regulation is very rigid, inasmuch as it is only the basic wage which can be determined by the planner... Wage formation is a consequence of bargaining between the workers and the enterprise management" (Péter Galasi and Endre Sík (1982): "Allocation du travail dans l'économie socialistie")

In general I would recommend you read The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience by Paresh Chattopadhyay (1994) as a step on the road to clearing up all your weird misconceptions about the economic system actually prevailing in the USSR. Certain rascals might consider looking for it on Z-Library.

If you'd read some of the stuff I've linked, you'd know that production norms were set with a great deal of influence from the workers doing the actual work. There was no wage labor market in the USSR and you have failed to provide evidence their was.

You're committing yourself to the crypto-liberal meme of workplace democracy, which is all too often emphasized by people who feel they have something to prove to liberals; in other words, those that emphasize changing who is in charge and not the actual rules of the game. It's immaterial to the existence of capital or wages.

Lastly you simultaneously criticize the USSR for not doing enough economic planning and doing too much.

I think you have thoroughly confused yourself as to anything I said.

You criticize the USSR for allowing the purchase of "government stock", which didn't happen and I challenge you to find evidence it did,

This one is an error on my part due to reading a text that was mistranslated. Properly said, what was meant was that you can buy securities, bonds, hence you could accrue interest. It was one of the regular functions of the state banks in the Soviet Union, so I feel little need to source it, but if you don't believe me...

while also criticizing the USSR for not mandating that state enterprises be profitable. What are you even doing?

You once again demonstrate a lack of understanding for anything I am saying. What I am saying is that because the USSR still followed the law of value, the arbitrary pricing of goods meant a whole host of tumors in the production process. Responses like the 1965 reform came about to address genuine problems of waste and mismanagement - problems which had resulted from the fundamentally capitalist character of production; despite attempts by Stalin at suppressing monetary forms, the law of value came right around his back and made itself known by the cracking facade.

Did the USSR plan too much or too little? Were they too socialist or not socialist enough?

You didn't understand a single thing I said, evidently.

You switch between maintaining the USSR couldn't be socialist because of the law of value doing what it wanted despite their best efforts to plan and saying that the USSR was too socialist by trying to plan their economy against economic laws.

Are black hole singularities really the densest things in the Universe? I have never, in any way whatsoever, said the USSR was "too socialist" or "planned too much", only the contrary.

1. Zero evidence that Stalin was paranoid.

2. I'd say testimony from people that actually knew the guy about some of the stuff he believed is good enough evidence, maybe you should read that Furr work you said you'd read earlier again?

3. Oh for sure there were problems - Stalin did a very good job at getting rid of people like Yezhov who caused the majority of them though.

4. There is a difference between being stubborn and being right. I'm right, you are stubborn.

5. Getting paid for doing a thing doesn't mean there's a labor market, a labor market is a lot larger than a guy being paid to do a thing.

6. You can't describe Soviet payment systems as wage labor because it is simply not. The Soviet state, even when it paid in piece-rate systems, paid more when productive norms were exceeded more. This is not how a capitalist wage works or even piece payment system works. There was a constant labor shortage in the USSR and if the USSR had a capitalist labor market we would expect pay to rise constantly or the country to enter major economic problems, but that never happened because the USSR wasn't a capitalist economy and didn't have a capitalist labor market. Workers changing jobs incredibly frequently makes sense in this situation because the USSR was experiencing an extreme labor shortage through a lot of its industrialization, meaning that workers could move around almost as much as they pleased because there was always work available. To prove the USSR had capitalist wages you have to prove it payed people and determined payment in an even remotely capitalist way, which you can't because it didn't.

7. So then you concede that workers in the USSR had significant control over their own workplaces?

8. You just criticized soviet planning for being inefficient while criticizing them in your response to me for not planning their enterprises enough.

9. That's very different from shares, bonds don't entitle the holder to any control over the actions of the organization whose debt it holds.

10, 11, 12. Then you don't believe the USSR could have planned its economy in the first place, correct? So what is it you want? No socialism until a magic revolution where all the workers everywhere rise up at once?

[Washington Resistance Army]

Orostan, again, you're making the big mistake all tankies do. You refuse to accept someone you support did bad things so you try to cover it up when even the official Soviet archives confirm these things happened.

Just accept Stalin had some good and some bad. You'd have much better success with stuff like "Yes Stalin's treatment of minorities was horrific and his paranoia often led to unnecessary deaths but his industrial plans also rocketed the USSR forward and greatly raised living standards" etc etc. This is just holocaust denial tier nonsense.

[Orostan]

Because they're facts. While there is immense evidence of the Holocaust, there is no evidence that Stalin was a 'murdering dictator'.

Katyn Massacre.

There's a ton of others, but I don't really care to get into them.

Done by nazi bullets in a time of year where the area was occupied by the nazis. Next question.

Because they're facts. While there is immense evidence of the Holocaust, there is no evidence that Stalin was a 'murdering dictator'.

So those Siberian labor camps are all just fake, right?

Regardless, it seems you've forgotten the existence of the gulags. And there were many that Stalin sent political prisoners to.

Also, I'm not going to waste my breath on historical denialism, because it's clear I'm not going to change your mind with facts.

Most prisoners in the gulags were never political and they were hardly death camps. Here are some actual facts on the issue written by a western historian using Soviet archival sources.

https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/8c5e/4 ... 455862.pdf

It really is like someone asking us to take David Irving seriously...

Irving made his sources up, Furr does not. They are in no way comparable.

[Orostan]

Orostan, again, you're making the big mistake all tankies do. You refuse to accept someone you support did bad things so you try to cover it up when even the official Soviet archives confirm these things happened.

Just accept Stalin had some good and some bad. You'd have much better success with stuff like "Yes Stalin's treatment of minorities was horrific and his paranoia often led to unnecessary deaths but his industrial plans also rocketed the USSR forward and greatly raised living standards" etc etc. This is just holocaust denial tier nonsense.

I have backed up every claim I have made with facts and evidence. Stalin made his mistakes, but instead of having a good discussion on that I have to defend him from people who haven't done any real research on the issue because they believe anti-communist propaganda.

[Sicilian Imperial-Capitalist Empire]

Orostan, again, you're making the big mistake all tankies do. You refuse to accept someone you support did bad things so you try to cover it up when even the official Soviet archives confirm these things happened.

Just accept Stalin had some good and some bad. You'd have much better success with stuff like "Yes Stalin's treatment of minorities was horrific and his paranoia often led to unnecessary deaths but his industrial plans also rocketed the USSR forward and greatly raised living standards" etc etc. This is just holocaust denial tier nonsense.

Exactly why I'm not going to make a proper argument against such nonsense. The official Soviet archives have been cited numerous times as evidence of Stalin's crimes (most notably, the gulag). Even non-Soviet historiographers have tried their hand at it (although I wouldn't recommend it).

And to Orostan, you have to attack the author just as much as the source. Otherwise you're not properly evaluating your sources. You have to scrutinize your sources before even thinking about using them.

I only use Wikipedia for things that are very general and should be easy to find (like perhaps an author's credentials, maybe?).

[Orostan]

Orostan, again, you're making the big mistake all tankies do. You refuse to accept someone you support did bad things so you try to cover it up when even the official Soviet archives confirm these things happened.

Just accept Stalin had some good and some bad. You'd have much better success with stuff like "Yes Stalin's treatment of minorities was horrific and his paranoia often led to unnecessary deaths but his industrial plans also rocketed the USSR forward and greatly raised living standards" etc etc. This is just holocaust denial tier nonsense.

Exactly why I'm not going to make a proper argument against such nonsense. The official Soviet archives have been cited numerous times as evidence of Stalin's crimes (most notably, the gulag). Even non-Soviet historiographers have tried their hand at it (although I wouldn't recommend it).

And to Orostan, you have to attack the author just as much as the source. Otherwise you're not properly evaluating your sources. You have to scrutinize your sources before even thinking about using them.

I only use Wikipedia for things that are very general and should be easy to find (like perhaps an author's credentials, maybe?).

Prove it. I've given you plenty of archival sources and writings based on that which you refuse to read because you are wrong.

[Exalted Inquellian State]

Because they're facts. While there is immense evidence of the Holocaust, there is no evidence that Stalin was a 'murdering dictator'.

Katyn Massacre.

There's a ton of others, but I don't really care to get into them.[/quote]
Done by nazi bullets in a time of year where the area was occupied by the nazis. Next question.

.[/quote]
It was done in Tver and Kharkiv using captured polish troops, with the graves dug in Katyn, during 1940, when Barbarossa hadn't even started.

[Debate Proxy 1]

What I'm saying is that divisions of labor are natural, or at least that there is a tendency of nature toward them. I can't continue tonight because very tired, and will have to check in another day, but basically, societies that lack them have a difficult time being economically competitive and productive. When faced with influxes of products from societies that do have them, or even the arising of one somewhere if we assumed the whole world to go classless and stateless, the people who knew how to invent rare products and organize these time-efficient labor divisions would gain (a) popular support from the introduction of that product (as the Indian fur trade showed) and (b) get people signing on for inequality because that is the only way to produce said product, or get it fixed for that matter.

You can see where that goes: initial market inequality -> eventual full capitalism.

It's rooted in genetics. Some people have better memories, intelligences, learning capacities than others, and will always find a way to leverage a position of influence or providership of inventions/reinventions to unskilled and semi-skilled labor for personal benefit, even when you hit a classless society.

The Handicapper General would like to know your location.

The Handicapper General would like to know your location.

*cocks shotgun*

Oh, look. People actually want me dead for expressing an opinion instead of coming up with a reasoned refutation of the plain, observable fact that some people are born more intelligent than others.

Will you dare make the same threat to James Madison if he were alive? He made the exact, same argument in the Federalist #10 that I linked in my sig.

This is why people like me believe so strongly in our right to self-defense when threatened with violence.