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7 months agoWait so you do agree USSR was a party oligarchy?
Both the pot and the kettle are black cause they are covered in soot.
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They call Soviet leadership a party oligarchy in both cases. They do not “agree” with you in any way shape or form.
Fucking hell, the editor did not save my message again.
TL;DR
Having a referendum to ratify constitutional changes is a thing in a large number of countries. It’s not out of the ordinary.
The Congress of Soviets was removed with the 1936 constitution. Supreme Soviet took its place. Supreme Soviet was elected directly, but all ballots had only a single candidate. You can try to look up a picture of a ballot - they all have a single name on them. There is one picture of a ballot template with 3 names, but that’s it.
The candidates in the ballots would be nominated on meetings of industrial plant and factory staff. Meetings are not elections. Meetings is when you sit and listen to the management read out their decisions.
There Supreme Soviet would convene a few times per year for a week or less. All other time there would be ~40 guys from the Presidium who would take on its duties.
There are stenograms of sessions available in Russian.. I can read Russian. What I’m reading is:
- The single-candidate ballots seem to be a norm, as one of the sessions mentions ~7000 ballots “with crossed out candidate names” out of ~1 million votes. Crossing out is how you vote on those ballots, it’s written above the right column, and you have to cross all but one name. If there are only 0.7% of crossed out ballots, that means all of the ballots had only 1 name on them.
- All of the decisions I read through have been accepted, ratified, voted on completely unanimously. No “nays”, no abstentions. This whole thing is just a glorified green stamp.
- A lot of time is spent on speeches. None of those speeches show any dissent. E.g. when Molotov is talking about friendly relationships with Nazi Germany and Italy in 1940, there’s zero dissent.
Supreme Soviet was officially the highest legislative authority in the country. It was an undemocratic sham.
No it didn’t [have those other interpretations].
It did, but I don’t want to argue about that. It’s all semantics and sophistry and we’re past that anyway.
Regarding what CIA means by “collective leadership”:
https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-01446R000100020012-2.pdf
It is entirely possible that the Soviet leaders are about to develop a new form of “dictatorship by committee”, giving them the advantage of appearing to be quasi-democratic.
When we speak of collective leadership, we mean a committee of a very few men, probably not more than five or six. The larger the membership, the greater the likelihood that fractionalization may occur, dividing the committee into antagonistic groups.
Okay mister Bolshevik. What you write is contrary to everything that I’ve read about soviet governance, but I guess I’ll just have to take your word for it.
I am neither a mister nor a Bolshevik. If you don’t know the meaning of “collective leadership”, then it’s on you.
The collective west is currently taking part in an active genocide, out in the open for all to see. But gommunism bad holodomor vuvuzela no iPhone. We can’t upset the genocidal ruling class now, can we?
Are you having a stroke?
You only need to placate and disarm a class if they become a threat to your power.
Or you want to push them further to achieve your goals.
Or there’s a threat of external forces using internal disorder for their purposes.
Why is this important?
Your original statement - “compelled to by democratic forces” - was implying (maybe accidentally), that those forces have at least partial power in the government. It sounded similar to the social democratic idea of “The workers have a say in the government, so they vote for things they desire”.
Your newer statement - “become a threat to your power” - is then paralleled with “success in class conflict”. Both imply there’s a strong workers’ movement making demands. What I want to point out is that it is not necessarily the case, as there are often other pressures at play which don’t directly involve the labor movement.
USSR had both a need for a compliant workforce to simplify the execution of economic plans and a great threat of external hostile forces leveraging internal strife, both of which made it a very appealing option to keep the working class as non-threatening as possible.
[Proofs and indicators] do not at all [serve similar goal rhetorically]
You don’t need to explain to me how formal proofs work. However, I was talking about rhetoric, not logic.
When you are talking to a person or a group of people and say things like:
- “The use of word ‘degeneracy’ implies fascist beliefs”
- “The desire for class collaboration is a proof of fascism”
- “The obsession with a plotting Other suggest fascist ideology”
All of these serve the same goal in your speech. It tells people around:
“Because of X you should believe that person is a fascist”.
My point is that it doesn’t matter whether you used “proof” or “indication”, that either of them would be there to have a person read about the USSR’s welfare policies and go “Hm, I guess USSR was actually democratic”.
Your original sarcastic comment had other possible interpretations: “democracy is a meaningless term”, or “democracy is secondary to well-being of the populace”, but these are even more reactionary than the welfare-democracy one, and your following response suggested that was the one you intended.
So far, you have yet to explain how exactly the USSR under Stalin was not democratic
I’ve been waiting for you to explain the contrary, as your only point to that so far was the welfare one. You also haven’t yet explained what meaning of “democracy” you subscribe to, as you have suggested you don’t believe the welfare explanation. It would be a waste of time for me to present a refutal, only for you to not believe in its core, thus rendering all the work futile.
You have managed to miss both the point of the joke and my explanation of it
I know you were sarcastic in the original comment, which is why I asked you to make an actual point.
They key points of your response were:
A state only does welfare policies when it is compelled to by democratic forces.
The USSR [did a lot of welfare]
these policies … are certainly a strong indicator [of democracy]
The first point you’re wrong on, as I have explained.
The second point I agree on.
The third point you are again wrong on, as examples I’ve provided demonstrate.
Both proofs and indicators serve similar goals rhetorically, I don’t see the point of your distinction here. I also didn’t say “proof” when criticizing your point:
Your “welfare implies democracy” take
Now going further.
Oh, was the USSR under Stalin fascist then?
I have no idea what led you to think I’m saying this, stop being defensive. It did do some things that, if were done by a western liberal government, would’ve lead to accusations of fascism, but that is beside the point.
Was it simply “placating” and “disarming” the working population?
That is correct, however; both figuratively and literally.
Nobody but the most dumbass of ultras can pretend
Now you’re just posturing. Please stop.
Even in Stalin’s time there was collective leadership
Collective leadership is rule of the Politbureau - a group of ~10 party officials, of the Council of Ministers - a group of 7 bureaucrats, and of the Central Committee - a group of several dozen party officials, picked by the leadership from the GenSec’s loyalists. Stalin held presiding positions in all three.
Party oligarchy is different from a one-man dictatorship, and CIA agrees on that.
I don’t know how that helps your point though.
Your username looks particularly funny in the context. I hope you know why.
A state only does welfare policies when it is compelled to by democratic forces.
Correction: by the need to disarm and pacify the proletariat, when class rule becomes too threatened. German Empire is a good example. Nobody would dare to call Bismarck’s rule “democratic”
And you’re still describing welfare. Most SocDems I know support things like this or similar ones, and food subsidies are done by many liberal governments, irrelevant of the democratic status.
using a different definition of a word that a community clearly does not use
I agree, MLs have long abandoned what communism was supposed to mean.
don’t remember making any references to “the will of the people”
I mean, your schpiel about welfare implying democracy is kinda it. You still haven’t made neither communist ties to mode of production, nor more liberal ties to the electoral structure. You’re only pushing the welfare angle.
Monarchs wanting to keep the populace docile, like in modern Saudi Arabia or in the German Empire would often implement welfare, and it would be ridiculous to call that in any way a democracy. However fascists often define “democracy” as the ruler following the will of the people, which is shown through fulfilling certain needs of the population, like food, healthcare, housing. Your “welfare implies democracy” take runs parallel to that idea, and can be argued to be a slight repackaging of the reactionary concept.
would make me a “liberal-fascist”
That is not how it works. It is possible to believe fascist things while being a liberal and to believe liberal and fascist things while being a socialist. The point is not that you are that shitty thing, but that you should change your position from the wrong one to the right one.
So democracy to you is when a state does SocDem welfare policies?
I would understand if, as a purported socialist, you wanted to tie democracy to communism, as bourgeois democracy democratizes only the superstrucure, and even that one just partially. But that tie-in would clearly be hard to accept if you wanted to argue for USSR being democratic, as it was far from a stateless classless moneyless society.
Still - why social democracy? Why welfare? It’s kinda of a weird choice, unless you tie the idea of democracy to the liberal-fascist “will of the people” concept. But that would imply very bad things about your views, friend.
There are multiple ways to interpret this. I have no interest in guessing.
State your point.
And what if it is? You seem to be fine with continuing on so far.
You keep thanking me time and time again. Is this a kink thing?
Have you been to meetings with management? I used to work at a government-run place in Belarus. The meetings were precisely as what I described them. I had a longer explanation typed out, but then lost it; I might redo it at a later date.
I wanted to know the reason behind you thinking it was democratic. The first reason you gave was the welfare. I’ve provided several reasons which were true for USSR at the time for why they would want to keep the proletariat pacified and disarmed. Speaking of which, the proletariat was literally disarmed in 1924.
The second reason you gave is the electoral system. So now we’re talking about the electoral system.
US House and Senate are in session approximately 150(+/-20) days a year, for most weeks there’s at least one day they’re in session. There’s also not a separate group which makes decisions for the rest of the parliament in the meantime.
You have the link now. You can always ask someone else to look through them for you to verify if I’m right or wrong. You can also ask me - pick out any session of any convocation out there and I will get you a translation of at least the key points, the votes, stuff like that.
Ok, I think I was vague here. There are reports, there are congratulations, there are suggestions. I don’t see any discussions, nor appeals, nor debates. I don’t see disagreement. What I see is a lot of self-congratulation. Even if I can’t prove it by giving you an authoritative translation here and now, you will remember this characterization and it will sit there in your head when you’ll hear similar things in the future.
You would be right to do so, as what I meant and keep meaning when I talk here was only the speeches I looked through, which is only like 5 or 6, picked randomly from random sessions of the 1st convocation (I think we’re both would be mostly interested in the 1st convocation, as that is the one which lasted from 1937 to 1945). One of the sessions I clicked was the 7th session, which had the Molotov’s speech - I stumbled upon it mostly by chance. Being friendly with the Nazi state would be an obviously contentious topic among leftists, so it piqued my interest to see the Soviet’s reaction to the report. Which is also why I mentioned it to you - it’s much easier to disregard absence of dissent on a matter of industrial or agricultural administration than on this topic.
I will try to summarize the part of the speech which pertains to the Nazis here. You’re free to disregard it as me bs-ing you.
This is only a part of the larger report on foreign policy, but I would still expect there to be some voices of concern regarding the shit Nazis were doing, or the fact that the report puts the blame for the war and its continuation on primarily UK and USA and their “imperialist ambitions”. The “peace or destruction” threat from Hitler’s July 19th speech is framed as a humble peace offer, which the greedy Britain has unreasonable refused. The cutting ties with the Nazi puppet Vichy is framed as Britain abandoning its former ally. No mention of persecution of Jews by the Nazis. Also neither terms “Nazi”, “National Socialist”, nor Hitler’s name appear in the report - he’s referred to as “the reichschancellor”.
Not all of these things I would expect from Molotov’s report itself - but I would be appalled if there was no other delegates to point at least one of the things I’ve outlined.
Instead, the report was accepted unanimously and without any debate.
The stenogram link for that place precisely
This phrase is everywhere in those stenograms. No against, no abstentions, accepted.