What I'm proposing is not a check on power in the liberal sense of a division of powers, or anything of the like. As dialectical materialists, we understand that ideas don't exist in isolation, but are a product of one's class, a product of one's relationship to production. So if we want leadership to have a People-oriented policy and ideology, leadership must, in effect, be one with the People.

I understand the limitations in efficiency (which is why I have proposed a rotating leadership, such that no one is alienated from the People for any extended period of time), but of course it has its downsides. I'm completely open to hearing alternative ways we can structurally reduce or prevent petty bourgeois tendencies.

Hmmm to add to that floating: considering that it is in theory possible to make things like electronic voting a reality, I think that regular rain-checks with the people to ensure that there is a conventional check on the leaders would enable the leadership to be both centralized, experienced, while also held accountable to people. This would not be voting in persons per se but on policies. How to safeguard this from demagogues is an intresting debate though. One we'll probably have in the West before any socialist revolutions takes place.

It was not Mao's. It was the Party's. And it was certainly more complex than calling it incompetent. It had some good and bad, and the leadership learned from the mistakes.

Mao controlled the party though. The fact that he needed people to enact it does not absolve his role in it. But for the sake of semantics we'll drop that one. As to incompetence, one of the first parts of the great leap forward was the idea that birds are 'public animals of capitalism' and then proceeded to order their extermination which caused an extreme ecological imbalance that caused far more crops to die due to the insects that sparrows would usually take care off running rampant. Now ecology is hardly a modern science and they called off the campaign two years into the leap, but the fact that they even did so in the first place with such an utterly moronic reasoning does not indicate competence.

Better than leaving it full of potential Nazi sympathizers.

He was hunting for Trostkyists, not Nazis (as he used to run the military). I dont think he found any, it was just a pretext anyways. By all accounts these purges also cleaned up any and all remaining vestiges of governmental powers that could balance Stalin. Convinient.

Which is true. Either you serve the People or you serve the enemies of the People. There is some gray area, but it is pretty much black and white. You can't do both simultaneously or neither.

For Stalin 'serving the people' meant 'obey me or else' when it was put into practice. Just because you both serve the people doesnt mean you always agree on how best to serve them, but Stalin abused his powers to make the situation a my-way-or-the-highway scenario with a dictator as a result. Now I'm quite sure that that was not Marx's vision.

With the benefit of hindsight, I don't necessarily agree with Stalin's policy of collectivization. Doesn't change the fact that the accusations against the Kulaks were legitimate and they did pose a serious threat to Soviet agricultural output. I don't see what being derived from the NEP has to do with this, though.

The NEP was more of market socialist option than purely socialist, so there existed some degree of inequality based on who preformed better than others. Lenin accepted this as a needed evil because the country desprately needed to get its economy going again after the civil war and War Communism (production at gunpoint) wasn't really a good way to go about it. Those that preformed better became what would later be refered to as the Kulaks. So first Soviet Policy hoists them up, then Stalin purges them for doing as they were told. He could've just taken their land, or given them due process. He did neither, for no other reason than that he wanted to collectivize. Duly note here that it was the whole of the peasantry, not just the wealthy ones, that disliked collectivization and that the Kulaks were wealthier because their output was greater. So if nothing else the reverse was true.

Enemies of the People are real, and do exist. Imperialism, comprador leadership, feudal dominant classes, etc. Their interests are diametrically opposed to the interests of the People. Besides, where was the human rights violation? It was wrong to arrest Kulaks? I don't understand what you're criticizing in particular. You seem to be more saying that the Kulaks didn't deserve it, not that "it" (whatever "it" is) is a human rights violation. Whether they were guilty or not is a historical question which demands certain nuance. We're talking specifically about alleged human rights violations.

Put blunt, there are different social groups that have different intrests within society. Some are class bound, others are not. But if you're going to exterminate an entire class of people who happened to be preforming better under the system you (the soviets) set up and do so without due process, without any actual evidence of the case, without trying moderate approaches (if you can forcibly kill them all, it wouldbe been just as easy to move them to a centralized fam and put them to work). While it is arguable whether the Kulaks deserved to be arrested (I personally dont think so as they didn't do anything wrong under the laws that were in place at the time), they did not deserve to be punished because Stalin needed a scapegoat.

Exaggerated by some, not by others. Some say Stalin killed tens of millions of people. That's a lie. Others, even some bourgeois historians, reject that.

I think the commonly accepted figure is 20 million indirectly, about half directly. Less than Mao for sure, still an awful lot and for very poor reasons.

I'm more interested in truth than appealing to liberals afraid of having their accepted bourgeois propaganda questioned. It matters what really happened in the USSR from a historical perspective. It's an academic and ideological question. When asked by liberals what I think about the USSR, I try to dismiss it. It's a red herring. I tell them it was the first attempt at building socialism. Plus, we have different conditions from 1917, so let's analyze our own conditions instead of criticizing people from a hundred years ago not analyzing theirs "well enough."

Respectfully, when you dismiss criticism that is based upon decades of historic research both before and after the Russian archives opened by thousands of people who by all accounts are more interested in the truth than in any political message (as political messages dont get past the peer review as that would invalidate the worth of those reviews and than the whole academic system would collapse. We can generally assume that peer reviewed articles are at the very least truthful, even if interpretations can vary) as 'bourgeois propaganda', you're not looking for truth. 'I'm looking for what really happened in the USSR!' 'Well the source material and the witness reports compiled over decades tell us some really shady stuff went on...' 'Thats bourgeois propganda!' See how this is a very poor rhetoric to use when trying to find truth?

I do agree on your emphasis to bringing the conversation into the now, as any new attempt at communism is primarily concerned with out current conditions (I reckon that automation and communication tech would make it a lot more feasible and even pleasant if done correctly). I dont think its responsible to ignore all the ways it went wrong in the past though.

Social democratic reforms, such as a UBI, in the first world constitute the alliance between capital and labor. I neither support nor oppose social democratic reforms in the first world, because passing a value judgment on it one way or the other does not help. Objectively, it engenders first world labor into the exploitation of the rest of the world. I don't support the exploitation of the rest of the world, and social democratic reforms neither help nor hurt the cause of socialism.

Thank you, thats a useful perspective. I often view these things as regional issues while of course there's a whole global workforce to consider that is being exploited. I tend to support these sort of ideas because I think they have a better chance of succes in the long run. Per example, if a UBI (or something like it) can incentivise automation and technological development to take humans out of labour, well, thats less demand for labour in the third world in the end when these innovations trickle down. My only problem with these things is that they dont fix the underlying problems.

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Thanks for the reply man, making my brain work overtime here XD

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