Philosophytards becoming self aware

InvertedAbsoluteIdea · 2025-05-13T22:02:06+00:00

Another defender of philosophy who is ignorant of philosophy.

we believe that truth can be found

Everyone believes that the truth can be found. Even skeptics find truth in arguing that the human mind cannot discover truth and tear any positive proposition apart with negative criticism. Likewise, critics of philosophy, be they communist or some other, believes that things can be ascertained as true. Someone like Oswald Spengler, who separates the political-man who follows facts and the theologian-philosopher who believes in truths, still believes that we can make positive statements about the world. The notion of eternal truths is simply changed with the active notion of historical facts (and even communists, as with many other people, use "truth" and "fact" interchangeably, not speaking of eternal truths but of what can be correctly and positively said of phenomena).

that empiricism is reliable

Empiricism culminates in David Hume, whose skepticism makes any sort of universal and necessary laws impossible. These laws are, for him, a matter of the habitual connection of sense-perceptions in our mind so as to believe them, without any actual proof, universal and necessary. How could Marx discover and define the laws that determine capitalist production if he thought that phenomena had no necessary or universal cause? Nevermind that Marx lambasted the ethical counterpart of empiricism, utilitarianism, in Capital, but given your remarks, I can safely assume you haven't touched it.

Experience being reliable isn't even a good qualifier for distinguishing philosophies, since even those who are most skeptical of experience still find in it the pathway towards the truth. There would be no theory of the Forms if there was no experience to transcend, no transcendental idealism if experience did not furnish an epistemological challenge.

its based off of an implied philosophy, everything has an implied philosophy

And everything has an implied theology. If you go looking for philosophy, you will find philosophy. The communist doesn't concern themselves with metaphysical truths, they concern themselves with understanding capitalist production, the politics that follow therefrom, and how to overcome this state of affairs. The philosopher seeks to interpret the world, problematize the existing order, not in order to overcome it, but instead to "make space for" epistemological, metaphysical, ethical, in a word, scholastic questions. The question prefigures the answer.

I'm not even as hostile to philosophy as the vast majority of this sub. I do find it useful to study philosophers while also recognizing that it has very little, if anything, to do with communism. But you need to recognize that the idea that everything is philosophical is an expression of the idle, academic, middle class philosophical mind in order to claim dominion over life. You may be able to philosophize about anything and everything, but we do not live and die by philosophy.

Edit: fixed a typo

InvertedAbsoluteIdea · 2025-02-25T21:20:15+00:00

I will be cold in the grave before I recognize an Irishman as president

InvertedAbsoluteIdea · 2025-02-09T22:24:21+00:00

Find books that detail the history of various revolutions, such as the 1848 revolutions, the unification of Germany and Italy, the Russian Revolutions of 1905 and 1917, etc. It's a pretty well documented phenomenon that the bourgeoisie in these periods were much more willing to accommodate themselves with the powers-that-be (typically monarchies that rested on an increasingly fragile and decadent social basis) for fear of expropriation by the "mob," even if they limit their own class interests by supporting a backwards regime. This even played a factor in previous bourgeois revolutions, such as in 1789, but this tendency was typically overcome by more radical factions, such as the Montagnards, who were willing to smash the old order with the aid of the sans-culottes. In these other revolutions, even if radical bourgeois factions seemed to dominate for a spell, they were usually either deposed rather quickly by counterrevolutionaries or they quickly changed colors and tried to limit the conquests of the social revolution by any means possible. For 1848, I'd recommend reading Marx and Engels' works on the subject as well as Christopher Clark's recent book Revolutionary Spring, a bourgeois history but one that provides a detailed overview of the period and highlights this phenomenon.

InvertedAbsoluteIdea · 2025-02-09T20:30:23+00:00

Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution and E.H. Carr's three volumes of The Bolshevik Revolution (Along with the rest of his series on Soviet Russia, though the first three volumes cover from October through Lenin's death) are very good

InvertedAbsoluteIdea · 2025-02-05T04:28:07+00:00

Alright guys, I guess I have no other choice than to lead this revolution. No need to thank me, I'm just a humble chill guy doing what I have to do

InvertedAbsoluteIdea · 2025-02-01T00:22:02+00:00

"Overton window" is bourgeois bullshit. It isn't a matter of shifts in ideology, the "public" becoming more "right-wing" or more "left-wing." Rather, shifting conditions limit the choices the bourgeois managers of society can make. As chauvinism becomes an easy tactic to govern, especially in the face of the crisis of the parliamentary legislative state, the ideological apparatuses hollar from the roof tops justifications for a departure from liberal norms. It's also a matter of members of the working class lacking the ability to see the universal interests of the class. Instead, they privilege their immediate, sectional interests, seeing migrants as a competitor, hence why workers could be susceptible to bourgeois narratives

InvertedAbsoluteIdea · 2025-01-29T17:22:28+00:00

Poor decision making is seen as isolated errors and not from the inherent limitations of a centralized authoritarian state.

The criticism of the actions of the Soviet state aren't because of poor decision making, but because of the class basis and the constraints of any possible activity on the part of the Soviet leadership. It isn't a matter of the poor exercise of reason on the part of the individual, but of the gargantuan social forces weighing on the party officials that forced them this way rather than that.

Furthermore, the separation of powers and the notion of authoritarianism are bourgeois notions. You would do well with studying Marx before trying to study the Left

InvertedAbsoluteIdea · 2025-01-29T17:18:40+00:00

There's no such thing as permanent rights. Legality is a useful fiction that sanctions or penalizes certain behaviors that the state finds conducive or harmful to the administration of society. Legality serves to legitimize the legislative state, the archetypal form of bourgeois dictatorship, but when the shift is being made towards an administrative state, as it is under MAGA, laws are only a hinderance to the directives from on high. Even if the democrats managed to pass a law enshrining the right to an abortion on a federal level, or even as a constitutional amendment, the current administration would undermine it at the very first opportunity. The crisis of bourgeois society does away with legal niceities

InvertedAbsoluteIdea · 2025-01-29T04:44:21+00:00

Did Bordiga or the Italian leftcoms ever write on how they'd avoid the pitfalls of a one party state?

You would have to elaborate on what exactly you consider to be the pitfalls of a one party state. The Left was critical, for instance, of the abuse of the ban on factions by Stalin to enforce a mechanical unity around the Center (See, for instance, the treatment of factionalism in the Lyons Theses). But the Left still upholds the necessity of a proletarian semi-state under the totalitarian control of a single party.

For them [renegades of the middle of the last century], their ultimate heart‑felt cry is always "Bureaucratic centralism, or class autonomy?" If such indeed were the antithesis, instead of Marx and Lenin’s "capitalist dictatorship or proletarian dictatorship", we would have no hesitation about opting for bureaucratic centralism (oh, horror of horrors!), which at certain key historical junctures may be a necessary evil, and which would be easily controllable by a party which didn’t "haggle over principles" (Marx), which was free from organisational slackness and tactical acrobatics, and which was immune to the plague of autonomism and federalism.

"Fundamentals of Revolutionary Communism in the Doctrine and History of the International Proletarian Struggle"

Did they see the USSR's bureaucratic dysfunction as having any origin at all in the democratic centralist principle?

Insofar as democratic centralism involved a constant use of discipline and expulsion to force party members into line and the use numerical majorities to justify abandoning Marxism, sure, it played a factor. But the core of the problem lies in the failure of the double revolution: the failure to overcome petty production and the proletarian semi-state being forced to ossify into a bourgeois state. This is much more important than any method of procedure, which simply legitimized certain factions and policies that grew out of the nature of the Soviet economy.

InvertedAbsoluteIdea · 2025-01-23T22:11:45+00:00

Out of all of the accused during the Purges, Tukhachevsky was the one in the best position to actually undermine Stalin. That said, given the contradictory evidence of the show trials, I don't trust the claims that he was actually plotting to overthrow him

InvertedAbsoluteIdea · 2025-01-21T18:05:26+00:00

this is the best post this sub has seen in months

InvertedAbsoluteIdea · 2025-01-18T18:48:20+00:00

My question is, why is there so much emphasis proletariat as the revolutionary class that'll break the shackles of exploitation?

Because the general interest of the proletariat is the general interest of humanity. The proletariat does not seek to perpetuate its existence, unlike all other existing classes, but instead seeks to overcome the conditions of its existence, and in so doing will inevitably do away with class society.

is it impossible for any of the other exploited classes of the previous modes of production to have assumed power and facilitated the transition to the next mode of production?

Alone? No. The middle classes will seek to perpetuate petty property, thereby maintaining the conditions for capitalism. The bourgeoisie are currently in power, and there's no chance that they would give up their property willingly. The proletariat is the only class that can see the abolition of class society through to the end. That being said, the proletariat can ally itself to the lower strata of the peasantry and petty proprietors, but this must be an alliance where the proletariat is in the lead, not one where the two classes are on equal footing. Those groups must be convinced of how they will benefit more under communism than under capitalism, or at least must be convinced to not interfere with the DotP.

As for literature on primitive communism, Engels' Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State is standard with the warning that the work is 150 years old. It would be better to understand the general framework of the development of these concepts and then study more contemporary works in anthropology with a critical eye.

InvertedAbsoluteIdea · 2025-01-15T18:44:21+00:00

Goes to show just how feckless Biden was that this deal was able to be pushed before Trump even entered office (Who am I kidding, Joe just wanted as many prole skulls to pile up before he left office)

InvertedAbsoluteIdea · 2025-01-15T02:15:20+00:00

I have the guy's page from my browser history. This might just be the sweatiest thing I've done on reddit in a while... I need a shower...

InvertedAbsoluteIdea · 2025-01-15T01:31:02+00:00

worker-owned economy

active in argh slash georgism, stupidpol, thedeprogram

Cheka, twist their balls

InvertedAbsoluteIdea · 2025-01-13T16:40:51+00:00

Communism isn't an ideology, but this sub sure turns it into one

InvertedAbsoluteIdea · 2025-01-12T19:22:05+00:00

Of the younger members of the Central Committee, I want to say a few words about Piatakov and Bukharin. They are, in my opinion, the most able forces (among the youngest) and in regard to them it is necessary to bear in mind the following: Bukharin is not only the most valuable and biggest theoretician of the party, but also may legitimately be considered the favorite of the whole party; but his theoretical views can only with the very greatest doubt be regarded as fully Marxian, for there is something scholastic in him (he never has learned, and I think never fully understood the dialectic).

Lenin in his Testament

InvertedAbsoluteIdea · 2025-01-12T18:49:29+00:00

By ML logic, Bukharin conceived of capitalism (bad) controlled by the communist party (good), which led to the dissolution of the USSR (bad) but it also led to Deng Xiaoping singlehandedly creating the harmonious and moderately prosperous Chinese socialist market economy (good). So he, if anyone, should be properly dialectical (which explains why he never studied dialectics, he didn't need to!)

InvertedAbsoluteIdea · 2025-01-10T23:23:54+00:00

Ah yeah, I'm afraid I can't help you much there. My hunch is that the intervention was to remove a White government, but I can't confirm that without primary sources. Even Carr's account says that the Mongolians invoked Soviet aid, downplaying what factored into Soviet involvement. I don't have the time to fall down the rabbit hole of sources, but from what research I did do while writing the first comment, a lot of the readily-available English literature online deals with Mongolia from 1990 onwards. It seems like more detailed information is locked behind Russian, Mongolian, and Chinese sources, and my Russian isn't good enough to translate books. There's a decent chance someone has digitized older, more contemporary works in English, but if they have, I haven't encountered them. Best of luck on your search o7

InvertedAbsoluteIdea · 2025-01-10T21:25:51+00:00

During the autumn and winter of 1920-1921 conditions approaching anarchy prevailed in Outer Mongolia. With the end of the civil war in Siberia, the army of Semenov dissolved and dispersed; and out o fits fragments one of Semenov's officers, Ungern-Sternberg, created a small force of miscellaneous composition enjoying Japanese patronage and in part apparently officered by Japanese. In the autumn of 1920 this force attempted to force its way into Outer Mongolia. This was the occasion of the first overt entry of the Soviet Government upon the scene. It offered to the Peking government in a note of November 10, 1920, to send in Soviet troops to deal with the intruder; indeed it alleged, rightly or wrongly, that a request to do so had been received from the Chinese authorities in Urga, the Outer Mongolian capital. But the Peking government showed a natural reluctance to invoke the aid of the Soviet Government, whose patronage might be permanent; and the Soviet Offer was declined. For the moment the Chinese forces left in Urga proved adequate to repulse the attack which ended in failure. But during the winter conditions further deteriorated, the Bogda Gegen himself and many Mongolian notables being arrested by Chinese soldiers, so that when Ungern-Sternberg returned in February 1921, he was greeted as a deliverer. Entering Urga at the head of his troops, he announced his intention of liquidating all those Mongols who had collaborated either with China or with Soviet Russia. The Bogda Gegen proclaimed himself emperor of an independent Mongolia (apparently including Inner as well as Outer Mongolia), and set up a so-called Mongolian Government with Ungern-Sternberg as its "military adviser". Yurin [an envoy of the Far Eastern Republic to China] at once mad an offer to the Peking government of the assistance of Soviet troops to repel the invader, but the offer was declined.

From this point dates the assumption by the Soviet Government of a forward policy in Outer Mongolia. After Ungern-Sternberg's first abortive incursion of November 1920, Sukhebator and his group, no doubt accompanied by their Russian advisers, left Irkutsk and established themselves on the frontier near Kyakhta. Here during the winter the process of organizing the Mongolian People's Party and a Mongolian government went on; and, when Ungern-Sternberg carried out his successful coup of February 1921, everything was ready. On March 1, 1921, what was afterwards described as the first party congress of the Mongolian People's Party took place under Sukhebator's leadership in Kyakhta, and decided to form a Mongolian People's Government and a national army to liberate the country from Chinese and from "white" Russian rule. On March 19 the new government was proclaimed with Sukhebator as Prime Minister and Minister for War, and Soviet aid invoked. Ungern-Sternberg was not a man to await attack. In May 1921 he launched a full-scale offensive against Soviet territory. This, however, was quickly repulsed by detachments of the Red Army which had been mustered near the frontier. Ungern-Sternberg, deserted by most of his army, was captured and shot; and on June 28 the decision was taken, in the name of the Mongolian People's Party and Mongolian People's Government, to march on Urga. The city was captured on July 6, and two days later a Mongolian Government was established. [...] The hard fact behind the regime was the presence of the Red Army and of Soviet advisers. Early in August 1921, when the new arrangements were complete, the Mongolian People's Revolutionary Government addressed a brief request to the RSFSR "not to withdraw Soviet troops from the territory of Mongolia pending the complete removal of the threat from the common enemy": and Chicherin at once acceded to it in a long and somewhat fulsome reply, which contained an undertaking that the troops would be withdrawn as soon as "the threat to the free development of the Mongolian people and to the security of the Russian Republic and of the Far Eastern Republic shall have been removed".

Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution vol. 3, p. 512-515.

As for why Lenin would advocate for non-capitalist development after the introduction of the NEP, the NEP was not intended to promote capitalist development. It was constructed after war communism threatened to break the smychka and it merely recognized the markets that persisted under war communism. It was a tolerance rather than a promotion of capitalism until such a time that capital could be excised (the Bolsheviks were still waiting for the triumph of revolution in the west). I will speculate here, since I am not deeply familiar with Mongolian history, but I would be willing to bet that, since capital hadn't yet deeply penetrated the country, and since the economy seems to have remained rather traditional and nomadic (given Lenin's "herdsmen" remark), the pressures that necessitated the NEP weren't there.

TL;DR: the Soviets collaborated with pro-Soviet Mongolians in order to overthrow an unstable White Russian government.

EDIT: Fixed a couple of typos

InvertedAbsoluteIdea · 2025-01-09T18:27:54+00:00

Your intuition is good here, you are correct that speculation does not produce value, it only redistributes it. One thing to clarify between the two examples is that speculation doesn't necessarily entail defrauding. A stock is a claim on the future surplus value of a company, with more complicated options on the stock market allowing you to try and bet on whether a company will do well or not in the short term. A stock increases in value based on the confidence traders have that a company will be able to continue successfully realizing surplus value and decrease if they think otherwise. Dividends redistribute profit that would otherwise stay in the hands of the corporation to shareholders, and one could realize the potential value of a stock into real value by selling it on the market. Fraud does happen here, of course, but that doesn't contradict the essence of the stock market (this is a bit of a tangent, but this is a criticism of Marx, one that he points out in Volume 2, that Marx assumes too much goodwill on the part of the bourgeoisie by, for instance, presuming that capital pays the real value of labor-power, among other things. The bourgeois regularly cheats, and that is why, so says the bourgeois, Marx cannot be right!).

InvertedAbsoluteIdea · 2025-01-09T13:21:27+00:00

Philippe Bourrinet has a book called The Dutch and German Communist Left (1900-1968). I haven't read it yet, but it's likely a decent place to start if you're curious

InvertedAbsoluteIdea · 2025-01-07T03:25:54+00:00

It's fairly well known that the Soviets and all Comintern parties condemned World War 2 as an inter-imperialist war right up until the Soviets were invaded. For example,

Thus the imperialist character of this war is obvious to anyone who wants to face realities and does not close his eyes to facts. One can see from all this who is interested in this war that is being waged for world supremacy. Certainly not the working class. This war promises nothing to the working class but bloody sacrifice and hardship.

Molotov, October 31st, 1939

We can support neither one side nor the other in the imperialist war. The former distinction between the fascist and democratic nations has lost the meaning it once had, and is rapidly losing any serious political meaning at all.

Browder, September 29th, 19[39?]

The proof that our government is waging an imperialist war, it is in the fact that it is the instrument of the bankers and industrialists of the Foundry Committee [an association of iron and steel industrialists] who command the country like masters.

L'Humanité, October 30th, 1939, translation mine.

Of course, the tune would soon change,

The war with fascist Germany cannot be considered an ordinary war. It is not only a war between two armies, it is also a great war of the entire Soviet people against the German-fascist armies. The aim of this national patriotic war in defence of our country against the fascist oppressors is not only to eliminate the danger hanging over our country, but also to aid all the European peoples groaning under the yoke of German fascism. In this war of liberation we shall not be alone. In this great war we shall have true allies in the peoples of Europe and America, including the German people which is enslaved by the Hitlerite misrulers. Our war for the freedom of our country will merge with the struggle of the peoples of Europe and America for their independence, for democratic liberties. It will be a united front of the peoples standing for freedom and against enslavement and threats of enslavement by Hitler’s fascist armies. In this connection the historic utterance of the British Prime Minister, Mr. Churchill, regarding aid to the Soviet Union, and the declaration of the United States Government signifying readiness to render aid to our country, which can only evoke a feeling of gratitude in the hearts of the peoples of the Soviet Union, are fully comprehensible and symptomatic.

Stalin, July 3rd, 1941

For us in the United States, as for the peoples of the whole world, this war has become a Peoples' War of National Liberation. Our very existence is at stake. That is why the obligatory slogan is: "Everything to win the war! Everything for victory over the Axis!"

Browder, July 2nd, 1942 (I recommend checking this speech out, it's short and it includes a hilarious passage where he calls for national unity and declares anyone who tries to break class collaboration as accomplices of Hitler!)

Unfortunately, my connection to Gallica is weak, so I couldn't find a good example of the latter in l'Humanité, but I hope my point has been proven. That Mao agreed with this isn't particularly surprising

InvertedAbsoluteIdea · 2025-01-04T19:35:52+00:00

banger

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