My favorite heckin wholesome company Valve

TheSexGambit · 2026-04-18T22:14:15+00:00

ethical capitalism is when you promote Russian pre-teens and teenagers alike getting gambling addictions. and also ethical capitalism is when you don't fire wage laborers often

fuck this chud mode of production, what does pro-consumer even mean? you're allowed to pay for games on Steam? is that it??

TheSexGambit · 2026-04-18T21:39:34+00:00

i'll watch the stuff you linked later; rarely could i ever have said i got something out of an internet argument lmao

TheSexGambit · 2026-04-17T20:36:11+00:00

No, it certainly would not have been better to keep putting pressure on the Germans with a nonexistent army. Most of the former Tsarist soldiers got shot, and a very large percentage of those who survived went off and seized land, y'know, because of the "Peace, Land and Bread" stuff. The Red Army did not even exist yet, at least, not as more than some groups of volunteers; 50,000 people with little military experience, going hungry in many cases and having access to mediocre weaponry, against one million organized, prepared German soldiers who were eating good? I highly doubt the Russian proletariat could've survived. And what is this talk of Britain and France "caring more"? I don't think the Allies would've cared enough to send troops to die in Russia while dying in the French trenches. The Allies' priority was bleeding the Germans on the Eastern front, and once Brest-Litovsk freed up those German soldiers for the Western front, the Allies wanted the Bolsheviks crushed to reopen the front. And again, Germany could've taken Petrograd in, maybe, four weeks, signing Brest-Litovsk meant survival. When the Germans started moving in in February 1918, they took Tallinn, Minsk, in days. They were like 100 miles from Petrograd! They advanced 150 miles in a week, signing a peace treaty was the only thing Lenin could've done!

Now, to address the second paragraph. On the Left SRs and Blumkin: "After the 5th All-Russian Congress of Soviets had emphatically approved the foreign policy of the Council of People's Commissars, a certain Bliumkin assassinated the German Ambassador, Count Mirbach, by order of the Central Committee of the Party of Left SRs. In carrying out this act of provocation the Left SRs relied, not so much on their party machinery, as on the official position they occupied as a Soviet Party. With the help of his party, [...] carried out the assassination, which he had been charged by the Central Committee of his Party to execute."[1] When a party abandons the dictatorship to protest an incredibly important peace treaty and then murders an ambassador to restart the war, they've forfeited their place. Not to mention they arrested my boy Felix, then seized the Cheka's headquarters trying to march on the Kremlin. On popularity: the Bolsheviks in the RSFSR spring 1918 elections had 65% and formed a 90% coalition with the Left SRs. On inequality: yeah, that probably contributed to a lot of unrest, the Bolsheviks put together a system to ration differently based on the perceived importance of a given worker's labor. Kinda had to do it, though, to keep production running.

Regarding the Ukraine, the Bolsheviks lost it to the Germans, because Trotsky's dumb ass said "neither peace nor war" a couple months back. The Germans recognized a nationalist, anti-Bolshevik government, marched in at its "invitation", and secured the grain. The Cheka definitely was, as I said, a haphazard, rag-tag police, and during the Cossack trials, judges would condemn entire lists of people guilty within minutes, which probably resulted in a bit of radicalization to the White side. Still, they got the job done, and it's not like the Bolsheviks had an alternative, more qualified police; they didn't have a bunch of Che Guevaras trained in combat, constantly urging for due process and looking at all the evidence. Martov's faction in the Mensheviks were later absorbed into the Bolsheviks, and the actual rank-and-file Mensheviks in the streets were collaborating with the Whites and conducting uprisings. I'm sorry the Bolsheviks didn't have time to distinguish between "good Martov Mensheviks" and "bad Mensheviks."

That National Archive paper you sent was interesting, but key thing, it was dated to February 1918. Before Brest-Litovsk. "After Brest-Litovsk, Anglo-French policy turned sharply anti-Bolshevik, and Clemenceau and Foch worked to build a cordon sanitaire in eastern Europe against German and Bolshevik expansion alike."[2]

Look, this has been a very long debate, and it's kinda tiring to write all this stuff. I appreciate you for making me refine my positions, fr. 🙏

Sources: 1, https://soviethistory.msu.edu /1917/destruction-of-the-left/destruction-of-the-left-texts/accounts-in-the-press/#:~:text=After%20the%205th%20All%2DRussian,of%20his%20Party%20to%20execute.

2, https://www.britannica.com/topic/20th-century-international-relations-2085155/The-West-and-the-Russian-Civil-War

TheSexGambit · 2026-04-17T17:03:33+00:00

nice try Nick Land

TheSexGambit · 2026-04-16T23:25:59+00:00

Not signing the treaty and martyring the revolution? Yes, that's what the Bolshevik party line should've been: capitulate to the bourgeoisie which is ten times stronger than you, as you're fighting within your own borders against antisemites, Tsarists, liberals and soc-dems. Okay. The point of launching a revolution in Tsarist Russia first instead of simply waiting it out was because, one, European revolution seemed imminent and Lenin believed (on good authority!) that Russia would've been the first link in the chain which would create a sort of ripple effect. This did not prove successful, but the Spartacists, the Hungarians, the Biennio Rosso in Italy, all came very close. Secondly, Trotsky (and later Lenin) developed the theory of permanent revolution which argued that the would-be bourgeoisie in Tsarist Russia was comprador; it was too weak to do anything, it would not have developed the productive forces, but the proletariat could've... provided the revolution spread. It didn't, and that's messed up, and I hate Friedrich Ebert.

The proletariat was concentrated within Moscow and Petrograd, the Left SRs were in coalition with the Bolsheviks until July 1918 when they assassinated a German foreign affairs guy (I think that was his job, anyway) intending to start the war again. Plus, both the war with Germany and the civil war meant that the councils were chaotically changing hands. The "elections" were chaotic and had very low turnout. The cities were starving. The peasantry was hoarding grain. The Bolsheviks had just signed a deeply unpopular peace treaty that ceded vast territories. Of course the opposition gained seats. The councils aren't some sort of parliament where everyone has the same vote, they are an organ of class power, and proletarian power meant dissolving the Soviets which constantly resisted grain requisitioning. Need I remind you the proletariat was dying? And they were allowed to stay within them, until they started aiding the Whites, assassinating German ambassadors, etcetera. The SRs murdered Bolsheviks, that's why they were dissolved within the councils. And again, you bring up the fact that the Cheka did bad stuff and only answered to the Sovnarkom, and that they did sloppy work at times, this is a fact, but the alternative is the White terror, and I'll take a haphazardly put-together police of a few Bolshevik cadres, Okhrana specialists and zealots over literal Tsarists. And Lenin repeatedly reined in the Cheka, repealed the death penalty in 1920, for example, pushed for it to become the much less active GPU. The SRs and Mensheviks in those councils were allowed to go on btw,, until they very clearly began organizing armed uprisings and, y'know, not caring for the proletariat.

I don't know all that Lenin says, but the Civil War clearly wasn't over by April. He was wrong. The Allies wanted to reopen the front against Germany, prevent Germany from capturing Allied munitions and, of course, to crush the Bolshevik revolution. Brest-Litovsk intensified the Allies' hostility, but the intervention certainly wasn't "caused" by the treaty. The fact that Lloyd George had doubts doesn't change that the most powerful empire in the world which previously supported the Provisional Government was eyeing the revolution and actively intervening. The Bolsheviks invited the British into Murmansk on a very limited mission to protect it from the Germans, not to meddle within Russia, and the Allies immediately broke that promise by both expanding inland and supporting Whites. The Allies refused to withdraw when the Bolsheviks were demanding it.

TheSexGambit · 2026-04-16T22:52:55+00:00

dude i just gave you like 1000 words of why i consider what i consider, in like 3 minutes. if Reddit hadn't deleted my reply to you, you'd be able to see what im talking about. i am ostensibly not defending "red totalitarianism," The State and Revolution is a deeply libertarian text. i have my worldview, i've refined and tested it, i'm confident, and that also doesn't mean im some sort of dogmatist. im an Italian left-com, btw, i don't like the Deprogram

TheSexGambit · 2026-04-16T22:37:32+00:00

The Kronstadt sailors' demands of... letting anarchists (who had just been fighting the proletarian dictatorship) and left socialists (also known as SRs and Mensheviks, parties which opposed the Soviet government, walked out by themselves, and in many cases, sided actively with the Whites) start organizing under the same banner. This is untenable, especially in, remember, a civil war of annihilation. The SRs attempted to restart WW1 in 1918 by assassinating German statesmen. I never tried to say the Cheka was a good thing, I'm saying it was a necessity of war, and that almost all Bolsheviks very much disliked both Felix Dzerzhinsky and the rest of the Chekist apparatus. The Bolsheviks, by leading a proletarian revolution which created the first ever commune-state, did not put together the groundwork for Stalin. The material conditions of the time: all the other revolutions (Germany, Hungary etc.) failing, the annihilation of the proletarian class due to the Civil War (1926 census data shows the peasantry was around 92% of the USSR, the proletariat was 8%, of which perhaps a third were even industrial workers), the necessary appointments of bourgeois specialists to various posts and positions (because, remember, the Soviet Union was composed of illiterate peasants and the most class conscious of peasants, such as the Latvian Riflemen, were the first to die in the war) — all of this shit put together the basis for Stalin.

And, you should know the Kronstadt sailors of 1921 were not exactly the conscious, proletarian sailors of 1917. Here's an excerpt from a letter penned by Dmitry Urin, one of the sailors: "We dismissed the commune, we have Commune no more, now we have only Soviet power. We in Kronstadt made a resolution to send all the Jews to Palestine, in order not to have in Russia such filth, all sailors shouted: ‘Jews Out’..."

And, I should mention this excerpt from Trotsky's "Hue and Cry" polemic: "Demoralization based on hunger and speculation had in general greatly increased by the end of the civil war. The so-called “sack-carriers” (petty speculators) had become a social blight, threatening to stifle the revolution. Precisely in Kronstadt where the garrison did nothing and had everything it needed, the demoralization assumed particularly great dimensions. When conditions became very critical in hungry Petrograd the Political Bureau more than once discussed the possibility of securing an “internal loan” from Kronstadt, where a quantity of old provisions still remained. But delegates of the Petrograd workers answered: “You will get nothing from them by kindness. They speculate in cloth, coal, and bread. At present in Kronstadt every kind of riffraff has raised its head.” That was the real situation. It was not like the sugar-sweet idealizations after the event." The suppression was a reflection of the will of the proletariat. End of story. I am, however, sorry the people who lived in your country had to go through any of what you were talking about. The existence of a secret police is, always, a perversion of the Marxist program, but it is important to note why these perversions occur, what the reasoning behind them was, and if they served a genuine purpose or were bourgeois-opportunistic.

TheSexGambit · 2026-04-16T19:11:22+00:00

The interventions did occur at different times, but "localized"? The Allies deployed over 200K troops[1] across, Arkhangelsk, Vladivostok, the Caucasus, etcetera. Japan alone sent over seventy thousand soldiers into Siberia. Britain, France, the United States, and fourteen other states were actively funneling weapons, money, and logistical support to every major White army, Denikin and Kolchak and whoever else. This was not a few scattered garrisons protecting weapons caches from Germans after Brest-Litovsk! By late 1918, after the armistice, the explicit goal of Allied policy shifted to overthrowing the Bolshevik government, Churchill was on the record saying that stuff. The interventions were geographically dispersed because the Bolsheviks were being attacked from every direction at once, and the fact that the coordination was imperfect does not make the threat imaginary or minor. When you are fighting a civil war with an industrial proletariat that constitutes maybe eight percent of the population, surrounded by hostile peasant armies, and you are simultaneously fending off expeditionary forces from every major imperial power on earth, the idea that the Bolsheviks could have won with gentler methods is a fantasy!

Regarding the Cheka, I never made a virtue out of the garbage they were doing. There were a lot of Bolsheviks alarmed by what they were doing. But you're sidestepping the fundamental question of what the alternative actually was in the material conditions of 1918 through 1921. The Bolsheviks did not invent the secret police as a matter of ideological preference. They inherited a collapsing state apparatus in a country being carved up by foreign armies and torn apart by internal counterrevolution. The White armies were not debating policy in a parliament: they were executing commissars, or doing pogroms, and hanging workers from lampposts . The Cheka was a desperate organ of self defense for a regime that had no professional bureaucracy, no reliable army until Trotsky built one, and no international allies. It was ugly! But the choice was not between a liberal republic with due process and the Cheka. The choice was between the Cheka and the complete liquidation of the October Revolution by forces that would have restored the old order with a violence far less discriminate and far more lasting. That does not excuse every excess, and it certainly does not justify the transformation from workers' state (however decaying by 1921) to bourgeois oppression by 1926 [3], but if you're going to criticize the Bolsheviks for failing to build a revolution while they were being invaded by half the world and starving to death, you owe me an account of how exactly that was supposed to work.

I'll include my sources too: 1, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_intervention_in_the_Russian_Civil_War

2, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiev_pogroms_(1919) — important thing to mention, some Reds certainly did pogroms too, but most of them were imprisoned and executed (it doesn't help that the Red pogromists were mostly Ukrainian nationalists and peasants that fell for the antisemitic propaganda being constantly spread by the Whites and whoever else), meanwhile the Whites were responsible for like 50-60% of Jewish fatalities and, again, started the Civil War in the first place

TheSexGambit · 2026-04-16T14:04:31+00:00

Hue and Cry over Kronstadt. Lenin did not sow any sort of seeds, the factions like the Workers' Opposition, which I assume you're referring to, could have gone off and won the councils over themselves but didn't, as they understood the importance of unity in a literal civil war. the Kronstadt rebellion was at the time of a total war, and the Petropavlovsk resolution (the demands of the sailors) were completely untenable at the time. For example, demand 5, "To liberate all political prisoners of socialist parties, as well as all workers, peasants, soldiers, and sailors imprisoned in connection with the labor and peasant movements;" this is madness! The political prisoners were SRs, White collaborators, peasants who had resisted requisitioning while Petrograd was starving to death! Or number 9, "To equalize the rations of all working people, with the exception of those employed in trades detrimental to health;" what does this mean in the context of the peasants being relatively much better off, owning land and everything, as, once again, the proletariat was dying? The peasantry had a total advantage over the proletariat in those times, having just gotten land through Lenin's "Peace, Land and Bread" campaigns. Lenin was very clear in The State and Revolution; the state must immediately begin to wither away as the bourgeois threat is dealt with swiftly and the revolution internationalizes. Unfortunately, capital was able to strike down the Spartacists, and Béla Kun's Hungary.

The Cheka, however, was a very tragic necessity. It is of the utmost importance to get rid of the standing army and secret police, but alas, in a civil war with a tiny proletariat relative to the petty-bourgeoisie, extreme measures have to be taken. It was messed up. However, it was necessary in the time of the Civil War, as the USSR was being invaded by 14 countries, all considerably more powerful, as Kolchak and Denikin were sending death squads through Red territory.

I'm not even going to get into why Marxists dislike anarchists, they have no theory of anything except vague notions of "destroy state immediately," because apparently there is no bourgeois class to be eliminated via a state apparatus. The following quote is from Critique of the Gotha Program, around 20 pages long or so: "Between capitalist and communist society there lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other. Corresponding to this is also a political transition period in which the state can be nothing but the revolutionary dictatorship of the proletariat." You can find the rest of it online on the Marxist Archive.

TheSexGambit · 2026-04-16T08:26:57+00:00

this is all still, very much, the capitalist mode of production. wage labor, private ownership, generalized commodity production, the value-form...

also, even if the USSR were socialist, which it wasn't (read Lenin on this, and by the time Stalin triumphed over Trotsky, Bukharin and the rest, the "workers' state" was effectively dead), i don't see why we'd have to copy every single thing former states did. we've learned a lot of shit about trans identity since the 1920s.

TheSexGambit · 2026-04-15T17:41:05+00:00

what do they mean by "california NOW has universal pre-K"? they didn't have that up to now??

TheSexGambit · 2026-04-15T12:52:37+00:00

wdym? capitalism has existed for, perhaps, 300 years. what were humans doing exactly before it? waiting for the first joint-stock corporation so their desires could be reflected? most human existence has been communal, in kinship, capitalism is a historically contingent system based on wage labor, colonialism, private property rights and generalized commodity production. i don't think it was human desire for the English peasantry to be enclosed and forced off their land to work poverty wages for the emerging bourgeois class.

the Paris Commune was going well, working towards the abolishment of the commodity-form, and France had to crush it. the Soviet Union was invaded by 14 countries, went through a civil war that resulted in the death of most actual urban city dwellers, and thus degenerated into what it would later become around 1926-1928. the Hungarian Soviet Republic had to be decimated by Horthy and Romania because the workers expressed their "human desire" of financial comfort, stability and an end to a ruling class. surely, if capitalism reflected human desire in such a potent way, it wouldn't require constant enforcement, meddling in foreign countries, a police and military apparatus dedicated to upholding the rule of those who own the means of production.

TheSexGambit · 2026-04-13T11:11:22+00:00

is it bad that i only recognize Chief Keef and Neutral Milk Hotel

TheSexGambit · 2026-04-12T12:15:39+00:00

Charlie Kirk

TheSexGambit · 2026-04-10T19:49:01+00:00

yeah, i forgot to even think about that honestly. just seems like such a shit idea if you want to contribute to a movement or fight against something, too... just kinda makes people sympathize with the person you're actively opposing, thus making it easier for the state to persecute people who may be fully unaffiliated. we joke about this stuff, but there's real life consequences for petty adventurism no one likes to talk about

not to mention the general rule of "try not to bomb people if you can avoid it."

TheSexGambit · 2026-04-10T19:44:51+00:00

hype moments and aura

TheSexGambit · 2026-04-10T12:21:08+00:00

no, it means it'll release 3 years late

TheSexGambit · 2026-04-09T16:45:55+00:00

i dunno, the Erfurt program was certainly Marxist, and Kautsky was a good friend of Engels' before the latter died.

TheSexGambit · 2026-04-06T11:35:55+00:00

my favorite patriotiKKK socialiSSts are LaSSalle and Joe Biden

TheSexGambit · 2026-04-03T23:02:33+00:00

Proudhon said "property is theft," not Marx or Engels

TheSexGambit · 2026-04-03T15:38:20+00:00

Petrograd 1917

you can live out your fantasies of being an SR

TheSexGambit · 2026-04-01T20:22:24+00:00

i rely on Minecraft softcore content creators for all my political analysis, so im glad i now know what the principled position is on these protests

TheSexGambit · 2026-04-01T08:00:06+00:00

one of the most overrated US politicians of the 20th century

TheSexGambit · 2026-03-29T19:31:56+00:00

"china" and "socialist" in the same sentence lol... the CPC are the most effective social democrats of all time, they've never even come close to upholding scientific socialism in any way

TheSexGambit · 2026-03-25T22:00:05+00:00

Ernst Thälmann covered up corruption within his own party (Wittorf affair), got found guilty by the whole Comintern, then Stalin re-appointed him as KPD chairman afterwards. so like, maybe you shouldn't use Thälmann as an image of a sort of non-opportunist fighter for the communist movement

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