• 1 Post
  • 18 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
Cake day: September 14th, 2023
  • LeniX@lemmygrad.mltoLate Stage Capitalism@lemmygrad.ml•Bread and Circus
    103·
    5 days ago

    This is some really idealistic brain worms with no analysis of the current system…

    “AI”, as much as I personally dislike the term, is already here. You can’t go back after you already have it. The only thing you can change right now is what to use it for. And if you make an argument akin to “if only all people collectively decided not to use this power-hungry tech and save the planet” - that’s not how our society works.

    Sure, we’d like to not roast the entire planet with this techbro, stolen data Silicon Valley bullshit, but that’s well beyond our control.

  • LeniX@lemmygrad.mltoWorld News@lemmygrad.ml•Putin announces 72-hour Victory Day ceasefire
    20·
    6 days ago

    the racism in russia

    Wasn’t it “the West” who came up with the idea of “Asiatic hordes” (which is repurposed Nazi propaganda btw), “orcs” and “untermenschen”? Wasn’t it “the West” who spread the narrative of “relatively European, relatively civilized”, temporary “white” Ukrainians when it was convenient for them? I don’t think you understand what racism is and where it came from.

    Historically, racism and “races” were Western European inventions that served the purpose of justifying hereditary slavery and colonialism. Here’s an interesting thing - it never went away. One look at Gaza, Palestine or the Arab world in general should tell you as much.

    Racism is also believing western “sources” are inherently, magically more trustworthy than any Russian outlets without doing any outside material analysis of the actual details of history. We do not trust either side, we don’t have to - we analyze the information through a materialist ideological lens.

  • LeniX@lemmygrad.mltoWorld News@lemmygrad.ml•Putin announces 72-hour Victory Day ceasefire
    21·
    6 days ago

    Yes, because reddthat libs clearly understand more than what CNN/NBC/ABC/XYZ western propaganda press says. You people were unable to point Ukraine on a map four days before Feb 24, and yet you pretend you’re fucking experts on the region and its history, with your stupid smirks and remarks. You ignored the time the US empire (the actual aggressor) conducted two color revolutions in Ukraine, including one that ended in a violent coup in 2014. You ignored the broken promises and Minsk agreements, you ignored 8 years of the AFU shelling the living shit out of people in the Donbass. You ignored the US nazifying Ukraine and pumping it full of NATO weapons, you ignored the US unilaterally torpedoing the INF treaty, you ignored the nuclear-capable Aegis missile systems in Romania and Poland painfully close to Russia’s borders.

    That’s the thing, though - they wanted to start a proxy war, and for that they needed to present Russia as the aggressor while erasing every single thing they did to provoke Russia into some sort of response. Otherwise there is no justification for “helping” Ukraine. Otherwise the narrative falls apart at its seams.

  • LeniX@lemmygrad.mltoAsk Lemmygrad@lemmygrad.ml•how did Khrushchev f*ck up?
    1·
    9 months ago

    the groundwork for the economic mistakes and the degeneration of the CPSU had been laid decades prior

    To all of this I’ll add that many of the reforms implemented under Khrushchev (or at least the general idea behind them) weren’t necessarily out of place - things like some amount of social liberalization or increasing availability of consumption goods (the light industry), given what the USSR and its people have been through. As is always the case, the appeal for these things didn’t appear out of nowhere - there were material reasons. And, of course, if implemented prudently, they could have produced positive results for the USSR. It’s just that the way they were conducted was overall a failure. Khrushchev’s shallow understanding of Marxist theory, his tendency of favoring short-term easy solutions aimed at quick returns (opportunism, essentially), as well as monumental loss of experienced ML cadres certainly played a part too.

  • LeniX@lemmygrad.mltoAsk Lemmygrad@lemmygrad.ml•how did Khrushchev f*ck up?
    1·
    9 months ago

    “Socialism Betrayed - Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union” by Roger Keeran and Thomas Kenny. An absolutely indispensable book to give you a starting point and moderately deep insights.

    There are more books, like “The Destruction of the Soviet Economic System - An Insider’s History” by Vladimir Kontorovich, I suggest you put those off for later, as they are more detailed but dry, filled with technical language.

  • LeniX@lemmygrad.mltoAsk Lemmygrad@lemmygrad.ml•how did Khrushchev f*ck up?
    1·
    9 months ago

    But what exactly caused the split?

    You sort of answered this one yourself. Among numerous factors it is precisely the things you mentioned - the de-Stalinisation nonsense, the purge against pro-Stalin elements (if you can even call them that - they were just anti-revisionist Marxists-Leninists), blatant revisionism of Marxism-Leninism and its core principles (continuous class struggle, dictatorship of the proletariat, the party of the proletariat), blind optimism when it comes to the national question

    What policies did he push that were reformist or capitalist in nature ? How exactly did he fuck up?

    They weren’t all strictly capitalist in nature, to be honest. It would be more accurate to say that his blunderous policies created conditions for capitalist restoration inside Soviet Socialism.

    The policies typically referred are such: he dismantled the state-owned MTSs (machine and tractor stations), putting the responsibility of maintaining and repairing the machinery on collective farms. He dismantled central planning, replacing existing institutions with decentralized regional planning committees, which greatly exacerbated the existing difficulties with planning. He encouraged the peasantry to keep more privately-owned produce and livestock, essentially strengthening NEP-style measures without second thought. He adopted wage-leveling - a mistake of monstrous proportions, which decimated incentive for production growth (more of a left-deviation, honestly - the USSR was not ready for such a thing), and also created severe discontent among the intellectuals, prompting them to look for other means of enrichment, siphoning this strata of society into the “second” economy who would then constitute would-be capitalists in its embryonic form.

    He also started the Virgin Lands cultivation bullshit, instead of trying to make a qualitative shift in agriculture. The idea was also to emulate US agricultural practice with heavy use of mineral fertilizer. The results were disastrous, partly due to the fact that initial yield seemed to have increased (but that was only true for land already cultivated), which gave overall sense of false promise, and also due to the abandonment of Stalin’s afforestation program, which worsened issues with droughts.

    There were also big mistakes of political nature on top of those related to the economy, including the damage done to CPSU - recruiting too many people of questionable ideological strength, massively increasing the % of intelligentsia compared to industrial proletariat, needless bureaucratization, etc. He also drove a split into industrial and agricultural factions inside the CPSU.

    Simply said, his overall strategy represented a Bukharinist right-deviation within the political spectrum of the CPSU. Something Stalin warned might happen in a peasant-dominated country.

    The list is hella incomplete, please feel free to add more stuff.