Awoo [she/her]

Has the fastfetch dev ever mentioned why they use the infinity symbol? Don’t want to find out later on that it’s a dogwhistle.

The positions are elected by a vote at the supreme soviet assembly, those positions are elected by the soviets (councils) below the assembly, and those are elected by the soviets below that, and so on down to the lowest level where the local constituents vote.

In the party it’s generally considered a “duty” though, especially among those that participated in the revolution like Stalin who treated loyalty to the organisation, self-sacrifice and subordination to it as a significant and necessary part of what made the revolution succeed. Thousands of people literally sacrificing their whole lives for the goal.

As such, Stalin wouldn’t break a decision of the assembly just as he wouldn’t want anyone else to. If they said they still needed him in his post he did his duty and stayed despite not wanting to.

He largely held equal powers to everyone else on the Council of Ministers, the position of Chairman didn’t have special powers. The General Secretary role of the party was invented by Lenin with the intention of it being used to break opposition in the party (perform purges). Once Stalin had successfully performed his purges and prevented split in the country/civil-war he saw the position as having completed its purpose and wanted rid of it, he didn’t like the cult of personality around himself and wanted people to view the government in a collective capacity rather than an individual leader kind of way. That’s obviously not what ended up being the perception though. Lots of hero worship got in the way.

Voices: Correct! Vote!

Rykov: There is a proposal to vote.

Voices: Yes, yes!

Rykov: We are voting. Who is for comrade Stalin’s proposal to abolish the post of General Secretary? Who is opposed? Who abstains? Noone.

October 16, 1952 (http://soviethistory.msu.edu/1954-2/succession-to-stalin/succession-to-stalin-texts/stalin-on-enlarging-the-central-committee/):

This article was taken from the Russian newspaper Glasnost devoted to the 120th Anniversary of Stalin’s birth, was the last speech at the CC [Central Committee] CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] before Stalin died. The text was being published for the very first time in the Soviet Union…

…MOLOTOV – [Glasnost -] coming to the speaker’s tribune completely admits his mistakes before the CC, but he stated that he is and will always be a faithful disciple of Stalin.

STALIN – (interrupting Molotov) This is nonsense. I have no students at all. We are all students of the great Lenin.

[Glasnost -] Stalin suggested that they continue the agenda point by point and elect comrades into different committees of state.

With no Politburo, there is now elected a Presidium of the CC CPSU in the enlarged CC and in the Secretariat of the CC CPSU altogether 36 members.

In the new list of those elected are all members of the old Politbiuro – except that of comrade A. A. Andreev who, as everyone knows now is unfortunately completely deaf and thus can not function.

VOICE FROM THE FLOOR – We need to elect comrade Stalin as the General Secretary of the CC CPSU and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR.

STALIN – No! I am asking that you relieve me of the two posts!

MALENKOV – coming to the tribune: Comrades! We should all unanimously ask comrade Stalin, our leader and our teacher, to be again the General Secretary of the CC CPSU.

Same attempt (A. I. Mgeladze, Stalin. Kakim ia ego znal. Strannitsy nedavnogo poshlogo. p. 118):

At the first Plenum of the CC [Central Committee] of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] called after the XIX Congress of the Party (I had been elected member of the CC and took part in the work of this Plenum), Stalin really did present the question of General Secretary of the CC CPSU, or of the post of Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR. He referred to his age, overwork, said that other cadres had cropped up and there were people to replace him, for example, N.I. Bulganin could be appointed as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, but the CC members did not grant his request, all insisted that comrade Stalin remain at both positions.

His sentence isn’t wrong. Stalin did try to resign multiple times (four actually). When his fourth resignation was rejected by the party he then attempted to abolish his own position entirely.

Here are some of the documented ones:

May 1924, 23-31 (Marxist Internet Archive, “The Trotskyist Opposition Before and Now”) ( https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1927/10/23.htm#1)

It is said that in that “will” [Lenin’s Testament - ZB] Comrade Lenin suggested to the congress that in view of Stalin’s “rudeness” it should consider the question of putting another comrade in Stalin’s place as General Secretary. That is quite true. Yes, comrades, I am rude to those who grossly and perfidiously wreck and split the Party. I have never concealed this and do not conceal it now. Perhaps some mildness is needed in the treatment of splitters, but I am a bad hand at that. At the very first meeting of the plenum of the Central Committee after the Thirteenth Congress [Undefined date of this attempt, however, within the Thirteenth Congress and thus anywhere within the 23rd to the 31st - ZB] I asked the plenum of the Central Committee to release me from my duties as General Secretary. The congress itself discussed this question. It was discussed by each delegation separately, and all the delegations unanimously, including Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinoviev, obliged Stalin to remain at his post.

What could I do? Desert my post? That is not in my nature; I have never deserted any post, and I have no right to do so, for that would be desertion. As I have already said before, I am not a free agent, and when the Party imposes an obligation upon me, I must obey.

A year later I again put in a request to the plenum to release me, but I was again obliged to remain at my post.

What else could I do?

August 19, 1924 (Grover Furr, Khrushchev Lied, p. 244):

To the Plenum of the CC [Central Committee] RCP [Russian Communist Party]

One and a half years of working in the Politburo with comrades Zinoviev and Kamanev after the retirement and then the death of Lenin have made perfectly clear to me the impossibility of honest, sincere political work with these comrades within the framework of one small collective. In view of which, I request to be considered as having resigned from the Pol[itcal] Buro of the CC.

I request a medical leave for about two months.

At the expiration of this period I request to be sent to Turukhansk region or to the Iakutsk oblast’, or to somewhere abroad in any kind of work that will attract little attention.

I would ask the Plenum to decide all these questions in my absence and without explanations from my side, because I consider it harmful for our work to give explanations aside from those remarks that I have already made in the first paragraph of this letter.

I would ask comrade Kuibyshev to distribute copies of this letter to the members of the CC.

With com[munist] greet[ings], J. Stalin.

December 27, 1926 (Grover Furr, Khrushchev Lied, p. 244):

To the Plenum of the CC [Central Committee] (to comrade Rykov). I ask that I be relieved of the post of GenSec [General Secretary] of the CC. I declare that I can work no longer in this position, I do not have the strength to work any more in this position. J. Stalin.

December 19, 1927 (Grover Furr, Khrushchev Lied, p. 245) (https://livrozilla.com/doc/796199/pelo-socialismo):

Stalin: Comrades! For three years [Suggesting there could be more resignation attempts unbeknownst to me - ZB] I have been asking the CC [Central Committee] to free me from the obligations of General Secretary of the CC. Each time the Plenum has refused me. I admit that until recently conditions did not exist such that the Party had need of me in this post as a person more or less severe, one who acted as a certain kind of antidote to the dangers posed by the Opposition. I admit that this necessity existed, despite comrade Lenin’s well-known letter [Lenin’s Testament - ZB], to keep me at the post of General Secretary. But these conditions exist no longer. They have vanished, since the Opposition is now smashed. It seems that the Opposition has never before suffered such a defeat since they have not only been smashed, but have been expelled from the Party. It follows that now no bases exist any longer that could be considered correct when the Plenum refused to honor my request and free me of the duties of General Secretary. Meanwhile you have comrade Lenin’s directive which we are obliged to consider and which, in my opinion, it is necessary to put into effect. I admit that the Party was compelled to disregard this directive until recently, compelled by well-known conditions of inter-Party development. But I repeat that these conditions have now vanished and it is time, in my view, to take comrade Lenin’s directive to the leadership. Therefore I request the Plenum to free me of the post of General Secretary of the Central Committee. I assure you, comrades, that the Party can only gain from doing this.

Dogadov: Vote without discussion.

Vorshilov: I propose we reject the announcement we just heard.

Rykov: We will vote without discsussion…We vote now on Stalin’s proposal that he be freed from the General Secretaryship. Who is for this proposal? Who is against? Who abstains? One.

The proposal of comrade Stalin is rejected with one abstention.

Stalin: Then I introduce another proposal. Perhaps the CC [Central Committee] will consider it expedient to abolish the position of General Secretary. In our Party’s history there have been times when no such post existed.

Voroshilov: We had Lenin with us then.

Stalin: We had no post of General Secretary before the 10th Congress.

Voice: Until the 11th Congress.

Stalin: Yes, it seems that until the 11th Congress we did not have this position. That was before Lenin stopped working. If Lenin concluded that it was necessary to put forward the question of founding the position of General Secretary, then I assume he was prompted by the special circumstances that appeared with us before the 10th Congress, when a more or less strong, well-organized Opposition within the Party was founded. But now we proceed to the abolition of this position. Many people associate a conception of some kind of special rights of the General Secretary with this position. I must say from my experience, and comrades will confirm this, that there ought not to be any special rights distinguishing the General Secretary from the rights of other members of the Secretariat.

Voice: And the duties?

Stalin: And there are no more duties than other members of the Secretariat have. I see it this way; There’s the Politburo, the highest organ of the CC; there’s the Secretariat, the executive organ consisting of five persons, and all these five members of the Secretariat are equal. That’s the way the work has been carried out in practice, and the General Secretary has not had any special rights or obligations. The result, therefore, is that the position of General Secretary, in the sense of special rights, has never existed with us in practice, there has been only a collegium called the Secretariat of the CC. I do not know why we need to keep this dead position any longer. I don’t even mention the fact that this position, called General Secretary, has occasioned in some places a series of distortions. At the same time that at the top no special rights or duties are associated with the position of General Secretary, in some places there have been some distortions, and in all the oblasts there is now a struggle over that position among comrades who call themselves secretaries, for example, in the national CCs. Quite a few General Secretaries have developed, and with them in the localities special rights have been associated. Why is this necessary?

Shmidt: We can dismiss them in the localities.

Stalin: I think the Party would benefit if we did away with the post of General Secretary, and that would give me the chance to be free from this post. This would be all the easier to do since according to the Party’s constitution there is no post of General Secretary.

Rykov: I propose not to give comrade Stalin the possibility of being free from this position. As concerns the General Secretaries in the oblast and local organs, that should be changed, but without changing the situation in the CC. The position of General Secretary was created by the proposal of Vladimir Il’ich. In all the time since, during Vladimir Il’ich’s life and since, this position has justified itself politically and completely in both the organizational and political sense. In the creation of this organ and in naming comrade Stalin to the post of General Secretary the whole Opposition also took part, all those whom we have now expelled from the Party. That is how completely without doubt it was for everyone in the Party (whether the position of General Secretary was needed and who should be the General Secretary). By which has been exhausted, in my opinion, both the question of the “testament” (for that point has been decided) and exhausted by the Opposition at the same time just as it has been decided by us as well. The whole Party knows this. What has changed now after the 15th Congress and why is it necessary to set aside the position of General Secretary.

Stalin: The Opposition has been smashed.

(A long discussion followed, after which:)

[continued in reply]

The USSR was a dictatorship

No it wasn’t. This is propaganda. Even the CIA admits that it is propaganda in this document:

https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/docs/CIA-RDP80-00810A006000360009-0.pdf

Democracy under socialism is simply structured differently. You need to study it properly.

Several countries that you support today still use a system very much like this. Cuba and Vietnam for example. A solid video on Cuban democracy is here: https://youtu.be/2aMsi-A56ds

All the socialist countries built on this system.

Have you actually read it yet?

Chatgpt is just Cortana with better marketing. AI isn’t smart, it’s just algorithms producing a facsimile of language via pattern heatmaps. What was Cortana if not just an earlier version of the same thing?

““AI”” is all a techbro marketing bubble. Will burst and move on eventually.

Like holy shit we had the autofill feature in Photoshop ages and ages ago and that’s just doing what the “intelligent” image generators do. We didn’t call it AI back then. All marketing for what amounts to just some interesting algorithms.

Rebranded Cortana?

Destined to fail.

Stop with the “one of us europeans” bollocks.

I’m from europe and this post is 100% accurate.

This nazi propaganda again. I stopped reading at the first sentence and I’m blocking you. You’re a nazi and there’s literally no point in conversing with someone that is so blatantly acting in bad faith. If this conversation happened on the street with basically anyone here in Manc you’d be bricked over the back of the head.

Please. There are so many examples of modern Communists claiming that the USSR and PRC aren’t “true communism” that’s it’s become a meme.

Yeah? Which ones. Name a single major communist party.

You are not referring to communists. You are referring to people like yourself, who are uneducated morons that don’t actually do any politics, but instead engage in politics as a source of entertainment through media. It’s a spectator sport for you, you’re not a participant, and neither are the “”“communists”“” that you claim oppose these things. There are a handful of trotskyist parties of relevance in the world today, and while some of those are critical of China and the Stalin period of the USSR they still uphold it other than Stalin. Even Trotsky himself wrote that he would have done everything Stalin did anyway.

If you’re not in orgs, you’re simply not a participant. If you’re not doing something, you’re not a communist. You’re a spectator and a non-participant.

What actually organising communists have this position? They don’t. Because you’re fucking wrong mate.

No I meant Khazaks. The Holodomor killed the Kulaks and news of it got out to the West so it got the headlines. But the same Collective Farming experiments were tried im Khazakstsn and led to mass starvation that killed over half the native population.

Stop saying holodomor dumbass it’s literally the word that nazis gave to the specifically Ukrainian part of the great famine as a means of playing down the holocaust and playing down the larger famine that happened at the time. I already told you to stop being a fucking nazi.

This region had a famine every 5 years for 1000 years and this was the last ever famine to occur in the region, thanks to the soviets.

Most modern Communists don’t view the USSR or PRC as examples of Communism.

Yes they do. You do not know any modern communists. I don’t think you could name a single serious communist party that does not acknowledge the USSR and PRC. Not in the west and certainly not in the global south where they are significantly less critical and more supportive of both.

You constantly demonstrate a distinct lack of any interaction with any actual real communists. Your entire knowledge of everything is through white western liberal circlejerking. You have never been a member of a party, or a union, or even a tenants organisation. You have never done any real organising. You are not and never have been a communist.

I can’t defend a Soviet Empire that caused the pain and suffering it did in Eastern Europe and Asia.

For the love of god I am begging you to read Blackshirts and Reds. Or sit through the yellow Parenti lecture on youtube. You’re just unfathomably wrong about this. These were feudal prior to the revolutions, living conditions were considerably worse.

Life expectancy does not go up when people’s lives are getting worse. What are you failing to understand about this?

Doing thing like killing half of all living Khazaks over a few years by intentionally starving them at scale

I have literally no idea what you’re talking about. This is either some utter bullshit that you’ve made up on the spot or another demonstration of your lack of much understanding of the topic because what you probably meant to say here was kulaks. What’s funny about that however is that you’re trying to imply that is ethnic killing in some way when kulak just means rich wealthy farm owners, the claim that kulaks were “intentionally starved” is nonsense, they were rich. They were dispossessed and forcefully collectivised.

Holodomor and the Great Leap Forward which killed more people than the Holocaust

“DAE communism is worse than nazism?” here you are giving away what you really support, you are a fascist upset at the fact communists defeated the nazis. Nobody within their right mind thinks this, not anyone that knows anything about the topics. Only fascists spread this shit, because it benefits them. Not only that, but it’s an antisemitic trope known as Double Genocide Theory.

If you’re NOT a nazi, I strongly recommend you stop hanging around with nazis, because half the shit you are spewing is literally nazi propaganda and will get you accused of being one by anyone that understands these topics. You were upset at your ban? It’s because you look like a literal nazi.

I also suggest you stop going around professing that you know a lot about communism and used to be one. You clearly don’t. It’s embarrassing. I get second hand embarrassment every time I read something you’re trying to bullshit your way through, it’s incredibly obvious and you just need to stop.

Do you believe Democracy was “Upgraded” in those places?

100% yes. If you do not then you simply have no idea what the democratic structure was and how that resulted in more democratic outcomes. You have a singleminded attitude that the design of liberal democracy - a multi party system where the people that promise to implement the policies that the largest donors want end up in power, where they do exactly what those people want - is the only thing that should be called “democracy”.

The soviet system was democratic. But this democracy has a different structure to the liberal democracy.

Instead of voting for leaders and then locals. The whole structure is built on smaller locals. Typically you will personally know the candidate. The people elect via agreement with the candidate or not. Then the members of the local soviet(council) vote on who will represent that council at the next tier up, and then those the tier up, and so on and so forth all the way up to the national supreme congress which then elects the politburo and so on. This is democratic.

You can’t claim you like Cuba but that you dislike the electoral system in these other places. They’re literally the same. All of them were based on the soviet system.

You ask me do I think they’re more democratic and I ask you why 95% of the Chinese population is happy with and supports their government while less than 40% is happy with their government in most liberal democracies. Which of these systems is producing happier people? Which of them is producing a more democratic outcome in the eyes of its people? You can not use the racist claim this is propaganda, or brainwashing, because the study I’m citing for it specifically states that is NOT what drives the Chinese people’s support for their government, conducted by Harvard, as a 30 year independent study.

I literally liked to Lenin’s interpretation. Lenin literally followed that interpretation. How is it not Lenin’s interpretation?

Re-read what I said to you.

Because they don’t over time. The conclusion of WW2 gave us the ability to observe the development of nations over time split into two with one half being Communist and the other being Capitalist. West/East Germany, North/South Korea, pretty clear record there.

I’ve literally shown you a study that says the opposite read the fucking things you’re being sent or you won’t get another response because you are not participating in good faith, it is a waste of my time and you’re a fucking dickbag for being so rude and disrespectful.

Bringing Korea into this is fucking absurd. The US performed a genocide there killing 20% of the entire population and razed the country to the ground, 95% of all buildings were turned to rubble, and the south was then occupied with a dictatorship regime that carried out mass killings. The south has been under US military occupation ever since. Their country is on its FIFTH republic because the occupation state has collapsed so many times and been couped EVERY time by US backed dickbags. The population of Korea wants to unite, but the north and south can not, because every attempt at doing so the US demands a seat at the table where they then scupper the talks. As for East Germany, it had no industrial base and was the least developed and most damaged in the war? You’re not comparing anything on an equal footing at all. You want an equal comparison? China and India were both equal, roughly the same population size and level of development at the end of ww2. Which system has developed the country better and provided for the people?

Let me leave you with this. Do you without the benefit of hindsight in the 1920s would you have been a Czarist/Cossack or a Soviet?

100% a soviet??? Are you out of your fucking mind? Have you actually ever looked at what the state of feudal russia was under the tsars? Lenin and the soviet revolution are some of the most unambiguous heroes of history and only a complete and totally incorrect understanding of what Russia was before and after could lead you to think otherwise. You want to support an average lifespan of 30 years old and not the improvement to 70 the soviets brought? You’re fucking stupid mate. Dumb as a bag of rocks.

Would you have fled to Taiwan or stayed in China in 1945?

Once again you’re out of your fucking mind. The average lifespan in China was 33 years old when the CPC launched the revolution. The average lifespan improved DURING the revolution, civil war and invasion by the Japanese because the liberation communists were bringing to the population was better than the life they had before.

How the fuck do you think revolutions happen? How the fuck do you think communists get popular support? Magic? Through people just believing that things will eventually in the future be better? Are you fucking mad? People in these conditions support what will bring an IMMEDIATE improvement to their conditions. And that’s exactly what revolution brought.

Your grasp of history is tenuous and you are completely and totally propagandised. You have never engaged with these topics in any critical fashion and it shows.

I think you may have meant to use a different adjective there.

Nope. If you don’t understand what vulgar means in the political context you’re demonstrating further lack of political literacy, particularly as “vulgar marxism” is a term any communist (as you claimed to have been once) should be quite familiar with. But I think at this point in the conversation you’re realising just how obviously bullshit that claim is to any actual communists.

“Dictatorship” doesn’t mean the same thing when Marx uses it vs what you understand the word to mean. Marx is talking about a dictatorship of CLASS. IE a large group of people within society. In liberal democracy the “ruling class” are the bourgeoisie, the capitalists, the billionaires and millionaires. They are the ruling class because when they led the revolutions to overthrow feudalism they designed the new system so that they would be the ruling class. That’s how it works. A dictatorship of CLASS.

Marx calls for exactly the same thing. A revolution that overthrows the current ruling class and installs a new ruling class. When the bourgeoisie overthrew the monarchs and their aristocracy they installed themselves as the ruling class, Marx calls for overthrowing the bourgeoisie and installing the proletariat as the new ruling class.

This isn’t a downgrade to democracy it is an UPGRADE to democracy. The current system only produces the results that the bourgeoisie wants. Socialism on the other hand with the proletariat in charge produces the results that the proletariat want.

My interpretation of it is essentially Lenin and Mao’s interpretation of it, just with the benefits of historical hindsight.

No it isn’t because your description above is fucking wrong. I’m telling you what Lenin and Mao’s interpretation is literally right now. This is basic as fuck stuff.

Who controls that dictatorship has all the effective powers of a dictatorship and has the ability to make life for the people they rule hell.

You’re acting like socialist countries don’t objectively provide a better quality of life than capitalist countries when compared at an equal level of development lmao. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2430906/

Your understanding of any of these topics is incredibly vulgar. A warped and contorted understanding that you’ve only learned through extremely passive engagement with the topic.

Yeah so you’re avoiding everything I said and injecting a completely different topic that you also don’t understand.

Marx’s critique isn’t with democracy it’s with bourgeoise-democracy. You would understand this if you understood even the basic bare minimum about marxist theory. All you are doing here is demonstrating that you do not understand the difference between what marxists refer to as a bourgeoise-democracy and what marxists refer to as a proletarian-democracy. Or if you prefer, the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie vs the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Marx’s “opposition to democracy” that you are utilising for bullshit propaganda here is opposition to using the mechanisms of bourgeoise-democracy to achieve socialism (because they’re designed for the bourgeoisie and to produce outcomes the bourgeoisie want) and instead advocates for revolution to destroy that dictatorship-of-class and install a new democracy of the workers, a new dictatorship of class but one instead run by the working class (the vast majority) instead of the former ruling class (the bourgeoisie, the vast minority).

These are incredibly basic 101 concepts that, if you were a communist as you claim, you would already be aware of and understand. You were not a communist. You haven’t even read a pamphlet like the manifesto, let alone the Critique Gotha Programme that you’re linking to. I have though. And to anyone that actually HAS read these things that you’re pretending to have read you look like and absolute clown who is winging it.

I’m saying I don’t believe you’ve ever engaged with communism. I don’t believe you’ve read a single book. I don’t believe you’ve even read a single pamphlet. I don’t think you could give me a simplified breakdown of what historical materialism is and I don’t believe you could tell me what the 5 basic classes are that marxists define, along with a simple 1 sentence description of their scientific definition. I don’t think you were a communist and I don’t think you know anything about the “historical record of communism” beyond what you have passively consumed from the far right wing fuckwads that you’ve surrounded yourself with and allowed to rot your brain. I’m saying that the confident manner in which you bullshit about these things is a severe personal failing.

All of these are 101 things that anyone who has actually engaged with the topic of socialism for more than like 1 single week would be able to answer instantly and easily.

I’m saying that your political opinions and knowledge of history is based on vibes that you have attained from the massive quantity of propaganda you uncritically consume and not from any actual meaningful knowledge.

Clear enough?

This is what happens when everything you know is based on vibes instead of actually reading any theory or history from primary source historians instead of third.

“Take me seriously” says man in absurd robes, silly hat and one of a kind noddy car.

Because the US has been embargoing it for 50 years to prevent it from getting everything it needs.

The UN regularly votes on the US embargo of Cuba, and only the US and its lapdog Israel support it.

Norway isn’t socialism.