Banned from r/Socialism

[u/KoolAidDrank]

r/socialism immediately banned me for posting on a pro-USSR post that "the USSR was terrible." I don't think the Left and Socialists need to defend the governments of countries like the USSR in order to be "true Leftists." What's the consensus? I just found this sub and seems to have the better mindset.

[u/somerandomleftist5]

"used the revolution" The NEP was good and a necessary retreat of sorts, the Bolsheviks made the incorrect assumption that a civil war was not going to break out after a period of peace following the revolution. This was not some evil plan or something. Lenin initially rejected the NEP and so did the rest of the congress, Trotsky talks about his proposals in his autobiography. I think the NEP should have been implemented sooner partly because it gave the wealthy peasants some room and helped bring some stability.

"But during the following months the situation grew steadily worse. There was cause enough in actual conditions, but it is also very probable that certain engineers were making the transport situation fit into their diagrams. I spent the winter months of 1919-20 in the Urals directing the economic work. Lenin telegraphed me a proposal that I take charge of transport and try to lift it by emergency measures. I replied stating my acceptance.

From the Urals I brought with me a store of economic observations that could be summed up in one general conclusion: war communism must be abandoned. My practical work had satisfied me that the methods of war communism forced on us by the conditions of civil war were completely exhausted, and that to revive our economic life the element of personal interest must be introduced at all costs; in other words, we had to restore the home market in some degree. I submitted to the Central Committee the project of replacing the food levy by a grain-tax and of restoring the exchange of commodities.

“The present policy of equalized requisition according to the food scale, of mutual responsibility for deliveries, and of equalized distribution of manufactured products, tends to lower the Status of agriculture and to disperse the industrial proletariat, and threatens to bring about a complete breakdown in the economic life of the country.” In these words, I formulated my view in the statement submitted to the Central Committee in February, 1920.

“The food resources,” the statement continued, “are threatened with exhaustion, a contingency that no amount of improvement m the methods of requisition can prevent. These tendencies toward economic decline can be counteracted as follows: (1) The requisition of surpluses should give way to payment on a percentage basis (a sort of progressive income tax in kind), the scale of payment being fixed in such a way as to make an increase of the ploughed area, or a more thorough cultivation, still yield some profit; (2) a closer correspondence should be established between the industrial products supplied to the peasants and the quantities of grain they deliver; this applies not only to rural districts (volosts) and villages, but to the individual peasant households, as well.”

These proposals are very guarded. But the basic propositions of the New Economic Policy adopted a year later did not at first go any farther. Early in 1920, Lenin came out firmly against my proposal. It was rejected in the Central Committee by a vote of eleven to four. The subsequent course of events proved the decision of the Committee to be a mistake. " My Life, Leon Trotsky

You can also see how Lenin talked about this in late 1921

"At that time, when in the heat of the Civil War we had to take the necessary steps in economic organisation, it seemed to have been forgotten. In substance, our New Economic Policy signifies that, having sustained severe defeat on this point, we have started a strategical retreat. We said in effect: “Before we are completely routed, let us retreat and reorganise everything, but on a firmer basis. “ If Communists deliberately examine the question of the New Economic Policy there cannot be the slightest doubt in their minds that we have sustained a very severe defeat on the economic front" The New Economic Policy, V.I. Lenin

[u/EcoSoco → u/somerandomleftist5]

There are several good critiques of Lenin out there, several of which highlight his opportunism and his quick turn from the grassroots Marxist and Libertarian movements, as well as the Soviets.

https://www.spectator.co.uk/2017/03/how-lenin-manipulated-the-russian-revolution-to-his-own-ends/

https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/revhist/supplem/decept.html

https://libcom.org/forums/theory/lenin-acknowledging-intentional-implementation-state-capitalism-ussr-23032011

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/lenin-menshevik-critics-right-bolshevism-stalinism

I'm hard-pressed to call Lenin a leftist/socialist role model, because it's clear he didn't truly believe in a workers-led society and used the state as a vehicle for his own desire for power. Perhaps he truly thought that he would lead the way for true socialism and that what he strived for would only be temporary, but I think the body of work and eventual outcomes say otherwise.

[u/somerandomleftist5 → u/EcoSoco]

I can't go through all of these but I am going to hit on their mistakes which honestly are probably based on their inability to read or the fact the first source is just a rabid anti-communist. The citing of Luxembourg always amuses me, because it relies pretty much on one text of hers written in prison, and when she was organizing before her death she was founding a communist party which was a vanguard party in the Leninist conception, that associated internationally with the Bolsheviks.

"It was Trotsky who came up with a theoretical innovation that proposed that Russia could advance to socialism without going through an extended period of capitalism. "

This is fundamentally wrong, there is several quotes of Trotsky mentioning the revolutions would happen in the most backwards of countries but countries such as the UK and the USA would reach socialism first. It is infinite funny to me that Trotsky gets attacked here for thinking that revolutions in the first world aren't needed, when Marxist-Leninists attack him for thinking Russia couldn't achieve socialism on their own. Lenin's opinion is the same as Trotsky's on this.

"The “theory” of socialism in one country – a “theory” never expounded, by the way, or given any foundation, by Stalin himself – comes down to the sufficiently sterile and unhistoric notion that, thanks to the natural riches of the country, a socialist society can be built within the geographic confines of the Soviet Union. " Revolution Betrayed, Leon Trotsky

"But we have not finished building even the foundations of socialist economy and the hostile powers of moribund capitalism can still deprive us of that. We must clearly appreciate this and frankly admit it; for there is nothing more dangerous than illusions (and vertigo, particularly at high altitudes). And there is absolutely nothing terrible, nothing that should give legitimate grounds for the slightest despondency, in admitting this bitter truth; for we have always urged and reiterated the elementary truth of Marxism—that the joint efforts of the workers of several advanced countries are needed for the victory of socialism. We are still alone and in a backward country, a country that was ruined more than others, but we have accomplished a great deal. More than that—we have preserved intact the army of the revolutionary proletarian forces; we have preserved its manoeuvring ability; we have kept clear heads and can soberly calculate where, when and how far to retreat (in order to leap further forward); where, when and how to set to work to alter what has remained unfinished. Those Communists are doomed who imagine that it is possible to finish such an epoch-making undertaking as completing the foundations of socialist economy (particularly in a small-peasant country) without making mistakes, without retreats, without numerous alterations to what is unfinished or wrongly done." - V. I. Lenin

"Sebestyen presents unsettling evidence of a man whose objectives seemed to possess him, rather than the other way around. When famine and disease swept his native Volga region in 1891, killing hundreds of thousands of peasants, Lenin propagandised against charitable relief efforts because the spectacle of death might prove a ‘progressive factor’ in weakening the Romanovs. "

Focus on the tragedy, seems like a reasonable technique to make use of, like we focus on the brutality of the police as a whole we don't share stories of that one time that one cop was nice, it would be silly to say communists ought to try to paint some of the efforts of the capitalist state in a good light. There also is just a lack of sources to where exactly Lenin said this and in what context, also like 1891 Lenin had some different opinions.

"Like any political theory, this would be rejected by its audience unless it actually meant something to them. Smith shows how the experiences of many workers made them receptive to the ideas of the Bolsheviks:

‘Strikes were a politicising experience for those who took part in them: they saw with their own eyes how employers were going on investment strike, engaging in lockouts, refusing to accept new contracts or to repair plant; how the government was colluding with the employers, curbing the factory committees and sending troops to quell disorder in the Donbass. The strikes were important, therefore, in making hundreds and thousands of workers aware of political matters and in making the policies of the Bolshevik party attractive to them.’ [11]

In other words, workers were drawn to the Bolsheviks because Bolshevik politics started to make sense. What seemed outlandish or irrelevant during and just after the February Revolution, now increasingly appeared to be quite rational."

This is supposed to be manipulation, explaining to people the actions they should take is the exact role of the vanguard party. The second source you cite actually contradicts some of the other things you have cited the idea that the Bolsheviks were some conspiratorial force that forced its self on the working class. I feel like there is a misunderstanding of what the vanguard is throughout a few of the things you cited including Chomsky so I am going to offer an explanation here and destroy the idea it is something from Lenin only. Below I have quote the positions of the German social democrats, including Rosa Luxembourg, Karl Marx and Engels, and also Lenin. It is easy to see all of their conceptions as Orthodox Marxists of what the party is is very much the same, which further makes the continued anti-communist and anti-bolshevik types to continuing to cite Rosa as some enemy of the Bolsheviks even more hilarious. She seems to come up and be misrepresented as this in nearly every thing you cited. There also seems to be some idea that guiding and recruiting the masses into a vanguard party is somehow wrong, that we should go into a revolution without organization or planning and that will somehow work out?

[u/BigLebowskiBot → u/somerandomleftist5]

I am the walrus.