View source for Ontology talk:9k/RD/Q19,19/comm

notes on text after text was mentioned by A Certain Program. <!-- ai.wsws.org --> (this entry contains no generated text, not even summaries of it)

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<pre>* presented Lenin's assessment of the RSFR from 1918
  * if the proletariat and the poor peasants display sufficient class-consciousness / convince the majority of people its program and tactics are correct
    * ok, that's a contradiction. the first sentence suggests the peasants and proletariat understand their own conditions from within them, the second suggests the party is feeding a model of their conditions to them. this is a material contradiction because both things can be happening. but you aren't persuading me that Lenin wasn't a "Stalinist" with this text
  * build a state and suppress the resistance - he said some of the resistance wanted to start wars again so yeah, that's pretty important.
  * restore productive forces; create structure, accounting, and labor discipline
    * "arguing at mass meetings about the conditions of work with the task of unquestioningly obeying the will of the Soviet leader, of the dictator, during the work"
  * get rid of all the bourgeoisie including the kulaks - he's about to do the stuff that made overseas people really mad
  * raising the productivity of labour on a national scale - I note a hidden theme in here, which is taking all the competing chunks of the country and unifying them into one thing. it's no secret in other texts like _State and Revolution_ or Marx's writings, but here it isn't emphasized
  * "a victorious army that has captured, say, a half or two-thirds of the enemy's territory and is compelled to halt"
    * that is a very evocative metaphor. it draws attention to how all States begin as Social-Philosophical Systems that have to secure a particular territory. you'd better hope the SPS is defined by being the proletariat or at the very least is a solid, fighting ally to all Third-World countries.
    * connect this to TC8 and the actual struggle over terrain
  * "specialists" resisted through sabotage and an attack on the bourgeoisie with power was necessary to take away their power
    * in about a year they begin a "ruthless crusade against the violators of this control"
  * to rebuild the productive forces from nothing, gain the experts' support with high salaries - enable "careerism" only temporarily
    * Lenin basically says this is a blue method and the red or orange method includes giving the average workers and experts the same _maximum_ salary. presumably you'll like, raise the low salaries and lower the high ones and end up somewhere in the middle. but as far as I can see this would only become stable when industries stabilize more and there is _less need_ for expert roles versus average workers. you're in effect trying to gradually abolish the experts.
  * throw off the "idlers, parasites and embezzlers" of state funds and common capital to replace their services of creating 'scientific organization' with control from below - next.
    * this feels like it never fully happened. it also feels like Trotskyists would be rather horrible at making it happen because the prime group of people to become Trotskyist theorists or organizers is exactly this class of people
    * _one year_. one year to get rid of the Careerists whose very job is to creatively destroy parts of society and open up unnecessary contradictions.
  * the small kulaks who are like, the scalpers of 1918, have caused a lot of trouble capturing things like grain and disrupting the economy, but apparently the thing to do about them is proceed on tightening up everything else and improving the state businesses so they can almost be ignored. but it sounds like 1919 is going to be quite a year. the big kulaks, these people, and the experts. they have to get rid of all three in approximately that order and they have only a year or two to do it
  * introduce compulsory labor starting at the rich, make them contribute data on what they are buying. get everybody else into compulsory labor system next.
  * create branches of the People's Bank and make it easy to make deposits or withdrawals
  * defeat the incursion of foreign businesses by building up the state businesses and holding down a state monopoly (economic institution) on foreign trade
  * make consumer co-ops a new basis for society - "communes or villages, or blocks of houses, etc."
    * if the mono-structure of consumer co-ops was healthy there would basically be one consumer co-op connected to the soviets that orders food for the town, not a bunch of them
  * after the internal war and its period of violence are over, catch the saboteurs in the factories, railroads, etc, and bring them to court
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