User:RD/9k/Immediate tasks of Russian republic (Q19,19)
Main entry
- The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government (Lenin 1918) [1]
Motifs or claims
- When a soviet socialist republic is sandwiched between competing empires, it's time to rebuild (Lenin 1918)
- The fight against the kulaks ends in creating the Bolshevik mono-structure ("raising the productivity of labor on the national scale", creating nation-wide "accounting"; Lenin 1918)
- Call using bourgeoisie a retreat / To conceal from the people the fact that recruiting bourgeois experts ("Careerists") with high salaries is a retreat from the standards of proletarian movements would be sinking to the level of bourgeois politicians and deceiving the people (Lenin 1918) -> wow, Lenin stirred up some absolute dirt on Deng Xiaoping Thought. I feel like Deng Xiaoping states conceal the significance of this kind of thing all the time. you'd think they'd be willing to say the word "retreat" rather than go on about the "socialist market economy" if they knew what they were talking about.
- Without proper development of the Bolshevik mono-structure which all goods pass through and which records and controls their distribution ("comprehensive state accounting and control of the production and distribution of goods"), the freedom of the working people cannot be maintained, and capitalism will be restored -> this seems like a really critical point. because it seems like it's saying that a country like China, Cuba, North Korea, or Vietnam having half the society be private businesses is a serious problem that halts socialist transition. or by some definitions is it; the mono-structure comes up in relation to the second transition to upper-phase communism too, in things like ultimately making it possible to get rid of money.
- Anarchism and anarcho-syndicalism are bourgeois trends, inasmuch as they resist state control and uphold private property and separate free-floating businesses as a fundamental right; in being irreconcilably opposed to forming a nation-wide Bolshevik mono-structure, they are irreconcilably opposed to socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat (Lenin) -> I am so glad when Marxist theorists say things like this because oh man anarchists are so annoying. they will come up with all these unreal distortions of property or dividing society being "fundamental human rights" and how separating people into tiny societies of one supposedly makes everybody respect each other and everybody is the same and classes cannot exist. none of it makes any sense and I cannot stand it. pretty much everything Lenin says makes vastly more coherent sense
I think when the world is so screwed now you fundamentally have to find ways of referring to what Lenin calls "state control" without referring to a "state". we really live in an age of anarchism now, not an age of countries which just escaped feudalism, and there is this widespread misconception that ever thinking of people as being inside a state instead of only belonging to themselves and being free to pick on any other country or ethnic group is somehow "colonialism" or something. this is why I tend toward phrases like "Bolshevik mono-structure". if you can totally separate the things the state does from talking about a formal government and fool people into thinking they did it all "themselves" as free-floating individuals then maybe we still have a chance - To achieve accounting for everyone's consumption, people can be put into consumer cooperatives; the richest can hand over a budget on their own
- Putting a whole village or town (?) into a consumer cooperative, free of charge, would be a more favorable policy for the proletariat than allowing arbitrary owner cooperatives to exist and charge an entrance fee; this is to imply that it is an acceptable compromise when the cooperatives already exist and are willing to negotiate
- A soviet republic can apply all the best parts of the Taylor system without orienting it toward exploitation -> he said a lot of words about the Taylor system. may as well note it down.
- The Soviet government has abolished trade secrets -> god that sounds amazing. think about how much people obsess today over "nintendo leaks". imagine if nobody could stop that and advance video game news just became a thing people thought of as pedestrian.
- Model communes (villages, soviet structures) must and will serve as educators, teachers, helping to raise the backward communes, and will be rewarded through things such as better pay, shorter hours, or a larger amount of cultural or aesthetic facilities (Lenin) -> ok, I can kind of visualize the Trotskyist vision of a soviet-socialist republic now. the newspapers never leave them? and turn into a weird contest of which towns can apply the best industrial methods. yeah. I see why they regurgitate these early works of Lenin. that's such a thought though, like, you're telling me Trotskyists don't really hate the 'problem' of society being loosely glued together by newsfeeds and can vaguely imagine a future where that is used to tie people together across distant cities and unify them onto the best policies, while it's mainly blue anarchists that are truly getting upset about it. that stands to reason; of course it's the anarchists that want to withdraw from everything.
so, why is it that there appears to be a swath of orange anarchists, who falsely present as allies of Trotskyists?? - thousands and millions of cases of wavering and desertion / Every great revolution is inconceivable without internal war, which involves thousands and millions of cases of wavering and desertion from one side to another (Lenin) -> one of those statements that is so ironic when you see a quote either come of Trotsky or in this case appear in a text that Trotskyists are okay with.
- thousands and millions of cases of wavering and desertion / places his confidence in the proletariat and supports it one moment and the next gives way to fits of despair (Lenin) / when certain "revolutionaries" hear this they are seized with noble indignation and begin to "thunder" abuse at us for forgetting the traditions of the October Revolution (Lenin)
- When the petty bourgeoisie run wild through resistance, crime, corruption, and profiteering you will need an iron hand
- bourgeois conspiracy / this element operates from within and takes advantage of every manifestation of disintegration, of every weakness, in order to bribe, to increase indiscipline, laxity and chaos (Lenin) -> you can see here that if the "blat" situation gets bad enough even Lenin would act to crush it.
- It is not enough to be an adherent of socialism or a Communist in general; you must be able at each particular moment to find the particular link in the chain to grasp with all your might in order to hold the whole chain and to prepare firmly for the transition to the next link (Lenin)
- No bureaucracy in the soviets, soviets in the commissariats -> I have to be honest, I don't fully know what a commissariat is. but apart from that, sounds solid.
Subjective themes
- Recruiting bourgeois specialists during proletarian revolution is valuable because they will likely be put to use in building up the new economy -> these events have some really interesting 'subtext' for how they apply to Gramscianism.
- consumer co-op as county / consumer co-op as fundamental unit of society -> this somehow never occurred to me and now that I finally noticed it I can see why for the longest time I was so confused. I was like, but don't workers always claim something, isn't there always something on the other end with the worker as the granting node and then the receiving node by which they both expand together, how do you stabilize chunks of workers when they're always chunk-competing. but Lenin had the answer. it's true that it's hard to separate out workers from the forces that lay them down where they are, but it's not true that those forces inevitably become the bourgeoisie. instead, the dialectical relationship between workers and founders and retailers is replaced with a back-and-forth relationship between workers and these consumer co-ops. god nothing made sense until I had that. now everything makes sense, or close.
god yeah, we have grounds to accuse anybody who conflates circles of businesses with "community" of having The Colonizer Attitude. anarchists would be so angry, but explain to me why it's wrong. the process of individuals stating they can go found a ring of businesses and a town wherever they want to without the input of a consumer co-op is basically the heart of 1700s colonialism. so like, blue and strawberry anarchists are colonizers, change my mind.
Related
Ideology codes
-
⧼hue-ins-domain-spacer/⧽ML / dialectical materialism
1-1-1 -
⧼hue-ins-domain-spacer/⧽ML / Vladimir Lenin
1-1-1
- DX / Deng Xiaoping Thought
- ML onto DX
Subpages
- Q19,19/comm - temporarily included below
"comm"
notes on text after text was mentioned by A Certain Program. (this entry contains no generated text, not even summaries of it)
* 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