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Cake day: August 3rd, 2023

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  • Whether their occupations and annexations where extractive or expansionist in nature, and whether they qualify for the definition of imperialism, is discussion that can be had, although I have neither the time nor energy to have it here. What stays unchanged past this talk of semantics is the fact that they were an authoritarian and expansionist state. To quote Rosa Luxemburg:

    When all this is eliminated, what really remains? In place of the representative bodies created by general, popular elections, Lenin and Trotsky have laid down the soviets as the only true representation of political life in the land as a whole, life in the soviets must also become more and more crippled. Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element. Public life gradually falls asleep, a few dozen party leaders of inexhaustible energy and boundless experience direct and rule. Among them, in reality only a dozen outstanding heads do the leading and an elite of the working class is invited from time to time to meetings where they are to applaud the speeches of the leaders, and to approve proposed resolutions unanimously – at bottom, then, a clique affair – a dictatorship, to be sure, not the dictatorship of the proletariat but only the dictatorship of a handful of politicians, that is a dictatorship in the bourgeois sense, in the sense of the rule of the Jacobins (the postponement of the Soviet Congress from three-month periods to six-month periods!) Yes, we can go even further: such conditions must inevitably cause a brutalization of public life: attempted assassinations, shooting of hostages, etc. (Lenin’s speech on discipline and corruption.)

    • Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, 1918.

    1918, this was written well before Stalin’s reign of terror, in a time when general sentiment towards the revolution was full of hope. Even anarchists where quick to support the revolutionaries, but quickly became disillusioned from what they saw. To quote Trotsky, the man himself:

    The working class […] cannot be left wandering all over Russia. They must be thrown here and there, appointed, commanded, just like soldiers […] Compulsion of labour will reach the highest degree of intensity during the transition from capitalism to socialism […] Deserters from labour ought to be formed into punitive battalions or put into concentration camps.”

    Then later in the year, as the workers were becoming angered at their treatment:

    the militarization of labour…is the indispensable basic method for the organization of our labour forces

    And

    Is it true that compulsory labour is always unproductive? […] This is the most wretched and miserable liberal prejudice: chattel slavery too was productive. Compulsory slave labour […] was in its time a progressive phenomenon. Labour […] obligatory for the whole country, compulsory for every worker, is the basis of socialism.


  • I’m sure the Ukrainian free soviets where happy to be liberated, or the sailors of Kronstadt. I’m sure the Spanish workers were glad to be shot in the back in the name of the party. The people of Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia were without a doubt thrilled to be occupied. The land grab in Finland liberated plenty of people, they were welcomed with open arms, yes? Communists leaders around the world felt so liberated, in fact, they bonded together in third-worldism to escape the influence of the СССР.











  • Communism is a stateless, classless and moneyless society. Of course there need to be structures in place to ensure it stays that way, because having a powerful few would have reintroduced classes. Thats why you need stable, democratic governance, for example federated councils or something similar.

    most people rather tune out ‘the noise’ and live their lives being blissfully ignorant

    I’d argue that’s not an intrinsic feature of humans, but the result of capitalist alienation. On the one hand, the individual has very little chance to participate in the decision making process, and people are overworked so they barely have the energy or time to do so, even if they wanted to