Welcome to Gaia! ::

Sorry it took me awhile to get back, bad thing happened. Then they became worse things.

Of course, Stalin made his coffee in total accordance with the Diamat method. I personally do not regard Stalin as a great hero of the motherland, and see Trotsky as the better man. But this isn’t about whose Great Leaders wins the personality contest it’s about ideology. Now there’s no denying that Stalin was not the theorist that Trotsky was, but he did more than just act as a statesman. He laid out the ideas of "Socialism in One Country", which would be refined and expanded upon by Maoists and others. I suppose you could also argue that Stalin helped set up the Soviet policy concerning nationalities with his 1913 work Marxism and the National Question. Though I’m not as familiar with that subject, so I could very well be wrong. Of course Stalin wasn’t perfect obviously otherwise revisionism would not have gripped the Soviet Union. The purges were disorganized and clumsy, understandable given the state of the USSR, but still responsible for the rise of right wing opportunism and liquidation of Leninism.

I doubt it particularly since such sentences would be shorter than just staying in prison, and far more beneficial to the inmate. They would be to give back to the community through either continuing to provide for their families through employment or toiling on a work crew that does work for cities and regional governments. Besides we have to rehabilitate the bourgeois somehow, and I don’t see how we could do that while they’re stuck in a cell.

The latter one? That was an unfunny funny moment, I apologize.

But wasn’t it the red army, who was composed primarily of peasants although of the lower rung, that ultimately ended the rebellion?
As for where I learned the stuff about Lenin well it was from this thing by Kostas Mavrakis.
Sorry lame response is so lame, if it’s any conciliation I’m actually working on a post for the guild and it should be up soon if all goes well.

Yeeeeeeahno. reading through this thing, and it does two things. On the one hand it quietly adopts propositions put forward by Trotskyism, drops those of Stalinism, without saying it is doing either.

The second thing it does is falsify the position taken by Trotsky, and then puts a roughly accurate, if somewhat distorted, position which corresponds to the facts against a straw man.

Not an example, but I am putting this first, because it is one of the most glaring things I've read thus far:

Trotsky's position here is simply lied about. I'm too lazy to grab my own quotes at the moment, but suffice it to say that Trotsky's position was not that the "slogan" of the democratic dictatorship had been invalidated, but that it was algebraic. With the advent of the revoltion, it was given definite content, and that content matched up with the theory of permanent revolution. Rather than Lenin being wrong on that question, it was merely that Trotsky had been more correct. It may be a very fine distinction, but it is this kind of distortion that permeates what I've read in this work so far.

Another thing I'd like to point out is that it keeps calling 'the revolutionary dictatorship...' a slogan. this isn't correct. It wasn't just a slogan, but the slogan was the condensation of a theory. The theory was not simply an exhortation for the workers to take power, allied with the peasantry. The theory said that the revolutionary government would be a dictatorship of two classes, and that this would represent a phase in the bourgeois revolution, roughly equivalent to the period of the Jacobin dictatorship during the Great French Revolution. To call this, therefore, just a slogan is the mark of great dishonesty.

Let us look at how Lenin deals with this slogan:

Lenin is here saying very clearly, and this point runs through this article, holding it together, that this is a bourgeois revolution, and as such the proletariat should stick to the minimum programme of the Social Democracy. This is no mere slogan!

Now that we've dealt with that pice of dishonestly, let's compare what lenin and Trotsky said of the coming revolution. (I provide a link, because I can't quote any sufficiently concise part). By comparing the two, we see that while Lenin's position was infinitely more revolutionary than the liberal-tailist Mensheviks, it was abstract, in that it didn't take into account the actual course of a revolution with a revolutionary proletarian government. Compare the reality of the 1917 revolution: The Soviets were the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry, they were carrying out the tasks of the bourgeois revolution, but under Bolshevik leadership were going past that, not hindered by any 'chinese walls'.

Ugh, I'll post this and do more later, because I'm feeling ******** crook, and it's taken me forever to type even this much...

I forgive you Naiax, but you still need more posts don't you? =P

but that means no voting sad
and no voting is bad, even if you don't like any of the candidates