• SuddenDownpour@sh.itjust.works
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    8 months ago

    I’m pretty sure the leftcommunists and anarchists and worker councils requesting for power to be really handed to the soviets which were purged by Lenin and Trotsky weren’t actually landlords. But you never know, people from .ml may think people unwilling to obey the bolsheviks get labeled landlords too.

    • Filthmontane@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Weird, I was under the impression that the purges happened after Lenin died. Can ghosts lead a purge?

      • SuddenDownpour@sh.itjust.works
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        8 months ago

        Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Terror#Industrial_workers

        Do also take a look at this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1917_Russian_Constituent_Assembly_election

        And this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socialist_Revolutionary_Party

        Selected quotes:

        The SRs were agrarian socialists and supporters of a democratic socialist Russian republic. The ideological heirs of the Narodniks, the SRs won a mass following among the Russian peasantry by endorsing the overthrow of the Tsar and the redistribution of land to the peasants.

        In the election to the Russian Constituent Assembly held two weeks after the Bolsheviks took power, the party still proved to be by far the most popular party across the country, gaining 37.6% of the popular vote as opposed to the Bolsheviks’ 24%. However, the Bolsheviks disbanded the Assembly in January 1918 and after that the SR lost political significance. (…) Both wings of the SR party were ultimately suppressed by the Bolsheviks through imprisoning some of its leaders and forcing others to emigrate.

        Following Lenin’s instructions, a trial of SRs was held in Moscow in 1922, which led to protests by Eugene V. Debs, Karl Kautsky, and Albert Einstein among others. Most of the defendants were found guilty, but they did not plead guilty like the defendants in the later show trials in the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and the 1930s.

        Note that these guys won the elections because they were the actually existing socialist movement in Russia and had been for decades. Lenin only led the government instead of them because he had the organization to overthrow the Mensheviks, not because the Bolsheviks were a better representative of socialism.

        • Filthmontane@lemmy.world
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          8 months ago

          That’s not true at all. The Mensheviks wanted to cooperate with the bourgeoisie and were therefore a bad representation of socialism. Lenin formed the Bolsheviks because the Mensheviks were being stupid. The country was also fractured after the revolution and many groups of counter-revolutionary groups were trying to overthrow the barely formed government. Meanwhile famines were ravaging the country. Understanding the historical context of Russia in 1917 and the economic struggles the people were dealing with is very important to understanding why things happened the way they did. Looking at the aftermath of a revolution where everyone is vying for power and killing each other doesn’t automatically make the winner of that power grab the bad guys.

            • Filthmontane@lemmy.world
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              8 months ago

              It was many factions. I’m just saying all of them were trying to have third revolutions while the people starved to death. At some point, revolutions end with a unifying government that isn’t trying to murder each other. Lenin was not the villain you’re painting him to be.

    • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
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      8 months ago

      When your purges actually violate literally every Marxist principle and sabotage the revolution, isn’t it kind of fair to accuse Bolsheviks, or at least the leadership, of being fake communists?

      Stalin was a counterrevolutionary, die mad about it, we’re Menshevik posting in this bitch.

      • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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        8 months ago

        Yeah continue ww1, so fucking based

        When people complaining about your side latch onto factions that they know nothing about it is kinda really funny

        • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
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          8 months ago

          If you didn’t willingly ignore the sins of “your side” that’d be valid.

          Meanwhile, the only criticism you launch at the Mensheviks is… They wanted to keep fighting the imperial powers?

          Don’t get me wrong, it was just a bad decision, but it wasn’t, ya know, genociding fellow socialists.

          I’d personally criticize them for thinking they needed to follow the traditional Marxist thought that economic liberalism was a required stage on the path to socialism.

          • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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            8 months ago

            Meanwhile, the only criticism you launch at the Mensheviks is… They wanted to keep fighting the imperial powers?

            Bwahahahaha yeah that’s why Tsarist and Kerensky Russia was aligned with France and England

            Bwahahahaha

            At some point you gotta just come to the conclusion that you haven’t read enough on this topic and pick up some books instead of speaking garbage.

            Also “the only criticism” that’s the fucking big criticism that got them overthrown, which you’d fucking know if you studied history.

            • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
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              8 months ago

              The imperial powers that were direct threats to the revolution and they were already fighting, buddy, aka the Ottomans and the Germans. Hey, remind me how that worked out in the end? Did the People’s Government get a seat at Versailles? No? Had to fight a war against fucking Poland first and then get even more people killed by Germany later?

              And your argument is “the decision was unpopular,” not that it was wrong.

              You also find that they were not overthrown. Their political alliance was couped, like what happens in a “real democracy” when you push an unpopular policy. Even then, they supported the Bolsheviks anyways in the civil war.

              Generally speaking, it’s considered rude to murder all of your fellow socialists anyways if that happens.

              • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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                8 months ago

                Hey, remind me how that worked out in the end? Did the People’s Government get a seat at Versailles? No? Had to fight a war against fucking Poland first and then get even more people killed by Germany later?

                And your argument is “the decision was unpopular,” not that it was wrong.

                Wait are you out here arguing that Russia should have continue fighting ww1? Seriously? And that refusing to fight the war led to nazi Germany and their exterminationist war against the soviet union?

                Bwahahahahahaha

                • DragonTypeWyvern@literature.cafe
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                  8 months ago

                  Eh, as you mentioned, it was deeply unpopular.

                  But yes. It would have.

                  Why would you think changing history would not change history?

                  • OurToothbrush@lemmy.ml
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                    8 months ago

                    But yes. It would have.

                    Remember this comment so you can cringe at it when you’re less ignorant :)

      • SuddenDownpour@sh.itjust.works
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        8 months ago

        I don’t think the Mensheviks were the good guys either. Mensheviks would allow a way out for the old elites to remain elites if they kept on with the times (from aristocracy to bourgeoisie), the Bolsheviks just laid the way out for new elites (party apparatus) by choosing not to empower the working class. The leninist model followed somewhat similar structures everwhere from Hungary to Vietnam, and they always ended the same way: with the party elites opening the way to privatization after one or two generational changes and the heirs of the new system realizing that they’d get more material privilege by establishing capitalism, and without an organized, conscious working class capable of stop them.

        • jkrtn@lemmy.ml
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          8 months ago

          I agree. A viable long-term economy needs an organized working class that isn’t sleepwalking through life. Would be cool to make the economic system not inherently hierarchical also.