propaganda appeals to a pathos that is very hard to unsettle and its important to provide good info regarding it. thank YOU for being tolerable because some people come in here with their heads up their asses

I see. So what’s the story behind the Bolsheviks dissolving that assembly? It’s my understanding that Lenin was unhappy with the expected outcome.

he simply dissolved the previous regime's legislative body and instated the third congress of workers under a marxist framework

The whole discussion surrounding socialism and propaganda hurts my head. It’s my understanding that the US and USSR were calling the soviet system communist for different reasons.

but why? and how is it that a single actor within the party at the authority to do that? Is that not un-democratic?

precisely. communism is simply an ideal to work towards. soviets were communists ideologically but the system in place was not communist. it could be argued that socialism wasn't even properly built in the USSR yet and they were still in state capitalism

IMO we wont leave the state capitalist system until capitalism's hegemony is diminished

attributing the dissolution to lenin is detractive to the overall unpopularity of the monarchy's system. it was something he did as a result of its democratic popularity

its the same as people thinking stalin banned homosexuality in his time. it was actually something voted in by the democratic system

you don't say "obama made gay marriage legal" you say "the US made gay marriage legal" to elaborate on the democratic nature of the action

I swear I called the USSR state-capitalist in here and got s***ted on for it

also, why advocate for this implementation of “socialism” if it won’t end in socialism? From my perspective, the ML ideology has yet to result in socialism.

the point isn't simply to result in socialism. it must result in a stable, lasting, democratic, and coherent form of socialism across the world

being right doesnt matter when youre facing a bayonet or famine

but there wasn’t a vote beforehand, correct? .. Lenin was acting accordance to an assumption he had?

what assumptions were to be had?

I’m just not seeing any good examples to point to then. Obviously, I have a limited understanding of these state’s but I don’t see how, in americas case, we could confidently say a system like this would result in better material conditions for the proletariat. Perhaps i’m pessimistic because “socialism” in this fashion has been historically in-acted in already underdeveloped countries.

Well we can look at the simple numbers in socialist countries vs the the capitalists

You can look up life expectancies, average income, malnutrition rates, child mortality rates, political participation rates, literacy rates, education rates

Think about what Russia and China were in the 1900’s and 1910’s compared to industrialized states like the USA or UK. Agrarian, poor, famine-ridden, colonized and exploited.

In not even 70 years, both countries have been able to build up an economic base that has not only led to them being able to project power to a level rivaling the the US but simultaneously providing their people with a standard of living never before seen. There’s currently a university-educated population in China that’s larger than the entire US population

And if the US isn’t a good example, compare the socialist China to the largely capitalist India. Night and day. Sure they had different conditions but both countries walked out of WW2 as agrarian, post-colonialist countries. And that’s not even counting China being ravaged in a race war

Burkina Faso, Laos, Libya, Cuba, Vietnam, etc

was the idea of dissolving the assembly part of the Bolshevik platform when people voted for them?

I just don’t like the idea of the party acting independent of the people. considering, the party is supposed to be representative of the people.

but aren’t china and russia restrictive in terms of information, content, and autonomy? my impression is that they’re both more oppressive than the US government.

The constituent assembly was part of the Tsarist regime and was replaced with a democratic council though

ok i’ll post it on my phone but i’m
not sure how the formatting will come out as.

After the land reform was done which as a huge success, problems of the land reform were becoming to arise like the peasants that had good land, and better tools for example from the redistribution were beginning to hire wage labour in China and starting to accumulate capital. These peasants who we’ll rich peasants would sell their grain to merchants who would make profit of the grain through speculation (selling higher than they got it from). This was the rich peasant-merchant alliance.

Then there were the peasants who ranged from not being able to make a living off their land so they would sell their labour to the rich peasants to peasants who would be able to live off their land but not hire any wage labour.

In order to prevent the growth of the rich peasants and merchants the communist party started promoting co-ops which were basically mutual aid teams where peasants would help each other out by letting them borrow tools, labour or animals. It’s important to recognize that the communist party of china got the idea co-ops through the mass line from the most advanced section of the peasants, the party made it a national thing rather than a local thing rather than the co-op being imposed top down from the above forcefully.

So the co-op movement ended up being hugely successful, it ended up outperforming the rich peasants to the point where rich peasants would start joining them otherwise they’d be ruined. Part of the reason was due to the CPC buying grain the co-ops would produce for a low price, sell the grain to the industrial prolateriant for a low price who would end up making more advanced farming tools which the CPC would buy for cheap and sell them for cheap to the co-ops which would in return help them produce even more grain . This was the peasant-prolateriant alliance and was the backbone of Socialist China.

Without the state in this case or if the state just decided it was fine for the rich peasants-merchant alliance to continue normally it would have lead to capitalist restoration in China.

The Co-Ops weren’t perfect they had problems as well as peasants joining the co-op getting what they needed and then leaving the co-op, which is why the co-op was needed to develop into the commune system. Why i find China agricultural economy during Mao era so interesting is you get to see dialectics in action and see how things develop through their contradictions.

USA or any western country benefits largely from imperialism let’s not forget even small “innocent” countries like Sweden are selling weapons to Saudi Arabia to massacre Yemen. I think a thing that many western leftist outside of the US is to educate themselves on the imperialism their country are partaking in since the focus is always on the US many people forget or undermine the very same atrocity their own countries do.

A very small fraction of the plunders of imperialism are given to the workers to placate them. Like the attempted coup of Bolivia for their lithium would have resulted in cheaper lithium for the US market and in turn cheaper electronics for us and only at the at the cost of the poor bolivians well what do they know all they were gonna do was nationalize their lithium and use the profits to find their social programs id say it’s better off in our hands anyway.

Also in America they have the special case of being able to peacefully develop, they never had a neighbour that wanted to and had the potential to wipe out all their people from existence like the Soviets did with the Nazis.

Also the USA had slavery where they can use the free labour to help develop the industry up north, until it got to the point slavery got irreconcilable.

What does Ricardian socialism get wrong?

It wasn't a decision made by just Lenin, the majority of the congress did:

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ban_on_factions_in_the_Communist_Party_of_the_Soviet_Union#:~:text=In%201921%2C%20factions%20were%20banned,Russian%20Communist%20Party%20(Bolsheviks).&text=the%20Congress%20regarded%20these%20as,the%20famines%2C%20and%20Kronstadt%20Rebellion.

You have to understand the conditions that they were in weren't exactly regular, they almost literally had the entire world against them

This is a good video that illustrates what led to authoritarian policies like the ban on factionalism etc

Perhaps i’m pessimistic because “socialism” in this fashion has been historically in-acted in already underdeveloped countries.

This is exactly true. Really existing socialism, with all its flaws, has led to better living conditions when compared to capitalist countries at the same level of development:

gowans.blog/2012/12/21/do-publicly-owned-planned-economies-work

"From the moment in 1928 that the Soviet economy became publicly owned and planned, to the point in 1989 that the economy was pushed in a free market direction, Soviet GDP per capita growth exceeded that of all other countries but Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. GDP per person grew by a factor of 5.2, compared to 4.0 for Western Europe and 3.3 for the Western European offshoots (the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) (Allen, 2003). In other words, over the period in which its publicly owned, planned economy was in place, the USSR‘s record in raising incomes was better than that of the major industrialized capitalist countries."

"No other country had more physicians per capita or more hospital beds per capita than the USSR. In 1977, the Soviet Union had 35 doctors and 212 hospital beds per 10,000 compared to 18 doctors and 63 hospital beds in the United States (Szymanski, 1984). Most important, healthcare was free. That US citizens had to pay for their healthcare was considered extremely barbaric in the Soviet Union, and Soviet citizens “often questioned US tourists quite incredulously on this point”"

"For example, outside its southern core, Latin America’s GDP per capita was $1,332 (1990 US dollars), almost equal to the USSR’s $1,370. By 1989, the Latin American figure had reached $4,886, but average income in the Soviet Union had climbed far higher, to $7,078 (Allen, 2003). Public ownership and planning had raised living standards to a higher level than capitalism had in Latin America, despite an equal starting point. Moreover, while the Soviet peacetime economy unfailingly expanded, the Latin American economy grew in fits and starts, with enterprises regularly shuttering their doors and laying off employees."

"Perhaps the best illustration of how public ownership and planning performed better at raising living standards comes from a comparison of incomes in Soviet Central Asia with those of neighboring countries in the Middle East and South Asia. In 1928, these areas were in a pristinely pre-industrial state. Under public ownership and planning, incomes grew in Soviet Central Asia to $5,257 per annum by 1989, 32 percent higher than in neighboring capitalist Turkey, 44 percent higher than in neighboring capitalist Iran, and 241 percent higher than in neighboring capitalist Pakistan (Allen, 2003). For Central Asians, it was clear on which side of the Soviet Union’s border standards of living were highest."

I'm not religious but if there is such a thing as hell then there's a special spot reserved for Blaise Compaoré for sure