Federal Police "Invade" Portland

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Continuation of my post regarding how Hitler described Nazism:
When asked in a 27 January 1934 whether he supported the “bourgeois right-wing”, Hitler claimed that Nazism was not exclusively for any class and he indicated that it favoured neither the left nor the right, but preserved “pure” elements from both “camps” by stating: “From the camp of bourgeois tradition, it takes national resolve, and from the materialism of the Marxist dogma, living, creative Socialism”.[30]
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“Communism”, in the sense of the planned economies of the 20th century, is dead. Those economic and political forms emerged from societies that were only just carrying through agrarian reform by tearing down the landed classes and essentially freeing the peasantry by distributing the land, and had been left undeveloped so adopted the planned economy as a means to build up industry on the back of a stunted, peasant agriculture at a time when most other countries were far more developed. They are a product of conditions that no longer exist in any country and are not coming back.

The protests we have seen in the USA recently are not people advocating for some kind of Stalinist planned economy. They are probably mostly liberal and leftist students and types like that, but many will just be working class members of local communities that are tired of perceived racial discrimination, and maybe are badly affected by the recent recession.
 
They pretty much wiped out the Kulaks in the Ukraine, so yeah, not so sure they were essentially freeing the peasantry.

And the Kulaks were doing just fine before the Communists got involved.

holodomor.ca

Holodomor Basic Facts - HREC

Holodomor Basic Facts - The term Holodomor (death by hunger, in Ukrainian) refers to the starvation of millions of Ukrainians in 1932–33 as a result of Soviet
holodomor.ca holodomor.ca
 
Whenever the fascists take the next step in the progression to full authoritarianism people really come out of the woodwork to talk about communism for some reason.
 
I’m sorry, but isn’t the goal of the communism of old to create a classless society also a modern day objective of socialists/communists today???
 
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Because communist proponents speaking of the evils of fascism is highly ironical.
 
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As they say, it’s obvious that scaling back law enforcement often isn’t going to hurt the rich the most. No, it hurts others. Maybe those who aren’t in the best neighborhoods.

Charles Barkley Says ‘Defund the Police’ Would Hurt Black Communities: ‘Who the Black People Gonna Call, Ghostbusters?’​

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So, some of this is ridiculous and causing more problems.

So, all of this unrest seems very exploitative to me.
 
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You know as well as I do that Marxists in Russia were true believers who thought that they would eventually get to their stateless utopia.

That was probably the wordiest way you could have said that they were not “real communists”.
 
They pretty much wiped out the Kulaks in the Ukraine, so yeah, not so sure they were essentially freeing the peasantry.
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And the Kulaks were doing just fine before the Communists got involved.
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Prior to the “communists getting involved”, the land in Russia was mostly held by large landowners that were essentially feudal or aristocratic in nature. The Bolsheviks in 1917 carried out a land reform that was incredibly popular among the peasantry, and which the Kerensky government had refused to do. They parceled the land out among the peasantry, essentially allowing them to own their own land and sell the produce from their land as they wanted. This was a popular move among the peasantry, and basically how the Bolsheviks garnered support from them early on. You say that the kulaks were “doing fine”, but really it was the communists that gave the conditions for a big class of rich peasants to really emerge. Following the period of War Communism which involved requisitioning all surplus grain from the peasantry, the Bolsheviks introduced a tax in kind which marked the beginning of the NEP period. This was another concession to the peasantry - a free market would be allowed to exist and the peasantry would be allowed to have possession of their surplus and sell it as they wish, minus a tax in kind which would be given to the state. The period of NEP was a concession to the peasantry that the Soviet government basically never recovered from, in that collectivization never undid the circumstances it led to.

The process of collectivization that you describe started around 1928, a decade after the communists had first seized power and years after Lenin had died. However this really never destroyed the peasantry. The worker in the kolkhoz, the collective farms that most peasants were forced into, was entitled to his own parcel of land and his own animals, and this entitlement was protected in law. This small parcel of land formed the backbone of Soviet agriculture well into the 1970s, when it was still the supplier of around half of the Soviet Union’s agricultural output. What this means is that, in actuality, the condition of the peasant as the small proprietor of a tiny parcel of land was actually preserved by the kolkhoz. The condition of the peasantry as a small proprietor was enshrined in law and was essentially subsidized by the state. At least if the policy of NEP had continued then, hypothetically, the “kulak” would have been able to develop into a large farm owner with employees and agriculture could have developed beyond the condition of the peasant small proprietor. What instead developed was a stunted agricultural production that was basically rooted in pre-capitalist (or early capitalist?) property relations involving small peasant proprietors.

The revolution in China and lots of other countries followed a similar course. The planned economies that didn’t emerge from these conditions were basically just puppet states that had the Soviet model imposed on them. These economies have run their course, and will never exist again.
 
You know as well as I do that Marxists in Russia were true believers who thought that they would eventually get to their stateless utopia.
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That was probably the wordiest way you could have said that they were not “real communists”.
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I believe that the Bolsheviks were “real communists” and I totally believe that they were committed to communism. The problem is that man does not make history as he wishes based on willpower, but rather is conditioned and limited by the social relations that he finds himself within. The Bolsheviks seized power in a country which was going through a bourgeois revolution as proven by the fact that land reform was only just being carried out, and they were forced to finish this process. They knew that the only way they could be saved was if the developed capitalist western European countries also fell to proletarian revolution and immediate socialist measures could be fulfilled in those countries. As this failed to happen the Bolsheviks ended up playing the role of bourgeois revolutionaries in the east, and never advanced to the point of carrying out the proletarian revolution. The USSR developed into a normal bourgeois nation-state, and the Comintern became its vehicle for foreign policy. There was a revolution in Russia in 1917, but it was purely a capitalist one.

At any rate, this is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. I did not originally bring up communism, and I shouldn’t have to have this discussion in every thread I comment on. It has nothing to do with what is happening in Portland.
 
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You are missing the point. The planned economies did not make them evil. The fact they tried to implement communism made them evil

So if I am reading you correctly though, you think Trotsky was right?
 
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Funny, that you don’t describe the tactics being used by the rioters as violent and typical of communist/socialist elements deserving of being condemned?

It is the rioters disregard for law that make POLICE INTERVENTION necessary.

So call it fascist all you like, but I’m of the opinion that it is the police who are fighting off the COMMUNIST tactics of the radicalized elements of the left, so that another Seattle doesn’t take place.

Enough is enough.
Balto1 said:
No, it’s because the kind of person who says fascism and communism are both the same and evil are the kind of people who think fascism is cool as long as people they don’t like are the targets. For example:
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And I could care less what kind of a person you think I am.
 
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This happened during Lenin’s time:
During the first few years after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Russian manufacturing production fell to a fraction of its pre-World War I level. Even worse was the steep decline in food deliveries to the cities. The Lenin government tried to support the townspeople by sending armed patrols to search the farms, confiscating everything edible they could find, including livestock, seed grain, and the peasant families’ own food.

By gradually slaughtering and eating the stock of domestic animals and by increasing the proportion of grain and vegetables in the diet, the basic needs of the population were met during the first three years. But in 1921 the oppression and exploitation of the peasants ripened into famine.

The Lenin regime blamed the famine on poor harvests in the Ukraine and other Russian gra naries caused by droughts and bad weather_ Here Lenin established a precedent for his suc cessors who have consistently blamed crop failures on natural disasters. The Lenin myth was generally believed, and the 1921 famine was interpreted as an unavoidable catastrophe.

Relief expeditions on a massive scale were sent from countries in the West, including the United States. The most important was organized by the League of Nations under the leadership of the Norwegian polar explorer Fridtjof Nansen (awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for this and other achievements in 1922). The lives of

12 to 13 million people were saved, but several millions, most of them peasants, perished. Not only did the relief efforts save tens of millions of lives, but in all probability the Communist regime was saved as well. Without massive relief the famine would have reached such pro portions that no regime would have been able to survive.
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Power and Peasantry: A Report from the Soviet Union

Dr. Rydenfelt is a professor of economics at the University’ of Lund in Sweden.
fee.org fee.org
 
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Yeah, I mentioned that in my post. My point wasn’t to prove that the Bolsheviks were nice to the peasantry, just that the concessions to the peasantry following 1921 led to an economy that was a stunted form of capitalism rather than a communist society, and that the planned economy of the “communist countries” cannot emerge again. Honestly there’s no point discussing the Holodomor or any other atrocity in assessing modern political movements, besides from a historical perspective. Let the dead rest.
 
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Regular_Atheist said:
The process of collectivization that you describe started around 1928, a decade after the communists had first seized power and years after Lenin had died. However this really never destroyed the peasantry. The worker in the kolkhoz, the collective farms that most peasants were forced into, was entitled to his own parcel of land and his own animals, and this entitlement was protected in law.
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It sounds like you were trying to exonerate Lenin whose failed policies also contributed to famine, by stating this process of collectivization started in 1928.

After Lenin died.
 
No, I wasn’t trying to exonerate Lenin. I don’t believe in a “good Lenin” versus a “bad Stalin” - I have explained what happened in the USSR and why it happened. It was not the product of good or bad personalities or conflicting wills. The individual has little agency when it comes to history, and there are no Great Men.

We should stop discussing this though. I am interested in it but I think it dissuades other posters from commenting and discussing the topic at hand, which is the riots in Portland and the harsh government response.
 
billsherman said:
I would think sending soldiers after American citizens would send a rather bad message. But that’s just me.
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I would think ‘sending LEO to arrest criminals sends a rather good message,’
But that’s just me.

People brought in for questioning but not charged, were released
 
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