damn to think that image has haunted my dreams for over four years now

oh huh something I was reading a book about recently. In addition to everyone else’s excellent comments I wanna point to James Harris’ The Great Urals: Regionalism and the Evolution of the Soviet System because it completely upends the traditional scholarship of the purges.

Here is a libgen link to it: https://libgen.is/book/index.php?md5=E10CBD3C52CDF7D5D258AC666D67FAB6

I’m gonna copy the description from libgen to emphasize I’m not editorializing when i sing the book’s praises:

Political histories of the Soviet Union have portrayed a powerful Kremlin leadership whose will was passively implemented by regional Party officials and institutions. Drawing on his research in recently opened archives in Moscow and the Urals—a vast territory that is a vital center of the Russian mining and metallurgy industries—James R. Harris overturns this view. He argues here that the regions have for centuries had strong identities and interests and that they cumulatively exerted a significant influence on Soviet policy-making and on the evolution of the Soviet system.After tracing the development of local interests prior to the Revolution, Harris demonstrates that a desperate need for capital investment caused the Urals and other Soviet regions to press Moscow to increase the investment and production targets of the first five year plan. He provides conclusive evidence that local leaders established the pace for carrying out such radical policies as breakneck industrialization and the construction of forced labor camps. When the production targets could not be met, regional officials falsified data and blamed “saboteurs” for their shortfalls. Harris argues that such deception contributed to the personal and suspicious nature of Stalin’s rule and to the beginning of his onslaught on the Party apparatus.Most of the region’s communist leaders were executed during the Great Terror of 1936–38. In his conclusion, Harris measures the impact of their interests on the collapse of the communist system, and the fate of reform under Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

In very dry, academic writing, with constant, painstaking reference to the archival sources, Harris lays out facts building to his conclusion that there was a massive USSR wide conspiracy, and as the NKVD was sent in to uncover it the conspirators covered it up harder (including using the non-violent purges to purge non-corrupt officials, scientists, managers, workers). The conspirators systemically distorted production potential of their territory; repeatedly, in several different regions, leaders encouraged overestimation of the quantity of ore, and often the quality of ore deposits. Some of the copper and coal they claimed would be the basis of soviet industry literally couldn’t even be used for industrial production. Hundreds of millions of rubles were wasted on facilities, and the conspirators covered it up harder (for example, scientists who disagreed with inflated guesses were–purged by the clique!). This conspiracy wasn’t a Nazi plot, or a trotskyist plot, or an SR plot, or a tsarist plot–all of this was done to cover up regional authorities’ incompetence and corruption (which dated back to literally 1917).

This excerpt from the conclusion is a good summary of his conclusions:

I would only add that by “not permitted to cite “objective reasons” for economic problems” Harris means "they had lied so, so much over the last 15 years that when Stalin ordered for much lower, more reasonable (based on the numbers central had) quotas but demanded absolute fullfilment of them, the regional authorities still couldn’t meet quotas and explaining why would reveal their conspiracy.

Another highlight was the financial commisariat giving the gulags less than 10% of the money the centre ordered them to (it took years for the centre to find out, thousands died). Yet another highlight was the Ukrainian regional authorities (which ofc , death to him, was high up in) using central orders for dekulakization to eradicate any peasants they felt unruly (they made a profitable partnership with the ural factory managers who needed forced labour). Similarly, regional authorities used coercion in collectivization even in periods when the centre was repeatedly ordering them not to.

an apple slice a week keeps the fall-wasps happy too

It exists in all children, regardless of location or culture.

Tho I think your issue is conflating teasing with bullying (the latter is more systematic, long term and doesn’t tend to arise outside of totalising institutions like school, work, bourgeois family, etc).

Ahistoricism is not good theory. When you study cultures outside of state formations and burgher societies you find a much wider variety of behaviour, and a greater degree of acceptance of ‘weirdness’, both on an economic level (e.g. various anishinaabe families and even individuals having idiosyncratic ways of harvesting maple sugar, saying “do it properyl” isnt socially acceptable), an aesthetic one (see the vast varieties of clothing that natives chose to wear in the earlier phases of colonialism 1600-1800, for example), or personal or spiritual choices (e.g. some of the prophets of the Nuer in Sudan ate excrement or ashes, some spent hours arranging seashells into neat patterns). You’ll also see variation in cosmologies, and people accepting random teenagers just saying “all the elders stories are wrong, I know how the world was actually created” with little more than an eyeroll. One of the best examples of the acceptence of difference (and why even outside of just being a decent person its important) is the Shawnee prophet Tenskwatawa (younger brother and main theorist and agitator behind Tecumseh’s war). He was basically useless most of his life. He maimed himself early in life failing to shoot a bow properly. He spent the better part of a decade doing the Shawnee equivilant of couch-surfing and bumming food off everyone else while aquiring a drinking problem. He was still socially accepted, if not trusted with any particularly important tasks. Then, one day, he drank a fuck ton and had a vision and turned into an anti-colonial prophet/propagandist. In our society, people would go “lol drunk failure go away”. In his society, people listened and he helped mobilise one of the biggest anticolonial wars against the US.

Im glad you liked it

the more i read about history the more convinced i become that ‘fascism’ (merger of economic and political power for bourgeois ends) is the default state of capitalism

Carrying on the legacy of Deng Xiaoping

the gospel of mark (haven’t gotten around to reading the others yet) gives me a lot of impressions of a jewish proto-nationalist struggle against rome, but then mystified and distorted by 1. people from outside the context misinterpreting stuff and 2. the empire itself adopting and coopting the movement (or the movement selling out)

There’s a neat sorta process of

“jesus inspired to preach (which, in historical context is equivilant to agitation)”

“jesus starts preaching literally about the corruption of judean society and the temple”

“jesus gets his ass beat by locals for telling them they’re sinful”

“jesus starts preaching in parables so he doesn’t get his ass beat”

“jesus builds movement and explains things literally to the apostles, but continues parableing in his preaching”

“jesus does mutual aid, healing people of physical and mental ailments (not curing imo, but alleviating symptoms (psychologically or literally with oil))”

“jesus confronts the demon legion (which is many)”

“jesus goes to jerusalem, intending to agitate more and die as a matyr to incite rebellion”

“jesus’s followers abandon him and it all falls apart”

30 year break until the actual attempted revolution

“some guy remembers jesus’s ideas (sees visions) and thinks “the rebellion would work if the whole roman empire rose up instead of just judea””

“starts spreading faith to non-jews”

which leads varying religious/cultural ideas being taken literally, misinterpreted and morphed until apocalypse means “the literal end of existence” instead of “the collapse of the existing social order” and jesus is turned into literally god, when in all likelihood he was preaching more or less what isiah or jeremiah did

Jesus also gives instructions for agitation:

8 These were his instructions: “Take nothing for the journey except a staff—no bread, no bag, no money in your belts.

9 Wear sandals but not an extra shirt.

10 Whenever you enter a house, stay there until you leave that town.

11 And if any place will not welcome you or listen to you, leave that place and shake the dust off your feet as a testimony against them.”

12 They went out and preached that people should repent.

13 They drove out many demons and anointed many sick people with oil and healed them.

Saito absolutely a GOAT (for an academic. I’ll put my issues with saito at the end of this post). Shitstain who wrote this article has barely read Saito’s work, because if he did he would 1. realise that actually Saito does directly address modern fertiliser and several other things the article brings up 2. Saito’s proofs for Marx’s changes are far more conclusive than a letter and some excerpts. It actually hinge more on Saito’s discussion of the differences between all the different manuscript varients of Capital, and his reading of the critique of the gotha programme.

Thing that pisses me off the most is actually the complete distortion of marxism the fool writing the article (others have given his name in other comments; i am genuinely too spiteful to remember it. Leigh-something i think). Firstly and most infuriatingly, the fucker editorialises critique of the gotha programme to make it agree with his machine fetishist nonsense. Article-writer cites the conditions for ‘from each according to their ability, to each according to their need’ as simply “after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly” The full list of preconditions is as follows:

“after the enslaving subordination of the individual to the division of labor, and therewith also the antithesis between mental and physical labor, has vanished; after labor has become not only a means of life but life’s prime want; after the productive forces have also increased with the all-around development of the individual, and all the springs of co-operative wealth flow more abundantly”

I.e. the distinction between physical and mental labour needs to be abolished, labour needs to be the thing people want to do. Anyone who’s read ch15 of capital knows machine work is not something people want to do. In Capital, Marx is actually very critical of complete automation of everything. Marx’s solution to the drudgery of machinework is to distribute it more equally and reduce the amount of work (in the sense of alienated, uninteresting labour) done altogether, not to make more shit using more machines. If the author of the article had even read the editorialised quotation they published, they’d notice Marx demands not just the increase of productive forces, but also the “all-around development of the individual” which Marx repeatedly asserts is incompatible with division of labour in the workshop or the mindnumbing repitition of machine labour for someones entire life.

All this said, while I think Saito has a better grasp on Marx’s analysis of capitalist production than the article-writer will ever have, Saito’s more practical politics are horribly academic-radlib. I don’t trust the article-writer to represent Saito’s most recent book accurately, as he fails to do so regarding either of Saito’s earlier works, but the sorta urban solarpunk imperial core stuff described wouldn’t shock me much from him, and it is true that Saito does the ritualistic academic-radlib ‘marxist’ denunciation of Stalin.

Karl Marx fanclub. We will dig him up and make Marx bathwater