Reds! A Revolutionary Timeline

Voted best in category in the Users' Choice awards.
I can tell you haven't actually read it. And yes, what you are doing is making excuses.

Anyone who holds to handwringing moralizing "bad vibes" explanations for the conjectural outcome of Red October is an anarcho-liberal who just transhistorically reads their Jeffersonian libdem patriotism back onto choice readings out of historical context and bereft of a close reading of the sources about the extremity of conditions that actually fell on the actors at the time

A one-man, one-vote polity would be dominated by the subpolitical peasantry concerned 90% by land-tenure

Taken strictly, this would have led to total collapse of public authority & industry and therefore military securing of territorial integrity

So either warlordism en masse or some figure standing above the peasantry which guarantees them a compromising share of their tenure or "sunshine and rain from above" in exchange for takings to secure the urban-based public authority and some military force with the industry that ties them all together fed by said takings

whether that is the Bolsheviks as a 'collective-Bonaparte' or Romanov dynast with some proto-fascist party at their back

is immaterial

[ incidentially: notice how closely my alternate scenario vis-a-vis the peasantry to what happened concretely approximates China from the 10s through 40s ]

the peasantry was not going to spontaneously organize themselves communistically and self develop their agricultural and household practices and pump out surpluses because they were just propagandized with cuddlier and more effusive moralizing political exhortations

the material basis did not exist in Russia solo, period

the proletariat can be communist on its own, but the peasantry or any other property-holding class will never be on its own
 
Last edited:
she said she "could not work within the confines of the state Bolshevik or otherwise




I agree.

Also like, this is an alternate history timeline that has moved past all of this and is getting ready to bask into the glorious future of full communism. Why bother litigating all the shit in the past?

These material realities help us establish frameworks for what's realistic and what's not that ITTL will be confronted concretely for Comintern states that are undeveloped industrially and do not have proletarian majorities

And concretely how the USSR ITTL might plausibly unwind even ITTL's relative 'Lite-Stalinism'
 
A one-man, one-vote polity would be dominated by the subpolitical peasantry concerned 90% by land-tenure
As someone who's grandparents are Mexican peasantry it seems to me that despite your tendency accuse others of being liberals you regard the peasantry like on of those early 20th/late 19th century liberals who think that the peasants are too religious and land focused to create the proper government and that they need to be kept out of power so that real serious revolutionary action can be done. Then act surprised when the peasants immediately roll back the revolutionary gains they associate with intellectual assholes who treat them like idiots and consistently write off their real struggle for actual quality of life improvements as immaterial in the face or revolutionary necessity.

If you want the peasantry to actually like your revolutionary actions you need to make them feel listened too. If your only policies are some form of punishment or removal of something then they will associate another revolution as a negative thing. If you give them what they want(land and a end to seizures) then they will likely be willing to accept the other revolutionary actions you want to do.

Not to mention it feels very libDem to write off the entire rural population as land obsessed idiots that can be herded towards conservatism/Fascism.
 
These material realities help us establish frameworks for what's realistic and what's not that ITTL will be confronted concretely for Comintern states that are undeveloped industrially and do not have proletarian majorities

And concretely how the USSR ITTL might plausibly unwind even ITTL's relative 'Lite-Stalinism'

Yes, but I would also like to focus on the story and not have yet another debate on What Made the Soviet Union Fell
I can tell you haven't actually read it. And yes, what you are doing is making excuses.

This is the 16th chapter of the book in its entirety.

So...she liked Spiridonova.

That's it.

No mention of Fanny Kaplan or the Left-SRs that joined the Cheka, or the assassination of the German diplomats.

Her criticisms of the excesses of Bolshevism are warranted.

They do not in any way excuse the Left SRs
 
Last edited:
As someone who's grandparents are Mexican peasantry it seems to me that despite your tendency accuse others of being liberals you regard the peasantry like on of those early 20th/late 19th century liberals who think that the peasants are too religious and land focused to create the proper government and that they need to be kept out of power so that real serious revolutionary action can be done. Then act surprised when the peasants immediately roll back the revolutionary gains they associate with intellectual assholes who treat them like idiots and consistently write off their real struggle for actual quality of life improvements as immaterial in the face or revolutionary necessity.

If you want the peasantry to actually like your revolutionary actions you need to make them feel listened too. If your only policies are some form of punishment or removal of something then they will associate another revolution as a negative thing. If you give them what they want(land and a end to seizures) then they will likely be willing to accept the other revolutionary actions you want to do.

Not to mention it feels very libDem to write off the entire rural population as land obsessed idiots that can be herded towards conservatism/Fascism.

My mothers' family are all immigrants from Torreón & the environs circa the turmoil after the Mexican Revolution

I don't know what this weird hereditary translation of lived experience thing is that has become so frequently countersigned in left zones among the online youth especially in the West

But let's put it aside since you did not know you concretely that you actually were talking to someone of Mexican rural mestizo & Zuni indigenous extraction

Now, that aside: the issue with the peasantry is the concrete social relations of production bound up with its reproduction as a social form

The peasantry is resistant to transformation of its social relations because its guarantor is customary land tenures and its insurance is high fertility rates; both militate against transformation because insecurity of tenure and emancipation of youth & women ( as well as sexual freedom ) undermine those guarantors of their forms of property-based social life

The proletariat in contrast because it has no property in the double sense ( it is neither property, as a slave; nor is it an enhancement or value-add to property, as a villein; and also has no property of its own ) therefore has no defense for its class interests except collective associative organization

The peasantry can be revolutionary, but cannot be revolutionary in the socialist sense except as adjunct to proletarian political collectivity

The thesis of the 'symchka' in Russia and other hypotheses of this nature was that the 'national' peasantry in the conditions of

(a) capitalist crisis generally
(b) state crisis locally,
(c) essential conflict v capital / trad landlords,
(d) in the context of tactical unity with the local proletariat joined with the international proletariat

that local "peasantries" could then be brought over to the revolutionary cause, and after the DOTP is achieved stably locally [ which is peasant-heavy state, means dependent on proletarianized-industrial DOTPs supporting from without ] then the peasantry could be gradually through carrot-and-stick subsumed into the associative mode of production

no serious thinker really believed that "peasantries" as such could be really revolutionary as such, at least since after the Narodniks (who were really confused melange between traditional-cultural romantic counterrevolutionaries in their roots & French Revolution redux wannabes), even the plain reading of Maoist dogmata disclaims that

Basically, only the workers are a fully universal class that can act not only nationally, but transnationally; regionally or continentially; globally — so particular 'peasantries' would in effect be making deals with the universal proletariat which by nature would be holding the decisive role

how those deals manifest in particular policy conjectures by region and 'per peasantry' would be determined by facts on the ground

but that 'peasants' were coequal class in the sense of its political valence was never realistically considered by anyone in the heroic age of revolutionaries except perhaps by the (again, kind of confused) Narodniks

nobody really questioned this in the First, Second, or Third Internationals seriously on the merits

What's liberal is your speaking of peasants like it's a question of agitprop framing, like I am a Rachel Maddow fan and my problem is 'condescending' to conservative workers vs their material interests

I am precisely not practicing this: peasant communities know a form of life that's all they have known often for centuries with attendant cultural practices selected for reproducing security — in this light, I maintain that reliance on appealing idealistically or moralistically to transformative measures that stand to make practiced forms of life insecure possibly will surely be rejected; and individual farmsteads and communities partaking of their rational interests will collectively have antisocial collective results (withdraw of surplus, soil underproduced because of household strategies and prevailing grindingly poor labor productivity to output, etc) and so policy would have to involve carrot-and-stick inducement to shift to different modes of social reproduction in light of subsidy + no succor to landlords
 
Last edited:
The peasantry is resistant to transformation of its social relations because its guarantor is customary land tenures and its insurance is high fertility rates; both militate against transformation because insecurity of tenure and emancipation of youth & women ( as well as sexual freedom ) undermine those guarantors of their forms of property-based social life
I'm fine with the complaint about experiences not being hereditary though I really don't think that rural people have an inherent drive towards high birthrates which thereby makes them incapable of revolutionary thought... Not to mention I am pretty sure that just because the proletariat do not own property somehow makes them immune to sexism....

that local "peasantries" could then be brought over to the revolutionary cause, and after the DOTP is achieved stably locally [ which is peasant-heavy state, means dependent on proletarianized-industrial DOTPs supporting from without ] then the peasantry could be gradually through carrot-and-stick subsumed into the associative mode of production
Also that is similar to what I was suggesting, though using an approach that would be more carrot heavy then stick to make them okay with revolutionary actions. It's not as if rural populations are secretly waiting for a revolution but that by treating them as a social group with goals,wants and necessities who could be bargained with rather than a unruly population that needs to be beaten/ignored until their way of life can be removed would provide a less violent and more productive result.

subsumed into the associative mode of production
Also this I'm not sure if you mean made into proper proletarians or if you just want to get rid of rural culture completely.
 
But if they were eager to jump back into the war, could they have turned authoritarian?

nobody answered your question so I will do it for you

as @IlluminatusP pointed out the Left-SRs never really had a program aside from "we hate the Bolsheviks"

so it'd probably just lead to a longer civil war.

judging by your posts, your ideal Soviet Union is a humble social democracy that's a captive market for American investment. in other words, a Gorbachev-wank, and we all know how that turned out.
 
judging by your posts, your ideal Soviet Union is a humble social democracy that's a captive market for American investment. in other words, a Gorbachev-wank, and we all know how that turned out.
I mean Gorbachev didn't want that specific result, he just wanted some reforms so that the USSR could survive longer/still be a world power. I would say that's more of a Neoliberalism-wank
 
nobody answered your question so I will do it for you

as @IlluminatusP pointed out the Left-SRs never really had a program aside from "we hate the Bolsheviks"

so it'd probably just lead to a longer civil war.

judging by your posts, your ideal Soviet Union is a humble social democracy that's a captive market for American investment. in other words, a Gorbachev-wank, and we all know how that turned out.
What, you serious? The Left-SRs were literally the pro-Bolshevik faction of the Socialist-Revolutionaries! They actively worked with the Bolsheviks, and only turned against them after the blatant moves of the Bolsheviks towards establishing a party-dictatorship! As for the party program, it is utter slander that they had no ideas other than opposing the Bolsheviks. They were supportive of Soviet democracy, organization of industrial enterprises by a federation of labour collectives, and a system of National Personal Autonomy similar to that envisioned by the Austromarxists.
 
The SRs were not some warm fuzzy pro-anarchist democratic socialist party who would've avoided all the failures of the Bolsheviks, more likely they would've made a lot of the same mistakes
 
What, you serious? The Left-SRs were literally the pro-Bolshevik faction of the Socialist-Revolutionaries! They actively worked with the Bolsheviks, and only turned against them after the blatant moves of the Bolsheviks towards establishing a party-dictatorship! As for the party program, it is utter slander that they had no ideas other than opposing the Bolsheviks. They were supportive of Soviet democracy, organization of industrial enterprises by a federation of labour collectives, and a system of National Personal Autonomy similar to that envisioned by the Austromarxists.

This is right. The idea that the left-sr's didn't have any platform besides hating the bolsheviks is pretty absurd when they were the one faction that were willing to work with them. They had distinct ideas about the organization of the peasantry, the industrial economy, and the administration of justice. For some months, they managed to work alongside the Bolsheviks really well to implement some of these things. Read Lara Douds and S.A. Smith's work if you have any doubt about this.

That being said, the war did play a significant part in their decision to leave the bolshevik government, and their ultimate resort to revolutionary terrorism soured the bolsheviks on them (and for good reason). Of course, the Bolsheviks are hardly blameless here - they engaged in repression of left-sr organizations well before the spate of left-sr terrorism, and the left-sr decision to leave Sovnarkom wasn't intended as a complete break with the revolutionary state (this is why they still participated in regional soviets loyal to the bolsheviks and retained some junior positions in the state bureaucracy).

The truth is somewhere between a lot of the hyperbole that is being spewed on both sides here. I'm hardly convinced that the left-sr's would have been a more effective national governing party than the bolsheviks, but it is likely that their mistakes - and the direction of Russia - would have been quite different.
 
Last edited:
Jesus Christ. Don't we have threads where we can scream at each other about how we're all The Wrong Kind Of Leftist elsewhere on this misbegotten forum? You know, threads that aren't this one?
 
Better question for the thread.

Do we get Orde Wingate in all his insane rastafarian glory. Because it will be hilarious for Ethiopia where you have a clash between old and new, Communist and Royal. Italian and Ethiopian

And then for some godforsaken reason a naked british man, his Jewish death squad and some very traumatized british conscripts just appear out of the middle of nowhere and start doing some specops/terrorism shit.
 
I'm fine with the complaint about experiences not being hereditary though I really don't think that rural people have an inherent drive towards high birthrates which thereby makes them incapable of revolutionary thought... Not to mention I am pretty sure that just because the proletariat do not own property somehow makes them immune to sexism....

The only reason even the partial degree of women's, sexual-gender, and youth emancipation exists is because the extended family of pre-capitalist social formations broadly has been overthrown by capitalism and then joint resistance to both capitalism and pre-capitalist relict relations

It's just a matter of empirical fact that the most substantial independent variable in trending toward women taking control over their fertility and personal freedom as well as sexual freedom:

is development and raising of lower quartiles of household incomes, which itself is most obviously associated with the emptying of the countryside

traditional peasantries are not really nuclear families, they are the familia of the paterfamilias (the Latin word instructively meant the patriarch then all his junior antecedents who had not formed their own + women + slaves)

the youth and women in traditional petty family-organized production are regarded as property of the patriarch (patriarchy in the properly specific sense, truly)

hence the not accidental traditionalist right wing being invariably associated with fantasist / illusory throwback or reimagining of the restoration of patriarchal power with its communitarian backbones in the clerical or akin village forces

this is an obvious continuity over historical time and the exceptions prove the rule

the truth is the Russian muzhik patriarch routinely in historical record was renown for helping himself to stepdaughters and even young son's teenaged wives

this is soaked through the historical record

the rightist incel youth today apotheosize capitalist 'big-men' insofar as they reproduce a facsimile of what rights were traditionally claimed by "a man with his house and land"

more kids mean more farmhands, more kids mean more leftover for old age care and lineage perpetuation, and the evidence is rife it ain't values and vibes that lead to transition out of the gravitational pull social-materially in favor of those baleful tendencies

sorry, truth hurts

Also that is similar to what I was suggesting, though using an approach that would be more carrot heavy then stick to make them okay with revolutionary actions. It's not as if rural populations are secretly waiting for a revolution but that by treating them as a social group with goals,wants and necessities who could be bargained with rather than a unruly population that needs to be beaten/ignored until their way of life can be removed would provide a less violent and more productive result.

Peasant traditional household heads, and their 'community associations' have been historically been renown for supporting left-populist reforms provided that concrete & real labor standards enforced on child labor, for women's emancipation and education, and on things that undermine this such as anything besides land and tool giveaways

Why? Because if you can't work your giant family as unpaid household labor, then it reduces the reproducibility of your headmanship of a traditional farmstead property

Presumably if promised something besides landless vagabondry or capitalist proletarianization, then you might wean them off

But obshchina councils hate to break it to you were more treehouses of grapy grandpas and not Rojava gender balanced committees

Let's be setting ourselves on solid ground here

Also this I'm not sure if you mean made into proper proletarians or if you just want to get rid of rural culture completely.

Besides people having their own head canon of stuff and wanting to imagine "the people" writ large of liberal fame now cast with red paint as a happy family I don't understand the emotional commitment to this so often found on the left today

I think it comes from fundamentally superficial self education and like I said truly subterranean liberal suppositions that people don't want to discard

Look at so-called breadtube which is largely red-drag by KKKamala lesser evil drones

The peasantry today is already extirpated globally apart from truly marginal survivals

The question is truly academic-speculative since the hypotheticals here are only important in "what could have been" circa an imagined 1910s-50s and to ensure we have clarity in class politics based on material analysis today [ eg., "the workers" not "the people" ]
 
Last edited:
What, you serious? The Left-SRs were literally the pro-Bolshevik faction of the Socialist-Revolutionaries! They actively worked with the Bolsheviks, and only turned against them after the blatant moves of the Bolsheviks towards establishing a party-dictatorship! As for the party program, it is utter slander that they had no ideas other than opposing the Bolsheviks. They were supportive of Soviet democracy, organization of industrial enterprises by a federation of labour collectives, and a system of National Personal Autonomy similar to that envisioned by the Austromarxists.

...and also World War I. They gave up basically anything in order to get back at the Bolsheviks for their perceived betrayal.

They resorted to blowing up trains instead of making them run on time.


The SRs were not some warm fuzzy pro-anarchist democratic socialist party who would've avoided all the failures of the Bolsheviks, more likely they would've made a lot of the same mistakes

Yeah, I made that mistake once too.

Jesus Christ. Don't we have threads where we can scream at each other about how we're all The Wrong Kind Of Leftist elsewhere on this misbegotten forum? You know, threads that aren't this one?

Hello and welcome to leftism. We're going to re-litigate 1921 for all eternity until climate change kills us all.
 
Last edited:
Hello and welcome to leftism. We're going to re-litigate 1921 for all eternity until climate change kills us all.
Even better join the dark side/Social Democracy . We do things, it may be free shit, it may be heinous war crimes or it may be those two combined but we will definitely Do A Thing which will then be argued about by Leftists until the sun explodes.

....That or end up as a cog in the part of the capitalist machine that's severed from all the other sections and doesn't really do anything but sound the alarm about the rising tide of fascism/the oceans dying.
 
The Left SRs incidentally believed in hostage-taking and like summary executions for counterrevolutionaries caught in flagrante delicto but NOT in creating an actual legal-judicial process for the death penalty

Bc of something having to do with theorization of Narodnik terrorism in the former and the latter being like persistence of Tsarist Okhrana practice

These aren't people who you would've been comfortable with politically today

Also the semi "soviet putsch" by Bolshevik center, a section ( not even majority, the party leadership was not fully read-in, nor locals ) decided to themselves on their own initiative only, force the intransigent but decisively organized Bolsh-center-based soviet minority on rejection of Brest-Litovsk by … voluntaristically assassinating the German ambassador, thus giving their soviet elected opponents no choice by making treaty dead-letter … because YOLO?

I do not see that as also procedurally democratic best practices either, given many locals and sections of their own party in the Left SRs reacted in the form: "wait wut?!"

Plz Goldman quoter you are ill-informed, I've read like 100 books on this topic, plz revise

Anyway if Russia had been majority proletarian as USA-1933 than demographic-mapping from Russia would have yielded them like 75% of the soviets and 55% of the Constituent Assembly, it would've been stupid — the Bolshevik factions would overnight become the functional 'parties' of the new regime and maybe everything would've been happy go lucky
 
Even better join the dark side/Social Democracy . We do things, it may be free shit, it may be heinous war crimes or it may be those two combined but we will definitely Do A Thing which will then be argued about by Leftists until the sun explodes.

....That or end up as a cog in the part of the capitalist machine that's severed from all the other sections and doesn't really do anything but sound the alarm about the rising tide of fascism/the oceans dying.

No social democrats have done anything but velvet glove austerity since without being able to to point to Stalin & strikers @ the donor class and say "give me and will keep away"

hard truth
 
You have a rather nasty habit of assuming that others, because they disagree with you, are ignorant. Perhaps you are the ignorant one? At any rate, I care not a wit for the fate of Tsarist reactionaries. It is the ruthless suppression by the Bolsheviks of other working class parties and the destruction of any meaningful freedom of expression that I object to.
...and also World War I. They gave up basically anything in order to get back at the Bolsheviks for their perceived betrayal.

They resorted to blowing up trains instead of making them run on time.




Yeah, I made that mistake once too.



Hello and welcome to leftism. We're going to re-litigate 1921 for all eternity until climate change kills us all.
WW1 WW1! Keep banging that WW1 drum. Anything to distract from the Bolshevik's betrayal of the working class. Anything to distract from the pure despotism that could hardly be distinguished from the palace-societies of the Bronze Age.
 
You have a rather nasty habit of assuming that others, because they disagree with you, are ignorant. Perhaps you are the ignorant one? At any rate, I care not a wit for the fate of Tsarist reactionaries. It is the ruthless suppression by the Bolsheviks of other working class parties and the destruction of any meaningful freedom of expression that I object to.

WW1 WW1! Keep banging that WW1 drum. Anything to distract from the Bolshevik's betrayal of the working class. Anything to distract from the pure despotism that could hardly be distinguished from the palace-societies of the Bronze Age.

I like how you're fixating on one person's answer and not giving any reply to anyone else disproving your points
 
Nobody was actually "disproving my points" lol. And I'm not fixating on shit.
 
No social democrats have done anything but velvet glove austerity since without being able to to point to Stalin & strikers @ the donor class and say "give me and will keep away"

hard truth
1. I was joking. I thought the join the dark side comment made that clear

2. I also joked about the tendency for SocDems to either do something to piss leftists off or ultimately amount to a cog in the broken capitalist machine.
 
1918 is a dark comedy of errors- to my understanding, the Left SRs would have gotten basically what they wanted and preserved their influence if they just waited a few more months, but B-L could also have been much less of an issue for the revolutionary coalition if Trotsky hadn't been such a hapless negotiator. History is a funny confluence of material forces and the people who occasionally get to roll the gods' dice, so to speak.
 
Last edited:
Back
Top