• Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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    2 days ago

    No? It was the truth. The majority of the faction vote supported overthrowing the constituent assembly and only recognizing the soviet government, which was by that time the government recognized by the working classes. That means that the total of the SRs, Mensheviks, and Bolsheviks voted in outweighed the votes the Right SRs and other factions, and thus support for overthrowing the constituent assembly in favor of the soviets was popular.

    Shortly after, the Left SRs and Bolsheviks formed a coalition, and won against the Right SRs among the peasantry, effectively a vote to support the soviet government. After the overthrow of the Tsar, the workers threw the broad majority of their support behind the bolsheviks, with most Left SRs and Mensheviks joining the bolsheviks and the rights split between the whites and the bolsheviks.

    I really don’t know what you’re trying to get at, here, do you think the Kerensky government was popular?

    • poVoq@slrpnk.net
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      2 days ago

      Yes, the “truth” as written by Soviet historians afterwards 🙄

      The Bolshevik were deeply unpopular and could not claim at all to represent the working class. They only got into power through political maneuvering and outright violence. Maybe at the time they were seen as the lesser evil, but that sure turned out to be a big miscalculation after Lenin started to purge his former political allies.

      • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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        2 days ago

        Source: you made it the fuck up, lmao. Repeating Red Scare fearmongering about the “evil commies” and wielding it like a club, regardless of the truth of the matter, is how you operate. You’ll go to any lengths to disavow socialism in action.

        The bolsheviks were very popular, throughout their existence, to the point that George Orwell’s Animal Farm’s main critique is the assumption that the Russian working class simply went along with the bolsheviks because they were too stupid to know any better. Liberals and fascists had to invent conspiracy theories of communist mind control in order to explain the popularity of socialism while painting it as the supreme evil.

        The bolsheviks were chosen because Marxism is correct, and the bolsheviks represented both the workers and the peasantry. The Mensheviks represented only the petite bourgeoisie, the Left SRs were more popular among the peasantry, and the Right SRs supported the outright bourgeoisie. The bolsheviks, on the other hand, were able to unite the workers and peasants soviets and won the Russian Civil War, creating the world’s first socialist state, which managed to:

        1. Double life expectancy
        2. Implement genuine socialist democracy via the soviet model
        3. Tripled literacy rates to full literacy
        4. Lowered working hours while raising wages and vacation days
        5. Went from a semi-feudal backwater to space in half a century
        6. Implemented free and high quality healthcare and education for all
        7. Modernized housing and nearly eliminated homelessness
        8. Dramatically expanded on women’s rights
        9. Defeated the Nazis
        10. And much, much more.

        The bolsheviks weren’t a “lesser evil,” they were immensely popular, to the point that today the vast majority of those still alive that lived in the USSR want it back.

        • unfreeradical@slrpnk.net
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          1 day ago

          The bolsheviks were chosen because Marxism is correct

          You just sabotaged your last trace of credibility for approaching the subject rationally.

          Marxism is a range of discourse that originated with a fallible individual and whose continuation has been by other fallible individuals who naturally are not in full agreement.

          It is not an absolute truth or universal solution.

          • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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            23 hours ago

            Marxism isn’t an absolute, static truth, but an effective framework for understanding and changing the world. Was Marx (or Lenin) 100% correct? Of course not, merely overwhelmingly correct, but Lenin’s application of Marxism led to correctly analyzing the situation and establishing socialism.

            • unfreeradical@slrpnk.net
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              1 day ago

              Socialism was never established in Russia, and “correctly analyzing the situation” is too vague to be meaningful.

              What do you think was done correctly that would not have been done so without Marxism?

              • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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                1 day ago

                Socialism was established in Russia, public ownership was the principle aspect of the soviet economy and the working classes were in control of the state. Correctly analyzing the situation is vague, as it necessarily is due to being a short lemmy comment. However, some examples of this, and their connection to Marxism, are as follows:

                1. Recognition of World War I as an inter-imperialist war, therefore leveraging the unpopularity of the war and the weakness of the Russian state to successful revolution

                2. Recognition of the peasantry as capable of allying with the industrial proletariat, which groups like the Mensheviks distrusted

                3. The establishment of a socialist state to defend the gains of the revolution, allowing the USSR to outlast the dozen+ capitalist nations invading it at its inception

                4. Proper engagement with the trade unions and other groups, combining legal and illegal work, without resorting to adventurist terrorism like the left SRs

                5. The recognition of the dialectical relationship between theory and practice, which groups like the left SRs rejected in favor of sponteniety

                And more. Is it possible that revolution could have been won another way? Yes. Did it work, and was this method applied successfully in China, Vietnam, Cuba, and many more examples throughout the world? Also yes.

                • unfreeradical@slrpnk.net
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                  1 day ago

                  I am sorry, but you are returning nonsense apologetics.

                  Russian workers obviously never controlled the economy.

                  • Cowbee [he/they]@lemmy.ml
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                    1 day ago

                    They fundamentally did, repeating that they didn’t like a mantra isn’t a point, nor is said mantra justified by claiming it’s “obvious.” Again, public ownership was the principle aspect of the economy, and the working classes were in control of the state. This is socialism as it exists in the real world, in concrete form. Both Is the Red Flag Flying? The Political Economy of the Soviet Union by Albert Syzmanski and This Soviet World by Anna Louise Strong are good places to start with looking at how the economy of the soviet union functioned.

                    An excerpt from the latter:

                    Several elections which I attended will show concretely how soviet democracy functions. Four election meetings were held simultaneously in different hamlets of Gulin village, which had no assembly hall big enough for all. One of these meetings threw out the Party candidate, Borisov, because they felt that he neglected their instructions; they elected a non-Party woman who had displayed energy in improving the village and were praised by the election commissioner—himself a Party member—for having discovered good government timber which the Party had neglected. The central meeting in Gulin expected 235 voters; 227 appeared and were duly checked off by name at the door. There ensued personal discussion of every one of nine candidates, of whom seven were chosen. Mihailov “did good work on the roads.” The most enthusiasm developed over Menshina, a woman who “does everything assigned her energetically; checks farm property, tests seeds, collects state loans.” Dr. Sharkova, head of the Mothers’ Consultation, was pushed by the women: “We need a sanitary expert to clean up our village.” The incoming soviet was instructed to “increase harvest yield within two years to thirty bushels per acre, to organize a stud farm, get electricity and radio for every home, organize adult education courses, football and skiing teams, and satisfy a score of other needs.

                    It may not be your preferred model of socialism, but it was real, and qualitatively different from capitalism. Trying to claim it isn’t the same as the “pure” socialism in our heads doesn’t change that material reality, socialism isn’t mystical but a material process.