/edu/ - Education

>>760 (OP)
Interesting question OP. I don't know of a definite measure, but we can brainstorm some general tendencies of left and right wing communists and see if we can abstract something from there. In all likelihood though, this kind of measure isn't particularly useful or objective and is really just a convention used historically as rhetoric, ie to slander people who one does not agree with.

I can't think of any communists other than those in the right opposition who self-identified as right wing. So I'm just going to do the left part and someone who's read more Bukharin can do the right one.

Left-Wing Communism
>Qualifies or even rejects notions of socialism as a transitional phase between capitalism and communism
>Is hostile to the idea that capitalism can be established by a workers state and then kept subordinate to that workers state
>Takes a somewhat all-encompassing definition of class collaboration: ie sees collaboration with social democratic parties as class collaboration

>>760 (OP)
In terms of the Bolsheviks, Left Center and Right all came out after Lenin's Death. The Left were the Trotskyist, later the United Opposition, including Trotsky (duh), Zinoviev, Radek and Antonov. They believed the NEP must be abolished quickly because it an weakened the Country by returning to Capitalism and that the USSR must quickly industrialized in order to expropriate the revolution as they saw that as the only way for Socialism to survive. The Centist Faction didn't actually exist, it was more so the guys following whatever Stalin said. In the beginning he supported the NEP and allied with Bukharin but eventually took the Trotskyist idea of Industrialization but with Socialism in one Country where as it implies Socialism doesn't need to be world wide as Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky said but can survive on its own. The Right with Bukharin and Rykov was the group the supported the NEP to achieve "Socialism at a Snail's Pace". Basically they allow Capitalism to flourish in order to build productive forces and slowly ease the Kulaks into Socialism. Also like Trotskyism, the Right Opposition was used as a slur by Stalin to those who opposed the First Five Year Plan and ofcourse these factions were later purged. Overall Trotsky is to the Left of Stalin who himself is Left of Bukharin but they are all still to the right of Left Communists like Bordiga and Pannekoek since they opposed Bolshevism. In terms of Lenin he is to the right of LeftComs for "Infantile Disorder" ofcourse but the Left, Right Oppositions all came after his death so he doesn't fit within those categories. Mao would be within center with Stalin since he very much looked up to him and modeled the Great Leap Forward after Stalin's Programs. As for Dickblast I'm still reading him so I'm not entirely sure but since he has criticized the USSR for its Bureaucracy and looks up to Bordiga we can assume he is more left then Stalin maybe.

Lenin was accused of being an anarchist when he published the april theses.

Is Deng to the right of Bukharin?

>>814
Yes very much. I would even call Deng in the realm of Social Democracy with Red Flags.

&ltDraft 1.0

[b]Communist[/b]
· [b]right[/b]: Deng, Doi-Moi reforms
· center:
· [b]center-right[/b]: Lenin (late), Bukharin (late)
· [b]center-center[/b]: Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Cockshott (early)
· [b]center-left[/b]: Lenin (early), Bukharin (early), Trotsky
· [b]left[/b]: Pannekoek, Gorter, Bordiga, Damen

Still undecided: Tito, Khrushchev, Castro, Brezhnev, Guevara, Gorbachev, Cockshott (late), Xi

>>830
>Tito
>Kruschev
>Gorbechev
>Xi
Not communists, but if you're going to call them that then right.

>Brezhnev
Right

>Castro
>Guevara
Center

>Late Cockshott
Center left

>>831
Wasn't Guevara dissatisfied with the way things were going in Cuba? I'm not too familiar, so correct me if I am wrong, wasn't Che's guerrilla campaigns in Latin America more and more ignored by the Cuban government?

>>832
Yeah that is true. Maybe he should be considered center-left.

&lt1/2

This is hard.
MLs w/ good historical knowledge from the details of 50s-to-90s pls halp.
Also I don't know what to make of this:
Castro-USSR:
>Castro remained critical of Marxist–Leninist Joseph Stalin, who was the Premier of the Soviet Union from 1941 to 1953. In Castro's opinion, Stalin "committed serious errors – everyone knows about his abuse of power, the repression, and his personal characteristics, the cult of personality", and also held him accountable for the invasion of the Soviet Union by Nazi Germany in 1941. At the same time, Castro also felt that Stalin "showed tremendous merit in industrializing the country" and "in moving the military industry to Siberia", things which he felt were "decisive factors" in the defeat of Nazism.[7]
>Guevara took great inspiration from the Maoist notion of "protracted people's war" and sympathized with Mao Zedong's People's Republic of China in the Sino-Soviet split. This controversy may partly explain his departure from [b]Castro's pro-Soviet Cuba in the mid-1960s.[/b]
Deng-USSR:
>In 1963, Deng traveled to Moscow to lead a meeting of the Chinese delegation with Stalin's successor, Nikita Khrushchev. Relations between the People's Republic of China and the Soviet Union had worsened since the death of Stalin. After this meeting, no agreement was reached and the Sino–Soviet split was consummated; there was an almost total suspension of relations between the two major communist powers of the time.
>Deng did little to improve poor relations with Brezhnev and the Kremlin during his early rule. He continued to adhere to the Maoist line of the Sino–Soviet split era that the Soviet Union was a superpower as "hegemonic" as the United States, but even more threatening to China because of its close proximity.
>China, now under Deng Xiaoping, was starting the Chinese economic reform and opening trade with the West, in turn, growing increasingly defiant of the Soviet Union. On November 3, 1978, the Soviet Union and Vietnam signed a 25-year mutual defense treaty, which made Vietnam the "linchpin" in the Soviet Union's "drive to contain China."
>On January 1, 1979, Chinese Vice-premier Deng Xiaoping visited the United States for the first time and told American president Jimmy Carter: [b]"The little child is getting naughty, it's time he get spanked."[/b] (original Chinese words: 小朋友不听话，该打打屁股了。).[54] On February 15, the first day that China could have officially announced the termination of the 1950 Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance, Deng Xiaoping declared that China planned to conduct a limited attack on Vietnam.
>[b]However, relations with the Soviet Union has improved since Mikhail Gorbachev took over Kremlin in 1985, and ultimately restored the state-to-state relations with Deng's meeting with Gorbachev in the 1989 Sino-Soviet Summit.[/b]
And finally - how alike are the market socialism modeled by late Bukharin and the models implemented by Tito and Raul Castro? Could I merge the latter two into center-right and eliminate the hard-right category, merging Deng & co. into right-wing again? (see below)

&lt2/2

&ltDraft 1.9 (help me get to 2.0)

[b]Communist[/b]
· [b]wrecker[/b]: Gorbachev
· right:
· [b]hard-right[/b]: Deng, Doi-Moi reforms, Xi
· [b]right-wing[/b]: Tito, Raul Castro
· center:
· [b]center-right[/b]: Lenin (late), Bukharin (late)
· [b]center-center[/b]: Stalin, Hoxha, Mao, Guevara, Ho Chi Minh, Cockshott (early)
· [b]center-left[/b]: Lenin (early), Bukharin (early), Trotsky, Cockshott (late)
· [b]left[/b]: Bordiga, Damen

Still undecided: Khrushchev, Brezhnev, Fidel Castro

Bump

Well-read Marxists please help: >>834

>>835
I don't think such "linear" scale makes sense. In Chinese context, Deng could be called a faithful successor of Zhou Enlai, a moderate right, and a pragmatist overall who did not follow a certain line dogmatically. This can be said about most renowned world-wide leftist statesmen.

Xi Jingping is definitely to the left of Deng Xiaoping, and could be called a successor of Hua Gofeng.

>>834
I don't know much about Cuba.
Bukharin opinion was as follows:
Continue NEP, develop productive forces without even thinking about Socialism, then gradually and slowly introduce it.
It is Similar to Zhou Enlai but not Tito, whose position was Market Socialism: establish worker-managed enterprises in majority of the economy, and that would be Socialism.

>>834
I can tell you about Yugoslavia.

During the war the agrarian country's miniscule industry was demolished, alongside with most of infrastructure. The whole country was rebuilt in like 5 years after the war.
Between 1945-1948 they followed the Soviet model, but due to a falling out they started looking for their own way to build socialism and that was workers' self management, which started in 1950, but was expanded in the 70s.
Up until '65 the country had like an average 9 % yearly growth, between 1945 and 1990 the average growth was ~ 5,5 %.
However in 1965 there a stagnation happened and the party leadership didn't know how to react so they re-introduced the market. Also the population wanted more consumer goods and the market was a good way to deliver those as well. However, this is how capitalist competition between companies started and some did well - especially those doign business with the West, and other had loses every year (and didn't go bankrupt because the state wouldn't allow for a company in a socialist country to go bankrupt).
Due to its "middle" position between East and West, Yugoslavia took on loans from the West, especially in the 70's to further develop itself, but the interest rates at the end of the 70's and the 80's were increased greatly (the debt crisis which affected the whole world). Durign the economic slump nationalist tendecies prevailed and every federative republic started pulling in its own way, thus the federal state and government started to crack.

>>866
This post is a bit incoherent as I just wrote, not thinking or preparing that much to make it more coherent.

>>863
>I don't think such "linear" scale makes sense.
I agree with this anon. The "left communists" in 1917-18 were much different than the "left communists" in the 1930s. The conditions, and thus political programs, shifted over the years. Splitting up historical communists into left, right, and center is not a very useful political model. The labels "left communist" and "right communist" weren't even something that people necessarily identified as, since all of them considered their ideas to be simply the expression of Marxist "orthodoxy" in given conditions. These words are more like slurs than useful political descriptors.

>>832
Guevara wanted to reorganize the Cuban economy along the lines of a fully centralized and non-market path of development. He was extremely critical of Soviet economic doctrines and even wrote a series of critical notes on Soviet political economy (roughly the length of a short book) which he never published during his life. What Guevara wanted to do was basically dispense with separate enterprises and commodity production and unite all production under one centralized plan, taking his ideas from both Marx's work in Capital plus the real practices of multinational corporations that operated in pre-revolutionary Cuba. The Cubans then had a debate on the future of their economic model and Guevara's faction lost.

>>868
Regarding the economic debates between Guevara and the pro-soviet economists in Cuba, there's a compilation book of the articles of both sides called "El debate cubano", I recomend it to anyone who can read spanish.

&ltDraft 1.95

[b]Communist[/b]
· [b]wrecker[/b]: Gorbachev
· [b]right[/b]: Lenin (late), Bukharin, Khrushchev, Deng, Doi-Moi reforms, Raul Castro, Xi
· [b]center-r.[/b]: Tito
· [b]center-c.[/b]: Stalin, Hoxha, Mao, Il-sung, Brezhnev, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Cockshott (early)
· [b]center-l.[/b]: Lenin (early), Trotsky, Guevara, Cockshott (late)
· [b]left[/b]: Bordiga, Damen

[b]Right[/b]: Privatization prominent with partial nationalization of major industries, collaboration with outside bourgeois forces
[b]Center[/b]: Collectivization prominent with full nationalization of major industries, hostility to outside bourgeois forces
[b]Left[/b]: Drive to communization, hostility to all bourgeois forces

Anybody who doesn't agree with me is right wing

>>896
I'm trying to be as objective about this as possible anon. If you disagree with something then voice it, right now you're just whining senselessly with no constructive criticism.

The wrecker is a wrecker because he wrecked the USSR.
The right is right-wing because their policies were called the Right-Opposition in the Comintern and they propose privatization, partial nationalization, and collaboration with outside bourgeois forces.
the center is center because that is what they were called in the Comintern and because they propose collectivization prominent with full nationalization of major industries, hostility to outside bourgeois forces.
The left is left-wing because that is what they were called in the Comintern and they propose more radical measures than the others; such as a drive towards communization, with hostility to all bourgeois forces.

Point out if some placement of theorists don't make sense and I will research it further before 2.0 (final). So far I'm fairly confident in the placement of the majority of the drafts picks.

>>897
I was just memeing lad

>>898
Oh okay, excuse me.

Add Wolff next to Tito.

>>892
Theorists and people who've never been in power shouldn't be on this list.

>>892
Kim Il Sung: center-c
Jong Il and Jong Un: center-r
Laos: right

>>892
Raul Castro and Khrushchev are more like center-r. They did not shift towards privatization as much as Gorbachev and Deng did.

>>814
It depends when. He is about the same as old Bukharin, and to the right of young Bukharin.

Communism is left wing. Centrists and right wings have their own economics that better synergize with their social policies.
Base and superstructure, quite uncontrovercially, mutually shape and maintain each other. People only try to unmarry social and economic policy for meme ideologies like ancap.

> What DEFINES left

Cringe thread. Leftism is dialectic, there is no definition.

Can we not compared dorky obscure tenured academics with a pet theory to revolutionary leaders who led vanguard parties in the seizure of power?

Very cringe thread