Hello everynyan, we’re reading This Soviet World.

Week 4 we are reading Chapter 4: “The Growing Democracy.”

EPUB, a link to a PDF, and online reading options, can be found on Comrade’s Library. If you find problems with the EPUB tell me and I will fix it. Dessalines has made an audio book.

Previous discussions:

Week 3 - Week 2 - Week 1

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  • woodenghost [comrade/them]@hexbear.net
    11·
    28 days ago

    The greater part of this intricate yet unified system of government is carried on by unpaid work. Elected deputies, whether to village or the All-Union Congress, receive no salaries of office. They draw their usual wages from the factory or institution which sends them and in which they keep on working, except insofar as they may be “released from production” for the needs of government; this varies with the importance of the work they do. There is thus no hard and fast line between the citizen and the man in office. Deputies are a link between the collective life of the factory and the larger collective life of the country. Any worker may approach them conveniently any day in their place of work to ask about the fulfillment of instructions given by the voters. They may be recalled by their constituents at any time simply through a factory meeting.

    (emphasis mine)

    This seems to counter those ultra leftists (eg Trotskyists), who accuse the Soviet Union of “state capitalism” and of having a political / bureaucratic “class”, that’s fundamentally materially different from the workers.

    • Damarcusart [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      8·
      28 days ago

      Those sorts of people have a tendency to treat the Soviet system as some kind of unchanging and perpetual vague “authoritarianism” rather than a shifting and changing system that adapted and changed as the people within it did and the material conditions did. The late USSR was a pretty different place to the one described here. Though the Trotskyites will often use these sorts of claims against the USSR under Stalin specifically.

    • oliveoil [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
      6·
      28 days ago

      This is something I don’t understand. So if a local factory ends up producing a whole bunch of people who end up in high positions on the national scale, then they have to foot the bill for all of their salaries themselves? Shouldn’t there be some recompensation from the wider constituency? Maybe I’m just nitpicking and this isn’t a major expense.

      And I understand that this is how politics works in general, but if the at base of support goes away, then that representative gets replaced. However, doesn’t this cause some favouritism for certain municipalities that form the core of support for high-up representatives?