/edu/ - Education

Sounds spooked to hell.

Kautsky is using racism as an allegory for the un-materialist idea of who is "bourgeois" assumed by the Soviet state. Just as a racist hates a black person for being black no matter how they act or dress, the Soviet state hated certain people for having supposed innate characteristics that never left them despite their material circumstances, characteristics which they idealistically described as "bourgeois"
They didn't shy away from using no-no words when describing racism back then

>by Kautsky and Trotsky

not by Kautsky and Trotsky. Just by Trotsky. It's a reply to Kautsky. The quote you have dropped is from Kautsky, but Trotsky is quoting him before replying to him, Trotsky is not saying any of those words.

Just what are you trying to pull off with this thread? Create the false perception that Trotsky said the N word in the early 1900s? This is /leftypol/. Nobody cares.

>>18641
it's especially weird to modern ears because Mongolian is not considered a slur anymore while Nggr is so it's kinda confusing.

>>18641
>the Soviet state hated certain people for having supposed innate characteristics that never left them despite their material circumstances, characteristics which they idealistically described as "bourgeois"
This.
What he's saying is that people misunderstand class and think it's like an in-born quality instead of your economic situation that can change. Just because you were born bourgeois doesn't mean you will be for life. If your capital is expropriated you are no longer bourgeois. By the same token if you were born a peasant but then become wealthy and/or powerful you can stop being a peasant. There's a basic contradiction here where the point of communism is to abolish class, meaning abolishing the proletariat along with the bourgeoisie, but people tended to (and still tend to) think of communism as a "proletarian state" - where the proletariat is in power. But this doesn't make any sense because when the workers have power they are no longer proles, since being a prole is a matter of having to work for a wage and being exploited because you do not have power.

>>18644
So was Kautsky right in suggesting that the Soviet state was trying to make class into something besides class, and calling things bourgeois which were not?

I see a similar tendency today when some people say confused reactionary things like "being gay is bourgeois" etc.

>>18645
>chart lectures people about not using "PMC" because it's liberal (true)
>chart also includes "managerial class," "precariat," "culturati," and labels performing arts lumpenprole

>"Angelina Jolie might be referred to as "lumpen aristocracy" to differentiate her position from a homeless person
>"this is a cultural signifier, not a class one: in class terms, their interests are the same as other members of their class."
Ah yes, the identical interests of Angelina Jolie and a "homeless person," please ignore that whether or not you are housed does not define whether or not you have a job and there are many homeless workers and many housed moochers.

Protip, if you make enough money you almost automatically start putting it into investments (capital ownership), and in certain industries like filmmaking some people who get rich go on to take bourgeois roles in the same industry (acting as producer funding movies), so no aristocracy is not merely cultural, but a real material and economic difference that implies a qualitative change due to the sheer amount of value the person has.

>>18646
sorry, forgot the 2nd image, i usually post that chart next to this one as a virgin/chad thing

>>18645
No, it's an absurd criticism. He published that text during the civil war, when the bourgeoisie (whether dispossessed of property or not), was fighting alongside the most reactionary remnants of the Tsarist army to maintain their class power by any means available.

Kautsky couldn't have justified this position, even to himself, without a basis for his position. He provided a theoretical justification that had two main points: 1) The February revolution, by overthrowing the dictatorial power of the Tsarist military, created the necessary political conditions for the proletariat to peacefully carry out the social revolution. 2) The October revolution was a continuation of the bourgeois revolution, and the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly was a step backward for the proletariat in political terms. When Kautsky argues for equal rights and conditions of life for the bourgeoisie, he does so with those assumptions in mind. There are further layers of assumptions and definitions beneath those, which might warrant examination in a separate post.

But it might be simpler and more enlightening to directly read Kautsky. Ch. 8 of "The Dictatorship of the Proletariat" is truly amazing. https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1918/dictprole/ch08.htm

He's crying about them being lishenets (disenfranchised) because he was a liberal who didn't understand class warfare.

>>18644
>What he's saying is that people misunderstand class and think it's like an in-born quality instead of your economic situation that can change

Nobody is saying that or said that in Soviet Russia.

That being said, the bourgeoisie will not just give up their position. You have to beat them without mercy.

>>18649
The bourgeoisie weren't disenfranchised
Maybe some individuals were, but not the whole class

>>18651
And even this meager policy was repealed in the 30s anyways

>>18651
Yes they were lol, anyone using hired labour was banned from voting and other privileges.

>>18653
Nope, also they were still able to press for concessions like the NEP, and they were still able to manage their capital with a few stipulations, something that gave them realer power than the state
The Bolsheviks' criteria for disenfranchisement was stupid. It mainly targeted "idlers", so if a bourgeois worked directly for their company, or better yet became an administrator in the Soviet state, they were exempt
Only some financial and rentier bourgeois were affected because they were "idle parasites", not because they were bourgeois