What is it with socialists and forced labor camps?
You got the Soviets and gulags (labor-prison camps), the German National Socialists (Nazis) and their concentration/labor/death camps, the Vietnamese Socialist "re-education" camps, the North Korean Socialist labor-prison camps (Kwan-li-so camps), Socialist Yugoslavia ran the infamous Goli otok camp, Socialist Romania created 5 "re-education" camps near Great Brăila Island, the Work Education Centers (forced labor camps) in Socialist Bulgaria, the force labor camps near Tirana in Socialist Albania, the Chinese prison camps for people who dissent or participate in any religion, the Socialist Cuban prison camps for political dissenters (MUAP camps), the Socialist Cambodian rural work camps (aka killing fields), Socialist Burma set up 91 forced labor camps, hell, even FDR set up interment camps for Japanese Americans.
>believe that the workers should control the means of production and class enemies should be eliminated
>eliminate political opponents by putting them into state run labor
Seems like common sense, really.
>>385714
How would you suggest dealing with counter-revolutionaries?
>>385714
>Nazis
>FDR
>Socialists
You should probably crawl back to wherever you came from.
>>385714
>the German National Socialists (Nazis)
>even FDR
The theoretical perspective you're using to conflate these with the other examples is controversial and not well respected in the disciplinary literature. It is >>>/x/ tier.
For the other examples, Bolshevism has a nominal connection to Marxism. Part of this is the concept that social reproduction precedes social being, in the sense that culture is a result of how we reproduce the conditions of our existence.
In this sense "labour camps" are meant to re-class individuals placed in them. This, of course, ignores the elements about collective subjectivity through-out Marx's analysis.
It seems to have actually worked, A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, First Circle and Gulag Archipelago all talk about the collective reconstruction of identity as proletarian identity within the Soviet GuLag.
>>385734
Give them fair representation in a democratically elected government and allow them to fully integrate in a free market to maximize wealth generation?
>>385714
They were trying to impose a fairly radical new way of thinking on people. It would take time, probably generations, to take root and produce a country full of people who thought collective labor was right and natural. However the revolution happened right now, and we need to get the ball rolling, so we're just going to compel everyone to start living this way and wait for it to stick.
>>385756
>democratically elected government
What is it with you fuckers and Democracy
>>385762
Makes sense, but why did a geographically and culturally disparate group of states across various decades all choose the same tool to impose their idiology? We're camps the most cost efficient?
>>385779
It's a pretty elegant solution. By which I mean simple, not necessarily effective. And people do tend to imitate one another when trying to follow a similar path.
>>385756
Doing that is just going to create an impoverished class causing crime and even more people being imprisoned.
What about shooting them? That could work.
>>385714
Because the upper class refused to work like normal people, therefore they had to be forced.
>>385779
>Makes sense, but why did a geographically and culturally disparate group of states across various decades all choose the same tool to impose their idiology?
Ideology, friend.
Because they're not "disparate …states" they are coaligned party governments.
>We're
No, that word you've used is "We are", you meant "Were".
They were grossly cost-inefficient. GuLag made consistent losses despite doing high profit work such as green fields clearing and gold mining.
This is largely due to labour productivity, which was kept down, by an underfed workforce which was consistently viewed as disposable. Free labour is well known to get higher rates of return than bonded or slave labour in capitalism. So much so that wage incentive systems had to be introduced in GuLag even though they were far below the rates of free labour.
As GuLag was closed down, most of these sites were replaced with either nothing (economic inefficiency) or highly motivated highly skilled mechanised labour.
Even from the argument that "such things had to be done," they would have been done far more efficiently by labour conscription than a semi-criminal penal colony.
>>385779
I think logistically it's just the most efficient/expedient means of confining a large amount people.
>>385802
>I think logistically it's just the most efficient/expedient means of confining a large amount people.
eeeeeeh, penal colonies proper are simpler. The "closed camp" black camp system of GuLag special camps was more expedient—the liquidation of the closed camps wasn't known until the 1950s when people started comparing GuLag postal refusal reasons.
>>385714
Look I know it's a bait thread but
>socialists
>Nazis
get this weak shit out of here
>>385838
>Nazis
>not socialists
Whew lad.
>>385838
http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/riseofhitler/25points.htm
No u
The bolshevists were communists. The fascists were a syndicalist heresy that went market socialist.
>>385762
The majority of people have never had a problem thinking collective labor was right and natural. There has never been, after all, such a thing as self-sufficiency. Survival is a communal effort regardless of how isolated the unproductive classes allow themselves to feel.
>>385786
This. So many fucking crocodile tears about landowners having to give up their fucking cows and pampered rich shits being sent to the countryside and having to, imagine, shovel shit for the food they eat.
>>385827
While I don't disagree with your points, I'm under the assumption that the primary purpose of a labor camp system is as a means of confinement, and a degree of expense/cost-inefficiency would be inherent. Was Gulag labor actually intended to pay for the system or even turn a profit?
>>385866
>have a functional agricultural middle class
>I know, why don't we break that
>huh, why is my country poor all the sudden
>>385895
>have a peasant technically-not-slaves-anymore class
>have a functional agricultural middle class
>huh, why are the peasants revolting and taking my stuff
>>385922
The peasants didn't revolt, a bunch of spoiled urban deadbeat Jewish intellectuals did.
>>385915
Says the meme spouting moron. Hitler himself said National Socialism is the opposite of Scientific Socialism. Why do you think communists were the first group to get rounded up and assassinated by the Nazis? Why the fuck did Hitler invade the fucking USSR you dumb piece of shit.
>>385922
>scientific sozcialism
>>385930
a bunch of spoiled urban deadbeat Jewish intellectuals can defeat armies and create a completely new country all by themselves, that was why Germany lost the wars it declared on the entire world
>>385950
:^)
Why do these threads always bring out the most retarded hyperbole from both sides?
>>385977
State regulation of economics =/= socialism.
Am I seriously the only person who has read Archipelago in the context of other purge, stalinism and gulag works?
Fuck's sake /his/, if you haven't read one monograph and one 5000 word equivalent primary source, don't post in a thread.
>>385947
>military juntas
>>385998
>primary source
Archipelago is a fucking novel
>>385947
I know, you don't read, you're here for shitposting
>>386022
Yes and it is a useful novel in an unusual genre based on penetrations of the fictitiousness by facticity in an oral memoirs circulating samizdat. Have you read the text?
>>385877
I'm sorry, but who backed his assertion up with a primary source document?
>>385866
Well, at least you're honest about being an evil, totalitarian fuck.
>>386031
It's winter break, you can reel it in.
>Yes and it is a useful novel
Depends on what you mean by "useful". Useful for cold war hyperbole, yes. Useful for accurate descriptions of the gulag, no.
>>386041
I believe based on other readings that it is a reasonable description of pre-1956 GuLag conditions. It is likely going to be our best source on the failures of the Trotskyite old guard to renegotiate "reasonable" living conditions in the 1930s. It is a decent source on the liquidation of the closed camps. It is adequate on the day to day. It is adequate on sporadic camp mutiny. It is deficient in that it over plays the role of the Reds in camp life significantly.
Do you think Conquest's analysis of the purges was deficient for being produced for Labour during the cold war? Or rather because it was produced in the 1940s using exterior sources?
>>386034
Someone posted a link that had nothing to do with their assertion. This isn't /pol/, you have to actually present your case.
>>386048
I think you should be shot for being a counter-revolutionary and a traitor.
>>386057
It's the "Eternal and unalterable platform of the National Socialist German Worker's Party."
Are you going to turn this into a no true Scotsman thing?
>>386058
That's nice, comrade, but they shot Makhno and Kronstadt long before GuLag really got going in the 1930s under the great platter spinner.
And it doesn't speak to the usefulness of Archipelago as a source. I mean obviously I'm waiting for a full open archive and someone like Sheila Fitzpatrick to do a proper history.
>>385998
If you want a fiction - try Varlam Shalamov, he's better than Solzhenytsin.
If you want something historical, you would have to learn russian and check both russian and foreign books (even though I doubt that any foreign writer would write anything without influence of cold war propaganda).
>>386080
Well look, I'm not a cunt, I'm not going to read Applebaum unless I need to tell someone why she's wrong. But until someone with the sensibility of Fitzpatrick about every day stalinism writes it in English, I'm not going further into the Soviet sources. I spent enough time in Hungarian camp historiography and literature.
>>386089
If you want something complex and simple about soviet history with lots of statistics and huge accent on the national politics - try "The history of USSR from Lenin to Gorbachev" by A.I.Vdovin.
>>386057
>implying /pol/ can ever state their own position on something
>implying they can post anything besides memes without a youtube vid or a link to some shady website
>>386127
I prefer every day life / low level social political history. And post archival work please.
>>386072
Nothing they did was substantively or characteristically socialist. They were revolutionaries of the Right. Did you know private ownership actually expanded under Nazi rule? There were factions in the party associated with the Strasser bros and Roehm that desired nationalization of key industries, but Hitler and the majority opposed trade unionism, labor militancy, and public ownership of the means of production. Nazi Germany was socialist like the DPRK is democratic.
>>385714
>nazis
>socialist
B8
>>385977
The proper term is wehraboo
s/wehraboo/cunt/387367
