Painting:The Great Oath
Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, was born in Gori, Georgia on 21st December, 1879. was a Soviet revolutionary and politician who was the leader of the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1922–1952) and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Soviet Union (1941–1953).
The son of a humble Georgian shoemaker, at the age of fifteen Stalin entered the Orthodox seminary in Tbilisi on a scholarship, where he proved to be a brilliant student, although he was expelled when he was caught distributing propaganda for the Georgian Socialist Party, which he had joined in 1898.
While studying at the seminary he joined a secret organization called Messame Dassy (the Third Group). Members were supporters of Georgian independence from Russia. Some were also socialist revolutionaries and it was through the people he met in this organization that Stalin first came into contact with the ideas of Karl Marx.
Soon after leaving the seminary he began reading Iskra (the Spark), the newspaper of the Social Democratic Labour Party (SDLP). It was the first underground Marxist paper to be distributed in Russia. It was printed in several European cities and then smuggled into Russia by a network of SDLP agents. The editorial board included Lenin and Trotsky
In 1901 Stalin joined the Social Democratic Labour Party and whereas most of the leaders were living in exile, he stayed in Russia where he helped to organize industrial resistance to Tsarism. he would end up being arrested and exiled to Siberia for coordinating a Strike at the large Rothschild plant at Batum.
At the Second Congress of the Social Democratic Labour Party held in London in 1903, there was a dispute between Lenin and Julius Martov over the future of the SDLP. Lenin argued for a small party of professional revolutionaries with a large fringe of non-party sympathizers and supporters. Martov disagreed believing it was better to have a large party of activists.
As Lenin and Plekhanov won most of the votes, their group became known as the Bolsheviks (after bolshinstvo, the Russian word for majority), whereas Martov's group were dubbed Mensheviks (after menshinstvo, meaning minority). Stalin who was still in prison in Siberia, decided he favoured the Bolsheviks in this dispute. He escaped on 5th January 1904. Lenin was impressed with Stalin's achievements in the Caucasus and in December 1905, he was invited to meet him in Finland.
Stalin would Settled in Baku to expand the influence of bolsheviks in the Caucasus, Joseph Stalin worked closely with his friends in developing the political consciousness of the workers in the region. The workers in the oil fields belonged to a union under the influence of the Bolsheviks, and Stalin was one of the Union's delegates
He returned to St. Petersburg in February 1912, he became editor of Pravda. Lenin, who described him as my "wonderful Georgian" arranged for him to join the Party's Central Committee, he was Exiled to Siberia on 1913. he would return to St Petersburg in 1917 with the overthrow of the Tzar and the pardon to all political prisoners by Prince Lvov. He would join the then Petrograd Soviet
At this time, Stalin, like most Bolsheviks, took the view that the Russian people were not ready for a socialist revolution. He therefore called for conditional support of the Provisional Government. He also urged policies that would tempt the Mensheviks into forming an alliance. However, he disagreed with Molotov, who was calling for the immediate overthrow of Prince Lvov.
When Lenin returned to Russia on 3rd April, 1917, he announced what became known as the April Theses. Lenin attacked Bolsheviks for supporting the Provisional Government. Instead, he argued, revolutionaries should be telling the people of Russia that they should take over the control of the country. Lenin ended his speech by telling the assembled crowd that they must "fight for the social revolution, fight to the end, till the complete victory of the proletariat".
On 26th October, 1917, the All-Russian Congress of Soviets met and handed over power to the Soviet Council of People's Commissars. Lenin was elected chairman and Joseph Stalin (Nationalities), As a Georgian and a member of a minority group who had written about the problems of non-Russian peoples living under the Tsar, Stalin was seen as the obvious choice for the post as Minister of Nationalities. Nearly half of the population of the Empire was made up of non-russians. To show his good faith, Stalin appointed several assistants from the various nationalities within Russia.
At the Tenth Party Congress in April 1922, Lenin proposed a resolution that would ban all factions within the party. Stalin was appointed as General Secretary and was now given the task of dealing with the "factions and cliques" in the Communist Party
Following Lenin's death in 1924, There was a big power struggle in the party between 3 main factions. The Left opposition (trotsky), the Centre (Stalin) and the Right opposition (Bukharin).
Trotsky had argued in 1917 that the Bolshevik Revolution was doomed to failure unless successful revolutions also took place in other countries such as Germany and France. In 1924 Stalin began talking about the possibility of completing the "building of socialism in a single country". Nikolay Bukharin joined the attacks on Trotsky asserted that Trotsky's theory of "permanent revolution" was anti-Leninist. in 1925 Trotsky was removed from the goverment and 2 years later from the Party and exiled for Factionalism.
During the Collectivation of Land Stalin Blame the policies of Bukharin for the failure of the 1927 harvest. By this time kulaks made up 40% of the peasants in some regions, He also advocated the setting up of collective farms. By 1935, 94 per cent of crops were being produced by peasants working on collective farms.
With no start-up capital, little international trade and virtually no modern infrastructure, Stalin's government financed industrialization from the profits made by state-owned factories and enterprises, trade, banks and transportation.
In 1926-1927, about one billion rubles were invested in industry; three years later, about 5 billion rubles could already be invested in it. The 1930s saw the production, for the first time in the history of the Soviet Union, of a wide range of new products, including motorcycles, watches and cameras, as well as the machines and tools needed to produce these and other goods.
To avoid the isolation of the Soviet Republic, the USSR entered the League of Nations (1934), and had a rapprochement with Great Britain and France.
Stalin had always opposed fascism and Hitler, on August 15, 1939 he tried to make a pact with Britain and France to attack Nazi Germany. Stalin proposed to send 1 million soldiers to fight Hitler, but the capitalist countries refused. On August 23, 1939, the Soviet Union and Germany signed a non-aggression pact in Moscow.
After the outbreak of World War II, however, and considering that the fall of England was imminent, Hitler ordered an attack on the Soviet Union. The Red Army could not contain the main German attacks at the beginning of the Barbarossa Plan, since more than 70% of the German military industry was concentrated on the eastern front for the invasion of the USSR.
When Germany reached Moscow, Stalin did not flee and even made in November a speech commemorating the victory of Soviet power, soon began to take control of the situation and Stalin was appointed Supreme Commander in Chief of the Red Army. Unlike the German forces and Hitler's hierarchy, the Soviet military autonomy took its generals into democratic decision-making and had some of its best generals, such as Zhukov and Vatutin, brought in from the frontier, also allowing the dispatch from the eastern fronts of thousands of Siberian troops already trained in combat with the Japanese.
On the night of Sunday, March 1, he was found lying on the floor, dressed in the clothes he had worn the night before and barely able to speak. Some doctors ruled that Stalin had suffered a stroke and had collapsed. His death just like Lenin's would end up in a 3-way Power struggle between Lavrentiy Beria, Georgy Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev
Elon told them (the republicans) to kill the negotiated spending bill, and then a republican led spending bill the dems would’ve agreed to, and finally wanted a completely unreasonable spending bill that was too far to the right for every Democrat and a chunk of republicans. I really don’t see how this can reasonably be blamed on Biden or the Democrats. What would you have them do?
Any and all discretionary funds that primarily benefit red states or prominent Republicans immediately stop flowing until a bill is passed. Remind them how a government shutdown feels.
An avalanche of wildly progressive executive orders and seat appointments. Doesn't matter that the courts will strike them down or Trump will rescind them - make the Republicans take things away from people
Get on camera and try to explain this shit to people
Drone strike Elon Musk and say Republican senators are next.
Also they shouldn't have dropped the cases against Trump or pardoned all those white collar criminals until the last minute.
All of this is moot though because the Democrats do not care and Biden least of all.
Literally anything
I mean the usual strategy with republicans and a democratic president that somewhat works is you let the hogs have some dumb nonsense that makes the news, the president does a line-item veto, and republicans don’t actually care enough so the spending bill passes. But that doesn’t work when the richest man in the world is stirring shit up and has just proven they can play a significant role in electing republicans.
They could all collectively just not listen to the unelected Musk. The election had been going this way for months before Musk got in. And the democrats could, you know, pretend that their name meant something and push back against oligarchical control of government. But all of that is based on the false premise that the Dems aren’t doing exactly what they want and that they have any interest in stopping any of this.
What's the specific interest in Democrats getting a government shutdown? It's too early in the cycle to win them votes, and it wouldn't be a positive impact on their investment portfolios. Like sometimes Dems are getting exactly what they want (and they would be if it were the case that both parties were coming together and passing a budget with yet another increase to defense spending), but sometimes the Republicans are genuinely an impossible negotiating partner.
I’d flip it around on you. What is their interest in avoiding a shutdown? Assuming a neoliberal ideology, a shutdown creates the conditions for further privatization of government functions and excuses to cut social programs. They love it.
What was privatized due to the last 3 government shutdowns?
Every shutdown leads to a negotiation of the new budget that invariably entails more "austerity" and cuts to government services. You see it in the most recent proposal to keep the government open and the things they cut. I haven't done deep research on the last 3 government shutdowns to list out what has been privatized each time, but the ratchet of privatization continues to turn and each shutdown creates a big loss and austerity aftermath that paves the way for the next round of privatizaiton.
The shutdown is happening because the republicans shut down two agreements, then the vote where democrats voted almost unanimously against involved cutting a large percentage of every bit of the federal government except the military. I really don’t see how you anticipate that austerity would be prevented when the party with a majority in the house wants like a trillion dollars in cuts everywhere except the military.
Also, I don’t buy that this is some evil scheme by democrats to do austerity and privatization when if they wanted that they’d have simply passed the proposed budget. They don’t need to have an elaborate 3D chess move to do it, they just needed a handful of conservative members of congress to vote with republicans.