Feel like the 6000 kilometer long forced labour camp running along the trainline from Krasnoyarsk to Anadyr would've been enough and the rest was just a tad excessive of the soviets.
Also must've been quite the effort to remove about 3000km of those traintracks in the eastern wilderness of russia since those aren't there anymore.
fuck you doublepost, also love the area to the north-east of moscow that is entirely surrounded by prisons and there isn't a land based way to leave without going through one, creating a free zone that is actually a prison and the prisons walls are made out of prisons. I think I can hear Foucault blasting ropes in the afterlife.
Also if I retrace the huge blob shape to the north-east of the country, just above the traintracks they have since deconstructed, that's an area of give or take 130.000km², so it's a prison camp the size of the Greece.
Location of Forced Labour Camps during the Soviet Union.
[Map of every internment and prison camp in the United States of America between 1922-1991]
Big oof, even by the propaganda numbers, US incarceration rates for black men are still almost quadruple those of the Gulags at their peak.
Beyond even that, there are more people in jail for blatant political reasons in America right now than there were in the gulags over their lifespan. The scale of mass incarceration in America puts it an order of magnitude ahead of anything else similar in human history barring maybe the Atlantic slave trade, even that was 13 million over 400 years compared to 2 million processed per year in the US prison system.
The us prison system is almost keeping up with generational chattel slavery in terms of body count...
The struggle then becomes how do we instill punishment to those who break the new laws post-revolution?
There are still ways labor can be done, but in ways that benefit either society, themselves or what have you. Give them actual living conditions, away from society maybe for safety, but still have education, free time, and are treated like human beings that either need help or a push in the right direction.
The Anarchist in me says exile from polite society (while still providing basic necessities) for major crimes. Minor crimes I don't have an answer for, but prison slavery isn't the answer.
In an ideal society, things like trash pick-up would still happen, but on a more horizontal field.
Exactly. I know there are ways to still have some type of punishment for crimes, while still treating people humanely and in actual conditions. Not like prisons now and certainly not like prison slavery.
Yeah, but Epstein would be tried in the people's courts and executed, I'm taking about humans
Yeah I agree, maybe these were more socially accepted back then but now we know better and should strive to do better. Taking care of these people at least as a first resort would probably do more for them than forcing them to do hard labor. And if they must work then its probably better to treat them well while they work like if they were a cashier at a restaurant being paid normal wages instead of being basically a slave
I would encourage you to look into prison abolition. I think there's a disconnect between us here, even though we fundamentally agree on the same thing.
If labor is done as punishment in a socialist society
Good post, but this isn't even necessary to make working a punishment, people tend naturally to want to be productive, giving people opportunities to work and they'll generally take them. Any rehabilitation program in a communist society needs to restrict as few freedoms as necessary to keep everyone safe.
People get all mad about AOC not calling border camps concentration camps, and then refuse to call gulags slave camps.
if you cant distinguish penal labour you need new analytic categories
There is no evidence that slave labor works, and it disgusts me that you would be OK with it.
Just because it feels good, doesn't mean it works or is ethical. I hate plenty of people, doesn't mean they should be slaves. Shoot them if they are like Bush, otherwise integrate them. Things will sort themselves out over time.
Most people were in gulags unjustly. People got sent to them for stealing from their employers, really petty shit.
Most people were in gulags unjustly
Source ?
Yeah a lot were but most. Like in hundreds of throusands. You know Gulags were just prisons. Are you saying that (especially after ww2) the majority of prisoners in the USSR were innocent. Thats a wild take
People got sent to them for stealing from their employers
What employers? You think there were actual physical people ownining means of productions or buisnesses employing people in the USSR ? (yeah there were some cause there was a black market) but that mode of production was a small minority
What employers? You think there were actual physical people ownining means of productions or buisnesses employing people in the USSR ? (yeah there were some cause there was a black market) but that mode of production was a small minority
Markets were not abolished under the USSR, read Wolff.
I also did not argue innocence, I argued unjustness. I'm not gonna debate you if your first instinct is to misconstrue my point.
The USSR had a kind of commodity-production and had wage labor but only post-Stalin there were pseudo market-type reforms i.e they had to take loans from the state, have emploeyr relationships, firms that pay interest, had to be profitable and there even was a type of psuedo competition between the state enterprises, (but at the same time they had to follow the plan set by the state.). Under Stalin markets in any capitalist sense were supressed (why black market structures emerged) and capital goods were mostly allocated based on their use-values rather than their exchange values, meaning that capital goods were mostly not treated like commodities.
Also i havent read Wolff on the issue, sorry that a demsoc marxist that stans co-ops as a transitionary system wasnt in my top list to read about how the economy worked in the USSR
capital s slavery, no citation, failing to elaborate categories. stop with the debate nerd trickery bullshit
You should get a time machine and go to 1951 USSR. Absolutely destroyed infastructure wise from the worse genocidal war in history, lost tens of millions of its lanor force, completely depleted on so many levels and with prisons full on nazi collaborators and see how the brilliant idea of not using forced labour from them would fare . Also people in Gulags were actualy paid . CIA documents about Gulags attest to that
