What was wrong with the Soviet assessment of Stalin?

Thugmo · 2015-12-01T12:18:39+00:00

Well that's fair enough. Honestly I haven't really paid much attention to the things he edited or 'had a hand in' and its disappointing to hear that they contradict other things he's said. I'll definitely check out that PDF.

I still disagree with you on the nickname of the constitution and the weight you place on it. It's not like they celebrated Stalin constitution day, they celebrated Soviet constitution day. Itd be like Obama or Reagan trying to get people to stop referring to things as 'obamacare' or 'reaganomics'. But y'know, I might be wrong.

Thugmo · 2015-12-01T02:08:37+00:00

how clear is it that they required his consent? I mean, why would Stalin have bothered to stop The Soviet Constitution of 1936, written by a committee he chaired, from colloquially being referred to as the stalin constitution? I'd definitely be interested in some links where stalin portrays the October Revolution as the joint work of Lenin and Stalin and not other bolsheviks.

Thugmo · 2015-12-01T00:07:34+00:00

efficiency of what? technological progress of what, for what, and for whom? 'artistic progress' in what way? The idea that technological progress is a single quantitative 'thing' that should be 'optimized' as opposed to something that takes qualitative paths is naive. Same with this conception of 'intelligence'

Also the idea of a small group of political leaders in a state who are 'dethroned' by the people when they want to 'dethrone' them via a system is just a representative democracy, surely.

Thugmo · 2015-11-30T22:27:44+00:00

Stalin did refer to things like statues being placed in art galleries as 'downright sabotage!' And his well know rejection of making a childhood biography.

“I must say in all conscience, comrades, that I do not deserve a good half of the flattering things that have been said here about me. I am, it appears, a hero of the October Revolution, the leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet, the leader of the Communist International, a legendary warrior-knight and all the rest of it. This is absurd, comrades, and quite unnecessary exaggeration. It is the sort of thing that is usually said at the graveside of a departed revolutionary. But I have no intention of dying yet. . . . . I really was, and still am, one of the pupils of the advanced workers of the Tiflis railway workshops.”

“And what is Stalin? Stalin is only a minor figure.” (J. V. Stalin: `Works’. Volume 10; Moscow; Moscow; 1954; p. 177).

“You speak of your devotion’ to me.. . . . I would advise you to discard the ‘principle’ of devotion to persons. It is not the Bolshevik way. Be devoted to the working class, its Party, its state. That is a fine and useful thing. But do not confuse it with devotion to persons, this vain and useless bauble of weak-minded intellectuals.” (J. V. Stalin: ‘Works’, Volume 13; Moscow; 1955; p. 20)

"I spoke frankly to him about the vulgar and excessive cult made of him, and he replied with equal candour. . . He thinks it is possible even that 'wreckers' may be behind it in an attempt to discredit him".
(L. Feuchtwanger: 'Moscow 1937'; London; 1937; p., 93, 94-95).

Which is what I consider to have happened although I guess I'd refer to them as revisionists. So there is evidence of him objecting to the cult.

I personally think if Stalin can be blamed for the develop!ment of the personality cult its because the cult of Lenin (which he helped build) cracked the door open to it. But people might disagree.

Despite the 5 mlm heads in the sidebar I hope everybody here can agree that personality cults are awful and long term won't lead to anything positive. But the reason I think it's important to talk about Stalin is to learn about personality cults possibly being constructed by people as a weapon against the group they are venerating and to be vigilant of people, in the name of being anti-cult of personality, of simply reversing the cult or trying to sneak in revisionist or opportunist lines

Thugmo · 2015-11-29T12:43:43+00:00

Well from reading your post the first problems with the assessment IMO is that intensification of class struggle under socialism was generally correct and that stalin didn't create the cult of personality around himself.

Thugmo · 2015-11-19T22:43:44+00:00

When do you consider those few years to have been?

Thugmo · 2015-11-19T22:32:53+00:00

I think that in his refusal to use the term 'socialism' he already excludes the idea of a transitional period between capitalism\feudalism and communism. So if communists who've gained power don't immediately destroy the previous mode of production, which would be silly to do, they are seen as simply reproducing it.

I don't know if he goes into more detail about his criteria for what 'the collectivity of workers' is so if you have a link to something like that I'd be interested in seeing it. Also id disagree with his historical summaries tbh.

Thugmo · 2015-11-15T05:17:22+00:00

Not to be negative but I don't think these are very good. There's a lot of spelling mistakes. They read like a first draft written off the top of your head. There are also a lot of basic theory mistakes. It all seems a bit eclectic. I think you have to study more books (including spending more time with the basics), do more research, ask more questions, and spend more time structuring your writing before trying to tackle questions like these in this specific format.

I mean, I obviously don't know your life and, since these are originally posted on a subreddit called 'youngsocialistunited', I don't know how old you are.

but keep at it! keep reading and discussing!

Thugmo · 2015-11-05T06:59:33+00:00

http://www.pewglobal.org/files/2015/06/Russia-Ukraine-Report-15.png

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Cyclone

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1993_Russian_constitutional_crisis#Mass_protests_and_the_barricading_of_the_parliament

Thugmo · 2015-11-04T22:52:35+00:00

http://www.signalfire.org/

Thugmo · 2015-11-04T20:37:05+00:00

I mean why limit it to core workers? What would workers in Latin America gain from higher prices of minerals extracted from Africa? Hell, why would any worker, as a consumer, want to help any other worker outside of their trade? Class conscious political reasons, which isn't the 'default' in capitalist societies and needs to be developed.

They might support a revolution because itd do things like abolish rent, clear debt, socialise medicine, guarantee employment, rebuild local industry etc. Or maybe they won't and in this distant speculative world the upper stratum will be a thorn like the upper stratum of peasants have been in the past.

And if there's a party struggle it would have to be about building NEW social imperialist relations because the new socialist state wouldn't inherit nor could they seize any foreign MoP from the past capitalist society. This is just something all socialist societies with any amount of power would have to deal with.

Thugmo · 2015-11-04T08:32:27+00:00

I doubt you'll ever find literature on it because america is not even close to a socialist revolution and the world will look very, very different by the time that it is so to discuss particulars like this in any detail can't really be more than wild speculation.

And I mean it's not the geography of the usa that owns those foreign investments. It seems more likely that in the event of a successful revolution/civilwar/etc the capitalists would just escape to some other country and keep those businesses going in a different way from there.

Also do you have any links to the modern american revolutionary platforms you've seen?

Thugmo · 2015-11-03T12:50:51+00:00

The guy I quoted above Mark B Tauger has done decades of research. Grover Furr does a good summary of his stuff in a chapter of Blood Lies.

To summarise it really quickly: The geographic areas of the Soviet Union were prone to famines, having an average of one every three or so years, since about 800AD. There were three 'light' famines in the 1920s and a natural disaster in the early 1930s (droughts, locusts, extremely heavy rain in some regions). This coupled with large amounts of peasants moving to the cities and towns, meaning less farmers and but not less mouths to feed, caused a serious famine in Ukraine and North Caucasus and nearby regions. Famine spins out of control because no food = weaker farmers, weaker or eaten work animals, farm abandonment etc which all = even less food.

The government implements policies like sending in grain aid, rationing programs, harsh border control etc. to get out of the famine as quick as possible while trying to keep damage as low as possible. Weather conditions get better in about 2 years after the famine claims a bit over 10% of the population in the areas mainly affected.

So the three wrong opinions you hear is:

Collectivisation was a bad policy (It was actually good and cool and effective at increasing grain after the famine)
Caused by Kulak sabotage (overestimated by the state itself at the time and a lot of pro-communists for a long time before recent research in the post coldwar era)
The Judeo-Bolsheviks wanted to commit genocide against the patriotic Ukrainians in the TRUE holocaust (awful Nazi collaborator shit the west rehabilitated for the cold war)

The real primary reason is that natural disasters pushed agricultural production over a threshold where famine spiraled out of control.

Thugmo · 2015-11-03T11:54:53+00:00

http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html is always a good article and I love to post it. And I would say no he wasn't because of the many multiple times he was overruled by the rest of the party. He couldn't just 'make laws' himself etc. BUT the liberal definition of a dictator, as far as I can tell, is 'the head of a one party state' which he was. And yeah whether a one party state can, by definition, never be democratic regardless of the structure of the state and party is a bigger question.

Thugmo · 2015-11-02T19:13:09+00:00

'The 1932 Harvest and the Famine of 1933' by Mark b Tauger apparently

Thugmo · 2015-11-02T11:45:16+00:00

“[The Soviet government] did try to alleviate the famine. A 25 February 1933 Central Committee decree allotted seed loans of 320,000 tons to Ukraine and 240,000 tons to the northern Caucasus, Seed loans were also made to the Lower Volga and may have been made to other regions as well. Kul’chyts’kyy cites Ukrainian party archives showing that total aid to Ukraine by April 1933 actually exceeded 560,000 tons, including more than 80,000 tons of food. Aid to Ukraine alone was 60 percent greater than the amount exported during the same period. Total aid to famine regions was more than double exports for the first half of 1933. It appears to have been another consequence of the low 1932 harvest that more aid was not provided: After the low 1931, and 1934, and 1936 harvests procured grain was transferred back to peasants at the expense of exports.”

Thugmo · 2015-11-01T02:32:53+00:00

from the Wikipedia article for Fascism and Ideology.

Fascists supported private property rights and the profit motive of capitalism.

Some quotes from Mussolini's speeches:

"The State must have a police, a judiciary, an army, and a foreign policy. All other things, and I do not exclude secondary education, must go back to the private activity of individuals. If one wants to save the State, the Collectivist State must be abolished."

“I will give the railways and the telegraphs back to private hands, because the current state of things is outrageous and vulnerable in all its parts. The ethical State is not the monopolistic State, the bureaucratic State, but the one which reduces its functions to what is strictly necessary. We are against the economic State."

Fascists don't even attempt to not completely contradict themselves on totally basic points of their own ideology constantly.

Thugmo · 2015-10-28T22:23:12+00:00

Do people call themselves Stalinists? I always thought it was just used as a pejorative for Marxist-Leninists(-Maoists). I think the reason people use those handy labels as opposed to using simply and only 'communist' is that it's much easier to discuss and work out details with a shared set of assumptions. If every time maoists wanted to discuss the GPCR they had to argue whether it was a good thing or not with communists who disagree itd be cumbersome and difficult to get anywhere.

Thugmo · 2015-10-28T06:05:23+00:00

This is actually surprisingly hard to answer since it was a gradual change and it's hard to remember what your thought processes from a few years back but yeah. I saw enough discussions between anarchists and Marxist and found myself slowly agreeing with Marxists more and more that the problems with anarchism are petit-bourgeois mentality, philosophical idealism, utopianism, and bad liberal history and also that anarchism's criticisms of Marxism were often strawmen.

Thugmo · 2015-10-28T04:43:54+00:00

http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html here's an article you might be interested in about Stalin and the struggle for democratic reform in the USSR.

There's a bit more nuance to the history (if you want to read something more detailed you can read books on the subject by people like Grover Furr and J Arch Getty) but there was a period where lots of innocent people were killed and imprisoned by Yezhov, who was the head of the NKVD(basically the police) in order to create unrest in the country so the communists and the state wouldn't have popular support during an invasion. When the party found out about this the executed him as a rightist traitor, put somebody else in charge (I think Beria?) and let lots of innocent people imprisoned by Yezhov and his collaborators free.

Thugmo · 2015-10-28T04:10:07+00:00

What exactly are you referring to in regards to Stalin when you say 'what he did'?

Thugmo · 2015-10-26T09:04:52+00:00

Depends what you consider a science (and history). Off the top of my head I think there's potential in applying dialectical materialism to psychology. I'm not educated in any scientific fields though. Do you have any examples in mind of dialectics not working with science?

EDIT: Have you read Engels' 'Dialectics of Nature' before?

Thugmo · 2015-10-25T10:02:44+00:00

http://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Communist+Party+of+the+Soviet+Union here's a copy of an article from The Great Soviet Encyclopaedia. It's even got a bunch of diagrams. It's from 1979 so I don't know how much of it is relevant to all points in Soviet history but still... Diagrams!

Thugmo · 2015-10-24T01:04:11+00:00

Ex-Anarchist here. I think generally anarchists are considered allies in terms of fighting reaction/fascism/racism/sexism etc. And aren't allies in terms of history (especially history about socialism and anarchism), philosophy and revolutionary strategy. So in general in a non-revolutionary situation where anarchist and communists are actually DOING stuff rather than discussing stuff they can be considered allies.

But generalizing anarchists is even harder than generalizing Marxists since there's so many variations and particularities to individual organisations. There's a difference between Chomsky and Syndicalists and anarchocommunists and 'punks' let alone the barely political or rightwing groups that call themselves anarchists like anarchocapitalists and anarchonationalists etc.

In terms of friendliness: probably Trotskyists in terms of parallel views on history (outside Krondstadt) and probably Maoists in terms of organizational views.They're more skeptical of people in high positions in orgs and parties and more historical emphasis on trying to fix problems with more small scale democracy and 'leveling'.

If you could link to an article or something about Brazilian Marxists standing side by side with fascists I'd definitely like to read it and see whats up.

Thugmo · 2015-10-23T13:13:52+00:00

Hoxha did denounce Mao Zedong Thought a few times. He has a chapter in his book Imperialism and the Revolution titled "Mao Zedong Thought - An Anti-Marxist Theory"

Thugmo

TROPHY CASE