| Alright, well, Renji suggested to me that we have an actual substantial discussion of Stalin here... and it seems so easy for debates here to veer into various accusations against (and laudatory declarations in praise of) Stalin, so here is where I want to keep such a volatile topic anchored. Josef Stalin is a figure that really needs to be analyzed by Communists- indeed, 57 years after his death, people have not come to terms with the Stalin era in a way that is really need. All we hear from anti-communists, Anarchists, Trotskyists, and Khrushchevites is the usual stuff about the "tyrant Stalin", while on the other side anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninists tend to gloss over Stalin's complexities, simply labeling him "the Great Stalin", and neither side really gives a clear picture that ANYONE can learn from... For Communists today, Stalin should upheld as a revolutionary Marxist-Leninist who carried forward the world revolutionary banner after the death of Lenin (albeit with many serious errors). Stalin did not make any major theoretical additions to Marxism-Leninism, and so thus "Stalinism" does not exist in the real world (except as a mudslinging term used by capitalists). However, there are many things that we uphold about Stalin... Stalin was the leader of the International Communist Movement for 40 years and helped solidify much of Communism's advances during that time. In that time, the Soviet Union developed the world's first socialist economy- something only barely glimpsed within Lenin's time. The Communist Party of the Soviet Union developed the first planned economy, and struggled to develop the first collectivized mechanized agriculture (in the place of an extremely backward peasant society). In this they succeeded with great results. The Red Army met and defeated the most powerful army in the world. 3.5 MILLION highly mechanized Nazi troops invaded -- confident of conquering the first socialist country. And these (previously invincible) armies were hurled back to defeat. In the end, after 22 million Russians died due to Nazi atrocities, it was the troops of Joseph Stalin that took the Nazi capital Berlin, and drove Hitler to suicide! Under Stalin the communist movement became truly international -- with the ComIntern (and its fraternal parties) appearing all over the world. While Stalin led the world movement, there were new seizures of power. When he died 1953, the communist forces were in power in a third of the world, and in his time at the leadership of the CPSU he led a series of important line struggles to uphold and strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat and forge a road forward toward socialism. His struggles with the rightist, state-capitalist line of Bukharin, and the defeatist line of Leon Trotsky were important and historic contributions to communist practice (and theory). He also led an important post-WWII struggle with Tito's form of revisionism- which was the worlds first experience with "capitalist roaders in power" -- i.e. political forces claiming to be communist but in reality establishing capitalism. Any one of the things listed above would be major achievements. All are important to uphold. And often those who paint Stalin in a mainly negative light are often intending precisely to reverse verdicts on some of these positive accomplishments I'm listing here. As Mao once said "I think there are two 'swords': one is Lenin and the other Stalin", once the sword of Stalin has been discarded "once this gate is opened, by and large Leninism is thrown away." And I think history has shown the truth of this, again and again. Stalin's accomplishments exist with some major problems. And the "socialist camp" and international communist movement that emerged after World War II was ripe with revisionism, and faced widespread capitalist restoration in the 1950s. The People's Democracies of Eastern Europe quickly fell apart, and socialism within places like East Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, etc. only lasted a few years, if even that... It is worth pointing out that Stalin himself was NOT a revisionist (or capitalist roader) -- and that it was only AFTER his death that Krushchevite capitalist roaders could make their coup in the Soviet Union. Mao said to make a distinction "between Sian and Yenan." Meaning: don't confuse our side and their side. (Sian was the center of Chinese counterrevolution and Yenan was mao's headquarters.) When criticizing Stalin (which is necessary) let's not be confused: Stalin's errors are, for better or worse, errors of the international communist movement. They were errors made in the course of attempting to make revolution -- they are not like the crimes of those who attempt to suppress revolution. Marxists and progressives from around the world, at the time, loved the guy and perhaps were willing to overlook his shortcomings. He was the leader of the only socialist state in the world for a long time. It would have been natural to give him unconditional support especially in light of the hostility the USSR was subject to which culminated in the Nazi invasion. Few forces have been attacked like the Soviet Union of 1917-1956 was. Few figures have been slandered like Stalin was (and still is). And yet millions of fighters all over the world went into battle with his name on their lips. After Stalin's death, Mao said that Stalin was "70% good, 30% bad." 70% is a significant positive assessment; but 30% as an assessment of his errors is no small thing; in a sense, Stalin got a "C-" in Communist class. These were significant problems (which I have discussed before as well). In 1984, in its founding Declaration, the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement wrote: "Today, the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement, together with other Maoist forces, are the inheritors of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, and they must firmly base themselves on this heritage. But they must also, on the basis of this heritage, dare to criticize its shortcomings. There are experiences which people should praise and there are experiences which should make people grieve. Communists and revolutionaries in all countries should ponder and seriously study these experiences of success and failure so as to draw correct conclusions and useful lessons from them." Now, one of the most commonly-flung accusations toward Stalin was that he committed "genocide" against the Soviet people. Let's break this down a bit: 1) Maoists think that Comrade Stalin and the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were grappling with something new: how to continue the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat, and how to deal with reactionary lines that emerge at the highest level of the Communist Party itself. No Communist had ever held state power before. Stalin was dealing with things that no one had ever dealt with before, and was oftentimes "winging it" in a significant way. No one had ever seen revisionist lines emerge within the party like this. And Marxists generally had thought the transition from capitalism to communism was going to be quicker and easier than it has proven to be. 2) Overall, among the post-Lenin leadership of the CPSU, Stalin had the best line, and he waged a correct struggle with Trotsky (who believed that the USSR should have just "given up" because the revolutions in Germany and Hungary had been crushed) and with Bukharin (whose line on agriculture and slowing social change was a de-facto program for restoring capitalism- essentially attempting to transform the USSR into what China is in the modern era). There were also extremely sharp struggles over preparing for World War II- carrying out intense changes in society and the economy, transforming the military forces, preparing defenses, and defeating potential "fifth column" forces who might have otherwise supported the Nazi invasion when it came. 3) However, Stalin did not correctly understand the basis for the emergence of revisionist lines under socialism. He did not see that the masses needed to be mobilize to further uproot the basis for capitalist restoration, and he believed that revisionists-within-the-party-leadership must be agents of foreign powers. In short, the analysis of the Soviet revolutionaries led to treating revisionism as a police matter. Many of the so-called "purges" in the CPSU(B) were a case of treating acute political "struggle between two lines" as if they were a police matter. Treating major political conflicts within the party as a "police matter" left the masses as by-standers. True, it successfully (and permanently) removed some leading counter-revolutionaries... indeed, many people Stalin killed deserved to die... but simply executing these counter-revolutionaries did not really expose or uproot their line -- so that those who replaced them often "picked up where they left off." It also led to some excesses: sometimes people were removed and killed who could have been won over. Sometimes contradictions "among the people" were treated as "contradictions with the enemy." Mao said "heads are not like leeks, they do not grow back." He meant that if you kill people, you do not give them a chance to change, and you do not have a chance to reverse any mistakes made. Killing people over political struggles also chilled the enthusiasm of the people. People tended to "stay out" of politics thinking it was "too dangerous to risk some mistake." It led to passivity among the masses -- and that too strengthened the hands of the revisionists. Indeed, in the Soviet Union a whole generation grew up that genuinely loved socialism, genuinely loved living in the Soviet Union, deeply loved Stalin, but were deathly afraid of actually joining the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. 4) The Maoists (i.e. Mao and those with his line within the Chinese Communist Party) thought it was mistaken to use police methods in inner-party struggle. When the large wave of purges happened in the CPSU (late 1930's) the Chinese Central Committee resolved never to use such methods in their own inner party struggle. This decision was kept by the Maoists (but not by the Chinese revisionists who have ruled China since 1976). Mao did not have his party opponents killed (despite the distortions that capitalist media puts on him), and many of his lifelong opponents were criticized but often not removed from their posts. This was an important way of underscoring that a life-and-death struggle with capitalist restoration did not mainly rest on removing or killing its leading proponents -- but on uprooting the line and the soil from which it springs. 5) As a result, the Chinese Communist Party had "rectification campaigns." They also repeatedly required their own cadre to "pass through the gate" of reevaluation and mass criticism. (Read the book Fanshen by U.S. journalist and aid worker William Hinton for an excellent look at how CCP leadership worked) But they never used the Soviet/Stalin method of "purges." And their methods were very different from purges. 6) In particular: Mao grappled for many years for a way to involve the masses of people in the struggle to defeat restorationist tendencies. Many of his famous mass campaigns (the Great Leap Forward, the Socialist Education Campaign and then the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution) emerged from his developing and creative understanding of how to do this. 7) Mao summed up that the GPCR (and all the complex "socialist new things" it included) was a a form "to arouse the broad masses to expose our dark aspect openly, in an all-round way and from below." http://www.awtw.org/back_issues/1996-22/gpcr_22_eng.htm 8 ) On one hand, Maoists build on the experience of Stalin, the Soviet Union and its struggle against restoration. On the other hand, Maoism is the most profound and creative CRITIQUE of the methods, weaknesses and even errors of the approach of even-the-best among the Soviet communists. 9) This area of innovation is considered the most important contribution of Mao to Marxism. It is called "the theory of continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat." It is rooted in a new analysis of where revisionism and capitalist restoration "comes from" under socialism. And it gives rise to the creative new approaches concentrated in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. 10) Most importantly, I will end this post with this to say: Stalin was NOT a tyrant. He did not murder "millions" of people. While he committed serious errors, as Communists we should not "throw the baby out with the bath water", so to speak. However, if we are to build a new socialist society that is able to actually get to communism without classes, states, or exploitation, we cannot simply make a repeat of the USSR under Stalin- we must go farther than our comrade ever did. |
| I don't quite understand what you mean by "hes still only as good as the leaders before him". In my opinion, Lenin actually had a sharper understanding of how socialism develops and a better grasp on dialectical materialism (read Lenin's Materialism & Empirio-Criticism and then compare it to Stalin's Dialectical & Historical Materialism) as the basis for revolution. Stalin also believed that after 1936, that there were no more bourgeois elements in Soviet society and that any counter-revolutionary activity had to be the work of foreign agents- thus, a lot of people were executed or imprisoned on the basis that they were "spies" committing "treason" (when their crime was simply upholding a revisionist line). Lenin, on the other hand, spoke of (in Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder) how "the resistance of the bourgeoisie increases tenfold with its overthrow." Stalin's methods, while ironfisted, in the end skirted over the issue of class struggle under socialism, and thus allowed revisionists to take power in the USSR after his death. So no, I would not consider Lenin and Stalin to be on the exact same level- in fact, it's just another reason that I am a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist, not a Marxist-Leninist-"Stalinist". And it was not until Mao's works and policies in the 1950's/60's/70's did the International Communist Movement really understand once more how class contradictions continue under socialism (like Lenin said), and it was Mao who took the initiative to develop a method of dealing with those contradictions- I would highly recommend Mao's work On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People, which gets into these issues (with a very different approach from Stalin): http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-5/mswv5_58.htm |
| Well, yes, but a socialist state and it's place in a world where imperialism still exists is not- as you seem to imply- not about "power" and "might", but about acting as a "base area" for the overall international revolutionary struggle. At one point, the Comintern (3rd Communist International) during Stalin's reign put defense of the USSR above the development of revolutionary movements anywhere else, under the growing threat of fascism. It told Communist parties around the world to subordinate themselves to the "democratic-bourgeois" forces in their respective capitalist countries in the name of the "Popular Front" against fascism. It also made the Communist Party of the Soviet Union the final say in the decisions of ALL communist parties- regardless of their particular and/or objective conditions, causing a very unequal balance to the movement as a whole. On one hand, this was a very understandable route to take: the world's only socialist state was facing the possibility of attack from Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy- the former of which was the biggest and most technologically-advanced army in the world. However, it also came at a great setback: the ability to make revolutionary gains were sacrificed in places like Spain, France, Italy, Germany, and even the United States. The line of the Comintern blatantly contradicted Lenin's declaration to the communist parties of the world that the revolutionary struggle in one's own country should be the primary task for people in a certain nation, especially when revolution can be made and one. In the end, the Popular Front line of the Comintern that Stalin advocated strengthened the USSR, but the question is: at what cost? Ten years after the Soviet victory against the Nazis, and 3 years after Stalin's death, capitalism was restored in the USSR and Eastern Europe. There were no socialist revolutions within western Europe or the Americas when there could have been. The only places socialism survived were in places where the communist parties dared to go against the Comintern (and Stalin): China and Vietnam. To his credit, Stalin thanked Mao for proving him wrong, but only after 1949. For a good book about the Popular Front and Comintern before and during WWII, check out: On the Line of the Comintern in the Spanish Civil War it is available in its entirety here: http://mikeely.wordpress.com/2009/01/05/critique-of-comintern-in-spanish-civil-war-intro/ For a look into how Mao's break with Stalin advanced revolutionary gains in Asia, pick up Red Star Over China by Edgar Snow. |
| Anyone have any books on Stalin they recommend? |
Sonwig said: HoloisHolo said: Anyone have any books on Stalin they recommend? Stalin... Waiting for the Truth! By Grover Furr. The book debunks a reactionaries book on Stalin. He is a good historian who thoroughly uses sources (or lack of sources) though be warned I think he is a little crazy about Trotsky. Alright thanks comrade |
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