Differences between Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Mao?

[CynicalIdealist]

Marx obviously never ascended into power, but I'm sure that he had ideological differences from the other three men.

However, I'm more concerned with their policy differences. It seems that many people here take well to Mao, in spite of the fact that 50 million people died thanks to atrocities, New Way Forward, etc. I've heard people argue that he wasn't directly responsible for many of those deaths, and that his rule brought about many positive things.

Lenin seems to get mixed reception (though he did follow through with Marx's belief of dictatorship of the proletariat), and I've heard Chomsky refer to Stalin's policies as a natural result of Leninism. Thus, the consensus seems to be Mao>Lenin>>>>>>>>>>Stalin, but I'm wondering why that is.

Finally, how about Fidel Castro and Chavez? Chavez seems to be a curious case of socialism from above, and Castro seems less like an authoritarian leader than did Mao/Lenin/Stalin, but I'd like to know more about what separates these leaders from one another. I'm under the impression that many of the policies under most all of them were positive, but that dissidents had it bad. So how was, say, Stalin worse than Lenin in this regard?

[The Vegan Marxist]

Marx obviously never ascended into power, but I'm sure that he had ideological differences from the other three men.

However, I'm more concerned with their policy differences. It seems that many people here take well to Mao, in spite of the fact that 50 million people died thanks to atrocities, New Way Forward, etc. I've heard people argue that he wasn't directly responsible for many of those deaths, and that his rule brought about many positive things.

Lenin seems to get mixed reception (though he did follow through with Marx's belief of dictatorship of the proletariat), and I've heard Chomsky refer to Stalin's policies as a natural result of Leninism. Thus, the consensus seems to be Mao>Lenin>>>>>>>>>>Stalin, but I'm wondering why that is.

Finally, how about Fidel Castro and Chavez? Chavez seems to be a curious case of socialism from above, and Castro seems less like an authoritarian leader than did Mao/Lenin/Stalin, but I'd like to know more about what separates these leaders from one another. I'm under the impression that many of the policies under most all of them were positive, but that dissidents had it bad. So how was, say, Stalin worse than Lenin in this regard?

Well, I see Chavez as one of the first leaders to show that socialism from top-bottom is possible. And he's got my support, but we should remain visual on what's going on. We're already seeing over a 100 communes being formed in Venezuela & Chavez is supporting them. When it comes to Castro. Fidel helped bring a shit-hole into a very economically stable society. Same goes for Stalin. He made a shit-hole into a large socialist state. Stalin is a very tricky leader, & we should remain very open-minded with him. Since it's apparent that the Hearst Foundation, who were the ones that created lies about Stalin, is the very source that most Americans use to this day to talk shit about Stalin. If you speak with a lot of Maoists, they don't particularly follow Mao through all that he did, so we'd have to keep that in thought, & try & understand what exactly Maoists follow when it comes to Mao. Lenin, in my opinion, was a great political leader, but the only thing I found to be a little odd was his idea that the proletarians shouldn't be the movers of the revolution, but rather a state-run military.

[Weezer]

Marx and Engels set the basis for Marxism. As far as I can see, their doctrines were a rough draft of a proletarian revolution. Different people, such as Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao, Che, Bakunin, etc. used to develop their own variants of Marxism.

Lenin then made the rough draft for Leninism, which Trotsky, Avakian, Mao, Stalin, etc. would take to further their ideas, as they did with Marx and Engel's rough draft.

Stalinism is not a direct result of Leninism, it was the result that the fact Lenin had died, and shit needed to get done in the Soviet Union.

Stalin's way were probably more efficient, but ignored a lot of things like human rights in the process of trying to get millions of peasants out of the middle ages. I don't exactly agree with Stalin's policies, because I don't think it could work in a place like America. Different areas would need different strategies for a proletarian revolution.

I have doubts about Chavez. He seems to be getting a lot of things done, but he has done senseless things against workers in the past. Castro was far less authoritarian than Mao or Stalin, and probably is the most libertarian Marxist-Leninist leader I can think of.

[RadioRaheem84]

I have doubts about Chavez. He seems to be getting a lot of things done, but he has done senseless things against workers in the past.


What has Chavez done that was anti-worker? I think Chavez and his movement are some of the best things to happen to socialism in a long time. While I am not all for the top-bottom approach he has surely brought politics to a level playing field in Venezuela. The worst he's done is spout off some really inane stuff about the US and for some odd reason supports the Iranian regime.

[The Vegan Marxist]

What has Chavez done that was anti-worker? I think Chavez and his movement are some of the best things to happen to socialism in a long time. While I am not all for the top-bottom approach he has surely brought politics to a level playing field in Venezuela. The worst he's done is spout off some really inane stuff about the US and for some odd reason supports the Iranian regime.

Well, I'm kind of for Iran right now when it comes to the Uranium enrichment site that is right now getting attacked by the entire capitalist superpowers.

[CynicalIdealist]

Don't think I made myself clear enough.

It seems that most socialists consider Stalin to be a mutilation of their believes, but why is that and why were Lenin and Mao different? For that matter, what differentiated Mao from Lenin? Mao and Lenin from Castro?

I'm curious about the degree of both economic development and casualties under all of these leaders, because I get the sense that all of them were authoritarian and stifled dissent. I'd like a better framework for viewing all of them as separate leaders and individuals.

[The Douche]

Well, I see Chavez as one of the first leaders to show that socialism from top-bottom is possible. And he's got my support, but we should remain visual on what's going on. We're already seeing over a 100 communes being formed in Venezuela & Chavez is supporting them. When it comes to Castro. Fidel helped bring a shit-hole into a very economically stable society. Same goes for Stalin. He made a shit-hole into a large socialist state. Stalin is a very tricky leader, & we should remain very open-minded with him. Since it's apparent that the Hearst Foundation, who were the ones that created lies about Stalin, is the very source that most Americans use to this day to talk shit about Stalin. If you speak with a lot of Maoists, they don't particularly follow Mao through all that he did, so we'd have to keep that in thought, & try & understand what exactly Maoists follow when it comes to Mao. Lenin, in my opinion, was a great political leader, but the only thing I found to be a little odd was his idea that the proletarians shouldn't be the movers of the revolution, but rather a state-run military.

Why/how are you anarchist?

[The Vegan Marxist]

Why/how are you anarchist?

I came up with that name when I first got into politics, & never really stopped. I was a 'straight-forward' anarchist back then, & believed that the State could get eliminated immediately & no problems could come from it. But now, you could pretty much classify me as a Marxist, but through Marxist theory, & practically any communist ideology, the state is eliminated in the end. So anarchy is an element of communism. Anarchist ideology does not have a time-line of when the state must end. And as someone that supports both anarchist & communist ideology, I find the idea of gradually ending the state as the workers take control as a more effective way of going about it, instead of just ending the state immediately, which would allow other capitalist superpowers to take us over & everything we would've fought for would be eliminated right there & then.

[The Douche]

I came up with that name when I first got into politics, & never really stopped. I was a 'straight-forward' anarchist back then, & believed that the State could get eliminated immediately & no problems could come from it. But now, you could pretty much classify me as a Marxist, but through Marxist theory, & practically any communist ideology, the state is eliminated in the end. So anarchy is an element of communism. Anarchist ideology does not have a time-line of when the state must end. And as someone that supports both anarchist & communist ideology, I find the idea of gradually ending the state as the workers take control as a more effective way of going about it, instead of just ending the state immediately, which would allow other capitalist superpowers to take us over & everything we would've fought for would be eliminated right there & then.

So you think there is such a thing as/could be a workers state?

Believing in a stateless society does not make you an anarchist. Seems to me you are not an anarchist, not attacking you for that, just saying you probably shouldn't refer to yourself as one/use the symbols, since you're not/

[The Vegan Marxist]

So you think there is such a thing as/could be a workers state?

Believing in a stateless society does not make you an anarchist. Seems to me you are not an anarchist, not attacking you for that, just saying you probably shouldn't refer to yourself as one/use the symbols, since you're not/

Anarchy is in relation of ending the state, & any control that comes from it. It's the call for an anarchist society. And yes, I do believe that a workers state can come about, which would eventually allow the state, itself, to wither away. Government control would end once communism is established. I just don't think it would be a good idea to end it immediately. Do you?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

As this thread shows, Mao had a defective theory. That is one immediate difference:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/mao-zedong-t121784/index.html

[The Douche]

Anarchy is in relation of ending the state, & any control that comes from it. It's the call for an anarchist society. And yes, I do believe that a workers state can come about, which would eventually allow the state, itself, to wither away. Government control would end once communism is established. I just don't think it would be a good idea to end it immediately. Do you?

Being an anarchist entails a specific understanding of the state, not just a desire to see the state gone at some point.

The idea of a "workers state" is completely incompatible with anarchism.

Of course I think we should end the state immediately, I am an anarchist, you are not, obviously...

[The Vegan Marxist]

Being an anarchist entails a specific understanding of the state, not just a desire to see the state gone at some point.

The idea of a "workers state" is completely incompatible with anarchism.

Of course I think we should end the state immediately, I am an anarchist, you are not, obviously...

Of course there's other factors through the idea of Anarchy. I never doubted that, but how would you go about things if the state was eliminated immediately?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

LL:


As opposed to Trotsky and Lenin's non defective theories? Since you hate all dialectics, why single out the "Asiatic" Mao alone?

Trotsky did not in fact propound a theory of change, and Lenin never published his. Mao did.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

LL:


But were they not dialecticians?

1) I wasn't making a point about dialectics in general, but a specific one about Mao's theory of change.

2) Marx's dialectics was totally different, and owed nothing to Hegel, as I have shown here:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/scrapping-dialectics-would-t79634/index4.html

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1158574&postcount=73

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1158816&postcount=75

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1161443&postcount=114

http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=1163222&postcount=124

http://www.revleft.com/vb/dialectics-and-political-t118934/index.html

[ZeroNowhere]

Paresh Chattopadhyay has some pretty good articles on this here (http://libcom.org/library/socialism-marx-early-bolshevism-chattopadhyay) and here (http://libcom.org/library/economic-content-socialism-lenin-it-same-marx). The latter is mainly on Lenin, the former includes Trotsky, Bukharin, etc.

[x359594]

...It seems that most socialists consider Stalin to be a mutilation of their believes, but why is that and why were Lenin and Mao different? For that matter, what differentiated Mao from Lenin? Mao and Lenin from Castro?

I'm curious about the degree of both economic development and casualties under all of these leaders, because I get the sense that all of them were authoritarian and stifled dissent. I'd like a better framework for viewing all of them as separate leaders and individuals.

Prima facie, Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Castro emerged during different epochs of history in different countries and confronted different material conditions. What they all had in common was a materialist understanding of history and the causes and conditions of their particular historical moments (which were all different,) but what their specific counties had in common was that they had all been colonies or neo-colonies of the capitalist West.

Thus Stalin and Castro saw a necessity for rapid industrialization, but in the case of Cuba it lacked the necessary raw materials to achieve that goal and had to rely on the Soviet Union to provide its basic industrial needs. Mao relied on the peasantry for a time, at least until the Great Leap Forward foundered and he was forced to return to a Soviet style 5 year plan to realize China's industrial goals.

The task Stalin faced was to do in the USSR in as a short a time as possible what had been done in the capitalist West in 200 years. In other words, he brought the Soviet Union up to par with the capitalist West in 30 years with all the attendant misery that modernization entailed, including famine, overwork, diversion of resources into heavy industry at the cost of consumer goods, etc. The trials and the purges are another matter.

What Lenin shared with Stalin was the belief that while ordinary individuals are caught in historical events which surpass them, blinded for their true meaning, so that their consciousness is "false," a revolutionary cadre has the access to the true ("objective") meaning of events, i.e., his consciousness is the direct self-consciousness of the historical Necessity itself. (It is this special position that allows him to criticize others in the well-known style of "your intentions may be good and your desire to help people sincere, but, nonetheless, objectively, what you claim means, in this precise moment of the struggle, a support for the reactionary forces..." - in Hegelese, what this position overlooks is how this "objective" meaning is already subjectively mediated. It is, for example, when the Party decides to change its politics that the same politics can radically change its "objective" meaning: till the pact Hitler-Stalin in 1939, Fascism was the principal enemy, while if, after the pact, one continued to focus on the anti-Fascist struggle, one "objectively" served the imperialist reaction.)

There is nonetheless a crucial cut here between Lenin and Stalin: while Lenin remained at this level, claiming the access to the "objective meaning" of the events, Stalin made a fateful step further and re-subjectivized this objective meaning. In the Stalinist universe, there are, paradoxically, ultimately no dupes, everyone knows the "objective meaning" of his/her acts, so that, instead of the illusory consciousness, we get direct hypocrisy and deceit: the "objective meaning" of your acts is what you REALLY WANTED, and your good intentions are merely a hypocritical mask. Furthermore, all of Lenin cannot be reduced to this subjective position of the privileged access to "objective meaning": there is another, much more "open," subjective position at work in Lenin's writings, the position of total exposure to historical contingency. From this position, there is no "true" party line waiting to be discovered, no "objective" criteria to determine it: the Party "makes all possible mistakes," and the "true" party line emerges out of the zig-zag of oscillations, i.e., "necessity" is constituted in praxis, it emerges through the mutual interaction of subjective decisions.

Although it seems clear that Stalinism emerged from the initial conditions of the October Revolution and its immediate aftermath, one should not a priori discount the possibility that, if Lenin were to have retained his health for a couple of years and deposed Stalin, something entirely different would have emerged - not, of course, the utopia of "democratic socialism," but nonetheless something substantially different from the Stalinist "socialism in one country," the result of a much more "pragmatic" and improvisatory series of political and economic decisions, fully aware of its own limitations. (Lenin's desperate last struggle against the re-awakened Russian nationalism, his support of Georgian "nationalists," his vision of a much more decentralized federation, etc., were not just tactical compromises: they implied a vision of state and society in their entirety incompatible with the Stalinist one.)

Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Castro all relied on terror to varying degrees, and in what is arguably the most intelligent legitimization of (the Stalinist) terror, Maurice Merlau-Ponty's Humanism and Terror from 1946, the terror is justified as a kind of wager on the future, almost in the mode of the theology of Blaise Pascal who enjoins us to make a bet on God: if the final result of today's horror will be the bright Communist future, then this outcome will retroactively redeem the terrible things a revolutionary has to do today. Along similar lines, even some Stalinists themselves, when (in half-private, usually) forced to admit that many of the victims of the purges were innocent, and were accused and killed because "the Party needed their blood to fortify its unity," imagine the future moment of final victory at which all the necessary victims will be given their due, and their innocence and their highest sacrifice for the Cause will be recognized. This can be described as the "perspective of the Last Judgment," a perspective even more clearly discernible in one of they key terms of the Stalinist discourse, that of "objective guilt" and "objective meaning" of your acts: while you can be an honest individual who acted with most sincere intentions, you are nonetheless "objectively guilty," if your acts serve reactionary forces - and it is, of course, the Party which has the direct access to what your acts "objectively mean." Here, again, we not only get the perspective of the Last Judgment (which formulates the "objective meaning" of your acts), but also the present agent who already has the unique ability to judge today's events and acts from this perspective.

It seems to me that this is the last line of defense for the communicants of the Church of Stalin. The same goes for Mao. But since socialism and much more communism has vanished from Russia and China the faith is unjustified.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

LL:


How about Lenin and Trotsky's dialectics?

We can discuss that in another thread.

[red cat]

As this thread shows, Mao had a defective theory. That is one immediate difference:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/mao-zedong-t121784/index.html

That thread does not show anything about Mao's theory.

It shows, along with this (http://www.revleft.com/vb/anti-dialectics-and-t128235/index.html) one, how you are unable to support your claims with any proofs.

[The Douche]

Of course there's other factors through the idea of Anarchy. I never doubted that, but how would you go about things if the state was eliminated immediately?

How would we go about what things?

[x359594]

...Lenin seems to get mixed reception (though he did follow through with Marx's belief of dictatorship of the proletariat), and I've heard Chomsky refer to Stalin's policies as a natural result of Leninism. Thus, the consensus seems to be Mao>Lenin>>>>>>>>>>Stalin, but I'm wondering why that is...

In The State and Revolution, written on the eve of' the seizure of power, Lenin could still speak of the state beginning to “wither away” (Engels' phrase, never used by Marx) on the day after the revolution, and of harmonious and easy fellowship and co-operation over the administrative chores taking the place, before very long, of all coercion.

As time went on, the realities of power left little room for easy optimism about withering away, and faith in the ever-receding transition to socialism had to be sustained by increasing devotion to the myth that party and proletariat were indissolubly one and the same. Since the state had not been transcended and the proletariat had not achieved the social consciousness which in theory should have preceded the revolution, ever new duties had to be thrust upon the party: it hunted out enemies in increasing numbers, harried political opponents, waged war on the bourgeois peasants, stiffened the new Red Army, dominated the Soviets and the trade unions, tried to shore up ruined industry. By 1921 Lenin had created a one-party state, in which a monopolistic party claimed in theory the right to run every aspect of public life.

Lenin's last political writings show that he contemplated a long period, lasting generations, perhaps, in which backward Russia would grow into socialism. This protracted period of socialist construction required, above all, peace between the peasants and the towns (this was the function of the NEP.) It would also call for the moral regeneration of party members which Lenin seems to have believed possible right to the end of his days. Lenin recognized that it was reversing the order of Marx to try to achieve social consciousness after the revolution and not before, and he justified this by the claim that the necessity of seizing power in October 1917 had been forced upon the Bolsheviks.

If the regime established at the Tenth Party Congress was only intended as a temporary, emergency measure, it was certainly true that the emergency did not abate during Lenin's lifetime; and there was therefore at no time an opportunity open to Lenin for modifying the regime. In fact many have argued that the foundations for the machine erected by Stalin for his tyranny were already laid by Lenin. While there is much force in this argument, and much evidence to support it, it may also be true that Lenin was struck down at a time when his work was still unfinished.

[red cat]

If you read the title, you'd realize that this thread was not about Mao alone, but for some reason, you seem to regard Mao alone as fair game in trolling about in every thread, while carefully avoiding saying anything critical about Trotsky.

Comrade, you don't see that criticizing Trotsky won't make things easier for imperialism. :lol: