A perhaps stupid question about revisionism...

[fa2991]

Since Stalin, Mao, and Hoxha held to such a strong anti-revisionist line*, why weren't they able to construct systems that would hold out against revisionism after they died? Why did their countries fail so quickly?

(*No Hoxhaist "Mao was a revisionist!" flame wars, please)

[Victus Mortuum]

Because Stalin, Hoxha, and Mao never had any form of socialism established under them in the first place, or immediately destroyed it if it did exist

[fa2991]

Because Stalin, Hoxha, and Mao never had any form of socialism established under them in the first place, or immediately destroyed it if it did exist

So not helpful. Obviously this is directed at anti-revisionist M-Ls.

[Comrade_Stalin]

Since Stalin, Mao, and Hoxha held to such a strong anti-revisionist line*, why weren't they able to construct systems that would hold out against revisionism after they died? Why did their countries fail so quickly?

(*No Hoxhaist "Mao was a revisionist!" flame wars, please)

Stalin never said that he was a anti-revisionist. It is people after him that clamed that title to say that this person or that person had "revisioned" communism = Capitalism.

[Kléber]

I know this thread was meant for Stalinists but I am an anti-revisionist Marxist and Leninist who is dissatisfied with the actual social analysis (or lack thereof) of most "anti-revisionists," who talk about the r-word like it is a Hegelian Idea standing above history and not the product of particular castes and classes of people with particular political/economic interests.

To clarify, "revisionism" was not discovered by Mao or Hoxha, the term was used by leftists in the Second (Social-Democratic) International to describe reformists who were "revising" the revolutionary and internationalist principles of Marxism and importing bourgeois ideas into the socialist movement. Eduard Bernstein, not Nikita Khrushchev, was the godfather of revisionism. The social base of revisionism was identified by Lenin and others as the labor aristocracy. That isn't in the Maoist-Third-Worldist sense that all European workers are "labor aristocrats;" the term was reserved for the elite Social-Democratic party and trade-union bureaucrats, who lived richly as "leaders" of the proletariat, profiting from their official positions and their compromises with the bourgeoisie. This situation was possible because imperialist super-profits enabled the bourgeoisie to make concessions to workers, thus the Social-Democratic bureaucracy was objectively inclined towards finding its place in the imperialist system, and opposing revolution which would strip away its privileges. The revisionist bureaucrats sought (and still seek today) to use the workers as mindless tools to support them in being the left props of imperialism, while constantly betraying every independent initiative of labor against capital.


Not infrequently, the bourgeoisie for a certain time achieves its object by a “liberal” policy, which, as Pannekoek justly remarks, is a “more crafty” policy. A part of the workers and a part of their representatives at times allow themselves to be deceived by seeming concessions. The revisionists declare that the doctrine of the class struggle is “antiquated”, or begin to conduct a policy which is in fact a renunciation of the class struggle. The zigzags of bourgeois tactics intensify revisionism within the labour movement and not infrequently bring the differences within the labour movement to the point of an outright split.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1910/dec/16.htm (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1908/apr/03.htm)

Trotsky considered Stalin and his theory of "socialism in one country" to be revisionist, representing the interests of a new labor aristocracy - the Soviet party-state bureaucracy. Their wealth and power as lords of the Soviet state turned even decent revolutionaries into lazy conservatives who were afraid to carry the revolution forward because it might disrupt their cushy lifestyle. The Soviet bureaucratic caste had grown out of Bolshevism just like the Social-Democratic bureaucracy grew out of Marxism and the organized workers' movement. In both cases, upon taking over the movement by taking advantage of its backwardness and the lingering power of capital, the bureaucrats revised the revolutionary principles. The Soviet proletariat at the end of its revolutionary war was too small, isolated, demoralized, and uncultured to keep its own representatives in check and establish a genuine socialist democracy, with officials recallable and paid at the workers' wages, on the model of the Commune. Instead, the revisionist bureaucrats slowly retreated from the revolution they had hijacked until they were comfortable enough to restore outright capitalism.


Is it not high time to tell the revisionists: don't you dare hide behind Lenin and the theoretical tradition of the party!?
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1928/3rd/ti02.htm

So getting to the real question, why did the revisionists win? The revolutionaries didn't really see them coming. The revisionist takeover of the Second International wasn't fully understood until most of its affiliate parties supported their imperialist governments in WWI. Lenin didn't even believe the copy of the German Social-Democratic Party newspaper Vorwärts pledging support for the war effort in 1914 to be real, he thought it must have been a forgery because the SPD wouldn't stoop to such class treachery. By 1915, revolutionaries were already moving toward the creation of a new, Third International. When that one got taken over and destroyed by counter-revolutionary Soviet bureaucrats, survivors tried to set up the ill-fated Fourth International. That organization, meant to be the new World Party of Revolution, was drowned in blood by assassins of the NKVD and Gestapo. Trotsky's mistakes as War Commissar and his failure to realize what was going on until it was too late definitely contributed to the problem (the same was true of Lenin) but despite the fact he fell in battle against revisionism, Trotsky's theoretical analysis of it survives and is correct.

[fa2991]

You're right that you're not the kind of guy I'm asking, but your post was very interesting none the less. It's sort of telling that no one who upholds MELSH or Mao has responded yet. :D


Trotsky considered Stalin and his theory of "socialism in one country" to be revisionist, representing the interests of a new labor aristocracy I've never quite understood this criticism. Didn't Lenin himself say that socialism might have to be developed in just one, or a few, countries in dire circumstances?

And wasn't Stalin at least partially responsible for the spread of communist rule all across Eastern Europe? That seems internationalist to me.

[Ismail]

To clarify, "revisionism" was not discovered by Mao or Hoxha, the term was used by leftists in the Second (Social-Democratic) International to describe reformists who were "revising" the revolutionary and internationalist principles of Marxism and importing bourgeois ideas into the socialist movement. Eduard Bernstein, not Nikita Khrushchev, was the godfather of revisionism.Indeed, Hoxha noted this in Eurocommunism is Anti-Communism and the Chinese would publish works by Lenin condemning revisionism. Revisionism began with Bernstein, no one argued to the contrary despite your "clever" attempt here. It's just that everyone knows the fruits of Bernsteinism: social-democracy. Unfortunately, many like you still seem to enjoy being apologists for Khrushchevism (which social-democrats praised) and Brezhnevism.

As for the question in the original post, it's nonsense. It's the equivalent of a creationist saying, "Well if evolution is true why don't we see monkeys evolve in front of our eyes!?" Albania fell because of external pressures and internal failings. The USSR fell largely because of internal failings. This thread will only descend into the standard Trotskyist vs. "Stalinist" affair. "X faltered despite Y, ergo Y (and possibly X) are both wrong" is not a mature debate point.

As Grover Furr said recently:

I suggest that we judge Stalin by a standard he himself accepted. Stalin strove to be a student of Lenin’s. He wanted to build socialism, and then a communist society run by and for working people, free from exploitation. How did he succeed?

In my view Stalin was a faithful follower of Lenin. He was a principled person, very intelligent, a hard worker. Stalin had the qualities that the best of the Bolsheviks had. But Stalin and all those who fought and worked alongside him failed to build that communist society for which they strove so hard.

I think the outcome would have been little different if Lenin had lived, or if Trotsky, Zinoviev, or someone else had led the USSR. The failure was not that Stalin, the Bolsheviks, and the Soviet working people did not try hard enough. What was faulty was their concept of how to build socialism and then continue to communism.

It’s up to the present generation, or a future one, to learn from the successes and failures of the Bolsheviks, including Stalin, and go further towards the goals towards which they strove so heroically.

[fa2991]

As for the question in the original post, it's nonsense. It's the equivalent of a creationist saying, "Well if evolution is true why don't we see monkeys evolve in front of our eyes!?" Albania fell because of external pressures and internal failings. The USSR fell largely because of internal failings. This thread will only descend into the standard Trotskyists vs. "Stalinist" affair.

I don't think it's nonsense at all. I'm not asking about the fall of the USSR, as in the collapse in 1991, but the turn to revisionism* there, and in China, and in Albania. Why were the 3 definitive anti-revisionists powerless to establish a structure whereby their countries would maintain "true" Marxism-Leninism after they died, at least for a while?

*As in Khrushchev, not as in Bernstein

[Kléber]

I've never quite understood this criticism. Didn't Lenin himself say that socialism might have to be developed in just one, or a few, countries in dire circumstances?
Yes, he said that in 1915, but many more times before and after that he said that the revolution had to spread West to be successful. It is not so much that socialism can not exist in a single country (show me the socialism and I'll support it) but that the Soviet Union did not actually construct socialism. The claim that socialism had been built in 1934 was the greatest "revisionism" of all because, by legitimizing the undemocratic political system and social inequality between the bureaucracy and the people, the bureaucrats officially abandoned any hope of building a better, truly democratic and socialist society. It was only a short step from that to the claims that communism could also be built in the USSR if it was only kept safe from an imperialist attack, incredible slogans like "We will build communism by 1980!" and the theoretical horrors of Juche. In fact, since Trotsky and the left-internationalist opposition proposed collectivization and industrialization in the mid-20's while the center-right coalition under Stalin and Bukharin favored continuing NEP, comparing five-year plans to "a peasant buying a gramophone instead of a cow," the argument that Trotsky was against building socialism is baseless. He merely did not see an isolated state as capable of holding out from global imperialism and developing more advanced social systems within its borders, a stance which has been confirmed by historical experience of deformed workers' states and the proven unsustainability of all national autarkic projects.

Of course, the divide between the bureaucracy and the workers culminated in 1937-38 with the mass-murder of Communist revolutionaries whose political experience and theoretical knowledge posed a threat to the ruling clique. Stalin tried to explain the need for hundreds of thousands of executions with the ridiculous theory of the "aggravation of class struggle under socialism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggravation_of_class_struggle_under_socialism)." This is contradicted by Stalin's own assertion that since 1934 there were "no longer any antagonistic classes in society (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/11/25.htm)" to be struggling, let alone aggravating. Stalin himself said, in the 1924 edition of Problems of Leninism (prior to the revisions of the 1926 edition) that "For the final victory of socialism, for the organisation of socialist production, the efforts of one country, especially a peasant country like Russia, are not enough – for this we must have the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries."


And wasn't Stalin at least partially responsible for the spread of communist rule all across Eastern Europe? That seems internationalist to me.Well, what Stalin set up in Eastern Europe were bourgeois "People's Republics" under the thumb of the Soviet army, presiding over societies that Maoists/Hoxhaists think were never socialist and the governments became insta-revisionist in 1956 because they had "bad lines" or whatever. Nevertheless, despite what Maoists/Hoxhaists say, the Eastern European governments did expropriate their bourgeoisie and establish state-capitalist deformed workers' states which mimicked the Soviet model under Stalin, but that did not make them socialist any more than Napoleon Bonaparte's official abolition of feudalism when he conquered Eastern Europe made him and the French Imperial army into democratic internationalist liberators.

[Ismail]

Why were the 3 definitive anti-revisionists powerless to establish a structure whereby their countries would maintain "true" Marxism-Leninism after they died, at least for a while?Because the proletariat lacked sufficient control over the means of production (which we can trace back to Lenin and the debates of the 1917-1921 period) and lacked any actual knowledge of Marxism-Leninism. Having a genuinely Marxist-Leninist leadership isn't enough.

To address Kléber, who repeats all the various falsehoods of times past:

Stalin himself said, in the 1924 edition of Problems of Leninism (prior to the revisions of the 1926 edition) that "For the final victory of socialism, for the organisation of socialist production, the efforts of one country, especially a peasant country like Russia, are not enough – for this we must have the efforts of the proletarians of several advanced countries."Stalin continued to hold this view. As he said (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/01/18.htm) in 1938:

Leninism teaches that "the final victory of Socialism, in the sense of full guarantee against the restoration of bourgeois relations, is possible only on an international scale" (c.f. resolution of the Fourteenth Conference of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union).

This means that the serious assistance of the international proletariat is a force without which the problem of the final victory of Socialism in one country cannot be solved.

This, of course, does not mean that we must sit with folded arms and wait for assistance from outside.

On the contrary, this assistance of the international proletariat must be combined with our work to strengthen the defence of our country, to strengthen the Red Army and the Red Navy, to mobilise the whole country for the purpose of resisting military attack and attempts to restore bourgeois relations.
Stalin tried to explain the need for hundreds of thousands of executions with the ridiculous theory of the "aggravation of class struggle under socialism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aggravation_of_class_struggle_under_socialism)." This is contradicted by Stalin's own assertion that since 1934 there were "no longer any antagonistic classes in society (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1936/11/25.htm)" to be struggling, let alone aggravating.Class struggle intensifies because world imperialism and capitalism does all it can to ensure that the construction of socialism and the march towards world revolution is hindered. The only error the Soviet Government at the time made was that, up until the 1949-1953 period (where Stalin began to criticize revisionist trends in economics, etc.), they tended to overstate this to the detriment of the dangers of revisionism. E.g. the following:

"The proceedings against Zinovyev and Kamenev, against Pyatakov and Radek, and against a group of military traitors (Tukhachevsky, Yakir, and others) prove that our enemies do not plan quietly 'to creep into socialism,' ... but they grab the most extreme, cruel, and filthy weapons for carrying on the struggle...

Capitalist encirclement is a real fact, whose significance for the entire cause of socialist construction in the USSR must not be in the slightest degree underestimated."
(Andrey Y. Vyshinsky, ed. The Law of the Soviet State. New York: Macmillan Co. 1948. p. 46.)


Of course, the divide between the bureaucracy and the workers culminated in 1937-38 with the mass-murder of Communist revolutionaries whose political experience and theoretical knowledge posed a threat to the ruling clique.I was unaware pretty much any of those in the Moscow Trials had any more ties with the working-class than, say, Stalin or Molotov. Not to mention that 20+ individuals in these trials, most held in front of international observers right across the rooms they were in, tended to note Trotsky's collaboration with German and Japanese intelligence services because Trotsky felt that war between the USSR and these states was inevitable (which, like Stalin, he got right).


Well, what Stalin set up in Eastern Europe were bourgeois "People's Republics" under the thumb of the Soviet army, presiding over societies that Maoists/Hoxhaists think were never socialist and the governments became insta-revisionist in 1956 because they had "bad lines" or whatever.People's Democracies were a rather haphazard affair, but the view by Soviet theoreticians were that said People's Democracies needed to be led by the DOTP, or else the gains of the masses would be counteracted. When the capitalist forces did indeed seek to limit communist participation in the affairs of the state (in 1940's Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1948, for instance), the communists responded accordingly and put an end to capitalist influence for the most part. But yes, the communist parties often had little support in countries like, say, Hungary, because the parties themselves were illegal and strictly persecuted throughout the 1920's and 30's. It wasn't like, say, Albania, where the Albanian Communists liberated themselves with no Soviet assistance.

After Stalin's death and the ascendancy of revisionism in the USSR, all of these states except Albania and Yugoslavia (Yugoslavia just opportunistically sought investments from both the USSR and USA) followed whatever the Soviets did.

[Kléber]

Indeed, Hoxha noted this in Eurocommunism is Anti-Communism and the Chinese would publish works by Lenin condemning revisionism. Revisionism began with Bernstein, no one argued to the contrary despite your "clever" attempt here. It's just that everyone knows the fruits of Bernsteinism: social-democracy. Unfortunately, many like you still seem to enjoy being apologists for Khrushchevism (which social-democrats praised) and Brezhnevism.
Khrushchevism was just Stalinism with a goofy face. The bureaucrats under Khrushchev could afford to relax repression of dissidents because, thanks to Stalin, there were not too many dissidents, and the smart ones had learned not to stick your neck out and point out anything wrong with society. Just because I acknowledge that Khrushchev and Brezhnev weren't capitalists, they were bureaucrats like Stalin, doesn't mean I apologize for them.


Stalin continued to hold this view. As he said (http://www.anonym.to/?http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/01/18.htm) in 1938:No because he had come to believe that socialist production relations had been constructed in the USSR, which was departing from his 1924 "orthodox Leninist" position that the USSR could not build it alone.


Class struggle intensifies because world imperialism and capitalism does all it can to ensure that the construction of socialism and the march towards world revolution is hindered. The only error the Soviet Government at the time made was that, up until the 1949-1953 period (where Stalin began to criticize revisionist trends in economics, etc.), they tended to overstate this to the detriment of the dangers of revisionism. E.g. the following:

"The proceedings against Zinovyev and Kamenev, against Pyatakov and Radek, and against a group of military traitors (Tukhachevsky, Yakir, and others) prove that our enemies do not plan quietly 'to creep into socialism,' ... but they grab the most extreme, cruel, and filthy weapons for carrying on the struggle...

Capitalist encirclement is a real fact, whose significance for the entire cause of socialist construction in the USSR must not be in the slightest degree underestimated."
(Andrey Y. Vyshinsky, ed. The Law of the Soviet State. New York: Macmillan Co. 1948. p. 46.)Vyshinsky was scum. He was a White Menshevik until 1920 while his victims had been faithful servants of the revolution from its beginnings.

The claim that hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens including so many prominent members of the military and political vanguard who set up the Soviet state, were imperialist spies and agents seeking to destroy it, is patently ridiculous.


I was unaware pretty much any of those in the Moscow Trials had any more ties with the working-class than, say, Stalin or Molotov.And Hoxha had more ties to the international proletariat than Khrushchev? Comrade Loulou, one-time government secretary and French bohemian dilettante, was more of a worker than an actual hardnosed Bolshevik who fought in the Russian Civil War?

They were better communists if they stood up to the revisionist clique which abolished Partmaximum, dissolved Comintern and murdered the leaders of October.


Not to mention that 20+ individuals in these trials, most held in front of international observers right across the rooms they were in, tended to note Trotsky's collaboration with German and Japanese intelligence services because Trotsky felt that war between the USSR and these states was inevitable (which, like Stalin, he got right).Many cowards capitulated under torture and threats.


People's Democracies was a rather haphazard affair, but the view by Soviet theoreticians were that said People's Democracies needed to be led by the DOTP, or else the gains of the masses would be counteracted. When the capitalist forces did indeed seek to limit communist participation in the affairs of the state (in 1940's Hungary and Czechoslovakia in 1948, for instance), the communists responded accordingly and put an end to capitalist influence for the most part. But yes, the communist parties often had little support in countries like, say, Hungary, because the parties themselves were illegal and strictly persecuted throughout the 1920's and 30's.
There is a big difference between a bourgeois republic and a DOTP, and Trotsky exposed the contradictory Stalinist line of a "workers' and peasants' government" as a sham in The Transitional Program (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1938/tp/tp-text2.htm). History has confirmed the "People's Republics" to have been a recipe for restoration.


It wasn't like, say, Albania, where the Albanian Communists liberated themselves with no Soviet assistance.
So Stalin's assistance is bad for a revolution? :P

[Ismail]

The bureaucrats under Khrushchev could afford to relax repression of dissidents because, thanks to Stalin, there were not too many dissidents, and the smart ones had learned not to stick your neck out and point out anything wrong with society.The "dissidents repressed" by Stalin were the ones brought back up (or "rehabilitated") by Khrushchev and praised as glorious Marxist-Leninists, like Voznosensky (http://www.marxists.org/archive/bland/1980/restoration-capitalism-soviet-union/appendix-3.htm).


No because he had come to believe that socialist production relations had been constructed in the USSR, which was departing from his 1924 "orthodox Leninist" position that the USSR could not build it alone.He still believed that the final victory of socialism had to be attained, and that the USSR still risked capitalist encirclement before then. Antagonistic classes were gone, unless you'd like to point out some significant bourgeois or kulak presence in the country after, say, 1934.


The claim that hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens including so many prominent members of the military and political vanguard who set up the Soviet state, were imperialist spies and agents seeking to destroy it, is patently ridiculous.I was unaware the Moscow Trials had "hundreds of thousands" of defendants.


And Hoxha had more ties to the international proletariat than Khrushchev? Comrade Loulou, one-time government secretary and French bohemian dilettante, was more of a worker than an actual hardnosed Bolshevik who fought in the Russian Civil War?Gorbachev came from a fairly modest family, whereas Trotsky came from a fairly well-off one. What's your point? Hoxha espoused proletarian internationalism and practiced it to the extent that Albania could be used as such an outpost. Khrushchev did not.


Many cowards capitulated under torture and threats.And what is your proof of this? Are you saying these hardened Bolshevik veterans (to use your terminology) who in earlier times had to endure evading (and in some cases, meeting with) the Tsarist security police all suddenly surrendered their wills and told lie after lie for hours, even in front of international audiences?

[Thirsty Crow]

Since Stalin, Mao, and Hoxha held to such a strong anti-revisionist line*, why weren't they able to construct systems that would hold out against revisionism after they died?

(*No Hoxhaist "Mao was a revisionist!" flame wars, please)
Their anti-revisionist line is a joke.
For instance, Stalin's revision (and it was a revision indeed) of Lenin's theoretical contribution was probably designated as the one true revision before any further revision cannot hold ground. Hipocrisy and unfounded reasoning, nothing else.

[Panda Tse Tung]

Their anti-revisionist line is a joke.
For instance, Stalin's revision (and it was a revision indeed) of Lenin's theoretical contribution was probably designated as the one true revision before any further revision cannot hold ground. Hipocrisy and unfounded reasoning, nothing else.

It's not 'revisioning' that is the problem. It is the implication and result of such a revision (even though what you say is hardly true).