Response to Kasama's attack on Grover Furr.

[Soviet dude]

Mike Ely recently posted a ridiculous screed on Grover Furr's work. The Kasama website basically censors criticism of anything Mike Ely writes, so this is being reposted here for people to see. The Kasama article is here:

http://kasamaproject.org/2010/10/04/three-quick-examples-of-leftist-pseudo-science/#comment-29277

---------
I just want to start this response by stating flat out, I think Mike Ely is the worst sort of revisionist. I think Ely is often intellectually dishonest in the extreme, and often flat our lies about his real intentions with what he posts. I don't like engaging him or most of the things posted on Kasama, preferring to ignore him and let him stew in his own revisionist BS. However, the grotesque distortion of Grover Furr's work deserves a response. I have tried to be as civil as possible, and have gone back and edited out a lot of language. I have left some things in, because I do not consider the type of ridiculous statements made by Ely to even begin to approach the level of civil discourse, and so I respond with some remarks I view as well deserved. If Ely is willing to dish it out, he should be willing to take it. Now let's see if this passes the censors at Kasama.


The very start of the article about Grover Furr is a disgusting attack, which goes completely against the claimed standards of discussion Kasama is supposed to uphold. The point of saying Grover Furr is an “English professor and amateur historian” is a subtle way of trying to hint to the reader somehow Grover Furr is not qualified to speak about the subject. Nothing has ever stopped Ely from blathering about anything and everything like an expert on this site, least of all not having any formal education from a bourgeois institution on the subject, but I'm sure the hypocrisy is lost on Ely and his gang of psychophants. All this, in an article about “logical fallacies” no less!

Note however, Ely doesn't even know what a “logical fallacy” is. I doubt Ely has ever even taken a class in a university that required a rigorous understanding of modern logic to construct formal proofs, but for those of us who have, most interner-jabber about “logical fallacies” is hysterical nonsense. An “appeal to authority” is –only-- logically fallacious as a step of deduction in an argument to arrive at a conclusion. It is not –necessarily-- a bad reason to give more weight to one set of arguments over the other. Indeed, subtly suggesting to the reader that Grover Furr is an “amateur historian” is an appeal to authority in reverse, and a completely and utterly dishonest one at that.

But let's talk about Grover Furr's qualifications and Mike Ely's for a second, anyway. What articles published in peer-reviewed historical journals about Soviet history has Mike Ely written? Absolutely zero. This is not true for Grover Furr, who has been published both in Western and Russian academic journals devoted to the topic Soviet history. Mike Ely of course, knows this, and immediately tries to discourage the reader from considering this fact, with a frankly idiotic and chauvinist characterization of the “Russian media.” The “Russian media” is “notorious for its love of crackpot and paranoid theories” which of course, the reader is to assume includes any academic journals that would dare publish anything written by Grover Furr. Most teenagers learning to argue on the internet would call this an “ad hominem.” I call it more of Ely's usual handwaving BS.

This little screed of Ely's is laden with what he would no doubt accuse others of “appeals to authority” and “ad homimens,” and would no doubt never pass the censors on this website, who rarely let posts critical of Ely through. But more importantly, Ely has no understanding of what constitutes “evidence.” What Ely is demanding when he claims to demand “evidence” is, in fact, a smoking gun. Perhaps he wants a document, no doubt obtained from Americans soldiers capturing Nazi government buildings, with Hitler giving orders to Trotsky, probably signed by both of them, with signatures of various eyewitnesses. He says we don't have this, and then declares anyone who says it is the case that Trotsky collaborated with the Nazis therefore must be crazy.

In the world of teenage internet-debates, Ely would undoubtedly be accused of “moving the goal posts,” a tactic used to avoid having to deal with the evidence put forth. Just think for a moment, if you were arguing with a righter-winger about the coup in Honduras a year ago. It is only a few days after the attack. They insist on upholding the line of the coup-regime and the Western press, and tell you that there is zero-proof that Washington Orchestrated the coup. You might go on to cite prior history of Latin America and Honduras, name people known to be associated with the US government or business interests, etc, but you can not produce a document with a state department seal saying the US government orchestrated the coup. The right-winger then pronounces victory and calls you a conspiracy nut for claiming the US was behind the coup. Any rational person would be shaking their heads at such stupidity, especially anyone with any knowledge whatsoever about US foreign policy. But this is essentially what Mike Ely has done here with Grover Furr's article.

Nowhere does Ely deal with anything Grover Furr says in any serious fashion at all. Grover Furr's article is characterized as basically relying completely on trial confessions (which is not true at all), and then handwavingly dismissing this by claiming that confessions are not evidence. Ely's only reasoning is itself based on claims that have no evidence: that the defendants were tortured, or that their families were threatened. Literally not one single shred of evidence has ever, ever been produced to suggest that any of the defendants were tortured or their families threatened. This, like most other portrayals of Soviet history, is based primaryly on –prima facie-- reasoning. Since it is literally axiomatic that the confessions can not be true, --any-- explanation for them being false is accepted without question. There is no attempt to seriously analyze these assumptions, even though they make nonsense of the confessions. Apparently Bukharin cared enough about his family to accept guilt for trying to conspire to overthrow the government with hostile foreign powers, yet doesn't care about them enough to admit to trying to kill Lenin, as that was a point he argued with the prosecution on.

Mike Ely continues further on, revealing his own ignorance about Soviet history and academic Sovietology in general. Mike Ely claims it is “is obvious to everyone and does not need proving” that Trotsky formed an opposition inside the USSR that was bent on overthrowing the government. I would accuse Ely of dishonesty here, but I doubt he actually knows this is not the case at all. Trotsky denied repeatedly having any connection to any opposition in Russia. Historians sympathetic to Trotsky, like Isaac Deustcher, who had privileged access to his personal archives before they became public, never once mentioned that this was a total lie, even though they had to have come across the letters themselves. Most Trotskyists today deny this, until they are confronted with the irrefutable evidence from Trotsky's own archives. Indeed, far from being “obvious to everyone” and not needing “proving,” the idea Trotsky had any connection to any opposition was denounced as a “Stalinist” lie, and wasn't proven until Trotsky's archives went public, and J. Arch Getty wrote a paper on it.

Mike Ely then falsely says Furr discussing this opposition network, which had been completely denied to exist by all “respectable” scholars, that Furr 'fallaciously' concludes all the other accusations are true. Again, nothing could be further from the truth. Anyone who has seriously read Furr's paper could not honestly come to that conclusion. That has lead some people to suggest Mike Ely didn't really read the paper. I would say, those people just don't understand Mike Ely, as intellectual integrity is not a trait Mike Ely possesses.

Mike Ely then goes on to commit a real logical fallacy, unlike the one he accuses Grover Furr of. When Mike Ely says:


“The fact that six decades of historical research (including into German, Japanese and Soviet government archives) has not produced any evidence of a vast complex espionage operation (of the kind the Soviets alleged) shows that there was no such operation.”
This is what is generally called an “Argument from Ignorance” by the teenage internet-debater crowd, or argumentum ad ignorantiam if you prefer Latin terms. Since it has not been proven that Trotsky conspired with Nazis, it must necessarily be false. Even a generous reading of this sentence can not but conclude this is literally logically fallacious.

But let's backup for a moment. Is it even true that “six decades” of research has not produced any evidence of collaboration? If Ely had read Furr's paper, I don't see how he (honestly) could say this (which may lend more credence to the thesis that Ely did not, in fact, read the paper). On pages 32-33, Grover Furr states:


“In February 1937 the Japanese Minister of War, General Hajime Sugiyama, revealed in a meeting that Japan was in touch with oppositionists within the USSR who were providing the Japanese with military intelligence.

Other examples of non-Soviet evidence attest to the real existence of the conspiracies alleged by the Stalin government. There is the “Arao telegram,” extant at least in 1962-63 though never heard from since. We have direct testimony from the German ambassador to Czechoslovakia that Hitler knew that high-ranking military figures in the USSR were preparing a coup d’état. This document, in the Czech national archives, was only discovered in 1987. This document is corroborated by correspondence found in captured German archives disclosed in 1974 but not recognized until 1988. ”

In another essay, released privately to some by Furr, Furr writes about a German document that admits to collaboration with Trotskyists.


“German Intelligence, Communist Anti-Trotskyism, and the Barcelona “May Days” of 1937

I’m writing an article on the falsifications in Khrushchev’s infamous 1956 “Secret Speech.” A few weeks ago I ran across the following statement, in an article on the subject of this speech:

"...в угоду политической конъюнктуре деятельность Троцкого и его сторонников за границей в 1930-1940 годах сводят лишь к пропагандистской работе. Но это не так. Троцкисты действовали активно: организовали, используя поддержку лиц, связанных с абвером, мятеж против республиканского правительства в Барселоне в 1937 году. Из троцкистских кругов в спецслужбы Франции и Германии шли "наводящие" материалы о действиях компартий в поддержку Советского Союза. О связях с абвером лидеров троцкистского мятежа в Барселоне в 1937 году сообщил нам Шульце-Бойзен...Впоследствии, после ареста, гестапо обвинило его в передаче нам данной информации, и этот факт фигурировал в смертном приговоре гитлеровского суда по его делу." (| Судоплатов, П. "Разведка и Кремль." М., 1996, с. 88; | Haase, N. Das Reichskriegsgericht und der Widerstand gegen nationalsozialistische Herrschaft. Berlin, 1993, S. 105)1

English translation from Gen. Pavel Sudoplatov, _The Intelligence Service and the Kremlin, Moscow 1996, p. 58:

“In the interests of the political situation the activities of Trotsky and his supporters abroad in the 1930s are said to have been propaganda only. But this is not so. The Trotskyists were also involved in actions. Making us of the support of persons with ties to German military intelligence [the ‘Abwehr’] they organized a revolt against the Republican government in Barcelona in 1937. From Trotskyist circles in the French and German special intelligence services came “indicative” information concerning the actions of the Communist Parties in supporting the Soviet Union. Concerning the connections of the leaders of the Trotskyist revolt in Barcelona in 1937 we were informed by Schuze-Boysen… Afterward, after his arrest, the Gestapo accused him of transmitting this information to us, and this fact figured in his death sentence by the Hitlerite court in his case.”

This passage is indeed in Sudoplatov’s book. But the footnote to the Haase volume is not. I assume it was added either by Lifshits, author of the Russian-language article, or by Trosten, author of the German version.

So I obtained the Haase volume. The text on pp. 105 ff. is the actual text of the German Reichskriegsgericht (Military Court of the Reich) against Harro Schulze-Boysen, charged with espionage for the Soviet Union (Haase, Norbert. Das Reichskriegsgericht und der Widerstand gegen die nationalsozialistische Herrschaft. Berlin: Druckerei der Justizvollzugsanstalt Tegel, 1993).The relevant paragraph, also on p. 105, reads thus:

Anfang 1938, während des Spanienkrieges, erfuhr der Angeklagte dienstlich, daß unter Mitwirkung des deutschen Geheimdienstes im Gebiet von Barcelona ein Aufstand gegen die dortige rote Regierung vorbereitet werde. Diese Nachricht wurde von ihm gemeinsam mit der von Pöllnitz der sowjetrussischen Botschaft in Paris zugeleitet.

English translation:

“At the beginning of 1938, during the Spanish Civil War, the accused learned in his official capacity that a rebellion against the local red government in the territory of Barcelona was being prepared with the co-operation of the German Secret Service. This information, together with that of Pöllnitz, was transmitted by him to the Soviet Russian embassy in Paris.”

“Pöllnitz” was Gisella von Pöllnitz, a recent recruit to the “Red Orchestra” (Rote Kapelle) anti-Nazi Soviet spy ring who worked for United Press and who “shoved the report through the mailbox of the Soviet embassy” (Brysac, Resisting Hitler: Mildred Harnack and the Red Orchestra. Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 237).

* * * * *

By itself Sudoplatov’s statement only proves that Soviet intelligence sincerely believed that Trotskyists were involved with "persons with ties to German military intelligence" in preparing this revolt. By the time he wrote his memoirs, in the 1990s, Sudoplatov was very anti-Soviet, and showed much remorse for many of the things he had done in the Soviet secret service. The fact that he insisted that the Trotskyists were involved with the Nazis in the “May Days” revolt of 1937 in Barcelona surely means that he sincerely believed it was true.

The information from the German Military Court published by Haase provides independent confirmation of Sudoplatov’s statement and of Soviet contentions at the time. It fully confirms Communist suspicions that German intelligence was involved in planning the Barcelona revolt of May 1937. Communist hostility towards Trotskyists and Trotskyism becomes understandable in the light of this information.

There's good evidence that the real panic over clandestine Trotskyists did not take place, even in the USSR, until after the May Days in Barcelona, 1937. Stalin's speeches (two of them) to the February - March 1937 Central Committee Plenum, minimized the dangers of Trotskyists; declared them marginalized; and encouraged CC members not to discriminate against people who used to be Trotskyists but no longer were.”

There is some more evidence outside of the trial confessions that could be brought up, but in my general experience, people like Mike Ely are not the slightest bit interested in an honest discussion of this material. Most of the time, they do not have the intellectual capacity, through their own ignorance of Soviet history, to discuss this subject in anything but the vaguest of terms, such as Ely has done here. Political posturing takes precedence over evidence for people like Ely, who is undoubtedly more concerned with himself being more palatable to the petty-bourgeois radicals who read Kasama, than about actually seriously discussing the history of the USSR.

I'm really sick and tired of responding to Mike Ely's screed in detail, but there is one last thing I must address for the interested reader. Mike Ely attempts to suggest we shouldn't trust Grover Furr's analysis, despite his overwhelmingly familiarity with the subject in comparison to Mike Ely, because Furr is “hardly the only person who had plumbed those archives” and that other people's views “don’t make much of an appearance” in Furr's work (a complete and total lie, but people should be used to Ely's intellectual dishonesty by now). He then goes on to cite Getty as someone who has, in contrast with Furr. Nevermind for the moment it doesn't appear Mike Ely has ever seriously read anything Getty has written. Allow me to tell everyone a story about Getty...

Getty and Furr used to discuss things with each other. If you look through Getty's articles on JSTOR, you will even see an article where Getty personally cites Furr. Getty once told Furr that he basically believed the charges against the defendants in the Moscow Trials were true. Furr, perhaps not realizing at the time, or not being sensitive enough about political repression in academia, started saying this to people on the internet, I believe the H-net list. Someone from that list actually called Getty to confirm the story. Getty denied it, and then immediately called Furr, and pretty much told him he'd never speak to him again.

The point of telling this story is not only to let the hot-air out of Ely's balloon (so much for contrasting the looney Grover Furr with the good J. Arch Getty, who doesn't actually agree with Ely at all on the issue of the Moscow Trials), but to let people know that literally everything that is said by scholars has to be written in politically-correct language to even get a hearing in bourgeois academia. I could mention some other stories about famous Western Sovietologists, but I won't bother. I think the point is clear; you have to be able to read in-between the lines on these subjects. All Grover Furr has really done is spell out the nature of all this modern research in an honest and very forthright way. I dare anyone, for instance, to read Furr's articles on Stalin and Democracy, and then read Getty's famous PhD thesis that literally changed the whole field of Western Sovietology, and draw your own conclusions.
-----------

The response to Patrick McNally was also censored by Kasama's goons. Basically in sort, McNally offers no evidence the POUM were not involved in the May Days, despite their massive participation in it for such a tiny group, and their heavy use of it in their propaganda literature against the Republican government. Also McNally falsely characterizes the May Days as some kind of conflict between the CNT and the Comintern, instead of between the CNT and the Republican government, and fails to mention the CNT quickly distanced themselves from the event anyway.

[pranabjyoti]

Yes, I also have read the essay of Mike Ely on kasamaproject, and awfully Mike make the same logical mistakes that he has criticized in his initial essay regarding logical fallacies. His own essay is an example of the fallacies he mentioned.
Moreover, Mike just like to forgot the book of Joseph E Davis, the US Ambassador to USSR during the purges and some books of other eye-witnesses who were present in the court during the trials and had seen everything clearing before their own eyes. He just also forgot the book The Great Conspiracy against Russia by Albert Kahn and Michael Sears. I have given the reference of those books in many of my posts regarding the purges, but trotskyists just love to forget and overlook those matter.

[Soviet dude]

Another censored reply to Kasama's nonsense:

----------

Let me just start out with stating I will not be censored. My responses will be posted in other locations, locations more widely read than this blog. Mike Ely is and his gang of psychophants are hypocrites in the extreme, who engage in vicious, ignorant attacks on others and demand people respond to them politely. I refuse to comply with Kasama's bullshit.

Mike Ely continues to make strawman arguments. Nowhere does Grover Furr ever claim that any and all statements made at the Moscow Trials are true. Even if most of the statements of the accused are true (which Mike Ely can give absolutely no reason to doubt), it does not fill in the gaps of exactly how Trotsky conspired with the German and Japanese. For instance, it is entirely possible Trotsky made some overtures to the Germans and Japanese, shared mutual intelligence with them, and took suggestions from one another, without either side investing much time or effort into collaboration. Mike Ely is constantly constructing a strawman (i.e. lying) about the implications of Furr's statements. Ely is purposefully conflating all the allegations made in the Moscow Trials with Grover Furr's research, and this is highly dishonest.

It is, again, clear that Mike Ely doesn't have the faintest understanding of what constitutes evidence, nor does he have any real familiarity with academic Sovietology. For instance, Ely states:


There is then a document that claims that Japanese agents were “in touch” with oppositionists (who are unnamed here.) And a German ambassador claims that Hitler knew there was a military opposition to Stalin.

Ok, and how is that evidence (at all) that Trotsky sent order to Bukharin and others to assassinate Stalin. It isn’t. What Ely either does not understand or does not mention is that, for decades, the entire anti-communist academic establishment denied there was any military conspiracy against the Soviet government. It is claimed to be a lie by Stalin, to purge Soviet generals, for whatever deranged reason they could attribute to Stalin (paranoia, jealousy, etc). Evidence that the Nazis knew of, and conspired with Russian military leaders is evidence that is incompatible with the totalitarian-paradigm and compatible with Soviet claims. Furr's article, and the majority of his research, are about the what the preponderance has to say. Mike Ely wants a convenient smoking gun, one that doesn't require him to actually understand and interpret a large body of evidence.

But let's for a moment, backup again. Ely once again shows his ignorance what evidence even exists, when he declares there is no evidence that Bukharin wanted to kill Stalin, outside of confessions. To quote Ely:


And lets not be confused here: Bukharin, Zinoviev etc. were all executed based on very specific allegations of treason, sabotage, cooperation with foreign intelligence, and plans for assassination. They were personally convicted of very specific and personal acts — none of which are backed by any evidence (other than the confessions and testimony associated with individuals being held in Soviet prison).

Allow me to also quote some of Ely's earlier remarks, about what he would consider evidence:


I have asked him (several times) to simply email me a one or two sentence message that mentions the single fact that he believes best documents this alleged conspiracy. And I’m still waiting. We don’t actually need seventy pages of hemming and hawing — a one paragraph description of one real documented fact would suffice to put Grover’s theory on a different plane (a report in a nazi file, a pay stub, a memoir from one of the architects of the conspiracy, one eye witness account that isn’t a prisonhouse confession… one simple real piece of evidence of any kind of the actual allegations that Grover says are confirmed.) Here Ely states a “memoir” or an “eye witness account” might due as evidence. It has long been known, via the memoirs of the Jules Humbert-Droz, that Bukharin conspired to kill Stalin as early as 1929. Allow me to quote from his memoirs:


Before leaving I went to see Bukharin for one last time not knowing whether I would see him again upon my return. We had a long and frank conversation. He brought me up to date with the contacts made by his group with the Zinoviev-Kamenev fraction in order to coordinate the struggle against the power of Stalin. I did not hide from him that I did not approve of this liaison of the oppositions. ‘The struggle against Stalin is not a political programme. We had combatted with reason the programme of the trotskyites on the essential questions, the danger of the kulaks in Russia, the struggle against the united front with the social-democrats, the Chinese problems, the very short-sighted revolutionary perspective, etc. On the morrow of a common victory against Stalin, the political problems will divide us. This bloc is a bloc without principles which will crumble away before achieving any results.’

Bukharin also told me that they had decided to utilise individual terror in order to rid themselves of Stalin. On this point as well I expressed my reservation: the introduction of individual terror into the political struggles born from the Russian Revolution would strongly risk turning against those who employed it. It had never been a revolutionary weapon. ‘My opinion is that we ought to continue the ideological and political struggle against Stalin. His line will lead in the near future to a catastrophe which will open the eyes of the communists and result in a changing of orientation. Fascism menaces Germany and our party of phrasemongers will be incapable of resisting it. Before the debacle of the Communist Party of Germany and the extension of fascism to Poland and to France, the International must change politics. That moment will then be our hour. It is necessary then to remain disciplined, to apply the sectarian decisions after having fought and opposed the leftist errors and measures, but to continue to struggle on the strictly political terrain’.
Bukharin doubtlessly had understood that I would not liase blindly with his fraction whose sole programme was to make Stalin disappear. This was our last meeting. Manifestly he did not have confidence in the tactic that I proposed.
Jules Humbert-Droz wrote this long after Stalin and everyone was dead and longer after he stopped caring about communism. Jules is a direct witness of the willingness of the Right of the party, and Bukharin personally, to resort to assassination. Why on Earth Ely thinks it is not possible for the Right of the party to resort to the same techniques years later, when their situation was even more desperate, is beyond me. Perhaps Ely also didn't read Getty's 'Road to Terror' very closely, in particular the Riutin Platform, and Bukharin and Rykov's own confessions outside of the trials about their relationship to the Rightists.

Ely also evidently doesn't know too much about the Spanish Civil War either, as the POUM was lead by a former associate of Trotsky's, Andres Nin. Nin at one point in time even petitioned the Republican government to allow Trotsky to enter Spain during the war. The close connection of the POUM with Trotsky, and the close connection of the POUM with the May Days, is more evidence (again, not a smoking gun, which are relatively rare in history), of Trotsky having contact with German intelligence.

Ely's babbling about standards of evidence is again hysterical. Again, I will just reference the scenario that is actually playing out here:


In the world of teenage internet-debates, Ely would undoubtedly be accused of “moving the goal posts,” a tactic used to avoid having to deal with the evidence put forth. Just think for a moment, if you were arguing with a righter-winger about the coup in Honduras a year ago. It is only a few days after the attack. They insist on upholding the line of the coup-regime and the Western press, and tell you that there is zero-proof that Washington Orchestrated the coup. You might go on to cite prior history of Latin America and Honduras, name people known to be associated with the US government or business interests, etc, but you can not produce a document with a state department seal saying the US government orchestrated the coup. The right-winger then pronounces victory and calls you a conspiracy nut for claiming the US was behind the coup. Any rational person would be shaking their heads at such stupidity, especially anyone with any knowledge whatsoever about US foreign policy. But this is essentially what Mike Ely has done here with Grover Furr's article. In conclusion, it is evident to me Ely has no understanding whatsoever of what constitutes evidence, has not seriously read anything Furr has ever written, has an extremely crude understanding of academic Sovietology, and is only politically posturing (as usual) for the petty-bourgeois radicals who read this blog.

[Soviet dude]

Another censored post:

-----

Patrick again demonstrates he doesn't really understand what he is talking about, on practically any subject, and furthermore, is literally incapable of honestly dealing with what is written. This will be demonstrated below.


So Furr recognizes that the Carsten thesis is still open. But let’s take a peek at just a couple arguments which he gives:
Patrick simply doesn't understand that, in any areas of academic research that are politically sensitive, people make statements like this all the time. J. Arch Getty, for instance, starts his essay out about Stalin having less power in the USSR than Margaret Thatcher did in England with statements about it Stalin being a brutal dictator. It is a matter of covering your ass, so to speak, or in Furr's case, of simply being published period.

There is a story behind this article, and namely it is that one of the editors of the publication had to threaten to resign just to get it published. No peer-reviewed criticism (except by J. Arch Getty, who is thanked by Furr at the end of the article for his contributions) was offered, it was simply deemed politically-incorrect to make such statements as Furr had. The actual arguments brought forth by Furr pretty much demolish the case that Carsten makes, and cherry-picking some polite statements doesn't change that.


Actually, Carsten does not make any such claim.
Unlike you, Furr doesn't have a problem attributing statements he made up in his head to others. Nowhere does Furr suggest Cartsen made such a claim. The whole rest of your paragraph is just one giant strawman attack.


First of all, it should be noted that such a comment tends to run against the thesis that Hitler had attempted to plot a coup with Tukhachevsky in 1937. If Hitler had planned such a coup, then Goebbels does not appear aware of it. He says nothing about the purge having stopped a coup by Tukhachevsky.
No one says Hitler plotted a coup with Tukhachevsky. If you read the article carefully, the main actor of the coup, according to the Nazi sources, was Fritsch.

But even assuming Hitler did know, the statements made say Stalin “brought an end to defeatism,” which is saying that Stalin brought an end to elements that wanted the USSR to lose, which is basically saying that a potential coup was squashed before it had the chance to happen.


Well here you’re just fuzzing over the details.
No, here you begin attributing statements and arguments to me I never made (i.e. lying). My remarks were a direct response to Ely asserting there is no evidence the defendants of the Moscow Trials conspired to assassinate Soviet leaders. We know this is false, as Bukharin did just that as early as 1928. It is you trying to make a crystal clear issue fuzzy, by backing up the goal posts without anyone noticing. Then you bring in hyperbolic nonsensical bullshit to obscure the issue: Bukharin and the Rightists wanted to assassinate Soviet leaders. We have crystal clear evidence of this, unlike what Mike Ely asserted in his ignorance. Your ridiculous bullshit about Protocals and AIPAC won't make that go away.


That’s a fancy way of saying that it was a fight with the Comintern, which had control of the Spanish government.
This is a complete and total lie, showing you don't understand anything about the Spanish Civil War. The Republican Government was most emphatically <b>not</b> in control by the Comintern. Here you have left the the realm of historical reality for the polemics of deranged anarchists and Trotskyites.


This is a claim suggesting that somehow German intelligence played some role in originating the conflict. The origin of the conflict was between the Comintern and CNT. CNT workers were eventually persuaded to seek a compromise, but that comes later. If we’re to honestly attempt to argue that the initiation of the conflict was engineered by Germans in the background, then the CNT is the only logical place to look. The conflict was not begun by POUM.
This is an assertion you can not prove in anyway. There is no reason at all the conflict had to be planned with only the CNT.


You should take more time to actually look at all of the multiple reasons over which various would-be “Trotskyist” groups have broken with each other. If you’re finding this to be stupid, then I think you might be blown away.
I'm quite aware of Trotskyists splitting with each other over which side of the toast to butter. That Nin, who controlled the POUM and had a personal relationship with Trotsky, and who tried to allow Trotsky to come to Spain, did not contact with him and exchange information is absurd.


Well first of all, your employing a false negative here. Your argument is similar to the way that some Right-wingers used that charge that Roosevelt was a communist. After all, Roosevelt gave aid to the USSR. Does this sound like something a politician hostile to communism would do? Ergo, Roosevelt is a communist.
This is ridiculous bullshit and you know it. All kinds of conservative governments have had dealings with communists one way or another, and this doesn't mean anything. Directly petitioning for Trotsky to be allowed to enter Spain is not even close to sending aid to a communist country that is at war with a government you are also at war with. That you could suggest they are comparable shows how intellectually dishonest you are.


In reality one does not have to be a follower of an exiled former political leader to support the right of asylum.
We are not talking about a “right to asylum” and Andres Nin was Trotsky's secretary.


could you reference this better?
"The situation was further complicated by the inability of the POUM leaders, particularly Nin, to obtain permission for Trotsky to come to Catalonia. Although there was some opposition to the idea within the Executive Committee of the POUM, that body did authorize him to make a formal proposal to the Catalan cabinet. He did so shortly before the POUMists were forced out of the government, but, aside from Nin's vote, it was unanimously rejected." - from International Trotskyism

[Saorsa]

The Kasama website basically censors criticism of anything Mike Ely writes, so this is being reposted here for people to see

That is completely not true. Kasama allows total freedom to criticise Mike and anybody else, so long as you do it without snarky ad hominem attacks. Sadly some leftists are so used to making personal attacks in the course of their political 'arguments' that they can't handle this rather basic rule.

[The Vegan Marxist]

That is completely not true. Kasama allows total freedom to criticise Mike and anybody else, so long as you do it without snarky ad hominem attacks. Sadly some leftists are so used to making personal attacks in the course of their political 'arguments' that they can't handle this rather basic rule.

Obviously the posts outweighed any "ad hominem" attacks with an actual intellectual critique on the lack of any Sovietological analysis that Ely obtains, Saorsa. You can't keep defending Ely when he obviously tries concealing his own ignorance on a particular subject, especially when more than one user posts similar critiques on such.

[Barry Lyndon]

That is completely not true. Kasama allows total freedom to criticise Mike and anybody else, so long as you do it without snarky ad hominem attacks. Sadly some leftists are so used to making personal attacks in the course of their political 'arguments' that they can't handle this rather basic rule.

Frankly, I see Grover Furr as a Stalinist hack and agree with Ely's criticisms.
But it is true that he does censor by classifying as 'snark' legitimate criticisms.
He had a post about the Platypus Review's(that nasty little pro-imperialist organization the banned racist whichdoctor was from) attacks on the Naxalite rebellion.
I posted comments pointing out and documenting Platypus's racism from the journals own articles, which was classified as 'snark'. It was perfectly relevant to the discussion because it was a good explanation as to why Platypus is so dismissive of Third World struggles that are overwhelmingly conducted by non-whites.
I gave up trying to debate because Ely censored out large parts of my arguments and kept putting my comments up for 'review' before they were approved.

[Bright Banana Beard]

Frankly, I see Grover Furr as a Stalinist hack and agree with Ely's criticisms.
But it is true that he does censor by classifying as 'snark' legitimate criticisms.
He had a post about the Platypus Review's(that nasty little pro-imperialist organization the banned racist whichdoctor was from) attacks on the Naxalite rebellion.
I posted comments pointing out and documenting Platypus's racism from the journals own articles, which was classified as 'snark'. It was perfectly relevant to the discussion because it was a good explanation as to why Platypus is so dismissive of Third World struggles that are overwhelmingly conducted by non-whites.
I gave up trying to debate because Ely censored out large parts of my arguments and kept putting my comments up for 'review' before they were approved.
Article of Stalin and article on Naxalite is two different things. Ho Chi Minh betrayed the Trotskyist organization to the French, does that means he is a traitor too? Michael Parenti's works on imperialism is good, but it have to be bad because he supports Milosevic, right?

One wrong view doesn't make other's view wrong.

[pranabjyoti]

Actually the article on Kasama by Mike Ely is nothing more than a trash and he actually just repeated the logical fallacies he described in the first part of the essay. The whole essay is based on baseless uplift of Trotsky and denouncing of Stalin. He just have no idea or just don't want to have any idea regarding the books and proofs of Moscow trials. There are huge amount of books and eye-witness accounts of Moscow trials and also on the treachery of Trotsky and trotskites to USSR, which, if not controlled, can be fatal to the newborn state. But, like most trots (and imperialist agents), Mike goes on slandering Stalin with just hollow, fuzzy words.
So far, what I have noticed, is that trots and anarchist are more akin to personal attack than giving authentic proof and details. So far, I haven't got any of their authentic reply regarding the books like The Great Conspiracy Against Russia by Albert Kahn and Michael Sears and also the books written by eye witnesses of the Moscow trial and other independent persons, but rather slandering on Stalin and Stalinists relentlessly. Mike Ely's essay is just another addition in this series.

[chegitz guevara]

Gee, I can't imagine why these posts were removed? Perhaps because they were long on character assassination and short on facts. I've never read anything from Furr that terribly impressed me. His sources are almost always obscure, not vetted documents. One gets the sense reading Furr that he would have done well in the Office of Special Projects which compiled the "evidence" supporting the assertion that Iraq was building weapons of mass destruction.

[pranabjyoti]

Gee, I can't imagine why these posts were removed? Perhaps because they were long on character assassination and short on facts. I've never read anything from Furr that terribly impressed me. His sources are almost always obscure, not vetted documents. One gets the sense reading Furr that he would have done well in the Office of Special Projects which compiled the "evidence" supporting the assertion that Iraq was building weapons of mass destruction.
It's nothing more than your personal opinion. By comparing something with the "evidences" of mass destruction of Iraq without proper back support can not make it irrelevant.

[chegitz guevara]

The fact that he doesn't vett his sources is not opinion.

[Roach]

Grover Furr sometimes uses J.Arch Getty as a source, for example here: http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html#note18

But not only Mike Ely is familiar to Getty but he says that Getty's work ''has helped dethroned the theories of “totalitarianism,” and enabled us to approach to the Soviet Union as a series of real political events. In the process he has brought forward some startling discoveries and observations about those dramatic conflicts.''

http://kasamaproject.org/2010/10/07/j-arch-getty-creating-a-alternative-new-history-of-soviet-30s/

I don't understant why he has such hostility to Furr while recommending Getty's work.

[graymouser]

Furr is a Stalinist hack and his "research" is shit. His method is to set out to prove that minor points in the minutiae of the Moscow Trials were not pure falsification, and then try to use this to claim that the larger points - the big lies - were also true. (He also concludes that the outrageous confessions extracted by the Stalinists were true wherever convenient, as though false confessions were not a reality.) In this way he resurrects nonsensical slanders against the Bolsheviks as having been German and Japanese agents, which now rests on little more than his demonstration that Trotsky had in fact visited such and such a hotel.

To be clear, I think the redbaiting that has been done against Furr is bullshit and I am totally against it. But neither Mike Ely nor any other left critic of Furr has stooped to that and your polemics against him are unprincipled trash and deserve to be in the dustbin with Furr's work.

[pranabjyoti]

The fact that he doesn't vett his sources is not opinion.
Well, I am giving you some.
1. Mission To Moscow by Joseph E Davis, US Ambassador to USSR during the Moscow Trials.
2. In Search of Soviet Gold by John LittlePage, US Engineer and worked in USSR during the 30's.
3. Report of the Observer Newspaper on 23.8.1936
4. Report of Daily Chronicle Newspaper on 26.1.1936
5. Report of Walter Durante, Moscow representative of New York Times on 25.1.1937.
6. Report of Harold Danny, Moscow representative of New York Times on 14.3.1938.
7. Lies Concerning The History of USSR by Maria Sousa.
THAT'S ALL FOR TODAY, WILL BE BACK WITH SOME MORE.....

[The Vegan Marxist]

Furr is a Stalinist hack and his "research" is shit. His method is to set out to prove that minor points in the minutiae of the Moscow Trials were not pure falsification, and then try to use this to claim that the larger points - the big lies - were also true. (He also concludes that the outrageous confessions extracted by the Stalinists were true wherever convenient, as though false confessions were not a reality.) In this way he resurrects nonsensical slanders against the Bolsheviks as having been German and Japanese agents, which now rests on little more than his demonstration that Trotsky had in fact visited such and such a hotel.

To be clear, I think the redbaiting that has been done against Furr is bullshit and I am totally against it. But neither Mike Ely nor any other left critic of Furr has stooped to that and your polemics against him are unprincipled trash and deserve to be in the dustbin with Furr's work.

Mike Ely tried demonizing Furr's work as "leftist pseudo science" & a betrayal to Communist history. How is this not a sign of stooping down to redbaiting against Grover Furr's work? For everything else you said, you based it all out of sheer opinion. His research has sources, while yours doesn't. If anything, it's your own view that's bullshit & betrays the very history of the Soviet Union.

[graymouser]

Mike Ely tried demonizing Furr's work as "leftist pseudo science" & a betrayal to Communist history. How is this not a sign of stooping down to redbaiting against Grover Furr's work? For everything else you said, you based it all out of sheer opinion. His research has sources, while yours doesn't. If anything, it's your own view that's bullshit & betrays the very history of the Soviet Union.
First and foremost, the fact is that there have been redbaiting books and articles attacking Furr as a communist in academia, and that is something I reject unequivocally despite the fact that I find Furr to be a hack. Get the difference between the two straight.

Second, Furr presents himself as an academic who is "proving" some of the more controversial assertions made during the Moscow Trials against Trotsky and many of the other Bolsheviks who were charged in that period. My criticism of him is quite specific and not at all based on opinion: Furr tries to document minutiae, such as hotels that Trotsky was or wasn't at during the 1930s, that show minor inconsistencies with Trotsky's rebuttal of the ludicrous and anti-Bolshevik claims at the show trials in Moscow. He then uses the evidence he provides for these minutiae as evidence for his larger case, namely that Trotsky and others were agents of the German and Japanese governments. The latter are blatant lies, unsupported in the actual files of the German government that were seized. Furr never documents the actual big charges, just makes the innuendo that since the little tiny bits were right in the Moscow trials that everything else had to be.

Third, this message board is not an academic forum nor a theoretical journal and I am not required to source every statement that I make here.

[pranabjyoti]

Third, this message board is not an academic forum nor a theoretical journal and I am not required to source every statement that I make here.
When some debate will raise against your statements, then it's a matter of intellectual honesty to give sources. If not, then I don't think you can be considered proper and serious.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

I have a pertinent question: Does any of this really matter?

We've pretty much come up with a valid history of the period - there were, undeniably, purges in the period of the late 1930s which terminated the lives of anywhere between tens of thousands and a couple of million people. Between those two figures, where the true figure lies, is anybody's guess right now. We simply don't know. But we know that it was a fair few people that snuffed it during the period.

Spending so much intellectual energy arguing about the minutiae of this period strikes of tribalism and is probably the most unimpressive thing about the left today.

Grow up, guys, seriously.

[pranabjyoti]

I have a pertinent question: Does any of this really matter?

We've pretty much come up with a valid history of the period - there were, undeniably, purges in the period of the late 1930s which terminated the lives of anywhere between tens of thousands and a couple of million people. Between those two figures, where the true figure lies, is anybody's guess right now. We simply don't know. But we know that it was a fair few people that snuffed it during the period.

Spending so much intellectual energy arguing about the minutiae of this period strikes of tribalism and is probably the most unimpressive thing about the left today.

Grow up, guys, seriously.
Not so, basically this kind of debate and clearing of the incidents during that period can be eye-opener regarding one fact, THE INTRA PARTY CONTRADICTION AND CLASS STRUGGLE. Class Struggle between petty-bourgeoisie and proletariat inside the party. This history is an example that how petty-bourgeoisie vices can hide inside party and can eat the whole party from inside out and tireless struggle is the only solution of this problem. If we take that kind of attitude, "its' history, lets forget it", we will make the biggest mistake and probably will invite 1989 again in the 21st century.

[kasama-rl]

Let me interject some thoughts here:

1) I think it is very important to craft a serious and truthful account of the Soviet revolution -- its amazing eruption in October 1917, its huge challenges, its pathbreaking experimentalism, its accomplishments, and its negative lessons.

We don't have many successful proletarian socialist revolutions -- and the experience of each one is precious. And the Soviet Revolution was the very first of its kind, and particular rich.

2) Furthermore, people of the world expect communists to have a sophisticated analysis of these events -- including what we would do differently and better. Clearly the major revolutions of the last century has both breathtaking accomplishments and also problems that eventually led to their reversal. And so there is a lot to say on BOTH accounts.

3) In my personal opinion, this involves a significant analysis (and largely an upholding) of the Stalin years. this produced the world's first planned economy, the first attempt at socialized agriculture, the first creation of a world wide communist international and (importantly) the remarkable defeat of Hitler fascism (which was largely carried out by soviet arms). And so, while anti-communists of many kinds choose to negate the Stalin years (and stalin) totally -- we have a different task and approach.

4) At the same time, this was a primitive first attempt, and many things "went wrong" -- including pretty early in the process. Some of the problems were the result of huge objective problems (encirclement, the devastation of world war and civil war, the political legacies of Tsarism, the threat of fascist invasions, the relative alienation of the peasantry etc.) and some of the problems were the result of choices made by the Communist Party and its leadership.

there is a lot to sum up. It is complex. And people expect of us a nuanced, and truthful accounting.

I personally think that we need a "nodal view" of the development: the restoration of capitalism happened (imho) around the mid-fifties (culminating in the Kosigin Reforms of 1963), but i think something went "terribly wrong" politically after the death of Kirov in 1934 that helped kill the revolutionary spirit and enthusiasm of the people (a conservative wind, an air of real political repression, a rise of nationalism etc.) There are other nodal points, of course, but we need to situate the major ones -- and excavate their causes and outlines.

5) One of the starkest features of the Soviet society was that advanced socialist things coexisted in a strange way with very retrograde and oppressive things. In the making of Magnetogorsk there were cohorts of advanced and militant communist volunteers straining to carve out a new city, and working along side them were battalions of political prisoners (often educated people like engineers and peasants) who were essentially forced labor. What a strange mix, and what a mixed legacy. New political power for many, extreme deprivation for many others. It was a society that seemed to be frozen in civil war -- and that is something we need to unravel and explain.

6) My point about Grover Furr is a simple one: Stalin needs far better defenders than Grover Furr.

His claims and arguments are cartoonish and factually false. He tries to prove things that are unprovable because they are untrue. And he does this by wrapping mis-conceived set of verdicts in the *appearance* of scholarly "research" and documentation. Because of this pseudo-scholarly appearance, it is sometimes convincing for two audiences: newbies who don't have much background, and cynical dogmatists who don't much care about the facts.

But the fact is the Grover's research is bullshit -- and it would be a complete embarassment for our movement (and for socialism) if we were associated with it. Anyone with any knowledge of the *actual* facts and events can see (relatively quickly) that his arguments are bullshit and designed to cover up the actual (and complex) events.

7) His methods are very similar to creationism -- he starts with a quasi-religious "belief" (i.e. that we must uphold the official Soviet version of events, or else we have capitulated to anticommunism) -- and then he cherrypicks facts and arguments to paste together a pseudo-"proof" of his thesis.

In fact capitalist roaders emerge within the very fabric of socialist society -- they are not mainly "agents" of foreign powers sent into a society free of antagonism from without. There were massive breakdowns in Soviet economics (shortages, railroad problems of huge proportions, food transport problems, difficulties getting spare parts etc.) -- but they were not mainly the result of secret networks of Nazi-paid saboteurs directed by evil Trotskyite conspirators within the party. It is simply fantasy, and there are no facts (zero zero evidence) that justify the thesis of this vast conspiracy. It is nutbag land -- it was paranoid fantasy when the Soviet government made these claims, and it is even more bizarre to try to "prove" this seventy years later when we have so much evidence of what REALLY went down.

8) In his own "defense" Grover puts forward a simple theory: If you don't accept his arguments, you must be an anti-communist (or a dupe of anticommunists). Well, that is a self-serving argument which is also not true.

The main opponents of anticommunism in the world of Soviet studies (Arch Getty, Sheila Fitzpatrick etc.) are not proponents of Grover's theories -- they can't be, because Grover's theories have no basis in reality.

So as communists, and as materialist, we need to develop an actual, serious theory of the contradictions of Soviet society, where restoration came from, and what explains the rather extreme purges of 1936-38 (and beyond).

9) The repressions of the late thirties were no small matter. There were executions in the hundreds of thousands, and most of them were on false charges. IN quite a number of cases, people were arrested and killed for (a) having made anti-government statements, (b) having been at one time or another in an oppositional movement, (c) having been denounced by someone for being an oppositionalist.

I think we need to decide (once and for all): Do we think that mass arrests and executions on flimsy evidence is defensible for socialists or not? Do we think that people deserve prison and execution for merely having oppositional views (oppositional views inside the communist party, or oppositional views outside the party.)

I think that we should be clear in our believe that socialism will not succeed if there is not a climate of lively and open debate -- which *requires* people knowing, clearly, that their statements in that political debate will not be criminalized. And so we have to be clear on this.

It won't do to deny that there were mass executions in the Soviet society -- the evidence is irrefutable. It won't do to pretend that those executed were probably guilty of treason and nazi-sympathies (this theory is nonsense and contradicted by all the evidence). And it will not do to UPHOLD the method of such mass executions -- no one on the planet wants to support a movement that (morally and politically) thinks it is ok to kill hundreds of thousands of people on flimsy evidence.

Mao opposed it, and never did anything like this in China. The Maoists explained that counterrevolution was not MAINLY some external foreign conspiracy, but emerged from the complex choices and problems of socialism itself. We should uphold this more advanced understanding -- and on that COMMUNIST BASIS (!) criticize the weaknesses and mistakes of the soviet experience.

10) There is some (limited) value in this debate over Grover Furr: We (as a movement) need to be sophisticated enough to expose bullshit (even if it comes wrapped on communist language). We need to be wary of arguments EVEN if they SEEM to confirm beliefs that we wish were true.

Grover's work is a lot like creationism or holocaust denial -- it is a logically consistent pseudo-scientific argument that is based on non-facts, and that employs well-known deceptive techniques to avoid the real questions and misdirect naive people.

So if you are serious about wanting to be a communist, if you want to learn how to do materialist analysis of history and socialism IN WAYS THAT CAN CONVINCE OTHER SERIOUS PEOPLE, then it is worth studying Grover's flawed and deceptive work as a negative example, and a good example of what to avoid.

If we embrace his methods, if we try to promote his silly and ridiculous historical claims, we will suffer the same fate that he suffers -- people will laugh at us, consider us pathetic and deluded.

And we have a better story to tell, a REAL and serious defense of socialism, based on real facts and analysis. We need to delve into the difficult experiences honestly, and face the actual historical record, and then go out broadly with a credible explanation of communist history and communist dreams.

We need to be militant, serious, materialist, scientific communists. Not intellectual bullies and bullshit artists.

Yours in the great adventure of communist revolution,
Mike Ely

[pranabjyoti]

A Counterpoint on Soviet Prisons: Take Me, Rehabilitate Me! (http://kasamaproject.org/2010/11/05/a-counterpoint-on-soviet-prisons-take-me-rehabilitate-me/)

Posted by Mike E (http://mikeely.wordpress.com/) on November 5, 2010
http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/prisoner-tattoo.jpg?w=400 (http://mikeely.files.wordpress.com/2010/11/prisoner-tattoo.jpg)by Mike Ely
In two accompanying (http://kasamaproject.org/2010/11/05/exploring-the-soviet-prison-system-in-the-1930s/) posts, we explore some of the effects of Soviet methods in the 1930s — particularly the large numbers of prisoners within Soviet society, and their experiences. Because that can be understood somewhat one-sidedly, I would like to inject this counter-story:
I was reading Sheila Fitzpatrick’s book, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (http://books.google.com/books?id=QS6IlPQf6owC&printsec=frontcover&dq=sheila+fitzpatrick+everyday+stalinism&source=bl&ots=eEGKmmJnto&sig=AB4_O-M8n3Gpb94dtN3yEi5RD8s&hl=en&ei=w0HUTNXjLsOVnAeqvsi9BQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCIQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false). Without giving away the plot, it is a story of great struggle and sacrifice, where despite shortages and madness, ordinary people felt (deeply) they were part of a great historic experiment, consructing a radically different and better world.
She writes:
“This was an age of utopianism…. Most memoirs about the period, including many written in emigration, recall the idealism and optimism of the young, their belief that they were participants in a historic process of transformation, their enthusiasm for what was called “the building of socialism.”
In one of the chapters dealing with institutions like education, I came to the part that started to talk about prisons. And I thought to myself, “OK, here we go,” and mentally braced myself for the discussion of a “dark side” of Soviet socialism.
I was wrong.
Instead, Fitzpatrick discusses that the prison experiences of the Soviet Union in the 30s were a remarkably innovative and remarkably successful exercise in rehabilitation. In the aftermath of great civil war and disruption, there were quite a few people who ended up in “anti-social” activities, including crime, and she describes the techniques and methods of a remarkably forward looking prison system. And then she says that there emerged a spontaneous mass movement among career criminals — who over and over would present themselves at police stations and ask to be rehabilitated. I laid down her book, and just thought for a while about what that represented: How society at that time felt like it was going somewhere, and the “anti-socials” felt excluded from something positive and attractive, and how they had heard about the personal transformations in the lives of their former accomplices, and how they wanted to be helped back in, and trusted the new socialist society, its authorities and the prisons (!) to help them transform.
It strikes me as an example of the highly complex and contradictory nature of Soviet socialism that this story emerges in the same period as the other stories we have posted today.
I apologize that i have not posted Sheila Fitzpatrick’s account directly in this post. I scoured the house for her book, but couldn’t find it. But I wanted to share this story today — so our discussion of Soviet socialism does not (by omission) remain onesided. And I promise to post those paragraphs from her book when I get them. (If you have the book, take a moment, type her discussion, and send it in for posting.)
Another article on Kasama.

[The Vegan Marxist]

Let me interject some thoughts here:

1) I think it is very important to craft a serious and truthful account of the Soviet revolution -- its amazing eruption in October 1917, its huge challenges, its pathbreaking experimentalism, its accomplishments, and its negative lessons.

We don't have many successful proletarian socialist revolutions -- and the experience of each one is precious. And the Soviet Revolution was the very first of its kind, and particular rich.

2) Furthermore, people of the world expect communists to have a sophisticated analysis of these events -- including what we would do differently and better. Clearly the major revolutions of the last century has both breathtaking accomplishments and also problems that eventually led to their reversal. And so there is a lot to say on BOTH accounts.

3) In my personal opinion, this involves a significant analysis (and largely an upholding) of the Stalin years. this produced the world's first planned economy, the first attempt at socialized agriculture, the first creation of a world wide communist international and (importantly) the remarkable defeat of Hitler fascism (which was largely carried out by soviet arms). And so, while anti-communists of many kinds choose to negate the Stalin years (and stalin) totally -- we have a different task and approach.

4) At the same time, this was a primitive first attempt, and many things "went wrong" -- including pretty early in the process. Some of the problems were the result of huge objective problems (encirclement, the devastation of world war and civil war, the political legacies of Tsarism, the threat of fascist invasions, the relative alienation of the peasantry etc.) and some of the problems were the result of choices made by the Communist Party and its leadership.

there is a lot to sum up. It is complex. And people expect of us a nuanced, and truthful accounting.

I personally think that we need a "nodal view" of the development: the restoration of capitalism happened (imho) around the mid-fifties (culminating in the Kosigin Reforms of 1963), but i think something went "terribly wrong" politically after the death of Kirov in 1934 that helped kill the revolutionary spirit and enthusiasm of the people (a conservative wind, an air of real political repression, a rise of nationalism etc.) There are other nodal points, of course, but we need to situate the major ones -- and excavate their causes and outlines.

5) One of the starkest features of the Soviet society was that advanced socialist things coexisted in a strange way with very retrograde and oppressive things. In the making of Magnetogorsk there were cohorts of advanced and militant communist volunteers straining to carve out a new city, and working along side them were battalions of political prisoners (often educated people like engineers and peasants) who were essentially forced labor. What a strange mix, and what a mixed legacy. New political power for many, extreme deprivation for many others. It was a society that seemed to be frozen in civil war -- and that is something we need to unravel and explain.

6) My point about Grover Furr is a simple one: Stalin needs far better defenders than Grover Furr.

His claims and arguments are cartoonish and factually false. He tries to prove things that are unprovable because they are untrue. And he does this by wrapping mis-conceived set of verdicts in the *appearance* of scholarly "research" and documentation. Because of this pseudo-scholarly appearance, it is sometimes convincing for two audiences: newbies who don't have much background, and cynical dogmatists who don't much care about the facts.

But the fact is the Grover's research is bullshit -- and it would be a complete embarassment for our movement (and for socialism) if we were associated with it. Anyone with any knowledge of the *actual* facts and events can see (relatively quickly) that his arguments are bullshit and designed to cover up the actual (and complex) events.

7) His methods are very similar to creationism -- he starts with a quasi-religious "belief" (i.e. that we must uphold the official Soviet version of events, or else we have capitulated to anticommunism) -- and then he cherrypicks facts and arguments to paste together a pseudo-"proof" of his thesis.

In fact capitalist roaders emerge within the very fabric of socialist society -- they are not mainly "agents" of foreign powers sent into a society free of antagonism from without. There were massive breakdowns in Soviet economics (shortages, railroad problems of huge proportions, food transport problems, difficulties getting spare parts etc.) -- but they were not mainly the result of secret networks of Nazi-paid saboteurs directed by evil Trotskyite conspirators within the party. It is simply fantasy, and there are no facts (zero zero evidence) that justify the thesis of this vast conspiracy. It is nutbag land -- it was paranoid fantasy when the Soviet government made these claims, and it is even more bizarre to try to "prove" this seventy years later when we have so much evidence of what REALLY went down.

8) In his own "defense" Grover puts forward a simple theory: If you don't accept his arguments, you must be an anti-communist (or a dupe of anticommunists). Well, that is a self-serving argument which is also not true.

The main opponents of anticommunism in the world of Soviet studies (Arch Getty, Sheila Fitzpatrick etc.) are not proponents of Grover's theories -- they can't be, because Grover's theories have no basis in reality.

So as communists, and as materialist, we need to develop an actual, serious theory of the contradictions of Soviet society, where restoration came from, and what explains the rather extreme purges of 1936-38 (and beyond).

9) The repressions of the late thirties were no small matter. There were executions in the hundreds of thousands, and most of them were on false charges. IN quite a number of cases, people were arrested and killed for (a) having made anti-government statements, (b) having been at one time or another in an oppositional movement, (c) having been denounced by someone for being an oppositionalist.

I think we need to decide (once and for all): Do we think that mass arrests and executions on flimsy evidence is defensible for socialists or not? Do we think that people deserve prison and execution for merely having oppositional views (oppositional views inside the communist party, or oppositional views outside the party.)

I think that we should be clear in our believe that socialism will not succeed if there is not a climate of lively and open debate -- which *requires* people knowing, clearly, that their statements in that political debate will not be criminalized. And so we have to be clear on this.

It won't do to deny that there were mass executions in the Soviet society -- the evidence is irrefutable. It won't do to pretend that those executed were probably guilty of treason and nazi-sympathies (this theory is nonsense and contradicted by all the evidence). And it will not do to UPHOLD the method of such mass executions -- no one on the planet wants to support a movement that (morally and politically) thinks it is ok to kill hundreds of thousands of people on flimsy evidence.

Mao opposed it, and never did anything like this in China. The Maoists explained that counterrevolution was not MAINLY some external foreign conspiracy, but emerged from the complex choices and problems of socialism itself. We should uphold this more advanced understanding -- and on that COMMUNIST BASIS (!) criticize the weaknesses and mistakes of the soviet experience.

10) There is some (limited) value in this debate over Grover Furr: We (as a movement) need to be sophisticated enough to expose bullshit (even if it comes wrapped on communist language). We need to be wary of arguments EVEN if they SEEM to confirm beliefs that we wish were true.

Grover's work is a lot like creationism or holocaust denial -- it is a logically consistent pseudo-scientific argument that is based on non-facts, and that employs well-known deceptive techniques to avoid the real questions and misdirect naive people.

So if you are serious about wanting to be a communist, if you want to learn how to do materialist analysis of history and socialism IN WAYS THAT CAN CONVINCE OTHER SERIOUS PEOPLE, then it is worth studying Grover's flawed and deceptive work as a negative example, and a good example of what to avoid.

If we embrace his methods, if we try to promote his silly and ridiculous historical claims, we will suffer the same fate that he suffers -- people will laugh at us, consider us pathetic and deluded.

And we have a better story to tell, a REAL and serious defense of socialism, based on real facts and analysis. We need to delve into the difficult experiences honestly, and face the actual historical record, and then go out broadly with a credible explanation of communist history and communist dreams.

We need to be militant, serious, materialist, scientific communists. Not intellectual bullies and bullshit artists.

Yours in the great adventure of communist revolution,
Mike Ely

The following is a response to an article written by Mike Ely, “Historical Socialism (and Stalin) Need Better Defenders (http://kasamaproject.org/2010/11/05/historical-socialism-and-stalin-need-better-defenders/)“.

------------------------------------

After finding myself able to sit down and take time to read this new article by Mike Ely, I couldn’t help but feel a bit disgusted on how idealist the very structure of criticism came out to be.

To begin with, before he was to even get started on attacking Grover Furr’s work, he stated – in his own opinion – that the Soviet Union witnessed capitalist restoration, not during the ’90s where the world watched the overthrowing of said Soviet Union, but during the period of 1963. What happened in 1963? Various different situations took place. Such as the massive drought, in which led to a large decline in the harvest of grain from 122,200,000 tons to 97,500,000 tons.1 In conclusion, Comrade Khrushchev (first secretary of the USSR) exhausted the nation’s currency reserves to help pay for grain, among other food supplies.2

We also witnessed small relations develop between the US and Soviet Union through US president John F. Kennedy. Though, this was cut short to November when president Kennedy was assassinated.

But what accounts for the mode of production in being Socialist – in contradiction, what accounts for the mode of production in being Capitalist?

Well, according to Karl Marx, founder of scientific socialism, for there to be socialism – I might add while still under an idealist definition – the means of production had to be collectively owned by the working class. This, of course, easily differentiated capitalism from socialism, whereas capitalism was where the means of production was privately owned by the bourgeoisie.3 So for there to have been capitalist restoration in 1963, we had to first witness the change in the mode of production from collectively owned means of production to privately owned means of production. So did such an event take place?

Given that Mike Ely resides under the ideal of Maoism, which was helped attributed during his early life when taking part with Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP), I would take that Ely’s belief on capitalist restoration in 1963 came about from a response by Mao Zedong to the Central Committee of the CPSU, in which states:


“In 1963, on the pretext of dividing the Party into “industrial” and “agricultural” Party committees, they … replaced more than half the members of the Central Committees of the Union Republics and of the Regional Party Committees.

“Through this series of changes the Soviet privileged stratum has gained control of the Party, the government and other important organizations.

“The members of this pivileged stratum have converted the function of serving the masses into the privilege of dominating them. They are abusing their powers over the means of production and of livelyhood for the private benefit of their small clique.

“The members of this privileged stratum appropriate the fruits of the Soviet people’s labour and pocket incomes that are dozens or even a hundred times those of the average Soviet worker and peasant. They not only secure high incomes in the form of high salaries, high awards, high royalties and a great variety of personal subsidies, but also use their privileged position to appropriate public property by graft and bribery. Completely divorced from the working people of the Soviet Union, they live the parasitical and decadent life of the bourgeoisie.” 4

This open letter response by Mao was of course stated in 1964, a year after where Ely states the Soviet Union was restored back to capitalism. Of course, in this same response by Mao, he then states:


“As a result of Khrushchov’s revisionism, the first socialist country in the world built by the great Soviet people with their blood and sweat is now facing an unprecedented danger of capitalist restoration. …

“… Among the ranks of the Soviet cadres, there are many who still persist in the revolutionary stand of the proletariat, adhere to the road of socialism and firmly oppose Khrushchov’s revisionism. The broad masses of the Soviet people, of Communists and cadres are using various means to resist and oppose the revisionist line of the Khrushchov clique, so that the revisionist Khrushchov clique cannot so easily bring about the restoration of capitalism. The great Soviet people are fighting to defend the glorious traditions of the Great October Revolution, to preserve the great gains of socialism and to smash the plot for the restoration of capitalism.” 5

Whether I agree with what Mao’s stating about the Soviet Union or not is irrelevant. The relevance of this open letter response to the CPSU by Mao Zedong is that Mao specifically points out that capitalist restoration had not yet transformed. That the Soviet Union was on a road towards capitalist restoration, contradicting Ely’s entire false idea of Soviet history.

We then find Mike criticizing Grover Furr, a Professor and author on Soviet history, which led to statements such as:


“..he claims to prove things that are unprovable because they are untrue.“

This of course points out the clear dogmatism in Ely’s critiques on those who he disagree’s with.

He makes slanderous remarks against Furr by stating that he mixes various verdicts to create the illusion of scholarly documentation. Of course, he doesn’t take into account of all who he [Furr] sources throughout his vast amounts of information. Such people like Arch Getty 6, who Ely even tries claiming is not a proponent to Furr’s research. Of course, if one was to ever read Getty’s work, you would then realize that Getty has sourced Furr as a proponent of his own work.

Fact of the matter is that, despite Ely’s slanderous remarks against Grover Furr’s work on the Moscow trials, Professor Arch Getty completely disagree’s with Ely’s entire account of what happened during the trials. In fact, until Furr announced to everyone on how Getty agree’s with Furr’s account on the Moscow trials, which led to Getty refusing to talk to Furr any longer because of known academia blacklisting due to such beliefs, there wasn’t really a disagreement between the two. Ely, of course, would like for you to believe otherwise.

Ely then continues by comparing Furr’s work with holocaust denial and creationism, because, according to Ely and Ely alone, Furr’s entire work is 100% fiction, despite the fact that Furr’s work has made it’s way among both Western and Russian academic journals under the devotion of Soviet history. Whereas, Ely has never achieved.

Ely defends his entire article by stating that “..Socialism (and Stalin) need far better defenders than Grover Furr.” Though, as we clearly can see on Ely’s false notions of capitalist restoration among the Soviet Union, along other false notions towards the scholarly work by Professor Grover Furr, it is Ely who fails to achieve the very act of giving us a better defense on Soviet history. It is Ely who we should learn to criticize, not the works of Furr.

1. Taubman, William (2003), Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, W.W. Norton & Co.
2. Ibid.
3. Marx, Karl. Capital. Print.
4. Zedong, Mao. “On Khrushchov’s Phoney Communism and Its Historical Lessons for the World: Comment on the Open Letter of the Central Committee of the CPSU (IX).” Marxists Internet Archive. Web. http://www.marxistsfr.org/reference/archive/mao/works/1964/phnycom.htm.
5. Ibid.
6. Furr, Grover. “Stalin and the Struggle for Democratic Reform.” Cultural Logic: An Electronic Journal of Marxist Theory and Practice. 2005. Web. http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/furr.html.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Not so, basically this kind of debate and clearing of the incidents during that period can be eye-opener regarding one fact, THE INTRA PARTY CONTRADICTION AND CLASS STRUGGLE. Class Struggle between petty-bourgeoisie and proletariat inside the party. This history is an example that how petty-bourgeoisie vices can hide inside party and can eat the whole party from inside out and tireless struggle is the only solution of this problem. If we take that kind of attitude, "its' history, lets forget it", we will make the biggest mistake and probably will invite 1989 again in the 21st century.

There is a difference between letting it lie, not 'forgetting it', and obsessing over it so much that it consumes our entire political will.

I get the impression that some people would rather their view of Stalin's period of rule was upheld rather than advancing Socialism today.

And, I must beg the question, what part of the execution quotas and other 'excesses' of 1937-38 which even dear old Grover Furr admits are part of 'tireless struggle'? If that is Socialism's 'tireless struggle', to murder it's own because of political deviation, then I am not a Socialist. That said, I clearly don't believe that is Socialism. You will never convince me that the overwhelming majority of those who heroically won the revolution for Russia in 1917 were fascists or capitalists. It is just a ridiculous assumption. Absolutely ridiculous. Trotsky and Stalin, in truth, were as bad as each other. However, if you look at the trial testimony and personal letters from the likes of Bukharin, you need only a modicum of sense to see that the man was not a fascist-trotskyist-capitalist-counter-revolutionary-anti-worker type that he was painted out to be.

I'm not coming at this from a Trotskyist point of view - i.e. i'm not casting judgement on Stalin's entire period of rule. However, when I look at the period of the mid-late 1930s as objectively as I can, I can only draw negative conclusions.

Also, that a Socialist state can be 'ruled' by one person for such an extended period is clearly anathema to Socialist democracy, but that is really a story for another day. It seems ironic that people call themselves Socialists and then support the extended rule of Stalin, Mao, Castro etc. Not that a long period of rule necessarily means they ruled badly, but that one person has a long period of rule is clearly going to go against the idea of workers' grassroots democracy. It's difficult to argue that, in the case of Stalin and Mao in particular, that they were deserving of such extended periods of rule when they were so contentious. It might be just about passable, for example in the case of Fidel Castro, to have a long period of rule when he really was a universally popular and well regarded leader of the country. However, the likes of Stalin and Mao clearly did not represent the wishes of their entire nations; in the case of Stalin it becomes clear that even after 5 years of power he does not represent the wishes of his Party Congress, let alone the entire USSR.

[pranabjyoti]

And, I must beg the question, what part of the execution quotas and other 'excesses' of 1937-38 which even dear old Grover Furr admits are part of 'tireless struggle'? If that is Socialism's 'tireless struggle', to murder it's own because of political deviation, then I am not a Socialist. That said, I clearly don't believe that is Socialism. You will never convince me that the overwhelming majority of those who heroically won the revolution for Russia in 1917 were fascists or capitalists. It is just a ridiculous assumption. Absolutely ridiculous. Trotsky and Stalin, in truth, were as bad as each other. However, if you look at the trial testimony and personal letters from the likes of Bukharin, you need only a modicum of sense to see that the man was not a fascist-trotskyist-capitalist-counter-revolutionary-anti-worker type that he was painted out to be.
Perhaps they aren't "capitalists", "imperialist-assistants", but actually they were just unable to shake off their petty-bourgeoisie class vice and ultimately led to their degeneration. History of 20th century is a proof that how petty-bourgeoisie ideology has destroyed years of struggle. Without tireless struggle against petty-bourgeoisie class and their ideology, SOCIALISM CAN NOT BE ACHIEVED and if you don't understand that, you better stay away from class struggle and anything related to it. After all, it's not a picnic party or some kind of debate class.

I'm not coming at this from a Trotskyist point of view - i.e. i'm not casting judgement on Stalin's entire period of rule. However, when I look at the period of the mid-late 1930s as objectively as I can, I can only draw negative conclusions.
You need some historical study. If you wish, I can suggest some good books of that period.

Also, that a Socialist state can be 'ruled' by one person for such an extended period is clearly anathema to Socialist democracy, but that is really a story for another day. It seems ironic that people call themselves Socialists and then support the extended rule of Stalin, Mao, Castro etc. Not that a long period of rule necessarily means they ruled badly, but that one person has a long period of rule is clearly going to go against the idea of workers' grassroots democracy. It's difficult to argue that, in the case of Stalin and Mao in particular, that they were deserving of such extended periods of rule when they were so contentious. It might be just about passable, for example in the case of Fidel Castro, to have a long period of rule when he really was a universally popular and well regarded leader of the country.
Stalin's USSR was certainly NOT LESS DEMOCRATIC than Castro's Cuba or Chavez's Venezuela. Actually Stalin led the party and USSR during it's toughest time in history and it's his credit that he tirelessly take the driver's seat. Your and I (and I think many) would probably just flee from such a situation.

However, the likes of Stalin and Mao clearly did not represent the wishes of their entire nations; in the case of Stalin it becomes clear that even after 5 years of power he does not represent the wishes of his Party Congress, let alone the entire USSR.
On which data, over which such an overwhelming conclusion of yours stand. PLEASE ENLIGHTEN US.

[Soviet dude]

I didn't think I would have to return to the issue of Mike Ely's ramblings about Grover Furr anytime soon. For whatever reason, Mike Ely has chosen to write another, very ignorant, diatribe about Furr's work. As is typical with nearly everything Ely writes, it is literally devoid of any specifics, so I will try to keep this as general as possible. And brief.

Mike Ely is a revisionist. I think that goes without saying. Lots of people, even people who follow his blog, are beginning to realize this more and more. Kasama is essentially a “Left-wing” attempt at engagement with the various social-democrat forces on the Left. Kasama is the “(ultra) left-wing” of the “Left Refoundationist” and “Left Regroupment” project. Attacking Stalin, and experimenting with various personalities like Zizek and Badiou, are about appealing to the petty-bourgeois and social-democrat forces Ely seeks to influence.

Mike Ely is also not a very creative or critical thinker, even though he tries to portray himself as such. After all, a man who spent half his life in the Avakian-cult couldn't be. Most of Ely's ideas don't represent much of a break with the version of Maoism he was taught decades ago. Very limited personal experiences, such as in Czechoslovakia, become the evidential foundation for sweeping judgments about the entire Soviet Bloc. I don't think Ely has the ability to seriously question previously held beliefs.

In any case, I think it is clear Ely took some of the criticism directed at him over the last exchange to heart, which is a good thing. Ely has been making threads about old books and articles by scholars like J. Arch Getty and Sheila Fitzpatrick. He knows, but probably would never admit, that he doesn't really know much about this field (cause admitting it would undermine his bullshit attacks on Furr). It's pretty hilarious, for instance, he thinks a 20 year old article about the Soviet penal system deserves a spot on his blog. It may make those who don't really much about the field think Ely reads this stuff and knows what he is talking about, but it's clear to everyone who does understand this field that Ely is fascinated by something everyone in-the-know already knows about. Ely's own comments on the article also show he has no ability to talk about this article in the context of the debates in the 1980s.

I ask that Ely be forthright with his readers, and admit he is just beginning to stumble into this field, and stop trying to present himself as someone who has the knowledge to debate Furr on the topic. Ely still falsely tries to contrast the work of Getty with Furr, and continues to censor comments on his website pointing out Getty privately believes basically the same thing Furr does. Ely is in over his head here, and should stop making an ass of himself. After all, if Furr is a crazy “creationist,” and Getty is the expert you uphold on evolution, what does it mean when the expert you uphold believes the same thing the “creationist” believes?

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

The bogus nature of Furr's work was exposed in these threads a few months ago:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/new-article-shows-t132429/index.html

http://www.revleft.com/vb/evidence-leon-trotsky-t132632/index.html

[Soviet dude]

Don't most people think you suffer from a mental illness?

[DaringMehring]

Rosa thinks critically, unlike people who swallow the Moscow trials and Furr's BS hook line and sinker. Believing on the basis of a bunch of bourgeois observers sucking up to the regime, plus forced confessions, plus some old Tsarist slanders about foreign agents, plus some kooky conspiracy theory type stuff, that the Bolshevik Party of 1917 was made up of fascists and foreign agents, all because they want to keep the great mantle of Stalin clean in their fantasy worldview, basically proves that someone doesn't have the mental faculty to fight for socialism effectively today.

I disagree with Ely that "Stalin needs better defenders" bc I see Stalin as the gravedigger of the revolution, but I'd certainly rather see people who want to uphold the historical legacy of Stalin, do so with some modicum of sense and grasp of reality. Like, if you don't believe in God, you'd still rather have the believers be of the "its hard to know, the physical laws of the universe could be God, God could be someone running us in a computer simulation" etc. type, rather than the "History records several miracles and Jesus rose from the dead. Hallelujah" type. In that, I think Ely is right to use the creationist parallel.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Don't most people think you suffer from a mental illness?What the fuck kind of comment is that!?

[The Vegan Marxist]

The bogus nature of Furr's work was exposed in these threads a few months ago:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/new-article-shows-t132429/index.html

http://www.revleft.com/vb/evidence-leon-trotsky-t132632/index.html

Those never "exposed" the nature of Furr's work. Stop kidding yourself, Rosa. All you presented was two more tiresome ramblings about whether or not Trotsky was a traitor to the Soviet Union, which is a pretty obvious yes to those who aren't some Trotskyist cult like the ISO.

[penguinfoot]

Trotskyist cult like the ISO.

Surely you mean Trotskyite cult?

[The Vegan Marxist]

Surely you mean Trotskyite cult?

Yes, I do, my mistake.

[Jimmie Higgins]

Don't you both mean Cliffite? Or is that one only used by other Trotskyist - er "ites".

[penguinfoot]

Don't you both mean Cliffite? Or is that one only used by other Trotskyist - er "ites".

Surely Trotskyite-fascist-wrecker would be more appropriate in this instance?

[The Vegan Marxist]

Don't you both mean Cliffite? Or is that one only used by other Trotskyist - er "ites".

Mainly only to those who still uphold the baseless theory of "State-Capitalism", but not under that of Cliff's personal theory on said "State-Capitalism".

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Soviet Dud:


Don't most people think you suffer from a mental illness?

Only those who have already been certified.:)

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Veggie Burger:


Those never "exposed" the nature of Furr's work. Stop kidding yourself, Rosa. All you presented was two more tiresome ramblings about whether or not Trotsky was a traitor to the Soviet Union, which is a pretty obvious yes to those who aren't some Trotskyist cult like the ISO.

In that case, you will find it easy to say where those threads go wrong -- particularly S Artesian's comments.

And it's a bit rich you dialectical mystics using the word 'cult'.:lol:

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

Pranabjyoti: The fact that 98 of the 139 CC members of the 1934 Congress were executed, imprisoned or exiled in the years after would tend to show that they were not all united behind Stalin, no? The fact that Stalin received several times more negative votes from the same Congress than Kirov, for election to the Politburo would also tend to suggest this. Or am I wrong here? Please tell me..

Also, Pranabjyoti, you say that perhaps they were not capitalist-imperalists or fascists, those who were tried in the late 1930s. In that case, why were they tried as such? The likes of Zinoviev and Kamenev were tried as being part of the Trotskyite centre, no? Stalin believed (or said) that Trotsky was an imperialist agent, did he not? Thus, being part of any supposed Trotskyite centre would suggest implication in capitalist-imperalism.

To be honest, Pranabjyoti, I sympathise with the period of Stalin for the shocking level of analysis of it, amongst bourgeois historians. I myself often defend Stalin against the excesses of bourgeois historians, but from a viewpoint of wanting historical accuracy and legitimacy. It would be nice if you, too, could show some wont for historical legitimacy, and say that whilst, yes, Stalin's period of leadership led to some great achievements for the USSR and for Socialism, it also had huge excesses which cannot and should not be explained away with some worthless mis-truths.

I beg you to at least consider this.

[pranabjyoti]

Pranabjyoti: The fact that 98 of the 139 CC members of the 1934 Congress were executed, imprisoned or exiled in the years after would tend to show that they were not all united behind Stalin, no? The fact that Stalin received several times more negative votes from the same Congress than Kirov, for election to the Politburo would also tend to suggest this. Or am I wrong here? Please tell me..

Also, Pranabjyoti, you say that perhaps they were not capitalist-imperalists or fascists, those who were tried in the late 1930s. In that case, why were they tried as such? The likes of Zinoviev and Kamenev were tried as being part of the Trotskyite centre, no? Stalin believed (or said) that Trotsky was an imperialist agent, did he not? Thus, being part of any supposed Trotskyite centre would suggest implication in capitalist-imperalism.

To be honest, Pranabjyoti, I sympathise with the period of Stalin for the shocking level of analysis of it, amongst bourgeois historians. I myself often defend Stalin against the excesses of bourgeois historians, but from a viewpoint of wanting historical accuracy and legitimacy. It would be nice if you, too, could show some wont for historical legitimacy, and say that whilst, yes, Stalin's period of leadership led to some great achievements for the USSR and for Socialism, it also had huge excesses which cannot and should not be explained away with some worthless mis-truths.

I beg you to at least consider this.
It's not that linear or simple as you think. Out of 139, 98 has been executed doesn't mean they just opposed Stalin and later executed. History is very complex process and there are up and downs, both in historical process and even among the historical characters. I suggest you to read The Great Conspiracy Against Russia by Albert Kahn and Michael Sears. I have plenty of sources regarding this matter in the Stalin of this history section above. Kindly read my posts and you will get some information.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

I've read your posts. I've given you my opinion and some factual explanations, but you cannot address it further than saying, effectively, 'it's complicated'. It really would be to the benefit of you, I and other revolutionaries if you were to simply admit that it was wrong for the Central Committee of 1934, and the many delegates to that same Party Congress, to have been executed, imprisoned and exiled.

Where you and I differ is that I give critical support to the USSR in the period between the October Revolution and WW2. I understand it's important role, as an entity, in pushing the working class towards emancipation, in moving towards Socialist economic relations etc.

I also recognise that, for all its successes, the USSR, especially in the mid/late 1930s, was involved, as a state (note, I am implicating the state, not solely Stalin) in the murder of many innocents. Even Grover Furr admits that First Party Secretaries presented Stalin with the idea of arbitrary 'death quotas', an idea which he accepted and signed off. Can you defend this? You shouldn't try to. Just admit it was wrong and that it is something that needs to be worked on and kept in mind, for any future Socialist revolution.

[The Vegan Marxist]

^I appreciate your open-mindness on the subject. Yes, mistakes were made during Stalin's leadership, then there was things that had happen that was beyond Stalin's hands, for Stalin was only one man, & held one role out of many roles others had taken part in too.

Comrade Stalin deserves our support. What he brought to this people deserves our support. But the future deserves not just our support of Stalin, but also our right to criticism as well.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Veggie Burger:


Comrade Stalin deserves our support.

Like a rope supports a hanging man...:)

[The Vegan Marxist]

Veggie Burger:



Like a rope supports a hanging man...:)

Rosa, seriously, you contribute absolutely nothing in this forum. Just leave since you can't be anything but a total ***** all the time.

[penguinfoot]

Rosa, seriously, you contribute absolutely nothing in this forum. Just leave since you can't be anything but a total ***** all the time.

Fuck off, sexist pig. Go back to that crappy blog of yours. Also, your poetry makes me LOL, what are you, like 13?

[DaringMehring]

^I appreciate your open-mindness on the subject. Yes, mistakes were made during Stalin's leadership, then there was things that had happen that was beyond Stalin's hands, for Stalin was only one man, & held one role out of many roles others had taken part in too.

Comrade Stalin deserves our support. What he brought to this people deserves our support. But the future deserves not just our support of Stalin, but also our right to criticism as well.

Word mistake makes it sounds like Stalin accidentally added two numbers together wrong. There's mistakes, and there's murdering all possible political opposition, soaking the banner of communism in innocent & communist blood. Not to mention invading Finland... not to mention re-illegalizing abortion... not to mention, falsifying soviet democracy... not to mention etc. etc.

Stalin didn't bring things to the people the workers&peasants of the USSR brought those things to themselves.

[Blackscare]

Rosa, seriously, you contribute absolutely nothing in this forum. Just leave since you can't be anything but a total ***** all the time.



And some goofy-looking wanna be Intifada member with a youtube fetish really contributes anything? Rosa made a few posts at the end of this thread just highlighting the fact that this topic was covered in earlier threads, and all you can do is call her a "total *****". Of course, this is after her very first post in here was met with an unwarranted comment about her sanity.


If you can't play nice, get your pathetic scummy little ass back to youtube and keep whining about how the Trotskyist plague is preventing the final social-veganist revolution from coming about.

This thread really displays a lot about you scummy types that like to cling to character assassination and slander in arguments regarding Trotsky. The way you champ at the bit to fling shit at other posters such as Rosa betray more than a little bit of desire to roleplay as a Stalinist hangman or propagandist.

Try to actually put forward a coherent argument, and stop with the sexist cop-out remarks.

[pranabjyoti]

I've read your posts. I've given you my opinion and some factual explanations, but you cannot address it further than saying, effectively, 'it's complicated'. It really would be to the benefit of you, I and other revolutionaries if you were to simply admit that it was wrong for the Central Committee of 1934, and the many delegates to that same Party Congress, to have been executed, imprisoned and exiled.
They had been trialed in open court before eyewitnesses and many proofs of their guilt had been produced and at the end, they had nothing to do but to confess. How can you forgot that a large section of the old party leaders abandoned the side of workers and take beside the warlords during WWI, THE MENSHEVIKS. The same people, who fought gloriously against Tsarist regime during 1905 and also the SR's and Narodniks, who even killed the Tsar but what was their actual role during the revolution? Please, don't forgot previous history while discussing a certain period.

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Veggie Burger:


Rosa, seriously, you contribute absolutely nothing in this forum.

Even so, it's still more than you.:)


Just leave since you can't be anything but a total ***** all the time.

Yes, I'm trying to catch you up.

[Soviet dude]

Fuck off, sexist pig.

Rosa isn't a woman. Rosa is a lecturer at some crappy British university, and Rosa is his ex-wife's name. Given the way he writes on here, it is no wonder both the SWP and his wife dropped him like a sack of dirt.

[The Red Next Door]

Fuck off, sexist pig. Go back to that crappy blog of yours. Also, your poetry makes me LOL, what are you, like 13?

You fuck off.

[The Red Next Door]

Rosa, seriously, you contribute absolutely nothing in this forum. Just leave since you can't be anything but a total ***** all the time.

You didn't need to call her a *****.

[The Vegan Marxist]

You didn't need to call her a *****.

Not a her. And why not?

[The Vegan Marxist]

Fuck off, sexist pig. Go back to that crappy blog of yours. Also, your poetry makes me LOL, what are you, like 13?

:laugh:

Of course, you bring up topics that are completely irrelevant to the topic at hand. It's the only way you can show any kind of dominance that disregards of anything having to deal with intellects.

How my writing of poems, which is only a hobby of mine, have anything do with this thread is beyond me. But to answer your question, no, I haven't been 13 in 7 years. Though, I should ask you the same thing given your childish attacks on matters that's none of your business.

Also, how am I a sexist? Calling someone a ***** is being sexist now?

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

They had been trialed in open court before eyewitnesses and many proofs of their guilt had been produced and at the end, they had nothing to do but to confess. How can you forgot that a large section of the old party leaders abandoned the side of workers and take beside the warlords during WWI, THE MENSHEVIKS. The same people, who fought gloriously against Tsarist regime during 1905 and also the SR's and Narodniks, who even killed the Tsar but what was their actual role during the revolution? Please, don't forgot previous history while discussing a certain period.

I've read the confessions of Kamenev, Zionoviev in full and most of Bukharin's testimony. It is quite clear that they are not speaking the truth, from both the content of their speeches and the language they use. Especially in Bukharin's testimony, it is quite clear that he is not some crypto-Capitalist, if you take into account the notes he wrote to Stalin and the overall style of his testimony.

In any case, was Bukharin, in particular, ever anything other than a committed Bolshevist, Socialist and Marxist theorist? No. He did nothing wrong except to opppose Stalin, and he seemingly paid for this dissent with his life.

It is likely that these confessions were gotten through force. In 1939 Stalin published the following letter: http://marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1939/01/10.htm

which condoned physical abuse of prisoners and stated that it had been happening up to two years previously which, neatly, ties in with when the great purges began and the Trial of the Twenty-One occurred.

I don't

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

And, before you say I am a prisoner of bourgeois propaganda, I have made the above post, including its rather explicit conclusions, armed with nothing more than an inquisitive mind, my previous knowledge gleaned on the subject and the archives at www.marxists.org

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Soviet 'Dude':


Rosa isn't a woman. Rosa is a lecturer at some crappy British university, and Rosa is his ex-wife's name. Given the way he writes on here, it is no wonder both the SWP and his wife dropped him like a sack of dirt.

I am in fact a worker and a trade union rep (unpaid); but you mystics like to make stuff up, don't you?:)

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Veggie Burger:


Not a her. And why not?

Because that's all you can do. You certainly can't take me on. And that's because, like the other dialectical mystics here, you are a coward.

[pranabjyoti]

And, before you say I am a prisoner of bourgeois propaganda, I have made the above post, including its rather explicit conclusions, armed with nothing more than an inquisitive mind, my previous knowledge gleaned on the subject and the archives at www.marxists.org (http://www.marxists.org)
The trot BS, I am sure that you are prisoner of anarcho-trot propaganda. Kindly read those literature and documents listed below. I am sick and tired of repeating them, but still;
1. Mission To Moscow by Joseph E Davis, US Ambassador to USSR during the Moscow Trials.
2. In Search of Soviet Gold by John LittlePage, US Engineer and worked in USSR during the 30's.
3. Report of the Observer Newspaper on 23.8.1936
4. Report of Daily Chronicle Newspaper on 26.1.1936
5. Report of Walter Durante, Moscow representative of New York Times on 25.1.1937.
6. Report of Harold Danny, Moscow representative of New York Times on 14.3.1938.
7. Lies Concerning The History of USSR by Maria Sousa.
And many more.......
Before those eye-witnesses, the Moscow trial had been conducted and Bukharin and others had given their confession, when they just can not but had to speak the truth. As per one observer "if this is a drama, then a talent of Shakespeare and Belasso combined is needed for its staging". I HOPE YOU TOO WILL AGREE THAT STALIN DIDN'T HAS THAT MUCH OF ART TALENT.
I also want to ask you one question, if Bukharin was really an old Bolshevik, then why he was anti-Stalin. AS IF BEING ANTI-STALIN IS ENOUGH TO PROVE ONES DEVOTION TO REVOLUTION.

[chegitz guevara]

Calling someone a ***** is being sexist now?

Yes, and has been for decades.

[The Vegan Marxist]

Veggie Burger:



Because that's all you can do. You certainly can't take me on. And that's because, like the other dialectical mystics here, you are a coward.

Hah! We've had our discussions in the past, Rosa. I, for one, am tired of hearing your shit. So I'm not going to please your rhetoric by provoking this further any longer. So go & call all Dialectical Materialists "mystics" all you you want, Rosa. Hope you have fun with it.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

The trot BS, I am sure that you are prisoner of anarcho-trot propaganda. Kindly read those literature and documents listed below. I am sick and tired of repeating them, but still;
1. Mission To Moscow by Joseph E Davis, US Ambassador to USSR during the Moscow Trials.
2. In Search of Soviet Gold by John LittlePage, US Engineer and worked in USSR during the 30's.
3. Report of the Observer Newspaper on 23.8.1936
4. Report of Daily Chronicle Newspaper on 26.1.1936
5. Report of Walter Durante, Moscow representative of New York Times on 25.1.1937.
6. Report of Harold Danny, Moscow representative of New York Times on 14.3.1938.
7. Lies Concerning The History of USSR by Maria Sousa.
And many more.......
Before those eye-witnesses, the Moscow trial had been conducted and Bukharin and others had given their confession, when they just can not but had to speak the truth. As per one observer "if this is a drama, then a talent of Shakespeare and Belasso combined is needed for its staging". I HOPE YOU TOO WILL AGREE THAT STALIN DIDN'T HAS THAT MUCH OF ART TALENT.
I also want to ask you one question, if Bukharin was really an old Bolshevik, then why he was anti-Stalin. AS IF BEING ANTI-STALIN IS ENOUGH TO PROVE ONES DEVOTION TO REVOLUTION.

anarcho-trot? I wasn't aware that the two were linked. In fact, i'm sure that Anarchists and Trotskyists aren't the best of friends...

And, i've already told you, the last few replies have been based almost completely on articles from marxists.org, including testimony to the trial of the twenty-one (the testimonies of Kamenev and Zinoviev in particular), and various letters and speeches of J. Stalin translated on the website.

What part of the trial ofthe twenty one, and letters and speeches from Stalin, are 'anarcho-trot' propaganda?

Stop throwing stupid words around too, you don't like it, i'm sure, if someone calls you a Stalinist. Anarcho-Trot is a ridiculous word with little linguistic relevance.

[DaringMehring]

Pranabjyoti, you give the same "evidence" again and again, mainly the "eyewitness" reports of bourgeois observers. So I guess, you'll take the bourgeois word for it... sure hope you don't convince workers to follow that example.

Fact is, the political climate on the eve of WWII was filled with diplomatic jockeying to ally with USSR. The bourgeoises suddenly saw the USSR in a different light... when their home countries were threatened by Nazis. No wonder, at this time govts began to formally recognize the USSR (eg USA).

Second off, the depression had all the petitbourgeois in a tizzy, disoriented, grasping at straws. Some of them grasped at Marxism without really understanding it. That meant blindly supporting the USSR, for them. For instance The Nation magazine, which refused to support the USSR in Lenin's time or during the 20s, then supported it during Stalin's time 30s and 40s (ha ha), then again turned against it.

If you apply any kind of critical thinking to the trials, look at the Dewey report for instance to see all the factual errors, read about the torture and threats to family, look at the ridiculous content of the "confessions", and consider the personal history of the defendants, then there is no way any reasonable person can have any doubt about the fact that they were frame ups.

You also fail to recognize that Bukharin submitted to Stalin and was carrying out work under his regime. As had many of the others executed. They had tried to oppose Stalin on some issue or at some point, been broken and demoted, and continued to work as per their new position. That is not exactly "anti-Stalin"... I mean Lenin had people working with him that had been in far more serious political disagreements - Bogdanov, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin...

Basically, when you say "if Bukharin was really an old Bolshevik, then why he was anti-Stalin" you reveal yourself as an idiot. Of course he was an Old Bolshevik --- what, every history is wrong? Lenin never said he was "rightly the favorite of the whole Party"? How could an Old Bolshevik be anti-Stalin, well lets see, how bout for a huge number of reasons as you could see if you bothered to read their writings. Not to mention, that Stalin ended up killing so many of them.

[Blackscare]

This thread got real pathetic real quick.

[Vladimir Innit Lenin]

I was trying to keep to the issue at hand. There are clearly a lot of issues that need answering by those in the Stalin camp, in terms of the purges of 1937-38 and the execution of former 'Old Bolsheviks', as well as the liquidation, imprisonment and/or exile of many Central Committee members and Congress Delegates from the 1934 Congress, supposedly the 'Congress of Victors'.

My main issue here is not that i'm trying to paint J. Stalin as a 'bad guy', or to cast judgement on other aspects of his rule - outside this period, and outside this field (i.e. i'm not casting judgement on his economic policies or on the way the USSR was run, necessarily) -, but simply to establish what happened in this raucous period.

It has become clear to me, through a variety of sources including from the mouth of Stalin himself, that people were the recipients of capital punishment not because they were fascists, imperialists or bourgeois agents, but because they opposed Stalin's domestic policies. Whether the likes of Bukharin were correct in terms of economic policy, or whether Stalin was, is immaterial here. The simple fact is that these people were executed not for committing a crime, but for having political differences - within the broad sphere of Marxism and not straying into non-Socialist forays, - with J. Stalin.

There is also the issue of the death quotas. Grover Furr himself admits that First Party Secretaries were, by Stalin no less, given permission to fill these execution quotas - and they did. Whether or not the initial idea was Stalin's or not (I tend to think that it was not) is, to some extent, immaterial, since I am not trying to prove that Stalin was 'evil' or whatever, as I don't really believe that he was. Rather, he allowed, rather than established, a culture of excess and for that, he must bear a great culpability, along with those mindless bureaucrats who devised and filled these execution quotas.

That is all, for now. Whilst i'm against Trot-ML flame wars, I feel it important to be able to set out a principled opposition - accompanied by a critical analysis - to the events of 1937-38 in the USSR and to the opposition of great revolutionaries, without casting a judgement over Stalin's rule, character or personal involvement in the vagaries of the situation.

[DaringMehring]

I was trying to keep to the issue at hand. There are clearly a lot of issues that need answering by those in the Stalin camp, in terms of the purges of 1937-38 and the execution of former 'Old Bolsheviks', as well as the liquidation, imprisonment and/or exile of many Central Committee members and Congress Delegates from the 1934 Congress, supposedly the 'Congress of Victors'.

My main issue here is not that i'm trying to paint J. Stalin as a 'bad guy', or to cast judgement on other aspects of his rule - outside this period, and outside this field (i.e. i'm not casting judgement on his economic policies or on the way the USSR was run, necessarily) -, but simply to establish what happened in this raucous period.

It has become clear to me, through a variety of sources including from the mouth of Stalin himself, that people were the recipients of capital punishment not because they were fascists, imperialists or bourgeois agents, but because they opposed Stalin's domestic policies. Whether the likes of Bukharin were correct in terms of economic policy, or whether Stalin was, is immaterial here. The simple fact is that these people were executed not for committing a crime, but for having political differences - within the broad sphere of Marxism and not straying into non-Socialist forays, - with J. Stalin.

There is also the issue of the death quotas. Grover Furr himself admits that First Party Secretaries were, by Stalin no less, given permission to fill these execution quotas - and they did. Whether or not the initial idea was Stalin's or not (I tend to think that it was not) is, to some extent, immaterial, since I am not trying to prove that Stalin was 'evil' or whatever, as I don't really believe that he was. Rather, he allowed, rather than established, a culture of excess and for that, he must bear a great culpability, along with those mindless bureaucrats who devised and filled these execution quotas.

That is all, for now. Whilst i'm against Trot-ML flame wars, I feel it important to be able to set out a principled opposition - accompanied by a critical analysis - to the events of 1937-38 in the USSR and to the opposition of great revolutionaries, without casting a judgement over Stalin's rule, character or personal involvement in the vagaries of the situation.

I agree Granma, that not every policy of Stalin's was wrong or bad. However, you are way too lenient here.

First you say those who were executed were killed for opposing Stalin politically. That is not true. Besides all the petty criminals, etc. --- there were plenty of Stalin loyalists executed. Like the NKVD purges, headlined by Yagoda and then Yezhov, or Kirov who was earlier assassinated. The true criteria was not even "politically disagrees with Stalin" but "represents a potential alternate power base to Stalin."

Then you say that Stalin himself was not to blame for the situation but it was just the general atmosphere, which Stalin allowed. While of course it is correct to always look to broader forces rather than individuals, in a dictatorship individuals to some degree take on power of broader forces. Eg, you can't do an analysis of German Nazism without accounting for Hitler's particular personality. There is no way to pretend that Stalin was passive, rather than active, in the purges. In fact he closely supervised who was to be killed, edited the scripts for the show trials, etc.

[pranabjyoti]

Pranabjyoti, you give the same "evidence" again and again, mainly the "eyewitness" reports of bourgeois observers. So I guess, you'll take the bourgeois word for it... sure hope you don't convince workers to follow that example.
"Bourgeoisie observer"? They were journalists, engineers, diplomats, lawyers. How can their citizenship of a capitalist-imperialist country automatically make them "bourgeoisie"? I am repeating them because they were eye-witnesses. How just that fact make them bourgeoisie OR AS THEY SPOKE IN FAVOR OF STALIN?

[pranabjyoti]

anarcho-trot? I wasn't aware that the two were linked. In fact, i'm sure that Anarchists and Trotskyists aren't the best of friends...
There are little difference in their attitude towards Stalin, both often vomit imperialist propaganda to prove their point.

And, i've already told you, the last few replies have been based almost completely on articles from marxists.org, including testimony to the trial of the twenty-one (the testimonies of Kamenev and Zinoviev in particular), and various letters and speeches of J. Stalin translated on the website.
Zinoviev and Kamenev both voted against the uprising during 1917 and moreover, they leaked out the plan by publishing it and openly opposing it. Your replies are based on such characters(!).

What part of the trial ofthe twenty one, and letters and speeches from Stalin, are 'anarcho-trot' propaganda?
They way they are presented in the website.

Stop throwing stupid words around too, you don't like it, i'm sure, if someone calls you a Stalinist. Anarcho-Trot is a ridiculous word with little linguistic relevance.
I will be angry, because there is nothing that can be called as "Stalinism". What actually represented by that word is Leninism. "Stalinism" and "Stalinists" are two trot innovation.

[DaringMehring]

Ok, so despite:

* The absolute improbability of the charges (eg the Jewish Old Bolsheviks Zinoviev and Kamenev are working with the Nazis to murder workers via industrial accidents in Ural plants)

* The use of torture and threats to family in obtaining confessions

* The Dewey commission finding numerous factual errors, such that "any unprejudiced person" must conclude that "no attempt was made to ascertain the truth."

* Khruschev's "Secret Speech" detailing exactly how the frame ups were conducted

* The defendants of the trials being officially rehabilitated by the USSR in 1988

You believe in the validity of the trials.

Ok.

Good luck tying your shoes.

[red cat]

Ok, so despite:

* The absolute improbability of the charges (eg the Jewish Old Bolsheviks Zinoviev and Kamenev are working with the Nazis to murder workers via industrial accidents in Ural plants)

* The use of torture and threats to family in obtaining confessions

* The Dewey commission finding numerous factual errors, such that "any unprejudiced person" must conclude that "no attempt was made to ascertain the truth."

* Khruschev's "Secret Speech" detailing exactly how the frame ups were conducted

* The defendants of the trials being officially rehabilitated by the USSR in 1988

You believe in the validity of the trials.

Ok.

Good luck tying your shoes.

I think the last two points are in favour of Stalin, from the anti-revisionist point of view at least.

[DaringMehring]

I think the last two points are in favour of Stalin, from the anti-revisionist point of view at least.

Look, I'm not trying to disparage the USSR somehow, or say that everything Stalin did was bad or there couldn't have been anything worse than Stalin. I'm not trying to defend the capitalist restoration in the USSR, or replicate bourgeois exaggerations about Stalin.

The point is --- Stalin's leadership had disastrous aspects and this can't be ignored by some conspiracy theory ala Grover Furr. I have worked with various M-L and Maoists who have no problem acknowledging that, and I have no problem working with them, even if some differences on Stalin etc. remain. However I have only had bad experiences with ones that can't let go of The Great Helmsman cult and all its negative consequences.

And surely you'd agree, it is possible to not agree with everything Khruschev did politically (I think he did some bad things but also some good things, like shifting production away from heavy industry towards increased living standards) while still believing his insider account of the Purges. Like how Sukhanov, while not a Bolshevik, nonetheless provided an honest and really useful first person account of the revolution.

[red cat]

Look, I'm not trying to disparage the USSR somehow, or say that everything Stalin did was bad or there couldn't have been anything worse than Stalin. I'm not trying to defend the capitalist restoration in the USSR, or replicate bourgeois exaggerations about Stalin.

The point is --- Stalin's leadership had disastrous aspects and this can't be ignored by some conspiracy theory ala Grover Furr. I have worked with various M-L and Maoists who have no problem acknowledging that, and I have no problem working with them, even if some differences on Stalin etc. remain. However I have only had bad experiences with ones that can't let go of The Great Helmsman cult and all its negative consequences.

And surely you'd agree, it is possible to not agree with everything Khruschev did politically (I think he did some bad things but also some good things, like shifting production away from heavy industry towards increased living standards) while still believing his insider account of the Purges. Like how Sukhanov, while not a Bolshevik, nonetheless provided an honest and really useful first person account of the revolution.

There is no Marxist Leninist or Maoist who completely upholds every aspect of the USSR. However, while criticizing the USSR, credibility of the sources involved must always be taken into account.

Khruschev's class politics and principles such as declaring the USSR as state of the whole people etc. indicate that he was sabotaging class-struggle in the USSR. In a previously socialist state where the proletariat has lost power to the state-capitalists, living standard of the proletariat might keep on increasing temporarily due to past socialism. Revisionists don't destroy all gains of socialism in a single day, due to the fear of mass-uprisings. The process that began under Khruschev was completed by the rehabilitation of all historical revisionists and finally the dissolution of the USSR.

[Soviet dude]

It has become clear to me, through a variety of sources including from the mouth of Stalin himself, that people were the recipients of capital punishment not because they were fascists, imperialists or bourgeois agents, but because they opposed Stalin's domestic policies. Whether the likes of Bukharin were correct in terms of economic policy, or whether Stalin was, is immaterial here. The simple fact is that these people were executed not for committing a crime, but for having political differences - within the broad sphere of Marxism and not straying into non-Socialist forays, - with J. Stalin.

This is simply not provable by you. You would not be able to produce a quote from Stalin saying anything like that, so I won't bother asking. Stalin, in fact, basically saved Bukharin for another few years, when he personally had suspicions raised against during the first round of trials him dismissed. And we know Bukharin was plotting to murder Stalin as early as 1928. We know this from the memoirs of Jules Humbert-Droz.


There is also the issue of the death quotas. Grover Furr himself admits that First Party Secretaries were, by Stalin no less, given permission to fill these execution quotas - and they did.

You have been lied to. These documents are not quotas, but limits. They are the maximum number of executions allowed, and when certain areas over-fulfilled them, they had to send in other documents making special requests.


Rather, he allowed, rather than established, a culture of excess and for that, he must bear a great culpability, along with those mindless bureaucrats who devised and filled these execution quotas.

Hindsight is 20/20. I don't think anyone in Stalin's shoes would have done much different, and in fact, would have probably committed more excesses.


That is all, for now. Whilst i'm against Trot-ML flame wars, I feel it important to be able to set out a principled opposition - accompanied by a critical analysis - to the events of 1937-38 in the USSR and to the opposition of great revolutionaries, without casting a judgement over Stalin's rule, character or personal involvement in the vagaries of the situation.

Most people here aren't capable of discussing events in a serious way.

[DaringMehring]

There is no Marxist Leninist or Maoist who completely upholds every aspect of the USSR. However, while criticizing the USSR, credibility of the sources involved must always be taken into account.

Khruschev's class politics and principles such as declaring the USSR as state of the whole people etc. indicate that he was sabotaging class-struggle in the USSR. In a previously socialist state where the proletariat has lost power to the state-capitalists, living standard of the proletariat might keep on increasing temporarily due to past socialism. Revisionists don't destroy all gains of socialism in a single day, due to the fear of mass-uprisings. The process that began under Khruschev was completed by the rehabilitation of all historical revisionists and finally the dissolution of the USSR.

Ok. I don't find Khruschev to be all that you say, in that from the standpoint of sociological processes, he represented a continuation of the Stalin regime. On the point you mentioned of proclaiming USSR a state for all people, is just propaganda on the part of the regime, very similar to Stalinist declarations about having achieved socialism.

But that's beside the main point, which is that now you're running to some binary view of history where Tov. Stalin uncovered all the "historical revisionists" and rightly killed them. Ie, upholding the Moscow trials as legitimate. On the basis that Khruschev was supposedly a revisionist.

I can only imagine the psychology goes into holding on to an obviously false belief like that. I suspect, it goes hand in hand with a feeling of powerlessness in the fight for socialism that surrounds us. Much like the Alex Jones listeners believe in a fantasy of conspiracies, evil men, and champions of truth, which in reality reflects their own powerlessness -- a powerlessness which is precisely due to them not finding the true causes of their problems, economic exploitation by capitalists.

The fact is, the Purges remains an important issue because it represents the culmination of the Soviet Thermidor. "Kamenev bore himself with particular courage. He told his interrogator: 'You are now observing Thermidor in a pure form. The French Revolution taught us a good lesson, but we weren't able to put it to use. We don't know how to protect our revolution from Thermidor. That is our greatest mistake, and history will condemn us for it.'" --- unless we learn from the experience of the USSR, like the Bolsheviks learned from the failures of the Paris commune about how to seize the power, then socialism will not succeed. We can't shirk this scientific duty with Grover Furr conspiracy theories.

[The Vegan Marxist]

Khruschev's class politics and principles such as declaring the USSR as state of the whole people etc. indicate that he was sabotaging class-struggle in the USSR. In a previously socialist state where the proletariat has lost power to the state-capitalists, living standard of the proletariat might keep on increasing temporarily due to past socialism. Revisionists don't destroy all gains of socialism in a single day, due to the fear of mass-uprisings. The process that began under Khruschev was completed by the rehabilitation of all historical revisionists and finally the dissolution of the USSR.

I don't think this is entirely true. Whether we like Khrushchev's politics or not, it wasn't just a "temporary" increase in living standards. In fact, most, if not all, social rights increased all the way to Gorbachev. Even Gorbachev brought some social accomplishments under his leadership. This is not to say that we should support Khrushchev's politics. Revisionism doesn't necessarily mean the person is wanting to restore capitalism. In fact, I would go so far to say that it wasn't Khrushchev's intentions at all in restoring capitalism. Too many achievements was made towards Socialism under Khrushchev to make such an analysis.

[Marxach-Léinínach]

I don't think this is entirely true. Whether we like Khrushchev's politics or not, it wasn't just a "temporary" increase in living standards. In fact, most, if not all, social rights increased all the way to Gorbachev. Even Gorbachev brought some social accomplishments under his leadership. This is not to say that we should support Khrushchev's politics. Revisionism doesn't necessarily mean the person is wanting to restore capitalism. In fact, I would go so far to say that it wasn't Khrushchev's intentions at all in restoring capitalism. Too many achievements was made towards Socialism under Khrushchev to make such an analysis.

Wasn't the late-50s/early 60s when the USSR finally recovered from WWII? I think that probably played a large part in the living standards going up.

[Marxach-Léinínach]

Worth noting as well that although the living standards continued to rise even after Khrushchev came to power, from Brezhnev onwards however the life expectancy went down four years, illnesses, accidents, alcoholism all increased, you had social decay, economic stagnation etc. It's nothing compared to the full-scale genocide by poverty you've had in the ex-socialist states since the restoration of capitalism, but it still shows that socialism was undermined to a fairly significant extent under the revisionist leadership.

[DaringMehring]

Worth noting as well that although the living standards continued to rise even after Khrushchev came to power, from Brezhnev onwards however the life expectancy went down four years, illnesses, accidents, alcoholism all increased, you had social decay, economic stagnation etc. It's nothing compared to the full-scale genocide by poverty you've had in the ex-socialist states since the restoration of capitalism, but it still shows that socialism was undermined to a fairly significant extent under the revisionist leadership.

Also worth noting, that Brezhnev came to power on the back of the military, which ended up consuming 50% of the nation's GDP at its height.

Khruschev also had a graceful exit, at least (from wiki):

"Even though Khrushchev suspected the real reason for the meeting,[245] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikita_Khrushchev#cite_note-244) he flew to Moscow to be attacked by Brezhnev and other Presidium members for his policy failures and what his colleagues deemed to be erratic behavior.[246] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikita_Khrushchev#cite_note-245) Khrushchev put up little resistance, and that night called his friend and Presidium colleague Anastas Mikoyan (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anastas_Mikoyan), and told him,
I'm old and tired. Let them cope by themselves. I've done the main thing. Could anyone have dreamed of telling Stalin that he didn't suit us anymore and suggesting he retire? Not even a wet spot would have remained where we had been standing. Now everything is different. The fear is gone, and we can talk as equals. That's my contribution. I won't put up a fight.[247] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikita_Khrushchev#cite_note-246)"

[The Vegan Marxist]

Wasn't the late-50s/early 60s when the USSR finally recovered from WWII? I think that probably played a large part in the living standards going up.

Economic stability had increased, so did living standards, yes. But I'm also talking about areas of the Soviet Union that wasn't affected by the Nazi invasion.

[pranabjyoti]

Economic stability had increased, so did living standards, yes. But I'm also talking about areas of the Soviet Union that wasn't affected by the Nazi invasion.
The whole Soviet economy was badly affected by Nazi invasion. How can some parts of USSR can be out that. It's pretty sure that those places, which was never under Nazi occupation, can also face economic restriction and lack of manpower as they had been supplied to fronts.

[Saorsa]

What a depressing thread. Honestly, a lot of M-Ls are embarassing themselves here.

[The Vegan Marxist]

The whole Soviet economy was badly affected by Nazi invasion. How can some parts of USSR can be out that. It's pretty sure that those places, which was never under Nazi occupation, can also face economic restriction and lack of manpower as they had been supplied to fronts.

This is true, but to state that the regions that weren't attacked by the Nazi's are just as worse off as those ares that were attacked by the Nazi's is a bit black 'n white. (not saying that you're assuming such)

[Rosa Lichtenstein]

Veggie Burger:


Hah! We've had our discussions in the past, Rosa.

A few brief comments in 'Visitor's Messages' does not, I think, constitute a discussion.


I, for one, am tired of hearing your shit.

Have you bugged my toliet? You need to get out more if you think that is entertainment.


So I'm not going to please your rhetoric by provoking this further any longer.

Scared, as I said.:lol:


So go & call all Dialectical Materialists "mystics" all you you want, Rosa.

Me? I have never done this!:rolleyes:


Hope you have fun with it.

Just so long as you don't; that's enough for me.:)

[pranabjyoti]

This is true, but to state that the regions that weren't attacked by the Nazi's are just as worse off as those ares that were attacked by the Nazi's is a bit black 'n white. (not saying that you're assuming such)
I just want to say that the whole soviet economy was badly affected and no part of a country can be out of economy.

[Soviet dude]

Mike Ely, Grover Furr, and 9/11 Conspiracy Theories.

In recent posts on the Kasama blog, Mike Ely has denounced the views and arguments of Grover Furr as akin to the views espoused by the 9/11 Movement. Here are a few of his comments:


Grover makes claims he doesn’t back up and he substitutes smoke for evidence. His writings are crackpot theories — quite similar in their illogic to the 911 cranks.


What is proof and evidence for Lyndon Larouche or for Eric von Daniken or for 911 Truthers is neither proof nor evidence for us.
The problem with Grover’s work is not that it ‘has a wrong line,” or that its assessment of a historical event is wrong — it is that it applies the same method as other conspiracy theories. It is different in form and focus (i.e. it is leftist, it claims to be communist etc.) — but in method and (il)logic it is not different from 911 conspiracy theories or Eric von Daniken’s discussion of alien evidence around the pyramids, or creationism.
Grover’s stuff is a classic case of pseudo-science — it has (roughly) the form, language, tone of actual scholarly research, but it is a rickety construct of false logic and irrelevant “evidence.” He documents many things, but never proves his thesis. It is not any different from “creation science” or 9/11 conspiracy “documentation,” or illuminati research. There are more comments of this nature. Ely primarily seeks to attack Furr, not on the basis of evidence or disagreement with interpretation of evidence, but by character assassination, not unlike what hard-right conservatives have tried to do to Furr in the past. The implication is clear: don't bother reading what Furr writes, because it is terrible stuff not worth wasting time on, like Young Earth Creationism, 9/11 conspiracy theories, etc.

What has occurred to me, is that in a much broader fashion, the way Mike Ely and his fellows at Kasama argue is much more akin to what is found in the 9/11 Truth Movement than anything Furr says. I will elaborate the similarities below:

What characterizes the typical 9/11 Truther position?

It is often asserted by those in the 9/11 Truth Movement that the things that everyone can see are not as they appear. The very first claims that could be categorized as 9/11 conspiracy theory involve claims that the Pentagon was hit by a missile. This was more believable at first, as the footage available of the plane hitting the Pentagon was grainy, and there didn't appear to be any wreckage in the footage of the rubble.

The next series of claims were that a plane hitting the towers could not cause the building to collapse. It is asserted that the towers could not have fallen in the fashion they did, that a plane hitting a building couldn't cause the collapse, and/or some combination of both.

Building 7 generally forms the last link of the chain, as a supposedly much harder case for the government and anti-skeptics to discount. Fewer videos and pictures of the damaged sustained by the building exist, it was not struck by an aircraft, yet it experienced a similar collapse. 9/11 Truthers argue it must, presumably like the Twin Towers, have actually been destroyed via controlled demolition.

After the “holes” in the official account have been exposed, typically evidence for the alternative scenarios is not proved. The “fact” that the official account is false is the main evidence for the alternative scenario. There are also other types of 'evidence' proved, namely some (quite true) evidence that suggests the Bush administration used the incident to ram through foreign-policy positions it wanted. There are also generally tons of obscure claims, some true and some dubious, that are harder to fit with the official account (the arrest of several Israeli agents on 9/11 in New Jersey, various other weird things that don't necessary mean anything, etc).

So what can we say characterizes the attitude and thinking of a 9/11 Truther?

1. What appear to be plain facts are not the what they seem.

A missile had to have hit the Pentagon. Planes did not cause the collapse of the Twin Towers, it was a controlled demolition. Building 7 has no good explanation, etc. This can actually get quite a bit more bizarre, up to including claims of holograms of planes, but it is generally the case that what can be checked should not be taken at face value.

2. Exposing “holes” in the official account is the primary evidence for the proposed alternative.

There is no credible first-hand account of a conspirator. No one admits to preparing the controlled demolitions, or firing the missile at the Pentagon, or anything else. There are no government documents showing this, etc. But it doesn't matter. The evidence for the events is the fact that the official account can't explain (to the satisfaction of the skeptic) something that is allegedly wrong with the account.


3. Possible government motives are strong evidence of a plot.

The Bush administration needed something like 9/11 to get push through its foreign-policy agenda. It would have been difficult or impossible to get America behind two wars without something as dramatic as 9/11 to realign the political landscape. This in itself, even if it is true, is taken as strong evidence itself of a government plot.

While there are many differences with what is going on here with Ely and Furr, since Ely brought up the comparison to 9/11 conspiracy theories first, I think it is worth exploring, especially considering talking about the evidence isn't something Ely appears willing to do.

How is Ely more similar to 9/11 truthers in his thinking than Furr? Let's list some ways.

1. 9/11 Truthers highly distrust US government sources. Mike Ely almost rejects out of hand (Soviet) government sources.

Both the US and Soviet governments produced a large body of documents regarding the 9/11 and the Moscow Trials. The vast majority of these documents do not doubt the official accounts of either government. 9/11 Truthers and Ely highly distrust this government material. Furr does not, nor do most Americans doubt their government's claims about 9/11.

2. 9/11 Truthers believe they have debunked the official version and that supports their alternative account. Mike Ely accepts the Western 'debunking' of the Moscow Trials as a basis for their alternative explanations.

9/11 Truthers spend a great deal of time trying to poke holes in the official account. 'Debunking' the official account is considered defacto evidence of their alternative explanation. They do not feel the need to produce evidence, say, in the form of conspirator testimony, to support their views. Likewise, Ely and Western anti-communists have never bothered trying to provide much proof that the defendants were tortured and their families threatened. Alleged 'problems' with the official Soviet account are so overwhelming, they assert, that they simply must have used torture and threatened family members to get confessions. No credible evidence for this has ever been offered, but just like the 9/11 alternative account, it isn't needed.

On a lesser known note, the Dewey Commission did try a little harder than most modern anti-communists to poke holes in the official Soviet account. One example surrounds the Hotel Bristol. It was alleged by the Dewey Commission that the Soviets had flubbed up in their fabrications, and Holtzmann's testimony could not possibly be true. A recent article by Sven-Eric Holmström shows, on the contrary, how Trotsky and the Dewey Commission actually willingly lied about the facts in order to discredit the trials.

3. 9/11 Truthers think Bush exploiting 9/11 is powerful evidence of a plot. Mike Ely thinks Stalin wanted his political opponents gone.

9/11 Truthers think blowing up billion dollar buildings was necessary for the Bush administration to push through its foreign-policy objectives. Generally when pointed out that the US governments appears to just make up incidents like the Gulf of Tonkin as excuses, or that you wouldn't need to fly planes [B]and use controlled demolition at the same time to achieve the same result of shifting political discourse in your favor, this is dismissed. Likewise, pointing out the fact Stalin didn't need to kill these people to consolidate power, as many of them had already been disgraced and expelled from the party years before (only to be let back in by Stalin) doesn't seem to factor much the minds of most anti-communists and Mike Ely. It is just assumed Stalin is crazy.

So, 9/11 Truthers and Mike Ely believe government leaders concoct outrageous plots to fulfill political objectives. Blowing up the towers and framing the opposition are just to be understand as window-dressing for a naked-power play by top government officials. Pointing out that simply making up lies (like the Golf of Tonkin) or just re-expelling and re-exiling party officials could have done the same effect don't appear to affect their thinking.

It appears to me, that many, many more similarities can be drawn between the way Mike Ely thinks about the Moscow Trials and your typical 9/11 Truther thinks about 9/11 than Grover Furr. You could also make a further case that Mike Ely, like most 9/11 Truthers, talk about relatively sophisticated topics they know nothing about, while a lot of anti-skeptics tend to have more than a layman's grasp of the relevant field of knowledge, as in the case of the “Towers in Free Fall” type arguments. It is surely the case, that Grover Furr knows a great deal more about the topic than Mike Ely ever will. Not only is Mike Ely just beginning to read the actual relevant research (as opposed to Furr doing it for decades), Ely has no ability to read Russian! He can't read any of the research coming out of Russia, which is much more up to date, but he can't read the primary source material in its original language.

I would prefer to discuss the actual evidence, but as with most anti-communists (Ely definitely fitting into this category, just ask him what he thinks of Cuba), this isn't really possible. Ely would rather sling as much mud at his opponents as possible, to cover up the fact that he really doesn't have a grasp of this field, and probably never will (Ely is much too old of a dog to learn any new tricks). For whatever reason, Ely sees Furr as some sort of threat to the communist movement. What if people actually take Furr's views as what serious communists think! For heavens, we will never be able to win over the petty-bourgeois masses! Regular people will never question government/establishment views! That seems to be what Ely is actually implying with his rants about why Furr's views are so harmful.

Perhaps we should actually take a moment to consider whose views are actually more harmful to revolution: the view that lines up with the views of the most vile sorts of reactionaries, the bourgeois mass media, the treacherous social-democrats and the liberals, or the view that lines up with what the international communist movement?

Here, Ely no doubt would retort “the view that lines up with the truth.” But Ely has no means of arriving at the truth on this issue, nor does it appear he has any desire to do so. Grover Furr has spent decades on this task, trying very hard to be objective with what the evidence says, and has arrived at a conclusion that is not tolerable to the bourgeois establishment and their allies. Ely has merely tried reading books to bolster a view he has already long held, without any serious investigation. Yet he wants us to believe it is Furr who is the Creationist, the 9/11 Truther, and the one with views what ultimately harm the movement to overthrow capitalism and usher in a new age for humanity.

Since Ely seems to be so into people like Zizek, who like to contaminate Marxism with Freudian psycho-babble, perhaps he should like into the concept of Projection.

[Brother No. 1]

Because that's all you can do. You certainly can't take me on. And that's because, like the other dialectical mystics here, you are a coward.

This coming from a man who has spent his life trying to de-bunk dialectial materialism and try to prove worth out of it, and spends his time on a forum in which if you disagee or not even 'appreciate' his work he decides to put in a cute little insult as he tries to respond while calling you a mystic and cowardly. (yes for your so brave, right?)

I dare wonder if 4chan is better then you in social traits and even respect...

EDIT: Also its the internet, the concepts of cowardly and bravery in this forum are not so much visable. So, really, you may get over yourself in the 'pride' that you "pwned" someone on the fucking internet. Doing something in society > being on the internet and trying to act as if you are the jehovah of knowlege.

[kasama-rl]

A minor factual correction:

Soviet Dude writes:

" The implication is clear: don't bother reading what Furr writes, because it is terrible stuff not worth wasting time on, like Young Earth Creationism, 9/11 conspiracy theories, etc."

On the contrary, I think there is value in reading it. It is terrible history (i.e. it is mythology and misdirection). But it is important for communists to be able to identify science from pseudo-science. And Furr's work is one place to learn that.

When I was a kid, an early inspiring science teacher gave me the book "Worlds in Collision" by Immanuel Velikovsky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Velikovsky)
It is a book that seeks (through elaborate argumentation and accumulation of data) to prove that Venus came close to the earth in early human history with with various complex impacts. He said this is a book you should read -- while you shouldn't believe a word of it. It was training in scientific thinking.

Like Mao he believed: why not read it -- go into it and come out the other side.

I urge all of you to read Furr's attempts to prove the unprovable, to document what actually didn't happen.

It is good training in critical thinking, scientific method and communist materialism.

cheers.

[pranabjyoti]

A minor factual correction:

Soviet Dude writes:

" The implication is clear: don't bother reading what Furr writes, because it is terrible stuff not worth wasting time on, like Young Earth Creationism, 9/11 conspiracy theories, etc."

On the contrary, I think there is value in reading it. It is terrible history (i.e. it is mythology and misdirection). But it is important for communists to be able to identify science from pseudo-science. And Furr's work is one place to learn that.

When I was a kid, an early inspiring science teacher gave me the book "Worlds in Collision" by Immanuel Velikovsky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Velikovsky)
It is a book that seeks (through elaborate argumentation and accumulation of data) to prove that Venus came close to the earth in early human history with with various complex impacts. He said this is a book you should read -- while you shouldn't believe a word of it. It was training in scientific thinking.

Like Mao he believed: why not read it -- go into it and come out the other side.

I urge all of you to read Furr's attempts to prove the unprovable, to document what actually didn't happen.

It is good training in critical thinking, scientific method and communist materialism.

cheers.
Well, in that case people should also read some other relevant materials and I hope that wouldn't be pseudo-scientific history at all.

[The Vegan Marxist]

I urge all of you to read Furr's attempts to prove the unprovable

It would seem as if you've already made up your mind & closed it completely against any work stating the contrary. How is this critical thinking on your part?

[Wanted Man]

I don't quite get the prioritisation at Kasama. Obviously, the first thing they do is to post interesting news and analysis articles, and that's great. But I mean when it comes to their attempts to "reconceive" Maoism.

For some strange reason, one of their top priorities in this is to determinedly try to "prove right" all the main historical Trotskyist positions (dismissing everything that contradicts it). That's all well and good; if people want to spend their time on that endeavour, who am I to criticise them? But in that case, why don't they just do it as Trotskyists? If you're going to argue their viewpoints 90% of the time, I don't see the difference.

[Soviet dude]

A minor factual correction:

By this, you mean, "major obfuscation."


On the contrary, I think there is value in reading it. It is terrible history (i.e. it is mythology and misdirection).The only thing that is terrible is that you pretend to be a communist. You have no ability to judge what is good history and not. This whole discussion has been an exercise in watching you pretend to know things you don't. You just walk into blunder after blunder, blindly throwing shit in the dark, hoping it sticks to someone.

People should also read what you write, as an example of a over-the-hill phony communist desperately trying to assert himself as an authority on anything and everything. You accuse others of misdirection, but you can't actually bring yourself to discuss the evidence in even a slightly meaningful fashion. All you do is engage is the nastiest sort of character assassination, and then hysterically accuse others of doing this as a justification for censoring views you don't like. You're a despicable, hypocritical fraud.


When I was a kid, an early inspiring science teacher gave me the book "Worlds in Collision" by Immanuel Velikovsky (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immanuel_Velikovsky)Guess what, I started reading atheist-skeptic literature over a decade ago myself. My first introduction to critical-thinking literature in my early teen years was Michael Shermer's Why People Believe Weird Things (I would meet him in person years later, and not be very impressed). He has two whole chapters dedicated to Holocaust Denial. When I first started reading Ludo Martens, I wondered to myself if this was like Left-wing Holocaust Denial. So I reread those two chapters. It isn't even close.

What did I do next? I started actually reading the sources Ludo Martens (and later, Grover Furr) cited in their essays. It was the fact-checking, a process that literally took years, that convinced me that the establishment paradigm of Soviet history is not only false, but maliciously so. You think people accept this stuff for quasi-religious reasons? Are you fucking retarded?

How much time have you actually spent reading scholars like J. Arch Getty? Have you ever communicated with him privately? Do you even fucking have a clue how repressive academic Sovietology is? Do you have some moronic view of universities as bastions of liberalism and free-thinking? Do you think you can get away with publicly saying the charges are mostly true, without the entire establishment conspiring against you, to destroy your career?

I wouldn't be so angry if you just weren't so massively full of shit. Everything you write shows you barely have a passing familiarity with the subject. You probably skimmed through Road to Terror on a whim, because your sycophant buddy Patrick recommended it to you. You obviously don't know anything about Western academic anti-communism directed at China either, but that doesn't stop you from having a knee-jerk reaction to Frank Dikötter's book, does it? Do you think your readers who got a clue can't see your rantings are nothing but a reflection of your bias, created and nurtured long ago in the Avakian cult you belonged to? Do you think anyone who has a clue accepts anything you say about Furr as somehow authoritative, because you throw around some logic-terms like you know how to properly use them?


I urge all of you to read Furr's attempts to prove the unprovable, to document what actually didn't happen.And here yet again, you are unable to actually deal with anything Furr says. You constantly construct strawman positions. You imply that accepting the guilt of the accused requires a vast global conspiracy. Nowhere is this implied by Furr, and if you would bother to even fucking read him, you would know this. I already told you once the guilt of the accused, even on a hyper-literal understanding of what the defendants confessed to, doesn't require any sort of global conspiracy. This is the strawman bullshit you have purposefully brought into the discussion in order to smear Furr. You lack the basic ability to honestly even discuss opposing ideas, unless of course, it is from right-opportunist slime like Carl Davidson.


It is good training in critical thinking, scientific method and communist materialism.Reading the garbage on Kasama is good training to understand how the phony-Left justifies lining up with Western imperialism, how when push comes to shove, they always side with reactionaries, and how the advanced-guard of counterrevolution performs its work inside the communist movement.

[penguinfoot]

I don't quite get the prioritisation at Kasama. Obviously, the first thing they do is to post interesting news and analysis articles, and that's great. But I mean when it comes to their attempts to "reconceive" Maoism.

For some strange reason, one of their top priorities in this is to determinedly try to "prove right" all the main historical Trotskyist positions (dismissing everything that contradicts it). That's all well and good; if people want to spend their time on that endeavour, who am I to criticise them? But in that case, why don't they just do it as Trotskyists? If you're going to argue their viewpoints 90% of the time, I don't see the difference.

Nonsense, in a recent article Kasama referred to "Soviet socialism", if I remember rightly the argument was that Soviet socialism needs better and more nuanced defenders than Furr because Furr's arguments rely on the assumption that there were large numbers of individuals who were consciously seeking to undermine and overthrow the Soviet Union when, from Kasama's point of view, the more acute danger to socialism comes from the continued existence of capitalist relations and phenomena, which spontaneously produce capitalist ideology and by their very existence undermine socialism - this is a classical Maoist argument, and not a bad one as far as Maoism goes, but it is not something that a Trotskyist could or would ever argue, because we do not think that the Soviet Union was ever socialist.

Similarly, Kasama has published a "study" of the Cultural Revolution which is exaggerated in its praise and has nothing to say about the reaction of the party leadership to genuine working-class struggles such as the wind of economism in Shanghai towards the end of 1966 and also does not say anything about the use of the PLA to destroy the most militant Red Guard factions and establish revolutionary committees across China in late 1968 - Trotskyists have always taken a much more critical stance towards the Cultural Revolution, and the fact that Kasama described their articles as a ground-breaking study is pretty laughable because they do not comprise a study and were not ground-breaking by any standard, in that they did not make use of new source materials or say anything that has not already been said by other Maoist supporters of the Cultural Revolution or which cannot be found in the reports and statements that were being made by the CPC and its supporters whilst the Cultural Revolution was actually taking place. Kasama is also an enthusiastic supporter of the Maoists in Nepal and India to the extent that when they did host an article with a more critical viewpoint not so long ago - here, http://kasamaproject.org/2010/08/25/arguments-against-the-maoist-peoples-war-in-india/ - they slandered the author as an opponent of revolution, without giving any extended critique or analysis of their positions. Trotskyists are not uncritical cheerleaders of peasant guerilla wars, Kasama does merit that description.

At a theoretical level, they do not accept Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, which is why they can hold the uncritically positive attitudes towards the PRC and contemporary Maoist movements that they do. There is nothing Trotskyist about Kasama, at all.

[The Vegan Marxist]

At a theoretical level, they do not accept Trotsky's theory of permanent revolution, which is why they can hold the uncritically positive attitudes towards the PRC and contemporary Maoist movements that they do. There is nothing Trotskyist about Kasama, at all.

But at a materialist level, they do accept Trotskyist slander & use such against those who are deemed as "Stalinists" or "Furrites".

[penguinfoot]

But at a materialist level

"At a materialist level"? What does that even mean? You're as stupid as the rest of them, if not more so. I've never seen Kasama use terms like Stalinism (or "Furrite", for that matter), which isn't surprising, because their vision of socialism draws its inspiration from the PRC - and is therefore one which allows a party to represent the working class and act on its behalf rather than the working class having to play a central role in its own emancipation. That is the essence of Stalinism.

[The Vegan Marxist]

"At a materialist level"? What does that even mean? You're as stupid as the rest of them, if not more so. I've never seen Kasama use terms like Stalinism (or "Furrite", for that matter), which isn't surprising, because their vision of socialism draws its inspiration from the PRC - and is therefore one which allows a party to represent the working class and act on its behalf rather than the working class having to play a central role in its own emancipation. That is the essence of Stalinism.

If you can't fucking understand what it means to take things under a materialist perspective over an ideological one, then you're the one who's just as stupid as those of Kasama. They don't have to use the terms "Stalinism" or "Furrite" to understand that they deem those of such. Anyone who takes the stance going against Trotsky's entire structural arguments on Stalin, then you're deemed as a "Stalinist", in which those of Kasama, especially from that of Ely, has clearly brought himself at a level of that of Trotsky when it came to the lies he made against Stalin.

Don't even get me started on the position Kasama takes, especially Ely, to those who upholds Furr's work over that of what Kasama offers.

[penguinfoot]

If you can't fucking understand what it means to take things under a materialist perspective over an ideological one, then you're the one who's just as stupid as those of Kasama

There's nothing "materialist" about anything you've said or about the fact that Kasama is slightly more critical of Furr than you are, you only used "materialist" because you wanted to use what you regard as a Marxist buzzword (not that "materialist" or "materialism" actually are distinctively Marxist terms) in order to obscure your absolute ignorance of Marxism and add some theoretical gloss to what you're saying. You saying "at a materialist level" added absolutely nothing to what you were trying to say, in any way. You might have just said that "they accept Trotskyist slander", and then you would have been wrong, but less immediately stupid. If you'd care to explain what the use of "materialist" is intended to achieve, be my guest.

As for the real matter at hand, it's absurd to say that Kasama accept "Trotsky's entire structural arguments", simply because some of their basic political positions are ideas that no Trotskyist could ever hold whilst remaining within any understanding of the Trotskyist tradition. Most obviously, Kasama think that the Soviet Union was in some way socialist during the 1930s, which is why several of their most recent articles include references to "Soviet socialism", as I've already pointed out, but this is not something that any Trotskyist could ever argue because the Soviet Union was a country that was surrounded by hostile capitalist states and one of Trotsky's most fundamental theoretical bases was that socialism cannot exist in one country, because socialism requires an advanced productive apparatus and an apparatus of that kind can only be international in scale, due to late capitalism having integrated the whole world into one economic unit. You cannot describe as Trotskyist an organization or website that believes that it is possible for one country to be socialist without stretching the concept of Trotskyism beyond all meaning - and whether you like it or not, words do have definite meanings, they should be used in precise ways that help articulate disagreements rather than obscure them. As well as (or in connection with) their position on socialism on one country, Kasama also believe that the Maoist insurgencies in India and Nepal are revolutionary forces and that the PRC was socialist despite having come into being primarily through a guerilla war that was conducted in the countryside without the active involvement of the working class - these are, again, positions that no Trotskyist could feasibly uphold, because Trotskyists think that the organized working class is the only force capable of achieving socialism and that the working class cannot, in its struggle to build socialism, be represented by a party or any other kind of organization that seeks to act or speak on its behalf.

If you'd like to explain how a website/organization can be Trotskyist - according to any sensible definition - whilst believing that socialism can exist in one country and whilst arguing that socialism can come into being through peasant guerilla war, then go ahead.

[The Vegan Marxist]

There's nothing "materialist" about anything you've said or about the fact that Kasama is slightly more critical of Furr than you are, you only used "materialist" because you wanted to use what you regard as a Marxist buzzword (not that "materialist" or "materialism" actually are distinctively Marxist terms) in order to obscure your absolute ignorance of Marxism and add some theoretical gloss to what you're saying. You saying "at a materialist level" added absolutely nothing to what you were trying to say, in any way. You might have just said that "they accept Trotskyist slander", and then you would have been wrong, but less immediately stupid. If you'd care to explain what the use of "materialist" is intended to achieve, be my guest.


So you're saying that one cannot merely claim to be ideologically Maoist, but also, under practical means, argue under a Trotskyist structure of thought? Anyone can claim to be Maoists, & in a lot of ways those of Kasama are Maoists, but whenever they come to argue against those who show complete opposition to Trotsky, they then switch their idealist stance of being Maoists, by then switching to Trotskyism through materialism. In other words, they speak so very highly of Maoism, but when they actually put their arguments in practice, through say a debate, I see more Trotskyist dogma being spouted than I do Maoist.

[penguinfoot]

So you're saying that one cannot merely claim to be ideologically Maoist, but also, under practical means, argue under a Trotskyist structure of thought? Anyone can claim to be Maoists, & in a lot of ways those of Kasama are Maoists, but whenever they come to argue against those who show complete opposition to Trotsky, they then switch their idealist stance of being Maoists, by then switching to Trotskyism through materialism.

I still don't get your rationale behind your use of "materialism" and "idealism" here. I presume you don't think that Trotskyism is materialist in the sense of being grounded in an understanding of the historical process and an analysis of material conditions and forces in a way that Stalinism is not (although this is true) and what you actually seem to be saying is that Kasama see themselves as Maoists but that their actual positions and arguments are a lot closer to Trotskyism. Now, this is still an idiotic position to take, but why not express it in those words rather than misusing terms like "materialism" and "idealism" in completely inaccurate and embarrassing ways?

More importantly, you haven't shown what is Trotskyist about Kasama. They believe that socialism can exist in one country and that one such country was the Soviet Union in the 1930s, they believe that Maoist insurgencies can bring about socialism, and that the Maoists in India and Nepal are revolutionary forces in those countries. How can those positions be upheld by Trotskyists? The only way you could conceivably define Kasama is Trotskyist is if you stretch the meaning of Trotskyism to include everyone who has an attitude that is less than entirely uncritical towards the Soviet Union under Stalin's leadership, and if you do that then you would have to include substantial numbers of Maoists within the category of Trotskyism, in that one of Mao's own critiques of Stalin was that he is said to have failed to properly distinguish between contradictions (putting aside, for now, the philosophical problems with that term) within the people and contractions between the people and their enemies and is also said to have sought to deal with contradictions in a mechanical and bureaucratic way rather than through relying on mass initiatives of the kind that Mao would supposedly employ during the Cultural Revolution and other campaigns. As I said, words have definite meanings, they exist to make things clear, you cannot simply distort and twist them to serve your own silly political ends.

[kasama-rl]

I originally wrote:
"I urge all of you to read Furr's attempts to prove the unprovable..."

To which VeganMarxist replied:

"It would seem as if you've already made up your mind & closed it completely against any work stating the contrary. How is this critical thinking on your part?"

This is a seventy year old controversy. It is not some new controversial event. Every serious thinking person over thirty has an opinion, and every communist should have one.

On a point of method: The fact that I have worked out a firm opinion (based on decades of study) doesn't mean that I didn't form that opinion with a critical method and an open mind. (That would seem to be obvious.) In other words it is not true that a currently agnostic position is proof of critical thinking, and a clear verdict is not.

There are many controversies to discuss and debate over the Soviet Union... and some are quite urgent. But seeking to prop up the discredited verdicts of the various Moscow Trials is not one of them. It is a dead letter and for obvious reasons.

The Soviet revolution was one of the great events in modern history -- and the first serious attempt to take the socialist road. The first planned socialist economy, the first attempted collectivisation of agriculture, the first attempt to develop a modern economy with socialist means, and (of course) the heroic resistance to Nazi invasion.

All of these things are important achievement to sum up (the positive and negative of this experience).

But it is also important to understand why something went so wrong over the 1930s. Not just the repression but the general conservatization of society (the rise of official Russian nationalism, the widening of wage gaps, the glorification of traditional family relations, the emergence of one-man management, the transformation of political struggle into a police affair, the recriminalization of abortion and gay relations, the re-conservatization of the military (uniforms, medals, hierarchy, etc. etc.), and so on.

But very significant was the dampening of the political life of the country, and the use of massive repression to force through both government policy and obedience -- it was not just that people were punished unjustly (for minor offenses or false charges) though that should be significant to us all, but it is also that this kind of peacetime state terror (with hundreds of thousands of executions in a vast witchhunting frenzy) ended the revolutionary political life in many ways. It chilled the revolutionary activism among the people in a way that is devastating for socialism.

On the strange charge that having a critical evaluation of major Soviet events is "trotskyist" -- I agree with the point that this would lead to labeling virtually all Maoists as Trotskyists (which I have heard defenders of Soviet state-capitalism do all through the 70s and 80s.)

Kasama's discussion of trotskyism's main theses has been ongoing, and it is there for anyone to examine:

Mike Ely: Learning from a Century of Revolution (Including Stalin) (http://kasamaproject.org/2009/01/07/mike-ely-on-triumphs-sorrows-of-the-soviet-revolution/)

Nando: History’s Cruelty towards Trotskyism (http://kasamaproject.org/2009/01/05/nando-historys-cruelty-towards-trotskyism/)

* * * * * *

As for the more foamy personal attacks on me above, I won't waste anyone's time by responding. Everyone can judge for themselves their lack of merit.

I'm more interested in a discussion of the real issues that confront us on this Soviet history -- which come up every time any of us self-describes as communist.