Stalin Poll [Archive]

Monkey Riding Dragon

22nd December 2010, 19:29

I marked good. My view of him is about 60% positive.

I think the accomplishments of the Stalin era are mostly obvious to those of us who have studied the subject, but also think that some of his important views are often overlooked. For example, Stalin didn’t support this Great Man theory himself! In fact, unless my sources are wrong, he opposed the personality cult that was built up around him. Likewise, he was actually a supporter of contested elections and fought for that consistently. These things are often overlooked by comrades next to the usual recognition of how his policies saw the Soviet Union develop from a rather backwater country into a superpower, how living standards both drastically improved and often grew more equitable as a result of his socialist policies, how they turned back and defeated Nazi Germany, etc. (all amidst a generally hostile international setting in which the USSR rarely had any diplomatic or trading partners to speak of). Stalin is very often wrongly conveyed in this highly authoritarian and egocentric way that, quite frankly, is definitely exaggerated, I believe, as factoids like these highlight.

At the same time, I think there should be some retrospective criticism of Stalin’s various occasional decisions to ally with the various imperialist camps (here liberal, there fascist) and identify the negative consequences of such alliances for the third world, as well as for the revolutionary spirit in the Soviet Union and the world communist movement in general. But of course this too should be approached with the nuance of recognizing that this was the first experience with sustained socialism in history.

There should also be retrospective criticism of Stalin's methodology regarding the handling of alleged political opponents, in which they were usually approached through the police paradigm. i.e. Leaders denounced during the Stalin period, both capitalist and communist, were seen as foreign spies and saboteurs, and thus the solution was formulated that the appropriate response was to arrest and punish them. Clearly this commandist approach led to considerable popular disillusionment with 'socialist' politics, ideologically speaking. Such questions should in reality be handled in a mass-based way (i.e. in a way that relies on the people to develop and apply solutions, rather than the police).

I also would disagree with the common pro-Stalin view that heavily lopsided industrial buildup at the expense of the countryside (where most of the people lived) was necessarily essential to winning WW2. I believe such a view negates the lessons of people’s war, the most central one of which being that the masses themselves are the main weapon you have. We need to rupture with this view that it’s just “whoever has the most tanks and planes will win”. It’s the masses that are really mighty and who possess the “spiritual atom bomb”! And I tend to think the Maoist principle of simultaneously developing both the countryside and the urban areas is also universally relevant (except in overdeveloped countries like this one).

One final, but also very important, area of criticism I would have of Stalin was that he was really locked into the theory of productive forces, which contends that once you've established a rudimentary level of socialism (i.e. once you've initially expropriated the capitalist class), the process of getting to communism from there mainly just entails building up the economy, rather than continuing on with revolutionary class struggle. Authentic socialism is an ongoing process of revolutionary transition.

But again, while I think there were real shortcomings to Stalin's leadership, I also recognize that he did his personal best to lead the first socialist country in history through what to this generation would be unfathomable challenges (e.g. the constant threat of invasion and actually losing some 27 million people -- close to 15% of the population -- to the Nazi attack) and managed to accomplish a great deal in that regard with no prior experience to go on.

Lyev

22nd December 2010, 19:31

Well, as Marxists, I think it is somewhat tenuous for us to reduce all political and economic problems of the USSR post-Lenin to Stalin as the man himself (great men don't make history), but, on the other hand, I think Stalin was a dickhead, for want of a better phrase. He oversaw the downfall of the USSR into a despotic state-capitalist regime; the deformation of the Third International into an arm of capital; he purged from the party thousands upon thousands of revolutionaries that actively took part in October and he was complacent in the rise of fascism, from Spain to Germany.

Comrade1

22nd December 2010, 19:31

Take yer revisionism and wipe yer own ass with it! Stalin was a great contributor to the Anarchist cause, even though the material conditions and degeneration may have forced him to take steps that may seem a bit drastic to some Anarchists today. But all non-sectarian Anarchists know that Stalinists are truely our comrades, even when they shoot at us or round us up.
Did you just hear yourself, I think you said you comrades can shoot at you and round you up :lol: but thats not the point. The point is Stalin was not terrible nor was he great, I would say he made a "good shot" for socialism in the USSR.

Rafiq

22nd December 2010, 19:39

In my opinion, he was a cool guy when he robbed banks :lol:

Seriously, he was a total ass.

He obliterated Class Struggle, fucked up the name of Socialism, befriended Fascists, eliminated International Socialist rhetoric and replaced it with Nationalism, betrayed a Revolution, was an authoritarian shit, brought in a red Bourgeoisie, Was going to send Jews to gulag before his death, and ruined all hope for Socialism.

The only reason people like him is because of rhetoric "He fought the Nazis", yeah, remember 1938?

"But he industrialized the USSR" So? Hitler also improved living standards in Germany, what's your point?

"But there are cool songs about him!" Okay point taken.

Rafiq

22nd December 2010, 19:40

He was a authotorian state-capitalist, not even close to an anarchist

Fixed.

Comrade1

22nd December 2010, 19:44

Fixed.
Thank you, better said your way.

scarletghoul

22nd December 2010, 19:46

You should read this (http://ml-review.ca/aml/AllianceIssues/All30v.htm) if you want to see the actual role that Stalin played in the Doctor's Plot. And there were tons of old Bolsheviks who weren't purged. As for the ones who were, having been in the party for a long time doesn't make them immune from being counter-revolutionary, Deng Xiaoping was an 'old Bolshevik' so to speak, wasn't he?
Stalin did indeed have many objections and misgivings regarding some of the bad incidents that occurred under his leadership, like the doctors' plot, but they still are ultimately his responsibility. It's absurd when people characterise Stalin as an anti-Semite (overall his historical role has been 'pro-Semitic'), but I really do think he could have done more in this particular instance.

Widerstand

22nd December 2010, 19:54

Did you just hear yourself, I think you said you comrades can shoot at you and round you up :lol: but thats not the point. The point is Stalin was not terrible nor was he great, I would say he made a "good shot" for socialism in the USSR.

Well one can hardly blame the Bolsheviks for it, after all our Anarchist comrades by their unreflected and ignorant opposition to the strawman of "Authoritarianism" were in a position to undermine the success of the greatest revolutionary project of the 20th century. They really can't be reasoned with, either.

In my opinion, he was a cool guy when he robbed banks :lol:

Seriously, he was a total ass.

He obliterated Class Struggle, fucked up the name of Socialism, befriended Fascists, eliminated International Socialist rhetoric and replaced it with Nationalism, betrayed a Revolution, was an authoritarian shit, brought in a red Bourgeoisie, Was going to send Jews to gulag before his death, and ruined all hope for Socialism.

The only reason people like him is because of rhetoric "He fought the Nazis", yeah, remember 1938?

Trotskyite lies.

"But he industrialized the USSR" So? Hitler also improved living standards in Germany, what's your point?

Hitler didn't improve the living standards for most Germans. Building Autobahnen hardly makes u for sending them to the front to die or to work camps.

The Ben G

22nd December 2010, 19:54

Bad. He was a major asshole, though I'm not gonna deny that he did have some positives to his negatives.

Comrade1

22nd December 2010, 19:59

Trotskyite lies.

Im a Marxist and agree.......

scarletghoul

22nd December 2010, 20:03

(now to balance things out incase anyone thought I wasn't a shameless Stalin apologist)
Thank you, better said your way.Don't fall into the trap of 'state-capitalist' theory. It makes absolutely no economic sense, and largely serves as a way for people to disown the unattractive points of socialist practice so they can feel good about themselves. For example, when you tell someone you're a commie and they go "but what about Stalin/Korea/Mao/etc" its easier to just go "I don't support them, they're not even socialist they're state-capitalist", rather than actually looking at their pros and cons as important parts of socialist history.

In my opinion, he was a cool guy when he robbed banks :lol:
This is one more point in his favour yes; he was a proper BAMF as a young revolutionary. Not only was he gangster bank-robber and pirate, but he was also a poet. We've all seen the young stalin photo. I mean, who looks that cool in a police mug shot, in 1912, or whatever ?

Seriously, he was a total ass.

He obliterated Class Struggle, fucked up the name of Socialism, befriended Fascists, eliminated International Socialist rhetoric and replaced it with Nationalism, betrayed a Revolution, was an authoritarian shit, brought in a red Bourgeoisie, Was going to send Jews to gulag before his death, and ruined all hope for Socialism. Leaving aside the completely meaningless and vague claims, there are a few points here- 1. to accuse the leader of the defeat of the Nazis of 'befriending fascists' is just sily. 2. Yes he ruined all hope for socialism.. by helping socialists take over much of Asia and half of Europe... 3. the Jewish question has been touched on already here. I do not see anything to suggest that Stalin was behind or even unopposed to the anti-semitic acts that occurred under his regime. There were prominant Jews in his government, and he helped establish the Jewish Autonomous region (this was before the state of Israel). As I said he does bear ultimate responsibility for the bad actions, but to say he was actively trying to put the Jews in camps is nothing short of ridiculous. 4. find me an example of any revolution surviving a significant amount of time (let alone under attack from the worlds most powerful empires) without being led by an 'authoritarian shit'.

"But there are cool songs about him!" Okay point taken.zvFRuio-3fI

Comrade1

22nd December 2010, 20:10

(now to balance things out incase anyone thought I wasn't a shameless Stalin apologist)Don't fall into the trap of 'state-capitalist' theory. It makes absolutely no economic sense, and largely serves as a way for people to disown the unattractive points of socialist practice so they can feel good about themselves. For example, when you tell someone you're a commie and they go "but what about Stalin/Korea/Mao/etc" its easier to just go "I don't support them, they're not even socialist they're state-capitalist", rather than actually looking at their pros and cons as important parts of socialist history.

This is one more point in his favour yes; he was a proper BAMF as a young revolutionary. Not only was he gangster bank-robber and pirate, but he was also a poet. We've all seen the young stalin photo. I mean, who looks that cool in a police mug shot, in 1912, or whatever ?
Leaving aside the completely meaningless and vague claims, there are a few points here- 1. to accuse the leader of the defeat of the Nazis of 'befriending fascists' is just sily. 2. Yes he ruined all hope for socialism.. by helping socialists take over much of Asia and half of Europe... 3. the Jewish question has been touched on already here. I do not see anything to suggest that Stalin was behind or even unopposed to the anti-semitic acts that occurred under his regime. There were prominant Jews in his government, and he helped establish the Jewish Autonomous region (this was before the state of Israel). As I said he does bear ultimate responsibility for the bad actions, but to say he was actively trying to put the Jews in camps is nothing short of ridiculous. 4. find me an example of any revolution surviving a significant amount of time (let alone under attack from the worlds most powerful empires) without being led by an 'authoritarian shit'.

zvFRuio-3fI
There is such things as State-capitalism as there is StateLESS-capitalists. I do not agree with Stalin, Mao, or Castro. They were looking for monitary gain rather than social gain. Which is a terrible start to socialism. And dont go and call me a trotskyist, I'm a marxist and disagree with Stalin, he was a total moron.

Widerstand

22nd December 2010, 20:18

Trotskyite lies.

Im a Marxist and agree.......

Of course Trots are also Marxists, who ever said different?

Comrade1

22nd December 2010, 20:22

Of course Trots are also Marxists, who ever said different?
Nobody ever said that, it just seems that most people think trots are the only people who oppose stalin

Burn A Flag

22nd December 2010, 20:26

The fact that Stalin liquidated all the old Bolsheviks that didn't die of natural causes kind of convinces me of his betrayal to the revolution.

scarletghoul

22nd December 2010, 20:29

Here is an example of the un-Marxist propoganda of the Stalinist USSR.

http://i229.photobucket.com/albums/ee277/jefferyhodges/WhiteArmyPropagandaPosterOfTrotsky.jpg
This anti-Semitic garbage was from the White Army, during the Russian Civil War. It's even in the filename. Better luck next time bro.

edit: oh you deleted it. Ah well. I'll leave it here.

Burn A Flag

22nd December 2010, 20:30

If we are actually going to simplify the view of a very complex historical figure with very positive and also very negative contributions to the growth of the Soviet Union and the international communist movement as a whole to "he was good" or "he was bad," I think I might need to take a break from this forum.

I understand, I just wanted to get a general picture for what the overall revleft opinion was for Stalin, since sometimes you get people basically dismissing anything bad said about Stalin as lies.

Burn A Flag

22nd December 2010, 20:31

This anti-Semitic garbage was from the White Army, during the Russian Civil War. It's even in the filename. Better luck next time bro.

edit: oh you deleted it. Ah well. I'll leave it here.

I know, that's why I deleted it. I remembered that pic and I always thought it was from the USSR. My Bad.

Rafiq

22nd December 2010, 20:31

Hitler didn't improve the living standards for most Germans. Building Autobahnen hardly makes u for sending them to the front to die or to work camps.

I guess O'l Chomsky lied then.

scarletghoul

22nd December 2010, 20:37

There is such things as State-capitalism as there is StateLESS-capitalists. I do not agree with Stalin, Mao, or Castro. They were looking for monitary gain rather than social gain. Which is a terrible start to socialism. And dont go and call me a trotskyist, I'm a marxist and disagree with Stalin, he was a total moron.
If Stalin, Mao and Castro were just looking to make money, why didn't they open up trade with the west, and why did they spend so much on healthcare, education, development, etc ?

Comrade1

22nd December 2010, 20:45

If Stalin, Mao and Castro were just looking to make money, why didn't they open up trade with the west, and why did they spend so much on healthcare, education, development, etc ?
Why did Stalin, Mao, and Castro nationalize all industry so they could increase profit for themselfs. In all these nations why do goverment wokers have double the salary than the average worker.

dearest chuck

22nd December 2010, 21:12

The fact that Stalin liquidated all the old Bolsheviks that didn't die of natural causes kind of convinces me of his betrayal to the revolution.
betraying the bureaucracy is the same as betraying the revolution...?

Marxach-LÃ©inÃnach

22nd December 2010, 21:35

red cat

22nd December 2010, 22:01

Why did Stalin, Mao, and Castro nationalize all industry so they could increase profit for themselfs. In all these nations why do goverment wokers have double the salary than the average worker.

How did they increase this profit for themselves ? Did they secretly transfer the money into some personal account or did they spend it in an extremely lavish lifestyle ? Although I don't consider Castro to be communist, I am interested to know about the lifestyles of all the three leaders mentioned and how much assets they personally owned.

Widerstand

22nd December 2010, 22:21

I guess O'l Chomsky lied then.

What did he say exactly?

KlÃ©ber

22nd December 2010, 22:26

You cannot compare the two situations in the first place. In China an organization other than the GMD, namely CPC, played the main role in defeating Japanese imperialism. In the USSR Stalin led the only resistance against Germany.
Funny how the "anti-revisionist" Maoist-Stalinists are really the worst liars and revisionists. Under direction from Moscow, the CPC gave up any attempt to win leadership of the anti-Japanese war and submitted to the GMD following the Xi'an Incident; its New Fourth and Eighth Route armies joined the regular Nationalist army answering to the GMD (hence why they were called "Fourth" and "Eighth" despite being the only two CPC armies). As for the USSR, the two greatest Soviet generals of WWII, Zhukov and Rokossovsky, were fascist bourgeois agents according to you.

Optiow

22nd December 2010, 22:27

I totally believe that he was not a good man for the USSR at all. As far as I am concerned, while people seem to credit him with winning World War Two, he was responsible for making millions of people's lives a misery, and has forever given a bad name to communism.

Marxach-LÃ©inÃnach

22nd December 2010, 23:18

How did they increase this profit for themselves ? Did they secretly transfer the money into some personal account or did they spend it in an extremely lavish lifestyle ? Although I don't consider Castro to be communist, I am interested to know about the lifestyles of all the three leaders mentioned and how much assets they personally owned.

Stalin had a low-key lifestyle to the end of his life, living in just a modest little apartment. It is true that he had his own holiday dacha, but even that was a pretty modest place as well. I don't think Castro was ever a proper communist either, but credit where credit's due, I'm pretty sure he doesn't have the most lavish lifestyle ever. I don't know what kinda lifestyle Mao had.

Bright Banana Beard

22nd December 2010, 23:19

I will wait for the days where bourgeoise will give green light to socialism!! Oh wait...

KlÃ©ber

22nd December 2010, 23:30

Stalin had a low-key lifestyle to the end of his life, living in just a modest little apartment. It is true that he had his own holiday dacha, but even that was a pretty modest place as well.
That's according to the Soviet propaganda apparatus, an institution from which you were lucky to get away with just being fired from your job if you spread negative information about the ruling clique.

Stalin was known to love expensive feasts, I believe he had a salary of 1,000 rubles a month which was five times that of an average worker, not counting state privileges like the resort home, limousine, servants, etc. Since partmaximum (the Soviet maximum income limit) was abolished in 1931, the top bureaucrats had second salaries for their multiple occupations and regularly granted themselves bonuses of tens of thousands of rubles (that's more money than an ordinary worker would ever dream of having at one time).

I don't think Castro was ever a proper communist either, but credit where credit's due, I'm pretty sure he doesn't have the most lavish lifestyle ever.Castro has a swanky residence and plenty of state privileges too (not that he can enjoy them much in poor health). I'm not sure about his income but the Cuban government, like all Stalinist governments, is very tight-lipped about the earnings and privileges of its elite, which isn't a good sign - in a real socialist democracy you would expect the maximum of transparency and accountability from elected officials. It's really ridiculous how some people can believe "socialism" exists in a country when the people don't even have the same freedom to investigate official corruption that they do in some capitalist countries.

I don't know what kinda lifestyle Mao had.He put on an enormous belly, screwed hundreds of young women, and lived it up with the big residence, shiny limo and personal army of bodyguards and attendants that had become the signature of Stalinist bureaucratic privilege since the consolidation of that Soviet caste in the 1930's. As for how much money he had exactly, again, we don't know because keeping the bureaucrats accountable to the revolutionary working people was never a priority for Stalinist despots.

Rafiq

22nd December 2010, 23:30

What did he say exactly?

He was talking about the fact that conditions for capitalism are better then before doesn't make it justification.

Then he went on saying that "Hitler greatly improved living standards for germans, is that an argument for Fascism?"

Bright Banana Beard

22nd December 2010, 23:45

Actually, the living condition under Nazis Germany didnt improve much, but Hitler and his cronies gained all of German's capital.

KlÃ©ber

22nd December 2010, 23:51

Actually, the living condition under Nazis Germany didnt improve much, but Hitler and his cronies gained all of German's capital.
The living conditions didn't improve much in the Stalinist USSR either. Many farmers became workers, but workers' standard of living remained relatively static, it went slightly up and down with the circumstances. The group that really gained under Stalin was the bureaucratic elite who enjoyed a huge improvement in their privileges and incomes from the 1930's on. That's not to say that there weren't some attempts to mitigate social inequality in the USSR; in fact, the most notable of those was during the Khrushchev administration, which I believe you hold responsible for turning the USSR into a capitalist, imperialist, fascist dictatorship.

red cat

23rd December 2010, 02:00

Funny how the "anti-revisionist" Maoist-Stalinists are really the worst liars and revisionists. Under direction from Moscow, the CPC gave up any attempt to win leadership of the anti-Japanese war and submitted to the GMD following the Xi'an Incident; its New Fourth and Eighth Route armies joined the regular Nationalist army answering to the GMD (hence why they were called "Fourth" and "Eighth" despite being the only two CPC armies). As for the USSR, the two greatest Soviet generals of WWII, Zhukov and Rokossovsky, were fascist bourgeois agents according to you.

Please stop flaming. Moreover that allegation sounds quite ridiculous when it comes from your tendency.

Coming back to the point, do you deny that the CPC maintained an organization in the army to such as extent that it enabled them to win over chunks of the GMD's army just after Japanese imperialism was defeated ? In no way was the GMD or Chiang actually leading the anti-imperialist struggle organizationally at any point of time. Maoist strategy consists of maintaining separate organization at all instances of tactical alliances with other forces.

red cat

23rd December 2010, 02:04

He put on an enormous belly, screwed hundreds of young women, and lived it up with the big residence, shiny limo and personal army of bodyguards and attendants that had become the signature of Stalinist bureaucratic privilege since the consolidation of that Soviet caste in the 1930's. As for how much money he had exactly, again, we don't know because keeping the bureaucrats accountable to the revolutionary working people was never a priority for Stalinist despots.

Some people put on fat after a certain age even if they don't consume calories above the average rate. As for your second claim, do you have any credible source for that ? I haven't come across much about Mao's sex life other than in Jung Chang's trash. Is that book what you base your conclusions on ?

S.Artesian

23rd December 2010, 02:08

If Stalin, Mao and Castro were just looking to make money, why didn't they open up trade with the west, and why did they spend so much on healthcare, education, development, etc ?

Uhh... they did. First Five Year Plan involved large imports of "capital goods" machinery from the West.

And Mao... remember that little meeting with Nixon in 1972?

And Fidel would love to trade more with West.

And.... so what? None of that has anything to do with anything. Out for monetary gain? Sure... right; that's why Fidel, of a wealthy family, considered to have a great future ahead of him within the capitalist structure in Cuba attacked Moncada Barracks.

It's why Mao decided move an army thousands of miles on half rations, why he lived in a cave.

And of course, it's why Stalin robbed banks.

WTF? I think you're all out of your minds.

Die Neue Zeit

23rd December 2010, 03:00

The Soviet people beat the Nazis in spite of the treacherous Stalin clique which enabled Hitler to consolidate the resources of Western Europe unopposed and win early victories against Red Army through a surprise offensive.

We sit here on a website called 'Revolutionary Left' and debate the merits of a man whose reign oversaw the eradication of the Bolshevik leadership, the mass immiseration of the Russian proletariat, the gross mismanagement of agricultural policy which resulted in the deaths of several million, the deaths of over a million citizens through execution or labour camps, the use of slave labour on a massive scale, the deportation and harassment of national minorities, an agreement with Nazi Germany that permitted the latter to subdue almost all of Europe, and the bungling of military strategy that saw millions of Soviet soldiers captured within days or weeks

Nicholas II didn't do half of the above and he still earned the sobriquet 'Nicholas the Bloody'. Why is it necessary to insist on 'subtleties' when discussing Stalin?

Of the Bolshevik CC elected in April 1917, and omitting three who died of natural causes, all but one were subsequently executed by the Soviet state. Guess who that one was...

He oversaw the downfall of the USSR into a despotic state-capitalist regime; the deformation of the Third International into an arm of capital; he purged from the party thousands upon thousands of revolutionaries that actively took part in October and he was complacent in the rise of fascism, from Spain to Germany.

My opinion is neutral.

1) Mass immiseration of the Russian proletariat: big negative (not necessary if #2 had been pursued correctly)

2) Choosing kolkhozization and not sovkhozization: negative, offset somewhat by the overall need for forced collectivization (period)

3) Labour camps / [prison] slave labour: positive (socialist primitive accumulation and other utilitarian considerations demanded these)

3) Pre-GPW military-industrial complex development: big positive

4) Policy towards national minorities: negative (both in terms of who was deported and harassed, and who wasn't)

5) Third Periodism: positive (including "building SIOC," but failed to distinguish German nationalists in greater detail from a left-right perspective)

6) Declaration of "achieving SIOC" vs. earlier "building SIOC": negative

7) Absence of competitive elections, even within a single-party system: negative

8) Popular Front: big negative

9) Purges: big negative (lowered more by the purges of military officers than by the purges of Old Bolsheviks)

10) Pre-GPW Foreign Policy (excl. Popular Front): big positive (the Non-Aggression Pact was a realpolitik man's response to Western Anti-Communism and failure to contain Hitler)

11) Immediate preparation (or lack thereof) for the Nazi invasion: negative (not tied to the purges, but to refusal to listen to spies re. Operation Barbarossa)

12) Military leadership in the Great Patriotic War: "As for WWII, Zhukov's role and those of the other military marshals were overrated. Sometimes the 'brilliant General' Stalin wanted to press the attack regardless (problems arise here), but at other times he had to temper the enthusiasm of his subordinates (credit has to be given to the 'brilliant General' Stalin for this)." (http://www.revleft.com/vb/stalin-hero-villaini-t71476/index.html) According to Stalin's Wars, indeed "We were victorious because we were led to Victory by our Great Leader and Brilliant General, Marshal of the Soviet Union Stalin!" (big positive)

13) Lost Peace / Cold Peace: positive
13A) Not installing satellite governments until the last minute: positive
13B) Wanting a unified, neutral Germany: positive
13C) Abandoning the KKE's insurrection in Greece: big negative
13D) Not really supporting the CPC's post-WWII insurrection (to the point of being rhetorically friendlier with the GMD if not logistically): neutral
13E) Purges in Eastern Europe: big positive (military competence was not an immediate issue for the cannon-fodder satellite militaries, and de-Nazification was a bigger issue)
13F) Post-GPW military-industrial/superpower development: big positive
13G) Not abandoning socialist primitive accumulation, even while subordinates did so in small steps: negative

S.Artesian

23rd December 2010, 03:12

3) Labour camps / slave labour: positive (socialist primitive accumulation and other utilitarian considerations demanded these)

That's enough to gag a maggot-- a so called socialist, proletariocrat or whatever the fuck he calls himself, the horse's ass, the big admirer of Kautsky, the flogger of "Marches on Rome" and "petit-bourgeois" anti-everything, comes out, and I do mean comes out of his little neutralist closet all dressed up in jackboots and riding crop--- endorsing slave labor and labor camps.

Hey, DNZ, try peddling that crap to workers-- how slave labor is good. Yeah, sure, it was good for Tom Scott to build his rail network through the South after the US Civil War, using convict labor leased from prisons. Yeah slave labor is a real plus.

If I were running this forum, I'd have you banned for endorsing slave labor

You call yourself a Marxist and you endorse slave labor camps? You know what you really are? You're an idiot, because Preobrazhenskii's "economics" of primitive socialist accumulation isn't socialist at all, and doesn't resolve the problem of relations between city and countryside because it fails at the most important task-- increasing the productivity of labor in agriculture.

KlÃ©ber

23rd December 2010, 03:29

Please stop flaming. Moreover that allegation sounds quite ridiculous when it comes from your tendency.

Coming back to the point, do you deny that the CPC maintained an organization in the army to such as extent that it enabled them to win over chunks of the GMD's army just after Japanese imperialism was defeated ? In no way was the GMD or Chiang actually leading the anti-imperialist struggle organizationally at any point of time. Maoist strategy consists of maintaining separate organization at all instances of tactical alliances with other forces.
No, the point was already made. Communist units were subordinated to the Nationalist army during the Sino-Japanese War, if you deny that, please show me where were the First, Second, Third, Fifth, Sixth and Seventh armies under Communist command? The soldiers of the Eighth Route Army and New Fourth Army may have been among the most valorous Chinese units of that conflict, but then the most valorous Soviet generals of WWII were actually revisionist traitors according to Stalinist revisionists.

You are really the one trying to distract the discussion here. I was not trying to say that the GMD and its leadership should take credit for leading the struggle against Japanese imperialism. I was pointing out another example of how an oppressed people defeated an imperialist aggressor in spite of a treacherous, conciliatory government. That said, "Maoist strategy" is not some magical elixir for power. The CPC could have made none of its enormous gains in 1945 without the help of a giant Soviet offensive into Manchuria which rivaled Bagration in scope and handed over vast amounts of seized Japanese weaponry to Mao's party-army.

Impulse97

23rd December 2010, 03:33

Did you just hear yourself, I think you said you comrades can shoot at you and round you up :lol: but thats not the point. The point is Stalin was not terrible nor was he great, I would say he made a "good shot" for socialism in the USSR.

Heh, he only made a good shot for socialism if by that you mean he shot every good socialist in the USSR.:hammersickle::che::hammersickle:

Conscript

23rd December 2010, 04:10

Good. He worked with what socialism had at the time, a national leftover of a failed internationalist wave of revolution, in a pragmatist way that, as a result, had him dealing more with the USSR's interests as a lone state than we would prefer. But, that's our less than ideal result of a less than ideal european revolution, one that was mostly crushed. The failure of the german revolution ought to be named the biggest disappointment in history.

Die Neue Zeit

23rd December 2010, 04:25

That's enough to gag a maggot-- a so called socialist, proletariocrat or whatever the fuck he calls himself, the horse's ass, the big admirer of Kautsky, the flogger of "Marches on Rome" and "petit-bourgeois" anti-everything, comes out, and I do mean comes out of his little neutralist closet all dressed up in jackboots and riding crop--- endorsing slave labor and labor camps.

Please, please read this thread on serial murderers:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/serial-killers-donei-t144226/index2.html

I don't see why society should waste bullets, lethal injections, electrocution-dedicated electricity, etc. - let alone cost-ineffective living accommodations - on serial murderers, serious counterrevolutionaries, class enemies, grossly corrupt officials, etc. when there is more utility to be derived from either their working to a slow and painful death in the GULAG, or their being lab rats.

Yeah, sure, it was good for Tom Scott to build his rail network through the South after the US Civil War, using convict labor leased from prisons. Yeah slave labor is a real plus.

Listen, you!

http://www.revleft.com/vb/army-clothing-created-t130986/index.html

While I myself am for corrective labour (http://www.revleft.com/vb/crime-stateless-societyi-t130377/index.html?p=1693523) as part of the "aggravation von dem Klassenkampf along with the transition to socialist production," I think there should be a demand calling for the abolition of prison labour for the benefit of private parties.

You call yourself a Marxist and you endorse slave labor camps? You know what you really are? You're an idiot, because Preobrazhenskii's "economics" of primitive socialist accumulation isn't socialist at all, and doesn't resolve the problem of relations between city and countryside because it fails at the most important task-- increasing the productivity of labor in agriculture.

Please repeat, again, what his solution was for increasing the productivity of labour in agriculture, if it wasn't akin to sovkhozization. In the main, socialist primitive accumulation prevailed until the 1950s (from the few years before Stalin's death to the mid-1950s).

MagÃ³n

23rd December 2010, 05:01

I think this thread could become a sort of Shakespearian Tragic Comedy. And by that fact, I like it. :thumbup1:

REVLEFT'S BIEGGST MATSER TROL

23rd December 2010, 05:38

[QUOTE]My opinion is neutral.

3) Labour camps / slave labour: positive (socialist primitive accumulation and other utilitarian considerations demanded these)
[/[QUOTE]

You sir, are no social - proletocrat.

KlÃ©ber

23rd December 2010, 05:49

I don't see why society should waste bullets, lethal injections, electrocution-dedicated electricity, etc. - let alone cost-ineffective living accommodations - on serial killers, serious counterrevolutionaries, class enemies, grossly corrupt officials, etc.
There are hardly enough of these real scumbags to build a single major public project. Most forced labor in the USSR was done by petty thieves, workers and farmers who had stolen something during tough times, and people charged, often falsely, for political offenses. The nastiest professional criminals were used to police other prisoners. Case in point - Naftaly Frenkel, a bourgeois good-for-nothing who became Stalin's chief overseer.

Please repeat, again, what his solution was for increasing the productivity of labour in agriculture, if it wasn't akin to sovkhozization. Yes but Preobrazhensky was explicitly opposed to robbing the peasantry and at one point even defended kulaks as bridges between the cities and the countryside.

KlÃ©ber

23rd December 2010, 06:08

I haven't come across much about Mao's sex life other than in Jung Chang's trash. Is that book what you base your conclusions on ?
No, Jung Chang is a ridiculous liar. I was referring to the memoirs of Mao's doctor, Li Zhisui. Still it wouldn't matter if Mao had been an ascetic who whipped and starved himself, he represented a bureaucracy whose chiefs lived lavishly in gated communities, isolated from the masses, with all the trappings and privileges of their "revisionist" counterparts in Moscow, through the most radical phase of the Cultural Revolution. And that bureaucracy violently crushed the revolutionary people when it ended the GPCR, after which it cozied up to US imperialism in the name of opposing "Soviet fascism."

scarletghoul

23rd December 2010, 06:16

Jacob Richter you could have avoided this shitstorm if you'd just not used the term 'slave labour', which is inaccurate anyway..

Anyway labour camps are far better than things like the US prison system which just cause people to degenerate and get more and more fucked up while contributing nothing to society. The Chinese Laogai system seems like the best from what I know

Die Neue Zeit

23rd December 2010, 06:19

^^^ They're not getting paid at all. Maybe some here will misinterpret "slave labour" to mean "slave labour" for some individual and his private business. In that case, I apologize. Also, the industrial city of Magnitogorsk itself was the best example of a GULAG facility. Because of a tarred reputation, many ordinary convicts in Magnitogorsk willingly chose to continue working there after their sentences expired.

I don't see why society should waste bullets, lethal injections, electrocution-dedicated electricity, etc. - let alone cost-ineffective living accommodations - on serial killers, serious counterrevolutionaries, class enemies, grossly corrupt officials, etc.There are hardly enough of these real scumbags to build a single major public project. Most forced labor in the USSR was done by petty thieves, workers and farmers who had stolen something during tough times, and people charged, often falsely, for political offenses. The nastiest professional criminals were used to police other prisoners. Case in point - Naftaly Frenkel, a bourgeois good-for-nothing who became Stalin's chief overseer.

You'd be surprised at how many real criminals one can uncover in a transitional economy, and you're ignoring shorter terms in the Gulag.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/can-tough-crime-t138310/index.html

I'm looking at things like outright wage theft, other labour law violations, and the usual canard of corporate crime. Very rarely is wage theft punishable by jail time. Ditto with other labour law violations. Meanwhile, not enough corporate crime is met with practically lifelong jail time.

For deterrence, even the most minor infraction of labour laws would result in lots of small business owners in the Gulag - for much shorter terms, of course. Those responsible for specifically criminal graffiti would spent a short but critical time in the Gulag, too - meaning that criminal offenses punishable by "community service" can be upgraded to short-term Gulag labour (and of course the convicts won't die or starve).

Yes but Preobrazhensky was explicitly opposed to robbing the peasantry

How, exactly, is sovkhozization "robbing the peasantry"? The underlying land was already owned by the state!

Geiseric

23rd December 2010, 06:40

he was anti revolutionary and not a true marxist leninist. The USSR was the world proletariat's greatest dissapointment, because of it's enormous potential. All of that potential was lost under the stalinist regime, because of their various anti revolutionary tendencies. Not going into it but I don't approve of stalin, respectively.

jediknight36

23rd December 2010, 06:44

not a very high opinion of Stalin, but largely this is because of my own ignorance.

I've recently been reading up on Stalinism in particular, seeking a better understanding, but I have so far not found out much.

He had a mighty fine mustache, however.

I am the same way. I honestly don't know too much about the man other than most lefties I know are more pro Stalin and most others are anti Stalin for no more reason than the capitalists have taught us to be so. I am also in agreeance (sp) with my fellow comrades that state that it is very difficult to boil a person's existence to good or bad.

My extent of Stalin is that I wonder what the world would be like if Trotski would have been in charge in his stead.

Posted using my ossim EVO 4G and Tapatalk.

Geiseric

23rd December 2010, 07:24

haha... Isn't slave labor one of the things we were taught was a no no as little kids? And by the way, the people doing these projects were always simply anti stalninist. They weren't necessarily anti revolutionary or revisionist... They could have been like ''damnit! Stalin reduced my potato rations by a pound this week!'' then bang, gulag prison camp.

ComradeOm

23rd December 2010, 10:12

10) Pre-GPW Foreign Policy (excl. Popular Front): big positive (the Non-Aggression Pact was a realpolitik man's response to Western Anti-Communism and failure to contain Hitler)Even leaving aside the role of the NAP in facilitating Hitler's conquests (http://www.revleft.com/vb/molotov-ribbentrop-pact-t145182/index.html?p=1929607&highlight=pact#post1929607), this is a perverse position. The NAP, and incorporation of the Batlics and areas of Finland/Romania was indeed a feat of realpolitik that would have impressed the Tsars. However I fail to see why we here on RevLeft should consider it laudable. Do you want us to fete Bismarck as well? Sure why not, his anti-socialist laws pale in comparison to Stalin's measures :rolleyes:

But then this is a perfect example of the latent Russian nationalism that so often clouds judgement of Stalin, even across the left. Making Russia 'great', either through military, territorial or economic advances, is worthless from a socialist perspective when it is achieved via draconian labour laws, mass violence against the population, deliberate slashing of living standards, slave labour, etc, etc. These are not the accomplishments of a socialist and they should not be lauded on a forum for the so-called revolutionary left

Because of a tarred reputation, many ordinary convicts in Magnitogorsk willingly chose to continue working there after their sentences expiredAnd where else would they have gone?

No matter how much you dress it up in theoretical bullshit (taking a page from Kautsky, hah) your endorsement of slave labour is truly disgusting. It shows just how far you have moved from socialism when you can endorse an industrial complex that relies on slave labour. Its grotesque for a socialist to endorse working convicts to the brink of death, but even more so when the majority of your "real criminals", classified as such by the USSR (http://www.revleft.com/vb/did-stalin-really-t145370/index.html?p=1933717&highlight=socially+harmful+elements#post1933717), were actually 'socially harmful elements' (ie, homeless, prostitutes, delinquents)

Marxach-LÃ©inÃnach

23rd December 2010, 11:16

My extent of Stalin is that I wonder what the world would be like if Trotski would have been in charge in his stead.

If ol' Lyev had been in charge, I'm quite sure the USSR would have ended up looking like Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge for a while, and then subsequently would've either capitulated or just plain collapsed long before the Great Patriotic War.

Garret

23rd December 2010, 11:30

Very Good but not perfect.

Thirsty Crow

23rd December 2010, 12:27

In overall, I'm pleased by the results of the poll.
ComradeOM has enumerated some good reasons for choosing either "bad" or "very bad" (which sound kinda...silly, but it has been shown that a demonstration of the opinion behind the chice of one of these may ameliorate the awkward situation arising from the wording itself).

I'd add that special emphasis should be pult on what DNZ counts as big negative - popular front.

Widerstand

23rd December 2010, 14:33

S.Artesian

23rd December 2010, 15:24

Please, please read this thread on serial murderers:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/serial-killers-donei-t144226/index2.html

I don't see why society should waste bullets, lethal injections, electrocution-dedicated electricity, etc. - let alone cost-ineffective living accommodations - on serial murderers, serious counterrevolutionaries, class enemies, grossly corrupt officials, etc. when there is more utility to be derived from either their working to a slow and painful death in the GULAG, or their being lab rats.

Listen, you!

http://www.revleft.com/vb/army-clothing-created-t130986/index.html

While I myself am for corrective labour (http://www.revleft.com/vb/crime-stateless-societyi-t130377/index.html?p=1693523) as part of the "aggravation von dem Klassenkampf along with the transition to socialist production," I think there should be a demand calling for the abolition of prison labour for the benefit of private parties.

Please repeat, again, what his solution was for increasing the productivity of labour in agriculture, if it wasn't akin to sovkhozization. In the main, socialist primitive accumulation prevailed until the 1950s (from the few years before Stalin's death to the mid-1950s).

My only comment to you is "fuck you, asshole. You have no idea what you are talking about."

S.Artesian

23rd December 2010, 15:33

Die Neue Zeit

23rd December 2010, 17:32

^^^ Please provide solid reasons for executions or mere life imprisonment of serial murderers and other capital offenders.

Even leaving aside the role of the NAP in facilitating Hitler's conquests (http://www.revleft.com/vb/molotov-ribbentrop-pact-t145182/index.html?p=1929607&highlight=pact#post1929607), this is a perverse position.

You are of the abstentionist position that all Stalin needed to do was not sign the NAP, because Hitler would have faced a two-front war. What you are forgetting (and most historians forget this, so I don't blame you) is that Stalin himself was facing a potential two-front war; the other bad boy group on the block was Japan.

Even if Zhukov and co. kicked their asses, I don't think the Soviets had the logistics, purges or no purges, to fight and win a two-front war, even if their adversaries engaged in two-front wars of their own.

The NAP, and incorporation of the Batlics and areas of Finland/Romania was indeed a feat of realpolitik that would have impressed the Tsars. However I fail to see why we here on RevLeft should consider it laudable. Do you want us to fete Bismarck as well? Sure why not, his anti-socialist laws pale in comparison to Stalin's measures :rolleyes:

Considering that the previous occupants were right-wing and proto-fascist thugs, that incorporation was a huge positive.

But then this is a perfect example of the latent Russian nationalism that so often clouds judgement of Stalin, even across the left. Making Russia 'great', either through military, territorial or economic advances, is worthless from a socialist perspective when it is achieved via draconian labour laws, mass violence against the population, deliberate slashing of living standards, slave labour, etc, etc. These are not the accomplishments of a socialist and they should not be lauded on a forum for the so-called revolutionary left

Hey, I said my opinion on the guy was neutral. The negatives from a revolutionary perspective do have to be evaluated with the positives from a geopolitical perspective (what you mislabel "Russian nationalism").

And where else would they have gone?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag#Life_after_term_served

Persons who served a term in a camp or in a prison were restricted from taking a wide range of jobs. Concealment of a previous imprisonment was a triable offence [...] Many people released from camps were restricted from settling in larger cities.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/101st_kilometre

Instead of regular documents, inmates would receive a temporary substitute, a "wolf ticket" (Russian: волчий билет, volchiy bilet), confining them to internal exile without the right to settle closer than 100 km (62 miles) to large urban centres. This has resulted in many residential communities established at 101 km (63 mi) away from city borders.

How many large urban centers were defined in Soviet law? I'd like to think there were plenty of areas to settle besides the large urban centers.

My statement about staying in Magnitogorsk was more about psychological impact than about movement restrictions. I can't think of any other crime and punishment system where those on parole would actually like to settle near the place of their imprisonment.

No matter how much you dress it up in theoretical bullshit (taking a page from Kautsky, hah) your endorsement of slave labour is truly disgusting.

On this issue, I didn't take a page from Kautsky at all. Besides, he came to revolutionary Marxism through some form of Darwinism. I came to revolutionary Marxism through some form of Utilitarianism.

It shows just how far you have moved from socialism when you can endorse an industrial complex that relies on slave labour. Its grotesque for a socialist to endorse working convicts to the brink of death, but even more so when the majority of your "real criminals", classified as such by the USSR (http://www.revleft.com/vb/did-stalin-really-t145370/index.html?p=1933717&highlight=socially+harmful+elements#post1933717), were actually 'socially harmful elements' (ie, homeless, prostitutes, delinquents)

I do have problems with how they repressed the homeless, prostitutes, delinquents, etc. plus overly broad categorization of "hooligans."

However, take our global population today, and a post-revolutionary situation could see even a million real convicts in such a Gulag system. This figure is less than the 2+ million incarcerated in the US prison system, and far less than the "Gulag atrocities," but it's more than enough to commit to Gulag projects here and there.

The balance between Group A (serial murderers, serious counterrevolutionaries, class enemies, grossly corrupt officials, etc.) and Group B (criminal offenses punishable today by short- or medium-term "community service," including criminal graffiti) would tilt towards Group B over time, but like I said, even a million people from both groups would be more than enough. Note: both groups would have high turnover, with Group A's turnover being due mainly to death, and Group B's turnover being due to paroles after sentences have been served.

dearest chuck

23rd December 2010, 17:43

marxism has become almost-exclusive domain of hateful nerds, needs more laid back jocks

REVLEFT'S BIEGGST MATSER TROL

23rd December 2010, 18:11

No matter how much you dress it up in theoretical bullshit (taking a page from Kautsky, hah) your endorsement of slave labour is truly disgusting. It shows just how far you have moved from socialism when you can endorse an industrial complex that relies on slave labour.

You know Jacob, I could be wrong since I am lacking in a huge exposure to your posts, but there always seemed to be some form, to use your syntax, some kind of of "technocratic - intellectualism" element. As if this is some kind of intellectual game, and one that is all the better if you can say contrary and outrageous things and then justify them.

I mean, look here, clearly someone with your reading must know that, like in bourgeois society, a large portion of convicts were arrested for either obviously wrong reasons (prostitutes, "wreckers" etc) or, in committing an offense in no way deserving of being used as slave labour. You must of known this, and so you must of been able to predict the response. So why not just say that you support really awful rapists and murderers being made to labour while imprisoned? Why does it have to be "STRONGLY SUPPORT STALIN USING PRISONERS AS SLAVE LABOUR?." Were you trolling? Or were you hoping to get everyone writing shit at you so you'd be able to respond and refute their petty outrage in a series of brilliant posts where half the words you use are invented by yourself?

Geiseric

23rd December 2010, 19:20

dude they aren't working in a furnature factory from 8 to 12, they're making railroads from five in the morning to 10 at night. They also should have never been sentenced so hard, and that kind of draconian behavior in a government almost endures that it's system isn't working. I mean this is SLAVE LABOR. What don't you understand about the concept, they were sent to a gulag for stealing an apple due to terrible economic policies put in place by the government, now they have to do slave labor when they're inside of a gulag, which by itself is more punishment then anybody deserves. All this intellectual utilitarianist stuff is unneeded, slave labor is always a bad thing.

LibertarianSocialist1

23rd December 2010, 19:26

I think Stalin made some mistakes but at least he didn´t turn into an anti-communist like Trotsky.

Hit The North

23rd December 2010, 19:41

I think Stalin made some mistakes but at least he didn´t turn into an anti-communist like Trotsky.

Show me where Trotsky expresses this mythical "anti-communism" or which of his actions support your interpretation.

Rosa Lichtenstein

23rd December 2010, 19:53

There's one option missing from the vote: "Unprintable".

jediknight36

23rd December 2010, 19:56

I hate to say this, but if your arguing about this and getting mad or upset, your wasting your time and breath. What's done is done, and no amount of bickering will change that.

Posted using my ossim EVO 4G and Tapatalk.

Hit The North

23rd December 2010, 19:59

I hate to say this, but if your arguing about this and getting mad or upset, your wasting your time and breath. What's done is done, and no amount of bickering will change that.

I agree that people shouldn't get upset about it, but there is the historical record to consider and it is important that we should learn from the victories and mistakes of our movement. Distortion and lies gets in the way of that.

Posted using my ossim EVO 4G and Tapatalk.

Wanker! :lol::)

I.Drink.Your.Milkshake

23rd December 2010, 20:09

Of the choices available I choose.... uhm.... "Arsehole".

Yeah - Arsehole. Stalin was an arsehole.

Die Neue Zeit

23rd December 2010, 23:29

dude they aren't working in a furniture factory from 8 to 12, they're making railroads from five in the morning to 10 at night. They also should have never been sentenced so hard, and that kind of draconian behavior in a government almost endures that it's system isn't working. I mean this is SLAVE LABOR. What don't you understand about the concept, they were sent to a gulag for stealing an apple due to terrible economic policies put in place by the government, now they have to do slave labor when they're inside of a gulag, which by itself is more punishment then anybody deserves. All this intellectual utilitarianist stuff is unneeded, slave labor is always a bad thing.

At least you're providing constructive criticism by providing a "community service" example like the 8-12 furniture factory work (four hours only?).

Geiseric

24th December 2010, 00:10

haha sorry, I was raging and that's the only thing I could think of at the top of my head. I was trying to stress the definition of slave labor.

Impulse97

24th December 2010, 01:33

I think Stalin made some mistakes but at least he didn´t turn into an anti-communist like Trotsky.

Ha! What have you been smoking? Whatever it is I want some.:hammersickle::che::hammersickle:

Martin Blank

24th December 2010, 01:48

I feel like Kassad when it comes to making a "good/bad" assessment of Stalin. I'm also in same camp as Rosa on my answer being "unprintable" -- although "mass-murdering fuckhead" does spring to mind.

Stalin was the personification of the petty bourgeoisie in power, with its bureaucracy and cold indifference to the conditions of the all-Russian working class (especially those workers in the "other" republics of the Union). For the petty bourgeoisie in its bureaucracy (an organic expression of its self-organization), the working class was little more than a set of economic calculations. His actions, and the actions of the bureaucracy as a whole, were also expressions of bureaucratic petty-bourgeois consciousness: the narrow conservatism and nationalism of "socialism in a single country"; the casual indifference shown toward workers and poor peasants in times of food shortages; the willingness to trade needed food on the world market, even while working people were starving, in order to get "hard currency" needed to build heavy industry; treating the rights, needs and, in the end, deprivations of the working class as figures in their "cost-benefit analysis"; the strengthening of the management systems -- both economic and political -- over and against the independent organization of the working class; the revival of tsarist-era legislation that directly benefited the bureaucracy (e.g., pass laws); etc. Even the liquidation of the "Old Bolsheviks" was seen as a calculated move, meant to finalize the securing of bureaucratic petty-bourgeois power over the Soviets and society (should any repercussions from the secret negotiations between the USSR and Germany cause any instability within the Soviet republic).

In the end, the only legitimate question to ask here is whether Stalin's actions -- and, by extension, the actions of the USSR -- did anything to advance the fight for world communism. The answer is an unequivocal no. As the embodiment of the petty bourgeoisie in power, any actions taken by Stalin or the USSR were advancements for the petty-bourgeois bureaucracy, not the proletariat. Even the defeat of the Germans, secured at the cost of, from the bureaucrats' perspective, a paltry 20 million lives, was no victory for the workers of the world. The entire Soviet mobilization against the German invasion was organized on a classless nationalist basis. There was no real talk of "German workers", and fraternization was generally disallowed. Moscow mimicked the brutish nationalism of the First World War, invoking symbology from the tsarist period (see Marxach-Léinínach's avatar for a good example) to rally the "Russian people" against Germany (not German capitalism -- Germany).

The rise of the "people's democracies", China, Korea, Indochina, Cuba, etc., were also not advances for the working class, since the states set up in the wake of the overthrow of the previous bourgeois regimes were all controlled by the petty bourgeoisie, not the proletariat.

Most relevant for this overall discussion, though, is the question of the characterization of Stalin's regime, the USSR, the "people's democracies", etc. There was no communism there, even though the organizations that were in power all called themselves "Communist". (Well, hell, Bush and Obama both say they support "freedom". Should we take them at their word, too?) The kind of "socialism" advocated had nothing to do with either the transition from the capitalist to communist mode of production or the opening phase of communist society. Instead, Stalin created a new variety of petty-bourgeois "socialism", based on the precept of "... to each according to their work". And who defined the value of each kind of work? Why, the bureaucratic petty bourgeoisie in power, of course. For the petty bourgeoisie, being a manager or paper-pushing official is hard work (harder than, say, working in a steel mill), so they get the dachas, the limousines, the special stores and freedom of movement. Meanwhile, the steel worker, laboring long hours under Stakhanovism, gets a subsistence ration, a dilapadated apartment in the shadow (and toxic clouds) of the mill's smokestacks, lower-grade bread and meat, and has to beg his managers to go to the next town to see his or her relatives. On paper, the bureaucrat and steel worker may be considered equal, but what can you really believe: the Stalin Constitution or your lying eyes?

Today, Stalin's petty-bourgeois "socialism" is codified by all manner of self-described socialists and communists. More to the point, we see advocacy of the rule of petty-bourgeois managers, intellectuals, bureaucrats and other assorted "specialists" in doctrines across the spectrum -- from "anti-revisionists", to Leninists and Trotskyists, to "democratic socialists", to technocratic socialists, and so on. We can sit here and argue until we are blue in the face about whether Stalin is "good" or "bad", but it is clear that, in the ideological battle, Stalin's petty-bourgeois socialism has won the fight among the various "socialist" and "communist" tendencies. It is so omnipresent as to be virtually invisible.

But it is there, and it has to be fought by proletarian communists today.

Die Neue Zeit

24th December 2010, 02:06

the casual indifference shown toward workers and poor peasants in times of food shortages; the willingness to trade needed food on the world market, even while working people were starving, in order to get "hard currency" needed to build heavy industry; treating the rights, needs and, in the end, deprivations of the working class as figures in their "cost-benefit analysis"

I would say, comrade, that the cost-benefit analysis was more than just quite faulty when they pursued kolkhozization over sovkhozization.

Even the defeat of the Germans, secured at the cost of, from the bureaucrats' perspective, a paltry 20 million lives, was no victory for the workers of the world. The entire Soviet mobilization against the German invasion was organized on a classless nationalist basis. There was no real talk of "German workers", and fraternization was generally disallowed. Moscow mimicked the brutish nationalism of the First World War, invoking symbology from the tsarist period (see Marxach-Léinínach's avatar for a good example) to rally the "Russian people" against Germany (not German capitalism -- Germany).

The Soviet victory ultimately forced bourgeois concessions via the welfare state to ward off worker unrest. Also, I would think that fraternization between soldiers is something more applicable to a revolutionary period.

The rise of the "people's democracies", China, Korea, Indochina, Cuba, etc., were also not advances for the working class, since the states set up in the wake of the overthrow of the previous bourgeois regimes were all controlled by the petty bourgeoisie, not the proletariat.

I think you've got the wrong reason there. It's not that this Third World rise was controlled by petit-bourgeois and other non-worker elements. It's that they systematically undermined independent political and economic organization by the working class. There could be some non-worker but anti-bourgeois regime that might allow this independent organization (my refined Bloc stuff).

S.Artesian

24th December 2010, 02:10

haha sorry, I was raging and that's the only thing I could think of at the top of my head. I was trying to stress the definition of slave labor.

Why apologize to a clod who endorses slave labor, giving the labor theory of value its ultimate expression-- as long as they labor, they have value?

Thecorollary here is that those running the slaves work the slaves to death, thereby minimizing overhead.

And look what our would be mass-murderer says about his make-believe serial killers:
utility to be derived from either their working to a slow and painful death in the GULAG, or their being lab rats.

He thinks he's talking about utility, when he's really talking about value-- he's getting the surplus labor at below subsistence costs, Die Neue Dr. Mengele is. Of course that he doesn't grasp the distinction between use value and value here is totally consistent with the rest of his vicious idiocy.

Slow and painful deaths as lab rats? Who the fuck let this fucking Nazi in the room?

Besides... that's so patently foolish. Given conditions in the markets, much more value could be obtained in exchange if the "social stalinoproletcaesarcrat state" killed these worthless dregs, these parasites, outright and then simply harvested their organs. Hey 15,000 people in the US alone die each year awaiting kidney transplants. Christ our Kaustkyshite could corner the whole damn market.

"Strip 'em and Rip 'em" could replace "Arbeit Macht Frei" on Die Alte Zeit's labor camps.

And then, after harvesting the organs, we could knock the gold out of their teeth, render the fat from their bodies, use their hair to soak up oil spills, and don't forget what cool lampshades their skin will make.

In case anyone has forgotten-- the law of value is to be overthrown, abolished, not made more acute, more barbaric.

Die Neue Zeit

24th December 2010, 02:28

And look what our would be mass-murderer says about his make-believe serial killers:

He thinks he's talking about utility, when he's really talking about value-- he's getting the surplus labor at below subsistence costs, Die Neue Dr. Mengele is. Of course that he doesn't grasp the distinction between use value and value here is totally consistent with the rest of his vicious idiocy.

Slow and painful deaths as lab rats? Who the fuck let this fucking Nazi in the room?

That's comrade Mike Lepore the DeLeonist:

They should spend each day strapped to a laboratory table with electrodes and scanners attached to their heads, while brain researchers try to figure out what caused them to be that way. To do anything else with them is a waste of scientific data.

(Checking "other." Thank you for being one of the few poll creators who remember to include an "other" option.)

I conditioned "slow and painful death" strictly to the Gulag. The other option was "utility to be derived from... their being lab rats."

And it is utility, the greatest good for the greatest number (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Act_utilitarianism).

S.Artesian

24th December 2010, 02:30

No, that's you, asshole. Fuck off, Dr. Mengele and take your slow painful death with you.

Die Neue Zeit

24th December 2010, 02:34

Please read my post above: "I conditioned 'slow and painful death' strictly to the Gulag. The other option was 'utility to be derived from... their being lab rats.'"

S.Artesian

24th December 2010, 02:50

I'm sorry, did I say Dr. Mengele? I should have said Dr. I.G. Farben. In either case, fuck off.

Martin Blank

24th December 2010, 03:02

Slow and painful deaths as lab rats? Who the fuck let this fucking Nazi in the room?

"Strip 'em and Rip 'em" could replace "Arbeit Macht Frei" on Die Alte Zeit's labor camps.

No, that's you, asshole. Fuck off, Dr. Mengele and take your slow painful death with you.

I'm sorry, did I say Dr. Mengele? I should have said Dr. I.G. Farben. In either case, fuck off.

For violating Godwin's Law and extreme flamebaiting, consider this a warning.

Bardo

24th December 2010, 03:04

Very bad.

He was a regressive, totalitarian state-capitalist. I believe authoritarian leaders like Stalin are the reason socialism is such a dirty word anymore. I feel like I'm constantly explaining to people that democracy and socialism are not mutally exclusive.

Geiseric

24th December 2010, 03:04

utility is applying mathematical logic to human conditions, and I think that it's more important to deal with the cause of people being imprisoned rather than what to do with them once they're imrpisoned. I must say though, if I am part of a revolution and a scent of slave labor, or any loss of human rights is present, my support is lost to that regime and I will actively fight that regime, be it communist, anarcho syndicalist, trotskyist, maoist, capitalist, fascist, etc. If we lose what makes us human for economic or political gain, the entire point of socialism is lost in my eyes. However I agree that the various factions who aren't sectarian need to band togather to fight for what we all believe in. Let the proletariat decide which tendencies they want, that's what democracy is for.

S.Artesian

24th December 2010, 03:18

For violating Godwin's Law and extreme flamebaiting, consider this a warning.

Here's a thought. I'm not flame-baiting anyone. You've got a clown here who pretends he's a socialist and finding of slave labor, and painfully working people to death because of their non-conformity to the demands of property. a "positive."

You want to warn me? Why don't you get rid of Nazi creep?

And if you don't, then you can fuck off.

And if that bothers you too much, you can ban me from this place, because your "rev" and your "left" don't stand for anything except... tolerance of slave labor and sadism. I would be honored to be disqualified from participating in what is obviously a circle jerk of those eagerly awaiting the opportunity to be goons and thugs.

The problem isn't that I told this strutting little Beria wannabe to fuck-off, the problem is that you didn't.

KlÃ©ber

24th December 2010, 03:26

For violating Godwin's Law and extreme flamebaiting
Flaming perhaps, but S.Artesian was not confirming Godwin's Law. DNZ said that slave labor is "positive" as long as the surplus value goes to state coffers rather than a private company. Since he and a few others will deny that there was anything wrong with forced labor in the Stalinist USSR, then Nazi Germany is an example everyone can agree upon where "public" slave labor was indeed reactionary.

Martin Blank

24th December 2010, 04:06

Die Neue Zeit

24th December 2010, 05:28

Flaming perhaps, but S.Artesian was not confirming Godwin's Law. DNZ said that slave labor is "positive" as long as the surplus value goes to state coffers rather than a private company. Since he and a few others will deny that there was anything wrong with forced labor in the Stalinist USSR, then Nazi Germany is an example everyone can agree upon where "public" slave labor was indeed reactionary.

To be honest, most (if not all) self-described "Marxist-Leninists", "anti-revisionists" or supporters of Preobrazhensky's "primitive socialist accumulation" support the exact same thing as DNZ, to one degree or another.

[...]

He's just honest enough to say it publicly.

Kleber obviously doesn't understand the Aggravation of dem Klassenkampf Along with the Transition.

1) Nazi Germany's prison labour shit was systemic industrial genocide, not criminal punishment or extreme anti-crime deterrence.
2) Nazi prison labour wasn't totally "public," because they could have made or assembled parts for very private armaments companies to put the finishing touches (that's what you get when you don't have a national-democratized military-industrial complex). There was no abolition of prison labour for the benefit of private parties.
3) My term above is different from Stalin's confused hodge-podge "aggravation... along with the development" or "aggravation... under socialism." In my transitional scenario, one is dealing explicitly with class enemies (petit-bourgeois and other non-worker elements not yet abolished as a class) and serious counterrevolutionaries. You cannot negotiate with these enemies.
4) Along with such political scum, one should waste as little bullets, lethal injections, electrocution-dedicated electricity, etc. - let alone cost-ineffective living accommodations - as possible on serial murderers, grossly corrupt officials, etc.
5) The lumpen classes will have to work legally somehow. For prostitutes, low-level gangsters, and other proper lumpenproles, it's easier to hold out the legality carrot. For pimps and various lumpenbourgeois elements, not so much. Ditto with chronic beggars and the lumpen-scum. With these two lumpen classes (lumpenbourgeoisie and lumpen-scum), if they don't voluntarily find legal work, they are indeed - to quote ComradeOm on Soviet law - Socially Harmful Elements worthy of sticks.
6) Not all Gulag work means slaving people to death. Those with much lighter sentences (like for criminal graffiti) would still have to do some work. I'm just not using the euphemism "community service." It's better to be rhetorically harsh for maximum deterrence, and have lenient work conditions for the lesser criminals once they get to that point. Someone mentioned in the Learning thread on serial killers, "put to work making toys for kids or growing food for the Third World or something." (http://www.revleft.com/vb/serial-killers-donei-t144226/index7.html) :)

7) Why did I rate the GULAG "positive" and not "big positive"? Because of what ComradeOm said regarding the overly expansive group "socially harmful elements."

And if that bothers you too much, you can ban me from this place, because your "rev" and your "left" don't stand for anything except... tolerance of slave labor and sadism. I would be honored to be disqualified from participating in what is obviously a circle jerk of those eagerly awaiting the opportunity to be goons and thugs.

The problem isn't that I told this strutting little Beria wannabe to fuck-off, the problem is that you didn't.

This forum isn't the monopoly of Marxist-Humanists, the likes that may or may not have broken completely from liberal humanism.

Why apologize to a clod who endorses slave labor, giving the labor theory of value its ultimate expression-- as long as they labor, they have value?

The corollary here is that those running the slaves work the slaves to death, thereby minimizing overhead.

And look what our would be mass-murderer says about his make-believe serial killers:

He thinks he's talking about utility, when he's really talking about value-- he's getting the surplus labor at below subsistence costs, Die Neue Dr. Mengele is. Of course that he doesn't grasp the distinction between use value and value here is totally consistent with the rest of his vicious idiocy.

Slow and painful deaths as lab rats? Who the fuck let this fucking Nazi in the room?

Besides... that's so patently foolish. Given conditions in the markets, much more value could be obtained in exchange if the "social stalinoproletcaesarcrat state" killed these worthless dregs, these parasites, outright and then simply harvested their organs. Hey 15,000 people in the US alone die each year awaiting kidney transplants. Christ our Kautskyshite could corner the whole damn market.

"Strip 'em and Rip 'em" could replace "Arbeit Macht Frei" on Die Alte Zeit's labor camps.

And then, after harvesting the organs, we could knock the gold out of their teeth, render the fat from their bodies, use their hair to soak up oil spills, and don't forget what cool lampshades their skin will make.

In case anyone has forgotten-- the law of value is to be overthrown, abolished, not made more acute, more barbaric.

Now that administrative matters have been settled, I must respectfully disagree about the value of organ harvesting and your attempt at the Hitler card.

One executed criminal, despite being "stripped and ripped," means one less very cheap contributor to ongoing workers' infrastructure projects - or one less person from a pool of workers' scientific test subjects. It's not about merely minimizing overhead, workers' enterprise management around Cost Leadership (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_leadership), etc. Too many tragedies, not enough statistics.

S.Artesian

24th December 2010, 06:05

To be honest, most (if not all) self-described "Marxist-Leninists", "anti-revisionists" or supporters of Preobrazhensky's "primitive socialist accumulation" support the exact same thing as DNZ, to one degree or another. If you want to try to remove all of these elements from RevLeft, good luck with that. Personally, I wouldn't shed a fucking tear, but this is supposed to be a place for all self-described "revolutionary leftists", so what do you do?

To S.Artesian: You're poking a bear with a stick here by telling an admin to fuck off. I'll let it go for now, but if you want to fight DNZ's position, do so politically -- especially since he's not the only one here who holds it. He's just honest enough to say it publicly.

Poking a bear with a stick? Please, don't flatter yourself. You're no bear and I don't need a stick.

Here's what the creep wrote:

utility to be derived from either their working to a slow and painful death in the GULAG

That was after he rated slave labor a positive.

As for Preobrazhensky-- been awhile since I read The New Economics but slave labor was not part of primitive socialist accumulation.

Just like organ harvesting to purchase industrial machinery has nothing to o with primitive socialist accumulation.

But in any case, you don't argue rationally with someone who disavows reality with statements like that creep's. You identify him, or her, as a thug, goon, slug.

As for your threat, and your "generosity" in "letting it go for now," obviously you've mistaken me for somebody who gives a flying fuck.

Die Neue Zeit

24th December 2010, 06:11

You're right, S. Artesian. Socialist primitive accumulation, first conceived by Preobrazhensky but extended by the likes of Boris Kagarlitsky (in Empire of the Periphery: Russia and the World System) to describe practically the whole Stalin era, is obsolete.

David Harvey wrote about accumulation by dispossession instead of primitive capitalist accumulation. Likewise, it's about Transitional Accumulation by Aggravative Dispossession (but with the various modifications listed above).

scarletghoul

24th December 2010, 06:13

I believe authoritarian leaders like Stalin are the reason socialism is such a dirty word anymore.
I'm pretty sure the reason socialism is a dirty word in the USA (its not dirty anywhere else) is because it's a threat to the bourgeoisie.. You would have had all the Red Scare and whatnot even if Stalin was the kindest most libertarian person in the world.

KlÃ©ber

24th December 2010, 06:13

Kleber obviously doesn't understand the Aggravation of dem Klassenkampf Along with the Transition to Socialism.
Apparently not, so you can just take those Klassenkampf and shove them up your Menshevik ass. The revolution has no need for any sort of apocalyptic masturbation about rounding up the lumpens and making conditions for prisoners as miserable as possible to save the government money.

Why did I rate the GULAG "positive" and not "big positive"?Oh, nice save! It's not like you said slave labor was a big positive!

KlÃ©ber

24th December 2010, 06:29

To be honest, most (if not all) self-described "Marxist-Leninists", "anti-revisionists" or supporters of Preobrazhensky's "primitive socialist accumulation" support the exact same thing as DNZ, to one degree or another.
Good point, most of our "anti-revisionists" are guilty of double-think whereas DNZ is a bit more honest. About Preobrazhensky, he didn't support forced labor projects or terror against the peasantry, in fact he was almost pro-kulak on the agrarian question. Also, I don't believe Stalinists should be banned or restricted - so long as they abjure the most reactionary Stalinist policies like forced ethnic migrations, the anti-abortion and anti-sodomy laws. Calling slave labor "positive" is pretty bad though. Wasn't which doctor banned for supporting primitive accumulation?

Die Neue Zeit

24th December 2010, 06:36

That ban was for a supporting a policy in which racism and religious bigotry were part and parcel. You know, those "Indian devils" and all that shit?

And I'm not an "Anti-Revisionist."

KlÃ©ber

24th December 2010, 06:50

Racist theories about the inferiority of indigenous peoples to Europeans arose as a result of the conquest, colonization and enslavement of those peoples. The first conquistadors to touch down in the New World may have robbed, raped and murdered without remorse, but they hardly cared if their victims were Mesoamerican, Moroccan or Mediterranean.

The European conquest of the Americas was, of course, still racist, not just because chauvinist ideologies built up around it and it was intertwined with the slave trade, but rather simply because it targeted and systematically exploited entire peoples. Which brings us to my real point - you are at pains to explain how are you not also a racist when the Stalinist system of forced labor which you defend, targeted Soviet national minorities for super-exploitation, forced Central Asian republics to accept cotton monoculture, forcibly migrated vast numbers of people in economic colonization projects that smacked of imperialist times and bureaucratic disregard for the working and farming people, even collaborated with the Nazi Gestapo to keep order in Poland 1939-41 while deporting its population, and ensured obedience by slaughtering hundreds of thousands among the national intelligentsia, party and state organizations of Soviet republics in NKVD "ethnic operations."

I didn't say you should be banned, if anything I meant WD should be unbanned if you are allowed to spew these revolting gulag fantasies. I don't think he actually called anyone an "Indian devil," it was some childish remark about loincloths. IIRC his defense was the same as yours will be: I was just defending the primitive accumulation, not the racist baggage.

Die Neue Zeit

24th December 2010, 06:54

If you noted my categorization of policies, you'll note that I rated the national minorities repression negatively. The labour camp development is independent of that, just as I separated the labour camp development from the mass immiseration of the proletariat (the first Big Negative). The "ethnic operations" I consider as part of the 1930s purges.

Also, the national minorities repression went on the upswing during the war (Volga-Germans, Chechens, etc.).

KlÃ©ber

24th December 2010, 07:20

Just like WD, you're for the super-exploitation but you'd prefer it to happen without people getting exploited. It's not that easy. The horrendous changes to the Soviet camp system under Frenkel were part and parcel of a greater reactionary social offensive by the bureaucracy. The big question is still how you are going to find enough convicts to fill a single death camp (oh I'm sorry, maybe-death camp), but you have solved that by proposing to round up "the lumpens" and cart them off. The way you are using it, "lumpen" has a pretty nasty ring to it especially given the national connotations in many countries where immigrants and oppressed peoples make up a second-class citizenry. The word lumpen has historically been used by phony Marxists of the reformist and Stalinist varities to smear militant workers to their left. As for actual lumpenproletarians, homeless people and street criminals, there are ways to help them join productive society in a democratic and egalitarian way, instead of making them slaves.

Geiseric

24th December 2010, 07:35

you should address the issues that make them lumpenproletariat imho, to make the problem over before we need to get rid of them. However I think you guys are over complicating this, stalin send people, most undeserving, to prison labor camps. The conditions were terrible, and I think it's easy to take one side here...

Die Neue Zeit

24th December 2010, 07:35

Maybe I should repeat again my class distinctions for the underclasses: proper lumpenproletariat, lumpenbourgeoisie, and lumpen-scum. Now you can better understand my class approaches to each of these classes.

Prostitutes where illegal, low-level gangsters, and such, as I said before, can be incorporated peacefully into the working class. The latter two classes, however, are class enemies.

[This was a post aimed at both Kleber and Syd.]

KlÃ©ber

24th December 2010, 07:47

Great, now I can better understand your burning hatred for the lumpen scum. You are obviously quite well-equipped to decide just who is a lumpenproletarian who goes to the reeducation camp with movies and field trips, and who is a lumpen-scum who gets to dig canals in an inhospitable wasteland for the rest of their life without getting paid. Your position is similar to that of Plato, who advocated enslavement for petty criminals in The Republic. I don't think you should be banned or restricted but you're a couple thousand years behind the times on this one.

Geiseric

24th December 2010, 07:50

I don't think anybody really deserves that bad of a treatment. I mean if they're really that bad, we'll just expropiate everything they have, and if they still cause a racket, nobody will take them seriously if we do our jobs right. However I get what you mean.

Martin Blank

24th December 2010, 08:31

As for your threat, and your "generosity" in "letting it go for now," obviously you've mistaken me for somebody who gives a flying fuck.

Well, continue with your flaming and I'm sure I can start the arrangements for your very own restriction. It's really all up to you.

Anyway, to the subject at hand, you conveniently ignored the point I was making. I have to wonder why you have chosen DNZ as your sole target here. After all, there are plenty of "Marxist-Leninists", "anti-revisionists", Maoists, Hoxhaites, etc., here -- some of whom have contributed to this thread -- who support the same positions. You can caterwaul until the cows come home about DNZ, but restricting him for his view on prison labor would also require a wholesale purge of the other currents. As I told Kléber, good luck with that.

For the record, I don't share the ... enthusiasm ... he shows toward prison labor, much for the same reasons you and others do. But he does raise a point about prisoners. What do you do with prisoners? Do you let them languish in their cells for 10, 20 or more years? Or do you utilize them for the good of society?

I have no problem with prisoners producing infrastructure or commodities in a workers' republic, but where I differ fundamentally with DNZ is that I generally advocate it being voluntary, organized (unionized), carried out according to contemporary labor laws, and the worker-prisoners receive the prevailing compensation for their labor. And, yes, in the case of non-proletarian elements (bourgeois, petty bourgeois and the associated "lumpen" elements) held as prisoners, I do favor a level of coercion to push them into meaningful labor, and have their rights contingent on their participation in labor, including extending sentences or giving them a dishonorable discharge for belligerent non-participation, sabotage or undermining the labor process, meaning they can only get the worst jobs (and if they don't, it's back to prison).

Then again, I think the rights of basic citizenship in a workers' republic need to be contingent on similar labor-based participation in society at-large.

I think what people are tripping about is the relatively crude and (as he admits) "harsh" language he uses to talk about it. As someone who has grown ... numb, for lack of a better term ... to DNZ's orthographical cretinism (sorry, dude :D ), it is a bit of a shock to the system when he speaks in plain language. But because of that, I never pay attention to any sentence of his that contains less than seven words. This gives me the luxury to concentrate on his meanings, not his shorthand. I highly recommend this method.

Having read the meaning of his comments, I understand DNZ's position and don't consider it any different than you get from your run-of-the-gulag Stalin-lover. As I said, I don't agree with his enthusiasm, and I certainly don't agree with the view that the GULAG system was a "positive". On paper, it may have looked nice to some, but in reality it was a method of suppressing proletarian resistance and regimenting the working class to subordinate themselves to the petty-bourgeois managers and officials. It was really the worst punishment the petty-bourgeois state could give out. Putting bullets in the heads of the "Old Bolsheviks" was considered more humane than being sentenced to a GULAG. I know I would have preferred it.

Looking at your response to DNZ, I can only characterize your response as moralistic hysteria. It is pretty much devoid of politics, other than throwaway comments about "Dr. Mengele" and strawmen. I mean, seriously, you brought up the organ harvesting thing, not DNZ. So it's nothing but a strawman to use it to attack either him or me based on it (especially since he disavowed it and I think such a grotesque view reflects more on your world view than mine). And while Preobrazhensky's New Economics doesn't specifically discuss prison labor or slave labor, his method does leave room open for the GULAG system, prison labor in general and slave labor in particular. (It might be more accurate to refer to it more as a form of serfdom than slavery, since, IIRC, many GULAGs required the prisoners to fend for themselves in terms of food, heating supplies, etc., when they were not working for the Soviet state.) Preobrazhensky sought to use whatever means were at the disposal of the Soviet republic to raise the industrial productive forces to, at the very least, an equal level with the advanced capitalist countries. Given that Preobrazhensky was willing to starve poor peasants and farm workers in order to feed his desired industrial dynamo (through international trade of grain to accumulate "hard currency" used to buy or build machinery), the use of prisoners as workgangs and their position being akin to that of a serf (or even slave) seems almost a "lesser evil". From the perspective of the petty-bourgeois official, it was not a case of "they tried the international trade thing and it didn't work out too well, so they tried the prison labor thing". Being unwilling to stick their necks out or put all their eggs in one basket, the bureaucratic officials hedged their bets and did both at the same time.

(Side Note -- I am reminded here of the old Soviet joke about bureaucratic policy: One day, TASS reported that the Transport Ministry was officially changing which side of the road their drivers should be on, from the right to the left. The change was to take effect the coming Friday. The next day, TASS reported that the Kremlin higher-ups were "immediately concerned" about the potential impact of this great traffic shift, so the Politburo met and made a final decision: half of the cars will drive on the left side, and the other half will drive on the right.)

"Primitive socialist accumulation" is not a part of communist theory, since it has nothing to do with the communist mode of production or the transition thereto. For starters, communism is an international system, and Preobrazhensky's theory is for an isolated national economy later defined by Stalin as "socialism" (sic!). Moreover, it is not a theory that advances or improves the social position of the proletariat. Quite the contrary. Preobrazhensky, by dint of his theory, was perfectly willing to "hire [the industrial] half the working class to kill the other half", as robber-baron Jay Gould once put it. Who benefited? Only the officials and managers benefited, since this process suppressed almost all independent proletarian opposition to the petty-bourgeois Soviet state. (The "carrot" of Stakhanovism sealed the deal, IMO.)

Martin Blank

24th December 2010, 08:36

Calling slave labor "positive" is pretty bad though. Wasn't which doctor banned for supporting primitive accumulation?

Which doctor was banned for a number of reasons, including his support for the use of primitive capitalist accumulation. "Primitive socialist accumulation" is another issue. Honestly, I wonder if those responsible for defining policy on this forum even have enough of a theoretical grounding in the question to make a determination. In any event, I do agree that calling slave labor something "positive" is problematic, to say the least. But it's a position held quietly by hundreds (if not thousands) of other members of this forum, and "making an example" out of one of them will not change their views. They answer to a Higher Power (Stalin, for those just joining us).

KlÃ©ber

24th December 2010, 09:55

And while Preobrazhensky's New Economics doesn't specifically discuss prison labor or slave labor, his method does leave room open for the GULAG system, prison labor in general and slave labor in particular.
No it doesn't, when he wrote that in 1926 the Soviet Union still had decent standards for prisoners, people were well-fed and housed, even in Siberia, and most importantly they got paid for their labor time. He supported a gradual improvement in living standards, one of the defining features of primitive socialist accumulation is that it does not immiserate the people being accumulated from. His eventual capitulation to Stalinism was a betrayal, not a confirmation, of the core of his theories.

(It might be more accurate to refer to it more as a form of serfdom than slavery, since, IIRC, many GULAGs required the prisoners to fend for themselves in terms of food, heating supplies, etc., when they were not working for the Soviet state.) Slaves had/have to fend for themselves when not working for their owners. Slaves often had part-time jobs, saved up money, even operated vendor stands, and there were rare cases of slaves owning other slaves. Just as there was a caste of gulag prisoners who criminally lived off the others and were tolerated as mid-level overseers by camp administrators.

Preobrazhensky sought to use whatever means were at the disposal of the Soviet republic to raise the industrial productive forces to, at the very least, an equal level with the advanced capitalist countries. Given that Preobrazhensky was willing to starve poor peasants and farm workers in order to feed his desired industrial dynamo (through international trade of grain to accumulate "hard currency" used to buy or build machinery), the use of prisoners as workgangs and their position being akin to that of a serf (or even slave) seems almost a "lesser evil". Now you are just making stuff up, it's all completely hypothetical and unfounded. Where did Preobrazhensky say it's okay to starve farmers? He specifically opposed super-exploitation of the peasants. He defended kulaks as a bridge between town and country, and supported their accumulation of wealth during NEP, although he said the state should work to distribute the benefits more evenly among the rest of the agricultural population. Prior to his convergence with the Left Opposition, he even mocked Trotsky as an anti-peasant orthodox Marxist bookworm.

"Primitive socialist accumulation" is not a part of communist theory, since it has nothing to do with the communist mode of production or the transition thereto.Eh, it was a Marxist attempt, albeit a flawed one, to analyze the isolated Soviet economy that was stuck in the transition stage.

For starters, communism is an international system, and Preobrazhensky's theory is for an isolated national economy later defined by Stalin as "socialism" (sic!).No, Preobrazhensky believed that only an international revolution could resolve the impasse in the Soviet economy. He did surrender to the Stalin clique when it ended NEP and launched the First Five-Year Plan, but he never quite believed that they had solved the contradictions of the transition economy and that's why they murdered him.

Moreover, it is not a theory that advances or improves the social position of the proletariat. Quite the contrary. Preobrazhensky, by dint of his theory, was perfectly willing to "hire [the industrial] half the working class to kill the other half", as robber-baron Jay Gould once put it.As robber-baron Jay Gould once put it... not as Preobrazhensky put it because you're stuffing words in his mouth, which is probably DNZ's fault for trying to pass his support for slave labor off as one of the man's theories.

Who benefited? Only the officials and managers benefited, since this process suppressed almost all independent proletarian opposition to the petty-bourgeois Soviet state. (The "carrot" of Stakhanovism sealed the deal, IMO.)Actually the industrialization of the Five-Year Plans increased the size of the proletariat and created new headaches for the bureaucracy, which is one of the reasons why they had to to "clean house" with a mass slaughter of real or potential dissidents.

The Soviet state was not petty-bourgeois; an element of the state and Communist Party, the "Right Communists," had enthusiastically supported market incentives and the growth of small business in the 1920's, but they were purged as "Bukharinites" by the bureaucratic center, and the Soviet petty bourgeoisie (kulaks and nepmen) had been eradicated by the time Stalin declared socialism to be in effect in 1934.

I do agree that calling slave labor something "positive" is problematic, to say the least. But it's a position held quietly by hundreds (if not thousands) of other members of this forum, and "making an example" out of one of them will not change their views. They answer to a Higher Power (Stalin, for those just joining us). Well then al8 and which doctor, the martyrs of honest idiocy, should be unbanned.

Palingenisis

24th December 2010, 12:28

Here's a thought. I'm not flame-baiting anyone. You've got a clown here who pretends he's a socialist and finding of slave labor, and painfully working people to death because of their non-conformity to the demands of property. a "positive."
.

What the fuck is wrong with you? He is NOT talking about non-conformity to the demands of property...he is talking about non-conformity to the demands of society. Socialism will be a lumpen's worst nightmare. There will no escape for those who would rather sponge, steal and sell their bodies to get high or drunk or whatever....They will be forced to contribute. Thats why when as the revolution approaches all the little work shy radical liberals will swing over clearly to the side of reaction.

Palingenisis

24th December 2010, 12:32

Good point, most of our "anti-revisionists" are guilty of double-think whereas DNZ is a bit more honest.

Uh....DNZ is not an anti-revisionist. And well he is just talking sense. The responses to him show a grave lack of cop-on, middle class sentimentality or things even worse maybe.

Palingenisis

24th December 2010, 12:34

Your position is similar to that of Plato, who advocated enslavement for petty criminals in The Republic. I don't think you should be banned or restricted but you're a couple thousand years behind the times on this one.

Those who cant be rehabilitated should be forced to contribute to society against their will and watched very closely. It should be remembered that Plato was a Communist.

ComradeOm

24th December 2010, 13:32

You are of the abstentionist position that all Stalin needed to do was not sign the NAP, because Hitler would have faced a two-front war. What you are forgetting (and most historians forget this, so I don't blame you) is that Stalin himself was facing a potential two-front war; the other bad boy group on the block was JapanThe Japanese had no intention of sacrificing themselves for German ambitions. Nor had they the capabilities or logistical reach to make serious inroads into the Russian Far East. Khalkhin Gol was a conclusive demonstration as to the superiority of the Red Army and one that shifted the balance of power within Japan towards the Imperial Navy. All this was known to the Soviet command and while doubts may have lingered the threat of a two front war was certainly not as forbidding as it was for Germany

Considering that the previous occupants were right-wing and proto-fascist thugs, that incorporation was a huge positiveSo now its okay to invade another country and annex its lands because its government's line is incorrect? Social-imperialist doesn't begin to describe just how wrong this sentiment is

The negatives from a revolutionary perspective do have to be evaluated with the positives from a geopolitical perspective (what you mislabel "Russian nationalism")And why should I or anyone else on this forum give a damn about Russia's geopolitical advancement during this period? Do you also admire Hitler for increasing Germany's global standing during the 1930s? Was the Nazi invasion of Poland acceptable in light of the elimination of the Składkowski regime?

I can't think of any other crime and punishment system where those on parole would actually like to settle near the place of their imprisonment.I can't think of any other system where released inmates were provided with so little choice as to where to settle or move

Note: both groups would have high turnover, with Group A's turnover being due mainly to death, and Group B's turnover being due to paroles after sentences have been served.If your ideology condones the working of men and women to death then I suggest that you reconsider it and how you arrived at this point. This is an appalling sentiment for anyone who professes to be a socialist and, for what its worth, its one that I condemn unreservedly

S.Artesian

24th December 2010, 15:56

Well, continue with your flaming and I'm sure I can start the arrangements for your very own restriction. It's really all up to you.

Not a problem for me. When I think it's right to tell someone to fuck-off, count on it happening.

Anyway, to the subject at hand, you conveniently ignored the point I was making. I have to wonder why you have chosen DNZ as your sole target here. After all, there are plenty of "Marxist-Leninists", "anti-revisionists", Maoists, Hoxhaites, etc., here -- some of whom have contributed to this thread -- who support the same positions. You can caterwaul until the cows come home about DNZ, but restricting him for his view on prison labor would also require a wholesale purge of the other currents. As I told Kléber, good luck with that.I'm not really concerned with the point you're making. I responded to DNZ in this thread because he made the claim in his little sing-song, "On the one hand" "On the other hand" cost benefit pseudo analysis.

See, it's really not that complicated. A smug, pontificating, pseudo-Marxist jerk who stacks his CV with absurdities steps out his "Kautskyshite" closet to say slave labor, working people to a slow and painful death, is a "good thing." So I tell this Martha Stewart of the Gulag to fuck off. What part of that is so complicated it needs further explanation?

For the record, I don't share the ... enthusiasm ... he shows toward prison labor, much for the same reasons you and others do. But he does raise a point about prisoners. What do you do with prisoners? Do you let them languish in their cells for 10, 20 or more years? Or do you utilize them for the good of society?
Shows what an ignoramus you are-- as if this is a question of enthusiasm, as if reluctantly supporting slave labor is somehow a more nuanced, more Marxist, more humane position. When you say "what do you do with prisoners" you are performing the classical maneuver of bourgeois political economists, sociologists, lawyers, cops, judges etc. -- you are abstracting the categories of the "you" in "what do you do" and "prisoners" from the social relations that generate the categories. You are simply reproducing the actions and ideology of the bourgeoisie from your "left" perspective-- which BTW isn't a bad evaluation of the fSU.

So who are the "you"-- the fSU bureaucracy who work ceaselessly for two things which are really one thing-- maintain their own positions and contain the prospects of proletarian revolution. That's who the "you" are. And the prisoners? They are those who don't toe those two lines. They don't work to maintain the bureaucracy as the ruling elite, and they don't work to contain the revolution.

The lie to all this bullshit about murderers, rapists, "lumpenproletariat" is that there aren't ever enough of them to consititute an army of slaves; that the categories of "lumpenproletariat" "criminals" etc. are categories defined by relations to property. So if your property requires you to engage in slave labor, then your property has nothing to do with socialism, accumulation, nor protecting either from "murderers and rapists." Your property produces an ideology that says-- aggrandize labor at rates far exceeding labor's ability to reproduce itself; enslave and impoverish as many as you can to develop, not production for use and need, but the power to contain the prospects of revolution.

And that last part-- about using them for the "good of society"? brought a fucking tear to my eye, really. Rings a bell, too. Let's see where else have I heard that-- hmmh.. syphilis experiments on murderers, rapists, lumpen, [who just happen to all be black, pure coincidence] at Tuskeegee?

Where else-- oh yeah, all that exposing enlisted men to high dosages of radiation-- yeah that was done for the good of society too. They weren't criminals, of course, just soldiers. But hey, they had taken the step forward, hadn't they? They could have refused and... gone to prison where, if they were black, they could have been volunteered for the syphilis infection.

Please spare us the "redemptionist" theorizing where we enslave others for the "good of society"

I have no problem with prisoners producing infrastructure or commodities in a workers' republic, but where I differ fundamentally with DNZ is that I generally advocate it being voluntary, organized (unionized), carried out according to contemporary labor laws, and the worker-prisoners receive the prevailing compensation for their labor. And, yes, in the case of non-proletarian elements (bourgeois, petty bourgeois and the associated "lumpen" elements) held as prisoners, I do favor a level of coercion to push them into meaningful labor, and have their rights contingent on their participation in labor, including extending sentences or giving them a dishonorable discharge for belligerent non-participation, sabotage or undermining the labor process, meaning they can only get the worst jobs (and if they don't, it's back to prison).Well that's wonderfully big and liberal of you.... it's also pure unadulterated idealistic bullshit because whether you have a problem with it or not, that is not what DNZ was advocating and more importantly, that's not how the system, any system that advocates, employs, compels slave labor operates. Actually it's pure unadulterated idealistic bourgeois bullshit, in that it assumes that the "laws" used to organize property and labor are "objective," "equitable," and not formed by those with special interests in preserving their status, privileges, access to property.

And it's pure bullshit in thinking that such a system can be enforced without including the rest of DNZ's little homage to Arbeit Macht Frei-- slow and painful death, starvation, inadequate medical care, torture, beatings.. etc. etc.

Then again, I think the rights of basic citizenship in a workers' republic need to be contingent on similar labor-based participation in society at-large.Oh... I'm sure everyone feels so much better knowing that-- knowing that you think there need to be basic rights that are based on similar labor-based participation. That too is bullshit. WTF does that mean? Clearly, it's your version of the Bolshevik's civil war version of "only those who work, eat" which again abstracts the categories from the social relations.

Clearly, when the Red Army forcibly requisitions grain and food supplies from peasants, the eating of those doing the work of the growing the grain and raising the cattle is way down the list of priorities. And necessarily so, that's what "force" means.

The point is to identify clearly the social need and not "glorify" by calling it a "big plus" or "rights of citizenship." It's class war.

So apply that to the reality of slave labor anywhere and everywhere in history... and you tell me where it's served the interest of your "basic rights of citizenship," you're community of laborers.

I think what people are tripping about is the relatively crude and (as he admits) "harsh" language he uses to talk about it. As someone who has grown ... numb, for lack of a better term ... to DNZ's orthographical cretinism (sorry, dude :D ), it is a bit of a shock to the system when he speaks in plain language. But because of that, I never pay attention to any sentence of his that contains less than seven words. This gives me the luxury to concentrate on his meanings, not his shorthand. I highly recommend this method.Right. Pure fucking genius. Here's a news flash-- all those sentence of more than seven words? They're just back-filling; they're just trying to obscure the reality of what's contained in those short sentences you can't be bothered with. I wouldn't want you to take this the wrong way, and think I'm poking a bear with a stick, but I have to tell you Dr. House, you're the idiot around here.

Having read the meaning of his comments, I understand DNZ's position and don't consider it any different than you get from your run-of-the-gulag Stalin-lover. As I said, I don't agree with his enthusiasm, and I certainly don't agree with the view that the GULAG system was a "positive". On paper, it may have looked nice to some, but in reality it was a method of suppressing proletarian resistance and regimenting the working class to subordinate themselves to the petty-bourgeois managers and officials. It was really the worst punishment the petty-bourgeois state could give out. Putting bullets in the heads of the "Old Bolsheviks" was considered more humane than being sentenced to a GULAG. I know I would have preferred it.

As for putting bullets in heads, and what you would have preferred-- really do you have the slightest clue as to what actually goes on in the real world? Let me put into more than seven words: What you personally prefer, bullet in the head, nicer Gulags, kinder, gentler slave labor, etc. doesn't have fuck all to do with anything.

Looking at your response to DNZ, I can only characterize your response as moralistic hysteria. It is pretty much devoid of politics, other than throwaway comments about "Dr. Mengele" and strawmen. I mean, seriously, you brought up the organ harvesting thing, not DNZ. So it's nothing but a strawman to use it to attack either him or me based on it (especially since he disavowed it and I think such a grotesque view reflects more on your world view than mine). You are an idiot, Dr. House. He brought up slave labor because of it's "utility." I pointed out that this has nothing to do with utility. It has everything to do with power, with the reproduction of relations of power, and actually-- exchange value in the most primitive and non-socialist way.

If we're talking about making good use of "lumpen" "murderers" "malingerers" why not fucking harvest their organs, and trade the kidneys for fucking tractors? Why turn away from that option? Hey, why not take the disturbed, the partially disabled, any and all of those who COST the society more than they RETURN, and assign them tothe dirtiest, most dangerous, least compensated jobs?

And why not also take those discriminated against, those who are different, those who don't meet the established criteria of "productivity" and do the same with them.. it's so fucking useful isn't it? Wait a minute, that's exactly what capitalism does. Hey, capitalism developed pretty quickly, maybe we should take a lesson.

Give us a fucking break, please, Dr. House, from your idiotic rationality. [Question: is it more dangerous to refer to an administrator as "idiotic" as compared to referring to just an ordinary contributor as "idiotic"?]

And while Preobrazhensky's New Economics doesn't specifically discuss prison labor or slave labor, his method does leave room open for the GULAG system, prison labor in general and slave labor in particular. (It might be more accurate to refer to it more as a form of serfdom than slavery, since, IIRC, many GULAGs required the prisoners to fend for themselves in terms of food, heating supplies, etc., when they were not working for the Soviet state.) Preobrazhensky sought to use whatever means were at the disposal of the Soviet republic to raise the industrial productive forces to, at the very least, an equal level with the advanced capitalist countries.
Given that Preobrazhensky was willing to starve poor peasants and farm workers in order to feed his desired industrial dynamo (through international trade of grain to accumulate "hard currency" used to buy or build machinery), Care to back that up with a reference to his writings? Care to show us where he says "whatever means" where he says the Soviet republic must be willing to starve the peasantry? You're making shit up, Dr. House, to cover the weakness in your "interpretation" of forced labor.

the use of prisoners as workgangs and their position being akin to that of a serf (or even slave) seems almost a "lesser evil". Your ignorance is stunning. Have you ever even read The New Economics?

Quite the contrary. Preobrazhensky, by dint of his theory, was perfectly willing to "hire [the industrial] half the working class to kill the other half", as robber-baron Jay Gould once put it. IMO.)[/QUOTE]

You're opinion is based on your ignorance.

hardlinecommunist

24th December 2010, 17:33

Comrade Stalin was one of the greatest Marxist Leninists and revolutionary Communist Leaders of all time so i voted for very good

Rosa Lichtenstein

24th December 2010, 18:12

^^^So said many of those who were on their way to be shot by Stalin's minions.:lol:

Die Neue Zeit

24th December 2010, 18:26

For the record, I don't share the ... enthusiasm ... he shows toward prison labor, much for the same reasons you and others do. But he does raise a point about prisoners. What do you do with prisoners? Do you let them languish in their cells for 10, 20 or more years? Or do you utilize them for the good of society?

I have no problem with prisoners producing infrastructure or commodities in a workers' republic, but where I differ fundamentally with DNZ is that I generally advocate it being voluntary, organized (unionized), carried out according to contemporary labor laws, and the worker-prisoners receive the prevailing compensation for their labor.

Well, comrade, now that you did raise the question of unionization, I am but reminded of my subscription to the thread on the Georgia prisoners strike.

I'm literally scratching my head on this. I don't want to come across as some sort of political hypocrite ("labour rights" under bourgeois rule, none afterwards).

Maybe I can incorporate unionization with the abolition of prison labour for the benefit of private parties, while retaining conscription (vs. "voluntary") and group-by-group regard or disregard for contemporary labour laws (incl. compensation)... as a compromise?

That disregard would definitely kick in for the worst criminals. The small-time offenders fit for "community service" could perhaps be subject to the labour laws (so much for actual slavery), but I'd still retain conscription. Again, consider that one-million pool out of the millions more incarcerated throughout the world today, and you'd still have a sufficient pool for infrastructure projects.

And since comrade MarxSchmarx brought up the word "corvee" in describing the labour used to build the pyramids, perhaps the corrective labour system as a whole could incorporate conscripted corvee labour (no compensation, but other labour laws in effect) as an alternative to paying hefty fines and such. So now we have Pool C in addition to Pool A (real Gulag labour for these worst of scum) and Pool B (the small-timers).

And, yes, in the case of non-proletarian elements (bourgeois, petty bourgeois and the associated "lumpen" elements) held as prisoners, I do favor a level of coercion to push them into meaningful labor, and have their rights contingent on their participation in labor, including extending sentences or giving them a dishonorable discharge for belligerent non-participation, sabotage or undermining the labor process, meaning they can only get the worst jobs (and if they don't, it's back to prison).

Why such clemency? "If they don't, it's back to prison"?

I think what people are tripping about is the relatively crude and (as he admits) "harsh" language he uses to talk about it. As someone who has grown ... numb, for lack of a better term ... to DNZ's orthographical cretinism (sorry, dude :D )

No worries, dude! :lol: :laugh:

I never pay attention to any sentence of his that contains less than seven words. This gives me the luxury to concentrate on his meanings, not his shorthand. I highly recommend this method.

Sound advice!

Looking at your response to DNZ, I can only characterize your response as moralistic hysteria.

I inserted an edit regarding this board not being a Marxist-Humanist board, and questioning the extent to which Marxist-Humanists have broken from liberal humanism.

And while Preobrazhensky's New Economics doesn't specifically discuss prison labor or slave labor, his method does leave room open for the GULAG system, prison labor in general and slave labor in particular. (It might be more accurate to refer to it more as a form of serfdom than slavery, since, IIRC, many GULAGs required the prisoners to fend for themselves in terms of food, heating supplies, etc., when they were not working for the Soviet state.)

Thanks for that small but crucial detail there. It's confusing though: wasn't the peasant serf better off than the slave? The image given here is that "serfdom" in prisons is worse than "slavery."

Preobrazhensky sought to use whatever means were at the disposal of the Soviet republic to raise the industrial productive forces to, at the very least, an equal level with the advanced capitalist countries. Given that Preobrazhensky was willing to starve poor peasants and farm workers in order to feed his desired industrial dynamo (through international trade of grain to accumulate "hard currency" used to buy or build machinery), the use of prisoners as workgangs and their position being akin to that of a serf (or even slave) seems almost a "lesser evil". From the perspective of the petty-bourgeois official, it was not a case of "they tried the international trade thing and it didn't work out too well, so they tried the prison labor thing". Being unwilling to stick their necks out or put all their eggs in one basket, the bureaucratic officials hedged their bets and did both at the same time.

Except, again, that they botched when preferring kolkhozization over sovkhozization.

(Side Note -- I am reminded here of the old Soviet joke about bureaucratic policy: One day, TASS reported that the Transport Ministry was officially changing which side of the road their drivers should be on, from the right to the left. The change was to take effect the coming Friday. The next day, TASS reported that the Kremlin higher-ups were "immediately concerned" about the potential impact of this great traffic shift, so the Politburo met and made a final decision: half of the cars will drive on the left side, and the other half will drive on the right.)

No punchline about having car accidents everywhere as a result??? :lol: :laugh:

"Primitive socialist accumulation" is not a part of communist theory, since it has nothing to do with the communist mode of production or the transition thereto. For starters, communism is an international system, and Preobrazhensky's theory is for an isolated national economy later defined by Stalin as "socialism" (sic!).

It certainly has nothing to do with the lower phase of the communist mode of production, but what makes you think a variant of it has nothing to do with the transition? I'll tie this with my response to the last quote below.

Moreover, it is not a theory that advances or improves the social position of the proletariat. Quite the contrary. Preobrazhensky, by dint of his theory, was perfectly willing to "hire [the industrial] half the working class to kill the other half", as robber-baron Jay Gould once put it. Who benefited? Only the officials and managers benefited, since this process suppressed almost all independent proletarian opposition to the petty-bourgeois Soviet state. (The "carrot" of Stakhanovism sealed the deal, IMO.)

What about that one-million global scenario I suggested? Each of Pool A, Pool B, and Pool C have high turnover, for different reasons. Pool A: slow and painful death (real Gulag stuff). Pool B: short sentences ("community service"). Pool C: anywhere from seasonal corvee labour turnover to monthly corvee labour turnover. I don't think even those paying hefty fines would be expected to work exclusively for the corrective labour system until the fine is paid.

KlÃ©ber

24th December 2010, 18:40

Those who cant be rehabilitated should be forced to contribute to society against their will and watched very closely.

Socialism will be a lumpen's worst nightmare.You have it completely backwards. Socialism will help the most marginalized people who fell through the cracks to get a job, an education and a decent life, not outdo fascism in being their worst nightmare.

It should be remembered that Plato was a Communist.Yeah and so was the Rev. Jim Jones! Plato has been called a communist, but his political fantasy did not resolve class contradictions, it just forced social misery onto "the scum" who will be enslaved. Plenty of primitive and utopian communists in history have been monarchist, sexist and racist, that doesnt make those things communist. Plato was definitely not a Marxist, unless you can show me somewhere that Marx said capitalism would be great as long as the workers were bad people who deserved to be exploited!

Slavery was already reactionary in Plato's time. The rupture into slaves and masters was the the end of primitive classless society. If you want to defend Stalinist slave labor as progressive you might as well defend the pharaonic projects of ancient slave empires.

Uh....DNZ is not an anti-revisionist. And well he is just talking sense. The responses to him show a grave lack of cop-on, middle class sentimentality or things even worse maybe. I didn't say he was one but he did found the "Third Period Marxist-Leninists" group; maybe you're familiar with that perspective - Stalin became revisionist in 1935 and so on.

DNZ may be smoking sense but he definitely isn't talking it. He backs away and wrangles his position quite a bit, with gems like "not everyone will be worked to death" and, "I said positive not big positive."

There will no escape for those who would rather sponge, steal and sell their bodies to get high or drunk or whatever....They will be forced to contribute. Thats why when as the revolution approaches all the little work shy radical liberals will swing over clearly to the side of reaction. Oh okay, so this all part of some impotent Third Worldist revenge fantasy where you get to shoot all the Trotskyist and anarchists. I work three jobs thank you. The only "work shy liberals" are you Stalinist hypocrites with your ridiculous online alter egos. I saw most of you hardcore gun toting guerrillas post in the "Is your ideology a secret" thread that you actually keep your political views private in real life and aren't politically active.

Die Neue Zeit

24th December 2010, 18:45

Those who cant be rehabilitated should be forced to contribute to society against their will and watched very closely. It should be remembered that Plato was a Communist.

The Trotskyist Hal Draper wrote:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1966/twosouls/1-ancestors.htm

Karl Kautsky, the leading theoretician of the Second International, began his book on Thomas More with the observation that the two great figures inaugurating the history of socialism are More and Münzer, and that both of them “follow the long line of Socialists, from Lycurgus and Pythagoras to Plato, the Gracchi, Cataline, Christ ...”

This is a very impressive list of early “socialists,” and considering his position Kautsky should certainly have been able to recognize a socialist when he saw one. What is most fascinating about this list is the way it falls apart under examination into two quite different groups.

Plutarch’s life of Lycurgus led the early socialists to adopt him as the founder of Spartan “communism” – this is why Kautsky lists him. But as described by Plutarch, the Spartan system was based on equal division of land under private ownership; it was in no way socialistic. The “collectivist” feeling one may get from a description of the Spartan regime comes from a different direction: the way of life of the Spartan ruling class itself, which was organized as a permanent disciplined garrison in a state of siege; and to this add the terroristic regime imposed over the helots (slaves). I do not see how a modern socialist can read of the Lycurgan regime without feeling that he is meeting not an ancestor of socialism but a forerunner of fascism. There is quite a difference! But how is it that it did not impress itself on the leading theoretician of social-democracy?

Pythagoras founded an elite order which acted as the political arm of the landed aristocracy against the plebeian-democratic movement; he and his party were finally overthrown and expelled by a popular revolutionary rising. Kautsky seems to be on the wrong side of the barricades! But besides, inside the Pythagorean order a regime of total authoritarianism and regimentation prevailed. In spite of this, Kautsky chose to regard Pythagoras as a socialist ancestor because of the belief that the organized Pythagoreans practised communal consumption. Even if this were true (and Kautsky found out later it was not) this would have made the Pythagorean order exactly as communistic as any monastery. Chalk up a second ancestor of totalitarianism on Kautsky’s list.

The case of Plato’s Republic is well-enough known. The sole element of “communism” in his ideal state is the prescription of monastic-communal consumption for the small elite of “Guardians” who constitute the bureaucracy and army; but the surrounding social system is assumed to be private-property-holding, not socialistic. And – here it is again – Plato’s state model is government by an aristocratic elite, and his argument stresses that democracy inevitably means the deterioration and ruin of society. Plato’s political aim, in fact, was the rehabilitation and purification of the ruling aristocracy in order to fight the tide of democracy. To call him a socialist ancestor is to imply a conception of socialism which makes any kind of democratic control irrelevant.

But Draper forgets that, under pre-industrial relations, equal division of land under private ownership was the only feasible socialism (not communism)! In this context, such relations, the austere way of life of the Spartan ruling class (real austerity, not today's mask for budget cuts), and the Pythagoreans' "monastic" communal consumption - all rolled into one under Plato's Republic - are a huge plus!

Die Neue Zeit

24th December 2010, 19:07

I didn't say he was one but he did found the "Third Period Marxist-Leninists" group; maybe you're familiar with that perspective - Stalin became revisionist in 1935 and so on.

"For Marxist-Leninists adhering to a Third Period or true "Anti-Revisionist" line defined first by the Sixth Congress of the Communist International and the resulting Programme of the Communist International, those sympathetic to this Third Period line, and those curious about it and its implications for today"

KlÃ©ber

24th December 2010, 19:10

But Draper forgets that, under pre-industrial relations, equal division of land under private ownership was the only feasible socialism (not communism)! In this context, such relations, the austere way of life of the Spartan ruling class (real austerity, not today's mask for budget cuts), and the Pythagoreans' "monastic" communal consumption - all rolled into one under Plato's Republic - are a huge plus!
Ruling elites always found a way around monastic limits on their consumption. I'm sure many a Spartan slaveowner told the helots carrying their stuff what a "huge plus" it was for them to be slaves at that time and place in history. Industrial socialism may not have been feasible back then but these are bad examples of primitive communism. Neither the Spartan elite nor the Pythagoreans wanted to redistribute land because that would mean expropriating their own political base. And like Plato they all supported slavery which can not exist in a classless society.

Die Neue Zeit

24th December 2010, 19:14

Primitive socialism /= primitive communism

I was referring to the former, which is a class society, not the latter, which isn't. Yes, I do acknowledge that some in the ruling elites tried to find ways around real austerity. However, in the Spartan and Pythagorean cases, most in the ruling elite simply cared about power. And, of course, Kautsky's discussion was one "notwithstanding" the slaves, so the classes here are in reference to the rulers and the free non-rulers.

KlÃ©ber

24th December 2010, 19:18

RED DAVE

24th December 2010, 20:38

Draper was an old comrade of mine. We once almost got into a fistfight when I called him a social democrat.

But Draper forgets that, under pre-industrial relations, equal division of land under private ownership was the only feasible socialism (not communism)! In this context, such relations, the austere way of life of the Spartan ruling class (real austerity, not today's mask for budget cuts), and the Pythagoreans' "monastic" communal consumption - all rolled into one under Plato's Republic - are a huge plus!Bullshit. No policy of a slaveocracy is any kind of plus. The only plus for such a ruling class would have been mass suicide.

Keep on showing what a lover of dictatorship you are, DNZ.

RED DAVE

Die Neue Zeit

24th December 2010, 21:08

I think there needs to be a separate thread debating the differences between primitive communism and primitive socialism.

RED DAVE

24th December 2010, 21:14

I think there needs to be a separate thread debating the differences between primitive communism and primitive socialism.It will come right after the thread on how many former inmates of the gulag can piss on Stalin's grave.

RED DAVE

Thirsty Crow

24th December 2010, 23:02

Those who cant be rehabilitated should be forced to contribute to society against their will and watched very closely. It should be remembered that Plato was a Communist.
It is unbelievable that someone may produce an utterance(snetence like this one.
It really shows everything one needs to know about the politics of the person in hand, and not only thatm it also shows the not so enviable level of understanding ideological formations (you know, that little thing called historical materialism).
Bloody amazing.

Rosa Lichtenstein

24th December 2010, 23:38

^^^Are you p*ssed?

REVLEFT'S BIEGGST MATSER TROL

25th December 2010, 03:19

Uh....DNZ is not an anti-revisionist. And well he is just talking sense. The responses to him show a grave lack of cop-on, middle class sentimentality or things even worse maybe.

Opposition to slave labour is middle class sentimentality. Oh you. :rolleyes:

I wonder if there is anything we can be sentimental about, if it is not an opposition to slave labour.

REVLEFT'S BIEGGST MATSER TROL

25th December 2010, 03:24

Also I think an important idea is the effect slave labour relations would have on a socialist society.

I mean, surely it would act as an acid on our egalitarian relations? Would it not breed a section of the population who were, as most prison guards are, rather fucked up and fascistic? What about the people who run such things? What effect will being a "manager" have on them? Given that they will be overseeing the exploitation of those they control.

I am in favour of killing the "unreformable" rather than subjecting them (and a socialist society) to slave labour.

As far as accusing people opposed to such things as moralistic, I don't see why that is a bad thing.

RED DAVE

25th December 2010, 04:50

Also I think an important idea is the effect slave labour relations would have on a socialist society.Brilliant.

I mean, surely it would act as an acid on our egalitarian relations? Would it not breed a section of the population who were, as most prison guards are, rather fucked up and fascistic? What about the people who run such things? What effect will being a "manager" have on them? Given that they will be overseeing the exploitation of those they control.Brilliant.

I am in favour of killing the "unreformable" rather than subjecting them (and a socialist society) to slave labour.Cold-blooded murder.

As far as accusing people opposed to such things as moralistic, I don't see why that is a bad thing.You need to rethink your sense of what's right and wrong.

RED DAVE

Hit The North

25th December 2010, 05:43

I think there needs to be a separate thread debating the differences between primitive communism and primitive socialism.

I think there needs to be a separate thread debating whether you should have the right to call yourself a socialist and maintain posting rights on this forum.:mad:

Sir Comradical

25th December 2010, 07:21

My position on Stalin is basically what Isaac Deutscher wrote in his book. Some good, some bad.

Martin Blank

25th December 2010, 08:02

Die Neue Zeit

25th December 2010, 08:47

Primitive slave states ≠ Any sort of socialism or communism

If, as Engels said, Napoleon and Metternich were not among the founders of socialism then Lycurgus and Pythagoras certainly were not either.

Keep on showing what a lover of dictatorship you are, DNZ.

I think there needs to be a separate thread debating whether you should have the right to call yourself a socialist and maintain posting rights on this forum.:mad:

Read your beloved Hal Draper himself on primitive socialism:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1966/twosouls/1-ancestors.htm

Here, in the pre-history of our subject, are two kinds of figures ready-made for adoption into the pantheon of the socialist movement. There were the figures with a tinge of (alleged) collectivism, who were yet thorough elitists, authoritarians and anti-democrats; and there were the figures without anything collectivist about them, who were associated with democratic class struggles. There is a collectivist tendency without democracy, and there is a democratic tendency without collectivism but nothing yet which merges these two currents.

Not until Thomas Münzer, the leader of the revolutionary left wing of the German Reformation, do we find a suggestion of such a merger; a social movement with communistic ideas (Münzer’s) which was also engaged in a deep-going popular-democratic struggle from below.

While I advocate proletarian-not-necessarily-communist organizational and programmatic positions for left unity, all this Socialism From Above was before late feudalism, so the broad economism of supporting primitive Socialism From Above up until that point, most notably Plato's The Republic but also inclusive of native North American civilizations (despite their human sacrifices) and what not, should be understandable.

RED DAVE

25th December 2010, 13:11

Read your beloved Hal Draper himself on primitive socialism:

http://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1966/twosouls/1-ancestors.htm
Here, in the pre-history of our subject, are two kinds of figures ready-made for adoption into the pantheon of the socialist movement. There were the figures with a tinge of (alleged) collectivism, who were yet thorough elitists, authoritarians and anti-democrats; and there were the figures without anything collectivist about them, who were associated with democratic class struggles. There is a collectivist tendency without democracy, and there is a democratic tendency without collectivism but nothing yet which merges these two currents.

Not until Thomas Münzer, the leader of the revolutionary left wing of the German Reformation, do we find a suggestion of such a merger; a social movement with communistic ideas (Münzer’s) which was also engaged in a deep-going popular-democratic struggle from below.Unless I've gone blind, I don't see the word "socialism" in what you've posted from Draper.

While I advocate proletarian-not-necessarily-communist organizational and programmatic positions ... .He's trying to tell us he's a social democrat.

[A]ll this Socialism From Above was before late feudalism, so the broad economism of supporting primitive Socialism From Above up until that point, most notably Plato's The Republic but also inclusive of civilizations like the Inca (despite their human sacrifices), should be understandable.Plato's Republic was an elitist dictatorship. It had nothing to do with socialism except that the self-selected ruling class ruled collectively over the masses. If it resembles anything, it resembles stalinism, so it's not surprising that you're drawn to it.

And, by the way, here's Draper on Plato.

The case of Plato’s Republic is well-enough known. The sole element of “communism” in his ideal state is the prescription of monastic-communal consumption for the small elite of “Guardians” who constitute the bureaucracy and army; but the surrounding social system is assumed to be private-property-holding, not socialistic. And – here it is again – Plato’s state model is government by an aristocratic elite, and his argument stresses that democracy inevitably means the deterioration and ruin of society. Plato’s political aim, in fact, was the rehabilitation and purification of the ruling aristocracy in order to fight the tide of democracy. To call him a socialist ancestor is to imply a conception of socialism which makes any kind of democratic control irrelevent.At this point, DNZ, it's possible to wonder if you deliberately distorted Draper's position.

For those of you who want an interesting discussion of "socialism from below" vs. "socialism from above," here's Hal Draper's book online.

THE TWO SOULS OF SOCIALISM (http://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1966/twosouls/index.htm)

RED DAVE

Dimentio

25th December 2010, 13:50

I also would disagree with the common pro-Stalin view that heavily lopsided industrial buildup at the expense of the countryside (where most of the people lived) was necessarily essential to winning WW2. I believe such a view negates the lessons of people’s war, the most central one of which being that the masses themselves are the main weapon you have. We need to rupture with this view that it’s just “whoever has the most tanks and planes will win”. It’s the masses that are really mighty and who possess the “spiritual atom bomb”! And I tend to think the Maoist principle of simultaneously developing both the countryside and the urban areas is also universally relevant (except in overdeveloped countries like this one).

Seriously.

History has shown consistently that technological superiority is more important than how many people you could field. The experiences of the Chinese Civil War could not possibly be applied on the Eastern Front, especially since the Chinese Civil War almost was lost by the communists and could only lead to a victory when the Soviets started to pump in modern weapons to the PLA.

Imagine if there had only been Soviet partisan units in the East Front. The Germans would have taken Moscow by late summer and probably reached their goals of the Arkhangelsk-Volga Line by winter 1941. The Soviet-Union would have ceased to exist and Hitler would have forcefully starved tens of millions of Soviet citizens to death, turned the remainder into Helots and fulfilled his dream about a Fascist European Super-state under German domination.

People's War is only possible to apply against weakened adversaries or in civil wars, where the combatants are unable or unwilling to utilise genocidal policies. Hitler was certainly willing to utilise genocidal policies. He didn't enter the USSR as a conqueror, but as an exterminator.

People's War has generally failed against leaders who are willing to kill off the civilian population on a routine basis, like d'Aubuisson in El Salvador or Fujimori in Peru.

RED DAVE

25th December 2010, 14:30

People's War is only possible to apply against weakened adversaries or in civil wars, where the combatants are unable or unwilling to utilise genocidal policies. Hitler was certainly willing to utilise genocidal policies. He didn't enter the USSR as a conqueror, but as an exterminator.

People's War has generally failed against leaders who are willing to kill off the civilian population on a routine basis, like d'Aubuisson in El Salvador or Fujimori in Peru.And while it is true that the US lost the War in Vietnam, this is only true because political opposition in the US, plus the presence of China across the border and the USSR kept the US at bay. No matter how heroic the people of Vietnam were, a country of 28 million does not defeat a country of 250 million.

Same thing is happening in Afghanistan. If the US unleashed its total military force, it could turn that unhappy land into ... .

RED DAVE

S.Artesian

25th December 2010, 15:28

To Kléber and S.Artesian: While re-reading through The New Economics for the purposes of providing the relevant passages, and also doing some thinking about the economic question in general, I moved to Capital and some other economic writings because of something that "clicked". As a result, I'm putting aside my responses to you two (because, in all honestly, you two aren't important enough to necessitate putting this theoretical element aside). I'll try to get back to you two in the next couple of days. We'll see.

Translation: "I can't find anything to support my assertions, so let me deflect, distract, and otherwise divert anyone's attention from the fact that I've been called out on my equivocating view of forced labor, and my unequivocal ignorance. Hmmh... one of the ways I can do that is my making the point as an administrator, moderator, super-moderator, and 5 star grand poobah, I have much greater responsibilities to the universe of my flock than to deal with you mere ordinary, unimportant mortals."

Priceless. For everything else, there's Mastercard.

Have a happy fucking holiday.

S.Artesian

25th December 2010, 15:36

Apparently DNZ, among his other sterling qualities too numerous to mention here, cannot read, because here's the opening sentence from the link DNZ himself provides to Draper:

Karl Kautsky, the leading theoretician of the Second International, began his book on Thomas More with the observation that the two great figures inaugurating the history of socialism are More and Münzer, and that both of them “follow the long line of Socialists, from Lycurgus and Pythagoras to Plato, the Gracchi, Cataline, Christ ...”
This is a very impressive list of early “socialists,” and considering his position Kautsky should certainly have been able to recognize a socialist when he saw one. What is most fascinating about this list is the way it falls apart under examination into two quite different groups. [Emphasis added].

Draper then proceeds to demolish Kautsky's assertions point by point, individual by individual.

DNZ is a true Kautskyshite-- convinced that he can get away with his own ignorance, his own distortions, not so much by claiming some link to revolutionary socialism, but by the smug belief that nobody actually will do the homework necessary to prove how full of baloney he is.

Die Neue Zeit

25th December 2010, 18:49

Unless I've gone blind, I don't see the word "socialism" in what you've posted from Draper.

Here he makes it synonymous with collectivism.

He's trying to tell us he's a social democrat.

Read the Communist Manifesto again on "proletarian parties." :rolleyes:

Plato's Republic was an elitist dictatorship. It had nothing to do with socialism except that the self-selected ruling class ruled collectively over the masses. If it resembles anything, it resembles Stalinism, so it's not surprising that you're drawn to it.

Before industrial development, the only feasible form of socialism was equalizing ownership of private property. That various Socialism From Above philosophers desired this, real austerity imposed upon the political rulers, and monastic-communal consumption - well, I said all these earlier in the thread.

Why do I advocate that the only social alternatives to slave and pre-late feudal relations before industrial development was Socialism From Above?

Because the chattel slave class(es) were incapable of long-term political organization. It took Haiti to sort things out somewhat.

In other words, I know the distinction between Socialism From Above and Populist Democracy, and in these earlier historical epochs am siding with the former.

S.Artesian

25th December 2010, 19:37

And while it is true that the US lost the War in Vietnam, this is only true because political opposition in the US, plus the presence of China across the border and the USSR kept the US at bay. No matter how heroic the people of Vietnam were, a country of 28 million does not defeat a country of 250 million.

Same thing is happening in Afghanistan. If the US unleashed its total military force, it could turn that unhappy land into ... .

ED DAVE

I disagree. The political opposition in the US was a consequence of the military progress of the war. Certainly the presence of the fSU and China probably had a lot to do with the US not using nuclear weapons.

In the last analysis however, it was what happened on the ground that counted-- and on the ground the US fielded an army of 500,000 supported by the most advanced logistical command and control network ever developed; by artillery and air support of unparalleled firepower. And that army with all that firepower lost control of the battlefield.

Even after it was clear that US overt ground involvement was not producing the desired effect-- which was the control of increasing amounts of territory and suppression of both main force engagements and guerrilla attacks, the US thought it could win.

Kissinger and Nixon were convinced all through the "peace" negotiations and after that they could grab a victory by maintaining their air war in the South, by interdicting supplies from the North and building up the logistic base of the ARVN. Didn't quite work out that way.

Bottom line was, the NVA became perhaps the finest infantry force in the world during this conflict.

The US was defeated in this conflict in its strategic goal which was to control the battlefield and make it impossible for Hanoi to resupply, re-man its armies in the field and conduct ground operations.

That being said, one more thing needs to be said: Vietnam was not a case of "peoples' war." There were main force engagements stretching back to 1965 and Ia Drang Valley, and before. Khe Sanh was not a guerrilla maneuver, but involved massing of artillery for concentrating fire on the marine base.

Used to be the adage in the military that "God is on the side of the heavier battalions," which is only partly true. We know God is dead, but before he died he indicated history is on the side of the heavy maneuver battalions.

gorillafuck

25th December 2010, 22:25

marxism has become almost-exclusive domain of hateful nerds, needs more laid back jocks
Jocks aren't laid back, they're hotheaded beefcakes:laugh:

I voted very bad, btw. Kleber has really been destroying this thread.

Dimentio

25th December 2010, 22:41

As for Stalin, I am thinking that his style of government was reminiscent of the ways of surgery of this surgeon.

http://games.adultswim.com/amateur-surgeon-2-twitchy-online-game.html

Martin Blank

26th December 2010, 00:34

Translation: "I can't find anything to support my assertions, so let me deflect, distract, and otherwise divert anyone's attention from the fact that I've been called out on my equivocating view of forced labor, and my unequivocal ignorance. Hmmh... one of the ways I can do that is my making the point as an administrator, moderator, super-moderator, and 5 star grand poobah, I have much greater responsibilities to the universe of my flock than to deal with you mere ordinary, unimportant mortals."

Disappointed manager is disappointed. :rolleyes:

Anyway, see the thread in Chit-Chat I started asking for people with knowledge in Marxian economics for a precis of what I'm working on rather than responding to you two right now.

Rosa Lichtenstein

26th December 2010, 00:41

^^^Miles, are you still working on that summary of the theory I won't mention here in case it derails this thread, too? The one you promised over a year ago?

KlÃ©ber

26th December 2010, 01:02

Disappointed manager is disappointed. :rolleyes:
You did not just make an ad hominem attack? If you're going to pull rank as a red name you should be the better man, instead of threatening the wrong person with restriction, or avoiding an economic debate by turning it into some Maoist struggle session where people get baited for sinning against communism in their personal life.

Tomhet

26th December 2010, 17:29

Neutral to Somewhat Positive..
Stalin did many great things, but he also did some horrible things..
His homophobia was reactionary and wrong, REGARDLESS of the historical circumstance, IMO..

Marxach-LÃ©inÃnach

26th December 2010, 17:39

Neutral to Somewhat Positive..
Stalin did many great things, but he also did some horrible things..
His homophobia was reactionary and wrong, REGARDLESS of the historical circumstance, IMO..

Marx, Engels and Lenin were all just as homophobic as Stalin was

S.Artesian

26th December 2010, 17:56

Here are the questions I would like answered by our Stalin stalwarts:

Were all those "old Bolsheviks," those who had served on the MRC, the Central Executive Council, and the Sovnarkom of the All-Soviet organization really secret fascists? Did they somehow become fascists after 1928?

Were all those who in 1928-1929 practiced coalition, compromise with the bourgeoisie in, say, Germany, "social fascists," while those who opposed coalition, compromise with the bourgeoisie in popular fronts in 1936 also fascists?

Did all those generals, like for example Tukhachevsky, actually go over to the side of the Nazis?

Were all those peasants, small, middle, large, actually savage counterrevolutionaries?

My point in asking these questions is not that I want to argue these points. On the contrary, I want to point out how useless it is to argue with those who answer "yes" to these questions as the answers require a disavowal of reality, a reality of what occurred prior to these specific determinations by the fSU leadership, and a disavowal of what occurred after these determinations-- which was of course the decimation of the proletariat internally and internationally, the victory of fascism in Germany, Spain, the subsequent greatest slaughter in history, the stabilization of capitalism after the slaughter, and the collapse of the USSR itself.

As Hooper said in Jaws, there's no point in arguing with someone who's lining up to be a hot lunch.

Rosa Lichtenstein

26th December 2010, 21:34

Marxach:

Marx, Engels and Lenin were all just as homophobic as Stalin was

Proof?

In fact, we debated this toward the end of this thread:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/karl-marx-racisti-t146433/index.html

Marxach-LÃ©inÃnach

26th December 2010, 22:13

Marxach:

Proof?

In fact, we debated this toward the end of this thread:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/karl-marx-racisti-t146433/index.html

Engels called a gay guy he didn't like an "ass fucker", Lenin compared sleeping with a woman who'd herself slept with another woman to "bathing in used bath water" or something like that, communists tended to be against homosexuality back then so I doubt Marx was an exception

Rosa Lichtenstein

27th December 2010, 03:23

Marxach:

Engels called a gay guy he didn't like an "ass fucker", Lenin compared sleeping with a woman who'd herself slept with another woman to "bathing in used bath water" or something like that, communists tended to be against homosexuality back then so I doubt Marx was an exception

No sources. Yes, that's proof alright.:rolleyes:

RATM-Eubie

27th December 2010, 04:19

Let me think.... Oh yea!!! Fucking awful! Red fascist scum!

RED DAVE

27th December 2010, 13:14

In other words, I know the distinction between Socialism From Above and Populist Democracy, and in these earlier historical epochs am siding with the former.Stalinism is as stalinism does.

RED DAVE

Marxach-LÃ©inÃnach

27th December 2010, 13:54

Marxach:

No sources. Yes, that's proof alright.:rolleyes:

Well I don't know about Lenin but this is certainly true -

"......Liebknecht, naturally, is angry as the whole criticism especially was aimed at him and he is the father who has begetted the rotten program together with the ass-fucker Hasselmann. ..."
(Marx Engels Werke vol.38, German edition - p. 30/31)

Rosa Lichtenstein

27th December 2010, 14:46

I have just been through the index to Volumes 38-46 of the English translation of the Collected Works, and checked every reference to Hasselman, and I can't find that quotation anywhere.

Who wrote it and in what letter to whom?

I have to add that saying that about someone does not necessarily imply homphobia.

Now, if you have no evidence about Lenin, perhaps you should withdraw that slur about him.

Rosa Lichtenstein

27th December 2010, 14:58

Marxach-LÃ©inÃnach

27th December 2010, 15:10

Ok, I checked this quotation on-line, and it's from a letter Engels wrote to Adolphe Sorge, 11/02/1991. It appears in Volume 49, p.126 of the English edition.

The English tramslation of the controversial part is "together with that bugger Hasselman".

This looks like an expletive to me, not a homophobic reference.

So, this is all the 'evidence' you have that Marx, Engels and Lenin were homophobic -- a passing comment of Engels's (and one that can be read in several different ways), but nothing from Marx or Lenin.

In which case, I think you should withdraw what you said.

Well for now, OK then. I still don't really see why Stalin gets singled out for that one though. It's not like homophobia wasn't extremely common back then. Hell, it still is in the part of the world where Stalin came from, let alone in the 19th century when he was born and grew up.

Rosa Lichtenstein

27th December 2010, 15:13

Well for now, OK then. I still don't really why Stalin gets singled out for that one though. It's not like homophobia wasn't extremely common back then. Hell, it still is in the part of the world where Stalin came from, let alone in the 19th century when he was born and grew up.

However, as one comrade wrote on this:

Following the Russian Revolution the Bolsheviks repealled laws that criminalized homosexuality.

They also granted women the right to free abortion on demand and the right to divorce and vote. They also abolished laws that gave legal preference to "legitimate" children and granted the same rights to children born out of wedlock.

http://chicago.indymedia.org/newswire/display/29479/index.php

These were among the first things the Stalinists attacked. So, and once more, it's a mistake to associate anything the latter did with Lenin (or Marx, or Engels).

Marxach-LÃ©inÃnach

27th December 2010, 15:20

However, as one comrade wrote on this:

http://chicago.indymedia.org/newswire/display/29479/index.php

These were among the first things the Stalinists attacked. So, and once more, it's a mistake to associate anything the latter did with Lenin (or Marx, or Engels).

Large numbers of the peasants and workers in the USSR were also against these policies. It's not like Stalin decided to shut down these policies just out of his "pure evilness" or whatever

RED DAVE

27th December 2010, 15:47

Large numbers of the peasants and workers in the USSR were also against these policies. It's not like Stalin decided to shut down these policies just out of his "pure evilness" or whateverWhat you are saying is that is was okay for the Stalinists to engage in reactionary politics: to throw gays, women, etc., to the dogs. There was no justification for this other than a desire to wipe out the legacy of the revolution.

By the way, American Stalinists were among the last left-wing groups to take up the banner of gay liberation. Despite the fact that it had as many cloeted gays as any left-wing group, it's homophobia in the late 60s was notorious as was the homophobia of the USSR, Cuba, etc.

RED DAVE

Hit The North

27th December 2010, 15:50

Large numbers of the peasants and workers in the USSR were also against these policies. It's not like Stalin decided to shut down these policies just out of his "pure evilness" or whatever

It's not about an individual's "pure evilness" or whatever. The attacks on these rights are attacks on personal liberty and represent a reactionary turn in the social policies of the state leadership. Just because the most backward elements of a society have retrograde social ideas, is no reason for the state to follow - especially one which claims to be the most progressive in human history, as the Stalinists claimed.

Die Neue Zeit

27th December 2010, 16:52

Stalinism is as stalinism does.

RED DAVE

Yeah, Plato and Julius Caesar were Stalinists. :rolleyes:

ComradeOm

27th December 2010, 18:48

Large numbers of the peasants and workers in the USSR were also against these policiesReally? I'm not aware of any significant backlash against the absence of sodomy laws in the Soviet Union during the 1920s. So let's not pretend that there was any popular pressure on the government to re-criminalise same-sex relationships in the 1930s; this was very much a top-down initiative

Rosa Lichtenstein

27th December 2010, 21:39

Marxach:

Large numbers of the peasants and workers in the USSR were also against these policies.

And I suppose your evidence for this is as good as your 'evidence' that Marx, Engels and Lenin were homophobic, too.

It's not like Stalin decided to shut down these policies just out of his "pure evilness" or whatever

That wouldn't surprise me, but, as the others have pointed out, this isn't about his personality, which is why I said the following:

These were among the first things the Stalinists attacked. So, and once more, it's a mistake to associate anything the latter did with Lenin (or Marx, or Engels).

DuracellBunny97

5th January 2011, 06:12

overall he was very bad, and committed unjustifiable atrocities, I only put other because he did achieve things that helped some people in more populous areas. overall very bad, he did achieve things, but mostly at the expense of the people communism should be meant to help. Fuck Stalin.

Geiseric

6th January 2011, 14:37

Dancebunny, people in cities were kinda effed too, things under stalin were worse then under the czars for everybody.

S.Artesian

6th January 2011, 15:36

Dancebunny, people in cities were kinda effed too, things under stalin were worse then under the czars for everybody.

Source, data, evidence for the claim that "things were worse then under the czars for everybody"? Certainly wasn't worse for Jews-- no Black Hundreds, no pogroms.

Geiseric

6th January 2011, 23:17

S.Artesian

6th January 2011, 23:29

the czars didn't have many hunger genocides of ukraine, they also didn't have purges of people that were against them, at least nicholas didn't. More people died under stalin then did with the czars is what i'm saying, although I understand the circumstances were different, just making a point. This isn't me being pro czar, it's me being anti stalin. I don't consider stalin a true socialist anyways.

Please, there was famine and hunger under the czars; and there was famine and hunger under the Bolsheviks in 1919.

Nicholas didn't have purges of people who were against him? Who fucking cares? He maintained a system that kept 90% of the population impoverished.

More people died under Stalin than the Czars? No, not really. Not if you go back to the beginning of the czars' rule. If you count although who died in childbirth, all those who died in the first 5 years of life , all those killed in the wars of conquest, as being the responsibility of the economy.

The term genocide is totally inappropriate in referring to, as I guess you are, the expropriation of the peasantry in the first 5 year plan. Brutal, murderous, extreme, wasteful, savage, criminal... all that can be said, but genocide it was not.

Making the point is important, but the point needs to be accurate if there is going to be any purpose to making it.

Anarchist Skinhead

7th January 2011, 00:57

wow, whats next, poll about Hitler? "Do you think Hitler was good, bad or very bad?". :crying:

Steve_j

7th January 2011, 01:06

I voted other.

The only four letter word on that poll was not in the theme that i would deem an appropriate desciption.

Rooster

7th January 2011, 01:41

Geiseric

7th January 2011, 02:56

Please, there was famine and hunger under the czars; and there was famine and hunger under the Bolsheviks in 1919.

Nicholas didn't have purges of people who were against him? Who fucking cares? He maintained a system that kept 90% of the population impoverished.

More people died under Stalin than the Czars? No, not really. Not if you go back to the beginning of the czars' rule. If you count although who died in childbirth, all those who
died in the first 5 years of life , all those killed in the wars of conquest, as being the responsibility of the economy.

The term genocide is totally inappropriate in
referring to, as I guess you are, the expropriation of the peasantry in the first 5 year plan. Brutal, murderous, extreme, wasteful, savage, criminal... all that can be said, but genocide it was not.

Making the point is important, but the point needs to be accurate if there is going to
be any purpose to making it.

ok fair enough, you're right. So basically the czars kept people on the brink of dying, and Stalin went the extra yard or so so they just did die is what I interpreted of what you said, it makes sense. I think Stalin's plans still ended up killing more then the czars did though, even if it was unintentional they're still dead.

S.Artesian

7th January 2011, 03:40

Pretty funny stuff reading about Plato's The Republic on this forum. I'm sure if anyone took the time to take that book into context with the rest of his then would see that it was mostly allegorical and idealistic. His slave labour was also born out of different conditions than that of modern slave labour.

Regardless, I do not think Stalin was all that hip.

God knows, hipness counts. It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.

"All the squares, fall out."-- Sly and the Family Stone "Dance to the Music.

Yeah, that was the problem, no pep in their step, no glide in their slide.

Rooster

7th January 2011, 11:38

God knows, hipness counts. It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing.

"All the squares, fall out."-- Sly and the Family Stone "Dance to the Music.

Yeah, that was the problem, no pep in their step, no glide in their slide.

Fine. As a person I think he was probably extremely ruthless, pragmatic, calculating, vindictive and power mad. I think the evidence for that comes from various first hand accounts of people that had to work with him. He was the negation of the negation for the revolution, his role in history is the conservation of the revolution but I don't think he necessarily took it in the right direction. I think if Trotsky had died before the split, Stalin would have elevated him to a hero of the soviets. I don't think there was anything at all pleasant about him. All this talk about if he was good for the revolution or not misses out the whole question of the quantitative and qualitative aspects of his rule. Sure, he increased industrial output, made gains to catch up with the west but at what cost? The system that grew up around him only worked because he was ruthless and as such, I think that's mostly why the USSR failed over all.

I also think that the fact that harsh repressive measures still existed after his death means that the revolution did not work. You don't barricade your door shut to your house party to stop people leaving and be able call it a success.

ComradeOm

7th January 2011, 12:34

wow, whats next, poll about Hitler? "Do you think Hitler was good, bad or very bad?". :crying:Don't be ridiculous, you can't sum up a major historical figure in such simplistic terms. Besides, the autobahn was a huge step forward for Germany's economic infrastructure and we have to admire his ability to destroy the right-wing Polish regime

Anarchist Skinhead

7th January 2011, 12:37

ComradeOm- its early here, I just woke up so not sure if you are serious or not with your post?

Geiseric

7th January 2011, 14:42

Don't be ridiculous, you can't sum up a major historical figure in such simplistic terms. Besides, the autobahn was a huge step forward for Germany's economic infrastructure and we have to admire his ability to destroy the right-wing Polish regime

Wait, so double teaming poland, which for the
first time, ever, with the U.S.S.R. Is considered a commendable feat? I mean re industrialising germany is one thing where there is some speck of merit, but poland was just fucked up. I mean regardless of what kind of regime they had there, it's a tragedy that poland had to endure 60 more years of opression under the U.S.S.R. after just getting their independence.

ComradeOm

7th January 2011, 15:19

ComradeOm- its early here, I just woke up so not sure if you are serious or not with your post?No, but this is typical of the arguments deployed to defend Stalin. Claim that its impossible to pass judgement and then mention a few 'positives'

I mean regardless of what kind of regime they had there, it's a tragedy that poland had to endure 60 more years of opression under the U.S.S.R. after just getting their independence.Liberal! Next you'll be claiming that the USSR had no right to annex the Baltic states :rolleyes:

KlÃ©ber

8th January 2011, 01:33

Don't be ridiculous, you can't sum up a major historical figure in such simplistic terms. Besides, the autobahn was a huge step forward for Germany's economic infrastructure and we have to admire his ability to destroy the right-wing Polish regime
Heh. Speaking of which, this "Stalin built ..." argument is all the more bullshit because the people who actually built Soviet infrastructure projects with their bare hands in the most desolate regions were prisoners; that is, "lumpen scum" and "Trotskyite political offenders."

revolution inaction

8th January 2011, 22:02

Don't be ridiculous, you can't sum up a major historical figure in such simplistic terms. Besides, the autobahn was a huge step forward for Germany's economic infrastructure and we have to admire his ability to destroy the right-wing Polish regime

He also used people as slave labour and worked them to death in camps :thumbup1:

[/DNZ]

Anarchist Skinhead

8th January 2011, 22:12

no no no... thats all imperialist lie i am sure :) he was such a lovely man and gave candy to kids! :)

S.Artesian

8th January 2011, 23:44

Wait, so double teaming poland, which for the
first time, ever, with the U.S.S.R. Is considered a commendable feat? I mean re industrialising germany is one thing where there is some speck of merit, but poland was just fucked up. I mean regardless of what kind of regime they had there, it's a tragedy that poland had to endure 60 more years of opression under the U.S.S.R. after just getting their independence.

Whoa, comrade. Let up on the pedal. The trans-axle is gone. You're just grinding metal.

ComradeOm was being playing the role of the apologists for Big Pappy. Apparently dripping with sarcasm doesn't convey all that well in 1s and 0s.

Geiseric

10th January 2011, 05:39

My bad, I just can't understand internet sarcasm so well. Sorry bout that :p I have many polish friends and they hate communism because of the U.S.S.R. So it's a touchy subject.

red cat

15th January 2011, 02:04

No, Jung Chang is a ridiculous liar. I was referring to the memoirs of Mao's doctor, Li Zhisui.

Might be off-topic at this point, but what makes Li Zhisui a credible source ? I haven't come across many accounts of any of those hundreds of young women who allegedly slept with Mao. I would expect a few of them to go public with the matter during the Tienanmen Square protests at least.

Geiseric

15th January 2011, 02:52

red cat

17th January 2011, 05:52

What would be the point of revealing that during the Tienamnen square protests, an event which was largely political? The 100 young women thing isn't really hugely important imho. However, isn't freedom of speech one of the virtues that Stalinist governments have traditionally never allowed?

Character assassination has always played a big role in anti-communist politics. So yes, it is very important to look into these stories.

However, isn't freedom of speech one of the virtues that Stalinist governments have traditionally never allowed?

Quite the contrary, from what is known from observing the present ones.

hardlinecommunist

29th January 2011, 23:46

The Japanese had no intention of sacrificing themselves for German ambitions. Nor had they the capabilities or logistical reach to make serious inroads into the Russian Far East. Khalkhin Gol was a conclusive demonstration as to the superiority of the Red Army and one that shifted the balance of power within Japan towards the Imperial Navy. All this was known to the Soviet command and while doubts may have lingered the threat of a two front war was certainly not as forbidding as it was for Germany

So now its okay to invade another country and annex its lands because its government's line is incorrect? Social-imperialist doesn't begin to describe just how wrong this sentiment is

And why should I or anyone else on this forum give a damn about Russia's geopolitical advancement during this period? Do you also admire Hitler for increasing Germany's global standing during the 1930s? Was the Nazi invasion of Poland acceptable in light of the elimination of the Składkowski regime?

I can't think of any other system where released inmates were provided with so little choice as to where to settle or move

If your ideology condones the working of men and women to death then I suggest that you reconsider it and how you arrived at this point. This is an appalling sentiment for anyone who professes to be a socialist and, for what its worth, its one that I condemn unreservedly
The Sovet Union really did faced the prospect of a two front war with the Japanese before and after Hitler came to power in Germany Comrade Stalin and The Soviet Party and Government throughout the 1920s and early to mid 1930s viewed Japan as a geat Geo Political and Military threat to The Soviet Union as Japan along with The Western Allies did attack and occupied areas of Siberia during The Soviet Revolution and Comrade Stalin and The Soviet Communist Party and government did continued to see Japan as a Major threat to the Soviet Union well into the midd 1930s and beyond

Metacomet

30th January 2011, 01:26

I put bad.

He did lead during an incredibly difficult time. But he certainly sullied the reputation of the whole left.

31st January 2011, 10:46

I put bad.

He did lead during an incredibly difficult time. But he certainly sullied the reputation of the whole left.

So before Stalin came along, communism was held in the highest esteem by everybody, yeah?
http://marxists.anu.edu.au/subject/art/visual_arts/satire/marx/marx1.jpg
http://farm1.static.flickr.com/176/456964557_f249f9beec.jpg
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/cf/WhiteArmyPropagandaPosterOfTrotsky.jpg
* kudos to Prairie Fire for posting these pictures originally

Geiseric

31st January 2011, 14:31

31st January 2011, 14:40

Sinister Cultural Marxist

4th February 2011, 00:50

Very bad, he killed a lot of people, hid it, and lied about how ineffective his policies were. Then, he tried to force socialism on Eastern Europe-a complete failure, as you can see from the fact that every single one of those governments collapsed in the late 80s.

Anyways, he was history's most successful dictator from a certain point of view. But he was a horrible human being and did some truly ruthless things to his political opponents, both communist and non-communist.

Born in the USSR

7th February 2011, 02:45

Some advices for anti-stalinists:

1. Remember:everything that Stalin did or did not had some sinister hidden motive. Everything.

2.In accordance with the spirit of paragraph 1, remember that Stalin was an omnipotent being, perhaps, an incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu, who had a complete view of everything happening in the Soviet Union, and complete power over any incident, which occurred in the years 1924-1953. Everything that happened during this time was the will of Stalin. Stalin knew the exact details of each criminal case of its era and for his boundless cruelty shot the innocent masses without any cause, no matter where they were and what position they occupied. Being an omnipotent, he didn't depend on information transmitted by the tens of thousands of subordinates.

3.Refer to long lists of dead, not worrying about demographics and consistency. Three million deaths from starvation? Seven million? Ten million? One hundred million deaths of all? Do not worry that someone will check your words, which are good for you without any verification.

4.Speak about George Orwell constantly,cite "Animal farm" and "1984". Do not worry, that Orwell never visited the Soviet Union, and both books are fiction.

5.All stalinists were "paranoid" becouse they devoted so much attention to security against the counterrevolution. Ignore the heap of evidence, including the restoration of capitalism in the Eastern bloc, that this threat was real.

6.Each one who has ever been arrested under the stalinist regime was likely innocent of any crime. The stalinists arrested just harmless poets and political preachers who wanted to share with the world their sterry-eyed messages.

7.Continue to castigate Stalin for the Molotov - Ribbentrop Pact, completely ignoring the strong support and collaboration with Nazi Germany, fascist Italy and imperial Japan of the U.S., Britain and France before the war and even after it started. As usual, do not let the enemy explore the context of a nonaggression pact.

8.If you are an anarchist or a trotskyist you should insist on the "collapse" of stalinism, ignoring the fact that your ideology has suffered a collapse in one hundred percent of cases throughout its history. Places the responsibility for these failures on the stalinists or the dominant military force. Ignore the fact that the most wonderful society costs nothing if it can not protect itself from reaction.

9.When they ask you about the numbers or the historical context, refer to labels like "ruthless tyrant" and "brutal killer." Remember, people like Stalin were mass murderers becouse they have killed so many people, and we know that they have killed them because they were mass murderers. This all can be traced!

PilesOfDeadNazis

7th February 2011, 03:07

Very bad, he killed a lot of people, hid it, and lied about how ineffective his policies were. Then, he tried to force socialism on Eastern Europe-a complete failure, as you can see from the fact that every single one of those governments collapsed in the late 80s.
I know, right? Stalin's ghost still fucked up the Soviet Union almost 4 decades after his death. Nothing ever changed within the Soviet Union or its government from 1953 until 1990.....

PilesOfDeadNazis

7th February 2011, 03:19

It was in fine esteem after Lenin, but stalin made people connect communism with repression. Can't say he wasn't repressive, again i'm not being pro-capitalism, it's just a metter of fact that he, and lenin to an extent, were repressive.
You're right. No one can deny that both Lenin and Stalin were repressive. But Communism was going to be connected with repression whether Stalin ever took control of the USSR or not. The Capitalists and the Capitalist governments will always spread anti-Communist propaganda(against both Bolshevism and Left Communism). All forms of Communism is blatantly against the Capitalists holding power. They don't like this coming from any of us, regardless of tendency.

Lenin and Stalin repressed the Capitalists("They repressed innocent people too!", this isn't the point). The point is, if they repressed the Capitalists and the Capitalists ONLY, they would still be connected to repression in the minds of those living in the States or other Capitalist countries because those who control the media there(the ones who, under Communism, would have their power taken away) will make them believe that Communism is repressive. They will make blind them to the surrounding material conditions and say all Communism brings repression and slavery of the worst kind. Again, they would do this whether Stalin was the most "popular" Communist leader or not; as long as Communism opposes Capitalism, those in Capitalist society will be forced to believe that it is repressive to everyone.

Die Neue Zeit

12th February 2011, 07:41

I responded to DNZ in this thread because he made the claim in his little sing-song, "On the one hand" "On the other hand" cost benefit pseudo analysis.

See, it's really not that complicated. A smug, pontificating, pseudo-Marxist jerk who stacks his CV with absurdities steps out his "Kautskyshite" closet to say slave labor, working people to a slow and painful death, is a "good thing." So I tell this Martha Stewart of the Gulag to fuck off. What part of that is so complicated it needs further explanation?

"I think it's very important that whatever you're trying to make or sell, or teach has to be basically good. A bad product and you know what? You won't be here in ten years." (Martha Stewart) :D

Liberal humanism is a bad product.

Orange Juche

12th February 2011, 07:55

Very very bad.

12th February 2011, 11:34

Lenina Rosenweg

12th February 2011, 17:32

I know, right? Stalin's ghost still fucked up the Soviet Union almost 4 decades after his death. Nothing ever changed within the Soviet Union or its government from 1953 until 1990.....

The Soviet system was created by Stalin and hence can be regarded as "Stalinist". The mass purges had to end, they were not compatible with the industrial society the SU had become. The result of this was that under Brezhnev the parasitic bureaucratic caste which Trotsky had denounced in "The Revolution Betrayed" (a must read, IMO) basically ran the country into the ground.

A collectivized, planned economy is an advancement over capitalism and is commensurate with rule by the working class but by the 80s the level of stagnation created by over-centralization, lack of any democratic acountability, and inability to accept or absorb innovation (computer science, "cynernetics" was regarded as a bougeois deviation in the 40s and 50s, hence by the 70s the USSR had to use IBM mainframes and later PCs). The Stalinist system ran into a dead end, as did the system in China, Vietnam, and today Cuba. That's why we got 1989 and 1991 (in my opinion vast tragedies which set back class consciousness worldwide).

There always were and are alternatives. "Worker's democracy", proposed by Trotsky and the anarchist and left communist traditions. But naw... don't wanna interfere with bureaucratic privelages. Its much better for the ex-nomenclature to turn them selves into oligarchs, bankers, and other such nice people.

Lenina Rosenweg

12th February 2011, 17:38

In the fSU it actually against the law to try on shoes. Everyone, when they got to a certain age, registered their official shoe size. There were 3 standard sizes for adult men and women. Trying on shoes in a shoe store or in a epartment store showed disloyalty to the SU, which of course had the best consumer products in the world. The result of this was that everyone brought there shoes home and engaged in a vast shoe trading network with family and friends.

"If the shoe fits, wear it...."

The Stalinist economies collapsed for a reason, although this entalied a vast human tragedy.

The Trotskyist economist Hillel Tiktin and a book, "The Death of Stalinism and the Rebirth of Marxism" by Walter Daum (associated with LRP) has some interesting discussions of why the USSR collapsed, although I don't necessarily agree with all their conclusions.

Lenina Rosenweg

12th February 2011, 17:44

I think there are some issues with the two implicit claims that:

1. Everything good that happened in the Soviet Union such as rapid industrialization, rapid increase in the standard of living, the defeat of Nazi Germany and Imperialist Japan, etc...were purely the result of the heroic soviet people.

2. Everything bad that happened in the Soviet Union such as show trials, purges, extra-judicial executions, judicial executions, gulags for people who were mostly guilty of non-political offenses and typically served short sentences, partial revival of state supported patriarchy, the demise of the old bolshevics, starvation based on natural disasters and disease and possibly Nazi Germany...were entirely the fault of Stalin, personally.

And people who practice the opposite logic where Stalin was responsible for everything good and Beria and external circumstances were responsible for everything bad are guilty of the same mistake.

This is just ridiculous. Some good things and some bad things happened in the Soviet Union while Stalin was in power and we really can't know how much he was responsible for just by guess work more than half a century later. The causal chains here are just not available for us to analyze.

I don't completely disagree with this.Stalin represented a bureaucratic caste which had hijacked the Revolution after its failure in the West, especially Germany. Stalin was a monster but he also reflected the tension filed and contradictory nature of the ruling caste.

The industrialization of the SU, which Stalin was forced to carry out, was actually done by former members of the Left Opposition, allies of Trotsky, who once they had fulfiled their function, were killed by Stalin.The list of Bolsheviks he killed is endless.

We need to take a materialist approach and under the processes behind the Soviet Thermidor.

12th February 2011, 17:53

The Soviet system was created by Stalin and hence can be regarded as "Stalinist".

I believe it was created by Lenin actually, and that Stalin led it in more or less the same style as Lenin had, hence from 1917-1953 it can be called "Leninist". I really don't see what new things Stalin contributed to the point that it could be called "Stalinist". From 1953 onwards it can be regarded as "Khrushchovite/Brezhnevite" rather than "Stalinist" as ideologically and economically it had nothing whatsoever in common with the Soviet system as it had been under Stalin's leadership - http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/RCSU75.html

S.Artesian

12th February 2011, 18:31

I believe it was created by Lenin actually, and that Stalin led it in more or less the same style as Lenin had, hence from 1917-1953 it can be called "Leninist". I really don't see what new things Stalin contributed to the point that it could be called "Stalinist". From 1953 onwards it can be regarded as "Khrushchovite/Brezhnevite" rather than "Stalinist" as ideologically and economically it had nothing whatsoever in common with the Soviet system as it had been under Stalin's leadership - http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/RCSU75.html

Really? Silly me, I thought it was created by class forces-- a proletarian revolution in a country dominated by low agricultural productivity, isolated, without the support of revolution in the advanced countries, confronting the pressure of its own lack of development and that of the world markets.

And double really? Stalin dies and the whole economy, the entire basis of the class relations, the mode of production changes in that same year? Far out. Man, if only the bourgeoisie had known it would be that easy.

Please tell us how the mode of production changed, how the relation of the laborers to the conditions of their labor was overturned, all in one year, actually less than one year?

I know it's just the dinosaur in me, but I just cannot grasp how the entire economy gets transformed with a counterrevolution; without the collapse of the older order like what took place in the 1989-1994 period.

ComradeOm

12th February 2011, 18:32

I believe it was created by Lenin actually, and that Stalin led it in more or less the same style as Lenin had, hence from 1917-1953 it can be called "Leninist". I really don't see what new things Stalin contributed to the point that it could be called "Stalinist". From 1953 onwards it can be regarded as "Khrushchovite/Brezhnevite" rather than "Stalinist" as ideologically and economically it had nothing whatsoever in common with the Soviet system as it had been under Stalin's leadership - http://www.marx2mao.com/Other/RCSU75.htmlAnd the political and economic system of the 1930s had little in common with that of the 1920s. To deny that there even was a Stalinist system - that there was simply a smooth continuation from 1917 to 1953 - is itself a brazen untruth

This is reason enough to level criticism at Stalin as the prime architect and beneficiary of this changing political/economic landscape. Was he involved in every last single excess and crime committed in his name? No, but he was so intimately involved in construction and direction this state that his name cannot be disassociated from its failings or triumphs. The former naturally far outweighing the latter

Born in the USSR

13th February 2011, 01:29

There always were and are alternatives. "Worker's democracy", proposed by Trotsky and the anarchist and left communist traditions.

Trots,where is your alternative?So many bla-bla and so little of acts.

gorillafuck

13th February 2011, 01:40

I love how Stalinists always make fun of what they perceive as irrational anti-Stalinist liberals or whatever but then you all get completely schooled when people with actual knowledge of history come in.

It's amusing.

Also, I'll quote this from a while back, since people insisting that you can't call Stalin good or bad is really stupid.
Peoples' opinions of Stalin are already deeply flawed. We sit here on a website called 'Revolutionary Left' and debate the merits of a man whose reign oversaw the eradication of the Bolshevik leadership, the mass immiseration of the Russian proletariat, the gross mismanagement of agricultural policy which resulted in the deaths of several million, the deaths of over a million citizens through execution or labour camps, the use of slave labour on a massive scale, the deportation and harassment of national minorities, an agreement with Nazi Germany that permitted the latter to subdue almost all of Europe, and the bungling of military strategy that saw millions of Soviet soldiers captured within days or weeks

Nicholas II didn't do half of the above and he still earned the sobriquet 'Nicholas the Bloody'. Why is it necessary to insist on 'subtleties' when discussing Stalin?

Bright Banana Beard

13th February 2011, 02:15

Personally, the real question of MLs is actually how far did the USSR goes, what was their flaws and mistakes, learn to avoid repeating it, how did the leadership responded to the event, etc.

The question of Stalin doesn't make some sense except for Stalin kiddies. Hell, he went as far to fix the mistakes, otherwise I would call him monster if he continued the famine, let the Nazis take USSR, let the massive purge continue, etc.

But he tried to fix them(even though it is not always good), that is why I uphold him. Thanks to him, we can avoid the tragedy of USSR if we study in details.

Geiseric

13th February 2011, 02:20

I don't see a reason to like Stalin, or to publicly state that an organisation follows some of his methods. There isn't a point, because despite propaganda and all that stuff, the USSR failed. And publicly condoning stalinism will only isolate the left from the working class since popular impression is that he killed millions, despite any propaganda people still realise this. Remember up till the end of WW2 Stalin was ''uncle joe,'' so the U.S. Gov even liked him, and the Russian Troops were seen as ''good guys,'' in US propaganda

When all is done, just excluding the ''Stalinism,'' and ''North Korea,'' label will make people not just turn away from your organization. I'm joining a trot organization, and when I saw their pamphlet, if I saw a ''Glorious Hero Stalin,'' or ''We condone the North Korean Government,'' I would have turned away. Just a thoight.

Queercommie Girl

13th February 2011, 13:16

Would you also credit Chiang Kai-shek with the defeat of Japanese imperialism? The Soviet people beat the Nazis in spite of the treacherous Stalin clique which enabled Hitler to consolidate the resources of Western Europe unopposed and win early victories against Red Army through a surprise offensive.

Not to necessarily defend Stalin, but your comparison is very poor.

Chiang Kai-sheik didn't do a damn thing against Japanese imperialism in China. When the Japanese invaded Northeastern China, Chiang pulled his troops away to fight the communists. When the Japanese army marched towards Nanjiang, Chiang ordered the KMT forces to retreat, leading to the massacre of 300,000 people in the city.

No matter what mistakes Stalin made, putting him on the same level as the likes of Chiang Kai-sheik is clearly a mistake.

Geiseric

13th February 2011, 19:34

Queercommie Girl

13th February 2011, 19:55

I always thought the Commies and the Nationalists kinda teamed up to fight the japanese, and at that point when they weren't fighting each other, Chiang got the communists to have a meeting somewhere and killed them all, leaving Mao and other lieutenants in charge. I'm pretty sure as well that Stalin is the one who told them to meet up.

Chiang only agreed to an "alliance" with the communists to fight against Japan after his own generals kidnapped him and forced him to enter into talks with the communists in Xi'an in 1937.

Chiang's massacre of the main Chinese communist force, led by Chen Duxiu (who later became a Trotskyist and the leader of the Chinese Left Opposition), happened much earlier in 1927, when the Shanghai Revolution was crushed due to the betrayal of the KMT forces.

And although Chiang formally agreed to ally with the communists to counter the Japanese in 1937, he never really committed any of his forces to the war. The Chinese communists under Mao did most of the fighting against the Japanese within China.

Japan would not be beaten so quickly actually, if it wasn't for the Soviet and American invasions of Japanese territories in East Asia.

Invader Zim

14th February 2011, 17:05

After all, there are plenty of "Marxist-Leninists", "anti-revisionists", Maoists, Hoxhaites, etc., here -- some of whom have contributed to this thread -- who support the same positions. You can caterwaul until the cows come home about DNZ, but restricting him for his view on prison labor would also require a wholesale purge of the other currents. As I told Kléber, good luck with that.

Well, now that we have no CC and only the discrestion of individuals such as yourself, perhaps we don't need luck?

Die Neue Zeit

15th February 2011, 03:15

Would you care to read discussions between Uncle Sam and I in the Workers Party usergroup on prison labour in Georgia, or my take on slave reparations in the context of African-Americans? :rolleyes:

psgchisolm

15th February 2011, 03:23

Japan would not be beaten so quickly actually, if it wasn't for the Soviet and American invasions of Japanese territories in East Asia.
What soviet invasions? The only time I heard of the Soviets in the Far-East was in the beginning of the war and near the end after they invaded manchuko.

Die Neue Zeit

15th February 2011, 03:44

The plural "invasions" refers to one invasion by the Americans and one by the Soviets; one plus one equals two.

human strike

15th February 2011, 11:21

Lenina Rosenweg

15th February 2011, 16:20

Trots,where is your alternative?So many bla-bla and so little of acts.

Paris Commune, 1871
Spain, especially Barcelona, 1936-37
Petrograd, Moscow, other cities, 1918-19

Elements of Worker's Democracy Iran 1979, Portugal 1974, France, 1968, Sri Lanka and Bolivia.Argentina early 2000s. Perhaps(hopefully) Egypt and Tunisia 2011-12.

Worker's Democracy is socialism.

Any questions?

Vampire Lobster

15th February 2011, 17:06

Not to rain on your parade or anything, but only some of those examples actually managed to last even for a year. Rest didn't last much longer.

Queercommie Girl

15th February 2011, 17:38

What soviet invasions? The only time I heard of the Soviets in the Far-East was in the beginning of the war and near the end after they invaded manchuko.

Yes, and "Manchuko", or Northeastern China, was a part of the Japanese Empire.

I didn't say the Soviets invaded the Japanese homeland, in fact, no-one did that.

∞

15th February 2011, 18:25

Praising the "contributions" of Stalin is equivalent to taking in vain all of those lives which he has ruined or destroyed. Stalin was monster both in practice and his elementary interpretation of Marxist economics and dialectical materialism. Think about it impartially, not under a guise of Soviet (and there is American) propaganda. Every decision he made was tactical not in terms for socialism, but in terms of preserving his power. Only a fool would look at his policies with such a blind eye. And if this is the Stalinist interpretation of socialism, then you are an enemy.

S.Artesian

15th February 2011, 18:35

You think maybe Staatsfeind was being sarcastic? Maybe? Just a little?

Born in the USSR

16th February 2011, 03:02

Paris Commune, 1871
Spain, especially Barcelona, 1936-37
Petrograd, Moscow, other cities, 1918-19

Elements of Worker's Democracy Iran 1979, Portugal 1974, France, 1968, Sri Lanka and Bolivia.Argentina early 2000s. Perhaps(hopefully) Egypt and Tunisia 2011-12.

Worker's Democracy is socialism.

Any questions?

Only one:have you ever seen workers even if from afar?

It seems,no.

Where have our bookish leftists got the idea that all workers can,and above all,want to control something?Most of them want only one thing:to flock home quickly after working.The working class is not homogeneous,there are a vanguard,a rearguard and a great mass dumping between them.

A strike committee,worker's vanguard consisting from several people,lead a strike of thousands of workers with consent of these thousands - that is a worker's democracy.A political party,worker's vanguard consisting from thousands of progressive workers,lead the country with a consent of the majority of the people - that is a worker's democracy and socialism.

"...by the dictatorship of the proletariat we mean, in essence, the dictatorship of its organised and class-conscious minority."- I think Lenin,non-bookish revolutionary,had a moral right to generalize his experience in suh words?

All your examples ( except the example of Russia in 1918-1919 that a do not understand;I don't know what happened in 1920 and I don't see the differense between Russia in 1919 and Russia in 1920 ) are examples of defeated revolutions.And that is very significant.

You,antistalinists,never support victorious revolutions - you prefer defeated.You love early deceased Lenin and you hate Stalin, who ruled for a long time, you love the dead Che and hate alive Castro.You like only dead revolutionaries.No doubt:if Lenin and Che would lived longer you would have hated them too.You like dead revolutionaries and insuccessfull revolutions.

Hidden counter-revolutionaries?

∞

16th February 2011, 03:19

Only one:have you ever seen workers even if from afar?

It seems,no.

Where have our bookish leftists got the idea that all workers can,and above all,want to control something?Most of them want only one thing:to flock home quickly after working.The working class is not homogeneous,there are a vanguard,a rearguard and a great mass dumping between them.

A strike committee,worker's vanguard consisting from several people,lead a strike of thousands of workers with consent of these thousands - that is a worker's democracy.A political party,worker's vanguard consisting from thousands of progressive workers,lead the country with a consent of the majority of the people - that is a worker's democracy and socialism.

"...by the dictatorship of the proletariat we mean, in essence, the dictatorship of its organised and class-conscious minority."- I think Lenin,non-bookish revolutionary,had a moral right to generalize his experience in suh words?

All your examples ( except the example of Russia in 1918-1919 that a do not understand;I don't know what happened in 1920 and I don't see the differense between Russia in 1919 and Russia in 1920 ) are examples of defeated revolutions.And that is very significant.

You,antistalinists,never support victorious revolutions - you prefer defeated.

Hidden counter-revolutionaries?

The point of refuting someone is to prove them wrong, not random quotes that you seem to take out of context.

Paulappaul

16th February 2011, 03:52

Where have our bookish leftists got the idea that all workers can,and above all,want to control something? Most of them want only one thing:to flock home quickly after working.The working class is not homogeneous,there are a vanguard,a rearguard and a great mass dumping between them.

Most of them Flock home quickly because they are so alienated from the means of production. Consider this: I worked in Workers' Cooperative, that meet every 2 weeks and decided its own hours, shifts, etc. I loved it. I worked my fullest while I was there. My current job? I fucking hate it.

When people do what they love, when they are in control, "work" becomes a hobby. And in a Communist society, as Marx would put, we are able to pursue our fullest capacity in the benefit of all of society.

A strike committee,worker's vanguard consisting from several people,lead a strike of thousands of workers with consent of these thousands - that is a worker's democracy.A political party,worker's vanguard consisting from thousands of progressive workers,lead the country with a consent of the majority of the people - that is a worker's democracy and socialism.

A strike committee is a strike committee - Vanguard is the phenomena we attach to it. A party is a party. Vanguard is the phenomena we attach to it.

A party represents only the most "class conscious" of proletarians. What does this mean? Such an abstract word has no character but in the mind of the person using it. Class Consciousness means only in this context, the grouping of proletarians onto a platform and consequently into a Party. That seems all fair and good, and with that we can so lazily lay down the word "Vanguard". The Party represents its platform and its principles. As you have so brilliantly laid out for us "The working class is not homogeneous" i.e. not the same. Here's where we run into a wall, we have the so called Vanguard which is little more then the representation of Principle and Platform, which is something solid and homogeneous in the working class which presents its antithesis.

Now here is the difference between legitimate and illegitimate Vanguardism. The Party is illegitimate Vanguardism, its class consciousness is dogmatic and rigid. It preaches discipline and conformity to a class that's not homogeneous. It does not represent Workers' Democracy, it represents those Proletarians who conform to its platform. A Workers' Councils, the inevitable destination of a Strike Committee, it's legitimate Vanguardism. Its power and legitimacy stems directly from the entire mass of the class, regardless of background.

All your examples ( except the example of Russia in 1918-1919 that a do not understand;I don't know what happened in 1920 and I don't see the differense between Russia in 1919 and Russia in 1920 ) are examples of defeated revolutions.And that is very significant.

What is the practice of Marxist - Leninism but the total disenfranchisement of Socialism, the death of thousands of Proletarians, failed economic and political systems and totally unsuccessful in 1st world countries? Oh by the way, the soviet union collapsed buddy. Revolution defeated.

S.Artesian

16th February 2011, 04:30

Only one:have you ever seen workers even if from afar?

It seems,no.

Where have our bookish leftists got the idea that all workers can,and above all,want to control something?Most of them want only one thing:to flock home quickly after working.The working class is not homogeneous,there are a vanguard,a rearguard and a great mass dumping between them.

A strike committee,worker's vanguard consisting from several people,lead a strike of thousands of workers with consent of these thousands - that is a worker's democracy.A political party,worker's vanguard consisting from thousands of progressive workers,lead the country with a consent of the majority of the people - that is a worker's democracy and socialism.

"...by the dictatorship of the proletariat we mean, in essence, the dictatorship of its organised and class-conscious minority."- I think Lenin,non-bookish revolutionary,had a moral right to generalize his experience in suh words?

All your examples ( except the example of Russia in 1918-1919 that a do not understand;I don't know what happened in 1920 and I don't see the differense between Russia in 1919 and Russia in 1920 ) are examples of defeated revolutions.And that is very significant.

You,antistalinists,never support victorious revolutions - you prefer defeated.You love early deceased Lenin and you hate Stalin, who ruled for a long time, you love the dead Che and hate alive Castro.You like only dead revolutionaries.No doubt:if Lenin and Che would lived longer you would have hated them too.You like dead revolutionaries and insuccessfull revolutions.

Hidden counter-revolutionaries?

That's not always the case. For example, I don't think any of us would like you any better if you were dead. Just my opinion....

Born in the USSR

16th February 2011, 07:34

you have so brilliantly laid out for us "The working class is not homogeneous" Ah!So it's a lie that that there are worker's aristacracy,lumpens and the proletariat proper?That among the workers there are people of different political persuasions including the fascist?It is not a fact that even in a srike workers take part differently:the majority passive, some shops may not participate in the strike at all,and workers activists are in the minority?

legitimate and illegitimate Vanguardism.What a bullshit!A vanguard is always legitimate,becouse it can act only in the interests and with consent of passive majority.It even can use violence against the rearguard - within the limits,with wich the majority agree.Illigitimate vanguard,that is a vanguard without a support of the majority, simply cannot exist.

Most of them Flock home quickly because they are so alienated from the means of productionIt's the same old story.Millions of petty propertions and decentralization instead of the national economy as a great united factory.And as a result : the same competition,anarchy of production,unemployment.

What is the practice of Marxist - Leninism but the total disenfranchisement of Socialism, the death of thousands of Proletarians, failed economic and political systems and totally unsuccessful in 1st world countries? Oh by the way, the soviet union collapsed buddy. Revolution defeated.Oh,yes," total disenfranchisement"!And have you seen this disenfranchisement?You should hold your tongue knowing shit about the life in the USSR.

Another "strong" argument:"the soviet union collapsed ".Ignore the fact that your alternatives such as Parise Commune collapsed immediatly after the birth,buddy.But why the USSR didn't collapse immediatly after the birth,but lieved for 74 years and was successfull in many affairs?Certainly,why should you think about it,let's a horse think,it has a huge head!It's all clear for you without thinking!

ComradeOm

16th February 2011, 10:45

Where have our bookish leftists got the idea that all workers can,and above all,want to control something?Most of them want only one thing:to flock home quickly after workingWhy are you even on this site when you have nothing but contempt for the workers?

bcbm

16th February 2011, 10:53

i voted "very good," that guy had a great mustache and did some other shit that was probably cool. or maybe bad. w/e

Born in the USSR

16th February 2011, 11:51

Why are you even on this site when you have nothing but contempt for the workers?

A next nonsense.

"The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing." (Marx) Marks loved workers less than some left sissies?Becouse today the working class is not revolutionary,therefore...

ComradeOm

16th February 2011, 12:01

"The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing." (Marx) Marks loved workers less than some left sissies?Becouse today the working class is not revolutionary,therefore...... it is nothing?

Born in the USSR

16th February 2011, 12:12

You are amazingly quick-witted.

ComradeOm

16th February 2011, 12:59

You are amazingly quick-witted.*Shrugs* Always worth double-checking when a self-proclaimed socialist confesses to nothing but contempt for the working class, viewing workers as nothing but chess pieces to be moved across the board. Its a bit like meeting a vegetarian in a steakhouse, if unfortunately more common. Hopefully some mod/admin will see this and restrict you for being an anti-worker muppet

Born in the USSR

16th February 2011, 13:45

I have no contempt for the working class, so as I do not beleave in love for workers of various demagogues and whistlers.

To gag an opponent is the last argument of antistalinists.

ComradeOm

16th February 2011, 15:17

To gag an opponent is the last argument of antistalinists.Whereas to shoot them is the first inclination of Stalinists

Geiseric

16th February 2011, 15:21

lol burned!
The panel would have accepted in the place of shooting either starved or ice picked.

Paulappaul

16th February 2011, 18:22

Ah!So it's a lie that that there are worker's aristacracy,lumpens and the proletariat proper?That among the workers there are people of different political persuasions including the fascist?It is not a fact that even in a srike workers take part differently:the majority passive, some shops may not participate in the strike at all,and workers activists are in the minority?

I can't understand your english, so I am gonna skip this one.

What a bullshit!A vanguard is always legitimate,becouse it can act only in the interests and with consent of passive majority.It even can use violence against the rearguard - within the limits,with wich the majority agree.Illigitimate vanguard,that is a vanguard without a support of the majority, simply cannot exist.

All the minor Communist Parties claim to be Vanguard. The Black Panther Party, claimed to be the Vanguard. But then again as another user said, you just ignore everything that everybody says and take one line out of context.

It's the same old story.Millions of petty propertions and decentralization instead of the national economy as a great united factory.And as a result : the same competition,anarchy of production,unemployment.

strawman, taking shit out of context. You're stupid.

Oh,yes," total disenfranchisement"!And have you seen this disenfranchisement?You should hold your tongue knowing shit about the life in the USSR.

Yeah I have. Infact most people have and it's very well documented, that Lenin's tactics worked like shit in the Western World. That the Soviet Union proved the impossibility of moving beyond a Capitalistic economy. What we hear with regards to the millions killed, the overproduction or underproduction, the denial of social rights, etc. all these things turn people off from Socialism, it disfranchises the word.

Another "strong" argument:"the soviet union collapsed ".Ignore the fact that your alternatives such as Parise Commune collapsed immediatly after the birth,buddy.But why the USSR didn't collapse immediatly after the birth,but lieved for 74 years and was successfull in many affairs?Certainly,why should you think about it,let's a horse think,it has a huge head!It's all clear for you without thinking!

Again Strawman, I never said the Paris Commune was great either. The Paris Commune proved the failure of its tactics and proved Marx to be right. The Workers' didn't seize control of the Bank or push forward and liberate more cities.