Unclebananahead
25th February 2011, 01:37
Okay, so here's a script I wrote a while ago (it's absolutely, definitely not an essay) and I just revised it somewhat. I would very much appreciate constructive insights for the purpose of improving it. So suggestions geared along those lines would be helpful. In case anyone is wondering what this script is for, I plan to transform it into a video intended for upload to You Tube. Also, those defending/upholding Stalin and his legacy probably won't like this piece. So just to let you know if you're one of those, you've been warned.
A Brief Response To The Stalin Question
By yer pal Comrade Banana Head
The conservatives in the US and elsewhere tell us that we can’t possibly hold Marxism and communism in any kind of favorable regard, because it was so gosh darn awful when it existed in the USSR under Stalin. It’s so awful, that we would be ill-advised from pursuing it, as it would yield nothing but failure and trouble. We have to look towards a future under perpetual capitalist rule according to them. Pro-capitalist writer and academic Francis Fukuyama wrote a book entitled, “The End of History," in which he claimed that the end of the USSR (and other factors) signaled that capitalism was humanity’s highest possible stage of socio-economic development. Fukuyama, as well as other similar minded folks, claim that capitalism is the best of all possible worlds, and whatever its flaws may be, it’s still better than any possible alternative. Very often the specter of Stalin is trotted out in support of these claims. People who are new to Marxism, become enthused and then get inspired to share their new convictions with others, often are confronted with the ‘Stalin question.’ ‘But what about Stalin?’ they ask. This video endeavors to briefly (but certainly not exhaustively) answer the Stalin question.
It seems that the issue of Stalin in particular has always been a controversial subject in contemporary Marxism, despite his having died well over 50 years ago. Here in the 21st century, there are still those who uphold the USSR under Stalin’s leadership to have been a correct application of Marxist and Leninist ideas, and they frequently refer to themselves as “Marxist-Leninists” or sometimes, “anti-revisionists.” They claim that the USSR during this period was truly socialist, ignoring the fact that workers exercised little or no say over state policy. Marx defined socialism as a society in which the proletariat has seized state power, smashed capitalist relations, and placed the means of production under public control. The USSR under Stalin did not fulfill this definition of socialism. Instead, the revolution was incomplete. There was a revolutionary seizure of state power by the proletariat, an expropriation of the bourgeoisie, and a centrally planned economy under the auspices of the ‘worker’s state,’ but this social order was presided over by a managerial caste of bureaucrats, and the head bureaucrat being Stalin. The working class were given little opportunity to exercise any meaningful democratic controls over the state apparatus.
It’s important to put this in proper context however. There is no denying that the Soviet Union was undergoing considerable adversity during the period in question. It was isolated and invaded by all the major imperialist powers right at the very beginning of its existence. And there is also no denying that under Stalin's leadership the Soviet Union industrialized within a generation, beat back the Nazi war machine, and emerged from the crucible of world war two as a world super power. Those are impressive accomplishments. And it's conceivable that anyone who was the leader of the USSR during that period would have had to make difficult decisions, and had to address potential threats and problems in an urgent fashion in order to secure its continued existence -- to defend its very life. I can appreciate that, and so should anyone interested in proletarian revolution willing to look into the history of this period.
Certain acts however, place the true nature of the bureaucratic/managerial led 'worker’s state’ into sharp relief against real socialism -- such as the trials in which 17 out of the original twenty-two communist party central committee members who were the leaders of the 1917 revolution were found guilty of various acts of treachery and then liquidated. Could the 1917 revolution really have been led by an assemblage of traitors, spies, and saboteurs? It seems unlikely to me. There were just twenty-two members of Lenin’s Central Committee in October, 1917. Three (Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, and Uritsky) all died of more or less normal causes (or at least, non-Stalin related causes). Two (Stalin and Kollontai) lived to see the nineteen-fifties. The other seventeen were shot as mad dogs, as fascists, as spies, as wreckers, as counter-revolutionists, as enemies of the people, as enemies of the working class, enemies of socialism, under Stalin. What sort of revolution is led by spies, fascists, saboteurs, and counter-revolutionaries? Should we really believe that this is the sort of company Lenin kept? It strikes me as implausible.
In December of 1932, the Soviet government under Stalin reintroduced the old internal passport system ('propiska'), which made it so that a person had to obtain authorization to leave one's district. This was 1932, before the Nazis had taken power in Germany. Hitler was not yet casting a long menacing shadow upon Europe. The Soviet Union had previously done away with the old internal passport system, which had existed under the Tsar. According to the Soviet encyclopedia of 1930, the internal passport system was, "a repressive invention of the police state, absent in Soviet law," but approximately two years later, Stalin re-introduced them, and used the propiska to register all soviet citizens to their places of residence, and control migration. Without stamped authorization on a citizen’s internal passport, he or she couldn’t take a train out of the city in which they resided. Perhaps even more severe, was the decree of June 6, 1934 regarding ‘flight abroad,’ which mandated the use of the death penalty against those convicted of leaving the country without prior authorization. And this was long before the German invasion of June 1941.
Stalin, along with some of his collaborators formulated the anti-Marxist policy of “socialism in one country,” which argued that socialism could be built in a single country, even an underdeveloped one like Russia. An emphasis was placed not on spreading proletarian class consciousness and revolution around the globe, but rather on the build-up and defense of the Soviet Union. After ‘internalizing’ this policy, the Communist International became less revolutionary and more willing to compromise with reactionary forces, in the name of the preservation of the USSR. This was accompanied by a return to a Menshevik, or ‘stagist’ theory in which it was argued that undeveloped countries must pass through two distinct revolutions (first the Bourgeois Democratic Revolution, which socialists would assist, and at a later stage, the Socialist Revolution with an evolutionary period of capitalist development separating those stages). This was certainly the case with China, as the Chinese Communist Party was very much wrongly advised by the Moscow headed Communist International to enter, and remain in the Chinese nationalist organization, the Kuomintang, in an attempt to steer it leftwards. This led to an extremely violent and bloody purging of the Chinese communists from that organization in 1927, in what was known as the Shanghai massacre, thus forestalling revolution in China for well over 20 years. Who knows how world history would have unfolded had the Chinese communists remained independent. China could potentially have had a successful revolution before 1930. Unfortunately, we’ll never know.
It must be remembered that the Bolsheviks under Lenin, found themselves inheriting what can only be described as a backward, shattered and defeated country, the ‘chief laggard’ among the great powers, after the successful 1917 revolution. To add to the adversity, the Soviets were isolated, subjected to a joint invasion by the imperialist powers, and a massive civil war. It was this set of circumstances that allowed for an opportunistic person such as Stalin to come to power. To his credit, Stalin built up the Soviet economy through centralized planning, and managed to industrialize within a generation, in spite of all his heavy-handed, Draconian, paranoid excesses. But was he a socialist? Was he a Marxist? Was he in favor of a worker controlled society? The answer I have to give is no. The USSR under Stalin never was socialist in any true sense of the word. It was a heavily deformed worker’s state. Under severely adverse circumstances, it had become degenerated, and ran by a paranoid, tyrannical opportunist, who was at the head of a managerial caste of bureaucrats. In spite of this degeneration, it industrialized within a single generation, defeated the Nazi war machine, emerged from world war two a world super power, and launched the space age in 1957. This demonstrates the amazing potential of a planned economy and what it can achieve.
The international proletariat in its struggle against capitalist-imperialism, can look at the Soviet Union as the world’s first grand experiment in socialism, which despite considerable adversity, and deformation, made definite gains, and showed what a planned economy can accomplish. Proletarian revolutionaries should study the example of the Soviet Union, and learn from its failures and successes. The next grand implementation of socialist ideas, will surely be much different, as it will be made under very different circumstances. That notwithstanding, it would be unwise to ignore the lessons of the past.
A Brief Response To The Stalin Question
By yer pal Comrade Banana Head
The conservatives in the US and elsewhere tell us that we can’t possibly hold Marxism and communism in any kind of favorable regard, because it was so gosh darn awful when it existed in the USSR under Stalin. It’s so awful, that we would be ill-advised from pursuing it, as it would yield nothing but failure and trouble. We have to look towards a future under perpetual capitalist rule according to them. Pro-capitalist writer and academic Francis Fukuyama wrote a book entitled, “The End of History," in which he claimed that the end of the USSR (and other factors) signaled that capitalism was humanity’s highest possible stage of socio-economic development. Fukuyama, as well as other similar minded folks, claim that capitalism is the best of all possible worlds, and whatever its flaws may be, it’s still better than any possible alternative. Very often the specter of Stalin is trotted out in support of these claims. People who are new to Marxism, become enthused and then get inspired to share their new convictions with others, often are confronted with the ‘Stalin question.’ ‘But what about Stalin?’ they ask. This video endeavors to briefly (but certainly not exhaustively) answer the Stalin question.
It seems that the issue of Stalin in particular has always been a controversial subject in contemporary Marxism, despite his having died well over 50 years ago. Here in the 21st century, there are still those who uphold the USSR under Stalin’s leadership to have been a correct application of Marxist and Leninist ideas, and they frequently refer to themselves as “Marxist-Leninists” or sometimes, “anti-revisionists.” They claim that the USSR during this period was truly socialist, ignoring the fact that workers exercised little or no say over state policy. Marx defined socialism as a society in which the proletariat has seized state power, smashed capitalist relations, and placed the means of production under public control. The USSR under Stalin did not fulfill this definition of socialism. Instead, the revolution was incomplete. There was a revolutionary seizure of state power by the proletariat, an expropriation of the bourgeoisie, and a centrally planned economy under the auspices of the ‘worker’s state,’ but this social order was presided over by a managerial caste of bureaucrats, and the head bureaucrat being Stalin. The working class were given little opportunity to exercise any meaningful democratic controls over the state apparatus.
It’s important to put this in proper context however. There is no denying that the Soviet Union was undergoing considerable adversity during the period in question. It was isolated and invaded by all the major imperialist powers right at the very beginning of its existence. And there is also no denying that under Stalin's leadership the Soviet Union industrialized within a generation, beat back the Nazi war machine, and emerged from the crucible of world war two as a world super power. Those are impressive accomplishments. And it's conceivable that anyone who was the leader of the USSR during that period would have had to make difficult decisions, and had to address potential threats and problems in an urgent fashion in order to secure its continued existence -- to defend its very life. I can appreciate that, and so should anyone interested in proletarian revolution willing to look into the history of this period.
Certain acts however, place the true nature of the bureaucratic/managerial led 'worker’s state’ into sharp relief against real socialism -- such as the trials in which 17 out of the original twenty-two communist party central committee members who were the leaders of the 1917 revolution were found guilty of various acts of treachery and then liquidated. Could the 1917 revolution really have been led by an assemblage of traitors, spies, and saboteurs? It seems unlikely to me. There were just twenty-two members of Lenin’s Central Committee in October, 1917. Three (Lenin, Dzerzhinsky, and Uritsky) all died of more or less normal causes (or at least, non-Stalin related causes). Two (Stalin and Kollontai) lived to see the nineteen-fifties. The other seventeen were shot as mad dogs, as fascists, as spies, as wreckers, as counter-revolutionists, as enemies of the people, as enemies of the working class, enemies of socialism, under Stalin. What sort of revolution is led by spies, fascists, saboteurs, and counter-revolutionaries? Should we really believe that this is the sort of company Lenin kept? It strikes me as implausible.
In December of 1932, the Soviet government under Stalin reintroduced the old internal passport system ('propiska'), which made it so that a person had to obtain authorization to leave one's district. This was 1932, before the Nazis had taken power in Germany. Hitler was not yet casting a long menacing shadow upon Europe. The Soviet Union had previously done away with the old internal passport system, which had existed under the Tsar. According to the Soviet encyclopedia of 1930, the internal passport system was, "a repressive invention of the police state, absent in Soviet law," but approximately two years later, Stalin re-introduced them, and used the propiska to register all soviet citizens to their places of residence, and control migration. Without stamped authorization on a citizen’s internal passport, he or she couldn’t take a train out of the city in which they resided. Perhaps even more severe, was the decree of June 6, 1934 regarding ‘flight abroad,’ which mandated the use of the death penalty against those convicted of leaving the country without prior authorization. And this was long before the German invasion of June 1941.
Stalin, along with some of his collaborators formulated the anti-Marxist policy of “socialism in one country,” which argued that socialism could be built in a single country, even an underdeveloped one like Russia. An emphasis was placed not on spreading proletarian class consciousness and revolution around the globe, but rather on the build-up and defense of the Soviet Union. After ‘internalizing’ this policy, the Communist International became less revolutionary and more willing to compromise with reactionary forces, in the name of the preservation of the USSR. This was accompanied by a return to a Menshevik, or ‘stagist’ theory in which it was argued that undeveloped countries must pass through two distinct revolutions (first the Bourgeois Democratic Revolution, which socialists would assist, and at a later stage, the Socialist Revolution with an evolutionary period of capitalist development separating those stages). This was certainly the case with China, as the Chinese Communist Party was very much wrongly advised by the Moscow headed Communist International to enter, and remain in the Chinese nationalist organization, the Kuomintang, in an attempt to steer it leftwards. This led to an extremely violent and bloody purging of the Chinese communists from that organization in 1927, in what was known as the Shanghai massacre, thus forestalling revolution in China for well over 20 years. Who knows how world history would have unfolded had the Chinese communists remained independent. China could potentially have had a successful revolution before 1930. Unfortunately, we’ll never know.
It must be remembered that the Bolsheviks under Lenin, found themselves inheriting what can only be described as a backward, shattered and defeated country, the ‘chief laggard’ among the great powers, after the successful 1917 revolution. To add to the adversity, the Soviets were isolated, subjected to a joint invasion by the imperialist powers, and a massive civil war. It was this set of circumstances that allowed for an opportunistic person such as Stalin to come to power. To his credit, Stalin built up the Soviet economy through centralized planning, and managed to industrialize within a generation, in spite of all his heavy-handed, Draconian, paranoid excesses. But was he a socialist? Was he a Marxist? Was he in favor of a worker controlled society? The answer I have to give is no. The USSR under Stalin never was socialist in any true sense of the word. It was a heavily deformed worker’s state. Under severely adverse circumstances, it had become degenerated, and ran by a paranoid, tyrannical opportunist, who was at the head of a managerial caste of bureaucrats. In spite of this degeneration, it industrialized within a single generation, defeated the Nazi war machine, emerged from world war two a world super power, and launched the space age in 1957. This demonstrates the amazing potential of a planned economy and what it can achieve.
The international proletariat in its struggle against capitalist-imperialism, can look at the Soviet Union as the world’s first grand experiment in socialism, which despite considerable adversity, and deformation, made definite gains, and showed what a planned economy can accomplish. Proletarian revolutionaries should study the example of the Soviet Union, and learn from its failures and successes. The next grand implementation of socialist ideas, will surely be much different, as it will be made under very different circumstances. That notwithstanding, it would be unwise to ignore the lessons of the past.