In defense of Trotsky’s actions post-exile

[Boris Krinkle]

While online the other day, I came across a self-proclaimed “Marxist-Leninist theoretical journal” which of course turned out to be a Stalinist blog created for the purpose of attacking Leon Trotsky.
Of course in it there was a MOUNTAIN of lies, but there were also some half truths, out of context quotes and other such “gray propaganda” techniques used to slander Trotsky and by association, Leninism. I will address a few issues here; defend Trotsky where needed and clear up any misconceptions about his post exile behavior.
"Being an irreconcilable opponent not only of fascism but also of the present-day Comintern, I am at the same time decidedly against the suppression of either of them."
-Leon Trotsky, "Why I Agreed to Appear Before the Dies Committee," 1939
One must take into consideration that at the time neither Germany or Italy were aggressors and even though they were reactionary (like Iran, the Baath Party, the Taliban, Gaddafi etc.) they (like the modern day examples provided) were at the time either being harassed by greater imperialist powers (Britain, France) or were in danger of such a breach of their self-determination.
And although the Comintern under Stalin was involved in imperialist aggression towards Finland, Poland and others, many of the parties in this international were not, like fascists not in power in the US or UK, guilty of any wrongdoing by association.
What Trotsky essentially means here is that he is opposed to these ideologies and movements while at the same time in favor of their freedom of speech.
"Hitler's soldiers are German workers and peasants. . . . The armies of occupation must live side by side with the conquered peoples; they must observe the impoverishment and despair of the toiling masses; they must observe the latter's attempts at resistance and protest, at first muffled and then more and more open and bold. . . . The German soldiers, that is, the workers and peasants, will in the majority of cases have far more sympathy for the vanquished peoples than for their own ruling caste. The necessity to act at every step in the capacity of 'pacifiers' and oppressors will swiftly disintegrate the armies of occupation, infecting them with a revolutionary spirit." --1940
Leon Trotsky
"On the Future of Hitler's Armies"
Writings of Leon Trotsky (1939-40)
(NY: Merit Publishers, 1969), p. 113.
What Trotsky means here is that the German soldiers would over time, through observation, begin to sympathize with the people they are oppressing and not the NSDAP or their hard-line Nazi officers.
I don’t consider this to be an incorrect analysis of the situation and after some time examining it, no one else committed to Leninism will either.
Lastly, it is suggested that Trotsky “ratted out” communists to the FBI to obtain a visa to escape to Mexico.
“By providing the US Consulate with information about common enemies, be they Mexican or American communists or Soviet agents, Trotsky hoped to prove his value to a government that had no desire to grant him a visa” (“Revolutionary Democracy”)
“Robert McGregor of the [United States] Consulate met with Trotsky in his home…he met again with Trotsky on 13 July…Trotsky told McGregor in detail of the allegations and evidence he had compiled…He gave to McGregor the names of Mexican publications, political and labour leaders, and government officials allegedly associated with the PCM [Mexico and the USSR were the only countries in the world to materially support the fight against Franco's Fascism in the Spanish Civil War 1936-39]. He charged that one of the Comintern’s [the Communist international's] leading agents, Carlos Contreras served on the PCM Directing Committee. He also discussed the alleged efforts of Narciso Bassols, former Mexican Ambassador to France, whom Trotsky claimed was a Soviet agent, to get him deported from Mexico…Upon receipt, the State Department transmitted McGregor's memo to the FBI” (“Revolutionary Democracy”).
These are partially true, but propaganda all the same, with barely enough truth to sustain their lies.
Trotsky did work with the FBI to obtain a visa, but it was absolutely necessary to continue his revolutionary work as at the time it was feasible that World war two could morph into a world revolution, and Trotsky was more important than any other communist to serve as a leader in such a revolution and the US was not safe.
As for speaking before the precursor to HUAC, Trotsky made it clear that he intended to oppose the repression of the American Communist Party as well as expose NKVD assassins. Although this resulted in the jailing (and probably executions) of many Communist Americans it was ultimately the right thing to do for the revolution.

[Geiseric]

Maybe he finally said screw comintern and screw the USSR's government, who no longer were capible of revolution, and who also regularly tried to kill him, his familly, and friends.

[Kléber]

Trotsky wasn't allowed in the US precisely because he refused to snitch on Stalinists.

[Ismail]

And although the Comintern under Stalin was involved in imperialist aggression towards Finland, Poland and others, many of the parties in this international were not, like fascists not in power in the US or UK, guilty of any wrongdoing by association.
What Trotsky essentially means here is that he is opposed to these ideologies and movements while at the same time in favor of their freedom of speech.The USSR was not involved in "imperialist aggression" towards anyone. Finland refused to lease ports to the USSR. The USSR feared that Finland would be a comfy base for the Germans to invade the USSR and seize Leningrad. Even though Finnish negotiators praised Stalin's terms, the government refused to cede any ports to the USSR even though Stalin put forward even more generous terms to the Finns. Finland, of course, later wound up under the leadership of Mannerheim, who allied with the Germans and who had butchered Finnish Communists in 1918.

Likewise there was no "imperialist aggression" against Poland. Nazi Germany invaded Poland, and the USSR took areas that the Soviets had claims on anyway owing to them being populated by oppressed Byelorussian and Ukrainian minorities. The Poles had rejected a mutual defense pact with the Soviets some time before this.

There cannot be "freedom of speech" for the enemies of socialism. Trotsky understood this pretty well (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1920/terrcomm/index.htm), although it seems he somehow forgot about it once he posited himself as an opponent of Stalin and as a defender of "proletarian democracy."


As for speaking before the precursor to HUAC, Trotsky made it clear that he intended to... expose NKVD assassins.Indeed. Good thing Stalin had him killed. He was pretty much willing to divulge info on Comintern influence and reach. This makes total sense for Trotskyists, but obviously for the rest of us it's treachery.

This is why this debate is generally going to be pointless. If you accept that the USSR was "state capitalist" or a "degenerated workers state," then just about anything Trotsky does can be justified. If you accept that the USSR was building socialism, then obviously Trotsky looks a fair bit worse.

[DaringMehring]

While online the other day, I came across a self-proclaimed “Marxist-Leninist theoretical journal” which of course turned out to be a Stalinist blog created for the purpose of attacking Leon Trotsky.
Of course in it there was a MOUNTAIN of lies, but there were also some half truths, out of context quotes and other such “gray propaganda” techniques used to slander Trotsky and by association, Leninism.


If you figured out its a slander blog based on lies, why bother discussing it as if it were serious?



I will address a few issues here; defend Trotsky where needed and clear up any misconceptions about his post exile behavior.

Misconceptions are different from intentional slander.



"Being an irreconcilable opponent not only of fascism but also of the present-day Comintern, I am at the same time decidedly against the suppression of either of them."


What Trotsky essentially means here is that he is opposed to these ideologies and movements while at the same time in favor of their freedom of speech.
You miss the point, which is who would be suppressing them. The only possible referent are the bourgeois regimes. Trotsky was not going to call on the bourgeois regimes to suppress anyone.



What Trotsky means here is that the German soldiers would over time, through observation, begin to sympathize with the people they are oppressing and not the NSDAP or their hard-line Nazi officers.
I don’t consider this to be an incorrect analysis of the situation and after some time examining it, no one else committed to Leninism will either.


Following Trotsky's politics in general (permanent revolution, degenerated workers' state, etc.), doesn't mean you have to defend every thing Trotsky ever said or predicted. There were some indicators that the Nazi army would mutiny, eg the concentration camp guards sympathizing with the "Peat Bog Soldiers" singers, but turns out, the Nazi army was defeated before it mutinied en masse, if it ever would have.



Trotsky did work with the FBI to obtain a visa, but it was absolutely necessary to continue his revolutionary work as at the time it was feasible that World war two could morph into a world revolution, and Trotsky was more important than any other communist to serve as a leader in such a revolution and the US was not safe.
As for speaking before the precursor to HUAC, Trotsky made it clear that he intended to oppose the repression of the American Communist Party as well as expose NKVD assassins. Although this resulted in the jailing (and probably executions) of many Communist Americans it was ultimately the right thing to do for the revolution.You are wrong.

Trotsky did not speak before the Dies Committee.

He explained that he had agreed to, in order to attack the proceedings, as you say. "This" did not happen, because when the Dies Committee learned of Trotsky's intention, they cancelled his appearance. This "this" did not result in the jailing or execution of any Communist Americans. The exiled Trotsky does not have communist blood on his hands, rather, just the opposite, the CP which helped in the suppression of Trotskyists, is the one that has communist blood on its hands.

Trotsky had a history of brilliant trial appearances, first and foremost being after the suppression of the 1905 revolution, he appeared as the chief defendant for the St. Petersburg soviet, and, facing the death penalty, so roundly humiliated the Tsarist prosecutors that the trial was aborted. It's obvious that he was envisioning a sequel to this.

In short, you seem a bit green. You should

1) read more.

2) concern yourself less with things you can already see through as lies.

3) be active in labor movement, get comfortable interacting with workers in a political context.

Good luck, comrade!

[RED DAVE]

Good thing Stalin had him killed.Remember not to turn your back, politically or otherwise, on a stalinist or maoist. They have their own fun ways of settling political disputes.

RED DAVE

[Boris Krinkle]

Stalin was involved in Imperialist agression, why else attack Finland? No, not because the Germans would invade, Stalin wasn't worried about that because he made a pact with Hitler and was taken off guard when the attack did come.

[Boris Krinkle]

thanks for the advice DaringMehring (really)

[S.Artesian]

Indeed. Good thing Stalin had him killed. He was pretty much willing to divulge info on Comintern influence and reach. This makes total sense for Trotskyists, but obviously for the rest of us it's treachery

Hmmh... yeah, sure great thing. And not only Trotsky, good thing Stalin got rid of... well almost everybody except Stalin. Because that worked out so well for the working class of the last 70 years don't you think?

I mean really why limit it to getting rid of Trotsky?

Look how well getting rid of the Left SRs worked out for the workers in Russia, not to mention the poor peasants.

Look how well getting rid of the all the left oppositionists in the Comintern worked out for the workers in.... oh say Germany 1928-1932; Spain 1934-1937; Vietnam 1937, and then again in 1945, restoring colonialism.

Look how well it worked out for workers in Russia, everywhere, getting rid of all left-oppositionists, agreeing to a mutual defense pact with the Nazis... I mean what did it really cost the Russian workers.......20-30 million dead. But if Trotsky would have lived, oh yeah, if everyone from Bukharin to Radek hadn't been executed, if the Spanish workers, anarchist, POUM supporters hadn't been arrested and executed... it would have worked out so much worse for the workers of... Spain, Russia, China, Vietnam, right?

Mos' def. Sure everything would have been so much worse. If all those steps hadn't been taken, the Soviet Union might have collapsed with a truly catastrophic decline in living standards and life expectancy. Soviet women might have been forced into a Natasha trade. Vietnam might have had to endure a 20 year war with the US, winning only to become the latest playground for Nike, Nestle, etc. with a golf course planned for every village. Why China might have gone capitalist. Albania, yes, even dear, righteous Albania might have regressed to narco-capitalism.

Thank Stalin, none of that happened. Thank heaven somebody had the sense to see what the ultimate repercussions of his actions or inactions might be.

Somebody pass me the bucket.

[Ismail]

Stalin was involved in Imperialist agression, why else attack Finland? No, not because the Germans would invade, Stalin wasn't worried about that because he made a pact with Hitler and was taken off guard when the attack did come.Stalin expected that the Germans would eventually invade, he just didn't know exactly when and expected them to invade a year after they actually did. I really don't need to list sources to note this; there's tons of them. To start with, and this includes Stalin's views on Finland, there's Stalin's Wars by Geoffrey Roberts.

How was Finland a war of "imperialist aggression"? What was "imperialist" about it? You apparently think that Stalin just wanted to attack Finland out of the blue, but what then do you make of the negotiations to secure Leningrad?


Hmmh... yeah, sure great thing. And not only Trotsky, good thing Stalin got rid of... well almost everybody except Stalin. Because that worked out so well for the working class of the last 70 years don't you think?Yeah, if only Zinvoiev, Kamenev, Bukharin, Pyatakov, Radek, etc. had been still breathing, the USSR would have still been alive today. :rolleyes:


Look how well getting rid of the Left SRs worked out for the workers in Russia, not to mention the poor peasants.As Lenin pointed out (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/jul/12.htm) in 1919, "The counter-revolutionary wave inside the country, however, was more powerful last year than this. The activities of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries had reached the highest point at that time. The armed struggle that they launched suddenly in place of their verbal support took us by surprise. The difficulties were immense, for they had chosen their time very cleverly. The Socialist-Revolutionaries hoped to play on the mood of the man in the street who was in despair from hunger.... It is quite possible that the Socialist-Revolutionary and Menshevik literary groups will die out without ever having understood anything about our revolution and for a long time will continue repeating, parrot fashion, that theirs would have been the best government in the world, a truly socialist and truly democratic government without civil war, if it had not been for Kolchak and the Bolsheviks; that, however, is not important, there have also been stubborn cranks in all revolutions."


Look how well getting rid of the all the left oppositionists in the Comintern worked out for the workers in.... oh say Germany 1928-1932;The SPD denounced the KPD and refused to work with it against the NSDAP. The KPD's line was in response to the SPD's reactionary policies. As E.H. Carr among others has noted (and Carr openly supported Trotsky's views on the "Third Period"), the SPD wasn't just some innocent force that begged for the KPD to come ally with them against Nazism.

See also: http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/olgin11.htm


Spain 1934-1937;Well the literal Spanish Trotskyists were about 20 people. If you mean the POUM, then they took an ultra-left position that could only undermine the anti-fascist struggle.


agreeing to a mutual defense pact with the NazisYou don't seem very good at history.

"The Nazi-Soviet Pact did not, by contrast, involve a military alliance, and Stalin refused to conclude one with Germany over the following months. Its main advantages in Stalin's mind were to keep the Soviet Union out of the coming 'imperialist war'... Given his assumption that the war in the West would be prolonged, the Soviet Union would also be in a position to advance its frontiers by annexing territories [which the Soviets had claims to] assigned to its sphere without German interference and to make additional demands on Hitler, especially in the Balkans, while German forces were tied up in a western campaign."
(Alfred J. Rieber, "Stalin as foreign policy-maker: avoiding war, 1927-1953" in Stalin: A New History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. p. 146.)


But if Trotsky would have lived, oh yeah, if everyone from Bukharin to Radek hadn't been executed, if the Spanish workers, anarchist, POUM supporters hadn't been arrested and executed... it would have worked out so much worse for the workers of... Spain, Russia, China, Vietnam, right?Quite right.

The way I see it, the Russian Revolution faced problems somewhat similar to those Engels described in his book The Peasant War in Germany, when he said that (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1850/peasant-war-germany/ch06.htm#6.1), "The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents and for the realisation of the measures which that domination would imply. What he can do depends not upon his will but upon the sharpness of the clash of interests between the various classes, and upon the degree of development of the material means of existence, the relations of production and means of communication upon which the clash of interests of the classes is based every time. What he ought to do, what his party demands of him, again depends not upon him, or upon the degree of development of the class struggle and its conditions." It seems fairly obvious to me that Soviet Russia faced such problems.

[S.Artesian]

So... everything would have worked out worse. As I pointed out. The German proletariat would have been crushed because "Nach Hitler, Uns" would not have been the order of the day.

Franco would not have been defeated if the Popular Front hadn't been supported by the workers.

In 1937, the workers actions in Vietnam would have been crushed if the CPs had not been under the discipline for the 3rd Intl.

What you don't get is the fact that you won. You got exactly what you said had to happen. You were able to crush all opposition within the fSU. You were able to purge the military, the bureaucracy of its treacherous fascists in red garb. You killed Trotsky and as many as his supporters as you could. You got your little pact with Hitler. You got everything you wanted.

And what did you get? What do you have to point to? Collapse, decay, regression. That's your glorious achievement in history-- the great undoing. What? You accept no responsibility for that? It was all the work of revisionists? Capitalist roaders? Oh that's rich.

You're the failure in history. Not Marx's analysis, not the proletariat. But you and your ilk with your chest-thumping pride in icepicks, popular fronts, and socialism in one country.




You could hunt down and kill "trotskyite-anarcho-fascists" by the thousands; defeat the Nazi war machine pretty much singlehandedly, but a few thousand capitalist roaders in your bureaucracy were enough to reverse socialism?

Doesn't get any lamer than that; any less Marxist than that; any further from historical materialism.

You won, jack. Take the credit, and take the responsibility. This is what you get with your victory. Take a drink from your victory chalice and tell us what it's like to have a mouth full of ashes.

[Jose Gracchus]

Yawn. This is always trotted out by the icepick brigade, who have nothing to say about Ho Chi Minh's ratting out of Trots to imperialists, or the CPUSA eagerly tailing the American Empire, going so far to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee (yes, the McCarthyist outfit that later annihilated them) to rat on Trots.

Fuck 'em and their crocodile tears and masturbation rags they call 'proof'.

[Ismail]

What you don't get is the fact that you won. You got exactly what you said had to happen. You were able to crush all opposition within the fSU. You were able to purge the military, the bureaucracy of its treacherous fascists in red garb. You killed Trotsky and as many as his supporters as you could. You got your little pact with Hitler. You got everything you wanted.There was no "pact" with Hitler.

We didn't quite get "everything [we] wanted." I mean Lenin got pretty much "everything he wanted," right? As did Stalin. But both Lenin and Stalin had to struggle against ultra-left and right-wing deviations. Stalin in his last years also struggled with right-wing deviationism, whether it be Titoism in the international sphere or types like Voznosensky (http://www.marxists.org/archive/bland/1980/restoration-capitalism-soviet-union/appendix-3.htm) in domestic matters. His book Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R. (http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/Stalin/econprobs.htm) is seen by us "Stalinists" as sort of the equivalent of what Trotskyists call Lenin's "Testament." See for instance this (http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv1n1/marksoc.htm) and this (http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv6n1/socreprod.htm). Enver Hoxha had to simultaneously struggle against pro-Soviet revisionism, Maoism, and "Eurocommunism" amongst other trends, and into his last years, although he was understandably very happy with what he oversaw, still stressed that further work was still needed in the fields of economics and political education.


And what did you get? What do you have to point to? Collapse, decay, regression. That's your glorious achievement in history-- the great undoing. What? You accept no responsibility for that? It was all the work of revisionists? Capitalist roaders? Oh that's rich.Actually we can point to progress, moves toward the construction of socialism, and efforts toward the liberation of the proletariat. Talking about "responsibility" is stupid, since it was precisely those revisionists who denounced Stalin, his works, and his legacy in general outside of World War II. We don't take "responsibility" for state capitalism in the post-50's USSR because this was the same USSR that was denouncing "Stalinism" to begin with, including works like Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R. in which the things Stalin warned about were promptly implemented after he died. Said work was also denounced as "left-deviationist" because it supposedly failed to take into account the so-called "creative development of Marxism-Leninism" as was expounded upon by Khrushchev and later Brezhnev.

Not to mention that according to Kaganovich, Khrushchev had once been a Trotskyist (http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv1n2/chuyev.htm).


You could hunt down and kill "trotskyite-anarcho-fascists" by the thousands; defeat the Nazi war machine pretty much singlehandedly, but a few thousand capitalist roaders in your bureaucracy were enough to reverse socialism?Hoxha did point out (in his 1980 work Eurocommunism is Anti-Communism) that socialism wasn't fully achieved in the USSR. Not to mention obvious facts like the proletariat lacking sufficient class consciousness. I find it stranger that apparently the USSR was so long gone by the 1930's yet it was still somehow a "degenerated workers state." Not to mention extending this same analysis well into the 1980's.

I don't see the point of your post. Sure there was a bureaucracy, that was a natural phenomena of a state, especially one in such conditions as Russia in the year 1917. Obviously bureaucrats differed with the work of Lenin and Stalin. Hence why Bukharin's line was so popular amongst higher echelons of the party than either Stalin's or Trotsky's, or why in the 1930's you had figures like Tukhachevsky who praised the Germans (http://www.shunpiking.com/books/GC/GC-AK-MS-chapter20.htm) and did not seem to care much at all (http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/tukh.html) about communism. The "Great Purges" primarily had an anti-bureaucratic character. You can criticize the effectiveness of this, but figures from J. Arch Getty to Robert Thurston to Sheila Fitzpatrick have noted the "shake-up" effects the purges had. Of course in your view Stalin represented the "Thermidor," so as I said earlier in this thread the whole debate is going to be pretty useless (because we have differing interpretations on fairly significant matters which bring us to the present thread's topic) outside of me correcting particularly ridiculous points you're making.

[S.Artesian]

There was no "pact" with Hitler.

Ummh.... what was that thing von Ribbentrop and Molotov signed?



Text of the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact
The Government of the German Reich and The Government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics desirous of strengthening the cause of peace between Germany and the U.S.S.R., and proceeding from the fundamental provisions of the Neutrality Agreement concluded in April, 1926 between Germany and the U.S.S.R., have reached the following Agreement:
Article I. Both High Contracting Parties obligate themselves to desist from any act of violence, any aggressive action, and any attack on each other, either individually or jointly with other Powers.
Article II. Should one of the High Contracting Parties become the object of belligerent action by a third Power, the other High Contracting Party shall in no manner lend its support to this third Power.
Article III. The Governments of the two High Contracting Parties shall in the future maintain continual contact with one another for the purpose of consultation in order to exchange information on problems affecting their common interests.
Article IV. Should disputes or conflicts arise between the High Contracting Parties shall participate in any grouping of Powers whatsoever that is directly or indirectly aimed at the other party.
Article V. Should disputes or conflicts arise between the High Contracting Parties over problems of one kind or another, both parties shall settle these disputes or conflicts exclusively through friendly exchange of opinion or, if necessary, through the establishment of arbitration commissions.
Article VI. The present Treaty is concluded for a period of ten years, with the proviso that, in so far as one of the High Contracting Parties does not advance it one year prior to the expiration of this period, the validity of this Treaty shall automatically be extended for another five years.
Article VII. The present treaty shall be ratified within the shortest possible time. The ratifications shall be exchanged in Berlin. The Agreement shall enter into force as soon as it is signed.
[The section below was not published at the time the above was announced.]
Secret Additional Protocol.
Article I. In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement in the areas belonging to the Baltic States (Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania), the northern boundary of Lithuania shall represent the boundary of the spheres of influence of Germany and U.S.S.R. In this connection the interest of Lithuania in the Vilna area is recognized by each party.
Article II. In the event of a territorial and political rearrangement of the areas belonging to the Polish state, the spheres of influence of Germany and the U.S.S.R. shall be bounded approximately by the line of the rivers Narev, Vistula and San.
The question of whether the interests of both parties make desirable the maintenance of an independent Polish States and how such a state should be bounded can only be definitely determined in the course of further political developments.
In any event both Governments will resolve this question by means of a friendly agreement.
Article III. With regard to Southeastern Europe attention is called by the Soviet side to its interest in Bessarabia. The German side declares its complete political disinteredness in these areas.
Article IV. This protocol shall be treated by both parties as strictly secret.
Moscow, August 23, 1939.
For the Government of the German Reich v. Ribbentrop
Plenipotentiary of the Government of the U.S.S.R. V. Molotov


Was that supposed to be a "ridiculous claim" of mine that you were correcting?



Actually we can point to progress, moves toward the construction of socialism, and efforts toward the liberation of the proletariat. Talking about "responsibility" is stupid,

Of course you don't. I already pointed that out. It's all the fault of the revisionists who were able to overcome the "progress" towards the construction of socialism, and efforts toward the liberation of the proletariat. Of course there's no connection between that "progress" and the actual decay, decline, regression whatever you want to call it. To find those connections after all would be materialism, historical materialism, and that has to be abolished.

Of course there's no link from the so-called efforts at liberation of the proletariat and "obvious facts like the proletariat lacking sufficient class consciousness." Of course not, it's all a result of revisionists and the fact the Khrushchev was a "Trotskyist." We know he was because somebody accused him of being one. And we know the great record of accuracy achieved by Soviet accusers. Every Bolshevik a fascist; the anarchists and POUM in Spain planning a fascist coup against the Popular Front.

You offer not a shred of economic, materialist, class analysis-- instead its all about "revisionists."

Shake up effects? I love that. Yeah, put em on their toes. Make em work harder. Sure that's what it was. Like a motivational exercise. See, it's like this: "Kill one, teach a thousand." "You don't want that to happen to you, do you?" Anti-bureaucratic, indeed.
A real example of workers self-emancipation, as demonstrated by our chief emancipators Yagoda, Vyshinsky, et. al.

Pretty pathetic. As is your smear of Tukhachevsky. I know, I know-- Grover-Furr has evidence. Sure he does.

And I am no supporter of the "degenerated worker state" theory.

Of course you don't understand the point of my post, because that would require so analysis of history beyond "revisionists" and "trotskyite wreckers."

[Ismail]

Ummh.... what was that thing von Ribbentrop and Molotov signed?You were describing it as a "mutual defense pact" in your last post, which was clearly wrong.


Of course there's no connection between that "progress" and the actual decay, decline, regression whatever you want to call it. To find those connections after all would be materialism, historical materialism, and that has to be abolished.Of course we can trace the origins of revisionism to the first days of the revolution. As I said, the material conditions of Russia in 1917 and the limitations it imposed on many aspects of socialist construction were bound to produce situations where revisionism could become ascendant.

See: http://freespace.virgin.net/pep.talk/COLLAPSE..htm


Of course there's no link from the so-called efforts at liberation of the proletariat and "obvious facts like the proletariat lacking sufficient class consciousness."Of course there is, unless you're asserting that the USSR under Lenin and Stalin had wonderful living conditions where there could be much leisure time or even effective methods of study for a population that was only beginning to get out of backwardness.


We know he was because somebody accused him of being one. And we know the great record of accuracy achieved by Soviet accusers. Every Bolshevik a fascist; the anarchists and POUM in Spain planning a fascist coup against the Popular Front.Actually this was Kaganovich, who was told by Khrushchev himself that he had been a Trotskyist, and had subsequently told Stalin that Khrushchev was now actively fighting Trotskyism (which, of course, Kaganovich later regretted saying 20+ years later.) William Taubman also notes in his biography of Khrushchev that, in his youth, he had been attracted to Trotskyism. Khrushchev himself noted that in his youth he had gone down a "dark path" or whatever at one point.


You offer not a shred of economic, materialist, class analysis-- instead its all about "revisionists."And how those revisionists appeared.


Shake up effects? I love that. Yeah, put em on their toes. Make em work harder. Sure that's what it was. Like a motivational exercise. See, it's like this: "Kill one, teach a thousand." "You don't want that to happen to you, do you?" Anti-bureaucratic, indeed.As Thurston notes, workers rose up against managers they considered abusive or corrupt. As Getty notes, the purges primarily targeted bureaucrats. The purges obviously weren't effective at ending the causes of such conditions, but then again overcoming said conditions in the objective material conditions of the time was more or less impossible at that point.


A real example of workers self-emancipation, as demonstrated by our chief emancipators Yagoda, Vyshinsky, et. al.Vyshinsky seems to have been a nice guy. Hoxha talked of a 1949 meeting with Vyshinsky in his 1982 work The Titoites.

The following day Vyshinsky was to come from Moscow. The name and personality of Vyshinsky was great and well known to all of us on account of the important role he had played as state prosecutor in the Moscow trials against Trotskyites, Bukharinites, rightists and other traitors of the Soviet Union. During the war I had got hold of a French translation of the account of the Moscow trials and had had the opportunity to study the evil activity and treachery of these sworn enemies of communism. Their guilt and secret collaboration with the foreign enemies of the Soviet Union was brought out clearly and completely exposed there. Everything was convincing. And the claims of foreign enemies that the admissions had been allegedly extorted from the criminals by torture were slanders. Our struggle against local enemies, the trials which were held in our country after the war against enemies of the people, the struggle which our Party had waged against Trotskyite elements further reinforced our belief in the justness of the merciless fight which the state in the Soviet Union had undertaken against these criminals.

When they held power, the foreign and internal enemies of our peoples employed the most inhuman forms and methods. But naturally the foreign enemies will defend their friends within our countries, while our duty has been and still is to suppress the enemies of the people and to give them no possibility to operate against the constructive work of the people

This the Soviet state did through the Moscow trials. In these trials Andrey Vyshinsky, outstanding jurist and Marxist-Leninist, played an important role. He displayed skill, acumen, wisdom, courage and determination in this important task. Through his acumen and strong logic, on the basis of a profound dialectical Marxist-Leninist analysis, he uncovered all the obscure angles of problems, the intrigues and plans of the enemies who stood in the dock, as well as of the external enemies who pulled the strings of this terrible and dangerous agency. And it was precisely this unerring method of unravelling matters which astonished the external enemies and their espionage agencies about how their secret plans were discovered and compelled them to slander an propagate that everything, every statement, every admission by the accused had been extorted by means of torture, drugs," etc.

We had gathered in one of the rooms of the palace, where we were staying, waiting for Vyshinsky. At last he came. I was excited because I was meeting him for the first time...

In the course of the analysis he made of the secret and open activity of Tito's renegade group, Vyshinsky explained to us in detail the theoretical and political content of the letters of the Bolshevik Party to the CPY and the Resolution of the meeting of the Information Bureau on this important question. Our parties were acquainted with these documents which we had studied in detail and on which we had taken decisions, fully endorsing them....

"The question of Yugoslavia is an internal question of the peoples of Yugoslavia and the Yugoslav communists" continued Vyshinsky, "and we have not meddled and will not meddle in their internal affairs. We have no right to interfere, but it is our duty to ensure the political and ideological exposure of the activity of this clique which is fighting against Marxism-Leninism and serves world capitalism. Already," continued Vyshinsky, "in the international arena and the internal plane the Titoites present themselves as open enemies of the Soviet Union and their activities in this direction will increase, not only against us, but also against all the countries of people's democracy and the socialist camp. Their activity is identical with the activities of the Trotskyites, Bukharinites and agents of world capital whom we have unmasked in our trials."

"The unmasking of the enemy has very great importance," stressed Vyshinsky. "The Soviet peoples had to be convinced of the treacherous activity of the Trotskyites, the Bukharinites and the rightists, therefore we placed importance on this and managed to achieve that our enemies themselves brought out the smallest details which are frequently important because they explain major questions. The truth which proved their treachery emerged naked before our courts and our peoples. This had decisive importance. This is the important thing to achieve," said Vyshinsky. "After this the number of years to which the enemy is sentenced has secondary importance. The people must approve this sentence, must be convinced. This is what we must do with Tito's renegade group, too. This group is in power and will defend itself. It will also commit all sorts of provocations against our socialist states, but we must be prudent, vigilant and must not fall for their provocations!" he concluded."

[RED DAVE]

Good thing Stalin had [Trotsky] killed.

Vyshinsky seems to have been a nice guy.

Stalinist ideas of a good time with nice friends.

RED DAVE

[S.Artesian]

And you said: "There was no "pact" with Hitler." There most definitely was. I wrote mutual defense in place of non-aggression, but there was most definitely a pact, more than one as a matter of fact. The pact included agreements on dividing up territory [so much for the "national question." Socialism in one country at work.].

Vyshinsky was a nice guy. Priceless. And Hitler cried when the Hamburg Zoo was bombed and some animals killed. Wonderful.

Ted Bundy was really nice too when you weren't one of his victims.

Your "materialist" analysis is that the "conditions" in the fSU account for the "difficulties" in executing the program you so heartily endorse, and subsequent "reversals" or deviations. That's not a materialist analysis, it's an ideological justification.

A materialist analysis will point how the program you so heartily endorse reproduces all those difficulties in its very organization; how the "program" is the expression of the revisionism inherent in the self-contradictory ideology of "socialism in one country."

[Ismail]

And you said: "There was no "pact" with Hitler." There most definitely was. I wrote mutual defense in place of non-aggression, but there was most definitely a pact, more than one as a matter of fact. The pact included agreements on dividing up territory [so much for the "national question." Socialism in one country at work.].Actually the territories that the USSR were "given" (never mind that Hitler was alarmed when Soviet troops moved into Lithuania, which the Germans considered a sort of protectorate) had enjoyed Soviet claims on them since Lenin's time.

"The annexed territories did not belong to the core of the Polish state and did have an anti-Polish national liberation movement. Before the war, five million Ukrainians lived in Poland as an oppressed minority....

Compared to 1939, the Poland of 1945 was 20 percent smaller, but no matter how badly the war had hit German Pomerania and Silesia, the basic infrastructure there remained superior to that of the eastern Polish provinces lost to the USSR, and the three-hundred-mile-long Baltic Sea coast offered opportunities for new industries such as shipbuilding."
(Constantine Pleshakov. There Is No Freedom Without Bread! 1989 and the Civil War That Brought Down Communism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. 2009. pp. 30-31.)

The Soviets, after all, stopped at the Curzon Line (http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/research/mlg09/did_ussr_invade_poland.html).

"This exclusively agricultural community [the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic]... may perhaps be regarded as a lasting embodiment of the protest of the USSR against the Roumanian seizure of Bessarabia, which, it is hoped, may one day be enabled, as South Moldavia, to unite with the northern half of what is claimed to be a single community. With this view, the Moldavian Republic maintains a sovnarkom of People's Commissars, but is for many purposes dealt with as if it were merely an oblast of the Ukraine."
(Sidney & Beatrice Webb. Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation? Vol. I. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. 1936. p. 77.)

I was not opposed to you calling it a "pact," just that you seemed to have been continuing your assertion made the post before that it was a "mutual defense pact."


Vyshinsky was a nice guy. Priceless. And Hitler cried when the Hamburg Zoo was bombed and some animals killed. Wonderful.

Ted Bundy was really nice too when you weren't one of his victims.This is assuming that Vyshinsky was a serial killer or insane or Hitler.


A materialist analysis will point how the program you so heartily endorse reproduces all those difficulties in its very organization; how the "program" is the expression of the revisionism inherent in the self-contradictory ideology of "socialism in one country."Except Stalin here merely considered himself a man adhering to Lenin's wishes. See posts by me here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2106911&postcount=14) and here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2110477&postcount=16). Of course you seem to denounce Lenin's actions as well (such as in-re the Left SRs), so basically you're just going to ridicule any position us "Stalinists" take as being mere "ideological justification" because you see it as inconceivable that Lenin and Stalin's call for the construction of socialism in one country could ever be defended on a materialist basis.

[S.Artesian]

This is assuming that Vyshinsky was a serial killer or insane or Hitler.

No, it's pointing out how immaterial personal characterizations are. We are dealing with social roles. Nice guy, abrasive guy; wonderful mother, terrible mother-in-law--- all of that is bullshit, and none of that bullshit matters.


Except Stalin here merely considered himself a man adhering to Lenin's wishes. See posts by me here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2106911&postcount=14) and here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showpost.php?p=2110477&postcount=16). Of course you seem to denounce Lenin's actions as well (such as in-re the Left SRs), so basically you're just going to ridicule any position us "Stalinists" take as being mere "ideological justification."More of the same "nice guy" bullshit. More ideological idealism pretending to be materialist analysis. Who cares what Stalin considered himself to be? You offer nothing but versions of the "great man" theory of history, or in this case, the "modest, great man" theory. Has absolutely no significance.

He merely thought himself an adherent of Lenin, adhering to Lenin's wishes? Fan-fucking-tastic. You know what? Everybody considered himself or herself adhering to Lenin's wishes. So what? That's no material, economic, historical, class analysis. That's idol-mongering.

So let me reproduce the points you so studiously ignore:


Your "materialist" analysis is that the "conditions" in the fSU account for the "difficulties" in executing the program you so heartily endorse, and subsequent "reversals" or deviations. That's not a materialist analysis, it's an ideological justification.

A materialist analysis will point how the program you so heartily endorse reproduces all those difficulties in its very organization; how the "program" is the expression of the revisionism inherent in the self-contradictory ideology of "socialism in one country." http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/misc/progress.gif

[Ismail]

No, it's pointing out how immaterial personal characterizations are.Actually it looks a lot like you're comparing Vyshinsky to Hitler and Ted Bundy.

I don't see how Socialism In One Country is either revisionist or self-contradictory. To repeat myself, "you see it as inconceivable that Lenin and Stalin's call for the construction of socialism in one country could ever be defended on a materialist basis."

Of course I'd rather not let this thread descend into another "Stalinism" vs. Trotskyism debate, primarily when the thread's subject does not necessarily call for such a thing. But as I said at the start, "This is why this debate is generally going to be pointless. If you accept that the USSR was 'state capitalist' or a 'degenerated workers state,' then just about anything Trotsky does can be justified. If you accept that the USSR was building socialism, then obviously Trotsky looks a fair bit worse." This thread is almost a one-way ticket to another "Stalinism" vs. Trotskyism debate, and all that goes along with it.

[S.Artesian]

Translation: You don't want to discuss those precise issues.

Got it.

Point being made:-- look at the world after everything you claim needed to build socialism basically occurred. Trotskyists defeated, bureaucracy purged, army purged, "ultra-lefts" in Spain defeated. "Nach Hitler, uns" embraced. Colonialism restored in Asia at the close of WW2. etc etc etc.

You really don't think the present conditions spring at all from those previous "victories"? Obviously, you don't. Which says all we need to know about your historical materialism-- conspicuous only in its absence.

[Ismail]

Point being made:-- look at the world after everything you claim needed to build socialism basically occurred. Trotskyists defeated, bureaucracy purged, army purged,Actually, as Hoxha pointed out, many physical and ideological remnants of these groups still existed. Stalin fought against them through his works written near the end of his life but, as he said, more work needed to be done. The objective material conditions in general were not favorable to the conditions of lasting socialist construction.

I don't get focus on the army by Trots. Oh no! The army was purged! Woe to socialism! As if the higher echelons of the army were hardened Communists (http://marxism.halkcephesi.net/Ludo%20Martens/node114.html#SECTION001034000000000000000) or something. Not to mention that even the incredibly anti-Stalin and Trotskyist historian Vadim Rogovin has said that a military plot probably did exist. It is to Hoxha's credit that, in the conditions of Albania, he subordinated the Army entirely to the Party, abolished military ranks, and even tolerated the weakening of the Army to see this happen.


"ultra-lefts" in Spain defeated.Of course Spain still fell to the Fascists thanks to Britain, France, the Casado coup (which was backed by an anarchist, Cipriano Mera) and copious amount of aid to the Francoists by Italy and Germany.


"Nach Hitler, uns" embraced.The Social-Democrats outlawed the KPD militia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rotfrontk%C3%A4mpferbund). Considering that many KPD members would chant things like "Never forget/forgive the murderers of Luxemburg!" I don't see why you see the need to keep on acting as if the SPD were some benign, innocent force that was just waiting for the KPD to ally with it.

See also: http://www.lalkar.org/issues/contents/jan2011/trotsky.html


Colonialism restored in Asia at the close of WW2. etc etc etc.Since you love to paint Stalin as some sort of ultra-colonialist, it'd be interesting to see what you think of this article: http://www.indianexpress.com/news/it-is-not-the-same-comrade/735550/0

Sure, during the 1930's anti-colonialism was downplayed. Of course at the same time Stalin was trying to get Britain and France working with the Soviets against the Nazis.


You really don't think the present conditions spring at all from those previous "victories"?Well I'm not praising colonialism or saying that the POUM being suppressed meant the victory over fascism in Spain or other strawmen, so yeah.

Grover Furr a few months back listed Khrushchevite actions taken only within a year of Stalin's death:

As Stalin lay dying his old comrades in the Politburo assembled at his bedside and unilaterally -- without any vote by the Central Committee - DID AWAY with the resolutions of the 19th Party Congress. Specifically, they did away with the expanded Presidium, the clear purpose of which was to bring new blood into Party leadership.

Then they set about abandoning the resolutions of the 19th Party Congress of just a few month's before (October 1952).

The new Party rules were never put into effect. Stalin's final work, _Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR_, which had been the main topic of discussion at the 19th Party Congress, was quickly dropped -- forgotten about, never referred to again.

The Korean War was soon settled and the South Korean fascists given 1/2 the country they had lost.

The Vietnam War was settled in 1954 when the USSR forced the North Vietnamese to retreat to the North for the promise of free elections in 1956 -- which the USA never permitted. A reign of fascist terror soon swept the South of Vietnam.As Geoffrey Roberts notes, Stalin saw the Korean War as evidence of the USA's military weakness since they could not defeat "little Korea." Quite different from what the post-Stalin leadership thought.

Not to mention that after Stalin's death the Soviets even made an offer to join NATO. From For a Lasting Peace, For a People's Democracy (Cominform journal), April 9, 1954: "It is quite obvious that NATO can, under given conditions, be divested of its aggressive nature provided all the big powers which belonged to the anti-hitlerite coalition, take part in it. In keeping with this and guided by unwavering principles of its peace-loving foreign policy, striving to relax international tension, the Soviet government has expressed its willingness to consider, jointly with the governments concerned, the question of the participation of the USSR in the North Atlantic Treaty."

[S.Artesian]

Grover-Furr. Enough said. History by innuendo.

[DiaMat86]

"Grover-Furr. Enough said. History by innuendo"

Circumstantial evidence is not innuendo. Trotsky was convicted in open court and his former associates implicated him in capital offenses. It's surprising to see such denial.

[Jose Gracchus]

Hearsay is not admissible in a court of law, especially for treason, imbecile. Of course it is hilarious to see "Marxists" clinging to legalism in court proceedings as a fulcrum of their politics. How's taking over SDS going...oh wait.

[S.Artesian]

"Grover-Furr. Enough said. History by innuendo"

Circumstantial evidence is not innuendo. Trotsky was convicted in open court and his former associates implicated him in capital offenses. It's surprising to see such denial.


The "evidence"-- and I've read Grover Furr-- is not evidence at all. The material Grover Furr wishes were evidence is based essentially on this:

Why would Stalin say these things if he didn't really believe them?

Stalin really believed these things. To believe these things there must have been evidence to convince Stalin.

Therefore despite the fact that there is no evidence available, there must have been evidence at the time, as evidenced by Stalin saying these things. Therefore, Stalin saying these things can be taken as evidence of these things being true.


that is exactly Grover-Furr argues.

Arguing with Grover-Furr is like arguing with a psychotic who is convinced he's Napoleon, and trying to convince him that he was not betrayed at Waterloo.

[Ismail]

The "evidence"-- and I've read Grover Furr-- is not evidence at all. The material Grover Furr wishes were evidence is based essentially on this:

Why would Stalin say these things if he didn't really believe them?

Stalin really believed these things. To believe these things there must have been evidence to convince Stalin.

Therefore despite the fact that there is no evidence available, there must have been evidence at the time, as evidenced by Stalin saying these things. Therefore, Stalin saying these things can be taken as evidence of these things being true.No it isn't. I've read pretty much everything Grover Furr wrote (including stuff not publicly on his website) and I've never finished reading said writings with "Stalin thought there was a conspiracy, ergo it is true" in my head, either as a result of Stalin's own words or Furr's interpretation of said words.

Erik Van Ree makes a similar point in his book about Stalin's views on conspiracies, but only that it just shows that Stalin believed there were conspiracies. It doesn't prove at all that they existed, but it also certainly doesn't show that Stalin basically faked everything to assume total control of the USSR or whatever as is the norm of bourgeois narratives.

In fact, to cite one example, Furr notes concerning Dimitrov's diaries that Stalin said that two women turned out to be "scum" based on NKVD investigations. Yet nothing happened to them. Thurston has noted that Stalin was quite trustworthy of the NKVD and it seems fairly obvious that the NKVD in this case dropped its investigation on these two at a later date. Now if we were to believe what you're claiming then evidently Furr would need to argue that they were "scum" because Stalin said so, but instead Furr is arguing that Stalin wasn't making shit up as he went along. That's the whole point. There's absolutely nothing to show that Stalin cynically had Radek or whatever denounced as spies and/or saboteurs to satiate his lust for power or the "desires" of the bureaucracy or whatever. That is what Furr argues. It's also obvious from his correspondence with Kaganovich where he's asking for more information on this or that case and comments on Moscow Trials testimony as he receives it.

[S.Artesian]

No it isn't. I've read pretty much everything Grover Furr wrote (including stuff not publicly on his website) and I've never finished reading said writings with "Stalin thought there was a conspiracy, ergo it is true" in my head, either as a result of Stalin's own words or Furr's interpretation of said words.

Erik Van Ree makes a similar point in his book about Stalin's views on conspiracies, but only that it just shows that Stalin believed there were conspiracies. It doesn't prove at all that they existed, but it also certainly doesn't show that Stalin basically faked everything to assume total control of the USSR or whatever as is the norm of bourgeois narratives.

In fact, to cite one example, Furr notes concerning Dimitrov's diaries that Stalin said that two women turned out to be "scum" based on NKVD investigations. Yet nothing happened to them. Thurston has noted that Stalin was quite trustworthy of the NKVD and it seems fairly obvious that the NKVD in this case dropped its investigation on these two at a later date. Now if we were to believe what you're claiming then evidently Furr would need to argue that they were "scum" because Stalin said so, but instead Furr is arguing that Stalin wasn't making shit up as he went along. That's the whole point. There's absolutely nothing to show that Stalin cynically had Radek or whatever denounced as spies and/or saboteurs to satiate his lust for power or the "desires" of the bureaucracy or whatever. That is what Furr argues. It's also obvious from his correspondence with Kaganovich where he's asking for more information on this or that case and comments on Moscow Trials testimony as he receives it.

From Grover-Furr's little episode in the world according to Joe:


Rogovin accepted unquestioningly the orthodox Trotskyist position that Trotsky was not involved in conspiracies with the Germans. This presented him a problem: How to explain Stalin’s handwritten comment on Trotsky’s telegram?

Even Rogovin had to admit that, since the note was addressed only to his closest, most trusted associates, it appeared to prove that Stalin and the rest of them did genuinely believe Trotsky was guilty of conspiring with the Germans.


See: http://clogic.eserver.org/2009/Furr.pdf


You can read the rest of this yourself. I read it once and felt ill for days.

[Ismail]

You can read the rest of this yourself. I read it once and felt ill for days.I read it all more than once. As Furr said, "... it appeared to prove that Stalin and the rest of them did genuinely believe Trotsky was guilty of conspiring with the Germans." Then Furr notes that Rogovin made up a stupid excuse as to why Stalin wrote what he did on the letter to thus "show" how Stalin didn't actually believe in conspiracies.

You're taking the quote out of context, as if Furr's entire collection of evidence in the 170 pages of text is just "Stalin believed it to be true, ergo it was."

[S.Artesian]

I read it all more than once. As Furr said, "... it appeared to prove that Stalin and the rest of them did genuinely believe Trotsky was guilty of conspiring with the Germans." Then Furr notes that Rogovin made up a stupid excuse as to why Stalin wrote what he did on the letter to thus "show" how Stalin didn't actually believe in conspiracies.

You're taking the quote out of context, as if Furr's entire collection of evidence in the 170 pages of text is just "Stalin believed it to be true, ergo it was."


There isn't a shred of hard, independent evidence anywhere in those 170 pages. Essentially, the circular "logic" that I cited is all Furr offers.

[PhoenixAsh]

Lastly, it is suggested that Trotsky “ratted out” communists to the FBI to obtain a visa to escape to Mexico.
“By providing the US Consulate with information about common enemies, be they Mexican or American communists or Soviet agents, Trotsky hoped to prove his value to a government that had no desire to grant him a visa” (“Revolutionary Democracy”)
“Robert McGregor of the [United States] Consulate met with Trotsky in his home…he met again with Trotsky on 13 July…Trotsky told McGregor in detail of the allegations and evidence he had compiled…He gave to McGregor the names of Mexican publications, political and labour leaders, and government officials allegedly associated with the PCM [Mexico and the USSR were the only countries in the world to materially support the fight against Franco's Fascism in the Spanish Civil War 1936-39]. He charged that one of the Comintern’s [the Communist international's] leading agents, Carlos Contreras served on the PCM Directing Committee. He also discussed the alleged efforts of Narciso Bassols, former Mexican Ambassador to France, whom Trotsky claimed was a Soviet agent, to get him deported from Mexico…Upon receipt, the State Department transmitted McGregor's memo to the FBI” (“Revolutionary Democracy”).
These are partially true, but propaganda all the same, with barely enough truth to sustain their lies.
Trotsky did work with the FBI to obtain a visa, but it was absolutely necessary to continue his revolutionary work as at the time it was feasible that World war two could morph into a world revolution, and Trotsky was more important than any other communist to serve as a leader in such a revolution and the US was not safe.
As for speaking before the precursor to HUAC, Trotsky made it clear that he intended to oppose the repression of the American Communist Party as well as expose NKVD assassins. Although this resulted in the jailing (and probably executions) of many Communist Americans it was ultimately the right thing to do for the revolution.

I a going to comment on this and nothing else. I am making this post and then bailing this thread which is bound to become a sectarian shitfest and flamebait.

ANYBODY who testifies, rats on, snitches and otherwise betrays revolutionary comrades deserves whatever hell they land themselves in.

IF Trotsky ratted out others in order to obtain a visum he deserved entirely what was comming to him. There is no room in the revolutionary left for traitors.

There is no justification and the justification you are trying to give here that he was somehow more important, had more value, and therefore was right in betraying other communists and handing them over to the burgeoisie lackeys is abject and vile.

In my opinion I would never, ever work with you or support you in whatever capacity at all. I simply can not trust you.

[Kléber]

IF Trotsky ratted out others in order to obtain a visum he deserved entirely what was comming to him. There is no room in the revolutionary left for traitors.
Trotsky did not rat on anyone. He was not allowed into the US. The Stalinist CPUSA's leaders Browder and Foster, on the other hand, did appear before HUAC to demand the banning of the SWP.

The user "Boris Krinkle" is a troll (see his other posts). The blog he quotes is a hotchpotch of lies from the same who say CNT-FAI and POUM were controlled by Franco. No communist would think it is ever OK to snitch, except of course the Stalinists who defend collaboration with the Gestapo during 1939-41.

[RED DAVE]

I don't seeYou don't see. Imagine that.


how Socialism In One Country is either revisionist or self-contradictory.Well, the verdict or history on this is not good for Team Stalin (or Team Mao).


To repeat myself, "you see it as inconceivable that Lenin and Stalin's call for the construction of socialism in one country could ever be defended on a materialist basis."Yup, and history is in agreement with that view. there was no way that socialism could have been constructed in the USSR given: the failure of the revolutions in the West, the civil war, the material backwardness or Russia. History is in agreement with this view.


Of course I'd rather not let this thread descend into another "Stalinism" vs. Trotskyism debate, primarily when the thread's subject does not necessarily call for such a thing. But as I said at the start, "This is why this debate is generally going to be pointless. If you accept that the USSR was 'state capitalist' or a 'degenerated workers state,' then just about anything Trotsky does can be justified. If you accept that the USSR was building socialism, then obviously Trotsky looks a fair bit worse." This thread is almost a one-way ticket to another "Stalinism" vs. Trotskyism debate, and all that goes along with it.debate you till the cows come home. As the workin clas begins to rise again, the uselessness of stalinism will be revealed.

RED DAVE

[Red_Struggle]

debate you till the cows come home

You don't debate. You complain.

EDIT: Fuck this thread

[RED DAVE]

You [RED DAVE] don't debate. You complain.

EDIT: Fuck this threadIf you can't stand the heat, eat somewhere else. You stalinists are going to get more and more battered as the class struggle heats up and it get more real.

RED DAVE

[Die Neue Zeit]

Trotsky wasn't allowed in the US precisely because he refused to snitch on Stalinists.

I don't know to what extent this offsets his earlier, hypocritical refusal to apologize for breaking even the most libertarian interpretation of party discipline by organizing a stunt protest action against party resolutions, the final straw before his expulsion from the party (http://www.revleft.com/vb/russian-left-unity-t155794/index.html).


Yawn. This is always trotted out by the icepick brigade, who have nothing to say about Ho Chi Minh's ratting out of Trots to imperialists, or the CPUSA eagerly tailing the American Empire, going so far to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee (yes, the McCarthyist outfit that later annihilated them) to rat on Trots.

It's a shame the icepick brigade can't pick better, factual, more concrete failings on Trotsky's part.

[PhoenixAsh]

Trotsky did not rat on anyone. He was not allowed into the US. The Stalinist CPUSA's leaders Browder and Foster, on the other hand, did appear before HUAC to demand the banning of the SWP.

The user "Boris Krinkle" is a troll (see his other posts). The blog he quotes is a hotchpotch of lies from the same who say CNT-FAI and POUM were controlled by Franco. No communist would think it is ever OK to snitch, except of course the Stalinists who defend collaboration with the Gestapo during 1939-41.

Thank you for setting that record straight....first time I had heard of it in a serious fashion was on this board and you start to get doubts. Just goes to show how insidious such rumour mongering is.

The general principle still applies though....and to me it doesn't matter what political "colour" somebody is...wether they be Anarchists, Trotskyists, Stalinists or whatever tendency in the revolutionary left. There is no place for treason.

The revolutionary left should adhere to the principle of thesis, antithesis and synthesis/rejection amongst themselves and absolutely refuse to cooperate in such fashion which only serves the agenda of counter revolutionary reactionaries.

[Kléber]

I don't know to what extent this offsets his earlier, hypocritical refusal to apologize for breaking even the most libertarian interpretation of party discipline by organizing a stunt protest action against party resolutions, the final straw before his expulsion from the party (http://www.revleft.com/vb/russian-left-unity-t155794/index.html).
Nothing to apologize for. It was a peaceful protest. Trotsky made mistakes during the civil war, but he was right to rebel against the bureaucracy and rally the Left Opposition in struggle for democracy and equality.

[Old Mole]

Another thread about M-L: s and Trots debating Trotsky vs. Stalin and the nature of the Soviet Union, what a surprise. As always the debate follows the same tiring dramaturgy: someone mentions Trotsky/Stalin, someone says either is a dickhead, this is debated endlessly and the USSR is as well.

Couldnt there by a special thread about the issue, and then, just maybe, people could try to do other stuff than ALWAYS incite these meaningless, always repeating tirades about dead men whose importance is still to be justified by their epigones. I mean, surely, as Marxists we put little importance in meauring the virtues of historical personalities in a semi-religous-moralistic way. The only thing of importance when studying history (as a communist) should be to gain deeper knowledge of the present situation and the present possibilities of class struggle....?

[RED DAVE]

I don't know to what extent this offsets his earlier, hypocritical refusal to apologize for breaking even the most libertarian interpretation of party discipline by organizing a stunt protest action against party resolutions, the final straw before his expulsion from the party (http://www.revleft.com/vb/russian-left-unity-t155794/index.html).You really are a party bureaucrat born and bred. What the fuck good is party discipline when the workers state itself is being destroyed by the bureaucracy? The purpose of party discipline is to keep the party strong to help in the fight for socialism. Stalinists and other hacks fetishize party discipline to cover all their shit.


It's a shame the icepick brigade can't pick better, factual, more concrete failings on Trotsky's part.That's becase Trotsky, very human and far from perfect, died in the cause of socialism, while stalinism upholds the cause of bureaucracy, murder and state capitalism.

RED DAVE

[S.Artesian]

So there's a very long video that somewhere in it shows something about Trotsky and/or the opposition organizing a demonstration against the party's policies?

Oh my fucking god. Does anyone remember the Z&K twins protesting, publicly, the Bolsheviks intention to seize power before the actual seizure?

Does anyone remember the debates with the left communists and the left SRs that went on outside the party, in which certain elements considered expulsion of Lenin [maybe even his arrest]? And this during a period of armed conflict.

DNZ himself refers positively to organizing a coup in 1918 against the Bolsheviks for their suppression of workers, etc.

But now when it comes to a protest against the certain policies-- oh no that's worthy of expulsion if not exile and assassination.

Do us a favor as our British comrades might say... and spare us the fucking hypocrisy.

DNZ despises Trotsky because Trotsky doesn't maintain, conform to the, adhere to the interpretation of Marxism as pronounced by the Oracle of Stuttgart, Kautsky,-- that's what all of DNZ"S comments on this matter boil down to.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Nothing to apologize for. It was a peaceful protest. Trotsky made mistakes during the civil war, but he was right to rebel against the bureaucracy and rally the Left Opposition in struggle for democracy and equality.

Wrong. Like I said there, Trotsky should have had the guts to resign his party membership, then organize the peaceful protest.


So there's a very long video that somewhere in it shows something about Trotsky and/or the opposition organizing a demonstration against the party's policies?

Oh my fucking god. Does anyone remember the Z&K twins protesting, publicly, the Bolsheviks intention to seize power before the actual seizure?

Yeah, and Zinoviev and Kamenev should have been expelled for scabbing out to the bourgeois press.


Does anyone remember the debates with the left communists and the left SRs that went on outside the party, in which certain elements considered expulsion of Lenin [maybe even his arrest]? And this during a period of armed conflict.

Those were mere debates, not actions on resolutions. Those debates didn't break unity in action.


DNZ himself refers positively to organizing a coup in 1918 against the Bolsheviks for their suppression of workers, etc.

No, I was referring to the Bolshevik coups d'etat of 1918 and the possibility of organizing a counter-coup against them.

[Kiev Communard]

Wrong. Like I said there, Trotsky should have had the guts to resign his party membership, then organize the peaceful protest.

For starters, Trotsky should have been far-sighted enough to see that the 1921 faction ban may be used for his own supporters' suppression and not to endorse this decision back then. In addition, it would have been nice if he had not advocated the militarization of labour during the 1920-1921 trade union discussion, as this made his 'democratic' credentials somewhat suspicious. Finally, his denunciation of and support for reprisals against the members of Workers' Opposition, which had a real mass base, was just a prefiguration for Stalin's crackdown on his own supporters in (rather weak) Left Opposition, so it must be said that Trotsky's past actions proved the foundation for his own undoing in 1923-1927 (I am not saying this to insult any Trotskyist, I am merely stating the facts).


Yeah, and Zinoviev and Kamenev should have been expelled for scabbing out to the bourgeois press.

These two gentlemen are my least favourite characters of the Russian Revolution. It would have been better if Martov and Bogdanov had been the members of the RSDLP (Bolshevik) leadership instead of them.


No, I was referring to the Bolshevik coups d'etat of 1918 and the possibility of organizing a counter-coup against them.

Interesting. What is your opinion of Menshevik-Internationalists (who won the 1918 spring elections to workers' soviets), then?

[Die Neue Zeit]

For starters, Trotsky should have been far-sighted enough to see that the 1921 faction ban may be used for his own supporters' suppression and not to endorse this decision back then.

Comrade, what I wrote about Trotsky's stunt-and-expulsion and a left unity plea for the "anti-revisionist" RCWP-RPC to shift gears from cheap demonizations towards using the stunt-and-expulsion instead has nothing to do with factions.

[By the way, I wrote in my work that forums and networks, currents, platforms, and tendencies are all well and good, but factionalism is a no-no (going back to the expulsion of Bakunin and the generally negative connotation of that word today) (http://www.revleft.com/vb/factions-tendencies-and-t132448/index.html). As defined in my work, the Workers Opposition, the Group of Democratic Centralism, the Left Opposition, etc. were tendencies and not factions.]


In addition, it would have been nice if he had not advocated the militarization of labour during the 1920-1921 trade union discussion, as this made his 'democratic' credentials somewhat suspicious. Finally, his denunciation of and support for reprisals against the members of Workers' Opposition, which had a real mass base, was just a prefiguration for Stalin's crackdown on his own supporters in (rather weak) Left Opposition, so it must be said that Trotsky's past actions proved the foundation for his own undoing in 1923-1927 (I am not saying this to insult any Trotskyist, I am merely stating the facts).

Trotsky's "democratic credentials" were weakened from the outset by his contempt for the peasantry and entertaining the notion of, in his own words, "civil war with the peasantry." This was his "permanent revolution."


These two gentlemen are my least favourite characters of the Russian Revolution. It would have been better if Martov and Bogdanov had been the members of the RSDLP (Bolshevik) leadership instead of them.

Interesting. What is your opinion of Menshevik-Internationalists (who won the 1918 spring elections to workers' soviets), then?

They didn't have the organizational spine to carry out a counter-coup against the Bolsheviks, even in 1920 (just after the bulk of the Civil War ended but before the embarrassment of Kronstadt). :(

[S.Artesian]

DNZ himself refers positively to organizing a coup in 1918 against the Bolsheviks for their suppression of workers, etc.


No, I was referring to the Bolshevik coups d'etat of 1918 and the possibility of organizing a counter-coup against them.

So... oh... let me then rephrase that, DNZ speaks positively of a "counter-coup" against the Bolsheviks. See, that makes all the difference in the world.

Kiev Communard makes, IMO, the correct criticisms of Trotsky... and if someone here wants to argue that Trotsky should have resigned from the party and taken the debate right to the organizations of the working class... I'd be all ready to endorse that.... except there were no independent organization's of the working class, by that time.

The trade-union policy for which Trotsky had been so criticized by so many of the Bolsheviks, including Lenin, was in fact imposed on the unions by those same Bolsheviks. And the soviets? Well we know what happened to them.

So here's DNZ's position-- the Bolsheviks should have been overthrown in 1918. but failing that, well then just bite your tongue and adhere to "party discipline." Next thing you know DNZ will be stating that Trotsky independently and single-handedly attacked Kronstadt against the wishes of Lenin and the Bolsheviks. And... that Trotsky had "contempt" for the peasantry... unlike Bukharin of course who wanted the peasants to enrich themselves... and the advocates of the first five year plan who forcibly dispossessed the peasantry [and please, let's not hear the bullshit about the force being restricted to the kulaks-- the kulaks were a miniscule part of the Russian peasantry].

The problem with the Russian Revolution is the same problem with Trotsky: too much "party discipline."

Separating the party from the class through suppressing the independent organizations of the workers--- the factory committees, the soviets---- is the compost applied to the soil of Russian material conditions that determines the defeat of the left opposition.

[Die Neue Zeit]

So here's DNZ's position-- the Bolsheviks should have been overthrown in 1918.

Not in 1918, but again in 1920. Let the Bolshevik putsch-ists handle the civil war, then overthrow them, just like when the Bolsheviks waited before overthrowing the Provisional Government.


But failing that, well then just bite your tongue and adhere to "party discipline." Next thing you know DNZ will be stating that Trotsky independently and single-handedly attacked Kronstadt

Kronstadt was a mistake because it occurred a year too late. Foreign imperialists were positioned to exploit the situation.


And... that Trotsky had "contempt" for the peasantry... unlike Bukharin of course who wanted the peasants to enrich themselves... and the advocates of the first five year plan who forcibly dispossessed the peasantry [and please, let's not hear the bullshit about the force being restricted to the kulaks-- the kulaks were a miniscule part of the Russian peasantry].

No major tendency was organized around the question of breakneck sovkhozization. :(


Separating the party from the class through suppressing the independent organizations of the workers--- the factory committees, the soviets---- is the compost applied to the soil of Russian material conditions that determines the defeat of the left opposition.

I'm all for the wholesale replacement of the external-to-the-party soviets and all, only if the Bolsheviks retained majority political support from the working class and only if they hadn't stepped into the trap of "all power to the soviets" in the first place. Check out my "All Power to Independent Social Democracy (http://www.revleft.com/vb/all-power-independent-t155105/index.html)" thread.

[Jose Gracchus]

Not in 1918, but again in 1920. Let the Bolshevik putsch-ists handle the civil war, then overthrow them, just like when the Bolsheviks waited before overthrowing the Provisional Government.

Sometimes it is as if you are trying to give the impression you've never seriously studied the historical topics you attempt to preach on.

What exactly do you think the Bolsheviks were doing from 1918 on after they basically closed the soviets and took full control of industry and the state? There was no organizational basis of Menshevik Internationalists and Left SRs anything like the Bolshevik and allied revolutionary left bloc of late 1917, the conditions were much more inhospitable and desperate in 1918-1920, and with the war still afoot in 1920 the Bolshevik repression and hysteria of any attempted uprising would be even worse then. What do you think, the VCheKa was just chillin for 3 years while the other parties maintained a full scale and operative national organization with strong active roots in the working class?

Here's a hint, both the upsurge of late 17 that gave the Bolsheviks your much fetishized "majority political party support" came out of "narrow economistic" basis, just like the more limited upsurge of 1921, part of which was Kronstadt.

There was absolutely no historical basis for any other political group to overturn the Bolshevik party-state in 1920. Your counterfactural is the substance of Turtledove, not history.


Kronstadt was a mistake because it occurred a year too late. Foreign imperialists were positioned to exploit the situation.

I know it is impossible for you to imagine working-class politics without concieving of some all-powerful conscious party apparatus that moves the workers around like chess pieces according to some masterplan program conceived of in the head of some 'conscious' militant, since this is the entire basis of your 'work' and politics, but Kronstadt was not a conscious gambit unleashed to overturn the government, so it is meaningless to say "it was a mistake" as if it was premeditated.

I have demanded you provide any proof that there was a credible likelihood of a British invasion of Kronstadt in 1921 in the time of the rebellion, and you have assiduously avoided responding to that challenge, only to restate this flagrant absurdity and from-whole-cloth fantasy fabrication every time you have been presented with an opportunity, on your own authority.

The only possible conclusion I have reached is you must not care a wit for the pursuit of truth and dialog in good faith, but think only in terms of self-promotion and publicity.


No major tendency was organized around the question of breakneck sovkhozization. :(

The peasantry was not going to be any happier about being deprived its livelihood, and autonomy as private producers whether you called it a fictitious "collective farm" or "state farm". Furthermore, you once more betray a very un-Marxist incapability to consider that what happened historically might have been very much determined by material conditions and happened that way for a reason and thus is not subject to possible contingencies. Stalin was looking to rob the peasantry blind to pay for the importation of machinery and expertise from the West; they only got turned into de facto wage farms after Soviet industrial workers themselves finally got a minimum wage. Maybe those things are tied to the different factors in place at different times and material states in the Soviet economy and productive social relations, and the status of class struggle? Maybe?

Surely not. One knows its never history determined that way, but rather its endless opportunities that everything could have been different, if only they had had recourse to your programmatic insights at the time.


I'm all for the wholesale replacement of the external-to-the-party soviets and all, only if the Bolsheviks retained majority political support from the working class and only if they hadn't stepped into the trap of "all power to the soviets" in the first place. Check out my "All Power to Independent Social Democracy (http://www.revleft.com/vb/all-power-independent-t155105/index.html)" thread.

Of course you've never read a book on the Russian Revolution or you would know the Bolsheviks had "majority political support" in substantial part precisely because of their calls for "all power to the soviets" and pragmatic support for things like the SR land reform, rather than some mystical attachment of workers to the workers' party Lenin just thought he should muck up with evil oligarchical (because that perennial Marxist Aristotle says so about ancient slave society democracy, so it must be timelessly true) soviets.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Sometimes it is as if you are trying to give the impression you've never seriously studied the historical topics you attempt to preach on.

What exactly do you think the Bolsheviks were doing from 1918 on after they basically closed the soviets and took full control of industry and the state? There was no organizational basis of Menshevik Internationalists and Left SRs anything like the Bolshevik and allied revolutionary left bloc of late 1917, the conditions were much more inhospitable and desperate in 1918-1920, and with the war still afoot in 1920 the Bolshevik repression and hysteria of any attempted uprising would be even worse then. What do you think, the VCheKa was just chillin for 3 years while the other parties maintained a full scale and operative national organization with strong active roots in the working class?

The Menshevik-Internationalists failed to learn the lessons from the earlier Bolshevik experience of czarist repression, secret police activity, etc.

In fact, Martov was one of the Liquidationists during the final Bolshevik-Menshevik split. Unlike Plekhanov, he was for liquidating the RSDLP into some sort of proto-Labourite organization.

Anyway, the war may still have been afoot in 1920, but it was already winding down that year.


Here's a hint, both the upsurge of late 17 that gave the Bolsheviks your much fetishized "majority political party support" came out of "narrow economistic" basis, just like the more limited upsurge of 1921, part of which was Kronstadt.

[...]

Of course you've never read a book on the Russian Revolution or you would know the Bolsheviks had "majority political support" in substantial part precisely because of their calls for "all power to the soviets" and pragmatic support for things like the SR land reform

Getting out of the war was hardly an economistic issue, and ditto with scrapping feudal relations. The eight-hour day had a political basis tied to soviet participation (and also party participation).


There was absolutely no historical basis for any other political group to overturn the Bolshevik party-state in 1920. Your counterfactural is the substance of Turtledove, not history.

Like Lenin said of the renegade Kautsky, the Menshevik-Internationalists lacked the spine to organize effectively.


I know it is impossible for you to imagine working-class politics without conceiving of some all-powerful conscious party apparatus that moves the workers around like chess pieces according to some masterplan program conceived of in the head of some 'conscious' militant, since this is the entire basis of your 'work' and politics

The basic idea comes right out of a more developed interpretation of key International Workingmen's Association resolutions, and the party-movement is the working class for itself. :cool:

Part of your statement should read "party-movement apparatus that institutionally moves its workers and other workers around [...] according to a revolutionary program developed by the most educated workers."


I have demanded you provide any proof that there was a credible likelihood of a British invasion of Kronstadt in 1921 in the time of the rebellion

They already intervened to try to sink Russian warships in the area during the civil war!

[This means they could enter Russian waters relatively unimpeded.]


The peasantry was not going to be any happier about being deprived its livelihood, and autonomy as private producers whether you called it a fictitious "collective farm" or "state farm". Furthermore, you once more betray a very un-Marxist incapability to consider that what happened historically might have been very much determined by material conditions and happened that way for a reason and thus is not subject to possible contingencies. Stalin was looking to rob the peasantry blind to pay for the importation of machinery and expertise from the West; they only got turned into de facto wage farms after Soviet industrial workers themselves finally got a minimum wage.

Of course robbing the peasantry blind for equipment imports was the goal, but larger-scale sovkhozy could have a more explicit atmosphere of labour discipline than smaller-scale kolkhozy.

The immediate period after WWII presented another opportunity for sovkhozization, this time with no goal of robbing the peasantry blind for equipment imports, yet agricultural buffoonery still prevailed.

[S.Artesian]

Part of your statement should read "party-movement apparatus that institutionally moves its workers and other workers around [...] according to a revolutionary program developed by the most educated workers." Emphasis added.

No, not hardly, since "most educated" is an ideological analysis and not a class relation for the unity, organization of the class as a class for itself.

So the class program is not developed by the "most educated workers"-- for the benefit of all others, through the organizations created by or for those "most educated workers"-- but rather in the organizations of the class as a whole-- like the soviets DNZ so viscerally dislikes and dismisses; or through the factory committees.

But this is where DNZ converges with the Leninists he pretends to denounce, or oppose, or suggest a counter-coup in 1920 or whenever; which is where he converges with the Stalinists who carry that banner of ideological obfuscation high in order to distort the material content of how the economy, how society is being organized; which is why he has little in common with Marx and Marx's analysis, and despite his citing of the IMWA in his bibliography, is why he has so little understanding of the accomplishments, and limitations of the IMWA.

[RED DAVE]

For starters, Trotsky should have been far-sighted enough to see that the 1921 faction ban may be used for his own supporters' suppression and not to endorse this decision back then. In addition, it would have been nice if he had not advocated the militarization of labour during the 1920-1921 trade union discussion, as this made his 'democratic' credentials somewhat suspicious. Finally, his denunciation of and support for reprisals against the members of Workers' Opposition, which had a real mass base, was just a prefiguration for Stalin's crackdown on his own supporters in (rather weak) Left Opposition, so it must be said that Trotsky's past actions proved the foundation for his own undoing in 1923-1927 (I am not saying this to insult any Trotskyist, I am merely stating the facts).This is excellent. Anyone who calls themself a Trotskyist (and I'm only a semi-trot) who can't look at this judiciously, is being a dogmatist.

One of the differences between the Trotskyist and the Stalinist/Maoist tendencies is that we, hopefully, can look at our history critically and learn from our mistakes.

(PS, calling your enemies "revisionists" is not learning, it's cursing.)

RED DAVE

[RED DAVE]

Not in 1918, but again in 1920. Let the Bolshevik putsch-ists handle the civil war, then overthrow them, just like when the Bolsheviks waited before overthrowing the Provisional Government.Wow!

So the Russian Revolution was a putsch, and the Bolsheviks just hung around from February till October waiting for the Provisional Government to ... what?


Kronstadt was a mistake because it occurred a year too late. Foreign imperialists were positioned to exploit the situation.Wow!

So the Kronstadt sailors should have suppressed a year earlier.


No major tendency was organized around the question of breakneck sovkhozization. :(What time frame are you talking about. Probably because by then, tendencies were outlawed.


I'm all for the wholesale replacement of the external-to-the-party soviets and allWow!

This is, of course, in line with your bureaucratic nonsense about the party, the state, the movement, etc.


only if the Bolsheviks retained majority political support from the working class and only if they hadn't stepped into the trap of "all power to the soviets" in the first place. Check out my "All Power to Independent Social Democracy (http://www.revleft.com/vb/all-power-independent-t155105/index.html)" thread.Not clear what you mean, but it is clear that you have no use for working class democracy.

RED DAVE

[Kiev Communard]

(PS, calling your enemies "revisionists" is not learning, it's cursing.)

RED DAVE

It should also be added that the term "revisionist" is itself so vague and prone to misinterpretations that it seems close to the accusations of being "heretic" in the late medieval Catholic Church. Personally I consider the "revisionist" term applicable only in a historical sense, i.e. only to the supporters of Bernstein and Co. in the Second International.

[DiaMat86]

Trotsky did not rat on anyone. He was not allowed into the US. The Stalinist CPUSA's leaders Browder and Foster, on the other hand, did appear before HUAC to demand the banning of the SWP.
.


You must be right because there is no such thing as foreign intelligence agents operating in Europe. I'm sure Trotsky was contacted by numerous foreign agents with whom he made deals.

The US Bosses simply did not want to so openly provoke Stalin. They knew the extent of Trotsky's contacts among the bolsheviks. Had not those men been discovered, implicated Trotsky, convicted of conspiracy, and executed by that time.? Trotsky was worthless to the US bosses, he had been defeated.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Wow!

So the Russian Revolution was a putsch, and the Bolsheviks just hung around from February till October waiting for the Provisional Government to ... what?

I never said that. See, in 1918 the Bolsheviks shut down soviets that didn't return Bolshevik majorities. The Menshevik-Internationalists and Left-SRs won out, but were shut out by local Bolshevik thugs, hence Bolshevik putsch-ists.

I don't mind the closure of the discredited Constituent Assembly at all, contrary to the concerns expressed by Rosa Luxemburg and worse by the renegade Kautsky. Neither, however, paid attention to the Bolshevik coups d'etat of 1918.


So the Kronstadt sailors should have suppressed a year earlier.

No, anti-Bolshevik worker political action, possibly enough to topple the regime, should have been organized a year earlier.


What time frame are you talking about. Probably because by then, tendencies were outlawed.

I'm talking about the agricultural policy debates in the late 1920s, when sovkhozy were not put at the forefront of development.


Not clear what you mean, but it is clear that you have no use for working class democracy.

The outstanding role model for left politics today that was the USPD was in a position to make the German Revolution a party-movement revolution, dispensing with the mistake of "workers councils" that turned out to be "united front" coalitions with the MSPD.

[Jose Gracchus]

I know I should know better than to wade into this...but here it goes...


The Menshevik-Internationalists failed to learn the lessons from the earlier Bolshevik experience of czarist repression, secret police activity, etc.

This just shows how clueless you are. First of all, the Bolsheviks only were able to reconstitute a broad and thorough class movement for revolution in the window of freedom after the February Revolution. Secondly, the Bolsheviks had a much larger repressive apparatus than the old Okhranka, and the VCHeKa was obviously much more deeply able to swim in the workers' pool and Tsarist policemen. These new secret policemen had very recently been worker militants coming out of factories, and party members. It was much easier for them to closely control proletarian activity and workplaces along the lines of the Bolshevik party-state.

Furthermore, the Mensheviks were similarly subject to state repression and infiltration and capricious interference prior to the Revolution. You simply have no idea what you're talking about. Cite a history book showing the Mensheviks casually walked the streets while Bolsheviks were learning to conspire in alleyways. Be my guest.


In fact, Martov was one of the Liquidationists during the final Bolshevik-Menshevik split. Unlike Plekhanov, he was for liquidating the RSDLP into some sort of proto-Labourite organization.

This has no relevance to your point. I know what the political differences between pre-Revolution Menshevism and Bolshevism were.


Anyway, the war may still have been afoot in 1920, but it was already winding down that year.

Yet what was their excuse/pretext for the repression of the Petrograd and Moscow strike waves? The workers' oppositions and political organizations? Kronstadt? Civil war.


Getting out of the war was hardly an economistic issue, and ditto with scrapping feudal relations. The eight-hour day had a political basis tied to soviet participation (and also party participation).

My point is that workers were not prepared to unleash insurrection no matter what program was attached (not that any could be convincingly coordinated on an all-national basis) at the depths of the food and pay crisis, which is what your delusions call for. You have no idea the real material and political factors at work in Red territory during the Civil War, so you find it effortless to dream up impossible and preposterous counterfactuals which you can provide not a single fucking shred of evidence to shore up this opinion.


Like Lenin said of the renegade Kautsky, the Menshevik-Internationalists lacked the spine to organize effectively.

Again, only someone whose exposure to the history of the Civil War is Google searches of keywords in Google Books in pursuit of out-of-context quotes to support one's preconceived theories (your chosen research methodology) could make such an idiotic assertion.

The Menshevik Internationalists suffered from VCHeKa imprisonment, torture, execution, infiltration, and capricious intimidation of the worker masses; not a voluntary "lack of spine". I know this is inconvenient, because it suggests history is not just a simple algorithim where if we put in the Kautsky-bourgeois-academic-hybrid inventions you've thought up and exist only in your head, as alternative programs in the "INPUT", workers magically take power and everything works out romantically and everyone lives happily ever after, which you're hoping looks credible here.

A hint: It doesn't. You're just revealing your own historical ignorance, political naivete (what's the word you used, not "grown-up"?), and fantasy role-playing.


The basic idea comes right out of a more developed interpretation of key International Workingmen's Association resolutions, and the party-movement is the working class for itself. :cool:

This bears no resemblance to the material reality of Red territory during the Civil War in 1918-1920. There's no magical sect you can dig out of hiding in this period, imagine armed with your program, and BAM! everything turns out differently. Sorry, but that's just preposterous.


Part of your statement should read "party-movement apparatus that institutionally moves its workers and other workers around [...] according to a revolutionary program developed by the most educated workers."

Bourgeois to the core.


They already intervened to try to sink Russian warships in the area during the civil war!

[This means they could enter Russian waters relatively unimpeded.]

THAT IS NOT PROOF AN AMPHIBIOUS ASSAULT AGAINST PETROGRAD AND ENVIRONS WAS POSSIBLE OR CONTEMPLATED BY THE BRITISH.

THAT is what you asserted. Don't bullshit me. I grow increasingly weary of your debating tactics which can be explained (as far as I can see) only by deliberate dishonesty.


Of course robbing the peasantry blind for equipment imports was the goal, but larger-scale sovkhozy could have a more explicit atmosphere of labour discipline than smaller-scale kolkhozy.

I love how you cry crocodile tears for the peasantry when it suits your purposes in polemic against Trotskyists re. "proletarian demographic minorities" but you seamlessly advocate more effective robbery and thuggery toward the peasantry than Stalin, here!

Of course you provide not a single shred of evidence that the kolkhozy and Stalin's economic aims re. the collectivization were due to "insufficient labor discipline" and thus your solution is an ahistorical hammer looking for a nail. More total fantasy.

Every remark you make makes it that much clearer you've never cracked open a single item of serious scholarship on this era.


The immediate period after WWII presented another opportunity for sovkhozization, this time with no goal of robbing the peasantry blind for equipment imports, yet agricultural buffoonery still prevailed.

No class analysis, no historical insight to why that was, just more hunting for fantasy opportunities to imagine if this or that group of Stalinists had only had your programs to magically insert into history. Give me a fucking break.

[Kléber]

Wrong. Like I said there, Trotsky should have had the guts to resign his party membership, then organize the peaceful protest.
He wanted to end the ban on party factions, so no, there was no reason to resign party membership. If he had resigned, fools like you would point to this as proof that he was a traitor.


You must be right because there is no such thing as foreign intelligence agents operating in Europe. I'm sure Trotsky was contacted by numerous foreign agents with whom he made deals.
False. Trotsky was kept under house arrest and then exiled by all European states. The only bourgeois regime he worked with was that of Mexico under the anti-imperialist Lázaro Cárdenas, which protected him to demonstrate its independence from the US.

The PLP is such a joke. How many of your leaders were hunted down and murdered by "Soviet fascism?" You think it's okay to sign a military agreement with Nazis and collaborate with the Gestapo. You think it's fine to shake hands with Nixon and joke around with Kissinger. So even if all of your bullshit were true, it would only mean that Trotsky was as much of a traitor as Stalin and Mao.


The US Bosses simply did not want to so openly provoke Stalin. They knew the extent of Trotsky's contacts among the bolsheviks. Had not those men been discovered, implicated Trotsky, convicted of conspiracy, and executed by that time.? Trotsky was worthless to the US bosses, he had been defeated.Nice backtracking. If Trotsky had really lost, it wouldn't have been necessary for the Soviet bureaucracy to focus its intelligence resources and personnel on the physical destruction of him, his comrades and even his family.

No gun, no bomb, no stab in the back could truly kill the heroic leader of the workers' and farmers' army. Trotsky lives on through his ideas, while yours rot and die.

[DiaMat86]

He wanted to end the ban on party factions, so no, there was no reason to resign party membership. If he had resigned, fools like you would point to this as proof that he was a traitor.


False. Trotsky was kept under house arrest and then exiled by all European states. The only bourgeois regime he worked with was that of Mexico under the anti-imperialist Lázaro Cárdenas, which protected him to demonstrate its independence from the US.

The PLP is such a joke. How many of your leaders were hunted down and murdered by "Soviet fascism?" You think it's okay to sign a military agreement with Nazis and collaborate with the Gestapo. You think it's fine to shake hands with Nixon and joke around with Kissinger. So even if all of your bullshit were true, it would only mean that Trotsky was as much of a traitor as Stalin and Mao.

Nice backtracking. If Trotsky had really lost, it wouldn't have been necessary for the Soviet bureaucracy to focus its intelligence resources and personnel on the physical destruction of him, his comrades and even his family.

No gun, no bomb, no stab in the back could truly kill the heroic leader of the workers' and farmers' army. Trotsky lives on through his ideas, while yours rot and die.


House arrest is not incommunicado. How could Trotsky simultaneously be a leader of a movement and be under house arrest? His son L. Sedov did a lot of his father's treacherous leg work. Sedov died from complications after an appendectomy. Too bad, so sad. When Sedov was operating in Berlin was it he who made the deals with Nazi Intelligence or was in Trotsky directly?

You must be getting desperate to drag in your strawmen. This thread is not about Mao or Stalin. It's about defending the indefensible treason of Trotksy.

[S.Artesian]

House arrest is not incommunicado. How could Trotsky simultaneously be a leader of a movement and be under house arrest? His son L. Sedov did a lot of his father's treacherous leg work. Sedov died from complications after an appendectomy. Too bad, so sad. When Sedov was operating in Berlin was it he who made the deals with Nazi Intelligence or was in Trotsky directly?

You must be getting desperate to drag in your strawmen. This thread is not about Mao or Stalin. It's about defending the indefensible treason of Trotksy.


You were challenged, remember that, to provide evidence that Trotsky explicitly avowed the overthrow of the Russian Revolution. Remember that? You provided no such evidence.

You now continue to pretend your lies are assertions and don't require evidence. And again you're portraying your glee at the death of a militant.

You are lying scumbag, whose ignorance is matched only by your dishonesty.

And that's no flame, that's an accurate assessment.

[Jose Gracchus]

The PLP: Because Grover Furr can't afford a publicist.

[DiaMat86]

You were challenged, remember that, to provide evidence that Trotsky explicitly avowed the overthrow of the Russian Revolution. Remember that? You provided no such evidence.

You now continue to pretend your lies are assertions and don't require evidence. And again you're portraying your glee at the death of a militant.

You are lying scumbag, whose ignorance is matched only by your dishonesty.

And that's no flame, that's an accurate assessment.


Evidence is ineffective in debating the Revleft Trots. There is plenty of evidence Trotsky was guilty.

If there were ANY evidence, no matter how flimsy, available that Trotsky was innocent the arch Anti-communists Gorbachev and Eltsin would have "rehabilitated" Trotsky. Just as they did for Bukharin and the rest of the gang. Of course the "Rehabilitations" contain no evidence merely declarations.

Your flaming doesn't bother me because it says a lot about you and nothing about me.

[Die Neue Zeit]

So the class program is not developed by the "most educated workers"-- for the benefit of all others, through the organizations created by or for those "most educated workers"-- but rather in the organizations of the class as a whole-- like the soviets DNZ so viscerally dislikes and dismisses; or through the factory committees.

Party-movement institutions already strive to be "organizations of the class as a whole"; a key distinction between these and mere soviets or factory committees is the clearest indication of class commitment (pucker up the dues, without which not even the most robust of workers councils can operate feasibly) and political support.

[S.Artesian]

Evidence is ineffective? How about to all those others who observe the thread? This is supposed to be a learning thread. Provide the evidence for those who want to learn how accurate your claims are.


Otherwise there's no point to you participating in a "learning" thread, and you should move your bullshit to a propaganda thread.

What I said was you are a) dishonest b) ignorant c)gutless. that's about you, not me.

[Jose Gracchus]

Evidence is ineffective in debating the Revleft Trots. There is plenty of evidence Trotsky was guilty.

If there were ANY evidence, no matter how flimsy, available that Trotsky was innocent the arch Anti-communists Gorbachev and Eltsin would have "rehabilitated" Trotsky. Just as they did for Bukharin and the rest of the gang. Of course the "Rehabilitations" contain no evidence merely declarations

I don't know what's more sad, that you think this feeble crap passes for a convincing argument, or that you believe it yourself.

What kind of absurd counterfactual is this? Trotsky was never rehabilitated because he didn't mince words about not supporting the "Soviet" state. The other corpses Uncle Joe paved his career with were not so principled (or had no choices, since the penal code included such crimes as "Family Member of Terrorist" and "Sympathy for Trotsky").

[Jose Gracchus]

Party-movement institutions already are "organizations of the class as a whole"; a key distinction between these and mere soviets or factory committees is the clearest indication of class commitment (pucker up the dues, without which not even the most robust of workers councils can operate feasibly) and political support.

Why? Because you say so?

Of course, you interestingly prove here that the Menshevik-Internationalists could not possibly have played your magical role, since you'd have them do it at the height of a food crisis when workers had no "pay" to spare for imaginary dues.

[Die Neue Zeit]

I know I should know better than to wade into this...but here it goes...

This just shows how clueless you are. First of all, the Bolsheviks only were able to reconstitute a broad and thorough class movement for revolution in the window of freedom after the February Revolution. Secondly, the Bolsheviks had a much larger repressive apparatus than the old Okhranka, and the VCHeKa was obviously much more deeply able to swim in the workers' pool and Tsarist policemen. These new secret policemen had very recently been worker militants coming out of factories, and party members. It was much easier for them to closely control proletarian activity and workplaces along the lines of the Bolshevik party-state.

First, the Bolsheviks already had majority political support from the working class before WWI, via its domination of the workers curia, which was different from typical parliamentary cretinism. There already was a worker-class movement in Russia before the war. Then again, this support already came during the beginning of the Kautsky-defined revolutionary period.

Second, I'd like to know your source stating that the Cheka was larger than the Okhrana. The OGPU might have been larger, but the Cheka had a hard time organizing things (covered somewhat by the extrajudicial powers given to its tribunals).

Third, I'm not contesting your last statement at all re. the new regime's closer links with the broader working class than the old czarist regime. In fact, I think this, more than Cheka infiltrations, made Menshevik-Internationalist activity more difficult.

[S.Artesian]

Party-movement institutions already are "organizations of the class as a whole"; a key distinction between these and mere soviets or factory committees is the clearest indication of class commitment (pucker up the dues, without which not even the most robust of workers councils can operate feasibly) and political support.


Bullshit. Ahistorical sophistry. A party is not a "organization of the class as a whole," that's the point, just as the "most educated workers" are NOT the class as a whole. You are assuming, or defining, or abstracting from the real historical process exactly what remains to be proven, established, materialized in and by the concrete struggle of the working class itself.

That's the whole point. That's why the soviets appeared independent of the RSDLP, that's why, as the struggle advanced, the working class petitions to the soviets went from supporting the PRG, to demanding the overthrow of the PRG and all power to the soviets.

The party by historical formation, its material existence and origins is never the organization of the class as a whole, nor the class for itself.

Of course claiming it is allows you to integrate yourself so seamlessly from Kautsky to Lenin to Stalin; allows you pretend the "third period" was the revolutionary strategy for the whole class; and of course, makes it so much easier for you the endorse the "primitive socialist [sic] accumulation" of the first five year plan.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Bullshit. Ahistorical sophistry. A party is not a "organization of the class as a whole," that's the point, just as the "most educated workers" are NOT the class as a whole.

Neither is a class movement "the class as a whole." What's your point? :glare:

[Jose Gracchus]

First, the Bolsheviks already had majority political support from the working class before WWI, via its domination of the workers curia, which was different from typical parliamentary cretinism. There already was a worker-class movement in Russia before the war. Then again, this support already came during the beginning of the Kautsky-defined revolutionary period.

Excellent, making my point that there was no room for the Menshevik-Internationalists to duplicate this and fill the role you made up in your head for them.


Second, I'd like to know your source stating that the Cheka was larger than the Okhrana. The OGPU might have been larger, but the Cheka had a hard time organizing things (covered somewhat by the extrajudicial powers given to its tribunals).

The Red Terror exceeded the scale of previous Tsarist repressions by a significant margin.

I'll wiggle my ass to the library for more thorough citations after you bother backing up even two of the dozen-odd assertions-from-fiat that you started off this episode of your infomercial.

Some of which, you've been repeating as truth for over a year without having been backed up once.


Third, I'm not contesting your last statement at all re. the new regime's closer links with the broader working class than the old czarist regime.

Think that might've made it harder to build some magical new "party-movement" under their nose, maybe? Just maybe? :rolleyes:

[Die Neue Zeit]

Think that might've made it harder to build some magical new "party-movement" under their nose, maybe? Just maybe? :rolleyes:

I just added a sentence to further concede that last point of yours:

In fact, I think this, more than Cheka infiltrations, made Menshevik-Internationalist activity more difficult.

[DiaMat86]

Evidence is ineffective? How about to all those others who observe the thread? This is supposed to be a learning thread. Provide the evidence for those who want to learn how accurate your claims are.

Otherwise there's no point to you participating in a "learning" thread, and you should move your bullshit to a propaganda thread.

What I said was you are a) dishonest b) ignorant c)gutless. that's about you, not me.

Aspiring communists should study Mao and Stalin because they actually achieved something. It's very important to point out where they went revisionist.

Trotskyists today do carry out class struggle and that is a good thing. Why do they promote a completely false history of the soviet union?

Sorry about making you so mad.

[Jose Gracchus]

I just added a sentence to further concede that last point of yours:

In fact, I think this, more than Cheka infiltrations, made Menshevik-Internationalist activity more difficult.

Then why would you say that the Menshevik-Internationalists should have had more "spine" and "couped" the Bolsheviks in 1920, where this contigency was closed off by material dynamics at the base, in the factory and in workers' organizations and political life?


Aspiring communists should study Mao and Stalin because they actually achieved something. It's very important to point out where they went revisionist.

Trotskyists today do carry out class struggle and that is a good thing. Why do they promote a completely false history of the soviet union?

Sorry about making you so mad.

Hurr derp derp.

[S.Artesian]

Neither is a class movement "the class as a whole." What's your point? :glare:

The point, which is painfully clear to the most casual observer, is that 1) you substitute ideology, and ideological credentials, for historical analysis 2) that you wind up justifying whatever reality you think offers you the greatest opportunity for self-aggrandizement 3) a class movement may or may not be the movement as a class as a whole. The critical issue is the "becoming," the mediations, the organizations that the movement develops to embrace, to bind all sections of the class to each other through their conscious intervention in the social conditions of their own labor. Those mediations, organizations, that make that possible are exactly the organizations you dismiss, discount, sneer at.

Indeed your dishonesty in accusing left Marxists of "contempt for the peasantry" is reciprocated perfectly by your honesty in your contempt for the organizations of the working class as a class, rather than a coterie of elite, educated individuals.

I wouldn't expect you to understand that, comprehend that, and I'm gratified to see, once again, that you haven't disappointed me.

[DiaMat86]

Then why would you say that the Menshevik-Internationalists should have had more "spine" and "couped" the Bolsheviks in 1920, where this contigency was closed off by material dynamics at the base, in the factory and in workers' organizations and political life?

Hurr derp derp.


I never said that.

The menscheviks belong in the dustbin of history. Didn't Trotsky say that himself?

[Jose Gracchus]

I never said that.

The menscheviks belong in the dustbin of history. Didn't Trotsky say that himself?

The first part was in reply to DNZ. I should've quoted him. Fixed.

[S.Artesian]

Neither is a class movement "the class as a whole." What's your point? :glare:


Notice the mis-direction of our second coming of Kautsky. First he makes the claim:


Originally Posted by Die Neue Zeit http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2156208#post2156208)
Party-movement institutions already are "organizations of the class as a whole"; a key distinction between these and mere soviets or factory committees is the clearest indication of class commitment (pucker up the dues, without which not even the most robust of workers councils can operate feasibly) and political support.

So... the claim that party movement institutions are "organizations of the class as a whole." That claim is refuted. So what does Der Alte Kocker do next-- why he dissembles, redirect, diverts-- "Neither are class movements...."

Perhaps in his haste to evade the issue concretely he overlooked the fact that he explicitly has conceded the original issue... about parties by his "neither."

This guy's another one who's just wasting time.

[hardlinecommunist]

Trotsky did not rat on anyone. He was not allowed into the US. The Stalinist CPUSA's leaders Browder and Foster, on the other hand, did appear before HUAC to demand the banning of the SWP.

The user "Boris Krinkle" is a troll (see his other posts). The blog he quotes is a hotchpotch of lies from the same who say CNT-FAI and POUM were controlled by Franco. No communist would think it is ever OK to snitch, except of course the Stalinists who defend collaboration with the Gestapo during 1939-41. Trotsky was a rat right before his death Trotsky had agreed to appear before the Dies Commission which was the precursor to the Joseph Mccarthy Hearings in order to snitch on The Soviet Intelligence Apparatus within The US. but thankfully Comrade Ramon Mercader got to Trotsky frist and put the rat Leon Trotsky out of his misery with the ice axe.

[Die Neue Zeit]

The point, which is painfully clear to the most casual observer, is that [...] a class movement may or may not be the movement as a class as a whole. The critical issue is the "becoming," the mediations, the organizations that the movement develops to embrace, to bind all sections of the class to each other through their conscious intervention in the social conditions of their own labor. Those mediations, organizations, that make that possible are exactly the organizations you dismiss, discount, sneer at.

Indeed your dishonesty in accusing left Marxists of "contempt for the peasantry" is reciprocated perfectly by your honesty in your contempt for the organizations of the working class as a class, rather than a coterie of elite, educated individuals.

I wouldn't expect you to understand that, comprehend that, and I'm gratified to see, once again, that you haven't disappointed me.

Did you even bother to read my long-standing blog on the subject (it's still linked on the upper right corner)? I relish at the prospect of a mass party-movement of the class (read: the working class for itself, like the pre-war SPD and inter-war USPD as the German working class for itself) having its very own, intra-party workers councils and bureaus (replacing party committees, commissions, and such)!


Notice the mis-direction of our second coming of Kautsky. First he makes the claim:

So... the claim that party movement institutions are "organizations of the class as a whole." That claim is refuted. So what does Der Alte Kocker do next-- why he dissembles, redirect, diverts-- "Neither are class movements...."

Perhaps in his haste

So what? I corrected my post. "Party-movement institutions already strive to be "organizations of the class as a whole." :rolleyes:

[Die Neue Zeit]

I just added a sentence to further concede that last point of yours:

In fact, I think this, more than Cheka infiltrations, made Menshevik-Internationalist activity more difficult.

Then why would you say that the Menshevik-Internationalists should have had more "spine" and "couped" the Bolsheviks in 1920, where this contigency was closed off by material dynamics at the base, in the factory and in workers' organizations and political life?

Given the track record of the Menshevik-Internationalists historically, like with that of the pro-SPD renegade ass-kissers in the Independent Social Democracies, it's fair to say that they themselves lacked spine. Lenin frequently referred to the renegade Kautsky and his ilk as spineless.

[S.Artesian]

Did you even bother to read my long-standing blog on the subject (it's still linked on the upper right corner)? I relish at the prospect of a mass party-movement of the class (read: the working class for itself, like the pre-war SPD and inter-war USPD as the German working class for itself) having its very own, intra-party workers councils and bureaus (replacing party committees, commissions, and such)!




OMG! I didn't read your long-standing blog on the subject? No. Hell no. And fuck no. And no way. And no fucking way. Everything you write has only one purpose and this is to obscure every historical moment in the service of one or other other of your self-aggrandizing theories: here it's Caesarism, there its proletariocrat democracy or some such nonsense, over there it's slave labor as primitive socialist accumulation.

No. Hell no. And fuck no.

How many other ways can I say it? Never? Is "never" good for you, because never sure is good for me.

[S.Artesian]

Trotsky was a rat right before his death Trotsky had agreed to appear before the Dies Commission which was the precursor to the Joseph Mccarthy Hearings in order to snitch on The Soviet Intelligence Apparatus within The US. but thankfully Comrade Ramon Mercader got to Trotsky frist and put the rat Leon Trotsky out of his misery with the ice axe.


Another member of the heroic ice-axe brigade. What a great job you guys have done, really.

Soviet Union -- 27 million dead in WW2, nail in the coffin hammered in by.... fucking oil price collapse in 1985-86. Yeah, that's sure some socialism you built there. You must have used an ice axe in constructing it.

Czechoslovakia, East Germany-- you big C communists chased from power by their own people who had had too much of the sort of thuggery you think is so revolutionary.

Albania--- please, who's kidding whom here?

China-- well after embracing Nixon, Pinochet, and Savimbi,and apartheid South Africa, need we say more?

[Die Neue Zeit]

Of course robbing the peasantry blind for equipment imports was the goal, but larger-scale sovkhozy could have a more explicit atmosphere of labour discipline than smaller-scale kolkhozy.

I love how you cry crocodile tears for the peasantry when it suits your purposes in polemic against Trotskyists re. "proletarian demographic minorities" but you seamlessly advocate more effective robbery and thuggery toward the peasantry than Stalin, here!

Of course you provide not a single shred of evidence that the kolkhozy and Stalin's economic aims re. the collectivization were due to "insufficient labor discipline" and thus your solution is an ahistorical hammer looking for a nail. More total fantasy.

On this side note, I'd like to make a couple of comments.

The gist of Socialist Primitive Accumulation was the extraction of as much surplus as politically and economically possible for industrial development. You yourself have reservations about Lenin adopting the SR's land redistribution plank as early as 1905. I'm merely suggesting the only solution that takes into account economies of scale.

Stalin and co. didn't need to send in the NKVD and say, "These farms are now state property, dear peasants!" Historically the First Five-Year Plan was characterized by, among other things, high inflation (related to the artificial depression of real wages that I have a major beef with). The regime could simply have used eminent domain and given printed money to the peasants as "compensation" for their farm property.

Work could then have begun on reconsolidating former landlord estates into sovkhozy, and on consolidating other non-sovkhoz estates into sovkhozy. Red directors could then be installed to oversee both the explicit atmosphere of labour discipline and rising labour productivity (possibly enough to minimize or eliminate the artificial depression of real wages of the urban workers, the non-farm rural workers, and the new farm workers) way before the time of the model Gorodets state farm... and construction materials plant!

[People learn new things everyday, by the way, in regards to the industrial combination in that last statement.]

[Jose Gracchus]

On this side note, I'd like to make a couple of comments.

The gist of Socialist Primitive Accumulation was the extraction of as much surplus as politically and economically possible for industrial development. You yourself have reservations about Lenin adopting the SR's land redistribution plank as early as 1905. I'm merely suggesting the only solution that takes into account economies of scale.

Stalin and co. didn't need to send in the NKVD and say, "These farms are now state property, dear peasants!" Historically the First Five-Year Plan was characterized by, among other things, high inflation (related to the artificial depression of real wages that I have a major beef with). The regime could simply have used eminent domain and given printed money to the peasants as "compensation" for their farm property.

Work could then have begun on reconsolidating former landlord estates into sovkhozy, and on consolidating other non-sovkhoz estates into sovkhozy. Red directors could then be installed to oversee both the explicit atmosphere of labour discipline and rising labour productivity (possibly enough to minimize or eliminate the artificial depression of real wages of the urban workers, the non-farm rural workers, and the new farm workers) way before the time of the model Gorodets state farm... and construction materials plant!

[People learn new things everyday, by the way, in regards to the industrial combination in that last statement.]

I love this. You think by using enough clever names you somehow would trick the peasantry into not realizing they were being massively superexploited in real time. That's idiotic, ahistorical, and totally implausible.

It also casts a sinister shadow over your attempt to play word-games with today's proletariat.

Oh, and somehow the peasants wouldn't realize their paper was worthless, or that there were no consumer goods to buy? You really are credulous.

[Die Neue Zeit]

You think by using enough clever names you somehow would trick the peasantry into not realizing they were being massively superexploited in real time.

What "clever names"? Socialist Primitive Accumulation isn't my term, and the same goes for eminent domain. I also don't recall writing "quantitative easing" in my post (LOL re. the early European bailouts using this euphemism).


Oh, and somehow the peasants wouldn't realize their paper was worthless, or that there were no consumer goods to buy?

Illiteracy was still high until the late 30s.

[Jose Gracchus]

What "clever names"? Socialist Primitive Accumulation isn't my term. I also don't recall writing "quantitative easing" in my post (LOL re. the early European bailouts using this euphemism).

You think by not calling it an expropriation the peasants won't realize that by "eminent domain" they are losing their eons-old livelihood, to which the entire fabric of the peasant society is attached? That there aren't members of that society which will not stand to lose immensely in this process? This is what I'm talking about. You're not a materialist. You think with some hocus pocus and the right jargon and ideological content, you can surpass material realities: such as the fact you're talking about expropriating the peasantry, which they will resist. Full stop.


Illiteracy was still high until the late 30s.

You don't have to read a book to tell the paper you got cannot buy shit at the store, or the store has no shit to buy with your paper. I mean, for Christ's sake, read the Webbs' book, and they liked Stalin. The peasantry could conduct themselves in the market for goods, or there would be no "scissors crisis". Furthermore, all it takes it a good rumor going through peasant communities that they are being ripped off. Illiteracy does not mean that the human subjects of your thought experiments suddenly become inert, passive pawns on a game board.

[Die Neue Zeit]

You're not a materialist. You think with some hocus pocus and the right jargon and ideological content, you can surpass material realities: such as the fact you're talking about expropriating the peasantry, which they will resist. Full stop.

Cooler heads are in order.

Google something called "policy triangle"; I gave a brief example of it here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/bankruptcy-internationalismi-t144285/index.html). It could be any other kind of polygon (quadrilateral, pentagon, hexagon, etc.), but the basic idea is that not all the policy areas that are points in that polygon can be achieved.

In this case, have a go at rapid industrialization, worker conditions (real wages and such), and peasant conditions - furthermore within the context of scissors crises and worldwide depression. Historical Socialist Primitive Accumulation had the potential to meet two of the three points / policy areas, but didn't because of policy bumbling on the third policy area spilling over to the second.


You think by not calling it an expropriation the peasants won't realize that by "eminent domain" they are losing their eons-old livelihood, to which the entire fabric of the peasant society is attached?

Landlord estates lasted long enough to make significant changes to the "fabric of the peasant society." The implementation of Left-SR land redistribution didn't result in the revival of obshchinas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obshchina) against the legacy of the Stolypin reforms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolypin_reform).

[Jose Gracchus]

Cooler heads are in order.

Google something called "policy triangle"; I gave a brief example of it here (http://www.revleft.com/vb/bankruptcy-internationalismi-t144285/index.html). It could be any other kind of polygon (quadrilateral, pentagon, hexagon, etc.), but the basic idea is that not all the policy areas that are points in that polygon can be achieved.

In this case, have a go at rapid industrialization, worker conditions (real wages and such), and peasant conditions - furthermore within the context of scissors crises and worldwide depression. Historical Socialist Primitive Accumulation had the potential to meet two of the three points / policy areas, but didn't because of policy bumbling on the third policy area spilling over to the second.

You're clueless. The massive depression in the working class's standard of living, and even more severely among the peasantry was exactly how Stalin paid for his industrialization. There's no getting around this. Give more value toward feeding and clothing workers and peasants, and Stalin and the ruling class he represented will not get their top-down industrialization as fast or cheap.


Landlord estates lasted long enough to make significant changes to the "fabric of the peasant society." The implementation of Left-SR land redistribution didn't result in the revival of obshchinas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obshchina) against the legacy of the Stolypin reforms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolypin_reform).

Total dishonest misdirection. Just because the Obshchina had been hopelessly disrupted by the Stolypin reforms does not mean that the peasantry would be thrilled and willing to lose their livelihood for useless pieces of paper, and a legal slip that says "eminent domain" versus "kolkhozization". That's what is at stake here, and being like "peasant life was different anyway!" does not change the fact your policy would be ripping them off with deliberate inflation or withholding of goods. You just hope this misdirection would confuse the peasants sufficiently to give it up quietly!

You have not a shred of evidence to back up your argument, just more empty supposition, your endless recourse in arguments when your claims are totally unjustified by fact. Your method is that of Grover Furr's: when in doubt, just make shit up and say its true.

[Die Neue Zeit]

You're clueless. The massive depression in the working class's standard of living, and even more severely among the peasantry was exactly how Stalin paid for his industrialization. There's no getting around this. Give more value toward feeding and clothing workers and peasants, and Stalin and the ruling class he represented will not get their top-down industrialization as fast or cheap.

I wasn't clueless at all. You just confirmed a policy triangle by focusing on the second and third policy areas and ditching rapid industrialization.


Total dishonest misdirection. Just because the Obshchina had been hopelessly disrupted by the Stolypin reforms does not mean that the peasantry would be thrilled and willing to lose their livelihood for useless pieces of paper, and a legal slip that says "eminent domain" versus "kolkhozization". That's what is at stake here, and being like "peasant life was different anyway!" does not change the fact your policy would be ripping them off with deliberate inflation or withholding of goods. You just hope this misdirection would confuse the peasants sufficiently to give it up quietly!

As I've said before, there is a hidden, underestimated carrot in all of this that might lead to less rural resistance: business risk. The wage farm / sovkhoz model forces the state to absorb the business risk, particularly if there's no piecemeal compensation like there was elsewhere in the Soviet industrialization campaign. Even illiterate peasants can understand the difference between them bearing the business risk (minimum quotas and quota prices set by other parties) and another entity bearing it (production targets assume a different character altogether).

[Jose Gracchus]

I wasn't clueless at all. You just confirmed a policy triangle by focusing on the second and third policy areas and ditching rapid industrialization.

Meaning you're a Stalinist and pick the depressing of living standards for cash for industrialization.


As I've said before, there is a hidden, underestimated carrot in all of this that might lead to less rural resistance: business risk. The wage farm / sovkhoz model forces the state to absorb the business risk, particularly if there's no piecemeal compensation like there was elsewhere in the Soviet industrialization campaign. Even illiterate peasants can understand the difference between them bearing the business risk and another entity bearing it.

Doesn't occur to you that maybe the ruling class had a reason why they imposed the business risk on the peasantry, which they hoped would absorb all losses and yield to better overall accumulation?

[Die Neue Zeit]

Meaning you're a Stalinist and pick the depressing of living standards for cash for industrialization.

Farm workers on a minimum wage, despite the earlier de facto expropriation and the imposition of labour discipline, hardly qualifies as "depression of living standards."


Doesn't occur to you that maybe the ruling class had a reason why they imposed the business risk on the peasantry, which they hoped would absorb all losses and yield to better overall accumulation?

That's precisely the policy bumbling of which I speak.

[S.Artesian]

As I've said before, there is a hidden, underestimated carrot in all of this that might lead to less rural resistance: business risk. The wage farm / sovkhoz model forces the state to absorb the business risk, particularly if there's no piecemeal compensation like there was elsewhere in the Soviet industrialization campaign. Even illiterate peasants can understand the difference between them bearing the business risk (minimum quotas and quota prices set by other parties) and another entity bearing it (production targets assume a different character altogether).
Right-- illiteracy was widespread in the 1930s says our primitive accumulatist, DNZ, so they wouldn't recognize a "consumer goods famine" [because, after all, they didn't buy books], but they would understand "VAR" [value at risk], based of course on the algorithms developed by the famous "Quants" of that time.

Hilarious. You can't make this stuff up. I mean you can't, I can't, but DNZ sure can. And does.

And this:


Farm workers on a minimum wage, despite the earlier de facto expropriation and the imposition of labour discipline, hardly qualifies as "depression of living standards."


Well, as a matter of fact without sufficient consumer goods available at the minimum wage to sustain an entire family, that's exactly what it means. And exactly what it meant-- in the dispossession of the direct rural producers and creation of the agricultural proletariat in 17th and 18th century England, and in the fSU during the five year plan.

That, "depression of living standards," was exactly what occurred particularly given the decline in agricultural productivity accompanying the "primitive socialist accumulation."

Geez, somebody get me a bucket and a mop so we can clean up this mess.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Right-- illiteracy was widespread in the 1930s says our primitive accumulatist, DNZ, so they wouldn't experience a "consumer goods famine" [because, after all, they didn't buy books], but they would understand "VAR" [value at risk], based of course on the algorithms developed by the famous "Quants" of that time.

Hilarious. You can't make this stuff up. I mean you can't, I can't, but DNZ sure can. And does.

Geez, somebody get me a bucket and a mop so we can clean up this mess.

I meant "business risk" in a very non-quantitative, abstract meaning.

Besides, Beta has not been supplanted by Value At Risk as the key measurement of financial risk (nice try, but you can't out-finance-major me here, and VAR isn't used outside finance). :p

[S.Artesian]

I meant "business risk" in a very non-quantitative, abstract meaning.

Besides, Beta has not been supplanted by Value At Risk as the key measurement of financial risk (nice try, but you can't out-finance-wiz me here, and VAR isn't used outside finance). :p


No shit. And to the Russian peasantry, that would have made all the difference, right?

Fucking amazing. You're a "finance whiz," among your many other talents [which seem to escape me at the moment]?

Well, that makes me feel so much better.

And it really does help explain your ridiculous fantasizing about how you could have "improved" upon the declines in consumption-- and productivity-- that accompanied, and sustained, the first 5 year plan, the "primitive socialist accumulation"-- as if such a thing as primitive socialist accumulation were even possible.

I think I now understand your entire "line" here. You approach these questions as if you were fantasy role-playing in some sort of on-line game, like maybe one started by Ismail.

You seem to have trouble with the more,not less, critical content of these real life plans-- they did not produce socialism.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Marx pointed out that the Paris Commune failed to expropriate the Bank of France. You might as well criticize him for "fantasy role-playing in some sort of online game" and "what-if" scenario-building along those same lines. :rolleyes:


You're a "finance whiz," among your many other talents [which seem to escape me at the moment]?

I said out-finance-major. You tried to introduce Value-At-Risk in order to pull off a you-out-finance-majored-me moment. :rolleyes:

[S.Artesian]

Marx pointed out that the Paris Commune failed to expropriate the Bank of France. You might as well criticize him for "fantasy role-playing in some sort of online game" and "what-if" scenario-building along those same lines. :rolleyes:

Really, same thing? Hmmh... perhaps I missed where you advocated the Russian peasantry seize somebody's property somewhere? Did I miss the part where you advocated the expropriation of the means of finance? Maybe it was hidden in the part where you suggest declaring eminent domain [a favorite trick of the state in the service of finance and real estate] and giving the peasants currency, or scrip, or maybe "vouchers" to exchange for.............to exchange for what?

Actually, you got a reverse expropriation going on.




I said out-finance-major. You tried to introduce Value-At-Risk in order to pull off a you-out-finance-majored-me moment. :rolleyes:No you didn't, unlesss you edited your post after my comment, something you've done before, because here's what you said and I quote:


nice try, but you can't out-finance-wiz me here
But I understand your confusion; your contact with what you actually say being only random, and tangential.

And I introduced VAR as a joke. No, I won't use those fucking idiotic smileys. Learn to figure it out.

[Jose Gracchus]

I do think the peasantry could have been passively and consciously brought out of their primitive state by a real proletarian regime - which implicitly would've been based on a revolution which would have spread to Central and Western Europe in 1917-1921, and subsequently the East thereafter.

On the basis of the material basis of the USSR in 1927, I think Stalin's solution was all that an authoritarian regime seeking to aggrandize itself to compete with the major bourgeois powers could manage. Human lives be damned.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Maybe it was hidden in the part where you suggest declaring eminent domain [a favorite trick of the state in the service of finance and real estate]

As I wrote elsewhere (and since you're too ignorant to go look, I'll be brief), eminent domain isn't a bourgeois-exclusive instrument. For example, it can be used for state-aiding cooperatives (beyond Lassalle and typical left-leaning calls for "state aid") and for tax-to-nationalize programs.


And I introduced VAR as a joke.

Usually your humour is good, but that time it fell quite flat.

[Die Neue Zeit]

I do think the peasantry could have been passively and consciously brought out of their primitive state by a real socialism regime - which implicitly would've been based on a revolution which would have spread to Central and Western Europe in 1917-1921, and subsequently the East thereafter.

I have no doubt about that, and one of the keys to such development would have been subsidized trade.


On the basis of the material basis of the USSR in 1927, I think Stalin's solution was all that an authoritarian regime seeking to aggrandize itself to compete with the major bourgeois powers could manage. Human lives be damned.

Even if the Soviet state didn't degenerate the way it did, the defeat of the European revolution(s), the scissors crises, and worldwide depression all necessitated rapid industrialization and an "elephantine bureaucracy" that was ironically smaller than the Russian Federation's bureaucracy today. Furthermore, if you recall, Stalin was ironically a mere "dove" compared to Kirov the working-class "hawk" in military-industrial affairs. I'm just suggesting the optimal policy triangle approach.

[A Marxist Historian]

For starters, Trotsky should have been far-sighted enough to see that the 1921 faction ban may be used for his own supporters' suppression and not to endorse this decision back then.

[This was a desperate measure for a difficult situation, with the economy in collapse, the workers fleeing the factories for the countryside, the population on the verge of starvation and right-wing peasant and sailor revolts menacing the return of the Whites, and the Workers Opposition thinking you could solve everything just by putting their trade union bureaucrats in control instead of party bureaucrats, and using anarcho-syndicalist language that sometimes sounded like what was coming out of Kronstadt. Though they did fight and die in the front ranks to suppress White Guard counterrevolution in anarchist disguise at Kronstadt. It served its purpose and should have been lifted by at the latest 1923, if not earlier. -MH-]

In addition, it would have been nice if he had not advocated the militarization of labour during the 1920-1921 trade union discussion, as this made his 'democratic' credentials somewhat suspicious.

[A mistake, but the ultraleft "war communism" policies were pushing the Bolsheviks into a corner. Trotsky *was* the first one to advocate the necessary "New Economic Policy" partial retreat back to capitalism, which would have rendered the militarization unnecessary. Which the Workers Opposition, which didn't want to make any concessions to the peasants at all, was dead against. -MH-]

Finally, his denunciation of and support for reprisals against the members of Workers' Opposition, which had a real mass base, was just a prefiguration for Stalin's crackdown on his own supporters in (rather weak) Left Opposition, so it must be said that Trotsky's past actions proved the foundation for his own undoing in 1923-1927 (I am not saying this to insult any Trotskyist, I am merely stating the facts).

[Reprisals? What reprisals? They weren't even kicked off the Central Committee. Lenin and Trotsky did advocate that, but they were outvoted. A good thing as it turned out. -MH-]

These two gentlemen are my least favourite characters of the Russian Revolution. It would have been better if Martov and Bogdanov had been the members of the RSDLP (Bolshevik) leadership instead of them.

[Lenin always did want to bring his old friend Martov back in. Martov wasn't interested. Bogdanov was more than a bit of a nutcase, though well meaning. Z and K had their good sides as well as their bad. Kamenev was a good Marxist theoretician. Zinoviev wrote some good stuff, especially his history of German Social Democracy. They wobbled back and forth between Left and Right, and finally paid the final price for their political inconsistency. -MH-]

Interesting. What is your opinion of Menshevik-Internationalists (who won the 1918 spring elections to workers' soviets), then?

[Backlashes to revolutions are quite common, and you definitely had one going on in spring 1918. Read Victor Serge's accounts. In Petrograd, the heart of the Revolution, the Bolsheviks did win the election campaign after bitter political struggles. In a number of more backward provincial towns the Bolsheviks lost -- but not to the Menshevik Internationalists, but to the whole damn Menshevik Party, whose right wing was collaborating with the White Guard counterrevolution, while Martov piously tut-tutted these traitors. -MH-]

[A Marxist Historian]

[QUOTE=The Inform Candidate;2155142]
What exactly do you think the Bolsheviks were doing from 1918 on after they basically closed the soviets and took full control of industry and the state? There was no organizational basis of Menshevik Internationalists and Left SRs anything like the Bolshevik and allied revolutionary left bloc of late 1917, the conditions were much more inhospitable and desperate in 1918-1920, and with the war still afoot in 1920 the Bolshevik repression and hysteria of any attempted uprising would be even worse then. What do you think, the VCheKa was just chillin for 3 years while the other parties maintained a full scale and operative national organization with strong active roots in the working class?

[In the summer of 1918, the Mensheviks and Right SR's staged revolts in collaboration with foreign imperialists. The Left SR's staged an independent attempt at a coup d'etat, not in collaboration with anybody, making use of the fact that the deputy head of the Cheka was a Left SR! If they had succeeded, that would have effectively meant that the Left SR wing of the Cheka would have been dictators instead of the Soviets, where the Left SR's were definitely the minority. So what else could the Bolsheviks do except crack down? When the socialist opposition parties realized that they were just putting the Whites in power, they temporarily went back to the Bolshevik side in the Civil War and were relegalized, took back their positions in the Soviets etc. Unfortunately as things got rougher they started to go neutral or go right back over to the other side again, and the Bolsheviks had to crack down again... And so it went, in a country on the verge of starvation and collapse, with the working class disintegrating.

By the mid-1920s, the country was in much better shape and the Left Opposition, not just Trotsky but Zinoviev and Kamenev too, wanted to redemocratize, starting with party and trade union democracy. If the Left had won, multi-party democracy would have been cautiously reintroduced. They didn't. -MH-]

....
I have demanded you provide any proof that there was a credible likelihood of a British invasion of Kronstadt in 1921 in the time of the rebellion, and you have assiduously avoided responding to that challenge, only to restate this flagrant absurdity and from-whole-cloth fantasy fabrication every time you have been presented with an opportunity, on your own authority.

[A reasonable question (unlike some of the flaming I three-dot out below).

Of course there was a credible likelihood of a British invasion of Kronstadt. The British Navy ruled the waves, and nothing would have been easier. The Wrangel troops just evacuated from Crimea were ready-made for the purpose, champing at the bit in their evacuation camps. Not a single life of a British soldier would have needed to be risked. And Petrichenko and the anarchist leaders in Kronstadt were already welcoming Whites bringing food aid to them from Finland with open arms. Nothing would have been easier, if the Bolsheviks had not managed to crush the mutiny literally just a few days before the ice melted.

Since the Soviet archives opened, scads of material confirming White links with the Kronstadt rebels has been published. But you don't even need that. Just read Paul Avrich's book on Kronstadt. And he was an anarchist himself! -M.H.-]

[I could go on further critiquing the rest, but enough... M.H.]
...

[A Marxist Historian]

[QUOTE=The Inform Candidate;2156229]

...
The Red Terror exceeded the scale of previous Tsarist repressions by a significant margin.
...

Wow! That is one of the most incredibly ignorant statements I've ever heard. It shows that the Informed Candidate is incredibly misinformed.

Tsarist repression was beyond hideous, infamous world over. The ugliest form was the pillaging, murder and rape of Jews, which reach pre-Holocaust levels during World War I, when a large part of the Jewish population was ethnically cleansed out of what is now Lithuania and Belarus.

Now that the Soviet archives are open, we have reliable figures for the number of people executed by the Cheka during the Civil War. 22,000 or so. Plus no doubt a lot of unauthorized revenge killings by angry workers, just like in Spain during the Civil War, where the anarchists were, frankly, quite a bit more ruthless than the Bolsheviks were during the Civil War.

And what were the Whites doing, i.e. the Tsarists? Probably killed more people in Finland alone. In one mining encampment in the Donbass, the Whites killed 8,000 miners, believing, not necessarily accurately, that every one of them was a Bolshevik. That mining encampment later changed its name to Shakhty, and thereby hangs a tale ... but I digress.

But the worst was the Jewish pogroms during the Civil War, carried out by Whites, Ukrainian nationalists, peasant "Greens," and Makhno's anarchists too, despite some disapproval from Makhno himself, and the occasional shooting when he was in the mood. (Makhno really liked to shoot people.) Best figures by current estimates, 200,000 murdered, raped or permanently crippled.

The most organized and large-scale form of this was the systematic mass murder by the Whites, i.e. the Tsarists. A lot of historians argue that the Nazis got their model for the Holocaust from the Whites. A lot of exile Whites became Nazis, and a few quite influential with the Nazi high command.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

The Inform Candidate;2159171
"You think by not calling it an expropriation the peasants won't realize that by "eminent domain" they are losing their eons-old livelihood, to which the entire fabric of the peasant society is attached? That there aren't members of that society which will not stand to lose immensely in this process? This is what I'm talking about. You're not a materialist. You think with some hocus pocus and the right jargon and ideological content, you can surpass material realities: such as the fact you're talking about expropriating the peasantry, which they will resist. Full stop."

On this, The Informed Candidate is better informed. There really is something idealist and nonmaterialist about thinking you could just collective the peasantry and they'd go along if you can't even provide them with tractors yet to make it practical.

You have to have the material conditions for collectivization to be be attractive to a peasant who knows the land a hell of a lot better than some bureaucrat with bright ideas in Moscow does. That means the right technology, in other words tractors. They collectived first and built the tractor factories afterwards to prevent total collapse.

The peasants ended up going along, after some small revolts were smacked down, but they just lost interest in their work, saying that if the bureaucrats think they know better than us, fine, let them do it, don't bother us.

And as a result you had a huge famine in which millions of people died.

The only way you can collective something as basic as agriculture without disaster is voluntarily. As Trotsky and the Left Opposition were screaming at the tops of their lungs.

The comments below are perfectly on the mark too.

-M.H.-

"You don't have to read a book to tell the paper you got cannot buy shit at the store, or the store has no shit to buy with your paper. I mean, for Christ's sake, read the Webbs' book, and they liked Stalin. The peasantry could conduct themselves in the market for goods, or there would be no "scissors crisis". Furthermore, all it takes it a good rumor going through peasant communities that they are being ripped off. Illiteracy does not mean that the human subjects of your thought experiments suddenly become inert, passive pawns on a game board."

[Die Neue Zeit]

^^^ What do you think of Trotsky's amateur stunt that I mentioned (http://www.revleft.com/vb/russian-left-unity-t155794/index.html)?

[A Marxist Historian]

^^^ What do you think of Trotsky's amateur stunt that I mentioned (http://www.revleft.com/vb/russian-left-unity-t155794/index.html)?

Breaking party discipline to go to the workers? Absolutely necessary. There was no chance at that point of winning a faction fight within an already quite bureaucratized Soviet Communist Party, where internal democracy had essentially ended at the party conference of January 1924, where most of the delegates were essentially appointed by Stalin and his people, with the Left Opposition getting a grand total of three delegates despite the support of some quarter to a third of the rank and file, if not more.

And very Leninist. Lenin never hesitated to break Bolshevik party discipline when the needs of the revolution required it.

Given the weak position of the Left Opposition this was a dangerous move by 1927. But a necessary one, justified by the fact that the Left Opposition were the revolutionaries and the Stalin-Bukharin group had veered off the revolutionary course.

-M.H.-

[Jose Gracchus]

DNZ makes an ahistorical fetish of party unity even where a party has long ceased being anything like a legitimate workers' party.