Trotsky On Anarchism

[Rakhmetov]

Trotsky's logic outweighs any and every invective Anarchists rely on to criticize those who seize state power.

In and of itself, this self-justification that “we did not seize power not because we were unable but because we did not wish to, because we were against every kind of dictatorship,” and the like, contains an irrevocable condemnation of anarchism as an utterly anti-revolutionary doctrine. To renounce the conquest of power is voluntarily to leave the power with those who wield it, the exploiters. The essence of every revolution consisted and consists in putting a new class in power, thus enabling it to realize its own program in life. It is impossible to wage war and to reject victory. It is impossible to lead the masses towards insurrection without preparing for the conquest power


http://fractioncommuniste.org/eng/bci01/bci01_8.php

[Tim Cornelis]

This is the basic and often repeated argument.

Anarchists are not against seizing power, they are against an elite seizing power in the name of the people. The workers themselves have to seize power. Trotsky basically defined the state as "armed people", anarchists disagree. A state is a governing institution separate and above the masses. Communes are not governments as they are self-governing.

So the workers shouldn't be seizing power over a governing institution separate and above the masses (i.e. a state). In fact, it is impossible to do so as they are the masses. And of course they should be defending their communes by means of violence if necessary against reactionaries, but that's not the definition of a state. A workers' state is an impossibility, it's a contradictio in terminis.

[ZeroNowhere]

In fact, it is impossible to do so as they are the masses.They aren't the masses, in fact no class is 'the masses'. There may be people, but there is no people.

The power of the working class is just as much the imposition of particular interests over the social interest and the masses as the power of any other class.

[Admiral Swagmeister G-Funk]

Trotsky didn't understand that 'power' could not be 'seized' by bureaucrats who tell themselves and other that they represent a repressed class, and he spent his whole career defending Leninism and attempting to make the point that this, which happened funamentally in Russia, was not thanks to Leninism.

I used to buy it, but the more I learned about Leninism, the more I felt that the left should break from it. How would the anarchists have seized power in the eyes of a Trotskyist? By setting up a state of their own? By taking the government from the old class? How would this new bureaucracy be any different without a complete change in the socio-economic order that gives all power to the workers and to the communities?

[Susurrus]

Not only the arguments above, but also history has more or less proven the inadequacies of Leninism, and the success in reality as well as on paper of anarchism.

[Kadir Ateş]

and the success in reality as well as on paper of anarchism.

Wait, where?

[Desperado]

Pointless semantics game. Anarchists, like Marxists, want the working class to "seize power". They simply disagree on how. Trotsky thinks they cannot without a vanguard party, anarchists think they only can without a vanguard party. This, and the precise nature of the vanguard, is what matters. Trotsky is not debating this, simply boringly reiterating his viewpoint, like most politicians.

[Susurrus]

Wait, where?

Anarchism has been implemented on a large scale several times through-out modern history. The anarchist areas during the Spanish Civil War, the Ukrainian Free Territory, and the current EZLN controlled parts of Mexico are the most cited examples. Even the Russian Revolution is a good example, when the power was still in the hands of the soviets, rather than the Bolsheviks.

[bcbm]

this should be moved to "history"

[Pretty Flaco]

While I'm not sure if I entirely agree with the anarchist's views on the state, their application of socialism has been much more successful than many other leftist tendencies. Why? Because the workers actually controlled the means of production.

[Jose Gracchus]

Anarchism has been implemented on a large scale several times through-out modern history. The anarchist areas during the Spanish Civil War, the Ukrainian Free Territory, and the current EZLN controlled parts of Mexico are the most cited examples. Even the Russian Revolution is a good example, when the power was still in the hands of the soviets, rather than the Bolsheviks.

As someone who is generally supportive of a lot of anarchist lines, and basically got into revolutionary politics via social anarchism, I say this while wanting to sympathize considerably: but your version of history is highly misleading and polemical. I'm afraid in each instance what the real content of the class struggle was a little bit more complicated than you let on. The soviets never consolidated power in Russia, and "the soviets" were certainly not explicitly antagonistic to "the Bolsheviks" as a whole. The uprising of the Spanish working-class was highly admirable, but it also was diverted into compromise with the bourgeois state within the structures of the CNT itself. The Ukrainian Makhnovshchina was characterized by many tendencies that anarchists often bash the Bolshevik party-state for. And in many cases the anarchists did not offer much of an alternative to industrial workers; their "just figure it out yourself" line was much better on the peasantry. The EZLN is simply not an "anarchist" movement, and the guerrilla leaders were originally Maoist in orientation, and it has taken on a kind of indigenist character since then.

[syndicat]

In and of itself, this self-justification that “we did not seize power not because we were unable but because we did not wish to, because we were against every kind of dictatorship,” and the like, contains an irrevocable condemnation of anarchism as an utterly anti-revolutionary doctrine. To renounce the conquest of power is voluntarily to leave the power with those who wield it, the exploiters. The essence of every revolution consisted and consists in putting a new class in power, thus enabling it to realize its own program in life. It is impossible to wage war and to reject victory. It is impossible to lead the masses towards insurrection without preparing for the conquest power



anarchism is not against the taking of power over production and society by the working class. what libertarian socialism is opposed to is a party taking state power, that is, capturing or creating a state and then implementing its program thru putting its leaders into control, to implement the program thru the state hierarchy.

the initial quote is from certain anarchists in the leadership of the CNT in 1937. it was an excuse concocted after the fact to justify their capitulation to the Popular Front. but that represented a change in position. in Sept 1936 the CNT had proposed that the two unions in Spain get rid of the Republican state and take power through regional and national defense councils, a unified militia and worker congresses.

to put this another way, the libertarian socialist position is for authentic popular power, not hierarchical party/state power.

moreover a significant minority of the anarcho-syndicalists in Spain opposed that capitulation and stuck to the original program of workers power. but Trotsky was simply ignorant of the anarcho-syndicalist movement in Spain.

[Jose Gracchus]

Syndicat and Desperado are the one's on the money here. Trotsky is attacking a strawman on a topic he knows nothing about, in service of his limitless ego as a man and a politician with a political organization and political followers to organize and mobilize in accordance with his slogans. There's nothing of theoretical substance here.

[DaringMehring]

Syndicat and Desperado are the one's on the money here. Trotsky is attacking a strawman on a topic he knows nothing about, in service of his limitless ego as a man and a politician with a political organization and political followers to organize and mobilize in accordance with his slogans. There's nothing of theoretical substance here.

He is referring to a particular political event in the Spanish revolution. He knew plenty about it as it happened; and his background, was in the Russian evolution from anarchism (Narodnik, SR) to Marxism. He is knowledgeable about those issues, and his critique stands.

Just look at Greece today, you have anarchists who are bravely battling the state forces. But what for --- to deface a McDonald's? Only a group like KKE, or other Leninist organization, is going to pose the question of power, but those groups might be too small and/or opportunist to actually do it.

Of course, if the anarchists do take the power for a workers' democracy, I'll be the first to support them/it. But when you let your mind be honest about it, is that where you really see them going?

[Crux]

Trotsky didn't understand that 'power' could not be 'seized' by bureaucrats who tell themselves and other that they represent a repressed class, and he spent his whole career defending Leninism and attempting to make the point that this, which happened funamentally in Russia, was not thanks to Leninism.

I used to buy it, but the more I learned about Leninism, the more I felt that the left should break from it. How would the anarchists have seized power in the eyes of a Trotskyist? By setting up a state of their own? By taking the government from the old class? How would this new bureaucracy be any different without a complete change in the socio-economic order that gives all power to the workers and to the communities?
You should read State and Revolution by Lenin.

[syndicat]

You should read State and Revolution by Lenin.

What? His idea that the German post office was a great model for socialism? It's a model for statism, yes. Lenin in that book does not advocate workers management of social production.

[Rusty Shackleford]

see, Trotsky was right about some things :lol::tt2:

[Crux]

moreover a significant minority of the anarcho-syndicalists in Spain opposed that capitulation and stuck to the original program of workers power. but Trotsky was simply ignorant of the anarcho-syndicalist movement in Spain.
Not at all, seeing as many of the french Anarcho-Syndicalists joined the PCF after the russian revolution and most also went on to join the Left Opposition, with a few going back to anarcho-syndicalism, when the stalinization began.

His collection on spain (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/spain/index.htm), naturally, touches quite a bit on the CNT and it's leadership.

On the French syndicalists:
A Letter to a French Syndicalist
about the Communist Party (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/ffyci-1/app06.htm)

The Anarcho-Syndicalist Prejudices Again! (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/unions/2-anarchsyn.htm)

A Necessary Discussion with Our Syndicalist Comrades (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/unions/1-discussion.htm)

[syndicat]

those are about French anarcho-syndicalism. I was talking about the Spanish movement of the 1930s. the quote by the OP shows his ignorance.

[Os Cangaceiros]

You should read State and Revolution by Lenin.

I read it. It wasn't that great.

[Dogs On Acid]

For Marxist-Bolsheviks any movement that condemns the Party or Vanguard is anti-revolutionary :rolleyes:

[Crux]

those are about French anarcho-syndicalism. I was talking about the Spanish movement of the 1930s. the quote by the OP shows his ignorance.
Incidentally I also linked to the collection of texts on the Spanish Civilwar. You'll find that his understanding of the CNT is neither ignorant nor one-sided.
Further more, the debates with the french anrcho-syndicalists alspo adress anarcho-syndicalism in general.

[Rocky Rococo]

The goal isn't to take power, it is to destroy power, to put an end to the power of one over another. Anything else isn't communism in any meaningful sense.

[Dogs On Acid]

The goal isn't to take power, it is to destroy power, to put an end to the power of one over another. Anything else isn't communism in any meaningful sense.

You cannot destroy power. Power is decision making, if there was no power there would be no decision making.

The point of a Revolution is to take power away from the Bourgeoisie and give it to the workers. Power will still exist but will be distributed in a non hierarchical and even manner (at least that's what Libertarian Socialists defend).

So each individual will have as much power as the other.

[Jose Gracchus]

I read it. It wasn't that great.

Yeah, I'm tired of people talking about this little pamphlet like its the best thing since sliced bread. Its particularly sad watching Trots and MLs bandy it around, when they, like Lenin himself, have no intention of abiding by "every cook can govern".

[manic expression]

Not only the arguments above, but also history has more or less proven the inadequacies of Leninism, and the success in reality as well as on paper of anarchism.
Of all the words that come to mind when pondering anarchism, "success" isn't one of them.

Some are hellbent on convincing themselves that socialism isn't sufficiently democratic/kind-and-gentle/pure enough for them. They'll condemn anything that doesn't wave a black flag, regardless of the facts.

[bcbm]

everyone knows success is measured in the number of secret police and mass graves

[Crux]

I can tell this is going to be a constructive discussion.

[S.Artesian]

They aren't the masses, in fact no class is 'the masses'. There may be people, but there is no people.

The power of the working class is just as much the imposition of particular interests over the social interest and the masses as the power of any other class.


No,not exactly as the proletariat, even in circumstances of uneven and combined development has no economic need to maintain the reproduction of classes in the organization of production, in the appropriation of labor.

The proletariat has no need to maintain the peasantry as the peasantry in order to dispossess it to feed accumulation [which is one reason I disagree with Preobrazhensky's "primitive socialist accumulation."

The proletariat has no need to impoverish other sectors of the population even as it eliminates the property basis for their reproduction.

The power of the working class is the imposition in fact of a particular interest not over the social interest, but as the vector, the mediation, the mechanism for that social interest, which is the emancipation of labor.

Kind of why Marx referred to the proletariat as the class that in developing the terms of its own emancipation, emancipates all others, no?

[Susurrus]

The soviets never consolidated power in Russia, and "the soviets" were certainly not explicitly antagonistic to "the Bolsheviks" as a whole. The uprising of the Spanish working-class was highly admirable, but it also was diverted into compromise with the bourgeois state within the structures of the CNT itself. The Ukrainian Makhnovshchina was characterized by many tendencies that anarchists often bash the Bolshevik party-state for. And in many cases the anarchists did not offer much of an alternative to industrial workers; their "just figure it out yourself" line was much better on the peasantry. The EZLN is simply not an "anarchist" movement, and the guerrilla leaders were originally Maoist in orientation, and it has taken on a kind of indigenist character since then.

Russia: this is true, but it worked while it lasted, and it was what the anarchists that backed the Bolsheviks expected to be the system that was to be put in place. While the soviets were not explicitly anti-bolshevik, the Bolsheviks undertook extensive action to subjugate them and expel all non-Bolshevik members.

Spain: If you are referring to the capitulation of the CNT to the "Popular Front," then yes. However, the initial actions of the people in organizing and creating a new system was anarchistic and successful, until they were shut down.

Ukraine: What tendencies were these? Be aware that both the Bolshevik and White propaganda machines were running at full strength against the Black Army, and had little regard for the truth. Many claims such as the existence of a repressive secret police in the Territory were made up by the Bolsheviks, not to mention the constant accusation that they were in fact White forces.
And what "figure it out for yourself" line? The makhnovists supported free soviets and trade unions as a form of organization. From one of their declarations:


3. Factories, workshops, mines and other tools and means of production become the property of the working class as a whole, which will run all enterprises themselves, through their trade unions, getting production under way and striving to tie together all industry in the country in a single, unitary organization.

4. It is being proposed that all peasant and worker organizations start the construction of free worker-peasant Soviets. Only laborers who are contributing work necessary to the social economy should participate in the Soviets. Representatives of political organizations have no place in worker-peasant Soviets, since their participation in a workers' soviet will transform the latter into deputies of the party and can lead to the downfall of the soviet system.

EDIT: Derp, forgot the Zapatistas.

While it is true the Zapatistas are not anarchists (they have rejected any kind of political characterization for their movement), their "Councils of Good Government" are very similar to the anarchist model, and it's quite probable that a movement named after an anarchist draws at least a little inspiration from anarchism.

As for the accusation of being overly simplistic in listing the various movements, that was not my intention, I merely was listing instances in which Anarchism was implemented at least for a limited time in a large scale. If it seems like a detailed explanation was necessary for each situation, then I apologize.

[Jose Gracchus]

He is referring to a particular political event in the Spanish revolution. He knew plenty about it as it happened; and his background, was in the Russian evolution from anarchism (Narodnik, SR) to Marxism. He is knowledgeable about those issues, and his critique stands.

Narodnikism is not anarchism, so you demonstrate here, only your own ignorance.


Just look at Greece today, you have anarchists who are bravely battling the state forces. But what for --- to deface a McDonald's? Only a group like KKE, or other Leninist organization, is going to pose the question of power, but those groups might be too small and/or opportunist to actually do it.

You're right that the class struggle in Greece has not yet produced a revolutionary outbreak credible to challenge the power of the bourgeois state, and the social conditions of bourgeois production. The fact that the KKE might be able to contest state power only means a social patriotic force that would surely turn Greece into some sort of shit-hole autarky, plausibly tailing the "progressive bourgeoisie", hardly means it is the product of the class struggle aforementioned. The Socialists in France might contest state power; that doesn't mean they are a vehicle for overcoming the capitalist mode of production, and an authentic tool of class struggle.


Of course, if the anarchists do take the power for a workers' democracy, I'll be the first to support them/it. But when you let your mind be honest about it, is that where you really see them going?

I don't think groups of "conscious" militants, anarchists or Leninists alike, can "build" an alternative to bourgeois state power. This epoch of class struggle is just in its infancy, today's class has only begun to relearn the lessons of struggle. Afraid it doesn't matter what magical recipe you find convincing, none can be injected into the class struggle to magically overcome capitalism, Leninism's modern degenerate remnants' illusions, notwithstanding.

[manic expression]

everyone knows success is measured in the number of secret police and mass graves
For some, it seems "success" is measured in the total tonnage of bourgeois lies believed.

[Dogs On Acid]

For some, it seems "success" is measured in the total tonnage of bourgeois lies believed.

How can a lie be bourgeois?

[manic expression]

How can a lie be bourgeois?
When it comes from the mouth of capitalist apologists...which is quite a frequent occurrence.

[Dogs On Acid]

Ugh, a lie is a lie it can't have private property characteristics. The person telling the lie on the other hand...

[Crux]

Originally Posted by bcbm http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2160632#post2160632)
everyone knows success is measured in the number of secret police and mass graves

For some, it seems "success" is measured in the total tonnage of bourgeois lies believed.
And sometimes those are two and the same.

[Jose Gracchus]

Remember, these are the guys who damn the ISO's accountant or whatever for having them owning (and then subsequently selling, even!) Caterpillar stock because its "imperialist", but have no problem with this (http://china.cat.com/cda/layout?m=63735&x=7). Remember, a red flag makes all the difference!

The ISO should just take over Oakland or something and turn it into a shit-hole Leninist autarky city-state, then they can sell their slaves...I mean workers to Caterpillar and call it building "productive forces" (read: the bureaucracy's revenues are too low, son! Work those 'unconscious elements'!). Then it'd be okay.

[Savage]

How can a lie be bourgeois?

If the bourgeoisie say that the sky is blue, they are lying.

[bcbm]

For some, it seems "success" is measured in the total tonnage of bourgeois lies believed.

besides that this doesn't even make sense, its amazing how it only takes two words to conveniently sweep everything under the rug.

[Die Rote Fahne]

This is the basic and often repeated argument.

Anarchists are not against seizing power, they are against an elite seizing power in the name of the people. The workers themselves have to seize power. Trotsky basically defined the state as "armed people", anarchists disagree. A state is a governing institution separate and above the masses. Communes are not governments as they are self-governing.

So the workers shouldn't be seizing power over a governing institution separate and above the masses (i.e. a state). In fact, it is impossible to do so as they are the masses. And of course they should be defending their communes by means of violence if necessary against reactionaries, but that's not the definition of a state. A workers' state is an impossibility, it's a contradictio in terminis.

What is being referred to is the DOTP phase, and it is key in realizing what Trotsky is talking about.

[A Marxist Historian]

No,not exactly as the proletariat, even in circumstances of uneven and combined development has no economic need to maintain the reproduction of classes in the organization of production, in the appropriation of labor.

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

In a socialist society that is absolutely true. But the whole point is to get there, and you can't do that right away.

When you have a society halfway between socialism and capitalism, you have to do some capitalistic type stuff.

During the famous Third Period a lot of Stalin's followers honestly thought you could just get rid of all classes, liquidate the kulaks as a class and all that. Head banker Pyatakov, who'd gone over from Trotsky to Stalin, even talked about abolishing money. We all know how that all turned out. Ditto with Maoists during the Great Leap Forward.

You think you are being an anarchist or a libertarian socialist or something, in fact what you are arguing for is Stalinism, even though you don't realize it. -M.H.-

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The proletariat has no need to maintain the peasantry as the peasantry in order to dispossess it to feed accumulation [which is one reason I disagree with Preobrazhensky's "primitive socialist accumulation."

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

That wasn't what Preo advocated, instead he just said you should have higher taxes on the richer peasants, the kulaks. In short, he was calling for taxing the rich, just like every other leftist in America does.

When Stalin said, let's not maintain the peasantry as a peasantry but welcome them into the socialist future Right Now, and of course they are all in favor except for a tiny band of sneaky conspirators posing as peasants who we are going to punish and expose, he was following your line, not Preobrazhensky's. -M.H.-

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

The proletariat has no need to impoverish other sectors of the population even as it eliminates the property basis for their reproduction.

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

Well, you just can't build socialism in one country, so while trying to get by till the revolution spreads you get to choose between different ugly choices. It's a trip wire balancing act.

And that's not just ancient history. If there is a revolution anywhere in the world next week, that doesn't immediately spread, it'll be the same stuffover again.

You do know, by the way, that the Spanish anarchists forcibly collectivized the peasantry whether they liked it or not? Fortunately, Spain being a more socially advanced country than Russia, most of them were OK with it. Though they did shoot a lot of the recalcitrants, and especially Catholic priests. They really shot a lot of Catholic priests. There was a famous incident in which they actually crucified one.

Now, I'm no fan of the Spanish Catholic Church, home of the Inquisition, but that was overdoing it. -M.H.-

------------------------------------------------------------------
The power of the working class is the imposition in fact of a particular interest not over the social interest, but as the vector, the mediation, the mechanism for that social interest, which is the emancipation of labor.

Kind of why Marx referred to the proletariat as the class that in developing the terms of its own emancipation, emancipates all others, no?

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

Exactly right. But that's over the long term, not at every moment on the path. Serious revolutionaries have to be practical and relate to the real world.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

[

Russia: this is true, but it worked while it lasted, and it was what the anarchists that backed the Bolsheviks expected to be the system that was to be put in place. While the soviets were not explicitly anti-bolshevik, the Bolsheviks undertook extensive action to subjugate them and expel all non-Bolshevik members.

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

Not true. You had a few Menshevik and anarchist delegates to the Moscow and Petrograd soviets as late as 1923, when Stalin's machine took over.

They didn't expel political opponents, they expelled political opponents that collaborated with the Whites like the Right SRs and Mensheviks, raised peasant insurrections like the Left SR's, bombed Bolshevik party headquarters like the anarchists did from time to time, or called for strikes at factories producing for the war effort like the Menshevik Internationalists did from time to time. And then would let them back in when and if their behavior improved, though after a while the Cheka was getting damned impatient, and rightly so.

As things turned out, that was pretty much all of the Bolshevik left political opponents. Such is life.

-M.H.-
-----------------------------------------------------------------

Spain: If you are referring to the capitulation of the CNT to the "Popular Front," then yes. However, the initial actions of the people in organizing and creating a new system was anarchistic and successful, until they were shut down.

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

Successful yes, anarchistic no. It looked a whole lot like the Soviet Union at the apex of War Communism, except with anarchists instead of Bolsheviks running things. But then the anarchist leaders decided to just throw all their anarchist ideas overboard and join the bourgeois government.

Understandable in a certain sense, as anarchist ideas never really can work, and they had to do something with the Fascists bearing down.

-M.H.-

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

Ukraine: What tendencies were these? Be aware that both the Bolshevik and White propaganda machines were running at full strength against the Black Army, and had little regard for the truth. Many claims such as the existence of a repressive secret police in the Territory were made up by the Bolsheviks, not to mention the constant accusation that they were in fact White forces.

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

Heck even the anarchist accounts admit there was a Makhno secret police. Fact was, there were two different Makhno secret police organizations competing with each other. I guess that's anarchists for you.

And whereas Dzherzhinskii shot Chekists who tortured prisoners, the anarchists secret policemen were anarchists, so they did what they wanted, which was of course to torture prisoners, something all policemen in any regime like to do, comes with the job.

They weren't Whites, but when Makhno mutinied that disrupted the front which is why the Whites took over the Ukraine. He then, being an anarchist, disrupted the Whites so the Bolsheviks took it back.

But the real story is his troop's pogroms against Jews. This is heatedly denied by anarchists, especially Jewish anarchists, especially Jewish anarchists who were on his staff. But facts speak for themselves.

The Jewish archives at YIVO in New York have a Makhno file filled with innumerable documents on Makhnovite murder, rape and killing of Jews. In every language you can imagine, some even in English. You don't need to read a book, it's all there in the records, meticulously compiled in detail.

I did some research there myself, and can verify this personally. I recall asking the archivist why Tcherikover, the Jewish archivist who compiled the Ukrainian pogrom archive, make public statements that Makhno was innocent? He had various explanation, which I won't bore you with here, but he assured me that facts were facts.

It had to do I think with Tcherikover's own politics, another long and obscure story I can explain to you if you are interested.

-M.H.-

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

And what "figure it out for yourself" line? The makhnovists supported free soviets and trade unions as a form of organization. From one of their declarations:

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

A lot of political organizations in Ukraine were issuing all sorts of proclamations against pogroms. According to a Russian historian whose lecture I attended, you had an inverse relationship between proclamations and pogroms. The more proclamations against pogroms against Jews, the more pogroms committed by the proclaimers.

I'm sure pretty much the same thing was true about your average Makhnovite declaration about soviet democracy, likely written by a well-meaning but stupid Jewish anarchist on Makhno's staff.

-M.H.-

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

EDIT: Derp, forgot the Zapatistas.

While it is true the Zapatistas are not anarchists (they have rejected any kind of political characterization for their movement), their "Councils of Good Government" are very similar to the anarchist model, and it's quite probable that a movement named after an anarchist draws at least a little inspiration from anarchism.

As for the accusation of being overly simplistic in listing the various movements, that was not my intention, I merely was listing instances in which Anarchism was implemented at least for a limited time in a large scale. If it seems like a detailed explanation was necessary for each situation, then I apologize.

[A Marxist Historian]

Remember, these are the guys who damn the ISO's accountant or whatever for having them owning (and then subsequently selling, even!) Caterpillar stock because its "imperialist", but have no problem with this. Remember, a red flag makes all the difference!

The ISO should just take over Oakland or something and turn it into a shit-hole Leninist autarky city-state, then they can sell their slaves...I mean workers to Caterpillar and call it building "productive forces" (read: the bureaucracy's revenues are too low, son! Work those 'unconscious elements'!). Then it'd be okay.

What, Oakland, the home of the Black Panther Party, taken over by one of the most lily-white pseudoradical groups there is? Who are pretty much Obama's left flank?

Oakland already has plenty of black pseudo-radicals and ex-Panthers supporting Obama in city government. It doesn't need white ones.

-M.H.-

[S.Artesian]

Quote:
Originally Posted by S.Artesian http://www.revleft.com/vb/revleft/buttons/viewpost.gif (http://www.revleft.com/vb/showthread.php?p=2160753#post2160753)
No,not exactly as the proletariat, even in circumstances of uneven and combined development has no economic need to maintain the reproduction of classes in the organization of production, in the appropriation of labor.

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


In a socialist society that is absolutely true. But the whole point is to get there, and you can't do that right away.

When you have a society halfway between socialism and capitalism, you have to do some capitalistic type stuff.

Yeah, some capitalistic like stuff, like prevent the workers from organizing for their own emancipation. And like shooting the workers. Is that capitalistic enough for you?

And if nobody's bothered to tell you before, let me tell you now, Trotsky's theory of uneven and combined development, which is his seminal contribution to Marxist analysis, exceed that of Lenin and Luxemburg, is not about and does not "allow" societies that are "half-capitalist" and "half-socialist."

"You have to do some capitalistic like stuff"-- that's the epitaph of Trotskyism.




During the famous Third Period a lot of Stalin's followers honestly thought you could just get rid of all classes, liquidate the kulaks as a class and all that. Head banker Pyatakov, who'd gone over from Trotsky to Stalin, even talked about abolishing money. We all know how that all turned out. Ditto with Maoists during the Great Leap Forward.


Ummh...not to put too fine a materialist point on it, but who gives a fuck what Pyatakov thought. What 3rd periodists thought. We're talking about social relations of production and what those relations require, advance, create.


You think you are being an anarchist or a libertarian socialist or something, in fact what you are arguing for is Stalinism, even though you don't realize it. -M.H.-
I'm a Stalinist arguing that the proletariat does not require the organization of other classes whose labor it can exploit in order to create its social organization of production, but what it requires is an international revolution? Sure I am. And you're Napoleon.
--------------------------------------------------------------

The proletariat has no need to maintain the peasantry as the peasantry in order to dispossess it to feed accumulation [which is one reason I disagree with Preobrazhensky's "primitive socialist accumulation."

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


That wasn't what Preo advocated, instead he just said you should have higher taxes on the richer peasants, the kulaks. In short, he was calling for taxing the rich, just like every other leftist in America does.Clearly you have never read The New Economics and if you have you certainly haven't understood it. Preobrazhensky was talking about the peasantry as a class, not the kulaks as a segment of the class. Anyone who thinks the expropriation of the peasantry was, or was going to be confined to the "rich" knows nothing about Russian agriculture at that time and how insignificant the kulaks were as a social force.


When Stalin said, let's not maintain the peasantry as a peasantry but welcome them into the socialist future Right Now, and of course they are all in favor except for a tiny band of sneaky conspirators posing as peasants who we are going to punish and expose, he was following your line, not Preobrazhensky's. -M.H.-

Stalin never said that, nor anything like that. He was much to clever for that, much more clever than you. You don't even have a clue as to what my "line" is. You wouldn't have a clue even if I had a "line" which I don't. One more reason I've always felt big T Trotskyists simply wanted a Soviet Union, bureaucracy, five year plans, and failures, to call the their own.

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

The proletariat has no need to impoverish other sectors of the population even as it eliminates the property basis for their reproduction.

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


Well, you just can't build socialism in one country, so while trying to get by till the revolution spreads you get to choose between different ugly choices. It's a trip wire balancing act.


Another line for the tombstone of Trotskyism


And that's not just ancient history. If there is a revolution anywhere in the world next week, that doesn't immediately spread, it'll be the same stuffover again.


Makes you the Stalinist, not me. The point is international revolution, something the Bolsheviks proceeded to fuck up from the very getgo.


You do know, by the way, that the Spanish anarchists forcibly collectivized the peasantry whether they liked it or not? Fortunately, Spain being a more socially advanced country than Russia, most of them were OK with it. Though they did shoot a lot of the recalcitrants, and especially Catholic priests. They really shot a lot of Catholic priests. There was a famous incident in which they actually crucified one.

First, late breaking news..... Catholic priests are not peasants. Why you bring in the priests makes no sense, which is in keeping with the bulk of your comments.

References please about the "forced collectivization" of the peasantry, because in my readings I haven't come across that-- forced collectivization, and I think neither have you since you say "They were OK with it." If they were OK with it, then it wasn't forced, was it?



------------------------------------------------------------------
The power of the working class is the imposition in fact of a particular interest not over the social interest, but as the vector, the mediation, the mechanism for that social interest, which is the emancipation of labor.

Kind of why Marx referred to the proletariat as the class that in developing the terms of its own emancipation, emancipates all others, no?
------------------------------------------------------------------


Exactly right. But that's over the long term, not at every moment on the path. Serious revolutionaries have to be practical and relate to the real world.

Final line of your epitaph. RIP. Regress In Practicality.

[A Marxist Historian]

Quote:
Originally Posted by S.Artesian
No,not exactly as the proletariat, even in circumstances of uneven and combined development has no economic need to maintain the reproduction of classes in the organization of production, in the appropriation of labor.

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


Quote:
Originally Posted by MH
In a socialist society that is absolutely true. But the whole point is to get there, and you can't do that right away.

When you have a society halfway between socialism and capitalism, you have to do some capitalistic type stuff.
Yeah, some capitalistic like stuff, like prevent the workers from organizing for their own emancipation. And like shooting the workers. Is that capitalistic enough for you?

"You have to do some capitalistic like stuff"-- that's the epitaph of Trotskyism.

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

Blah blah. Make an argument, don't just display your ignorance. What were the Bolsheviks supposed to do about all those peasants in Russia who didn't want socialism right away, they wanted to try out some farming on the land they'd taken away from the landlords and make some money. Shoot them all? You really are a Stalinist in anarchist disguise.

-M.H.-

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

And if nobody's bothered to tell you before, let me tell you now, Trotsky's theory of uneven and combined development, which is his seminal contribution to Marxist analysis, exceed that of Lenin and Luxemburg, is not about and does not "allow" societies that are "half-capitalist" and "half-socialist."

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

For that one, we have Marx, Critique of Gotha Program, and of course all sorts of stuff by Lenin. Yes, there is a period between capitalist and socialist societies, transitional societies. And governmentally speaking, corresponding to that phase is that phrase Marx came up with, the "dictatorship of the proletariat." At one point he said that was his *only* real original contribution to socialist thought.

Now if you disagree with Marx on that one, fine, many people do. But don't try to drag in Trotsky as your attorney, that's just dishonest.

-M.H.-

-----------------------------------------------------------
Quote:
Originally Posted by MH
During the famous Third Period a lot of Stalin's followers honestly thought you could just get rid of all classes, liquidate the kulaks as a class and all that. Head banker Pyatakov, who'd gone over from Trotsky to Stalin, even talked about abolishing money. We all know how that all turned out. Ditto with Maoists during the Great Leap Forward.
Ummh...not to put too fine a materialist point on it, but who gives a fuck what Pyatakov thought. What 3rd periodists thought. We're talking about social relations of production and what those relations require, advance, create.
-------------------------------------------------

No you aren't, you are just playing with words. What Pyatakov and 3rd periodists thought mattered, they operated in the real world, and they had ideas just like yours, except unlike you they tried to put them into practice.

-M.H.-

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


Quote:
You think you are being an anarchist or a libertarian socialist or something, in fact what you are arguing for is Stalinism, even though you don't realize it. -M.H.-
I'm a Stalinist arguing that the proletariat does not require the organization of other classes whose labor it can exploit in order to create its social organization of production, but what it requires is an international revolution? Sure I am. And you're Napoleon.
--------------------------------------------------------------

That's right, it requires international revolution. Of course. But what do you do when revolution succeeds somewhere, and world revolution does not follow next week?

If you are serious about the ideas you are putting out there, you have two choices. You can try to put them into practice, like Stalin etc. did, or you can pick up your marbles, go home, and maybe post to Revleft.

OK, maybe you're not a Stalinist. Maybe you are just a blowhard who doesn't really mean what you are saying. I suppose that would be an improvement.

-M.H.-

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

The proletariat has no need to maintain the peasantry as the peasantry in order to dispossess it to feed accumulation [which is one reason I disagree with Preobrazhensky's "primitive socialist accumulation."

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


Quote:
That wasn't what Preo advocated, instead he just said you should have higher taxes on the richer peasants, the kulaks. In short, he was calling for taxing the rich, just like every other leftist in America does.
Clearly you have never read The New Economics and if you have you certainly haven't understood it. Preobrazhensky was talking about the peasantry as a class, not the kulaks as a segment of the class. Anyone who thinks the expropriation of the peasantry was, or was going to be confined to the "rich" knows nothing about Russian agriculture at that time and how insignificant the kulaks were as a social force.

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

I have it right there on my bookshelf, a few feet away from my computer. Where in the book does he talk about expropriating any peasants at all? He doesn't. The program of the Left Opposition on the subject (have you read it?) doesn't either, and does *exactly* call for increasing taxes on them to further industrialization, i.e. "primitive socialist accumulation," transferring surplus generated in the capitalist sector of the economy to the socialist sector, which is pretty much how Preo defined PSA.

As to whether the kulaks were insignificant or a social force, that is exactly the big argument you had in the Russian Communist Party at the time, with Bukharin's people putting out your argument and Trotsky and Preobrazhensky saying the opposite. If you want to agree with Bukharin and think Preo was a fool, fine, but don't try to put your words in his mouth, that is dishonest.

Yes, there were kulaks and they were a growing social force. The reason they were a growing social force was that the party leadership, Stalin and Bukharin, were doing everything possible to encourage them. Otherwise they would have probably been no big deal. Usually the folk in the villages getting richest fastest were party members. What's going on now in China is just Bukharinism on steroids.

Reasonable tax measures done in an intelligent fashion would have solved the problem and helped the Soviet Union industrialize, maintain that balancing act holding action until the German workers could help out. And if the correct, Trotskyist policies had been followed in the Comintern, Hitler would have been stopped, and Germany would likely have gone communist, given how huge the social crisis in Germany was during the Great Depression, and everything would be very very different.

-M.H.-
Quote:
Originally Posted by MH
When Stalin said, let's not maintain the peasantry as a peasantry but welcome them into the socialist future Right Now, and of course they are all in favor except for a tiny band of sneaky conspirators posing as peasants who we are going to punish and expose, he was following your line, not Preobrazhensky's. -M.H.-
Stalin never said that, nor anything like that. He was much to clever for that, much more clever than you. You don't even have a clue as to what my "line" is. You wouldn't have a clue even if I had a "line" which I don't. One more reason I've always felt big T Trotskyists simply wanted a Soviet Union, bureaucracy, five year plans, and failures, to call the their own.

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

Yes he most certainly did, though I'm paraphrasing of course. I've read what he wrote on the subject during the Third Period. Have you?

As for what your line is, or even if you have one, that is your business and I don't really care. I'm only relating to what you say here in this thread, since I don't know you from a hole in the ground. If it is inconsistent with what you actually believe, that is your problem and none o' my own.

-M.H.-

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

The proletariat has no need to impoverish other sectors of the population even as it eliminates the property basis for their reproduction.

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


Quote:
Originally Posted by MH
Well, you just can't build socialism in one country, so while trying to get by till the revolution spreads you get to choose between different ugly choices. It's a trip wire balancing act.
Another line for the tombstone of Trotskyism


Quote:
Originally Posted by MH
And that's not just ancient history. If there is a revolution anywhere in the world next week, that doesn't immediately spread, it'll be the same stuffover again.
Makes you the Stalinist, not me. The point is international revolution, something the Bolsheviks proceeded to fuck up from the very getgo.

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

Um, are we having a dialogue of the deaf or something? You do know that Trotskyists are kinda into international revolution? And that after '23, whatever fuckups committed by "Bolsheviks" can't really be blamed on Trotsky, now can they?

Or do you think the Comintern did something horrible in Germany or something circa 1921 or thereabouts? I suppose that'd be an interesting subject for a different thread. If that's what you think, start a new thread and explain it to us all.

I'm asking you, what do you do if there is a revolution somewhere and the *entire world* doesn't follow suit in the following week. You're dodging the question because you really don't have an answer.

If you got one let's hear it, and let's stop flaming and get down to business. Hey, if you actually have an original thought and not just big words to sling around like magic totems, I'd love to hear it.

-M.H.-

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

Quote:
Originally Posted by MH
You do know, by the way, that the Spanish anarchists forcibly collectivized the peasantry whether they liked it or not? Fortunately, Spain being a more socially advanced country than Russia, most of them were OK with it. Though they did shoot a lot of the recalcitrants, and especially Catholic priests. They really shot a lot of Catholic priests. There was a famous incident in which they actually crucified one.
First, late breaking news..... Catholic priests are not peasants. Why you bring in the priests makes no sense, which is in keeping with the bulk of your comments.

References please about the "forced collectivization" of the peasantry, because in my readings I haven't come across that-- forced collectivization, and I think neither have you since you say "They were OK with it." If they were OK with it, then it wasn't forced, was it?

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

Most were, quite a few weren't. And quite a lot kept their heads down and decided to go with the flow so as not to get in trouble. Something that happened in the USSR too.

And quite a few of them weren't too happy when their churches got burned down. Though OTOH quite a few were. The Church had thoroughly pissed off many peasants, but many others were still good Catholics. And many more were somewhere in between. Life's like that.

For refs, try Borkenau's "Spanish Cockpit," among a zillion other places. He wrote well and was a good observer on the spot, though his politics weren't too great.

-M.H.-

------------------------------------------------------------------
The power of the working class is the imposition in fact of a particular interest not over the social interest, but as the vector, the mediation, the mechanism for that social interest, which is the emancipation of labor.

Kind of why Marx referred to the proletariat as the class that in developing the terms of its own emancipation, emancipates all others, no?
------------------------------------------------------------------


Quote:
Originally Posted by MH
Exactly right. But that's over the long term, not at every moment on the path. Serious revolutionaries have to be practical and relate to the real world.
Final line of your epitaph. RIP. Regress In Practicality.
__________________
Feel free to neg rep

"You have a fucking bad attitude. All you have to do is be civil! Quit being a dick!"

[bobbrown]

All this talk abot 'anarchism' and what not has got me real confused.:confused: Sorry for being an annoying newbie.

But this talk of an "armed populance" strikes me in flat faced opposition.

Why do that? Why not do speeches and write letters, and try and persuade people to your point of view?

Sure, economic oppression must be overhauled, but I think ther are better ways of doing it, through the democratic system.

Just my two cents.

[bcbm]

i hate when people don't use the quote function and make shit unreadable

[Sun at Eight]

I think The Marxist Historian is coming from years of e-mail arguments, i.e., mailing lists and newsgroups (before Revleft and many of its users were gleams in anyone's eyes!), and probably needs a little tutorial in how to use the quote functions. It's the same reason he signs his posts. After that I'm sure everything should be fine, since I think Revleft can bear minty Spart polemics.

EDIT: Particularly around multi-quoting, which is not as intuitive in the interface.

[bcbm]

i'm too lazy to try to read that shit, especially about an argument that doesn't matter

[manic expression]

If the bourgeoisie say that the sky is blue, they are lying.
And if the bourgeoisie says that the Soviet Union was bad...

Yeah, right. You believe them.


And sometimes those are two and the same.
When, precisely?


besides that this doesn't even make sense, its amazing how it only takes two words to conveniently sweep everything under the rug.
When those two words happen to be so readily applicable and valid, then yes, I suppose it is convenient.

[S.Artesian]

I have it right there on my bookshelf, a few feet away from my computer. Where in the book does he talk about expropriating any peasants at allYou have it on your bookshelf? That's just wonderful. Doesn't mean you read it does it? Nowhere in the text of The New Economics does Preobrazhensky even mention "kulaks." Throughout the book, in its various chapters on "The Law of Primitive Socialist Accumulation" and the "Law of Value in the Soviet Union" Preobrazhensky is dealing with the exchange between the state, "socialist"-- industrial-- sector of the economy, and the private, petty-commodity-producing-agricultural sector of the economy, the peasantry.

No, Preobrazhensky does not talk about expropriating the peasantry. I didn't say he did.

But expropriation did occur, and it was not confined to the kulaks-- an insignificant economic force in the Soviet economy. It was practiced on the peasantry as a whole with anti-kulak ideology, being just that-- an ideology to justify the practice is it was imposed on the entire sector.

The taxation, transfer, "unequal exchange" proposed by Preobrazhensky was not wholesale liquidation and expropriaton. It was however to be applied to the entire sector, to the entire class of peasants.

Anybody who thought expropriation was going to be, or could be, or would have made any difference if it was confined to the kulaks doesn't know anything about Soviet agriculture at that time.

"Taxing the rich"-- would have accomplished nothing regarding economic transformation.

EDIT: Regarding forced collectivization during the Spanish Civil War-- it hardly compares to what was practiced in the fSU. Less than 20% of the land in the Republican zone was collectivized and the overwhelming number of collectives were voluntarily organized. Economic pressure was applied to those peasants remaining outside the collective-- they could employ no external labor, even that of extended family members; those that fled the land had their land seized-- but forced classwide collectivization through seizure was not the organizing force of the rural class struggle.

[syndicat]

the kulaks were those peasants who owned more than 10 hectares of land, which was at the time the maximum amount a single family could farm on their own and thus required hired labor.

but the excess land of the kulaks had been mostly expropriated during the revolution. by 1921 they were only 0.07 percent of the peasantry according to government statistics.

so the peasants forcibly expropriated were the ordinary peasants.


Regarding forced collectivization during the Spanish Civil War-- it hardly compares to what was practiced in the fSU. Less than 20% of the land in the Republican zone was collectivized and the overwhelming number of collectives were voluntarily organized. Economic pressure was applied to those peasants remaining outside the collective-- they could employ no external labor, even that of extended family members; those that fled the land had their land seized-- but forced classwide collectivization through seizure was not the organizing force of the rural class struggle.

where do you get the stat about less than 20 percent of land in anti-fascist zone collectivized? 14 million acres of farm land were expropriated by the unions. Except for a few cases in Aragon, the land expropriated was either land of large landowners, fascists who'd fled, or excess land of farmers who had more land than they could farm with their family's own labor, that is, the Spanish kulak class.

The main controversy over forced collectivization is in regard to Aragon. there were some cases where this did happen there. but less than 5 percent of the collectivized villages in Aragaon had total collectivization. the vast majority had some individual farmers who did not have excess land and who did not join the collective. so forced collectivization was a very minor phenomenon.

[bcbm]

When those two words happen to be so readily applicable and valid, then yes, I suppose it is convenient.

sure buddy, sure

[S.Artesian]

the kulaks were those peasants who owned more than 10 hectares of land, which was at the time the maximum amount a single family could farm on their own and thus required hired labor.

but the excess land of the kulaks had been mostly expropriated during the revolution. by 1921 they were only 0.07 percent of the peasantry according to government statistics.

so the peasants forcibly expropriated were the ordinary peasants.

Agree.




where do you get the stat about less than 20 percent of land in anti-fascist zone collectivized? 14 million acres of farm land were expropriated by the unions. Except for a few cases in Aragon, the land expropriated was either land of large landowners, fascists who'd fled, or excess land of farmers who had more land than they could farm with their family's own labor, that is, the Spanish kulak class.


From Michael Seidman, "Agrarian Collectives During the Spanish Revolution and Civil War" - in pdf format on the web.

On pages 2,3 he says:


Although the theme of collectivization has fascinated historians because of its libertarian resonance, collectivization was a minority phenomenon even in the Republican zone. Only 18.5 % of the land in the Republican zone (and, of
course, none in the Nationalist zone) was collectivized.[9] Thus, individualists in Spain continued to be overwhelmingly important,especially in comparison to state-sponsored collectivization of Soviet agriculture in the same period. More than 300,000 Spanish peasants acquired land in one form or another. Half of
these resided in the provinces of Albacete, Ciudad Real, Cuenca, Toledo, and Madrid. Perhaps the extent of land reform in the center helps to explain why in 1936 and 1937 the region resisted repeated assaults by Nationalist forces.

In March 1937 the Communist minister of agriculture, Vicente Uribe, announced that nearly 9% of total Spanish farmlands had been distributed to the peasantry. By the end of the year, the Communist press claimed that over a third of private holdings had been redistributed or confiscated.10 The peasants,
the party asserted, had largely opted for individual use. This assertion was not mere propaganda. In Catalonia, collectives were islands in a sea of medium- and small-property holders. An inquiry by the Generalitat (Catalan regional government) at the end of 1936 revealed that only sixty-six localities had taken some collectivist measures, and over 1000 municipalities had not. The relatively few collectives that did exist were, it seems, formed by small owners. The Generalitat’s decree of 5 January 1937reinforced the family farm by granting formal legal usufruct to those who had cultivated the land as of 18 July 1936.[11] Even in Aragón, supposedly the most revolutionary and anarchist of
regions and where the CNT was often the dominant left organization, most of the land was not collectivized. Notwithstanding the presence of militias that encouraged or compelled communal ownership, perhaps only 40 % of the land of the region was expropriated.[12] In February 1937, 275 Aragón collectives had a total of 80,000 members; in June, 450 collectives included 180,000 members, less than two-fifths of the Aragón population in the Republican zone.[13]



In a footnote, he writes:


9. Total seizures may have amounted to approximately one-third of arable
land. Payne, Spanish Revolution, 240–1; Luis Garrido González, ‘Producción
agraria y guerra civil’, in Casanova, ed., El sueño, 100. Anarchist sources,
however, claimed that nearly half of the peasants in the Republican zone were
‘collectivists’. See Bernecker, Colectividades, 111.

[Jose Gracchus]

Another major factor to consider is standard bourgeois primitive accumulation in the agrarian economy has preceded far further in Spain in the 1930s than Russia in the 1910s...recognizably feudal forms, still recognizable in the rural relations in Russia in 1917, had been replaced by thoroughly bourgeois farming relations in much of Spain. In Spain a lot of collectivization really was just the rural-agrarian flipside to urban-industrial collectivization: it was rural proletarians seizing the means of production - capitalist farms.

[A Marxist Historian]

I think The Marxist Historian is coming from years of e-mail arguments, i.e., mailing lists and newsgroups (before Revleft and many of its users were gleams in anyone's eyes!), and probably needs a little tutorial in how to use the quote functions. It's the same reason he signs his posts. After that I'm sure everything should be fine, since I think Revleft can bear minty Spart polemics.

EDIT: Particularly around multi-quoting, which is not as intuitive in the interface.

all too, too true. I hit Reply with Quote this time instead of reply, and didn't sign, let's see if this works better.

Eep! I tried Reply with Quote on something else, and after writing a long reply to another posting, got this weird message I've gotten before, namely "reply is too short, please give us at least one character." When this happens, all I can think of to do is put the whole thing on the clipboard, get out of Internet Explorer, and try again from scratch, and the interface doesn't seem too willing to let me do that either, generating posting that don't look too good at best.

Can anyone help me out here, if for no other reason than so that you won't have to look at ugly formatting?

[A Marxist Historian]

You have it on your bookshelf? That's just wonderful. Doesn't mean you read it does it? Nowhere in the text of The New Economics does Preobrazhensky even mention "kulaks." Throughout the book, in its various chapters on "The Law of Primitive Socialist Accumulation" and the "Law of Value in the Soviet Union" Preobrazhensky is dealing with the exchange between the state, "socialist"-- industrial-- sector of the economy, and the private, petty-commodity-producing-agricultural sector of the economy, the peasantry.

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

No, he doesn't mention kulaks there, why would he? It's an abstract work of economics, not an analysis of Soviet agriculture. Pre *also* wrote a number of sometimes polemical pieces on social diffentiation in the countryside and the kulak question. Indeed the big debate on economics and the countryside was between Preo and his followers who wanted, in practice, higher taxes on the private sector and Bukharin and his followers who thought that would strangle economic growth.

Just read what Moshe Lewin has to say about it, which you should enjoy as he is a total Bukharin man who is the biggest advocate of your notion that there were no kulaks worth mentioning. And a huge Gorbachev fan too of course.

PSA for Preo is, just like I said, transfer of surplus value from the private sector, not just the peasantry by the way, when he was writing at the height of NEP there was a quite large urban private sector. He and the Left certainly wanted higher taxes on the "NEPmen."

-M.H.-

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

No, Preobrazhensky does not talk about expropriating the peasantry. I didn't say he did.

But expropriation did occur, and it was not confined to the kulaks-- an insignificant economic force in the Soviet economy. It was practiced on the peasantry as a whole with anti-kulak ideology, being just that-- an ideology to justify the practice is it was imposed on the entire sector.

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

It's true you had expropriation of the kulaks, and it felt pretty much like expropriation to a lot of the middle peasants too. The official line, of course, was that the overwhelming majority of the peasantry were streaming into the kolkhozes spontaneously and enthusiastically, and that it was the poor peasants themselves that were demanding that the evil kulaks be expropriated, and were delighted with the help they were receiving from the benevolent Soviet workers' state. And this wasn't just the official line, it was what the Stalinists had talked themselves into believing. Denial is not a river in Egypt.

And, Russia being the huge and varied place that it was, there were even places this was more or less true, and you can read all sorts of enthusiastic naive Stalinist accounts of how things went down in carefully selected showpiece villages. Of course, most places things were very different.

Legally, it was no such thing as expropriation, kolkhozes, the dominant form, are collectively owned by the peasants themselves, not by the state. You also had state farms, but they were much fewer, as Stalin regarded that as a bit of an ultraleft heresy. In practice of course the peasants had very little democratic input into running the kolkhozes except on low-level local stuff that doesn't matter much, and the taxes on kolkhoz production were extremely high until the Khrushchev era, when they were reduced to something much more reasonable.

-M.H.-

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

The taxation, transfer, "unequal exchange" proposed by Preobrazhensky was not wholesale liquidation and expropriaton. It was however to be applied to the entire sector, to the entire class of peasants.

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

That is true. Any form of taxation, no matter how low the tax rate, is transfer not exchange by definition. Yes indeed, Preo didn't want the peasantry to be totally free of any tax burden. Would you? That's not socialism, that is Tea Partyism.

He was in favor of a progressive income tax, with the rich paying much more than the poor or the middle peasants. He didn't lay that out in the book because that was not what the book was about, and besides it was noncontroversial. Even Bukharin was for that in theory. The arguments were over how much, how high, how progressive the income tax should be. Preo didn't go into that in New Economics because that is a theoretical work, not an analysis of agricultural and tax policy.

-M.H.-

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

Anybody who thought expropriation was going to be, or could be, or would have made any difference if it was confined to the kulaks doesn't know anything about Soviet agriculture at that time.

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

Ha! I sort of agree with you. Stalin was in charge, and he really didn't know anything about Soviet agriculture at that time. The people beneath him often knew quite a lot, but had managed to persuade themselves that white is black and black is white, something people are all too inclined to do.

-M.H.-

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

"Taxing the rich"-- would have accomplished nothing regarding economic transformation.

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

Here I agree with you too. The Soviet Union did not need and did not want a total economic transformation from NEP to socialism in the late 1920s. It was just a bad idea, and Trotsky was not in favor of it. Why? Because you can't build socialism in one country. Preo was not as clear on that, and was impatient and *liked* the idea of a total economic transformation without waiting for the Revolution to spread, which didn't seem about to happen right away. So he went over to Stalin.

Taxing the rich would not have enabled an economic transformation. It would have curbed the NEPmen and kulaks a bit, by the late '20s they were definitely becoming a problem, and it would have helped the USSR industrialize a little faster, and enabled raising workers' wages a little.

That's why the Left Opposition was in favor. They felt that too much of the Bukharin economic course would lead to capitalist restoration. I don't think capitalism has been restored in China, but it is obvious that the ultra-Bukharinistic course in China has generated huge capitalist forces in China that could quite easily lead to exactly that.

-M.H.-

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

EDIT: Regarding forced collectivization during the Spanish Civil War-- it hardly compares to what was practiced in the fSU. Less than 20% of the land in the Republican zone was collectivized and the overwhelming number of collectives were voluntarily organized. Economic pressure was applied to those peasants remaining outside the collective-- they could employ no external labor, even that of extended family members; those that fled the land had their land seized-- but forced classwide collectivization through seizure was not the organizing force of the rural class struggle.

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

Perhaps I overemphasized to make the point here. You look at it and see the glass half empty, and I see the glass half full. I think there was a lot more coercion and less voluntary organization than you do, but I certainly don't think what went on was anything like as bad as in the USSR under Stalin.

The anarchists had much better support and organization in the countryside than the Stalinists did in Russia. There is a vision of the Soviet state as some sort of all-seeing totalitarian colossus, which after the Great Terror of the late 1930s was almost true for a while. That is *not at all* what things were like in the Soviet countryside in the late 1920s, at which point the presence of Soviet party and state among 90% of the population of the country was feeble.

Which is exactly why the imposition of Stalin's brilliant ideas on recalcitrant peasants was so much worse than the same thing in Spain. But in principle the situation was not that different.

-M.H.-

PS: is there a tutorial on how multiquote works?

[A Marxist Historian]

Since quote for some reason is not working for me, here's my reply to syndicat as to collectivization and agriculture in Russia:
Actually, individual land ownership had been abolished during the Russian Revolution. By the peasants themselves by the way, not by the Bolsheviks. Land was owned by the village communes, not individual peasants. And the communes decided who got which land.

But the communes were dominated by the more prosperous peasants, who gave the best land to their friends and the worst to the people they didn't like. So you had during the NEP *economic* differentiation not land ownership differentiation. Which was *encouraged* by the Soviet government, with Bukharin's famous slogan for the peasants, "enrich yourselves."

The theoretical party definition of a kulak was simple. Did he work the land himself, or was he hiring farmworkers to work for him? In other words, was he a capitalist? Hiring farmworkers to work for you was relegalized in 1925, though it had in fact been going on on a growing scale before that anyway. In real life on the farm things were much more complicated. The usual *peasant* definition of a kulak was a moneylender, the peasant you borrowed money from at ridiculously high usurer's rates.

By the late '20s, a clear class of rural capitalists, kulaks, had developed, 10% of the farm population growing some 50% or so of the grain (don't have the figures in front of me, I think that's about right), who owned grain mills and sometimes even tractors, while the poor and middle peasants were still using sickles like their ancestors had for the last thousand years. But still in theory not owning any land.

The old prerevolutionary kulaks, beneficiaries of the Stolypin "reforms," had had their landholding redistributed away from them during the Revolution. The new kulaks were sometimes the old kulaks, and were sometimes brand new ones taking advantage of the NEP and, quite often, of party membership.

-M.H.-

[syndicat]

Since quote for some reason is not working for me, here's my reply to syndicat as to collectivization and agriculture in Russia:
Actually, individual land ownership had been abolished during the Russian Revolution. By the peasants themselves by the way, not by the Bolsheviks. Land was owned by the village communes, not individual peasants. And the communes decided who got which land.

But the communes were dominated by the more prosperous peasants, who gave the best land to their friends and the worst to the people they didn't like. So you had during the NEP *economic* differentiation not land ownership differentiation. Which was *encouraged* by the Soviet government, with Bukharin's famous slogan for the peasants, "enrich yourselves."



the technical definition of kulak is what I gave: owns more land than can farm with his family, and thus hires others. as I pointed out, government statistics say that only 0.07 percent of the peasants in 1921 were kulaks.

now, the land was declared nationalized by the government. the peasants couldn't make it a law. the peasants seized the land in 1917.

the mir or commune had controlled the land for a very long time, apart from the land in the hands of the big land owners, which was seized in the revolution...1917 in Russia proper, a bit later in Ukraine. Many of Makhno's army's actions were seizure of land by kulaks (including colonies of German farmers who hired Ukrainian peasants to work for them).

the mir distributed land on the basis of number of mouths to feed. the larger the family, the larger the plot they were allotted.

if the peasants had seized the land in 1917 and the mir alloted it according to mouths to feed, where would your supposed kulak class have come from? how would they have gotten control of the land?

in reality this talk about some major kulak class post-revolution is just ML mythology.

in regard to Seidman on the extent of collectivization in Spain, he talks about Catalonia. but Catalonia was not an area of big land owners. there had been big landowners but the land had been distributed to the peasant renters in the early '30s under the ERC's land reform...one of the few actual land reforms in Spain. so there was not much collectivization in Catalonia. the exception were market garden operations near cities which worked with hired laborers. to compete with the ERC's farmers union, the POUM also organized farmer unions in Lleida and Gerona. Again, these were organizations of the small farm proprietors.

when talking about collectivization, you need to talk about the area. that's because Spain's land holding pattern in the countryside differed greatly from one region to another. the area of bit latifundias was the area south of the Guadrama mountains, that is, south of Madrid, in Nueva Castilla and Andalucia. in that part of Spain 3 percent of the population owned 90 percent of the land. However, a large part of this area was overrun fairly early on by the fascist army...especially Caceres and western Andalucia.

But there were major land seizures in Nueva Castilla. There were 700 collectivized villages in Nueva Castilla, Murcia and Valencia.

But Valencia was another area where a large part of the land remained in the hands of the individual peasant proprietors. The richest land in the country was along the coast and this was the main citrus region. Here you had small orchards owned by individual peasant proprietors. The situation was similar to Catlonia in that in each region the CNT was the dominant union but this was based on the urban working class. In the case of the citrus industry, the CNT socialized everything other than the orchards. That is, the entire packing and transport and marketing system. The individual peasant proprietors had been the main political base of the pre-war Valencia Autonomist Party which was proto-fascist. During the civil war the Communist Party preyed on their fears of the CNT to mobilize them.

Aragon is interesting because it was an area of small holders but with some larger and medium sized farm owners. Many of the owners of small plots could not survive from their plot and worked in wage labor part of the year.

Collectivization as a solution promoted by both the CNT and UGT farm worker unions was not aimed at seizing land of small proprietors working on their own. Their aim was to take the land of the big owners and the excess land of farmers who did work but also hired laborers to work on their larger farms. The aim of the unions was abolition of wage-slavery in the countryside.

Collectivization therefore is not really relevant in relation to all of the farm land then in Spain or the anti-fascist zone. Where it was relevant was in areas of Aragon, Nueva Castilla, Murcia and Valencia (and the small anti-fascist area in Andalucia) where large land owning and hiring of farm workers had existed.

it is simply incorrect to say there had been any significant Republican land reform, except in Catalonia, prior to the revolution. so this can't be an explanation for the persistence of small farm proprietors outside Catalonia.

Burnett Bolleten, an American UPI reporter in Spain at the time, collected a lot of data on worker seizures of land and companies. he gives an estimate of 14 million acres of farm land collectivized. but we'd need to know the total of farm land in the anti-fascist zone to know the percent. but, as I say, i don't think that is entirely relevant because collectivization was a solution for the situation of capitalist agriculture, that is, where farm workers were hired laborers.

[A Marxist Historian]

the technical definition of kulak is what I gave: owns more land than can farm with his family, and thus hires others. as I pointed out, government statistics say that only 0.07 percent of the peasants in 1921 were kulaks.

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OK then, so what you mean is not *owned* the land, since they didn't own it, but *farmed* the land?

Sure, in 1921 at the end of War Communism before the NEP came in, very few peasants farmed more land than they could work by themselves. Things *changed* under NEP, that's the point.

-M.H.-

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now, the land was declared nationalized by the government. the peasants couldn't make it a law. the peasants seized the land in 1917.

the mir or commune had controlled the land for a very long time, apart from the land in the hands of the big land owners, which was seized in the revolution...1917 in Russia proper, a bit later in Ukraine. Many of Makhno's army's actions were seizure of land by kulaks (including colonies of German farmers who hired Ukrainian peasants to work for them).

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I assume you mean "from" kulaks, I'm not going to pester you about your grammar. Makhno's troops were Ukrainian peasants who certainly seized the land from non-Ukrainians, whether German or anything else. But they tended to be kulaks too. Why? Because it was a volunteer cavalry army on horseback, and a peasant who had a horse, i.e a Cossack more or less, and could afford to use his horse as a cavalry not a plowhorse, pretty much had to be a kulak by Ukrainian standards. And Ukraine, the granary of the Tsarist empire, was exactly where you had the highest level of differentiation between rich and poor peasants in the whole Tsarist Empire, and where you had the least seizure of land of prosperous *Ukrainian* peasants during the Revolution.

-M.H.-

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the mir distributed land on the basis of number of mouths to feed. the larger the family, the larger the plot they were allotted.

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That was the theory. Often, it corresponded about as well to actual practice as Stalinist rhetoric about the glories of collectivization corresponded to reality.

In practice, in farming land quality is very important, sometimes almost as important as how good your equipment is. If you get stuck with miserable land you can't grow a thing, if you get the good land you can get rich quick, especially in the aftermath of famine with people desperate for bread. That everybody might get the same number of acres is irrelevant.

And then you save up and buy a tractor, or build a mill and become the village miller and charge whatever you like, everybody has to pay whatever price you set or they're screwed. Etc. etc.

-M.H.-

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if the peasants had seized the land in 1917 and the mir alloted it according to mouths to feed, where would your supposed kulak class have come from? how would they have gotten control of the land?

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

Simple. Peasants didn't simply turn their grain into bread and eat it, they sold it. The peasants who grew the most grain got prosperous, those who didn't do as well, for whatever reason, got poor, got hungry, and had to hire themselves out to the kulaks to feed their kids.

They didn't get control of the land, and they didn't need it. They were capitalists not landlords.

And they got tired of what they saw as the too low prices the Soviet state was paying them, and you had a nationwide kulak-organized peasant grain strike in the spring of 1928. And then a whole lot of bad stuff happened.

-M.H.-

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in reality this talk about some major kulak class post-revolution is just ML mythology.

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This is of course a big question the historians argue about, and the Moshe Lewin Bukharinist school is naturally favored in academia these days. I think that's wrong.

-M.H.-

[Savage]

And if the bourgeoisie says that the Soviet Union was bad...

Yeah, right. You believe them.

Ah no, when I read Marx and realize that certain governments that are perceived as socialist are actually just capital personified, when I realize that socialist societies need to be devoid of nasty things like commodity production and the value form in order to have overcome capital, that's when I make my judgement.

[manic expression]

Ah no, when I read Marx and realize that certain governments that are perceived as socialist are actually just capital personified, when I realize that socialist societies need to be devoid of nasty things like commodity production and the value form in order to have overcome capital, that's when I make my judgement.
And how do you come to this conclusion? Why do you assume that the socialist countries of history weren't devoid of commodity production and the rule of the law of value?

[A Marxist Historian]

And how do you come to this conclusion? Why do you assume that the socialist countries of history weren't devoid of commodity production and the rule of the law of value?

This is where the value of Preobrazhensky's theories come in. His analysis is that, in transitional societies like, say, the Soviet Union in the 1920s when he was writing, you had a *struggle between* the law of value and the socialist principle of planning, in the two different sectors of the economy, the state and private sectors.

Were those countries dubbed "socialist countries" by their leaders (the Soviet Union after the abolition of NEP, Maoist China, etc.) devoid of the rule of the law of value? Well, contemporary China obviously not. The Soviet Union? That was at one point Stalin's opinion. There was even a brief attempt circa 1930 to move to the abolition of money.

But this was clearly not the case. If the law of value truly had no meaning in Soviet society, there would have been no need for the monopoly of foreign trade, as the importation of cheaper capitalist goods from abroad would not have been problematic.

As it clearly was. The GDR, the economically most successful "socialist country" ever, at least until recently with the rapid economic growth in China, crumpled like paper when the Berlin Wall went down and the state monopoly of foreign trade disappeared.

-M.H.-

[manic expression]

But this was clearly not the case. If the law of value truly had no meaning in Soviet society, there would have been no need for the monopoly of foreign trade, as the importation of cheaper capitalist goods from abroad would not have been problematic.
One doesn't follow from the other. Why would foreign trade with capitalist countries be more socialist without a state monopoly?


As it clearly was. The GDR, the economically most successful "socialist country" ever, at least until recently with the rapid economic growth in China, crumpled like paper when the Berlin Wall went down and the state monopoly of foreign trade disappeared.
That is a political factor, not a purely economic one. The DDR was given up by Gorbachev, which was the cause of its fall. If the vanguard's leadership is no longer a vanguard but essentially counterrevolutionary, it is no condemnation of the economic foundation but of the direction of the party and of the state.

[Savage]

And how do you come to this conclusion? Why do you assume that the socialist countries of history weren't devoid of commodity production and the rule of the law of value?

It is funny that you're revising Stalin's position of commodity producing socialism.

[manic expression]

It is funny that you're revising Stalin's position of commodity producing socialism.
I think you'll find that I disagree with Stalin on more than a few issues.

[Savage]

I think you'll find that I disagree with Stalin on more than a few issues.

Interesting, so you uphold Marx's understanding of a socialist society then?

[manic expression]

Interesting, so you uphold Marx's understanding of a socialist society then?
You mean this?

"What we have to deal with here is a communist society, not as it has developed on its own foundations, but, on the contrary, just as it emerges from capitalist society; which is thus in every respect, economically, morally, and intellectually, still stamped with the birthmarks of the old society from whose womb it emerges. Accordingly, the individual producer receives back from society -- after the deductions have been made -- exactly what he gives to it. What he has given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he has given to society in one form, he receives back in another."

Yes, I do. If you had another passage in mind, I'd be open to giving my thoughts on it.

[A Marxist Historian]

One doesn't follow from the other. Why would foreign trade with capitalist countries be more socialist without a state monopoly?

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OK, I'll lay out the logic a little clearly and explain why one follows from the other.

We were talking about whether the capitalist law of value applied in a society like, say, the Soviet Union.

In a true socialist society, the law of value doesn't apply. But if the law of value doesn't apply, then if you import goods produced on a capitalist basis from a capitalist country, and they are cheaper, lower price, than what the socialist society produces, this won't disrupt the economy because the capitalist law of value just doesn't apply, as cheapness or being expensive just doesn't matter.

But in fact it did, once the monopoly of trade went down with the DDR everybody wanted Deutschmarks and all East German industry went to pot even before the West Germans came in with wrecking balls and started knocking factories down.

Clear? -M.H.-

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That is a political factor, not a purely economic one. The DDR was given up by Gorbachev, which was the cause of its fall. If the vanguard's leadership is no longer a vanguard but essentially counterrevolutionary, it is no condemnation of the economic foundation but of the direction of the party and of the state.

It is absolutely true that Gorbachev dumped the DDR. But the economic foundations had everything to do with how the working class felt about it all, why workers ended up voting for German reunification and ending the existence of the DDR. They had lost faith in socialist production in East Germany, especially after the Wall was down and they could go to the West and buy things, and they wanted Deutschmarks to buy more things.

Marxists always have to pay more attention to what is going on with the workers than with the leaders on top.

Politics, as somebody said, I forget who, is concentrated economics. That the East German Communist Party went along with Gorbachev on this had a big effect on workers' consciousness of course. But ultimately it was the relative economic failure of East Germany as opposed to West Germany in East German workers' eyes that was the reason the DDR went down.

Only a revolutionary leadership with a perspective of *revolutionary* reunification of East and West Germany, with East Germany taking over the West instead of the other way around, could have the answer to the situation. The East German idea of "building socialism in half a country," though it worked better there than in say Bulgaria or for that matter the Soviet Union itself, just didn't cut it. Trotsky had the right idea.

-M.H.-

[manic expression]

It is absolutely true that Gorbachev dumped the DDR. But the economic foundations had everything to do with how the working class felt about it all, why workers ended up voting for German reunification and ending the existence of the DDR. They had lost faith in socialist production in East Germany, especially after the Wall was down and they could go to the West and buy things, and they wanted Deutschmarks to buy more things.
True. However, it did have political/ideological underpinnings as well. It was much a case of workers in socialist Europe believing the consumerist capitalist propaganda that the 1980's is known and hated for. The communist responses to this challenge was almost self-defeatist and woefully ineffective. Communists had to be out on the streets telling people that all that glitters is not gold, and in this case what was glittering was complete BS...but they weren't. That's kind of what I meant when I said the party became too formal in its position.


Marxists always have to pay more attention to what is going on with the workers than with the leaders on top.
Oftentimes the two are very much connected, no?


Politics, as somebody said, I forget who, is concentrated economics. That the East German Communist Party went along with Gorbachev on this had a big effect on workers' consciousness of course. But ultimately it was the relative economic failure of East Germany as opposed to West Germany in East German workers' eyes that was the reason the DDR went down.
As you alluded to, the SEP had always been tied very closely to Moscow's line, arguably more than any other country in socialist Europe. Thus, as Moscow veered right more than a jockey at a British horse race, the SEP wasn't in a position to do anything about it. Add in the failure to combat imperialist propaganda and the recipe for disaster was set.


Only a revolutionary leadership with a perspective of *revolutionary* reunification of East and West Germany, with East Germany taking over the West instead of the other way around, could have the answer to the situation. The East German idea of "building socialism in half a country," though it worked better there than in say Bulgaria or for that matter the Soviet Union itself, just didn't cut it. Trotsky had the right idea.
Trotsky didn't live to see Germany in two halves, and "Socialism in One Country" (which wasn't actually Soviet policy after 1956 IIRC) doesn't mean you stop promoting revolution beyond socialism's borders.

[Jose Gracchus]

That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. The SEP was not popular, and the gerontocratic Warsaw Pact states were kept barely afloat by bribing the working class with giveaways financed unsustainably and alternatively by mortgaging the State to Western bankers or by Soviet subsidy. The glorious bureaucratic managers of the USSR did not want to keep paying to prop up the SEP, and made a calculated choice to cut them off and save the cash of financing a wall of buffer states in Central-Eastern Europe that had long outlived any usefulness to that elite. The idea that the Soviet state apparatus had any commitment intrinsically to "socialism" in the late 1970s and forward is a wide-eyed fantasy that exists only in the heads of Brezhnevite moralists today, and has no historical content.

You have literally no idea what you're talking about in the history of Eastern Europe in the 1980s. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

[Savage]

Yes, I do. If you had another passage in mind, I'd be open to giving my thoughts on it.

Fair enough, I just find it odd that you believe a post monetary, ultimately classless society to have existed within the USSR.

[A Marxist Historian]

That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. The SEP was not popular, and the gerontocratic Warsaw Pact states were kept barely afloat by bribing the working class with giveaways financed unsustainably and alternatively by mortgaging the State to Western bankers or by Soviet subsidy. The glorious bureaucratic managers of the USSR did not want to keep paying to prop up the SEP, and made a calculated choice to cut them off and save the cash of financing a wall of buffer states in Central-Eastern Europe that had long outlived any usefulness to that elite. The idea that the Soviet state apparatus had any commitment intrinsically to "socialism" in the late 1970s and forward is a wide-eyed fantasy that exists only in the heads of Brezhnevite moralists today, and has no historical content.

You have literally no idea what you're talking about in the history of Eastern Europe in the 1980s. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada.

Eh? Well, I have a piece of paper on my wall that says I know something about modern European history. But let's not get into that.

The SED not popular? Well, now they call it Die Linke, after two name changes. Still pretty popular there. It's true the SED got pretty damn unpopular for a while around 1989, but for a good part of its history it was quite popular. Nobody ever liked Ulbricht much, but Honecker was another story.

We have some East Germans posting here on Revleft, maybe you should pay some attention to what they say from time to time. Maybe they know things you don't, being as they live there and you obviously don't?

It's true that by the late '80s the USSR and Eastern Europe had got themselves into a serious economic pickle thru Stalinist mismanagement. So what else is new?

Until the 1960s, the standard of living for workers in some countries in Eastern Europe, especially Czechoslovakia, was *higher* than in large parts of Western Europe, and only partially because of support from the Soviet Union, which some fools actually think was "imperialistically exploiting" Eastern Europe. That's not what they tell you in school, or in myth books from the Tony Cliff-Chris Harman school, but figures don't always lie.

Certainly Brezhnev was committed to socialism as he understood it. Anybody who doubts that should just read all those top-secret Politburo discussions now so easily available. Frexample, read his top scret explanations of why the Soviet Union should invade Afghanistan.

He was a lousy socialist, but he ain't alone on that. Not to mention any names, but there are some pretty lousy socialists here on Revleft too.

-M.H.-

[Orange Juche]

Why didn't Trotsky eat ice cream?

He got brain freeze!

[A Marxist Historian]

True. However, it did have political/ideological underpinnings as well. It was much a case of workers in socialist Europe believing the consumerist capitalist propaganda that the 1980's is known and hated for. The communist responses to this challenge was almost self-defeatist and woefully ineffective. Communists had to be out on the streets telling people that all that glitters is not gold, and in this case what was glittering was complete BS...but they weren't. That's kind of what I meant when I said the party became too formal in its position.


Oftentimes the two are very much connected, no?


As you alluded to, the SEP had always been tied very closely to Moscow's line, arguably more than any other country in socialist Europe. Thus, as Moscow veered right more than a jockey at a British horse race, the SEP wasn't in a position to do anything about it. Add in the failure to combat imperialist propaganda and the recipe for disaster was set.


Trotsky didn't live to see Germany in two halves, and "Socialism in One Country" (which wasn't actually Soviet policy after 1956 IIRC) doesn't mean you stop promoting revolution beyond socialism's borders.

Well, good to see a poster here who knows what he is talking about. Most of what you say in this posting at least makes sense, even if I don't agree with you on some things.

But Trotsky not being alive for German disunity is just point picking, it's obvious he would have thought it's even harder to build socialism in half a country than a whole one.

And whatever the formal platform was, Khrushchev was obviously a "socialism in one country" man. I mean, here's the guy who was down for peaceful coexistence! Definitely not a Trotskyist. For him the USSR was always first, that's why he had his split with Mao, another "socialism in one country" guy, except that for Mao it was China.

Khrushchev's idea of promoting revolution beyond socialism's borders was sending missiles to Cuba, not workers revolution.

-M.H.-

[Jose Gracchus]

Eh? Well, I have a piece of paper on my wall that says I know something about modern European history. But let's not get into that.

The SED not popular? Well, now they call it Die Linke, after two name changes. Still pretty popular there. It's true the SED got pretty damn unpopular for a while around 1989, but for a good part of its history it was quite popular. Nobody ever liked Ulbricht much, but Honecker was another story.

Uh Die Linke has nothing to do with what I'm talking about, and obviously I said 1980s, so yeah, I do know what I'm talking about. This clown made it sound like there was some kind of impulse for socialism and workers buried real deep down in the CPSU and SED in the late 80s; that's preposterous.


We have some East Germans posting here on Revleft, maybe you should pay some attention to what they say from time to time. Maybe they know things you don't, being as they live there and you obviously don't?

Hey, there's an ex-Soviet citizen sitting on my couch five feet away. Want to play the "hurr who knows better" game still?


It's true that by the late '80s the USSR and Eastern Europe had got themselves into a serious economic pickle thru Stalinist mismanagement. So what else is new?

Nothing. I was arguing with someone who seriously contended that this is the cause of evil infiltrators penetrating somehow the Great Socialist Fatherland and its puppets.


Until the 1960s, the standard of living for workers in some countries in Eastern Europe, especially Czechoslovakia, was *higher* than in large parts of Western Europe, and only partially because of support from the Soviet Union, which some fools actually think was "imperialistically exploiting" Eastern Europe. That's not what they tell you in school, or in myth books from the Tony Cliff-Chris Harman school, but figures don't always lie.

Its factually true in the absolute that the USSR looted the material resources, industrial fabric, and even large quantities of labor-power from Eastern Europe after 1945. Certainly after the Stalinist phase, the relationship actually became a peculiar case of imperialism where the USSR financed its satellites in order to maintain a strategic buffer zone.


Certainly Brezhnev was committed to socialism as he understood it. Anybody who doubts that should just read all those top-secret Politburo discussions now so easily available. Frexample, read his top scret explanations of why the Soviet Union should invade Afghanistan.

I'm not really interested in what Brezhnev, with his gigantic car collection, understood socialism to be. Especially while his economists and managers were going to get Hayekist education in the West and complaining about the level of labor discipline they could impose on their workers versus Western firms. Check out some of those sources; they could easily be Swedish capitalists complaining in the late 1970s.


He was a lousy socialist, but he ain't alone on that. Not to mention any names, but there are some pretty lousy socialists here on Revleft too.

-M.H.-

I think you're a kook if you think Brezhnev was any kind of socialist.

[A Marxist Historian]

Uh Die Linke has nothing to do with what I'm talking about, and obviously I said 1980s, so yeah, I do know what I'm talking about. This clown made it sound like there was some kind of impulse for socialism and workers buried real deep down in the CPSU and SED in the late 80s; that's preposterous.

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I was dealing with what you said, not what the other fella said.

The collapse in popularity of the SED in the late '80s was quite sudden. As late as the early '80s, the regime was fairly popular, though not with everybody of course.

Die Linke has everything to do with this, because even now, some 65% of the membership of Die Linke is former SED members. My source for this is honorary chairman of Die Linke Modrow, who was also the last head of state for the GDR. And is a fairly popular fellow to this day in East Germany.

I consider him a fairly opportunist left social democrat, whose politics are not terribly good. At least he doesn't like the "realos" trying to turn Die Linke into a second edition of the SPD.

But trying to deny that he is a socialist and interested in the cause of the workers is just the worst form of sectarian stupidity. And he wasn't buried deep down in the SED, he was right at the top.

Now the CPUSSR is another story, after Andropov croaked there was hardly anybody in it still interested in socialism in any way, at least at the top levels. Looking at the decomposition products of the CPUSSR makes that pretty obvious. The Zyuganov party, the "official" Russian CP, are basically anti-Semitic gaybashing Russian nationalist social-fascists.

One time when I was in Russia, a rank and file left activist told me that in her factory, the party cell was made up of the owner, the managers, the foremen and one solitary worker for the form of things, hoping for a promotion.

-M.H.-

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Hey, there's an ex-Soviet citizen sitting on my couch five feet away. Want to play the "hurr who knows better" game still?



Nothing. I was arguing with someone who seriously contended that this is the cause of evil infiltrators penetrating somehow the Great Socialist Fatherland and its puppets.



Its factually true in the absolute that the USSR looted the material resources, industrial fabric, and even large quantities of labor-power from Eastern Europe after 1945. Certainly after the Stalinist phase, the relationship actually became a peculiar case of imperialism where the USSR financed its satellites in order to maintain a strategic buffer zone.

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Given the huge destruction the Soviet Union suffered, with 25 million dead and the whole western half of the country destroyed, large scale transfer of economic resources from Eastern Europe was absolutely justified, although the way it was done was pretty terrible, in fact it was downright Stalinist, surprise surprise. Better would have been if the help came from America, but somehow that wasn't happening, to Stalin's great and basically justified annoyance.

I read a fine book analyzing this many years ago by a thoroughly bourgeois academic who pointed out that this was done to the countries that invaded the Soviet Union and did the damage, and *not* done to good guy countries like, say, Bulgaria. Or Poland for that matter, even though Stalin didn't like Poland.

Of course it was disgusting that Stalin made no distinction between German or Rumanian or Hungarian workers and their ruling classes. But what would you expect? Stalin was a Stalinist after all.

-M.H.-

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I'm not really interested in what Brezhnev, with his gigantic car collection, understood socialism to be. Especially while his economists and managers were going to get Hayekist education in the West and complaining about the level of labor discipline they could impose on their workers versus Western firms. Check out some of those sources; they could easily be Swedish capitalists complaining in the late 1970s.

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

Yex, a whole bunch of his medium level economic managers were lusting for capitalism, and under Gorbachev and then Yeltsin they got what they wanted.

The central top level economic manager and planner under Brezhnev was Nikolai Baibakov, the first of whose autobios was translated into English and published by the CPUSA in the '80s. I haven't read it, but I have read his two subsequent autobios in Russian published in the '90s, devoted to defending Soviet economic planning against criticism, and supporting the "red-brown" Zyuganov party and opposing Yeltsin.

The '80s bio likely has lots of Brezhnevite fuzz covering it, and may not be too interesting, though I suspect you'd know a lot more about the Soviet Union under Brezhnev if you read it. The later books make it quite clear, minus any need for phony bullshit, that he did definitely consider himself a socialist and was trying to build what he considered socialism.

------------------------------------------------------------
I think you're a kook if you think Brezhnev was any kind of socialist.

I consider Brezhnev a socialist of the Archie Bunker school.

He most certainly was a worker by background. The Soviet Politburo under Brezhnev was *entirely* composed of former workers, with only one intellectual in it. And that's the way Brezhnev liked it.

I think there has never in the history of the human race been a government with a higher percentage of workers by original social background at the top levels.

The Soviet Union was not a socialist country, you can't build socialism in one country anyway. But it was certainly a degenerated workers state, with the top guys not only workers, but pretty degenerated on a personal basis, not just politically.

-M.H.-

[RedTrackWorker]

Given the huge destruction the Soviet Union suffered...large scale transfer of economic resources from Eastern Europe was absolutely justified....

I read a fine book analyzing this many years ago by a thoroughly bourgeois academic who pointed out that this was done to the countries that invaded the Soviet Union and did the damage, and *not* done to good guy countries....

Lenin versus Spartacist historian:


This struggle is the struggle for freedom, for the reconciliation of peoples, for Socialism. It is necessary to take up this struggle for peace, for a peace without annexations or war indemnities. Such a peace, however, is only possible if every thought of violating the rights and liberties of nations is condemned. Neither the occupation of entire countries nor of separate parts of countries must lead to their violent annexation. No annexation, whether open or concealed, and no forcible economic attachment made still more unbearable by political disfranchisement. The right of self-determination of nations must be the indestructible principle in the system of national relationships of peoples.


By a just or democratic peace, for which the overwhelming majority of the working class and other working people of all the belligerent countries, exhausted, tormented and racked by the war, are craving — a peace that has been most definitely and insistently demanded by the Russian workers and peasants ever since the overthrow of the tsarist monarchy — by such a peace the government means an immediate peace without annexations (i.e., without the seizure of foreign lands, without the forcible incorporation of foreign nations) and without indemnities.

[manic expression]

That's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. The SEP was not popular, and the gerontocratic Warsaw Pact states were kept barely afloat by bribing the working class with giveaways financed unsustainably and alternatively by mortgaging the State to Western bankers or by Soviet subsidy. The glorious bureaucratic managers of the USSR did not want to keep paying to prop up the SEP, and made a calculated choice to cut them off and save the cash of financing a wall of buffer states in Central-Eastern Europe that had long outlived any usefulness to that elite. The idea that the Soviet state apparatus had any commitment intrinsically to "socialism" in the late 1970s and forward is a wide-eyed fantasy that exists only in the heads of Brezhnevite moralists today, and has no historical content.
Ah, so good of you to show. Now, once we tear away the meaningless sloganeering that you're so fond of...there's very little you actually said. You (sort of) claim Gorbachev gave the DDR up because he didn't feel like paying for it anymore, and yet you ignore the massive shift in policy all around that time, and that it wasn't at all just a bureaucratic book-balancing decision. But that's really the only real charge you've made, so I'll just let your utterly typical void of argument sink in for effect.


You have literally no idea what you're talking about in the history of Eastern Europe in the 1980s. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada.But you do because your girlfriend's mom told you something once. Got it.


Lenin versus Spartacist historian:
Yes, what a terrible suppression of self-determination when the Soviet Union added to Belarus the part that Poland had conquered. :rolleyes:

[Jose Gracchus]

He most certainly was a worker by background. The Soviet Politburo under Brezhnev was *entirely* composed of former workers, with only one intellectual in it. And that's the way Brezhnev liked it.

I think there has never in the history of the human race been a government with a higher percentage of workers by original social background at the top levels.

This is fucking stupid. You can't just make something "Really really worker yo" and suggest that at all affects the material content of the relations of production at the base of the society.


The Soviet Union was not a socialist country, you can't build socialism in one country anyway. But it was certainly a degenerated workers state, with the top guys not only workers, but pretty degenerated on a personal basis, not just politically.

-M.H.-

I don't know what "personal basis" means except some quasi-conservative "decadence before the fall" bullshit.


Ah, so good of you to show. Now, once we tear away the meaningless sloganeering that you're so fond of...there's very little you actually said. You (sort of) claim Gorbachev gave the DDR up because he didn't feel like paying for it anymore, and yet you ignore the massive shift in policy all around that time, and that it wasn't at all just a bureaucratic book-balancing decision. But that's really the only real charge you've made, so I'll just let your utterly typical void of argument sink in for effect.

And what's your story? I offered a mechanism. I suggested (HORROR) that maybe economic realities and fundamentals shape policy at the core of things. You prefer to believe everything is sublime sincere ideological in content.

I understand Brezhnevites now. Everytime someone hoists a red flag, you believe materialist history ends, and it becomes just every liberal's wet dreams of the "right ideas, right places". Gotcha.


But you do because your girlfriend's mom told you something once. Got it.

At least when I hear her talk about the social benefits like child care of the early 1980s, I don't have to roll my eyes at the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of the preacher.

And no, unlike some people, I don't believe things just because someone else (like the brave party people that gave my life meaning after meeting them at some rally yo) told me they were so. I read books.


Yes, what a terrible suppression of self-determination when the Soviet Union added to Belarus the part that Poland had conquered. :rolleyes:

Revanchism is the first stage of socialism!

[S.Artesian]

Given the huge destruction the Soviet Union suffered, with 25 million dead and the whole western half of the country destroyed, large scale transfer of economic resources from Eastern Europe was absolutely justified, although the way it was done was pretty terrible, in fact it was downright Stalinist, surprise surprise. Better would have been if the help came from America, but somehow that wasn't happening, to Stalin's great and basically justified annoyance.

Our pseudo-Marxist historian, authentic apologist for Stalinism should meet our pseudo-Marxist "economist," apologist for Stalinism, Paul Cockshott so they can embrace each other over the war guilt of Germany.

Here's the bottom line: after the destruction inflicted upon the population in general, and workers in particular, brought on in part by the fSU's policies which led to the destruction of the proletariat's revolution in particular, the fSU is, in general, justified in inflicting more destruction, privation, misery on those workers.

And that, comrades, is indeed the meaning of "socialism in one country." And "defending the Soviet Union," as distinct, separate, apart, and in opposition to defending the workers' revolution.

[manic expression]

And that, comrades, is indeed the meaning of "socialism in one country." And "defending the Soviet Union," as distinct, separate, apart, and in opposition to defending the workers' revolution.
Except that's not what "Socialism in One Country" actually is.


And what's your story? I offered a mechanism. I suggested (HORROR) that maybe economic realities and fundamentals shape policy at the core of things. You prefer to believe everything is sublime sincere ideological in content.
Um, no, you suggested that Gorbachev was interested in budget shopping, which is one of the most ridiculous misinterpretations of the historical record on record. Yeah, go ahead and tell yourself it was a cost-saving measure...that's the ticket! :lol:


I understand Brezhnevites now. Everytime someone hoists a red flag, you believe materialist history ends, and it becomes just every liberal's wet dreams of the "right ideas, right places". Gotcha.
Each and every time someone hoists a red flag, we can rest assured they don't share either your ideas or your places. :laugh: But thanks for not addressing what I said, it goes well with your "scholarship".


At least when I hear her talk about the social benefits like child care of the early 1980s, I don't have to roll my eyes at the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of the preacher.
But you have no problem using it as a way to try to score points on RevLeft debates. Stay classy!

Oh, and whether or not your eyes roll you still can't bring yourself to see a socialist society when it's sitting in front of you...or in a book.


And no, unlike some people, I don't believe things just because someone else (like the brave party people that gave my life meaning after meeting them at some rally yo) told me they were so. I read books.
That's a nice way of saying you don't do jack shit as far as political activity, and you're either busy cherry-picking your favorite historians or too ignorant to draw independent conclusions from them. But since your definition of "research" is your friend's mom, whose opinion you apparently ignore, it's obvious you're a complete hypocrite no matter what your source is.

Oh, and great job on adding so much political substance to this thread. You really knocked it out of the park with "omg youre dumb and my gf's mom is from there so i kno more lol bye". :laugh: Real scholarly stuff.

[A Marxist Historian]

Lenin versus Spartacist historian:

Nope, that quote of yours is Lenin vs. Stalin, not Lenin vs. me.

I didn't say that Stalin's policy in Eastern Europe was *good.* In fact it was bad, very bad. In fact it was downright Stalinist.

It was however *not* imperialist. Imperialism is economic exploitation, not reparation payments.

Are black or Third World nationalists who demand that white American workers pay for the crimes of US imperialism "imperialists"? No, they just have a bad political line.

Same with Stalin forcing German workers to pay for the crimes of the Nazis, which they were not responsible for.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

This is fucking stupid. You can't just make something "Really really worker yo" and suggest that at all affects the material content of the relations of production at the base of the society.



I don't know what "personal basis" means except some quasi-conservative "decadence before the fall" bullshit.



And what's your story? I offered a mechanism. I suggested (HORROR) that maybe economic realities and fundamentals shape policy at the core of things. You prefer to believe everything is sublime sincere ideological in content.

I understand Brezhnevites now. Everytime someone hoists a red flag, you believe materialist history ends, and it becomes just every liberal's wet dreams of the "right ideas, right places". Gotcha.



At least when I hear her talk about the social benefits like child care of the early 1980s, I don't have to roll my eyes at the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of the preacher.

And no, unlike some people, I don't believe things just because someone else (like the brave party people that gave my life meaning after meeting them at some rally yo) told me they were so. I read books.



Revanchism is the first stage of socialism!

Material content of the relations of production at the base of society? Lotsa big words. Do you know what they actually mean?

OK, I'll break it down for you. Forget the Politburo. Just what do you call a society where autoworkers and coal miners get paid more than doctors and lawyers? It sure wasn't socialism, but doesn't sound much like capitalism to me. That's what was going on down at the base of society.

It was something in between, with the material content blah blah blah of a transitional nature. If run by a fairly healthy workers' state, like you had when Lenin was alive, it's moving in the general direction of socialism. If it's run by a *bureaucratically degenerated* workers state, like with Stalin or Brezhnev, it's moving in the opposite direction, back to capitalism.

Clear?

As for personal basis, as you yourself mentioned, Brezhnev was pretty corrupt with that huge car collection of his, and his daughter was even worse. And not just Brezhnev alone, this ran through the whole overgrown dictatorial bureaucracy.

OK, you wanna mechanism?

Well, you had a *political counterrevolution* in the 1920s after Lenin died, with the old revolutionary guard purged and then killed in the late 1930s, and Stalin in the early 1930s bringing in a new generation of up-and-coming factory workers who'd gone to engineering school, like former steelworker Brezhnev.

They had been beneficiaries of the revolution not revolutionaries, whose idea of what the revolution was all about was working class upward social mobility, especially their own personal upward mobility of course.

In 1921, the Soviet working class, in the aftermath of the Civil War, was down to about a million and a half people. That is approximately the same number as the number of workers promoted into the Soviet bureaucracy during the First Five Year Plan period. And were pretty much the same people. During that period, if you didn't have a record as a Trotskyist or something it was hard for a veteran factory worker *not* to become a Soviet bureaucrat.

The Soviet Union under Stalin was a dictatorship of the Soviet proletariat, or rather ex-proletariat, in the most literal possible sense.

Many of those workers complaining about how Trotsky was a bureaucrat and going on strikes in 1921 led by Mensheviks became loyal Stalinists in the 1930s baying for Trotsky's blood. *Not* the majority of the Soviet working class in 1921, except perhaps as a passing mood. But after the German Revolution of 1923 failed, and it looked like the original Lenin-Trotsky idea of world revolution was just not gonna happen, that kind of demoralization spread to the bulk of the Soviet working class, and Stalin rode that to power.

Upward social mobility was the death of working class socialism in the Soviet Union. Just like America actually.

OK, is that clear enough for you?

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Our pseudo-Marxist historian, authentic apologist for Stalinism should meet our pseudo-Marxist "economist," apologist for Stalinism, Paul Cockshott so they can embrace each other over the war guilt of Germany.

Here's the bottom line: after the destruction inflicted upon the population in general, and workers in particular, brought on in part by the fSU's policies which led to the destruction of the proletariat's revolution in particular, the fSU is, in general, justified in inflicting more destruction, privation, misery on those workers.

And that, comrades, is indeed the meaning of "socialism in one country." And "defending the Soviet Union," as distinct, separate, apart, and in opposition to defending the workers' revolution.

Just 'cuz one doesn't think, like Artesian alleges Cockshott does, that German workers share the blame for Nazism and the Holocaust doesn't mean that the Soviet Union is to blame for Hitler's genocide against, guess who, the people of the Soviet Union.

That is a form of blaming the victim that borders on Holocaust revisionism.

Stalin's policies definitely had a lot to do with Hitler seizing power. But the Soviet Union and its people, unlike Stalin, were Hitler's prime victims.

The Soviet Union was not inflicting destruction on people in East Europe, it was trying to rebuild the Soviet Union out of the immense destruction and human suffering it had undergone, something Artesian doesn't seem to give a damn about.

Some resulting privations for Eastern European workers were a side consequence, which the Soviet Union certainly more than made up for with the material aid given to Eastern Europe *after* the USSR was back on its feet.

It was all done in a very Stalinist way, but that doesn't mean it was wrong in principle. And yes, it had a whole lot to do with "socialism in one country," which is the very essence and definition of Stalinism.

Defending the Soviet Union and defending the working class of the world were *exactly the same thing.* Anyone not clear on that should have figured that out after the Soviet Union collapsed, with the welfare state being rolled up in West Europe, Clinton abolishing welfare in America, and a whole string of US imperial assaults on the Third World no longer checked by Soviet might.

-M.H.-

[Jose Gracchus]

Thanks, but I can look up useless Spart boilerplate without you putting it on a baby spoon and pretending its an airplane going wooooo

Tell me about how Laos has become a deformed workers state bro

[Jose Gracchus]

Um, no, you suggested that Gorbachev was interested in budget shopping, which is one of the most ridiculous misinterpretations of the historical record on record. Yeah, go ahead and tell yourself it was a cost-saving measure...that's the ticket! :lol:

What's your explanation? Gorby was a secret anticommunist who just fell for liberalism and wanted freedom and joy and the great workers' party appointed him in charge because of "careerism"? :rolleyes:

My version is absolutely true. Eastern Europe was seen as a financial sink that the USSR could no longer afford to prop up as a buffer zone. Sorry that the illusions you have were not considered a priority by the Soviet bureaucracy. Why do you think they gave up on the SED and the wonderous workers' states dependent on Moscow's largesse (and the occassional IMF loan)?


Each and every time someone hoists a red flag, we can rest assured they don't share either your ideas or your places. :laugh: But thanks for not addressing what I said, it goes well with your "scholarship".

And you've provided what evidence?


But you have no problem using it as a way to try to score points on RevLeft debates. Stay classy!

And you've provided what evidence?


Oh, and whether or not your eyes roll you still can't bring yourself to see a socialist society when it's sitting in front of you...or in a book.

Socialism isn't just a romantic ideological label that some authoritarian party can slap on the side of whatever. I suppose you think Thomas Sankara declared socialism, which magically made it true.


That's a nice way of saying you don't do jack shit as far as political activity, and you're either busy cherry-picking your favorite historians or too ignorant to draw independent conclusions from them. But since your definition of "research" is your friend's mom, whose opinion you apparently ignore, it's obvious you're a complete hypocrite no matter what your source is.

And you've provided what evidence?

But yes, I've attended rallies and meetings, not that I think these things compose much in the way of communist practice.


Oh, and great job on adding so much political substance to this thread. You really knocked it out of the park with "omg youre dumb and my gf's mom is from there so i kno more lol bye". :laugh: Real scholarly stuff.

And you've provided what citation or what source? But of course you're a thoroughly dishonest fuck who choose to cherry-pick my remarks for style points. Maybe you'll get a dozen PSL "likes" out of it, and a circle-jerk.

[syndicat]

I assume you mean "from" kulaks, I'm not going to pester you about your grammar. Makhno's troops were Ukrainian peasants who certainly seized the land from non-Ukrainians, whether German or anything else. But they tended to be kulaks too. Why? Because it was a volunteer cavalry army on horseback, and a peasant who had a horse, i.e a Cossack more or less, and could afford to use his horse as a cavalry not a plowhorse, pretty much had to be a kulak by Ukrainian standards.

you are completely mistaken. in 1921 when the government demobilized Makhno's army, they kept stats on how much land each owned (or controlled). there weren't any kulaks. a majority owned (controlled) no land at all. that is, they were landless farm laborers (poor peasants...like Makhno's father) or urban workers. the people who did control (own) land were ordinary peasants.

[S.Artesian]

The Soviet Union was not inflicting destruction on people in East Europe, it was trying to rebuild the Soviet Union out of the immense destruction and human suffering it had undergone, something Artesian doesn't seem to give a damn about.

Right, it was attempting to rebuild the fSU by how? Oh by transferring resources, means of production, the expropriated labor of the proletariat to its own realm of dominance. But no, that doesn't mean depriving people of Eastern Europe of those means of production, or holding down their living standards, because after all, the people of Hungary, Romania, Germany didn't really need that productive apparatus, those resources. See the Soviets were just sparing them the problem of overproduction, get it?


Some resulting privations for Eastern European workers were a side consequence, which the Soviet Union certainly more than made up for with the material aid given to Eastern Europe *after* the USSR was back on its feet.

One more line to add to epitaph of Trotskyism

Sure, more than made up for. Too bad those ingrates weren't properly appreciative.


It was all done in a very Stalinist way, but that doesn't mean it was wrong in principle. And yes, it had a whole lot to do with "socialism in one country," which is the very essence and definition of Stalinism.

Which you defend in your defense of reparations. Yet another line for the tombstone.

[manic expression]

What's your explanation? Gorby was a secret anticommunist who just fell for liberalism and wanted freedom and joy and the great workers' party appointed him in charge because of "careerism"? :rolleyes:
Gorbachev was an anti-socialist, backed by imperialism, who enabled counterrevolutionary elements throughout Soviet society while at the same time silencing pro-socialist voices. That actually has to do with what he did, not with whatever insane motive you've somehow divined from your magic wand.


My version is absolutely true. Eastern Europe was seen as a financial sink that the USSR could no longer afford to prop up as a buffer zone. Sorry that the illusions you have were not considered a priority by the Soviet bureaucracy. Why do you think they gave up on the SED and the wonderous workers' states dependent on Moscow's largesse (and the occassional IMF loan)?
Except the DDR was the most successful socialist country in Europe. Why would it then be a "financial sink"? When did the party come out and say "yeah we don't feel like paying for it anymore so nice knowin ya!"? Oh, right, never. Good show.


And you've provided what evidence?
Common knowledge of what happened is far more than sufficient to debunk your ludicrous theories of "Tax Accountant" Gorbachev. But let's go deeper, just for fun. What's my evidence?

What actually happened in the fall. The policies of Glasnost and Perestroika, which benefited (http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1989-03-25/news/8903290721_1_gulag-archipelago-glasnost-boris-yeltsin) almost exclusively (http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/items/show/551) reactionary voices (http://www.deseretnews.com/article/63294/YELTSINS-RIDE-TO-GLASNOST-HAS-BEEN-LONG-BUMPY.html); the rise of Walesa (http://chnm.gmu.edu/1989/items/show/474), Yeltsin and other anti-socialist figureheads who weren't combated but appeased by the party leadership; the actual happenings (http://en.rian.ru/world/20090917/156153211.html) during the end of Soviet support for its fellow socialist states Europe; the lack of anti-capitalist propaganda from the party to counter the absolutely insane counterrevolutionary arguments that capitalism would make everyone rich and happy and dance like Michael Jackson; the anti-socialist riots around the USSR, including the murderous and ultra-nationalist "Black January (http://www.armeniaforeignministry.com/news/q_a/070207-ap-karapetian.html)" pogrom, flames that Gorbachev fanned, not only refusing to do what he was charged with in his position but also using them as pretext to move even further to the right (http://www.tol.org/client/article/8710-black-january.html); the shredding of the referendum of 1991 in which, in spite of years of propaganda and anti-socialist backtreading, a majority of Soviet citizens voted to keep the Soviet Union intact...something that would be undone in the span of a few years.

But to you, none of this matters, because it was all just a failed attempt to do a Deng impression. :rolleyes:


Socialism isn't just a romantic ideological label that some authoritarian party can slap on the side of whatever. I suppose you think Thomas Sankara declared socialism, which magically made it true.
Funny how that's precisely what you're trying to with my views: slap whatever romantic label you want on the side and call it a day.


But yes, I've attended rallies and meetings, not that I think these things compose much in the way of communist practice.
No, you wouldn't, because your idea of communist practice is cherry-picking historians you don't even listen to.


And you've provided what citation or what source? But of course you're a thoroughly dishonest fuck who choose to cherry-pick my remarks for style points. Maybe you'll get a dozen PSL "likes" out of it, and a circle-jerk.
Unfortunately for you, I've been responding to just about every word you've said so far. Apparently, your inability to read a thread is equal to your inability to understand history. Figures.

[A Marxist Historian]

Thanks, but I can look up useless Spart boilerplate without you putting it on a baby spoon and pretending its an airplane going wooooo

Tell me about how Laos has become a deformed workers state bro

You're welcome I suppose, but instead of trolling why don't you go to the Spartacist website and find out yourself?

I'll give you a clue. There was a war on, and Laos had a revolution. Beginning of wisdom.

-M.H.-

[A Marxist Historian]

Thanks, but I can look up useless Spart boilerplate without you putting it on a baby spoon and pretending its an airplane going wooooo

Tell me about how Laos has become a deformed workers state bro

And one more thing. If you think the stuff in that posting of mine was some kind of orthodox Spartacism, then you really are pretty illiterate.

Now, I'd like it if the Spartacists were to agree with all my analyses of the Soviet Union under Stalin. I've seen no particular evidence of that however.

Political consequences and program wise it does come out pretty much the same, which is fine with me, and apparently gives you huge indigestion. But that's your problem not mine.

-M.H.-

[Savage]

Gorbachev was an anti-socialist, backed by imperialism, who enabled counterrevolutionary elements throughout Soviet society while at the same time silencing pro-socialist voices. That actually has to do with what he did, not with whatever insane motive you've somehow divined from your magic wand.

Sorry, another question. I've heard Marxist-Leninists echo Stalin's line of 'two non-antagonist classes' in the USSR, is this a position you follow? Was the working class of the USSR proletarian? Was there a bourgeoisie?

[RedTrackWorker]

Nope, that quote of yours is Lenin vs. Stalin, not Lenin vs. me.

I didn't say that Stalin's policy in Eastern Europe was *good.* In fact it was bad, very bad. In fact it was downright Stalinist.

You said: "large scale transfer of economic resources from Eastern Europe was absolutely justified". "Absolutely justified" is not the same as saying it was "good" and does not contradict Lenin's stance against indemnities due to war?

[A Marxist Historian]

You said: "large scale transfer of economic resources from Eastern Europe was absolutely justified". "Absolutely justified" is not the same as saying it was "good" and does not contradict Lenin's stance against indemnities due to war?

A reasonable question.

Large scale transfer of economic resources to the USSR was good and justified not because of "war guilt," but because 25 million Soviet citizens had died, and the whole western half of the country was in ruins.

Large scale transfer of economic resources from the USA to Haiti right now would be good too, not so much because the US is responsible for all the horrible things that happened to Haiti, though that is certainly true, but simply because the Haitians desperately need it and the US could easily afford it.

Now from Stalin's "socialism in one country" nationalist view, the Germans and Hungarians and Rumanians were "responsible" for the crimes against the Soviet Union. And he did not differentiate between the rulers and the ruled, as he wasn't a Marxist.

But be that as it may, the only place those economic resources the Soviet Union so desperately needed could be gotten was from Eastern Europe, which the Soviet Union had just liberated from the Nazis. And which was in vastly better shape than the Soviet Union. Better this should have been done voluntarily through persuasion than through coercion, but one way or another it had to be done. Survival necessity.

And the Soviets more than paid back this forced loan when they could.

In the late '40s and '50s the standard of living was often *higher* in much of Eastern Europe than in much of Western Europe, even though Eastern Europe was traditionally poorer. Why?

Because the economic restoration of Western Europe, just like that in Eastern Europe, was on the back of the working class. But because Western Europe was capitalist, and Eastern Europe was not, belts were tightened tighter in the West, despite all the resources sent eastwards.

This reversed itself when the West European "economic miracle" finally took off in the late '50s. An economic miracle totally created out of the hide of the West European working class, which is why despite Stalinism the working class of Italy and France was pro-Soviet for so long.

-M.H.-