Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist
7th January 2013, 23:49
I found this on a reddit I browse occasionally and thought that it was worth sharing. I know Stalin bashing is a common theme over here and alot of people accuse me of being "Stalinist" because I disagree with the way the Stalin question is being posed, but I wanted to clarify my position a little bit. I don't think that critiquing Stalin is sectarian in of itself, but I feel that the way Stalin is approached here is a bit sectarian. My biggest problem with the Anti-"Stalinist" vib is that it seems that there is a tendency to reduce Marxist-Leninism to the actions of Stalin which is a bit absurd because Marxist-Leninism has existed long after Stalin's death.
Then there is the even more absurd tendency to reduce a support for a theoretical aspect of Stalin's thought (Socialism in one country, Class Struggle Under Socialism) into a support for his actions. So any one who thinks that socialism can be achieved in one country automatically is a Stalinist and supports death camps, even if that person vehemently denies support for the horrendous actions of Stalin it doesn't matter because clearly that person supports Stalin and every immoral action he ever did, he is only saying that because deep down inside he wants to get nice and close to you so he can shove an ice pick in your head and betray the revolution. This is absurd, there are no imaginary "Stalinists" running around trying to betray the revolution, you are just projecting the failures of your movement on an easy scapegoat so you don't need to deal with the fact that your movement failed and has no one but itself to blame (though it would be fair to argue that Stalin sabotaged the movement of his day, a debatable point but one that has merit.) Likewise, Anti-Revisionists like myself don't want to "rehabilitate" Stalin, we just want to defend him against Khrushchevite revisionism and bourgeois interpretations of Soviet history, though personally since there are no Khrushchevites here this task seems somewhat redundant to me. Nonetheless, alot of people seem to be under the impression that if they find a bad thing about Stalin that it automatically can be used to disprove my Maoism, which quite frankly is wrong. Stalin's crimes don't effect me or my politics because I don't pretend to "uphold" Stalin, I just happen to think that there are a few theoretical concepts that he formulated that became useful once they were fleshed out (and I will put emphasis on this because I don't want anyone to use this to call me a "Stalinist" and accuse me of supporting some massacre or something). I have no investment in defending Stalin because I am a Maoist, you know the one with the Mao in front of the "ism", just because you can tangentally attach me to Stalin and his political thought doesn't mean that I take your criticisms as against my tendency, because you aren't critiquing my tendency. It's like me giving an Anarcho Communism a critique of Marxism and going "See, here's what you've got wrong". He'll just shrug it off because why the fuck should he care, he isn't a Marxist. Likewise if you prove that Stalin killed one million babies I won't take it as a point against me, because I'm not a "Stalinist"
So, now that I've rambled incoherently for a while, I'm going to show you a good example of a valid critique of Stalin that in my opinion is non-sectarian. I found this post in a forum I browse every once and a while and I thought I would share it. Here go you
Comrade mza66 recently submitted to our reddit a link to the book "From Marx to Mao Tse-tung: A Study in Revolutionary Dialectics" (PDF), by British communist George Thomson. First of all, I finished reading the book today and I have to say this is an amazing introduction to Marxism. Thomson covers a lot of ground from an anti-revisionist perspective, his prose is clear, his style didactic and there's plenty of relevant and illuminating quotes by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. Easily the best introduction (the book is about 100 pages long) to modern-ish Marxism-Leninism(-Mao Tse-tung thought, keeping in mind this was written in 1971) I have ever read.
But anyway, that's not what I was going to talk about. Reading his wikipedia page one thing caught my attention:
In 1951, he was the only member of the Communist Party's Executive Committee to vote against the Party’s programme The British Road to Socialism, because “the dictatorship of the proletariat was missing”.
"Interesting!", I thought, a rare case of strong commitment to one's principles. Intrigued, I kept reading about this, jumping to the page about the CPGB's programme itself. There I found that, apparently:
The first edition of the document received the personal approval of Joseph Stalin prior to publication.
Considering the document called for things like:
"Britain's Road to Socialism proposes that socialism can be achieved in Britain by the working class leading the other classes in a popular democratic anti-monopoly alliance against monopoly capital, and implementing a left-wing programme of socialist construction. Part of this strategy involves winning the labour movement for a left position, through struggle in the existing democratic bodies of the working class, such as Trades Unions, Trades Union Councils and tenant's associations."
it seemed odd for Stalin to support such clear case of Western revisionism. So I kept reading, until I hit a marxists.org page with a link to some letters between Stalin himself and the Secretary General of the British Communists (PDF). There, in one of those letters, Stalin advices Pollitt:
"The draft of the programme correctly puts forward the task of utilising the traditional English institutions (Parliament) in the struggle for socialism. It is well known that the English Communists are being accused that they will establish Soviet Power in England. Hence it is imperative that in the draft of the programme it should be very clearly and definitely stated that the English Communists are not going to delegitimise Parliament, that England shall come to socialism through its own path and not through Soviet Power, but through Peoples’ Democracy that would be guided by peoples’ power and not by capitalists; peoples’ power representing a coalition of working class as the leading force of the coalition, working intelligentsia, small and middle strata of the cities as well as farmers. The Communists must declare that this power shall act through the Parliament."
This seems pretty damning, and definitive. My investigation ends here, I just wanted to share with r/communism an interesting case of a communist leader known for its protracted fight against revisionism in the USSR openly endorsing an extremely obvious case of revisionism abroad (it really gets worse than this, with Stalin endorsing other practices such as voting for Labor in districts where the Communists could not present their own candidates, etc). So what do you think? Is this another case of people falling for "Western exceptionalism"? Was Stalin just doing a bit of realpolitik, pushing for un-Marxist policies because they would benefit the USSR in the short term? Is there more to this that I'm missing?
Link: http://www.reddit.com/r/communism/
So in short, Stalin was a Bernsteinite. Which in my oponion is a pretty good reason to dislike him, since I think we can all agree on the fundamental thesis of "Fuck Bernstein"
Then there is the even more absurd tendency to reduce a support for a theoretical aspect of Stalin's thought (Socialism in one country, Class Struggle Under Socialism) into a support for his actions. So any one who thinks that socialism can be achieved in one country automatically is a Stalinist and supports death camps, even if that person vehemently denies support for the horrendous actions of Stalin it doesn't matter because clearly that person supports Stalin and every immoral action he ever did, he is only saying that because deep down inside he wants to get nice and close to you so he can shove an ice pick in your head and betray the revolution. This is absurd, there are no imaginary "Stalinists" running around trying to betray the revolution, you are just projecting the failures of your movement on an easy scapegoat so you don't need to deal with the fact that your movement failed and has no one but itself to blame (though it would be fair to argue that Stalin sabotaged the movement of his day, a debatable point but one that has merit.) Likewise, Anti-Revisionists like myself don't want to "rehabilitate" Stalin, we just want to defend him against Khrushchevite revisionism and bourgeois interpretations of Soviet history, though personally since there are no Khrushchevites here this task seems somewhat redundant to me. Nonetheless, alot of people seem to be under the impression that if they find a bad thing about Stalin that it automatically can be used to disprove my Maoism, which quite frankly is wrong. Stalin's crimes don't effect me or my politics because I don't pretend to "uphold" Stalin, I just happen to think that there are a few theoretical concepts that he formulated that became useful once they were fleshed out (and I will put emphasis on this because I don't want anyone to use this to call me a "Stalinist" and accuse me of supporting some massacre or something). I have no investment in defending Stalin because I am a Maoist, you know the one with the Mao in front of the "ism", just because you can tangentally attach me to Stalin and his political thought doesn't mean that I take your criticisms as against my tendency, because you aren't critiquing my tendency. It's like me giving an Anarcho Communism a critique of Marxism and going "See, here's what you've got wrong". He'll just shrug it off because why the fuck should he care, he isn't a Marxist. Likewise if you prove that Stalin killed one million babies I won't take it as a point against me, because I'm not a "Stalinist"
So, now that I've rambled incoherently for a while, I'm going to show you a good example of a valid critique of Stalin that in my opinion is non-sectarian. I found this post in a forum I browse every once and a while and I thought I would share it. Here go you
Comrade mza66 recently submitted to our reddit a link to the book "From Marx to Mao Tse-tung: A Study in Revolutionary Dialectics" (PDF), by British communist George Thomson. First of all, I finished reading the book today and I have to say this is an amazing introduction to Marxism. Thomson covers a lot of ground from an anti-revisionist perspective, his prose is clear, his style didactic and there's plenty of relevant and illuminating quotes by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. Easily the best introduction (the book is about 100 pages long) to modern-ish Marxism-Leninism(-Mao Tse-tung thought, keeping in mind this was written in 1971) I have ever read.
But anyway, that's not what I was going to talk about. Reading his wikipedia page one thing caught my attention:
In 1951, he was the only member of the Communist Party's Executive Committee to vote against the Party’s programme The British Road to Socialism, because “the dictatorship of the proletariat was missing”.
"Interesting!", I thought, a rare case of strong commitment to one's principles. Intrigued, I kept reading about this, jumping to the page about the CPGB's programme itself. There I found that, apparently:
The first edition of the document received the personal approval of Joseph Stalin prior to publication.
Considering the document called for things like:
"Britain's Road to Socialism proposes that socialism can be achieved in Britain by the working class leading the other classes in a popular democratic anti-monopoly alliance against monopoly capital, and implementing a left-wing programme of socialist construction. Part of this strategy involves winning the labour movement for a left position, through struggle in the existing democratic bodies of the working class, such as Trades Unions, Trades Union Councils and tenant's associations."
it seemed odd for Stalin to support such clear case of Western revisionism. So I kept reading, until I hit a marxists.org page with a link to some letters between Stalin himself and the Secretary General of the British Communists (PDF). There, in one of those letters, Stalin advices Pollitt:
"The draft of the programme correctly puts forward the task of utilising the traditional English institutions (Parliament) in the struggle for socialism. It is well known that the English Communists are being accused that they will establish Soviet Power in England. Hence it is imperative that in the draft of the programme it should be very clearly and definitely stated that the English Communists are not going to delegitimise Parliament, that England shall come to socialism through its own path and not through Soviet Power, but through Peoples’ Democracy that would be guided by peoples’ power and not by capitalists; peoples’ power representing a coalition of working class as the leading force of the coalition, working intelligentsia, small and middle strata of the cities as well as farmers. The Communists must declare that this power shall act through the Parliament."
This seems pretty damning, and definitive. My investigation ends here, I just wanted to share with r/communism an interesting case of a communist leader known for its protracted fight against revisionism in the USSR openly endorsing an extremely obvious case of revisionism abroad (it really gets worse than this, with Stalin endorsing other practices such as voting for Labor in districts where the Communists could not present their own candidates, etc). So what do you think? Is this another case of people falling for "Western exceptionalism"? Was Stalin just doing a bit of realpolitik, pushing for un-Marxist policies because they would benefit the USSR in the short term? Is there more to this that I'm missing?
Link: http://www.reddit.com/r/communism/
So in short, Stalin was a Bernsteinite. Which in my oponion is a pretty good reason to dislike him, since I think we can all agree on the fundamental thesis of "Fuck Bernstein"