What's bad about revisionism?

[Hungrydeer]

So in my understanding revisionism is modifying Marxist theory. So wouldn't this make Lenin a revisionist because he had the doctrine of "Vanguard-ism". And Stalin a revisionist for his doctrine of "Socialism in One Country"? The way I see it, anti-revisionism just turns Marxism into a religion.

[Alan OldStudent]

So in my understanding revisionism is modifying Marxist theory. So wouldn't this make Lenin a revisionist because he had the doctrine of "Vanguard-ism". And Stalin a revisionist for his doctrine of "Socialism in One Country"? The way I see it, anti-revisionism just turns Marxism into a religion.
Today, "revisionism" is more of a dirty name that some call others whom they consider to be a heretic against Marxism.

Trotskyists call Stalinists revisionist. Hoxhaists call Trotskyists and Maoists revisionists, Maoists consider Trotskyists to be revisionist, and so on. If you go to a party filled with Marxists of various tendencies and ask the revisionists to stand up, everybody will sit down. If you ask the party goers to point to the revisionists, you will observe a sea of pointing fingers.
http://alanoldstudent.nfshost.com/general_images/Dingbats/divide4.gif

Originally, when revisionism meant something concrete, it started with a fellow named Eduard Bernstein, who decided that society could become socialist through an evolutionary process, and that capitalism could be transformed into socialism by piecemeal reforms. So revisionism was really some sort of theory that espoused the evolutionary road to socialism, as opposed to a more radical notion of replacing capitalism.

My problem with the term revisionism is that those most often using it against others frequently sound so bloody sectarian. Marx was not a prophet who spoke unvarnished truth. He did not write scripture inspired by God.

Marx himself would be horrified by the notion that so many Marxists consider everything he said to be the unquestioned truth. Marx challenges us to think critically, not dogmatically, to analyze the contradictory trends in human society rationally, in organic terms.

Marx thought that capitalism had to be replaced by socialism and did not think it could be gradually changed by reforms. So I agree with Marx on that account and disagree with Bernstein.

So rather than wondering if Lenin was a revisionist because of his notion of the vanguard party, ask yourself if you see vanguardism as being valid. Ask yourself if you feel Marxism as you understand it is valuable. Always ask yourself why.

Can Marxist notions show us a way of creating a decent tomorrow for us and our children? Ask yourself why or why not?

I see Marxism as being valuable in creating socialism. I also think we must find a way to replace capitalism before it kills us off, and I don't think the way to do that is by piecemeal reforms, although the fight for reforms is quite important.

http://alanoldstudent.nfshost.com/general_images/Dingbats/divide4.gif
By the way, it appears you're pretty new here. Welcome. I hope you find this an interesting and challenging place. And do read some Marx. He'll exercise your brain :)

Regards,
Alan OldStudent
The unexamined life is not worth living--Socrates

[Blake's Baby]

So in my understanding revisionism is modifying Marxist theory...

I think the Stalinists would argue with that definition. No-one else cares, because 'revisionism' is a stick that different flavours of Stalinist use to beat each other with.


... So wouldn't this make Lenin a revisionist because he had the doctrine of "Vanguard-ism"...

The argument is that Lenin developed Marxist theory rather than revising it. Marx didn't write about everything and Lenin applied Marxism to a concrete situation. And that 'vanguarism' is implicit in Marx anyway.


... And Stalin a revisionist for his doctrine of "Socialism in One Country"?

Stalinists would see SoiC in the same way as they'd see Lenin's developments - as a creative application of Marxism (or 'Marxism-Leninism') to a concrete situation.

The rest of us see SoiC as not 'revision' of Marxism but the abandonment of Marxism (at best; that is if we think Stalin was ever a Marxist at all, when we think that Stalin wasn't the head of the counter-revolution, no better than Hitler etc).


...The way I see it, anti-revisionism just turns Marxism into a religion.

Many of us think the Stalinists turned it into a religion way before 'anti-revisionism'.

[TaylorS]

"Revisionism" is a term used by dogmatists who treat Marxism as a secular religion for Marxists they think are "heretics" to the One True Way.

[Marxaveli]

So in my understanding revisionism is modifying Marxist theory. So wouldn't this make Lenin a revisionist because he had the doctrine of "Vanguard-ism". And Stalin a revisionist for his doctrine of "Socialism in One Country"? The way I see it, anti-revisionism just turns Marxism into a religion.

It is fundamentally impossible for Marxism to be a religion, since religions presuppose a belief in the supernatural and the existence of a deity.....Marxism lacks such a metaphysical component, therefore by default it cannot be a religion (since Marxism is grounded in a 'materialist' conception of the world, whereas religion would be in an 'idealist' context).

As for Revisionism, BB pretty much hit it on the head.

[Homo Songun]

To OP's question, revisionism is the expression of the petit-bourgeoisie in the working class movement.


Stalinists would see SoiC in the same way as they'd see Lenin's developments - as a creative application of Marxism (or 'Marxism-Leninism') to a concrete situation.I don't know what "Stalinists" think, but I feel that Stalin's actual position vis a vis the the debates with Zinoviev, Trotsky et cetera were more nuanced and critical than what people typically claim his opinion was. Stalin never claimed that Socialism could have a "final victory" (his words) in one country alone. By final victory he meant that society passes a threshold where reversal to capitalism becomes impossible. But he did think that Soviet society should get on with the business of building Socialism as such, and that furthermore, it could be done even in a backward country like Russia. Zinoviev didn't think so, but Z's definition of "final victory" was different from Stalin's. Z believed that it meant the moment of the disappearance of antagonistic classes, which was, to Z, impossible in one country. To the contrary, Stalin believed class antagonisms could disappear and yet bourgeois rule could be re-imported from without even past such a date. Correctly, Stalin showed that Z's line of thinking had a fallacy, in his words: "To engage in building socialism without the possibility of completely building it, knowing that it cannot be completely built -- such are the absurdities in which Zinoviev has involved himself." On the negative side, this position had a tendency to view class struggle in the Soviet Union being more like "police matters" of counter-revolutionary activity brought in from without.

Mao absorbed the lessons of the SU in the 30's, and came to believe that even if Stalin was right vis-a-vis Trotsky and Zinoviev on the possibility of *building* socialism, he didn't emphasize internal class struggle in that process enough. Mao went so far as to claim that the bourgeoisie could even find a new home in the party itself.

I believe that history has more or less vindicated Mao on this issue (even if it is true that the imperialist bourgeoisies will never stop their encirclement/destabilization campaigns). It shines a positive light on the struggle he led in his later years against capitalist restoration in the SU and the PRC. I don't buy some of the Cultural Revolution era theses/attitudes that flow from this stance though, particularly the strange phenomenon of "social imperialism". Likewise for some of the atrocious foreign policy decisions of the PRC, which Mao was definitely involved with to some degree -- no matter what modern-day "Marxist-Leninist-Maoists" say ;)

[Stalinist Speaker]

A revisionist is somebody that changes something that contradicts marxist theory, (Example usage of imperialism in soviet union from 1953-1991 makes them revisionist because they were not supposed to be pro imperialists) Lenin and stalin could not be a Revisionist because his theory didn't contradict marxist theory.
Why is it important to stop revisionism? If a government is revisionist it can lead to capitalism being brought back to the country, it could lead to a imperialist state e.t.c and if that happens you cant get a communist society (when the state dissolves) (For example if capitalism was brought back under the transaction period between socialism and communism you will most likely end up with a anarcho-capitalist society instead of a communist when/if the state gets dissolved, or it might lead to the complete fall of socialism and a new capitalist country will rise instead (just like in the USSR))

[Flying Purple People Eater]

A revisionist is somebody that changes something that contradicts marxist theory

We know that. The question is why that's a bad thing.

[Yuppie Grinder]

Revisionism is another word for Heresy. Heresy is fun, easy, and educational. Try it today.

[Stalinist Speaker]

Stalinists would see SoiC in the same way as they'd see Lenin's developments - as a creative application of Marxism (or 'Marxism-Leninism') to a concrete situation.

The rest of us see SoiC as not 'revision' of Marxism but the abandonment of Marxism (at best; that is if we think Stalin was ever a Marxist at all, when we think that Stalin wasn't the head of the counter-revolution, no better than Hitler etc).



Many of us think the Stalinists turned it into a religion way before 'anti-revisionism'.
Socialism in one country was a necessary addition and was proved to be successful, the rule of Stalin got almost the half of the world socialist in 30, years and they created technology and improved living standards as never seen before. Real progress! if there would have been an stalinist successor instead of Krushev we could have been a completely socialist world by now and maybe less than 50 years to dissolvation of the state.

Anti-revisionism is important if anti-revisionism kept being in the CPSU the USSR wouldn't have fallen. Stalins way to deal with revisionists proved only to be effective under a short period of time, therefore i believe that you need to battle revisionism through education and knowledge, and yes we need to keep fighting revision (like it was an religion) otherwise we will never succeed.

[Thirsty Crow]

Socialism in one country was a necessary addition and was proved to be successful, the rule of Stalin got almost the half of the world socialist in 30, years and they created technology and improved living standards as never seen before.
And 70+ years later you can babble with a straight face that success actually means the eradication of the society which you take as a model? And supposedly it all comes down to individuals and their ideas - only if it were not for that meanie Khruschev.

[Stalinist Speaker]

And 70+ years later you can babble with a straight face that success actually means the eradication of the society which you take as a model? And supposedly it all comes down to individuals and their ideas - only if it were not for that meanie Khruschev.

well it wasn't only krushev there were many more to criticizes, he just came in as an example.

[Thirsty Crow]

well it wasn't only krushev there were many more to criticizes, he just came in as an example.
Where from? If the working class was the ruling class in a non-antagonistic class society (kolkhoz peasants and workers), how did such a counter-revolutionary grouping develop? What was its social basis? How come the ruling class, the working class, remained passive and simply watched the destruction of the revolutionary party?

[Stalinist Speaker]

Where from? If the working class was the ruling class in a non-antagonistic class society (kolkhoz peasants and workers), how did such a counter-revolutionary grouping develop? What was its social basis? How come the ruling class, the working class, remained passive and simply watched the destruction of the revolutionary party?

Due to stupidity, they didn't know where this would lead and they thought that what they did was an good idea. (after all soviet union was the first country developing communism) some did it intentional for their own benefits (depends), many people didn't understand or see any harm in what was being done by the revisionists, the people in the party that opposed them either got expelled (Example Lazer Kagnovich) or the were silenced or ignored.

[Thirsty Crow]

Due to stupidity, they didn't know where this would lead and they thought that what they did was an good idea. (after all soviet union was the first country developing communism) some did it intentional for their own benefits (depends), many people didn't understand or see any harm in what was being done by the revisionists, the people in the party that opposed them either got expelled (Example Lazer Kagnovich) or the were silenced or ignored.
So the entire working class and its revolutionary vanguard in the party were simply stupid?
And some did it for their own benefits. What kind of benefits? Do you really want to argue that it is possible to enact a veritable social counter-revolution by means of intra-party maneuvering? And, again, how did the working class managed to be so stupid as to fail to see that?

That would probably be the first ruling class in history that stood by passively while their social power was being eroded.

[synthesis]

I think Stalinist Speaker provides a necessary counter-point to this discussion, in order to most accurately answer the OP's question. I don't feel that many responses actually take into account what so-called "Marxist-Leninists" (Stalinists) mean, specifically, when they use the term "revisionist."

It's used, for example, to refer to Khrushchev's "peaceful coexistence" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaceful_coexistence) line, which was the final nail in the coffin of anything resembling genuine Soviet internationalism. (No, I'm not arguing that Lenin represented that either.) It is, however, amusing that Maoists continued to apply this label to Khrushchev after Nixon shook hands with Mao.

[Stalinist Speaker]

So the entire working class and its revolutionary vanguard in the party were simply stupid?
And some did it for their own benefits. What kind of benefits? Do you really want to argue that it is possible to enact a veritable social counter-revolution by means of intra-party maneuvering? And, again, how did the working class managed to be so stupid as to fail to see that?

That would probably be the first ruling class in history that stood by passively while their social power was being eroded.

Ok maybe not stupid but they didn't fully understand the situation. the working class saw it but that was when it was to late, (last years of the USSR 1987-1991) but in the 1960 they were barely effected by it thats why many didn't see why they didn't do anything.
Why else was capitalism brought back by krushev? then of course he had a reason to do it. and once again the people that opposed the reforms Like Kagnovish, zyuganov e.t.c either were silenced expelled or ignored. and the rest thought that following Krushev was the right thing, (basically they were blinded by the progress that was being made and they didn't see how it would have ended up in a long perspective.

[Thirsty Crow]

Ok maybe not stupid but they didn't fully understand the situation. the working class saw it but that was when it was to late, (last years of the USSR 1987-1991) but in the 1960 they were barely effected by it thats why many didn't see why they didn't do anything.So, the ruling class in society was so disinterested and quite frankly stupid to perceive what is going on some quarter century later.

If the counter-revolution, centered around Khruschev's clique within the party, occurred, how was it possible for the former ruling class not to be affected in any significant way?


Why else was capitalism brought back by krushev? then of course he had a reason to do it. and once again the people that opposed the reforms Like Kagnovish, zyuganov e.t.c either were silenced expelled or ignored. and the rest thought that following Krushev was the right thing, (basically they were blinded by the progress that was being made and they didn't see how it would have ended up in a long perspective.What reason did this clique have? What social basis, to which end? Because "progress" as you put it did not occur in socialism?

[Ismail]

Revisionism means to deprive Marxism of its revolutionary and scientific content. Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky were the two most infamous early revisionists, who came from the ranks of the labor aristocracy within the working-class movement. Modern revisionism emerged with the likes of Browder, Tito, the Soviet revisionists, Mao, etc.

It has nothing to do with being "dogmatic," Lenin and Stalin sharply denounced revisionism and yet continuously pointed out the distinction between it and creatively applying and developing Marxism. The latter leads to scientific analyses of phenomena, to revolution, to socialism and to communism. The former leads to reformism and renegadism, including the restoration of capitalism in countries where the revisionists seize state power.

Of course the revisionists almost always try to hide their revisionism by proclaiming the "creative application" of Marxism. Thus one Deng-era economist declared, "Marx and Lenin... still serve as a beacon for our research into socialist economic issues, but reliance on these classical works alone is far from enough... Lenin once said, 'We can never take Marx's theory as something unchangeable, sacred and inviolable. On the contrary, Marxism lays a solid foundation for all sciences. Socialists should carry the theory forward in all respects if they do not want to lag behind real life.'" (Chinese Economists on Economic Reform - Collected Works of Xue Muqiao, p. 44.)

Kim Il Sung similarly said to WPK cadres that, "You should neither cling to propositions of the classics and try to settle the questions dogmatically nor be enthralled by the ideas of flunkeyism and try to interpret the issues as others do. Judging from the written opinions of several scholars and from other essays, almost all comrades either interpret the propositions dogmatically or tend to flunkeyism and attempt to follow the thinking of other countries... You can only arrive at a correct conclusion if you use your own faculties to solve the problems, free from flunkeyism and dogmatism." (Works Vol. 21, pp. 223-224.)

Experience proved that when Lenin denounced dogmatism he did it from revolutionary positions, whereas the theorists of Dengism and the founder of Juche did so from positions of opportunism and renegadism, something quite apparent then and now. It is very easy to negate things under the cover of "opposing dogmatism," it is much more difficult to actually uphold revolutionary and scientific positions in times where their existence is demanded.


And supposedly it all comes down to individuals and their ideas - only if it were not for that meanie Khruschev.As opposed to "that meanie Stalin"? Khrushchev was the leading representative of the counter-revolutionary process in the USSR. Brezhnev and Kosygin followed after his downfall. They represented the new bourgeoisie.

And it is revisionist formulations which, after all, provide the cover for opportunism and capitalist restoration. Deng Xiaoping Theory continues to be on the lips of every CPC "theoretician" of the country's barely-concealed capitalist system and the advocates of further market reforms within it.

[Thirsty Crow]

R
As opposed to "that meanie Stalin"?Nope. I don't view Stalin as a great man exclusively responsible for the degeneration of revolution in Russia. On the other hand, so called anti-revisionism is based on the postulate of a counter-revolutionary process without any class basis.


Khrushchev was the leading representative of the counter-revolutionary process in the USSR.
Let me repeat myself:


If the working class was the ruling class in a non-antagonistic class society (kolkhoz peasants and workers), how did such a counter-revolutionary grouping develop? What was its social basis? How come the ruling class, the working class, remained passive and simply watched the destruction of the revolutionary party?

And:


That would probably be the first ruling class in history that stood by passively while their social power was being eroded.

Looking back at the draft of the 1936 Constitution, you might want to explain how did this stratum, most definitely not a class, called the intelligentsia, managed to morph itself into the ruling bourgeois class in two to three decades.

If it's not that stratum, then back we are at the beginning. What class basis?

[Ismail]

If the working class was the ruling class in a non-antagonistic class society (kolkhoz peasants and workers), how did such a counter-revolutionary grouping develop? What was its social basis?The same social basis as the "old" revisionism: the labor aristocracy, which in the conditions of the trade unions and early social-democratic parties mainly took the form of their bureaucracies, and in the conditions of the socialist state took the form of the state and party bureaucracies as well as the managerial strata.

One work which deals with the social basis for capitalist restoration is Red Papers #7: How Capitalism Has been Restored in the Soviet Union and What This Means for the World Struggle, which is one of the main works on the subject. See: http://www.bannedthought.net/USA/RU/RP/RP7/RU-RP7.pdf (specifically chapter II.)


How come the ruling class, the working class, remained passive and simply watched the destruction of the revolutionary party?Because they were told that the Party was "returning to Leninism" and furthermore would preside over the achievement of Communism by 1980. It is precisely one of the most malignant effects of revisionism to sully the name of Marxism and to equate it with state-capitalism. The work I linked earlier also discusses the material reasons for this subject.

But it's worth noting that one could make the same argument as you, only applying it to any year from 1917 to 1924, or 1927-28, or (as the Brezhnevites do) 1985-91.

Also, to quote an old post of mine:

Hoxha in 1966, from his Selected Works Vol. IV, pp. 38-44:

"The seizure of power by the Soviet modern revisionists from within, without using weapons or violence, is so to speak, a new phenomenon. We think that in fact Stalin had not envisaged this, for the Soviet Union least of all....

He was convinced that if some anti-party hostile activity emerged within the party, this might be developed and organized in the usual ways, but he was also firmly convinced that this activity would be attacked and liquidated by the same methods and forms that had been used to expose and liquidate all such activities in the past...

We think that there were contradictions and frictions in the leadership of the Soviet Union and we cannot accept the absurd thesis of the Khrushchevites that none of the leaders could open his mouth to express his opinion for fear of Stalin. From what we have heard, Stalin called Khrushchev a narodnik, criticized Voroshilov, Molotov and others. Hence, on the one hand we must conclude that Stalin was not politicaly short-sighted while on the other hand, that he did not always use bullets and terror as his enemies claim, but on the contrary used conviction and exchange of opinions.

Although we have no access to the internal documents which would verify many things, it is a fact that Stalin did not detect the danger posed by the traitors Khrushchev, Mikoyan and others, and that the Patriotic War exercised a great influence in this direction. If there is anything for which we can blame Stalin it is the fact that after the war, and especially in the last years of his life, he did not realize that the pulse of his Party was not beating as before, that it was losing its revolutionary vigour, was becoming sclerotic and, despite the heroic deeds of the Great Patriotic War, it never recovered properly and the Khrushchevite traitors took advantage of this. Here, if I am not mistaken, is where we must seek the origin of the tragedy that occurred in the Soviet Union.

The construction of socialism in the Soviet Union and the fight against both external and internal enemies were carried out by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and Stalin who led it in a lofty revolutionary spirit. The merciless blows justly dealt to the Trotskyites, the Bukharinites and others were the logical conclusion of this great class struggle.

All this complex, many-sided struggle rightly enhanced the authority of Stalin and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (Bolshevik). This was positive, but the methods and forms of work which were used in the leadership of the Party had an opposite result.

If a minute analysis is made of the political, ideological and organizational directives of Stalin on the leadership and organization of the Party, the struggle and work, generally speaking, no errors of principle will be found, but we shall see that little by little the Party was becoming bureaucratized, that it was becoming overwhelmed with routine work and dangerous formalism which paralyze the party and sap its revolutionary spirit and vigour. The Party had been covered by a heavy layer of rust, by political apathy and the mistaken idea spread that only the head, the leadership, acted and solved everything. It was this concept of work that led to the situation in which everybody, everywhere, said about every question: «The leadership knows this», «the Central Committee knows everything», «the Central Committee does not make mistakes», «Stalin said this and that's the end of it». Many things which Stalin may not have said at all were attributed to him. The apparatuses and officials became «omnipotent», «infallible», and operated in bureaucratic ways, misusing the formulae of democratic centralism and Bolshevik criticism and self-criticism which were no longer Bolshevik. There is no doubt that in this way the Bolshevik Party lost its former vitality, it lived by correct formulae, but only formulae; it carried out orders, but did not act on its own initiative.

In such conditions, bureaucratic administrative measures began to prevail over revolutionary measures. After the adoption of these bureaucratic methods and forms of work, the correct revolutionary measures taken against the class enemy achieved an effect opposite to that desired and were used by the bureaucrats to spread fear in the Party and the people. The revolutionary vigilance no longer operated, because it had ceased to be revolutionary, although it was advertized as such. It was being transformed from a vigilance of the party and the masses into a vigilance of the bureaucratic apparatuses and, if not in all aspects, at least in form, into a vigilance of the security organs and the courts.

It is understandable that in such conditions, sentiments and views which were non-proletarian, not of the working class, took root and developed in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in the ranks of the communists and in the consciousness of many of them. Careerism, servility, charlatanism, cronyism, anti-proletarian morality, etc. developed and eroded the Party from within, smothered the spirit of the class struggle and sacrifice and encouraged the hankering after a «good», comfortable life with personal privileges and gain, and with the least possible work and toil. «We worked and fought for this socialist state and we won. Now let us enjoy it and profit from it. We are untouchable, our past covers everything.» This was the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois mentality which was being created in the Soviet Union and the great danger was that this was developing in the old cadres of the Party with an irreproachable past and of proletarian origin, cadres who ought to have been examples of purity for the others. Many of those who used beautiful words, the revolutionary phrases and theoretical formulae of Lenin and Stalin, who reaped the laurels from the work of others and who set and encouraged the bad example, were in the leadership, in the apparatuses. A worker aristocracy made up of bureaucratic cadres was being created in the Communist Party of the USSR.

Unfortunately, this process of degeneration developed under the «happy» and «hopeful» slogans that «everything is going well, normally, within the norms and laws of the Party» which in fact were being violated under the slogans that «the class struggle goes on», that «democratic centralism is preserved», that «criticism and self-criticism continue as before», that «a steel unity exists in the party», that «there are no more factionalists and anti-party elements», that «the Trotskyite, Bukharinite groups are a thing of the past», etc., etc."

Pages 46-47:

"Molotov and his comrades were old revolutionaries, honest communists, but were the typical representatives of that bureaucratic routine, that bureaucratic «legality», and when they made feeble attempts to use it against the evident plot of the Khrushchevites, it was already too late. Instead the bureaucracy and the bureaucratic «legality» were used by the traitors who covered up their palace intrigue with this «legality» and manoeuvred through their network and the entire stratum of bureaucrats of proletarian, and not kulak, capitalist or feudal, origin to seize the reins of the Party and the organs of state power.

Immediately after the death of Stalin, the Khrushchevite plotters manoeuvred deftly with this «legality», with the «rules of the party» and «democratic centralism», with their crocodile tears over the loss of Stalin, while gradually preparing to torpedo his work, his figure and Marxism-Leninism, until all their activity was crowned with success at the 20th Congress and in the crematorium where the body of Stalin was burned. This is a period full of lessons for us Marxist-Leninists, because it highlights the bankruptcy of bureaucratic «legality» which is a great danger to a Marxist-Leninist party, brings out the methods which the revisionists use to turn this bureaucratic «legality» to their advantage, shows how honest leaders, who have experience but have lost their revolutionary class spirit, fall into the traps of conspirators and make concessions, submit to the pressure and retreat in face of the blackmail and demagogy of revisionist traitors disguised with revolutionary phraseology."


Looking back at the draft of the 1936 Constitution, you might want to explain how did this stratum, most definitely not a class, called the intelligentsia, managed to morph itself into the ruling bourgeois class in two to three decades.The socialist intelligentsia was transformed into a bourgeois intelligentsia. It did not and could not rule the Soviet Union, since obviously it wasn't a class. Its function was the same as in the "normal" capitalist countries: to legitimize the state-capitalist regime established by the revisionists.

[Brotto Rühle]

Capitalism never left the Soviet Union. Value production never ceased, workers were alienated from the means of production, had to sell their labour power to the state to survive, produced commodities that made profit, etc.

The reason we, the left communists and ultra left, call Stalin revisionist, is because of his revision of a) Marx's critique of political economy, as well as Marx's notion of communism as a singular society (Stalinists claim a separate society; socialism, will occur first). B) revising Marx's concept of socialism/communism, same society to Marx, as a society with classes. And c) claiming the peasantry has the same class interests as the proletariat.

Those aren't the only reasons, but they are major reasons.

[Ismail]

as well as Marx's notion of communism as a singular society (Stalinists claim a separate society; socialism, will occur first).Without getting into the rest of your post, it was the position of Lenin as well that socialism was the lower stage of communism. This is likewise the position of the Trotskyists. It seems a bit odd to talk about this being a uniquely "Stalinist" position.

[Thirsty Crow]

Because they were told that the Party was "returning to Leninism" and furthermore would preside over the achievement of Communism by 1980.So, to sum this up, the working class is the ruling class in a non-antagonistic class society, socialism achieved.
And this ruling class was positioned so that a labor aristocracy, once favoring working class rule, now capitalism, might provide any justification whatsoever for their course of action and obedience, not class struggle, was secured.

I'll get back when I read the second chapter of the work you proposed.


The socialist intelligentsia was transformed into a bourgeois intelligentsia.The notion of the stratum of intelligentsia in Russia covers economic management and state management as well ("any person of higher education"). This can be clearly seen in the haste with which Stalin in the mentioned draft proceeds to argue that the intelligentsia doesn't constitute a class, but a special layer of the working class which is the ruling class.

This stratum is not exhausted with the mention of ideologues (the function of ideological legitimation).

[Ismail]

So, to sum this up, the working class is the ruling class in a non-antagonistic class society, socialism achieved.On the situation at the time the Stalin Constitution was promulgated:

"We have achieved only the first, the lower phase, of communism. Even this first phase of communism, socialism, is far from being completed, it is built only in the rough.

In our country the parasitic classes, i.e., all and sundry capitalists and little capitalists, have been liquidated. Thanks to this, the exploitation of man by man has been abolished. This is not only a gigantic step forward in the lives of the peoples of our country, but also a gigantic step forward along the road of emancipation of the whole of mankind.

We, however, have not fully carried out the task of abolishing classes, although the working class of the U.S.S.R. which is in power is no longer a proletariat in the strict sense of the word, and the peasantry, the great bulk of which has joined the collective farms, is no longer the old peasantry.

Both the two classes which exist in the U.S.S.R. are building socialism and come within the system of socialist economy. But although both are in the same system of socialist economy, the working class in its work is bound up with state socialist property (the property of the whole people), while the collective farm peasantry is bound up with cooperative and collective farm property which belongs to individual collective farms and to collective-farm and cooperative associations. This connection with different forms of socialist property primarily determines the different position of these classes. This also determine the somewhat different paths of further development of each of them.

What is common in the development of these two classes is that both are developing in the direction of communism. As this proceeds the difference in their class positions will be gradually obliterated until here too the last remnants of class distinctions finally disappear.

We cannot but realize that this is a long road."
(V.M. Molotov. The Constitution of Socialism: Speech Delivered at the Extraordinary Eighth Congress of Soviets of the U.S.S.R., November 29, 1936. Moscow: Co-operative Publishing Society of Workers in the U.S.S.R. 1937. pp. 28-29.)

Obviously the continued existence of "bourgeois right," the continued separation of mental from manual work, and various other remnants of older societies made their mark.

The Albanians noted, however, that at "the 21st Congress of the CPSU, Khrushchev put forward the thesis that from that time both in the Soviet Union and in other socialist countries, there was no longer any danger to the fate of socialism either from outside or from inside. That not only the complete, but even the final victory of socialism had been achieved." To this the Albanians pointed out that it was only the victory of socialism and communism on a world scale which ensured that the basis of capitalist restoration could be completely overcome. (Some Questions of Socialist Construction in Albania and of the Struggle Against Revisionism, pp. 104-105.)


And this ruling class was positioned so that a labor aristocracy, once favoring working class rule, now capitalism, might provide any justification whatsoever for their course of action and obedience, not class struggle, was secured."The revisionist counter-revolution which occurred in the Soviet Union and elsewhere is a new phenomenon, is a counter-revolution which history has never known before...

Differently from the other counter-revolutions, it was not carried out by the old former ruling classes overthrown from the state power, but by a new bourgeois class, which was formed gradually in the conditions of socialism as a result of the bourgeois influence from inside and the pressure of imperialism from outside. It did not begin from below but from above, from the leading cadres of the class which is in power, who degenerated into bourgeois elements and who, for the achievement of their purposes, even used the Party in power and the existing State. It was not carried out by the use of the armed force but was carried out in a peaceful manner, disguised with socialist phraseology, by gradually eroding from within the socialist system." (Ibid. pp. 84-85.)

Of course the new bourgeoisie was willing to use force to keep itself in power, as the deployment of the army in the Georgian SSR in 1956 and in working-class riots in subsequent years proved, among other examples.

[Red_Banner]

It is fundamentally impossible for Marxism to be a religion, since religions presuppose a belief in the supernatural and the existence of a deity.....Marxism lacks such a metaphysical component, therefore by default it cannot be a religion (since Marxism is grounded in a 'materialist' conception of the world, whereas religion would be in an 'idealist' context).

As for Revisionism, BB pretty much hit it on the head.

You are missing the point.


It isn't about so much weather Marxism is a religion or not, it has divided into different camps in much of the same way Judaism and Christianity has.

[Thirsty Crow]

Ismail, it would be best if you didn't respond with quotes that seem to bear little relevance to the issue I raise.

It is not clear how the ideas presented in the quote, supposed bourgeois influence (where from if the bourgeoisie has been liquidated; the only possible explanation is - from lingering ideas, the maxim of "take care of yourself", which flatly contradicts the entire materialist conception of history; it is also unclear how imperialist influence actually asserted itself and resulted in revisionism) relates to what I wrote.

To quote myself yet again:

A
nd this ruling class was positioned so that a labor aristocracy, once favoring working class rule, now capitalism, might provide any justification whatsoever for their course of action and obedience, not class struggle, was secured. This concerns the working class, and for the moment accepts the assumption of the labor aristocracy.
What I claim is this: the working class was the ruling class. At the same time, one giant section of the ruling class was in such a relationship to the minority section of labor aristocrats that the former managed to spout whatever rhetoric they wished to secure obedience, instead of class struggle, in what was a veritable counter-revolutionary process.

How this actually, historically came to pass is a deep mystery and an inexplicable anomaly in composition and action of any historical ruling class. Tantamount to assuming the section of the bourgeoisie willfully aiding workers' revolution, without the revolution, without the other sections of the bourgeois ruling class even raising their voice.

[Hit The North]

A problem with the anti-revisionist analysis of the USSR is that it starts from the idealist position that a mode of production is the result of particular politically-based policies, rather than being based on a specific organization of the material relations of production, which would be the materialist approach. So, for instance, a society isn't socialist because its government makes war-noises against imperialism and then capitalist when it declares peaceful coexistence with imperialism.

As Subvert & Destroy makes clear above, surplus value was still pumped out of the direct producers who were subject to the command of the state enterprise and had no independent, collective control over the means of production. Nothing fundamentally changed with the passing of power from Stalin to Khrushchev.

[Brotto Rühle]

Without getting into the rest of your post, it was the position of Lenin as well that socialism was the lower stage of communism. This is likewise the position of the Trotskyists. It seems a bit odd to talk about this being a uniquely "Stalinist" position.

Socialism isn't a separate society. That's my point. Lenin and the Trotskyites agree, that's fine. It's annoying that Lenin decided to call the lower phase "socialism", however, Stalinists treat socialism as a separate society, that is still a class society, and where the law of value still persists.

[Fred]

Ok maybe not stupid but they didn't fully understand the situation. the working class saw it but that was when it was to late, (last years of the USSR 1987-1991) but in the 1960 they were barely effected by it thats why many didn't see why they didn't do anything.
Why else was capitalism brought back by krushev? then of course he had a reason to do it. and once again the people that opposed the reforms Like Kagnovish, zyuganov e.t.c either were silenced expelled or ignored. and the rest thought that following Krushev was the right thing, (basically they were blinded by the progress that was being made and they didn't see how it would have ended up in a long perspective.

Comrade, Kruschev no more brought back capitalism, than Stalin achieved "socialism" in the 1930s. It is a totally idealistic non-Marxist analysis of the USSR. There was almost no change in the economic and social system under Kruchev.

To the OP -- revisionism as it is used in the Stalinist world is not terribly valuable. Indeed the differences between Stalin/Mao/Tito/Kruschev/Hoxha are interesting, but not qualitative. They represent different flavors of nationalistic/conservative deviations from Marx. I won't go into details about that -- for it is best left for another thread. So any good Marxist could, in a literal sense, revise Marx. That is, IMO, what Lenin and Trotsky did. But the comrade that spoke about Bernstein is correct, that was the beginning of the use of the term in the Marxist movement.

[Stalinist Speaker]

So, the ruling class in society was so disinterested and quite frankly stupid to perceive what is going on some quarter century later.

If the counter-revolution, centered around Khruschev's clique within the party, occurred, how was it possible for the former ruling class not to be affected in any significant way?

What reason did this clique have? What social basis, to which end? Because "progress" as you put it did not occur in socialism?

No would call some of them opportunists and some anti-stalinists they all hopped on the same wagon against the other stalinists (like Kaganovich, Molotov e.t.c) and obviously they follow Krushev and his ideas instead of giving the anti-revisionists (stalinists) support. They went through with these reforms because they thought that it would be god in a way and an other no one was expecting a collapse under Krushev, But they started to build the foundation of the collapse and Gorbatchev finished it up and led the USSR until it collapsed due to the reforms that were put through last 40 years.
the people and some party officials were blinded by the progress that was made in the country, (Example: the soviet space program, the new amount of technology created that was better then anything else in the world, so when they saw the bright side of how much their country was completing they didn't see how it was falling apart form behind until it was to late. (obviously some saw that there was an possibility for it to collapse earlier but their voice wasn't strong enough and want heard.)

[Fred]

A problem with the anti-revisionist analysis of the USSR is that it starts from the idealist position that a mode of production is the result of particular politically-based policies, rather than being based on a specific organization of the material relations of production, which would be the materialist approach. So, for instance, a society isn't socialist because its government makes war-noises against imperialism and then capitalist when it declares peaceful coexistence with imperialism.

As Subvert & Destroy makes clear above, surplus value was still pumped out of the direct producers who were subject to the command of the state enterprise and had no independent, collective control over the means of production. Nothing fundamentally changed with the passing of power from Stalin to Khrushchev.
I couldn't figure out a way to "Thank" the first paragraph without suggesting I approve of the second, so I guess I will have to write a response. For the first part, yes, exactly. The idea that a "political line" of a government can change the class nature of the state is pure idealistic twaddle.

However, I strongly disagree about the USSR being capitalist. Production in the USSR was not for profit. Labor was not an exchange value as it is under capitalism. According to Marx, the "inner nature of capital" is competition. It cannot exist as a single, "state" capital.

To be clear, Stalin and his clique were parasites on the post-capitalist Russia/ (USSR). And their leadership did eventually lead to the counterrevolution of 1991-2, when capitalism was restored.

[Ismail]

It is not clear how the ideas presented in the quote, supposed bourgeois influence (where from if the bourgeoisie has been liquidated; the only possible explanation is - from lingering ideas, the maxim of "take care of yourself", which flatly contradicts the entire materialist conception of history; it is also unclear how imperialist influence actually asserted itself and resulted in revisionism) relates to what I wrote.You asked what the social basis of revisionism was. I replied.

And the idea that the liquidation of the bourgeoisie means the liquidation of bourgeois mentality is no more logical than the idea that because collectives and state farms existed in the USSR this meant the peasant once and for all got rid of any petty-bourgeois psychological holdovers.


How this actually, historically came to pass is a deep mystery and an inexplicable anomaly in composition and action of any historical ruling class. Tantamount to assuming the section of the bourgeoisie willfully aiding workers' revolution, without the revolution, without the other sections of the bourgeois ruling class even raising their voice.I'm not quite sure what you mean here. In the 20's and 30's there were attempts by the revisionists seize state power, but they were rebuffed. Likewise in the late 40's revisionism in the field of economics (Voznesensky), foreign policy (Varga), etc. was rebuffed. Of course the root causes of revisionism could not be overcome by the Soviet leadership, insofar as capitalism still existed in the rest of the world and the marks of older societies continued to make themselves felt. Such is the significance of continuing to revolutionize society under the dictatorship of the proletariat.


A problem with the anti-revisionist analysis of the USSR is that it starts from the idealist position that a mode of production is the result of particular politically-based policies, rather than being based on a specific organization of the material relations of production, which would be the materialist approach.Using this logic Marxists start from an idealist position when they seek revolution and point out the fundamental laws of socialism which will be followed after said revolution.

Khrushchev's theoretical and ideological activity was meant to legitimize Soviet revisionism and the restoration of capitalism, the same with his successors. They were not idle words: from Soviet revisionist rantings about "Stalin's distrust of the peasantry" came the dissolution of the machine-tractor stations (which directly went against Stalin's words in Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R.), from attacks against "dogmatism" and "subjectivism" in economics came the Soviet revisionist position on the law of value under socialism (again directly contradicting Stalin), etc.


So, for instance, a society isn't socialist because its government makes war-noises against imperialism and then capitalist when it declares peaceful coexistence with imperialism.It was Stalin who supported the World Peace Council and Lenin who formulated the idea of peaceful coexistence. Neither made "war-noises" against imperialism, but Khrushchev and his successors certainly did revise and bastardize the Leninist positions on war and peace.

To quote one article (http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv15/guhastal.htm):

Already concerned with the visible world development from capitalism to socialism and developing opposition to imperialism, the imperialists thought that their possession of nuclear weapons, especially in the period of their temporary monopoly and the unprecedented military force would enable them to arrest and if possible reverse the wheel of history. In other words, the imperialists were using all their class power and energy in an attempt to maintain imperialist status quo. That was the role of nuclear weapons for the imperialists. Molotov said, ‘As we know, a sort of new religion has become widespread among expansionist circles in the U.S.A.; having no faith in their own internal forces they put their faith in the secret of atom bomb although this secret has long ceased to be a secret.’ (Speech at the 30th anniversary of the October Revolution, 6th November, 1947: Speeches – Molotov, Vol. II, F.L.P.H. Moscow, 1949)

The attitude towards the nuclear weapons became the central issue in the determination of foreign and home policy of the Soviet Union in the leadership of the CPSU.

Despite the temporary imperialist nuclear monopoly, Stalin continued to carry forward a consistent proletarian internationalist foreign policy without any concession or ideological retreat, knowing that the answer to the perennial imperialist threat lay in unwavering opposition to imperialism and mobilisation of socialist camp and all anti-imperialist forces. The launching of international peace offensive in Stalin’s days had the aim of carrying this policy forward on a broad front, again, as principled and practical answer to imperialist pressure.

The opposition elements, the revisionist section of the leadership of the Soviet party believed that Stalin’s thorough-going opposition to imperialism, especially in the ‘nuclear age’ was becoming highly dangerous to Soviet national interest. They believed that the Soviet Union must at all cost buy off the threat of nuclear destruction by concessions to imperialism – easing the tension between the Soviet Union and the U.S.A. The threat of nuclear weapons gave rise to fear in a section of the communists of the world including a section of the Soviet leadership and this was the international basis of modern revisionism. For the revisionists nuclear weapons are a force in themselves, outside objective social laws, the threatened use of which can act as some kind of the catalyst in international politics to compel the basic social forces to forego the historically necessary world mission of emancipating the people as well as themselves! So, to them Marxism became outdated in the ‘nuclear age’ and that required thorough revision. The essence of Khrushchev’s position in this respect was long ago publicly recognised by a leading capitalist politician, Harold Macmillan, who described Khrushchev approvingly as the ‘first Soviet statesman to recognise that Karl Marx was a pre-atomic man.’ This deflection from dialectical and historical materialism promoted fear in them and the fear led them to opportunism, capitulation and bourgeois nationalism. Thus the revisionist section of the leadership of the Soviet party demanded a line of ‘least resistance’ and ‘smooth-sailing’ – to which Stalin did not pay any heed....

Stalin died in March 1953 and in September of that year Soviet Red Army General Talensky, rejecting Stalin’s formula of ‘permanently operating factors’ in war, introduced the ‘theory’ that in the ‘nuclear age’ the atom bomb can determine the fact and outcome of war at the very first phase of war by attacking suddenly, once more proving Stalin’s prophetic words that ‘Atom bombs are intended for intimidating the weak nerved.’It was Khrushchev who denied the thesis of Lenin and Stalin that the prospect of another world war remained possible so long as imperialism continued to exist.

[Hit The North]

However, I strongly disagree about the USSR being capitalist. Production in the USSR was not for profit. Labor was not an exchange value as it is under capitalism. According to Marx, the "inner nature of capital" is competition. It cannot exist as a single, "state" capital.


Well capital investment existed so where did the surplus value come from if not from the labour of the Russian workers? Meanwhile, the fundamental relationship of the capitalist labour process remained intact whereby instead of labour employing the means of production to satisfy its own needs (socialism), the means of production employed labour in order to valorise itself. Labour might not have had an exchange value, but it was still subject to the will of the means of production via the command of the state: workers were subordinated to state property. To your third objection, I'd argue that equally, no state can exist in isolation. The USSR still had to compete with foreign capital and this became even more the case the more developed the economy became.



Using this logic Marxists start from an idealist position when they seek revolution and point out the fundamental laws of socialism which will be followed after said revolution.


Except that the revolution Marxists seek is an overturning of the existing material relations of production and the 'laws of socialism' will follow from the establishment of the new relations of production. For this to happen, a social revolution is required. Did Khrushchev and his clique do this? If so, show me how. And you'll have to point to more than the closure of machine-tractor factories.


Khrushchev's theoretical and ideological activity was meant to legitimize Soviet revisionism and the restoration of capitalism, the same with his successors. They were not idle words: from Soviet revisionist rantings about "Stalin's distrust of the peasantry" came the dissolution of the machine-tractor stations (which directly went against Stalin's words in Economic Problems of Socialism in the U.S.S.R.), from attacks against "dogmatism" and "subjectivism" in economics came the Soviet revisionist position on the law of value under socialism (again directly contradicting Stalin), etc.


You'll have to school me in the differences here because Stalin acknowledged that the law of value continued to operate in the USSR. I don't often quote the old dictator, but here you go:



It is sometimes asked whether the law of value exists and operates in our country, under the socialist system.


Yes, it does exist and does operate. Wherever commodities and commodity production exist, there the law of value must also exist.


In our country, the sphere of operation of the law of value extends, first of all, to commodity circulation, to the ex-change of commodities through purchase and sale, the ex-change, chiefly, of articles of personal consumption. Here, in this sphere, the law of value preserves, within certain limits, of course, the function of a regulator.


But the operation of the law of value is not confined to the sphere of commodity circulation. It also extends to production.
Source (http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1951/economic-problems/ch04.htm)


What was the revisionist position?

[Popular Front of Judea]

Fascinating to see an idealistic belief system as totally divorced from objective reality as we see in this thread. Hermetically sealed for your ideological protection. Absolutely no mention of the prison camps or the inefficient, wasteful central planning that Stalin's successors inherited.

[Fred]

Fascinating to see an idealistic belief system as totally divorced from objective reality as we see in this thread. Hermetically sealed for your ideological protection. Absolutely no mention of the prison camps or the inefficient, wasteful central planning that Stalin's successors inherited.
Well, romantic love is often uncritical. But it must be noted that the planned economy in the USSR was immensely successful despite being badly mismanaged by Stalin and his political kin. It is an argument for a collectivized planned economy, not against.

As for Stalin's writing that the law of value existed in the USSR. If you read the whole article, Stalin contradicts himself (imagine that!). The law of value, it turns out does not apply -- he says it himself, that the overall value to the society of given plants and given INDUSTRIES over the course of a decade or more is how things are decided and how resources are allocated. It has nothing to do with profit as we know it in a capitalist economy. Also, in the USSR, since wages for labor were allocated as part of a plan, the more people that worked, the lower wages tended to be. Does that sound like capitalism?

Surplus value in one way or another, will need to be used to build new shit, even in moving toward a communist society. What that means is that workers will not get 100% of the value that they produce.

[Popular Front of Judea]

Well, romantic love is often uncritical. But it must be noted that the planned economy in the USSR was immensely successful despite being badly mismanaged by Stalin and his political kin. It is an argument for a collectivized planned economy, not against.

As for Stalin's writing that the law of value existed in the USSR. If you read the whole article, Stalin contradicts himself (imagine that!). The law of value, it turns out does not apply -- he says it himself, that the overall value to the society of given plants and given INDUSTRIES over the course of a decade or more is how things are decided and how resources are allocated. It has nothing to do with profit as we know it in a capitalist economy. Also, in the USSR, since wages for labor were allocated as part of a plan, the more people that worked, the lower wages tended to be. Does that sound like capitalism?

Surplus value in one way or another, will need to be used to build new shit, even in moving toward a communist society. What that means is that workers will not get 100% of the value that they produce.

No argument that central planning made possible Russia's industrialization in record time or made possible Russia's successful war with Nazi Germany. The problem came in making the transition from quantity to quality. The SU did not do a very good job at delivering consumer goods, as most acknowledge.

In retrospect I think Brezhnev has taken a bum rap. He knew the limits of the system he inherited and adjusted his behavior accordingly. He tweaked the amount of repression that the system required, more than the Khrushchev thaw but not close to Stalin's purges. He bribed the working class -- as much as the system could deliver. Afghanistan was his big mistake. Not only did it entangle the SU in a unwinnable war but it brought the Saudis aboard the opposition. It was the Saudis opening the oil taps that ultimately did the SU in.

I can't help but to think of the old joke:

Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev and Leonid Brezhnev are all travelling together in a railway carriage. Unexpectedly the train stops. Lenin suggests: "Perhaps, we should call a subbotnik, so that workers and peasants fix the problem." Stalin puts his head out of the window and shouts, "If the train does not start moving, the driver will be shot!" But the train doesn't start moving. Khrushchev then shouts, "Let's take the rails behind the train and use them to construct the tracks in the front". But it still doesn't move. Brezhnev then says, "Comrades, Comrades, let's draw the curtains, turn on the gramophone and pretend we're moving!"

[Ceallach_the_Witch]

hmmm, idk whether i'm willing to take a particularly positive view of brehznev (insofar as i take a positive view on any politician, I suppose) but i certainly think he's a more interesting figure than is made out. Plus I kind of like that quote attributed to him - "If they are poking fun at me, it means they like me"

[Fred]

No argument that central planning made possible Russia's industrialization in record time or made possible Russia's successful war with Nazi Germany. The problem came in making the transition from quantity to quality. The SU did not do a very good job at delivering consumer goods, as most acknowledge.

In retrospect I think Brezhnev has taken a bum rap. He knew the limits of the system he inherited and adjusted his behavior accordingly. He tweaked the amount of repression that the system required, more than the Khrushchev thaw but not close to Stalin's purges. He bribed the working class -- as much as the system could deliver. Afghanistan was his big mistake. Not only did it entangle the SU in a unwinnable war but it brought the Saudis aboard the opposition. It was the Saudis opening the oil taps that ultimately did the SU in.

[/i]
Leonid was a very boring appartchnik that made it to the top. Agreed that quality, especially of consumer goods, was a huge problem in the Soviet system, one that certain Eastern European countries tried to ameliorate using the "discipline of the market" (e.g, Yugoslavia). That did not work too well. Worker's democracy would have had a huge impact, but, uh, that was not on the agenda.

The war in Afghanistan was being won by the Soviet-backed regime and the Soviet armed forces-- it was Gorby that cut and ran. It was a worthy cause, anyway -- all the state cappers and anarchist notwithstanding. It is pretty strange that among ostensible revolutionaries, most come out on the patently wrong side on this one. Hmmm, a left nationalist modernizing regime vs. the most reactionary political forces on Earth? Let's see. . . .

[Ismail]

Except that the revolution Marxists seek is an overturning of the existing material relations of production and the 'laws of socialism' will follow from the establishment of the new relations of production. For this to happen, a social revolution is required. Did Khrushchev and his clique do this? If so, show me how.I've linked various times in other threads to the three main works on the restoration of capitalism in the USSR (by Nicolaus, by the Revolutionary Union, and that by Bill Bland.) You're free to read them.


And you'll have to point to more than the closure of machine-tractor factories.It is important to note why Stalin criticized the proposals to disband the MTS:

Assuming for a moment that we accepted Comrades Sanina's and Venzher's proposal and began to sell the basic implements of production, the machine and tractor stations, to the collective farms as their property. What would be the outcome?

The outcome would be, first, that the collective farms would become the owners of the basic instruments of production; that is, their status would be an exceptional one, such as is not shared by any other enterprise in our country, for, as we know, even the nationalized enterprises do not own their instruments of production. How, by what considerations of progress and advancement, could this exceptional status of the collective farms be justified? Can it be said that such a status would facilitate the elevation of collective-farm property to the level of public property, that it would expedite the transition of our society from socialism to communism? Would it not be truer to say that such a status could only dig a deeper gulf between collective-farm property and public property, and would not bring us any nearer to communism, but, on the contrary, remove us farther from it?

The outcome would be, secondly, an extension of the sphere of operation of commodity circulation, because a gigantic quantity of instruments of agricultural production would come within its orbit. What do Comrades Sanina and Venzher think — is the extension of the sphere of commodity circulation calculated to promote our advance towards communism? Would it not be truer to say that our advance towards communism would only be retarded by it?

Comrades Sanina's and Venzher's basic error lies in the fact that they do not understand the role and significance of commodity circulation under socialism; that they do not understand that commodity circulation is incompatible with the prospective transition from socialism to communism. They evidently think that the transition from socialism to communism is possible even with commodity circulation, that commodity circulation can be no obstacle to this. That is a profound error, arising from an inadequate grasp of Marxism.

Criticizing Duhring's "economic commune," which functions in the conditions of commodity circulation, Engels, in his Anti-Dühring, convincingly shows that the existence of commodity circulation was inevitably bound to lead Duhring's so-called "economic communes" to the regeneration of capitalism. Comrades Sanina and Venzher evidently do not agree with this. All the worse for them. But we, Marxists, adhere to the Marxist view that the transition from socialism to communism and the communist principle of distribution of products according to needs preclude all commodity exchange, and, hence, preclude the conversion of products into commodities, and, with it, their conversion into value.

So much for the proposal and arguments of Comrades Sanina and Venzher.


You'll have to school me in the differences here because Stalin acknowledged that the law of value continued to operate in the USSR.As the Albanians noted (http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/albind/socalb1.htm): "In attacking the Marxist-Leninist view in regard to commodity production in socialism, the Soviet revisionists claim that history knows only two types of social production: the natural economy and the market economy. Therefore, they assert, either socialism and an economy without the system of commodity and money relations, or socialism and a market economy with commodity, value, money, economic spontaneity, competition, prices, profits, credits, interest, taxes on the fundamental means, rent, etc, which extend over the whole people's economy. According to the revisionists, any commodity production in socialism is identical with capitalist commodity production. According to them, to assert the existence of commodity production of a special type in socialism means, allegedly, to decide 'arbitrarily,' contrary to the objective reality." For more on the different views of the law of value under socialism see: http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv1n1/marksoc.htm


The war in Afghanistan was being won by the Soviet-backed regime and the Soviet armed forces-- it was Gorby that cut and ran. It was a worthy cause, anyway -- all the state cappers and anarchist notwithstanding. It is pretty strange that among ostensible revolutionaries, most come out on the patently wrong side on this one. Hmmm, a left nationalist modernizing regime vs. the most reactionary political forces on Earth? Let's see. . . .Actually it was Gorby who revved up the Soviet war drive in Afghanistan. He only withdrew when it was beyond all doubt that, as in Vietnam, the whole people opposed foreign occupation, and would never permit the Soviet social-imperialists to conquer their country. It's always amusing how revisionist and apologist narratives of the war in Afghanistan essentially carry forward the "civilizing" mission preached by the French, British, and other imperialist powers in regards to "backward peoples."

[Fred]

I've linked various times in other threads to the three main works on the restoration of capitalism in the USSR (by Nicolaus, by the Revolutionary Union, and that by Bill Bland.) You're free to read them.

It is important to note why Stalin criticized the proposals to disband the MTS:


As the Albanians noted (http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/albind/socalb1.htm): "In attacking the Marxist-Leninist view in regard to commodity production in socialism, the Soviet revisionists claim that history knows only two types of social production: the natural economy and the market economy. Therefore, they assert, either socialism and an economy without the system of commodity and money relations, or socialism and a market economy with commodity, value, money, economic spontaneity, competition, prices, profits, credits, interest, taxes on the fundamental means, rent, etc, which extend over the whole people's economy. According to the revisionists, any commodity production in socialism is identical with capitalist commodity production. According to them, to assert the existence of commodity production of a special type in socialism means, allegedly, to decide 'arbitrarily,' contrary to the objective reality." For more on the different views of the law of value under socialism see: http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/rdv1n1/marksoc.htm

Actually it was Gorby who revved up the Soviet war drive in Afghanistan. He only withdrew when it was beyond all doubt that, as in Vietnam, the whole people opposed foreign occupation, and would never permit the Soviet social-imperialists to conquer their country. It's always amusing how revisionist and apologist narratives of the war in Afghanistan essentially carry forward the "civilizing" mission preached by the French, British, and other imperialist powers in regards to "backward peoples."

All three writers you cite, make the same tired arguments that were thoroughly debunked by Joseph Seymour in the Spartacist pamphlet, Why the USSR is not Capitalist. It is still available on their website for two dollars. Highly recommended. At which time it is available online, I will definitely post links

Re: Afghanistan, the Soviets intervened in a civil war at the request of the government, led by the left-nationalist PDPA. The CIA massively funded and armed the mullah-led rebellion. The silly notion that "all the people" opposed the Soviet intervention is pure fantasy. But here's my question: If 60 percent of the population favored chattel slavery for women, would it then be wrong to fight for the freedom of women? Because that was one of the central reasons for this civil war. In any case, this was no Vietnam. The Soviets/PDPA were doing fine against the insurgents -- but Gorbachev had other fish to fry -- and had no stomach or interest in fighting this war to conclusion. The Stalinist methodology leading to the embrace of mullahs, not only in Afganistan, but also in Iran, led to massive defeats for the working class. That you cannot recognize it even with hindsight is fairly astounding, but I guess the result of the Stalinist blinders you put on.

[cliffhanger]

Looking back at the draft of the 1936 Constitution, you might want to explain how did this stratum, most definitely not a class, called the intelligentsia, managed to morph itself into the ruling bourgeois class in two to three decades.I think part of the issue with your perspective is the matter of definitions. The managerial and intellectual stratum is already semi-bourgeois, it's petty-bourgeois, due to its position within production relations. Under a dictatorship of the proletariat, the petty-bourgeoisie is subordinate to proletarian leadership and can play a progressive role. But if the petty-bourgeoisie gains independent power over production relations and moves away from planning the economy in an administrative and progressive way then it becomes the basis for a new bourgeoisie.

Beyond that, you seem to be incredulous that the Soviet working class would sit by as counter-revolution was happening. Well, in part you have to keep this within the narrative of actual Soviet history: They had just lost 20 million people to the Nazi invasion, buckling the economy, and that after the enormous sacrifices during the industrialization drive. The problems were so enormous that there was a significant famine in 1947. This all contributed two conflicting trends: The prestige of the party and the heavy dependence on bureaucracy. Although there were in fact worker uprisings across the Soviet Union (and Eastern Europe) against such bureaucratic characteristics of the economy, I think the average person reasonably thought that any deviations were correctable over time, and were focused on rebuilding their lives and the country. In fact, it took a very long process for the CPSU to fully collapse, and obviously in a number of countries the revisionists have been unable to completely eradicate remnants of socialist ideology.

[Ismail]

Re: Afghanistan, the Soviets intervened in a civil war at the request of the government, led by the left-nationalist PDPA.What is "the government" in this case? It certainly can't be the leader of the country, Hafizullah Amin, who the Soviets had shot upon entering the country.


The CIA massively funded and armed the mullah-led rebellion.And the Soviet and Chinese revisionists gave much in the way of arms and other material supplies to the Vietnamese. In all of these cases ulterior motives were at work, but that does not change the character of the war. The Americans invaded Vietnam, just as the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The resistance was of an anti-imperialist character.


But here's my question: If 60 percent of the population favored chattel slavery for women, would it then be wrong to fight for the freedom of women? Because that was one of the central reasons for this civil war.This is a misleading argument because in 1978-79 the country was led by a regime which took power in a military coup, lacked a mass social basis, and which persecuted actual revolutionaries. The issue was not the unity of the people against a foreign occupier.


In any case, this was no Vietnam. The Soviets/PDPA were doing fine against the insurgentsDepends on how you define "fine." I don't think a Soviet populace increasingly wary of an endless war and Soviet soldiers returning from battle addicted to drugs or suffering from PTSD indicates that the Soviet social-imperialists were "doing fine." The National Liberation Front had few prospects of taking Saigon so long as US forces remained in South Vietnam, does that mean the Americans were "doing fine"?

[Fred]

What is "the government" in this case? It certainly can't be the leader of the country, Hafizullah Amin, who the Soviets had shot upon entering the country.

And the Soviet and Chinese revisionists gave much in the way of arms and other material supplies to the Vietnamese. In all of these cases ulterior motives were at work, but that does not change the character of the war. The Americans invaded Vietnam, just as the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. The resistance was of an anti-imperialist character.

This is a misleading argument because in 1978-79 the country was led by a regime which took power in a military coup, lacked a mass social basis, and which persecuted actual revolutionaries. The issue was not the unity of the people against a foreign occupier.

Depends on how you define "fine." I don't think a Soviet populace increasingly wary of an endless war and Soviet soldiers returning from battle addicted to drugs or suffering from PTSD indicates that the Soviet social-imperialists were "doing fine." The National Liberation Front had few prospects of taking Saigon so long as US forces remained in South Vietnam, does that mean the Americans were "doing fine"?
Ismail, don't you get a little queasy equating the NLF/North Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh, and the freaking mullahs in Afghanistan? They are equivalent in your mind. So is the aid given to the Mullahs by the CIA -- equivalent to the support given to N. Vietnam by the USSR and the PRC? Pretty crazy world you inhabit, comrade, with no way of telling which side of the class line you are on and what represents historical progress.

The base of the PDPA was somewhat narrow in Afghanistan. So was the Bolsheviks, in Russia in 1917. That is a red herring. Oh, and you forgot to mention that the coup that brought the PDPA to power overthrew a monarchy. Women were (and sadly probably are today) bought and sold in Afghanistan, esp in the countryside. The PDPA, reduced the bride price. The Mullahs made lots of money lending cash to men that had to buy their wives. They rebelled over this. I know that Stalinists don't routinely view the enslavement of women as a major issue, as they seem to have great affection for the nuclear family.

Maybe this should be a different thread, but I don't want your assertions unchallenged in the learning section.

[Ismail]

Ismail, don't you get a little queasy equating the NLF/North Vietnam under Ho Chi Minh, and the freaking mullahs in Afghanistan? They are equivalent in your mind. So is the aid given to the Mullahs by the CIA -- equivalent to the support given to N. Vietnam by the USSR and the PRC? Pretty crazy world you inhabit, comrade, with no way of telling which side of the class line you are on and what represents historical progress.Neither the revisionist USSR nor China were led by the proletariat, their "aid" to DR Vietnam was meant to get it to adhere to either of their reactionary foreign policy goals. And yet the Vietnamese did take this aid, though they had the advantage of holding state power and being able to use this aid in a way that did not enslave them.

The Afghan resistance, having no comparable organization, obviously saw both the ascendancy of religious and tribal forces in leading positions and their mostly tactical use of US funding and arms to achieve their goal of ousting the Soviet social-imperialists from the country in order to keep their own positions secure. Again, the primary contradiction was between the invaders and those subject to the invasion. The fact that local reaction opposed the invasion does not change the character of the war, nor does the fact that the US imperialists quite naturally backed said reaction for its own interests.

As for the form of resistance in Afghanistan, however, Hoxha wrote in his diary in December 1983 (Reflections on the Middle East, pp. 530-531):

Frequently when I read reports or see on the TV shots of the fighting and daring actions which the Afghan fighters carry out against powerful formations or motorized columns of the Soviet army of occupation, jumping from rock to rock amongst the snow and ice, the rain and countless other difficulties, and armed only with rifles, my mind goes back to our glorious National Liberation War, to the heroism and sacrifices of our valiant, patriotic and revolutionary people. Of course, our war was at a much higher level and much better organized and, above all, it was led by our Communist Party on the basis of the teachings of Marxism-Leninism. Our people, rallied in the Democratic Front organization, closely united, without distinction as to region or religion, were more conscious about the ideals for which they had to and did fight and about the character of the state which they would build on the ruins of past regimes, after the victory. Nevertheless, I repeat that the struggle of the people of Afghanistan is a just struggle, and the Afghan patriotic fighters deserve to be honoured and respected by all the patriotic forces of the world, to be supported so that they can step up their liberation war even further until they drive the Soviet occupiers completely from their homeland. And, whether the Soviet social-imperialists and their local lackeys like it or not, this will certainly be realized in the not too distant future. The people of Afghanistan will regain their freedom and independence.
The base of the PDPA was somewhat narrow in Afghanistan. So was the Bolsheviks, in Russia in 1917.Not comparable. What happened in 1917 was a proletarian revolution, whereas seemingly by your own admission ("left nationalist modernizing regime") what happened in Afghanistan was not. The invasion was hardly any more popular in the cities than it was in the countryside.


Oh, and you forgot to mention that the coup that brought the PDPA to power overthrew a monarchy.Actually it didn't, it overthrew a bourgeois nationalist regime (that had overthrown the monarchy) one half of the PDPA was perfectly willing to collaborate with, that one half which also collaborated with the monarchy beforehand and which was installed by the Soviets following their invasion and defeat of the other wing, the wing that actually carried out the coup.


I know that Stalinists don't routinely view the enslavement of women as a major issue, as they seem to have great affection for the nuclear family.I like how for reasons of ideology you formally condemn Brezhnev and Co. as "Stalinists" but in practice completely apologize for them and reserve your main venom for those who actually do uphold Stalin. The Soviet social-imperialists cared for the rights of women in Afghanistan about as much as the US imperialists do today: whatever gives their invasion a "humanitarian" and "progressive" gloss.

[Fred]

Neither the revisionist USSR nor China were led by the proletariat, their "aid" to DR Vietnam was meant to get it to adhere to either of their reactionary foreign policy goals. And yet the Vietnamese did take this aid, though they had the advantage of holding state power and being able to use this aid in a way that did not enslave them.

The Afghan resistance, having no comparable organization, obviously saw both the ascendancy of religious and tribal forces in leading positions and their mostly tactical use of US funding and arms to achieve their goal of ousting the Soviet social-imperialists from the country in order to keep their own positions secure. Again, the primary contradiction was between the invaders and those subject to the invasion. The fact that local reaction opposed the invasion does not change the character of the war, nor does the fact that the US imperialists quite naturally backed said reaction for its own interests.

As for the form of resistance in Afghanistan, however, Hoxha wrote in his diary in December 1983 (Reflections on the Middle East, pp. 530-531):
Not comparable. What happened in 1917 was a proletarian revolution, whereas seemingly by your own admission ("left nationalist modernizing regime") what happened in Afghanistan was not. The invasion was hardly any more popular in the cities than it was in the countryside.

Actually it didn't, it overthrew a bourgeois nationalist regime (that had overthrown the monarchy) one half of the PDPA was perfectly willing to collaborate with, that one half which also collaborated with the monarchy beforehand and which was installed by the Soviets following their invasion and defeat of the other wing, the wing that actually carried out the coup.

I like how for reasons of ideology you formally condemn Brezhnev and Co. as "Stalinists" but in practice completely apologize for them and reserve your main venom for those who actually do uphold Stalin. The Soviet social-imperialists cared for the rights of women in Afghanistan about as much as the US imperialists do today: whatever gives their invasion a "humanitarian" and "progressive" gloss.
I don't apologize for Brezhnev. I oppose him from the left in contrast to opposing him from the right as you do. And you've done it again in showing me how vacuous Hoxha is with that brilliant quote. Actually saying that the cutthroat reactionaries were fighting for freedom? Whose? Preposterous. They were fighting for the enslavement of the Afghan people to the most reactionary forces that exist. You can't even defend the French Revolution, how the hell do you expect to defend the Russian Revolution?

When the PDPA came to power it replaced the King of Afghanistan. In any case it all goes wrong for you once you declare the USSR to be a "social imperialist" power. The motivation for the Soviet intervention is immaterial. The results, had they followed through would have been enormously beneficial to the people, especially the women of Afghanistan. Under the PDPA, they didn't have to wear a head-to-toe Burkha, the could go to school and learn to read and right. They participated in all aspects of social life, had jobs, were in the government and the military. Under the mullahs, they were and are again slaves. As a "true Stalinist" you can have no coherent way to view what happened there -- no sense of the scope of the tragedy -- because the "freedom fighters" won.:crying:

Q: Firemen fight fires. What do "freedom fighters fight"?:)

[Ismail]

Actually saying that the cutthroat reactionaries were fighting for freedom? Whose?He never said that, actually. He said the Afghan people were fighting for freedom, which meant the defeat of the occupying forces. It is quite difficult to speak of genuine social liberation in Afghanistan without such basic freedom.


When the PDPA came to power it replaced the King of Afghanistan.No it didn't, it replaced a bourgeois-nationalist regime led by a man who had proclaimed a Republic after ousting the King. Said Republic had existed for a few years until the Soviets became anxious about it having the gall to conclude agreements with countries other than the USSR, whereupon it suddenly took interest in uniting the two revisionist PDPA factions for its own social-imperialist interests.


The motivation for the Soviet intervention is immaterial.Good thing imperialism isn't based too much on the subjective wishes of the ruling clique in power.


The results, had they followed through would have been enormously beneficial to the people, especially the women of Afghanistan.The results were as follows: in 1992 the regime, which had gotten rid of virtually all of its "left-wing" rhetoric in the name of appeasing the most reactionary sections of Afghan society, fell. Such was the result of any withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan. The results beforehand were imperialist war, with mass bombings of villages and other "progressive" endeavors which reaffirmed in the minds of Afghans the imperial motives of the Soviet revisionists occupying the country.

And your attempt to portray women as a single unified bloc without variation in their views, as if they were all unanimously full of praise for the PDPA, is ridiculous. It is again akin to how the US imperialists cited women's rights as one of the "moral" justifications for invading Afghanistan. The RAWA was an example of a group that opposed the Soviet social-imperialist and PDPA use of women in occupation and quisling propaganda.

[LOLseph Stalin]

To me revisionism means adapting Marxism to fit the conditions of a specific country. So no, I don't view it as necessarily bad.

[Old Bolshie]

As it was already pointed out, originally revisionism meant a distortion of Marxist theory and a change of its revolutionary character towards a more reformist one.

What was a bad about it? Perhaps the support of SPD of German's war effort in World War I.

However, the concept of revisionism was completely adulterated after the Sino-soviet split.

It was not about the distortion of the theory anymore but just a slander aimed to give a Marxist legitimacy for national rivalries and interests. Its meaning was totally emptied.

[Ismail]

To me revisionism means adapting Marxism to fit the conditions of a specific country. So no, I don't view it as necessarily bad.In that case why did Lenin and Luxemburg simultaneously denounce revisionism and stress the scientific character of Marxism and its universal validity through said character? Again, Albania did a lot of "adapting Marxism to fit the conditions of a specific country," yet there was no Albanian equivalent to Titoism (which used the Yugoslav partisan experience as a lynchpin to justify bourgeois nationalism) or Juche, nor did the Albanian experience result in such "creative applications" as, say, the vast majority of the countryside being in private hands (as in Poland after 1956.) Unless you're willing to tell us about how Khrushchev and Brezhnev or various other revisionists "adapted Marxism" rather than bastardized it, comments like these have no content and just repeat truisms.


As it was already pointed out, originally revisionism meant a distortion of Marxist theory and a change of its revolutionary character towards a more reformist one.

What was a bad about it? Perhaps the support of SPD of German's war effort in World War I.

However, the concept of revisionism was completely adulterated after the Sino-soviet split.

It was not about the distortion of the theory anymore but just a slander aimed to give a Marxist legitimacy for national rivalries and interests. Its meaning was totally emptied.But it was precisely the Soviet revisionists who spoke of a peaceful transition to socialism in the West, and the Yugoslav revisionists who spoke of technological progress causing the capitalist countries to "grow into" socialism, etc. Just because the Chinese struggle against revisionism was actually used as a cover for their national chauvinism and attempts to become a rival superpower does not change the fact that, as Hoxha noted after the Sino-Albanian split, "Since we were already acquainted with Khrushchev and Mikoyan, we were quite clear that they did not proceed from principled positions in the accusations they were making against the Chinese party. As became even clearer later, the differences were over a series of matters of principle towards which, at that time, the Chinese seemed to maintain correct stands. Both in the official speeches of the Chinese leaders and in their published articles, especially in the one entitled 'Long Live Leninism (http://marx2mao.com/Other/LLL60.html)', the Chinese party treated the problema in a theoretically correct way and opposed the Khrushchevites."

[Five Year Plan]

Revisionism has morphed into a generic swear word hurled at any perceived deviation from Marxist orthodoxy. The claim that there is a Marxist orthodoxy is a little problematic, at least in the context of the people who tend to make the claim. They tend not to be the most well read when it comes to Marxism.

[Ismail]

The claim that there is a Marxist orthodoxy is a little problematic, at least in the context of the people who tend to make the claim. They tend not to be the most well read when it comes to Marxism.There were and are all sorts of Western "Marxists" who denied the leading role of the proletariat in the revolution in favor of students and "the third world" (such as Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm), as well as other currents representing petty-bourgeois and ultimately reformist aspirations. Those opposed to revisionism are well aware of them, considering that they form yet another strand of modern revisionism.

To give another example, "After Khrushchev's slanders against Stalin, the French Communist Party was shaken and such intellectuals were the first to capitulate. It launched the slogan of 'complete freedom in art and culture', and such former defenders of socialist realism such as Aragon, André Stil, and André Wurmser not only changed their coats but even sold their souls and their hides to revisionism. Thus the French pseudo-communist literary figures began to fall in love with the Lukacses, the Kafkas and the Sartres." (Hoxha, Eurocommunism is Anti-Communism, 1980, p. 227.) Such persons obviously represented deviations from Marxism-Leninism, were recognized as such, and justly rebuffed.

[Stalinist Speaker]

To me revisionism means adapting Marxism to fit the conditions of a specific country. So no, I don't view it as necessarily bad.
So it wasn't bad that the soviet union turned imperialist? or china capitalist? or how the revisionist Gorbachev managed to destroy almost every socialist state?

[Popular Front of Judea]

Bad or not the dissolution of the SU is a historical fact. The SU ran its course. All is left now is Stalinist nostalgia.


So it wasn't bad that the soviet union turned imperialist? or china capitalist? or how the revisionist Gorbachev managed to destroy almost every socialist state?1

[Old Bolshie]

But it was precisely the Soviet revisionists who spoke of a peaceful transition to socialism in the West, and the Yugoslav revisionists who spoke of technological progress causing the capitalist countries to "grow into" socialism, etc.

You have to be more specific here (with quotes or something) but the idea that a peaceful transition to socialism could occur in the West was behind the ideological conception of Eurocommunism which as you know emerged as a reaction against the USSR by some western communist parties.


Just because the Chinese struggle against revisionism was actually used as a cover for their national chauvinism and attempts to become a rival superpower does not change the fact that, as Hoxha noted after the Sino-Albanian split, "Since we were already acquainted with Khrushchev and Mikoyan, we were quite clear that they did not proceed from principled positions in the accusations they were making against the Chinese party. As became even clearer later, the differences were over a series of matters of principle towards which, at that time, the Chinese seemed to maintain correct stands. Both in the official speeches of the Chinese leaders and in their published articles, especially in the one entitled 'Long Live Leninism', the Chinese party treated the problema in a theoretically correct way and opposed the Khrushchevites."

That was pretty much my point. It was also somewhat a hypocritical position that the Chinese took when their revolution was not even a proletarian one in first place.

[Zanthorus]

Revisionism is bad because Marx and Engels were right about basically everything.

No, really.

[Five Year Plan]

There were and are all sorts of Western "Marxists" who denied the leading role of the proletariat in the revolution in favor of students and "the third world" (such as Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm), as well as other currents representing petty-bourgeois and ultimately reformist aspirations. Those opposed to revisionism are well aware of them, considering that they form yet another strand of modern revisionism.

To give another example, "After Khrushchev's slanders against Stalin, the French Communist Party was shaken and such intellectuals were the first to capitulate. It launched the slogan of 'complete freedom in art and culture', and such former defenders of socialist realism such as Aragon, André Stil, and André Wurmser not only changed their coats but even sold their souls and their hides to revisionism. Thus the French pseudo-communist literary figures began to fall in love with the Lukacses, the Kafkas and the Sartres." (Hoxha, Eurocommunism is Anti-Communism, 1980, p. 227.) Such persons obviously represented deviations from Marxism-Leninism, were recognized as such, and justly rebuffed.

Your response is more a confirmation than a refutation of my original post. You are hurling revisionism around as a swear word. This might be valuable for people who already share your political assumptions. It's not useful for launching a productive exchange of ideas.

[Ismail]

You have to be more specific here (with quotes or something) but the idea that a peaceful transition to socialism could occur in the West was behind the ideological conception of Eurocommunism which as you know emerged as a reaction against the USSR by some western communist parties.Eurocommunism was based on three tendencies:

1. The 20th Party Congress and the Soviet revisionist call for "national roads to socialism" in order to justify capitalist restoration and alliance with the bourgeoisie of other countries;
2. The revisionist parties of Western Europe seeking to enter into reformist alliances with social-democratic parties and to tie themselves to the bourgeois state apparatuses of their own countries;
3. The late 60's/early 70's emphasis on the "young," "humanistic" Marx as a negation of Lenin, Stalin already having been negated years prior.

I can certainly quote works pointing out that at the 20th Party Congress and onwards the Soviet revisionists spoke of a peaceful transition to socialism being possible under "new conditions" in the world, though I can't really quote directly (with a few exceptions in the third world) considering that so few primary source materials (Soviet speeches and party congresses) are online.


Your response is more a confirmation than a refutation of my original post. You are hurling revisionism around as a swear word. This might be valuable for people who already share your political assumptions. It's not useful for launching a productive exchange of ideas.Except you haven't actually given examples of modern revisionism. Not to mention that you allege that anti-revisionists "tend not to be the most well read when it comes to Marxism," and when I pointed out the examples of Marcuse and Fromm as vulgarizers of Marxism you did not respond, apparently believing that their pseudo-Marxism (the students as the vanguard of the revolution, the latter's attempt to reconcile Marxism with Zen Buddhism, etc.) constitutes something worthy of engaging in a "productive exchange of ideas" with.

[Five Year Plan]

Except you haven't actually given examples of modern revisionism. Not to mention that you allege that anti-revisionists "tend not to be the most well read when it comes to Marxism," and when I pointed out the examples of Marcuse and Fromm as vulgarizers of Marxism you did not respond, apparently believing that their pseudo-Marxism (the students as the vanguard of the revolution, the latter's attempt to reconcile Marxism with Zen Buddhism, etc.) constitutes something worthy of engaging in a "productive exchange of ideas" with.

I haven't claim there is such a thing as modern revision. Why would I be obligated to provide examples? You claim that I made statement about anti-revisionists. I didn't. I made a statement about people who call themselves anti-revisionists and use the word revisionist as an epithet.

As to the substance of your last two posts, you have claimed that various thinkers are revisionists. So what? They might be contradicting basic aspects of Marxism or they might not be. It's impossible to tell from your post. Why? Beause, as I pointed out in my last post, you don't provide an argument one way or the other. You just slap a label on them and use other people's agreement with that label as a litmus test on their politics. This methodology might be useful in nationalist style cheerleading and purging bureaucratic rivals. It's just not intellectually useful.

We can keep going around and around, I suppose, but we won't get anywhere until you construct an argument instead of just name dropping and labeling.

[Ismail]

They might be contradicting basic aspects of Marxism or they might not be. It's impossible to tell from your post. Why? Beause, as I pointed out in my last post, you don't provide an argument one way or the other.Probably because this isn't, say, "Was Sartre a great Marxist?" or "Is Songun a correct doctrine after all?" thread. The positions of Bernstein and Kautsky were no more "ignored" and revisionism made a "swear word" against them than the positions of Mao, Tito and other modern revisionists were "ignored" and supposedly the same process applied to them.


You just slap a label on them and use other people's agreement with that label as a litmus test on their politics. This methodology might be useful in nationalist style cheerleading and purging bureaucratic rivals. It's just not intellectually useful.The irony here being the fact that it is precisely in the ranks of revisionism that ones find nationalism and apologia for it, from Kautsky to Tito, Castro to Mao, and so on.

And in fact to struggle against revisionism is to uphold revolution. It was the Soviet revisionists who, above all, spoke of "restoring Leninist norms" and "socialist legality," which as Hoxha pointed out was in fact bureaucratic legality.

[Hit The North]

I can certainly quote works pointing out that at the 20th Party Congress and onwards the Soviet revisionists spoke of a peaceful transition to socialism being possible under "new conditions" in the world, though I can't really quote directly (with a few exceptions in the third world) considering that so few primary source materials (Soviet speeches and party congresses) are online.
Your ability to dredge up quotes isn't in question. What you've singularly failed to do in this thread is construct an argument to show how any of these strategic changes in outlook managed to change the mode of production in the USSR.

[Ocean Seal]

So in my understanding revisionism is modifying Marxist theory. So wouldn't this make Lenin a revisionist because he had the doctrine of "Vanguard-ism". And Stalin a revisionist for his doctrine of "Socialism in One Country"? The way I see it, anti-revisionism just turns Marxism into a religion.
There is nothing wrong with revisionism, we should constantly be revising improve our understanding of the world.

[Ismail]

What you've singularly failed to do in this thread is construct an argument to show how any of these strategic changes in outlook managed to change the mode of production in the USSR.They didn't, obviously, and no one argued that. What they did do was signify the rise of a new bourgeoisie which was betraying the proletarian internationalism of Soviet foreign policy up to that point. That was the point of the 20th Party Congress: to lay the foundations for capitalist restoration under the cover of "returning to Leninism."

I have already mentioned works discussing capitalist restoration in the USSR.


There is nothing wrong with revisionism, we should constantly be revising improve our understanding of the world.Except revisionism literally does the opposite, it deprives Marxism of science and of its revolutionary content. Again, how have Castroism, Juche and Songun, Maoism and other revisionist doctrines "improve[d] our understanding of the world" rather than sought to obscure it?

It's akin to saying "there's nothing wrong with reformism, we should always strive to secure gains for the working-class by all available means," as if that's what reformism means.

[Fred]

Your response is more a confirmation than a refutation of my original post. You are hurling revisionism around as a swear word. This might be valuable for people who already share your political assumptions. It's not useful for launching a productive exchange of ideas.

Well, don't expect that to change any time soon. Ismail, as a good Stalinist, does use terms such as "revisionism" as epithets to be hurled at opponents on the left. He doesn't quite go as far as some to say the Kruschev's secret speech restored capitalism in the USSR, but he's not really far from that position. With all the same people in power and no qualitative change in the mode of production in the USSR, somehow, a counterrevolution happened.

[Ismail]

He doesn't quite go as far as some to say the Kruschev's secret speech restored capitalism in the USSR,No one ever claimed that though. I've never seen any Marxist-Leninist materials from groups in the West, let alone Albanian or Chinese materials (and I've read plenty of the former), claim that "the 20th Party Congress restored capitalism in the USSR."

The 20th Party Congress certainly signified the triumph of revisionism within the CPSU, which at once abandoned proletarian internationalism and began to restore capitalism. Throughout the early and mid-60's Albanian and Chinese materials spoke of the revisionists arduously seeking to restore capitalism. The invasion of Czechoslovakia is generally considered the point where Soviet social-imperialism made itself known, and it was pretty clear that a country which oppresses others, as Engels pointed out, forges its own chains. By that point the Albanian and Chineses concluded that capitalist restoration was pretty much complete. Of course neither subscribed to the absurd theory of a "degenerated/deformed workers' state" beforehand, which after 1956 serve as an apologia for revisionism on the part of the Trots, who welcomed the 20th Party Congress.

Here's an example of a 1965 Albanian work discussing the efforts of the Soviet revisionists to restore capitalism: http://www.scribd.com/doc/155863088/Khrushchevite-Revisionists-Take-One-Further-Dangerous-Step-Towards-Capitalist-Degeneration-of-Socialist-Economy

[Fred]

No one ever claimed that though. I've never seen any Marxist-Leninist materials from groups in the West, let alone Albanian or Chinese materials (and I've read plenty of the former), claim that "the 20th Party Congress restored capitalism in the USSR."

The 20th Party Congress certainly signified the triumph of revisionism within the CPSU, which at once abandoned proletarian internationalism and began to restore capitalism. Throughout the early and mid-60's Albanian and Chinese materials spoke of the revisionists arduously seeking to restore capitalism. The invasion of Czechoslovakia is generally considered the point where Soviet social-imperialism made itself known, and it was pretty clear that a country which oppresses others, as Engels pointed out, forges its own chains. By that point the Albanian and Chineses concluded that capitalist restoration was pretty much complete. Of course neither subscribed to the absurd theory of a "degenerated/deformed workers' state" beforehand, which after 1956 serve as an apologia for revisionism on the part of the Trots, who welcomed the 20th Party Congress.

Here's an example of a 1965 Albanian work discussing the efforts of the Soviet revisionists to restore capitalism: http://www.scribd.com/doc/155863088/Khrushchevite-Revisionists-Take-One-Further-Dangerous-Step-Towards-Capitalist-Degeneration-of-Socialist-Economy
Sorry comrade. The USSR's invasion of Czechoslovakia did not change the class nature of the state. How could it have? Only using an idealistic formulation. Sorry, Ismail, but I can't bear to read any Hoxha right now. The magical transformation of a workers' state into a capitalist/imperialist state via changes in policy is preposterous. Especially when, ECONOMICALLY, the changes were not significant.

The "Trots" did not consider the 20th congress as creating any kind of qualitative change in the USSR. To the extent that it marked the end of slaughtering huge numbers of potential political opponents in the USSR, it wasn't a bad thing, however.

[Ismail]

Sorry comrade. The USSR's invasion of Czechoslovakia did not change the class nature of the state. How could it have?The invasion simply confirmed what had been suspected. In 1965, for instance, Hoxha said that, "The Warsaw Treaty exists, and we believe that it will continue to exist, as a 'shield' for the expansionist policy of the Khrushchevite revisionists. They, the Soviet revisionists in the first place, will use this treaty in order to preserve their military hegemony, to have the forces and armaments of their partners under their control and supervision so that, for definite aims, they can dominate the weak partners, intimidated and 'disarmed' by them, through their fear of some 'attack', and intervene, possibly jointly, in case any of their partners gets out of line." (Selected Works Vol. III, pp. 772-773.)

The Soviet invasion no more changed the class nature of the USSR than the invasions of the Philippines and other lands did for the USA. Both expressed the logic of imperialism which both these countries were compelled towards as a result of their status as major capitalist countries. In both cases the world became aware of the emergence of these states as imperialist powers. Obviously a state practicing imperialism cannot be considered a state ruled by the dictatorship of the proletariat.


To the extent that it marked the end of slaughtering huge numbers of potential political opponents in the USSR, it wasn't a bad thing, however.I am reminded of a conversation between Hoxha and Khrushchev wherein the latter said, "You are like Stalin who killed people" and the former replied, "Stalin killed traitors, and we kill them, too." (Hoxha, The Khrushchevites, 1984, p. 374.)

It also reminded me of another instance Hoxha recalled (Selected Works Vol. III, p. 33) shortly after the Hungarian uprising,

Nikita Khrushchev had received a long letter from the traitor Panajot Plaku, who wrote to him about his great 'patriotism', the 'ardent love' he had for the Soviet Union and the Party of Labour of Albania, and asked that Khrushchev, with his authority, intervene to liquidate the leadership of our Party with Enver Hoxha at the head, because we were allegedly 'anti-Marxists', 'Stalinists'. He wrote that he had gone to Yugoslavia because a plot had been organized to kill him. As soon as Khrushchev received the letter, he said to us: 'What if this Plaku returns to Albania, or we accept him in the Soviet Union?' We answered, 'If he comes to Albania, we shall hang him on twenty different counts, while if he goes to the Soviet Union, you will be committing an act that will be fatal to our friendship.' At that he backed down.And of course these and other incidents of resisting revisionist pressure led to Khrushchev's complaint in his memoirs that the Albanians were "monsters," while in 1962 he said (http://digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org/document/113341) to a meeting of Bulgarian revisionists, "Albania is copying what we had done precisely, only with greater, Asiatic brutality. In our Russian understanding, Asiatic brutality is unusual brutality. So they're doing it at a lower level because Stalin actually was a Marxist, was actually a genius and talented, but he misused this talent and directed it against the Party, against the people. One cannot compare Stalin and Enver Hoxha, or Stalin and Mehmet Shehu. And they're not acting like Stalin, but like butchers - they simply chop. Whoever speaks up, they chop off his head."

And all this was logically connected to the revisionist claim that class struggle did not exist under socialism, that the Yugoslav revisionists were not renegades from Marxism but merely "forced into the lap of imperialism" due to the actions of Stalin, etc. The issue was never one of safeguarding against the persecution of innocent people, but of rehabilitating those who were justly dealt with (such as Tukhachevsky) to further the interests of Soviet revisionism which had no problems repressing genuine Marxist-Leninist forces and workers' unrest caused by efforts at capitalist restoration.

[Five Year Plan]

Ismail, you earlier quoted Hoxha as saying that counter-revolution back to a capitalist state was carried out "Differently from the other counter-revolutions" in that "it was not carried out by the use of the armed force but was carried out in a peaceful manner, disguised with socialist phraseology, by gradually eroding from within the socialist system."

There's not much to say about this from a Marxist perspective except to point out that it contradicts the basic Marxist principle that states are systems of political power and armed force configured to serve a particular ruling class, and that one ruling class does not replace another "gradually" or "peacefully." Trotsky was right when he derided this idea as anti-Marxist, or as you would say, "revisionist" since it was just "running backwards the film of reformism." The reason why revolutions are called revolutions is that they entail a series of rapid transformations by which quantity laps over the banks of quality, and the very essence of an object or institution is altered.

The reasons why Marx thought that social revolutions occur rapidly and by force (though this force doesn't always entail open violence, as in the October Revolution) is that any state is dominated by and serves a ruling class that will act to defend it against ascendant classes wanting to transform the state to serve a new ruling class. Social revolutions or counter-revolutions occurring gradually and without any qualitative breaking point implies that ruling classes are content with sharing power and will not openly content with one another for power. It's the same problem with the notion that a state can have multiple ruling classes. It's also the same problem with the attempt by Soviet theoreticians to develop a Marxist theory of "people's democracy." In the rare occasions that multiple classes are exercising state power, that power is openly split, geographically, with two different state machines attempting to jockey for supremacy. Marxists like Lenin call this "dual power."

It is certainly true that revolutions can occur from above. Many bourgeois revolutions occurred when older feudal ruling classes decided to transform their own class positions and their state, under international pressure, to bring them into conformity with capitalist exploitation. Because these revolutions occurred from above, no force was necessary to overthrow the prior ruling class. But they still entailed a rapid qualitative transformation that can be pinpointed as far as retooling the state is concerned. A state that defends feudal prerogatives is going to be very different in terms of legal processes and institutional frameworks than one that defends capitalist prerogatives.

Denying any of this is basically the basest form of revisionism in that it tries either to ignore or rewrite everything Marx, Engels, and Lenin ever wrote about revolution.

[Ismail]

Ismail, you earlier quoted Hoxha as saying that counter-revolution back to a capitalist state was carried out "Differently from the other counter-revolutions" in that "it was not carried out by the use of the armed force but was carried out in a peaceful manner, disguised with socialist phraseology, by gradually eroding from within the socialist system."

There's not much to say about this from a Marxist perspective except to point out that it contradicts the basic Marxist principle that states are systems of political power and armed force configured to serve a particular ruling class, and that one ruling class does not replace another "gradually" or "peacefully."But then again the proletariat is tasked with taking upon itself control over a qualitatively new society opposed to those led by prior classes. Unlike the prior revolutions and counter-revolutions, the vast majority of the population is supposed to take control of society and lay the foundations for the abolition of all classes (and thus states.) All the while the contradictions between manual and mentor labor, between those engaged directly in production and those overseeing it, the issue of "bourgeois right" in remuneration, etc. continue to exist.

By denying the continued existence of class struggle, as the Soviet revisionists did, the essential task of the proletariat to continue to revolutionize society and uphold its class dictatorship is broken, and from this it is quite possible, as the experience of the USSR and various other countries proved, for capitalist restoration to be carried out.

And the counter-revolutionary process was carried out at all levels of society. As Hoxha noted, "Under the slogan of the 'fight against Stalin's personality cult,' or under the pretext of rotation, the Khrushchevite revisionists rode roughshod over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Seventy per cent of the members of the members of the Central Committee elected at the 19th Congress of the CPSU in 1952 were no longer figuring on the list of the Central Committee members elected at the 22nd Congress in 1961. Sixty per cent of the CC members in 1956 were no longer figuring on the list of the CC members that were elected at the 23rd Congress in 1966. A still greater purge has been carried out in the lower party organs. For instance, during 1963 alone, more than 50 per cent of the members of the party central and regional committees in the Republics of the Soviet Union were relieved of their functions, while in the city and district party committees three quarters of their members were replaced with others. The purge of the revolutionary cadres has been carried out on a large scale also in the State organs, and especially in those of the army and State security." (The Party of Labor of Albania in Battle with Modern Revisionism, 1972, pp. 498-499.)

Also as an aside I was quoting a paper from an Albanian conference on social studies, not Hoxha, but obviously there was no divergence of views on the subject.


It's also the same problem with the attempt by Soviet theoreticians to develop a Marxist theory of "people's democracy."Soviet theoreticians pointed out that People's Democracy was a specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, not a "multi-class" state.

As for the rest of your post, it essentially boils down to "there was only one party, the economy was owned by the state, and they still waved a red flag, ergo no qualitative changes occurred."

As for how Trotsky "was right": "Only utter imbeciles would be capable of thinking that capitalist relations, that is to say, the private ownership of the means of production, including the land, can be reestablished in the USSR by peaceful methods and lead to the régime of bourgeois democracy. As a matter of fact, even if it were possible in general, capitalism could not be regenerated in Russia except as the result of a savage counter-revolutionary coup d’état which would cost ten times as many victims as the October Revolution and the civil war." (On the Kirov Assassination, December 1934)

[Five Year Plan]

But then again the proletariat is tasked with taking upon itself control over a qualitatively new society opposed to those led by prior classes. Unlike the prior revolutions and counter-revolutions, the vast majority of the population is supposed to take control of society and lay the foundations for the abolition of all classes (and thus states.) All the while the contradictions between manual and mentor labor, between those engaged directly in production and those overseeing it, the issue of "bourgeois right" in remuneration, etc. continue to exist.

By denying the continued existence of class struggle, as the Soviet revisionists did, the essential task of the proletariat to continue to revolutionize society and uphold its class dictatorship is broken, and from this it is quite possible, as the experience of the USSR and various other countries proved, for capitalist restoration to be carried out.

Of course class struggle continues after a socialist revolution and the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The domestic bourgeoisie needs to be subdued, the workers' state consolidated, peasants assimilated into an industrial cooperative economy, and the law of value overcome as class struggle is waged on an international plane.

Saying that class struggle continues after the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat is different than saying that a revolution (or in this context, counter-revolution) which might ensue through the process of struggle is a gradual process with no qualitative break in which one state, under one class, rapidly transforms into another type of state. The class struggle that might result in victory of one class over another certainly is a gradual process, but the revolutionary consummation of that victory is not. Revolutions are not gradual and piecemeal. They punctuate economic struggles that are.

If you are having problems understanding this, you might want to refer yourself to Marx's famous Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. In that text he explains how "the changes in the economic foundation lead sooner or later to the transformation of the whole immense superstructure." Notice that he doesn't say changes in the economic foundation, the class struggle, leads to a staggered process in which pieces of the immense superstructure gradually change.

Why can't classes share the state in a way that would make the revolutionizing of the state piecemeal and gradual? Because states are unitary political systems protecting the power of one or another class in the process of production. Lenin was clear on this, too:


"The essence of Marx's theory of the state has been mastered only by those who realise that the dictatorship of a single class is necessary not only for every class society in general, not only for the proletariat which has overthrown the bourgeoisie, but also for the entire historical period which separates capitalism from "classless society," from communism. Bourgeois states are most varied in form, but their essence is the same: all these states, whatever their form, in the final analysis are inevitably the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. The transition from capitalism to communism is certainly bound to yield a tremendous abundance and variety of political forms, but the essence will inevitably be the same: the dictatorship of the proletariat." (Lenin CW, Vol. 25, p. 413)From a Marxist or Leninist perspective, it makes no sense to talk about a state that is ruled by two classes or transitional states that are gradually changing hands from one class to another. It is revisionist in the truest sense of the word, and your arguments to this end constitute an exemplar of what I alluded to above as dilittantes hurling "revisionism" as a vacuous epithet.


And the counter-revolutionary process was carried out at all levels of society. As Hoxha noted, "Under the slogan of the 'fight against Stalin's personality cult,' or under the pretext of rotation, the Khrushchevite revisionists rode roughshod over the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Seventy per cent of the members of the members of the Central Committee elected at the 19th Congress of the CPSU in 1952 were no longer figuring on the list of the Central Committee members elected at the 22nd Congress in 1961. Sixty per cent of the CC members in 1956 were no longer figuring on the list of the CC members that were elected at the 23rd Congress in 1966. A still greater purge has been carried out in the lower party organs. For instance, during 1963 alone, more than 50 per cent of the members of the party central and regional committees in the Republics of the Soviet Union were relieved of their functions, while in the city and district party committees three quarters of their members were replaced with others. The purge of the revolutionary cadres has been carried out on a large scale also in the State organs, and especially in those of the army and State security." (The Party of Labor of Albania in Battle with Modern Revisionism, 1972, pp. 498-499.)Hoxha's "counter-revolutionary process" points to little more than the routine housekeeping that occurred whenever new bureaucrats assumed power and replaced in their immediate circle the previous bureaucrat's underlings with a different set of clients, often from different sections of the bureacracy over which the ascending ruler had been a patron and the previous ruler may have been antagonistic.

These numbers say literally bupkis about the changing class nature of the state, which is an issue of state form, how power is configured within a state in relation to class processes, and not just a matter of the personalities who occupy various offices. It doesn't even rise to the level of pointing out dramatic transformation within the party as a whole, or the relationship between the working class and the party. Dozens of bureaucrats in 1952 were no longer in the central committee and other elite committees in 1956 or 1961 or 1966. And so what? Similar transformations can be seen in the transition from Khrushchev to Brezhnev, and Brezhnev to Andropov. Were these social revolutions also?

I will hand it to Hoxha, though. He recognizes a good purge when he sees one.


Soviet theoreticians pointed out that People's Democracy was a specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, not a "multi-class" state.Soviet theoreticians debated for many years over the subject, so it is perhaps a little dishonest to speak of a "theory" rather than multiple theories. It turns out that theoreticians sometimes had a hard time keeping up with policy changes from above that the theories were designed to support. However, what these theories shared was the attempt to link the construction of socialism with the struggles for national liberation from fascism in Eastern Europe during World War II. That's right. The multi-class "democratic" popular front coalitions that struggled against fascism were, in these theories, said to have established the people's democracies.

In class terms this presented huge problems for the theoreticians. Before the Cominform Resolution of 1948, which was by and large a response to the Marshall Plan's signaling to the Soviets a waning interest in economic and political cooperation, the theorists uniformly denied that the states established in the Eastern European countries were in any way dictatorships of the proletariat (see the writings of Konstantinovsky, Trainin, Leontiev, etc.). Instead they were said to represent "the rule of the toiling people" so steeped in peril that they had to consolidate behind their supposedly democratic conquests. The construction of socialism was not even on the agenda in these writings.

Even after the new Stalinist line in 1948 was hammered out, and with the agenda of "constructing socialism" front and center, there was a great deal of ambiguity regarding the class nature of the new states. These societies were referred to as "transitional" to (but not yet) socialist states: "People's democracy, it should not be forgotten, is an intermediate stage between the bourgeois state and the Socialist State, between capitalism and Socialism. No country can remain long in that intermediate stage without moving either forward or backward." (Kuusinen)

Yes, that's right. Intermediate states that neither the dictatorship of the proletariat nor the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Does this sound familiar? It's the exact formulation that Lenin attacked ruthlessly in the quote of his I provided above.

It was only later in the 1940s that there grew wide acceptance that the the dictatorship of the proletariat was being or had been established in these Eastern European satellites, viewed as synonymous with the monopolization of political power by the Communist parties within the various national liberation coalitions. But since this process of political monopolization occurred some years after the Soviets and their allies had already established firm control over the actual machinery of the state, including the military, police, and security forces, a person is entitled to ask what type of social revolution leaves the same group in charged of these coercive backbones of state power. If a state consists of "armed bodies of men," as Lenin said it did in State and Revolution, Stalinists might have a hard time squaring the realities of Eastern Europe's immediate postwar history with the anti-revisionist orthodoxy.


As for the rest of your post, it essentially boils down to "there was only one party, the economy was owned by the state, and they still waved a red flag, ergo no qualitative changes occurred."No, it doesn't.


As for how Trotsky "was right": "Only utter imbeciles would be capable of thinking that capitalist relations, that is to say, the private ownership of the means of production, including the land, can be reestablished in the USSR by peaceful methods and lead to the régime of bourgeois democracy. As a matter of fact, even if it were possible in general, capitalism could not be regenerated in Russia except as the result of a savage counter-revolutionary coup d’état which would cost ten times as many victims as the October Revolution and the civil war." (On the Kirov Assassination, December 1934)Yes, Trotsky was right there in a way that actually disproves your point again. Counter-revolutions don't occur by gradual peaceful means. They occur suddenly and dramatically, and usher in rapid transformations from top to bottom in the way power is configured in a state, entail a series of forcible confrontations, even where blood is not actually shed.

[Old Bolshie]

1. The 20th Party Congress and the Soviet revisionist call for "national roads to socialism" in order to justify capitalist restoration and alliance with the bourgeoisie of other countries;

I fail to see how the 20th Party Congress or the call for "national roads to socialism" implies capitalist restoration or alliance with bourgeoisie of other countries unless you can provide more specific information about it.


Eurocommunism was based on three tendencies:

1. The 20th Party Congress and the Soviet revisionist call for "national roads to socialism" in order to justify capitalist restoration and alliance with the bourgeoisie of other countries;
2. The revisionist parties of Western Europe seeking to enter into reformist alliances with social-democratic parties and to tie themselves to the bourgeois state apparatuses of their own countries;
3. The late 60's/early 70's emphasis on the "young," "humanistic" Marx as a negation of Lenin, Stalin already having been negated years prior.


You forgot to mention that Eurocommunism was built as a reaction of Western Communist Parties against USSR, it was heavily condemned in USSR and ultimately meant a break with USSR.

[Ismail]

These numbers say literally bupkis about the changing class nature of the state, which is an issue of state form, how power is configured within a state in relation to class processes, and not just a matter of the personalities who occupy various offices. It doesn't even rise to the level of pointing out dramatic transformation within the party as a whole, or the relationship between the working class and the party. Dozens of bureaucrats in 1952 were no longer in the central committee and other elite committees in 1956 or 1961 or 1966. And so what? Similar transformations can be seen in the transition from Khrushchev to Brezhnev, and Brezhnev to Andropov. Were these social revolutions also?The latter were not done under the pretext of struggling against "Stalinism" and in any case were essentially contests between persons with the same revisionist views, as opposed to, say, the "Anti-Party Group" which Khrushchev had to threaten a military coup in order to defeat. It was also just one instance of the counter-revolutionary process.


Soviet theoreticians debated for many years over the subject, so it is perhaps a little dishonest to speak of a "theory" rather than multiple theories.Yes, amazingly enough, a brand new situation emerged and there was no uniform theory at first but instead a number of different approaches. And this was evidently encouraged by Soviet institutions and Stalin, who encouraged similar debate on issues of political economy, linguistics, etc.


However, what these theories shared was the attempt to link the construction of socialism with the struggles for national liberation from fascism in Eastern Europe during World War II. That's right. The multi-class "democratic" popular front coalitions that struggled against fascism were, in these theories, said to have established the people's democracies.And this is leaving out the fact that the leading force in these struggles was said to be the Communists. Was the Soviet Republic "multi-class" (as in two states simultaneously ruling) because the Bolsheviks and Left SRs briefly had a government coalition? I don't think that's the case.


These societies were referred to as "transitional" to (but not yet) socialist states: "People's democracy, it should not be forgotten, is an intermediate stage between the bourgeois state and the Socialist State, between capitalism and Socialism. No country can remain long in that intermediate stage without moving either forward or backward." (Kuusinen)

Yes, that's right. Intermediate states that neither the dictatorship of the proletariat nor the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Does this sound familiar?It doesn't sound familiar considering that Kuusinen there didn't mention the subject of class dictatorship but instead whether a country has/was constructed/constructing socialism or not, and noting that obviously any situation where it was not clearly could not last.


Counter-revolutions don't occur by gradual peaceful means. They occur suddenly and dramatically, and usher in rapid transformations from top to bottom in the way power is configured in a state, entail a series of forcible confrontations, even where blood is not actually shed.Literally as soon as Stalin died, as Hoxha notes, the Soviet revisionists began making changes. Various articles note that by the end of 1953 already a number of economic policies were enacted to the benefit of undermining the planned economy. The 20th Party Congress was preceded by various right-wing activities such as the rehabilitation of the Titoites. The English Revolution wasn't concluded in a year, why should a counter-revolution be? Again, your argument here is essentially formalistic: only if Khrushchev massively privatized the economy (as Gorbachev sought) or publicly renounced Marxism would you actually admit that "sudden and dramatic" changes which "usher in rapid transformations from top to bottom" occurred.


I fail to see how the 20th Party Congress or the call for "national roads to socialism" implies capitalist restoration or alliance with bourgeoisie of other countries unless you can provide more specific information about it.The most blatant case of this is in the colonial and dependent countries. See for instance:

"After the 20th Congress of CPSU Moscow and Beijing were confronted with the need to adjust their revolutionary models. The problem was how to treat the bourgeois governments in Asia in which there was no place for the communists. The Soviet answer was to follow the concept of peaceful transition in which a non-communist government which followed a non-capitalist path and an anti-imperialist foreign policy could actually lead the country to a socialist revolution....

The Soviets praised the Nehru government for its social and land reforms and the liquidation of the 'economic position of imperialism'. They also lauded the economic development of India under the first five-year plan and said that in drawing up the second five-year plan India had tried to learn from the Soviet experience. They declared that the Soviet Union would support India in building a 'socialist society'.

The Soviet economists also praised the development of the state sector as a 'special character which by its very nature differs from the state monopolistic capitalism of the United States and Western Europe' and cited Lenin to say that 'state capitalism is a step towards socialism, especially in a country with a preponderance of small undertakings.'

They also displayed their 'utmost confidence' that socialist ideas had been an 'irresistible attraction' to a country like India and that Soviet economic aid, expansion of Soviet-Indian trade and exchange of economic experts would further stimulate the 'ideals of socialism' among Indians....

Thereafter, the Soviets continued to praise Nehru’s socialism and state capitalism in India to the displeasure of the Chinese communists. In September 1956, addressing the 8th Congress of the CCP, Anastas Mikoyan defended the Soviet claim that India under Nehru was proceeding towards a socialist economy. Mikoyan also said that the Chinese had found their 'own distinctive new forms and methods of building socialism' and cited the Chinese communist alliance with the national bourgeoisie and the Chinese communist effort to move towards socialism through state capitalism. He dealt at length with the Soviet policy towards the underdeveloped nations and their national bourgeois leaders and quoted Lenin on the 'new transitional forms and ways' these countries were seeking to 'avoid the torments of capitalism.' He also defended India’s socialist economy and declared that 'we must be able to see the differences between state capitalism in India and capitalism in the United States.' ....

The Soviets insisted upon the 'progressive role' of state capitalism in India and rejected the mechanical imitation of the Chinese model for India, indeed for all developing nations. A Soviet scholar stated that 'imitation' of the Chinese method of economic development in other underdeveloped countries was 'impermissible' and quoted an early statement by Mao Zedong on the impossibility of the national bourgeoisie's ruling a viable national state, and directly contradicted him, citing India as evidence to the contrary. He also praised the Indian national bourgeoisie as 'progressive elements' and declared that despite the Chinese refusal to recognize the fact India was 'definitely marching towards socialism.' ...

Bypassing capitalism was possible only with aid from the victorious proletariat of an industrially developed state [the Soviet Union]. Non-capitalist development in India was in fact the 'revolutionary process' of gradual and consistent growth of the national liberation revolution into a socialist revolution. Moreover, the 'ideas of the October Revolution' were main elements of India's economic planning...

The Soviets then advised the Indian communists to support the economic measures of the Nehru government, to collaborate with all 'progressive forces' and to display 'tact' towards representatives of the bourgeois nationalist movements. E. Zhukov again praised Nehru’s socialism and insisted that India under Nehru’s leadership was proceeding towards the 'socialist path' though 'it is different from the Soviet concept of socialism.' Another Soviet scholar insisted that India was proceeding towards socialism and quoted Khrushchev as saying that the Soviet Union was convinced that India was proceeding towards socialism 'though we mean different things by socialism.' Nevertheless, he said 'we support the policy of Nehru who says that India is building a socialist society.'"
(Ray, Hemen. Sino-Soviet Conflict Over India. New Delhi: Shakti Malik. 1988. pp. 28-30, 32-33, 35-36.)


You forgot to mention that Eurocommunism was built as a reaction of Western Communist Parties against USSR, it was heavily condemned in USSR and ultimately meant a break with USSR.The Eurocommunist parties continued maintaining organizational and financial links with the Soviet revisionists, who in turn "attacked" Eurocommunism only because it threatened to undermine their control over these parties.

[Five Year Plan]

The latter were not done under the pretext of struggling against "Stalinism" and in any case were essentially contests between persons with the same revisionist views, as opposed to, say, the "Anti-Party Group" which Khrushchev had to threaten a military coup in order to defeat. It was also just one instance of the counter-revolutionary process.

This says absolutely nothing about how the state changed in relation to class processes, or the working class, as a result of the personnel changes at the higher levels of the Soviet bureaucracy in the 1950s and 1960s. To put it differently, it says nothing about how a socialist form of state was smashed and replaced with a capitalist form of state.


Yes, amazingly enough, a brand new situation emerged and there was no uniform theory at first but instead a number of different approaches. And this was evidently encouraged by Soviet institutions and Stalin, who encouraged similar debate on issues of political economy, linguistics, etc.So far in this thread, I've managed to learn that you are very good at avoiding people's main points, addressing some minor or tangential detail by adding additional or clarifying information about it, and hoping that this gives your reply the appearance of a decisive rebuttal. The point you haven't addressed here is that not only were there multiple theories, but that before the Cominform's resolution in 1948, there was near-unanimity among Soviet theorists that the "people's democracies" were states "in transition," states that were neither bourgeois nor socialist. As though there were a third option, combining the two.

Neither does your trivial addendum address the point made about how the CP was firmly in control of all military and security forces before the expulsion of non-CP elements in the democratic fronts. (Anne Applebaum's recent book Iron Curtain is just the latest in a long line of books that details this fact.) Was the revolution when the fascists and their military was smashed? That's consistent with the idea that states are bodies of armed men, and that their apparatuses of coercion must be destroyed. (The only exception to this is when the existing ruling class collectively transforms itself into a new ruling class, as in the bourgeois revolutions from above, and doesn't apply to cases where a ruling bureaucracy is divided in class loyalties, where this division would manifest itself in a struggle for control over the armed forces.) But then you have to explain away how clearly non-proletarian, even bourgeois, politicians following a bourgeois program can govern jointly in a proletarian state. This is what the initial Soviet theorists tried to grapple with by saying that the people's democracies were in transition, on the fence, between being capitalist and socialist states.

Or did a proletarian revolution happen without smashing the state that was built up in its place, through a process of gradual nationalization and expulsion of non-CP coalition partners, partners that the CP initially deliberately empowered as a strategy for cooperating with bourgeois states allied to them in World War II? Neither position is tenable from a Marxist perspective. The first depends on a state of multiple classes, and the second depends upon a peaceful, gradual revolution in which the state is not smashed.

Don't feel bad, though. Supposedly "orthodox" Trotskyists have these same problems. They are complications you'll inevitably run into when you point to situations where the bureaucracy is the motor of change, and claim that those actions resulted in the creation of a workers' state. Some of us old-fashioned types call a position like this "revisionism."


And this is leaving out the fact that the leading force in these struggles was said to be the Communists. Was the Soviet Republic "multi-class" (as in two states simultaneously ruling) because the Bolsheviks and Left SRs briefly had a government coalition? I don't think that's the case.You are confusing multi-class with multi-party. The Bolsheviks worked in coalition with the Left SRs for as long as the Left SRs did not deviate from the revolutionary socialist program.


Literally as soon as Stalin died, as Hoxha notes, the Soviet revisionists began making changes. Various articles note that by the end of 1953 already a number of economic policies were enacted to the benefit of undermining the planned economy. The 20th Party Congress was preceded by various right-wing activities such as the rehabilitation of the Titoites. The English Revolution wasn't concluded in a year, why should a counter-revolution be? Again, your argument here is essentially formalistic: only if Khrushchev massively privatized the economy (as Gorbachev sought) or publicly renounced Marxism would you actually admit that "sudden and dramatic" changes which "usher in rapid transformations from top to bottom" occurred.Anybody familiar with the massive literature on how the Soviet economy functioned from the mid-1930s onward, knows that there was no, NO core transformation in how what people call "planning" took place. The division of the economy into competing ministries that hoarded resources, stormed the plan, and bargained with one another competitively were a product of changes enacted in 1936. What some bureaucrats said about previous besmirched bureaucrats ("rehabilitating them") is interesting gossip, and might perhaps put potential economic transformations into perspective, but do not themselves constitute any kind of economic change or change in a form of state.


The most blatant case of this is in the colonial and dependent countries. See for instance:

"After the 20th Congress of CPSU Moscow and Beijing were confronted with the need to adjust their revolutionary models. The problem was how to treat the bourgeois governments in Asia in which there was no place for the communists. The Soviet answer was to follow the concept of peaceful transition in which a non-communist government which followed a non-capitalist path and an anti-imperialist foreign policy could actually lead the country to a socialist revolution....

The Soviets praised the Nehru government for its social and land reforms and the liquidation of the 'economic position of imperialism'. They also lauded the economic development of India under the first five-year plan and said that in drawing up the second five-year plan India had tried to learn from the Soviet experience. They declared that the Soviet Union would support India in building a 'socialist society'.

The Soviet economists also praised the development of the state sector as a 'special character which by its very nature differs from the state monopolistic capitalism of the United States and Western Europe' and cited Lenin to say that 'state capitalism is a step towards socialism, especially in a country with a preponderance of small undertakings.'

They also displayed their 'utmost confidence' that socialist ideas had been an 'irresistible attraction' to a country like India and that Soviet economic aid, expansion of Soviet-Indian trade and exchange of economic experts would further stimulate the 'ideals of socialism' among Indians....

--snip--
Another deluge of other examples of bureaucrats "praising" some other bureaucrats and their activities in some other country. What does this say about how the state functioned in relation to class processes? Nothing. It's a detail about foreign policy alliances. Very important stuff for a nationalist ideology like "Marxism-Leninism," but not relevant for determining scientifically the class nature of a state. That you don't seem to be able to make this distinction is very troubling in light of your claims to fidelity to Marxist methodology.

[Ismail]

This says absolutely nothing about how the state changed in relation to class processes, or the working class, as a result of the personnel changes at the higher levels of the Soviet bureaucracy in the 1950s and 1960s. To put it differently, it says nothing about how a socialist form of state was smashed and replaced with a capitalist form of state.Besides works I've mentioned which detail the economic changes which occurred under the Soviet revisionists, as well as discuss the organizational degeneration of the CPSU (notably Red Papers #7), the Albanians also noted (http://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/plavrev.html) the following:

The bourgeois policy on admissions to the party, brought a gradual decrease in the number of workers in the party. Thus according to figures published by the revisionist Soviet press, in the period 1966-1971, while admissions of workers and peasants represented 40.1 per cent, and 15.1 per cent respectively of the total, those from the ranks of the intelligentsia were 44.8 per cent.

The percentage of workers in the party dropped from 55 per cent in 1971, to 41.6 per cent in 1976, at a time when the working class made up 61.2 per cent of the total population.

The Soviet revisionists try to justify the priority given to admissions from the intelligentsia, with technical progress, which they claim determines the development of society and in which the main role is played not by the working class, but by specialists of production. Therefore, according to the revisionist logic, the ranks of the party should be filled with intellectuals. In 1976, one out of every four to five specialists was a party member, whereas only one out of every 12 workers was a party member.

In that party the Leninist norms which must be applied in the process of admissions have long been abandoned. Admissions to the party are not decided by the collective leading organs and organizations of the party, but by the apparatuses, by the revisionist bourgeoisie according to its ideology and norms...

At the 7th Congress of the PLA in 1976, Comrade Enver Hoxha pointed out that in the revisionist Soviet party “...the members of party committees of different levels are bureaucratic officials, while the secretaries of these committees are almost one hundred per cent intellectuals and technocrats.”
The point you haven't addressed here is that not only were there multiple theories, but that before the Cominform's resolution in 1948, there was near-unanimity among Soviet theorists that the "people's democracies" were states "in transition," states that were neither bourgeois nor socialist. As though there were a third option, combining the two.It's worth noting that in 1944-46 there were views, which even Stalin entertained, that the bourgeoisie in Eastern Europe had been discredited through its collaboration with fascism. Kuusinen told Dimitrov in October 1948 that it was possible to achieve the hegemony of the working-class and its leading role in society without a dictatorship of that class, chiefly due to the existence of the USSR which provided an invaluable assurance to working-class hegemony in these states, but he did add that: "This does not quite mean that the question of the implementation of the dictatorship of the proletariat has disappeared entirely. The working class, which is leading social development on the road to socialism, will not give up the implementation of the dictatorship of the proletariat should countervailing internal and external forces make it necessary to resort to it... If the peop[le's] democracy proves impossible, then the dictatorship of the proletariat. But socialism must be realized." (Bold in original)

By December, after three years of debate on the question, Stalin had come to the following conclusion: "We consider it an axiom that the transition from capitalism to socialism without dictatorship of the proletariat is impossible." He spoke of the democratic republic mentioned by Marx and Engels as having more in common with the countries of People's Democracy and added, "As long as there are antagonistic classes, there will be dictatorship of the proletariat. But in your country it will be a dictatorship of a different type. You can do without a Soviet regime. However, the regime of the people's republic can fulfill the major task of the dictatorship of the proletariat, both in terms of abolishing classes and in terms of building socialism. The people’s democracy and the Soviet regime are two forms of dictatorship of the proletariat." (The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov: 1933-1949, pp. 450-451.)

What is important is that through debate and discussion a correct analysis was arrived at. In concept the idea of People's Democracy entailing the hegemony rather than the direct dictatorship of the proletariat is not much different from the Revolutionary-Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry which Lenin spoke of.


Neither does your trivial addendum address the point made about how the CP was firmly in control of all military and security forces before the expulsion of non-CP elements in the democratic fronts. (Anne Applebaum's recent book Iron Curtain is just the latest in a long line of books that details this fact.)I don't see how this is relevant, or even accurate considering that multiple parties existed in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. By "non-CP" elements you mean reactionaries who opposed the socialist transformation of industry and agriculture and of the revolutionization of society in general, who denounced the "Soviet agents" and "dupes" in their own parties who were willing to cooperate in the system of People's Democracy.

As the Albanians noted, "the participation of the representatives of other parties in the governments of some countries of people's democracy, is in itself no argument to prove that the question of state power had not been solved." Nonetheless, "The experience of some countries of people's democracy in Europe has proved that the existence for a long time of bourgeois or petty-bourgeois parties has been a negative factor which, together with the revisionist course pursued later by the leadership of the communist party itself, has influenced the negative process which has been and is developing in these countries. In some cases, this regressive process has brought about the revival or consolidation of the system or two or more parties in the name of 'democratic pluralism' which is opposed to the so-called 'dogmatic' 'monolithic' concept of socialism." (Omari, The People's Revolution in Albania and the Question of State Power, 1986, p. 134, 136.)


Was the revolution when the fascists and their military was smashed?I think that you can't take all the countries of Eastern Europe and apply a uniform schemata to them. The Albanians, for instance, argued that their revolution simultaneously carried out democratic and socialist tasks as opposed to passing from one stage to another.


Another deluge of other examples of bureaucrats "praising" some other bureaucrats and their activities in some other country. What does this say about how the state functioned in relation to class processes? Nothing. It's a detail about foreign policy alliances. Very important stuff for a nationalist ideology like "Marxism-Leninism," but not relevant for determining scientifically the class nature of a state. That you don't seem to be able to make this distinction is very troubling in light of your claims to fidelity to Marxist methodology.What's funny is that the Soviet revisionists very clearly went against Stalin on this point. The Soviets under him denounced Nehru and also made a materialist analysis of the class-collaboration of Gandhism (which the Soviet revisionists likewise reversed.) And it was the Soviet revisionists who denounced Stalin's supposedly "one-sided" view of nationalism.

[Five Year Plan]

Besides works I've mentioned which detail the economic changes which occurred under the Soviet revisionists, as well as discuss the organizational degeneration of the CPSU (notably Red Papers #7),

I've actually read that essay. It does a reasonably good job of showing how capitalist competition existed within the bureaucracy under Khrushchev. What it glaringly absent is how these practices differed from what existed before it in the 1930s and 1940s. It's a clever little sleight of hand that might not be caught by people who are just looking for ammunition to support a conclusion they've already arrived at.


the Albanians also noted the following:
It's worth noting that in 1944-46 there were views, which even Stalin entertained, that the bourgeoisie in Eastern Europe had been discredited through its collaboration with fascism. Kuusinen told Dimitrov in October 1948 that it was possible to achieve the hegemony of the working-class and its leading role in society without a dictatorship of that class, chiefly due to the existence of the USSR which provided an invaluable assurance to working-class hegemony in these states, but he did add that: "This does not quite mean that the question of the implementation of the dictatorship of the proletariat has disappeared entirely. The working class, which is leading social development on the road to socialism, will not give up the implementation of the dictatorship of the proletariat should countervailing internal and external forces make it necessary to resort to it... If the peop[le's] democracy proves impossible, then the dictatorship of the proletariat. But socialism must be realized." (Bold in original)

By December, after three years of debate on the question, Stalin had come to the following conclusion: "We consider it an axiom that the transition from capitalism to socialism without dictatorship of the proletariat is impossible." He spoke of the democratic republic mentioned by Marx and Engels as having more in common with the countries of People's Democracy and added, "As long as there are antagonistic classes, there will be dictatorship of the proletariat. But in your country it will be a dictatorship of a different type. You can do without a Soviet regime. However, the regime of the people's republic can fulfill the major task of the dictatorship of the proletariat, both in terms of abolishing classes and in terms of building socialism. The people’s democracy and the Soviet regime are two forms of dictatorship of the proletariat." (The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov: 1933-1949, pp. 450-451.)

What is important is that through debate and discussion a correct analysis was arrived at. In concept the idea of People's Democracy entailing the hegemony rather than the direct dictatorship of the proletariat is not much different from the Revolutionary-Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry which Lenin spoke of.You claim it's a correct analysis, but it posits proletarian hegemony without the establishment of a workers' state. Since hegemony is emergent from control over the means of production, and workers come to own the means of production through establishing a state that appropriates those means of production, how is this logically possible? On top of that it does nothing to clarify when a proletarian state was established, and how it could have been established either in 1945, 1948, or any of the surrounding years in light of all the empirical information we have on hand.

I knew you'd bring up the DDPP nonsense, which is why I earlier quoted Lenin stating clearly and unequivocally that states are dictatorships of one class and one class only. If you are implying that his earlier views, before that clear and unequivocal pronouncement, were different, and that what he meant by DDPP was a state serving two ruling classes presiding over two different and conflicting modes of production, you'll have to do more than point to the label "dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry." It was an imprecise formulation, certainly, since it was coined to denote only that any revolutionary socialist state in Russia would have to undertake bourgeois tasks with the assistant of the peasantry as well socialist tasks, the latter only being fully realizable once a socialist revolution in Europe occurred of course. But there is no evidence that this label was meant to denote a state serving two ruling classes simultaneously. If you think there is evidence for this view, provide it.


I don't see how this is relevant, or even accurate considering that multiple parties existed in East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. By "non-CP" elements you mean reactionaries who opposed the socialist transformation of industry and agriculture and of the revolutionization of society in general, who denounced the "Soviet agents" and "dupes" in their own parties who were willing to cooperate in the system of People's Democracy.As a Marxist, you don't understand how who controls the armed security and military forces and other instruments of coercion (the things that make a state a state) is relevant to a discussion about who the ruling class is? Also troubling.

To make matters worse, you are confusing this with the question of participation in political governance. The claim I made was that the Soviet military had established immediate control over these aspects of the state, not that they monopolized political offices. As I have repeatedly stressed, they allowed bourgeois parties pursuing bourgeois programs to participate in governing coalitions in all these countries, with some variation from country to country. It was a deliberate strategy. How were they able to allow these different parties to participate? Well, because they were in control of these states. Because they had already monopolized control over all the coercive apparatuses.


As the Albanians noted, "the participation of the representatives of other parties in the governments of some countries of people's democracy, is in itself no argument to prove that the question of state power had not been solved." Nonetheless, "The experience of some countries of people's democracy in Europe has proved that the existence for a long time of bourgeois or petty-bourgeois parties has been a negative factor which, together with the revisionist course pursued later by the leadership of the communist party itself, has influenced the negative process which has been and is developing in these countries. In some cases, this regressive process has brought about the revival or consolidation of the system or two or more parties in the name of 'democratic pluralism' which is opposed to the so-called 'dogmatic' 'monolithic' concept of socialism." (Omari, The People's Revolution in Albania and the Question of State Power, 1986, p. 134, 136.)You quoting somebody who says something is not proof that that something is in fact true. Omari does not provide a single argument as to why any socialist should believe that a workers' state pursuing a revolutionary program would empower bourgeois parties pursuing explicitly bourgeois programs in a way that runs the risk of overturning proletarian power. I would be curious if you'd like to try your hand at the rhetorical gymnastic required to walk that impossibly thin tightrope, but in view of your other posts in this thread, I am not optimistic.


I think that you can't take all the countries of Eastern Europe and apply a uniform schemata to them. The Albanians, for instance, argued that their revolution simultaneously carried out democratic and socialist tasks as opposed to passing from one stage to another.I also think you can apply a uniform schema to them, not the one you mention though. I'd like to see you argue your position from Marxist principles of social revolution and the state instead of just hiding behind quotes from obscure authors who are writing about related issues but not directly addressing the questions I have raised.

[Ismail]

You claim it's a correct analysis, but it posits proletarian hegemony without the establishment of a workers' state. Since hegemony is emergent from control over the means of production, and workers come to own the means of production through establishing a state that appropriates those means of production, how is this logically possible? On top of that it does nothing to clarify when a proletarian state was established, and how it could have been established either in 1945, 1948, or any of the surrounding years in light of all the empirical information we have on hand.It should be reasonably obvious that, in the final analysis, political power was in the hands of the working-class through its vanguard, which outside of Albania and Yugoslavia depended to a great extent on the role of the Soviet Union in destroying the local regimes which collaborated with fascism and replacing them with ones in which said parties played a leading role.

In this context it is obvious that the political tasks of the proletariat in countries like Romania, Czechoslovakia and Hungary were first democratic and then socialist. Of course the "patriotic" bourgeoisie, which had joined the resistance against fascism, had no stomach for actual social revolution and tried to oppose the working-class but was struck down. It is clear that there were no retreats as far as economic policy was concerned, the programs of the countries of People's Democracy clearly kept on moving leftwards and building up momentum for the construction of socialism.


If you are implying that his earlier views, before that clear and unequivocal pronouncement, were different, and that what he meant by DDPP was a state serving two ruling classes presiding over two different and conflicting modes of production, you'll have to do more than point to the label "dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry."Lenin clearly noted that the proletariat would exert hegemony under this specific form of dictatorship, but that it would not be exclusively proletarian in character. It would carry out the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and then move over into the socialist revolution through the proletariat transforming this revolutionary-democratic dictatorship into a stable dictatorship of the proletariat.


As a Marxist, you don't understand how who controls the armed security and military forces and other instruments of coercion (the things that make a state a state) is relevant to a discussion about who the ruling class is? Also troubling.I never claimed that. I'm asking why you're bringing it up.


Omari does not provide a single argument as to why any socialist should believe that a workers' state pursuing a revolutionary program would empower bourgeois parties pursuing explicitly bourgeois programs in a way that runs the risk of overturning proletarian power. I would be curious if you'd like to try your hand at the rhetorical gymnastic required to walk that impossibly thin tightrope, but in view of your other posts in this thread, I am not optimistic.The existence of other parties, as Omari noted (though I didn't include that bit in my post), was due to the ratio of class forces. It was a similar situation with the Bolsheviks and Left SRs coalitioning, because the Bolsheviks had not yet gained the trust of the peasant masses. The bourgeois parties in Eastern Europe appealed towards the peasantry (such as the smallholder parties) or towards the petty-bourgeoisie.

[Fred]

Oy, comrades, you are being sucked into the Ismail/Hoxha vortex. Beware! No light can escape this black hole. The details of when Kruschev said one thing, or the strange meandering thoughts of Hoxha that are wildly impressionistic and idealistic, are ultimately a waste of time. Ismail is a smart comrade that tries to make convincing arguments -- but it almost always comes down to a quote from Hoxha that may or may not have anything to do with the issue at hand.


Lenin clearly noted that the proletariat would exert hegemony under this specific form of dictatorship, but that it would not be exclusively proletarian in character. It would carry out the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and then move over into the socialist revolution through the proletariat transforming this revolutionary-democratic dictatorship into a stable dictatorship of the proletariat.


Lenin's formulation of the DD of the PP was abandoned as of the April Theses in 1917. He never went back on this. Obviously, the USSR was not rule by the peasants and the proletariat, but the proletariat with support of the peasantry (sometimes more, sometimes less). Enough with the Stalinist Scholasticism. As the comrade stated only one class can have state power at a time (excluding very brief and unstable periods of dual power like in Russia from February to October).

[Questionable]

The details of when Kruschev said one thing, or the strange meandering thoughts of Hoxha that are wildly impressionistic and idealistic, are ultimately a waste of time.Learning from history is a waste of time? Nonsense. Marxist-Leninists are one of the few groups who take the time to learn from the past experiences of socialist movements. It is modern day ultra-leftists who come up with "impressionistic and idealistic" theories that never gain any traction due to their flaws.

Marxism aside, I think an intelligent person of any political shade could see the problem in statements like this. It is unfitting in a serious discussion for a participant to say "I refuse to address anymore arguments regarding X" without providing any valid reason. Yet, on Revleft, it's perfectly acceptable for people to ignore anything published by Hoxha and the Albanians on the shakiest grounds, the reason usually being some vague statements about how they're "crazy" or "a waste of time," or some clever remarks about bunkers and beards that are also designed to negate the main point without addressing it.

To give the point some contrast, I struggle to think of any time when Ismail negated a quotation from the likes of Trotsky or Mao on the arbitrary grounds such as these. He's always willing to explain what he perceives as the flaws in their reasoning. He never makes snide remarks about the "Trotsky blackhole" or some such. Yet, his opponents are the ones who accuse Marxist-Leninists of using "revisionist" as a catch-all word to dismiss their opponents!

I think honest observers must admit that there is something strange going on here.


Ismail is a smart comrade that tries to make convincing arguments -- but it almost always comes down to a quote from Hoxha that may or may not have anything to do with the issue at hand.Can you provide an example of Ismail posting a quotation that was off-topic? I frequently take the time to read what he posts, and I can't think of a time where he posted anything unrelated.

EDIT: I see Remus Bleys thanked your post. I find that ironic, because him and his Titoite ilk, such as Red Banner, are the main culprits in the intellectual denial I just described. I could copy a dozen or so posts here from them that consisted of one-liners saying something along the lines of "Hoxha is so stupid" after Ismail had written a paragraph or more debating with them.

[Ismail]

Lenin's formulation of the DD of the PP was abandoned as of the April Theses in 1917. He never went back on this. Obviously, the USSR was not rule by the peasants and the proletariat, but the proletariat with support of the peasantry (sometimes more, sometimes less)This is the whole "Lenin became a Trotskyist" view that isn't borne out by facts.

"Trotsky's supporters... creat[ed] the impression that it was not Lenin's theory of socialist revolution, but Trotsky's 'permanent revolution' writings that constituted the basis of the Bolshevik Party's strategy and tactics of the October Revolution...

The Party's documents and the works of Lenin helped to destroy the myth of Trotsky's ideological kinship with the Bolshevik Party and Lenin from early 1917 on. Actually, Trotsky's activity in the USA, his writing for Novy mir, a newspaper of socialist émigrés from Russia, provided firm evidence that at the time Trotsky had joined the Rightist group and had together with them attacked the Bolsheviks and all Leftist supporters of Zimmerwald. That is precisely why, in a letter to A.M. Kollontai on February 17, 1917, Lenin urged exposure of Trotsky's subversive activity behind a screen of 'Left' talk.

Speaking subsequently at the Petrograd City Conference of the RSDLP(B) on May 5, 1917, Lenin sharply condemned the proposal put forward by some Party comrades to set up, during the municipal elections, a bloc of Bolsheviks and men like Chkheidze and Trotsky. Lenin told the conference: 'Who are we to form a bloc with?. . . Chkheidze is the worst screen for defencism. When publishing his paper in Paris, Trotsky failed to make clear whether he was for or against Chkheidze. We have always spoken out against Chkheidze, because he is a fine screen for chauvinism. Trotsky failed to dot his i's'.

In that period another document of Lenin's—a plan he wrote after May 6 for a pamphlet he intended to write about the April Conference—also urged the need to combat Trotsky's line. In the new conditions, he said, the Party's main task was to combat the petty-bourgeois vacillations in the coming revolution, which was bound to be a 'thousand times stronger than the February revolution'. Among those who expressed these vacillations, Lenin said, was Trotsky.

Before joining the Party, Trotsky had organisational links with the conciliators and opponents of Bolshevism. As for Trotsky's letters from the USA, they had nothing in common with Lenin's theory of socialist revolution. In his letters he re-asserted the fundamentally incorrect, anti-Party slogan of 'No tsar, but a workers' government', which meant a revolution without the peasantry, and a leaping over the stage of democratic revolution.

Lenin at once found it necessary to draw a line between his own and Trotsky's extremely adventurous stand. In his 'Letters on Tactics' (April 1917), he made a point of emphasising that Trotsky's slogan was wrong for it failed to reckon with the motive forces and the pace of the revolution. Lenin qualified the 'No Tsar, but a workers' government' slogan as a 'playing at 'seizure of power'', as a 'kind of Blanquist adventurism'."
(Ignatyev, V.L. (ed). The Bolshevik Party's Struggle Against Trotskyism in the Post-October Period. Moscow: Progress Publishers. 1969. pp. 156-157.)

[Remus Bleys]

EDIT: I see Remus Bleys thanked your post. I find that ironic, because him and his Titoite ilk, such as Red Banner, are the main culprits in the intellectual denial I just described. I could copy a dozen or so posts here from them that consisted of one-liners saying something along the lines of "Hoxha is so stupid" after Ismail had written a paragraph or more debating with them. Im not really a titoist. That's irrelevant.

And I've had dozen of conversations with Ismail, thank you very much. And I've been civil and taken the time to read what I can about Hoxha, as well as dozens of conversations with actual albanians from the time period. Have you?

Ismail does have a habit of posting unrelated quotes. Thats the reason I liked the post.

And my arguments don't go into "thats stupid." I actually back it up.
Unlike the hoxhaists who go "Thats revisionist" and there evidence is a hoxha quote.

[Questionable]

Ismail does have a habit of posting unrelated quotes. Thats the reason I liked the post.

Give me an example. I, for instance, can give several examples from your posting history that directly contradict what you've said here:


And my arguments don't go into "thats stupid." I actually back it up.

Such as these:


No, but it does make him an idiot.

In response to Ismail talking about Maoism, and then this:


Were talking about hoxhaist albania. I fail to see how this is relevant.

In response to a quotation from an Albanian source that used the word "liberty." Amusingly, you quoted only the word "liberty" and ignored everything else in the quote, for the sake of your silly joke. Then this one:


Fuck this I'm done.

In response to a post by Ismail regarding criticisms of Stalin. And then:


Oh look more irrelevance that just implies even Stalin thought the banning of Religion might have gone to far.

Need I go on?


Unlike the hoxhaists who go "Thats revisionist" and there evidence is a hoxha quote.

This is just another demonstration of the intellectual laziness of many local anti-Stalinists.

[Remus Bleys]

"No, but it does make him an idiot. " It kinda does...
I was done with that conversation anyway at that point. It was pointless, and everyone involved knew it was pointless. Now its turned into humor.



In response to a quotation from an Albanian source that used the word "liberty." Amusingly, you quoted only the word "liberty" and ignored everything else in the quote, for the sake of your silly joke. Humor is revisionist? And let's all act like Albania was the land of liberty!
Anyway, the thread did turn into humor anyway.
I got rid of the rest of the quote because I actually agreed with what he said.

Fuck this I'm done. I'm not gonna argue with someone who thinks that Stalin was theoretically perfect.


Oh look more irrelevance that just implies even Stalin thought the banning of Religion might have gone to far. I still don't see how that quote was relevant...
And just because Stalin said he wasn't going light on religion, doesn't mean that he wasn't.


This is just another demonstration of the intellectual laziness of many local anti-Stalinists. Nice way of saying I'm stupid. I could easily do the same to you.
Like that time you accused 9mm of being racist for calling Albania a shithole. Which it was. That's not a criticism of Albanians, thats a criticism of an oppressive government.
Then the argument you've never heard anyone say America was a shithole. :rolleyes:
This just shows the intellectual dishonesty of Hoxhaists.



Give me an example. I'm not gonna sift through every example to take down your god Ismail.
Is he your Avakian?

Like, there was a chit chat thread where someone said that he wouldn't read ismail's block quotes... Ismail replied with a block quote.:laugh:

Ismail is a smart comrade, he really is. I respect Ismail. Which is why its so frustrating all he does is quote.

[Questionable]

I was done with that conversation anyway at that point. It was pointless, and everyone involved knew it was pointless. Now its turned into humor.

So then I'm correct in saying that anti-Stalinists are the main culprits in arbitrarily dismissing their opponents. Rather than mounting a counter-argument, it is perfectly acceptable to call the discussion "pointless" and opt out when you feel defeated.


Like that time you accused 9mm of being racist for calling Albania a shithole.

I stand by that accusation. Calling any country a shithole is contrary to the spirit of proletarian internationalism, and is definitely comparable to calling a female comrade a "*****" during a disagreement. I admire 9mm in many ways, but I definitely think he was wrong on that one.


I'm not gonna sift through every example to take down your god Ismail.

You claimed that Ismail posted irrelevant quotations. If you cannot provide proof, then I am not wrong in dismissing that claim as slander.


Ismail is a smart comrade, he really is. I respect Ismail. Which is why its so frustrating all he does is quote.

I really don't understand this anti-quotation attitude on Revleft. It's really quite ridiculous. I mean, is reading a quote too mentally stressful for some people? The argument Ismail is presenting is within the quotation itself, so if you want to respond to the argument, you ought to respond to the quote.

This anti-quotation attitude is really connected to a greater anti-Marxist attitude, and was fostered originally by the revisionists who were attempting to negate Marx and Lenin. Quotations from the classics were, and still are, dismissed out-of-hand as "outdated" or "dogmatic" or what-have-you, all in the name of contorting Marxism. Our good old buddy Hoxha had this to say:


Rejecting Marxism-Leninism, the social-democrats claim that "problems of today cannot be solved by old concepts". Following in their wake, the revisionists too, speculate with the newer conditions and phenomena, and, under the guise of fighting "dogmatism" and upholding "the creative development of Marxism" claim that many things today should be looked at with a critical eye, that what was right 30 years ago cannot be such any longer, that atomic weapons and the danger of a nuclear war makes it indispensable to revise our views and stand on many questions of strategy and tactics, that he who abides by the basic theses of Marx and Lenin in the sixties of the 20th century is a dogmatist who takes no account of the great changes that have come about in the world, and he who consults the classic works of Marxist-Leninists in order to analyze and explain the present historical process, is afflicted with the mania of quotations and so and so forth. Hence, Marxism-Leninism is outdated for revisionists too, it no longer suits the newer conditions, it should be "enriched" with new ideas and new conclusions. Just like all the old opportunists and reformists, the revisionists too are stripping Marxism of its critical and revolutionary spirit and are attempting to turn it from a weapon in the hands of the working class into a weapon in the hands of the bourgeoisie to be used against the working class.

http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hoxha/works/revisionists.htm

[Remus Bleys]

So then I'm correct in saying that anti-Stalinists are the main culprits in arbitrarily dismissing their opponents. Rather than mounting a counter-argument, it is perfectly acceptable to call the discussion "pointless" and opt out when you feel defeated.
At that point yeah. The claim Maoism is racist is ridiculous. One doesn't need to be a Maoist to understand that.



I stand by that accusation. Calling any country a shithole is contrary to the spirit of proletarian internationalism, So its antiproletarian when I call america a shithole?



and is definitely comparable to calling a female comrade a "*****" during a disagreement. I admire 9mm in many ways, but I definitely think he was wrong on that one. This is so astoundingly stupid I don't know how to respond.



You claimed that Ismail posted irrelevant quotations. If you cannot provide proof, then I am not wrong in dismissing that claim as slander. Its late and the claim is pretty self evident.
And I provided you with the chit chat. If he is that into quoting that he block quotes to someone who just said they don't read block quotes, its just showing off.


This anti-quotation attitude is really connected to a greater anti-Marxist attitude ITS A CONSPIRACY!

and was fostered originally by the revisionists who were attempting to negate Marx and Lenin. Quotations from the classics were, and still are, dismissed out-of-hand as "outdated" or "dogmatic" or what-have-youI do quote. I quote a lot. I just don't quote for fucking everything. Its piss poor writing.

But Im not even attacking quotes. I'm attacking irrelevant quotes.

all in the name of contorting Marxism. Nice strawman




http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hoxha/works/revisionists.htmI appreciate the irony here.

[Brotto Rühle]

My God Questionable, pure ideology.

[Five Year Plan]

It should be reasonably obvious that, in the final analysis, political power was in the hands of the working-class through its vanguard, which outside of Albania and Yugoslavia depended to a great extent on the role of the Soviet Union in destroying the local regimes which collaborated with fascism and replacing them with ones in which said parties played a leading role.

I thought we were discussing the dating and nature of a social revolution by which a capitalist state was supplanted by a dictatorship of the proletariat. Why bring up the obviousness of the fact that the CPs in these various countries came to monopolize political power? The question that is being debated here is what, if any, relationship that monopolization had to a process of social revolution. I have repeatedly made the point that, at its essence, any state is constituted by coercive apparatuses. That is the state's differentia specifica. And a social revolution is marked by one class smashing that coercive apparatus and replacing it with another. On this Marx, Engels, and Lenin all agree.

You are left to defend a position where a social revolution, as a process coextensive with the CP monopolizing political authority and expelling its coalition partners, began years after control over a state's coercive apparatus had already been firmly established, which is completely anti-Marxist and idealist. Or you are left to defend a position in which the social revolution took place with the Soviet conquest of the fascist-occupied Eastern European states, and the smashing of their fascist states, in which case you are claiming that a capitalist state can be smashed, only to have bourgeois parties pursuing bourgeois programs occupying positions of governmental authority. Also untenable from a Marxist perspective. No wonder you squirm.


In this context it is obvious that the political tasks of the proletariat in countries like Romania, Czechoslovakia and Hungary were first democratic and then socialist. Of course the "patriotic" bourgeoisie, which had joined the resistance against fascism, had no stomach for actual social revolution and tried to oppose the working-class but was struck down. It is clear that there were no retreats as far as economic policy was concerned, the programs of the countries of People's Democracy clearly kept on moving leftwards and building up momentum for the construction of socialism.More additional information that says nothing to resolve the conundrum you are stuck in, and which I have highlighted for you above for what must be the third or fourth time in this thread.


Lenin clearly noted that the proletariat would exert hegemony under this specific form of dictatorship, but that it would not be exclusively proletarian in character. It would carry out the tasks of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and then move over into the socialist revolution through the proletariat transforming this revolutionary-democratic dictatorship into a stable dictatorship of the proletariat.How crafty of you. When asked your own opinion, you'll hide behind long block quotes from other people in order to avoid directly meeting the challenge. But when asked to provide any textual evidence from Lenin that he ever conceived of a DDPP as a state enshrining the primacy of multiple ruling classes, suddenly the flood of block quotes runs dry, and we are left with the tumbleweed swept and dessicated riverbed that is your lone declaration. It's not even a declaration that directly relates to my question, though it does substantiate my position. I did not ask whether Lenin thought the DDPP would carry out bourgeois democratic tasks, or whether he thought that the proletariat would exercise hegemony. I know that both these things are correct.

Lenin DID say that the proletariat would exert hegemony under the DDPP, and that it must do so, precisely because he understood that state to be a proletarian state, where proletarian hegemony was anchored in the state machinery. Because he knew that states must, ultimately, be at the service of one class or another, even if multiple classes can benefit along the way as the class which has built its dictatorship into the state pursues its long-term objectives. He was clearly not envisioning some kind of state with multiple ruling classes. He had not yet mastered the Marxist theory of the state to a point where he was using language with precision, something that was only to happen in the aftermath of the Great Betrayal, and so was using words like "dictatorship" sloppily and not to refer to a form of state or the state's social basis, but rather to who would be involved in exercising political power. But the basic idea of proletarian social supremacy in the state is still there, even if clouded in inexact formulations.

You find it difficult to argue with Lenin's indisputably clear statement about states being the dictatorship of one class, so you crawl back to Lenin's earlier and more imprecise formulations. Yet even there you can find no solace. How uncomfortable for you.


The existence of other parties, as Omari noted (though I didn't include that bit in my post), was due to the ratio of class forces. It was a similar situation with the Bolsheviks and Left SRs coalitioning, because the Bolsheviks had not yet gained the trust of the peasant masses. The bourgeois parties in Eastern Europe appealed towards the peasantry (such as the smallholder parties) or towards the petty-bourgeoisie.That explains the mentality that the Soviet bureaucracy might strategically have had in divying up political power. It doesn't explain why we should categorize such an entity, one where bourgeois parties and programs are being allowed to contend for power, as a proletarian state.

[Alan OldStudent]

It is fundamentally impossible for Marxism to be a religion, since religions presuppose a belief in the supernatural and the existence of a deity...

Actually, some religions do not presuppose the existence of a deity. Check this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontheistic_religions) and this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism) out.

Regards,

Alan OldStudent
The unexamined life is not worth living--Socrates

[Fred]

Learning from history is a waste of time? Nonsense. Marxist-Leninists are one of the few groups who take the time to learn from the past experiences of socialist movements. It is modern day ultra-leftists who come up with "impressionistic and idealistic" theories that never gain any traction due to their flaws.

Marxism aside, I think an intelligent person of any political shade could see the problem in statements like this. It is unfitting in a serious discussion for a participant to say "I refuse to address anymore arguments regarding X" without providing any valid reason. Yet, on Revleft, it's perfectly acceptable for people to ignore anything published by Hoxha and the Albanians on the shakiest grounds, the reason usually being some vague statements about how they're "crazy" or "a waste of time," or some clever remarks about bunkers and beards that are also designed to negate the main point without addressing it.

To give the point some contrast, I struggle to think of any time when Ismail negated a quotation from the likes of Trotsky or Mao on the arbitrary grounds such as these. He's always willing to explain what he perceives as the flaws in their reasoning. He never makes snide remarks about the "Trotsky blackhole" or some such. Yet, his opponents are the ones who accuse Marxist-Leninists of using "revisionist" as a catch-all word to dismiss their opponents!

I think honest observers must admit that there is something strange going on here.

Can you provide an example of Ismail posting a quotation that was off-topic? I frequently take the time to read what he posts, and I can't think of a time where he posted anything unrelated.

EDIT: I see Remus Bleys thanked your post. I find that ironic, because him and his Titoite ilk, such as Red Banner, are the main culprits in the intellectual denial I just described. I could copy a dozen or so posts here from them that consisted of one-liners saying something along the lines of "Hoxha is so stupid" after Ismail had written a paragraph or more debating with them.
If you have read my posts since I've been here, you must know that I take history very seriously. But not so much the musings of tertiary Stalinists. Stalin was a poor enough excuse for a Marxist theorist. His progeny are even worse. Maybe off-topic isn't quite right. Ismail will take one sentence in a post which is beside the point of the post, and answer it with a full page onslaught of Hoxha thought. So it is tangentially related, yet really pretty disconnected. Forget snide remarks. Ismail thinks the Great Purges and the murder of legions of old bolsheviks was cool. How does he feel about the murder of Trotsky? I keep it civil with him and with you because it is always better to go that way. But I do feel he hijacks discussions sometimes so that he can quote the glorious Hoxha. I'm sorry, but as with foot fetishists fascination with feet, I don't get this ardor for Hoxha. He does, and I respect his right to put forward his positions. I just don't think highly of them.

[Popular Front of Judea]

Actually, some religions do not presuppose the existence of a deity. Check this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nontheistic_religions) and this (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism) out.

Regards,

Alan OldStudent
The unexamined life is not worth living--Socrates

And I would add this: cargo cult (http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Cargo_cult&printable=yes)

I had hoped that the old Stalinists would at least die out. My hopes alas were misplaced. Damn you internet!

[Fred]

This is the whole "Lenin became a Trotskyist" view that isn't borne out by facts.

"Trotsky's supporters... creat[ed] the impression that it was not Lenin's theory of socialist revolution, but Trotsky's 'permanent revolution' writings that constituted the basis of the Bolshevik Party's strategy and tactics of the October Revolution...

The Party's documents and the works of Lenin helped to destroy the myth of Trotsky's ideological kinship with the Bolshevik Party and Lenin from early 1917 on. Actually, Trotsky's activity in the USA, his writing for Novy mir, a newspaper of socialist émigrés from Russia, provided firm evidence that at the time Trotsky had joined the Rightist group and had together with them attacked the Bolsheviks and all Leftist supporters of Zimmerwald. That is precisely why, in a letter to A.M. Kollontai on February 17, 1917, Lenin urged exposure of Trotsky's subversive activity behind a screen of 'Left' talk.

Speaking subsequently at the Petrograd City Conference of the RSDLP(B) on May 5, 1917, Lenin sharply condemned the proposal put forward by some Party comrades to set up, during the municipal elections, a bloc of Bolsheviks and men like Chkheidze and Trotsky. Lenin told the conference: 'Who are we to form a bloc with?. . . Chkheidze is the worst screen for defencism. When publishing his paper in Paris, Trotsky failed to make clear whether he was for or against Chkheidze. We have always spoken out against Chkheidze, because he is a fine screen for chauvinism. Trotsky failed to dot his i's'.

In that period another document of Lenin's—a plan he wrote after May 6 for a pamphlet he intended to write about the April Conference—also urged the need to combat Trotsky's line. In the new conditions, he said, the Party's main task was to combat the petty-bourgeois vacillations in the coming revolution, which was bound to be a 'thousand times stronger than the February revolution'. Among those who expressed these vacillations, Lenin said, was Trotsky.

Before joining the Party, Trotsky had organisational links with the conciliators and opponents of Bolshevism. As for Trotsky's letters from the USA, they had nothing in common with Lenin's theory of socialist revolution. In his letters he re-asserted the fundamentally incorrect, anti-Party slogan of 'No tsar, but a workers' government', which meant a revolution without the peasantry, and a leaping over the stage of democratic revolution.

Lenin at once found it necessary to draw a line between his own and Trotsky's extremely adventurous stand. In his 'Letters on Tactics' (April 1917), he made a point of emphasising that Trotsky's slogan was wrong for it failed to reckon with the motive forces and the pace of the revolution. Lenin qualified the 'No Tsar, but a workers' government' slogan as a 'playing at 'seizure of power'', as a 'kind of Blanquist adventurism'."
(Ignatyev, V.L. (ed). The Bolshevik Party's Struggle Against Trotskyism in the Post-October Period. Moscow: Progress Publishers. 1969. pp. 156-157.)
We have done this dance before. Ismail, Trotsky was not a rightist in 1917. How on Earth do you group him with Chiedze, a right-Menshevik? Lenin wanted clarity as to Trotsky's position on Chiedze -- turns out it was the same as Lenin's. I also think you have lots of explaining to do about Lenin favoring Trotsky being co-opted onto the CC and PB in 1917. I guess whatever misgivings he had were put to rest, eh?

Lenin was pushing for the seizure of power by early September. So did he turn into a Blanquist adventurer? Quote whatever source you like. Lenin pushed for a seizure of power by the proletariat which coincides with the theory of Permanent Revolution. Unless you want to argue that the October Revolution brought the bourgeoisie to power.

[Ismail]

I also think you have lots of explaining to do about Lenin favoring Trotsky being co-opted onto the CC and PB in 1917. I guess whatever misgivings he had were put to rest, eh?No more than the misgivings Lenin had of Lunacharsky and other figures who held idealistic views but who he felt could be of use after the revolution.


Lenin was pushing for the seizure of power by early September. So did he turn into a Blanquist adventurer? Quote whatever source you like. Lenin pushed for a seizure of power by the proletariat which coincides with the theory of Permanent Revolution. Unless you want to argue that the October Revolution brought the bourgeoisie to power.The February revolution brought the bourgeoisie to power. The October revolution brought the proletariat to power. Lenin noted years earlier that there would be no stopping halfway between a bourgeois-democratic revolution and a proletarian revolution.


I thought we were discussing the dating and nature of a social revolution by which a capitalist state was supplanted by a dictatorship of the proletariat. Why bring up the obviousness of the fact that the CPs in these various countries came to monopolize political power?Because this was obviously part and parcel of the deepening of the social revolution, a process which began with the liberation of these countries.

The rest of your post is pretty much based on a strawman. Obviously the states of People's Democracy were dictatorships of the proletariat. This was the conclusion Stalin and every other Marxist-Leninist reached. They were not states ruled by multiple classes.


That explains the mentality that the Soviet bureaucracy might strategically have had in divying up political power. It doesn't explain why we should categorize such an entity, one where bourgeois parties and programs are being allowed to contend for power, as a proletarian state.Using that logic a state ruled by the bourgeoisie, where proletarian parties are allowed to contend for power under exceptional circumstances (see: 1917), isn't actually a bourgeois state.

[Five Year Plan]

Because this was obviously part and parcel of the deepening of the social revolution, a process which began with the liberation of these countries.

Using that logic a state ruled by the bourgeoisie, where proletarian parties are allowed to contend for power under exceptional circumstances, isn't actually a bourgeois state.

You are claiming that the monopolization of political power by the CP represented the "deepening of the social revolution." So in your view, the social revolutionizing of the state supposedly began with the smashing of the fascist state, and the process continued onward from there up through the political monopolization of the CP.

I will repeat once more. Soviet control over the state was fully consolidated well before the monopolization of political power by the CP. There was no more "revolutionizing" going on in 1948 or 1950 regarding who was actually in control over the state machinery. Any revolution, as far as that issue was concerned, was over. Policies regarding production changed and evolved in the ensuing years, but that is different than the issue of the class basis of state power, of the class of those people who control the state's essential institutions (the machinery of coercion) and use them to suit their needs and back their policies. Like so many others dilettants, you are confusing changes in the mode of production, perhaps instigated by gradually evolving policy decisions by those who occupy the state, with a transformation in the class basis of the state achieved by securing control over the instruments of coercion and force.

Instead, what changed in 1948-1950 (what you call the "deepening of the social revolution"), rather than being a process of the social revolutionizing of the state, were the policies pursued by those who controlled the state and had controlled it since immediately after the fascists had been driven out. What changed about the policy was that the expulsion of the bourgeois coalition partners who were not just "contesting elections" but governing and pursuing their bourgeois program at the behest of the Soviets, who proactively placed them in power.

Your comparison of this to bourgeois states allowing communist parties to run for office is fallacious. The Soviets did not just allow the bourgeois parties to remain legal or to contest elections, which is what your analogy implies, but actually placed them in office and worked with those officially empowered officials to pursue bourgeois objectives like the restoration of capitalist control over factories that had been seized by workers. Yeah, if a bourgeois state placed communists in office so they could pursue their program of establishing workers' control in workplaces, arming workers' militias, etc., then I would think that something very strange was going on regarding the class basis of the state.

Even by the flawed interpretation of the DDPP that Stalinists assign to Lenin, it's a major deviation and revision. According to that two-stage bastardization of his theory, the workers and peasants are able to accomplish bourgeois tasks precisely because they are the ones formulating policy and making state decisions in lieu of the bourgeoisie. The whole purpose of this is negated if you place the bourgeoisie in office and allow them to formulate policy, even if you do ultimately have the ability through your control over the armed forces to remove them from office, because the whole point was that the bourgeoisie following its own program and policies will not be able to accomplish the bourgeois tasks. This is the reason that the DDPP is necessary in the first place!

While the placing of the bourgeoisie in power doesn't make sense from the perspective of even the Stalinized DDPP theory, it does make sense from the perspective of Soviet bureaucratic strategy in the immediate aftermath of World War II, when the USSR was trying to maintain cooperative economic relations with the West. The reason the CP relied upon the bourgeoisie was precisely because they were not the working class, because both had a shared interest in suppressing workers and their uprisings, and because both desired to protect the state from an overturn in its class basis. Such an overturn would make Truman and Churchill most unhappy.


The rest of your post is pretty much based on a strawman. Obviously the states of People's Democracy were dictatorships of the proletariat. This was the conclusion Stalin and every other Marxist-Leninist reached. They were not states ruled by multiple classes.Stalin saying something is true does not make something obviously true. You declaring that the states were not ruled by multiple classes do not alter that reality that Soviet theorists broached this theory repeatedly in the years after the establishment of the "people's democracies" as a way of trying to resolve the massive theoretical issues that you in this thread cannot contend with effectively. But I will add, don't feel bad. Orthodox Trotskyists also have this issue, and fall back on a silly explanation of "dual power" also contradicted by the historical data.

[Old Bolshie]

The most blatant case of this is in the colonial and dependent countries. See for instance:

"After the 20th Congress of CPSU Moscow and Beijing were confronted with the need to adjust their revolutionary models. The problem was how to treat the bourgeois governments in Asia in which there was no place for the communists. The Soviet answer was to follow the concept of peaceful transition in which a non-communist government which followed a non-capitalist path and an anti-imperialist foreign policy could actually lead the country to a socialist revolution....

The Soviets praised the Nehru government for its social and land reforms and the liquidation of the 'economic position of imperialism'. They also lauded the economic development of India under the first five-year plan and said that in drawing up the second five-year plan India had tried to learn from the Soviet experience. They declared that the Soviet Union would support India in building a 'socialist society'.

The Soviet economists also praised the development of the state sector as a 'special character which by its very nature differs from the state monopolistic capitalism of the United States and Western Europe' and cited Lenin to say that 'state capitalism is a step towards socialism, especially in a country with a preponderance of small undertakings.'

They also displayed their 'utmost confidence' that socialist ideas had been an 'irresistible attraction' to a country like India and that Soviet economic aid, expansion of Soviet-Indian trade and exchange of economic experts would further stimulate the 'ideals of socialism' among Indians....

Thereafter, the Soviets continued to praise Nehru’s socialism and state capitalism in India to the displeasure of the Chinese communists. In September 1956, addressing the 8th Congress of the CCP, Anastas Mikoyan defended the Soviet claim that India under Nehru was proceeding towards a socialist economy. Mikoyan also said that the Chinese had found their 'own distinctive new forms and methods of building socialism' and cited the Chinese communist alliance with the national bourgeoisie and the Chinese communist effort to move towards socialism through state capitalism. He dealt at length with the Soviet policy towards the underdeveloped nations and their national bourgeois leaders and quoted Lenin on the 'new transitional forms and ways' these countries were seeking to 'avoid the torments of capitalism.' He also defended India’s socialist economy and declared that 'we must be able to see the differences between state capitalism in India and capitalism in the United States.' ....

The Soviets insisted upon the 'progressive role' of state capitalism in India and rejected the mechanical imitation of the Chinese model for India, indeed for all developing nations. A Soviet scholar stated that 'imitation' of the Chinese method of economic development in other underdeveloped countries was 'impermissible' and quoted an early statement by Mao Zedong on the impossibility of the national bourgeoisie's ruling a viable national state, and directly contradicted him, citing India as evidence to the contrary. He also praised the Indian national bourgeoisie as 'progressive elements' and declared that despite the Chinese refusal to recognize the fact India was 'definitely marching towards socialism.' ...

Bypassing capitalism was possible only with aid from the victorious proletariat of an industrially developed state [the Soviet Union]. Non-capitalist development in India was in fact the 'revolutionary process' of gradual and consistent growth of the national liberation revolution into a socialist revolution. Moreover, the 'ideas of the October Revolution' were main elements of India's economic planning...

The Soviets then advised the Indian communists to support the economic measures of the Nehru government, to collaborate with all 'progressive forces' and to display 'tact' towards representatives of the bourgeois nationalist movements. E. Zhukov again praised Nehru’s socialism and insisted that India under Nehru’s leadership was proceeding towards the 'socialist path' though 'it is different from the Soviet concept of socialism.' Another Soviet scholar insisted that India was proceeding towards socialism and quoted Khrushchev as saying that the Soviet Union was convinced that India was proceeding towards socialism 'though we mean different things by socialism.' Nevertheless, he said 'we support the policy of Nehru who says that India is building a socialist society.'"
(Ray, Hemen. Sino-Soviet Conflict Over India. New Delhi: Shakti Malik. 1988. pp. 28-30, 32-33, 35-36.)

I don't see how considering Nehru's India "progressive" and "marching towards socialism" implies a restoration of capitalism or an alliance with the bourgeoisie. On the other hand, Stalin called for Popular and United Fronts which included bourgeoisie parties.


The Eurocommunist parties continued maintaining organizational and financial links with the Soviet revisionists, who in turn "attacked" Eurocommunism only because it threatened to undermine their control over these parties.

Actually they didn't. PCI refused to participate in the International Conference of CP's organized by the USSR and the financial aid was cut sometime after. PCE's internal factions opposed to Carrillo's Eurocommunism began to be subsided by Moscow.

[Fred]

No more than the misgivings Lenin had of Lunacharsky and other figures who held idealistic views but who he felt could be of use after the revolution.

The February revolution brought the bourgeoisie to power. The October revolution brought the proletariat to power. Lenin noted years earlier that there would be no stopping halfway between a bourgeois-democratic revolution and a proletarian revolution.



:lol: yeah, Lunarcharsky and Trotsky, they were about on par in importance as revolutionary leaders and theoreticians. What Lenin noted in your quote, my friend, is the Permanent Revolution. He was almost there before 1917. He had to lose the dd of the pp as a formulation, which he did. Lenin's appraisal of Trotsky was higher than his appraisal of anyone else from 1917 onward. They had some disagreements, it is true -- but the collaborated closely. Anyway, using isolated quotes from Lenin based on earlier disputes is a vacuous exercise, indeed.

[Art Vandelay]

:lol: yeah, Lunarcharsky and Trotsky, they were about on par in importance as revolutionary leaders and theoreticians. What Lenin noted in your quote, my friend, is the Permanent Revolution. He was almost there before 1917. He had to lose the dd of the pp as a formulation, which he did. Lenin's appraisal of Trotsky was higher than his appraisal of anyone else from 1917 onward. They had some disagreements, it is true -- but the collaborated closely. Anyway, using isolated quotes from Lenin based on earlier disputes is a vacuous exercise, indeed.

And to be quite frank, post 17' they didn't have many major disagreements, at least that come to mind. I can think of Brest-Litovisk for sure, although Trotsky and Lenin weren't all that far apart on this matter, merely had a disagreement of tactics over how long exactly they could stall and use the meetings to their advantage. There was of course, also, the trade union question and I don't think many would disagree that Lenin's proposal was far superior to Trotsky's. I think the interesting one, is Trotsky's proposal to end war communism at least a year earlier and that a tax on the peasantry would have provided a better transition into the NEP, this would have also negated the need for the militarization of labor.

[Ismail]

It is evident in aufheben's remarks about "'orthodox Trotskyists" that his issue is not just with me. I also think that the debate has run its course and there can't be much more to it than running around between the exact same arguments.


I don't see how considering Nehru's India "progressive" and "marching towards socialism" implies a restoration of capitalism or an alliance with the bourgeoisie.I don't get why you keep on saying stuff like this, as if anyone ever actually claimed that capitalism was restored because Khrushchev praised Nehru. The fact is, however, that Khrushchev's policy was explicitly counterpoised to Stalin's; the assessment of Nehru, Gandhi, and the Indian National Congress itself pre-1955 was criticized as dogmatic and one-sided by Soviet theorists.


On the other hand, Stalin called for Popular and United Fronts which included bourgeoisie parties.And the leading force of those fronts were to be the communist parties. Nor can one find the establishment of Popular Fronts in Spain or France coinciding whatsoever with claims that either states were building socialism. Compare this with the words of the post-1956 Soviet theorists, who for example declared that "revolutionary democrats can play the leading political role in the countries with a relatively weak proletariat." (Lenin and National Liberation in the East, 1978, p. 19.)

[Old Bolshie]

I don't get why you keep on saying stuff like this, as if anyone ever actually claimed that capitalism was restored because Khrushchev praised Nehru.

Because that was one of your points about Eurocommunism tendencies and roots.


And the leading force of those fronts were to be the communist parties. Nor can one find the establishment of Popular Fronts in Spain or France coinciding whatsoever with claims that either states were building socialism.Except in cases where National Fronts were organized like in GDR and Czechoslovakia post-WWII.


Compare this with the words of the post-1956 Soviet theorists, who for example declared that "revolutionary democrats can play the leading political role in the countries with a relatively weak proletariat." (Lenin and National Liberation in the East, 1978, p. 19.)The term "revolutionary democrats" was put forward by Lenin to designate the revolutionary forces during a revolution. I don't see the issue here.

[Ismail]

Except in cases where National Fronts were organized like in GDR and Czechoslovakia post-WWII.They didn't claim to be building socialism either until after the other parties accepted the leading role of the Communists.


The term "revolutionary democrats" was put forward by Lenin to designate the revolutionary forces during a revolution. I don't see the issue here.If you think a country can build socialism without the leading role of the proletariat, but with the leading role of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia or military officers (which is basically what "revolutionary democrats" was referring to when the post-56 Soviet leadership used it) then this is hardly in line with "orthodox" Marxist thinking, and Soviet theorists readily acknowledged this fact and claimed they were building upon what few precedents established by Marx, Engels and Lenin existed.

A good example of how they tried justifying things from a Marxist angle (from On the Road to Communism: Essays on Soviet Domestic and Foreign Politics, 1972, p. 166):

One difficulty was that the officer class was the vanguard of the revolution in Egypt and, to a certain degree, in Syria. These revolutionary democrats were promptly dubbed 'officer patriots' and a quotation was dug up in which Marx purportedly spoke of the patriotic role the native army played during the Sepoy Revolt in India. The background of the officer class was also brought into play. In Syria the upper classes refused to serve the French during the mandate. As a result, most graduates of the Homs Military Academy came from poor families and had chosen the military as the only way in which they could advance. This presumably assured their proletarian purity. After the Ghanaian army had ousted Nkrumah, further refinements were added to the army's revolutionary role. Writing in Izvestia in 1967, A. Iskenderov suggests that while a revolutionary movement can arise and develop without an advanced political party, such a party is needed to consolidate the victory of the revolution and the army cannot take its place. Furthermore, Karen Brutents asserts:

. . . it was not the army of the Egyptian monarchy that carried out the revolution; on the contrary, it was the revolutionary forces that established their control over the army, virtually changing its nature and leading it in the attack against the reactionary and anti-national authority. It was in the army that the revolution started and scored its first victory. [Emphasis in the original.]

This sort of sophistry did not fit the facts. Reviewing some of the reasons for the Arab defeat in 1967, two Soviet journalists reporting from Cairo wrote that while the renewal of the officer corps went on during the years of revolution, it had not reached the top military leadership. Then, an officer-businessman type had emerged, creating a military bourgeoisie in the country. What is more, "far from all the important bureaucrats are 100 per cent socialists. How could they carry out a socialist policy? Thus far there is no answer to this." The same writers note in a later article: "The middle classes of the UAR where many of the leaders of the Egyptian revolution had their origin are notorious for their inconsistency."Not to mention various other aspects of the debate, like if it was necessary for the proletariat to have its vanguard or if it could fulfill "non-capitalist" tasks just as well as part of a single party led by the aforementioned "revolutionary democrats."

[Old Bolshie]

They didn't claim to be building socialism either until after the other parties accepted the leading role of the Communists.

The fact that other parties accepted the leading role of the communists doesn't deny the fact that they were "building socialism" in alliance with bourgeoisie parties.


If you think a country can build socialism without the leading role of the proletariat, but with the leading role of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia or military officers (which is basically what "revolutionary democrats" was referring to when the post-56 Soviet leadership used it) then this is hardly in line with "orthodox" Marxist thinking, and Soviet theorists readily acknowledged this fact and claimed they were building upon what few precedents established by Marx, Engels and Lenin existed.

A good example of how they tried justifying things from a Marxist angle (from On the Road to Communism: Essays on Soviet Domestic and Foreign Politics, 1972, p. 166):
Not to mention various other aspects of the debate, like if it was necessary for the proletariat to have its vanguard or if it could fulfill "non-capitalist" tasks just as well as part of a single party led by the aforementioned "revolutionary democrats."

If the leading role of the officers is in alliance with the proletariat and supported by it during the revolution itself I don't see the problem. The proletariat then assumes its leading role. This happen in Portugal during the revolutionary period of 1974-75. Other thing would be if the the officers interests went against the proletariat interests. Besides the vanguard of the Russian workers in the October Revolution and afterwards could be very easily described as a "petty-bourgeois intelligentsia".

[Ismail]

The fact that other parties accepted the leading role of the communists doesn't deny the fact that they were "building socialism" in alliance with bourgeoisie parties.It's worth noting that there were no actual bourgeoisie in the sense of owners of corporations and whatnot in these parties. Among the Liberal Democrats for example the majority group (32%) as of 1989 were white-collar workers, the rest comprising craftsmen, teachers, doctors, journalists, etc., while the Christian Democrats had many workers and the National Democrats were focused on those who were in the NSDAP and those who served in the German army during the war.

Of course Lenin pointed out that a party could literally be a workers' party in composition and yet still express bourgeois ideology and interests, but I don't think anyone can honestly claim the other parties in the GDR had more than nominal ideologies. Case in point: the leader of the Liberal Democrats could declare in the 80's: "we can be certain that our specific contribution to social progress, our active cooperation in the National Front on the further path of socialism and communism are more than ever in demand, both materially and in spirit" and that the ruling SED was producing a situation of "true freedom" for East Germans. (Sperlich, Oppression and Scarcity, 2006, p. 52.) The combined influence of the other parties on SED policy was negligible by all accounts.


If the leading role of the officers is in alliance with the proletariat and supported by it during the revolution itself I don't see the problem. The proletariat then assumes its leading role. This happen in Portugal during the revolutionary period of 1974-75. Other thing would be if the the officers interests went against the proletariat interests. Besides the vanguard of the Russian workers in the October Revolution and afterwards could be very easily described as a "petty-bourgeois intelligentsia".The problem with the post-55 Soviet view of "non-capitalist development" is that it substituted sociological analysis for a class-based one, and argued that third world states could play the role of a semi-independent arbitrator between classes. A good example and critique of this in regards to Ethiopia can be seen here: socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/download/5482/2381 (http://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/download/5482/2381)

[Old Bolshie]

It's worth noting that there were no actual bourgeoisie in the sense of owners of corporations and whatnot in these parties. Among the Liberal Democrats for example the majority group (32%) as of 1989 were white-collar workers, the rest comprising craftsmen, teachers, doctors, journalists, etc., while the Christian Democrats had many workers and the National Democrats were focused on those who were in the NSDAP and those who served in the German army during the war.

Of course Lenin pointed out that a party could literally be a workers' party in composition and yet still express bourgeois ideology and interests, but I don't think anyone can honestly claim the other parties in the GDR had more than nominal ideologies. Case in point: the leader of the Liberal Democrats could declare in the 80's: "we can be certain that our specific contribution to social progress, our active cooperation in the National Front on the further path of socialism and communism are more than ever in demand, both materially and in spirit" and that the ruling SED was producing a situation of "true freedom" for East Germans. (Sperlich, Oppression and Scarcity, 2006, p. 52.) The combined influence of the other parties on SED policy was negligible by all accounts.


By the time National Fronts were constituted those economies weren't full nationalized yet and private ownership still existed though.

[Ismail]

By the time National Fronts were constituted those economies weren't full nationalized yet and private ownership still existed though.Yes but my point is that the decisive force in these countries were the Soviet troops who would thwart any counter-revolutionary efforts. Of course the lack of organization and initial popular support of most of the Eastern European CPs did have negative effects. Hoxha in particular recalled in both The Khrushchevites and in The Titoites how weak the Romanian CP was in the immediate postwar years. An excerpt from the latter work, discussing his 1948 visit to the country and later his experience in staying at the house of a peasant woman and her communist son (since his visit to the country was incognito):

I got into a big Soviet ZIS car together with Dej. The others got into cars, too. When I was to enter the car the driver opened the door for me and I did not notice that it was an armoured car. I saw this when I got out and opened the door from inside. Never before had I had the occasion to see such a thing, although I had read in newspapers and books that such cars were used by kings and dictators to protect themselves from attempts on their lives, and by gangsters to protect themselves from the attacks of the police. Once in the car, it seemed to me I was not in a car, but in a real arsenal: both on my side and Dej's side we had a German twenty-round automatic pistol, each with two spare magazines, under our feet we each held another German twenty-round pistol with spare magazines and, of course, the guard and the driver had the same...

They showed either that the Rumanian comrades were as frightened as rabbits, or that the situation in their country was by no means as calm as they tried to make out.

When I commented on the "arsenal" Dej replied:

"We must be vigilant!" ....

After lunching together with our hosts I went to take a rest. Everything in this village home was clean, quiet and attractive. This helped me overcome my boredom from remaining alone and would allow me, in the quiet of the night, to classify the materials and opinions which I would present in the meeting with Vyshinsky and Dej. During lunch and in the afternoon, after my rest, I took the opportunity to talk with my hosts and to learn about the situation in the country to the extent that they knew it and were able to answer my questions.

"The situation is not yet completely clear," said the mother, "but we are masters of it. We drove out the king and liberated the country thanks to Stalin's Red Army. Another advantage from this was that the country was not burnt and devastated except for a few things; our industry is running. Our country is fertile, but from now on it will become more fertile and more prosperous. To tell you the truth," continued the old lady, "the economy is still not in the hands of our state, the capitalists are still very much alive, the big and medium merchants have their property, exploit it freely and live well, even though our state levies taxes on them." "When I have the opportunity to meet Dej," continued the old lady, "I ask him, 'What are you doing? Are you still leaving these capitalists and the wealthy of the land who sucked our blood, who were supporters of the Germans and of Codreanu and the Conducator (Antonescu) who sent our boys to burn Russia and be killed there?' 'Be patient,' Dej replies, 'everything will come in its own time.'"Still, I don't think the existence of multiple parties had a significant political (much less economic) effect on anything post-40's. The Dubček faction in Czechoslovakia tried activating them and the Soviet revisionists occasionally liked pointing to those states that had multiple parties as demonstrating "different roads to socialism," but otherwise the only other significance I can see is that in the 80's the Polish revisionists tried activating them as an alternative to pro-Solidarity forces and in that same decade the churches (and thus CDU) gave some encouragement to modest dissident movements in the GDR.

[Old Bolshie]

Yes but my point is that the decisive force in these countries were the Soviet troops who would thwart any counter-revolutionary efforts. Of course the lack of organization and initial popular support of most of the Eastern European CPs did have negative effects. Hoxha in particular recalled in both The Khrushchevites and in The Titoites how weak the Romanian CP was in the immediate postwar years. An excerpt from the latter work, discussing his 1948 visit to the country and later his experience in staying at the house of a peasant woman and her communist son (since his visit to the country was incognito):
Still, I don't think the existence of multiple parties had a significant political (much less economic) effect on anything post-40's. The Dubček faction in Czechoslovakia tried activating them and the Soviet revisionists occasionally liked pointing to those states that had multiple parties as demonstrating "different roads to socialism," but otherwise the only other significance I can see is that in the 80's the Polish revisionists tried activating them as an alternative to pro-Solidarity forces and in that same decade the churches (and thus CDU) gave some encouragement to modest dissident movements in the GDR.

My point was precisely the late 40's/early 50's when those National Fronts were formed.



The problem with the post-55 Soviet view of "non-capitalist development" is that it substituted sociological analysis for a class-based one, and argued that third world states could play the role of a semi-independent arbitrator between classes. A good example and critique of this in regards to Ethiopia can be seen here: socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/download/5482/2381 (http://socialistregister.com/index.php/srv/article/download/5482/2381)

I don't agree that Soviet theorists thought that the states could play a role of semi-independent arbitrator between classes at least from what I red in the article. This view would be completely erroneous and totally unmarxist as the state could be somehow independent in a class society. As I said I don't think that is the case.

The article also wrongly claims that oppressed people played no role in the revolution when there was a period of violent civil unrest with strong participation of the working class in Ethiopia right before the fall of the Emperor. The communist movement was also not a irrelevant one in Ethiopia when they were being strongly supported by USSR.

It must be also said that it were the soviets who pressured for the creation of a working class party which would assume the vanguard in Ethiopia's society which it did in the 80's.

[Ismail]

My point was precisely the late 40's/early 50's when those National Fronts were formed.The Fronts were established pretty much as soon as the war ended or even before then, in the form of organizations in exile.


I don't agree that Soviet theorists thought that the states could play a role of semi-independent arbitrator between classes at least from what I red in the article. This view would be completely erroneous and totally unmarxist as the state could be somehow independent in a class society. As I said I don't think that is the case.And yet the Soviet revisionists wrote that, "The working class and progressive forces support the development of state enterprise, for it really does serve to curtail the sphere of private-capitalist enterprise, both of the local and foreign variety... because [a state enterprise], more than any other, is made subject to state control, inspection and guidance through the institutions of bourgeois democracy... is better suited than all other methods within the framework of bourgeois development to create the material prerequisites of socialism." (Ulyanovsky, Socialism and the Newly Independent Nations, 1974, p. 516.)

The Albanians noted years prior why the revisionists upheld such a view:

"N. Khrushchev's propagandists recently have gone so far as to present the state monopoly capitalism of capitalist countries as one of the principal factors in the overthrow of the monopolist bourgeoisie and as almost the first step toward socialism. Thus, in his closing speech at the international meeting of Marxist scholars in Moscow devoted to current problems of the capitalist world, transmitted by TASS in summarized form September 3, 1962, the director of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the USSR Academy of Sciences, A. Arzumanyan, said inter alia: 'At present, in the third state of the general crisis of capitalism, nationalization cannot be regarded as an ordinary reform. It is bound up with the revolutionary struggle for the liquidation of monopolies, for the overthrow of the power of the financial oligarchy. Through the correct policy of the working class, relying on an upsurge in the struggle of the broad popular masses, it may become a radical means of abolishing the domination of the monopolist bourgeoisie. The nationalization of industry and of the banks is now becoming the slogan of the antimonopolist coalition.' What is the difference between this concept and the well-known, fundamentally opportunist point of view in the Program of the LCY that 'specific forms of capitalist state relations can be the first step toward socialism,' that 'the ever growing impact of state-capitalist tendencies in the capitalist world is the most outstanding proof that mankind is entering every more deeply, in an uncontrollabe manner and in the most varied ways, into the epoch of socialism'? ....

We cannot fail to recall in this connection that in his time V.I. Lenin harshly criticized the bourgeois reformist notion that state monopoly capitalism is a non-capitalist order, a step toward socialism, which is necessary to the opportunist and reformist denial of the inevitability of the socialist revolution and their embellishing of capitalism. V.I. Lenin emphatically stressed that 'steps toward greater monopolism and state control of production are inevitably followed by an increase in the exploitation of the working masses, the intensification of oppression, difficulty in resisting exploiters, and the strengthening of reaction and military despotism. Parallel with this, they result in an extraordinary increase in the profits of the big capitalists to the detriment of all other strata of the population.'"
("Modern Revisionists to the Aid of the Basic Strategy of American Imperialism," Zëri i Popullit, September 19 and 20, 1962. Quoted in William E. Griffith. Albania and the Sino-Soviet Rift. Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press. 1963. pp. 378-379.)


The article also wrongly claims that oppressed people played no role in the revolution when there was a period of violent civil unrest with strong participation of the working class in Ethiopia right before the fall of the Emperor. The communist movement was also not a irrelevant one in Ethiopia when they were being strongly supported by USSR.The military took power as a result of the unrest. It had no more of a link to the working-class, student and peasant movements against the monarchy than the Egyptian military today has, just because they both opposed the regime in power at the time but for significantly different reasons.

What is the "communist movement" you refer towards? The Soviet revisionists sought to tie the Eritrean national liberation struggle to their social-imperialist schemes, but quickly abandoned it once the Derg came to power. That's the closest thing I can think of to a "communist movement" in the country.


It must be also said that it were the soviets who pressured for the creation of a working class party which would assume the vanguard in Ethiopia's society which it did in the 80's.The Soviet revisionists pressured Somalia to set up a revisionist party on its pattern as well. I don't see what this has to do with anything, plenty of bourgeois states friendly to the Soviet revisionists operated within one-party frameworks.

[Old Bolshie]

The Fronts were established pretty much as soon as the war ended or even before then, in the form of organizations in exile.

East Germany's National Front was established some years after the war ended.


And yet the Soviet revisionists wrote that, "The working class and progressive forces support the development of state enterprise, for it really does serve to curtail the sphere of private-capitalist enterprise, both of the local and foreign variety... because [a state enterprise], more than any other, is made subject to state control, inspection and guidance through the institutions of bourgeois democracy... is better suited than all other methods within the framework of bourgeois development to create the material prerequisites of socialism." (Ulyanovsky, Socialism and the Newly Independent Nations, 1974, p. 516.)

The Albanians noted years prior why the revisionists upheld such a view:

"N. Khrushchev's propagandists recently have gone so far as to present the state monopoly capitalism of capitalist countries as one of the principal factors in the overthrow of the monopolist bourgeoisie and as almost the first step toward socialism. Thus, in his closing speech at the international meeting of Marxist scholars in Moscow devoted to current problems of the capitalist world, transmitted by TASS in summarized form September 3, 1962, the director of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the USSR Academy of Sciences, A. Arzumanyan, said inter alia: 'At present, in the third state of the general crisis of capitalism, nationalization cannot be regarded as an ordinary reform. It is bound up with the revolutionary struggle for the liquidation of monopolies, for the overthrow of the power of the financial oligarchy. Through the correct policy of the working class, relying on an upsurge in the struggle of the broad popular masses, it may become a radical means of abolishing the domination of the monopolist bourgeoisie. The nationalization of industry and of the banks is now becoming the slogan of the antimonopolist coalition.' What is the difference between this concept and the well-known, fundamentally opportunist point of view in the Program of the LCY that 'specific forms of capitalist state relations can be the first step toward socialism,' that 'the ever growing impact of state-capitalist tendencies in the capitalist world is the most outstanding proof that mankind is entering every more deeply, in an uncontrollabe manner and in the most varied ways, into the epoch of socialism'? ....

I've red all of this and I didn't see any evidence that soviet theorists saw the state as an independent force above classes. The full nationalization of an economy is one of the firsts steps taken by any worker's state. I don't see the issue with that or why it would turn the state somehow independent from classes.


We cannot fail to recall in this connection that in his time V.I. Lenin harshly criticized the bourgeois reformist notion that state monopoly capitalism is a non-capitalist order, a step toward socialism, which is necessary to the opportunist and reformist denial of the inevitability of the socialist revolution and their embellishing of capitalism. V.I. Lenin emphatically stressed that 'steps toward greater monopolism and state control of production are inevitably followed by an increase in the exploitation of the working masses, the intensification of oppression, difficulty in resisting exploiters, and the strengthening of reaction and military despotism. Parallel with this, they result in an extraordinary increase in the profits of the big capitalists to the detriment of all other strata of the population.'"
("Modern Revisionists to the Aid of the Basic Strategy of American Imperialism," Zëri i Popullit, September 19 and 20, 1962. Quoted in William E. Griffith. Albania and the Sino-Soviet Rift. Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T. Press. 1963. pp. 378-379.)

Which Lenin are you referring to? The one who said "You will find that, given a really revolutionary-democratic state, state- monopoly capitalism inevitably and unavoidably implies a step, and more than one step, towards socialism! ", or the one who said "For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly".


The military took power as a result of the unrest. It had no more of a link to the working-class, student and peasant movements against the monarchy than the Egyptian military today has, just because they both opposed the regime in power at the time but for significantly different reasons.

Your comparison is flawed. The Egyptian military didn't engage to full scale nationalization of the economy, expropriation of the bourgeoisie, landowners and the Church, did it?


What is the "communist movement" you refer towards? The Soviet revisionists sought to tie the Eritrean national liberation struggle to their social-imperialist schemes, but quickly abandoned it once the Derg came to power. That's the closest thing I can think of to a "communist movement" in the country.

In 1975 five different Marxist organizations existed in Ethiopia.


The Soviet revisionists pressured Somalia to set up a revisionist party on its pattern as well. I don't see what this has to do with anything, plenty of bourgeois states friendly to the Soviet revisionists operated within one-party frameworks.

It has to do with your complain about the lack of a party as the leading force of the revolutionary process.

[Ismail]

East Germany's National Front was established some years after the war ended.But before that was the Democratic Bloc. In any case this is essentially formalistic; what is the significance of your argument in this regard?


Which Lenin are you referring to? The one who said "You will find that, given a really revolutionary-democratic state, state- monopoly capitalism inevitably and unavoidably implies a step, and more than one step, towards socialism! ", or the one who said "For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly".I think Lenin had something else from, say, Ba'athist Iraq, Syria or India in mind when he said "revolutionary-democratic state."


Your comparison is flawed. The Egyptian military didn't engage to full scale nationalization of the economy, expropriation of the bourgeoisie, landowners and the Church, did it?The Ethiopian military got rid of the discredited feudal structures but did not pursue any real socialization.


In 1975 five different Marxist organizations existed in Ethiopia.And all zero of them supported by the Soviets.


It has to do with your complain about the lack of a party as the leading force of the revolutionary process.10 years after the Derg took power it formed a party in order to institutionalize itself. That's hardly revolutionary and, considering that the military continued to wield actual power, hardly marked any step up in the "revolutionary process."

[Old Bolshie]

But before that was the Democratic Bloc. In any case this is essentially formalistic; what is the significance of your argument in this regard?

It only became formalistic some years after as it was the case of the Czechoslovakian National Front.


I think Lenin had something else from, say, Ba'athist Iraq, Syria or India in mind when he said "revolutionary-democratic state."

So did the soviets "revisionists" when they spoke about state-monopoly capitalism.


The Ethiopian military got rid of the discredited feudal structures but did not pursue any real socialization.

Besides what I've already mentioned what left them to do to "pursue any real socialization"?


And all zero of them supported by the Soviets.

4 of them were supported by the Soviets. Only the movement which opposed the Derg failed to be supported.


10 years after the Derg took power it formed a party in order to institutionalize itself. That's hardly revolutionary and, considering that the military continued to wield actual power, hardly marked any step up in the "revolutionary process."

Actually, the Constitution of 1987 placed the center of the country's political power in the party.

[Ismail]

So did the soviets "revisionists" when they spoke about state-monopoly capitalism.No they didn't, Soviet materials from the 60's-70's specifically praised regimes in Algeria, Syria and elsewhere for their nationalization measures, presenting these as objectively weakening domestic capitalist forces.


Besides what I've already mentioned what left them to do to "pursue any real socialization"?I could point out much of the urban economy was in the hands of private elements, but to you anything strengthening the bourgeois (using "socialist" phraseology) state constitutes "socialization."


4 of them were supported by the Soviets. Only the movement which opposed the Derg failed to be supported.Name the movements supported, then, and evidence of them receiving Soviet support considering I haven't come across any such claims.


Actually, the Constitution of 1987 placed the center of the country's political power in the party.Constitutions can claim a lot of things, it doesn't change the fact that the leadership of the Derg was practically identical to the leadership of the Workers' Party of Ethiopia.

[Old Bolshie]

No they didn't, Soviet materials from the 60's-70's specifically praised regimes in Algeria, Syria and elsewhere for their nationalization measures, presenting these as objectively weakening domestic capitalist forces.

Were Algeria and Syria state monopoly capitalist regimes? I don't think so. So the soviet theorists couldn't be referring to it.


I could point out much of the urban economy was in the hands of private elements, but to you anything strengthening the bourgeois (using "socialist" phraseology) state constitutes "socialization."No, but a state which expropriates the bourgeoisie and socialize the means of production? Definitely. That would be hardly a bourgeois one though.


Name the movements supported, then, and evidence of them receiving Soviet support considering I haven't come across any such claims.The Union of Ethiopian ML's organizations which involved those 4 movements were supported by the USSR through the Derg. For instance, Seded members were sent to USSR to receive military and ideological training.


Constitutions can claim a lot of things, it doesn't change the fact that the leadership of the Derg was practically identical to the leadership of the Workers' Party of Ethiopia.It was not a claim but a effectively transfer of political power to the party.

As far as the leadership goes, since the Derg led the revolutionary process until the conception of the party I don't see the issue with the fact that the leadership of the Derg was practically identical to the party's one.

[Ismail]

Were Algeria and Syria state monopoly capitalist regimes? I don't think so. So the soviet theorists couldn't be referring to it.Algeria and Syria were bourgeois "socialist" regimes which carried out policies of nationalization and were praised as pursuing the "non-capitalist path of development" by the Soviet revisionists. The revisionists presented nationalization in these states as specifically undermining monopolies and the basis of capitalism itself.


The Union of Ethiopian ML's organizations which involved those 4 movements were supported by the USSR through the Derg. For instance, Seded members were sent to USSR to receive military and ideological training.Seded was literally comprised of Derg members who had a firmly pro-Soviet orientation. You haven't given the names of the other three.

And what of the Eritrean national liberation struggle, which was led by avowed Marxists and which the Derg sought to suppress?

[LOLseph Stalin]

So it wasn't bad that the soviet union turned imperialist? or china capitalist? or how the revisionist Gorbachev managed to destroy almost every socialist state?

Where did I say that? Let's call that for what it is, imperialism...

[Brutus]

or how the revisionist Gorbachev managed to destroy almost every socialist state?
I thought the typical ML view was that socialism was dead by 1956/7 due to the reforms, which made the factories focus on profit above anything else? Or are you a Brezhnevite?

[Old Bolshie]

Algeria and Syria were bourgeois "socialist" regimes which carried out policies of nationalization and were praised as pursuing the "non-capitalist path of development" by the Soviet revisionists. The revisionists presented nationalization in these states as specifically undermining monopolies and the basis of capitalism itself.

That's not state monopoly capitalism to which you referring some posts ago.

And sure those nationalizations undermined capitalism and imperialism. Otherwise imperialistic powers like France and Britain wouldn't have invaded Egypt when the Suez Canal was nationalized by the Egyptian government just to give one example.


Seded was literally comprised of Derg members who had a firmly pro-Soviet orientation.

For sure you weren't expecting the Soviets to support anti-soviet groups, were you?


You haven't given the names of the other three.

Malerid, Waz League and the Meison.


And what of the Eritrean national liberation struggle, which was led by avowed Marxists and which the Derg sought to suppress?

And what great Marxists they were when only in its second congress they were already dropping Marxism from their ideological orientation.