Socialism in One Country

[LiamChe]

What is the modern ML stance on this. It seems to me like it might be contradictory to internationalism. Was there a reason that Stalin found this theory so important to uphold and is it still upheld by modern MLs?

[boiler]

I dont think Socialism in One Country was contradictory to internationalism. Since all the other Workers revolutions failed in Europe. Russia was left isolated so the only way for Russia to go was to try and build socailism in Russia. But while trying to build socialism in Russia, the Russian Communist Party was giving help and support to other revolutionary groups and Communists in other coutries through out the world.

[Brotto Rühle]

Its not against internationalism, but against Marxism. Anyone who believes socialism can exist in a single country, or that it ever has, is ignorant to Marx's critique of political economy.

[Red_Banner]

How can you even have socialism in one country(nevermind the problem of it being targeted by reactionaries) when you haven't even built socialism?

A socialist state and actual socialism are 2 different things.

The state merely builds socialism.

[Bolshevik Sickle]

Cultural marxism (i.e. LGBT rights, women's rights, feminism) should work fine in one country.

[reb]

qyFMKiHFZXg

[G4b3n]

Stalin came up with the idea after the revolutions in the west had failed completely. He saw it as the only method of survival for the "socialism" being established in Russia. It is safe to say that the notion is in complete contradiction with what Marx had to say on the topic and only put into affect due to the defeat of the left opposition.

As for modern MLs, if I ever did hear one purpose such a silly idea I would have no desire to continue conversation with that particular Stalin worshiper.

[reb]

In brief, people who advocate for "socialism" in one country assume that political changes affect material base, that all you need to do is to capture state power and then use state power to change the mode of production. What this amounts to in terminology is changing the superstructure to change the base. Anyone who isn't a marxist-cretinist, should be able to understand the incoherence of that. This is one aspect as to why socialism in country is for dummies and another reason as to why capitalism can be not be reformed, which might seem strange but this is in essence the stalinist position; stalinism being nothing more than social-democarcy with bayonets. And "socialism" here invariably refers to this made up category that in every which way describes the capitalist mode of production. Again, tying both stalinists and trots together in their common bed of social-democracy and anti-marxism with their common idealism.

[Comrade Jacob]

All it is is the idea that socialism should be built (in already successful revolutionary countries) as the world-revolution happens instead of after in order to secure a socialist power that would aid the world-revolution. Many revolutions wouldn't have happened if not for the aid and support of "Stalinism".

[Misericordia]

I think the best part about this theory is that ultralefts and Trots(the more idiotic ones especially, the ones you see on the internet) use it as a strawman to denounce "Stalinism"(of which they say it is a pillar), even though no one has given a shit about "socialism in one country" since 1945 for obvious reasons(hello? there was more than one socialist state after the communist victory during WWII). I guess after WWII, Stalin stopped being a Stalinist?

[Remus Bleys]

What is the modern ML stance on this.
For it.

It seems to me like it might be contradictory to internationalism. Because it is.
Correct
Was there a reason that Stalin found this theory so important to uphold and is it still upheld by modern MLs?Revolution in Germany (and in the rest of the world, sadly) failed, so Stalin needed something to legitimize the soviet state, and how it would function on its own, whilst keeping to the red rhetoric that had put him in power.

[LiamChe]

Oh, ok I understand now. For some reason I was thinking it meant socialism can only thrive in one country or that its only possible in a few countries. But it would make sense what you are saying. For some reason I thought I read something that Socialism in One Country was something contradictory to internationalism, however I have started reading "On the Final Victory of Socialism in the U.S.S.R" By J. V. Stalin and I'm starting to realize that it was not that, but rather a way of focusing on building Socialism in the USSR. Which makes sense. I think the article I read was Trotskyist, so that would explain the confusion.

"Of course you are right, Comrade Ivanov, and your ideological opponents, i.e., Comrades Urozhenko and Kazelkov, are wrong. And for the following reasons : Undoubtedly the question of the victory of Socialism in one country, in this case our country, has two different sides.
The first side of the question of the victory of Socialism in our country embraces the problem of the mutual relations between classes in our country. This concerns the sphere of internal relations.
Can the working class of our country overcome the contradictions with our peasantry and establish an alliance, collaboration with them?
Can the working class of our country, in alliance - with our peasantry, smash the bourgeoisie of our country, deprive it of the land, factories, mines, etc., and by its own efforts build a new, classless society, complete Socialist society?
Such are the problems that are connected with the first side of the question of the victory of Socialism in our country.
Leninism answers these problems in the affirmative.
Lenin teaches us that "we have all that is necessary for the building of a complete Socialist society."
Hence we can and must, by our own efforts, overcome our bourgeoisie and build Socialist society"-"On the Final Victory of Socialism in the U.S.S.R" By J. V. Stalin

[#FF0000]

(hello? there was more than one socialist state after the communist victory during WWII)

lol no there weren't. there were plenty of capitalist states being run by red-clad bureaucrats and strongmen, but there were no "socialist states"

[Per Levy]

even though no one has given a shit about "socialism in one country" since 1945 for obvious reasons(hello? there was more than one socialist state after the communist victory during WWII).

do you really want to paint the soviet sattellite states as being "socialist"? the SU wasnt socalist to begin with, still these states with their imposed puppet regimes werent anything but buffer states for the SU. also "communist victory", there is a reason why in russia today as back to stalins times wwII was called the "great patriotic war".


Cultural marxism (i.e. LGBT rights, women's rights, feminism) should work fine in one country.

may i ask what kind of stuff you watch and listen to? i mean "cultureal marxism" do you even know what that is? in wich political circles this phrase is used? yeah it is used by rightwingers of all stripes to label anything they dont like as being marxist.

[#FF0000]

Cultural marxism (i.e. LGBT rights, women's rights, feminism) should work fine in one country.

Hey, I don't want to seem harsh here, but I think your understanding of these topics is sorely lacking and you should commit yourself to learning about these different ideas you try to talk about before claiming them, you know?

[Five Year Plan]

qyFMKiHFZXg

I don't know why you posted this video, but it seems that the idea of a transitional society is actually important in demonstrating why socialism cannot be achieved in one country.

Suppose a workers' revolution happens in one country. If it made no sense to talk about a transitional society, this means that the state that workers established would remain just as capitalist as the one it supplanted. Does that even make sense? Why would revolutionary workers establish a state that is content to leave society just as capitalist as ever before. Why even have a revolution? Or we can take the alternative, and hypothesize that workers use the revolution establish socialism in that one country (what this question is about), independent of the regimes in other countries. Also not a plausible position.

The Marxist and Leninist position is neither of these. It is that workers following a revolutionary program will establish a workers' (socialist) state that they will use as a mechanism for transitioning all of society to socialism. It is an uneven process, and it doesn't occur over night. And it certainly can't be completed within any one country without workers' triumph internationally. But it is a necessary process that begins after the revolution in one state, not before, because workers' power does not develop within capitalist society, under a bourgeois state, as the power of the bourgeoisie developed under a feudal state. To say that the process isn't necessary, that we jump literally from a fully capitalist to a fully socialist society, that we can't talk about a transitional society (under a workers' state) is just half-baked nonsense veering between ultra-leftism and Stalinism: it leaves us with the two implausible options I presented above: either full on socialism within a single country after a revolution, or a full-on capitalist society and capitalist state established by revolutionary workers.

Kliman is wrong on this one, as he and the MHI people are about Leninism in general. He does do decent work on value theory, however.

[Five Year Plan]

In brief, people who advocate for "socialism" in one country assume that political changes affect material base, that all you need to do is to capture state power and then use state power to change the mode of production. What this amounts to in terminology is changing the superstructure to change the base. Anyone who isn't a marxist-cretinist, should be able to understand the incoherence of that. This is one aspect as to why socialism in country is for dummies and another reason as to why capitalism can be not be reformed, which might seem strange but this is in essence the stalinist position; stalinism being nothing more than social-democarcy with bayonets. And "socialism" here invariably refers to this made up category that in every which way describes the capitalist mode of production. Again, tying both stalinists and trots together in their common bed of social-democracy and anti-marxism with their common idealism.

For somebody decrying Stalnism, you have an understanding of base and superstructure that is strikingly reminiscent of the Stalinist diamat theory cranked out by the Soviet bureaucracy from the 1930s onward. Of course the Stalinist position is wrong about socialism in one country, but not because they acknowledge that the "superstructure" can change the "base." What you are proposing is the most undialectical position of one-way traffic between the two, which are not actually distinct realms of society in the first place. Guess who regulates tax policy? State agents. When the state, pushed by some faction of capitalists, changes tax policy for the working class, guess what this means: the superstructure is changing the base, even if it is within the context of the same mode of production.

The reason the Stalinists are wrong is that a totalizing mode of production like capitalism can only be overcome in its totality. If only a segment of the globe had overthrown the bourgeoisie, guess what would happen? The USSR all over again, with a degenerating workers' state and bureaucratic agents eventually assuming the function of capital by managing value relations through the suppression of the working class. Why? Because of international competition and dependency.

[Danielle Ni Dhighe]

Cultural marxism (i.e. LGBT rights, women's rights, feminism) should work fine in one country.
Um, why are you using a false definition of "cultural Marxism" used by conservatives?

[synthesis]

For somebody decrying Stalnism, you have an understanding of base and superstructure that is strikingly reminiscent of the Stalinist diamat theory cranked out by the Soviet bureaucracy from the 1930s onward. Of course the Stalinist position is wrong about socialism in one country, but not because they acknowledge that the "superstructure" can change the "base." What you are proposing is the most undialectical position of one-way traffic between the two, which are not actually distinct realms of society in the first place. Guess who regulates tax policy? State agents. When the state, pushed by some faction of capitalists, changes tax policy for the working class, guess what this means: the superstructure is changing the base, even if it is within the context of the same mode of production.

Who has denied that the superstructure can affect the base? The question is whether the superstructure can change the base in some qualitative sense.

[Five Year Plan]

Who has denied that the superstructure can affect the base? The question is whether the superstructure can change the base in some qualitative sense.

The "superstructure" spontaneously, on its own, doesn't one day decide to establish socialism. Workers constitute part of the base and establish a new superstructural form of power through they oversee a transition to socialism. Just as the bourgeois state, harnessing the collective discontent of peasants, workers, and bourgeois merchants and industrialists, oversaw the consolidation of bourgeois society and set about destroying and curtailing the reactionary remnants of feudalism. Isolating out one aspect of that process, and claiming that the superstructure doesn't change the base (which is what reb, in fact, did) misses the boat entirely.

[Zukunftsmusik]

I think the best part about this theory is that ultralefts and Trots(the more idiotic ones especially, the ones you see on the internet) use it as a strawman to denounce "Stalinism"(of which they say it is a pillar), even though no one has given a shit about "socialism in one country" since 1945 for obvious reasons(hello? there was more than one socialist state after the communist victory during WWII). I guess after WWII, Stalin stopped being a Stalinist?

Socialism in some countries

[reb]

For somebody decrying Stalnism, you have an understanding of base and superstructure that is strikingly reminiscent of the Stalinist diamat theory cranked out by the Soviet bureaucracy from the 1930s onward. Of course the Stalinist position is wrong about socialism in one country, but not because they acknowledge that the "superstructure" can change the "base." What you are proposing is the most undialectical position of one-way traffic between the two, which are not actually distinct realms of society in the first place. Guess who regulates tax policy? State agents. When the state, pushed by some faction of capitalists, changes tax policy for the working class, guess what this means: the superstructure is changing the base, even if it is within the context of the same mode of production.

The reason the Stalinists are wrong is that a totalizing mode of production like capitalism can only be overcome in its totality. If only a segment of the globe had overthrown the bourgeoisie, guess what would happen? The USSR all over again, with a degenerating workers' state and bureaucratic agents eventually assuming the function of capital by managing value relations through the suppression of the working class. Why? Because of international competition and dependency.

The point I was making, which might not have been clear enough for those who have to pedantically go out their way to try and preserve the name of their tendency, was that political change alone can not affect the mode of production. This is exactly the same idealist position that trots and stalinists hold, because they both try to describe the USSR as something other than capitalism by appealing to legalistic and outward political manifestations and decrees whilst ignoring the fundamental social-relations.

Stalinists are wrong because they are trying to defend a capitalist state as marxists by saying that it isn't a capitalist state. Trots are wrong for the same reason.

And it's funny that you are appealing to dialectics in this regard. Marx never presented an argument in this way. I don't know why people feel like they must, as it it automatically makes them right. Dialectically speaking, the negation of capitalism first occurs as the negation of the capitalist mode of production, which is an automatic negation built around the relationship the proletariat has to the means of production (it being the geist in this instance), further more, the negation of the capitalist society can only begin when the mode of production has been negated. Further, the negation of the negation of capitalism is communism, not some halfway negation of just having political power or just transitioning the mode of production because that does not make any marxian sense.

See what I did there?

[Five Year Plan]

The point I was making, which might not have been clear enough for those who have to pedantically go out their way to try and preserve the name of their tendency, was that political change alone can not affect the mode of production. This is exactly the same idealist position that trots and stalinists hold, because they both try to describe the USSR as something other than capitalism by appealing to legalistic and outward political manifestations and decrees whilst ignoring the fundamental social-relations.

You and your comrade Subvert really should learn about what Trotskyists think about various issues before crapping all over them because your posts are really embarrassing to read. Trotskyists don't hold that "political change alone" affects the mode of production. They, like every other Marxist who doesn't mangle Marx's base-superstructure metaphor, say that political change substantial enough to lead to the uprooting of the class basis of the state (a social revolution) changes the mode of production. In order to understand this, though, you'll have to understand that different modes of production require different kinds of state, and that you can't just interchange different kinds of states to work with any type of mode of production. Bourgeois forms of state are incompatible with feudal modes of production, and will act to destroy feudal relations of production. Socialist forms of state are incompatible with a capitalist mode of production, and will act to corrode bourgeois relations of production (by doing things like nationalizing property and bringing it under the control of a workers' state).

When workers' smash the bourgeois state and form a workers' state, they are engaged in an act that is at once both political and economic simultaneously. When they use their state to transition to socialism, they are undertaking a process that is similarly both economic and political simultaneously. As Marx emphasized in his famous base-superstructure passage, "In considering such transformations, a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the material conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophical – in short ideological – forms in which men become conscious of the conflict and fight it out." Base and superstructure can be distinguished through abstraction of the concrete world, but concretely, people engage in class struggle politically, through the so-called "superstructure." It is how "men become conscious of the [class] conflict and fight it out."

So, no, the question isn't whether "political change alone can affect modes of of production." It's a question of which types of political change are capable of constituting a change in the mode of production.


Stalinists are wrong because they are trying to defend a capitalist state as marxists by saying that it isn't a capitalist state. Trots are wrong for the same reason.

And it's funny that you are appealing to dialectics in this regard. Marx never presented an argument in this way. I don't know why people feel like they must, as it it automatically makes them right. Dialectically speaking, the negation of capitalism first occurs as the negation of the capitalist mode of production, which is an automatic negation built around the relationship the proletariat has to the means of production (it being the geist in this instance), further more, the negation of the capitalist society can only begin when the mode of production has been negated. Further, the negation of the negation of capitalism is communism, not some halfway negation of just having political power or just transitioning the mode of production because that does not make any marxian sense.

See what I did there?Capitalism is a negation of feudalism (and all precapitalist modes of production which rely directly on political compulsion to extract surplus). Does this mean that one day people woke up under feudalism, without any traces of capitalism, and the next day people woke up under capitalism, where all traces of feudalism had ceased to exist? Of course not. A transition occurred between the two, when capitalist relations of production gradually developed within and alongside feudal relations. The difference between the bourgeois revolutions, which were the smashing of the feudal states and their replacement by bourgeois states, and the socialist revolutions, which will smash the bourgeois states and replace them with workers' states, is that socialist revolutions will have to occur before the transition to socialism can begin, not that there won't be a transition. I stated why in my last post to you: because feudalism and capitalism are both systems that rely on private property, capitalism can develop within the feudal societies while, up to a point, benefiting feudal lords. Socialism, which relies on the total negation of private property, cannot develop within an economic system (capitalism) that will act to stamp out, through its political domination, any challenges to private property.

EDIT: And I will add that unless you think the smashing of bourgeois states by workers will occur everywhere at the same time, you are left with the pressing and (for you) uncomfortable question of how to characterize a country that is the first to undergo a workers' revolution. You can't say that it's socialist, because that would be socialism in one country, but since you absolutely refuse to admit that a society can be in transition under a socialist workers' state while still containing some aspects of capitalism for a time, you are stuck with saying those isolated post-revolution societies are just plain ol' capitalism in all its full glory. You will therefore have to support overthrowing capitalism all over again. It ends up becoming an endless succession of workers' revolutions overthrowing capitalist societies that workers themselves have set up. Until one day, of course, socialist revolutions happens all at once everywhere. This is what makes your position half Stalinist, half ultra-left.