if lenin lived

[redcannon]

If Lenin lived long enough, do you think he would have made the transition from socialism to communism in the USSR?

[Rawthentic]

The transition is not dependent on figure heads, but on the working classes, who create history.

[redcannon]

but lenin would have headed that transition. it would have been up to him to make it.

[Kropotkin Has a Posse]

Premiers and presidents can only slow down the transfer to communism, not speed it up, if you ask me.

[redcannon]

please, stick to the question, its been bugging me for ages

[Vargha Poralli]

Premiers and presidents can only slow down the transfer to communism, not speed it up, if you ask me.

Lenin is not an ordinary politician.


OP it is very hard to predict,what could have happened if some had happend insted of something else. If Lenin had lived longer I cannot say that he would have sped up the transition but definitely he would not have done the mistakes Stalin did for certain. Like taking ultra left stance on Germany when compromise is needed and taking reformist stance in other places.He definitely would not have hindered the Transition like Stalin did.

[Devrim]

If Lenin lived long enough, do you think he would have made the transition from socialism to communism in the USSR?

If Lenin had lived longer, I think that he would be more closely associated with the degeneration of the revolution than he is at the moment. By the time Lenin died in January 1924, The NEP had been introduced, The Treaty of Rapallo signed, and the working class shown at Krondstat what would happen when it protested.

The Russian state was clearly a tool of capital against the working class. Lenin's early death saved him from being more closely associated with the horrors, which came with Stalin's primitive accumulation of capital.

Devrim

[Vargha Poralli]

the working class shown at Krondstat what would happen when it protested.


It is petty bourgeoisie rebellion. Workers had no part in it.


The NEP had been introduced

To prevent more Kronstadt like rebellions to pacify the Peasantry which had numerical majority. Lenin said that the Bolsheviks are taking one step backward to take 2 steps forward later.


The Treaty of Rapallo signed

What else is possible for the workers state which had been devastated by War,Revolution and Civil war ?


The Russian state was clearly a tool of capital against the working class.

More ultra left stupidity and dishonesty.



The Russian state was clearly a tool of capital against the working class. Lenin's early death saved him from being more closely associated with the horrors, which came with Stalin's primitive accumulation of capital.

If Lenin was a State Capitalist because of NEP and how copuld Stalin be one when he abandoned it ? What makes Stalinist USSR a state capitalist ? There had been nop answer for that.

[Aurora]

If Lenin lived long enough, do you think he would have made the transition from socialism to communism in the USSR?
No,communism can ony exist when there is no need for the state(state=a tool by which one class suppresses another).There were still bourgeois elements in the USSR and there were bourgeois elements outside it.Therefore the state was still needed.

[Whitten]

Originally posted by [email protected] 15, 2007 02:16 pm

If Lenin lived long enough, do you think he would have made the transition from socialism to communism in the USSR?
No,communism can ony exist when there is no need for the state(state=a tool by which one class suppresses another).There were still bourgeois elements in the USSR and there were bourgeois elements outside it.Therefore the state was still needed.
Precisely.

According to Marxist theory stateless communism can only exist when there is no longer a need for the state. Clearly all the way up to the present day there would still have been a need for a workers state in the USSR.

[redcannon]

many schools of communism say that in order to reach communism, a country must undergo socialism. so far as i know, that's what the USSR was trying to acheive. there's a good chance that I'm wrong

[Entrails Konfetti]

If Lenin lived, Nachie would have made a time machine and assasinate him.

Hows that for being hypothetical!

[( R )evolution]

As others have said, the USSR still needed the state very much after the revolution. This also goes back to the USSR not being industrialized enough to realize real communism. There was still a very strong need for a workers state. I highly doubt Lenin would have been able to achieve communism in his life time. Would he have been able to do a better job trying to achieve it (or creating a better socialist state) than the piece of shit Stalin, I think so.

[Leo]

It is petty bourgeoisie rebellion. Workers had no part in it.

On the class nature of the rebels lets look at the class composition of the Provisional Revolutionary committee of the Kronstadt soviet:

* Petritchenko, chief quartermaster of the battleship 'Petropavlovsk',
* Yakovenko, liaison telephonist to the Kronstadt section,
* Ossossov, boiler man in the battleship 'Sebastopol',
* Arkhipov, chief engineer,
* Perepelkin, electrician in the battleship 'Sebastopol',
* Patrouchev, chief electrician in the 'Petropavlovsk',
* Koupolov, head male nurse,
* Verchinin, sailor in the 'Sebastopol',
* Toukin, worker in the 'Electrotechnical' factory,
* Romanenko, docks maintenance worker,
* Orechin, headmaster of the Third labour School,
* Valk, sawmill worker,
* Pavlov, worker in a marine mining shop,
* Boikev, head of the building section of the Kronstadt fortress,
* Kilgast, harbour pilot.

Also Israel Getzler notes that the politicized Red sailor still predominated at Kronstadt at the end of 1920 is borne out by the hard statistical data available regarding the crews of the two major battleships, the Petropavlosk and the Sevastopol, both reknowned since 1917 for their revolutionary zeal and Bolshevik allegiance. Of 2,028 sailors whose years of enlistment are known, no less than 1,904 or 93.9% were recruited into the navy before and during the 1917 revolution, the largest group, 1,195, having joined in the years 1914-16. Only 137 sailors or 6.8% were recruited in the years 1918-21, including three who were conscripted in 1921, and they were the only ones who had not been there during the 1917 revolution. As for the sailors of the Baltic Fleet in general (and that included the Petropavlovsk and Sevastopol), of those serving on 1 January 1921 at least 75.5% are likely to have been drafted from Great Russian areas (mainly central Russia and the Volga area), some 10% from the Ukraine and 9% from Finland, Latvia and Poland. If we take this information as being representative of the Kronstadt rebels as a whole it would suggest that 59% of the sailors had been there since at least 1916 whilst 93.9% had been there at the time of the October revolution, hardly a great change in the composition of the garrison from when it was the ‘stronghold of the revolution’ in 1917.

So it seems like it was composed of workers, and sailors to me. Unlike the Bolshevik party Politburo at the time, which was composed of full members - Kamenev, Krestinsky, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky; candidate members - Bukharin, Zinovyev and Kalinin, only one of whom, Kalinin, had ever been a worker, and two of whom, Trotsky, and Zinovyev, actually came from rich peasant backgrounds.

Of course you can believe in what you want to believe, you don't seem to really interested in reality anyway.


What else is possible for the workers state which had been devastated by War,Revolution and Civil war ?

Yeah, if you had been devastated by War, Revolution and Civil War, then you sell guns to the imperialists.


If Lenin was a State Capitalist because of NEP and how copuld Stalin be one when he abandoned it ? What makes Stalinist USSR a state capitalist ?

To name a few;

*It being a class society
*The existance of wage-slavery
*Control of the means of production by the bureaucratic bourgeois class
*"Welfare" based economy
*Investement on non-productive sectors
*Imperialist ambitions

Again, same things make the NEP state capitalist. Same things make the Keynesian economies state capitalist. Same things make corporatist and "third way" economies state capitalist. Same things make Gandhi and Roosevelt or Mao and Nasser state capitalist. It is not a specific tendency of Russia, it is a global economical tendency of decedent capitalism.

[Janus]

Despite Lenin's intelligence and capabilities, there's no way that he could've somehow transcended the political and material conditions in Russia at the time. The most we could've seen was a less repressive socialist state and even then it still couldn't have reached communism while the party was still in power.

[Ander]

I think the Soviet Union should have reached socialism first before they even thought about communism ;)

[Vargha Poralli]

Originally posted by [email protected] 18, 2007 02:33 am
I think the Soviet Union should have reached socialism first before they even thought about communism ;)
Its name is USSR. Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. They are in no imagination that Soviet union is a communist state.

[Ander]

Originally posted by g.ram+March 18, 2007 02:12 am--> (g.ram @ March 18, 2007 02:12 am)
[email protected] 18, 2007 02:33 am
I think the Soviet Union should have reached socialism first before they even thought about communism ;)
Its name is USSR. Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. They are in no imagination that Soviet union is a communist state. [/b]
I think history has quite firmly established that actions speak louder than words. A name means nothing; is the Socialist Republic of Vietnam really socialist?

[( R )evolution]

Peoples Republic of China??? Is it really the peoples?

[Whitten]

Originally posted by Jello+March 18, 2007 06:32 pm--> (Jello @ March 18, 2007 06:32 pm)
Originally posted by [email protected] 18, 2007 02:12 am

[email protected] 18, 2007 02:33 am
I think the Soviet Union should have reached socialism first before they even thought about communism ;)
Its name is USSR. Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. They are in no imagination that Soviet union is a communist state.
I think history has quite firmly established that actions speak louder than words. A name means nothing; is the Socialist Republic of Vietnam really socialist? [/b]
Are you claiming the USSR was really communist???

I think you need to educate yourself before making such comments. The USSR never claimed to be communist, they claimed to be practicing the socialist dictatorship of the proletariat, as a workers state.

[Ander]

...No. I think it is pretty clear that I was saying the USSR was neither communist nor socialist.


Originally posted by Jello
I think the Soviet Union should have reached socialism first before they even thought about communism ;)

See?

[Whitten]

Originally posted by Jello+March 18, 2007 10:38 pm--> (Jello @ March 18, 2007 10:38 pm) ...No. I think it is pretty clear that I was saying the USSR was neither communist nor socialist.


Jello
I think the Soviet Union should have reached socialism first before they even thought about communism ;)

See? [/b]
Still, you suggested the USSR was trying to move towards communism before it was finished with socialism. I fail to see what about the USSR could give you that idea.

[Ander]

You understood my comment incorrectly. What I meant was that the USSR was not socialist.

The person who made the thread asked if Lenin would have made the transition from socialism to communism. I said that the USSR should have made the transition to socialism FIRST, then we can talk about communism at all.

[( R )evolution]

Whitten, I think you misunderstood Jello's statement. He was saying that the USSR was never even socialist and that they should think about socialism before even thinking about the transition to communism.

[which doctor]

No, Lenin would not have made the transition from socialism to communism. Even saying that the USSR was socialist (which is debatable), it would be against Lenin's class (the bureaucratic class) interests to dissolve the state.

[Rawthentic]

Originally posted by [email protected] 18, 2007 05:35 pm
No, Lenin would not have made the transition from socialism to communism. Even saying that the USSR was socialist (which is debatable), it would be against Lenin's class (the bureaucratic class) interests to dissolve the state.
I think I would have to disagree here, for in the initial years (1917-21) where workers exercised control over the state and economy, there was little to no bureaucratic presence, at least not a significant one. Lenin was the leader that called for "proletarianization" of the Bolshevik Party and a consistently revolutionary line. He did make mistakes though, such as the NEP, which basically put the petty-bourgeois in power.

[pandora]

I think this explains a lot of it from Trotsky's side, certain people in the party got used to their "positions" and rather than lose their careers allowed Stalin to institute his bureaucracy.

I personally think that Lenin lost it when Goldman did, when he slaughtered the Anarchists during the Civil War. This destruction of alternative viewpoints would lead to the state to come.

Trotsky's last writing:


The October revolution pursued two intimately related tasks:

First, the socialization of the means of production, and the raising, through planned economy, of the country’s economic level;

Second, the building on this foundation of a society without class distinctions, and consequently without a professional bureaucracy—a socialist society administered by its members as a whole.

The first task in its basic outlines has been realized; despite the influence of bureaucratism, the superiority of planned economy has revealed itself with indisputable force. It is otherwise with the social regime. In place of approaching socialism it moves ever further away.

Owing to historical causes, which cannot properly be dealt with here, there has developed on the foundation of the October revolution a new privileged caste which concentrates in its hands all power and which devours an ever greater portion of the national income.

This caste finds itself in a profoundly contradictory position. In words it comes forward in the name of communism; in deeds it fights for its own unlimited power and colossal material privileges. Surrounded by the mistrust and hatred of the deceived masses, the new aristocracy cannot afford the tiniest breach in its system. In the interests of self-preservation it is compelled to strangle the least flicker of criticism and opposition. Hence the suffocating tyranny, the universal grovelling before the “leader” and the not less universal hypocrisy; from the same source flows the gigantic role of the GPU as the instrument of totalitarian rule.

Anyone who comes out in defense of the toilers against the oligarchy is immediately branded by the Kremlin as a supporter of capitalist restoration. This standardized lie is not accidental: it flows from the objective position of the caste which incarnates reaction while swearing by the revolution.

In all previous revolutions the new privileged class tried to shield itself against criticism from the left by means of fake revolutionary phraseology.

The Thermidorians and Bonapartists of the Great French Revolution hounded and condemned all genuine revolutionists—the Jacobins—as “Royalists” and agents of Pitt’s reactionary British government. Stalin hasn’t invented anything new. He has only carried the system of political frame-up to its extreme expression. Lies, slander, persecution, false accusations, juridical comedies flow inexorably from the position of the usurping bureaucracy in Soviet society...

Lenin proposed in his “Testament” (January 1923) to remove Stalin from the post of General Secretary of the Party, giving as his reasons Stalin’s rudeness, disloyalty and tendency to abuse power. Two years earlier Lenin warned: “This cook will prepare only peppery dishes.” No one in the party liked or respected Stalin. But when the bureaucracy began to sense acutely the danger threatening it from the people, it required precisely a rude and disloyal leader, ready to abuse power in its interests. That is why the cook of peppery dishes became the leader of the totalitarian bureaucracy...

Here is the explanation. In 1928 when I was expelled from the party and exiled to Central Asia it was still impossible to talk not only of execution but even of arrest. The generation with which I had gone through the October revolution and the Civil War was still alive. The Political Bureau felt itself besieged from all sides. From Central Asia I had the opportunity of maintaining unbroken connections with the opposition which was growing.
Trotsky, (1940) "The Comintern and the GPU," Fourth International November, Volume 1 No. 6 pages 148-163.

[Vargha Poralli]

I personally think that Lenin lost it when Goldman did, when he slaughtered the Anarchists during the Civil War

Fuck it. It is much irritating to hear this again and again. Anarchists were not "mass slaughtered" during Lenin's time. There were many anarchists who worked with the Soviets (Victor Serge is one example although anarchists might call him traitor) and those who were repressed were not repressed because they were anarchists but because they worked with mensheviks,sr's and the whites to undermine the soviet power.


This destruction of alternative viewpoints would lead to the state to come.

It took more than 10 years for Stalin to strengthen his power by annihilating all old Bolsheviks and their families and friends. By 1939 only Trotsky(Thanks to his exile), Stalin and Kollontai were the main Bolsheviks alive. To accomplish this Stalin allied with many opportunistic mensheviks who were lucky enough to survive till then.

Stalin did not gain power overnight and simply as Napoleon did. It took much time and deception for him to do it.