Discussion on Stalin.

So, according to what you said, elections were by the party members and not the people.

The Bolhshevik party memebers voted on actions and Lenin, apart of the party, was mostly always on the losing side. The Bolsheivks party committies had the power and the people as did the Soviets. You need to Read the article on it and not just blindly critize something.

Just because you are against a kind of revisionism does not mean that you are not a revisionist yourself.

In the Marxist-Leninist movement, an anti-revisionist is one who favors the line of theory and practice associated with Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin, usually stated in this way so as to show direct opposition to the path of Trotskyism, Ultra-Leftism and Revisionist trends of Socialism. Anti-revisionists claim that the Soviet Union under Stalin's leadership represented a correct and successful practical implementation of the ideas of the scientific socialist ideas of Marx, Engels and Lenin in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). That does not mean; however, that Marxist-Leninists are completely uncritical of Stalin.

Marxism-Leninism is seen by its followers as a healthy, solid, scientific ideological road, devoid of both the alleged corruption and elitism of Trotskyism, and the perceived idealism of Left Communism.

Anti-revisionism is based on the view that the Soviet Union successfully implemented Marxism-Leninism during approximately the first thirty years of its existence — from the time of the October Revolution until the Secret Speech and peaceful coexistence of 1956. Anti-revisionists point out that Stalin's policies not only achieved impressive rates of economic growth and argue that such growth could have been sustained and a prosperous communism could have been achieved if the Soviet Union had remained on this same course (see also the article Theory of Productive Forces); they also typically further allege that the worldwide ideological impact and leadership of the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s world labor movement represent a superior ideological and social model of real "workers' power" that was first ruined by the Secret Speech and some anti-revisionist claim it was later to reemerge within Enver Hoxha's Albania and/or China's Cultural Revolution, only to be ruined again by the capture and deposition of the Gang of Four by China's "state capitalists" (or according to others, the denunciation of the Cultural Revolution at the third session of the Eleventh National Congress of the Communist Party of China,by Deng Xiao Ping).

According to anti-revisionists, these later attempts to 'fix' or revise the socialist system represented a shift onto the road to capitalism and ultimately led to the downfall of the Soviet Union and the betrayal of communist principles in all self-proclaimed communist countries. Thus, revisionism is seen as the cause of the fall of the Soviet Union and the East European socialist republics.

For more reading this is a great source of information on an anti-revisionist outlook on the Soviet Union:

http://www.northstarcompass.org/nsc9912/lies.htm

Now many third-world countrys[and almost the whole world] are industrialized

Thats becuase we, Marxist-Leninists and Maoists, industrilized it trying to fully develop our Socialist states.
Plus I wouldnt say Africa/Asia are well developed. Eastern Europe can be classifed as a 3rd world country but still following original Marxism that is about 160 years old and focused on mainly 1st world countries in Western europe doesnt mean that this "othradox" Marxism may/may not be sucessful. Marxism-Leninism allows a vanguard party which helps the Revolution abd by Marxism-Leninism what do you mean exactly? since Trots consider themselfs "Marxist-Leninists" and theres Marxist-Leninists who dont care about Trotsky or Stalin and theres Marxist-Leninists who defend Stalin.

on Reference to Stalin being protrayed as a "god."

In 1927 the political defeat of the opposition and expulsion from the Soviet Union of its most prominent leader, Leon Trotsky, forced the remaining members of the opposition to the view that open political challenge to the policies of the leadership around Stalin was unlikely to achieve success in the near future. They therefore ceased open opposition, condemned their "former errors" and promised to cease all factional activity. For the first time in its history there appeared to be political unanimity within the Communist Party.
In reality, however, the struggle of the oppositionists had merely entered a new, third phase, in which they worked to secure the appointment of their members to influential positions, while at the same time plotting the elimination of those whom they regarded as their irreconcilable political opponents by methods of terrorism. The opposition had become, as Stalin expressed it, "a conspiratorial and terrorist organisation".
This incontrovertible historical fact has been concealed by the almost universally accepted myth that, at least from this time on, Stalin functioned as a "dictator" with "absolute powers", and this myth was itself the product of the "cult of personality" built up around Stalin by the concealed opposition from 1934.
Roy Medvedev, whose "history" of this period is virulently hostile towards Stalin, points out that the founder of the "cult" was Karl Radek, who admitted to treason against the Soviet state at his public trial in 1937:
"The first issue of 'Pravda' for 1934 carried a huge two page article by Radek, heaping orgiastic praise on Stalin. The former Trotskyite, who had led active opposition to Stalin for many years, now called him 'Lenin's best pupil, the model of the Leninist Party...' This seems to have been the first large article in the press specifically devoted to adulation of Stalin, and it was quickly reissued as a pamphlet in 225,000 copies, an enormous figure for the time". (R. A. Medvedev: "Let History Judge"; London; 1972; p. 148).

And one of the most fervent and sickening exponents of the "cult" was none other than Nikita Khrushchev who was in 1956 allotted the main role in denouncing it:

"Comrades, we have heard at our Eighteenth Party Congress a report of struggle....led by our Party and its Stalinist Central Committee, directed by the genius of our great guide and leader, Comrade Stalin...
Our victory in defeating the fascist agents - all these despicable Trotskyite, Bukharinites and bourgeois nationalists - we owe above all to the personal efforts of our great leader Comrade Stalin..
The Communist Party of the Ukrainian Bolsheviks...stand solid like a wall of steel around the Stalinist Central Committe around its beloved leader -- our great Stalin.
The devotion of the Bolsheviks of the Ukraine to Comrade Stalin reflects the boundless confidence and devotion which he enjoys among the whole Ukrainian people...
The Ukrainian people has...rallied closer than ever around the Bolshevik Party and around our great leader, Comrade Stalin...
Under the leadership of Comrade Stalin, the Bolsheviks of the Ukraine have achieved great successes...
Only as a result..of the special attention paid by Comrade Stalin to the development of Ukrainian culture, have we achieved such momentous victories in the development of culture.
That is why the Ukrainian people proclaim with all their heart and soul, with the utmost affection and devotion: ..'Long live our beloved Stalin!'...
Throughout the Soviet Union the Bolshevik ranks are now more firmly welded than ever.. in their loyalty to...their leader and teacher, the friend of the Ukrainian people, Comrade Stalin...
Long live the towering genius of all humanity, the teacher and guide who is leading us victoriously to communism our beloved Comrade Stalin!"
(N. S. Khrushchev: Speech at 18th. Congress CPSU, March 1939, in: "The Land of Socialism Today and Tomorrow"; Moscow; 1939; p.381, 382, 383, 389, 390).
That Stalin's frequently expressed scorn for the "cult of personality" was perfectly genuine -- even though, as a prisoner of the concealed opposition majority, he was unable to stop it -- is illustrated by his shrewd observation to the German author Lion Feuchtwanger in 1937:
"I spoke frankly to him (Stalin - WBB) about the vulgar and excessive cult made of him, and he replied with equal candour ... He thinks it is possible...that the 'wreckers' may be behind it in an attempt to discredit him".
(L. Feuchtwanger: "Moscow 1937"; London; 1937;p.93, 94-5).

It was the dissatisfaction openly expressed by Stalin at the inactivity of the state security organs in relation to acts of terrorism which led him to allot to his personal Secretariat, headed by Alexandr Poskrebyshevspecial investigative functions. And it was the evidence uncovered by this body and passed on to the state security organs which forced the latter to put on trial a number of leading opposition elements in 1936-38, including the former head of state security, Genrikh Yagoda. Following a preconceived plan, the defendants admitted to treason in open court, while their as yet undiscovered fellow conspirators heaped abuse on their heads.
Under their new chief, Nikolai Yezhov, who was also a member of the opposition conspiracy, from the autumn of 1936 the state security organs became extremely "active" instituting a reign of terror which resulted in the arrest of many honest Communists and their imprisonment or execution without trial.
Although the "cult of personality" enabled the blame for the crimes of the "Yezhovshchina" to be laid upon Stalin's "psychopathological suspiciousness", when historical fact is dissected from propaganda it reveals that Stalin carried on a long struggle against the conduct of the state security organs under Yezhov which resulted in the latter's dismissal in late 1938 (and later arrest) together with his replacement by a trusted colleague of Stalin's, Lavrenti Beria. Contrary to the allegations later made by Khrushchov and others, during the whole period in which Beria was People's Commissar for Internal Affairs and in charge of state security -- from December 1938 to January 1946 -- not one Communist of any prominence was arrested by the NKVD. On the contrary, under Beria the NKVD was purged of the officials responsible for the "Yezhovshchina", was reorganised, and carried out a review of the cases of political prisoners sentenced under Yezhov, as a result of which large numbers were rehabilitated and released:
"Beria soon made almost a clean sweep of the old NKVD. The few who had survived from Yagoda's time...now followed their colleagues to execution...
By March 1939 Beria's men were everywhere in power; his own Georgian following held many of the major posts....
The appointment of Beria is usually taken as a convenient date to mark the end of the Great Purge....
The gross result of Beria's assumption of the NKVD was that a proportion of those in prison awaiting trial were released....
In the towns and villages of the Soviet Union, the pressure of haphazard mass arrests greatly eased."
(R. Conquest: "The Great Terror"; Harmondsworth; 1971; p.623-4, 626, 627).
"The purge is really ended at last, as has already been indicated by the replacement of Yezhov by Beria at the Ministry of Internal Affairs, by the execution of five GPU officials at Kiev for gross abuse of power..., by the present trial in a mid-Siberian town of four GPU officials for arresting over 150 children, some under 12, as terrorists, etc., under Article 58, by a play now on in Moscow exposing the abuses of the purge to enthusiastic audiences, and, finally, by the return of political prisoners in hundreds, if not in thousands".
("The Times", February 27th., 1939; p.11).

Although the "cult of personality" which they had built up around Stalin had many advantages for the conspirators, it also had serious disadvantages. Although in a minority, Stalin and his political allies utilised every "harmless" task allotted to them by the majority to castigate any proposals for the modification of socialist society in what they regarded as a capitalist direction:
"In proposing that the MTSs (Machine and Tractor Stations - WBB) should be sold to the collective farms as their property, Comrades Sanina and Venzher are suggesting a step in reversion to the old backwardness and are trying to turn back the wheel of history....
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 nationalised enterprises do not own their instruments of production... 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, move us farther from it.
The outcome would be, secondly, an extension of the sphere of commodity circulation, because a gigantic quantity of instruments of production would come within its orbit....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?...
Engels, in his 'Anti-Duhrung', convincingly shows that the existence of commodity circulation was inevitably bound to lead... to the regeneration of capitalism."
(J. V. Stalin: "Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR"; Moscow; 1952; p.100-2).

And the existence of the "cult of personality" made it necessary for the oposition majority to give the fullest and most favourable publicity to such attacks on their programme!
Furthermore, while the opposition majority could rely on the minority around Stalin adhering to the Communist Party principle that a decision of the majority was binding on the minority, who were prohibited from expressing public disagreement with it, this principle of "democratic centralism" is held by Marxist-Leninists to be valid only so long as they recognise the Communist Party as one based essentially on Marxism-Leninism, as one continuing to apply Marxist-Leninist principles to the construction of socialism. Had the opposition used, during Stalin's lifetime, their majority on the leading organs of the Communist Party to initiate measures which clearly undermined the basis of socialist society in the Soviet Union -- measures of the kind undertaken after Stalin's death, that is -- then the danger arose of the minority headed by Stalin saying: "The CPSU is no longer a Marxist-Leninist Party, but a revisionist party dominated by traitors to socialism; therefore, loyalty to Marxism-Leninism compels us to denouce publicly its majority leadership and to appeal to the rank-and-file of the Party and the working class to save socialism by repudiating these revisionist leaders". This danger to the opposition programme -- a danger greatly enhanced by the "cult of personality" around Stalin -- prevented them from using their majority, during Stalin's lifetime - to do much more to undermine the basis of socialism than to increase the economic and social differentials between management, official and intellectual workers on the one hand and the mass of workers on the other, so creating a privileged stratum which could provide in future a social basis of support for the restoration of capitalism.
Despite the frustrations experienced by the opposition during Stalin's lifetime -- frustrations which were virulently expressed in Khrushchev's "secret speech" to the 20th. Congress of the CPSU in 1956 - the organisation of a terrorist attack upon Stalin was rendered extremely difficult by his loyal bodyguard. A carefully laid plan was elaborated in conjunction with the German intelligence service to take advantage of the German invasion of 1941 by removing Stalin from office on the grounds that the initial Soviet military reverses were due to his "incompetence"; but here again the opposition was out-manoevred and compelled to recognise Stalin, at least for the rest of his life, as "the architect of Soviet victory".

I did not say that Marxism-Leninism wasn't socialist, I said it wasn't COMMUNIST.

you can find us under the left wing so yes we are Communist. We put in a system that will, someday, get to Communism. It helps Socialism even in a under-developed country and it has worked. Then Revisionism/Reformism came along.

Do you actually expect a reasonable person to take Stalinist propoganda.

so I believe in "Stalinist propanganda" and apperently not a respectable person becuase I defend Joseph Stalin. The book I got this from was Marxist-Leninist and blaming Joseph V. Stalin for everything that happned in the USSR is idiotic. Sicne Joseph Stalin didnt make the collapse of the USSR.


I

was not talking of anti-revisionism in the ml form, I was talking about the ACTUAL FORM.

Anti-Revisionism is Marxist-Leninist for its in the Marxist-Leninist movement.

From the Marxist-Leninist group.

In the Marxist-Leninist movement, an anti-revisionist is one who favors the line of theory and practice associated with Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin, usually stated in this way so as to show direct opposition to the path of Trotskyism, Ultra-Leftism and Revisionist trends of Socialism. Anti-revisionists claim that the Soviet Union under Stalin's leadership represented a correct and successful practical implementation of the ideas of the scientific socialist ideas of Marx, Engels and Lenin in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). That does not mean; however, that Marxist-Leninists are completely uncritical of Stalin.

Marxism-Leninism is seen by its followers as a healthy, solid, scientific ideological road, devoid of both the alleged corruption and elitism of Trotskyism, and the perceived idealism of Left Communism.

Anti-revisionism is based on the view that the Soviet Union successfully implemented Marxism-Leninism during approximately the first thirty years of its existence — from the time of the October Revolution until the Secret Speech and peaceful coexistence of 1956. Anti-revisionists point out that Stalin's policies not only achieved impressive rates of economic growth and argue that such growth could have been sustained and a prosperous communism could have been achieved if the Soviet Union had remained on this same course (see also the article Theory of Productive Forces); they also typically further allege that the worldwide ideological impact and leadership of the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s world labor movement represent a superior ideological and social model of real "workers' power" that was first ruined by the Secret Speech and some anti-revisionist claim it was later to reemerge within Enver Hoxha's Albania and/or China's Cultural Revolution, only to be ruined again by the capture and deposition of the Gang of Four by China's "state capitalists" (or according to others, the denunciation of the Cultural Revolution at the third session of the Eleventh National Congress of the Communist Party of China,by Deng Xiao Ping).

According to anti-revisionists, these later attempts to 'fix' or revise the socialist system represented a shift onto the road to capitalism and ultimately led to the downfall of the Soviet Union and the betrayal of communist principles in all self-proclaimed communist countries. Thus, revisionism is seen as the cause of the fall of the Soviet Union and the East European socialist republics.

You need to stop thinking that people other than you and your buddys define everything by ml standards.

you Define me by your standards.

Now your taking it that I "define everything" by ML standards.

You need to realize that almost everything told to you by ml propoganda is almost certainly a lie.

So kulaks didnt try to starve the population and didnt opress/expolit peasants in the 20s. So Stalin, even though I sent you his words on what he thought of it, was all Stalin's decison even though others in the CPSU created it and he didnt hate it.
So the USSR didnt have Capitalist restoridartion after I sent you paragraphs on the subject from a book called "Capitalist restoridation in the Soviet union."

However, the events from 1929-1953 were the fault of stalin.

Even though, like Lenin and (in)famous the Centeral Committe, he didnt absoulte power?

Well actually the Kulaks did try to starve the population, but not directly. They destroyed their crops and livestock in protest of Stalin's forced collectivisation. This resulted in a lack of food which would have been easily avoidable if the collectivisation would have been done more gradually. This would have given more time for adjustment to the new system and such. So I partially blame Stalin and partially blame the Kulaks for the famine that happened.

I said ALMOST EVERYTHING.

You never did say what was "ML propaganda" and what wasnt.

The Kulaks were selfish fools...

The Kulaks were selfish fools...

Of course they were, but I don't blame the whole thing entirely on them. If the collectivisation would have been more gradual they may have been more willing to contribute. With gradual collectivisation they would have still been able to keep much of their produce for a time. Of course, eventually they would have to give more and more of it up, but at least there would have been time to adapt to the new system. Well going back to the fact they're greedy, there still would have been conflict over collectivisation regardless of the methods used, but alot of lives would have been saved.

Well, ml propaganda is from ml sources wich makes everyone look bad and glorifies the ml's.

I can use this statement for anything you know that right?

Last time I checked none of the sites I have read/looked at glorified ourselfs to be like "gods" but in those sites they dissmiss the propraganda placed on them by the Capitalists/Revisionists.

Well, ml propaganda is from ml sources wich makes everyone look bad and glorifies the ml's.

That's going to come back and bite you in the ass.
Also Trotskyist propaganda makes alpine climbers and their ice axes look bad...

I am not a trotskyist

I'll admit it, I am. >.< I'm probably the only Trot in this group too.

I am not a trotskyist

Only trots are allowed in this group.
so either convert or be expelled.

Only trots are allowed in this group.
so either convert or be expelled.

You're the one to talk. Stalinist.

Oh-and using what someone calls themselves as a derogatory name to call them is not very smart.

She said it was a joke and #2: Trotskyists, i.e. thats her, always call us "Stalinists."

She did not say it was a joke!!!!!!!

It was intended as a joke. Stupid internet and not being able to tell! >.<