[annatar1914]

I am Orthodox Christian but i'd like to talk about Joseph Stalin and his legacy, if any. First of all, please indicate if you are a Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist, and then let's talk about the world's perception of Stalin and whether it is correct or incorrect.

[fuser]

He is dead, get over it specially all you trots and Stalinist.

btw, I will be considered a stalinist even though I reject the term itself and see it as just a historical category.

[Conscript]

Who cares what a backwards Russian chauvinist like the OP thinks of Stalin?

[Dagoth Ur]

I doubt he'd even see the appeal of American Stalinism, ie the complete and total backbreaking of American Imperial pride.

[quetzalcoatl]

Stalin wasn't stallin
[youtube]EI3u80z1qKo[/youtube]

[Andrea_Chenier]

I am what you would call marxist-leninist-stalinist, although humble comrade Stalin rejected to put his own name in marxist theorist tradition. He considered himself a pupil of Lenin. You should love Stalin, too, as he put an end to many socially progressive bolshevik policies and even restored the Orthodox Church.

[annatar1914]

I doubt he'd even see the appeal of American Stalinism, ie the complete and total backbreaking of American Imperial pride.

I'm sure there would have to be more to it than that. What would an American Stalin do, if in some strange way he became President of the United States for example?

[Dagoth Ur]

I'm not talking about an American Stalin (which really wouldn't work with our culture or history) we're talking about THE Stalin. Stalin as a icon is about as "anti-American" as you can get without trapsing into Maoist territory. The only point of American Stalinsim is about visciously attacking every nationalist and imperialist aspect of American culture through the prism of Uncle Joe and his infinite superiority over American capitalism.

Although if I were to guess Stalin would never get to be POTUS because he was a bank-robbing revolutionary. You might as well ask what it would have been like to have Stalin as czar instead of revolution.

[annatar1914]

I am what you would call marxist-leninist-stalinist, although humble comrade Stalin rejected to put his own name in marxist theorist tradition. He considered himself a pupil of Lenin. You should love Stalin, too, as he put an end to many socially progressive bolshevik policies and even restored the Orthodox Church.

In some manner, this comment was rather prescient. I'm still hashing out some of the details though in my own mind.

[Dagoth Ur]

Although he did these things for very materialist reasons, not as representations of his Faith. As all proper followers of Ywh-Jehova-Allah would. Material worlds call for material actions, this is an important gift from God.

[The Immortal Goon]

Stalin betrayed most of Lenin. Most importantly, the theory of socialism in one country. Lenin chided Trotsmy for calling the Soviet Union a, "worker's state," and instead called the Soviet Union less than a worker's state and instead a workers' state with a "beaurcratic twist," that had to be opposed.

When Stalin took over, so did magic. Now the Soviet Union was socialist, well surpassing Trotsky's error but magically tying to Lenin via faith alone. What was the mechanism of this magic? Banning Lenin!

By banning Lenin's work and undermining Lenin's theory Stalin used magic to take the Soviet Union into the socialist paradise it is today.

This is just science. Anybody that denies it is a filthy trot.

[annatar1914]

Found this interesting quote from Joseph Stalin, thought it was rather prophetic;

had told Politburo members "You are blind like young kittens. What will happen without me? The country will perish because you do not know how to recognize enemies."

Certainly seems that he was right, does it not?

[Rich]

Stalin betrayed most of Lenin. Most importantly, the theory of socialism in one country. Lenin chided Trotsky for calling the Soviet Union a, "worker's state," and instead called the Soviet Union less than a worker's state and instead a workers' state with a "bureaucratic twist," that had to be opposed.

Off the top of my head I think Lenin said that It was a workers and Peasants State with bureaucratic deformations. IG, I think you're trying to pull a fast one here. You must be aware that Lenin never supported the theory of permanent revolution and never disavowed his characterisation of the coming revolution as a revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. Lenin was certainly very concerned about bureaucracy and what was Lenin's primary chosen weapon in the struggle against bureaucratisation? None other than the workers and Peasants Inspectorate under the leadership of comrade Stalin.

In Lenin's Marxist analysis the root cause of the bureaucratisation was the tension between the workers and the peasants. Hence when Stalin liquidated the Kulaks and abolished the Peasantry as an independent class leaving merely a large rural proletariat in Cooperatives, all that was left was the dictatorship of the Proletariat. That is as long as you don't reject the whole Marxist Leninist con trick.

[The Immortal Goon]

You must be aware that Lenin never supported the theory of permanent revolution

False.

To say this is to say that Lenin never supported Marx. Trotsky's work on permanent revolution is the application of Marx's work on the subject. So, for instance, Trotsky writes of Permanent Revolution in Russia:

With regard to countries with a belated bourgeois development, especially the colonial and semi-colonial countries, the theory of the permanent revolution signifies that the complete and genuine solution of their tasks of achieving democracy and national emancipation is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat as the leader of the subjugated nation, above all of its peasant masses.

Not only the agrarian, but also the national question assigns to the peasantry – the overwhelming majority of the population in backward countries – an exceptional place in the democratic revolution. Without an alliance of the proletariat with the peasantry the tasks of the democratic revolution cannot be solved, nor even seriously posed. But the alliance of these two classes can be realized in no other way than through an irreconcilable struggle against the influence of the national-liberal bourgeoisie.

Which more or less mirror's Marx's work on permanent revolution in France:

Napoleon represented the last battle of revolutionary terror against the bourgeois society which had been proclaimed by this same Revolution, and against its policy. Napoleon, of course, already discerned the essence of the modern state; he understood that it is based on the unhampered development of bourgeois society, on the free movement of private interest, etc. He decided to recognise and protect this basis. He was no terrorist with his head in the clouds. Yet at the same time he still regarded the state as an end in itself and civil life only as a treasurer and his subordinate which must have no will of its own. He perfected the Terror by substituting permanent war for permanent revolution. He fed the egoism of the French nation to complete satiety but demanded also the sacrifice of bourgeois business, enjoyments, wealth, etc., whenever this was required by the political aim of conquest. If he despotically suppressed the liberalism of bourgeois society — the political idealism of its daily practice — he showed no more consideration for its essential material interests, trade and industry, whenever they conflicted with his political interests. His scorn of industrial hommes d'affaires was the complement to his scorn of ideologists. In his home policy, too, he combated bourgeois society as the opponent of the state which in his own person he still held to be an absolute aim in itself. Thus he declared in the State Council that he would not suffer the owner of extensive estates to cultivate them or not as he pleased. Thus, too, he conceived the plan of subordinating trade to the state by appropriation of roulage [road haulage]. French businessmen took steps to anticipate the event that first shook Napoleon’s power. Paris exchange- brokers forced him by means of an artificially created famine to delay the opening of the Russian campaign by nearly two months and thus to launch it too late in the year.

Just as the liberal bourgeoisie was opposed once more by revolutionary terror in the person of Napoleon, so it was opposed once more by counter-revolution in the Restoration in the person of the Bourbons. Finally, in 1830 the bourgeoisie put into effect its wishes of the year 1789, with the only difference that its political enlightenment was now completed, that it no longer considered the constitutional representative state as a means for achieving the ideal of the state, the welfare of the world and universal human aims but, on the contrary, had acknowledged it as the official expression of its own exclusive power and the political recognition of its own special interests.

The history of the French Revolution, which dates from 1789, did not come to an end in 1830 with the victory of one of its components enriched by the consciousness of its own social importance.

Ah, you may say, but this is a historical work that Marx is using to explain the French Revolution, which is quite different than extending Permanent Revolution to a theory of action.

Except that Marx does do this, and in doing so actually discredits Stalin's conception of Socialism in One Country completely:

The rule of capital and its rapid accumulation is to be further counteracted, partly by a curtailment of the right of inheritance, and partly by the transference of as much employment as possible to the state. As far as the workers are concerned one thing, above all, is definite: they are to remain wage labourers as before. However, the democratic petty bourgeois want better wages and security for the workers, and hope to achieve this by an extension of state employment and by welfare measures; in short, they hope to bribe the workers with a more or less disguised form of alms and to break their revolutionary strength by temporarily rendering their situation tolerable. The demands of petty-bourgeois democracy summarized here are not expressed by all sections of it at once, and in their totality they are the explicit goal of only a very few of its followers. The further particular individuals or fractions of the petty bourgeoisie advance, the more of these demands they will explicitly adopt, and the few who recognize their own programme in what has been mentioned above might well believe they have put forward the maximum that can be demanded from the revolution. But these demands can in no way satisfy the party of the proletariat. While the democratic petty bourgeois want to bring the revolution to an end as quickly as possible, achieving at most the aims already mentioned, it is our interest and our task to make the revolution permanent until all the more or less propertied classes have been driven from their ruling positions, until the proletariat has conquered state power and until the association of the proletarians has progressed sufficiently far – not only in one country but in all the leading countries of the world – that competition between the proletarians of these countries ceases and at least the decisive forces of production are concentrated in the hands of the workers. Our concern cannot simply be to modify private property, but to abolish it, not to hush up class antagonisms but to abolish classes, not to improve the existing society but to found a new one. There is no doubt that during the further course of the revolution in Germany, the petty-bourgeois democrats will for the moment acquire a predominant influence. The question is, therefore, what is to be the attitude of the proletariat, and in particular of the League towards them:

1) While present conditions continue, in which the petty-bourgeois democrats are also oppressed;
2) In the coming revolutionary struggle, which will put them in a dominant position;
3) After this struggle, during the period of petty-bourgeois predominance over the classes which have been overthrown and over the proletariat.

Which, again, is repeated by Trotsky in his work on the theory:

The conquest of power by the proletariat does not complete the revolution, but only opens it. Socialist construction is conceivable only on the foundation of the class struggle, on a national and international scale. This struggle, under the conditions of an overwhelming predominance of capitalist relationships on the world arena, must inevitably lead to explosions, that is, internally to civil wars and externally to revolutionary wars. Therein lies the permanent character of the socialist revolution as such, regardless of whether it is a backward country that is involved, which only yesterday accomplished its democratic revolution, or an old capitalist country which already has behind it a long epoch of democracy and parliamentarism.

...and never disavowed his [Lenin's] characterisation of the coming revolution as a revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.

This is false:

To this extent, the bourgeois, or the bourgeois-democratic, revolution in Russia is completed.

But at this point we hear a clamour of protest from people who readily call themselves “old Bolsheviks”. Didn’t we always maintain, they say, that the bourgeois-democratic revolution is completed only by the “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry”? Is the agrarian revolution, which is also a bourgeois-democratic revolution, completed? Is it not a fact, on the contrary, that it has not even started?

My answer is: The Bolshevik slogans and ideas on the whole have been confirmed by history; but concretely things have worked out diflerently; they are more original, more peculiar, more variated than anyone could have expected.

To ignore or overlook this fact would mean taking after those “old Bolsheviks” who more than once already have played so regrettable a role in the history of our Party by reiterating formulas senselessly learned by rote instead of studying the specific features of the new and living reality.

’The revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” has already become a reality[3] in the Russian revolution, for this “formula” envisages only a relation of classes, and not a concrete political institution implementing this relation, this co-operation. “The Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies”—there you have the “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” already accomplished in reality.

This formula is already antiquated. Events have moved it from tile realm of formulas into the realm of reality, clothed it with flesh and bone, concretised it and thereby modified it.

A new and different task now faces us: to effect a split within this dictatorship between the proletarian elements (the anti-defencist, internationalist, “Communist” elements, who stand for a transition to the commune) and the small-proprietor or petty-bourgeois elements (Chkheidze, Tsereteli, Steklov, the Socialist-Revolutionaries and the other revolutionary defencists, who are opposed to moving towards the commune and are in favour of “supporting” the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois government).[4]

The person who now speaks only of a “revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry” is behind the times, consequently, he has in effect gone over to the petty bourgeoisie against the proletarian class struggle; that person should be consigned to the archive of “Bolshevik” pre-revolutionary antiques (it may be called the archive of “old Bolsheviks”).

The revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry has already been realised, but in a highly original manner, and with a number of extremely important modifications. I shall deal with them separately in one of my next letters. For the present, it is essential to grasp the incontestable truth that a Marxist must take cognisance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, which, like all theories, at best only outlines the main and the general, only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity.

This, actually, is a cornerstone of Trotsky's work on permanent revolution:

No matter what the first episodic stages of the revolution may be in the individual countries, the realization of the revolutionary alliance between the proletariat and the peasantry is conceivable only under the political leadership of the proletariat vanguard, organized in the Communist Party. This in turn means that the victory of the democratic revolution is conceivable only through the dictatorship of the proletariat which bases itself upon the alliance with the peasantry and solves first of all the tasks of the democratic revolution.

Assessed historically, the old slogan of Bolshevism – ’the democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ – expressed precisely the above-characterized relationship of the proletariat, the peasantry and the liberal bourgeoisie. This has been confirmed by the experience of October. But Lenin’s old formula did not settle in advance the problem of what the reciprocal relations would be between the proletariat and the peasantry within the revolutionary bloc. In other words, the formula deliberately retained a certain algebraic quality, which had to make way for more precise arithmetical quantities in the process of historical experience. However, the latter showed, and under circumstances that exclude any kind of misinterpretation, that no matter how great the revolutionary role of the peasantry may be, it nevertheless cannot be an independent role and even less a leading one. The peasant follows either the worker or the bourgeois. This means that the ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry’ is only conceivable as a dictatorship of the proletariat that leads the peasant masses behind it.

A democratic dictatorship of the prolelariat and peasantry, as a regime that is distinguished from the dictatorship of the proletariat by its class content, might be realized only in a case where an independent revolutionary party could be constituted, expressing the interests of the peasants and in general of petty bourgeois democracy – a party capable of conquering power with this or that degree of aid from the proletariat, and of determining its revolutionary programme. As all modern history attests – especially the Russian experience of the last twenty-five years – an insurmountable obstacle on the road to the creation of a peasants’ party is the petty-bourgeoisie’s lack of economic and political independence and its deep internal differentiation. By reason of this the upper sections of the petty-bourgeoisie (of the peasantry) go along with the big bourgeoisie in all decisive cases, especially in war and in revolution; the lower sections go along with the proletariat; the intermediate section being thus compelled to choose between the two extreme poles. Between Kerenskyism and the Bolshevik power, between the Kuomintang and the dictatorship of the proletariat, there is not and cannot be any intermediate stage, that is, no democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants.

Lenin was certainly very concerned about bureaucracy and what was Lenin's primary chosen weapon in the struggle against bureaucratisation? None other than the workers and Peasants Inspectorate under the leadership of comrade Stalin.

I think that from this standpoint the prime factors in the question of stability are such members of the C.C. as Stalin and Trotsky. I think relations between them make up the greater part of the danger of a split, which could be avoided, and this purpose, in my opinion, would be served, among other things, by increasing the number of C.C. members to 50 or 100.

Comrade Stalin, having become Secretary-General, has unlimited authority concentrated in his hands, and I am not sure whether he will always be capable of using that authority with sufficient caution. Comrade Trotsky, on the other hand, as his struggle against the C.C. on the question of the People's Commissariat of Communications has already proved, is distinguished not only by outstanding ability. He is personally perhaps the most capable man in the present C.C., but he has displayed excessive self-assurance and shown excessive preoccupation with the purely administrative side of the work.

...Stalin is too rude and this defect, although quite tolerable in our midst and in dealing among us Communists, becomes intolerable in a Secretary-General. That is why I suggest that the comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post and appointing another man in his stead who in all other respects differs from Comrade Stalin in having only one advantage, namely, that of being more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc. This circumstance may appear to be a negligible detail. But I think that from the standpoint of safeguards against a split and from the standpoint of what I wrote above about the relationship between Stalin and Trotsky it is not a [minor] detail, but it is a detail which can assume decisive importance.

...I think that Stalin's haste and his infatuation with pure administration, together with his spite against the notorious "nationalist-socialism" [Stalin critised the minority nations for not being "internationalist" because they did want to unite with Russia], played a fatal role here. In politics spite generally plays the basest of roles.

...The Georgian [Stalin] who is neglectful of this aspect of the question, or who carelessly flings about accusations of "nationalist-socialism" (whereas he himself is a real and true "nationalist-socialist", and even a vulgar Great-Russian bully), violates, in substance, the interests of proletarian class solidarity, for nothing holds up the development and strengthening of proletarian class solidarity so much as national injustice; "offended" nationals are not sensitive to anything so much as to the feeling of equality and the violation of this equality, if only through negligence or jest- to the violation of that equality by their proletarian comrades. That is why in this case it is better to over-do rather than undergo the concessions and leniency towards the national minorities. That is why, in this case, the fundamental interest of proletarian class struggle, requires that we never adopt a formal attitude to the national question, but always take into account the specific attitude of the proletarian of the oppressed (or small) nation towards the oppressor (or great) nation.

[annatar1914]

Off the top of my head I think Lenin said that It was a workers and Peasants State with bureaucratic deformations. IG, I think you're trying to pull a fast one here. You must be aware that Lenin never supported the theory of permanent revolution and never disavowed his characterisation of the coming revolution as a revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. Lenin was certainly very concerned about bureaucracy and what was Lenin's primary chosen weapon in the struggle against bureaucratisation? None other than the workers and Peasants Inspectorate under the leadership of comrade Stalin.

In Lenin's Marxist analysis the root cause of the bureaucratisation was the tension between the workers and the peasants. Hence when Stalin liquidated the Kulaks and abolished the Peasantry as an independent class leaving merely a large rural proletariat in Cooperatives, all that was left was the dictatorship of the Proletariat. That is as long as you don't reject the whole Marxist Leninist con trick.

Well, while I agree that Stalin was the correct interpreter of Lenin's thought, as I do not think myself in Marxian categories (maybe Agonist ones) I tend to see these men in terms of what they did rather than why they thought they did them. I subtle distinction perhaps as I am indeed a Communist, but thinking metaphysically rather than dialectically. I can buy the conclusions-maybe-without using the same premises as Marx-Lenin, etc...

Dialectical Materialism is the Ontology of the wrong state of things in this fallen Universe, I concede it's verity in the material world, but the material world is not all there is; there is a theodicy which impels the unfolding progress of things through conflict, and thus reveals the will of God.

[Raez]

Well I have largely mixed view about Stalin.
In my opinion he betrayed the principle of communism by creating famine and selling the grain for profit during the Dust Bowel which killing many people in USSR.
But at same time he manged to industrialization so quickly.

[fuser]

Frankly its ridiculous to say that he "created" famine. One can accuse USSR for criminal neglect but the famine was never "manufactured".

[Potemkin]

"Dust Bowel"?

[SolarCross]

"Dust Bowel"?

I had a dust bowel once. My doctor suggested colonic irrigation....

[Potemkin]

Haw haw!!