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Post by StalinRevolution on Dec 23, 2003 16:26:41 GMT -5
Knowing that they didn't have as much knowledge as we do now,don't condemn them so harshly.
What in the hell are you talking about?Free healthcare,education,etc is an authoritian welfare state?all i am saying is that this was still available under Khrushchev.
Here you are right.But why do you say all this?I know about the bureocracy,the coup,etc,etc.I hope you do not think that I like Khrushchev or am defending his line.
I respect their revolutionary struggle and like a lot about them.But that dosen't mean I have to dogmaticly follow their line.I am not accusing you of this,I simply think there are some people here who's only purpose is to propagate the RCP agenda.
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Post by more on Dec 23, 2003 17:50:54 GMT -5
it is strange for someone named "stalinrevolution" to accuse communists of promoting a communist agenda.
Don't you have an agenda? aren't you here to discuss it, while you learn from others?
Do you propose that communists not have an agenda?
And aren't all leninists supporters of a vanguard party? is it wrong to support the line and programme of the party you think is best?
In another thread, you accused people of "anti-communism" for criticizing the Stalin Constitution. But what about this complaining about people who support a communist agenda? Do you realize how anti-communist that sounds?
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Post by StalinRevolution on Dec 23, 2003 18:23:43 GMT -5
Of course there is nothing wrong with it.But forcing it down other peoples throat is another thing.
No
Of course not,but,as I said before,forcing down people's throats is another thing.
That was this thread.
Its not complaining about someone who supports a communist agenda,its about someone supporting a communist agenda i beileve is illogical.
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Post by more on Dec 23, 2003 18:26:58 GMT -5
ok.
maybe i didn't know where you were coming from.
It seemed to me like lots of people here had strong beliefs -- and you didn't mind having strong beliefs, but you were complaining that others did.
But i'm not a reg here. So i really should keep my mouth shut.
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Post by StalinRevolution on Dec 23, 2003 20:58:23 GMT -5
Sure I have strong beliefs but I don't force them on people. By all means don't.This is the opposite of what this place is about.Speak your mind,even if you aern't a regular.It just gives you a bit more credebility if you are.  |
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Post by eat the world on Dec 24, 2003 10:19:01 GMT -5
Here are some notes on these questions by Bob Avakian, from a longer piece that is posted on the 2changetheworld debate site here You can find that thread here: 2changetheworld.info/disc/view.php?bn=changetheworld_test01&key=1047340964&pattern=Stalin&pattern=Stalin
[glow=red,2,300]On Stalin and Stalinism[/glow] Through the course of summing up the triumph of revisionism and the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union after Stalin's death, Mao made the pathbreaking analysis that in socialist society, even after ownership of the means of production is in the main socialized, there are still classes and class struggle and most centrally the antagonistic contradiction and struggle between the proletariat in power and the bourgeoisie which still exists and is constantly regenerated out of the contradictions of socialist society overall. This was in direct opposition to Stalin, who by the mid-1930s was declaring that antagonistic class contradictions had been eliminated in the Soviet Union, that all exploiting classes had been eliminated. (See for example Stalin's report, "On the Draft Constitution of the USSR," in 1936, and Stalin's report to the 18th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1939.) This was a most serious error on Stalin's part and it was bound to do damage to the proletariat in carrying out the class struggle against the bourgeoisie in Soviet society -- which objectively did exist.
This was connected to a tendency on Stalin's part of mix up what Mao referred to as the two different types of contradictions in class society -- those between the people and the enemy, and those among the people themselves. The first, said Mao, are antagonistic and must be dealt with by the methods of dictatorship. The second, contradictions among the people, are not antagonistic and must be dealt with by democratic means -- through ideological struggle, criticism and self-criticism, and so on.
Stalin's tendency to mix up these two fundamentally different types of contradictions meant that methods of repression and dictatorship were used against people who were not enemies but were merely making mistakes or simply expressing disagreement with the policy of the Soviet government. At the same time, relating back to the fact that Stalin failed to recognize the continuing existence (and constant regeneration) of the bourgeoisie within socialist society, Stalin tended too much towards seeing opposition as all externally based -- as being a matter of imperialist agents at work within the Soviet Union. All this contributed to a situation where, on the one hand, the target of repression and dictatorship tended to be too broad -- including no only actual enemies, who should have been repressed, but also individuals and groups among the people whom it was wrong to repress -- and on the other hand the decisive class struggle against the actual bourgeois forces existing and being constantly regenerated within socialist society itself was not carried out as correctly and powerfully as it should have been. Again there was a growing tendency not to rely fully on the masses -- both to recognize and repress actual enemies and to carry out struggle to resolve contradictions within the ranks of the people themselves.
Linked to all these errors were certain tendencies toward woodenness and a mechanical approach to problems in Stalin's outlook and methodology. Mao put this rather strongly: "Stalin had a fair amount of metaphysics in him and he taught many people to follow metaphysics." (Mao, "Talks at a Conference of Secretaries of Provincial, Municipal and Autonomous Region Party Committees," Selected Works, Vol. 5 p. 367.)
This connects up with Stalin's tendency toward one-sidedly insisting on 'monolithic unity.' Mao strenuously argued against this kind of outlook: 'To talk all the time about monolithic unity [he said], and not to talk about struggle, is not Marxist-Leninist" (Schram, Mao's "Talks at Chengtu," p. 107). While Mao does not refer specifically to Stalin in this particular statement, it is clear that this criticism applies to Stalin's outlook and method -- particularly in his later years when the Soviet Union had 'realized some gains' and 'they became less reliant on the masses,' as Mao put it.
This is tied in with the fact that, during Stalin's later years especially, things became rather 'cold' in the Soviet Union and initiative was seriously stifled. Contrast this with the whole spirit of Mao, who says, 'Whenever the mind becomes rigid, it is very dangerous,' and 'Unless you have a conquering spirit it is very dangerous to study Marxism-Leninism. Stalin could be said to have had this spirit, though it became somewhat tarnished.' Mao also said that 'If you are too realistic you can't write poetry" (Schram, Mao's "Talks at Chengtu," pp. 110, 115, 123). And I would add, in keeping with the thrust of what Mao is saying here, that if you don't have a poetic spirit -- or at least a poetic side, it is very dangerous for you to lead a Marxist movement or be the leader of a socialist state.
To these criticisms Mao made of Stalin, our Party has added a sharp criticism of the United Front Against Fascism (UFAF) line adopted by the Communist International (Comintern) in 1935 and the related lines and policies of Stalin in carrying out a united front with the 'democratic' imperialists against the fascist imperialist bloc of Germany, Italy and Japan in World War 2. Some of Stalin's errors of that time were really rather extreme and even smacked of rank opportunism -- including appeals to Great Russian chauvinism and to a patriotism that was tied in with a number of reactionary things, such as patriarchy and 'traditional relations' between men and women (it was during the period leading up to World War 2 that Soviet law was reversed on abortion and it was made illegal, to cite one significant example). These serious deviations from Marxist-Leninist principle jump off the pages of Stalin's speeches On the Great Patriotic War, and I have made fairly extensive analysis, in Conquer the World and elsewhere, of serious errors of principle in the UFAF line, so it is not necessary to go into this at greater length here.
It is necessary, of course, when making such sharp criticisms, to keep in mind the objective situation and the very extreme and dire necessity faced by the Soviet Union -- at that time the world's only socialist state surrounded on all sides by hostile imperialist states and their allies and forces to deal with a massive all-out invasion from what was, at the start of World War 2, the most powerful and seemingly invincible imperialist armed force -- Nazi Germany. And here I can only add that in reading over histories of World War 2, particularly the battles n the Russian front with the Nazi armies, there war incredible stories of how soldiers on both sides died of such things as going out in the dead of the Russian winter to relieve themselves and literally having their bodies freeze to death. And you can also recall the stories and accounts, so vivid, of the masses of people who died of starvation by the thousands and hundreds of thousands in Soviet cities such as Leningrad -- and they literally had almost no clothes and perhaps actually in fact no food -- along with the thousands of people, the tends and hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens, who died in the war directly from bombardments and so on. When you read these accounts you get a very vivid sense of the dire necessity that was involved here and that Stalin and the Soviet Union were up against, and you get extremely angry at those people who flippantly criticize Stalin without taking into account in any kind of serious way the tremendous difficulties that he had to deal with and that he could foresee on the horizon even before World War 2 broke out.
But even keeping all that in mind, and even allowing for the fact that Stalin and the Soviet Union had n other previously existing socialist states whose experience they could learn from -- even making the necessary allowance for that -- it is still necessary to criticize Stalin for very serious errors along the lines I have indicated here.
Of course, it is even more necessary to maintain the fundamental distinction between our criticism of Stalin and the unprincipled and in many cases totally unfounded slanders of the reactionaries against Stalin and "Stalinism." Our criticism is fundamentally different from theirs -- ours is a revolutionary criticism, made from the standpoint of the proletariat, not from the standpoint of the bourgeoisie, the imperialists and reactionaries. We make unsparing criticism of Stalin's mistakes and shortcomings because this is in accord with reality and it is necessary to make this criticism in order to serve the proletarian world revolution; and we continue to uphold Stalin's historical role overall for exactly the same reasons. It is something worth pondering seriously that those who treat Stalin as, on balance, a negative figures -- or as someone who may have initially more positive but then became essentially negative -- themselves either from the start oppose the revolutionary interests of the international proletariat or degenerate into such a position. More specifically, those who attempt to approach things as Marxists but negate Stalin's role overall end up as social-democrats (socialists in name, bourgeois democrats in fact) or plan and simple bourgeois-democrats or more openly reactionary defenders of the exploiting system. As Mao pointed out very insightfully in responding to Khrushchev's slanderous denunciations of Stalin as far back as 1956, when the sword of Stalin is dropped -- as they were then openly doing in the Soviet Union -- it will not be long before the sword of Lenin too is dropped (and, we can add, the sword of Mao as well). |
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Post by eat the world on Dec 24, 2003 14:14:17 GMT -5
I think Stalinrevolution makes a good point when he writes: "Knowing that they didn't have as much knowledge as we do now,don't condemn them so harshly."
When the rebels of the Paris Commune tried to seize power in the 1870s, they did not know as much about socialism as we do now, 130 years later. The first attempt at countrywide seizure, in the Russian empire, was pathbreaking. They tried many things, for the first time.
And while we identify their errors, we have to understand that these are ERRORS OF OUR MOVEMENT made IN THE COURSE OF attempting to create socialism and reach communism.
Brother SR makes an important point. and i agree with it.
Having said that, however, I would add: It is also not important to forget to sum up clearly what those errors were, and to say so openly. Wouldn't it be terrible if our movement went through these earth shaking experimental attempts -- and then we didn't learn the lessons, and went on to advocate and repeat similar errors?
It is fine so say "lets not negate the bolsheviks like lenin and stalin" It is important.
but it is also important to say: Let's learn deeply from these early experiences, and rise higher, on their shoulders.
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Post by etw on Dec 24, 2003 14:17:13 GMT -5
sorry: I wrote: "It is also not important to forget to sum up clearly what those errors were, and to say so openly."
But I meant to write:
"It is also important not to forget to sum up clearly what those errors were, and to say so openly."
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Post by StalinRevolution on Dec 25, 2003 10:54:32 GMT -5
Good points here.I find that when we simply sum things up,we find that we more or less agree.Not to say that we should not go in depth in arguments,but sometimes then we really forget what we are arguing about!
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Post by eat the world on Dec 25, 2003 11:28:26 GMT -5
Stalinrevolution:
One thing i love about you and about this site, is that people dig into things, and seek to unravel both facts and views.
No disagreement with you implies disrespect on my part.
And i find it interesting to discuss -- both when we agree, but also when we don't.
Actually fighting our way to a true understanding of events, and a correct line for action -- that is important, and worth taking the time to wrangle.
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Post by readpunk on Jan 11, 2004 11:19:44 GMT -5
How can criticism of the USSR be anti-communist? Just steal the words straight out of my mouth why don't ya', ha ha. |
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Post by RosaRL on Jan 11, 2004 11:27:11 GMT -5
on 12/23/2003 at 00:37:56, SonofRage wrote:
Criticism of the USSR isnt anti-communist although there is a lot of what passes for criticism out there that is anti-communist. For example - Trotsky's 'the revolution betrayed' or any of Richard Pipes works and so on.
Making honest criticism of what happened and trying to figure out what went wrong is very communist.
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Post by Deleted on Jan 12, 2004 7:43:59 GMT -5
Just steal the words straight out of my mouth why don't ya', ha ha. hehe, like the old saying: "great minds think alike" ;D Rosa, I am curious, what is anti-communist about Trotsky's "A Revolution Betrayed." While am by no means a Troskyist, since I generally dislike all forms of Leninism, I am curious what specifically you find anti-communist about this particular work? |
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