Avakian on Stalin

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This was discussed in another thread, so I thought I'd just post it here, for reference. (can someone add where this is extracted from, and what year it was written?)

Bob Avakian on the Question of Stalin and "Stalinism"

It is necessary, in summing up the stage that has ended and the historical experience of socialism so far, to speak once again to this question. I made a rather extensive analysis of the positive contributions as well as the serious errors of Stalin in Conquer the World. But right now, especially, with the changes going on the revisionist countries and the increasing repudiation and attacks there directed at Stalin and "Stalinism" from many different quarters, it is necessary to return to this and to make clear what it is we uphold and won't renounce and what we cannot uphold and must criticize in terms of Stalin's role as the leader of the Soviet Union and in the international communist movement over a decisive period of thirty years, from the early 1920s until his death in 1953.

Mao used the formulation that Stalin's achievements were 70 percent and his errors 30 percent of his overall role. The essence here is not the quantitative analysis-- not the percentages, 70 percent positive, 30 percent negative -- but the overall assessment this suggests: Stalin mainly should be upheld, but he did make errors, including serious errors.

First on the positive side -- the reasons why it is correct to uphold Stalin overall -- his contributions to the international communist movement that outweigh his negative side:

Following Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin led the Soviet Union in taking the socialist road in opposition to right and 'left' opponents whose lines would have led to openly abandoning the goal of socialist transformation or in any case would have led to socialism being overwhelmed and defeated by the forces of capitalism, inside the Soviet Union and internationally.

Stalin led in the complex and acute struggles to carry out collectivization of agriculture and to socialize the ownership of industry, putting the economy on a whole new foundation. This was something that had never been done before. While some significant mistakes were made, the fact is that, contrary to the slanders of the defenders and apologists of the old order, this monumental upheaval was marked by the enthusiasm and initiative of millions and millions of people in the countryside, especially the poor peasants, who were radically transforming centuries-old relations of oppression and casting off thousands of years of enslaving, mind-numbing tradition.

Stalin gave emphasis to the revolutionary struggle and the formation and development of communist parties in the East -- that is, the colonial world -- which was a very important development for the international communist movement. Along with this, Stalin made very valuable contributions in developing Marxist theory concerning the national and colonial question and the liberation struggles of the oppressed nations.

Stalin led the Soviet people in arduous and heroic struggle to defeat German imperialism, led by Hitler, in World War 2.

In the last years of his life Stalin not only refused to buckle under to the imperialists, who were threatening the Soviet Union with atomic weapons, but he continued to grapple with the problems of how to carry forward the socialist transformation of society and what would be the transition from a socialist economic system to a communist one.

All this is more than enough reason to continue to uphold Stalin's historical role as a leader of the Soviet Union and in the international communist movement.

As I wrote in Mao Tsetung's Immortal Contributions, in noting some of Stalin's main historic achievements and putting his errors in historical context:

"To bring about socialist collectivization together with socialist industrialization and transform the Soviet Union from a relatively backward to an advanced country economically -- all of which was accomplished in the two decades between the end of the civil war in Russia and WW2 -- was a great achievement of the Soviet working class and people under the leadership of Stalin. And it had much to do with the Soviet Union's ability to defeat the Nazi invaders in WW2, another great achievement of the Soviet people carried out under Stalin's leadership.
"All the same time, in giving leadership to an unprecedented task of such tremendous proportions--the socialization, transformation and rapid development of the economy of such a large and complex country as the Soviet Union under the conditions where it was the only socialist state in the world still dominated by imperialism -- Stalin did make certain errors. To a significant degree this is explainable by the very fact that there was no historical precedent for this task, no previous experience (and previous errors) to learn from. On the other hand, as Mao has summed up, certain of Stalin's errors, including in the sphere of political economy, economic policy and socialist construction, arose because and to the extent that Stalin failed to thoroughly apply materialist dialectics to solving problems, including many genuinely new problems that did arise." (Mao Tsetung's Immortal Contributions, pp. 89-90)

It would be extremely wrong to negate Stalin's positive side and refuse to uphold his historical role overall. It would be extremely wrong to underestimate his errors or refuse to thoroughly criticize them. As we know, Mao spoke of Stalin's errors representing "30 percent" of Stalin's overall role. But when Mao speaks of the actual content of this "30 percent," it is clear that he is not talking about minor mistakes with minimal consequences. Here are some of the things he says concerning the negative side of Stalin:

The Chinese revolution was made by acting contrary to Stalin's will! "If we had followed Wang Ming's, or in other words Stalin's, methods the Chinese revolution couldn't have succeeded. When our revolution succeeded, Stalin said it was a fake. We did not argue with him, and as soon as we fought the war to resist America and aid Korea, our revolution became a genuine one [in his eyes]." (Schram, Mao's "Talks at Chengtu," pp. 102-103)

"Stalin felt that he had made mistakes in dealing with Chinese problems, and they were no small mistakes. We are a great country of several hundred millions, and he opposed our revolution, and our seizure of power." (Schram, Mao's "Talks at Questions of Philosophy," p. 217)

While recognizing Stalin's great achievement in leading the collectivization of Soviet agriculture, Mao was at the same time sharply critical of important aspects of Stalin's policy toward the peasants and the effect of this on the relations (contradictions) between workers and peasants, industry and agriculture, and the city and the countryside. Here is how I characterized this criticism in Conquer the World:

"As Mao put it, you want the hen to lay eggs but you don?t feed it; you want the horse to gallop but you don't give it fodder and so on. Basically they took a tremendous amount from the peasantry as the basis for a breakneck industrialization program at the same time as they were carrying out rapid and widescale collectivization of agriculture, ?. In the comments and criticisms made by Mao in places like Ten Major Relationships and consistently throughout? Volume 5 of Mao's works and also in the CIA-collected Miscellany of Mao Tsetung Thought and in the Chairman Mao Talks to the People collection there is a consistent thread of criticism of the Soviet policy toward the peasantry. If you want to put it in a rather stark form, to a significant degree, they carried out industrialization on the backs of the peasantry while at the same time carrying out collectivization." (Conquer the World, Revolution #50, p. 19)

Mao also criticized Stalin for placing too much emphasis on technique and technically trained personnel and not enough reliance on unleashing the initiative of the masses in carrying out socialist construction and transformation of the economy. For example, in commenting on Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR, Mao said: "Stalin emphasized only technology, nothing but cadre; no politics, no masses. This too is walking on one leg!"

This was linked with a more general problem of orientation that Mao summed up: Stalin's tendency to rely on administrative procedures rather than relying on and mobilizing the masses. This tendency asserted itself and became more pronounced the more Stalin's leadership was consolidated and the more the Soviet Union made gains in socialist construction. As Mao put it, "At that time [the 1920's] Stalin had nothing else to rely on except the masses, so he demanded all-out mobilization of the party and the masses. Afterwards, when they had realized some gains this way, they became less reliant on the masses." (See Mao Tsetung's Immortal contributions, p. 147).

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And I think we must call attention to the fact that Stalin's "top-down" tendency became very pronounced in the way he attempted to bring socialism to Eastern Europe after World War 2.

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.

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[part 3, continuation]

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).

As for "Stalinism", here too we must have a very critical approach to criticism. That is, we must distinguish between those aspects of Stalin's methods and policies that deviated from Marxist-Leninist principle and were harmful to the interests of the international proletariat, on the one hand, and those aspects of "Stalinism" that are in accord with and further the fundamental interests of the proletariat. In reality, there is no such thing as "Stalinism," scientifically speaking. Stalin advocated and in the main upheld Marxism-Leninism, not "Stalinism." I have used this term here-and have put it in quotation marks-to refer to how the bourgeoisie and reactionaries generally use this term, "Stalinism," to describe anyone and anything that is identified, rightly or wrongly, with the leadership and influence, with the historical legacy, of Stalin in building socialism, in building communist parties, and generally in the experience of the international communist movement. When the imperialists, the revisionists, and other reactionary fools attack "Stalinism," they include in this attack the exercise of state power by the proletariat and the central and decisive role of the proletarian state in building a socialist economic system, and they include the leading role of the communist party, the vanguard party of the proletariat. And when we see the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China and Mao?s basic line and methodology attacked as "Stalinism" as well, we know there are definitely very important things about "Stalinism" that we must uphold!

In conclusion on this point, it is correct and necessary, from an historical standpoint, to uphold Stalin's role overall to counter the slanderous attacks of the reactionaries against Stalin, and to vigorously respond to their attacks on communism in the form of attacks on "Stalinism." But, at the same time, it is also correct and necessary to learn from not only the achievements but the very serious errors of Stalin-and more than that, to really strive to avoid repeating such errors.

A repeat of the "Stalin Experience" is not what the international proletariat needs-that is not aiming high enough. Things advance in spirals. The historical experience of the Soviet Union and the international communist movement under Stalin's leadership, with its positive and negative aspects, is part of the synthesis we have achieved, it is part of the concentrated summation of that experience that is integrated into our ideology, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.


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[1949]

I believe it is excerpted from "The End of a Stage, The Beginning of a New Stage" from 1990.