discipline posted:

http://www.versobooks.com/events/911-verso-at-the-2014-left-forum

hmm, and it links to his book of letters with the pussy riot girl. makin' a strong case

daddyholes posted:

by his own accounts,in Salon.com, he is incredibly clinically depressed

my ninja...

Panopticon posted:

hitler invaded the soviet union as punishment for stalin's murder of trotsky, hitler's gay boyfriend

catchphrase

Grover Furr came out of the closet and posted:

Everybody makes mistakes, so Stalin must have made some. But I don’t think this is what you’re getting at.

Stalin tried very hard to follow Lenin’s guidelines. He had tremendous respect for Lenin, and always referred to himself as “a pupil of Lenin’s.”

The problem was that Lenin did not know how to go from the situation the USSR found itself at the end of the Civil War in 1921 to a communist society. Nobody knew! Marx and Engels had not laid out a blueprint for this. Lenin did not have one either.

Lenin and Stalin were brilliant men, sincerely dedicated to the goal of communism, devoted to the working class. They had no personal ambitions except to try to bring about that society of justice and equality which the communist movement has always stood for, and that the working people of the world desperately desperately needed then and still do.

Despite titanic efforts, immense sacrifices, and great achievements, in the end the communist movement failed. Trotsky, and later Khrushchev, said these failures were due to Stalin’s personal failings. That is, if somebody else besides Stalin had been in the leadership, all would have been well.

I think this is all wrong. The problem was the Bolsheviks’ line – not just Stalin’s, but Lenin’s too, and Marx’s and Engels’ as well.

Stalin, and the Bolsheviks generally, had a social-democratic conception of socialism. It was the left wing of the social-democratic conception, of course. The right-wing of it -- the German S-D party, the Russian Mensheviks -- took the extreme economic determinist position that capitalism had to do its historic work of industrializing, developing, etc. In the meantime, capitalism itself was not to be overthrown. In fact capitalism was to be cultivated, because it was still "progressive."

Once you decide to retain money, wages, and inequality -- all of which go inseparably together – together with social welfare benefits for the working class, you have a society that is, in important ways, very similar to a bourgeois social-democratic society. This concept of socialism is at least as compatible with Marx and Lenin as any other concept, and probably is the version that is most compatible to what Marx, Engels, and Lenin had written.

The Bolsheviks even tried governing with opposition socialist parties. It was those parties that betrayed them -- the S-Rs and Mensheviks. The S-Rs tried to overthrow the Bolsheviks; tried to assassinate Lenin, did manage to severely wound Lenin and to kill a few Bolsheviks. They were not interested in anything else because their own conceptions of socialism were that outright capitalism had to complete its work, and anything more than that was premature, doomed to failure, doomed to be a "dictatorship", and so on.

Trotsky's view was a version of this, with a few different wrinkles, but really, not very different at all, and not really “left” either. In essence it was a more defeatist version, straddling the fence between the Bolshevik and Menshevik conceptions, just as Trotsky himself had straddled the fence between the two parties in his life.

What I showed in my two-part article was that Stalin was committed to a social-democratic concept of political democracy as well. Now, I didn't use that term. And it certainly would have worked differently with a communist party in control of the state, than it would with capitalists in control of the state, as in classic social-democracy.

But the conception of democracy was the same. The 1936 “Stalin” Constitution was predicated on a conception of democracy familiar to progressive capitalism: universal, equal, and secret voting, representative democracy, contested candidacies. The latter was never implemented. But that was what the Constitution stated. .

This is why I say that the "socialists" of today are "Stalinists.” To put it another way: what doomed Soviet socialism is what keeps POST-Soviet socialism down too. Because post-Soviet socialism bases itself on a social-democratic concept of socialism.

The "democratic socialists" all share the social-democratic conception of socialism that united Stalin, Trotsky, the S-Rs, and the Mensheviks. The Chinese CP still justifies its fascist state and economy with social-democratic rhetoric -- "capitalism has not yet fulfilled its historical mission."

We are all taught that it was Stalin who "allied with Hitler", either publicly or secretly. But who was it really? It was the Rights and Trotskyists! Bukharin, Radek, Piatakov, et al. All the evidence we have today supports this conclusion – which is hotly denied by all the anti-communist researchers and, of course, by Trotskyists.

We are taught that "Stalin killed hundreds of thousands" during 1937-38. But what happened in reality? It was Ezhov, with his rightist helpers in the Party leadership. And Ezhov himself was part of the Rightist conspiracy, planning to overthrow the Stalin government, and linked directly with Bukharin, Trotsky, et al.

(Recently-published testimony of Ezhov himself and of his right-hand man Frinovsky confirm this, and some virulent anti-communist researchers who saw these same documents years ago accept them as genuine.)

So it was the "nice, democratic Bukharinist" Right-wing that murdered all these innocent people, knowing they were innocent -- to cover up their own conspiracy, and cover their own tracks. This is what happened. But how many present-day “Marxists” want to hear it? Or are capable of hearing it? To say nothing of the overt anti-communists.

So to sum up: the USSR failed to attain communism. But it was not because of any personal failings on Stalin’s, or Lenin’s, parts. It was because their concept of socialism was faulty. Could they have known this at the time? I don’t see how they could have known it. We can see it now – but only because of their heroic attempts. In retrospect, we can see what they did that worked, and what did not, thanks to their experience. Of course they could not have known that then.

In the last years of his life Stalin was preparing the USSR to move to the next stage on to communism. The move to communism was the watchword of the 19th Party Congress in October 1952. I’ve just finished reading the reports of that Congress in Pravda.

Q: We all hear the anti-Stalin propaganda when we talk about what happened in Ukraine from 1930-32 with the "Holodomor" with how Stalin "withheld aid" to Ukraine and such. In what ways did Stalin materially help Ukraine during this period? What actually went on during this time?

Grover Furr came out of the closet and posted:

This tale actually stems, ultimately, from the Nazis, who began spreading it in the mid-30s. In the USA it was picked up by the Hearst newspapers, which were extremely anti-communist.

The late Doug Tottle nailed these facts in his book Fraud, Famine and Fascism. The Ukrainian Genocide Myth from Hitler to Harvard (Toronto: Progress Books, 1987). Tottle was affiliated with the Canadian Communist Party, and some of his statements are apologetic. But he did his homework on the fraudulent nature of this myth.

After WW2 the “man-made famine in Ukraine” myth became the credo of the pro-Nazi Ukrainian Nationalist groups, many of whose leaders were settled in the US by the CIA, and were funded to carry on their anti-Soviet propaganda. Until the early 1960s these fascist Ukrainian nationalist groups had terrorist cells within the USSR as well.

Today this myth is an integral part of the nationalist ideology of the state of Ukraine. The reactionary capitalists and former CPSU members who rule it have to construct a history that legimitizes Ukrainian nationalism.

This myth of the “man-made famine” is an integral part of the project of historical formation for Ukraine. Since Ukrainian nationalism has been fascist from the beginning, the only way it can be “legitimized” is by ferocious anti-communism.

There are some very good books, written by Cold War anti-communists who were nevertheless good historians, that demonstrate how fascist Ukrainian Nationalism has always been. I recommend:

John A. Armstrong. Ukrainian Nationalism. NY: Columbia University Press, 1963.

Alexander Motyl. The turn to the right : the ideological origins and development of Ukrainian nationalism, 1919-1929. NY: Columbia U.P. 1980.

The excellent research by Prof. Mark Tauger, of the University of West Virginia, and others, has thoroughly exploded this Nazi-born myth of the “Man-Made Famine.” His research is now available online at his own website,

http://www.as.wvu.edu/history/Faculty/Tauger/

In addition I recommend the following article by two professional demographers:

Barbara Anderson and Brian Silver, “Demographic Analysis and Population Catastrophes in the USSR.” Slavic Review 44, 3 (Autumn, 1985), pp. 517-536. Available through JSTOR.

Robert Conquest, the most famous anti-Soviet phony “scholar” during the past half-century, was paid $80K by Ukrainian Nationalist groups to write Harvest of Despair, the main English language book that spreads this notion. He drew heavily upon Nazi propaganda as his so-called “evidence.”

There are a couple of good reviews of his book, and of this issue. They are:

• Jeff Coplon, “In Search of a Soviet Holocaust,” Village Voice Jan. 12, 1988. At http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/vv.html

• Jeff Coplon, "Rewriting History: How Ukrainian Nationalists Imposed Their Doctored History on our High-School Students". Capital Region magazine (Albany, NY), March 1988. At http://chss.montclair.edu/english/furr/essays/coplonrewriting88.pdf

• “The Hoax of the Man-Made Ukraine Famine of 1932-33.” Six-part series originally published in Challenge-Desafio, the newspaper of the Progressive Labor Party, beginning on February 25, 1987. At http://www.plp.org/cd_sup/ukfam1.html and following.

• In addition, I recommend Arch Getty’s review of Conquest from the London Review of Books, January 22, 1987, pp. 7-8.

• Doug Tottle’s book also analyses both Conquest’s work and the fraudulent Ukrainian nationalist film “Harvest of Despair.” It is well worth reading.

babyfinland posted:

"The Years of Hunger" by Stephen Wheatcroft and R.W. Davies, two of the top historians of the USSR, is far and away the best book on the famine of 1931-33. Simply put, no one has done the archival research these two have, no one has put the pieces in place like these two have. The book is a gripping account, almost like a narrative, of the famine and the Soviet political culture, as well as the mentality of the populace. The early chapters describe the major state programs of collectivisation, dekulakisation, and crop collection. The later chapters examine the nature of the Sovkhozy and Kolkhozy the death of livestock, as well as a concluding chapter rebutting various arguments made by political ideologues about the famine and putting it in historical perspective.

The many and varied factors causing the famine are dmonstrated to a high degree. Overall, and quite generally, the famine resulted from bad policy rushed into quickly. However, this isn't the whole story. The famine was as bad as it was because of a whole slew of phenomena that corresponded with the bad policy. Policy limiting the extent of fallow land and mandated overcultivation, for example, severely reduced flexibility of planting times which became disastrous when combined with odd weather conditions. The bungling of grain collections by the state is explored in excruciating, but gripping, detal. Wheatcroft and Davies frequently recount series of communication between officials, or proposed policy documents as they circulate through the heirarchy, describing the conditions and proposing oslutions, and the response of the higher ups. The top leadership comes off looking somewhat bad on net, altohugh there are a number of examples of people like Stalin making the right decision in the face of incompetent subordinates. The caricature of Stalin as tyrant who would allow no criticism is thoroughly demolished. From what I gathered from the book, the authoritarian nature of the political system and restrictions on/intimidation of people who would potentially speak up did not seem to be as big of a problem as it was in some other authoritarian nations with major famines.

One problem is their criticism of Mark Tauger's arguments about the role of plant disease that was spreading throughout the area (somewhat independent of state policy). Tauger (correctly) presents this as a small but significant cause, whereas Wheatcroft and Davies would have it be insignificant. However, their argument agianst Tauger is completely incoherent. This should be obvious when one reads it, but you can also find Tauger's review of this book on the Economic History website.

Although there are only a few pages dedicated to refuting alternative explanations of the famine, this book serves to utterly destroy right wing (the famine was deliberate) and left wing (it was caused by reactionary saboteurs) myths about the famine. There is no evidence of an intentional famine at all, and the book recounts the serious attempts of the state to help mitigate and eliminate the famine. The authors even quote a personal correspondence with Robert Conquest in which he concedes (contrary to what he got famous for saying for decades) that the famine wasn't intentional. While only a few Ukrainian nationalist cranks hold this view, the book clearly destroys the idea of a famine concentrated only or overwhelmingly in the Ukraine. They show that 5.5-6.5M died in the famine, rather than some higher estimates.

While they don't explicitly mention them, this book refutes the favorite claims of certain Stalinists about the famine. To give one example, Douglas Tottle has tried to show the extent of sabotage by giving a few examples of saboteurs killing livestock and attributing the entire decline to sabotage. The chapter in this book on livestock, however, shows that the livestock starved in the famine itself! They also show how the condition they were kept in in state and collective farms contributed to the deaths of livestock.

I don't like the sound of that, can we all just agree to not click on Tom's link and pretend it's good? Wouldn't that be the best path forward, from a revolutionary standpoint?