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What Do We Mean By Anti-Capitalism?

category international | the left | opinion / analysis author Thursday April 27, 2006 01:28author by Wayne Price - NEFACauthor email drwdprice at aol dot com Report this post to the editors

Part 1 of The Nature of Stalinist Societies

If anti-capitalists want an alternative to capitalism, we need to examine the nature of countries of the type of the Soviet Union. There are three groups of theories about them. One is the idea that these societies are socialist or “workers’ states.” This will be compared with the original libertarian goals of classless socialism. This is the first of a 3 part series.

Many activists call themselves “anti-capitalist.” But this is a negative; what should we be for? Since anti-capitalists wish to find an alternative to the current system, it is necessary to examine the nature of societies which claim to have once replaced capitalism, namely the former Soviet Union and similar nations. There is a large left literature on this topic. Many radicals have sought to analyze the countries ruled by Communist (Marxist-Leninist) Parties, countries which called themselves “socialist” and which many of us on the far-left called “Stalinist.” However, to a lot of radicals today this area of theory seems old, being about a country far away which no longer exists. From 1989 to 1992 the Soviet Union and the Stalinist governments of Eastern Europe dissolved, in a combination of popular revolt and maneuvering by sections of the ruling bureaucracy. Therefore, many conclude that it is no longer relevant to study the nature of these states.

I strongly disagree with this attitude of uninterest. For one thing, Communist Party-ruled regimes continue to play a significant role in the world. The great nation of China affects today’s world economy, politics, and military balance. There are still a number of small Asian countries with Communist Party governments. This includes North Korea, whose nuclear armament affects international tensions. The Cuban government continues to play a major role in Latin American affairs, particularly in alliance with the Venezuelan regime of Hugo Chavez. The Marxist-Leninist FARC maintains a state within a state in Columbia. This has been a growing target of U.S. intervention. And many radicals are attracted to the Maoist rebellion in Nepal, which has a chance of coming to power. Finally, to understand the world, it is necessary to understand what is going on in the successor states to the Soviet Union, such as Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, etc., along with the new Eastern European states. This cannot be done without understanding their very recent history, the system they lived under until a few years ago.

To me, however, the most important reason for studying the nature of the Soviet Union and similar states is the light it sheds on what we mean by ANTI-CAPITALISM and by SOCIALISM. Whether we regard these states as socialist determines what we think is the alternative to capitalism. There are a great many radicals who are attracted to the model of the old Soviet Union or of Maoist China, who are impressed by Cuba today or by the Nepalese Maoists. They would like to create a world in which all countries are more-or-less like Cuba, including North America and Europe. They described the Soviet Union and Cuba as “really existing socialism.” That is, if you want socialism, this is the socialism which really existed, whatever you would have liked it to be, so anti-capitalists better accept it.

Conversely, the establishments of Western capitalism have been glad to agree that the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, etc. are/were “socialist” and “communist.” They say, capitalism may have faults, but this is the only “anti-capitalist” alternative which ever was or ever could be. These ugly, totalitarian, Stalinist states are the only socialism which could ever exist. So everyone must accept capitalism, they declare.

(I call these regimes “Stalinist.” This does not deny that Lenin and Trotsky laid the basis for Stalin’s totalitarianism. Nor do I deny that there were important changes in these countries after Stalin’s death. But I believe that this system became consolidated under Stalin’s rule, when the last remnants of the Russian revolution were destroyed, tens of millions of workers and peasants were exterminated, and the new bureaucratic ruling class was solidified. Russian totalitarianism became the program of all Communist Parties, such as the Chinese. So Stalinism is an appropriate label.)

Among radicals, particularly among anarchists, there are tendencies which reject the labels of socialist, of communist, and of the left. For them it is not a problem that the Soviet Union’s system is identified with socialism. They agree with this identification. I will not go further into these tendencies right now, except to point out that they reject not just state socialism but the whole of the socialist project.

Historically anarchists considered themselves to be a part of the left--the extreme left of the left, that is, the most oppositional of those in opposition to capitalism and the state. They considered themselves as an extreme part of the socialist movement. In his famous article on “Anarchism” for the Encyclopedia Britannica, Kropotkin wrote of “...the anarchists, in common with all socialists, of whom they constitute the left wing...consider the wage-system and capitalist production altogether as an obstacle to progress.” (1975, p. 109)

The tendency with which I identify is revolutionary, class-struggle, pro-organizational, anarchism. By “anti-capitalism” we mean libertarian socialism and authentic communism. We advocate replacing capitalism with a cooperative network of self-managing producer and consumer associations and communes, which will produce goods for use, not for profit. It will be democratically planned from the bottom up. Society will be coordinated through these associations and communes, in a federation of workplace and community councils. The police and military will be replaced by a popular militia, so long as it is needed.

“In place of the old bourgeois society, with its classes and class antagonisms, we shall have an association, in which the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.” These are the stated goals of the Communist Manifesto of Marx and Engels. (1955, p. 32) They are the original goals of the socialist project, reflected both in the humanistic, libertarian tendency within Marxism and in revolutionary anarchism. Did the Stalinist regimes meet these goals? Were they even going in that direction? If not, what does it mean to call them “socialist?” These are questions I will discuss in this 3-part series.

The Three Theories About Stalinism

On the left, theories about the nature of the Soviet Union can be grouped into three trends.
One (to be considered in this part) is that it was a form of socialism, or tending toward socialism, or a “post-capitalist” society. Trotsky regarded the Soviet Union under Stalin as a “degenerated workers’ state.” After World War II his orthodox followers called the new Stalinist states, “deformed workers’ states” (since they could not be “degenerated” without having had actual workers’ revolutions; but most of these theorists regard Cuba as a “healthy workers’ state”). In any case, these theories regard the Stalinist system as better (more “progressive”) than capitalism .

A second group of theories regards Stalinism as a new, third, type of class society. It is, they claim, not socialism and not capitalism. The bureaucracy was a new ruling class which managed a nationalized, collectivized, economy. It exploited the workers in some fashion. This system is not better than capitalism and possibly is worse. Such a theory (called “bureaucratic collectivism”) was developed by some dissident Trotskyists. A version has been developed by the theorists of “Parecon.”

A third group of theories regards the system as a variant of capitalism, despite its apparent differences from traditional capitalism. Usually this is called “state capitalism.” The concept is rooted in the work of Marx and Engels. It has mostly been developed by dissident Trotskyists but anarchists have also used it. In my opinion this is the best analysis of this system.

I will discuss the new-type-of-class-society theories in Part 2 of this series, next month. State capitalism will be reviewed in Part 3 of the series.

Was the Soviet Union “Socialist”?

Whether to call the Soviet Union “socialist” may be a matter of definition. If people wish to define “socialism” as government-owned industry--which may be what most mean by “socialism”--then the Stalinist countries were indeed socialist. I cannot prove that a definition is “wrong.” However, the Marxism which the system’s supporters claim to follow describes socialism in a different way (at least Marx’s Marxism does). It insists on a class analysis of each society. In the very same section of the Communist Manifesto which was quoted above, Marx and Engels declared, “...The first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to establish democracy...the state, i.e....the proletariat organized as the ruling class....When in the course of development, class distinctions have disappeared...the public power will lose its political character.” (1955, pp. 31-32)

That is, to Marx, the working class and its allies (peasants, women, etc.) would take over society and establish true democracy, a “state” which is nothing but the self-organized working class. It will proceed (rapidly or slowly) to end all class distinctions and the state. (Libertarian Marxists believe that Marx became even more anti-statist after the Paris Commune.) I am not discussing here the validity of libertarian (autonomist) Marxism, just pointing to its overlap with class-struggle anarchism in the socialist project.

It is obvious that countries of the Soviet Union’s type do not meet these class criteria. There was (is) a bureaucracy of bosses on top, who ran everything and made the decisions. The state was the bureaucracy “organized as the ruling class.” In a planned economy, they did the planning. The workers were on the bottom, taking orders, doing what they were told, and resisting where they could--just as under capitalism. There was a vast system of police repression. Only one party was allowed; all others, even socialist parties, were outlawed. No opposition caucuses were permitted within the single party either. Organizing for other views, such as anarchism, was rewarded by jail, labor camps, mental hospitals, or death. Independent unions and strikes were banned. Therefore the working population had no choices and no way to control their “leaders.”

Supporters of the Stalinist system knew this, of course. They could hardly deny that the Soviet Union then and Cuba today are single-party dictatorships. They could only argue that these were benevolent dictatorships, good for the workers. They could point to real or imagined low-level workplace assemblies, for example (in which the workers could decide how to carry out their part of plans which had been made elsewhere, by others). Criticisms of the one-party dictatorships usually were answered by changing the topic, by pointing out that, after all, the U.S., with its two parties, is really a dictatorship of the big capitalists (true, but irrelevant to criticisms of Stalinism).

In fact, these supposedly benevolent dictatorships were enforced through massive terror. 20 million workers and peasants may have been murdered under Stalin’s rule, to solidify the bureaucracy. Millions more died under Mao, in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. In Cambodia/Kampuchea, Pol Pot exterminated a fourth of the population. Many thousands have risked their lives fleeing from Vietnam, North Korea, Tibet, and Cuba. Even the less violent regimes, such as Cuba’s, are backed by enormous police forces and have a large number of political prisoners.

Clearly, in none of these states is the proletariat in the position of the ruling class, on the road to abolishing all class distinctions and the state. The most repressive regimes on earth, with states similar in structure to Nazi Germany’s, disguise themselves as the embodiment of the most advanced, liberating, socialist ideals! This is disgusting, although not without its logic. What is especially disgusting is that so many radicals let them get away with it, either by supporting these states or by rejecting the ideals of socialism. (To what extent Marxism led to such tyranny, i.e. what are the authoritarian aspects within Marxism, is another discussion.)

Also astonishing is the number of well-meaning radicals who are impressed with the Maoists of Nepal. The 60s and 70s have come and gone. We have seen this movie before. We know--or should know--how it comes out. We know what happens when movements with Marxist-Leninist (Stalinist) or radical nationalist leaders take power. The result is never the democratic rule of the working population.

Defense of Stalinism

The apologists argue that these societies were good for the working class, and therefore the workers did rule them, even if they didn’t. These supporters point out that the Soviet Union had full employment, guaranteed housing, and universal health care. This is compared to the unemployment and increased misery of the Russian people today. A similar argument is made about China, which once had the “iron rice bowl,” guaranteeing work and food for all Chinese. This has been abandoned by the current leadership (although the leadership remains a Communist Party, proclaims Marxism-Leninism as its ideology, and maintains a great deal of nationalized property--which makes it all confusing). Similar points are made about the health care and medical coverage of Cuba. Much of this is true--even if the Soviet Union’s jobs, health care, and housing were pretty low-quality in practice.

Every ruling class makes a de facto DEAL with its working population: If you let us rule, without rebellion, we will grant you some benefits and rights, to make life livable for you. In the U.S.A., for example, the top bourgeoisie gets to have wealth beyond the dreams of the emperors and pharaohs of old. They get to run society in their interest. In return, they had provided most U.S. workers (whites, anyway) with a fairly high standard of living, one better than their parents had, and with a moderate degree of political democracy and freedom. In this period, this deal has been dissolving, with a lowering of the standard of living and a decrease in freedom. A rise in discontent and rebelliousness may be predicted.

In the Communist-run countries, the deal was that workers got full employment, housing, health care, education, etc. This was not as good as in the Scandinavian social democracies (under private capitalism), but still decent, considering their low level of productivity. In return, the bureaucracy got to have unlimited power and great riches for the upper crust (which lived far, far, better than the bottom workers). This does not mean that the workers ran the Soviet Union or run Cuba, any more than the workers run the U.S. or the Scandinavian countries. It was a class deal.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Eastern European states, the workers had hoped that they would get the same deal as in Scandinavia or at least Western Europe: Germany or France, say. Instead, they were treated as if they lived in Africa or the poorer parts of Asia. The old bureaucrats turned bourgeoisie got very rich but the workers and farmers got very few benefits to replace those they had lost. Mostly they got an increase in political freedom (and not so much of that), which is good but cannot be eaten. Naturally many look back to the old deal with longing; at least there were jobs and food. But this does not prove that the Soviet Union had ever been anything but an exploitative, class-divided, totalitarian state. Nor can all the education or medical coverage in Cuba, as valuable as that is, make the state a workers’ democracy or Castro other than a dictator.

Class deals are not enough. The problem is that our standards are so low. Much more than decent schooling for children and good medical coverage is needed on a world scale if the human race is to avoid destruction by nuclear war or ecological catastrophe. What is needed is the vision which was demanded by the Utopian socialists, the original Marxists, and the anarchists. Nothing less will do.

Workers’ Rule Must be Democratic

Trotskyists and others point out that capitalism may be managed by a bourgeois-democratic state but that it also has functioned under various forms of dictatorship, such as monarchy, police states, or fascism. Similarly, they argue, working class rule (beginning socialism) may be through proletarian democracy, such as the Paris Commune or the original soviets, but it also may function under a dictatorship. Stalin, Mao, Kim Il Sung, and Castro all are supposed to have ruled “workers’ states,” not as good as the Commune system, no doubt, but still maintaining working class power, however indirectly. So they argue.

However, the analogy between capitalism and working class rule does not hold. Capitalists rule the workers primarily through the market. What they need from a state is protection of the market, enforcing of contracts, repression of the workers, and some regulation and economic intervention to keep the market on a steady course. This is best done through a capitalist democracy, but it is not a big problem if these tasks are carried out by some form of dictatorship. Neither Nazi Germany nor Pinochet’s Chile lowered capitalist profits--quite the contrary.

Unlike the capitalists (or other ruling classes, such as feudal lords or slaveholders), today’s workers do not own private property in the means of production. Modern workers cooperate in the process of production, at the workplace and in society as a whole. If the workers are to manage industry, they must do so cooperatively and collectively. Unlike the capitalists, they cannot rely on any automatic processes, such as the “invisible hand” of the market. They must make conscious decisions about how the economy (and everything else) is to be managed. They must engage in democratic planning, a matter of deliberate, conscious, collective, decision-making. If the working class and oppressed people are to rule, and develop a classless, oppressionless, society, it must be done through the most radical, thoroughgoing, participatory, democracy. This cannot be done through any kind of elite rule, let alone dictatorship, whether by one person or by a vanguard party. The Bolsheviks never understood this, and modern Leninists do not understand this now.

There is the same problem with Trotsky’s analogy between Stalin’s “workers’ state” and a bureaucratized, gangster-dominated, labor union. Both, he argued, are workers’ institutions, dominated by undemocratic forces, internal agents of capitalism. Like a bad union, the Stalinist state should be defended against the capitalists and capitalist states, while workers struggle to take it back. This analogy also does not hold. Even a bureaucratized union may still provide some protection for the workers against the bosses. But the Stalinist states directly exploit and oppress the workers. They are analogous to capitalist bosses, not to unions.

The Soviet Union and its descendants are not workers’ states, nor post-capitalist, nor socialist, nor tending toward socialism. They are totalitarian states with a bureaucratic ruling class and an exploited working class. They are no alternative to capitalism. Anti-capitalism must include the most democratic self-management, in the tradition of libertarian socialism, or it must fail.

[Attempts to describe the Communist Party-ruled system as a new class society will be discussed in next month’s essay.]


References

Kropotkin, Peter (1975). The essential Kropotkin. (E. Capouya & K. Tompkins, eds.). NY: Liveright.
Marx, Karl, & Engels, Friedrich (1955). The communist manifesto. (Samuel Beer, ed.). Northbrook, IL: AHM Publishing Corp.

Written for www.Anarkismo.net

Part 2 The Bureaucratic Ruling Class vs. Democratic Self-Management can be found at http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=3063

author by Ilan S. - AATWpublication date Thu Apr 27, 2006 17:31author address author phone Report this post to the editors

By calling the bolshevic state capitalism "Stalinism" one dilute the fact that this state capitalist system with its repression of the anticapitalist opposition was already in power since 1918.

The repression of the Ukrainian anarchist led revolution and the masacre of the Kronstat soviet - both at 1921 was long befor
Stalin became the so dominant figure in the hierarchy.
Ilan

author by r gravespublication date Thu Apr 27, 2006 22:43author address author phone Report this post to the editors

interesting and thoughtful piece, thanks.

there are some interesting maoist-dominated discussions going on about the legacy of stalinism at the burningman weblog-- i'd be interested to see you join the fray and directly engage with their stalinist apologetics-- a lot of the discussion is based on avakian's "conquer the world?..."

it's too rare that serious engagements between anarchists and leninists are carried out. often these discussions are carried out on echo chamber blogs or degenerate into foodfights.

http://burning.typepad.com/burningman/2006/04/open_nepal_thre.html

http://burning.typepad.com/burningman/2006/04/campaign_propos.html

author by the burningman - free radicalpublication date Fri Apr 28, 2006 05:34author email redflags.us at gmail dot comauthor address author phone Report this post to the editors

Wayne is no doubt familiar with some of the engagement Maoists (of my sort) have had with anarchists. There was some real world overlap here in New York City. I've met Wayne, and more than one of the participants in the Red Flags discussions were once in Love and Rage with him.

An important component of this discussion is Wayne's historical Trotskyism, and the way in which that form of (philosophical) "Idealist" categorical thinking still informs his analysis.

"What We Believe" = Platformism = an ahistorical catechism of moral assertion = not a political or social program capable of reaching beyond its philosophical adherents.

What seems at first glance to be free from authoritarian brackets is, in fact, deeply dogmatic and immune to changes in the world. Stalinism is, to Wayne, a "category," not an actual philosophy -- and certainly not one that ANY actually existing political party upholds, as such, in THESE discussions.

Marxists, on the other hand, start from a dialectical material analysis of the world and not the moral categories on the back of our eyelids.

When Wayne helped precipitate the split of the Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation as co-author of the "What We Believe" catechism, his insistence on attacking national liberation (which he reads as either state capitalism or "Stalinism") and what is called the Mass Line was always informed by the tactical handbook of Trotskyism -- transitional programs, slogan-mongering and so on.

Of those Love and Ragers who remained orthodox anarchists, it was noticable that (with one important exception) they had all been Trots in a prior incarnation... mostly from the Revolutionary Socialist League (which dissolved into Love and Rage) and another guy from the Socialist Workers Party.

Marxists and anarchists have many common grounds. That's why we work together all the time, and why some are intent on distorting what Marxists (and perhaps most especially Maoists) think AND do.

Wayne is always welcome to say his piece -- but I have strong suspicians that what he says will have little to do with either what's happening today or what the other participants at Red Flags are discussing. He will likely repeat his Trotskyite litany, colored by anarchist moral assertion, and think he did something brave.

Related Link: http://burning.tyepad.com
author by Tom Wetzel - WSA (Personal Capacity)publication date Sat Apr 29, 2006 02:18author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Anarchists do not refer to the type of society that existed in the Soviet Union, Cuba, China, etc. as "Stalinist." That is a Trotskyist term because it was designed to differentiate between Leninism and the Communist Party and international under Stalin and his heirs. I would say that the mode of production that emerged in the USSR was prefigured in the program and practice of the Bolshevik party. As Sam Farber (an American Trotskyist) points out, the Russian Marxist tradition in both its Bolshevik and Menshevik forms had no tradition of advocating direct worker management production. They evisioned a socialist economy as one based on nationalization of industry and central planning. They were not necessarily undemocratic in their thinking originally. Their only conception of "workers power" was in the election of leaders to run the state....not in terms of direct participation in the making of the decisions through participatory democracy. Leninist groups still talk about "democratic planning" through elections. This implies central planning and would lead to the same mode of production as that in the USSR even without the police state terror characteristic of the Stalin regime.

What exactly is the point to this discussion? I don't think Wayne is sufficiently clear on this point. If we are trying to understand the "mode of production," that is, the class structure and dynamics of the type of social order that came to exist first in the USSR, then it isn't helpful to characterize it as "Stalinist." The Stalin regime in the '30s had its characteristic *political* features -- systematic use of police state terror, one-party and indeed one-man dictatorship, and so on. But a mode of production of the type that was consolidated in the USSR in the '30s could perhaps exist under a less repressive *political* environment. "Stalinism" thus refers to certain *political* features of the USSR during a certain period. It is not an accurate label for the mode of production. The contribution here from "burning man" is a bit odd. Maoists agreed with Wayne in characterizing the USSR as "state capitalist" but they did so on the highly "idealist" (in the Marxist sense) premise that the nature of a mode of production is determined by the ideas of the leaders. Since the USSR after Krushchev was "revisionist," it was no longer "socialist". That fails to look at the actual power relations in social production, the structures that divide the society into classes with antagonistic interests, dominators versus dominated, exploiters versus exploited. I personally would not call the ruling class in these countries a "bureaucracy" because that doesn't specify clearly enough their role in social production. Their are "bureaucracies" in all kinds of organizations -- in the unions, in the Boy Scouts, in AARP, you name it. I think that there are two dominating classes in advanced capitalims, the most powerful is the plutocracy, the big investors, and a secondary dominating class is the coordinator class as I call it, that is, the professional managers and their top professional advisors, such as top engineers, corporate lawyers, finance officers and the like. Get rid of private ownership & appropriation, but keep the hierarchical division of labor characteristic of late capitalism, and voila, you end up with the mode of production in the so-called "Communist" countriies, which I would call coordinatorist since it empowers the coordinator class. We'll see what Wayne has to say about this later on in his piece on this subject.

author by Wayne Pricepublication date Sat Apr 29, 2006 05:09author address author phone Report this post to the editors

(1) Burningman the Brave writes a lengthy response to my essay and manages not to discuss a single argument I raise in opposition to Stalinism (Maoism in his case, which he calls "Marxism"). Remarkable.

He makes one outright false statement and one true statement. It is not true that I oppose national liberation. See my essay on the U.S.-Iraq war on this site. It is true, however, that I take moral criteria into account in my politics. Unlike most Marxists, I do not worship the supposed dialectical process of history and support whatever I conclude is the future. If these historical processes produce mass suffering and oppression, then I am against them. I am only for those historical processes which lead toward freedom, equality, and happiness, such as the class struggle. This includes a class analysis of what Mao's China really was.

He says that Maoists and anarchists have much in common. It is true that we are both AGAINST Western capitalist imperialism. But what we are FOR is completely different. Which was the point of my essay.

(2) Ilan and Tom, who are comrades, do not like my use of the term "Stalinist." Frankly I do not feel strongly about it either way. I often hear U.S. anarchists use the term (perhaps not to oppose "communism"). I cannot tell whether we have a political or a terminological difference. As I stated, I believe that Lenin and Trotsky laid the basis for the Soviet Union's totalitarianism (as they say). But I also believe that this became consolidated under Stalin. Do they disagree with this analysis?

At this point I could present what Lenin and Trotsky thought they were doing and then how Stalin congealed Russian state capitalism throught the war on the peasants, mass industrialization, and the great purges. But I think that this is another essay.

author by prole cat - ctc (personal capacity)publication date Sun Apr 30, 2006 18:59author address author phone Report this post to the editors

The massacre at Kronstadt and the crushing of the Mahknovists (that Illan cites) appear to have been something worse than simply "laying the basis" for Stalin's later totalitarianism. These acts were contrary to free socialism, of themselves.

author by Waynepublication date Tue May 02, 2006 05:48author address author phone Report this post to the editors

*These acts were contrary to free socialism, of themselves.* Yes they were. That is how they lay the basis for Stalin's consolidation of totalitarianism. In 1921, the Communist Party regime of Lenin and Trotsky crushed the Kronstadt rebellion, outlawed all other political parties, and outlawed all caucuses within the one legal party, among other acts. Yet the economy remained dominated by private property capitalism (which even increased under the NEP), the party was heterogeneous, including many who would oppose aspects of the consolidation of the regime. Subjectively, the rulers really wanted to spread the revolution internationally.

By the time Stalin was done (his rule began by about 1924, not that far away actually), there had been a homogenization of the party into a purely bureaucratic and nationalist machine, there had been the collassal forced industrialization and forced collectivization of agriculture (begun 1929), and the entire party (including Stalin's own supporters) had been killed off and replaced with a new ruling class (thru the great purges, killing tens of millions). Something new had been created.

Frankly, while Lenin and Trotsky had authoritarian politics (which got worse under the pressures of the civil war, etc.), I do not think that they intended what the Soviet Union became (unlike Hitler, who knew exactly what he was doing). That is my opinion, anyway, after much study. In any case, the point is not to repeat that Lenin and Trotsky were bad but to make a serious analysis of how the Soviet Union came into existence.

author by Tom Wetzel - WSA (personal capacity)publication date Tue May 02, 2006 08:52author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Says Wayne:
"Yet the economy [in 1921] remained dominated by private property capitalism (which even increased under the NEP), the party was heterogeneous, including many who would oppose aspects of the consolidation of the regime. Subjectively, the rulers really wanted to spread the revolution internationally."
This is highly misleading. The CP nationalized the entire economy, even down to artisanal ventures, between July 1918 and 1920, under so-called war communism. By 1920 virtually all of the collective management boards, created mainly in 1917 and early 1918, had been eliminated and replaced by one-man managers, appointed from above. Besides, the "heterogeneity" and subjective opinions of party members are entirely irrelevant to determining the incipient class strucutre of the soviet union. There was already a central planning body, Vesenkha, set up in Nov. 1917, charged with the responsibility of creating national economic plans. Autonomous working class activity had been systematically discouraged through things like absorption of the shop committees into the top-down trade unions, failure to conduct new elections to the shop committees and soviets beginning after Oct. 1917, repressive measures against the press of other leftwing organizations beginning immediately after Oct. 1917, and becoming systematic with the Red Terror in the summer of 1918. The self-conception and practice of the Bolshevik party, as a "vanguard," is implicitly mirros the sort of relationship of a coordinator class to a working class, that is, the concentration of planning, conceptualization, and decision-making authority into a hierarchy. Moreover, it is curious that Wayne focuses on the consolidation of Stalin's power and "totalitarianism" after 1924 because these things are only part of the political enveironment, they do not tell us what the mode of production or class structure is. Lenin had originally believed that a long period of state-regulated capitalism -- what Lenin meant by "state capitalism" -- would be needed to develop the productive forces in Russia. So NEP was a retreat to that position. But it was only a temporary retreat. The institutional structures and the relationship of the party to the mass already prefigured a coordinator class dominated regime. Minor breathing space for some capitalist activity in the '20s did not change this. It merely shifted the power from one type of coordinator -- those in the state sector -- to a different brand, those in the private sector.

author by Waynepublication date Sun May 07, 2006 03:15author address author phone Report this post to the editors

The main topic of this part of my essay was why the Soviet Union should not be regarded as socialist (or a "workers state," etc.). I will address Tom's concerns more when I get to parts 2 and 3. However, even then I will be limited in how much I can go into a discussion about how the Soviet Union developed, which Tom and PC have been raising--important topics, but not my central issue here.

But I agree with Tom when he refers to the "incipient" class structure of the Soviet Union in the 1920s. Then it was incipient. Through Stalin it become more than incipient, it became consolidated. That is my point.

author by Stalin School of Correctificationpublication date Mon May 08, 2006 23:32author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Wayne -- could you expand on how Stalin "[killed] of tens of millions?"

I have no doubt that in a country of 160 million living people, that over a few decades tens of millions did in fact die.

But unles Stalin is responsible for mortality itself, I'm curious what your source is for this vague estimate. You seem to be going with the Robert Conquest/Black Book methodologies...

What was the population of the Soviet Union in 1930? 1936? 1950?

From what I understand, the Nazis killed 26 million Russians (and other Soviet peoples) in the second world war -- well documented and uncontroversial. If Stalin is also (personally?) responsible for killing "tens of millions," I wonder: how many "tens" of millions... and then added to the dead of World War 2 -- how could ANYBODY have been left?

Are you claiming that in a 12-year period (say, 1933 to 1945) that 40+ million died out of a population of 160 million?

Do you actually believe that? And that this same population THEN rallied together in the single most heroic war effort in human history?

France fell in weeks. In Stalingrad and Leningrad, up to half the population died in defense of the cities -- and still kept fighting.

If one in three Russians had been killed off by that point and everyone was SIMPLY cowering in fear, I imagine they might have fought a more "French" war... But they didn't.

Unless you are blaming Stalin for the war's dead from the anti-fascist fight, which I presume you do ala Robert Conquest, then I can't see where you get this "tens of millions" number. From the histories I've read (about eight or nine, scholarly and popular), its interesting to note the origins of these various numbers.

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm

Contrary to the widely promoted, yet utterly ridiculous claim of mass "killings" -- there were not death camps in the Soviet Union. Not one. No crematoria, no graves with hundreds of thousands. Getty estimates 9 million "surplus" deaths throughout the Stalin period -- but most of these are disease, famine, etc. The number of political killings -- which were indeed massive -- was so much lower that it doesn't inspire the same level of "its beyond discussion" that's the whole point of the insane "tens of millions" number inflation.

It's a lie. It doesn't stand up to the slightest scrutiny, which is kind of the point: to point out the ridiculousness of it is to "justify" the horror.

There were prison camps, and bad they were without BS histrionics. There was a (effective) civil war, focused in the same Western Ukraine that welcomed the Nazi armies during the war... and that today attempts to ally with the USA against Russia as part of long-established geo-politcial patterns that have little to do with "socialism" or Stalin.

It was a civil war between poor peasants united with advanced workers (the "25,000ers," see Viola, Cambridge or Oxford Press?) to nationalize agriculture and end the starvation of the cities due to profiteering semi-capitalist agriculture in the countryside.

Guess what? When the poor rise up, the landlords and kulaks will defend to the death their right to starve others for their own profit. Then, as now, the privileged and middle classes often view their loss of privilege as equivelant to death. Then, as now, a section of the "left" will side with their own oppressors because the vanguard forces lack some mythical purity of arms.

Stalin ended that pretty much once and for all, though not on terms that were replicated in, say, China -- where the Mass Line and semi-voluntary communes was developed in lieu of "nationalization."

So, since Wayne is game to footnote -- what's his footnote for those "tens of millions" besides relying on what "everybody knows" when "everybody" tends to have NO FUCKING IDEA what they are talking about.

J. Arch Getty, in his illuminating book "Origins of the Great Purges" writes that the situation was the exact opposite of the totalitarian myth we've been (literally) bombarded with by the captialist media from Goebbels to Murdoch to the New York Review of (Anti-Communist) Books.

As I'm sure Wayne is familiar, Getty argues that Stalin's government was quite weak, and often barely present in much of the country. He notes that there were real political differences within the state, with leaders such as Bukarin setting the stage for state-capitalism, and that scumbag Trotsky arguing that the "dictatorship of the proletariat" meant military discipline applied TO the proletariat... (Sidenote: Bukarin's economic books were adopted by the Chinese "capitalist-roaders" decades later.)

Getty also puts the death toll from direct state repression MUCH lower, but still enough to horrify. Based on extensive examination of opened Soviet archives, he puts explicit political deaths (killings) in the hundreds of thousands, and with "surplus deaths" tabulated from census records (including famine and disease IN GENERAL) at around 9 million.

Horrible, no doubt. A horror for the ages, no doubt. But an irrational cannibalism? No -- fighting to the knife, amid a weak infrastructure, foreign intervention by the most powerful armies on earth and a significant section of both the party and peasantry that was at odds with socialism.

I wouldn't assume the good guys lost in all those arguments, just as I wouldn't tabulate ALL deaths as the responsibility of one side.

But hey, why not say it's "tens of millions?"

It's important to do that because that's what was supposed to scare us into supporting Western Imperialism during the Cold War, just like stories of "Bolshevik massacres" were WIDELY circulated throughout the world by the Nazis to justify their "liberation" of the Ukraine.

I mean, if Stalin was killing one out of every three Soviet peoples, perhaps the Nazi monomania on killing Jews was a step up, no? Maybe Hitler wasn't so bad and all that "communit propaganda" was just a cover-up... That was (and is) the logic.

Capitalist propaganda, recycled in ultraleft (anarchist/Trotskyist... and, on the flip, social-democratic) rhetoric served an essential purpose throughout the Cold War with Schactmanites and those of the "third camp" Sam Farber/IS variety working as hard as possible to make any rational, historically-based and socialist discussion impossible.

To defend socialism is, to this utterly reactionary logic, to engage in holocaust denial.

This is something else considering it was the Red Army that liberated the very real death camps of Eastern Europe to the cost of real millions dead.

It was the anti-racist armies of the Soviet Union that crushed the Nazis -- and that ended not just the greatest holocaust inside of Europe since the witch burnings -- but also armed national liberation struggles world-wide, politically and militarily, to end the formal colonial era and vastly expand for a time the revolutionary forces.

We all say we know that "history is written by the victors." Then some of us turn around and use fascist/captialist historiography to score grotesquely dishonest political points.

That's right. I'm defending Stalin and the socialist Soviet Union (against this type of bs).

Regarding the rest of Wayne's arguments, I don't have the time. I don't think this site is widely read, and among those participating by name they are surely quite set in their thinking.

Quick question: how many "surplus deaths" was colonialism responsible for? How many "surplus deaths" did the open restoration of capitalism and destruction of the Soviet welfare state bring about?

What was the life expectancy of a Russian man twenty years ago and what is it today?

Down with authoritarianism! Down with health clinics and literacy! Down with workers in power! Up with gangster capitalism and the ultraleftists who have little or nothing to say about it!

author by Tom Wetzelpublication date Wed May 10, 2006 08:27author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Stalin School doesn't really say anything about the class structure of the USSR under Stalin. That's because Stalinism doesn't stand for workers' liberation, but the empowerment of the coordinator class. The business about "kulaks and landlords" is part of the Stalin propaganda to jusify forced statification of agriculture beginning in the late '20s. This did lead to famine, as the peasants slaughtered their herds and resisted their enserfment to the state bosses. There was effectively nil kulak or private landlord class in Russia at that time. These classes were eliminated in the 1917 revolution. By the early '20s the percentage of peasants with enough land to hire laborers to work for them was less than 1%. The purpose of forced statification was primitive accumulation by the coordinator class, that is, increase the rate of exploitation of the agricultural labor force to suck down profits that can be used for industrialization.

author by Waynepublication date Thu May 11, 2006 05:12author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Stalin School challenges me to give evidence that there were “tens of millions” killed under Stalin. I refer him to his highlighted Internet reference, which concludes: “Although it's too early to be taking sides with absolute certainty, a consensus seems to be forming around a death toll of 20 million. This would adequately account for all documented nastiness without straining credulity.” He himself concludes that there were “9 million ‘surplus’ deaths throughout the Stalin period...” and that “The number of political killings ...were indeed massive...” Which is the POLITICAL point. The rest of his statements are indeed comparable to Holocaust denial, not so much in the denial of numbers killed, but in the denial of the reality of what Stalin’s Russia was like for workers and peasants. Stalin School should feel free to explain to U.S. workers that he and his comrades will do to them what Stalin did to the Russian workers! See how far it gets them.

author by Pat Murtaghpublication date Thu May 11, 2006 15:25author email murtaghpatrick at hotmail dot comauthor address author phone Report this post to the editors

The actual academic death toll of Stalin's terror hovers around the 25 million mark. You may read some biased estimates that put it much higher (66 million-close to Mao's beloved corpses) such as Sollznitzn, but these are wrong. The historical documentation is available to anybody who may decide to look. This OBVIOUSLY excludes those who think that mass murder was and is and will be a VERY good thing.
From a pure "corpse count" Stalin was about twice as bad as Hitler. We won't get into the mass starvation of the "Great Leap Backward" under the sort of state that Leninists propose to recreate after history has proven them even more brutal than most of their critics claimed.
Such is the power of belief.
The present day Maoist cultists who will continue to haunt anarchist sites until the end of time can believe all sorts of wierd things, but I think they should be treated EXACTLY as a fundamentalist who comes onto your site and says that God will punish you for disagreeing with 1.000th of the Christians alive in this world. these people are MUCH more important than the defenders of Stalin today.
All that being said statements like "Stalin's state was weak" are absurd from simple common sense. You don't have to have the personal experience of relatives who were killed under Stalin (my own), the meeting of other similar people or any academic knowledge. It is simple common sense for anyone who examine the record in even a most cursory fashion without the religious conviction that any data that disagrees with their views is "manipulated"(as if recently released Soviet archives were "manipulated".
The "bottom line" is that apologists for mass murder are NOT "our friends" and never will be, no matter what the noises that they make. They should be treated like any other fascist. Fascists often (USUALLY-ALWAYS ?) make "anti-capitalist" "noises". Why should anarchists pay attention to the noises coming from one pathetic attempt at a ruling class as opposed to another ? The Maoists that post here and elsewhere are simply pathetic. The ONLY threat that they pose is NOT to the powers that be but to us if we take them too seriously.
Pat the M.

author by Stalin Schoolpublication date Fri May 12, 2006 03:48author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the high Stalinist period of the US communist movement when they helped build the CIO, overcame the historical white chauvinism of the left, and sent thousands of volunteers to "surplus death" some of those Phalangists in Spain?

I think radical people, working class and otherwise, are wising up to the lies of our masters.

Because the POLITICAL point is WHO is fighting for WHAT, not some grotesque moral calculus that blames every dead person in a period of war on the leading forces of the left. What did anarchists do to stop fascism? They complained about Stalin. And dissolved as a movement for forty fucking years after the fiasco of Spain when they couldn't hold their mud long enough to beat Franco. No Pasaran? Well, okay. Pasé. Because to the lost and confused that you aim to generate, their is NO difference between anti-fascism and fascism.

Which explains the continuing and profound failure of your "movement" (scene, subculture, sects) to rise above the same fucking stew.

It's why you're arguing about this now while this country goosesteps off to Christian insanity. It's why the communists in this country are fighting fascism, while you continue to shit on the memory of those same soldiers that liberated Berlin.

THAT is the political point of fascist/capitalist historiography and why the Trotskyism of your analysis shows through for the "third camp" bullshit that it is.

You have no movement. You have no army. You have no history as "anti-authoritarians" besides your own (inevitable) defeat, which you always cast as "betrayal."

BTW: how is the anarchist movement fairing among the working classes? How did Trotskyism's fanatical hatred towards socialism convince workers they were any better?

Oh. It didn't.

My favorite Stalinists:

Fred Hampton.
Mao Zedong.
Leila Khaled.
Che Guevara.
And the existing, fighting armies of liberation on a tear throughout the world right now -- growing, learning and doing BETTER instead of giving up, talking shit and signing up with the class enemy's "school of falsification."

author by Waynepublication date Fri May 12, 2006 11:07author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Again, Stalin School of Correctification (his name is a take-off of Trotsky's The Stalinist School of Falsification) has written a lengthy response to me, although not as lengthy as his first screed. Alas, in neither post does he find space to respond to any of my essay's arguments against Stalinism. This is, of course, because he cannot. (He also does not comment on the fact that his challenge to me about Stalin killing tens of millions fell flat when I cited his own authority.)

The arguments he does raise shows that he, like most Maoists, lives in an imagined past. He does not know that the 60s and 70s are over. Marxism-Leninism collapsed in most of the world. The states founded by Marxist-Leninists have consistently turned into traditional capitalism. Even in places where it still exists, few really expect that it will produce true liberation. Stalinism, Leninism, Trotskyism, and, to a degree, Marxism, have been discredited to millions. The most dynamic, "revolutionary" movement in the Muslim/Arab world is (unfortunately) authoritarian versions of Islam. Better than that is a worldwide growth of anarchism among the radical youth and working class. This is the exciting reality of this period of radicalization. The Maoists just don't get it.

I could analyze his remarkably dopey and contradictory arguments: the anarchists' failure in Spain shows that they were no good, but the Stalinists' failed struggle in Spain shows that they were great; that the Russian people fought hard against the German invader shows the value of Stalin's leadership, but that the Ukrainians instead often greeted the German invaders (at first, anyway) shows...the value of Stalin's leadership. And so on. But it is not worth going on. He won't get it.

author by Waynepublication date Fri May 12, 2006 11:12author address author phone Report this post to the editors

No, sorry, Trotsky's book was the Stalinist School of Slander. It has been so long since I read this stuff... (Trotsky was also capable of slander, such as in his written attack on the rebelling sailors of Kronstadt.) Someone should write a book, The Maoist Method of Mendacity.

author by Anarkismo Editorial Group - Anarkismopublication date Tue May 23, 2006 22:04author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Part 2 The Bureaucratic Ruling Class vs. Democratic Self-Management can be found at http://www.anarkismo.net/newswire.php?story_id=3063

author by bpublication date Wed May 24, 2006 04:05author address author phone Report this post to the editors

what ever you want to call what was going on in russia, clr james and the "johnson-forest" tendency have a great analysis in "State Capitalism and World Revolution"

http://www.akpress.org/2004/items/statecapitalismworldrevolution

author by ?publication date Fri May 26, 2006 03:30author address author phone Report this post to the editors

Wayne -- Can you explain how on earth one man killed "tens of millions" of people?

We know how Hitler did it. It required vast machineries, crematorea, etc.

Also, in terms of "political" killings: what is your method for determining this?

I am very interested in the sources that Price is using, and I do not accept the basic theory he proposes, noticing the Soviet Union to have a mixed economy, that the political thrust of the Soviet Union is somehow moot.

There were millions of reactionaries, nazi collaborators, and others who needed to be controlled by the state.

Can you describe massacres that happened?

Or were people killed in "ones and twos" until it was "tens of millions."

Where were the death camps?

I've never heard this discussed in any seriousness, and I very much distrust the Cold War (and Russian right-wing) historiography of the time.

author by Waynepublication date Fri May 26, 2006 11:16author address author phone Report this post to the editors

(1) For an overview of sources and details, I suggest looking at the highlighted Internet site which is cited by Stalin School above. If you scroll down to where the author reviews the literature on Stalin’s massacres, you will have a good listing of the literature.

When ? expresses “distrust [of] the Cold War historiography,” apparently meaning the pro-US side of the Cold War, I would say that I distrust statements by historians on both sides of the Cold War, but that does not mean that I have to leave my brains outside the door. I do not *automatically* disbelieve what either side said. (Apparerently ? does not disbelieve what the spokesmen for US imperialism said about the Nazis.) I can make judgements and evaluate statements. In fact, I believe that both sides of the Cold War sometimes told the truth...about the *other* side! The U.S. spokesmen often told true things about the Russians and the Russian Communists told true things about the US. But still what they said has to be evaluated.

(2) HOW did Stalin (“one man”) kill all those people? asks ?. Well it was like this: At the top were the show trials of the old leaders, Lenin’s old Central Committee members, all of those still living were killed off. Then there were lower level trials, first of members of the oppositions, then of supporters of Stalin, until all the former members of the Bolshevik Party from before 1917 were convicted. Many were immediately “executed.” Others were sent to prisons which were mostly slave labor camps. Over time most of the political prisoners were rounded up in the camps and shot. Then there were millions of workers and peasants rounded up to work in the slave labor camps to build the big dams and instillations. Very many died from overwork and poor food. Then there were the peasants forced from their farms into collective farms which had not yet been established--millions of them. Many died. Not to mention the artificial famine in the Ukraine, where grain was collected by the state and sold abroad, leaving little or nothing for the peasants to eat. Many starved to death.

(3) ? writes, “There were millions of reactionaries, nazi collaborators, and others who needed to be controlled by the state.” Now I ask ?, where do YOU get your information? Can you cite any research which says this? Or are you just relying on old statements by Stalinist thugs who were justifying their mass murders?

(4)”I do not accept the basic theory he proposes, noticing the Soviet Union to have a mixed economy, that the political thrust of the Soviet Union is somehow moot.” I have no idea what this means. If ? is accusing me of claiming that the Soviet Union had a mixed economy, I am not. Stalinist state enterprises and its independent enterprises were all capitalist. See the next two parts of this series.

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