Sino-Soviet Split

Volume II of the Selected Works of Jiang Zemin, published in 2012, notes it was translated by "The Bureau for the Compilation and Translation of Works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin Under the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China."

Likewise party occasions in China will often show banners of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin (unlike, say, Cuba where only Marx, Engels and Lenin will be shown.)

Vietnam apparently never "de-Stalinized" either (Stalin's works were still sold in Vietnamese bookstores in the late 80s), nor did the DPRK to my knowledge (Kim Jong Il explicitly praised Stalin in a 1996 text, "Respecting the Forerunners of the Revolution is a Noble Moral Obligation of Revolutionaries.")

Tbh this is what a lot of the major issues of 20th century socialism boil down to, even its something that most ☭TANKIE☭s seem to admit without realizing it.

khrushchev: stalin man bad
mao: wtf no

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Rated PG Parental Guidance pseud rant ahead

Stalin was Robespierre and Napoleon rolled into one and imprinted himself in the notion of socialism itself, and the left really has to come to grips with that heritage. Complete disavowal ("it wasn't true socialism") or gleeful celebration of Stalin's reign seem to be the only two camps. We must own up to it. Whether we like it or not, it was a form of socialism, no matter how much off-target it hit. But we don't have to apologize for it. Even past the simple fact that contrition for something you haven't done is spooky nonsense, there's the very significant matter that a war-ravaged, semi-feudal arctic wasteland the size of a continent became one of the only 2 world superpower in a mere 3 decades. Not even we stop to think about it, but this is, by a huge margin, the fastest development in mankind's history, and it's unlikely it'll be surpassed. It's most likely the fastest increase in living standards in relative numbers too, tho the data-gathering at the time isn't enough to properly prove it.

Still, compare and contrast. Despite this amazing development, Stalinist USSR was arguably socialism at its worse for other reasons, which I don't think I have to enumerate here. Capitalism, on the other hand, "came into the world oozing mud and blood from every pore". The scale of the violence perpetrated is incomparable, and very, very few people have the slightest ideas of how bad it was and still is. Have you ever seen a liberal, let alone a reactionary, mention the hell on Earth that was the Congo Free State? Now that was as capitalist as it gets, as it was probably the only time in history where there existed a market on severed human hands. Did you see them bring up the European powers testing their new industrialized weaponry by machine-gunning and gassing entire African tribes? But everyone is well aware of the time they used those on other Europeans. Australian aboriginals being hunted for sport? I confess I don't have proper sources, but there's some evidence that life for the Tasmanian tribes was made so unbearable by colonization that it might have been the only time in history (capitalism has a lot of firsts) where one or more people's simply decided to stop reproducing in order to shorten their collective suffering.

And this is all just the tip of the iceberg. I just bring up these so I can state with no doubts that socialism at its worse was still nothing compared to the capitalist day-to-day. Stalin imprinted his pathological personality on socialism, and committed terrible things that were largely unnecessary, and that's one of the points that usually are missed. The excesses of Stalin (and Mao) – the famines, the mass relocations, the collective punishments, the routine intrusion in private life – were unnecessary, and tho this might seem, at first glance, to make these events more awful, the other side of the coin is that they weren't necessary parts of the system. It's undisputable that the 30s famine, the Great Purge, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, on the whole, stalled development of the socialist societies. They were products of their time, and not systemic crimes, inherent in socialism. In capitalism, it's the exact opposite. The pitiless dispossession of whole masses of peoples, grinding their lives away for 14 or even more hours a day, and terminating colonial peoples so these things could repeat further, all of them were absolutely integral and necessary for capitalism to develop and reach its current form. Mass violence against the weak is part and parcel of it, not out of some horrible spook that can be averted and give capitalism a human face, but out of simple self-perpetuation. The human suffering it entails isn't incidental, but rather both causal and consequential of its continued existance. Capitalism with a human face is as paradoxical as dry water. It had to commit these atrocities in order to come into being (if you forgive the slight anachronism), and tho it has given up on extermination (for now), the other crimes are happening this very moment, only farther away fro the eyes of the peoples of develop countries, giving the illusion that capitalism has improved.

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Such improvement is localized and temporary, of course. Capitalism has merely expanded in more ways than one. The superexploitation of the dispossessed still happens just as it did in the early industrialization of the UK, only now, instead of the proles, the porkies and any in-betweener inhabiting different neighborhoods, they are in different countries. Perhaps as important as the offshoring of exploitation, was the offshoring of its visibility. This keeps the people in the developed countries as ignorant of the human suffering caused by capitalism today as they are of that inflicted against their own ancestors in their own homeland, until not that long ago, and thus tolerant or even enthusiastic about it. You can bring up the worst crimes committed in the name of socialism, and not only will it, in all likelihood, have been a historically isolated incident extraneous to socialism itself, but it still be dwarfed by what capitalism causes just by dint of existing. Throw all charges against Stalin and his heirs as you like, and socialism would still have the moral high ground. For all its faults, systemic or not, it has never ended entire tribes and peoples. Do you understand just how abominable this is? As much as people cry about the crimes of communism, you can still hold your head high, knowing that its existance didn't spell the extinction of entire nations and cultures, wiped out forever. God only knows how much human "experience", let's call it, has been lost, irretrievably. And not a single damn anti-socialist will ever have the balls to own up to their legacy, and for good reason, because it would entail accepting the immanent inhumanity, or antihumanism, of capitalism. People who want to perpetuate this chimera simply have to be either ignorant of its full scope, or accept their unacceptable legacy.

And lastly, let me bring up the start of this rant. We have to abandon these two extremes of disowning or enshrining the past. It was its own phenomenon, it accomplished some goals and completely forsook others, but in the end, it fell – or rather, was dismantled, but nonetheless, it's a closed chapter. Let's do what Zizek says, and abandon ideology. Trying to enact Stalinism again would be as ridiculous as if the Bolsheviks had tried to emulate the even more ill-fated Paris Commune, with which they, nevertheless, measured themselves up constantly. That's what it means to abandon ideology, as it was deftly defined by Marx: "they do not know it but they are doing it". It means always being self-aware, and never falling to the twin weapons of reactionay pathology, dexontextualization and ahistoricism. It's owning up to the past, studying its every detail, but leaving it where it was. It's about always taking care not to get spooked, and keeping eyes on the goal of elevating mankind instead of adoring idols and dogmas. It's about always questioning yourself, without being paralyzed by doubt. Or to put in a single word, sublation. As in dialectics, we ought to incorporate all the theses and provide antitheses, so that we may create something new and better.

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Great effort post.

Good post user. I think it should also be added that even this more “ethical” and “cleaner” form of capitalism that most westerners imagine exists, which is to say, capitalism which has simply exported its worst crimes to the third world, only emerges in the wake of the rise of socialism. The dark satanic mills only get moved offshore when the ruling class begins to fear that the Soviets are making them look bad. The Soviet Union meanwhile does the opposite, in the sense that it’s worst failures only arise thanks to the pressures from the outside. The early Soviet Union abolished the death penalty, released captured Tsarist officers and agents, etc, and only changed those policies when it became clear that they were not practical of the Reds wanted to win the war. The purges and famine emerged in part out of a need to rapidly industrialized and to avoid internal subversion, in order to deal with the very real threat of invasion. In other words, capitalism only became slightly less horrific when threatened by socialism, while socialism only abandoned its principles in favour of drastic self preservation when threatened by capitalism.

autistic sectarian and anti materialist division. Proper shit show from all involved, complete shambles, probably the biggest mark against us in history.

John Pilger has good info on abuse of abos

also this post is dank AF

Are you gonna post on Zig Forums now? That would be great. Should get a tripcode here though.

No, I just happened to visit here and replied to this topic.

pls stay forever

come by more often

Well, there was that one time Stalin wanted to have Mao executed, but was talked out of it at the last minute

he was just joking lol no need to worry fucking mao piece of shit its just a prank

Sources???????????????????????

Maoists are complete retards. At least with Trots, you know they read or understand some Marxist theory. With Maoists on the other hand, you can't even be sure they're even literate.

Are you sure about that?

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Roo should just drop the communist aesthetic (or keep it very low-key) and embrace his role as left-wing Alex Jones. He'd be 10x more successful and it'd be more effective at getting his anti-imperialist message across.

thanks for effortpost

OP here. First off, those are some great sources for the ideological divide that I would never have found otherwise, thanks a lot.

Was it really though? To my view, saying that the Sino-Soviet split was primarily based on ideology is like saying that U.S. imperialism picks its targets based on a shortage of democracy. Material interests ultimately govern imperialist conduct, even if the imperialists themselves believe their own bullshit about "defending American values".

In the Sino-Soviet case, you have China accusing the USSR of attempting to restore capitalism, with most of the evidence coming from cutting deals with the imperialist USA - arms control, etc. - and the subsequent softness on US leaders in the Soviet press to preserve those deals. From there, in order to defend the cause of socialism, China makes a military alliance with the USA itself, and backs US imperialist interests in its press - literally refusing to denounce the coup that overthrew Allende for example. After having made this alliance with capitalism in the name of anti-revisionism, China reintroduces capitalism itself, and afterward invades a socialist country it had previously supported (Vietnam).

The theory with the most explanatory power here seems to be Offensive Realism of bourgeois IR theory, which basically poses that states have inherently contradictory interests by virtue of being states, and that they make their alliances based on maintaining a Balance of Power to ensure one strong interest cannot gain an advantage over the others. This would explain why China would choose U.S. imperialism over its natural ideological ally, but it doesn't explain the economic dimension of why two allegedly socialist states would behave like imperialist powers in the first place. I suppose that Trotskyist theory on the nature of the ML states would be the best place to look here?

I will admit that there's a big ideological factor of Deng's revisionist faction. The alliance with U.S. imperialism began while the state was under the firm control of Mao and the Cultural Revolution though, so I'm still skeptical of this idea.

Reading all this revolutionary phraseology employed for obvious imperialist considerations, like celebrating hydrogen bomb tests, supporting Pinochet, praising the EEC as "unity against hegemonism" while denouncing Comecon as "neo-colonialist" just makes me cynical. A big factor in my radicalization was a desire to abolish war, but twentieth century socialism clearly did not do that, and I lack the theoretical understanding to explain why.

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Not really. To Trots (at least the non-Cliffite ones), the USSR and China were still workers' states, albeit "degenerated"/"deformed."

So they simply attribute the Sino-Soviet split to nationalism on the part of the "Stalinist bureaucracies" of both countries.

Yeah, as Piero Gleijeses notes in his book Conflicting Missions: "[Gerald] Ford left for his first trip to China [December 1975], where he met Mao Zedong and other top Chinese leaders and was lectured on U.S. lack of resolve vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. On his return Ford told the Republican congressional leadership, 'There is a very strong anti-Soviet attitude. It is almost unbelievable. The Chinese . . . urged us to prevent Soviet expansion anywhere, but especially in the Middle East, the Pacific and in Africa.'"

It's important to remember though that in the 1960s, China *was* viewed as a bigger threat than the USSR by many Western commentators. The move towards rapprochement with the US didn't occur till the famous Kissinger-Nixon visits, and it seems the downfall of Lin Biao was also connected with this, since he was Mao's second-in-command and designated successor but also apparently against the rapprochement, whereas Zhou Enlai (sympathetic to Deng) and the Gang of Four (obviously antagonistic to Deng) both supported it.