Can you be a Marxist-Leninist without liking Stalin...

lel

Yes, but here is a question. Why don't you like Stalin?

A lot of people find that they don't like Stalin simply because of the western propaganda surrounding him and don't have a genuine criticism of his policies. (i.e. not liking Stalin because he killed 100 gorillion people with his bare hands and single handedly plunged the USSR into a famine - many westerners unironically believe this).

It's called being a trotskyist brother

If you don’t like Stalin there’s a very good chance you’re just a crypto-liberal who’s read Marx

Depends what you mean by "like Stalin."

The Communist Party of the Soviet Union after 1956 upheld Stalin as a revolutionary and someone who presided over the construction of socialism, but who also did bad things: archive.org/details/OnOvercomingCultIndividual

This position was repeated by virtually every other pro-Soviet party on the planet, such as the Communist Party of Cuba.

If by not "liking Stalin" you mean denouncing him as a traitor to socialism or whatever then no.

i "like" Stalin, but even if you ignore the holodomor myth there's the deportation of the ingush and the chechens and the purges of course, it makes sense most public communists try to avoid talking about him

You shouldn't ignore the holodomor meme you should confront it. It's blatant Nazi propaganda.

ofc, i always have sources at hand
archive.org/details/DouglasTottleFraudFamineAndFascism
web.archive.org/web/20180629091151/http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h-russia&month=0205&week=a&msg=G9gRj0I/eXnblGCPQyYXlA&user=&pw
b-ok.cc/book/1173369/1dd4cf

Plenty of mainstream historians of the USSR argue against the claim that the famine was intentionally created. Even Robert Conquest.

I argued with a Ukrainian nationalist "socialist" over the subject here: reddit.com/r/ChapoTrapHouse/comments/anf8xs/looks_like_the_imperialist_chuds_got_to_wikipedia/eftno2a/ (I'm HysniKapo, he's LunarTruthMonger)

Isn't Stalin Denial as bad as Holocaust Denial? Like it or not he made so alot of people died.

No one is denying that a lot of people died. Difference is Stalin didn't wage campaigns to exterminate "inferior races." Most of the deaths attributed to Stalin were part of efforts to rapidly modernize the Soviet Union to meet growing external threats (namely as the rise of fascism.) The Great Purges were likewise in the context of fears of fascist espionage and sabotage.

George Washington killed tons of people too yet most amerifats worship him. Simply "killing people" isn't enough to throw out a person's entire legacy. Also killing reactionaries isn't a bad thing.

Stalin was a fascist

Socialists cannot be fascist.

In fairness, many of those who died during collectivization were ordinary peasants. Also, in regards to the Great Purges, Khrushchev noted:

The same thing was repeated in the republics, e.g. "of the 644 delegates to the Tenth Georgian Party Congress in May 1937, 425 had been arrested and shot." (Amy Knight, Beria: Stalin's First Lieutenant, p. 84.)

You mean the truth? There is no evidence whatsoever of this "Stalin" you mentioned. No such man has ever lived.

Yes, Bordigists are such.

They're hardly Leninists.

Bordigists call themselves unorthodox Leninists. They do adhere to Leninism but reject democratic centralism.

In what ways do they adhere to Leninism besides paying lipservice to Lenin? Democratic centralism is one of the defining features of Leninism.

Trots are Marxists and Leninists but anti-"Marxists-Leninists" but they reject the ideology of the USSR even after Stalin's death.

Yes. Whether you support long-dead historical figures / countries that have since long stopped existing or not is usually an irrelevant issue. I personally don't think Stalin is anywhere near as bad as he tends to be portrayed, but if someone takes a consistently socialist and anti-imperialist stance and is willing to help build the socialist movement, what do I care how they feel about Stalin, Mao or Ho Chi Minh. Take sectarianism to the trash.

Anti-Soviet Trots are neocons. Anti-Soviet anything will eventually reveal itself to not be leftist at all.

no, since Stalin basically defined how a socialist state is run

Wew lad. I can't think of a country that doesn't have 2+ communist parties.

Vatican City

Soviet anything will eventually reveal itself to not be leftist at all by selling out. The Soviet Union was capitalistic by the fucking 60s.

t. grandfaggot of a kulak

Then where was the capitalist class?

Not just Stalin, but the conditions of clinging to life and being beset on all sides by enemies. The Soviet Union was forced into a state of emergency from the beginning, and as a result what was meant to be emergency measures for a desperate situation became the standard of socialist governance, and was even subsequently justified as Marxist theory.

What’s your position on the class composition of the USSR? Did the bureaucrats/nomenklatura constitute a separate class?

I don't think they did. A bureaucrat can be corrupt and self-serving, but he is still an employee.

I think Szymanski's book remains the best critique of the "USSR was state-capitalist" thesis: archive.org/details/IsTheRedFlagFlying

The second best is this: archive.org/details/TheMythOfCapitalismReborn (although it takes its own idiosyncratic view that the USSR wasn't socialist either, but merely a transitional society)

I can understand why he inspires such widespread love and admiration even to this day, I used to admire him myself. But he wasn't a pleasant person to meet in-person. He was a petty bully that would not tolerate anything less than being the dominant figure in every relationship with others. His achievements, while very real, are still hugely overstated by many socialists routinely. His presence was not a necessity for the survival of the Soviet state. The pact with Germany was necessary, but his government's decision to ship 100's of thousands of tons of petroleum, grain, manganese etc. etc. to Hitler's war machine stands as one of the all-time great blunders of the 20th century. Without which the Wehrmacht could scarcely have defended their borders properly, let alone launched a drive to Moscow.

All those resources provided the Soviets with things they couldn't produce though. Scopes,machine parts,industrial equipment.

It's not like Britain or France were going to trade with them

In retrospect Stalin obviously made some mistakes (The Purges / Displacement of entire ethnic groups from fear of separatism / brief rehabilitation of the Orthodox Church etc) but complete Anti-Soviet tier rejection of him is also wrong

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I don't think that was a mistake. As American journalist Edgar Snow noted, "Atheism is still taught in the schools, and young people, except where parents have been extremely zealous, remain indifferent to the idea of God. Any notion that religious instruction might be be admitted to educational institutions was dispelled. . . . Despite the fact that 'believers' persist even among the school-teachers, the State can afford to be more tolerant, since the power of the Church to organize resistance has been completely broken. It possesses no important economic power. It can in no way control or influence livelihood or threaten the socialist system, nor does it any longer criticize Communism." (The Pattern of Soviet Power, 1945, pp. 188-189)

A 1954 Central Committee resolution likewise noted,

(Source: Robert H. McNeal, Resolutions and Decisions of the CPSU Vol. 4, 1974, pp. 35-36.)

Just wanna say I'm happy you're posting here these days.

Nigga if your countries communist parties haven’t had at least 2 splits are they even really communist parties?

t. Yvan Craipeau
marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/11/ussr.htm

Nothing of this is a mistake

I don’t have time to read these atm, but I’ll take a look at them later. What I’d like to know now is how people can say that the bureaucrats weren’t a ruling class when they had, in practice, a monopoly on political power, and exclusive control over the means of production and allocation of surplus product. I skimmed Trotsky’s piece and found that he mentioned that the statement that the bureaucracy is a class has no roots in dialectic analysis. But this seems to me to be dogmatism, and an adherence to dialectical method even in the face of empirically verifiable facts. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s a duck.

The CPSU carried out mass rehabilitations after 1953 and acknowledged that the deportations were unjustified.

How did they have control over the means of production? They couldn't own it. They couldn't hire workers to work for them. And it is precisely by being tasked with allocating the surplus product, rather than extracting surplus-value (as all exploiting classes do), that signifies they do not qualify as such.

And while they held political power, this does not make them a ruling class by that fact alone. The Trump Administration is not its own class just because it holds political power. Soviet officialdom were tasked with upholding the existing economic system. As I wrote elsewhere:

Meant to say "as the capitalist class does," since surplus value comes into being under capitalism. Earlier exploiting classes appropriated the surplus product via ownership of property.

But yeah point still stands: simply having the ability to determine how society's surplus product should be allocated does not make one a ruling class. It makes one a government official.

No, but they had a monopoly on state power, and the state owned the MoP. So they effectively controlled them.
That's because under a bourgeois system politicians and the government is ultimately controlled by the bourgeoisie through various means. The state under capitalism is simply the guarantor of the interests of a ruling class which exercises real power. Under undemocratic socialism there is no third party that the government acts as an agent of, and so it makes sense that they act as their own agents.
That operates under the assumption that ruling classes must behave the same way under all modes of production. Even if you want to use this definition, it could be argued that there was expropriation on some level, even if it took the form of corruption that enriched the bureaucracy and their families. But more importantly I think this is missing the real point of what defines a ruling class. A feudal lord who was extremely generous, and allowed his subjects to keep 99.9% of their produce wouldn't cease to be a feudal lord. What makes him a feudal lord is the fact that he controls the land and has the power over the surplus and the state. Likewise the fact that the actual benefit to the bureaucracy was minimal and often came through illegal means doesn't preclude them from being a ruling class. Imo they were a ruling class, just one whose interests were not always at odds with the general mass of workers under most circumstances. However Marx, Mao, and other theorists all readily acknowledge that the interests of various classes can coincide under certain circumstances, like when threatened by imperialism as the USSR was.

In addition the argument that the bureaucrats were not a ruling class presents a conundrum. Since the USSR was not a democracy, and thus not under the control of the workers, it begs the question, who was the ruling class in the USSR? If you want to argue that it was the workers, then you are in a position of claiming that the workers may be the ruling class without actually exercising political power. This seems to throw a wrench in a key part of Marxist theory, and puts you in the position of having to completely re-evaluate what actually defines the class character of a state. It really seems like an issue of occam's razor, either the bureaucrats were a ruling class, or the fundamentals of Marxism will need to be re-examined.

So what's make a ruling class?

The class in control of the state. Bureaucrats are not a class, and there was no capitalist class in the USSR after the end of NEP. What existed were workers and collective farm peasants, as well as a stratum called the intelligentsia whose members came from both classes.

The question is whether they *owned* them. Brezhnev could not hire labor, he could not accumulate capital, he could not buy or sell property. Nor could any of his associates. The surplus product was not theirs for the taking to dispose of as they wished. Revenue, raw materials and goods went to government agencies to be allocated elsewhere in the economy and society.

Your incredibly generous feudal lord comparison makes no sense for the same reason: Brezhnev and Co. were not equivalent to feudal lords. Nor were they capitalists who "altruistically" give many millions of dollars to charitable causes. And they obviously weren't slaveowners either.

I don't see the point here. When Mussolini or Hitler suppressed bourgeois parties except their own, that didn't suddenly make fascist officials a new class nor did it deprive the capitalists of their status as the ruling class of Italy and Germany.

Lenin pointed out, "That in the history of revolutionary movements the dictatorship of individuals was very often the expression, the vehicle, the channel of the dictatorship of the revolutionary classes has been shown by the irrefutable experience of history. . . . If we are not anarchists, we must admit that the state, that is, coercion, is necessary for the transition from capitalism to socialism. The form of coercion is determined by the degree of development of the given revolutionary class, and also by special circumstances, such as, for example, the legacy of a long and reactionary war and the forms of resistance put up by the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie. There is, therefore, absolutely no contradiction in principle between Soviet (that is, socialist) democracy and the exercise of dictatorial powers by individuals. The difference between proletarian dictatorship and bourgeois dictatorship is that the former strikes at the exploiting minority in the interests of the exploited majority, and that it is exercised—also through individuals—not only by the working and exploited people, but also by organisations which are built in such a way as to rouse these people to history-making activity. (The Soviet organisations are organisations of this kind.)"

Obviously democracy is good and important for socialism, and its violation has a corrosive and demoralizing effect, but the absence of a developed democratic system does not mean a new ruling class has emerged from the ranks of government officials.

At the end of the day, as I said, there was a mass "quitting of jobs" in 1989-1991 on the part of this supposed new class of bureaucrats. They clearly didn't enjoy their role and would much have preferred to be capitalists, even going so far as to endorse the dismantling of the Soviet state. Rather odd behavior for a ruling class.

So which one is it? The bureaucrats control the state but aren't a ruling class?

There's no contradiction.

Again, to cite fascism, Hitler was Führer of Germany. He oversaw the state machinery and theoretically had pretty much unlimited power. The ruling class of Germany remained the capitalists, and it is this class whom Nazi officials (including Hitler) served.

So who controlled the state in the third Reich?Hitler or the capitalists?

"If, however, it is conceded that the present war will provoke not revolution but a decline of the proletariat, then there remains another alternative: the further decay of monopoly capitalism, its further fusion with the state and the replacement of democracy wherever it still remained by a totalitarian regime. The inability of the proletariat to take into its hands the leadership of society could actually lead under these conditions to the growth of a new exploiting class from the Bonapartist fascist bureaucracy. This would be, according to all indications, a regime of decline, signalizing the eclipse of civilization.

An analogous result might occur in the event that the proletariat of advanced capitalist countries, having conquered power, should prove incapable of holding it and surrender it, as in the USSR, to a privileged bureaucracy. Then we would be compelled to acknowledge that the reason for the bureaucratic relapse is rooted not in the backwardness of the country and not in the imperialist environment but in the congenital incapacity of the proletariat to become a ruling class. Then it would be necessary in retrospect to establish that in its fundamental traits the present USSR was the precursor of a new exploiting régime on an international scale.

We have diverged very far from the terminological controversy over the nomenclature of the Soviet state. But let our critics not protest: only by taking the necessary historical perspective can one provide himself with a correct judgment upon such a question as the replacement of one social régime by another. The historic alternative, carried to the end, is as follows: either the Stalin régime is an abhorrent relapse in the process of transforming bourgeois society into a socialist society, or the Stalin régime is the first stage of a new exploiting society. If the second prognosis proves to be correct, then, of course, the bureaucracy will become a new exploiting class. However onerous the second perspective may be, if the world proletariat should actually prove incapable of fulfilling the mission placed upon it by the course of development, nothing else would remain except openly to recognize that the socialist program based on the internal contradictions of capitalist society, ended as a Utopia. It is self evident that a new “minimum” program would be required for the defense of the interests of the slaves of the totalitarian bureaucratic society." - Trotsky 1939
marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1939/09/ussr-war.htm

The class nature of the state was capitalist. The Nazis were the party in charge of the state, carrying out the interests of the capitalist class which dominated the economy and were responsible for Hitler's ascendancy to begin with.

To go back to the USSR, Brezhnev and friends owed their positions to the socialist economic system and state structure built around it. A manager might request funds from central planners to repaint a factory and instead use said funds to buy a fancy steak from abroad, but that would be a case of abusing his job.

Like fucking Trotsky said the USSR was a degenerated workers state because the bureaucrats were sucking off the expanded labor productivity of the working class.

If that's the case the bourgeois were duped. They became increasingly subordinated to the dictates of the state's war economy and then the war effort after 1939. As it is capitalist interests are not a monolithic bloc but a series of interlocking interests that don't march in lock step. Bourgeois factions compete for scarce resources and different visions of society according to their hierarchy and position in production. In the Nazi's case they were very warm toward large industrial firms like Thyssen, Krupp, Siemens and IG Farben as far as rearmament was concerned but decidedly snubbed other bourgeois elements that would have preferred consumerism instead. Fascism, in other words, is not inevitble and doesn't even serve bourgeois interests as well as liberal democracy. Perhaps, at the time, the national bourgeoisie thought Hitler served their interests well, but experience disabused their ranks of this belief, which has logically led to the Pan European (and elitist) project of European integration following WWII.

Obviously there wasn't a monolithic bloc, hence why I wrote earlier how Mussolini and Hitler suppressed other bourgeois parties.

Dimitrov noted, "the accession to power of fascism must not be conceived of in so simplified and smooth a form, as though some committee or other of finance capital decided on a certain date to set up a fascist dictatorship. In reality, fascism usually comes to power in the course of a mutual, and at times severe, struggle against the old bourgeois parties, or a definite section of these parties, in the course of a struggle even within the fascist camp itself—a struggle which at times leads to armed clashes, as we have witnessed in the case of Germany, Austria and other countries."

Hence why the Comintern described fascism "as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital."

Still, the point is that no matter how much power Hitler and other Nazi officials (ministers, gauleiters, etc.) held, they were still the political representatives of the capitalist class. Obviously this doesn't mean every capitalist supported Hitler, just as the Bolsheviks initially found themselves at odds with certain workers under Menshevik influence (like the Printers' Union), but it doesn't change the fundamental class character of the state.

why did he deport ethnic populations to siberia if not to exterminate them

he wasn't fond of them

understandable. have a nice day

LMAO ISMAIL BTFO

adiós comrade

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...

le me, head of le jude department like a boss, peacefully handling the JQ with a small diplomatic agreement with an african country

Because if he were to simply order mass executions of the able-bodied male population, that would have caused a much greater demographic problem than shipping the entire population en masse to Siberia where they could begin life anew.

Again, the deportations were wrong, but if he was going to enact collective punishment based on reports of mass collaboration with the invaders, he could have taken a genuinely genocidal route if he so wanted.

To be fair that's a vastly different issue. Migration to the JAO was optional, and the Soviets wanted Jews around the world to see it as a secular, socialist alternative to Zionism which they could help build up, whereupon it was hoped it would grow to become an Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic within the RSFSR.

THE DAY OF THE DOCTOR WHEN?

WHEN?

Was it ever a lively place? also what does the doctor thing mean

No, but it seems to be fully dead now, with just Isnail responding to himself.
Look up the Doctor's Plot.

I've always regarded /marx/ as a place to ask questions. I don't post on here because /marx/ is "dead," I post on here 'cause I felt like it.

based snail

Oh please snail, you feel like it because it's boring to respond to yourself over and over again in /marx/.

i ask him questions all the time, he gets at least 3 a day in the ask me anything thread and maybe 1 in the ussr thread.

Which is snail false flagging himself.

ok den

Also i made a lil' snail icon that Ismail should start using, here it is

@iui < snail

More proof this is snail false flagging.

Pathetic.

@ini

...

sorry fren, will stop posting @ioi

If Zig Forums is dead you are probably a main reason for it. Please leave

There are many - poland, czechia, slovakia,…

Since when does Ismail post on Zig Forums?

Stalin was cool, and if you don't like him, you're a lib.

i was only shitposting, the other guy didn't seem serious either

You can't be Marxist if you think in terms of liking/disliking historical figures.

Which is unsurprising. Even Che was "Stalinist".

Also, last anti-Stalinist Marxist-Leninist movement ended up with Gorbachev. And nobody before him was particularly good (with the sole - and debatable - exception being Chernenko, but he didn't have enough time and was trying to revert destalinization).

MLs are also perfectly aware of what "criticism of Stalin" is meant to hide.

Most public "communists" are Liberal whores.

And Nazis called themselves Socialists.

Rejection of democratic centralism is usually understood as not adhering to Leninism.

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So far, everything anti-Soviet keeps revealing itself as Right-wing.

Neither nomenklatura nor bureaucrats could constitute a separate class.

If you want to look for different class, then you should look at upper management and specialists (neither of those are identified as bureaucrats and nomenklatura) - those could (and I would argue they were), but they could be only Petit-Bourgeoisie (i.e. effectively self-employed). Not Capitalists.

Much bigger blunder was Reich selling their military technologies to Soviet Union.

That remains to be proven. Reich did not collapse after it failed Blitzkrieg of 1941 and fought for 3 more years. I.e. Soviet resources weren't that crucial.

Revisionist CPSU. The very same CPSU that accepted Khrushchev's speech which is objectively false.

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Khrushchev's speech wasn't even published in the USSR until 1989. This was the official evaluation of the CPSU concerning Stalin: archive.org/details/OnOvercomingCultIndividual

What made the CPSU after Stalin "revisionist"?

Isn’t Krushchev recognized as a bad source on the Great Purge by the mainstream at this point?

Not exactly. Historians always regarded Khrushchev's speech as self-serving since it sought to exonerate the CPSU, the Soviet system, and Khrushchev's own role as an associate of Stalin. That didn't mean the speech's main theme of "Stalin was suspicious and did bad things" was wrong, just distorted since the goal was to draw as sharp a distinction between the deceased Stalin and everything else as possible.

But when it comes to the statistics Khrushchev gave which I quoted (70% of members and candidate members of CC elected at 17th Congress were arrested and shot, similar fate met a majority of the delegates), they're regarded as correct. To my knowledge not even Furr disputes those two statistics.

A wrong conception of communism. Krushchev thought that raw production output will lead to post-scarcity and distribution according to need. What he failed to realise is that communism also implies a change in social relations, which he severely undermined by giving the managerial class more power while reducing the amount of workers in the CPSU.

This is the same criticism Mao made of Stalin. Was Stalin also a "revisionist" in this sense?

I don't see how he substantially empowered managers. He reduced income differentials and, as the authors of The Myth of Capitalism Reborn note, "the decline of the proletarian composition of the party that had characterized the 20 years preceeding the 20th Congress was reversed beginning at the Congress."

To quote Szymanski (Is the Red Flag Flying? pp. 88-89):