Grover Furr strikes again

The best username I've ever seen online was "Grover Baby Furr." Anyways that's all I've got

The accusation that Furr isn't "a real historian" is laughable. I majored in history and most of my professors weren't even reading the footnotes of the authors they were criticising/praising. Furr actually takes his time to sit down and artistically checks every footnote of Kotkin, flies to Russia and actually digs through the archives (he speaks Russian) - this is sometimes more effort than most "credible" historians do. It's quite clear that Kotkin tried to gish-gallop the reader with thousands of footnotes.

Every attack I've seen on Furr is against his person - that he "isn't peer-reviewed", that he "isn't an historian" etc. but never against the content.

This reminds me when I visited economics subreddit (don't remember exactly which one) and they had a discussion about Marxist economics. The top post had a critique of LTV, in which he discredited it by saying that moving a pile of rocks from one place to other doesn't increase the value of them.

How do you deal with 'subjective value' bullcrap? I see that all the time and these people just choose to ignore both socialist and capitalist planning, at all.
It's like they think the entire world is just a magical supermarket and nothing before that or after that ever existed.

I don't even know how to argue for subjective value. Neither the customer nor the salesman sell products at what they personally value them, the customer makes a cost/benefit analysis and the salesman tries to sell his product for the highest price possible without hurting his sales output. This debunks any notion of subjectivity even if you don't believe the LTV is true. The only time subjectivity plays a role is when payment is optional or a donation, like community theatre events or whatever.

Yeah, even those who majored in economics are often painfully ignorant about Marxian economics (because it's optional in the curriculum if being there at all). I encourage anybody who has a solid grasp at Marxism to walk into economic subeddits without fear. Don't get caught up into arguing for Keynesianism - neoclassical economists will often change the subject when talking about Marx and want to talk about tax rates or whatever to trick you into defending Keynesian economics by making provoking neoliberal statements. But to BTFO even the most economic-savy academics is really is when Marxism is talked about.

I know, but people think enterpreneurs are some sort of wizard class and that
is just decided from market forces, which they deny to specify while totally ignoring things like input-output tables or the massive amount of planning going on in capitalist economies.
Should I just wait until their wages before we have the same conversation?
sage for offtopic

I think if you want to go on reddit to talk about Marxism stay away from economics subreddits. Not because of fear but rather because most of people who go there are neoliberals, which pretty much means they are well off and rich. I think subreddit such as /r/explainlikeimfive and similar are the best since they get visited by actual people and not alien overlords from outer space who want to exploit everyone who can breathe. Seriously, go over at /r/neoliberal and tell me if you think real living people are behind these posts. I certainly would feel more comfortable sitting next to a conservative boomer that a neolib.

From everything I've heard from Furr, it seems like he's actually pretty well measured and doesn't exonerate Stalin for X,Y,Z explicitly, he just says that of all the accusations that he's researched evidence for, it's been found false or inconclusive. And he really does have countless examples of this stuff. This doesn't mean that Stalin dindu nuffin but that's what it ends up getting twisted into. What's more telling about Furr is the things he doesn't choose to cover, which usually contains more general critiques of Stalin and the USSR in that time period, which in some part still hold. I think it's basically just a particular kind of rabid ML you're talking about here that tends to project this onto Furr, and since regardless of whether he's being taken seriously by others, he's actually just never given an opportunity to actually engage with more reputable or unbiased contingents. Some of the bad rep he gets basically is guilt by association is what I'm saying, and in part that's because of his lack of visibility outside of those circles, which, in no uncertain terms, is definitely poltically useful in the same way that conspiracy theorists are discredited purposefully by certain actors.

Grover Furr Tankies piss me off because I can’t tell if they are being strategically dishonest or just retarded.

Tried to watched recently some lectures by historians on 20th century socialism from my country. Within the very first 5 minutes I had to cringe. They use formulaic language as "as we all know", "the horrors of communism", "it is established beyond doubt", not realizing where (cold war era and post-fall) ideology ends and the discipline proper begins. For many of them parroting this shit is experienced as a kind of triumph, an established and unmovable reference point that is almost completely absent from other historiographic eras and topics.

Another thing: they don't reference the exact source, they reference the reference, e.g. they say "Kotkin establishes" instead of "Kotkint interpreted [these state archival documents] as…". Their pretense certainty is dumbfounding, clearly ideological in nature and is shameful to the discipline itself, but to unbiased scientific inquiry in general as well.

NOT ONE CRIME

tbh that was pretty good. still see above.

Kotkin is an ALRIGHT historian but he has shown biases before and not all his works are credible. Stalin Waiting for Hitler was one of poorest works in my opinion, so I think Furr would probably find plenty of actual holes in his argument.

Why would you do that anyway? Keynesianism has very little to do with Marxist/real economics. Keynes' macro was partially salvageable as Shaikh shows, but "Keynesianism" is a dumpster fire.

In interviews Furr has actually pointed out one of the key flaws of Lenin and Stalin– that revisionists took power after and the collapse eventually occurred. He emphasizes it as a key area that Marxists should study and try to draw conclusions about.

Yeah, that's very fair. I'm of the same opinion insofar as there needs to be a proper Materialist view of what made possible the ability for revisionists, opportunists, etc. and I'm never satisfied by people who blame individual actors, which you find in multiple tendencies. You have people who screech about "Muh Stalinism" as their eternal boogeyman whilst exonerating Lenin, or even if they see that Lenin was closer to Stalin than many may think instead have their own personal individual they wish to focus on. At the same time you also have people who blame specific individuals like Kruschev and various others as wrecking but there is rarely much analysis into how any of the scenarios played out like they did and into the root causes of such. A big reason for this is the fact that the actual history of events hasn't been studied as extensively as it should have been, and the accusations of revisionism themselves likely had much more weight in these things happening. Furr in this sense is doing excellent work here because as much as he can declare NOT ONE CRIME, what is really needed is an exhaustive look at the history he is studying to attempt to understand where things went wrong and how to correct them.

It's difficult because it really does seem like there were key points it could have gone very differently. If China and the Soviets had teamed up, we would have world communism by now, tbh. Both of their economies would have benefited greatly, as well as global worker's power. And the split pretty much did just come down to revisionists fucking China over.
But that's exactly where Cockshott tries to intervene with his ideas for democracy. While he suggests imitating the ancient Greek voting system, I think the key takeaway is to prevent unrepresentative, bourgeois-aspirational climbers from getting into power. Climbers and opportunists can be stopped in a variety of ways. Cuba's system of democracy has actually proven itself for this repeatedly, where it actually disallows campaigning during elections to prevent social capital from influencing the votes. Cuba is also smaller than the USSR, so it has a shallower structure of delegates.
Mao attempted to get the climbers out with the GPCR, and it probably did succeed in delaying the coup, but in the end it failed.

Here it is msuweb.montclair.edu/~furrg/

I have a degree in history from a world-class university and honestly I think it was complete waste of time, apart from giving me some credibility when applying for jobs. Should have taken the STEM pill.

I own both of Kotkin's books on Stalin. To me he is fair and treats pro-soviet and anti-soviet biases from time to time, likely because of the schizophrenic nature of the documents he is dealing with. Kotkin is not a wonderful historian by any means, his books were good for me because it helped me understand as someone without a masters in history what the soviet state was like. He is also more pro-soviet than most mainstream historians, as he believes collectivization kept the USSR from being crushed by Gemany and also states the truth that the Holodomor as claimed by "victims of genocide" orgs was not a real genocide as it effected soviet russia and soviet kazakhstan much more than it did ukraine.

Furr is a nutjob and Kotkin is a hack.

If you want to study real historical work on the Stalin era, read books by J. Arch Getty and R.W. Davies. E.H. Carr is probably good, but I haven't read his work. The above authors not only cite sources for their work but also provide huge amounts of data and statistical info to back up their views. Kotkin cites huge numbers of sources but gives no indication he has actually read them.

You can find a review of Kotkin's work here:
wsws.org/en/articles/2015/06/01/kot1-j01.html

I haven't read Furr yet, but so far the only attacks on him and his opinions are never given any substance. They're just "he's a historical revisionist" "he's a hack" "he's a nut job" "his claims are absurd" but nobody ever says how so. This gives me more incentive to read his works in a more open minded light than anything. At the very least, every time Furr advocates shill him, they at least reference the fact that he combs every claim and tries to find sources as close to primary as possible. The wikipedia page on him, for example, says critics claim he's a "historical revisionist" with nothing to back it up. But if history is recorded incorrectly, then obviously it must be revised.

Grover Furr's function is to act more like a lawyer. If the Makarov doesn't fit, you must acquit and they never proved Stalin shot those people (he most definitely shot those people though)

His biggest problem is uncritically accepting that the Moscow Trial "confessions" were legitimate. Leaving aside the inherent absurdity of lifelong revolutionary leaders supposedly joining Hitler to "reintroduce capitalism", there is ample historical evidence refuting them - alleged meetings with Trotsky when he was actually in another country, etc.

Well, let's see. Grover Furr's claim to fame is stating that Stalin literally did nothing wrong and that the people arrested and shot during the Great Purge were all guilty (even when the people doing the arresting were secretly trying to kill innocent people to discredit the regime.) Like the other user says, he uses confessions as part of the evidence even though it's obvious that some of these confessions make zero sense. Furr goes to any extreme to exculpate Stalin that he builds vast conspiracy theories that men like Nikolai Yezhov (head of the NKVD) were actually working against Stalin by arresting and executing large numbers of people! Wouldn't it have been easier to just kill Stalin himself rather than try to discredit the regime by doing a bad job?

You need to learn the difference between a fact and an opinion. The idea that Furr "combs every claim" and studies critically every source is just an opinion. My opinion is that Furr does exactly what FinnishBolshevik does - which is to comb evidence to find exactly what he wants and then build an argument around that, while ignoring anything that contradicts said evidence.

Shouldn't it be self-evident that he's a historical revisionist when he claims that everyone except Stalin was a liar and a criminal? He says that Khrushchev lied, Trotsky lied, those around Stalin lied, other historians have lied… Grover Furr's entire strategy is character assassination. Even people like Keeran have criticized Furr for being so one-sided he loses track of the truth.

All people that Furr refers to in his books.

That's bullshit. The refutation you're mentioning is ignoring the use of couriers between Trotsky and others. Moreover there IS evidence of them being honest. Hell there is evidence of actual repentance by some members.

That's a gross exaggeration if I've ever heard one. Not to mention that the Great Purge was neither started by Stalin nor controlled by him. it's like saying President Eisenhower was directly responsible for the McCarthy Trials.
Yes and they were caught and put on trial for that, and moreover many people who were framed were pardoned, such as General Rokossovsky. However the revision and amendment and pardoning of all falsely accused requires a thorough investigation into each individual. That's nearly a million people to check of which most were NOT in fact innocent. They started this process in 1939 and was interrupted by the war, and was picked up afterwards.
Except that its confirmed by people like J.Arch Getty
Because Stalin was the figure of the USSR, you think him being killed randomly when nothing was in place would result in Yezhov getting into power?
Except that people have tried and failed to give him anything more than a nit-pick reply to his arguments. You can claim
Another exaggeration.
Because he did. This is confirmed by other historians than Furr.
Among other things like slander. His book on Stalin is a pretty good demonstration of that.
And they have, or was Bloodlands and its Holodomor rubbish written by a non-historian?
His critiques are shallow and beat around the bush just like you.

If you have so many grievances. Write up a nice essay on it and email Furr. His email is public and he has replied to criticism before.

Attached: Getty Naumov Yezhov.jpg (856x1360, 251.93K)

Thanks for at least saying something other than "No, Grover Furr a dum dum and wrongbad."

In what universe would you equate Dwight Eisenhower with Joseph Stalin? Eisenhower was not a dictator. He did not enjoy a massive cult of personality. He had not presided over the arrest and execution of virtually all old members of his party. Please try to engage with reality.
lmao, so Stalin & co. were fine with people being rounded up en masse for two years before finally putting a stop to the terror but later they didn't have time to rehabilitate everyone because THEY WERE REALLY WORRIED ABOUT PROPER PROCEDURE.
"people like Getty" - what people would these be? Because I can assure you that Getty doesn't believe Yezhov was part of a giant conspiracy working on behalf of Polish landlords, English capitalists, German fascists, etc.
According to Furr's conspiracy theory Yezhov's goal may not have been to take power at all but rather to help the Germans take power via coup d'etat. If you want the logic explained, you'll have to ask Grover Furr…
Grover Furr's arguments consist almost entirely of nitpicking, moving goalposts, and whataboutisms.

Grover Furr has stated, and I quote:
"Today, we know that Khrushchev’s and Gorbachev’s men were lying in virtually everything they wrote about Stalin."

When Keeran called him out on his bullshit, Furr responded:
"But there is an even greater distortion in Keeran’s words here, for he claims that my study is “a strained effort to argue that every Khrushchev allegation was simply a lie. ” This is more than just false. It is what every anticommunist accuses me of…"

So which is it? Does Furr think that Khrushchev lied about "virtually everything" or not? His response to Keeran is precisely to nitpick and move goalposts. He even equates Keeran with anti-communists, lmao. Are we beginning to see a pattern?

Maybe I'll send him some pamphlets on mental health resources.

Look at Grover Furr's "rejoinder to Roger Keeran":