VERY COMPLEX ISSUE AND I DO NOT AGREE WITH VIEW
ON STALINISM.
HOWEVER WE HAVE TO REFLECT ON IT.STRONG BUREAUCRATIC FUNCTIONING EVEN IN ERA OF SOVIETS OF LENIN. HOWEVER WAS
STALINISM DIVORCED OR A VIOLATION OF LENINISM OR IS MAOISM A COUNTER -THESIS TO
IT? TO ME MAOISM AS PRACTICED IN CHINA WAS MORE AKIN TO STALINISM EVEN IF IT
INNOVATED CONCEPT OF CULTURAL REVOLUTION. - Harsh Thakor
From M-L-M
Mayhem:
In the past, whenever the possible problems of
Stalin/Stalinism came up, I simply deferred to the analysis made by the Communist Party
of China during the "Great Debate" where, in the face of the Soviet Union's revisionism,
they defended Stalin from rightist critiques while, at the same time, providing
their own critiques. And though I still believe this is a good starting
point, I have also come to believe that more is required. The problem
with making sense of "Stalinism" as a phenomenological reality, and
the possible errors this phenomenon (that we are conveniently calling
"Stalinism") produces, is more than simply recognizing a general
summary of Stalin's errors. This is not to say that the above document is
not useful; it provides us with some understanding of the phenomenon: it
highlights the way in which the party under Stalin improperly understood line
struggle and how to deal with counter-revolution; it notes that democratic
centralism was improperly applied. But since this document was aimed
primarily at dealing with the onset of revisionism that, by turning Stalin into
a scapegoat, was pushing through a counter-revolutionary agenda, it was not
intended as a critique of that phenomenon that can possibly be called
Stalinism.
So why we need to further think through the Stalinist phenomenon critically and from a properly left position, rather than ignore it altogether, is because this problem is not reducible to the figure of Stalin––though it is quite true that this problem crystallized during the Stalin period of the Soviet Union and this is why we brand it with his name. We could imagine a possible world, as suggested in the previous post, where Trotsky was in command of the Soviet Union; since it seems doubtful things would have gone another way, we would then be calling this phenomenon "Trotskyism" (and perhaps Stalinists in this possible world would be like Trotskyists in our world)… The fact is that this is a phenomenon that necessarily emerged under the first dictatorship of the proletariat in an attempt to deal with the problem of capitalist restoration and fight for the continued socialist transformation of that society. (As the above cited document argues, some of the errors that we call Stalinist "were scarcely avoidable at a time when the dictatorship of the proletariat had no precedent to go by.") Since the first world historical communist revolution ended up being determined by a party that was chaired by Stalin when it had to encounter these contradictions, the phenomenal experience of certain problematic aspects within that society can be named Stalinism.
These problematic aspects are paradigmatically articulated in a document entitled Elements of a Sum Up of the WCP where members of the Workers Communist Party, one of the largest communist organizations in Canada during the 1970s/1980s, attempted to make sense of their organization's unexpected collapse:
So why we need to further think through the Stalinist phenomenon critically and from a properly left position, rather than ignore it altogether, is because this problem is not reducible to the figure of Stalin––though it is quite true that this problem crystallized during the Stalin period of the Soviet Union and this is why we brand it with his name. We could imagine a possible world, as suggested in the previous post, where Trotsky was in command of the Soviet Union; since it seems doubtful things would have gone another way, we would then be calling this phenomenon "Trotskyism" (and perhaps Stalinists in this possible world would be like Trotskyists in our world)… The fact is that this is a phenomenon that necessarily emerged under the first dictatorship of the proletariat in an attempt to deal with the problem of capitalist restoration and fight for the continued socialist transformation of that society. (As the above cited document argues, some of the errors that we call Stalinist "were scarcely avoidable at a time when the dictatorship of the proletariat had no precedent to go by.") Since the first world historical communist revolution ended up being determined by a party that was chaired by Stalin when it had to encounter these contradictions, the phenomenal experience of certain problematic aspects within that society can be named Stalinism.
These problematic aspects are paradigmatically articulated in a document entitled Elements of a Sum Up of the WCP where members of the Workers Communist Party, one of the largest communist organizations in Canada during the 1970s/1980s, attempted to make sense of their organization's unexpected collapse:
"Like many
parties, the WCP was strongly influenced by J.V. Stalin's approach to the
party. We uncritically absorbed Stalin's notion of the monolithic party, the
'general staff' of the working class, run like an army with its members totally
unified in thought and deed, marching in step under the 'infallible wisdom' of
the leadership and kept in line by the cadres. We shared Stalin's vision of
democratic centralism which put extreme emphasis on centralism and considered
democracy more or less a formality, a luxury that could seldom be afforded,
rather than a strategic necessity to develop political line, correct errors,
and give party members real control of their organization."
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the rest click
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