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It has never worked in the past. Germany, Italy and Japan are famous communist nations, that’s the only way to defeat fascism and Co.
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I’m not sure what point you are trying to make here. The American empire sat back and let the USSR and the Chinese communists take the vast majority of casualties to defeat those rival empires then made them into imperial vassals?
I fucking love that he chose to call them stalinists. In addition to it being true, it send a fuck you to the alt-right and the alt-left (who love to talk up stalin as of late)
Who in the alt left is talking about Stalin lol maybe some whackos online
Stalin took the Russian state from an agricultural backwater to a Space Age superpower in a matter of twenty years.
If he’d started out a Virginia plantation owner instead of a Georgian bank robber, capitalists would have loved him. He’d be bigger than Churchill.
American liberals love (the whitewashed version of) FDR because they see the quasi-socialism of the mid-20th century as the morally correct path. Eastern Europeans - who came through two world wars and repeated genocides on every front - have a lot more of an appetite for Iron Fisted Dictator[Communist] after enduring generations of Iron Fisted Dictator[Monarchist]
But the way in which he did it was very costly. Stalin is comparable to Musk in that sense. In love with technology and factories, but too focussed on advancement no matter the human cost. Everything was about efficiency.
If he hadn’t been, would the USSR survived? That focus on technology, factories, and efficiency, no matter the cost, seems like the right approach when there’s Nazis at your doorstep, conquering all of Europe and conducting mass exterminations.
Mostly the tankies on .ml
Who, you know, MIGHT be real people but probably aren’t for the most part…
I just assume any .ml account is a propaganda bot. Because even if they are real people… they are propaganda bots.
dude what the fuck
If you’re not a tankie, you shouldn’t be offended by, “tankies on .ml”
That instance actively and demonstrably moderates counter-opinions to tankie rhetoric, to the point where the instance is just a field of landmines for those that don’t tow the line. They are a terrible, gross farse of “leftists” and deserve all the shit they catch and more.
.worlder describes .world
Irrelevant to the comment. My comment is clearly and explicitly about .ml. That’s why I said .ml Thank you for further demonstrating the level of user .ml gives the rest of us.
Lemmy is far too small to bot.
lemmy.ml is just friendly to those people, so it attracts them.lemmy.ml was built by those people, sometimes it feels for the express purpose of spreading their bullshit.
Yeah, how dare they build a space where they could express their views!
From someone who has gone to more than a few political protests and rallies in Boston:
Every fucking time Socialist Alternative shows up, it’s fine until some edgelord dipshit unfurls the fucking huge Soviet flag with Stalin and Mao silk screened on it. It’s like they’re trying to alienate reasonable people as well as historically-informed people. I consider myself a staunch socialist. I also outright detest Stalin and Mao because they were fucking authoritarian despots who wrapped their regimes in “communism” banners.
Sure, some of the systems at lower levels were socialistic, but at the end of the day, it was all in service to the cult of personality in charge of the whole gig. And yes, that’s what the US has devolved into (and arguably had done so quite a while ago, just not so overtly), but that doesn’t excuse Stalin or Mao, nor does it justify being an apologist for them.
Every fucking time Socialist Alternative shows up, it’s fine until some edgelord dipshit unfurls the fucking huge Soviet flag with Stalin and Mao silk screened on it.
I’m not super familiar with Socialist Alternative, but aren’t they a Trotskyist org? What are they doing waving Stalin flags?
This rhetoric adds nothing of subtance to the political understanding of either contemporary Trumpism or the history of Stalinism. Sanders only serves to obscure the meaning of this critically important understanding. Fascism and Stalinism are not the same.
To be clear, Stalinism took hold in the Soviet Union as a result of its historic backwardness and international isolation. The failure of the revolution to take root in Europe (largely a result of the historic betrayal of Social Democracy in the Second International) created conditions for the consolidation of a nationalist clique and a bureaucratic degeneration of the workers state that formed from the victory of the October Revolution. That is Stalinism. This political form was responsible for mass murder of the old cadres of the revolution who opposed it, systematic betrayal of the workers movement internationally, collaboration with imperialism allowing for the restabilization of capitalism during its repeated periods of crisis, and ultimately the destruction of Soviet Union union and the restoration of capitalism in 1991. A detailed and correct historical understanding of this history is critically important for the working class as it enters into a new period of revolutionary struggle.
Sanders use of the term as a political slur wrongly directed at Trump confuses the issue, and ultimately gives capitalism a pass for its own crisis. Trump is not simply an evil individual responsible for wrecking America. He is the product of the terminal crisis of capitalism at the center of world imperialism. He represents a financial oligarchy whose wealth and influence has grown increasingly disconnected from social development and the process of production. The historic content of Trumpism has a stronger relationship to the fascism of Mussolini and Hitler than the national labor bureaucraticism of Stalin.
This is no small error by Sanders. This is a deliberate falsification that is calculated to confuse political consciousness and hinder the development of revolutionary conclusions. It should be clear to anyone who takes more than a second to think about it that the comparison to Stalinism is shallow. The historic content of Trumpism is its own.
The failure of the revolution to take root in Europe (largely a result of the historic betrayal of Social Democracy in the Second International) created conditions for the consolidation of a nationalist clique and a bureaucratic degeneration of the workers state that formed from the victory of the October Revolution.
What path should the USSR have taken instead? (genuine question)
The survival of the Soviet Union as a socialist state depended on the expansion of the revolution internationally. Stalin’s policy of building socialism in one country led to all manner of bureaucratic overreach with authoritarian methods and betrayal of the international working class. The correct policy would have been to spread the revolution throughout the world on the basis of Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution, as advanced by the Left Opposition.
The failures of the revolutions in Germany through 1923 were terrible tragedies, prepared largely by the betrayals of the Second International and the inexperiance of the new communist KPD of the Third International. This is not something you can really blame Stalin for, but it created the conditions for what followed.
The betrayal of the Chinese revolution of 1925–27 was the first great International betrayal of Stalinism. Stalin ordered an alliance with the bourgeouis Kuomantang that ended with the massacre of thousands of Chinese comminists at the hands of the nationalista. After that, he ordered a series of putsches that predictably ended in further defeats. Trotsky was expelled from the Communist party for his criticism of the line that led to this disaster.
The ultraleft line of the Comintern in its third period led to disaster and betrayal in Germany in the 1930s. Stalin divided the forces working class by refusing to allow a united front of the communists with German Social Democracy. The SPD still had significant influence in the working class, with over a million working class members who were trained in the revolutionary theories of Marxism. The KPD under the influence of Stalin denounced these workers as “social fascist” essentially no different than the Nazis, thus paving the way for Hitler to come to power (only to turn around later to make his infamous pact with Hitler). These events led Trotsky to conclude the Third International was dead for purposes of revolution, and to call for the founding on the Fourth International.
Fourth International called for political revolution in the USSR to restore democracy and defend the gains of the October Revolution and to expand the proletarian revolution internationally. Trotsky and large numbers of the cadre of the FI were murdered by Stalinist agents, who opposed this perspective. In the postwar period the role of the Stalinists was to use their influence to prop up bourgeois governments throughout the third world, and to effect its foreign policy objectives with respect to the imperialist countries. Stalin fell out of favor after Krushevs secret speech following his death, but the basic political methods remained the same.
The correct policy would have been to spread the revolution throughout the world on the basis of Trotsky’s theory of Permanent Revolution, as advanced by the Left Opposition.
The failures of the revolutions in Germany through 1923 were terrible tragedies, prepared largely by the betrayals of the Second International and the inexperiance of the new communist KPD of the Third International. This is not something you can really blame Stalin for, but it created the conditions for what followed.
The ultraleft line of the Comintern in its third period led to disaster and betrayal in Germany in the 1930s. Stalin divided the forces working class by refusing to allow a united front of the communists with German Social Democracy.
What? These criticisms are all contradictory.
On the one hand, Stalin should’ve done more to spread the revolution to other countries, like Germany. On the other hand, he should’ve convinced the KPD to work together with the SDP instead of taking a more revolutionary approach. Were the SDP not the very people who were in the Second International and betrayed the revolution?
It seems kind of silly to blame the KPD-SDP split on Stalin considering that the social democrats both killed much of the KPD leadership (such as Rosa Luxembourg), and also continued using equivalent language about how the KPD were just as bad as the fascists. The SDP made the decision to align with the bourgeois parties and help them enact austerity policies during an economic crisis, and ultimately to back Hindenburg over Thälmann, who then appointed Hitler. The KPD felt that, in addition to the SDP being utterly uncooperative and uninterested in reconciliation, their association with crushing economic policy made them more of a liability than an asset - in hindsight, this was probably a miscalculation, but the blame is not entirely on them.
Now, if your position was that the USSR should have taken a realpolitik perspective and backed the anticommunist SDP to stop Hitler, despite their attitude to the KPD, that would be a coherent criticism - except that you also criticize the USSR for making a very similar decision in China. The USSR policy viewed the CCP as too weak to win a revolution, and instead aimed to achieve a united front, regardless of ideological disagreements.
Of course, with the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this estimation was an error, but I’m asking for a single coherent path. Either be willing to compromise and work together with anti-communists like the KMT and the SDP, or take a hard line and support revolution - even in the face looming threats from the Nazis in one case and the Japanese on the other. Or, I suppose, take it on a case-by-case basis, in which case your criticism would be less ideological and more personal, regarding Stalin’s ability to assess foreign situations - and that’s a bit of stretch because I don’t think most of the leftists in Germany and China foresaw what would happen in their respective countries either.
Aside from these contradictions, I don’t really agree with the Trotskyist demand for an aggressive foreign policy. Of course, Marx predicted a global revolution but Marx was not a prophet, and socialist movements in other countries were not sufficiently developed to follow suit (as evidenced by the failure of the Second International). Trying to create an insurgency within another country is an act of aggression, at least potentially of war, and it seems like you’re demanding that the USSR should’ve gone to war with every country on earth simultaneously to compensate for the failure of those countries’ own socialist movements. That would’ve obviously been suicidal.
The USSR’s (post-Stalin) policy of “peaceful coexistence” was based on the correct understanding that such aggression would (perhaps correctly) be seen as a nationalistic act of aggression. Indeed, to the extent that the USSR expanded militarily, for example under Stalin or in Afghanistan, I think it deserves criticism. It seems a lot more reasonable to consolidate their position and serve as a proof of concept for socialists worldwide to follow on their own initiative than to try to impose those conflicts from the outside.
It is wrong to lump the KMT and the SPD together. The KMT was a bourgeois nationalist party. The SPD, despite its well documented problems, was a workers party with enormous political significance. Absolutely not tbe same, hence the difference in policy toward the two.
I don’t agree with that assessment. The KMT at the time was led by Sun Yat-Sen, who was much more left-leaning than his successor Chiang Kai-Shek. The KMT was originally a revolutionary party that deposed the monarchy, and it had left-wing elements within the party (as well as cooperating with the CCP) before Chiang purged them. Also worth noting that as a pre-industrial, colonized society, the class distinctions were not precisely the same as in Western countries, as demonstrated by the fact that it was by mobilizing the peasants rather than the much smaller industrial proletariat that the Chinese revolution was eventually successful. As argued by Frantz Fanon, class collaboration with the bourgeoisie in poor countries is potentially viable because the primary conflict in those cases is with foreign colonizers.
If you ask me to choose between the early KMT under Sun that overthrew a monarchy and cooperated with communists, and the SDP who betrayed and murdered communists, denounced them as being as bad as fascists, and enacted austerity policies that contributed to the Nazis’ rise, I’m picking the early KMT every time.
Alright. Goes to show the Stalinist hostility to the revolutionary working class and their affinity for bourgeois nationalism is as strong as ever.
It’s not “hostility to the working class,” it’s just objective facts. The CCP originally tried to follow the more orthodox approach of focusing on the industrial proletariat, with the exception of a particular member who had personal experience with the rural peasants and believed they had greater potential for radicalization. The CCP ignored him, and were promptly defeated, leading to the Long March. Among the survivors was that man I mentioned earlier, who was now able to implement his strategy of focusing on the peasants, and as a result of that strategy, even though the communists had been thoroughly defeated, hiding in the most remote regions of China, most of the party dead, the revolution caught on and spread like wildfire.
If othodox Marxist theory was objectively not suited to the conditions of China regarding which class had radicalization potential, because the lack of industrialization meant that the proletariat hadn’t really developed, then isn’t it reasonable to think that orthodox theory regarding the bourgeoisie was questionable as well?
And in Germany, the so-called “working class” party of the SDP actively fought against the potential of setting up a socialist government, set the freicorps against communists, and insisted on setting up a system where they would give the bourgeoisie power and then work with them to worsen the conditions of the working class. You yourself acknowledged their betrayal of the working class, it’s just when they take off their “Second International” hat and put on their “SDP” hat they’re absolved of everything, apparently.
Goes to show that the Trotskyist tendency towards blind contrarianism is as strong as ever. If Trotsky and Stalin had switched roles, you’d all be Stalinists, it doesn’t even matter what their ideological differences were, you just want to support the guy who lost so that you can imagine he would’ve done everything perfectly and you don’t have to engage with difficult practical decisions. Classic “support every revolution, except the ones that succeed.”
I have to wonder how much of it is driven by chauvinism towards developing countries too, as you seem actively hostile to considering their material conditions.
Too many people here just blindly hating on Bernie and nitpicking how “Stalinism is technically incorrect”. Where’s the Trump hate? Bring some of that shit out. I’ll start.
Fuck Trump, MAGA, and their entire cult of personality.
Because turbo libbing is not the solution to defeating Trump. It is similar to saying Israel has the right to defend itself before each statement. Bernie is actively antagonizing commies by repeating US imperialist propaganda and applying it to someone he does not like.
If you feel antagonised when someone criticise Stalin then that’s a you problem though.
Staline’s Image Cult isn’t “imperialist propaganda”
Americans using their global opponents which they demonize in all their media as insults is an all too classic trope.
I am sure we are all extremely well informed on Stalin because of our unbiased media.
Yes, the US has red scare propaganda.
Historians exist outside of the US, though. We have decades and decades of non-US, non communist-scare historical research to know what the USSR and Stalin did. If you don’t want to recognise the errors of the past, you will repeat them. If the most you can do is aim for Stalin’s USSR but 2025 version, then you’re as much an enemy of the people than capitalists are.
non communist-scare
Oh? What are you referring to?
Research done by people whose purpose wasn’t to produce red-scare propaganda (I don’t know how I could have worded that better, I’m not a native speaker)
Basically, I live in a country where the communist party used to be very powerful. Red scare has been a thing here, but leftism was strong in the country, and lots of historians here have published good quality researches about the USSR
Fun fact though: our “”“communist”“” party is now between centrism and neoliberalism. Their alliance with the socialist party destroyed anything it had to do with communism
Such as?
Oh, libs. When will you learn that the right is immune to these sorts of accusations? Nobody is swayed by this “Trump is a communist” rhetoric, the only people who agree with it are people who already hate Trump and would clap along with any comparison or accusation as long as it’s negative. Trump has “Only Nixon could go to China” powers.
It’s the same sort of thing as the Dems trying to attack Trump as weak on immigration and pass themselves off as border hawks. Liberals can’t help but to concede this whole moral framework to the right and argue purely along technical lines of efficiency.
Of course the liberals clap along because it owns the “tankies,” and in their minds, if they just punch left enough they’ll convince everyone that they’re “one of the good ones” on the left, as if they’re not going to be labelled Stalinists anyway, like they did with Obama.
It’s bad enough that it’s not true, but even worse is that nobody buys it (who wasn’t already “vote blue no matter who”).
he said “stalinist”; not communist… one of the primary things that differentiates stalin from marx and lenin (afaik; i’ll freely admit i’m not reading books on the subject, but that’s also the perspective of the mainstream and thus afaik the communication he’s going for) is the authoritarianism, purges, etc: he’s trying to say that trump is a cult of personality of equal substance to the mainstream understanding of stalin
i’ll freely admit i’m not reading books on the subject
Let me first clarify a few points then.
Marx and Lenin were also “authoritarian.” You should read Engles’ On Authority, it’s not long and explains his position on the matter, which was consistent with Marx.
“Stalinism” isn’t really a thing, nobody calls themselves that, it’s just a pejorative for Marxism-Leninism, which was Stalin’s stated ideology (in fact, he’s the person who coined the term). Marxism-Leninism (“Stalinism”) is the most prevalent ideology among self-described communists globally, particularly in the global south.
If Sanders just wanted an authoritarian figure to compare Trump to, there are no shortage of right-wing ones who have much more in common with him. The choice of Stalin seems to be intentional, to distance himself and his own brand of socialism from Stalin and other M-Ls.
I believe this is a flawed strategy, in the same way it would be to accuse a witch-hunter of being a witch. The problem is that you’re accepting the premise that witches are real and need to be hunted, and at that point it becomes a question of who can better make the case that they’re not a witch - which is going to be the witch-hunter, because that’s their job, they know how to play the game, they made the rules. In the same way, right wingers are always going to be more convincing anti-communists than someone who calls himself a socialist, they made the rules of the red scare and they know how to play it. The real way to defeat the witch hunt is to have enough people who aren’t afraid of being called witches, and the way to defeat red scare stuff is not to accept the framing and punch left, but to say, “So what if I am a Red?”
Cowards driving by and downvoting without addressing any arguments: where is the lie?
I take drive by downvotes as a compliment, the meaning I get from them is, “I don’t like this because it challenged my beliefs in a way I can’t answer.” Great! That’s what I was going for.
