Ontology:Q49,84
Core characteristics
- alias (en) [string]
- --
- references [Item]1
-1-1 - shares thematic block [Item] (BB)1
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Wavebuilder combinations
- : forms result [Item]
- Stalin's Marxism (JS)1
-1-1 - along with [Item]
- Joseph Stalin1
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- Stalin's Marxism (JS)1
Wavebuilder characterizations
- : route [Item]
- Joseph Stalin1
-1-1 - along with [Item]
- Vladimir Lenin1
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- Joseph Stalin1
Background
Joseph Stalin was a major theorist within the Bolshevik party and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. He co-authored a paper on the creation of Georgia as an independent state within the Soviet Union. Later, after the death of Lenin in 1925, he took up many of the theoretical tasks of the central party. From 1925 to his death in 1953, he generally had a lot of support among the Soviet population, although this changed by approximately 1960.
Among Marxist theorists, almost everyone who is not a member of Trotskyism or Western-Marxism still tends to accept Stalin as part of the same tradition as Marx and Lenin. He is accepted as part of Maoism, Hoxhaism, and generic Marxism-Leninisms which do not label themselves through associations with particular theorists.
In Trotskyism and Bordigism
Within Trotskyism, Stalin has taken on a widely-varying array of negative connotations as different groups of Trotskyists have opposed him for different reasons. Among the earliest members of Trotskyism in the 1930s, the typical claim was that Stalin's government as a whole was failing to get the country through socialist transition. For some later Trotskyist theorists such as Hayashi, as well as in Bordigism (a separate form of Marxism from Italy) the problem was in the structure of Bolshevism itself, and the complaint was that Stalin's government had either "only created state capitalism" or "not countered the problem of commodity production"[1].
Most "orange" Marxists tend to steadily claim that there exists some form of socialist transition analogous to the material system of Bolshevism that Stalin's government created but which is somehow "more correct" and would have gotten through the process of transitioning out of the features of capitalism faster. Past the year 1960, this claim becomes almost quantifiable: if the Soviet Union began creating Bolshevism in about 1917 and it completely stopped pursuing socialist transition in about 1960, then the Soviet Union became upsetting to Trotskyists within the space of 43 years, and Trotsky and Bordiga were effectively trying to require that the full process of getting rid of elements of capitalism should go much faster than 43 years. Whether this is a reasonable requirement is highly debatable. David Graeber points out while attempting to justify anarchism that in the ancient world a form of social structure could take a thousand years to fully form. More recently, the United States took between 100 and 200 years to properly create industries and establish capitalism. It would not seem like an unreasonable claim to say that whatever Bolshevism is materially achieving could actually take 100-150 years to complete before it would cease to be and give way to a new system.
Although Trotskyist theorists and their supporters have made claims of persecution by Stalin's government, the reasons for these complaints are not actually centered around any concept of "freedom" or "oppression" as great portions of the populations of Liberal-republican countries have commonly been led to believe. In general, every complaint which comes from a Trotskyist theorist is actually a theoretical complaint that Stalin or other members of his government were not allowing Trotskyists to build a Communist party or enact socialist transition — that if Stalin did not allow a separate form of Marxism called Trotskyism to replace him, Stalin was flat-out not allowing Communism. The concept of revisionists and debate over the most materially correct Marxism is largely foreign to center-Liberals, but it is central to the worldviews of many Marxist groups that have challenged Stalin, and critical to understanding their behavior and goals — Trotsky does not experience freedom or contentment if he does not get to build the Soviet Union in his own separate conflicting image of Trotskyism.
In Existentialism and anarchism
Within a certain cluster of academic anarchisms largely centered in the United States and Europe, there has been a totally different approach to opposing Stalin than there has been within "orange" Marxisms. Here the primary problem has been that there is a particular very abstract concept of freedom that is assumed to underlie all human societies, which Stalin is claimed to have violated. On the surface these arguments will appear reasonable, but with enough research into what any of the concepts or words they rely on are even attempting to mean, they only become increasingly more confusing. (Given this, it is impossible to properly cover them here in their entirety, and it is recommended you browse through other Ontology entries to better understand them.)
One of the major themes you will see come up in this particular kind of anticommunist work is the abstract notion of an "ability to do otherwise". The writers will begin with some abstract concept of Free Will, then start defining the presence of freedom as the physically available capacity to do otherwise, while attempting to characterize anything that limits the capacity to do otherwise as both anomalous and malicious. It is very common for Existentialist types to try to use this half-baked concept of Freedom to try to define a generalized dictator that applies to all situations in which anyone tries to limit the capacity to do otherwise, regardless of the actual surrounding material context that would prompt someone to do so. This is no matter of "but Communism really is that important": if you believe that no possible material context could ever justify limiting the ability to do otherwise, then you logically believe that Tory types are justified to band together by the millions to refuse masks and vaccines if they personally feel that doing otherwise is more important to their own agency and well-being. For Tory types it is genuinely impossible to tell what is and isn't tyranny based on their own desire for well-being and freedom. Sociality and community and every positive process that "makes people human" will all feed Tories with the impulse that vaccines and masks are hurting them, the will of their communities is not being respected, their free will is being treaded on, and the way they are being treated is practically undemocratic. The Existentialist model of Free Will is simply inadequate to explain observed Tory behavior. It does not explain why after having all the freedom anyone could want in daily life to the point of arguably limiting the freedom of minority ethnic groups Tories would still be so bent on gaining self-determination they apparently believe they do not have.
If Existentialists can be pried away from the concept that Stalin is bad because "I'm not permitted to vote him out" or "I'm not permitted to walk away", one of the next things they will likely try to say is that Communism is an artificial imposition that creates or preserves poverty — a model where although people having the right to desert Communist parties or leave workers' states is irrelevant, the material processes of Bolshevism themselves are faulty and ineffective compared to the processes that would attempt to solve the same problems otherwise. These arguments begin to resemble the "state capitalism" arguments given by Trotskyists and Bordigists. All of these are more reasonable than the "freedom" arguments because they actually begin to present propositions that can be analyzed through dialectical and historical materialism. With that said, all of these arguments leave critically important questions assumed or unspoken. If people are afraid of a country "failing" or "faltering"... why? Do people put individual wealth over the well-being of a national population of millions of people? What is the value of maintaining the structural integrity of a population? Can you put a value on not scattering a population out of a country and forcing its members to be assimilated into miscellaneous other countries and empires? What is the value of not being prejudiced against a population of millions of people and indifferent to its destruction? Finally, if people move out of one country that is "faltering" into another country, can they ever be expected to take care of that second country when it goes through hardship, or only to plunder it and abandon its people once again? Is there any reason to expect that the principles of the United States for example are something anyone would find value in or bother to preserve when people so easily leave other countries just to move wherever they personally find it possible to secure their immediate survival? None of these questions would be damning to a Materialist, but Existentialists are generally terrible at giving properly explanatory answers to any of them.
Across various Existentialist texts, you will find a common unspoken theme that the authors do not only embrace migration as an easy solution to countries' "unsolvable" problems but outright do not seem to care what country people are actually in. If Einstein moves out of Germany to escape politics, Existentialists will casually relate the story and accept it. If people get upset with the Soviet Union and leave, Existentialists will casually tell that story and not spend any time thinking about the alternative of what happens when people stay. Then they will throw a fit when people get baffled and stumped at the exponentially more complicated problems of the United States and don't bother to commit themselves to being part of the United States or trying to fix it.
Much of this pattern can be traced back to a particular pattern that seems to characterize today's capitalism, which meta-Marxism has tentatively labeled Careerism. This is the process of individuals freely flowing across a country or occasionally across the world to claim unfilled business territories or job-slots until every slot is filled by increasingly more impressive people and many spatial regions of capitalism practically speaking have no more open slots. Careerism confounds the historical process leading to Bolshevism because it takes away the imperative for populations to house and feed extra people to get rid of conflict — if people can just go wherever they want and individual action is assumed to create the best outcomes for everyone, why would people "move" to a Communist party? To a schizoanalyst type this might sound great, because they've avoided Stalin. But the dark side of Careerism is that everyone is obligated to make individual decisions before they can ever have any expectation of anyone providing open jobs, welfare programs, or anything that aids their survival; nobody is incentivized to predict Menshevism, Bolshevism, or even anarchism happening as much to expect that either privilege or antisocial treatment by Tories will be their future with no in-between. This system is a vicious cycle. Everyone who benefits from it has no reason to believe it isn't beneficial while everyone who suffers has no recourse because all the people who have benefited have filled up all the slots where people have agency. The only real way things can go is for all the sets of filled-up slots to start essentializing themselves small amounts and admit they're countably separate. Materially they will all have to admit they have become finite and need to define themselves by specific rules just to make sure everyone inside them is the optimal set of people to be in them and gets along; Idealism will slowly become physically impossible versus the understanding that all groups of people are physical arrangements of physical objects put together for particular reasons or particular purposes. At the very least, Careerism doesn't inevitably lead to racism, but it could lead to a weird imperative for people to culturally differentiate to the point freedom does not meaningfully exist any more and all choices are a matter of never inherently fitting into anywhere or wanting any result of a choice but choosing to go through a long "degree" of "culture classes" to become the culture-tool that is most required to supply open spaces.
In center-Liberalism
In Toryism
Within Toryism, most arguments against Stalin are typically indistinguishable from arguments used in center-Liberalism or blue anarchisms. However, there is one important point where the context becomes different. In practice, many Tory types are perfectly content to follow people that other people consider to be dictators. This raises the question: if everything Tories say about "freedom" or "dictators" is not actually conveying meaningful information about their beliefs nor relevant to their own lives, then why do Tories pretend to oppose Stalin on grounds of being a "dictator"?
A partial answer can be found in the occasional incidence of borrowed Identitarian fascisms. In rare cases Tories actually don't care what kind of "dictator" leads them, and will ostensibly align themselves with mainstream Marxism-Leninism on the grounds that it is "actually" the exact same thing as nationalism. Some common warning signs of this include people characterizing Marxism specifically by its lack of "identity politics" or "culture war issues" as if the concept of not talking about race and gender were the sole and entire content of several Marx or Engels texts, and appealing to tradition as if any particular accepted set of Marxist theorists or especially one particular unnecessarily-specific country were truly unquestionable. It is not always easy to pick out an Identitarian fascist; to some extent there can be a continuum between malicious appropriations of Marxism by nationalists and very archaic Marxist groups from backward countries who are only trying to pull themselves and their countries out of a reactionary period and actually do not mean any harm.
To get the more complete answer, it is important to understand Existentialism and Toryism as a unity of opposites. Existentialism forms out of the fear of Toryism, but at the same time, Toryism borrows many of the underlying models of Existentialism, or initially provides them. Thus, whenever Existentialism does something that Toryism doesn't like, Toryism will in effect take Existentialism and turn its own models it typically uses back on it — Existentialism will build its models of "dictators" based on what a Tory is, while Tories will assume that they can form a coherent model of what a "dictator" is based on what is normal for Tories and what an Existentialist is. In reality, Tories want to casually live their lives and realize Toryism, containing particular forms of structure such as exclusive monotheistic religion, isolated Proudhonist households, and unlimited growth for chunks of societal structure that they exclusively permit to exist ("businesses"), and whenever Existentialists interfere with that process they feel that there has been a disruption in their actual capacity to do otherwise — a malicious actor has cut off their Free Will, which can only mean the immoral and unnatural creation of a dictator.
In the grand scheme of things, the reason Tories oppose Stalin is deeply similar to the reason that Trotskyists do. Tories want to realize Toryism and reproduce Tory populations, and Trotskyists want to realize and reproduce Trotskyism, but Stalin does not let them create their own self-sustaining national population which is other to and separate from Stalin's population, nor change all the characteristics of Stalin's population to become their population, so as a result they get angry. No abstract concept of "democracy" is sufficient to fix this problem. When a Demos is determined not to be part of another Demos, no Demos will agree to be . Of course, with a different kind of theory of civilizations which does not presuppose that "" is a sensible concept that automatically has the right to control anybody, this would not be as much of a problem. The key is to realize that all collections of people are material objects, and it is not the outer land borders that define populations as much as the inner individual-to-individual bonds. With this model, it could become possible to construct mathematical projections of individuals assembling into stable societies either the same size as or smaller than a national population and understand the historical development and group psychology of those smaller populations, opening the gateway to both social science and empathy. This sort of outcome is much more likely to occur for the case of mainstream Marxist-Leninists meeting on an even level with Trotskyists as Trotskyists than it is for Communists or Existentialists meeting evenly with Tories as Tories. Nonetheless, it is an important thought exercise for all cases, when we consider how frequently Existentialists and Tories keep improperly switching around models of Tories and Existentialists interchangeably and misapplying them all to Communists. A universal model which is actually correct is good; matching any correct material model to any specific thing and not to the wrong things is even better.
Usage notes
For the literary character, the identifier is E:Koba Stalin.
References
- ↑ "Dialogue with Stalin". Bordiga, A., Libri Incogniti (trans.). (1952). Il Programma Comunista; Marxists Internet Archive.