waistli...@aol.com wrote: <snip>
The Soviet armed forces should have not “looted� Germany? Why not? Why should Germany not have been “looted?� To save the German workers? Germany should have been liberated of an equivalent value equal to that in which she took from the Soviet workers as war aggressors. The German army was not filled with capitalist but workers. It is a fact that some Soviet tanks had to throw ammunition over board to fill tanks with “loot.� I do not think this act of “looting� - taking back by force of arms an equal value destroyed by the German fascists, is because of the Patriotic nature of the propaganda campaign to rally the people of the Soviet Union. I believe this was called justice by the men of the Soviet Army and the party was complicit in these actions.
Whatever this position represents it has nothing in common with the politics of Lenin, the Bolsheviks or the early Comintern.
During the first World War Lenin and the Bolsheviks demanded a peace without reparations or annexations. The Comintern (and teh KPD) opposed the Versailles Treatey among other reasons because it demanded reparations from Germany (i.e. from the whole German people, even though it was the German ruling class that was responsible for taking Germany into teh war) and because a weakening of German industry by removing whole factories also meant a weakening of the German proletariat.
After 1945 the Soviet Union annexed those parts of Poland it had occupied under the Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939 and "compensated" Polant by giving it an equivalent area of eastern Germany. The removal of factories was a form of reparations - which did indeed weaken the proletariat in the Soviet Zone and set back industry there by about a decade - the British, French and American zones were not subjected to reparations at all (although the French did initially want them and did take over control of Saarland with its coalfields for 10 years).
All in all, these policies seem to have little in common with the communism of Lenin, the Bolsheviks and the early Comintern.
One final comment, many of the factories dismantled weren't (or indeed couldn't) be reconstructed within the USSR and it simply rotted or rusted. And in one respect the former Soviet Zone (later the GDR) still hasn't recovered - on many sections of the railway system where there had been two sets of tracks (one in each direction) one set was removed and sent to the USSR. Very few of these tracks were ever replaced in GDR times and some of them have still not been replaced today although on those parts of the railway system that haven't been closed down (in the run-up to privatisation) there has been major investment since German reunification.
Einde O'Callaghan
________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
