Barkley --
Let me preface by thanking Michael for indulging me. That said, on to the
polemics.
You want to stress the "systemic" issue. In other words, even if Lenin
committed murder, the murder should be attributed to the idiosyncracies of
Lenin and the circumstances he faced, and not to the inherent nature of
"communism" as a governing philosophy.
To a certain extent, I think this is undisputable, in the sense that the
Lenins and Stalins of the world are unique and transcend any specific
political philosophy. It is also undisputable that Lenin and Stalin are not
the inherent heirs of Marx, nor in turn is Marx the end all and be all of
the Left.
However, it is also undisputable that people who consciously attempted to
actualize Marxist values and "communism" killed a lot of people. A lot of
people. Some intentionally, some recklessly, some negligently. And the
political structures they created permitted tyrants like Stalin to thrive
and wield power. And such occurrences were not limited to Russia -- similar
things happened again in disparate places, such as China, Cambodia and North
Korea.
Therefore, the "systemic" question is not so easy. It is easy to explain
away specific incidents in isolation. Lenin faced foreign invasion and
civil war. Stalin was a uniquely paranoid tyrant. Etc. But if the same
problems occur in varied circumstances spread over many years, the "system,"
and the actualizing philosophy, must be questioned.
I think it was Jean Francois Revel who said something like "capitalism is
judged by its results, but communism is judged by its promises." That never
seemed fair to me.
David Shemano
----------------------------
David,
I have been away for several days, and clearly
this thread has gone all over kingdom come. I also
understand that Michael P. wishes it would go away.
Furthermore, I am probably going to have to drop off
the list again soon due to work crashing down on me
with the new editorship. However...
Well, I am not going to get into a detailed examination
of exactly how the US penal code would judge these
various figures. I believe that we agree that there is a
spectrum of culpability that involves such issues as knowledge
and intention, etc.
I think it is worth moving this back up to some extent
to the systemic level again. We can argue about the
personal culpability of these folks endlessly (who was
worse, Hitler or Stalin? blah blah...). But the systemic
question was where this came in originally. Were these
people dead from "communism"?
Although Lenin's associates identified the grain
seizures with some effort at communism, there was no
collectivization at that time. This was in fact simply another
round of wartime requisitioning that has gone on for centuries.
I believe something like a quarter of the German population
died during the 30 Years War. Most of that was due to
requisitioning, not people actually being shot. Maybe Lenin
was guilty of some sort of personal culpability because he
knew (or should have known) that peasants would die. But,
this was hardly systemic.
This is relevant to the analysis of Stalin. His policy was
not the same as Lenin's. He was not requisitioning grain.
He was carrying out the first state-collectivization ever.
It appears that he desired to actively kill kulaks who resisted
(and many were indeed shot in the head). There is no
evidence whatsoever that he actively sought a famine.
I think the argument that this was a massive blunder is
very strong.
Now one can argue that it was systemic, a screwup
of communism. Maybe. But then there were many ag
collectivizations that happened after WW II in Eastern
Europe and elsewhere (let's hold China aside) that did not
result in famines or hardly any deaths at all. And, although
arguably most of these societies might have been more
ag productive under other systems, they were not disasters
and nobody starved. Indeed, it was widely argued that they
"learned from the errors of Stalin."
China of course tried something different, and this case
has also been discussed at length. Again, once the GLF
was over, the Chinese learned from their own mistakes.
Mao apologized. Nobody starved after that.
Of course, we do have the more recent case of the Kims
in North Korea. They should have known better by now....
A final remark, and I really do not want to go on and on
about this as it really has been about beaten to death (ooog!),
but I do think it is worth keeping track of these distinctions
about degrees of systemic failure or accident versus intention,
etc. Again, there are now all these books that simply lump all
these deaths together, famines with purges and on and on,
and identify them as "people killed by communism." What
is more appalling is indeed the fact that on the Right there are
now many who are indeed using these numbers and repeating
them over and over to come up with the story that indeed Hitler
was not so bad, blah blah. Well, obviously I find all of this
rather frustrating, but I think I have about shot my wad on this one.
Most of the remarks I would make further on this have now
been made by (in some cases many) others.
Barkley Rosser
