CB: >> Neither the Vietnamese , Eastern Europeans nor the Chinese termed >> themselves "Stalinists". They were Marxist-Leninists. Your use of the >> term slanders and disrepects them , and wrecks civil discussions on >> these issues. It's a provocation.
It's almost axiomatic in historical materialism that it's a mistake to take someone's self-description automatically being the truth. (I can't find the quote, which is from the _German Ideology_, I believe.) I don't know about the Vietnamese, but the Chinese CP saw themselves as promoting the thought of Marx, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong until the last of this list fell from political grace. (At the local Maoist bookstore in Berkeley when I lived there, one could easily buy a picture of Stalin, at least during the 1970s.) The Eastern European CPs after WW2 were under Stalin's direct rule, at a time when the USSR's ruling elite was still pushing the cult of personality. I think it's legit to think of those who are into that cult of personality as "Stalinist." >> To refer to people who don't consider themselves Stalinists as >> Stalinists is none other than Trotskyist/petit bourgeois revolutionist >> slander, childish namecalling, unworthy of this list. hmm... I guess "Trotskyist/petit bourgeois" isn't name-calling. Marv: > I also winced when I saw the reference to "Stalinists", but the writer is > invariably fair-minded and I don't think in his case there was any malicious > intent. thanks. > It's a hackneyed hangover from Trotskyist dogma which holds that > the parties which endorsed the Khruschev speech could not be absolved > of their > "Stalinist" past so long as they did not repudiate popular fronts with > bourgeois liberals, "stages" theories of development, or fully rehabilitate > the Old Bosheviks, notably the Left Opposition. It was regarded as analysis > rather than an insult, notwithstanding that by these criteria most > socialists active in broad-based reform movements who necessarily find > themselves allying with liberals and favour the extension of such alliances > into the political arena could be tarred with the same brush. > > Whatever the pretence at objectivity, many Trotskyists used "Stalinist" as > an epithet in much the same way CP'ers and their other political enemies > venomously referred to the "Trotskyites". Glad you refrained from replying > in kind. Political slurs, as you note, can be as destructive as ethnic > slurs, even when they're not conscious. Not having been brought up in the Trotskyist tradition (or, rather, on a far edge of that tradition), I don't use the word "Stalinist" in that sectarian way. In addition to those who literally follow Stalin's personality cult (or apologize excessively for Stalin), to me Stalinism refers to dictatorial regimes in poorer countries that are pushing a nationalist program of economic development, based on rejection of capitalist property relations and their replacement with state ownership of the means of production. To some extent, it also applies to countries which were literally under the thumb of Stalin's USSR, as in Eastern Europe after WW2. I wouldn't call those regimes "Marxist-Leninist" (unless it were clearly understood that the phrase was being used as a synonym for "Stalinist") since Marx was much much more in favor of democracy than those regimes were, while Lenin started out fighting for democracy. Neither Marx nor Lenin saw national economic development as the main purpose of socialism. As I understand it, the phrase "Marxist-Leninism" became the name of a dogma back in the 1920s, when various Bolsheviks were trying to prove that they were truer followers of Lenin than their competitors. (Trotsky participated in this competition, in his own way.) Eventually, it became a state-determined dogma. -- Jim Devine / "All science would be superfluous if the form of appearance of things directly coincided with their essence." -- KM _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
