I believe in socialism, but I feel Stalin shouldn’t be idolised due to things like the Gulag.
I would like more people to become socialist, but I feel not condemning Stalin doesn’t help the cause.
I’ve tried to have a constructieve conversation about this, but I basically get angry comments calling me stupid for believing he did atrocious things.
That’s not how you win someone over.
I struggle to believe the Gulag etc. Never happened, and if it happened I firmly believe Stalin should be condemned.
Me to other Communists: Stalin was a complex character who did make mistakes, went too hard on some stuff and not hard enough on others, but overall was a force for good, and I can never fault him for leading the USSR in defeating the Nazis.
Me to libs: You will not talk badly about uncle Joe Steel, ender of the holocaust, killer of fascists, beacon of hope to the global south.
I would like more people to become socialist, but I feel not condemning Stalin doesn’t help the cause.
Constantly repudiating historical socialists for being the wrong type of socialist hurts the cause far more, and is exactly what the feds want you to do.
Yeah, I feel the same towards Stalin as I feel towards most figures and places that have been relentlessly smeared by Cold War and Red Scare propaganda.
And that is that the entire reason these figures are so viscously demonized is because capitalism cannot survive the threat of a good example. The ruling class needs the most radical allowable criticism of their system to be, “Sure, we have many faults, but all of the alternatives are far worse so you better not dare even thinking about fighting for positive change.”
That narrative can only function if every victory of the global proletariat is smeared as a dystopian hellscape ruled by cartoon villains. And I don’t think it’s to our benefit to cede that rhetorical ground wholesale out of fear that challenging it might be unpopular among Cold Warriors.
real lol, good post!
This comically evil understanding of the Soviet prison system is based off only a handful of unreliable sources.
Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror (published 1968) laid the groundwork for Soviet fearmongering, and was based largely off defector testimony.
Robert Conquest worked for the British Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD), which was a secret Cold War propaganda department, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda; provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers; and to use weaponized information and disinformation and “fake news” to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements.
He was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash.
The Great Terror came out in 1968, four years before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and it became, Garton Ash says, “a fixture in the political imagination of anybody thinking about communism”.
- Andrew Brown. (2003). Scourge and poet
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (published 1973), one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author’s personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, Nazi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth.
Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A history (published 2003) draws directly from The Gulag Archipelago and reiterates its message. Anne is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), two infamous pieces of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class in the United States, whose primary aim is to promote the interests of American Imperialism around the world.
However, in contrast to these depictions, we have this interesting report produced by the CIA regarding the nature of the gulags, or “Forced Labor Camps” as they describe them. Let’s take a second to note that this year, California voted to uphold their forced labor practices in the state, and that the US still maintains constitutionally protected forced labor as a form of punishment.
A 1957 CIA document [which was declassified in 2010] titled “Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six:
- Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas
- From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon “economic accountability” such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid.
- For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day.
- Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners’ food supplies.
- Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day.
- A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals.
- In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the “ordinary criminals” of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes.
- Saed Teymuri. (2018). The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA
In terms of scale, Solzhenitsyn estimated that over 66 million people were victims of the Soviet Union’s forced labor camp system over the course of its existence from 1918 to 1956. With the collapse of the USSR and the opening of the Soviet archives, researchers can now access actual archival evidence to prove or disprove these claims. Predictably, it turned out the propaganda was just that.
Unburdened by any documentation, these “estimates” invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR’s single largest enterprise.
In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. …
Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the Nazis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as “the largest system of death camps in modern history.” …
Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prisoners, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other communist states…
- Michael Parenti. (1997). Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
This is 2 million out of a population of 168 million (roughly 1.2% of the population). For comparison, in the United States, “over 5.5 million adults — or 1 in 61 — are under some form of correctional control, whether incarcerated or under community supervision.” That’s 1.6%. So in both relative and absolute terms, the United States’ Prison Industrial Complex today is larger than the USSR’s Gulag system at its peak.
Regarding the “death rate”, In peace time, the mortality rate of the Gulag was around 3% to 5%. Even Conservative and anti-Communist historians have had to acknowledge this reality:
It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive…
Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hitler were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more.
- Timothy Snyder. (2010). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
(Side note: Timothy Snyder is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations)
This is still very high for a prison mortality rate, representing the brutality of the camps. However, it also clearly indicates that they were not death camps.
Nor was it slave labor, exactly. In the camps, although labor was forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (minus expenses).
We find that even in the Gulag, where force could be most conveniently applied, camp administrators combined material incentives with overt coercion, and, as time passed, they placed more weight on motivation. By the time the Gulag system was abandoned as a major instrument of Soviet industrial policy, the primary distinction between slave and free labor had been blurred: Gulag inmates were being paid wages according to a system that mirrored that of the civilian economy described by Bergson…
The Gulag administration [also] used a “work credit” system, whereby sentences were reduced (by two days or more for every day the norm was overfulfilled).
- L. Borodkin & S. Ertz. (2003). Compensation Versus Coercion in the Soviet GULAG
We can comb over the details all you want, but I don’t think you care about the details. You are looking to reinforce your own personal bias, not correct it. You are not taking an objective and materialist view of history regarding the Stalin era of the USSR. Not even, at a minimum, drawing comparisons between the prisons in the Soviet Union and the current for-profit systems that exist today in America.
All this effort in this post will go on to be wasted, I feel. I do it, though because your post will attract others with similar questions, and hopefully those more willing to deprogram themselves will read it and do more investigating.
You’re not going to build a socialist movement if you build it off the back of Cold War era red scare propaganda. You came to us with a simple question, and to fully understand the answer, you need to read more and deprogram yourself.
great post!GOOD post!
An additional note on The Gulag Archipelago, Solzhenitsyn’s wife has admitted that it is not based on reliable information, but instead folklore of the camps.
13·7 days agoUntil 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day.
While he is at this labor, the convict works under the same conditions, and with the same protections that he would enjoy in outside labor. His hours are seven or eight a day, depending upon the nature of his work
Did it change between 1935 and 1954? Are Callcott and the CIA talking about different things? Genuine question, I wish to know.
So I think the CIA is talking about specific camps, and it could be possible that these camps were operating different working hours, but maybe what Callcott is describing is an average or generalized notion of an eight-hour day across the entire system. From the first page of the CIA report, section (2), subsection (a), it states:
Forced Labor Camps ia the USSR: This six-page report provides detailed information on the organization of labor camps and on working and living conditions in camps the area of Bratsk (N 56-02, E 101-4O) and Tayshet (N 55-57, E 96-02) in Irkutsk Oblast. The bulk of this information concerns Ozerlag, [ REDACTED ] Other camps described In the report are Kraslag near Tayshet, Minlag in the Vorkuta area, and Vyatlag rear Verkhne-Kansk in Kirov Oblast.
So these camps might have been operating 10 hours days for a reason, and then changed that policy later.
Definitely saving a copy of this to have ready for debates with friends! Sources matter and shit coming from declassified CIA and not “some USSR propaganda.” Not like the CIA is the most honest of sources, but this being stuff that wasn’t meant for mass release makes it easier to put cracks in the anti-communist indoctrination of the western populace. Really shows how much we were failing to find actual proof of the stuff our leaders always kept spouting. The MIC wanted to use whatever war hawk lies to create conditions needed to make the money gun go burrr. Just like the lies about missile build-ups that weren’t happening in the USSR before we claimed they were and started going nuts “closing the gap.” Of course the USSR did start building-up, but not before we kept yelling about drastically increasing ours.
He was mostly alright, but his significance really comes from popularizing and formulating what is now known as Marxism-Leninism.
As a result of mounting internal and external pressure, as well as the power-struggle following Lenin’s death, Stalin had to make countless concessions to deal with problems that could not be avoided.
Because of his role leading a country that was led into, and greatly harmed by war (tens of millions of deaths as a result), it can be very challenging to get an appropriate critique and analysis of his role. You are not going to find any example of peaceful revolution, nor will you find any examples of countries in a state of war that can grant complete freedom and liberty.
I defend him to the extent that he led a struggle against European fascism, and I defend him against accusations that Marxism and fascism are the same. Going so far to condemn Stalin generally has a tendency to grant a certain level of forgivenes and apologia for fascists and their collaborators, as well as a wide assortment of reactionaries and nationalists.
When it comes to people who would be identified as “Stalinists”, usually what is meant is something more similar to what we would call National Bolsheviks (NazBols). If not that, then in reference to the tendency of certain Marxist-Leninist groups to justify social conservatism, petty nationalism, and premature centralization.
One thing I’d like to touch on: the experience of the Bolsheviks told us that we need unity of Marxists, where we exclude the distorters of Marx. If you want to be a Marxist, you need Marx - no way around that. Stalin had to read Marx’s major works, Lenin did so and more, and so did Trotsky, Luxembourg, even Kautsky and Bernstein.
Any major revolutionary figure is going to be smeared and distorted for someone else’s gain. People still hate Robespierre, for instance, and people still try to rewrite the narrative of people from Nat Turner to Huey P. Newton - Stalin was no different. You don’t have to defend him at all, nor do you have to condemn him (or any other historical figure), but you should at least understand the real Stalin and understand that the USSR was born out of the ashes of the Russian Empire - generally for worse as we came closer and closer to its dissolution. If you don’t care to catch the full story, you are going to be clueness when it comes to any revolutionary movement across the Americas, especially the US. You can try to overcorrect or overly emphasize how much you don’t like Stalin, if you’d like, but remember that Stalin’s opposition and the leftists who opposed the initial October Revolution were well on their way to make mistakes in the complete opposition direction - equally as harmful and destructive. That doesn’t make you superior, it makes you blind. Stalin’s errors were far from the only possibility.
It could’ve went way worse, or it could’ve been far better off - which would you prefer?
Going so far to condemn Stalin generally has a tendency to grant a certain level of forgivenes and apologia for fascists and their collaborators, as well as a wide assortment of reactionaries and nationalists.
Is it so hard to believe that Everybody Sucks Here?
You should read Davod Katz on holocaust trivialization through making the Soviets into a boogeyman- basically used to justify exterminating people because they were collaborating with the evil soviets, especially in the Baltics where holocaust collaboration was very thorough.
highly recommend reading Losurdo’s Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend. it’s a very good historiography of stalin which dispels a lot of the western-propagated myths about his rule and the guy himself. near the end there’s a very enlightening section about why “condemning” communist leaders and figures as somehow aberrations of communism is a dangerous road to go down. Stalin was not an aberration of communism, he was trying his best to further the cause and by all accounts he did quite a good job. we can critique without performing such a binary disavowal, ultimately that is liberalism
The gulag system was infinitely more humane than America’s prison system. They weren’t death camps, it’s difficult to understand what the stigma around them is other than the fact that they have a spooky Russian name. Prisoners were paid a full wage, and were permitted to leave the prisons for short times.
stalin was a good guy who was doing his best
He had a really big spoon.
he was s power hungry megalomaniac that felt no shame in killing anyone who crossed him
The man tried to resign four times. It always was denied.
Trotsky and Bukharin constantly crossed him and he let them until hey tried to murder him. Hell, he defended Bukharin even then.
In short you are off by several universes.
When you get your politics from Marvel movies
He is an ambiguous person. He certainly did a lot of good things, but there were mistakes and even from our point of view, quite cruel decisions. It is difficult to assess why he made certain decisions. There is a lot of unconfirmed information and ambiguous accusations around him, although, of course, there are bad decisions, maybe we don’t know all the information, or maybe he was wrong. It was a difficult time back then. According to some reports, at the end of his life, even Lenin treated him ambiguously and was afraid of the concentration of power in one hand and even wrote a letter to the congress, but some doubt this, so it may not be true. To truly understand this, you need to be a historian and read a lot of original documents by yourself. But I don’t think that we should consider him only a complete villain, as he is often exposed.
Regarding Lenin, he specifically had beef with Stalin over his rude treatment of Lenin’s wife, and wished someone would replace him who was in all manner the same except kinder. Ie, Lenin fully backed Stalin’s positions, theoretical understanding, etc and wished he was simply a kinder person towards comrades when interacting with them.
Stalin tried to resign over this, and his resignation was rejected.
For further reading: Archival evidence and records show he tried to resign no fewer than four times, all rejected.
He killed loyal communists, many falsely accused of treason, and became the poster boy of the Red Scare, providing anti-communists with propaganda to equate socialism with totalitarianism. His oppressive policies, human rights abuses, and betrayal of socialist principles alienated global leftist movements and set back the progress of socialism by decades.
Those communists wanted to coup the USSR and had connections to the nazis. Your point is incredibly childish.
Being the poster boy of the red scare means that his government was effective enough to scare the piggies. You only get smeared if you’re feared. I assume you rather had it that he’d be loved by all the piggies out there so that they would not do a red scare that would force you to use your intellectual muscles to dispell the bullshit. Reality doesn’t work that way.
Don’t assume then, phallasy-based emotional reaction attacks are useless diversions. Learn theory, learn communication, learn.
Edit: lol the irony, those tactics aren’t clever
Thank you for editing your post, it literally proves my point.
Maybe do not accept everything his detractors said about him as holy gospel. And stop projecting, holy shit.
deleted by creator
Shouldn’t the dictatorship of the proletariat have been disbanded after the revolution was successful?
Why were the people not free to self organize into communes of their own design that best reflects their values?
At what point do you think Marxists believe the DotP is to be ended? Moreover, what do you think a DotP is? People weren’t allowed to dissolve government into small communes because they were invaded by more than 14 Capitalist countries, and in addition the Soviets were Marxists and not Anarchists, they wanted full public ownership and central planning as the goal.
Sooner the Soviets I guess. A shame there was no peace to see what could have been.
Same as it ever was.
The USSR never had a single year of peace, in its entire existence. Following the revolution was a brutal civil war in which 14+ nations (including the US) landed troops to try to stop the republic. Even after the reds won against the whites, they had years of intrigues against them, then rising fascism, which a lot of historians see as a continuous conflict in eastern europe from the years between the twe world wars.
Stalin presciently stated that “we have 10 years to industrialize in the time it took capitalist nations 50+ years, or we’re toast”. Then you have operation barbarossa and the nazi onslaught, with its scorched earth policy and genocidal onslaught of the USSR, the eastern front of ww2 being the bloodiest conflict in history, with the soviets saving the world from fascism.
Then you have the US atom bombing civilians as a warning to the soviets, and 60 years of a cold war arms race, and too many other threats and incursions to count.
The USSR wouldn’t have lasted a single year if they disarmed and followed that advice, and europe would probably be all speaking german now if it weren’t for Stalin.
Appreciate the reply m’dude.
Shouldn’t the dictatorship of the proletariat have been disbanded after the revolution was successful?
This question doesn’t even make sense. The dictatorship of the proletariat doesn’t start until the revolution is successful. When the revolution succeeds it replaces the pre-existing dictatorship of the bourgeoisie with the new dictatorship of the proletariat. These are definitional. The fact that you asked the question means you are missing some critical pieces of information that will make it quite literally impossible for you to analyze anything about history, communist theory, revolutionary politics, and left organizing.
Why were the people not free to self organize into communes of their own design that best reflects their values?
You are describing libertarianism. Under current global conditions, people self-organizing into collectives creates warlords which reproduces feudalism which reproduces capitalism. People self-organizing into communes that best reflect their values is quite literally how we got to where we are today. Prehistoric human communities formed around shared values and splintered along values misalignment. They formed and disbanded and reformed. And eventually the technologies for hoarding became available (generally agriculture) and then conquest became a viable strategy for survival. Those conditions haven’t really changed yet. The point of a socialist transition to communism is actually to collectively organizing human activity to bring about the conditions whereby conquest is no longer a viable strategy for survival. That requires significant reorganization of production and distribution. So far, we’ve seen it takes longer than a century to pull that off.
Maybe next life then. Appreciate your efforts.
Not a great socialist
Factually wrong, he was a excellent socialist.
Wasn’t Stalin a communist dictator? We aren’t looking for communism or a dictatorship. Claiming otherwise is just misleading.
Stalin was a Communist leader of the USSR. He was not a dictator according to the CIA. Moreover, the idea that Socialists do not seek Communism is a bit strange, the two most major camps of Socialism are Marxism and Anarchism, neither of which has “Socialism” as an end goal. Anarchists seek direct implementations of full horizontalism and decentralization out of the shell of the old, so to speak, while Marxists seek full public ownership and central planning, ie they wish to implement Communism.
The idea of a stagnant, static, never-changing system is foreign to the overwhelming majority of Socialist ideologies, ergo it must continue to advance. This advancement in my opinion is of course going to be Communism.
Finally, the hammer and sickle is the symbol of Marxism-Leninism and the Soviet Union, which is used as the symbol for this community. You yourself do not need to support them, but using the term we in doing so is silly.
I call myself a socialist but do not support a full horizontalism or full decentralization. I support partials of both.
I do believe that optimizations for quality of life and value and stability are rarely at the ends of the spectrums, but sometimes somewhere in the middle and subjective to democratic agreement and changing based on reality.
I want my system to be flexible to have times of more centralization, times of decentralization, times of horizontality, times of independent nodes, etc.
Why is it that you believe the correct answer is “in the middle?” Moreover, why do you believe that you can simply stop the progression towards full public ownership, and therefore full centralization, assuming productive forces continue to develop? The point of Marxism is that there is no such thing as a stagnant system, and competition within markets further results in centralization, paving the way for public ownership to be superior.
I don’t think I’d be “stopping” the progression, just that the progression is not towards some absolute idealistic end. (and to note in my ideal system, my individual ideals are secondary to the populations average), just that the natural maximum optimization, say of organizations type, an amount of organizations would be publicly controlled by a government, and an amount would be controlled by the employees themselves in a coop structure.
I think this makes sense as there will likely be products that a niche set of people want, but is not at such a scale that the government and the people behind it would want to dedicate collective resources towards it directly.
Fundamentally I believe the uniqueness and fickleness of people I believe will always outpace any collective structure, and so allowing for that to be represented in a society is key to success, and that entails organizations outside of collective-control which rely on consensus.
I do want a socialist system were all shares of an organization are either public ally owned or owned by the employees themselves, with no rent seeking capitalists involved.
The abolition of private property under communism is akin to the abolition of chattel slavery. So let me ask you this. Do you think abolition of slavery is too extreme and total slavery (whatever that means) is too extreme, and therefore something in the middle like only chattel slavery for a subset of the population is where the system will be optimized?
There is a lot of truth to your main point that centralization and decentralization are a dialectic, but I don’t think you understand that they are a dialectic. Instead of seeing the dialectic, I think what you’re doing is arguing against a strawman. Marxist theory does not posit that everything everywhere at all times in all ways should be centralized. Centralization and decentralization cannot exist without each other. The question is one of the relationship between the two. Stalin was not pursuing a policy of centralizing everything everywhere all the time, nor was the USSR. You are not arguing against a real position. You are accidentally landing on the Marxist position without understanding it.
Out of curiosity, have you read Marx? Much of what you’re saying goes against standard Marxist consensus. As an example, cooperatives are not “Marxist,” they allow accumulation despite eliminating bourgeois exploitation of proletarians. To that extent, they also must retain money, and trade, which becomes superfluous in the context of the rest of a Socialist society that would rather be fully planned.
Moreover, you are separating the idea of “government” from the “people” in a manner that confuses what Communism would actually look like. In retaining private property, you retain the conditions for Capitalism to emerge, and you retain groups that potentially stand at odds with the interests of the rest of the economy. This is why Public Ownership and Central Planning becomes superior to market-based systems once the productive forces have reached sufficient levels of development, and why Marxists say a system like that which you describe would eventually turn into Communism anyways as it works itself out to be more efficient.
If you want a starter guide, I recommend my own introductory Marxist reading list.
I have not yet, but i do plan to, thanks for the reading list, I will check into it.
At least at the moment and from what I know so far, I do not identify or align with Marxism or Communism, I do with socialism and i do not view socialism as some half step.
What do you say in response to the notion that no system is static, and ergo is either moving towards full public ownership and planning or is regressing? Markets have a tendency to centralize in order to combat a tendency for the rate of profit to fall, which leads to inefficiencies. At some point, these markets coalesce into syndicates with internal planning, at which point it becomes far more efficient overall to fold them into the public sector. There remains no use for said markets.
To me, the statement that markets will always remain useful in some aspect, same with private property, sounds similar to saying feudalism will always have some use, and even slavery. At some point markets will fade into obsolescence much the same way older modes of production did, alongside advancements in technology and production, same as what happened to feudalism and slavery.
Right, communism and socialism aren’t the same thing though, why are you conflating them? Regardless of sillyness.
Socialism, in my opinion, inevitably leads towards Communism if maintained. What matters is which has supremacy, Capital, or Humanity. I am not conflating them, but pointing out that Socialism, in the eyes of Marxists, is simply pre-Communism.
That makes sense! Thank you! I suppose communism can be seen as extreme socialism, in a way.
(I had to block some trolls before I found your comment, sorry for the slow response.)
Sort of. Socialism is simply when public ownership becomes the dominant and driving factor of an economy, typically marked by human supremacy over Capital, rather than the reverse. Since markets naturally centralize, they develop unique forms of planning suitable for their industries and sectors, paving the way for public aquisition and planning. Socialism trends towards full socialization, at which point classes cease to exist and as such class oppression ceases to exist, and “money” becomes superfluous, as there is no trade between institutions.
I think any extreme is probably a bad situation. Thank you for clarifying! I’ve got some thinking to do now.
Why is an extreme a bad situation? What if said extreme was an eradication of poverty? Eradication of racism? Extremes are not inherently superior to moderatiom, nor is the reverse true.
If you want a reading list, I have one linked on my profile.
Historically speaking, socialism and communism are terms that are synonymous and interchangeable.
That is certainly not the case today, but the disagreement over terminology largely comes about as a result of state led suppression of communists and Red Scare tactics. As it became more dangerous to identify oneself as a communist the result was that it became more desirable/safer to identify as a socialist and also to argue that socialism was distinct from communism.
And while I’m no linguistic prescriptivist and I recognize that semantic drift happens to nearly all terminology over a long enough time frame, the issue with this changing definition is that it does not come out of any theoretical grounding or ideological framework. It is a reaction to external pressure, and that reaction by different groups and different peoples leads to the situation today where there is very little agreement or consensus regarding what people are referring to when they use these terms. They have been effectively rendered useless for the purposes of political discussion unless you first begin with a lengthy preamble about how you personally define these terms.
One popular way of making this distinction is the framing that Lenin used. He described socialism in terms of the international class struggle in the epoch of imperialism (the epoch we were currently living through). The jist is that the communist theory of “The State” is that it is definitionally an organ of class domination/class warfare. It is the instrument through which one set of class interests are enforced upon the rest of society, and during the epoch of imperialism that instrument of capitalist class domination is wielded on a global scale. Therefore, any communist party seeking to put an end to the tyranny of the capitalist class will necessarily need a plan for opposing the counter-revolution of the capitalist class and the inevitable sabotage, acts of war, and attempts of the re-domination of the working classes during the epoch of imperialism.
In other words, the working classes would require their own state organ to enforce the interests of the working classes and protect against capitalist reaction and domination. If we are talking about this in terms of the common framing of the “endpoint” of communism being a “stateless, classless” society*, the argument goes that you cannot immediately jump to a stateless society so long as capitalism still has a stranglehold over the majority of the world and imperialist nations are still empowered to wage class warfare across the globe.
This analysis of the strategy and tactics required for the liberation of the working class was referred to as socialism by Lenin. So in this framework, Socialism is the strategy a communist party uses on the path to communism. If you would like to argue that a communist party working towards communism is meaningfully distinct from being communist, you are free to do so. But the distinction is quite slim.
On the other end of the spectrum, you have people inside the imperial core who describe themselves as socialists, or more commonly democratic socialists, and what they mean when they call themselves socialist is, “I want the system to remain relatively unchanged, but we should distribute the fruits of our country’s imperial plunder more equitably by petitioning the capitalist state to administer more welfare and social programs such as universal healthcare.”
This variety of socialist has very little relation to the historical usage of the term, and comes about much more directly as a result of that Cold war/red scare reaction I mentioned above. I would argue that this kind of socialism is little more than a rebranding of liberalism, but that certainly qualifies it as being distinct from communism.
On this forum at least, if you see someone talking about socialism they are much more likely to be using a definition closer to the first definition than the second one.
(*The framing of communism as a stateless, classless, moneyless society is a very sloppy framing, but is sufficient for this discussion)
Thank you for clarifying! I see how those perspectives can be difficult to understand with how similar they seem on the surface. I appear to have been taught a slightly different concept than most people here, if I understand correctly.
I have some thinking to do, I really appreciate the help. Thank you!
Before Marx, the term communism was used by many utopian socialists to describe an idealist, egalitarian society.
Its modern usage is almost always traced back to Karl Marx’s usage of the term where he introduced the concept of scientific socialism alongside Friedrich Engels. The theory of scientific socialism described communism not as an idealistic, perfect society but rather as a stage of development taking place after a long, political process of class struggle. Marx, however, used the terms socialism and communism interchangeably and he drew no distinction between the two.
Lenin was the first person to give distinct meanings to the terms socialism and communism. The socialism/communism of Marx was now known simply as communism, and Marx’s “transitional phase” was to be known as socialism.
Prolwiki > Communism > Etymology
So yes, there is a distinction between the two, but I have a feeling this isn’t the distinction you were referring to.
Could you be talking about Social Democracy? Because, that’s not socialism, or communism. If you’re interested in this distinction presented by Lenin, you might want to read Chapter 5 of The State and Revolution.
I have some reading to do, thank you for pointing me in the right direction! This is great!
Anytime comrade!
We aren’t looking for communism
What’s this? A recommendation?
It would be a good thing for you to read. More lenin is good for everyone
I’ll have a look! Thank you!
That is cold war / anti-communist propaganda, which capitalists and the media that they own will never stop propagating, because capitalists are definitionally anti-communist.
Even in Stalin’s time there was collective leadership. The western idea of a dictator within the communist setup is exaggerated. Misunderstandings on that subject are caused by lack of comprehension of the real nature and organization of the Communist power structure. Stalin, although holding wide powers, was merely the captain of a team and it seems obvious that Khrushchev will be the new captain.
Second Thought: We Need To Talk About “Authoritarianism”
(Sorry for the stupid question, I only know what I’ve been taught in school.)
If it wasn’t authoritarian or a dictatorship, why’d they build those absolutely giant statues? Just a democratic flex?
Why did “they” build Mt. Rushmore or the Lincoln Memorial?
I’m afraid I don’t know. The people under Stalin’s rule, obviously.
under Stalin’s rule
You are still speaking from the cold war framing of Stalin being a dictator and not an elected official who tried to step down multiple times.
Joseph Stalin was elected as the General Secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU in April 1922 during the 11th Congress of the Party. Between then and until his death, he asked to be relieved of his duties as General Secretary a total of four times — all of which were rejected.
That’s one weird situation
For starters, “Gulag” just means “prison.” Of course prisons existed in the USSR, and some had rather brutal conditions. Others, however, did not, and treated prisoners better to much better than your average American prison. Nobody is saying the Gulags never existed, perhaps they mean your specific interpretation of the conditions of gulags and the extent to which they were used. Edit 1
As for Stalin himself, it’s fair to say he committed a fair degree of errors in judgement, had reactionary social views such as his view of homosexuality, was frequently paranoid, and so forth. At the same time, it is equally fair to understand that Stalin has been the subject of countless lies, exaggerations, myths, and other degrees of Cold War propaganda we learn as fact despite evidence to the contrary, especially following the opening of the Soviet Archives. Moreover, it is necessary to acknowledge the vital role he played in governing the worlds first Socialist State, and building the foundations of this rapid improvement on the utter squalor of the Tsarist regime.
Should Stalin be idolized? I don’t think so, as I believe that can get in the way of accurate analysis. Should Stalin be villianized and made a scapegoat to brush the Red Scare under the rug? I don’t believe so, either. The USSR came with countless benefits, from a doubling of life expectancy to free healthcare to near 100% literacy rates (better than the modern US), and more. These benefits were formed under Stalin, and as such we must do our absolute best to separate fact from fiction. If we accept and push purely the accepted bourgeois narrative regarding the real experience of AES states, then we cannot learn from them properly and sort out what worked and what did not.
Basically, Stalin was neither a perfect saint devoid of mistakes nor a unique monster that should be especially condemned. He was the leader of the USSR, but did not have absolute control, and in addition was in many ways less monstrous than contemporary leaders such as Hitler and Churchill. Correct contextualization is important. I highly recommend the short, 8 minute article “Tankies” by Roderic Day, hosted over on Red Sails. For more in-depth reading, Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend by Domenico Losurdo is a good historical critique of Stalin that focuses on taking a critical stance towards Stalin and contextualizes him.
Edit 1: seeing your other two comments, I am now entirely certain that this is the case.
Thanks, this is the kind of response I was looking for. I’ll look into what you said further.
With the image that Stalin has in the west, I think it alienates people when he’s not condemned. I can’t think of a singe leader that we should praise (Mandela maybe?) if anything we should praise ideas not people.
If you don’t directly challenge false, bourgeois narratives, then they are used as ammo against related subjects. “Stalin was a butcher of 100 million,” if accepted, means the Soviet Union was a horrible failure as well. This means Socialism was a horrible failure in the Soviet Union. This cascading power of bourgeois narratives prevents real radicalization, and moreover allows repitition of failures if not properly analyzed.
Take another example. Stalin synthesized Marxism-Leninism. As a Marxist-Leninist, there is no avoiding Stalin when talking with liberals. Because of my belief that Marxism-Leninism is correct, I cannot avoid the topic of grappling with Stalin’s existence.
As Marx said, “The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.”
people need to be educated not coddled. conceding to and legitimising liberal/right wing revisionist history is a strategic error for any communist or communist movement.
You are factually incorrect in the very first statement. “Gulag” means “главное управление исправительно-трудовых лагерей” and is a name of a state agency directly operating a network of concentration/forced labor camps. Each of the camps had their name, control and command structures and operated under direct oversight of some best Stalin’s chaps.
Also, it wasn’t just ‘prison’. Each of them was a concentration camp for politically it otherwise unsound elements, that provided Stalin with supply of free slave labor.
I’ll direct you to @RedWizard@hexbear.net in his comment here going over the Soviet prison system, along with myth-dispelling surrounding the Soviet prison labor system.
You didn’t need to direct me anywhere to accept that you made a clear factual mistake.
The Gulag system was the Prison system of the USSR for much of its existence. No, it did not translate directly into “prison,” but that doesn’t change that it was the prison system, and moreover the conditions of many gulags were favorable compared to American prisons. It’s worth reading RedWizard’s comment because he dispelled a lot of the myths you perpetuate.
This comically evil understanding of the Soviet prison system is based off only a handful of unreliable sources.
Robert Conquest’s The Great Terror (published 1968) laid the groundwork for Soviet fearmongering, and was based largely off defector testimony.
Robert Conquest worked for the British Foreign Office’s Information Research Department (IRD), which was a secret Cold War propaganda department, created to publish anti-communist propaganda, including black propaganda; provide support and information to anti-communist politicians, academics, and writers; and to use weaponized information and disinformation and “fake news” to attack not only its original targets but also certain socialists and anti-colonial movements.
He was Solzhenytsin before Solzhenytsin, in the phrase of Timothy Garton Ash.
The Great Terror came out in 1968, four years before the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago, and it became, Garton Ash says, “a fixture in the political imagination of anybody thinking about communism”.
- Andrew Brown. (2003). Scourge and poet
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago (published 1973), one of the most famous texts on the subject, claims to be a work of non-fiction based on the author’s personal experiences in the Soviet prison system. However, Solzhenitsyn was merely an anti-Communist, Nazi-sympathizing, antisemite who wanted to slander the USSR by putting forward a collection of folktales as truth.
Anne Applebaum’s Gulag: A history (published 2003) draws directly from The Gulag Archipelago and reiterates its message. Anne is a member of the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and sits on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), two infamous pieces of the ideological apparatus of the ruling class in the United States, whose primary aim is to promote the interests of American Imperialism around the world.
However, in contrast to these depictions, we have this interesting report produced by the CIA regarding the nature of the gulags, or “Forced Labor Camps” as they describe them. Let’s take a second to note that this year, California voted to uphold their forced labor practices in the state, and that the US still maintains constitutionally protected forced labor as a form of punishment.
A 1957 CIA document [which was declassified in 2010] titled “Forced Labor Camps in the USSR: Transfer of Prisoners between Camps” reveals the following information about the Soviet Gulag in pages two to six:
- Until 1952, the prisoners were given a guaranteed amount food, plus extra food for over-fulfillment of quotas
- From 1952 onward, the Gulag system operated upon “economic accountability” such that the more the prisoners worked, the more they were paid.
- For over-fulfilling the norms by 105%, one day of sentence was counted as two, thus reducing the time spent in the Gulag by one day.
- Furthermore, because of the socialist reconstruction post-war, the Soviet government had more funds and so they increased prisoners’ food supplies.
- Until 1954, the prisoners worked 10 hours per day, whereas the free workers worked 8 hours per day. From 1954 onward, both prisoners and free workers worked 8 hours per day.
- A CIA study of a sample camp showed that 95% of the prisoners were actual criminals.
- In 1953, amnesty was given to 70% of the “ordinary criminals” of a sample camp studied by the CIA. Within the next 3 months, most of them were re-arrested for committing new crimes.
- Saed Teymuri. (2018). The Truth about the Soviet Gulag – Surprisingly Revealed by the CIA
In terms of scale, Solzhenitsyn estimated that over 66 million people were victims of the Soviet Union’s forced labor camp system over the course of its existence from 1918 to 1956. With the collapse of the USSR and the opening of the Soviet archives, researchers can now access actual archival evidence to prove or disprove these claims. Predictably, it turned out the propaganda was just that.
Unburdened by any documentation, these “estimates” invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR’s single largest enterprise.
In 1993, for the first time, several historians gained access to previously secret Soviet police archives and were able to establish well-documented estimates of prison and labor camp populations. They found that the total population of the entire gulag as of January 1939, near the end of the Great Purges, was 2,022,976. …
Soviet labor camps were not death camps like those the Nazis built across Europe. There was no systematic extermination of inmates, no gas chambers or crematoria to dispose of millions of bodies. Despite harsh conditions, the great majority of gulag inmates survived and eventually returned to society when granted amnesty or when their terms were finished. In any given year, 20 to 40 percent of the inmates were released, according to archive records. Oblivious to these facts, the Moscow correspondent of the New York Times (7/31/96) continues to describe the gulag as “the largest system of death camps in modern history.” …
Most of those incarcerated in the gulag were not political prisoners, and the same appears to be true of inmates in the other communist states…
- Michael Parenti. (1997). Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism
This is 2 million out of a population of 168 million (roughly 1.2% of the population). For comparison, in the United States, “over 5.5 million adults — or 1 in 61 — are under some form of correctional control, whether incarcerated or under community supervision.” That’s 1.6%. So in both relative and absolute terms, the United States’ Prison Industrial Complex today is larger than the USSR’s Gulag system at its peak.
Regarding the “death rate”, In peace time, the mortality rate of the Gulag was around 3% to 5%. Even Conservative and anti-Communist historians have had to acknowledge this reality:
It turns out that, with the exception of the war years, a very large majority of people who entered the Gulag left alive…
Judging from the Soviet records we now have, the number of people who died in the Gulag between 1933 and 1945, while both Stalin and Hitler were in power, was on the order of a million, perhaps a bit more.
- Timothy Snyder. (2010). Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin
(Side note: Timothy Snyder is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations)
This is still very high for a prison mortality rate, representing the brutality of the camps. However, it also clearly indicates that they were not death camps.
Nor was it slave labor, exactly. In the camps, although labor was forced, it was not uncompensated. In fact, the prisoners were paid market wages (minus expenses).
We find that even in the Gulag, where force could be most conveniently applied, camp administrators combined material incentives with overt coercion, and, as time passed, they placed more weight on motivation. By the time the Gulag system was abandoned as a major instrument of Soviet industrial policy, the primary distinction between slave and free labor had been blurred: Gulag inmates were being paid wages according to a system that mirrored that of the civilian economy described by Bergson…
The Gulag administration [also] used a “work credit” system, whereby sentences were reduced (by two days or more for every day the norm was overfulfilled).
- L. Borodkin & S. Ertz. (2003). Compensation Versus Coercion in the Soviet GULAG
We can comb over the details all you want, but I don’t think you care about the details. You are looking to reinforce your own personal bias, not correct it. You are not taking an objective and materialist view of history regarding the Stalin era of the USSR. Not even, at a minimum, drawing comparisons between the prisons in the Soviet Union and the current for-profit systems that exist today in America.
All this effort in this post will go on to be wasted, I feel. I do it, though because your post will attract others with similar questions, and hopefully those more willing to deprogram themselves will read it and do more investigating.
You’re not going to build a socialist movement if you build it off the back of Cold War era red scare propaganda. You came to us with a simple question, and to fully understand the answer, you need to read more and deprogram yourself.
I like copy-pasta, and you got a good recipe, but I’ve been temp/perma banned to often to use it anymore these days. It being highly relevant didn’t help me in the past.
Consider linking to your previous comment you’ve already made in the future. Perhaps those with delicate senses would clutch their pearls slightly less. Not that they matter.
Appreciate you stranger. Peace.
Also, it wasn’t just ‘prison’. Each of them was a concentration camp for politically it otherwise unsound elements
“It wasn’t a prison! It was [definition of prison]”
You know, when you change the name of a thing, you totally change its essence too! Or something like that, I’m no anarchist.
“It wasn’t a prison. it was a prison by another name!!11111”
The correction the name is actually important. It’s literally an acronym, like SCUBA. GULAG is an abbreviation of “главное управление исправительно-трудовых лагерей”. Translated to English “Main Directorate of Correctional Labour Camps”, so in English the abbreviation would be MDCLC. GULAG does not mean “prison” in any language much like USA does not mean “country” and CIA does not mean “spies”.
Removed by mod
Your comment consists of 0 facts, an ableist slur, and a recommendation to watch a work of fiction designed specifically to push an anticommunist narrative. Moreover, the assertion that I must not have read is silly, I linked an article and a full history book in my comment, and have a Marxist reading list linked on my profile with a mix of theory and historical texts. Why would anyone take what you have said seriously? Many others on this thread have read far more than I have, this is true, but I don’t write without knowledge I have aquired through study either.
Enjoy your echo chamber where Stalin was a good guy who was just misunderstood.
I’d have a conversation but as it’s clear that any dissenting opinions will be immediately deleted, can’t risk anyone getting wrong think now, just like in the good ol’ Soviet Union, it’s clear you don’t want to hear facts, you just want your insane ideas reinforced.
If you were really right, my comment would not have been deleted.
What facts did you provide? Why do you believe removal proves you right? All you did was recommend anticommunist fiction and wag your finger, lmao.
If you really want to understand communism, watch G.P.U. I guarantee that by the ending, you’ll revise every single thing with which your cultural Marxist masters indoctrinated you.
Never knew about that, I’m morbidly curious. Thanks for the post!
tl;dr there’s no response here it’s 100% reaction mugging
Lol, just delete it and say that I hmdont know what I’m talking about. Great way to not having to consider other opinions, or, you know, facts
But at least you’re not stuck in an echo chamber, right ?
Why are you starting shit in a thread three days later?
Your comment isn’t deleted. People can look it up in the modlog if they’re really curious. You can’t just lie about having facts in it. You don’t even have a point of view; you just have a negative reaction to someone else’s.
But you’re right. We should have to listen to the same default opinion that gets bounced back and forth between our public schools, news, politicians and popular culture. You know, get out of our echo chamber.
As always, I have a book that I wish to quote from, but I cannot choose which parts, so I’ll just point to Russian Justice if anyone is interested.
For a shorter read see Chapter 14 in This Soviet World
Excellent work, comrade 🫡
I think you hit the nail on the head with this comment. Stalin was a very influential man who shaped large part of the 20th century. Villanizing or idolizong his achievements without acknowledging the other side of the coin would be having an incorrect outlook on him.
I took a quick read of the link describing tankies. It more or less echoes what you said. That being said my observation of the use of the word tankie doesn’t fall in line with what the author was talking about. I’ve seen it used primarily for people who staunchly or blindly defend figures like Stalin and are incapable of acknowledging any criticisms of said figures. What yoyre describing is more of a lefty or a socialist in my opinion. The article was written in 2020 so maybe the use of the word has evolved over time. I haven’t been familiar with the word for that long to say otherwise.
Regarding the term “tankie,” I actually disagree with what you’re saying here. The term “tankie” is described to mean what you say, but the term is applied to people with the same analysis as myself, Roderic Day, and others who defend AES. I’ve even seen Anarchists labeled “tankie.” The reason the word “tankie” is used is because it allows the thrower to terminate the conversation and misrepresent the accused as having all of the blind, dogmatic sins the term itself has been associated with, regardless of the actual bearings of the conversation at play.
The quantity of people who actually fit the term “tankie” is miniscule compared to the quantity the word is thrown at with regularity.
That sounds to me like you were just dealing with bad faith actors, which isn’t uncommon here unfortunately.
I think we both agree on what it’s intended use is meant to be for. I guess you’ve just had the misfortune of dealing with people misusing the label to shut down any actual discussion.
What I am describing is by far the most common usage of the term I have seen, to the point that it might as well be the only usage. The intended usage of “tankie” has become weaponized discussion-avoidance and serves as a cheap copout to prevent tackling uncomfortable topics.
Good: industrialized a poor country under extremely difficult conditions, maintained the integrity of the socialist project, defeated the Nazis, supported China and the DPRK
Bad: forced relocation of ethnic minorities, imposed sedentism on nomadic and semi-nomadic groups, betrayed and isolated Yugoslavia
