PinkoCommie
08-26-2013, 08:35 PM
and so can no longer locate the source. Even so, I find it worthy of bringing up again against the background of the war we are about to join in order to shore up the "recovery."
In 1929 (then the peak capitalist boom year), Soviet industry accounted for 3.8 percent of world production. By 1932, when the capitalist world had fallen into the deepest depression of its history, Soviet production was 11 percent of world production. By 1936, it had risen to 15.2 percent of world production. The third Five-Year Plan for socialist construction would have plausibly reached one third of world output had the Second World War not disrupted the process. British economist J. Miller, who studied the Soviet economy between 1936 and 1937, wrote: “... it (is) not an unreasonable prediction that within the next generation the Soviet Union will be as powerful, industrially, as the rest of t& world put together” (Hewlett Johnson, 7& Soviet Power, p. 93).
Social services boomed. Stalin’s 1938 budget increased maternity benefits by 30 percent over 1937. The number of factory workers and office-workers accommodated in rest homes and of children admitted to “Pioneer” camps increased in equally dramatic fashion. State expenditures for workers’ cultural needs, social insurance, education, health insurance, and aid to mothers of large families were scheduled to rise by two-thirds between 1937 and 1942. (The fascist invasion, of course, disrupted these plans.)
The population increased. Child mortality plummeted. The number of kids in day care centers and kindergartens soared. Industrial accidents fell by almost half. Cotton production all but tripled. Grain production doubled. All these developments took place while imperialist shills and scribblers shed buckets of crocodile tears over Stalin’s supposed “reign o terror. ” Like Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, they protested too much, revealing their own guilt: the real reign of terror against workers was occurring in the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. Hewlitt Johnson, one of the most important leaders of the Church of England aptly wrote, Fear haunts workers in a capitalist land. Fear of dismissal, fear that a thousand workless men stand outside the gate eager to get his job, breaks the spirit of a man and breeds servility. Fear of unemployment, fear of slump, fear of trade depression, fear of sickness, fear of impoverished old age lie with crushing weight on the mind of the worker. A few weeks’ wages only lies between him and disaster. He lacks reserves. (The Soviet Power p.187).
The capitalist world wallowed in the downside of its boom-bust “cycle.” By 1937 its combined industry had increased a measly 3.5 percent over 1929. On the other hand, total Soviet industrial production grew by 371 percent, and modern large-scale industry alone reached 428 percent of the 1929 figure.
While tens of millions of workers starved, lost their homes, or desperately sought relief in the U.S., Britain, and France; while wages in Hitler’s fascist “paradise” of 1937 declined by 21 percent relative to 1929; while youth in the “advanced” capitalist nations had little to do but hang around street corners, the workers’ dictatorship of the U.S.S.R. improved the quality of life as measured by any conceivable yardstick.
The wage system under Soviet socialism dramatically improved the living standards of the working class. The average annual wage nearly doubled between 1929 and 1933 and nearly quadrupled between 1929 and 1937. During the same period, wages in the depression-ravaged capitalist countries shrank absolutely.
The reality of improved Soviet living conditions flew in the face of imperialist lies about the “starving” Russian masses. Not only did Stalin’s government raise wages, but at the same time it consistently lowered the prices of staple goods. Between 1934 and 1937 bread prices were lowered by more than half, butter the same; the price of eggs was cut by nearly three-quarters; prices for meat were slashed by 63 percent and for lump-sugar by 73 percent.
With all its imperfections the Soviet proletarian state provided a life without the crushing burden of such fear. Everyone had the opportunity to work. Every child could go to school and learn. Decent, affordable housing was being built. Medical care was universally available. Sick-pay was guaranteed with no time-limit. Older workers could retire with pensions “Palaces of Youth,” with free classes in ballet, sculpture, history & geography, mechanical experimentation, aviation, short-wave transmission, and music; through the recreational facilities built next to every large factory and complex of small industries in the Union. No Soviet child languished in the city during summertime for lack of camp tuition. No child had to agonize over the future, to contemplate going to jail, fighting a rich man’s war or the unemployment lines. Within its economic limitations, Soviet socialism did more for youth than any society before or since.
Most people on the Left have read a few books about the activities of the CIA and of Western secret services. They have learned that psychological and political warfare is a fundamental and extremely important part of modern total warfare. Slanders, brainwashing, provocation, manipulation of differences, exacerbation of contradictions, slandering of adversaries, and perpetration of crimes that are then blamed on the adversary are all normal tactics used by Western secret services in modern warfare.
But the wars that imperialism has waged with the greatest energy and with the most colossal resources are the anti-Communist wars. Military wars, clandestine wars, political wars and psychological wars. Isn't it obvious that the anti-Stalin campaign was at the heart of all ideological battles against socialism and Communism? The official spokesmen for the U.S. war machine, Kissinger and Brzezinski, praised the works of Solzhenitsyn and Conquest, who were, by coïncidence, two authors favored by Social-Democrats, Trotskyists and Anarchists. Instead of `discovering the truth about Stalin' among those specialists of anti-Communism, wouldn't it have been better to look for the strings of psychological warfare by the CIA?
It is truly not an accident that we can find today, in almost all stylish bourgeois and petit-bourgeois publications, the same slanders and lies about Stalin that were found in the Nazi press during WW2.
During Seminars about the Stalin period, we have often read a long anti-Stalin text and asked the audience what they thought of it. Almost invariably, they replied that the text, although virulently anti-Communist, clearly showed the enthusiasm of the young and poor for Bolshevism, as well as the technical achievements of the USSR; by and large, the text is nuanced. We then told the audience that this was a Nazi text, published in Signal 24 (1943), at the height of the war! The anti-Stalin campaigns conducted by the Western `democracies' in 1989--1991 were often more violent and more slanderous than those conducted by the Nazis in 1930s: today, the great Communist achievements of the 1930s are no longer with us to counteract the slanders, and there are no longer any significant forces to defend the Soviet experience under Stalin.
When the bourgeoisie announces the definitive failure of Communism, it uses the pathetic failure of revisionism to reaffirm its hatred of the great work achieved in the past by Lenin and Stalin. Nevertheless, it is thinking much more about the future than about the past. The bourgeoisie wants people to think that Marxism-Leninism is buried once and for all, because it is quite aware of the accuracy and the vitality of Communist analysis. The bourgeoisie has a whole gamut of cadres capable of making scientific evaluations of the world's evolution. And so it sees major crises and upheavals on a planetary scale, and wars of all kinds. Since capitalism has been restored in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, each contradiction of the world imperialist system has been exacerbated. When the working masses throughout the world face the specters of unemployment, misery, exploitation and war, only Marxism-Leninism can show them the way out. Only Marxism-Leninism can provide arms to the working masses of the capitalist world and to the oppressed peoples of the Third World. Given these great, future struggles, all this rubbish about the end of Communism is intended to disarm the oppressed masses of the entire world.
That, good folks, is what Hope and Change really looks like...
In 1929 (then the peak capitalist boom year), Soviet industry accounted for 3.8 percent of world production. By 1932, when the capitalist world had fallen into the deepest depression of its history, Soviet production was 11 percent of world production. By 1936, it had risen to 15.2 percent of world production. The third Five-Year Plan for socialist construction would have plausibly reached one third of world output had the Second World War not disrupted the process. British economist J. Miller, who studied the Soviet economy between 1936 and 1937, wrote: “... it (is) not an unreasonable prediction that within the next generation the Soviet Union will be as powerful, industrially, as the rest of t& world put together” (Hewlett Johnson, 7& Soviet Power, p. 93).
Social services boomed. Stalin’s 1938 budget increased maternity benefits by 30 percent over 1937. The number of factory workers and office-workers accommodated in rest homes and of children admitted to “Pioneer” camps increased in equally dramatic fashion. State expenditures for workers’ cultural needs, social insurance, education, health insurance, and aid to mothers of large families were scheduled to rise by two-thirds between 1937 and 1942. (The fascist invasion, of course, disrupted these plans.)
The population increased. Child mortality plummeted. The number of kids in day care centers and kindergartens soared. Industrial accidents fell by almost half. Cotton production all but tripled. Grain production doubled. All these developments took place while imperialist shills and scribblers shed buckets of crocodile tears over Stalin’s supposed “reign o terror. ” Like Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, they protested too much, revealing their own guilt: the real reign of terror against workers was occurring in the U.S., Britain, France, Germany, and Italy. Hewlitt Johnson, one of the most important leaders of the Church of England aptly wrote, Fear haunts workers in a capitalist land. Fear of dismissal, fear that a thousand workless men stand outside the gate eager to get his job, breaks the spirit of a man and breeds servility. Fear of unemployment, fear of slump, fear of trade depression, fear of sickness, fear of impoverished old age lie with crushing weight on the mind of the worker. A few weeks’ wages only lies between him and disaster. He lacks reserves. (The Soviet Power p.187).
The capitalist world wallowed in the downside of its boom-bust “cycle.” By 1937 its combined industry had increased a measly 3.5 percent over 1929. On the other hand, total Soviet industrial production grew by 371 percent, and modern large-scale industry alone reached 428 percent of the 1929 figure.
While tens of millions of workers starved, lost their homes, or desperately sought relief in the U.S., Britain, and France; while wages in Hitler’s fascist “paradise” of 1937 declined by 21 percent relative to 1929; while youth in the “advanced” capitalist nations had little to do but hang around street corners, the workers’ dictatorship of the U.S.S.R. improved the quality of life as measured by any conceivable yardstick.
The wage system under Soviet socialism dramatically improved the living standards of the working class. The average annual wage nearly doubled between 1929 and 1933 and nearly quadrupled between 1929 and 1937. During the same period, wages in the depression-ravaged capitalist countries shrank absolutely.
The reality of improved Soviet living conditions flew in the face of imperialist lies about the “starving” Russian masses. Not only did Stalin’s government raise wages, but at the same time it consistently lowered the prices of staple goods. Between 1934 and 1937 bread prices were lowered by more than half, butter the same; the price of eggs was cut by nearly three-quarters; prices for meat were slashed by 63 percent and for lump-sugar by 73 percent.
With all its imperfections the Soviet proletarian state provided a life without the crushing burden of such fear. Everyone had the opportunity to work. Every child could go to school and learn. Decent, affordable housing was being built. Medical care was universally available. Sick-pay was guaranteed with no time-limit. Older workers could retire with pensions “Palaces of Youth,” with free classes in ballet, sculpture, history & geography, mechanical experimentation, aviation, short-wave transmission, and music; through the recreational facilities built next to every large factory and complex of small industries in the Union. No Soviet child languished in the city during summertime for lack of camp tuition. No child had to agonize over the future, to contemplate going to jail, fighting a rich man’s war or the unemployment lines. Within its economic limitations, Soviet socialism did more for youth than any society before or since.
Most people on the Left have read a few books about the activities of the CIA and of Western secret services. They have learned that psychological and political warfare is a fundamental and extremely important part of modern total warfare. Slanders, brainwashing, provocation, manipulation of differences, exacerbation of contradictions, slandering of adversaries, and perpetration of crimes that are then blamed on the adversary are all normal tactics used by Western secret services in modern warfare.
But the wars that imperialism has waged with the greatest energy and with the most colossal resources are the anti-Communist wars. Military wars, clandestine wars, political wars and psychological wars. Isn't it obvious that the anti-Stalin campaign was at the heart of all ideological battles against socialism and Communism? The official spokesmen for the U.S. war machine, Kissinger and Brzezinski, praised the works of Solzhenitsyn and Conquest, who were, by coïncidence, two authors favored by Social-Democrats, Trotskyists and Anarchists. Instead of `discovering the truth about Stalin' among those specialists of anti-Communism, wouldn't it have been better to look for the strings of psychological warfare by the CIA?
It is truly not an accident that we can find today, in almost all stylish bourgeois and petit-bourgeois publications, the same slanders and lies about Stalin that were found in the Nazi press during WW2.
During Seminars about the Stalin period, we have often read a long anti-Stalin text and asked the audience what they thought of it. Almost invariably, they replied that the text, although virulently anti-Communist, clearly showed the enthusiasm of the young and poor for Bolshevism, as well as the technical achievements of the USSR; by and large, the text is nuanced. We then told the audience that this was a Nazi text, published in Signal 24 (1943), at the height of the war! The anti-Stalin campaigns conducted by the Western `democracies' in 1989--1991 were often more violent and more slanderous than those conducted by the Nazis in 1930s: today, the great Communist achievements of the 1930s are no longer with us to counteract the slanders, and there are no longer any significant forces to defend the Soviet experience under Stalin.
When the bourgeoisie announces the definitive failure of Communism, it uses the pathetic failure of revisionism to reaffirm its hatred of the great work achieved in the past by Lenin and Stalin. Nevertheless, it is thinking much more about the future than about the past. The bourgeoisie wants people to think that Marxism-Leninism is buried once and for all, because it is quite aware of the accuracy and the vitality of Communist analysis. The bourgeoisie has a whole gamut of cadres capable of making scientific evaluations of the world's evolution. And so it sees major crises and upheavals on a planetary scale, and wars of all kinds. Since capitalism has been restored in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, each contradiction of the world imperialist system has been exacerbated. When the working masses throughout the world face the specters of unemployment, misery, exploitation and war, only Marxism-Leninism can show them the way out. Only Marxism-Leninism can provide arms to the working masses of the capitalist world and to the oppressed peoples of the Third World. Given these great, future struggles, all this rubbish about the end of Communism is intended to disarm the oppressed masses of the entire world.
That, good folks, is what Hope and Change really looks like...