Seeing as the subject has come up I went back to PopIndy as I recalled a lot of discussion on this matter. There's some good stuff on SI too. To start off here's a post that anax made, 4/07, which serves as an abstract of commie schism-ism. it is from a thread on Trotsky's Their Morals and Ours.


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Sure I know... Trotsky was a Menshevik. He only became a Bolshevik on the eve of the revolution. Once in, he played a huge role in both the revolution and the Civil War - major league hero. Lenin got shot in an assasination attempt. He never really recovered. Stalin's star rose in the party. Trotsky became his rival. Lenin died but before he did, he wrote a testiment proposing Trotsky as party secretary. After his death, Stalin (who was also a real hero) took over the party and purged Trotsky and his supporters. Trotsky went into exile. A major schism developed in which the Trotskyites/Trotskyists (one of those is an insult but I forget which one) organized as a seperate party (in the U.S., it was the SWP - Socialist Workers Party) and criticized, first Stalin and then the Soviet Union and then the subsequent socialist states as "degenerate worker's states" and so on. In return, the Communist Parties criticized Trotsky & followers as being "ultra-left, petty bourgeois" opportunists who would always side with reaction when the time came.

This was pretty overblown from both sides, IMHO, and got worse as the historical basis for it dissipated. Even gigantic figures got in on the act. Since Dr. DuBois was a member of the Communist Party, it is no wonder that he took those positions. Trotsky fed the rift from exile but then got assasinated in the 1930s, most likely by the NKVD (or its predecessor). Stalin was thoroughly denounced by the CPSU in the 1950s. The rift should probably have healed but evolutionary issues intervened. The evolution of the SWP is an example. The Communist Party was very powerful in the American labor movement . In contrast, the SWP's draw was much smaller and tended to concentrate among intellectuals, particularly in NYC. They inevitably got isolated and a bit off kilter. More, a "revolutionary party" that never accepted a single real socialist revolution in the entire world and which spent a good deal of its time attacking the Communist Party had a natural appeal in the U.S. (I'm sneering a bit here). The party developed a reputation for being full of shit and splitting at the drop of a hat (Megan's SEP is like an umpteenth iteration of that splitism). On the other hand, the CPUSA went through a couple of iterations of both bureacracy and unbelievabaly conservative policies. I knew many CP types who fessed up to reading SWP literature to get their dose of revolutionary talk despite the fact that they thought the "Trots" were crazy.

In any case, they survived and got a reprieve during the New Left (although, they were partly displaced by "Maoists" in the student movement and in SDS because the Maoists were even more at home among students and had shorter slogans). To their credit, the "Trots" survive to this day (in more than a dozen small groups) though they got a bad name for producing an a entire raft of "neocons" from people who left their ranks (everybody from Christopher Hitchens to Wolfowitz to the Kristols to Sen. Coleman in Minnesota).

Trotsky, himself, was the real deal though, and it is probably time that this rift went away, particularly since the Soviet Union is gone.

If you are interested and remind me, I will tell you the story of how I was a Trot for 15 minutes, once.

Not a bad story for a slow day...

In the meantime, let's hear from you on what you think about Trotsky on Morality? You can't post it if you don't read it.

...And argue about it.
http://populistindependent.virtual.vps-host.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=263&p=3035&hilit=stalin#p3035
[/quote]

but it'd be fun to hear the "Trot for a day" story :)

EDIT: wait, I'm vaguely remembering that you might have told this one already. I can fill in with my story of being accosted by Trots if people get really bored. I ended up with a subscription to their newspaper.

And, yes, I am one of those closest "reads Trot papers for dose of radical talk" people

Finally, Trotskyite is the insulting one, they winced when I said it and insisted that I call them Trotskyists.

I probably read that all at some point. I remember parts of it, need to review.

I'll be over there readin for a bit... ;)

A very informative thread by the esteemed Pinko Commie
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Marching arm in arm with the credulity of US journalists still swallowing nonsense from the State Department and Pentagon about "exposing the central front" to Soviet blitzkrieg, is their willingness to take at face value almost anything they are told by intellectuals in Moscow, so long as it is somehow associated with "reform" (which to American journalists means, in the last analysis, restoration of capitalist relations).

And in these heady days in Moscow it seems that some of these Soviet intellectuals will say anything they think Americans want to hear. A friend of mine recently returned from a conference in Hawaii, where American historians associated with "revisionist" readings of the origins of the Cold War were increasingly irked to hear Soviet participants piously echoing all the most hawkish American constructions of Soviet behaviour in the postwar period, to the tremendous pleasure of the American right-wingers in attendance. At this stage in the process of _glasnost_, these Soviets plainly felt that any defence of Soviet deeds in the pre-Gorbachev years amounted to a betrayal of the new thinking.

At the start of February, the tabloid _Argumenti i Fakti_ reported that the Soviet historian Roy Medvedev had proposed that Stalin's victims amounted to some 20 million. From Moscow, the _New York Times'_ correspondent Bill Keller relayed this to his newspaper which on 4 February ran a front-page headline announcing "Major Soviet Paper Says 20 Million Died as Victims of Stalin", with the lead paragraph reiterating Medvedev's claim that "about 20 million died in labour camps, forced collectivisation, famine and executions".

To me, the total figure seemed to have an insouciant roundness and also a suspect symmetry with the total - also 20 million - normally reckoned for Soviet losses in the war against Hitler. Looking through Medvedev's breakdown one could perceive that the word "million" really meant "a lot", with no substantive precision beyond the vague imputation of multitude. As relayed by Keller these volumes were expressed as "one million imprisoned or exiled from 1927 to 1929", or "nine or 10 million of the more prosperous peasants driven from their lands", and so on. In the end we were left with an overall figure of 40 million who, on Medvedev's account, had an awful or terminal time of it between 1927 and 1953, with 20 million actually killed.

All US reports of Medvedev's estimates told their readers that his was the most "precise" accounting thus far. No newspaper or TV programme that I saw, rang up any of the relevant scholars to get their reaction. When I started to do so myself, I was interested to find well-qualified historians and demographers in the US who regard Medvedev's claims as absurd. Sheila Fitzpatrick, professor of history at the University of Texas at Austin, told me there was "no serious basis for his calculations" and that privately some Soviet demographers and historians find Medvedev's work in this area embarrassingly bad. She gave me a couple of examples to explain why she thought Medvedev's numbers ridiculous.

Medvedev concludes that nine to 11 million prosperous peasants were driven from their lands with another two to three million arrested or exiled in the forced collectivisation of the early 1930s. But, Fitzpatrick says, Medvedev makes no distinction between those who left their villages voluntarily and those who left by force. This was the era of industrialisation and many of Medvedev's millions were moving to the town. Medvedev also bases his figures on the assumption that the average peasant family in the late 1920s had eight members, whereas in fact five was the normal size. Fitzpatrick also cited the famous conversation between Churchill and Stalin as another flimsy source, often used by some to claim that Stalin told Churchill that ten million peasants died in collectivisation. The actual passage in _The Hinge of Fate_ makes it clear Stalin was talking about the total number of peasants he was dealing with, not those who died. According to Fitzpatrick, a respected estimate, concurred with by several historians in the West, is that of the historian Victor P Danilov, who recently wrote in _Pravda_ that approximately three to four million died in the famine of the early 1930s. But where does that leave us on the matter of the purges?

In his 1946 survey, _The Population of the Soviet Union_, the demographer Frank Lorimer studied data from the Soviet census of 1925 and 1939 and all available information on fertility and mortality between these two dates. He calculated that what demographers call "excess deaths", that is, in Lorimer's method, a comparison of the reported total population in 1939 with the expected population at that date - given the count in 1925 and everything known about fertility, mortality and emigration between those years - amounted to somewhere between 4.5 million and 5 million, though this total included perhaps several hundred thousand emigrants, such as those Central Asian nomads moving into Sinkiang to avoid collectivisation.

In their 1979 volume _How the Soviet Union is Governed_, Professors Jerry Hough and Merle Fainsod generally supported Lorimer's calculation and concluded that the more extreme western estimates "cannot be sustained". Rather, "a smaller - but still horrifying - number" of "maybe some 3.5 million" emerges as the direct or indirect result of collectivisation in the early 1930s. With respect to the purges of 1937 and 1938, Hough and Fainsod again criticise excessive Western estimates, and report that on the evidence of extant demographic data, "the number of deaths in the purge would certainly be placed in the hundreds of thousands rather than in excess of a million". Indeed, "a figure in the low hundreds of thousands seems much more probable than one in the high hundreds of thousands, and even George Kennan's estimate of 'tens of thousands' is quite conceivable, maybe even probable."

At the far end of the spectrum from Hough and Fainsod, is Robert Conquest who had reckoned in excess of 20 million deaths under Stalin before 1939. In his essay _The Stalin Question Since Stalin_, Bukhtain's [sic -Bukharin?] biographer, Stephen Cohen cites Conquest's figure as "conservative", without mentioning lower numbers by other scholars and concludes by saying: "Judged only by the number of victims, and leaving aside important differences between the two regimes, Stalinism created a holocaust greater than Hitler's".

In this decade the most significant scholarly battle on the subject has been waged in the pages of the _Slavic Review_ between Stephen Wheatcroft and Steven Rosefielde, with Wheatcroft writing in 1985 that "these wildly unscholarly estimates [such as Cohen's] serve neither science nor morality", and "It is no betrayal of thm [the victims] nor an apologia for Stalin to state that there is no demographic evidence to indicate a population loss of more than six million between 1926 and 1939, or more than three to four million in the famine. Scholarship must be guided by reason and not emotion."

In a widely noted essay, also in _Slavic Review_ for 1985, the demographers Barbara Anderson and Brian Silver supported Wheatcroft, reckoning "excess deaths" between 1926 and 1939, to those alive in 1926, at a median figure of 3.5 million. Conquest, now at the Hoover Institution in Stanford, says that Medvedev's numbers are "obviously in the right range" though "perhaps he spread them wrong", and "I'm not sure where he gets them from". He slighted Anderson and Silver's work as the product of demography rather than sovietology, and derided Hough and Fainsod's figures as "improbable". From the University of Michigan, Anderson responds that: "Conquest wouldn't know a number of it bit him." She thinks Medvedev's computations "ludicrous".

No doubt some will be eager to conclude that the foregoing is somehow an attempt to exonerate Stalin, dismiss the purges as got up by western propaganda. The following observation by Hough and Fainsod is salutary: "Some persons seem instinctively to object to [our] figures on the grounds that the Great Purge was so horrible that the number of deaths cannot have been so 'low'. We must become so insensitive to the value of human life, however, that we dismiss tens of thousands of deaths as insignificant and need to exaggerate the number by ten, 20, 30, 40 times to touch our feelings of horror."

The task is obviously to arrive at truth, but many such estimates evidently have a regulatory ideological function with an exponential momentum so great that now any computation that does not soar past ten million is somehow taken as evidence of being soft on Stalin. One can find an analogy in current writing on the French Revolution, where the passionately anti-Jacobin Rene Sedillot has produced a book addressing the matter of the Revolution's (and Counter-Revolution's, though it's never quite put like that) human cost where he boils up, by very questionable means, a casualty figure far in excess of all previous estimates.

The symmetry that calculations, such as Medvedev's, seek to establish between Stalin and Hitler performs similar injury to history. Hitler wanted to exterminate the Jews and the gypsies, and though accuracy is important it does not alter the moral scale of this horror one iota to propose that, in pursuit of this design, Hitler may have, in reality, killed a million less or a million more than the conventional estimate.

Evil though he was, Stalin did not plan or seek to accomplish genocide, and to say that he and Hitler had the same project in mind (or as right-wing German historians now argue, that somehow Lenin and Stalin put Hitler up to it) is to do disservice to history and to truth.
http://www.campin.me.uk/Politics/purging-stalin.txt
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http://socialistindependent.org/board/index.php?topic=38.0

to hear that story. I used to be in the YSA and, later on, one of the other split off groups. then I just got tired of all the BS asnd infighting. So I tend to refer to myself as "Retired Trotskyite" on some boards.

purging Stalin. What blows my mind are those who can blithely gloss over all the harm Stalin did: to the Party, to the military, to the Russian people. There is even a movement for the Russian Orthodox Church to canonize the guy! There is a school of thought that the purge of Red Army officers during the mid- and late-30s placed the USSR at a great disadvantage once Hitler turned his sights on them.

I will give Stalin that: he did not plan or seek to commit genocide, but he pretty much wiped out at least one social class--the kulaks. If not outright, then certainly through famine and committal to the Gulags.

The figures for Stalin's purges are probably lower than those antipathetic to him suggest, but the real figures are unlikely ever to be known.

Hey, yanno, I'd forgotten about "Trotskyite" being considered derogatory. Most of the idiots I knew in the YSA (that's Young Socialist Alliance for the uninitiated) weren't worthy of the name "Trotskyist". You would not believe some of the idiocy I listened to before leaving the YSA about a year after joining. I still laugh at the stupidity nearly forty years on.

You really think the idea that Germany had to expand to the East popped out of the little guy with the mustache's head one day in the '30s? You really think the antipathy to Communism was one of the little sign painter's personal quirks?

It's taken me a while to get my head around it and I'm surely not done. I think there are some tables in that thread, if not I'll see if I can find them.

Yep, plenty of fucked up shit there, innocents were taken down, charges were overblown. Things might have been done differently, but mebbe not given personalities, history.

One big question is what might the alternative have been. Had Trotsky pulled it off would he have declared war on capitalism? that would have been even more disastrous for the Soviet Union. If not, how would a Trotsky led regime differ from Stalin's?

I'll admit I got a soft spot for Trotsky due to his 'History of the Russian Revolution', which is excellent. His present day 'followers', by denigrating any socialist attempt that's ever come down the pike seem to me to be playing into the capitalist's hands from their university offices.

The main point is that this 'Stalin was equal to/worse than Hitler' jive need be laid to rest. It is a completely dishonest attempt to write off socialism entirely.

if anything he betrayed everything the revolution stood for. His reign was a 26 year nightmare of back-stabbing and a cult of personality that would not quit. I can say one thing for Stalin. He was no worse than most of the Tsars that ruled Russia.

Now, how would it have been had Trotsky taken over as Lenin seemed to have preferred? That's a hard one to call. I would like to think it had been less violent and bloody. I do believe that once in power, Trotsky would have seen the folly of trying to prosecute a "war on capitalism". Russia was absolutely not able to carry out such a task, even if Trotsky had remained gung-ho. I would like to think that he wouldn't have been as bad as Stalin (as creator of the Red Army, I believe he would have seen the folly in killing off seasoned, educated officers). I know he was critical to some extent of the treatment of the kulaks, but would he have left the remnants of the NEP in place or would he have gone gung-ho for collectivization as Stalin did? I think he might have been of Lenin's Better Slower, But Better" School. Lenin realised that the Russian people were not ready for a full-on revolution, and that a slight retreat (the NEP) might be better for Russia at that time and place. I suppose the answer lies with a question: just how much of a hothead WAS Trotsky?

It seems to me you are insinuating that EVERYTHING boils down to personality..

The main reason the trots are held in contempt by many, around here anyway, is that they throw out the baby with the bathwater yet have done nothing to show the superiority of their position, or to further revolution. All they do is bitch about commies.

Your speculations about what Trotsky might have done are only that. Though he conducted the Civil War brilliantly his conspiracy against the party was so half-assed as to call into question his judgement.

that they aren't speculations.

I don't believe that there was a plot against the Party. Stalin claimed that there was a plot, but all he had were confessions obtained by confessions taken under duress. Trotsky and Company called Stalin and the Party on their less-than-revolutionary BS. Stalin didn't like it, so he had Trotsky killed along with many others.

We are not huge fans of Trotsky, here. I think most of us hold him in high regard where he deserves it and leave it at that. The USSR in the 1920s was fighting for its life against threats from without and threats from within; no breathing space was allowed the young revolution; things were done; it is what it is; but Uncle Joe's mustache really was kick-ass...

But he was a lot better than Stalin!

Pick juggling?

Sorry, it just popped out...

I never saw that one coming. Which, ironically, was exactly his joke!!

Trotsky's mustache was more a goatee and that just isn't my thing. I think I'm gonna have to vote Uncle Joe, man..

All of that for being 'called out'? I find that very unlikely. Naw, Trotsky was actively working against Stalin and the Politburo, though I believe(lacking full information)that some of the charges (like piecing out the USSR to the capitalist, dealing with the Germans) were piled on to justify the heavy hand.

But here's the thing, history is made by people, not Platonic Ideals. History is messy, ugly things have happened and necessity has no truck with removed observers. This episode of socialist history in no way invalidates the Russian Revolution, the Soviet Union or the socialist endeavor. Yet that is the only reason that it is ever brought up.

At least he would have been less likely to unleash the purges that Stalin did. Even those who had forsworn previous allegiance to Trotsky were killed off.

I wasn't aware that one has to be a Stalinist to be considered progressive.

I personally thought Lenin was kind of cute because he had a goatee.

:evilgrin:

When I was in one of the opposition groups we used to sing a ditty about Trotsky's asassination called "Ramon's Iron Pickaxe" to the tune of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer". Got some of the mucky-muck comrades pissed off, but others with some sense of humor liked it.

the latest iteration of "liberal" to come down the pike. Here is the thing, we just are not hung up on this hero worship and personality-whoring that so many seem unable to get shed of. So you and many others say Stalin was a monster - okay. So what? Many folks say FDR was a monster and that every politician in this blood-soaked empire is a monster - so what?

When you are talking about "Stalin", you are talking about the government of the Soviet Union. That government was in no way as monstrous and venal, as murderous and vile as the government of the USA. Now before you protest that you were not justifying the USA in any way, let me just say - so what? We know that capitalism is the engine that is destroying the working people of this planet; we know that our every effort must be bent to opposing capitalism in every way possible and by every means available. So just why in the hell is the nature of Joseph Stalin of any importance or relevance to us, at all?

Just asking...

http://populistindependent.virtual.vps-host.net/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=308&hilit=capitol


I was maybe 19 years old and I had been recruited to be part of the "advance team" for one of the later D.C. demonstrations. Basically, we went down maybe two weeks early and spent the time arranging housing, "lobbying" (which consisted of yelling at congressional staffers), giving speeches at black churches and to "Quakers" in Georgetown, and organizing some "lead-up events" a few days before the actual march. One of those events was a rally on one of the side steps of the Capitol at which Rennie Davis was supposed to speak (yes, that Rennie Davis, from AssHole Gallery fame).

Anyway, we had a PA set up and a few hundred people there (who were mostly other advance people, I think) and we're waitin'... and no Rennie. Fucker! After about 30 minutes and a restless crowd, we decided to talk, ourselves. A woman we knew spoke and did an OK job, and I spoke and said some insane shit (I was a street fightin' man and knew zilch about politics), and then this guy who came down from New England with us spoke and he was brilliant... totally incoherent, but brilliant. It was some amazing rant about if we really wanted to end the war we should put our lives on the line right then and there, and we didn't deserve to be called a "movement" until we broke a police line or some such... It was terrific. Everyone started chanting and making noise and all of a sudden these very professional rolled up signs showed up at the top of the stairs, where we were.

We, of course, unrolled the signs (which were very nice, if a little wordy) and were chanting at the top of our lungs when the chant changed to "No More Trot Bullshit!". Of course, we started chanting "No More Trot Bullshit!" (not knowing what a "Trot", was) at the top of our lungs until some kind soul informed us that we were the "Trots" in question. Moi?

It turns out that the signs were from the SWP (Socialist Workers Party... I think it was, anyway), and the Trots had infuriated everyone a few days before (as was their custom) by denouncing the Vietnamese as "Stalinists" at one of the events.

The very nice yellow signs got rolled up and that was the end of my career as a "Trot". It wasn't really 15 minutes...

...more like 5.

and I spoke and said some insane shit (I was a street fightin' man and knew zilch about politics)

Of course, we started chanting "No More Trot Bullshit!" (not knowing what a "Trot", was) at the top of our lungs until some kind soul informed us that we were the "Trots" in question. Moi?

You are a running joke, here (as well as a running dog lackey and a running sore, etc.)...

Give 'em enough rope...

But I swear we know this guy.

I mean what are we trying to prove by letting pustules like this shit on the board? And who are we trying to prove it to? He is only here trying to get himself banned so he can go back to his burger-buddies and say, "See? Those commies are <fill-n-the-blank>" I could care less what he and his liberal "friends" think.
Fuck 'em all...

Where is the goddamn firing squad?

:machinegun:

in principle I agree, there is obviously no attempt at meaningful dialog goin' on here. In this case I think it a courtesy to allow the target of this smirk to express hisself.

I ain't Mr Nice Guy.

.

...from me, you choose to answer this one which has nothing to do with you.

Yes, this an accurate account of what I understood when I was 19... or maybe it is a false memory... I can't really know because it was 40 years ago.

This is also an accurate account of what you think now, minus the humor. Ignorance may be bliss but you can now keep your bliss to yourself. You are just trolling. Just ban yourself before Dhal does it for you... or settle down and decide why you are really "wasting" your time here.

and I have no problem with deleting him. This board is for leftists, which he/she clearly is not.

State their claims, copy/paste their stuff, start their threads, whatever. Then let the topics live or die based on interest.

There's nothing wrong with making provocative statements to get attention (lol most forum users do that) but when it starts turning personal...it's a bore.

Too bad.

I have to admit the dynamics of this board -- especially as it relates to new comers -- is odd.

My only point is that I was under the impression that you are well thought of here as being learned in theory, especially Marxist theory. This would be a logical effect of having been once young and "politicized" into fringe parties that did little political education work, but that focused on factionalism -- as you identified, Trots and SWP types.

I think we can all agree that such factions have accomplished absolutely nothing, world wide, in the last 40 years, since they took advantage of you in that funny vignette, that at least 99.9% of the working class rejects them (or doesn't even know of their existence), and that today, many of them are fronts for law enforcement, intelligence agencies, the military or business interests intent on splitting, disrupting or discrediting authentic, populist (and popular) leftist organizations.

I congratulate you for having learned from that experience!

I'm just a little shocked by the fact that my simply saying that the vignette "explains a lot" earned such a showering of epithets, from turd to owner owned ass!

I'm sure this site will garner lots of new members interested in learning more based on the friendly demeanor of your "welcoming committee"!

You are just playing. You know how the web works. There is no conversation in what you have posted so far. But, OK. You have been misunderstood. One more time.

I learned nothing from that experience 40 years ago. I liked the "Trots" that I met at the time. I just thought they were almost always wrong about the big things. Still, they were dedicated and they worked hard. So did "Maoists", Panthers, SDSers, Nationalists and radicals of all types.

We were all children. And the times were strange. There was much to motivate us, but there was little to give guidance. And the culture was strangely declassed.

As far as police spies went, there weren't many and they weren't hard to spot for the most part. They cared about "violent" demonstrations and nothing more. The deviousness of COINTELPROs and the rest were invisible at our level. In many ways, we were our own jailers... but not because of malice.

The biggest thing I learned from that era is how narrowly deterministic life is... the importance of materialism... even if it were a crude, rude materialism at first. Authentic leftist organizations? They were all "authentic" (well, maybe not LaRouche). But none of them were as authentic as the veterans from the 1930s and 1940s who had grown up under very different social conditions.

I've got no beef with the Trots... I have a beef with self-satisfied, ego-driven "leftism" which simply mirrors the philistinism of the the most backward segments of the society. I also have a beef with slogans intended to "police" the discussion: democracy, freedom, liberty, and so on.

If I know nothing else, I know what those really mean.

you've been a member since Jan 16th 2008.

and basically went away. I'm a newcomer in the sense I've come back and there's this whole new landscape that I totally don't get -- lots of inside baseball.

PI is a completely different place from early 08, so I'm a newcomer to the new context -- and still trying to figure it out.