Was Joesph Stalin a Fascist? discussion and poll

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Stalin may not have been the greatest internationalist, but he was certainly not a nationalist. The theory of Socialism in one country argued that until an international revolution could be arranged, it was best to organize one country with socialist ideals to show the proletariat how much it worked. Keyword: until.

No, they were different, but in terms of repressive policies Stalin wasn't doing anything new. He did things differently than Lenin in terms of exploiting nationalism, for instance.

Stalin was less of an idealist than Lenin was. Stalin seemed to enjoy power for its own sake, Lenin sought power and undertook violent repression because he believed in communism. But the policies were basically the same: to seize and maintain power by force against all comers.

Was it inherent to communism? Hard to say. But it was certainly inherent to the Blanquist approach of Marxism-Leninism, from which all other forms of state communism have sprung.



There was no particular shift in policy, really. There's nothing Stalin did that Lenin didn't start. It just snowballed, and probably would have even if Lenin had remained in charge somehow.



Trotsky's full of it. He always cast himself as the "real" communist, but he indulged in all the same Bolshevik revisions of Marxism that the other two did. He was just bitter that he got cast out.

The revolution began in St. Petersburg, when the sailors of Petrograd, fed up with the war and the Czar, seized the city and stormed the Winter Palace. When the Bolsheviks began implementing repressive measurs, the same revolutionaries rose up again - against the Bolsheviks. This was the Kronstadt Rebellion.

Guess who was in charge of the mass slaughter of the sailors of Petrograd, the people who had brought Lenin & co. to power in the first place?

Trotsky.



I think it just reflects Orwell's progressivism. He seems to have believed in an evolutionary process fuelled by dissidence and subversion rather than violent revolution. Animal Farm fits strikingly well with most revolutions, not just communist ones. Take the American Revolution. The revolutionaries rose up against tarriffs and other measures being imposed by Parliament, not to mention the patronizing attitudes of aristocrats in frilly lace. What did they get? They got patronizing aristocrats in frilly lace imposing a new and much, much higher set of taxes under Alexander Hamilton's severe scheme of tarriffs and duties. And when they rose up again, their new government used force and repressed them (for instance, the Whiskey Rebellion). No sooner had Washington come to power, than he was ordering tax protestors shot. An army of 15000 he sent to put down some 500 insurrectionists.

Same thing as at Kronstadt.



Yes, but he seemed to have been more aligned with CNT-FAIs anarcho-syndicalism, than with the communists. Homage to Catalonia is basically a long-winded complaint about how authoritarian communists overrode and took over the alliance, inspired and funded by the Bolsheviks.

Until is such a long word for having only 5 letters.

What is your take on the continuity between Lenin and Stalin?
Is Stalinism just Leninism writ large or is it a break?

Does Trotsky have it right when he said if it were not for the working class Stalin would have been a fascist or is that just sour grapes?

Socialism in one country seems to me to be a dodge more than a revolutionary tactic.

All this is very important in America were the "left" as much as have came from what used to call itself the anti-Stalinist left. The purges when they came to light alienated the majority of what was previously american communism.

OK,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,Let's live in the real world.

1. The ONLY things that we'll ever find out about Stalin is what our own governments ALLOW us to find out.

2. ALL historical books are censored nonesense.

3. The same goes for Hitler, and every other "bad guy" in history.

4. Remember,,,,,,,,,,,,the winners of any war write the history books.

5. Politicians are utter liars and cannnot be trusted to give a fair account of their world rivals.

[diverting discussion to analysis of Orwell.]

I disagree with the general reading of animal farm.
To me it is a quite heavy handed history of the Russian revolution.
Napoleon = Stalin
snowball = Trostky
etc.
I have a better opinion than you of Homage to Catalonia (simply a matter of taste.)
I see it not as an indictment of authoritarianism in general but a specific jab at the Stalinists.
(justifiably so they tried to kill them and in general they were as*holes and arguably can be blamed for the failure of the republic.)

George said he would have fought in a soviet troop if he had not met the PUME first.
and if I remember right wanted to switch to a conventional non-anarchist group during the conflict.

1984 of course is more general.
[back to Stalin]

As I was saying to Enrico the gap between Lenin and Stalin used to be very important to the American left because like Trotsky it allowed them to be "true socialists" while divorcing themselves from Stalin's horrors. (this is way I was a bit surprised to be assumed to be right wing when asserting my thesis.)

The old rhetoric of the right used to be that there is a continuum between Marx and Stalin and thus anyone who was a Marxist was tainted with the same brush. Now they blabber on about Hitler being a liberal. ( I think most of what the american right does is trolling and one day they will say just kidding. That is because I have faith in the goodness of humans).

It's not Orwell's style. If he wanted to talk about specifics, he would have. He usually uses metaphor to outline universal principles, not specific cases.



It's a good book ... I didn't mean "complaint" in the sense of whining, more along the lines of protest or disagreement. He is making a specific jab at the Russian-backed Stalinists, but he takes many snipes at authoritarianism in general while doing so:

I have no particular love for the idealised "worker" as he appears in the bourgeois Communist's mind, but when I see an actual flesh-and-blood worker in conflict with his natural enemy, the policeman, I do not have to ask myself which side I am on.



I do not think there's that much of a gap between any of them, Trotsky included. Lenin initiated the horrors of the Red Terror, Trotsky took part in them and even commanded the butchery and betrayal at Kronstadt, and all three of them were busy backstabbing the Makhnovists for no particular reason other than to enforce orthodoxy on the left (it nearly cost them the revolution, too, since they wasted so much force fighting Makhno that they could barely spare from the effort against the Whites - and Makhno was their ally, or at least, so he believed)



It's because they're unfamiliar with the big divide between classical Marxism - that of Rosa Luxembourg, Karl Kautsky, etc - and the Bolsheviks. The Bolsheviks were essentially Blanquists, from the very start.

As far as orthodox Marxism goes, I don't think there was anything inevitable about it becoming Marxism-Leninism, it was simply a result of the historical situation, but because Marxism-Leninism was the first succesful revolution and created a framework for a succesful revolution, Blanquist as it was, that was the pattern that came to characterize all future revolutions. Which mostly took place in the developing world, again counter to Marxist theory, where communism was supposed to be a mass uprising in the most advanced economies, not the periphery of imperialism and colonialism.

I don't think orthodox Marxism is realistic in its prescriptions, it has some interesting views but its hope for an internationalist revolution that is completely democratic emerging from the advanced economies is absurd. But I can't say the orthodox Marxists are any more accountable for Russia and the rest of the Marxist-Leninist project than Proudhon is responsible for Italian fascism (Georges Sorel is a bit of a different story though - he should carry a good deal of blame for both fascism and Marxism-Leninsim)

I think that Stalin liked very much holding power. As I said earlier, the regime took an abrupt turn to bureaucracy after Stalin took over. It had already started under Lenin, but it accelerated afterwards. He was opportunist and, unlike Trotsky and the other, more intellectual communist leaders, he was ready to plunge into the bores of bureaucracy to ensure his rise to power.

However, I would not discard all he did or said as "rhetoric". I think he was still a communist at heart, not just a generic dictator, and that he truly believed in the marxist principles which he had followed from his youth -- not in the same way as Trotsky and the others, since Stalin was not strong on the theory, but still.

In particular, I do not think the Soviet claim to a democratic government is an invention; it simply derives from a different understanding of democracy, under which the Western democracies were plutocracies (which is not untrue to this day).

Was Socialism in one country a dodge? Obviously, but only because the global revolution had failed to happen in 1918-1921. It was really the only thing to do.


I read it as a way to universalize a specific evolution and to make it clearer and simpler. The parallels to the Russian revolution are rather direct. A good example would be the evolution of the slanders on Snowball and the repression, which closely ressembles the period between Trotsky defeat and the purges of the late '30s.

I don't remember anything that close to anything real in 1984.

Joseph Stalin was a communist not a Fascist. It is astounding but at the same time however most other Americans have trouble distinguishing fascism with communism.

Not the subject but thanks for playing. The question is not whether communism is fascist but whether Joe Stalin drew from fascism in his divergence from Lenin.

I have to get to work but Joe being weak on theory made it possible for fascistic elements to arise in his practice.

Everything we see in Stalin, we see in Lenin's policy of Red Terror. Just on a smaller scale.



It's sour grapes. When he was a youth, and during his initial involvement in the communist movement, Stalin was rather meek and reluctant to wield power on several occasions (to the chagrin of Lenin). It's hard to imagine, from his early history, that he would just wear any hat to seek power - despite how much he came to cherish it.



Stalin was not a member of the bourgeouis as Lenin was - certainly not a lawyer, as Lenin was. But there weren't many who were "more intellectual". As a youth, Stalin was educated and in fact was one of the best students in his classes, he earned himself a scholarship after graduating first in his class, and was frequently punished, as he was often discovered with forbidden literature (eg Victor Hugo) including Marxist writings, and spent much of his free time in a bookstore in Tiflis. He was not some mean thug Lenin picked to do his dirty work, as he is often assumed to have been. Far from it ... he tended to be more lenient than Lenin, initially, and even earned Lenin's wrath for it on a couple of occasions. As editor of Pravda he took an approach of reconciling differences between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, and refused to publish no less than 47 articles by Lenin because they were too hostile and rigid towards the Mensheviks.

In these early days, on the occasions when he did stand up to Lenin, it was generally on the grounds of moderation, surprisingly.


Well yes but there were so many "only things to do" by that point that they had turned Marxism on its head to make it happen. The subordination of the soviets to the Party, the imposition of wage labour, the creation of a central bank, the embrace of Blanquism .... by the time they came up with socialism in one country, their policies no longer resembled Marxism at all. As noted by Western Marxists such as Kautsky and Luxembourg.

They had to butcher communism to make it work, to the point where it was just another ideology of power and devoid of any real meaning other than that.

Does this mean that the fall of the soviet union can not be clearly read as the failure of communism? or just that the failure happened at the beginning?

I guess here we get into semantics - was it even communism, ever? It doesn't look anything like what Marx was talking about. It happened in a backwards, agrarian nation at Europe's periphery. Marx prescribed revolution, but there was clearly an evolutionary process that was necessary first - for capitalism to come to its full state of development. Marx supported unrestricted free trade, so that it would lead to the formation of a global monoculture and the elimination of national cultures, a process that clearly hadn't even started yet at the time of the revolution. No wonder there was no internationalism.

Marx thought that the uprising would be populist and the people would not see any loss (quite the opposite) in making all capital a public good, but there's a prerequisite for this: nobody privately owns any capital anyway, by this point in capitalism. It's all owned by institutions and held, precariously, on credit. That certainly hadn't happened either in Czarist Russia. There were millions of small farmers who owned their land outright, heck, there was still cottage industry in Russia at that time.

If the preconditions never came to pass, and if it didn't wind up looking anything like what Marx talked about - is it communism, in any sense other than being a brand? A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, as the bard says, but if you call a dandelion a rose, will it smell like one?

Marxism is probably heavily flawed ... he really was more of a critic than a provider of solutions, most of what he actually said about communism could be contained in a small pamphlet and as a matter of fact, most of it is, and it's only as an aside at that (a letter chastising a German communist party, Critique of the Gotha Program). Communism as an idea of Marx's, is pretty empty and vague, and definately not what most people think it is. You could write all of it and make a paper airplane out of the amount of paper you'd need. But his criticisms of capitalism would be enough that you'd want a forklift to pick it all up at once.

From your lips to God's most likely non-existent ears.
In my academic life I am a Marxist anthropologist amongst other things.
wonderful encapsulation of Karl and to my thinking exactly.

Back to the question was the Stalin's dandelion he called a rose fascism?

of course in the Ur-fascist Ecoian sense not in the derived from Italy sense.
I think he fits if one can call his adherence to "Marxism" a traditionalist.
The new communists of Russia certainly seem to idealize communism in the way.

@ edgewaters: You made a mistake in you quotes. In the post before your previous one, only the last two quotes are mine.

The failure of communism was 1919-1921, when no global revolution happened. After that, the only successful revolution had to deal with this fait accompli: they had taken power, but no one else.

Marx's views were very millenarist: the socialist revolution would happen, then the communism revolution, and all of a sudden, the communist heaven would come to be, bringing History to an end.

Last edited by enrico_dandolo on 02 Aug 2012, 10:54 pm, edited 1 time in total.

He was no Fascist, as he has no connection to the ideological and historical current that is Fascism. Certainly an extremely authoritarian, militaristic, genocidal, Orwellian Leninist, but no Fascist.

As an active anti-Fascist, I believe that calling things that aren't actually Fascist decreases the importance of the term, and its true danger.