Joseph Stalin nostalgia?

 

My general tendency is to avoid Stalin-Trotsky debates and have even ruled them as out of order on Marxmail since they inevitably lead to flame wars and have very little relevance to politics today. As proof of the latter, my closest political associate was the late Mark Jones who was about as hard core a Stalinist as they come. But we found that our agreements about the environmental crisis and imperialism superseded whatever disagreements we had about the Spanish Civil War, etc.

If pressed, I will defend Trotsky’s analysis of fascism, the popular front and all the rest. I am sharply critical of Trotsky’s party-building methodology but have yet to read a more cogent analysis of the tragic events that led to the rise of fascism and WWII. For the most part, this analysis has achieved intellectual hegemony. If you read New Left Review, Monthly Review, and other influential Marxist journals, you will find very little special pleading on Stalin’s behalf.

Calvin Tucker

Andy Newman

It has been years since I ran into anybody on the Internet who was trying to refurbish the image of Joseph Stalin. Back in 1996, when the mailing list that preceded Marxmail was in operation, a group of about 10 people showed up all around the same time in order to advance the cause of Sendero Luminoso. Almost immediately they got into flame wars with a Spartacist League supporter and Morenoite, causing the list to eventually implode. When I launched Marxmail in 1998, I resolved to keep these kinds of fights off the list.

I should add that the flame wars did not just involve Trotskyists versus Stalinists. Among the Maoists, there was a particularly nasty fight over who was the authentic representative of Chairman Gonzalo outside of Peru. The London-based Adolfo Olaechea condemned his Queens, NY-based rival Quispe in terms that could have been lifted from Vishinsky.

In addition to his Sendero work, Olaechea was a friend of the London-based Stalin Society whose website is adorned with a flattering portrait of the deceased tyrant and these words:

The Stalin Society was formed in 1991 to defend Stalin and his work on the basis of fact and to refute capitalist, revisionist, opportunist and Trotskyist propaganda directed against him.

In the USA, this kind of pedal to the metal Stalin worship is limited to the fringes of of academia and the organized left. The best known Stalin apologist in the academy is the unlikely named Grover Furr, a Montclair State literature professor who maintains a vast library of Stalinist apologetics at http://chss.montclair.edu/English/furr/homepage.html. He has the most intriguing defense of the Moscow Trials, namely that the same standards were applied by Vishinsky that you can find in American courts:

Concerning evidence: The testimony of others, unsupported by physical evidence, is enough for conviction even in the United States. Often – as in the case of conspiracy – physical evidence is not to be expected. And physical evidence can be faked, forged, altered, etc., just as personal testimony can be.

Wow, I had never considered that. How reassuring. What a splendid case for the superiority of socialism.

Furr has a solid ally in the Progressive Labor Party, a formerly Maoist sect that was fairly influential in the 1960s. On their website, you will find inspirational material such as “Stalin’s Successes, Humanity’s Gains”. I suppose they think by invoking Stalin’s name they will eventually be transformed into a mass party bearing some resemblances to the Communist Party of the late 1930s. As I recall, Billy Batson turned into the comic book hero Captain Marvel by uttering the word “Shazam” but I doubt that saying “Stalin” will have similar transformative powers.

It should be said that a more intelligent defense of Stalin (I am being charitable here obviously) does not deny that he was a brutal dictator but tries to “contextualize” him and find the silver lining around a dark cloud in socialist history. The best exponent of this approach is John Arch Getty, the American historian who is not related to the oilman and friend of the Soviet Union, the late John Paul Getty.

Getty’s main argument is that the Soviet working class was “willing to trade free speech for cheap food”. He also insists that the number of executions that took place under Stalin was around 2 million, a figure lower the estimate of other Sovietologists. Getty is quite skilled at seeming reasonable, a must for somebody operating in academia. In an article titled “Trotsky in Exile: The Founding of the Fourth International” that appeared in the Jan. 1986 Soviet Studies,  Getty writes: “It seems reasonable to assume that Trotsky’s activities were grist to the mill of those hard-line Moscow politicians who favored repression of the opposition.” This sentence is obviously open to multiple interpretations, including one that amounts to “He had it coming”.

For reasons that not entirely clear to me (although I do have some suspicions to be outlined below), there are a couple of websites in Britain that have bought into the more sophisticated brand of Stalin apologetics that is associated with Getty. One is Andy Newman’s Socialist Unity blog that I wrote about in my last post. As a corollary to the Sir Winston Churchill boosterism there, you find a rather informed defense of Stalin’s policies by Newman and his co-thinkers, mostly in the comments section.

It stands to reason that if you endorse the CP’s “people’s anti-fascist” coalition with the blood-soaked British Prime Minister, you are likely to buy into the rest of the crapola. Two of Newman’s most vehement supporters are the brothers Calvin and Noah Tucker, who operate the website http://21stcenturysocialism.com along with Uri Cohen. Calvin Tucker and Cohen are ex-members of the Communist Party in Great Britain and split to form a group associated with the magazine Straight Left that you can read about in a wiki. They wanted the CP to be more “pro-Soviet”, a policy that seems consistent with their current beliefs.

It is quite a paradox to see these characters operating in the name of socialist unity and 21st century socialism when they seem so intent on bringing back the 1930s. Thank goodness that the Latin American left that they hold up as a model has chosen not to follow their lead. In a speech to the World Social Forum in 2005 that has been described as the first call for 21st century socialism, Hugo Chavez said: “We have to re-invent socialism. It can’t be the kind of socialism that we saw in the Soviet Union, but it will emerge as we develop new systems that are built on cooperation, not competition.” Apparently, this insight was lost on Newman and the Tucker brothers who have a kind of nostalgia for the 1930s that is best limited to the big bands and screwball comedies.

I first got the sense that something was amiss back in October 2008 when an excerpt from Georgi Dimitrov’s speech to the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International, 1935 appeared without comments on the Socialist Unity blog. Dimitrov is best known as the architect of the Popular Front strategy that led to a disaster in Spain, when the coalition between bourgeois parties and the CP took a hard line against the kind of radical measures that could have rallied the people against Franco.

In the comments section, Newman chided a Trotskyist for bringing up Spain since “the USSR was the biggest provider of arms to the Spanish republic by a country mile.” As somebody who spent a number of years in the British SWP, Newman obviously knew that this was not under dispute.

One of his tag-team partners Noah Tucker joined in with a burst of rhetoric that I have not seen since the 1960s:

Andy has already pointed out that the USSR armed (not disarmed) the Spanish Republican forces. Perhaps I should also remind you that it was the Soviet Union- and also China, the GDR, Czechoslovakia etc, and after 1960 Cuba, who provided the revolutionaries in the Third World with the munitions with which to fight imperialism.

Where do you think that the Koreans and the Vietnamese got their MiGs from? Who provided the ANC, and Zapu and Zanu with AK47s?

So there you have it. Revolutionary politics boils down to armaments. Who needs strategy and tactics when the Manual of Arms will suffice?

If you go to the 21^st century socialism website, you will find a plethora of well-researched but mostly wrong-headed analyses of 20^th century socialism in the In Depth section.  You will not find any explicit defense of Stalin but there is an implicit defense of his policies of the sort found in “The Soviet Model and the economic cold war“, written by one Marcus Mulholland. (To my knowledge, Mulholland is not involved in recruiting hedge fund managers to work in emerging markets.) It amounts to a ringing endorsement of Stalin’s economic policies:

Industries in the Soviet Union were run directly by government ministries on the basis of overall plans developed by the state planning commission, known as Gosplan.  According to Hanson, the instructions to each enterprise during Stalin’s leadership included guidelines or directions on a range of matters including:

The product mix: what to produce and in what proportions;

Output targets;

Who will supply the enterprise, with what and how much;

A labour plan: how many workers and the total wage bill;

Who are the customers and what they should each be provided with;

The prices of inputs and outputs;

An investment plan, for replacing and modernising equipment.

I hate to rain on Mulholland’s parade, but Stalin’s rule was marked mostly by a lack of planning. Despite the announcement of 5-year plans, the economy had more in common with bureaucratic fiat than scientific planning. All this is discussed in chapter 5 entitled “The Disappearance of Planning in the Plan” in Moshe Lewin’s  “Russia USSR Russia”.

The Soviet government announced the first five year plan in 1928. Stalin loyalists, like Krzhizanovksy and Strumlin, who headed Gosplan, the minister of planning, worried about the excess rigidity of this plan. They noted that the success of the plan was based on 4 factors: 1) five good consecutive crops, 2) more external trade and help than in 1928, 3) a “sharp improvement” in overall economic indicators, and 4) a smaller ration than before of military expenditures in the state’s total expenditures.

How could anybody predict five consecutive good crops in the USSR? The plan assumed the most optimistic conditions and nobody had a contingency plan to allow for failure of any of the necessary conditions.

Bazarov, another Stalin loyalist in Gosplan, pointed to another area of risk: the lack of political cadres. He warned the Gosplan presidium in 1929, “If you plan simultaneously a series of undertakings on such a gigantic scale without knowing in advance the organizational forms, without having cadres and without knowing what they should be taught, then you get a chaos guaranteed in advance; difficulties will arise which will not only slow down the execution of the five-year plan, which will take seven if not ten years to achieve, but results even worse may occur; here such a blatantly squandering of means could happen which would discredit the whole idea of industrialization.”

Strumlin admitted that the planners preferred to “stand for higher tempos rather than sit in prison for lower ones.” Strumlin and Krzhizanovksy had been expressing doubts about the plan for some time and Stalin removed these acolytes from Gosplan in 1930.

In order for the planners, who were operating under terrible political pressure, to make sense of the plan, they had to play all kinds of games. They had to falsify productivity and yield goals in order to allow the input and output portions of the plan to balance. V.V. Kuibyshev, another high-level planner and one of Stalin’s proteges, confessed in a letter to his wife how he had finessed the industrial plan he had developing. “Here is what worried me yesterday and today; I am unable to tie up the balance, and as I cannot go for contracting the capital outlays–contracting the tempo–there will be no other way but to take upon myself an almost unmanageable task in the realm of lowering costs.”

Eventually Kuibyshev swallowed any doubts he may have had and began cooking the books in such a way as to make the five-year plan, risky as it was, totally unrealizable.

Real life proved how senseless the plan was. Kuibyshev had recklessly predicted that costs would go down, meanwhile they went up: although the plan allocated 22 billion rubles for industry, transportation and building, the Soviets spent 41.6 billion. The money in circulation, which planners limited to a growth of only 1.25 billion rubles, consequently grew to 5.7 billion in 1933.

Now we get to the real problem for those who speak about “planning” during this period. As madcap and as utopian as the original plan was, Stalin tossed it into the garbage can immediately after the planners submitted it to him. He commanded new goals in 1929-30 that disregarded any economic criteria. For example, instead of a goal of producing 10 million tons of pig iron in 1933, the Soviets now targeted 17 million. All this scientific “planning” was taking place when a bloody war against the Kulaks was turning the Russian countryside into chaos. Molotov declared that to talk about a 5-year plan during this period was “nonsense.”

Stalin told Gosplan to forget about coming up with a new plan that made sense. The main driving force now was speed. The slogan “tempos decide everything” became policy. The overwhelming majority of Gosplan, hand-picked by Stalin, viewed the new policy with shock. Molotov said this was too bad, and cleaned house in the old Gosplan with “all of its old-fashioned planners” as he delicately put it.

When Stalin turned the whole nation into a work camp in order to meet these unrealistic goals, he expanded the police force in order that they may function as work gang bosses. Scientific planning declined and command mechanisms took their place. As the command mechanisms grew, so grew the administrative apparatus to implement them. The more bottlenecks that showed up, the greater the need for bureaucrats to step in and pull levers. This is the explanation of the monstrous bureaucratic apparatus in the former Soviet Union, not scientific planning.

So the question remains, what would attract radicals in 2009 to the Soviet leader who arguably was responsible for the counter-revolution of the 1990s? Given the atomization of the Soviet working class, a necessary consequence of a police state whatever J. Arch Getty writes, it was fairly easy for the bureaucrats to opt for private property. Trotsky predicted that there would be fierce resistance to such measures but he could not have anticipated how socialism would serve only as an empty vessel by the time Gorbachev came on the scene. We can thank Stalin for Gorbachev even though the naïve supporters of a Stalin revival cannot understand that the two figures are dialectically interrelated.

The answer is to be found in the impotence of the left. Frustrated by the failure of the antiwar movement to have achieved success in Iraq or Afghanistan and by a never-ending diet of neoliberal economics, there is yearning for a muscular left that could have stood up to the capitalists. Despite his history of placating the imperialists, Stalin enjoys a reputation of implacability that owes more to Cold War stereotypes than reality. It is this mythology that has mesmerized Newman and the Tucker brothers and nothing else.