By the time of Lenins death, he had put in place all the institutions and levers of control that Stalin would later use to brutalize the population, all the worst parts of the Great Purge can be connected back to the systems that Lenin put in place.
Lenin had immense opportunities for positive change as the leader of the first socialist nation, however he squandered it completely by his purge of any ideals that weren’t his own, and his project turned into a dictatorship. Meanwhile the Democratic Socialists and Anarchists that Lenin loved to berate helped build societies that are now infinitely better to live in and more open to change from the working class than any of the modern countries inspired by his ideology.
You can say “Marx is the theory , Lenin is the practice” but it’s much more accurate to say, Marx is the theory, Lenin is a practice, and not the best one historically.
but you cannot deny that he was on of its greatest exponents
While the revolution was a great propaganda victory for Socialists globally, almost every group that sprung up inspired by the revolution later became controlled by Moscow.
For example, the communists in my home country, the Communist Party of the USA, were summoned to Moscow by Stalin and had their more anarchist/democratic leaning factions purged, with some even being arrested and kept in Moscow till they died.
The amount of control that Stalin and the Comintern had on international communism lead to repeated purges of more democratic/less Authoritarian socialists and basically ensured that Stalinist/Marxist Leninist Socialism was the only type allowed to flourish in any form for most of the cold war.
I certainly couldn’t predict what would’ve changed had the Russian Revolution been more democratic/pluralist, or had a more democratic revolution inspired the last century of global Socialism, but I at least believe that Socialism wouldn’t face the uphill “Gulags, Famine, Stalin, Mao” battle that it currently does.
Peace between us, war on the bourgeoisie, comrade
I would love nothing more than a united left, but it’s more the actions of Marxist Leninist inspired governments after their revolutions, (Universal banning of non-Leninist Socialists, Universal banning of pluralist socialist democracy, Yugoslav’s Split, 1956, and 1968) that makes me bash against ML’s. It’s hard to trust talk of leftist unity when the history of Leninism has involved the crushing of any other form of leftism since its inception.
Man, anticommunist leftists sure love ignoring the political, historial and material context of things, don’t they? Yeah, Lenin was evil and he did that all because he was very very bad and the Bolsheviks are so evil!!! The man who consecrated his entire life to a worker’s revolution, read and wrote extensively about it, and from the start was adamant on educating the workers through newspapers and other publications, just was so bad and so evil and so bad. Bad Lenin! Bad!!
If by “nothing required the overthrow of the results of a democratic election” you ignore the ever-increasing threat of a reactionary, pro-Tsarist coup under lukewarm administration, then yeah, it wasn’t required.
If by “nothing required Lenin to purge other fellow socialists” you mean there weren’t counter-revolutionary Mensheviks and other such assets in positions of power during a literal civil war, then yeah, it wasn’t required.
If by “crushing syndicalism” in Russia you mean not immediately giving the means of production to uneducated workers, but instead slowly growing unions to unforeseen levels of participation, with tens of millions of union members in the 30s already, but understanding that socialism can’t survive against the onslaught of external powers without heavy planning (as proven by the 20+ million soviet deaths in WW2 in the fight against Nazism due to still comparatively low levels of industrialization), planning which initially can be done better by a vanguard party of socialist intellectuals, then yeah, it wasn’t required.
If by “crushing the working class” you mean creating unforeseen levels of access to healthcare, education, eliminating unemployment and homelessness. Or maybe you mean going against the interests of Kulaks and understanding that the best for peasants isn’t direct ownership of the land, but the elimination of structures of ownership of it altogether. Then yeah, it wasn’t required.
Talking of war communism as if the USSR wasn’t facing constant struggle against the rest of Europe portrays that you either don’t understand the history or you’re making a malicious intent. The Bolshevik revolution faced a coalition of the Tsarist loyalists in the civil war, which was militarily and economically supported by a total of 14 other countries, including Britain and its colonies, France, and many other European powers, in the direct aftermath of WW1. It’s basically a miracle that the Bolsheviks were able to win the war, and it speaks very highly of their power to mobilize the population and resources in times of extreme difficulty. This was in the immediate inception of the newborn state, before the USSR even existed as such. Then it was subjected to economic sanction and isolation. Afterwards, during several attempts to make agreements of mutual defense against Nazism with France and Britain (and even Poland) for all the decade of the 30s and being systematically ignored, what is the USSR to think about the rest of the world? Again, the victory of barely post-feudal agricultural USSR against the industrial power of Germany which was established for more than a century at that point, is basically another miracle. Saying that the USSR didn’t have reasons to see itself in “war socialism” is astonishing. It falls into what Michael Parenti said in his work Blackshirts and reds: for anticommunist leftists, the only worthy revolutions are the ones that failed.
This is not to say that there weren’t excesses in repression during the USSR. Of course there were. Stalinism was extremely excessive and brutal during WW2, and the oppression went way overboard. Then again, that’s the nature of the history of states up to that point, isn’t it? How can we expect the people born in brutal systems of oppression, who directly suffered that oppression, to not fall in excesses of oppression when times are hard? The best we can do is analyse these excesses from a historical, materialist, constructive point of view, and try to minimise the excesses. But let us not deceive ourselves with idealism: revolutions are bloody, and the ruling class doesn’t give away its power without fighting. Let’s learn from the mistakes of the past and build more fair and resilient systems that won’t commit those excesses, or will minimize them. But let’s not be ignorant about the historic and material conditions that led up to them, or we will fall in the same mistakes, or even worse, be on the receiving end after the reactionaries take over.
If by “nothing required Lenin to purge other fellow socialists” you mean there weren’t counter-revolutionary Mensheviks and other such assets in positions of power during a literal civil war,
If by “crushing syndicalism” in Russia you mean not immediately giving the means of production to uneducated workers, but instead slowly growing unions to unforeseen levels of participation,
If by “crushing the working class” you mean creating unforeseen levels of access to healthcare, education, eliminating unemployment and homelessness.
While the soviets did eventually institute some rather progressive welfare reforms for their time, these reforms had no popular demand from the working class that grain requisition did originally,
and were put in place from above, not gained through demands of a working class movement. I believe most Leninists would call this a Bourgeoisie Concession had it happened in a capitalist country.
The Bolshevik revolution faced a coalition of the Tsarist loyalists in the civil war, which was militarily and economically supported by a total of 14 other countries, including Britain and its colonies, France, and many other European powers, in the direct aftermath of WW1
Of course there were. Stalinism was extremely excessive and brutal during WW2, and the oppression went way overboard.
I actually have far more of a problem with Stalins actions in the 1920s before the Great Purge and World War 2. Between Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Ryhzkov, and their supporters, Stalin had effectively crushed any opposition even within the party. Not though discrediting them intellectually or by testing their ideas and showing the failures, but instead by killing or imprisoning them.
I thoroughly believe these conflicts during the 1920s were what doomed the USSR, Stalin had killed almost all competing ideas for a potentially better Socialism, even among fellow Leninists. And through his purges Stalin became the gold standard of Leninism for the USSR, with the effective intellectual ban on the ideas of Bukharin, Zinoviev, and Trotsky lasting until the end of the USSR.
Let’s learn from the mistakes of the past and build more fair and resilient systems that won’t commit those excesses, or will minimize them.
That is what I tried to do here, and is why I’m majoring in Soviet history, but I don’t think just quoting the old propaganda justifications or Parenti counts as sober analysis.
As socialists I believe we should focus historically on the possible off-ramps from authoritarianism that the USSR and all “Actually Existing Socialist” states had. Which is why I focus on Stalin and how the collection of power into Lenin’s position lead to the possibility of much larger later abuses under Stalin, imagine how much could’ve changed had after the civil war the Factions ban been lifted and the working class was allowed to choose between the Workers Opposition,Left Oppositionor Right Opposition in free and fair internal Party elections like takes place now in most modern Socialist parties. I’m sure in this scenario Stalin wouldn’t of been able to commit the atrocities he later did, and that Soviet politics would rely much more on the will of the working class than behind the curtain political maneuvering.
So you are a bad socialist
Marx is the theory , Lenin is the practice
Marx wasn’t the only socialist of his time, though history has deemed him certainly the most important.
Lenin on the other hand…
Nothing about the theory required Lenin to overthrow the results of a democratic election in 1917
Nothing about the theory required Lenin to advocate for the purging of his other fellow socialists in the soviets/councils.
Nothing about the theory required Lenin to backstab and crush his anarchist allies in Ukraine.
Nothing about the theory required Lenin crushing anarchism/syndicalism in Russia.
Nothing about the theory required Lenin to crush the working class when they told him outright that his actions were against their will.
Nothing about the theory required Lenin banning all dissent even within the Communist party.
Nothing about the theory required Lenin to start mass seizures of food and mass nationalizations under “War Communism” that started the canard of “Socialism is when the government owns things”.
By the time of Lenins death, he had put in place all the institutions and levers of control that Stalin would later use to brutalize the population, all the worst parts of the Great Purge can be connected back to the systems that Lenin put in place.
Lenin had immense opportunities for positive change as the leader of the first socialist nation, however he squandered it completely by his purge of any ideals that weren’t his own, and his project turned into a dictatorship. Meanwhile the Democratic Socialists and Anarchists that Lenin loved to berate helped build societies that are now infinitely better to live in and more open to change from the working class than any of the modern countries inspired by his ideology.
You can say “Marx is the theory , Lenin is the practice” but it’s much more accurate to say, Marx is the theory, Lenin is a practice, and not the best one historically.
Lenin may not be the one who best (in your opinion) applied real Marxism, but you cannot deny that he was on of its greatest exponents
Peace between us, war on the bourgeoisie, comrade
While the revolution was a great propaganda victory for Socialists globally, almost every group that sprung up inspired by the revolution later became controlled by Moscow.
For example, the communists in my home country, the Communist Party of the USA, were summoned to Moscow by Stalin and had their more anarchist/democratic leaning factions purged, with some even being arrested and kept in Moscow till they died. The amount of control that Stalin and the Comintern had on international communism lead to repeated purges of more democratic/less Authoritarian socialists and basically ensured that Stalinist/Marxist Leninist Socialism was the only type allowed to flourish in any form for most of the cold war.
I certainly couldn’t predict what would’ve changed had the Russian Revolution been more democratic/pluralist, or had a more democratic revolution inspired the last century of global Socialism, but I at least believe that Socialism wouldn’t face the uphill “Gulags, Famine, Stalin, Mao” battle that it currently does.
I would love nothing more than a united left, but it’s more the actions of Marxist Leninist inspired governments after their revolutions, (Universal banning of non-Leninist Socialists, Universal banning of pluralist socialist democracy, Yugoslav’s Split, 1956, and 1968) that makes me bash against ML’s. It’s hard to trust talk of leftist unity when the history of Leninism has involved the crushing of any other form of leftism since its inception.
“Peace between us until the MLs get into power and then I’ll have you look towards that wall.”
Man, anticommunist leftists sure love ignoring the political, historial and material context of things, don’t they? Yeah, Lenin was evil and he did that all because he was very very bad and the Bolsheviks are so evil!!! The man who consecrated his entire life to a worker’s revolution, read and wrote extensively about it, and from the start was adamant on educating the workers through newspapers and other publications, just was so bad and so evil and so bad. Bad Lenin! Bad!!
If by “nothing required the overthrow of the results of a democratic election” you ignore the ever-increasing threat of a reactionary, pro-Tsarist coup under lukewarm administration, then yeah, it wasn’t required.
If by “nothing required Lenin to purge other fellow socialists” you mean there weren’t counter-revolutionary Mensheviks and other such assets in positions of power during a literal civil war, then yeah, it wasn’t required.
If by “crushing syndicalism” in Russia you mean not immediately giving the means of production to uneducated workers, but instead slowly growing unions to unforeseen levels of participation, with tens of millions of union members in the 30s already, but understanding that socialism can’t survive against the onslaught of external powers without heavy planning (as proven by the 20+ million soviet deaths in WW2 in the fight against Nazism due to still comparatively low levels of industrialization), planning which initially can be done better by a vanguard party of socialist intellectuals, then yeah, it wasn’t required.
If by “crushing the working class” you mean creating unforeseen levels of access to healthcare, education, eliminating unemployment and homelessness. Or maybe you mean going against the interests of Kulaks and understanding that the best for peasants isn’t direct ownership of the land, but the elimination of structures of ownership of it altogether. Then yeah, it wasn’t required.
Talking of war communism as if the USSR wasn’t facing constant struggle against the rest of Europe portrays that you either don’t understand the history or you’re making a malicious intent. The Bolshevik revolution faced a coalition of the Tsarist loyalists in the civil war, which was militarily and economically supported by a total of 14 other countries, including Britain and its colonies, France, and many other European powers, in the direct aftermath of WW1. It’s basically a miracle that the Bolsheviks were able to win the war, and it speaks very highly of their power to mobilize the population and resources in times of extreme difficulty. This was in the immediate inception of the newborn state, before the USSR even existed as such. Then it was subjected to economic sanction and isolation. Afterwards, during several attempts to make agreements of mutual defense against Nazism with France and Britain (and even Poland) for all the decade of the 30s and being systematically ignored, what is the USSR to think about the rest of the world? Again, the victory of barely post-feudal agricultural USSR against the industrial power of Germany which was established for more than a century at that point, is basically another miracle. Saying that the USSR didn’t have reasons to see itself in “war socialism” is astonishing. It falls into what Michael Parenti said in his work Blackshirts and reds: for anticommunist leftists, the only worthy revolutions are the ones that failed.
This is not to say that there weren’t excesses in repression during the USSR. Of course there were. Stalinism was extremely excessive and brutal during WW2, and the oppression went way overboard. Then again, that’s the nature of the history of states up to that point, isn’t it? How can we expect the people born in brutal systems of oppression, who directly suffered that oppression, to not fall in excesses of oppression when times are hard? The best we can do is analyse these excesses from a historical, materialist, constructive point of view, and try to minimise the excesses. But let us not deceive ourselves with idealism: revolutions are bloody, and the ruling class doesn’t give away its power without fighting. Let’s learn from the mistakes of the past and build more fair and resilient systems that won’t commit those excesses, or will minimize them. But let’s not be ignorant about the historic and material conditions that led up to them, or we will fall in the same mistakes, or even worse, be on the receiving end after the reactionaries take over.
Nice propaganda bro, sources would be nice.
The coup took place before the October Revolution and was crushed by the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks before the October Revolution even started.
Oh the good old, “Call them counter revolutionary and now it’s okay to shoot them”. The Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries had a far bigger hand in the Febuary Revolution than the Bolsheviks, and later had their legitimacy confirmed with a free election. If anyone was counter-revolutionary it’d be the betrayers of the majority elected socialist government, the Bolsheviks under Lenin.
Nice try, but the Union’s under Marxist Leninist regimes are always heavily policed and controlled by their respective governments. "In this respect, through the Western lens of a dichotomy of independent unions versus company unions, they were more accurately comparable to company unions, as “unlike unions in the West, the Soviet variety do not fight for the economic interests of the workers. They are conveyor belts for Party instructions, carrying punishments and rewards to industrial and collective farm employees. Soviet trade unions work with their employer, the government, and not against it.” I’m not completely against planning, but I’m against banning any form of independent organization/representation for workers, and then striking them down whenever they complain.
While the soviets did eventually institute some rather progressive welfare reforms for their time, these reforms had no popular demand from the working class that grain requisition did originally, and were put in place from above, not gained through demands of a working class movement. I believe most Leninists would call this a Bourgeoisie Concession had it happened in a capitalist country.
The Bolsheviks only faced an allied invasion after having pulled out of the war and signed a separate peace with the Germans through Brest-Litovsk, which happened after the bolsheviks had overthrown the mensheviks. More importantly though, the civil war didn’t even start until the Bolsheviks had crushed their socialist opposition. The Tsarists had almost zero power and were thoroughly crushed after events such as the Kornilov affair, and it would’ve stayed that way had the Bolsheviks not fractured the Russian socialist movement.
I actually have far more of a problem with Stalins actions in the 1920s before the Great Purge and World War 2. Between Trotsky, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Ryhzkov, and their supporters, Stalin had effectively crushed any opposition even within the party. Not though discrediting them intellectually or by testing their ideas and showing the failures, but instead by killing or imprisoning them.
I thoroughly believe these conflicts during the 1920s were what doomed the USSR, Stalin had killed almost all competing ideas for a potentially better Socialism, even among fellow Leninists. And through his purges Stalin became the gold standard of Leninism for the USSR, with the effective intellectual ban on the ideas of Bukharin, Zinoviev, and Trotsky lasting until the end of the USSR.
That is what I tried to do here, and is why I’m majoring in Soviet history, but I don’t think just quoting the old propaganda justifications or Parenti counts as sober analysis. As socialists I believe we should focus historically on the possible off-ramps from authoritarianism that the USSR and all “Actually Existing Socialist” states had. Which is why I focus on Stalin and how the collection of power into Lenin’s position lead to the possibility of much larger later abuses under Stalin, imagine how much could’ve changed had after the civil war the Factions ban been lifted and the working class was allowed to choose between the Workers Opposition, Left Opposition or Right Opposition in free and fair internal Party elections like takes place now in most modern Socialist parties. I’m sure in this scenario Stalin wouldn’t of been able to commit the atrocities he later did, and that Soviet politics would rely much more on the will of the working class than behind the curtain political maneuvering.