ROLAND BOER
Communism has ‘failed’, or so the common observation goes.
More often, one hears the opinion that the Soviet Union ‘failed’, or that the
communist countries of Eastern Europe did so as well. But what does ‘failure’
mean here? Usually it simply means that they came to an end, even that they
were not eternal. Dig deeper and the ‘failure’ is marked by a host of items:
dictatorship and totalitarianism rather than ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom’; the sad
reality that was far from the perfect dream; the fragmentation that arose
instead of the voluntary union of working people from many ethnic and religious
backgrounds; state capitalism instead of communism; and simple betrayal of
revolutionary Marxism. My answer in the face of this persistent propaganda is
that they did not fail, and that communisms – plural – as such have not failed.
To be sure, they had and continue to have many problems, for they are not
perfect by any means, but this is not failure. In order to deal with the
various caricatures of failure, let us travel to various parts of the world,
both ‘post-communist’ and still communist.
Romanian ‘Dictatorship’
‘Post-communist’ is what the locals call Romania. Neither
communist nor capitalist in any conventional sense, it is in a period never
experienced before and thereby unique. One feature of this period is the coming
to terms with Nicolae Ceaușescu, the second communist leader of Romania, from
1967-1989. On one side, Ceaușescu is held up as the example of all that is bad
about communist dictatorship. Propagator of the ‘mini-cultural revolution’
after his ‘July Theses’ in 1968, he fostered a North Korean style personality
cult, gave himself many honours, attempted to build ‘socialism in one family’
by appointing family members to high posts, and destroyed the country
economically in the 1980s by attempting to repay onerous debts incurred from
Western European countries. In short, he was the most ‘Stalinist’ of all the
eastern bloc leaders, ruling by decree and through his feared secret police,
the Securitate. The lynching of him and his wife in 1989 is
regarded as unfortunate but necessary.
Yet, in a widely publicised opinion poll in July 2010 by
IRES (Romanian Institute for Evaluation and Strategy), 41% of the respondents
said they would have voted for Ceaușescu if he had been alive and run for the
position of president. Further, 63% said their lives were better during
communism, while only 23% stated that their lives were worse. And 68% stated
that communism was a good idea, but had been poorly applied. The facetious
response to such a result is that it merely reflects a tainted nostalgia for
communism. But Romanians are smarter than that. Let me put this in perspective:
the respondents were reflecting on the worst period under the communist
government in the 1980s. Earlier, Ceaușescu had fallen into the trap of taking
up heavy loans from Western Europe for the sake of economic expansion.
However, by 1982, the debt had become an onerous burden, so
he decided to repay it through exporting much of Romanian agricultural and
industrial production. This resulted in shortages of food, fuel, energy, and
medicines. Yet, it was precisely this period that the respondents said was
better than what they have now. Since 1989, the situation has become decidedly
worse. The economic devastation of the 1990s, the de-industrialisation of
Romania as Western European countries bought up the factories and promptly
closed them, and then the swathe cut through the country after the rolling economic
crisis of 2008 – all these have made the 1980s look like a relatively benign
period. I cannot help thinking of Lukács adage: ‘bad communism is better than
good capitalism’.
Bulgarian ‘Perfection’
Ask an older Bulgarian today what they remember most from
1989 and it is highly likely she will say, ‘It was a glorious feeling to know
that when you made a phone call, you didn’t have the feeling that someone else
was listening’.
But ask, ‘Is it better now?’
And the answer will be, ‘We prefer not to answer that’.
The answer is soon obvious. Travel on any road and you find
it potholed beyond belief. Walk any street and you run a serious risk of being
knocked on the head by a falling brick or crumbling façade. Ask anyone what
they do for a living and the answer will be evasive, since less than 25% of the
population is in formal employment. Or if you inquire after someone’s family,
chances are the children have moved internationally to find a new life and job.
Indeed, in a few years after 1989, two million people left Bulgaria, reducing
its population from nine to seven million.
What about communism? Was it perfect? Did it meet its own
high aspirations? Denigrators are of course keen to point out its failings,
stressing the gaps between the grand aims of the Bulgarian Communist Party,
which was the government from 1944 to 1989, and its failings. But communism is
by no means perfect. As Lenin and Mao pointed out repeatedly, winning a
revolution is the easy part; constructing socialism is far, far more difficult.
So, let us see what the Bulgarian communist government did
achieve, keeping in mind the difficulties and a modest sense of what was indeed
achievable. The communist government had three leaders, the revolutionary hero,
Georgi Dimitrov (1946-49) who died too young, Vulko Chervenkov (1949-54) and
the long-lived Todor Zhivkov (1954-89). Zhivkov may have had his limits, like
any leader, but his time was marked by political stability and a steady
increase in living standards. The reason: communist central economic planning.
Already in the late 1950s, real wages increased by 75 per
cent, returning people to pre-war levels, while collective farm workers were
the beneficiaries of the first agricultural welfare and pension scheme in
Europe. By the 1960s, agricultural incomes rose by 6.7 per cent per year and
industrial incomes rose by 4.9 per cent annually. Consumption of healthy foods
– fruit, vegetables and even meats – increased significantly, while doctors and
medical facilities became commonly available. As a result, fewer children died
and people lived longer. While 138.9 in 1,000 children under the age of one
died in 1939, by 1990 it was 14 in 1000. And those who survived could expect to
live longer: life expectancy rose to over 68 years for men and over 74 years
for women. Indeed, a reasonable number could expect to make a century: in the
late 1980s, 52 people were found over one hundred years of age per one million.
Meanwhile, Zhivkov exercised his ‘tyrannical’ rule. People
often made jokes about his dialect and proletarian manners. But did Zhivkov
have the perpetrators arrested and punished by the secret police? No, he
collected them for a good laugh now and then. He was usually known as ‘bai
Tosho’ (old uncle Tosho) or ‘Tato’, a dialectical term for
‘poppa’.
Yugoslavian ‘Disunity’
Balkanisation is perhaps the term that captures best the
image of Yugoslavia – or, rather, the ‘former’ Yugoslavia. Tito may have kept
the disparate peoples of that part of the world together for a while, due to
his personal charm and iron fist, but it was only a matter of time before it
would all fall apart. Deep-seated ethnic hatreds and religious animosity –
between Islam, Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism – would resurface eventually,
and of course they did with the Balkan War of the 1990s. Or so the official
narrative went from the members of the EU and the NATO alliance, which
deliberately sought to destabilise and break up yet another socialist country.
The NATO attacks on Yugoslavia ensured that they would succeed.
However, the real situation was quite different. Yugoslavia
is one of the best examples of what has been called ‘affirmative action’ in
relation to ethnicities, cultures and religions. Given the range of peoples and
regions in Yugoslavia, the constitution was explicitly designed as an
affirmative action constitution. The Socialist Federal republic of Yugoslavia
comprised six republics and two autonomous provinces that were part of the
socialist republic of Serbia. Given the great ethnic diversity of Yugoslavia,
the constitution and the framework of the laws sought to ensure that smaller
groups were not discriminated against by larger ones. The measures included
very strong anti-discrimination laws, with heavy penalties for vilification in
terms of ethnicity, language, and religion. Further, in provinces and regions,
local people were encouraged to take up government positions, and local
languages, cultures, social formations and education were fostered. At a
federal level, all republics and autonomous regions, no matter what the size,
had equal representation in the federal government. This entailed toning down
the dominance of the larger parts, so they didn’t lord it over the others.
Needless to say, this was a constant work in progress, but
the model for this approach was the first affirmative action state in human
history – the USSR. It may come as a surprise to some, but the chief
theoretician of what was called the ‘national question’ was Stalin. Coming from
Georgia – a part of the world with some of the most complex intersections of
multiple ethnicities – Stalin developed an increasingly complex approach to the
question of ethnic diversity. This approach may have been primarily theoretical
before the Russian Revolution, but it grew significantly in the practical
experience that followed the revolution. Through the civil war and then the
immense task of constructing a very different state (since the former state had
largely collapsed and threatened to leave nothing but anarchy in the vacuum),
Stalin built his arguments.
The principle was that each ethnic area and group should
have the right to self-determination and autonomy, especially in light of
centuries of tsarist repression by the ‘great Russian’ majority. Only on this
basis would a new, voluntary union arise: ‘Thus, from the
breakdown of the old imperialist unity, through independent
Soviet republics, the peoples of Russia are coming to a new,
voluntary and fraternal unity’.[1] In practice, of course, this was easier said
than done. After the revolution, the old ruling elites in the various border
regions immediately claimed the right to secession and autonomy. Stalin was
astute enough to see through the game and the policy became one of recognising
autonomy only when a workers and peasants soviet formed the government in each
area. Further, such autonomy involved a delicate play of central policies and
regional initiatives. Thus, the central government sought to foster local
languages, culture, literature, education, government and even religion to some
extent. In some cases, especially in the southern and eastern border regions,
this required a program of educating and training local leaders and
institutions, even to the point of creating written languages in oral cultures.
At the same time, local initiatives fed into the policies of the central
government, which then changed its policies in light of such input.
Already in 1918, Stalin made a crucial breakthrough. Due to
the sheer size and diversity of what was to become the USSR, Stalin saw that
his position on the national question also applied to anti-colonial movements
throughout the world. So he wrote that the October Revolution ‘has widened the
scope of the national question and converted it from the particular question of
combating national oppression in Europe into the general question of
emancipating the oppressed peoples, colonies and semi-colonies from
imperialism’.[2] If one supports the emancipation of ethnic minorities within
the USSR, then the same should apply to any colonised place on the globe. Over
the following years, this insight was developed into an international policy of
supporting anti-colonial struggles around the world.
The result was the 1924 constitution of the USSR, which was
the first affirmative action constitution in the world. The crucial paragraph
of the declaration reads:
The will of the peoples of the Soviet republics, who
recently assembled at their Congresses of Soviets and unanimously resolved to
form a “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics,” is a reliable guarantee that this
Union is a voluntary association of peoples enjoying equal rights, that each
republic is guaranteed the right of freely seceding from the Union, that
admission to the Union is open to all Socialist Soviet Republics, whether now
existing or hereafter to arise, that the new union state will prove to be a worthy
crown to the foundation for the peaceful co-existence and fraternal
co-operation of the peoples that was laid in October 1917, and that it will
serve as a sure bulwark against world capitalism and as a new and decisive step
towards the union of the working people of all countries into a World Socialist
Soviet Republic.[3]
A major feature of the constitution was the detailing of
equal roles for both a Federal Soviet and a Soviet of Nationalities. Stalin’s
observations on the initial treaty and then constitution indicate a range of
economic, political and international factors, but he made it clear that the
initiative actually came from the border regions, especially Azerbaijan,
Armenia and Georgia, which were later joined by Ukraine and Belarus. Needless
to say, the constitution did not solve all of the problems immediately, for it
remained a work in progress. Determining the status of each republic and region
was complex and at times did not reflect that actual nature of the local
situation. So these matters were constantly debated and reformulated, leading
to two revisions of the constitution in 1936 (under Stalin’s initiative and
with emphasis on the theme of the ‘brotherhood of the nations’) and the
constitution of 1977 (under Brezhnev), but the essence remained the same. Thus,
the 1936 constitution included the clause: ‘Any direct or indirect restriction
of the rights of, or, conversely, any establishment of direct or indirect
privileges for, citizens on account of their race or nationality, as well as
any advocacy of racial or national exclusiveness or hatred and contempt, is
punishable by law’.[4] Article 36 of the 1977 constitution contains the most
complete statement of this position:
Citizens of the USSR of different races and nationalities
have equal rights.
Exercise of these rights is ensured by a policy of
all-round development and drawing together of all the nations and nationalities
of the USSR, by educating citizens in the spirit of Soviet patriotism and
socialist internationalism, and by the possibility to use their native language
and the languages of other peoples in the USSR.
Any direct or indirect limitation of the rights of
citizens or establishment of direct or indirect privileges on grounds of race
or nationality, and any advocacy of racial or national exclusiveness,
hostility, or contempt, are punishable by law.[5]
This socialist model of state organisation carries through
today in China, where the ethnic minorities – more than 55 of them – are
fostered in similar terms, while efforts are made to keep in check Han
dominance.
Chinese ‘Capitalism’
‘China is more capitalist than any other country’– or so one
hears on a reasonably regular basis, even from socialists who perhaps should
know better. Old Maoists like Alain Badiou hold that China veered that way
under Deng Xiaoping, ‘he who follows the capitalist path’. Ephemeral socialists
like Slavoj Žižek opine that Chinese capitalism is unbridled in a way unlike
that of the bourgeois democracies of Europe. ‘State capitalism’ it is often
called, even more than the Soviet Union (the term ‘state capitalism’ was first
used by Karl Liebknecht to describe the German economy in the 1890s).
Various strands are responsible for such a characterisation
– anarchist criticisms, Trotskyite assessments, radical laissez faire assessments,
and time-bound Maoists – although all of them turn on an idealised, if not
romanticised, view of what communism should be. Such a view is idealist, since
it holds communism to be a rational idea that is yet to be realised, and
believes that communism is singular rather than plural. Needless to say, such a
communism always remains in the utopian future.
So let us attempt an analysis that takes into account the
realities of the situation in China today, rather than idealist projections of
a communism yet to come. In the tradition of Marx and Engels, I suggest three
variations on the socialist dialectic: the use of capitalism to build
socialism; the need to foster the full development of capitalism under
socialist guidance so that communism may emerge; the need for economic and
political strength in a global situation that remains hostile to Chinese
socialism.
The first may be drawn from Lenin’s justification of the New
Economic Program: using capitalism to build socialism.[6] For Lenin and the
soviet government it meant permitting certain levels of market exchange with
the countryside, granting concessions to some international mining companies
and industries, and employing specialists at higher rates of pay to rebuild an
economy and indeed country destroyed by a series of wars and revolutions.
In China and under Deng Xiaoping’s urging, the process began
to go much further, for Deng argued that there was no necessary contradiction
between socialism and some capitalist economic forms, assuming that the latter
would be directed by the former. Indeed, Deng Xiaoping understood the mandate
that Marxism is practice in the sense that it would make use of what would
unleash productive forces. The employment of some capitalist methods was to be
undertaken as a way of ‘accelerating the growth of the productive forces’.[7]
Deng always understood this approach as part of the strengthening of socialism,
not merely in terms of economic strength, but also in terms of political and
social strength. I would add that today this process continues, almost to the
point of paradox (to an outside observer). Thus, the 2014 meetings of the
Political Bureau of the Chinese Communist Party agreed to continue the process
of reforming the economy, while at the same time President Xi Jinping sought to
strengthen Marxism by blocking any push for bourgeois democracy, and by drawing
heavily on Mao Zedong concerning the ‘mass line’ campaign in its push for
closer integration and sensitivity between government and people.[8]
The second variation on the dialectic is to argue that the
full development of capitalism needs to be fostered under the direction of a
communist government that has already won power in a revolution. China is in a
unique situation, for it missed its chance to develop into a capitalist economy
and thereby develop the classic pattern for socialist revolution in the context
of a ‘mature’ capitalism. Instead, the socialist revolution happened before the
full development of capitalism. Thus, in order to develop its forces of
production to a point where they are superior to capitalist ones, China has
found it necessary to foster the economic potential of capitalist forces of
production so they may provide the basis of socialist forces of production.
That is, China has returned to a capitalist economy so as to
develop forces of production for socialism. This approach relies on an insight
from Marx: ‘A social formation never comes to an end before all the forces of
production which it can accommodate are developed, and new, higher relations of
production never come into place before the material conditions of their
existence have gestated in the womb of the old society’.[9] Socialism in an
orthodox sense is not socialism unless it develops from capitalism. Yet the
Chinese approach gives this Marxist orthodoxy an extraordinary and apparently
paradoxical twist, for China is already politically a socialist country. So it
has developed an approach in which the forces of capitalist production are
harnessed for the sake of creating a situation for the full realisation of
socialism. In this light we may read Mao Zedong’s observation, ‘Thus this
revolution actually serves the purpose of clearing a still wider path for the
development of socialism’.[10] This dialectic means that one is, in economic
terms, in favour of capitalism for the sake of the development of forces of
production, but that one is, in political terms, against capitalism for the
sake of the development of relations of production.
The third form of the dialectic is the most direct: the
drive for economic strength in whatever way is absolutely necessary, since
socialism needs to be powerful, economically and militarily, in order to
flourish. In China, this approach has borne obvious fruit. China has become the
second largest economy in the world and is disrupting the global status quo,
even without as yet realizing its full potential.[11] BRICS and the Shanghai
Cooperation Zone are already challenging the hegemony of the International
Monetary Fund and the World Bank. The increasing obsession with Chinese
economic power in the United States and Western Europe is but a reflection of
their own stumbles and declining position. Already in some respects, China is
more technologically advanced than any other place on the globe. And with
economic power comes military strength, which remains a necessity in the
Realpolitik of persistent hostility to socialism.
The ‘Betrayal’ of the Russian Revolution
The longest-lived effort to construct socialism was the
USSR, but in this case we find the deployment of one or both biblical
narratives – a ‘betrayal’ or a ‘Fall’ narrative – to account for its ‘failure’.
For many, Stalin embodies the manifestation of that betrayal. Was he not, after
all, a paranoid and omniscient dictator, ruling by a bloodthirsty and
capricious will? Caricatures aside,[12] once one opts for a narrative of the
‘Fall’, one is playing a theological game. By ‘Fall’ narrative I mean a
narrative that is structured in terms of a fall from grace, analogous to the
story in Genesis 2–3, in which Eve and then Adam eat of the
fruit of the forbidden tree (of the knowledge of good and evil) and are thereby
banished by God from paradise.
Since Stalin has been written off most as the quintessence
of the betrayal of Marxism – especially after the concerted efforts of
Khrushchev’s politically motivated ‘Secret Report’ and Hannah Arendt’s wayward
work, The Origins of Totalitarianism[13] – attention has turned to
Lenin. Did he too betray Marxism and the revolution, thereby setting up the
completion of that betrayal by Stalin? Did he begin the process of running the
revolution into the mud of authoritarianism, repression, and dictatorship?
Most feel that Lenin did at some point betray the
revolution, thereby setting the ‘Fall’ narrative on its way. The least generous
suggest that it happened even before the revolution, especially through Lenin’s
supposedly devious machinations and his refusal to cooperate with other
socialist groups such as the Mensheviks and
SRs, both
Left and Right wings.[14] Indeed, for such critics, communism by its very
nature leads to such betrayal. For others, the moment of the ‘Fall’ is the
October Revolution itself, or soon afterwards. The formulations vary, but the
point is the same: the party and even the working class disintegrate; the
Bolsheviks do everything possible to distort in most horrendous ways their own
principles; Lenin’s thought loses it coherence; bureaucracy becomes pervasive;
a transformation takes place from a flexible, democratic, and open party to one
of the most centralized and ‘authoritarian’ political organisations in modern
history; the dictatorship of the proletariat becomes the dictatorship of the
secretariat; the revolution shifts from being a revolution from below to one
from above; the democratic soviets crumble before a centralized and dictatorial
party.[15]
Unfortunately, such ‘Fall’ narratives bear an inescapably
theological dimension, in which a fall from grace obscures the complex
messiness of history. They also neglect Lenin’s repeated point that the
revolution itself is easy; far more complex is the construction of communism,
when many mistakes are made. Yet others lament the lost opportunities,
suggesting that a broad, cross-party socialist government, such as the one
established in the February Revolution, was the ideal.[16] Others entertain the
possibility that the brief time after the revolution was valid, but that the
‘civil’ war corroded all the gains, for it was a period of centralized control,
tough measures, the Cheka, and ‘war communism’, all of which betrayed
the revolution.[17] A solution for some is to side with Trotsky, arguing that
if he had won out over Stalin, the situation would have been far different.
Apart from the obvious fallacy of such a position, it succumbs to the dreams of
alternative histories.
All of them belong to the genre of revolutionary ‘Fall’
narratives, accounts of betrayal of the communist revolution. In response, I
rely upon the insight of Cockshott and Cottrell. Refusing the facile dismissals
by many on the Left in order to distance themselves from Stalin, they argue
that the full implementation of a communist economic system happened under
Stalin. Through the Five-Year plans beginning in the late 1920s, the capitalist
mode of extracting surplus value was replaced by a planned economy, in which
surplus was controlled and allocated by the planning mechanism.
Under Soviet planning, the division between the necessary
and surplus portions of the social product was the result of political
decisions. For the most part, goods and labour were physically allocated to
enterprises by the planning authorities, who would always ensure that the
enterprises had enough money to ‘pay for’ the real goods allocated to them. If
an enterprise made monetary ‘losses’, and therefore had to have its money
balances topped up with ‘subsidies’, that was no matter. On the other hand,
possession of money as such was no guarantee of being able to get hold of real
goods. By the same token, the resources going into production of consumer goods
were centrally allocated. Suppose the workers won higher ruble wages: by itself
this would achieve nothing, since the flow of production of consumer goods was
not responsive to the monetary amount of consumer spending. Higher wages would
simply mean higher prices or shortages in the shops. The rate of production of
a surplus was fixed when the planners allocated resources to investment in
heavy industry and to the production of consumer goods respectively.[18]
They do not shy away from the conclusion that this outcome
was largely what Marx anticipated, with one caveat: it took place under a form
of authoritarian communism. I would add that such a phase is necessary for any
effort to construct communism. Genuine revolutionary fervour characterized much
of the effort, but for those less inclined to engage, forced labour, exile, and
‘terror’ were deployed. Stalin embodied the sheer grit of the revolutionary
‘miracle’ required to adopt such a radically new economic system.
Conclusion
As Domenico Losurdo has pointed out, the demonization of
communism has continued unabated since the nineteenth century, so much so that
it has become a comprehensive black legend.[19] He also argues that it has
become a twisted caricature that has little to do with actual history. The same
may be said of the motif of communism’s ‘failure’ – in terms of dictatorship,
perfection, dissent, the turn to capitalism and betrayal or ‘Fall’ narratives.
But when pressed, a critic will fall back on the simple point that communism in
many places came to an end. The toppling of the Berlin Wall is the symbol and
the rolling back of communism in Eastern Europe and even in parts of Asia (such
as Mongolia) is the reality – or so it is argued. The reply is equally simple:
let us leave aside the continuing socialist countries in Asia, let alone the
South American versions of socialism, and ask: why is longevity, or indeed
eternity, a criterion for success? The fact that communism has actually
appeared over more than a century is ample proof of the success and continuing
appeal of communism. It may be for shorter or longer periods of time, it may
even establish itself relatively permanently, but it has appeared. I propose a
more modest criterion of success. If a socialist revolution is able to see off
the counter-revolution – in the form of internal opposition and international
hostility – then it is a success. The reason is that after crushing the
counter-revolution, the opportunity arises for the peaceful construction of
socialism in all its multiple forms. And if it comes to an end sooner than one
hopes, the old adage applies: try and try again.
End notes:
[1] J. V. Stalin, ‘The Government’s Policy on the National
Question,’Works, volume 4 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1953
[1919]), p. 237.
[2] J. V. Stalin, ‘The October Revolution and the National
Question,’Works, volume 4 (Moscow: Foreign Languages Press, 1953
[1917]), pp. 169-70.
[3] ‘Appendix 1: Declaration of the Formation of the Union
of Soviet Socialist Republics.’ In J. V. Stalin, Works, volume 5 (Moscow:
Foreign Languages Press, 1953), p. 404.
[4] See
http://www.departments.bucknell.edu/russian/const/36cons04.html#chap10.
It also included the crucial article 124: ‘In order to ensure to citizens
freedom of conscience, the church in the U.S.S.R. is separated from the state,
and the school from the church. Freedom of religious worship and freedom of
antireligious propaganda is recognized for all citizens.’ This eventually led
to the rapprochement between the Orthodox Church and the Soviet government,
especially during and after the Second World War.
[6] Among many references, see V.I. Lenin, “Achievements and
Difficulties of the Soviet Government,” in Collected Works, vol. 29,
55-88 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1919 [1965]), pp. 68-74; V.I. Lenin, “From
the Destruction of the Old Social System to the Creation of the New,” in Collected
Works, vol. 30, 515-18 (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1920 [1965]); V.I.
Lenin, “The Tax in Kind (The Significance of the New Policy and Its
Conditions),” in Collected Works, vol. 32, 329-65 (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1921 [1965]), p. 334-53; V.I. Lenin, “New Times and Old Mistakes in
a New Guise,” in Collected Works, vol. 33, 21-9 (Moscow: Progress
Publishers, 1921 [1966]).
[7] Deng, “There Is No Fundamental Contradiction Between
Socialism and a Market Economy,” in Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping,
vol. 3, 99-101 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1985 [1993]), p. 100.
[9] Marx, “Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of
Political Economy,” in Marx: Later Political Writings, ed. Terrell
Carver (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 160.
[10] Mao, “On New Democracy (January 15),” in
Mao’s
Road to Power: Revolutionary Writings 1912-1949, ed. Stuart R. Schram, vol.
7, 330-69 (Armonk: M. E. Sharpe, 1940 [2005]), p. 335n.
[11] For instance, the “pivot to Asia” and effort to
“contain” China by the USA and its smaller allies are already in tatters as
China develops close ties with Russia, India, Africa and South America.
[12] See Domenico
Losurdo, Stalin: Storia e critica di una leggenda near (Rome:
Carocci editore, 2008).
[13] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New
York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973 [1951]). In this case, the Left has
been deeply complicit in the Western agenda of the Cold War.
[14] Bruce Lincoln’s Passage through Armageddon: The
Russians in War and Revolution 1914-1918 (New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1986);Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War (New
York: Simon and Schuster, 1989).
[15] Theodore H. von Laue, Why Lenin? Why Stalin? A
Reappraisal of the Russian Revolution, 1900-1930 (London: Weidenfeld
and Nicolson, 1964); Oskar Anweiler, The Soviets: The Russian Worker,
Peasants, and Soldiers Councils, 1905-1921 (New York:
Pantheon, 1974 [1958]), 195-253; Marcel Liebman, Leninism Under Lenin (London:
Merlin, 1975 [1973]), 213-356; Tony Cliff, The Revolution Besieged:
Lenin 1917-1923(London: Bookmarks, 1987); Samuel Farber, Before
Stalinism: The Rise and Fall of Soviet Democracy (London: Verso,
1990); Moira Donald,Marxism and Revolution: Karl Kautsky and the Russian
Marxists, 1900-1924 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 221-46;
Sheila Fitzpatrick, The Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994), 156-72; Daniel Bensaïd, “Leap! Leaps! Leaps!,” in Lenin
Reloaded: Towards a Politics of Truth, ed. Sebastian Budgen, Stathis
Kouvelakis, and Slavoj Žižek, 148-63 (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007),
156; Neil Harding, Lenin’s Political Thought (Chicago:
Haymarket, 2009), vol. 2, 283-328.
[16] Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks in Power:
The First Year of Soviet Rule in Petrograd (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 2007).
[17] Cliff, The Revolution Besieged: Lenin 1917-1923.
[18] W. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell, Towards a
New Socialism(Nottingham: Spokesman, 1993), 4-5.
[19] Domenico
Losurdo, Stalin: Storia e critica di una leggenda near.
__
The writer is a left-winger from Australia, based in the
industrial city of Newcastle. His main interest concerns the intersections of
Marxism and religion, having written a five-volume series called
The
Criticism of Heaven and Earth (Haymarket, 2009-13). He has recently
completed a long study on Lenin and religion. He frequently visits Asia and
teaches at Renmin University of China (Beijing). He blogs at
Stalinsmoustache.org
If publishing or re-posting this article kindly use the
entire piece, credit the writer and this website: Philosophers for
Change, philosophersforchange.org.
Thanks for your support.
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De PHILOSOPHERS FOR CHANGE, 28/10/2014
