I like most of his analysis, which is why I like listening to his rambling while doing other stuff (in this case, I listened to it while putting up some shelves in my parents' garage). I think my biggest problem with his analysis of the Soviet Union et al is that he really clings to this idea that the global socialist movement today would be in better shape if the movements of the 20th century didn't happen.
From the point of view of western socialist parties, that seems to be true - the idea of Stalin as this mustache-twirling evil dictator is constantly hung over every leftist - but my feeling is that if the socialist movements of the 20th century hadn't happened then the socialist movements of the 21st century would have exactly zero ground to stand on.
Richard Wolff points out when he talks about the Soviets that they were literally only the second people in history to try to do what they did, with the first being the Paris Commune. Of course they were going to fuck some things up, but I think that every mistake made by those movements was basically guaranteed to happen at some point of another. Would it be better for socialism if the mistakes of the 20th century happened in the 21st century instead?
And even if in the Soviet Union or any of these other countries it was impossible to build socialism, the influence of socialist leaders on their development is impossible to deny. When the industrial revolution came to Europe and America, children were sent into the textile mills and coal mines to work. When the industrial revolution came to the Soviet Union, children were sent to creches, daycares and schools, in a universal childcare system that remains the fucking gold standard that few other countries have matched.
They would have invaded it just as they did the Soviet Union, and they would have had an advantage there that they didnt in the Russia: The Kaiser, and millions of men deployed on the front door. No tricky naval shenanigans, everyone is already there.
Maybe I'm an orb-head too, but I don't think he's necessarily passing judgement on communism or communists for this, it's a simple recognition that modernization is a terrifying prospect for a peasant, and communists having to take the blame (in the popular imagination) for that is unfortunate.
Matt's takes are only controversial if you're unfamiliar with the (objectively correct) left-communist analysis of the USSR
I don't think it refers to a particular text, but is primarily shit I've picked up either through osmosis, my own research into Soviet history, or both. It essentially boils down to:
- Lenin essentially gambled everything on the October Revolution setting off the spark of revolution across all of Europe, especially Germany. This uniformly failed across the board.
- With the failure of revolution in Europe, the USSR was not only diplomatically isolated but also entirely materially unprepared for establishing a socialist revolution. Worse, the Russian Civil War physically annihilated the Russian proletariat, killing the vibrant embryos of soviet democracy and leaving the VKP(b) the only remaining coherent institution
- Furthermore, the Russian Revolution was a dual, parallel revolution - the proletarian revolution in the cities and the peasant revolution on the land. This entrenched a fragile and begrudging alliance between the party/proletariat and the peasantry (town and country) that was inevitably going to result in a confrontation between the two, as they had contradictory visions of what "socialism" meant.
- Stalin came to power through skillful politicking and manipulation of the party apparatus and aggressively cleared the board of any rivals. With the USSR isolated, backward, and unstable - the NEP facing crisis and tensions between town and country/center and periphery mounting - Stalin decided the best course of action forward was essentially appropriating the crash industrialization program of the former Left Opposition. This entailed an extremely violent and rapid period of primitive accumulation through brutal state repression, an effective declaration of war on the peasantry in the countryside to enact forced collectivization to fuel the industrialization program. Famine and terror inevitably ensued as a result.
- Whether or not Stalin's choices were necessary will be a riddle for the ages, because he was objectively correct about Russia needing to "catch up in ten years or the capitalist West will crush us", as the Nazi invasion occurred ten years after he made that speech. Twenty-seven million Soviets died to that onslaught, which also laid waste to the USSR's prime industrial and agricultural regions.
- By the end of WWII, the collapse of relations with the USA, and the onset of Cold War ossification, the USSR was so hopelessly far behind the West that catching up was impossible. The Sino-Soviet Split was the final nail in the coffin as it allowed the USA to triangulate the PRC against the USSR, and the revolution in the USSR was slowly suffocated over the course of forty years.
I'm actually much more charitable toward Stalin than most self-identified left-communists, who largely despise him and share the Trotskyist position that he was the "Soviet Thermidor".
So are you gonna post the take, or do you expect me to listen to this and divine the funny part? The Wheel is on, ffs.
Didn't Marx explicitly say that agrarian countries like Russia weren't ready to do a communism?
Towards the ends of their lives Marx and Engels increasingly moved toward the position that revolution would take hold in the weakest link in the European chain - Russia - as Russia was where Marxism most deeply entrenched itself and was embraced by the left-wing underground.
No.
"The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?
The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development."
From the 1882 Preface to the Communist Manifesto
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/preface.htm
Considering the fact that the USSR did eventually collapse, I think there is a point here.
I don't think socialist countries can protect themselves without seeming scary and authoritarian, because the capitalist countries assailing them simply have better PR. Every state takes on "authoritarian" traits to protect itself when there's a perceived threat, but capitalist countries have a broader and more established media empire to run defense for them, and to frame socialist defensive efforts in a negative light.
The only thing that might change that is stuff like climate change and the continuation of the pandemic (and the wider collapse of society it will produce) forcing people to accept ideas and solutions they wouldn't have been willing to entertain before.
The propaganda war matters less there than I think most people think it does. We experience that level of analysis much more critically as western leftists because we have little to no political action we take part in and instead consume politics on an aesthetic level. Or maybe I’m just posting my own brainworms as a PMC dsa Karen
Yeah, and then this cool capitalist country would unite with germany in partioning africa :yea:
:data-laughing: yeah i bet he does but if you think i would ever subject myself to two hours of him rambling at a mic to parse that :data-laughing:
It's timestamped, you only need to listen to like three minutes to pick up his argument
It's revisionism time. Stlain failed because he was a liberal. He should have immediately allied with germany to destory the objectively more evil Britain. The pro nazi stance would have made america a neutral party. They could have picked up ireland in a Color revolution. Further cementing ties with america. Then when Germany ran out of meth they could annex it and do dengism. That would ensure the sino soviet split never happened and the world would have been saved from fascism forever speedrun any% without the germany money and scientists america would have absolutely lost the cold war.
