I keep seeing all the other leftist spaces filled with Stalin apologists and those who think he did nothing wrong (even to the point of denying the Holodomer) so I hope this isn’t a space filled with those types of people
Someone naming themselves "Imbased" and promoting the holodomor nazi propaganda is exceptionally suspicious. Every anarchist I personally know in real life and not just solely on the internet recognises this was a natural famine distorted and given a name that sounds like the holocaust in order to play down the events of the holocaust.
Promoting holodomor is in itself and act of minimising the holocaust and rehabilitating the nazis.
Whether you're legit or not, this is an all-the-left space and attempting to promote sectarianism is not cool and counter-revolutionary.
There are a lot of hardline mls here, but they know cough that we gain NOTHING from shitty pointless petty squabbles about shit that doesn't matter to growing the left and achieving our common goals
Right comrades?
remember why we're here.
if not letting this poster repeat Nazi propaganda literally designed by Goebbels to justify Operation Barbarossa is squabbling then so be it
Here's a thought, maybe articulate your side and explain things calmly instead
that works the first couple times and then you need to use copypastas because it's exhausting
You absolutely do not need to because it doesn't matter, at all, at aaaaalllll
Go yell at chuds about it instead
Helping your comrades and your local community does, as does practicing and improving your own ability to agitate educate and organize
Go yell at chuds
what if it's more useful to educate anarchists since they actually seem to care about people but are steeped in anticommunist propaganda
What if it's just you wanting to feel superior to your fellow comrade for having 'the most correctest of informations, akshually'
Who cares about fucking Stalin in 2020... It was an example used by OP and your first impulse was to slap 'em with some copy pasted stalin apologia. Good job, you did it
Who cares about fucking Stalin in 2020
here's a copypasta that explains why it's important
Tankies don’t usually believe that Stalin or Mao “did nothing wrong”, although many do use that phrase for effect (this is the internet, remember). We believe that Stalin and Mao were committed socialists who, despite their mistakes, did much more for humanity than most of the bourgeois politicians who are typically put forward as role models (Washington? Jefferson? JFK? Jimmy Carter?), and that they haven’t been judged according to the same standard as those bourgeois politicians. People call this “whataboutism”, but the claim “Stalin was a monster” is implicitly a comparative claim meaning “Stalin was qualitatively different from and worse than e.g. Churchill,” and I think the opposite is the case. If people are going to make veiled comparisons, us tankies have the right to answer with open ones.
To defend someone from an unfair attack you don’t have to deify them, you just have to notice that they’re being unfairly attacked. This is unquestionably the case for Stalin and Mao, who have been unjustly demonized more than any other heads of state in history. Tankies understand that there is a reason for this: the Cold War, in which the US spent countless billions of dollars trying to undermine and destroy socialism, specifically Marxist-Leninist states. Many western leftists think that all this money and energy had no substantial effect on their opinions, but this seems extremely naive. We all grew up in ideological/media environments shaped profoundly by the Cold War, which is why Cold War anticommunist ideas about the Soviets being monsters are so pervasive a dogma (in the West).
The reason we “defend authoritarian dictators” is because we want to defend the accomplishments of really existing socialism, and other people’s false or exaggerated beliefs about those “dictators” almost always get in the way— it’s not tankies but normies who commit the synecdoche of reducing all of really existing socialism to Stalin and Mao. Those accomplishments include raising standards of living, achieving unprecedented income equality, massive gains in women’s rights and the position of women vis-a-vis men, scaring the West into conceding civil rights and the welfare state, defeating the Nazis, ending illiteracy, raising life expectancy, putting an end to periodic famines, inspiring and providing material aid to decolonizing movements (e.g. Vietnam, China, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Indonesia), and making greater strides in the direction of abolishing capitalism than any other society has ever made. These are the gains that are so important to insist on, against the CIA/Trotskyist/ultraleft consensus that the Soviet Union was basically an evil empire and Stalin a deranged butcher.
There are two approaches one can take to people who say “socialism = Stalin = bad”: you can try to break the first leg of the equation or the second. Trotskyists take the first option; they’ve had the blessing of the academy, foundation and CIA money for their publishing outfits, and controlled the narrative in the West for the better part of the last century. But they haven’t managed to make a successful revolution anywhere in all that time. Recently, socialism has been gaining in popularity… and so have Marxism-Leninism and support for Stalin and Mao. Thus it’s not the case that socialism can only gain ground in the West by throwing really existing socialism and socialist leaders under the bus.
The thing is, delinking socialism from Stalin also means delinking it from the Soviet Union, disavowing everything that’s been done under the name of socialism as “Stalinist”. The “socialism” that results from this procedure is defined as grassroots, bottom-up, democratic, non-bureaucratic, nonviolent, non-hierarchical… in other words, perfect. So whenever real revolutionaries (say, for example, the Naxals in India) do things imperfectly they are cast out of “socialism” and labeled “Stalinists”. This is clearly an example of respectability politics run amok. Tankies believe that this failure of solidarity, along with the utopian ideas that the revolution can win without any kind of serious conflict or without party discipline, are more significant problems for the left than is “authoritarianism” (see Engels for more on this last point). We believe that understanding the problems faced by Stalin and Mao helps us understand problems generic to socialism, that any successful socialism will have to face sooner or later. This is much more instructive and useful than just painting nicer and nicer pictures of socialism while the world gets worse and worse.
It’s extremely unconvincing to say “Sure it was horrible last time, but next time it’ll be different”. Trotskyists and ultraleftists compensate by prettying up their picture of socialism and picking more obscure (usually short-lived) experiments to uphold as the real deal. But this just gives ammunition to those who say “Socialism doesn’t work” or “Socialism is a utopian fantasy”. And lurking behind the whole conversation is Stalin, who for the average Westerner represents the unadvisability of trying to radically change the world at all. No matter how much you insist that your thing isn’t Stalinist, the specter of Stalin is still going to affect how people think about (any form of) socialism— tankies have decided that there is no getting around the problem of addressing Stalin’s legacy. That legacy, as it stands, at least in Western public opinion (they feel differently about him in other parts of the world), is largely the product of Cold War propaganda.
And shouldn’t we expect capitalists to smear socialists, especially effective socialists? Shouldn’t we expect to hear made up horror stories about really existing socialism to try and deter us from trying to overthrow our own capitalist governments? Think of how the media treats antifa. Think of WMDs in Iraq, think of how concentrated media ownership is, think of the regularity with which the CIA gets involved in Hollywood productions, think of the entirety of dirty tricks employed by the West during the Cold War (starting with the invasion of the Soviet Union immediately after the October Revolution by nearly every Western power), and then tell me they wouldn’t lie about Stalin. Robert Conquest was IRD. Gareth Jones worked for the Rockefeller Institute, the Chrysler Foundation and Standard Oil and was buddies with Heinz and Hitler. Solzhenitsyn was a virulently antisemitic fiction writer. Everything we know about the power of media and suggestion indicates that the anticommunist and anti-Stalin consensus could easily have been manufactured irrespective of the facts— couple that with an appreciation for how legitimately terrified the ruling classes of the West were by the Russian and Chinese revolutions and you have means and motive.
Anyway, the basic point is that socialist revolution is neither easy (as the Trotskyists and ultraleftists would have it) nor impossible (as the liberals and conservatives would have it), but hard. It will require dedication and sacrifice and it won’t be won in a day. Tankies are those people who think the millions of communists who fought and died for socialism in the twentieth century weren’t evil, dupes, or wasting their time, but people to whom we owe a great deal and who can still teach us a lot.
Or, to put it another way: socialism has powerful enemies. Those enemies don't care how you feel about Marx or Makhno or Deleuze or communism in the abstract, they care about your feelings towards FARC, the Naxals, Cuba, North Korea, etc. They care about your position with respect to states and contenders-for-statehood, and how likely you are to try and emulate them. They are not worried about the molecular and the rhizomatic because they know that those things can be brought back into line by the application of force. It’s their monopoly on force that they are primarily concerned to protect. When you desert real socialism in favor of ideal socialism, the kind that never took up arms against anybody, you’re doing them a favor.
credit to /u/fatpollo
can you not see how its use as an example is exactly why it's so important
Because that wasn't the question OP asked - but you did answer it for them I'd figure. Just not the way you think.
I said to do that 3 comments ago before suggesting to go yell at chuds
Not at all saying it’s wrong to correct misinformation and educate each other, but when we’re talking to our comrades how we go about doing that really matters.
Tbh I doubt you or much other people on this space organize, most online leftist spaces I’ve seen are just doing it for the memes and don’t actually care about helping oppressed people, I doubt this space is going to be much different tbh.
Actually from your post history you seem to care more about moderating this internet community and plugging your podcast then you do actually doing anything irl, so I don’t think even you can lecture the Stalinists on this issue, you’re complaining about squabbles but starting them and saying it doesn’t matter but responding as if it does, at least be more honest with your engaging than this or I won’t take you seriously
yeah because posting about irl organizing online is really smart and extra opsec
hey being shitty like this makes the fact that you just made a account and is starting shit really harder to just say that you are talking in good faith huh
Yeah for sure. My initial comments were angry with the response you got and on your defense, but now any such good will is basically gone, not sure what possible good faith reasons there could be for this post and these replies haha
You know my post was not attacking you right?
Not to mention how ridiculous it is to make assumptions and attack others based on your assumption that they don’t organize. Am I a front lines badass revolutionary? No, but I do what I can in my community with the material conditions I’m forced to work with
pay special attention to that "poisoned well" link. Anne Applebaum wrote the entry in Encyclopedia Brittanica for tHe HoLoDoMor, a term invented later on for the famine by fascists
pointless
I'm glad these things don't matter to you but there are lives at stake.
As a class, does bickering about something that will not affect how we do action and grow the left help us become more powerful or raise class consciousness?
I’m not asking about what’s true but what’s effective
I'm not letting the majority cis white male pressence on this site tell me what and what isn't effective.
Fighting visciously over definitions is pointless, the suffering of people’s at the hands of imperialists is not, but the two are in no way linked.
You owning someone online who was talking shit about DPRK does not in any way help the people of DPRK nor does it help the working class at large.
That’s why it’s pointless.
Educate people, if you can’t teach our comrades and build solidarity with Them who the fuck exactly are you thinking you’ll sway with this?
It's not up to you to tell me what's important and what's not.
There was a natural famine happening at the time and people were starting to starve in central Asia, particularly in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.
Part of the problem was that for generations, a new class of peasants had begun to form who were able to buy and own land, gradually displacing the former feudal system where most of the land was used by peasants for distant landowners who weren't really interested in the region.
This new landlord class (kulaks) basically perpetuated the same feudal system, with other peasants continuing to work for them on the land they acquired. Naturally this exacerbated wealth inequality in the region and gave the landlord class relative privilege and control over the peasant workers.
When the famine hit and people started to starve, the landlord class was relatively insulated from the problem, even being able to hoard food and resources. As the workers became more desperate, they were willing to work for less food, which allowed the landlords to hoard more, which made the workers position more desperate, causing them to be willing to work for less, and so forth in a snowball effect.
All of this was pretty normal for the region. It was a problem, with the relatively wealthy hoarding wealth and the workers becoming increasingly desperate to work for them in the middle of a natural disaster, but it was a problem central Asia had been dealing with for hundreds of years, if not longer. The new landlordism wasn't particularly parasitic when compared to feudalism, but it was parasitic nonetheless.
When people started starving to death the government stepped in and started organizing collective farms, redistributing land and hoarded resources to the peasants so that they could work for and feed themselves in a more efficient, equitable model for everyone.
The landowning class however, like capital controlling classes throughout history, weren't satisfied to work for themselves and allow the peasants to work for themselves alongside them.
Their response was to start sabotaging the collective farms, and to begin raiding and destroying depots where food was being distributed to starving people, as well as burning fields, grain silos, and slaughtering livestock, including breeding stock and egg and dairy producing stock.
Even anti-Communist propagandists like Robert Conquest (whose propaganda was cited extensively during the Cold War before most of it was debunked and he was forced to recant his claims over and over again) claim that the landowning class destroyed about 96 million head of cattle, and possibly twice as much tonnage of grain and other foodstock, completely wrecking the food production capacity of the region in the middle of the famine and exacerbating the problem beyond anything seen before.
The death toll is vastly overblown by those who want to make it out to be a genocide perpetrated the the Soviet government against her own people. The aforementioned Robert Conquest initially claimed a completely unrealistic 20-30 million deaths, before revising his claim by several million just years after his now infamous propaganda piece was published, and again as low as 13-15 million deaths decades later when his claims were immediately and categorically disproven by the opening of the Soviet archives.
As genuine investigative research continues to debunk claim after claim made by propagandists like him, the numbers continue to dwindle and the legacy of the self-proclaimed "Cold Warriors" is continuously eroded. To this day, the Ukrainian government claims ~4 million cases of starvation in the region during that period, completely disregarding blatantly false "research" conducted from a time before evidence was even available.
Eventually before his death, Conquest was forced to admit that there was no way the Soviets could have caused the famine, although he stubbornly refused to admit that they did anything to prevent it or that the land-owning capitalist class destroying 2-4 million tons of food for every starving person and wrecking the productive capacity of the region might have been responsible, despite this being the inevitable conclusion of his lifelong body of work, ironically vindicating the Soviets through desperate attempts to portray them as villains.
Decades of propaganda and its consequences are hard to undo however, and these indisputable, verifiable facts of recorded history are never welcomed in certain circles. The western public consciousness truly is a poisoned well, and facts alone aren't enough to undo that damage.
credit to /u/spookyjohnathan
This place is based on left unity and anti-sectarianism. Although there are probably more MLs than anarchists, the main goal here is to make every comrade feel safe, valid and accepted. Struggle sessions can and do occur, but you are by no means obligated to participate in them. Also for god sake why is everyone defending Stalin or talking about history in the replies of a post that is just plainly not asking that.
this is a safe leftist space, just don't bring up china and you're good. anarchist btw
Not conducting proper struggle on ideology present leaves the reality that there is reactionary ideology present. This makes it an inherently unsafe space for the most marginalized in the community.
There is a c/anarchism. I've never checked it out, but I doubt you'll find much Stalin stuff there
:anarchy: There's some good conversations happening occasionally, but you will absolutely be dogpiled by rabid tankies if you criticize their 'anti-imperialist' darlings like the DPRK n shit... Kinda exhausting but I've got a bit of hope left.
