EDIT: The author of this article is Alex Skopic, not Nathan J. Robinson
Spend enough time on the socialist left, and you’ll eventually encounter this vocal minority of latter-day Stalinists. Some are just online trolls and contrarians who use Stalin’s image for shock value in absurd memes—Stalin turning SpongeBob’s ‘Goo Lagoon’ into a ‘Goo Lag,’ and so on.
i'm not reading anymore. First paragraph on a presumably serious article on Stalin mentions SpongeBob Squarepants memes.
Americans don't have someone who accomplished things on the level of Lenin or Stalin so we have to fall back on that one episode where Squidward leads a fast food restaurant strike.
that one Iranian cleric who said they had no ability to retaliate against the US for Qassem Soleimani's assassination because the only American heroes are Spiderman and Spongebob
it was written by willy fucking wonka, it was never going to be a serious article
hence being in the dunk tank
it is quite funny to me they criticise him for restoring the officer corps and reimplementing military ranks, weeping that it's just like the Tsars, but also for purging officers from the Red Army whom they describe as military geniuses essential to the war effort. so like, are military officers Good or Bad as a concept, or is that question entirely dependent on their relationship to Joseph Stalin (who is of course Bad) at any given time?
The author does this again here:
What about World War II, though? Surely that’s Stalin’s ace in the hole—that no matter how many people he purged, how many socialist movements he wrecked, or how much of a bigot and philistine he was personally, his “tough decisions” were the crucial factor that won the war. Stalinist authors like Furr and Ludo Martens devote many pages to the war years, and there is one thing they’re right about: the Soviet Union, more than any other geopolitical group, was responsible for breaking the back of Nazi Germany, and destroying Hitler’s empire of madness and death. The images of Red Army soldiers throwing open the gates of Auschwitz will live in human history forever, and at Stalingrad alone, more than a million of them gave their lives—more than the U.S. lost in the entire war. But crucially, these are not Stalin’s victories, nor his sacrifices. He, like Churchill and Roosevelt, was sitting safely behind his desk when the real heroism happened. To credit him with “winning the war” or “defeating Nazism,” as if he personally parachuted into Berlin with a belt of grenades and started blowing up bunkers, is to erase the collective struggle of millions, and to surrender to the deeply conservative “great man” theory of history. Supposed Marxists should know better.
Stalin didn't personally shoot all those people who got executed either, but the author didn't hesitate to blame him for them. Are leaders responsible for things or not? I guess in the case of Stalin he's to blame for bad things but can't be credited for good things because he's Bad.
Yeah, there are many good examples. The pattern of criticisms being justified in ways contradictory to others is very sloppy reasoning and quite telling as to what the purpose (conscious or not) of the piece really is: criticism of a genuinely threatening radical at any cost. Any supposed beliefs about history, ontology, proper praxis, etc. are simply placed and replaced as needed.
Have you forgotten that the entire 70+ years of soviet history, as well as much of the period that came afterward is best described as "Stalin bad"???
the title of this piece reminded me of this JoeysStainlessSteel rant:
Marxism-Leninism can never be legitimized and Stalin can never be seen as a revolutionary hero— this is what all left-anticommunists and intelligence services agree on.
Because Marxism-Leninism has been adaptable and agile enough to build socialism in Russia, Eastern Europe, Cuba, Korea, Vietnam, Laos and China.
This is despite the fact in Russia— where the descendants of the people who lived under Stalin lived— see Stalin as a better figure than Lenin and routinely rate him the best Russian leader and currently have a 70% approval rating of him.
Even today statues of Stalin are going up all over Russia.
Because Lenin died in the mid 1920s after World War, Civil war and all capitalist invasion and then a famine in 1921 was the start of reconstruction of Soviet industry. When Lenin died Russia was still a very miserable and war torn place.
Whereas Stalin led the Soviet Union during Socialist construction which (from the memoirs of working people) was like a groundswell of human liberation and flowering.
The truth is if Lenin had lived instead and made the necessary decisions to ensure Soviet survival (collectivisation, smashing the fifth column in the 1930s) then they'd hate Lenin today as much as they did Stalin because bourgeois propaganda would've been levelled at Lenin instead.
Which is why they pushed the faked "Lenin's Testament" for almost a century. As if Trotsky (a guy that joined the Bolshevik party a few months before the Oct Revolution) was usurped by evil Stalin who stole the Communist crown off Lenin's head.
Instead, of you know, like having a vote on who the leader should be as you would expect in a Communist party and what was done.
It's why Trotsky was hailed as the "true bolshevik" by Hearst press— which was run by a fascist William Randolph Hearst who spent the entire time making shit up about the Soviet Union and providing Goering and Mussolini columns in his newspapers.
I miss them. I know they were breaking site rules but they were a top tier poster that I legitimately learned many things from.
It’s important to note though that most communists in the global south don’t even mention Stalin, or if they do it’s mostly to acknowledge he had a major role in defeating fascism.
Whether it’s because of propaganda or because they remember the USSR’s role in the collapse of global communism, I don’t know. But most still openly praise Lenin but rarely talk about Stalin and pretend Khrushchev and everyone else don’t exist lol
People seem to fixate on his role in industrializing Russia and defeating the Nazis. That’s just one or two feats. But this article and the Trotskyite article from a few weeks ago don’t focus on that. Their focus is on how many communist/leftist uprisings were effectively suppressed by the USSR for larger geopolitical reasons. Legit or not, people remember it. Obviously Russians will remember when their lives were better under the USSR and even under Stalin and that’s valid, but I think it’s also valid to not be too fond of the guy who gave up on your country’s revolution. Maybe it was doomed to fail and he just hurried it, but it still stings looking back.
The CPSU didn't have the opportunity to rebuild their party the way the CPC did in Yanan after the Long March. There's a direct causation between WWII killing so many principled comrades and snakes like Khrushchev taking over the party after Stalin's death.
I highly doubt most modern communists in the global south - who are usually busy with actual organizing - have trouble forming a fair judgement about their parties and history
It’s clear that Lenin and perhaps works about Lenin by Stalin is more useful to them, and debating about Stalin’s legacy is a waste of their time
Each of the points were elaborated in detail, see if machine translation works for you, if not I may have to spend time translating the entire article if you’re interested.
Could you please? That would be awesome.
They also mention Greece and Yugoslavia. And it’s not an uprising, but I would also consider the purge of old bolsheviks a suppression. Rather convenient that everyone is an op.
There's also Kronstadt even if thats under Lenin and executed by Trotsky.
And I mean disregarding any allegations of being paid counterrevolutionaries, the demands include to release all "political prisoners"(vague and nondefined term) and to let opposition parties and groups operate freely, this being during a civil war which has had both open rebellion and terrorist campaigns conducted by some of these groups. Would those that have participated in bomb plots be "political prisoners"? Who knows! But it sounds very nice to say that political prisoners must be released.
love it when a magazine called "current affairs" writes an unprompted hit piece on a guy who's been dead for 70 years. i haven't read this magazine since i read an article on there in 2019 with a title like "the leftist case for rollercoasters" and thought "why am i wasting my time reading this? why are they publishing an article about rollercoasters here?"
What the fuck sort of priorities do they have to write some bull shit article about a leader who's been dead for 70 years. What losers.
It's actually very important that we keep bringing this shit up over and over and over again, I mean how else could we possibly build an actually influential current-day western left-wing movement?
listen up everyone, the union buster dressed like a plantation owner has something to say
If the Paris Commune was successful, "leftists" today like Nathan would be crying about how violent it was and how many poor colonialists were killed.
Probably says that Haitian revolution was too violent and that the 200 year long shake down by the French and USA was "necessary"
I think usually they avoid the issue of the 200 year extortion by just ending their interest after both sidesing the revolution and muttering about ethnic cleansing of whites.
Or at least the smart ones do some flourish like that to avoid having to openly support it, the Haitians did the bad thing so after that they become irrevelant.
This fucker fired all the people who tried to organise the magazine as a worker co-op (which they only did because this clown literally promised them it would happen but strung them along for so long they decided to do it themselves).
I am not justifying Stalin’s oppressive violence
I fucking am. All states do oppressive violence, if they didn't they wouldn't be a State, and while mistakes were made the overwhelming majority of oppressive violence done by the USSR under Stalin was done strictly against the bourgeoisie, which is precisely why the Soviets had a successful revolution in the first place. Just as the liberal countries had to defeat and suppress royalists to make way for capitalism, communist countries must defeat and suppress capitalists to make way for socialism.
>someone posted a spongebob meme at me on twitter and now I will spend my very serious career arguing with them through my work
I feel like what this article does is explain why Stalin would need to purge people that said they were communists from the party.
Because sometimes the communist is not a communist, but a huge lib.
