AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
For context Libs on Bsky are passing aroudn this fascists shithead's bullshit book "On Tyranny" as a manual for "resisting authoritarianism" THE CALL IS COMING FROM INSIDE THE HOUSE YOU LIBERAL SHITWIPES!
My favorite stuff to read in genocide studies is when Western academics shiv each other on political grounds.
Norman Naimark is an interesting case. He's a super right wing guy, Hoover Institution, literally Galician parents and all that. Wrote a book called Stalin's Genocides
He's unique because he posits that the definition of genocide should be broadened and one of this hobby horses (that I interestingly enough entertain and mildly agree with) is that kulaks became a targeted class. Which brings up some interesting points like, if I manufacture a class of people that are labeled as enemies, and I just slide those goalposts to be able to push more people into that class does that constitute a genocide? It's a very postmodern proposal to redefine genocide.
Ironically another right wing guy called Michael Ellman does not like Naimarks theory because:
It would stain the credibility of the United States.....
Ironically, Snyder and Applebaum (like Naimark) point to the USSR's advocacy for current and specific definition of genocide as the reason that USSR actions don't fall into the legalistic criteria of genocide, they also do not see this potential for blowback. Ellman doesn't even acknowledge things in recent history that would fit the extended definition (which would effectively add all ethnic cleansing into the criterion) such as "Mexican Repatriation".
It's almost like this term is a political football in-as much as it is a descriptor of historic atrocity.
Turns out communists target classes. Weren't they extremely explicit about this? And the pearl-clutching libs then say that "every domestic enemy of the state was called a kulak"
Or do you mean, like, they were all explicitly targeted with death as the only allowable outcome rather than the dissolution of there class? (a number of them were killed either way, of course)
Removed by mod
GOOD POST
I love being in a leftist space where people can actually critically analyze the actual successes and failures of communist states in good faith. You've given me much to think about.
It's really refreshing to see a criticism of Stalin (and the Bolsheviks more broadly) that goes beyond the token "criticisms" tankie spaces usually make (e.g. Stalin shouldn't have stopped at Berlin, the mass relocations were bad but totally not unforced atrocities, etc.) while also not falling into the shitlib "Stalin was literally Hitler who fusion danced with Hitler to form a double Hitler and do hella genocide" kind of shit.
My favorite evergreen criticism of almost every stage of human development.
good post. where can I read more of this type of stuff?
So there's not a lot of "popular history" of this kind of stuff in the West.
I've gotten a lot of this knowledge mostly by studying history and reading the works of Marx/Lenin/Trotsky/Mao. You can get a lot of really good basic info if you study the Sino-Soviet Split (The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World)
For specific recommendations that are accessible:
Vanguard of the Revolution: The Global Idea of the Communist Party - Good primer about global communist development
The New Class by Milovan Djilas - this is the OG book of "I've been trying to build this shit and I'm mad at what we've built" Conversations with Stalin by Milovan Dijas is also a good read because it really explains the reality of the consequences of USSR foreign policy in places where it needed to succeed the most in real communism building ways and not in "fight America" ways.
Also if you read The New Class absolutely must read The New Industrial State and the Affluent Society by Gailbraith because the entirety of the structure of Djilas and Gailbraith lines up, you start to see the patterns that are literally about industrial production as a social process in and of itself has hard problems that were solved in almost the exact same ways on both sides of the Iron Curtain, leading to similar outcomes of social stratification, one capitalist and one communist.
Other than that back copies of Comparative Communist Studies and Communist and Post Communist Studies from JSTOR or however you can get academic publications have been really interesting to me.
This is just a silly thing for you to say. "Proletarian" does not mean the same thing as "worker," it refers to someone who is reliant on selling their labor for wages. Peasants and proletarians are both workers, and it's a basic feature of the development of (e.g. European) capitalism that there were successive stages of owning and working classes.
I really don't think the butter-churn benchmark was representative of Leninist theory about divisions in the peasantry* (which is not me saying that they didn't make catastrophic errors). It feels to me like saying "People engaged in ritual cannibalism during the Cultural Revolution" as a way of characterizing the CR. Yes, such a thing did happen as far as I can tell, but it's not like it was a national issue or part of Mao's doctrine, it was a bizarre thing that took hold among certain factions in a certain region during a period of upheaval.
Obviously, Mao handled the peasant question much better, it's probably what he is given the most credit for, but he does something similar in his ""cosmology"" in terms of dividing the peasantry into three major types, (poor, middle, rich) and aligning himself fundamentally with the poor while accepting collaboration with the middle, making distinctions about "well-to-do middle peasants" and so on. Here's an example from Stalin. This is not to say Lenin and Stalin did not make grave errors, I repeat that they did, but when you were sneering about a ""cosmology,"" you were failing to explain these differences against Mao.
Lastly, I admit that Trotsky was more honest before his exile, but I really question using him as a source for criticizing Stalin when he would historically go on to do any anticommunist thing he had to in order to attack Stalin. I don't think you need to go and get, idk, some troubled journal entry from Molotov, your point is made, I just think speaking of Trotsky as though he's credible is, uh, fraught.
*Edit: I reread your post and it seems to be suggesting that the butter-churn thing actually came from Moscow. Is that so?
I'm going to address one or two points because it's unique and the rest is just copy and pasting from classic apologia, and if we start looking at the feasibility of best case Soviet side through numbers, you'll just start saying Big Black Book of Gommunism.
There is no practical difference between a proletarian who sells his labor for a wage, and a tenant farmer who takes on debt for land. You're merely comodifying the means of production in sharecropping. In fact there's a composite of this relationship at some of the most exploitative shops where workers also have to rent tools from their bosses. In 2024 it's on its face ridiculous to attempt to segregate farm labor from industrial labor rather than advocate for labor solidarity, that's exactly how I know you're writing apologia.
Mao is writing from 1955 when the rewards of the revolution have been realized by the peasantry, the literal beginning of what you've linked states, that rich peasants emerged from the middle and middle from the poor as a result of the revolution. This is adressing accumulation of wealth under a system that has already brought benefits to its people. Under Lenin and Stalin peasantry literally didn't realize the benefits of the revolution until after WW2.
Not only that but Mao consistently self criticized his own leadership about bringing more development to the rural areas, a tradition that is still passed down in the CCP today despite Dengism.
Also Mao himself writes a critique of the explicit problems of Bolshevik revolution in On the Ten Major Relationships (1956 literally one year later) which mirror mine (I wonder where I stole them), and serve as a second source to back up the reasons for material conditions made in claims from the 1955 piece.
And by the way what was promised to the peasantry by Lenin in Proletariat and Peasantry was never delivered, not by Lenin and certainly not by Stalin.
Toodles.
You were so much nicer to me before, but in my process of trying to look up that butterchurn thing, all I found was an argument that you had with Barx 12 days ago, where you had a tone much more like you have here. I'm not sure what I did to deserve it. Also I still want a source on the butterchurn thing.
I would consider farm labor in a modern state like the US to be proletarian. This should be obvious. It's a backward country in many ways, but the relations of production are not medieval.
Even if they [modern American rural workers] were peasants, or we were talking about an industrializing nation in the modern day that actually does have something like a medieval peasantry alongside a proletariat, I would advocate for solidarity among the working classes against the owning classes. Nothing I said contradicted that. You underestimate how specific a criticism I was making, just because I support one of Lenin's premises in a defective argument does not mean I support every premise, every inference, and every conclusion. You're shadowboxing.
It turns out you don't.
Butterchurn is Conquest's Harvest of Sorrow. It's because local ispolkoms could add criteria to the list and poor rural areas added butterchurns. It's not like it doesn't make sense or is out of the ordinary. Look at the difference between family 1 and family 2 in the image. Family one owns a couple of hand tools, family 2 owns a horse and a plow and a couple pieces of non mechanized farm machinery. Family 2 is not part of the alliance according to Lenin cuz they're middle peasants. It all literally adds up, that's how butterchurns get on these lists.
Like yeah that happened, that didn't preclude the modernization of the country under the USSR, modernization happened in spite of Stalinist mismanagement.
You want more fun stories here's a secondary Russian source detailing how marrying the sons of someone who was considered a kulak and even if that kulak was dispossessed, made the women who married the sons, and their parents kulaks.
https://web.archive.org/web/20071007122505/http://hist.web.tstu.ru/12_2004_1.html
The criticism makes no sense because Marxist-Leninist conception it's based on makes no sense. Lenin and Stalin repressed the peasants reflexively before an owner-worker form could bootstrap among the class. The issue that Mao points out is that there was a feudal relationship between the peasants of the USSR and the USSR itself, minimum quotas and obligatory sales are literally painting a landlord peasant relationship red.
The reason I'm upset is that this is such a lazy, annoying and tiring line of argument when people are like 'what do you mean the Stalinist repressions were repressive and ridiculous?' or 'what do you mean Bolsheviks completely fucked up with the peasants? I'm posting "Mao Zedong Thought" here'. It's reflexively defensive because just because I'm not writing praise at every immediate moment I must be a SECRET LIB.
And in reality guess what all states fuck their people up, in fact my actual position on this is that industrial production is incredibly morally difficult and society in general has only very recently even been able to create the most basic tools to understand how to more equitably do it, and I'm still not sure if it's actually possible to have a fully moral industrial production.
I literally recommended The New Class /The Industrial Society/ The Affluent Society in another part of this post, (which are books written on different sides of the iron curtain by different people that point out the same organic developments among industrialized economies one capitalist, one socialist) and you're here expecting a point by point defense of every single accusation levied against Stalin of all people. Literally the communist that was hated by almost every other communist in reality.
cool they literally ate the rich
Yeah, its not like anyone who matters has ever actually given a shit about genocide, by any definition heretofore proposed.
Yeah fun fact that I just wanted to look it up. Naimark has basically gone on an Israeli podcast and has toed the academic line, about how you can't just destroy Palestinians because you want to. He didn't call it a genocide, he explicitly denied it was a genocide but said it was ethnic cleansing. And he also used the term "the so-called Nakba".
The host by the end of it looks so sad because he really thought he was gonna get this Jewish Genocide Studies scholar to definitively say, YOU CAN TREAT THE PALESTINIANS LIKE DOGS.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qocuOyP4i2g
My understanding is "ethnic cleansing" is a euphemism for genocide with no distinct meaning. It's used to launder certain genocides as "less bad". Is that a fair assessment?
In terms of a distinct meaning, ethnic cleansing is a descriptor of generally dispossessing a people, where genocide is a descriptor of destroying a people. You can ethnically cleanse people without destroying them.
Genocide itself used in the IR sense is a legal charge according to the genocide convention. Not all ethnic cleansing counts as genocide in the genocide convention.
Ugh. So many former humans choosing to join a 'protocols of the elders of Zion'/'the turner diaries' crossover LARP, and everyone just keeps kayfabe. Like they can be neutral on this shit.
TBF this was the "center-right" and polite position in academia all along.
The consensus has been there for a long time.
Yeah. How are we doing on that 'western civilization' thing? Any progress?
Some Westerns are adopting bidets and learning to wash their asses. Hope remains, however dim it may be.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy: