Wandering thoughts and notes related to the tread. >From 1928 with Stalin's Industrialization of the Country speech and plan, to his death in 1953, the polices of forced collectivization, rapid industrialization and centralized planning through a series of five year plans held complete sway. Without question the execution of Bukharin and other leaders, and the imprisonment of tens of thousands of rank and file communists - party members, many of whom were innocent of any wrong doings, had much to do with the silencing of the voices of opposition. However, it would be wrong to assume that Stalin eliminated diversity of thought and policy, which simply adapted to that peculiar form of Soviet speak. Everyone simple wrote in the form of Stalin and those unfamiliar with this form of Soviet speak will find it all but impossible to follow the various intense forms of political struggle and divergence.
It would be horribly wrong to think for a moment that Stalin's economic polices were not overwhelmingly supported by the population. The idea that violence alone can account for the popularity of Stalin views is equally wrong and a failure to understand elementary politics. The people loved Stalin beyond comprehension of those not familiar with politics and how people actually think things out. American actually did vote for Bush W. and he was horrible stupid by all accounts. Stalin was by no mans unlearned. Acceptance of Stalin's view and approach to building socialism was supported because it worked. The success was so obvious in the building of entire new towns, roads, factories and cities. Within an incredibly short time, (less than the time I worked and retired from Chrysler), the Soviet Union leaped from a semi-feudal country and backwardness into the front ranks of the industrialized countries. One has to visualize this pace of development; place themselves in this environment of going to work everyday and look out at Soviet society as a citizen rather than a detach analyst trapped by ones own ideological inclination. One needs go to the country side and see how industrialization of the country uproots the old society and why dozens of communists sent to set up schools were murdered and many of the female teachers raped and then murdered. The resistance is complex and mirrors the resistance capital encounters in injecting the money economy into a historically stable natural economy. Somewhere on the A-List I produced the statistics of how fast the population moved from peasant to proletariat, and it is breathtaking. Then what was traced was the impact of these peasants turned proletarian on organization and why the organizations would collapse. The spontaneous life as culture of the new proletarian is to convert all organizations into form of the extended family. To understand this one has to "go there and experience it." The new proletariat was less than 10 years old and Lenin himself wanted only to recruit proletarians into the party who had a minimum of 10 years factory seniority! I no longer have the books with all the stats, but remember some and have some from the book "Socialism Betrayed: Behind the Collapse of the Soviet Union." In the first year of the 5 year plan industrial production grew by 11 percent. From 1928 to 1940 the industrial sector grew from 28% of the economy to 45 percent of the economy. Between 1928 and 1937 heavy industry output of total manufacturing output grew from 31 percent to 63%. The illiteracy rate drop from 56 percent to 20 percent and guess who Stalin wrote for and to? You can bet it was not the intelligentsia. Here I am condoning nothing but stating the obvious facts so misunderstood by our own intelligentsia. Further, it is a profound misunderstanding that Stalin was not a first rate theoretician with a gigantic memory, which he used against his opponents. He really understood all the issues. Whatever his demons, paranoia, masochism and narsssacism, he understood quantitative dimensions of the social process; specifically its nodal point and easily outflanked his opponents, who deeply felt political struggle are won and lost on the basis of an abstract theoretical profundity. More often than not his opponents were more wrong than he was and he understood that by reading what they wrote. The reason Lenin recruited Stalin into the upper level of the party is based on his early writings. On his death bed Lenin saw something grievously wrong with Stalin's personality, in the way he treated Lenin's wife. This incident and Stalin's later apology is perhaps the only time he apologized to anyone. To understand the rise of Stalin to power all one has to do is read his foundations of Leninism and compare it to what Bukharin wrote and then what Trotsky wrote. The whole damn party voted for Stalin after reading the material published in papers and in the case of Trotsky published in book form. This of course means that I have actually read Trotsky - pretty extensively and Bukharin. And then I went "there" at the time of the great debates. No one in the Soviet Union could really go along with Trotsky because he did not make any sense that matched Soviet reality. There is a real reason Lenin called him "the Judas." This by no means excuse any of the real or perceived "crimes" of the Stalin regime. One with a true grasp of material relations and processes can explain the process to a 13 year old child. Then of course Stalin named himself and "Stalin" means "man of steel." OK. Plus . . . . Building a factory system does not require the mastery of the theory of value. Between 1941 and 1953 the Soviet Union defeated German fascism and rebuilt - in the main, their economy. By 1948 overall industrial production output exceeded 1940 by two and a half times. Acute problems in agriculture persisted as the agricultural population was systematically depleted to build industry. This depletion produced another set of distortions, all of which must be laid at Stalin's table because he was the leader of all the good and all the bad. The buck stopped at his desk and this is the proper way to deal with any and all leaders. Nevertheless, there is simply no way to explain the emergence of Nikita Khrushchev if one believes there was not wide diversity of thought and actions in the Soviet Party. The idea that Stalin could destroy the Soviet state is a mind boggling proportion, and to assign to him the power of a superman. To begin with the Soviet's were not state organizations. In fact did not Lenin write an article called something to the effect: "Why the Soviets Cannot become State Organizations?" There is a material reason why the Soviet form would collapse, rise again and collapse again. Saying "because of Stalin" is cool because that is where the buck stops. The problem is that such an explanation explains nothing of the actual process. Hence, one leaves themselves open for a repeat of history . . . in theory. :-) WL. **************Get a jump start on your taxes. Find a tax professional in your neighborhood today. (http://yellowpages.aol.com/search?query=Tax+Return+Preparation+%26+Filing&ncid=emlcntusyelp00000004) _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
