Charles has one point worth keeping and one that ruins it. The one worth keeping: DSA answered a hostile resolution by voluntarily agreeing with its historical premises. That's a bad reflex regardless of what you think about the Soviet Union. It concedes the terms of the argument before the argument starts, and it assumes an audience that rewards you for distancing yourself. That audience doesn't exist. The congressmen who wrote the resolution don't care whether you denounce Stalin, and the people it was written to frighten aren't reading the fine print of the reply.
The one that ruins it is Grover Furr. Dennis's response was true and useless: yes, Furr teaches medieval English literature, and no, that isn't the problem. Take Katyn. Beria's memo of March 1940 proposes shooting the Polish officers; the Politburo approves it, and Stalin signs. Shelepin's 1959 note to Khrushchev gives the figure of 21,857 and recommends destroying the files. Gorbachev acknowledged NKVD responsibility in 1990, and the packet was handed to the Poles in 1992. Furr's answer is that the documents are forgeries. That is the whole method in one move. Where there is no signed order, he says the charge is unproven, and where there is a signed order, he says the paper is fake. No evidence can reach the conclusion, because the conclusion decides in advance which evidence counts as evidence. That isn't skepticism about archives. It's an argument built so that nothing can touch it, which is also what makes it worthless. But I want to press on on something else, because the rest of this thread is arguing on ground I think is already lost. Michael writes that the Soviet Union defeated the Nazis despite Stalin rather than because of him. I understand the impulse, and I don't dispute the judgment. What bothers me is that it's a moral ledger. It keeps the whole question at the level of one man's character and competence, which is precisely the terrain an apologist wants, because on that terrain the fight is settled by whoever can produce more documents, and it never ends. The 1932-33 famine wasn't a byproduct of authoritarian temperament. It followed from a state trying to extract a marketable grain surplus from a peasantry it couldn't reach through market compulsion, because the property relations that would have made peasants sell weren't there. Once you decide to industrialize at that pace with that agrarian base, coercion isn't a deviation from the plan. It's the mechanism. Stalin's personal rule shaped how savagely that was carried out, and I don't think that was a small factor. But it didn't invent the problem, and removing him wouldn't have dissolved it. So I don't accept Charles's political complaint either, though I think he's put his finger on the right failure for the wrong reason. DSA's trouble isn't that it condemned Stalinism. It's that a condemnation stated as a list of crimes, with no account of what kind of society generated them, leaves you mute when someone asks what you're proposing instead. The answer that was available and wasn't used is that we reject the Soviet order for the same reason we reject this one. In both, the people who do the work have no say over what is done with what they produce, and the surplus is pumped out of them by a power they don't control. Party plan or market discipline—that relation is the thing socialists are against. Say that and the resolution has nothing to bite on. Say instead that Stalin was a monster and we're the good kind, and you've agreed to spend the rest of the argument in the archives, defending a position that concedes the only question that mattered. -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#43326): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/43326 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/121137801/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
