*The Terror: Extraction without Mediation* Anthony Teso
An account of why a regime that called itself the dictatorship of the proletariat came to organize the killing of hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants and then turned the same machinery against the party that had built it. *Abstract.* This essay argues that Stalinist terror was not merely an ideological excess, an instrument of personal dictatorship, or an accidental product of administrative chaos, but a structural response to a system of surplus extraction without either value mediation or conscious allocation by the direct producers. After 1929, economic shortfalls therefore appeared as intentional obstruction, giving the figure of the “wrecker” a necessary role in the regime’s political economy. The essay links this logic to patrimonial Bonapartism, showing how terror enabled the center to penetrate and periodically destroy the personal networks through which its authority operated. It further contends that the permanence of coercive extraction after 1929, rather than coercion alone, marks the decisive rupture. By comparing the major Marxist characterizations of the Soviet social formation, the analysis identifies terror as a catastrophic form of social synthesis occupying the space left by both abolished value mediation and the political expropriation of the working class. Extraction without Mediation.docx ( https://1drv.ms/w/c/c3598b38f68269be/IQD-nF0oyjQjTbEs4GMofRPZAYtdOqpkvKdQqCjXdkyBJ3k?e=XoSdiz ) Tony -- Tony -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#43415): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/43415 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]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
