Old School Commies.....A Question

[VoodooAce]

Ok. Its 1950. You are a card carrying member of the US Communist Party.

You are probably a communist because you believe the wheels of capitalism are greased by the blood of the workers. Now, my question....

How do you reconcile this concern for humanity while at the same time supporting a monster like Josef Stalin?

Most people I know today that would classify themselves as communist would hate a Josef Stalin and despised the USSR. I know that this view may not necessarily be that of the majority of communists world wide, but it seems to be so in the US.

Most of these people I know are communists BECAUSE they care for the less fortunate and believe communism to be their best answer.

Were the commies 50 years ago different in this, somehow? Did they actually believe the tyrany of a Stalin was worth it? Did they actually believe the USSR to be a communist society? Were they not bothered by the total lack of freedom their citizens had? Or did THAT seem worth it as well?

Someone help me out, please! This question has confused me for a decade and I need resolution!

 

[Hitro]

Although I'm not a communist, I think I've talked to enough communists (including some who were around then) to say something about this.
The most important part is, today like back then, that "communists" aren't a collective that shares exactly the same opinion on everything. On the contrary there have been many differences between the various groups that called itself communist, also in the 50ies. Many disagreed with Stalin, for example such prominent figures like Trotsky but of course also many far less known people. Many also disagreed with the USSR, but both wasn't easy. For the non-communists the commies are all the same and for the Stalinists they were traitors, after all many of Stalins victims were convinced communists, socialists and social democrats, those who disagreed or at least seemed to disagree or get too powerful in his view.
As you said yourself, the USSR is usually not seen as a model for communism amoung today's commies. But that has been the same for many on the left throughout the existence of that country.
On the other hand there were of course those who supported Stalin and the USSR (easy to find in the leadership of Eastern Europe) and those who simply didn't care much about it (the more or less ignorant mass you find on every politcal side).

 

[Vrylakas]

The Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz wrote a brilliant book, *The Captive Mind*, about why people come to believe in and follow totalitarian dictatorships. It's been a major source of bewilderment for people in Eastern Europe about why people in Western Europe followed so loyally Stalin and the Soviet Union, no matter how barbaric he behaved. The scene of Picasso drawing a memorial sketch of Stalin for Le Monde upon the dictator's death in 1953 leaves Eastern Europeans speechless.

The reality is that here in the West, it was easy to live in denial about what the Soviet Union really represented. Communism provided some very effective propaganda, bolstered by Moscow with red banners, slogans, (feigned) comraderie, and bold self-righteous victriol. Two world wars had led many to believe that the West and its societies were fundamentally flawed, and there was this "Great Experiment" going on in Russia (and later China, for those who could no longer deny Russia's crimes)... It was easy when you're living comfortably in London, New York or Rome and not threatened with the fateful knock on the door at 3.00 a.m. by a secret police to begin to publically voice pro-communist ideas - especially when you don't have to deal with the real consequences of communism. Anti-communist agitators were discredited by opportunists (McCarthy, Nixon) and kooky far-rightwing ideologues (Thatcher, Reagan), which masqueraded for many the reality that communism was a violent and poverty-perpetuating criminal system. In Milan Kundera's book *The Book of Laughter* he talks about the weird world in a communist society where the truth is spoken softly between trusted friends and one could only speak in lies when in public, even when everyone knew you were lying; in the West these public pronouncements were taken at face value by many gullible people.

In Terry Pratchett's & Neil Gaimon's book *Good Omens*, the demon Crowley at one point admits to the angel Aziraphale how demons were really embarrassed by human Satanists, and looked down on them but had to support them for "political" reasons. It was the same for Eastern European communists in their relationships with Westerners like Tagliatti or Gus Hall; they praised them publically but secretly wondered what the hell those morons were thinking, that they'd want to give up Britihs, Italian or American life for Soviet life....

 

[amadeus]

Originally posted by VoodooAce
Most people I know today that would classify themselves as communist would hate a Josef Stalin and despised the USSR.

I think you'd be pretty suprised if you talked to the average communist...

 

[Simon Darkshade]

From whay I've studied of the era, the crimes and true nature of the Stalinist regime were not widely known among Western communists, particularly the lower ranks. When negative reports did emerge, they were written off as capitalist propaganda.
With the 'official' revelation of the true nature of Stalin in Khrushchev's not-so-secret speech, many tried to deny it. Others were extremely confused and disturbed, etc.

The truth about the Soviet Union was not known, and Stalin was generally seen as the Great Leader of the international communist movement. They were deceived by a very effective propaganda machine.

 

[polymath]

If the Communist Russians had managed to take over Europe, for example, the card-carrying communists in the UK would have been one of the first groups to be lined up against the wall. Why? Because they espoused true Communism, and this was the last thing on the minds of the Russian government.

 

[tetley]

There's no doubt the Stalinist and Maoist regimes are an embarrassment to communists/socialists (and yes, communism and socialism *ARE* the same thing. Don't BS me). But to say that's "not true communism" simply is not true. Think about it:

The ONLY way to get rich under communism is to be a criminal. I mean, seriously: the very philosophy of communism is to deny virtually every means to advance oneself. Communism says, "You will be equal, and you will be happy with that. End of discussion." What have you done?--every human being with any SHRED of ambition will be tempted to circumvent the system somehow.

So what do you have in the Soviet Union and China? Legalized criminal behavior! I mean, no s**t, I could have told you that. What kind of people do you EXPECT your leaders to be when the very fundamentals of your system make ambition illegal?? Not true communism my foot--you got exactly what you wanted, and you sow what you reap.

 

[allhailIndia]

Communism, like so many other interesting ideologies was completely and comprehensively destroyed by the Chinese, Russians and to certain extent, the CPI(Communist Party of India).
Communism does not generally mean totalitarianism and brute force. Although the idea that the worker must be protected was good, the concept of goverments dabbling in business was its main fallacy. As shown in India, the USSR and China, the government must at best ensure that worker's rights are maintained and they are paid well and not act as the ultimate businessman. Only now India and China are realizing the mistakes of the past and liberalizing, China with a little more success than India, but Russia is almost completely lost to the Mafya and the criminl underworld.

Although, most people disdain socialism and communism in a major part of the world, Capitalism without these two is nothing but a dictatorship in the name of Democracy.

 

[Greadius]

I'm confused as to why China is still refered to as Communist...
They've allowed almost completely liberalization of their economy, they use supply/demand and comptetition in industry, they've reduced the amount of government subsidized industries, they've replaced party control of business' with professional management...

Isn't China more like an authoritarian regime than Communism?

I think the best example you can find of an attempt at pure Communism was in Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge.

 

[polymath]

Tetley, you are putting the cart before the horse here, and not making much sense.
"The ONLY way to get rich under communism is to be a criminal" is the sort of statement that says more about yourself than about the topic at hand. I mean, you seem to be saying that the purpose of life is to get rich. It is not. What communism says is that our ambition should be to help each other, not think about #1. Your post misses this point entirely, and says, hey communism doesn't let me think only about myself, I'd better become a criminal, and sod my fellow workers.
Now, I'm a realist, and can see that there's nothing wrong with wanting to be rich and ambitious. But the ambition of communism is to all advance together. As your post shows, there are too many people obsessed with personal riches to let it happen, and it is those people who mean there probably never will be true communism.
Therefore, the Stalinist and Maoist regimes were not true communism, they were too full of people who thought "Ah, plenty of chances to get rich here' for it to work.
Personally I'm a a right winger, but to say that Mao and Stalin ran true communist countries is a joke.

 

[Vrylakas]

Ah, but Polymath you're falling into a typical Western ideological trap when you say that the Soviet and Chinese models of communism weren't "pure communism". This is dangerously lurching towards the communism thread in the "Off-Topics" forum so I'll try to remain history-focused, but:

1. There is no such thing as "pure communism". How can any ideology ever attain "purity" in practice when you're dealing with humans? No theory can exist in purity; practical application is always the reality. Robert Owens' communes in the early 19th century failed, the Paris Commune failed, and the communist experiments of the 20th century have failed in spectacular fashion. Why? You blame it on a greedy few, but human ambition (in economy, society and politics) is a natural trait of our species, and while it has caused us much pain in our long history it has also brought us many benefits; what do you think got us into civilization in the first place? Communism was a magical, mystical theory that pretended it could make human ambition go away. Humans have done better with systems that have attempted to harness their ambition rather than suppress it.

2. The various communist regimes that have existed in the 20th century, in Russia, China, Hungary, Cuba, Cambodia, Ethiopia, etc. have all ended up as brutal dictatorships that have killed and spread poverty to far more humans than the supposedly evil Capitalism they were all railing against. This is no coincidence or mistake. These regimes are the natural outcome of communism as embodied by Marx, Lenin, Mao and Castro. Marx wrote that the masses would automatically realize their interests and organize, eventually rising up to overthrow their oppressors, the capitalist slave-drivers. Lenin realized that this was childish and would never happen, so he injected the need for a vanguard party to organize the masses - since they were clearly too stupid to see their own interests - and force communist paradise down their throats. Unfortunately, this would require a massive super-state and omnipotent dictatorship (an idea anathema to Marx) but added that this superstate would eventually wither away in Marxist fashion. But there was the little human ambition equation.... Creating massive super-states with no internal checks on their power simply gave some ambitious people an opportunity to take over and achieve power far above and beyond anything the worst robber-barons of the capitalist heyday could ever have imagined. It was a surprise to no one when Brezhnev conceded that the state had no intention of withering away, and was here to stay.

3. An oddity about communism, a theory created in the industrializing West, is that it never took root there. It found its expression in states on the verge of industrialization that were just beginning to enter the modernization process; Russia, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, Hungary, Cuba, etc. It began in states that didn't have yet the social conditions and classes (at least to the proportion that Marx discussed) Communism was designed for. Many of these states had to develop significant addendums to the theory to accomodate their own social and economic realities (for instance, Lenin's declaration that peasants were a "rural proletariat"). Pol Pot took this to an extreme and declared a sort of rural, anti-urban communism. Almost none of the communist leaders throughout the world actually belonged to the Proletariat; not Lenin, not Marx, not Mao, not Pot, etc. As a friend in Poland used to say, "Why are we listening about a theory for the workers when it's expounded by people like Lenin and Marx who've never worked an honest day in their lives? Did Marx know how to swing a sledgehammer?" In the West itself, few countries ever seriously came under the threat of a communist take over. Germany in 1918-19 might be the exception - and indeed Bavaria at one point briefly declared itself independent as a communist republic, but the modern industrial world has traditionally had small, weak native communist parties. Communists stood in and won some elections in France and Italy but usually by playing opposition to specific local policies and they were easily contained within the system.

4. So getting back to the original question posed on this thread; why do some who live comfortably and safely in the West expound communism even despite communism's historical record? I suspect guilt has something to do with it. Because of the Age of Imperialism and the subsequent world wars, it has become fashionable in the West to hold anti-Western beliefs. Communism suited that bill during the Cold War. It has less glimmer nowadays and therefore there are fewer adherants in the West than just a decade ago, but it was a neat and simple theory that claimed to solve all problems and blamed them on the West in the process (how convenient!) so it still catches the glint of some students' and academics' eyes...

 

[allhailIndia]

I have always wondered why there was such a paranoia about commies in the minds of Americans, ecpecially Senator McCarthy. Despite all the "Ban the Bomb" marches and "Flower Power" marches, there was hardly any change in US policy vis-a-vis the USSR. It is quite hard to imagine how actors and artists could sell state secrets to the USSR( i am not so sure about Marilyn Monroe ).

I would like a little enlightnment about this

 

[VoodooAce]

Originally posted by rmsharpe


I think you'd be pretty suprised if you talked to the average communist...

I doubt it....

I wasn't just making a guess there, RM. I think, in your 15 years on this earth, you still havn't found that there are almost always middle grounds....grey area between the black and white.

Maybe, as mentioned throughout this thread, if I talked to communists BACK THEN.....but the communist that believes in what Stalin did is rare today.

I know, RM, that you're comfortable with your little misconceptions (communists are inherently evil, etc...), so whatever. Believe what you want.

Anyway, Vrylakas, to say that communism breeds the sort of tyrants we've seen this century is flawed.

There have been how many revolutions/civil wars this century? Many. And how many of them have ended up producing a new dictator in whatever form? Just about all of them. Regardless of whether they were taking place in a 'capitalist' society or if it was a communist revolution.

Soi I could almost as easily say that capitalism and Democracy doesn't work in the third world.

This is why I always choose the good George...Washington...as my hero. He's that rare figure that was able to reject the power for the good of the revolution and for the good of the country.

The fact that so many revolutions end up producing a new dictator is human nature.....not communist nature.

Anyway, thanks guys. I believe that both Hitro and Vrylakas hit upon plausible explanations.

Its easy to NOT worry about that knock on the door at 3 AM if its not a likelihood at the time. That and, what with the propoganda wars going on, it was probably a little difficult to believe what you read/saw.

The L.A. Times had a nice story on this subject (they were in Stalins home town). I guess throughout Russia there are still 20-30% of the people that believe Stalin was all right. They believe that most of what we know about him today are all lies and...here's that word again....propoganda.

 

[Vrylakas]

VoodooAce wrote:

Anyway, Vrylakas, to say that communism breeds the sort of tyrants we've seen this century is flawed.

There have been how many revolutions/civil wars this century? Many. And how many of them have ended up producing a new dictator in whatever form? Just about all of them. Regardless of whether they were taking place in a 'capitalist' society or if it was a communist revolution.

First of all, there have rarely been revolutions in capitalist societies in the 20th century - although how one defines a capitalist society. As I mentioned in my last post, developed modern societies have never seriously been threatened by communism, or any revolution for that matter. Developing societies are however susceptible to revolutions because large portions of the traditional social structures are being dislocated. (Think Mexico, Russia, China, Cuba, etc. in the 20th century.)

Secondly, communism - despite its rhetoric - is not born of revolutions. Revolutions are messy and chaotic affairs, usually beyond any one group's control even when a group initiates it. After the dust settles and one group is able to consolidate control, this is when coherent programs begin to make an impact. Communism wasn't born in the Revolution of March, 1917 or that of November (although the November one was really a coup d'etat); it was born in the reign of terror that followed the civil war of 1917-1922. Of course the communists spent 70+ years spreading the lie that what was really a popular revolt against war conditions and Tsarist corruption and oppression was a proletarian-orchestrated revolution led of course by Lenin, etc. You can't imagine the amount of really bad art that was designed to propagate this lie. Communism is a form of social engineering that requires extremely controlled conditions, conditions that do not exist in a revolution.

The fact that so many revolutions end up producing a new dictator is human nature.....not communist nature.

Yes, the instability of a revolution produces wonderful opportunities for ambitious potential-tyrants anywhere in the world at any time. However, what's unique about communism (again, it being a post-revolutionary phenomenon, despite its rhetoric) is that it always produces tyrants. Some moreso, some lessso, but all are mere variations on a theme; János Kádár of Hungary was far less of a communist tyrant than Ceaucescu or Pot but still he managed to have thousands murdered and tens of thousands imprisoned. Again, don't confuse communist rhetoric about revolutions with the reality that communist regimes are entrenched political elites whose main concern is staying in power and who will refrain from no brutality to do so. The Yugoslav writer and dissident Milovan Djilas, once #4 man in the communist government in Yugoslavia an a confidant to many communist leaders, wrote a brilliant book called The New Class that exposed these realities of communist governments.

My wife can name virtually every member of the Polish government's administration for the 1970s and 80s despite the fact she has absolutely no interest in politics. How is this possible? The administration in Poland didn't change for most of her life while growing up, with a few minor changes. She simply absorbed their names over the decades by hearing them constantly on television - the same names over and over again. That's life in a dictatorship, in one of its most benign aspects. Ever since 1989 BTW she hasn't the slightest idea who's who in Polish politics except for the president. A good sign of change, democratic change.

 

[allhailIndia]

Even if they are not dictators, the communist/socialist rulers often make decisions which cause the deaths of millions of their countrymen, which is equally bad, as it could have been averted. I am here referring to the fatally flawed ploicies of collectivization practised by Nehru in the first few years of Indian Independence, until wiser counsel prevailed.

 

[Jimmicus]

To give an answer (or at least an opinion) on the original question:

The question of how one defended Stalin as a western communist can be partly answered by discussing Stalin's status while he was alive. His reputation of course was forged during WWII. In this war Stalin mobilized the Russian people in resistance to an enormous degree by a mixture of propoganda (the teutonic evil, etc.), intimidation and appealing to the strong Russian patiotic tendency. With these tools Stalin was able to rally the people and fight back from defeats which would have led any Western nation to surrender.

This performance gave Stalin an aura of divinity amongst many of his own people. Whatever his faults, 'he' had saved them from the Nazi evil. This aura that was enhanced by his own party activists and was given respectability in the West (at least for a time) by his wartime associations with Churchill and Roosevelt as part of the 'big three'. For a long time as well, the West simply did not know about Stalin's atrocities, which allowed further time for his divine status to be entrenched in the minds of his supporters.

As the Soviet Union was the most powerful communist country in the world during the cold war, to criticize it's leader was to criticize communism itself, something which no card carrying member of the Communist party in any country could do (Soviet propoganda and media went to extrordinary lengths to avoid public criticism of Soviet methods, another one of communism's failngs). This unwillingness to criticize must have been a hard habit to break, especially amongst western communists who of course were a distrusted minority in their own country. So even after Stalin had been discredited in his own country, many in the West continued to espouse his virtues as the greatest Communisist leader rather than to admit they had made a mistake.

A similar cult status exists around Hitler in far right groups of today. Those who may be attracted to these groups for whatever personal reasons, often end up defending his atrocities by pretending they never happened in spite of the obvious and horrible truth. The human mind is unfortunately very good at editing out facts that do not fit with our pre-conceptions. An honest-to-god change of heart about one's most basic views of society is very rare (most people never do this more than once or twice in a lifetime, many never do at all).


Time to stop wittering...

 

[sgrig]

What I find strange is that in the West, Communism and Soviet Union is practically synonymous with horrible repression, slaughter of millions of innocent people, and so on. Many people in the West don't seem to realise that such horrible repression only really happened during Stalin's rule from 1920's to 1953. Since late 1950's, mass repression was virtually non-existant. Of course, individuals who openly critisized the party and government were persecuted, but that was on a limited scale. It seems that the general perception of the Soviet Union in the West is still the same as it was shaped by western propaganda during the Cold War.

I grew up as a child in the Soviet Union, my parents lived there for a very long time, and my grandparents lived for most of their life in the Soviet Union. They are saying that of course there were problems, especially with lack of consumer goods, but at no time they have ever felt that they are being oppressed or that they are not 'free' in any way. Of course, they don't agree to say the least with Stalin's actions, especially since my grandmother's dad was a victim of Stalin's repression, but still they don't associate Soviet Union with Stalin's crimes.

In any case, my grandparents had a much better and enjoyable life in the 'oppressive' Soviet Union, than in modern-day 'democratic' Russia.

 

[Richard III]

Originally posted by polymath
I mean, you seem to be saying that the purpose of life is to get rich. It is not. What communism says is that our ambition should be to help each other, not think about #1.

Not at all.

Communism - yes, even the idealogical version - is all about thinking about #1, it's just that Marx wanted the workers to think about #1 collectively, on the assumption that doing so individually was not powerful enough.

Communism is about expropriating the means of production so that the surplus labour value created by a worker for a capitalist could instead be redistributed to the worker. The truly poor, sick, mentally ill or habitually criminal were referred to as the "lumpenproleteriat," and were (and still are) regarded by actual Marxists as chaff. Marxism is based on a purely economic, materialist vision of history. You can't get more focused on wealth and less focused on other issues than that.

I think it's fair to say that Stalin and Mao were running true communist governments for exactly the same reason that it's fair to say that Reagan and Bush were running capitalist governments, provided you accept that "true" means "as close to the ideal as can be practically achieved." In both cases, the "pure" idealogical form was or is just impractical for the time. In the communist case, to redistribute wealth and have a planned economy in countries the size of the PRC or USSR, you couldn't do it in without an astonishingly coercive degree of state-directed force.

For all of you who insist otherwise, remember that Marx used the phrase "a dictatorship of the proletariat" for a reason. You needed the dictatorship - in theory - to get to the communist ideal. Stalin and Mao were just following the plan.

R.III

 

[Vrylakas]

Sgrig wrote:

What I find strange is that in the West, Communism and Soviet Union is practically synonymous with horrible repression, slaughter of millions of innocent people, and so on. Many people in the West don't seem to realise that such horrible repression only really happened during Stalin's rule from 1920's to 1953.

Again, a matter of perspective Sgrig. I suspect Russians, who've had far less exposure to non-authoritarian governments than most in Europe, are far more tolerant of oppressive political conditions. For other Europeans though - even in the Balkans - it is difficult to live under those conditions. For example, in Poland today there is still considerable anger with both the Germans and Russians for WW II (another topic), but many Poles are particularly hostile towards the Germans. Why? Because (from a Polish perspective) for whatever the Russians did in Poland, they only did what they also do to their own kind at home; the Germans however would never have dared do the things they did in Poland in Germany itself.... Yes, the Brezhnev era was a far more repressively lax time for Russians than the Stalin era, but the gulags were still fully operational. In fact, for many in the empire outside of the Soviet Union itself, things actually got worse as the economic situation deteriorated and dictators feared civil unrest. Romania, East Germany and Czechoslovakia became much more repressive in the 1980s, as indeed did Poland after Solidarnosc.

 

[sgrig]

Originally posted by Vrylakas
Again, a matter of perspective Sgrig. I suspect Russians, who've had far less exposure to non-authoritarian governments than most in Europe, are far more tolerant of oppressive political conditions. For other Europeans though - even in the Balkans - it is difficult to live under those conditions. For example, in Poland today there is still considerable anger with both the Germans and Russians for WW II (another topic), but many Poles are particularly hostile towards the Germans. Why? Because (from a Polish perspective) for whatever the Russians did in Poland, they only did what they also do to their own kind at home; the Germans however would never have dared do the things they did in Poland in Germany itself.... Yes, the Brezhnev era was a far more repressively lax time for Russians than the Stalin era, but the gulags were still fully operational. In fact, for many in the empire outside of the Soviet Union itself, things actually got worse as the economic situation deteriorated and dictators feared civil unrest. Romania, East Germany and Czechoslovakia became much more repressive in the 1980s, as indeed did Poland after Solidarnosc.

I guess you are right, that it is a matter of perspective. However, funnily enough, in Russia very few people nowadays hate Germany, even people who lived under German occupation, now admire Germany. (Although, there has been an attempt to bring together German and Russian veterans of WW2, and that did not go to well. They ended up fighting each other, even though most were 75-80 years old)

Actually you pointed out an interesting thing: under communism, all nationalities 'suffer' equally, while under fascism, some nationalities suffer more than others! So I guess there is some equality in communism after all!