Stalin has not had a great press, although I have suggested once or twice that the man was a little more ambivalent than the standard accounts would have it. So something more to add to the mix. It comes from a book called Towards a New Socialism by W. Paul Cockshott and Allin Cottrell.
They argue quite persuasively that the full implementation of a communist economic system happened under Stalin. Through the five year plans beginning in the late 1920s the capitalist mode of extracting surplus value was replaced by a planned economy, in which surplus was controlled and allocated by the planning mechanism.
Under Soviet planning, the division between the necessary and surplus portions of the social product was the result of political decisions. For the most part, goods and labour were physically allocated to enterprises by the planning authorities, who would always ensure that the enterprises had enough money to ‘pay for’ the real goods allocated to them. If an enterprise made monetary ‘losses’, and therefore had to have its money balances topped up with ‘subsidies’, that was no matter. On the other hand, possession of money as such was no guarantee of being able to get hold of real goods. By the same token, the resources going into production of consumer goods were centrally allocated. Suppose the workers won higher ruble wages: by itself this would achieve nothing, since the flow of production of consumer goods was not responsive to the monetary amount of consumer spending. Higher wages would simply mean higher prices or shortages in the shops. The rate of production of a surplus was fixed when the planners allocated resources to investment in heavy industry and to the production of consumer goods respectively (pp. 4-5).
The key to this momentous shift was the old issue of compulsion: how do you encourage workers and peasants to engage in the new system? Under the circumstances of such rapid change and in the face of a sustained threat from international capitalism, that compulsion took the form of carrot and stick. Genuine revolutionary fervour characterised much of the effort, but for those less inclined to engage, forced labour, exile and ‘terror’ were deployed. Crucial to this process was the personality cult of Stalin, who embodied the sheer grit (thereby making up for what he lacked in oratorical skill) of the revolutionary ‘miracle’ required to adopt such a radically new economic system. Stalin was thereby able both to promote a deep sense of ‘participation in a great historic endeavour’, but he was also the ‘stern and utterly ruthless liquidator of any who failed so to participate’. I would add that this combination, along with the deep strength of the communist economic system, enabled the extraordinary recovery during the Second World War and the eventual victory by the USSR over Germany and fascism. Interesting bloke, our Stalin.
15 January, 2012 at 4:08 am
Yes, killing and incarceration are great “encouragements”, comrade.
But let’s not kid outselves: what really allowed that avuncular Georgian smile to atone for his “stern and utterly ruthess liquidation” of those ingrates who refused to serve their New Tsar? Ol’ Pockface wouldn’t have lasted very long at all without riding the benefits of a belated but lucrative industrialisation. And with a ready supply of peasants-turned-industry-fodder, it was an industrialisation bound for success. After a slow start in the previous century – isolationism followed by an unspectacular start under Alex II (except for that fine railway) – industrialisation really only started in earnest under those canny economists, the soviets. And like anywhere else that went through industrialisation (Western Europe, the US, Japan, a few other isles), what inevitably followed were rapid economic growth and ruthless empire-building. Any leader who’s riding the one-off gains offered by industrialisation can be as big a cunt as he pleases. And he was.
15 January, 2012 at 10:27 am
Sigh … Deano. Please don’t trot out the old line about the communists providing the path to industrialisation. You hear it from starry-eyed liberals and jaded lefties; it’s neither original nor insightful. Nor is the unreflecting demonisation of Stalin,
As for Stalin’s ruthlessness, so what? You can’t crush the bourgeoisie by being nice. More extensively, concerning the issue of compulsion, of what the Regulation Theorists call the ‘mode of regulation’, every socio-economic system needs it in some form. And no shift to a very different system happens smoothly. Witness the sheer devastation, brutality, mass murder if not genocide of the imposition of capitalism, especially in colonial countries but also at its points of origin. By comparison, what happened under Stalin was a Sunday picnic.
15 January, 2012 at 12:24 pm
There’s a good reason for some “old lines”: they’re facts. The soviets introduced industrialisation and empire-building to Russia. Both industrialisation and empire-building are initially very lucrative. I mean, they worked everywhere they were tried. Industrialisation was far and away the main reason why Russia succeeded economically under Stalin.
As for criticising the violence of capitalism, I agree. Yet you resort to the et tu fallacy: just because someone else is more of a cunt doesn’t exonerate the lesser cunts. It’s good to see some critical spirit from you when it comes to other totalitarian regimes, such as capitalism. But what of Stalin’s case, with 40,000,000 killed by his fascist regime? On body count alone, that eclipses most countries’ colonisation efforts, and is only itself eclipsed by Mao’s 60,000,000.
If only crushing the bourgeisie were the limits of Stalin’s ruthlessness and terror. But come on, don’t give us that old apologetic line. Those who made up most of Stalin’s victims were no more than kulaks, peasants.
15 January, 2012 at 1:30 pm
There’s an elephant in the room here with the argument for ‘industrialisation’, namely the qualitative difference between communism and capitalism. Being the scientific scholar that you are, surely this ‘fact’ should not be ignored. But come on, Deane, you should know that the heuristic framework within which you operate determines the nature of those ‘facts’.
I agree that comparisons only get us a certain distance, but all the same let’s see. Your figures are taken from that dodgy piece of work known as ‘The Black Book of Communism’, which has since been shown be a very flaky piece of ideological doggerel. The figure of 60 million comes from a wild guess by Solzhenitsyn. Since the archives have been opened, the stats are rather different: 1,8 million kulaks were sent to labor colonies, 400,000 died there and further 376,000 died in the purges.
But let’s take those figures at face value. Take India, for instance. Since the ‘democratic capitalist experiment’ since 1947, more than 100,000,000 people had died by 1979, with tens of millions more since. Hmmm … Add to that the effects of capitalism in Eastern Europe since 1989, as well as the following colourful list:
17 Million killed by Capitalist Britain in India,
18 Million slaves killed by Capitalist & Rightist Europeans during the Atlantic Slave trade,
5-10 Million Native Americans Killed by Capitalist & Expansionist Europeans during the invasion of the Americas,
8 Million Killed by King Leopold with the help of Capitalist Enterprise in the Congo,
10 million in the Nazi slaughter of Jews, gypsies, communist and gays
15 Million slaughtered in the Capitalist reordering of WWI,
55 Million killed in the Nationalist Imperialist invasion of Europe by Hitler & the resulting WWII,
3 Million killed by the Capitalist U.S. led U.N. “police action” in Korea to stop the North from repatriating their country,
3.5 Million killed by Capitalist U.S. in Vietnam,
1 Million killed in the 9 years (mostly) secret U.S. bombing of Cambodia & Laos (prior to Pol Pot),
1 Million slaughtered in Indonesia by proxy Capitalist dictator Suharto (helped by ‘death lists’ sent by the CIA & MI6),
1 Million slaughtered by U.S. installed Fascist dictators throughout Latin America (including 200k in Guatemala, 100k in El Salvador),
1.3 Million killed in U.S./U.K. led U.N. Iraqi sanctions (UNICEF estimating 500k child deaths),
1 Million killed in current U.S./U.K. invasion of Iraq,
and on and on.
A good estimate is that the total number of people killed under capitalism is of the order of 1.5 billion. That’s just shy of a quarter of the total world population at present.
If we take Stalin’s comment, ‘you can’t make an omelette without broken eggs’, then the broken eggs under capitalism beat anything has gone before.
Oh yes, and a ‘kulak’ (derived from ‘fist and thereby designating ‘tight-fisted’) means an affluent peasant who screws his or her neighbours. This type developed after the 1906 ‘reforms’. Those who were done over were the poor peasants, the muzhiks (distinguished after 1906 in terms of bednyaks, the poor, and middle peasants, serednyaks). Obviously, the kulaks resisted collectivisation since their wealth was confiscated, they hoarded grain and as a last resort burned crops. I’d send ‘em off too.
15 January, 2012 at 2:40 pm
A kulak is “an affluent peasant who screws his or her neighbours”? Well, if you want to classify a family owning a cow as abusers who should be sent to Siberia, because some of their neighbours don’t own cows, sure.
As I said, the assessment of Stalinist and Maoist totalitarianism as bad doesn’t mean that British or Chinese capitalism isn’t also bad. I’m all for criticising folk and systems on both sides of the iron curtain. Yet it’s an historical accident that those countries that got as one-sidedly powerful and unprecedentedly technologically superior before the twentieth century, and were capitalist, certainly managed to orchestrate the bulk of the damage. It’s just that there’s nothing in Stalinist history that indicates that if his particular variant of totalitarian terror had risen to world dominance first, the Stalinist empire wouldn’t have achieved the same results… or worse. Although we could debate the precise numbers involved, what I’m saying is that Stalinist communism still needs to be criticised for its peculiar lack of ethics (in a non-elitist sense, naturally), just in case anybody still thinks this catastrophic system is the great way forward.
As for the heuristic framework determining the nature of facts, this is of course true. As a moderate realist, I am resigned to the fact that the facts I know are an mixture of both subjectivity and objectivity, and that we have no means to know for certain what that mix is. All this is a red herring (or are you revealing your secret idealism and secret need for certainty?). As you say, millions were murdered, persecuted, imprisoned by Stalin’s system. Was this justified? Hell no.
15 January, 2012 at 5:44 pm
Even the conservative Oxford Dictionary defines a kulak as:
‘a peasant in Russia wealthy enough to own a farm and hire labour. Emerging after the emancipation of serfs in the 19th century the kulaks resisted Stalin’s forced collectivization, but millions were arrested, exiled, or killed’.
A little more than a cow, it seems.
And lets not get into speculative, alternative histories, or musing over ‘historical accidents’, shall we.
15 January, 2012 at 7:08 pm
Yeah, but some of the so-called kulaks who ended up in Siberia did just have a cow. This was vindictive Ol’ Pockface we’re talking about. Stalin didn’t carefully consult his copy of the Oxford Dictionary before sending them to Siberia.
Historical speculation is not the point of my comparison. I was pointing out that the great colonial violence objectively occurred at the height of the technology disparity between Western Europe and the less technologically developed areas of the globe, in the nineteenth century. Stalin was far too late to industrialisation to get in for these easy kills. You can’t compare capitalist kills against communist kills, because the main factor in exploitation and violence was the stage of empire-building.
But, all that aside, answer me this. Was Stalin a cunt?
15 January, 2012 at 7:31 pm
By the time they got to Siberia (the move was an age-old resettlement program, by the way) none of the kulaks would have had anything at all, let alone a cow. But before then they would have their own farms and hired labour. Most of them didn’t die in Siberia, as the stats indicate – otherwise, why send them there in the first place?
Speaking of stats, you are seriously backpeddling now: ‘You can’t compare capitalist kills against communist kills’. Uhuh. So, according to the Deane Galbraith relative scale of death, how many capitalist deaths would count for one communist one? In other words, what is your gerrymander?
17 January, 2012 at 6:03 am
C’mon – no avoiding the main question with red herrings: Stalin – was he a cunt or was he not?
17 January, 2012 at 9:24 am
Interesting rehtorical move, Deane. I must remember to use it. When faced with a difficult turn in the debate, switch to a tangential question and then insist that’s the main issue at stake. Were you or have you ever considered being a politician? http://stalinsmoustache.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/typology-of-scholars-the-politician/.
Anyway, to satisfy your curiosity over female genitalia, of course he was a cunt. What serious politician isn’t? No-one gets to be a leader of any country, let alone a superpower, without being one. He was also an accomplished ‘expropriator’ during the illegal period of the Bols – once directed a massive ‘ex’ of the Tiflis Treasury that made a big difference to Bol finances. But as I am beginning to show, he was also a dynamic and creative war leader, a person with economic guts, and able to inspire people. It’s no wonder he ranks in the top 3 of Russian leaders throughout history by popular vote. As I’ve said a few times now, the bloke was far more complex than the propaganda would have it.
16 January, 2012 at 11:47 pm
[...] Well, it’s probably just my Kiwigger Dean arguing with my stepmom Roland about Stalin again. [...]
17 January, 2012 at 12:27 am
A kulak is “an affluent peasant who screws his or her neighbours”? Well, if you want to classify a family owning a cow as abusers who should be sent to Siberia, because some of their neighbours don’t own cows, sure.
All good knock about stuff, no doubt, but there some serious issues here.
1. By city standards a lot of ‘rich’ peasants would have seemed dirt poor. However, within the village, everybody would have been acutely conscious of any differences, in both standard of living and power.
2. In England at the time of the enclosures, the income derived from a cow was roughly equivalent to a laborer’s wage. So owning a cow made big difference to a family’s standard of living.
And then there is the Irish ballad ‘The Emigrant’s Letter’
“There’s a woman on board who knows Katie by sight,
And we talked of auld times ’til they put out the light.
I’m to meet the good woman tomorrow on deck,
And we’ll talk about Katie from here to Quebec,
I know I’m no match for her, no not the least
With her house and two cows, and her brother a priest.”
3. In the Russian context the key issue was not the ownership of cows, but of horses.
Before collectivisation, horses were the prime movers. As such they determined how much land a family could cultivate.
Those who didn’t own a horse were beholden to those who did.
This allowed the horse owners to lord it over poor peasants.
Academics make a lot the fact that there was never an official definition of a kulak. This misses the realities of life in a village. Rich peasants didn’t get the nickname ‘fist’ for nothing.
Decisions about who was and who wasn’t a kulak were taken on the spot, in the villages: not by Stalin, in Moscow.
17 January, 2012 at 9:17 am
Brilliant. Thanks George.
19 January, 2012 at 12:21 pm
One can dehistoricize or fetishize industrialism/industrialization, or empire/imperialism, or the state/state-building, refrain from seeing these things in terms of class struggle. One can believe in “totalitarianism”, or erase the distinction between dictatorship or the proletariat and other forms of dictatorship (and then, condemning all dictatorship or tyranny or despotism or autocracy or authoritarianism, be a liberal or democrat or anarchist, or, supporting this fetishized dictatorship, be a fascist). In which case one is expressing the conservative or reactionary view of the petty bourgeoisie. Or one can see class struggle and fight accordingly.
19 January, 2012 at 12:22 pm
Correction: dictatorship OF the proletariat.
28 March, 2012 at 1:25 am
[...] a circular argument here. And at least we weren’t arguing about whether it’s ok to liquidate the Easter European peasantry again. The main thing is that even if we disagree about these things, we don’t let [...]