The space of real freedom opened, oddly enough, by the German invasion of Russia in WWII, is a complicated subject. There are a lot of reports that in the vacuum of authority sometimes created by the collapse of party and state institutions, there was some breathing room for a degree of autonomy, even if it was a house in Stalingrad being shelled to rubble. The best thing I know on this is Vassily Grossman's Life and Fate, where the house incident is central. This is one of the great books of the 20th century, btw. I don't think this partial and limited autonomy is socialism, although it captures something that socialism would have and that Stalinism didn't. As to whether the party was a coherent enough entity to be said to be an agent under Stalinism, and especially during the war, if John thinks it was, we'll have to disagree. I think the purges had done their work. Likewise about the wisom of Stalin's "strategy" in the first days of the war: Surely strategic retreat was necessary, but this is what "not one step back" precluded.
Charles says:
>Doesn't this imply that during the war , the working class and Party were
>running the show ? How could Stalin have had bottomline control over the
>nation , if he was screwing up, but the nation won the war ? The only
>conclusion one can reach is that there was socialism in the SU, i.e. there
>was a self-determining mass of people who had control over their actions
>and lives, and were not being dictated to by Stalin. Overwise, if they were
>following Stalin's dictat, they would have lost, because he was committing
>enormous errors and crimes, right
>Now, a change of subject:
> >How about some discussion of why Stalin was an idealist ?
>
>I said: it idealist to assert the supremacy of
>the political over nature itself,. . . and over economics,
>>
>CB: Oh , I see what you mean. Quite right. But with respect to the war,
>Stalin was not applying anti-genetics or anti-quantum physics. Materialist
>realism wold make a big difference as compared with counting on racial
>superiority of Germans to win, etc. The aspects of materialism-idealism
>pertinent to the war helped the Soviets over the Germans.
This is vague. I don't know to what extent the Germans "counted" on their racial ideology, for example, expected that the Slav untermenschen would be easy pickings. Surely they were surprised by the strength of Soviet resistance, but so was everyone. As fara s materailsit "realism," I think that Stalin's voluntarism affected his military strategy. The "not one step back" order is a case in point.
>
>Most of the Stalinist diamat is purveying of Leninism, though, not at all
>dreary. Most Soviet philosophers are more advanced materialists than
>Western Marxists for this reason.
Well, we can disagree about how dreary official Soviet Marxism-Leninism was.
We talked about Nietzsche.
>
>CB: Nietzsche's voluntarism seems very much subjective idealist.
As I said, he's complex: a perspectivist voluntarist who chooses the perspective of materialism.
>Also, I keep hearing this theme from him and his commentators of hatred of
>egalitarianism and hatred of working classes, committment to an elite,
>supermen. The more I read and hear of Nietzsche the more he seems an arch
>anti-historical materialist.
Well, he's not a Marxist historical materialist. But he does offer
materialist, indeed class-based, accounts of the origin of morality.
>
>On Hitler reading him, evidently many German soldiers carried copes of Thus
>Spoke Zaruthustra ( spelling) into the trenches with them in WWI. So,
>Nietzsche was popular enough that Hitler, a soldier, was likely to be
>familiar with him.
Possibly, but this is sheer speculation. If he had, he might have read some of Nietzsche's fulminations against militarism, nationalism, racism, and antisemitism, all things Nietzsche hated. Oh, and Germany too. N liked to imagine that he was a Pole, and he lived by preference in Switzerland.
--jks
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