[lbo-talk] Cultural Change? ( Marxist democracy)

Charles Brown cbrown at michiganlegal.org
Wed May 5 11:58:40 PDT 2004


Doug Henwood wrote:


> Look, I'm no fan of Stalinism. But the standard western liberal
> critique of Stalinism - which in many sloppy versions covers not just
> 1930-50 (appx) but 1917-1986 - needs a lot more nuance.

Defence of Stalinism and of the whole period from 1917 to 1986 also needs a lot more nuance, doesn't it. To take another example, literacy is compatible with very significant prejudice and superstition e.g. belief in the possibility of Rapture.

Ted

^^^^^^ CB: There is some nuance of difference between Stalin being popular then and still being popular now (as Chris Doss has reported several times). The current Russian population has had a collective and cross-generational chance to contemplate and reflect on Stalin and Stalinism. They are not now under the dictator's whip to cheer Stalin. In general, the Russian population has more direct or inherited "direct" experience with what actually happened during Stalin's rule than Americans and people on this list. Prejudice also impacts Americans' judgment about the SU, ( prejudice doesn't just impact the Soviet and Russian people's judgments over these many decades). It is not at all settled that the popularity of Stalin in Russia is entirely or even substantially built on prejudice and superstition, or that it was all coerced.

What I am trying to say is that a likely interpretation of Marx's use of the term "dictatorship" is that he meant that masses and majorities of uncoerced, self-determining working people would support and endorse and carry out (!) , yes, mass repression in class warfare with the bourgeoisie and its allies.

In other words, it was Marx who formulated the _dictatorship_ of the proletariat as, contradictorily, a key component of socialist _democracy_. There is a nuanced possibility ,probability even, that Marx anticipated a mass and even majority of working people who would be repressively and murderously hostile toward resistent owning classes , including petit owning classes, intellectual strata, AND THAT THIS DICTATORIAL ATTITUDE WOULD BE SUBTANTIALLY RATIONAL and democractic in the full historical context and in face of the murderous and repressive resistance of the bourgeoisie to peaceful socialist revolution.

Marxists can denounce the dictatorship and repression of the SU, but not on the basis that Marx and Engels considered all repression undemocratic. They assumed that the socialist state would repress masses of people, who were part of the ruling classes or allied with the ruling classes. ( See _The State and Revolution_ for a summary of Marx and Engels' attitudes toward these issues.).

In a real world struggle like the history of the Soviet Union ( and other socialist countries), I am certain that there was "unjust" or undemocratic or unsocialist murderous repression outside of the type of socialist repression anticipated by Marx. But to be blunt, there was also mass repression - democratic repression (!) - that fit the ideas of Marx and Engels. Not all leftists are Marxists, but leftists who are Marxists ought to take heed of this in evaluating the history of the SU.

Marx and Engels' overall theory in which democracy IS the working class as ruling class, and by which democracy _is_ a state with repressive apparatus, prisons, standing bodies of armed personnel,etc. does not exclude a period of mass repression as fulfillment of democracy in the phase of the dictatorship of the proletariat, (and in the case of Russia, the working masses of peasants.).

Surely Marxists here don't think that M and E had a concept of democracy identical with the liberal concept.



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