[lbo-talk] Re: Trotsky and Soviet Planning

Turbulo at aol.com Turbulo at aol.com
Sun Jan 9 17:50:27 PST 2005


Amadus wrote:

It would be more accurate to say that the Bolshevik revolution, though impossible without the peasantry lacked the peasantry's long-term support, and therefore produced counterrevolution, the hallmark of which became Stalinism. Counterrevolution in Russia meant a backslide into a wholesale state-monopoly capitalist system (though this arguably started under Lenin, around when Fannie shot him), as well as further backslide into political dictatorship. It was counterrevolution which led to the wholesale slaughter and downright genocide of peasants under Stalin; I don't think we'd argue that peasant genocide was consistent with the worldview of the peasant majority in Russia.

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If the revolution lacked long-term peasant support, as I think it did, it stands to reason that any possible counter-revolution would be by, or with the support of, the peasants, and not coincide with Stalin's suppression of peasant property. This is, in fact, the way it was. Stalin's collectivization drive, beginning in 1928, was not a couterrevolution, but a frenzied and brutal attempt to maintain the economic underpinnings of the revolution against peasant refusal to sell grain to the state, or in many cases to cultivate it at all. This situation threatened the cities with famine. It was a result of the disatrous policies of Stalin, who maintained the NEP, even when it clearly posed a threat to the Soviet state, in order to defeat Trotsky and the Left Opposition.



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