[lbo-talk] Stalin, democrat

Jerry Monaco monacojerry at gmail.com
Mon May 8 11:27:58 PDT 2006


On 5/8/06, Wojtek Sokolowski <sokol at jhu.edu> wrote:
> Chris quoted:
>
> "When we talk about the repressions, we avoid looking
> at one obvious, but unpleasant, fact. The repressions
> of 1937-38 to a great extent were created not by state
> totalitarianism, but by a profound _democracy_. But
> not a democracy of civil society of rational
> individuals, but the archaic one of the peasant
> commune.

To talk about this in terms of democracy is to stretch the concept of democracy (a very loose notion anyway) beyond comprehension. Chris is pointing to a very interesting phenomena that is not unique to Stalinist terror. Any account of peasant mobilizations down through history will reveal similar patterns. For example look at Georges Lefebvre's "The Great Fear of 1789: Rural Panic in Revolutionary France." No matter what one thinks of Lefebvre's overall thesis, his investigations in how the fear spread and why, shows that the "dark" forces that Chris mentions are at the base of a "class" fear of being preyed upon by outsiders - those who will destroy the delicate ballance of agricultural life. This fear is rarely rational. Simlilar fears can be found in other peasant based societies at different times -- the German peasants at the time of the reformation for example, the English fear of wanderers, Gypsies, and Jesuits in the late 17th century, etc. Every political and economic regime will try to direct this amorphous fear in a direction that benefits those in power. Sometimes it rebounds against those in power.

Look at the way this fear was often used to recruit a layer of poor and peasants into the armed forces and death squads in South Africa, Central America, & South America. (Or if you wish look at the way it has been used by some "left" guerrilla forces in the same locations.) It is not essentially a different phenomena, though each specific situation should be studied differently.

An even broader attempt to describe some of these phenomena can be found in Barrington Moore's classic Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy : Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World, a book that I rarely agree with but is interesting.


> [WS:]
> A similar observation was made by Michael Kennedy (_Professionals, Power and
> Solidarity_) who claimed that contrary to popular myths, the communist
> regime received substantial public support. Only certain segments of the
> intelligentsia vocally opposed it.

As far as the intelligentsia is true I think this observation is right-on Woj. Have you ever read "The Intellectuals On the Road to Class: A sociological study of the role of the intelligentsia in socialism" by George Konrad and Ivan Szelenyi? I read it 20 years ago and liked it. Do you have an opinion?


> Following this thread I argue (_Civil Society and the Professions in Eastern
> Europe_) that the relationship between the regime and the masses was
> dialectical in the Marxist sense. Initially, the organizational forms
> created by the state socialist regime facilitated occupational advancement
> and civic engagement of the "masses" (mostly semi-literate peasants), but as
> that advancement and engagement grew, the organizational forms that
> initially promoted it became the integument of the future development -
> integument that "burst asunder" as the demand for a different kind of
> democracy - the democracy of civil society, and civic engagement of rational
> individuals - grew.

This is very interesting and perhaps if I can find your book in the library I will take a look.


> I think that this development from "democracy in the archaic sense" - or
> "mob rule" or "tyranny of the majority" or populism -which is the back bone
> of all forms of dictatorship - to the democracy of civil society and
> rational individuals in Eastern Europe is probably one of the most clear
> examples of Marx's dialectics. From that point of view, Stalin was a
> democrat at one point of historical development, and a bloody tyrant at some
> later point.

Incomprehensible. What are you trying to say? To use words such as democracy in such sense is simply to use the word so that there is no clarity left. The word becomes meaningless.


> I think it also explains why the infatuation with populism among the US
> lefties is viewed with scorn and derision by most Eastern European
> intellectuals. The naiveté of the US left was often the butt of "yank
> jokes" when I lived on the other side of the iron curtain. This probably
> explains why it was the "hard-nosed" Thatcher who became the Anglo-Saxon
> hero of Eastern European intellectuals after the "velvet revolution" -
> whereas the US political thought was largely ignored.

And here is one of Woj's obligatory rants. I don't get it.... The fact that Eastern European intellectuals were deluded by Thatcher is about as easy to explain as why Western intellectuals were deluded by Stalin or why U.S. intellectuals were deluded by the tecnocratic craze in the 1950s. And it is about as meaningful. If one thing is sure in life it is the ability of modern intellectuals to delude themselves for their own benefit.

I'm not sure what you mean by "populism." Usually such phrases reduce to your dismissal for anybody who might put any trust at all in people who work on assembly lines, as construction workers, as migrant workers, as casheirs, or as a taxi driver. (Just a list of a series of my jobs.)

What you don't seem to realize is the contempt for democracy that you express and that most of the people you lable "the U.S. left" also express. You think very much alike.



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