[lbo-talk] Angela Davis a Stalinist?

[Matthias Wasser]

The "socialism in one country" thing depends on a bunch of different
questions. If your analysis of imperialism is such that you think the world
is one big economy, and that the workers of Europe and the settler nations
are paid off, then waiting for the first world to revolt is a fool's errand.
(Some people still seem to be waiting.) If you think that the world is more
like Sid Meier's Civilization and that each society is on its own
progressing from this stage to that stage and eventually to that other stage
- which is of course the understanding we invoke when we talk about "the
developing world," &c. - then Kautsky's point that it's stupid to install
communism in Russia holds.

As far as Soviet policy is concerned it's probably relevant. Once you had a
class with some stable grip on power it was bound to pursue a realist
foreign policy, which sometimes meant supporting third world revolution and
sometimes holding back from it.

On Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 8:21 AM, Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:


>
> The point wasn't stabilizing the Soviet (not Russian, dammit) economy; it
> was accelerating it forward. The vast majority (80%+) of the deaths during
> the Stalin period were a direct, albeit unintended, result of the breakneck
> industrialization policy, which caused famine in the agricultural regions of
> the country as the USSR sold grain abroad to finance the first Five-Year
> Plan.
>
> It is kind of interesting how the Trots focus on the Moscow Trials, as
> opposed to the giant famine, given that the former affected only a small
> number of people in the elite that the average Soviet person didn't care
> about and the latter affected tens of millions of peasants. Did Trotsky
> himself ever talk about the famine?

I wouldn't be surprised to find out that he did - but back when he was in
the halls of power, and Stalin was advocating a middle course, he was very
forceful advocate of rapid industrialization. Of course by the time he was
getting kicked out the entire debate had shifted to the left, i.e. for more
emphasis on heavy industry relative to agriculture, such that even Bukharin
was calling for a more zealous industrial policy.