[lbo-talk] Angela Davis a Stalinist

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Thu Aug 13 10:38:52 PDT 2009


Charles writes: "Today we can confidently pronounce Stalinist industrialization and collectivation premature, forced , rushed and evil. Not so easy to do so in 1930."

That makes it sound like a single decision, taht anyone could have called wrong. But Stalin, and the group around him fought a bitter struggle first to conquer the Bolshevik Party, and then to force collectivisation upon the unwilling peasantry. Certainly it was not easy to hold to the Trotskyist policy in the Bolshevik Party since thousands who did so were imprisoned, and hundreds killed - by Stalin's supporters. But it would be wrong to say that it was not easy to see that Stalin's road was mistaken, because many, many Bolsheviks did, and paid a terrible price for their opposition.

On a far greater scale, many peasants could see that forced collectivisation was a disaster. You can argue that they did not have a viable political alternative, but thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of them did indeed alert the soviet leaders to the disastrous consequences of their policies, that they would lead to famine and the wrecking of basic tools and wasting of resources.



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