[lbo-talk] more noxious crap

[Chris Doss]

That's not how the common people understood themselves, including the Whites. Really, the Chechen auls weren't rising up against first the Whites and then later the Reds because of their position on capitalism. They did so in both instances because they wanted independence (and in the second due to the Bolsheviks' antireligious policies). The Cossacks didn't side with the Whites because they thought they loved capitalism, but because they were being ethnically cleansed and their land given to the gortsy. The Karaim sided with the Whites because they had a priviliged position with respect to other Jews. Etc.

--- On Sat, 10/3/09, Marv Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:


> From: Marv Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] more noxious crap
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Saturday, October 3, 2009, 6:03 PM
> Russia was a capitalist society,
> including in the countryside where capitalist social
> relations had supplanted serfdom well before the Russian
> Revolution. I expect you'd be loath to turn to Lenin's
> Development of Capitalism in Russia or to Trotsky's theory
> of combined and uneven development for confirmation, but,
> AFAIK, this issue never really been in dispute in the
> mainstream academic literature either. For that matter, it
> wasn't in dispute within the ruling class; key Tsarist
> officials like Stolypin and Witte well understood they were
> advancing capitalist development, not trying to protect
> residual feudal privileges and practices.
>