stalin vs tito

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Well that's one interpretation. Without liberal thinking, you think Marx would have ever been inspired to think and write a Communist Manifesto? It's kindof like how the Enlightenment was directly responsible for the proliferation of pre-modern European philosophy, culture, art, you name it.

Which liberal nation doesn't have unions? I'm actually curious to know.

i'm not talking about liberal thinking but liberalism as economic model. wait, what kind of liberalism are we talking about? american or european?

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"Maoists" are more idealist than Trots at times. At least the Trots defend the "deformed" Workers' states! In the MLM book of fairy tales, the pure Princess Russia woke up one day and for no reason at all decided to take a drink of the State Capitalist potion, which instantly turned her into a horrible witch. Then she flew away on her broomstick to live in the magical Three Worlds Theory fairy kingdom for ever after.

not all maoists are like that, some just lack more solid, realistic thinking.

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Classic...

Did you even read my post? Or try to?

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I have to agree with Moris on this point about sourcing. I read Maoist critiques of Soviet 'social imperialism' and the unsocialist nature of the entire system post-Stalin etc., while the vast majority of people I know that actually lived under the system, including some very intelligent and informed people, consistently tell me otherwise. It's so frustrating to hear a critique of your country by people with a great deal of theoretical, but no practical information with which to base their critique.

There are some logical fallacies to this argument: one is that one cannot possibly give a correct analysis of a place without actually being there- like I said earlier in this thread, it is possible to be an astronomer who can correctly analyze the moon without necessarily going there. Also, I too know many people who "loved" the post-Stalin USSR, but I have also met many people that loooove the system here in America, or supported Ceausescu when they lived in Romania, etc.

Secondly, just because you may not agree with the source does not mean truth cannot be contained within it. Just because truth comes from an "inconvenient" source doesn't make it any less true... and let's face it, all information is biased in one way or another because it reflects the class bias and outlook of the author.

To be brief: hearsay alone can't constitute as an analysis. Looking at a nation's economy and comparing it to Marx and Lenin's economic viewpoints is how one determines whether a place is socialist or not.

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"Maoists" are more idealist than Trots at times. At least the Trots defend the "deformed" Workers' states! In the MLM book of fairy tales, the pure Princess Russia woke up one day and for no reason at all decided to take a drink of the State Capitalist potion, which instantly turned her into a horrible witch. Then she flew away on her broomstick to live in the magical Three Worlds Theory fairy kingdom for ever after.

This is a blatant straw-man. Maoists do not believe that the USSR just one day up and magically transformed into state-capitalism. Indeed, the ground for capitalist restoration was paved by many errors committed by the Soviet revolutionaries and the material conditions of the time that we have since summed up and learned from. Revisionism doesn't fall out of the sky; it comes about through certain conditions and because of the weight of bourgeois tradition.

One of the key problems was that Comrade Stalin did not correctly understand the basis for the emergence of revisionist lines under socialism. He did not see that the masses needed to be mobilize to further uproot the basis for capitalist restoration, and he believed that revisionists-within-the-party-leadership must be agents of foreign powers. In short, the analysis of the Soviet revolutionaries led to treating revisionism as a police matter.

Treating major political conflicts within the party as a "police matter" left the masses as by-standers. It successfully (and permanently... heh heh heh =/) removed some leading revisionists, but did not really expose or uproot their line -- so that those who replaced them, often picked up where they left off. It also led to some excesses: sometimes people were removed and killed who could have been won over. Sometimes contradictions "among the people" were treated as "contradictions with the enemy."

Killing people over political struggles also chilled the enthusiasm of the people. People tended to "stay out" of politics thinking it was "too dangerous to risk some mistake." It led to passivity among the masses -- and that too strengthened the hands of the revisionists... thus many people who were sick of the purges became very attracted to the "moderate" outlook of Khrushchev and his revisionist clique.

There were many more errors that led to capitalist restoration: overemphasis on Russian nationalism strengthening new-bourgeois forces within the Red Army during WWII, reliance on some pragmatic ways of building up industry, etc.... but that is another discussion for another time. The point is, Maoists do not think capitalism just reappeared one day- it came from the material conditions within Soviet Russia and the errors of the Soviet revolutionaries.


Regardless, Tito was very very brazenly capitalist undoubtedly. In 1956 Tito encouraged local administrations to foster private capital by its taxation and other policies. In 1961 the League of Communists of Yugoslavia decreed that private individuals have the right to purchase foreign exchange. In 1963 the LCY embodied the policy of developing private capitalism in its constitution. According to provisions of the constitution, private individuals in Yugoslavia may found enterprises and hire labour; in fact, some private businesses were allowed to employ up to 500-600 workers and thousands of such businesses flourished according to the Official Statistical Pocket-Book of Yugoslavia of 1963. Just reading old Yugoslav books and articles and comparing them to Marx's Capital will show you just how badly Tito deviated from the socialist path.

If we're serious about building socialism, we can't be pragmatic about it... we need to be seriously looking at what socialism actually IS, not what we want it to be, and make sure to not repeat the errors of the past that would lead us back to the capitalist road. To be true to Marxism is NOT idealistic... as Lenin said: "The theory of Marx is all-powerful because it is true", and by staying true to what Marxism actually SAYS we can dare to scale the heights and overcome ANY obstacles.

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one is that one cannot possibly give a correct analysis of a place without actually being there- like I said earlier in this thread, it is possible to be an astronomer who can correctly analyze the moon without necessarily going there.

It's not that it's impossible for someone who hasn't seen conditions on the ground to make a correct analysis -it's just that I have found that those who have present less ideological, more realistic, and more balanced accounts of system and its problems.

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Also, I too know many people who "loved" the post-Stalin USSR, but I have also met many people that loooove the system here in America, or supported Ceausescu when they lived in Romania, etc.

People I talk to don't all loooove the Soviet system. In fact everyone has one critique or another to make about it. Its just that their criticism doesn't devolve into calling the Soviet system 'state capitalist', but rather usually takes issue with a problem-ridden or corrupted form of socialism.

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Secondly, just because you may not agree with the source does not mean truth cannot be contained within it. Just because truth comes from an "inconvenient" source doesn't make it any less true... and let's face it, all information is biased in one way or another because it reflects the class bias and outlook of the author.

In the same breath you mentioned that all information is biassed and the concept of truth. Let me ask you something: Do you believe that the Chinese Maoists of the 1960s had absolutely no reason in their critique of the USSR other than to altruistically try to correct the Soviet line? Has it not occurred to you that ideological critique can also be a tool with other, more pragmatic and cynical motivations behind it?

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Its just that their criticism doesn't devolve into calling the Soviet system 'state capitalist', but rather usually takes issue with a problem-ridden or corrupted form of socialism.

That's exactly what differentiates revisionism from open capitalism, i.e. that it looks like something else from the surface. Revisionism that becomes open capitalism is no longer revisionism, but open capitalism. A revisionism that can be recognized as capitalism without a Marxist-Leninist scientific analysis serves no purpose, because people can readily see its bourgeois essence.

Well if I'm going to admit that the USSR was becoming revisionist in its later years, my critique won't be based on any deliberate institutional shift away from Marxism-Leninism (ie I don't think there was any one set of policies 'from above' which could document it, at least until 1987 and 1988 and the laws on state enterprise and cooperatives). Rather I believe the revisionism, if it is to be called that, came from a gradual institutionalization of corruption (which began in Stalin's time btw but wasn't able to gain a foothold until Brezhnev's because of Stalin's successive purges of the Party to root out opportunists). My point, and the reason I don't like calling it revisionism, is for one because the Maoist critique has its own sense of politically motivated opportunism historically, and secondly because I would like to believe that it was possible to save the USSR from institutionalized corruption and inefficiency much more readily than a USSR which was fundamentally non-adherent to the principles of Marxism-Leninism at its core.

On that note: I apologize to anyone here debating on the Tito-Stalin split and Yugoslavian socialism, and welcome someone to open a new thread or refer me to an old one in which we can continue the debate on institutional/ideological problems of the late Soviet Union (but please don't refer me to Andrei's essay on the USSR's capitalist revisionism post 1956, purportedly, in his own words, the best thread on the subject )

Andrei wrote:

Greg wrote:

"Maoists" are more idealist than Trots at times. At least the Trots defend the "deformed" Workers' states! In the MLM book of fairy tales, the pure Princess Russia woke up one day and for no reason at all decided to take a drink of the State Capitalist potion, which instantly turned her into a horrible witch. Then she flew away on her broomstick to live in the magical Three Worlds Theory fairy kingdom for ever after.

This is a blatant straw-man. Maoists do not believe that the USSR just one day up and magically transformed into state-capitalism. Indeed, the ground for capitalist restoration was paved by many errors committed by the Soviet revolutionaries and the material conditions of the time that we have since summed up and learned from. Revisionism doesn't fall out of the sky; it comes about through certain conditions and because of the weight of bourgeois tradition.

You are dodging the uncomfortable question! Nobody can deny that everything has it's roots in something else. That is not in contention. What you are avoiding is the overwhelming tendency for certain "Maoists" to treat the Soviet Union in Manichean terms: after September 7, 1953 it becomes one of two celestial combatants indistinguishable from each other in every way. Please answer the question: was the Soviet Union worth defending in 1956? 1976? 1986?

soviet78 wrote:

Well if I'm going to admit that the USSR was becoming revisionist in its later years, my critique won't be based on any deliberate institutional shift away from Marxism-Leninism (ie I don't think there was any one set of policies 'from above' which could document it, at least until 1987 and 1988 and the laws on state enterprise and cooperatives)

That's not true, Soviet78. The theory of 'peaceful coexistence' was a radical rupture with established Marxism-Leninism doctrine! Also, there was surely a plethora of 'policies' resulting from any Congress of an organization on the scale and breadth of the CPSU, the 20th one included. Yes?

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In the same breath you mentioned that all information is biassed and the concept of truth. Let me ask you something: Do you believe that the Chinese Maoists of the 1960s had absolutely no reason in their critique of the USSR other than to altruistically try to correct the Soviet line? Has it not occurred to you that ideological critique can also be a tool with other, more pragmatic and cynical motivations behind it?

What is that even supposed to mean? What other "motivations" would they have? That's simply an ad hominem attack that has nothing to do with the actual question.

The document I presented is filled with plenty of evidence and facts; to dismiss it outright simply because it is Maoist is unprincipled. I have studied Yugoslav documents that I have found in my local university library (including an English-language theoretical journal dedicated to defending Yugoslav socialism) and sources given to me by friends from Yugoslavia. If I can study Titoite documents and opposing viewpoints, why can't others study and analyze what I'm presenting?

Besides, the Chinese were all over Yugoslavia. They had observers, diplomats, study teams, etc. that visited Yugoslavia to understand what was going on and to possibly learn from what Tito was doing. When they saw what was going on (such as the IVth Congress of the League of Communists of Croatia declaring that "competition, the seeking of profits, speculation and the like" were viable sources of development), the correctly concluded that something was wrong in Yugoslavia.

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Please answer the question: was the Soviet Union worth defending in 1956? 1976? 1986?

Umm, not sure when this question came up before, but to answer it NOW: yes, no, and no... but we're discussing Yugoslavia here, not the USSR. That is a discussion for another thread.

The concept of defending Yugoslavia as a "corrupted form of socialism" is essentially a Trotskyite theory, and the idea of a reactionary superstructure with a revolutionary economic base makes absolutely no sense (and rejects the dialectical relationship between the two).

This IS an important question, because essentially we need to understand how capitalist restoration occurs if we're genuinely going to emancipate humanity (especially because Tito was the first revisionist in power).

Anyways: I have presented plenty of evidence to support the fact that Tito was a capitalist, and so I am done with the matter; whether one chooses to read it for what it is or refuses to on the grounds that it comes from a source you don't like is up to the individual.