Exploring the Soviet Union's Past: Ideological Tensions and Stalin's Legacy with Cosmonaut Magazine

Reflect on the pages of history with us as we unravel the complexities of the Soviet Union's past alongside the insightful minds from Cosmonaut Magazine—Donald , Christian, and Connor . Our engaging discussion takes us through the ideological and economic tensions of the Russian Revolution, shining a light on the nuances of the New Economic Policy and the philosophical struggles within the Bolshevik party. We promise you a deeper understanding of the significant historical shifts and the moral implications of Stalin's leadership, challenging long-held narratives with a critical eye.

Join our conversation as we explore the broader canvas of Marxist ideologies, state power, and the practicalities of managing a socialist economy. We'll tackle controversial topics, such as the historiography of Stalin and the paradoxes of anti-war sentiments, with a careful examination of the interrelations between global events and the shifting tides within communism. Our guests from the Cosmo Pod podcast bring fresh perspectives to these discussions, making this episode an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the geopolitical repercussions that continue to shape contemporary issues.

As we conclude this thought-provoking voyage, we delve into the societal impacts of war and the lingering psychological legacy of the 20th century's traumas. The series wraps up with reflections on the balance between individual rights and state power, critiques of economic planning in the Soviet context, and the ideological shifts that have occurred within the left. Prepare to leave with a profound understanding of the complexities and human costs of revolutionary change, courtesy of our esteemed guests and their compelling contributions to this series.

Transcript

Speaker 1: 1:34

Hello and welcome to varnvlog, and today I am here with an illustrious crew from cosmonaut magazine and cosmo pod podcast. We are here with the someone infamous, donald parkinson, christin cally and call and connor harvey and I don't know connor, but I do know donald and christin going pretty far back. Donald I've known for fucking ever.

Speaker 2: 2:00

Yeah, um, probably over 10 years at this point.

Speaker 1: 2:02

Yeah, it is definitely over 10 years, because I knew you before the mark fisher piece came out, and that's a decade.

Speaker 2: 2:09

So yeah, it was the old north star embracing the infantile days. Yeah, oh god, those were different times.

Speaker 1: 2:15

Those are different times, very different times, and and one of the things about those different times, as we were Discussing back when we came on to the left I mean, I'm a little well, I'm Actually significantly older than you, but we, we were in the same milieu and I feel like most of what we did was argue about the sylvia union and and very overly simplistic ways, um, usually it was either in like, on one end you'd occasionally have your grover fur, maybe, if you were sophisticated, dominica lasordo Maybe, maybe frizo, maybe, maybe like a post rcp, kasama, brand, ml, defense of the soviet union, um, or you'd have their defenses, trotsky's, but they were not Like that dominant.

Speaker 1: 3:11

After the fall, the uh, well, the fall, the decline of the uss wp, which was a long and slow decline, um, and by the time that you and I entered the left, I think the only thing um that was like that was really representing a kind of like Engagement with the soviet union. It wasn't purely anti-communism, was a kind of third campus, uh. Uh, critique coming from either left comms are from certain kinds of trotsky, is particularly cliff, it's po shack, menites, etc. Um, and so there was just lots of arguing about that. And in retrospect when I go back. I've recently, for some nightmare reason, went back and looked at some of the archives of some of those old groups on facebook and realized like we were all fucking idiots.

Speaker 2: 4:13

Yeah, we were all wrong in so many ways like Like we were repeating things that totally uncritically.

Speaker 1: 4:20

I've done interviews about my understanding of soviet historiography and realized that like I had super bias sources and my sources were often uh, corrupt and also when I tried to correct them I would go and pull from stuff that was probably just as bad in the other direction. And now you guys have done three series Uh, when you're working on one you're going to release on the new economic policy and debates around that. You've done a series on the Development of of uh, stalling, marxist linensum, stallinism, etc. The uh, and you had the unfortunate position of basically making everybody angry with that, with those episodes, because you weren't mean enough to stalling for some people and you were too mean for others. Um, mean here meaning say things I don't like, um. And then you did something on the fall of the soviet union, um, which I think was actually pretty good.

Speaker 1: 5:17

I liked your stalling series quite a bit and I know one thing that you and I share Is an ambivalent admiration for bukaren and for parts of the nep.

Speaker 1: 5:28

But I am ambivalent about some of it.

Speaker 1: 5:32

I think Some of it uh, I was reading, actually in a different context, I was reading um the kowski trotsky exchange on terror and weirdly it was relevant, um, to stuff that bukaren was arguing about, why the nep Was necessary and also Maybe why trotsky wouldn't have been the best thinker on those issues.

Speaker 1: 5:53

Kind of was obvious to me in that, in that debate. But even in reading that it was very clear to me like, oh, this is not just you know right deviationist tendency, there's something very real going on about trying to keep the peasantry not over, relying on terror, etc. They keep the peasantry as part of the coalition and there are problems with that. But that, you know, and this way I said with trotsky of a kowski, to not deal with those problems is to just Abnegate the responsibility of revolutionaries, even if you were stuck in an ideal situation prematurely. So, um, where you guys want to start on the relevance of the civil union, maybe talking about the nep, because that's what you, that's what your next series is really going to come on, maybe we'll start there. So what do you think are the biggest understand misunderstandings of the, the ap?

Speaker 2: 6:51

I just want to start by saying that, um, I think the ambivalence that you described was only intensified by the research that we did and I think you know christian had a lot to say on that as well, because I think we both kind of had, you know, this position about the nep Kind of was the framework, was kind of the the golden age of the soviet state and that if they kind of modified it or tweaked it a little bit, keeping it probably was the best option. But the more we read about it, the more it, you know, shook our faith in that argument.

Speaker 3: 7:26

I, I couldn't at least stay um. You know, I remember several years ago john morrow and Samuel farber had jackman articles defending the new economic policy and I remember reading those and being very excited about them at the time and I remember I posted one of them on Facebook. And our friend, uh, shon gillery, who has a you know russia podcast as well, um, I remember he was like extremely dismissive and almost like like In in reference to the morrow and I remember he was like, are you fucking kidding? He was like, and I remember I was like a little hurt by, I was like, oh, you know, it's like clearly this guy's, you know shon's like smart, knows his stuff. And I was like, well, I was like you know, and that that sort of opened up, I think, some room to where I'm like, okay, and I, what we, but we need to do generally is stop cheerleading. Um, uh, period. You know I mean no more, no more cheerleading stuff and um, it doesn't really get it. It's really what that is is a substitute for study and um, and but I was definitely um into the new economic policy.

Speaker 3: 8:28

You know, steven cohen's book, I think, has a very, very rosy and a little bit quixotic depiction of buccane and um, the new economic policy. But once you read about it, you see, okay, there's these real limitations and um, I mean, the thing I'll say in general and I think I think a lot of leftists would do better Is that you're, you are not smarter than any of these people, you know. I mean there's, there's, there's no marks and there's no nothing that you've ever read. That's making you somehow like privy, to like the golden, you know, fucking chalice, that these guys were like too narrow-minded to see or something. And I think probably, probably the big thing with the new economic policy is that, like any, or like the misgivings I think people have, that I think are stupid, is that? You know, when people talk about it, they talk about it only on ideological terms, you know. So they'll say, oh, but it had elements of capitalism in it, and you know, as if that in itself is some kind of like condemnation, you know, um, and I think, and I think one of the biggest ones that really came across to me is that, um, even though there was like an element of get giddiness and zealotry and this sort of thing, um, you know, for someone like Stalin or these people associated with them and it wasn't like they were like excited to Uh, confront the pesitree in this way. It, even into 1929, stalin was still kind of defending the new economic policy, to certain extents as a framework.

Speaker 3: 9:56

You know these, these people weren't like designing things, you know it's. It's like it's really a very, very, very reactive, active historical situation. You get this everything we've read chili, cuba, the whole eastern blog, we did vietnam, cambodia, I mean we've done, studied, so you get slavia, so many countries. And I think the essential thing that people miss out on is that these regimes are largely reactive. They're generally kind of doing the best they can and they're really, for the most part, did not figure out like the magic bullet for building socialism.

Speaker 3: 10:33

You know what I mean. There, there just isn't like some kind of like, well, if only they had just done this thing. It's like no, it this just history doesn't work like that. It's it's, it's very dirty, it's very messy and you have, you have to like find some balance between your own morals and your own principles and these sort of grander limitations of history, these grand limitations of material scarcity, of international, you know, markets, of state conflict. And if you don't get any of that, then you're just you're gonna, you're gonna walk away with like a baby's grasp of the import of you know any of this stuff, or that's just my two cents on you guys.

Speaker 1: 11:17

So what did you kind of pull away from karn that you found unexpected Like? Because you know, I read Cohen's book and I like it, but I also realized that it is a Not quite hagiographic depiction, but it is a depiction aimed at rehabilitation of a tradition that was basically a racing buccane's contributions. And so, as a corrective, I think when, anytime when you have a scholarly correct like that, the first Four ways going to be an overcorrection, um, uh, you know, and I think we're even seeing this right now, with some reevaluations of Stalin, like Dometic Lacerdo's Stalin, a black legend book, which I don't think, I'm just gonna go ahead and say it, I don't think it's a good book, but there are things in it that I do think socialists have to deal with and hopefully, over time, as we move away from these things is like tied to states that have living traditions and their own immediate Realpolitik that we can be more honest about this stuff and more balanced about. You know our view of what happened, which I I do think that largely the Stalin period was a disaster, but I don't I think it was an honest disaster in a lot of ways.

Speaker 1: 12:31

You know, the anti-communist narrative about it makes it seem like it was like just a blood thirsty, free for all, led by, you know, the red czar, and I've very long since come away from that not being the case like so I am very interested in maybe what I'm not contextualizing in the MEP and maybe for our listeners who are totally are those baby communists and efficiently, they do come here. I'm not normally the podcast for baby comedies, I will admit that. But, um, let's talk about what is the NEP, what time period I were talking about and what are the kind of predominant historiographic interpretations of of that period. It's a lot of questions, so I'm gonna just let you guys free for all, pick which one you want to answer.

Speaker 3: 13:30

Well, someone's got to. I don't want to double talk though. Oh no, connor, you should do it. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4: 13:41

So I mean, I guess I'll just start with the question of what is the new economic policy. So you know, basically, for context, it's the period following, you know, the Russian Civil War, war, communism. You basically have this period where you know the Soviets are on their back feet, they've just fought a revolution, they've basically been completely reactive for half a decade at this point to the conditions that they're facing, and the NEP is sort of a way in which they try to have a corrective of that. So a more rationally planned element. Obviously, what's, you know, important here is, when I'm saying rationally planned, I don't mean with recourse to central planning, I mean they're taking a step back in order to try to build socialism in a way that is reasoned and isn't completely reacting to the circumstances of history, and so what they end up doing is trying to build back a relationship with the peasantry that had been damaged over the course of the Civil War and war communism.

Speaker 4: 15:09

So, for example, during war communism, you have this condition of hyperinflation that meant that, you know, the Soviet currency was basically useless and it led to a condition where they had to requisition grain directly, which didn't, you know, for obvious reasons, make the peasantry very happy.

Speaker 4: 15:35

At the same time you have this huge influx of population into rural areas from the cities, because we have to remember that a lot of these urban dwellers there may be a generation removed from living among the peasantry. So they probably have family back in rural Russia, they probably have some sort of ties there, and so they're going back to these rural areas. There's too many mouths to feed with too little to go around. So requisitioning of grain, clearly it's not going to win you any friends amongst the peasantry, and so the idea of the NEP was to use to eliminate the requisition of grain, to use price controls, tax policy in order to then, in opening up of markets, to try to use the peasantry as a basis for industrialization. So the idea being that eventually there would be enough of a market within the countryside for industrial goods that then could be fed back into industry and reinvest. I could go into more, but I think just for the basic answer of what is the NEP, I think I've covered a bit and I'd want to let someone else talk.

Speaker 2: 17:08

Yeah, I think it's important to kind of talk about what war communism was as well, because you've got to understand they basically had what you could call a food supply dictatorship or does a total state monopoly on food basically.

Speaker 2: 17:22

And so essentially peasants can only sell to the state at fixed rates, and so the biggest change really of the new economic policy is the introduction of essentially free market.

Speaker 2: 17:34

In the countryside and then in the cities you also have markets developing, and the big argument from Lenin is that as long as we maintain state control over the commanding heights of the economy and maintain a state monopoly on foreign trade and maintain the rule of the working class through Soviet power led by the Vanguard party so in a way Lenin talks about this model of state capitalism before 1917, before they actually take power. And what happens is that essentially through, in a lot of cases through the necessity of war. For example, the grainwet transitioning that was implemented was already kind of being implemented by the provisional government, if you read Lars Lees' book Bread and Authority. So in a lot of ways war communism was a war economy, but the ideological hostility to the market kind of intensified how far they were willing to go down this war economy routes. So the point where they start saying, okay, well, this is actually kind of like communism.

Speaker 2: 18:39

And the inflation one thing that's interesting is that because money was so worthless, trade unions were demanding that factories pay their workers in goods directly.

Speaker 2: 18:47

Just give us directly the goods that we're making so that we can trade them more effectively.

Speaker 2: 18:52

And the reality is is like this is like kind of a volunteeristic attack on the market Well, it probably was necessary in order to feed the cities during the Civil War ends up kind of carrying an ideological momentum of its own but at the same time like there's no real monolithic Bolshevik interpretation of this period.

Speaker 2: 19:12

That's another thing that is really important to understand is, yes, you have the Karn's book, the transition period, economics, politics, transition period where he's really kind of putting forward this war, communism as actually is moving towards communism thing, whereas Lenin is a bit more aware of the limitations of this and in a lot of ways Lenin shows a lot of pragmatism during this period if you look at the real record. But there is definitely a kind of ultra left current that wants to keep war, communism even going and sees the new economic policy as a betrayal. And a lot of this is the rank and file young Bolshevik militants who sacrifice a lot during this war, civil War, which is just absolutely brutal. It's hard to imagine the brutality and the violence and the misery that occurs during this period and, by the same time, there's this feeling that by bringing back all these what they call net men, all these private middle traders that were essentially giving power back to the bourgeoisie, and all the sacrifice that we made during the Civil War was really for nothing.

Speaker 2: 20:26

And so there is a hostility from the rank and file militant working class towards the net bend. You know, later on Stalin is kind of able to mobilize that towards his own ends through his industrialization policies, which are kind of seen by some as a return to war communist methods, which is interesting Well this kind of always led me to the weird figure that Baccarin plays, because he's like the key, the in some ways post facto leader of the right opposition.

Speaker 1: 20:58

Yet for most of the of the pre-revolutionary and the early revolutionary period up to and beginning through the Civil War, he's actually associated with the left wing of the Bolshevik movement and I think a lot of his excitement about war, communism and then the NEP seems to me actually an extension of this kind of left tendency. But through a means of what we have to keep the peasants as part of the dictatorship of the peasants and the proletariat. And we have to somehow deal with quote, socialism in one country, a phrase that while is associated with Stalin does have its origins in Baccarin himself and how to maintain that split, particularly when they're writing in a context where it's not clear yet. You know, I mean during the very beginning of the NEP period. It's like, yes, the German Revolution and the Civil War have settled out the immediate prospects of a revolution in Central Europe, but it's still not clear that how far off that actually is going to be. So I think all these things are, you know, at play when we judge that.

Speaker 1: 22:14

But I think the point you made at first, that we can't really judge this only through its ideological justifications is actually very important. Right Understanding what Baccarin wrote and what this actually led to are two kind of separate things. So to turn that back on you, other than also alienating some of the younger Bolsheviks who really were, you know, hard fought and were taking positions well to the left of what Baccarin was seeming to take and who else was alienated by this policy, Well, another one of the issues is that the new economic policy really prioritized for quite some time the peasantry and workers at large were sort of D prioritized in relation to the peasantry, and so it's a major concern for the Bolsheviks.

Speaker 3: 23:09

You see this especially in 25 and 26, the facing the countryside and there's really like a kind of a legitimately like almost a pro-Kulak position that's being taken. And for ideological reasons it's very uncomfortable. I mean for material reasons. They were kind of the big producers and you know, it's like there's a really funny issue in socialist history where sometimes your the principle and the sort of ideological qualifications starts bumping up against material necessity in a way that the circle isn't always squared. And Baccarin sort of famously has the get rich slogan which almost everybody's like ah, you should have said that and they sort of distance themselves from this. But for clarification, basically Baccarin says to the peasantry get rich, cultivate your land, you know, go gangbusters out there in the fields, and then you know, the more food you make, the more you sell us, the more we'll sell you goods. And then everybody goes on happily ever after because it increases production. That's the idea at least. But there's a discomfort here and it's like with all three of these. It's almost. I mean, a lot of this reminds me of like, kind of a nurture in nature thing. You know, into some extent there's like there's features that are, you know, there's almost like a perimeter set by the virtue of the state being socialist or with this desire for socialism. You know there's these perimeter set but within those perimeters there's a lot of wiggle room and everybody finds out eventually that if, unless you have like the scaffolding for a non-market society or something, you have to make certain deals. I mean, even in high Stalinism, the collective farms were allowed to produce their own goods, you know their own private plots and there wasn't a choice but to do that. You know what I mean.

Speaker 3: 25:01

I mean this is really the issue. I mean, varun, you're kind of mentioned this and this is really the issue with a lot of leftists. When they're starting off, they're okay, I want to. I'm a new leftist and I'm uncomfortable with authoritarianism for obvious reasons, and I'm also really intense about getting rid of capitalism for obvious reasons.

Speaker 3: 25:17

So the good guys are the people who are really gung-ho about being sort of libertarian, non, you know, aggressive, non-authoritarian, anti-stalinist and this sort of thing, but also against a market sort of to the maximum, and so a lot of people are, I think, are attracted to anarchism or left communism for this reason, but I think, on just kind of plain historical grounds, there's just not a ton of room for that in reality, and there's a reason why these tendencies get brushed away pretty quickly and there's a reason why they don't fucking work out frankly, you know what I mean. You have to have a scaffolding for that and there isn't one in a war-torn, fucking peasant country and, to be honest, I don't think there's a world in which you get rid of authority on some level. I mean, that's just kind of getting into the realm of fantasy. You know.

Speaker 2: 26:09

I just want to add real quick what's interesting is that you know the Tony Cliff tradition even a lot of the left communist traditions will say that the kind of point of no return to where the Soviet Union becomes like irredeemably state capitalist is like 1928, when Stalin unleashes his five-year plans and collectivization and all that stuff, when in reality that's probably the time period when the Soviet Union is the most aggressively anti-market and the most aggressively anti-commercial activity, where you have, you know, very volunteeristic attacks on private trade, where you have basically the closest Soviet Union gets to essentially abolishing the value.

Speaker 2: 26:52

For you have certain points in the five-year plan to basically have like rationing, placing markets for basic consumer goods, and it is very quickly phased out because it's realized that it's actually we don't have the means to actually do these kinds of economic calculations and do this kind of planning under the existing circumstances and it's actually not a good policy for many reasons. But nonetheless, I think it's interesting how you know the critique a lot of people make of Stalin as a state capitalist doesn't really make any sense Because if you look at it, the most intense assault on capitalism in Soviet history maybe second only the war on communism really is the early five-year plans and obviously you have the popular front. You have concessions to capitalism and the old regime under Stalinism in a lot of ways, but nonetheless, you know it kind of shows that if you want to, kind of just you know it doesn't make sense to critique Stalin on the basis that he was somehow like instituting state capitalism. Yeah, that's just.

Speaker 2: 27:58

You have to critique him on other grounds and there are many other grounds to critique Stalin. But the kind of cliff-eyed line that this is all about, like re-establishing capitalism, just doesn't make sense if you really look at what the economics were like and what the history was like.

Speaker 3: 28:12

It would also scrubs some kind of morality to this. That just doesn't. It's not like Stalin was like setting out to be a fucking villain. I mean, like all, like you know, it's really easy to get this like sort of view from now and see how these things play out, but it's like I don't know. I'm sorry, I'll, after I'm done I'll hand it over to you.

Speaker 3: 28:35

But, like you know, one of the more intense kind of like revelatory experiences in this Stalin episode that we did was I read James Harris's book with Sarah Davies I think, or something like this, and called Stalin's World is a really good book. But I decided to make a mark on every page where Stalin does something that I thought was reasonable or that I could conceive of myself doing. And then I would make another kind of mark for anything that I thought was really unreasonable or stupid. And I think it was like something like 90 to 10 in terms of it's like In terms of him doing sort of reasonable things in the day to day, you know, and the effects of these things are they sort of build up to these absolute calamitous moments. But it's like Often I think it's really easy to mis-scribe intention and then you end up with this moralizing version of history where it's like Does that get you anywhere?

Speaker 3: 29:35

I don't think it answers any questions because, like, you can tell me that it's a degenerated worker's state or a bureaucratic centralism or state capitalism, but what have you answered for the next round? What have you proposed that's going to make any kind of difference for the next round? And really the answer to that is absolutely fuck all. And you only really get that from Really just reading tons of liberal historians where you're like oh yeah, these guys aren't really bogged down with all these weirdo mark-solid theories and they're actually able to tell you a lot more about these places and people without this bizarre, almost anti-material moralizing version of history. And that's one of the reasons I think all of us ended up sort of falling in love with these people, like Laura's, lee and Fitzpatrick. And they're not communists I don't think, or not really, but I would rather read them every day of the week than your bog standard Marxist of whatever sects version of what happens. I think it's just a no-brainer to me.

Speaker 1: 30:49

So I have always been alienated by the various categorizations. One, state capitalism is something that Lenin talks about. But you're right, I've never made sense when they're claiming the most state capitalism, so collectivizations, when you're claiming the state capitalism is happening, thank you. That makes no sense, and particularly since also the policy being pursued is literally the policy from the Trotsky's position that was advocated by Trotsky at that point, like it's maybe not the way Trotsky would have said to pursue it, but it is the policy Trotsky would have said to pursue.

Speaker 1: 31:27

The other question we can talk about the purges and the Yizhavchina and all that, and I think there's a lot to criticize Stalin for there. But often I find that my main criticism of him is bureaucracy plus an inability to control shit, like he actually is unleashing social forces that he doesn't understand. It's not that like we're going to eradicate X number of people. It's more like well, there has to be, like it's Taylorist management schemas that capitalists would also do and I've seen it would quote, as in our society as well. So that's also something where I'm like well, I don't want to exonerate Stalin's fuck up there because it's massive, but it's also the mistake. Is not what liberal historians have often tried to do, and definitely not what Marxologists or Marxian historians have tried to do either. So I find that interesting.

Speaker 1: 32:24

I also my favorite thing to do with Stalin is to put Stalin in contrast with Stalin, like when people tell me they're Stalinist or Marxist-Leninist, I often don't even know what they're talking about, because I'm like we're talking about Stalin in 1951 or 1928 or 1935. Those are actually like there's a continuity there. It's the same guy, but those are different policies, different people, different orientations and logic for why they exist are different, and it's just bracketed out like there's, like some, a historical Stalin to both critique and to go on to. And I find that super frustrating because I'm like, yeah, I agree with you. Lars Lee, sheila Fitzpatrick, even a true Nambi, pammy Limbaugh, like Alando Figg, is actually better at a lot of this than me going and reading I don't know. I'm going to pick randomly the upset people, ruder-joneskaja or Tony Cliff or even CLR James, people whose politics are in some ways closer to mind but whose understanding of the Soviet Union seem they seem based off typologies that don't have a whole lot to do with any actual knowledge of Soviet history at all.

Speaker 3: 33:40

It reminds me of probably the funniest response you might want to cut. You can cut this out if it's too personal and in fact, if I remember somebody having no idea who it was got mad at us in our Stalin episode for he's like you should have read more black authors on Stalin. It said you CLR James as an example, and basically was saying this from the point of being a Stalinist, with the idea that if you have read some black authors, they would have really told you how cool Stalin was and the sort of thing. It's like CLR James is the only Marxist that I know to call the Soviet Union fascist. It's like one of the most desperate, like clearly this person is not reading the shit that they're trying to get. We had a lot of that where people were like, actually, if you had just read this one book that you didn't read, as opposed to the 20 that you did, I mean it's like that shit was insane, but yeah.

Speaker 4: 34:41

I mean it's just it's really important to read everybody. I mean, I think for our Stalin podcast we read a pretty wide array of authors. I mean we read liberal historians, but we also read conservative historians Not your like flat out anti-communists necessarily, but you know.

Speaker 1: 35:01

Richard pipes, for example.

Speaker 4: 35:03

Yeah, we weren't reading pipes. But you know, there are certain conservative historians in the Soviet Union. I'm blanking on their names right now, but anybody who's Nymar? Yes, Okay, there you go, he's good.

Speaker 3: 35:15

I don't agree with him. He's good.

Speaker 4: 35:16

But he's good and you have to be able to have those dialogues in order to really get at the history. And I think when we're talking about Stalin, at least in online spaces, it's really we're looking at the personality cult myth around him. It's not really Stalin the man, and I think actually the Sarah Davies book that we read on Stalin gets at this the best that even Stalin was aware of the personality cult around him and that he was not the person. That was the myth that was being made in his own lifetime. This one, this anecdote, really stuck with me and it's supposedly a conversation that Stalin had with his son, and you know, his son is, you know, speaking of his greatness, right, and Stalin goes oh, I am not Stalin.

Speaker 4: 36:14

And basically, to the point of the person that Stalin has been made out to be, nobody could ever live up to that.

Speaker 4: 36:21

I mean, he's basically, you know, the man of steel, a God among men, and what we're trying to do, I think, in the Stalin project, was to give him a fair shake as a human being and like understand, well, hey, why did he make the choices that he made?

Speaker 4: 36:40

I mean, and just to tie it back to the NEP episode that we just recorded. No matter what the peasant question was going to have to be answered, that was very clear by the end of the 20s. It was how they were going to answer it. And again we can all say the choice that was made we don't agree with. But a decision was going to have to be made, and so one of the things we were trying to figure out is surveying like how would we or how what other options were on the table and what we possibly would have done. And I remember walking away from this whole experience saying God damn, I'm glad I don't have to answer that question now, like for all time, because I'm not in that situation, but it was a very difficult task that anybody grappling with you're going to make mistakes.

Speaker 2: 37:42

Yeah, I think one conclusion I came to and we talked about this more in the NEP episode but I think collectivization was absolutely a mistake. I don't think there's any real economic argument for collectivization being in that benefit. I think what collectivization did was it allowed political control over the peasantry. Collectivization, in my opinion, was done for political reasons and had a lot to do with the actual on the ground situation of cadres in the countryside who had to put, who are putting increasingly harsh policies onto the peasantry and dealing with the reactions. And I think but regardless, I think you know Robert Allen and his book Farm to Factory does a pretty good argument that they could have pretty much achieved the same economic growth without doing collectivization.

Speaker 2: 38:36

It's really it was a matter of like collecting, of attracting excess labor from the countryside and I was really like what allowed the Soviet Union to kind of like achieve the industrialization was the fact that I was able to bring all this labor from the countryside and then fully utilize it because they had the full employment policy.

Speaker 2: 38:56

So if they had gotten rid of because during the new economic policy you had state ownership of factories but they were still operating by profit and loss metrics, so they still had unemployment and they still were hiring labor at profit, so when you replace that with the quota system and it's like, well, no longer it's no longer your job to make a profit, it's your job to fill out these quotas that are increasingly being set above what we know you can accomplish, just to get you to put out as much as you physically can, which is another interesting fact, that that your incentive is not to employ as much labor as possible, and so you basically are able to create this economy of labor mobilization. And that's really how the growth of the growth that happened under Stalin was able to happen. And the argument I think that Alan makes is that if you could have done this without collectivization and maybe you had slightly less economic growth, but the human cost of collectivization doesn't justify the small amount that it benefited, that it contributed.

Speaker 3: 40:05

I think it's you can't justify it. You can't justify. I mean that's like I think the thing about Stalin is amazing. Even when you understand, on historical terms, on his terms, even the dilemmas, there is no excuse for the amount of bloodshed and the effect of these policies, even if he didn't under, even if he didn't think that they were going to happen that way. The fact of the matter is, the reason, the right opposition, the reason a lot of you know Yotrotsky and Pragerzinski, even though in 29 they were trying to or they were warmer to Stalin, I mean the thing is, is that everybody realized, like the right opposition realized, that this is what was going to happen. I mean, I think they understood that if you go in with the kind of guns of blazing against the peasantry, you're going to, you're going to, you'll get the war.

Speaker 3: 40:59

And I think the left opposition, even though they kind of toyed with it in the late 20s, by the early 30s, when they backed away from it, I think they understood that, that that was just not worth it, that there's no, there is no excuse for a socialist state to abide over a famine. To that extent that that was just sort of inexcusable and it's really really harsh. There's a lot of caveats to that and whatnot. I mean, especially looking at someone like Trotsky, he's like, oh, I wouldn't have done it that way. He's like, well, yeah, did Stalin want to do it that way? I don't think so. It's like no one would have wanted to do it that way. So and I think this is kind of the issue with what I would call a sort of consumerist approach to picking your ideological tendency on the left is like, oh, here's a person that says things that I, like you know, I saw, sort of identify with them, you know, or like even sort of loose ideas like this is, you know, in history, these things, people are contradictory. The real ramifications of the decisions that are being made are really thick and pregnant with deep material reality in a way that, like, people just don't often consider.

Speaker 3: 42:19

And again, the thing that you know I really enjoyed about liberal historians is they're not trying to tell you about how Stalin felt, you know. So, someone like David Priestlin, for example, who I think we all like adore you know, his book on Stalin, stalin's Stalinism is great, but it's like he's not trying to tell you you know any kind of moral narrative. He's basically saying, like these were the things that play and these are the decisions that are made, and he sort of let you know, there's a lot of times are really good historians, like now. Why would you know this person have done this thing? Well, I, you know, maybe think that it's this, but, like, at the end of the day, I can only tell you, you know, I can only paint so much of the picture, you know, and it's. You're a lot better off with that kind of thing, I think. Then trying to find, like a hero, to excavate, I don't think that works.

Speaker 2: 43:14

Yeah, I would compare someone like Priestlin or JR Gettie. These are smart liberal historians. You know I don't even want to really call them liberals because you know it's just like that's probably what they are, but it's. They're not writing as polemicists for liberalism, they're writing as historians. But someone like like the three books that people kept telling us that we should have like spent more time on were the Lucerdo Stalin, a black legend, grover for a Khrushchev, lyd and all of his other work, and so the argument is the historiography school.

Speaker 1: 43:47

Yeah, yeah, Like well it's not a book, but the Grover for books I'm like so. Almost always it's like we don't know what happened there, for whatever I want to have happen, yeah.

Speaker 2: 44:00

Yeah, the third one is the Ludo Martins another view of Stalin. We read these books it's like they're more polemics than actual works of history. Like I would say the Lucerdo one is the smartest of the three and that it's it's. It does have some interesting arguments, like he does kind of make this argument that the culture of the purges kind of like has roots in the underground wing of the Bolshevik movement and the kind of paranoid culture about that fostered and the purges are kind of a carryover of that, which is an interesting argument.

Speaker 2: 44:32

I thought you know I could actually see like a liberal anti-communist to make him like a similar type of argument. But you know, even then it's that book is ultimately a polemic and trying to kind of convince people that Stalin was actually a pretty reasonable and even at times liberal guy that you know was kind of a national populist that you know we should have more respect for as a kind of a almost Roosevelt type figure. Grover first book is basically just like trying to prove that Stalin did nothing wrong. And Ludo Martins I'm not as familiar with but it's a similar type of like polemic about just saying we need to uphold Stalin in the name of the anti-revisionist communist movement.

Speaker 4: 45:18

I have an own pretty good authority that Grover Furr is not ignorant but knows the sources but actively works to suppress things that don't actually follow in line with his argument. One of the people on my I'm not going to say a name, but one of the people on my PhD committee is a Soviet historian and knows Furr, so it I tend to think that he's probably well aware of what he's doing and purposefully doing it.

Speaker 3: 45:53

But that's there's your metacist. You know, he's like, he's like a monk, that sort of like. Read all of the, you know I mean to his credit. He's clearly even Getty mentions that. There's like things that Furr uncovered that like no one had barfed up yet because he's like he's so obsessed. But it's like he basically captures all this stuff in a bag and then chooses the stuff. That sort of that is evidence for a foregone conclusion. You know what I mean. But the conclusion is foregone. And as far as Martins goes, he's, he's. Martins is a total fanatical. You know zealot, I mean his, his book, I mean. I mean I tell you what I mean.

Speaker 3: 46:34

After reading Priestlin and Harris and all these people, you know for what, like six months or something, and just devouring it. I finally did look at the Ludo Martin's book and within a paragraph he's like calling out Titoist, fascist, zenovist. It's like what fucking year is this, bro? I mean it's like bizarre, bizarre bullshit. And it's like this is not. It's like you know it, in a way like if you're a historian, you're like kind of a law you're, you're bringing up evidence, you're trying to make a case, but like you know that that, that like something like that it's like you know. It's like it's like going to the fucking court of law and being like, oh look, the other guy is, he's a schlub, or he's like you know, your honor that my client. He didn't mean to. You know, it's like the weakest, fucking goofiest shit that I've come across. I was so when I looked at that I was like you know, I can't take anybody seriously who was trying to get me to read that book. It was just stupid, total waste of time.

Speaker 1: 47:40

Yeah, I, the L'Ossetto is the most interesting of those to me because it's it is in some ways the least historical. It's it's basically a Hegelian argument and it doesn't so much there are historical errors in it, at least from what I can tell from reading Italian responses to it when it was published in Italy that aren't getting aired and this it's boosters here in America. But that there's, the L'Ossetto is the most sophisticated in so much that it that is not trying to deny a lot of history that we actually have documentation for and the way that say Fur might and Martin's definitely is. But I, like you guys, came to a much more complicated even just like priestess and cockkins Were my starting points really getting into the history of Stalin, and both of them Did change my opinion on what I thought was going on.

Speaker 1: 48:39

It didn't make me think that that the Marxist Leninism of that time period was any less of a fuck-up, but it did. Let me think that like, oh, this this is not an Unreasonable power man person. This person is brutal in there, like practicality in some ways, but more like an average CEO than like a, than like a genocidal monster. But the these things spiral out of control over and over and over again. And that is the lesson. And to me it made me both.

Speaker 1: 49:13

I Don't want to, you know, I'm not a Kauskis of the Neo or the classical variety and I don't even know what Neo Kauskism is anymore, but but it made me somewhat Pathetic to the fears that like Kauski and Plokanov and and them had about a premature revolution in the first place, like I get why they are concerned now because, like I was in that Kalski Trotsky exchange I was reading I was, I was like. You know, klauski's critique of the terror is like well, if you're in a minority position, you're gonna have to use terror. That's just the only way a minority can stay in power. Like, and it's not. It sounds like a moral critique and at moments it does dip into it, but the basic critique is you're not gonna have a choice and it's only gonna get worse and it's gonna spiral out of control. And while I don't ultimately agree, what would the conclusions Kauski makes from that? I do think that's an observation that's not entirely unfair like Mike McNair gets into that.

Speaker 3: 50:17

I mean in that the revolutionary strategy book, which is the first time I ever heard that Is it me? It's sort of heretical. You're not supposed to say that, you know. I mean that that book kind of goes into this thing where it's like, well, was it premature? And I think I Don't know. I mean it's not for me to say, but it's. I've definitely entertained this myself, absolutely.

Speaker 2: 50:39

I think you know the problem with Kalski's position at the time is that he's essentially was scabbing on our actual revolution. I was imperfect and complicated, as it was in a moment where it really did need all the help they could get and it's like Well is it premature?

Speaker 2: 50:55

Well, you know, perhaps, if you know the international proletariat doesn't come to his aid, then it we have, that's what it will happen. And by sitting around, you know, crapping on this entire revolutionary move, and that's happening and trying to distance yourself from it in every way and and you know you are not, you are essentially, like you know, keeping the workers movement in Europe from coming to the support that the Soviet Union needs, which doesn't say the common turn, also made a lot of major errors. I think the way that they tried to like force a split between revolutionaries and reformists, rather than like trying to win over the entire Zimmer wall of left, kind of, was a miss. What was a mistake? I will say.

Speaker 1: 51:37

I mean, and that goes on, the on the 1918 program is, you know, I think right and I think the where it was done the most fully was in Italy with Bordega and the PSI.

Speaker 2: 51:50

Like I think the way that the split with the Italian socialist was kind of an instrumentalized by the common turn ended up kind of putting the communists in a position of being this kind of minority and you know. But you know we can talk all about you know the way that it was premature enough, but I don't see anything else happening historically other than some kind of revolution. And I think that um Lenin's initial plan, when he's talking about a democratic dictatorship of the proletarian peasantry, I think that the closest that you have to that program being that it really is basically the new economic policy era, like that is probably the closest that you get in Soviet history to the actual original Bolshevik program. Mm-hmm, right, and it's like we're going to do the tasks of the democratic revolution but the proletariat is going to lead it, because the proletariat is the only class that is actually in his hesitant interest to fully overthrow Vizar's autocracy and implement a real sovereignty of the masses. You know, and so you know how it goes.

Speaker 2: 53:03

After that, the labels you want to put on it are more and more difficult. But I guess we're kind of going back to that. But I think that is, you know, the closest that you know the Bolsheviks were to their original vision. And so I think, if you know war communism didn't happen, maybe a lot of the more like reformist socialists might have been more willing to get on board with it, because war communism Did kind of create this like image of you know, these Bolsheviks aren't caring about the material preconditions for socialism, they're just trying to rush in the communism in this backward country and they're just going to recreate asianic despotism. And you know there's a lot of weird orientalism and some of these arguments as well about how, like um, you know, oh, they're just going to recreate the Mongol empire.

Speaker 1: 53:47

I think it's like one of the mentioned Mongol and the ingan, so the two get mentioned all the time.

Speaker 2: 53:50

Yeah, yeah, there's this kind of argument that you're going to like, just revert to like tributary Despotism, which is kind of what the bureaucratic collectivism argument is, whereas I think what really ends up happening is what it's in. It's an alternative path to industrial modernity, is what kind of develops, and it's a it's a path to industrial modernity that is Not being uh, it's not done through commercialist methods.

Speaker 1: 54:15

It's being done through this kind of, you know, centralized command state well, I mean, this kind of leads to a paradox of of, uh, one of the things that, by the time we get to the 50s, that the soviets and then later on the, the, the prc, are really good at is basically national liberation revolutions that end up being bourgeois revolutions, no matter how you parse it. Uh, that's not a bad thing, it's just. It seems to be what they were able to work out a model for that got you not subjected to the great western powers when you did it and it was effective and it is absolutely actually um, particularly by the time you're dealing with it in the 50s and 60s, and they've kind of like taken the kinks out and talk about, like, how to incorporate different groups and not have to do all these massive suppressions and whatnot. Um. But it is also true and and this was, you know, when I was more sympathetic to left communism, this was my sympathy basis that they didn't end up in most cases being socialist states, even by their own standards, and that is a problem, whereas when I the more I studied the soviet union and I was like, if this is your model for what state capitalism is, I have no idea what doesn't meet it right, like, um, because at certain points you don't have market relations, consistent three throughout the society. Sometimes you do, uh, you don't have like.

Speaker 1: 55:48

Even when you talk about like state capitalism and contemporary china which I think is a much stronger argument where, like, the state owns businesses but only as like an ownership partner, doesn't actually like when, when the soviets ran firms, they ran them like it was not, you know, it was not like co-ops and partial things and and like just government majority control on a traditional bourgeois Board of Directors. It wasn't any of that, um. And so I've always been kind of struck about the state capitalist argument, bureaucratic collectivism I just don't know what it means exactly like. Sometimes it feels like orientalism. Sometimes it does describe a development of a nomenclature class. It has a lot of power, um, but one that was not completely uncontrolled, because one of the things, if you take the bureaucratic collectivist argument seriously, then you kind of should actually like stalling, because the person, the, the group he's terrorizing, you know Himself.

Speaker 1: 56:49

Like the people he's targeting, not Not the people that are getting caught up in purges in the greater society where you just have social forces on least right, um, is the nomenclature, it's like it's, it's the, it's the skilled, it's the skilled laborers emerging from the, the bolsheviks, and the working class and the prior intellectuals and the prior intellectual that exist in society. That's Like the way that they control them during, and I think this is a bad way to control them, but it's terror. Then that seems to be the only thing they have. Um, so that's a problem, but, like, if you don't have any other means to tie them into the project, I don't know what else you do, what you know.

Speaker 1: 57:31

And to bring me back to the kowski point, like I said, I'm sympathetic with kowski until until I get to the point where trustee says but what are we supposed to do? Are we just supposed to betray the revolution because it's too early? I know it's too early, like, like, I am well aware of the fact that this was not supposed to happen here by ourselves. Are you going to get on board and have your revolution so we can finish this? Like, what are you going to do?

Speaker 3: 57:54

because until you do, yeah, sure, you're right, doesn't mean anything and I'm not going to betray the people, put us in the power like, but it's like you can tell your your boy all night not to get too drunk but you know, once he's shit-faced it's like you got to take him home, make sure he's you know, get water next to him. You know, it's like I think that's your fuck if that's your your boy, that you got to make sure he's all right getting back. You know what I mean. It's like in all the moralizing, whatever that Save that for later. You know, it's like these, these, this is like a you know process and yeah.

Speaker 2: 58:26

Yeah leaving.

Speaker 3: 58:27

You know, leaving a revolution like, yeah, hanging out to dry, like that's very tricky. You also have like an opposite case, okay, like uh, paul levy or somebody who's sort of um, uh, I think making a very prescient call. That the sort of like March action type politics is, you know, fail, and then it does, and then he's vindicated, and then he's like told you, and that's enough to get him.

Speaker 2: 58:50

Well, the clarifier, real quick march action, is in 1921, the communist party of germany decides to launch an armed insurrection, basically Without any real mass support from the broader working class, and what happens is you just end up with a complete failure. It gets shut down by right wing Freikor you know the right wing militias and uh, you have social democratic and communist workers fighting in the street. You, um, it's basically a total disaster. And so, and there's this whole thing called the theory of the offensive, which is this idea that we need to like launch offensive, like actions, to like shake the workers out of their Mentioned slumber and give them the wake up to the reality of the world revolution. So, you know, this is like the ultra left bellicone Wing of the common turn is pushing this kind of politics.

Speaker 3: 59:39

Luckily, I think if you were to push that kind of thing now, you would get called a fed, regardless if you were or not. I think there's a very healthy skepticism of that kind of thing, and that's, I think, god for it. I mean, could you imagine if you had people on twitter advocating for that kind of shit? I mean, it would just be a nightmare.

Speaker 2: 59:56

Yeah, but I mean during 2020. You have a lot of people.

Speaker 3: 1:00:00

Yeah, I think it came and went. Thank god it did.

Speaker 2: 1:00:02

Yeah, but you know, I've seen, I, you know I've. You know I've not that level of like revolutionary mania, but you do see it pop up in times of struggle and times of crisis. People, you know they start thinking, you know it's time to get a gun. You know it's time to prepare for the armed struggle.

Speaker 3: 1:00:18

You know you got to be so I so careful, I mean, I think this is, this is where the classic Marxist Strategy and I think I think Kalski has a lot to say, but really it's not just Kalski, but it's fucking August Bebel and all you know, all of them from in those early days, which is Okay if revolution is, you know what? I'll put it this way it's thinking about the dynamics of history and society on like scientific terms or on like kind of common sense terms, which I'm sorry, but if you're like, you know, talking about having a, you know, a malice uprising in in the mountains of North Carolina or whatever, then you've, you've sort of you've forgotten that, haven't you? But like, but it's like they talk about these things On the terms that you would, if you were a general or something, okay, you're gonna go into battle. Well then you won't make sure that you have as many people on your side as possible and you have to do that by Showing them that you are, can be a responsible governor of their interests and having them have, you know, buy in and you know, it's like a basic kind of like functional understanding of Like social movement, you know, and it's like that goes such a long way.

Speaker 3: 1:01:37

It's like, okay, while we're people in the eastern block like kind of, you know, happy or ambivalent to see communism fall, and it's, I think it's largely because they didn't have any buy-in, they didn't think that those states like represented them. You know what I mean. It's kind of, you know, obvious, you know, but it's like it, you can use that very simple calculus to, I think, have have a Functional understanding of how, like you know, democracy and mass politics works. Simr reason that Cuba is still around, other than also just being an island and these sort of things. But you have a kind of more Responsive relationship between the state and its people, you know, to the extent that it's capable of doing that.

Speaker 3: 1:02:18

And it's just like I mean a lot of that stuff is like total common sense and I'm sorry, but I think a lot of that comes from the fact that most people get into leftism, from what going to college and going to all the Stupid people classes and learning all the stupid stuff you know, and by which I mean like Like a little bit too much of your theory stuff you know, and then it doesn't ground you. I mean, all it's you know, it's kind of funny. I mean I can really speak for my, you know, parents. They are always, or, um, you know, sort of Bullying me for being, you know, lofty minded about socialist stuff, and I was, you know, always had these like lofty Kind of conceptions of how things were done. And they made fun of me and they were right too, because my ideas were like a little Flaky, you know, in terms of what I understood to be the limitation, the material reality of the world, you know.

Speaker 2: 1:03:06

Well, pushes you to sharpen your own ideas, you know yes, and I don't like that. I like talking to anyone who pushes me to sharpen my own idea.

Speaker 3: 1:03:13

Exactly. I mean, that's the reason I got into all this stuff is because I mean, for years I was just getting arguments with my uncles every year and then finally I just read so much that they wouldn't argue with me about it. They'd be like what do you think about this? And I'd be like, well, 19,. You know, 35 strong, you know it's like in, you end up, you know, and you sort of like, at that point you're not even arguing anymore, you're just having like a discussion and and and um, and I think that's kind of what we're trying to get at. Is that, like you know, this is, this is I'm trying to get something a little bit like a the deeper understanding of this stuff. Um, because I think if you don't have a deeper understanding of this stuff, it look, what does it tell you About the future? Like, what does it tell you about your own time? What, what are, how are you like perfect example?

Speaker 3: 1:03:54

I mean, I've been reading, um, you know you read, uh, um, like capitalist riders writing about crypto or writing about the potentials of technology and stuff, and when I read that stuff I'm like I go, oh, these guys are experiencing the zealotry of, like youthful Comma saw, collectivization type stuff. I mean it's like that same, it's it's the same kind of like youthful, invigorated zealotry that you and you just find it everywhere and and and varn you mentioned this and you're totally correct to and and our dear uh cosmonaut Comrade Amelia mentions this quite often and I think, again, completely correct which is that, like a lot of the excesses of Stalin, you find in every large industry in the united states, ever all the gilded age capitalists when it comes down to um, uh, kind of terror, when it comes down to, um, you know, dog eat dog Survival. When it comes down to the praise, I mean there's a lot of, you know you can find songs written about like you know, uh, uh, you know the gilded age, you know carney, again, these people you know that were like you know the walmart song and this sort of thing. It's like the, the, the cult of personality, it's all in there.

Speaker 3: 1:05:09

I mean these are the kind of trans historical things and like, I think, as marxist, it's not our job to just say, well, they existed, then therefore it's bad, but it's to say, okay, how are these dynamics, how are we going to be able to mitigate and work through these dynamics in the future and I think that's Really the interesting thing is okay, what? What about you know, planned economics can we glean and how do we take this and like look into what's possible right now? You know what I mean, uh, and I think anybody that's like. You know, I've gone really weary of these people. You come across people who are very, very, very, very, very confident and you talk to them and you realize that they just don't. They haven't read as much and they're and I think a lot of people's confidence is entirely a Confidence in their very particular beliefs, is a total, direct connection to their, um, their ignorance. You know, and I think yeah it's very dirty pruger.

Speaker 3: 1:06:14

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. And reading this stuff has been so humbling, you know, like a lot of my like you know, you know fucking braggadocious convictions have really been pilloried. I mean it's almost like a crisis of faith that you have reading this stuff Seriously, but it does make me hopeful, you know, makes you want to read more.

Speaker 1: 1:06:35

I mean it's made me much more circumspect about the Bolsheviks, about and I've been, I've been, you know, on Both I had a very Trotsky-us, informed opinion. I mean I was never formally a Trotsky-us but it wasn't a post Trotsky-us organization. The very Trotsky-us or a formed opinion is like pre 1928 Bolsheviks did nothing wrong ever. Post 1928 Bolsheviks Utterly bad, era probate, totally destroyed everything good about the left, like. Then I went through the reaction to that.

Speaker 1: 1:07:11

Actually, now someone's studying the USSR, I study China and that's that's sort of where I get my and it's even more mixed, honestly, like it like, if we want to talk about, like, trying to make a difficult situation clear, being very hard to do in hindsight, and definitely you can't do it off of just the Ideological written records that you have, particularly some of them are like species to barely literate peasants, it's, it's.

Speaker 1: 1:07:38

You can't really do that with China and you come up with a very complicated like view of like okay, well, I get why I can Stalin chose the KMT, but I also get why that actually leads to the Sino-Soviet split, even though they're gonna blame that on Khrushchev, even though that's clearly not actually the reason, because the origins of that go all the way back to the 1920s, like In that.

Speaker 1: 1:08:03

While I kind of see where China would feel that way and I think it's legitimate, what they end up doing actually in some ways still race to Like the collapse of world communism, like as much as anything the West did honestly and like you know this, having a simple narrative about who was right and who was wrong and whether or not Khrushchev was historical nihilism. And look, you know, I do think someone Khrushchev's condemnation of Stalin was to avoid self-incrimination, like frankly. But you know, I said the chev is still up there and my favorite communist leaders, and I know I'm like, I think I'm wildly unpopular for being a Khrushchev stan, even though I I also am ambivalent about it like it's not, like he was a great leader, it's just, you're in safe company varm.

Speaker 1: 1:08:53

Yeah, yeah, I'm like, I'm like Khrushchev was okay, um, but nonetheless it is. Uh, it's interesting to me when you, when I came to China, so after, after dealing with the complications of China and even something like the, the cultural revolution, which I had a very simple narrative of until I really studied it, I'm like, oh my gosh, like it's not. Like a lot of the stuff that I thought was bad did happen, but like the, what's actually going on in their foam are complicated. And I'm only hearing, even from Chinese sources, I'm only hearing one side of the story. Um, and uh, realizing that, let me go back and review pretty much everything.

Speaker 1: 1:09:39

Like there are some, like there are some real villains in In Soviet history. Like I do consider barrier a real villain. Like I, like I'm not, I can't, and most circumstances go like a barrier was was just operating under the times. No, he was a child rapist. Like he's, he's awful, but, um, but I do have to think about what conditions would cause that kind of person to be able to get that far into the party, and are they just a fault of bad actors? And the answer to that is no, like, um, that's something you always have to keep your eyes out, for particularly in moments of chaos and civil wars, those kinds of people will emerge, and they come from multiple class origins too. I wish I could say they were just the bourgeoisie. They're not, so it's something that we have to look out for, um.

Speaker 1: 1:10:29

But I think it's really interesting that the study that you know the orderly server union is some ways the late Soviet union is, is an easier story, just because it's clearer to us, we have more documentation, it's not under the fog of war, um, and it's also clear that that the early Soviet union really made western powers afraid. We might complain about breznev in the lake cold war, but breznev and goreby did not really scare the west like. That's pretty clear um, so it's an easier story. I think it's, uh, I think it's. It's still one that maybe we should dive into sometime about, like, what was actually going on in the late Soviet period. And I think, um, I think goreby chaff is a much more mixed and like I have come away from studying him, as Is uh, I see him as a tragic figure more than a villain, but um, nonetheless, you know it's, it's a 90 year history. That's another thing about Soviet history. It's unfortunately not very long, um, and yet I am always amazed by what I don't know about it, like, um, and that's when my approach is just finding all this stuff out.

Speaker 1: 1:11:45

And uh, I think I too have been moderating my positions. I've become a lot, I will admit this. I've become a lot more distrustful of trosceus narratives. Um, even though that's probably the historical position closest to where I emerge now, I'm still a lot of. It seems more self-serving than people realize they take. They also make huge mistakes. You, there's a reason why no one talks about what the trosceus were doing in the beginning of world war two, like not because they were off actually siding with hitler they weren't doing that but like they weren't defenseless then, like that's weird, um, you know stuff like that. So I think that I think those histories I also think our history of the left opposition and of the left communist are are inordinately cleaned up.

Speaker 3: 1:12:33

Um, well, this is that pre-sland gets into that. I never put the connection together, but he basically draws a pretty straight line between you know what he has, this like kind of quadrant of understanding bullshit, vicka, deology, and then you, and so he's got, like you know, a kind of a populist versus a more bureaucratic, you know approach and a uh Well, jeez, you guys might have to help me with it sort of populism.

Speaker 2: 1:12:58

Populism versus technicism. Yeah, yeah, technocracy.

Speaker 3: 1:13:01

Yeah, and then there's another, there's two other quadrants, which is basically what? Uh, it's not market, non-market, but it's, I thought, like a kind of um, maybe it's like a relationship between, like the amount of authority or democracy that's used. I can't quite remember.

Speaker 2: 1:13:19

As I sit here saying, it's um, it was Well, you had like um, a kind of um, authoritarian, and then you had mobilizationism. Then you had a more kind of like democratic bottom up, yes, mobilizationism. Then you had a more technocratic but liberal politically approach versus a more technocratic but, like, um, you know, top military, top-down style approach, and there's obviously all in no one figure consistently stays in any of these categories. It's right all these different approaches end up being used by Stalin in different eras, which makes it even more.

Speaker 3: 1:13:58

That's what that was. What was so interesting is that, like looking at so I'll put it this way like, if you're, uh, like you know, sort of a kind of a libertarian, kind of anarchist Kind of conviction or something it's like okay, I want I. I want no market, but I want a certain amount of like freedom, freedom or something it's like okay, well, most people are still going to engage in certain kinds of activities and there's like who is going to tell them they can't do that? You know, I mean, at some point you get to like the socialism in great part is a juridical scheme. You know, there is a there, there is a that. That's kind of the whole thing.

Speaker 3: 1:14:38

It's like, okay, if we want to have, um, you know, a non-market exchange of this sort of thing, like there's a lot of market activity, that is pretty just, uh, you know it's gonna gonna happen, or people do it. Especially, they're gonna do it in times of war. You know what I mean. So who is going to? You can't, you can't both have like a libertarian, socialist regime and a kind of a front against the market in this way? They're I just like. I mean, like, in what world is that possible?

Speaker 2: 1:15:09

So yeah, Trotsky gives a classic example of like you want to, um, you know, get rid of the market. You want to have acts, free access to goods, okay. But, um, it turns out that you can't produce enough goods that have just total free act, you know, x? Good the roll, free access to it. So you have to ration it, okay. So what does that mean? Well, it means that ration lines form, okay. And what does that mean? Well, it means that you need A police to keep the ration lines from becoming disorderly. Yeah and so, right there, you see, you know the problem is like. And so the scarcity means that people have the way to rationalize, and that means black markets pop up. And you control black markets. So you have to have political repression. And so, you know, it becomes obvious that, like, it's not a matter of pure political will, you have to actually develop the material Infrastructure that allows you to do something like happen, free access to a certain good.

Speaker 3: 1:16:05

I don't know if you guys feel this way, and maybe this is a little bit of exaggeration on my part, but I found, I found that a lot of these issues, like a lot of these issues, to be aware of them, to get turned on to them, you have to be. You have to be a Marxist or you have to be in the the, the water of Marxism and stuff. But I don't think that necessarily solving them will is like Marxism alone, or even for the most part, is not going to get you there. You know, I think some it's, there's like a part of me like seeing these same Sort of dilemmas open up in different societies, in different places, and marxists and capitalists alike not really having like having these various kind of like ways of dealing with them, or something it's like.

Speaker 3: 1:16:54

At a certain point I'm like okay, it's not that we need a new theory or something, it's not. I don't think it's like as simple as that, but I do think that it's like, and a lot of places like, well, um, I don't, I don't think being a marxist is really helping me with these Particular set of problems. I think, oh, like, in a way, there's something deeper at hand that requires a deeper, like in in engagement. And it doesn't help that, like, a lot of the major marxists have like kind of flimsy, goofy, very surface level readings of some problems and it's like okay, well, to what extent is like you know, it's like a you know we have to like even dig deeper, deeper into this stuff if that makes sense.

Speaker 4: 1:17:38

Yeah, no, that's a. It's a really good point. Um, and I, and I feel lucky that Even though I had spent I have spent time in sectarian organizations that I never Really fully like imbibed any one reading of soviet history. So, going into this project, I've really just been open, like really open-minded to it. Um, just like I, and I also feel lucky in a certain sense that I came into when I was educated in the marxist tradition by someone who was Connected to the living tradition, like.

Speaker 4: 1:18:13

So, just like a little background, my Mentor in my ma program Was down in chile during the revolution. He was an american, going to, you know, basically support and also study the revolution, and ended up getting tortured, uh, by pinoche's roots, you know. And so like there was, and then he, his teacher, was earnest mandel, so, but I never really got the full mandelian trotsky view, um, I more. He basically told me to study history. He said don't waste your time with too much marxist theory, study history, that's going to do you much better. Um, so you know, like this project for me has been really enlightening and I think the biggest thing that I've come away Is that I don't think any of us is going to fully know, have the answer as to what happened. I mean, even the people at living at the time had really couldn't fully grasp what was happening, let alone us sitting here From 2023. And I think what we can do is is look at the questions that are important. Um, and I think one of the things that that I came out of this, the nep Experience, was um, you know both.

Speaker 4: 1:19:33

On the one hand, this you get this caricature of the nep that it was um, you know, basically a complete opening up of markets, and that you know it was basically a free-for-all. You know, like, like christian alluded to earlier, oh, yeah, you know, peasants, you know, get rich. The reality was the, the. The amount that markets were actually opened up was basically in the retail sector alone. So that was where your net men were coming from. It was in the, in retail sales, not even in wholesale sales. Uh, those were still controlled by the state.

Speaker 4: 1:20:11

Um, now, you know you can get into the fact that you know, opening up those retail markets also, then put pressure back onto the state, but you know, need, needless to say, it's a lot more complicated than you a picture, than you often get. And then, on the other end. You know, when people start to talk about the, the following period of collectivization and then the first five year plans. Well, you know, you, you get the sense when you hear people talk that Planning was far more sophisticated than it actually was. But when it really comes down to it, I think var and you alluded to it early it was basically a a taylorist quota scheme was basically, you know the we need 3 000 tons of steel, let's set our production quota at 6 000,. Right, like it was not like this fully instantiated system where they were getting information from the populace and they're getting information from this widely distributed network. Basically, it was very, very crude.

Speaker 4: 1:21:17

Um, it was a, it was a blunt object that relied on terror, and I think, just, I want to tie back to the, the question of terror that we talked about earlier, part of the.

Speaker 4: 1:21:30

I think the issue that we've seen come up time and time again, especially when we want to talk about the collapse of the Soviet Union, is that that that early recourse to terror Is, in a way, what dooms the Soviet Union to the, the path that it followed, because there is the sense that Once the terror went away, for a few decades you had the memory of the terror, but which was enough to keep discipline. But then, once that starts to fade, that is when you really get into this period of stagnation and where you, you know, when you look at cultural studies of the 70s and 80s in the Soviet Union, this like real sense of fatalism and nihilism that that comes up because there really isn't an idea of where are we going to go from here. So I think, like all just to Go back to, this is, I think we really need to be thinking about these questions, um, and getting to the root of the matter as much as we can, uh, as much as we can.

Speaker 1: 1:22:51

I think that's actually a fair place and maybe a fair place to stop One of the things I think that we have to deal with as we pivot towards this. I've been recently, you know, I've been responding to someone who said being a Marxist is not always the answer to these questions to you, and I'm like, the more I study Marx and I think what I have done to Marx, what you guys have done to the Soviet Union, in some ways, is like going into every fucking letter and like figuring out this position, trying to correlate it, not just what he said, but like where we are in the international. Who are we debating with? What's this, this interposition to? Because it's almost always this interposition where Marx is triangulating dialectically between two other positions, that he abuses the outer edges of acceptable opinion and coming up with like, and there's certain things that he does not answer.

Speaker 1: 1:23:38

You know, you know you guys are going to eventually talk about national policy in the Soviet Union and national policies, one of those things where, like Marx and Ingalls are frankly, all over the place, like they are like there's no there, to me there's no way to get around that. Like I was even trying to like write down why mark, why Ingalls considers the Slavs and nonhistoric people, and then compare them to the Irish and go like, well, no, they're. Like I don't see why one is here and the other is here, other than, like you want them to be for immediate political purposes. Like there's not actually a good guideline here for what we can consider a valid national policy or this and the other. And so when people go return to Marx, but then they think they already have the conclusion, it's more like, well, return to Marx so that you can say that you have a conclusion that probably isn't there. Right, like that we actually still have to think a lot of this through. There aren't good, great guidelines.

Speaker 1: 1:24:38

I mean, I still go back and forth between the debates between Bauer, stalin and Panna Cook, and sometimes I'm with Panna Cook and sometimes I'm with Stalin. I'm rarely ever with Bauer, because the Bauer answer seems to create all sorts of internal problems and divisions within the working class. And I find it interesting. And then I find I go back and read you know, I've recently gone back through state and revolution a couple times and realize Lenin's also good doing this, like the number of times where he's like even making concessions, like yes, you know, these infantile left-wing communists and the Netherlands are, are crazy. But there's certain things which the right's about here, here and here.

Speaker 1: 1:25:22

I know that sometimes Donald doesn't like that text, but like there are things about that when he's talking about the nature of the state, and like what you're asking people to do and this paradox that you, kristen Connor, both mentioned, where people want like the controls of limiting, of limiting certain kinds of organization, particular organizations that will fill natural people because they already exist, like market was raised but there's all kinds of ones.

Speaker 1: 1:25:49

Like people fall back into fear of my feudal relations and stuff too, and you having to foreclose that. Well, you don't, you do have to foreclose that in times of stress by prohibition, and that's going to involve some variety of force, which means you have some variety of state. And that's why, you know, I do think that's why Marxists are like yeah, we can probably get with the state at some time, but we're never going to like the promise is never unalienable. You know, no authority ever. That's one thing I want to like point out. That's Marxists are like when in writing on the state never goes like well, we're going to never have authority. He seems to think that the people will just become an authority, like like popular consensus will be an authority.

Speaker 2: 1:26:35

But we're not there yet.

Speaker 2: 1:26:37

Like I think you know one thing that reading all this stuff and studying the terror especially and it's convinced me is that you know, you know I'm probably going to get some flack for saying this, but I mean me and Christian have talked about this a lot too. But there is a small, there is a merit, the small L liberalism in the sense that you do need to have protections of individuals from abuses of the state power, that there is a need for this concept of people possessing certain rights that provide them with protections from arbitrary abuses of state power. Like, I don't think we can move past that idea. You know I I'm very conflicted on this because I don't want to give too much to liberalism, I don't want to concede too much to liberal ideology, but I do think that you need to have this concept that people should have protections from arbitrary abuse of state power does have merit. Like people should have right to a trial, for example. You shouldn't be able to just shoot someone without a public trial. Personally, I'm for abolishing the death penalty entirely, which you know the DDR, for example, did do in the 1970s. But you know there are other abuses of state power that happened regardless and I think, like in a lot of ML theory.

Speaker 2: 1:28:01

The idea is like well as a dictatorship of the proletariat.

Speaker 2: 1:28:04

There's no separation between the proletariat and the state because the state represents the proletariat's interests. So therefore there's no way that the individual needs of a citizen can go against the needs of the state. But the reality is that Lenin actually does concede that this can happen. In his debate with Trotsky on the trade unions in the 1920s he actually argues that the trade union should maintain a level of independence from the state so they can defend the workers immediate interests from, you know, the broader decisions of the state. So there is a, you know Lenin does basically admit that the interest of the dictatorship of the proletariat or the decisions of the state can go against, you know, the individual needs of the worker and there should be protections of those individual needs and rights. I mean, I think this isn't developed enough by Lenin, I don't think. But there is, I think, a need for that kind of small L liberalism and we don't have to call it liberalism, but that's just kind of how this idea is academically referred to, is you know?

Speaker 2: 1:29:05

this idea that people have rights, you know, and that you can say that this is a metaphysical idea, but I mean it's. It's the basic argument that people need to have protections from arbitrary state power. I think is pretty hard to argue against.

Speaker 3: 1:29:22

Well, me and all the, all the, the Soviet response to this is just say the thing that you like and put the word socialist in front of it to kind of legitimize it more. But, like, socialist legality is, you know the word that you get from Bacarra a lot. Or even like in the you know the social market, you know you get these kind of like funny things where, like, no one wants to say what they mean because they don't want to pin themselves up, you know, into a corner. But like I, yeah, I think. I mean, if you're going to have a revolution, you know you've got to be serious about that and all the things that come with it. And that's not a pretty picture all the time. And I think, if you know, if, like, if you're going to do war, communism, then by God do it and execute the people and all this stuff. You know, whatever you have to do, that's. There's a certain historical place for that kind of thing, as regrettable as it is. But once that is over, it has to be over, you know. And if you're serious about democracy, then you have to be serious about democracy.

Speaker 3: 1:30:17

I mean, another cause of that episode that I was on, that you guys weren't was talking about Czechoslovakia and the just the extent to which there was. They could not square the circle of wanting both democracy and legality and all this stuff and socialism. You know it's was really tough. I mean, you really got the feeling that Dubček and these people were just absolutely struggling to figure out a way, a way through these things, and I think I think they're their burden, is our burden, you know, to this day, which is like you know what is a planned economy Really?

Speaker 3: 1:30:54

What is it? You know beyond. You know beyond just kind of abstract principles. You know what really do we mean by democracy? What really do we mean by cooperation? You know what really is that. You know it's like this shit is very heavy and it's really I yeah, I mean I would just, I would just would just caution, you know people to be a little bit more thoughtful when they talk about these things, because it's a lot of it gets pretty deep. You know is one of the reasons also, like you know, really like to engage with, like you know, liberal economists and stuff too. You know, I think there's just there's a lot out there that you can learn from. I mean, I've been listening to reading Adam twos and people like that, and I think there's just, you know, there's no reason not to engage with this stuff critically. We should gave you everything critically, obviously. Yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:31:43

I will say this, and I think, like Orthodox, hardline ML ideology is pretty much a dead letter and I don't see much of a future for it. You know, I guess some could argue that China is going to return, or is returning to, you know, a kind of like hardline ML stance.

Speaker 1: 1:32:02

But I'm I'm skeptical, I'm skeptical, I'm very skeptical.

Speaker 2: 1:32:07

I think you know it's. China is a whole other can of worms. I need to do more research on China to talk about it with any real confidence or authority.

Speaker 1: 1:32:17

The more research I do on contemporary China, the more confused I am about what the right?

Speaker 2: 1:32:23

But I do really think that, like the Orthodox hardline kind of Marxist-Leninist ideology is its own worst enemy, you know.

Speaker 1: 1:32:33

I have my theory about why that exists, donald, is that it's a reaction to both like the, the, the, the anarchism and movementism and later, later left communism of the of the odds and early teens after Occupy, and also frustration with the right and center right of the DSA Right. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 2: 1:32:57

That makes a lot of sense and I just think a lot of people turn towards that kind of ideology because they realize they've been lied to about communism. So it's just a bracy other extreme which is like the most. You know everything that historical communism has ever done was, was correct, and we just need to. You know there's the whole theory of historical nihilism that if we, you know, are too critical of Stalin and reject Stalin too much, then we can. We're just, you know, destroying the, the whole ground that we stand on. But I don't, you know the ground we stand on has already been kind of broken with the collapse of Soviet Union.

Speaker 1: 1:33:33

Yeah, seems weird to be dying on that hill after the site of Soviet split and the right, right, exactly, and the marketization of most of the of the former communist countries.

Speaker 1: 1:33:42

It's real hard for me to be like, and Khrushchev, saying a mean thing once, is why everything fell apart. I mean the, the other, the other part of me is like oh, but we like, it's OK to have historical nihilism towards the entirety of the USSR after 1982. Well, hey, come on like, but it is. I mean, I think we're in an interesting time period where we can learn a lot from this time period, and we can learn even a lot from the Cold War, but none of it is going to speak directly to us. We, that's. That's my frustration with a lot of Marxist Linen. Ism is just like, like, even if I took you seriously, even if I believe in everything you're saying about contemporary China and the USSR, etc. We're there's no way in which in which me and the socialist core I mean, excuse me, and the hopefully socialist core, but in the, in the capitalist core right now could could equate conditions that we exist under to those conditions. There's there's not many parallels, honestly, like there's some, but they're vague and and so for me to guess we can lift that and didn't apply it. Now I'm like that's, I can come up with orientations and principles and apply now. Maybe you know like I have my theoretical minimum for communism.

Speaker 1: 1:35:08

I think Parker McQueen when you guys stated something and I know he got a lot of pushback but I was like you know what? That's my theoretical minimum. It's not my belief set, but it's actually like anyone who believes this is at least in the same page as me, right, like, like there's a spectrum of where we can go with this and I'm probably on a different spectrum than Parker, but like broadly, the only one that's contestable is like our Marxist, always democratic, and I would say no, but in general we try to be like. So I guess you know, I guess it does kick the board deguest out because they have this real ingrained hatred of the D word, but nonetheless I do think it's kind of how we have to be right now.

Speaker 1: 1:35:58

And even people who I think we have to fight against, like there's a lot of the of the kind of social democratic, democratic socialists, whatever the fuck they want to call themselves, end of the DSA, which is not in dominance right now. But I do think we have to actively polymerized against. They are still comrades, that's the thing. Like that's. I think people missed that about some of what I. What I say is like no, they're still in the realm of our allies and they probably ultimately want many of the same things as us to treat them as utter reprobaic enemies, as a disaster, like, even if I think they're wrong and if I think we have to, like politically defeat them like you know, I don't that's the different thing than saying, no, you're not socialists, go, fuck off. I mean, I do think there has to be a line, but that line should probably be drawn fairly broadly.

Speaker 3: 1:36:48

I think, similarly to you, know, with regards to the ML thing, now, I think you're exactly right and I think there's a certain directionlessness of movementism that you even see in the last couple of years that affects this. I think a lot of it's too, is that you, you start to read a little bit and you realize that a lot of the things that you were told about the Soviet Union is wrong. A lot of things that you're told about Stalin are wrong. A lot of things, probably everything that you're told about Cuba, is wrong. And then there's Wales, and then all of a sudden you're, you know, you're utterless, and if you've been lied to by the one side, then like why wouldn't you just, with full embrace, you know, across the Rubicon? In that way, and I think that's what a lot of people do I think they end up yeah, they end up very utterless, sort of in the middle of the sea, and you want to be attached to something. You know. You want a historical, even for the, just the perspective of, like personal identity. It feels good to be attached to a historical project and say, like I identify with this.

Speaker 3: 1:37:48

I don't think this doesn't make for very good critical thinking or like historical criticism. You know what I mean. I think it makes a lot of these people stupider, but but but they're no more guilty of it. I mean they're extremely guilty of it because of, like, the severity of the things that they sort of support often, but like everybody does, this I mean to a large extent. I mean I don't think even I or we are like free from like attaching ourselves to certain things for the purpose of identity, and sometimes you kick the can down the road as well. I mean, like you know at least.

Speaker 3: 1:38:24

I mean I remember one of the things that I used to do when I was younger that I'm very embarrassed by is I've sort of assumed that's like you know, say, as it regards, like you know, like a certain topic or something, and it could really be anything, but you know, especially as it regards economics or something.

Speaker 3: 1:38:41

If I saw that there was a book written about it, then I'd be like, oh well, there's someone figured this out. So like I can kind of champion this or I can feel comfortable saying this because somebody figured it out, and then, like you start to read these people or you follow them on Twitter, you know and you see just the amount of stupid shit that people believe and say, even people that you've like kind of trust and you're like, okay, well, maybe maybe I don't need to, you know, put this sort of on my shield when I'm going out and talking about these things and you become a little bit more reserved with what you think you know and what you think is even possible and this sort of stuff. I think I think that's a distinction has to be made there.

Speaker 4: 1:39:23

Right. I agree with that and I think I came out of the most recent experience in researching a lot more sympathetic to social Democrats. Not that I totally agree with them, but more to the point of. Whenever I hear a lot of leftists confidently talk about planning, I really do start to get my my hackles up, like in very skeptical. I think we are far further ahead in our planning capabilities across society than, obviously, in the 1930s. However, I don't think it's as simple as going from Well, walmart and Amazon have essentially planned economies. Now we can do that on a national, then international scale. I don't. I don't think that's that simple.

Speaker 1: 1:40:25

Don't leave Phillips. Plus cybernetics equals communism. Yeah, equation there, yeah.

Speaker 2: 1:40:31

And there's a lot to learn from cybernetics type stuff, absolutely.

Speaker 3: 1:40:35

And I don't like.

Speaker 2: 1:40:36

London's advice to like learn from the capitalists. Basically, like you know, and that's one thing I think the Soviet Union kind of could have done better by being more lenient on the specialists. Like I really think, like the kind of communist conceit that like we can answer every question of Marxism and bourgeois, specialists are just, you know, like obstacle and we're going to get me to get rid of them as soon as possible. Yeah, I think you know that kind of bureaucrat, anti pop, you know kind of anti bureaucratic populism, I mean it's. It does appeal to the more libertarian, anarchistic side of things, but like I think it was a mistake. I think you know technicists in a lot of cases have the right approach of you know, let's actually like scientifically look at the economy and do real scientific planning.

Speaker 3: 1:41:23

You know, yeah, Well, the extent of cybernetics or like veracity in a very losing the like, the idea extremely largely you know, is like, okay, how much of it is so practical that it's just already implemented by the capitalist world? And the answer to that is quite a bit, you know. Yeah, quite a bit.

Speaker 4: 1:41:42

So anybody?

Speaker 2: 1:41:43

who's worked for a large corporation.

Speaker 2: 1:41:45

you know anyone, but I think cybernetics, you know, can help us kind of understand what planning really is in terms of the idea, like the metaphor that cybernetics always uses, the idea of, like the captain of a ship the captain of the ship isn't single handedly controlling everything, they're just, you know, reacting to things in certain ways. Oh, idea of the cybernetics idea of control, I think really does kind of bring something to questions of planning. I'm not an expert on it. I do find annoying that a lot of leftists like use that as a silver bullet.

Speaker 2: 1:42:17

Yeah, yeah, the reality is like these are political problems Right, we saw, through collective democratic decision making and not for this kind of some some whiz kid coming out of a brilliant cybernet theory and implementing it.

Speaker 1: 1:42:30

Oh, I think you know the cybernetics is a way around, like cancelism and maybe God's plan, as it actually says. But then it pretends that there's an objective answer and that there's not a feedback and the thing about the cybernetic metaphor right, you and you write about that. But also like it assumes there's an expert setting up the system that's actually in control. It does. It may say it doesn't, but it does, and in that sense it's interesting.

Speaker 1: 1:42:58

I mean, I do find it interesting that the other thing when people use cybernetics as an answer, they often like skip over the problem of the 80s and 90s and while it did, while it did just get kind of tied to a couple of different things, including software development, because of the the crisis of the behaviorless assumptions of the cybernetics. What I find interesting about it, though you want to talk about learning from the socialists, we do have to admit that why we got cybernetics was was the capitalist learning from learning from the capitalist? But was the capitalist learning from the socialist? Because they were taking things and and and and bugged on off and other things that were coming up in the Soviet Union that Gosplan and the Central Committees didn't accept, and then running with it in a way that would would be useful for for capitalist development right. I mean, there is interestingly still a dialectic in a way between the capitalist and communist world, that is, that largely capitalism has been more able to benefit from it's kind of maddening actually.

Speaker 3: 1:44:03

Leon Tiev, the out with tables. The capitalist got a hold of that, even though it was like a homegrown. Yeah, yeah, it's one of the more embarrassing aspects of socialist history is that? Is this like, really yeah?

Speaker 1: 1:44:17

I mean, like the Soviets had a better, had a better personal computer than the capitalist though, but they were so afraid of military secrets they didn't fucking release it Like it's it's. It's mad when you start learning that, like the technological history of the Soviet Union, you're just like man. We were so close to so many things so many times. But again it's easy to dismiss that from our concerns now. But they were right to be kind of worried about. Like this is also like this is Reagan's America pushing down on them to like this is you know when this is really coming to head?

Speaker 1: 1:44:56

And the Cold War, which had been sort of in detente a little bit in the in both the Nixon and Carter administration. I mean, nixon was amping it up and down simultaneously, but, and so was Carter really to, but nonetheless it like by the time you get into late, reagan, there's there's absolutely no question that politically, the United States wants to bring back the, the red menace again. And so what I have done, differently than what the Soviet Union did in regards to their computing technology, I don't know it. In hindsight it's pretty clearly a mistake, but that's in hindsight. That's a different problem.

Speaker 2: 1:45:34

Like it's just the reality is that when you're in that position of like always having to play catch up with the West out of desperation, you're just creates this culture of paranoia and clamping down and, in hostility, the pluralism and openness and you know it creates a lot of the negative characteristics that you know kind of become, been rationalized by ml readings of Marxist.

Speaker 4: 1:46:00

Right, I, and I don't I mean obviously people who grew up in the 80s probably remember how, the paranoia of the right, of the new red scare and the ramping up of those. But like I, so doing research, my ma research, on Cuba, I read some Rand Corporation, basically foreign policy plans and they're literally calling for turning Cuba into a parking lot. I mean that is the level of animosity towards communism in the 1980s. Yeah, they are going on the full offensive.

Speaker 1: 1:46:40

And they stay that way even after communism falls. Rand Corporation stuff is about what they should do to Russia. It's basically Balkanized it, so much so that George Kennan and other Cold War ghouls are actually saying, like dude, chill out, Like we don't need to like it is funny you know how much Kennan was pushing back against people more extreme than him, Right?

Speaker 2: 1:47:02

Yeah, I read a biography of him a while ago, actually, Actually you know speaking of the 1980s, and that is a fascinating figure. Yeah, it's you know it's. I've been reading that book, abaration in the Heartland of the Real, which is like that big book about Timothy McVeigh and all the conspiracies around him, and it's pretty good so far. It's pretty well researched and it's not really making any like insane. It's not like Program to Kill, which a lot of people who like that book also like where it was. Just like these fantastical queens.

Speaker 2: 1:47:28

But it was just kind of talking about the culture in the 1980s when Timothy McVeigh was growing up and just how all these anti-communist you know paranoid movies are being put out and the right really was going hard on the moral panics and the culture of war stuff. It kind of reminds me of today actually, like you know there really. Was this just insane anti-communist cultural offensive with really hard line? Like you know, this is the days of Red Dawn Rocky like just a lot of militaristic fantasies Rocky III what Soldier of Fortune magazine is popular and this is my youth, by the way.

Speaker 1: 1:48:05

Like I remember all this stuff.

Speaker 2: 1:48:06

Yeah, yeah, you know, it's just this very xenophobic hard line anti-communism that's just being really influential on mass media.

Speaker 1: 1:48:14

And it was still lingering in the 90s too. Like I remember all the stuff about, like, for example, the plight of homosexuals in Cuba, which is real but had been undone by like what, like 25 years in Cuba before it was even kind of addressed in the United States by the Supreme Court, like so it's just like yeah, and like Fidel apologized for it, which doesn't make it okay, I'm not saying that, but like that's more than anyone in the US did.

Speaker 3: 1:48:44

Yeah, name a fucking Republican who's willing to apologize for the shit that they did 50 years ago.

Speaker 2: 1:48:49

Name one.

Speaker 3: 1:48:50

You know what I mean. The three-card trick that's played on stuff like that is so wild, I mean because it's they're clever enough to take a real thing and just exploit the fuck out of it, and it's like, okay, in any other context, any of the people talking about something like that do not give a fuck for any other country for any other time period. You know what I mean. It's like it's so sneaky I have like such a personal vendetta, I guess shit like that and to the exclusion of every positive thing that could be said about someone like Fidel, I mean it's like that kind of shit burns me up. I remember, even when I was in university and that would come up there were kids that the only thing that knew about Fidel Castro is that he was homophobic, and it's like that is insane. You know what I mean.

Speaker 3: 1:49:47

Right yeah, it puts you in a bad situation because you can't, because immediately you have to concede that it's true. But the fucking edifice that's being erected for that to be the singular legacy of somebody like that to American liberals is fucking insane. I mean, it's really a fucking problem.

Speaker 2: 1:50:08

Right. Well, I think you know Cold World liberalism really did try to like create this idea that communism is actually conservative, which is funny because you have people today like that idiot Jackson Hinkle, who make that like their whole career as being a conservative.

Speaker 1: 1:50:25

Thank you, we're going to take. I mean, what I find interesting about that, donald, is that's actually a far right trope, that, like you know, going back to Yankee and Kerry Bolton and people, yeah, yeah, yeah. Who were like.

Speaker 2: 1:50:37

It's also, you know, people like Karl Popper are kind of making this argument. That's like, well, you know, in the collapse of the Soviet bloc, like all these, like people like Jeffrey Sachs are going as a go.

Speaker 2: 1:50:46

I can't wait to go in and open these people's minds. With all this xenophobia and closed mindedness and all this conservatism, we're going to open up the market and all this new stuff is going to open their minds and they're going to be, you know, liberal, open minded people. I mean there was a real conservatism to the culture, you know, in the East bloc and especially, you know, I think that kind of conservatism really reaches this peak with, like, high Stalinism and Zadanov doctrine and this kind of like, which is a, quite frankly, is there is a xenophobia, there is a hostility to Western culture. That is essentially xenophobia. Like it's, you know, not to say that the West is not victimizing the Soviet Union there literally were, but still the kind of like rejection of Western culture on mass and maybe a few exceptions. It is, you know, essentially a Philistine xenophobia, you know. I mean I know a lot of people are going to like give me shit for saying this, but I mean it's just what absolutely is.

Speaker 3: 1:51:44

I mean, there's no way around it and you can also. The thing is, you can also. You can explain it, but I think the level of kind of like Russov philia that you get in the Zdanovshina is like it's, it's embarrassing, you know, I mean yeah, I did bring back the table with ranks.

Speaker 3: 1:52:03

It totally can be explained by the war. But like also means it's embarrassing, even though even the way Zdanov paints the, the fracture of Europe, you know, of the imperial versus the democratic powers, I mean to have the confidence of calling to. Ok, to call like Western European capitalist world, imperialist is true, but to call the Eastern Bloc democratic, sort of uniquely in you know, as you know, in contrast it's like totally.

Speaker 2: 1:52:43

You make the case for Czechoslovakia, maybe, but even then it's like by 60.

Speaker 3: 1:52:49

You know it's insane. I think at the time they really did believe the the sort of post popular front kind of like people's democracy strategy would be democratic and I think genuinely I think Stalin believed that it was one of the more even kind of cute kind of aspects.

Speaker 1: 1:53:06

It's one of the times where I wish Stalin was actually more cynical, I mean.

Speaker 2: 1:53:12

I think I think they really did believe that they were going to do this people's democracy thing, but the geopolitical situation really did like lead to the clampdowns and the enforcement of single party role in those countries. Like you know, even like an anti communist historian like Neymar, who basically says Stalin was genocidal, he admits like yeah, like the Eastern Bloc was not the plan, like it was a, it was formed in reaction to geopolitics.

Speaker 1: 1:53:40

Yeah, I think I think this is the crucial takeaway is, like you know, we have to get beyond Stalin. Bad, I mean, there are times like I have my historiography of things that are always like, well, I understand why they did this, but I wouldn't have done it.

Speaker 2: 1:53:55

The faction ban in 1921, like that's oh yeah, that's a big one for me to like the nap episode, that kind of was. My big conclusion was like yeah, the ban on factions really was just a huge mistake and Lenin big fuck up on Lenin's part there.

Speaker 1: 1:54:09

And he, I mean I feel like some of the stuff in the last testament, if you take it as legitimate, is actually about realizing that was a fuck up. But you know there's other ones. I mean the Sino-Soviet split. The Sino-Soviet splits, one that I just I lose sleep over because I'm like okay, on one hand, we have China doing something truly radical and actually trying to look up the visions of communism no one else has even tried Like and on the other hand, they're undermining all other parts of the communist world for like petty geopolitical reasons constantly.

Speaker 1: 1:54:43

Once it look, I kind of got why you got to that point. But how do you justify it Like, particularly in the 80s, when you're like we're going to make four races South Africa to fuck Cuba because they were too nice to the USSR? What the fuck are you doing Like? Are we're going to like be really nice to Pina J because the US wants us to also? Eventually we're even going to like continue, even when we're no longer getting benefits from that Like it? That kind of stuff is really hard for me to like justify.

Speaker 4: 1:55:14

You know that was something that we came to. I mean, doing our Vietnam and Cambodia episodes is just the side of Soviet split was probably one of the most world historic tragedies of the 20th century.

Speaker 2: 1:55:29

when you start to really dive into it, yeah, and I mean, I think, like, honestly, like you know, mao, the way it's presented, it was all about anti revisionism and like you know, like how their cruise chav like spit on our legacy like this and insult like Stalin like this.

Speaker 1: 1:55:44

But really in my opinion, like I don't think it has anything to do with that.

Speaker 2: 1:55:47

I just think that's what the I think a lot of them have to do the nuclear weapons because basically the Soviet Union was willing to give economic aid to China and you know they did very generous economic aid. You know that's what they did not want China to develop its own bomb, they wanted to maintain control over the bomb. And China basically saw that as like Russian chauvinism. It's like basically saying we're the leaders of the world communist movement, your second hand partners, like you're not actually a sovereign government with its own standing in the communist movement, you're basically just going to be a junior partner to the Soviets because we're actually you're not going to. You know there's this kind of identification of you know actually having their own a bomb of sovereignty.

Speaker 2: 1:56:34

And so what happens is Mao does the Cino Soviet split and then launches the great leap forward to industrialize enough to get an a bomb. And you know it's very brutal and human cost is pretty intense, but it does work. And then you know you could even go as far to argue about the cultural revolution. The main thing that it accomplishes is getting rid of any remaining Soviet influence in the country which, in a way, kind of opens the door to you know, you know the complete, you know reversal of Maoism.

Speaker 1: 1:57:12

Yeah, although it does lead to like an integrate, like the integration of like white color, blue color and peasant groups in ways that I think is also underplayed, like there are positive things to the cultural.

Speaker 2: 1:57:25

Yeah, I don't mean to totally dismiss the cultural revolution, Like I think there was positive stuff going on but really negative stuff. That was that. I don't think. I think a lot of people who are man's size, cultural revolution or just way to blase about, like there was, you know, and I just think there was.

Speaker 1: 1:57:44

I mean there's ethnic conflict that got unleashed.

Speaker 1: 1:57:46

It wasn't control at all, I mean yeah like a lot of that was that happened in Russia to happen probably more in China. There's also the removal of like anybody with any sympathies towards the, towards, you know, even old Marxist, leninist, bolshevism, and it's not even dealing with the early purges of the party. And China, you know, everyone thinks it's funny when people tell me like well, the, you know the Communist Party of China, which Mao was the first leader of, and I'm like what are you on like there's? There's like several sets of leaders before you get to Mao being in charge to do. I know that a couple of them are persona non grata now but, yeah, it's, it's it's.

Speaker 1: 1:58:41

Yeah, China. China is a harder case and it's hard to deal with politically, also today, because I tend to be both a defensive stuff but but also like when people read it to me as like trying to do this grand anti imperialist socialist project, I'm like, what evidence do you actually have for that? Like the Belt and Road Initiative kind of. But even that's been massively scaled back in the past two or three years. So you know, I'm going to defend it against Western imperialism and I think, and I think also that any socialist political grouping in a Western country should have as their number one orientation is to try to repair any Western socialist relations to China and to like demilitarize relations as absolutely as much as preventing stopping war with China is going to be an incredibly important political task.

Speaker 1: 1:59:36

Absolutely. I think it's like like general, general, general anti militarism is going to be a huge thing and it's going to be hard, because it seems to be the thing that the social democrats are in theory and support of us on, but when you actually get them into power they do absolutely nothing about. So it's like it's hard to say what that would look like and, yeah, I think we can get there. I don't want to get too much into contemporary geopolitics because that's where I tend to make everybody angry by saying stuff like you know that multi polarity is fine and it's also inevitable, but it really matters how we organize that multi polar world, as to whether or not it's going to lead to a bunch of fucking wars. Like we can have a multi polar world where America still bombing the shit out of half the planet and someone like John Mirshimer doesn't care if we are either, like, and I think that's something that we have to deal with.

Speaker 1: 2:00:41

But I also think in some ways that's an over correction from the. I think you know, donald, you made a disagree with me, but in the odds, and particularly in the between the two burning campaigns, it seemed like international policy was something left us just forgot about. Like entirely, like you're just like we're not even talking about that, like other than opposing Trump starting a war somewhere. We're not, we don't care. Like.

Speaker 2: 2:01:04

Yeah, you know, I think it's kind of true. I think it was very much kind of fringe, like it was really only like the kind of fringe ML groups that were really like kind of focusing on anti war stuff. Honestly, like you know, in a lot of ways, like you know, the kind of red, brown stuff we see today is kind of a result of like left wing, anti imperialist kind of becoming more fringe, of having to look for allies and unsavory places. You know, yeah, which is how you end up kind of with, you know, some of the gray zone people working with people associated with Fallen Gong, apparently like the answer group, the coalition.

Speaker 3: 2:01:49

They're kind of like I sort of associate them with that sort of thing, where it's like I just always hear like kind of yeah, like gray zone.

Speaker 2: 2:01:58

Well answer, I will give them credit as they've kind of distance themselves from more like will Roush oriented.

Speaker 3: 2:02:07

I kind of give a lot of those people credit for just sticking it out, Right, right, I mean it's, it's it's not.

Speaker 1: 2:02:16

it's not the debate about Syria.

Speaker 3: 2:02:19

To be a, to be a kind of a peacenik Stalinist is also so weird because it's like no one is buying it. You know what I mean. It's like that's the hardest position to be in. It's like I'm, like I'm anti war at all costs. I hate, like you know, say, suffering and stuff, but like you know, you know, long live comrades, don't it's? You paint yourself into a corner there, even even though I understand it's like you know it's tough.

Speaker 3: 2:02:42

Yeah, yeah, that's really tough, although ironically Stalin is like the biggest peacenik of all time, like all of the, all of the. That James Harris book is so funny because, like Stalin was he cost in a lot of ways.

Speaker 2: 2:02:56

Yeah.

Speaker 3: 2:02:57

He was, like it's always trying to like, always trying to get some kind of treaty with somebody.

Speaker 2: 2:03:03

Yeah, no, stalin did not like war. He was good at war, he became good at it at least but he wasn't like looking to get into wars.

Speaker 1: 2:03:11

You know well it's very hard to like progress your revolution and do a world revolution and fight a bunch of defensive wars all at the same time. I don't know, maybe it will exhaust your society, kill a large portion of the men and then like you'll have problems later. Yeah, I know one.

Speaker 2: 2:03:26

I thought I was seeing it's like how many people just like went insane because they were so traumatized by having to live through like the Civil War and all this stuff.

Speaker 1: 2:03:35

Yeah, yeah, I read this. It's a reactionary Russian thinker, not in almost a print of this gun into Dmitry Orlov, but he actually did like make that very clear in his book about collapse. It was like yeah, I mean we went through the Civil War, which which we went immediately after getting out of World War One, which then we had the Great Patriotic War, then then we had the Cold War, then we almost went to war with the Chinese, then we almost went to war with with the Americans multiple times, like Afghanistan, you know then we go to Afghanistan, right, it's just like.

Speaker 1: 2:04:18

It's like, yeah, I get why they were war exhausted, honestly, like like even the United States, who has been at war like what almost all of my lifetime, it has figured out a way to do war that involves so little of the population that we don't get war exhaustion, Like that's part of having to wait with it.

Speaker 3: 2:04:39

What's the stakes of any US war as compared to like the Civil War or, oh my God, world War Two? In World War Two, from the point of view of a fucking like any you know anybody on the in the in the East and the Soviet Union is like total, in fucking describable apocalypse that like just nobody in the United States has ever even fucking like it's impossible to even consider. You know what I mean. Even, even, even for just like the average European, it's so fucking traumatic. You know all the displacements for the, for the Slavs, christ. I mean it's like so insane and it's like you have like without understanding that there's no way you can ever understand anything that has to do with Russia or the Soviet Union post war. I mean it's like really is probably the singular thing to understand and there's, there is not, you know, there is no American equivalent, not, not even, not even the Civil War is the closest thing we have to it, and that's not the same, I mean like even that's a drop in the bucket and it's like it's yeah crazy.

Speaker 4: 2:05:46

No, I can only imagine the level of trauma because I'm a US trained historian. So for Latin America and US train, so you know it's studying Soviet history has been sort of out of my wheelhouse. But one of the things that I can tell you, studying trauma across the beginning of the 20th century to the middle of the 20th century there is a reason why in the post four years, that there is this turn inward into the focus of individual, looking at individual family units and focusing on raising children and all all that that you associate with the baby boom. Because when you have literally gone through you know, you know obviously they weren't we were not fighting with. There was no conflict in the United States. Men were sent off to die, in both cases right, oftentimes partners abandoned.

Speaker 4: 2:06:47

Then you were interrupted in the inch of war years with the Great Depression. I think people do have a day Forget just how deprivating it was for people. So you do, you have this turn towards, you know, focusing on internal development that you have in the post war years because of just how traumatized people are. And that's part of the reason why, like, let's say, the Red Scare and McCarthyism was so effective, because it was an appeal to another menace that could then lead to war later. So let's amplify that trauma. You know another tenfold and you can then only imagine what was going on in the Soviet Union.

Speaker 1: 2:07:34

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, the only society that I think it has a similar claim to coming out of that kind of trauma and intensity is actually the Chinese. Frankly, because I was looking at from like the type being rebellion to, to the to there, to the Chinese and the war. It's like, oh wow, the, the death scares and these are the death stats are like OK, the one the type being versus the US Civil War. Your civil war is bloodiest war per capita of US history by far, by like an order of magnitude actually, and the typing by itself six times that it's. It's just a scale of that Like we don't have in our history, except for the indigenous here, you know, and even then it's actually probably the Pox that that you have. That's that bad, the Pox in the Indian Wars, anything like that death scale, and definitely not with people who we identified with and that that is.

Speaker 1: 2:08:45

I don't think you can underestimate that. I don't want to sound like a Nambi Pambi liberal about trauma, but I do think you actually have to deal with that when you're trying to like why was it so violent? Because one of the things that I also think about when we talk about like not so much the purges, but definitely the red terror. It's like, well, yeah, but like the SR's and I'm sympathetic to the SR's in a lot of ways the leftist are so yeah, but the leftist are in the Rodnick's. In one year killed 9000 people and just terrorist attacks, that's you know. That's that's like general society is just that violent. I don't know what we like.

Speaker 1: 2:09:23

It's not to say that I think they're like even all the red terror was okay, but like I'm just when I look at that, I'm like, well, how, like I know how the checker got to where it got. I don't know how. Like, like, what do you do? Like you know. And yet I also agree to agree with you guys back, I also think that a lot of the trends that bring it all down actually start in this time period. So it's like that's where I'm. I'm torn, like I don't have a good answer for these problems. Like it does leave me to think that, since we have the ability not to start off from a place of that much social violence, that maybe we shouldn't like that, maybe we should not be valorizing violence like that.

Speaker 2: 2:10:06

Oh yeah, I definitely agree very strongly of that. I think you know it's one of the ultimate traits of an infantile leftist is valorizing violence and just making empty threats of violence that people they politically disagreed with, and you know just stuff like that, you know.

Speaker 1: 2:10:22

I just mean they're cool for about five minutes, until you right.

Speaker 2: 2:10:26

I think like a lot of people's idea of like what a revolutionary is, like this weather underground, like red army faction type, understanding what it's like who's willing to pick up a gun and fight the state now versus, you know, do reformism or whatever you know, that's just not how Marxists have thought about these things.

Speaker 1: 2:10:43

Not historically, at least not before the 70s, although you know I always my pushback to that is always like, well, who did the rather underground mostly kill my dudes themselves, like they were very good at blowing themselves up by accident, like that. That's what they actually accomplished. And red army faction they killed some more people than themselves blow out of themselves. Yeah, so it's something to think about. When I, when I see these things like, for example, when you see like Americans larking, go long, so ways them, and you're like please don't kill anybody, please just don't kill anybody. Like like historically, they're like I mean you guys kill someone and it goes real bad, and also don't former sex cult, that'd be great, and yeah, I mean those things are more than embarrassing. So and that now, thank you guys so much for coming in. People should check out your recent series. When are they coming out on Cosmopod, on the NDP?

Speaker 2: 2:12:02

I was. I was muted, I think two weeks from now.

Speaker 1: 2:12:05

I think, is the plan. Okay so, but this is released. This will be concurrent to your to take on the NDP, so we will be the bonus episode. Alright, so thank you guys for coming on, and we're going to end. Before I end, though, anything else you guys want to plug.

Speaker 2: 2:12:21

Cosmonauts got a new book out. Fight the Constitution. Oh, you got your copy. Yeah, get a copy and I wrote the preface, but it's got essays from all different members of mug who also wrote for Cosmonaut and if you want to learn about, you know, political vision for social system and the United States, it is something that is out there. It's not perfect, it's not complete, but it is a start. So, yeah, awesome, and also thank you for having us on Yep.

Speaker 4: 2:12:55

I guess I'll, if I can do an individual plug. I should have a one of my last articles as it as a academic coming out soon If for University of Illinois press in a book on labor organizing and the working class during the pandemic.

Speaker 1: 2:13:18

Alright, Kristen playing guitar anywhere.

Speaker 3: 2:13:24

Yeah, just playing playing music in Brooklyn. I don't know if I this worth plugging too much. Baby, I want to come see me play jazz. I live in Brooklyn. I play jazz guitar.

Speaker 2: 2:13:34

Alright, you should go see him if you can. He's very good, yeah, please.

Speaker 3: 2:13:39

Contribute to my lifestyle, all means.

Speaker 1: 2:13:43

Alright. Well, every good socialist movement has at least one petite bourgeois deviationist. So, as I was, I am myself, since I run a fucking podcast.

Speaker 2: 2:13:54

I mean, you should love that petty bourgeois, formalist deviationism.

Speaker 3: 2:13:59

Yeah, donald, and I definitely teeter on Bohemian socialism.

Speaker 1: 2:14:06

Alright, well, thank you guys so much. Have a great day.