I think a little clarification is needed. No. I don’t actually think everyone there is insane. I don’t care about the bans so stop trying to use that. HB enthusiasts coming here and trying to call me out achieves nothing besides proving my point
Edit: Feel free to keep trying to brigade me. It’s not going to scare me to take this down
Perhaps now is the time.
The kulaks were not an ethnic minority persecuted by the bolsheviks as a scapegoat for society’s ills. They were the economic class directly responsible for many of those ills. They were the capitalists of the peasantry, enclosing land and claiming ownership over what should have been the common means of production, precisely the kind of group that communists the world over want to destroy in order to liberate the majority of people.
When it was written that the kulaks were to be “liquidated”, it did not mean that they were to be mass executed, it meant that their private property was to be moved into public ownership, ending the existence of the kulak class and making them into regular workers.
As is the case in every single campaign of economic or social justice, the privileged class fought back with everything they had. Kulaks contributed to the Soviet Famine of 1930-1933 by mass slaughtering their cattle and burning their fields. Kulaks hoarded grain, took the wealth that they had stolen from their neighbors and fled the country, plotted sabotage and insurrection against the workers’ movement. And for those crimes, many Kulaks were caught and executed.
So if the original commenter’s great grandparents were kulaks who “suffered at the hands of the soviet union,” they deserved it.
🤭
You guys don’t even hide it anymore. You’re openly advocating for brutal police regimes. The jokes write themselves. Convenient.
You don’t get to call directing state power against the petite bourgeoisie a brutal police regime when your government is supporting the most brutal dictatorships in Africa, whose violence is directed at the working class.
Yeah I get to do that, because that’s what happened factually, sorry. No amount of whataboutism will change that. I don’t care about Western imperialists, fuck them too.
The vital context is wielding state power against internal threats. Which literally every state must do to continue to exist. It’s not whataboutism to point out that the state you currently live in is currently doing far worse, for far worse reasons in a context where your criticism can only be used for anticommunism.
Would you say it’s constructive for an Israeli to be critical of gay rights in Palestine? Of course not, because divorced of context, it only carries water for imperialism
The problem is the violence of the totalitarian regimes you defend harms innocents too, which is why serious communists shouldn’t advocate for that kind of power abuse any more than they should advocate for Western imperialism. It’s not that hard.
Nobody is advocating power abuse. One of the books I try to get people to read, Life and Terror in Stalin’s Russia contextualizes the scale of and how such abuses occurred in a much more useful criticism than “communism bad Stalin evil, that’s why you can’t ever do anything about rightists organizing against the state”.
A good accompaniment to illustrate what it looks like and what the consequences are when the left fails to take appropriate action once in power is The Jakarta Method
That’s precisely the extent of my criticism. Understanding stalinism instead of just demonizing it is a good thing, if only to avoid repeating the same mistakes. But the end doesn’t justify the means. Apologism is not OK.
It’s OK to take a stance against power abuses, and vital to denounce them if you consider yourself a leftist.
Suppression of the right was necessary, however the relative freedom given to locals to carry it out resulted in people using it to settle old scores or non-ideological people to advance politically within the party. While dekulization enabled them, those actions were orthogonal (and actually hindered) the aims of dekulization.
Whether that can be considered justification or apologia isn’t constructive IMO. Personally though, I just consider it an error in the way it was carried out.
Similar issues (and resulting sentiments) are observed in the wake of Mao giving villages the freedom to set up their own courts and try landlords and others.
We had that struggle back when Kruschev sent the tanks into Hungary and every western leftist org was falling over each other to denounce the USSR. Meanwhile nazis were being put in charge of police forces in South America to do crimes against humanity against indigenous and communist elements and hundreds of thousands were being massacred in South Korea.
Turns out the tankies were right. Denouncing the enemies of the state you live in just serves to carry water for imperialism.