My friend, you’re grossly downplaying the severity of your arguments here, and linking to a CIA document and a hexbear thread 💀 isn’t assisting the argument. That document (and subsequently YOU) severely underestimates the extent of Stalin’s authoritarian control.
Who wrote that document? No really? Talking about how Stalin faced limited external opposition. WELL NO FUCKING SHIT!! BECAUSE HE PURGED ANY OPPOSITION THE SECOND HE HAD THE CHANCE TO!! YOU’D BE OUT OF YOUR MIND TO OPPOSE HIM!!
Also, the document is talking about how he was merely the leader among many. Are you aware that Stalin had absolute control over the NKVD, the military, and the political system? The purges and repression of opposition eliminated any real collective decision-making. His control over the apparatus of power meant that, in practice, his word was final. Khrushchev’s rise to power came after Stalin’s death, in part because of Stalin’s purging of potential rivals—further solidifying that Stalin was more than just “the captain of a team.”
I genuinely can’t believe these takes and it can only be retorted by someone who was in support of the actions of his regime frankly speaking. I don’t know why you can’t be Marxist and condemn the actions of Stalin or all the other authoritarian communist regimes. It’s quite frankly ridiculous that you would offer up these points to me as solid rebuttals. I may not be an expert in sociology or history or political science or whatever, and I may just be a college student who engages in political discourse merely as a hobby, but I refuse to take anyone who downplays the acts of Stalin and his regime, nevertheless in the face glaring contradictions, seriously. I’m sorry buddy. I tried to engage in this discussion with you unbiasedly, but i can’t take it anymore.
I encourage you to, again, read history books, rather than taking any one person’s word for anything. The thread I linked has references posted as well, so you can check the original sources yourself if you question their validity. In order to be a Marxist, it is critical that we learn to separate fact from fiction, and part of that is recognizing that we all have implicit biases. We should not fear searching for more truth. Stalin certainly wasn’t a saint, and I am not making him out to be one. I believe you are over-correcting and making critical errors in judgement because of it.
I highly recommend the short, 8 minute article “Tankies” by Roderic Day, hosted over on Red Sails. For more in-depth reading, Stalin: History and Critique of a Black Legend by Domenico Losurdo is a good historical critique of Stalin that focuses on taking a critical stance towards Stalin and contextualizes him.
We believe that Stalin and Mao were committed socialists who, despite their mistakes, did much more for humanity than most of the bourgeois politicians
And i stopped reading there. I don’t consider causing the deaths of 20 million people to be “doing more for humanity”. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with Marxism. There’s something wrong with the people that believe it however.
You freely admit to being unfamiliar with Socialist history, and yet are unwilling to even finish a short article? It’s 8 minutes long, if you refuse to read things you don’t agree with without doing the due research to overcome them you doom yourself to blindness.
Seriously, read the full article or you’ll never be able to genuinely understand anything you don’t already agree with. Better yet you could read the history book, but if you can’t be trusted to read an 8 minute article I fear you’re simply fine with never even daring to let your preconveived notions be challenged by historical and archival evidence.
