By: Pablo

Pablo — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 00:06:57 +0000

(I don’t speak for revcom.us)
A hundred million? So, what’s your source? Siberia and the Yangtze plain must be chock full of plots of turned earth to accomodate all these corpses, by your logic…
This article is actually not as critical and reactionary as much of what I;ve run into in the context of this speaking tour by Raymond Lotta. The examples of repression of the Cossacks, the Ukrainian famine supposedly willfully “caused” by Stalin himself, and the other suffering that (according to Jamieson) occured on a mass scale as a direct result of the Soviet Union and Peoples’ Republic of China—-Mathiesen really doesn’t give enough context to prove these two foundational claims of his article. He also assumes that without state power in the hands of communists, fewer, as opposed to more, people would have been executed or starved in these societies.
If the Ukrainian famine was a willful policy objective of the Soviets, how come when the archives came out, they indicated that this famine caught the Soviet leadership by surprise? Was there or was there not a pro-Nazi movement in the Ukraine, the breadbasket of the Soviet Union, that among other things was purposefully witholding grain from the state? If so, what was any government supposed to do—just be hands off and let the urban population starve when it was clear there would be a German invasion in due time? This is not to justify how Stalin specifically handled that issue, BUT, if all the farmers in the Midwest decided not to grow food for you people in Chicago and other cities, I bet you’d be calling on the President to send in the army, too.
The history of this and other incidents is not so clear-cut as Jamieson makes it seem. I’ve heard Lotta give this speech. He didn’t deny that there were famines, but he didn’t attribute them so simplistically to the default cause (i.e. the evil communist regimes).
And if it’s preventable death that Jamieson abhors, I’ll join him in that, only if he joins me in condemning the world capitalist system and the states controlled by capitalist ruling classes, in which tens if not hundreds of millions of people have died through preventable diseases, reactionary wars (including WWI and most of WWII) and starvation.
Remember Amartya Sen’s famous article that spoke of the 4 million people in India who have died EACH YEAR since India’s “independence” up to today for reasons of poverty? Add that up—that’s only one country. If the debate over Marxism vs. capitalism is reduced to which society has a higher death count (or imprisonment rate for that matter), it should be clear who comes in fir$t! But as Lotta said in his response to Jamieson, I don’t believe it’s that simple. Still, we don’t hear many anti-communists singling out India and other governments where state powered is concentrated in the hands of landholders, capitalists, etc for their “mass graves”—casualties of a system where production is carried out for profit, and where the STATE (repressive apparatus consisting of laws, army, police, jails…) enforces the daily domination of the ruling class (i.e. those who own and control means of production).
In fact Maoist China doubled the life expectancy of the Chinese people from 1949-1976—no small accomplishment for a poor country emerging from feudalism. By 1972 it had effectively solved the widespread problem of hunger. Shit, the U.S. still hasn’t done that in its own damn borders, to say nothing of the countries that it effectively starves through imperialist economic policies. 1 in 8 children here will likely be food insecure at some point in their lives. The Soviet Union had a comparable rise in life expectancy, literacy, public health, etc under Lenin and Stalin.
But nobody judges all capitalism by zeroing in on only the industrial revolution in Britain, and nobody judges the bourgeois revolution by its experience in only France, for example. The communist revolution is a historical process, just as capitalism is a historical system (a system we must MAKE history, in my view). What happened under Stalin 1) still needs deeper investigation 2) is misunderstood by most students including on elite campuses, though most of these people ofcourse have a very negative impression of it and 2) was an initital attempt, not without significant accomplishments, at building a world free of exploitation and class division. The Chinese revolution led by Mao did in fact do things differently than the Soviet one in important ways, and the revolutions to come will have to critically assimilate its lessons as well. This is the spirit and substance of Lotta’s presentation as I understand it.
Whether you agree with that or not, if you hate enforced deaths, you should logically be a communist and yearn for more revolutions aimed at putting state power in the hands of the masses and working people, in order to build socialist societieties in transition to communism. It’s precisely the genuine communist revolutions of the 20th century that, to use Jamieson’s own measuring stick, addressed the problem of preventable death for the first time in history—if you don’t believe me just compare post-Independence India, with its tragic LACK of such a revolution, to Maoist China, or even the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin. It’s for quite legitimate reasons like this (and many others) that I’ll bet Mao and Stalin are way more popular today in China and Russia than Nehru in India.
Socialist society gave people not only the right to eat, to be employed, to go from poor peasants to tri-lingual scientists, and to have affordable medical care, “rights” that could never exist or be enforced on a large scale under capitalism, rights that saved and changed lives—it gave people the “right” to transform society in the direction of a classless world, which is what socialism is all about. This needs to be done, and can be done, on a larger scale the next time around.
Happy blogging.

By: Mistakes were made | The Chicago Weekly Blog

Mistakes were made | The Chicago Weekly Blog — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 02:00:39 +0000

[...] polemicist Raymond Lotta issued a reply to Keith Jamieson’s recent essay, Everything You Know About Communism is Right, and had it passed out in front of the University of Chicago’s Cobb Hall [...]

By: Keith Jamieson

Keith Jamieson — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 00:19:17 +0000

I agree: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1462

By: Lindsay T

Lindsay T — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 03:14:16 +0000

You’re not even attempting to deal with Lotta’s arguments. For example, check out “Why Did the Heavens Not Darken”, a 1988 book from Arno Mayer which clearly documents that equal rights for Jews was a significant feature, legally and politically in the Soviet Union (policies continued, I will mention, by Joseph Stalin). One of the fliers at the event’s literature table (available at the website of Lotta’s project to Set the Record Straight about the history of communism, thisiscommunism.org) brought out how the Russian Revolution of 1917 brought political and social emancipation to Jews in a country with a history of virulent anti-Semitism and violent anti-Jewish pogroms. And this was at a time when most of the Jewish people in the world lived in central and Eastern Europe, facing organized fascist movements and institutionalized anti-semitism (for example in Romania, Poland and Hungary). Yes, people have been lied to about all of this—and they should check this out for themselves.

Comments on: Everything You Know About Communism is Right: What Raymond Lotta got wrong

By: Pablo

By: Mistakes were made | The Chicago Weekly Blog

By: Keith Jamieson

By: Lindsay T