Its wild reading this shit online every day when the real.life communists I meat in mutual aid get along wonderfully with me. Its time guys, the Soviet Union has fallen, Capitalism has emerged from its Cocoon once again showing its true colors of fascism. Anarchists and Communists need each other now more than ever. Make those alliances, I’d much rather deal with each other in the aftermath than be put to the boot in Amazon City.

Because they have to latch onto “great men”, it helps with their simplistic cult minded tendencies to defer to authority.

Simply put, they have no idea what they’re talking about.

Stalin took credit for defeating Nazis (after carving up Poland with them first, but who cares about minor historical details) and was leading this big global superpower that could stand up the The Evil West (while also crushing every other leftist organization that didn’t bend the knee, but again, minor details).

And from there it’s a pretty simple leap to the world being divided into the Good Camp and the Bad Camp. The US is clearly in the Bad Camp (which is the part I don’t argue). The USSR was against the US. Therefore it must be the Good Camp. The idea of multiple evil people opposing each other is a bit too complicated for them.

as an anarchist who has organised with meatspace MLs, the topic of Stalin never comes up on its own. it comes up online more often because we’re not doing anything more important than just talking.

Stalin comes up in meatspace when some liberal confronts an ML and demands to know if they’re ‘Stalinist’ and what they think of the ‘Holomdor’. then the ML explains how ‘Stalinism’ isn’t a thing, they primarily read Marx, Engels and Lenin, and how Stalin was the leader of a team not a dictator and even the CIA’s own profile on him says exactly that, and then explain the ongoing threats the Soviet security state was protecting against and the cultural and economic trauma of losing 15% of their population in World War II, and the climatological history of the Southern regions and how the famine impacted more than just Ukraine and how famines were common in the region, and how the Ukrainian kulaks, protesting that their lands were being given to the serfs, burned crops and equipment and salted the land, and how famines were ended in the region under the USSR, and then ask the liberal if they care about famines under capitalism.

then the liberal says ‘yeah but Stalin was basically Hitler’ and then we in this group of anarchists, ML(M)s and syndicalists chase this fucking wrecker out into the street so we can get back to work.

i think any strong opinion on Stalin as an individual is already wrong, because you’re falling for the Great Man of History fallacy. i think Stalin is irrelevant unless you’re an ML cadre who needs to learn from the successes and mistakes of the USSR, but i think the history of the USSR is also important to any communist.

when you see an ML defending Stalin, it’s almost always because someone is criticising MLs based on an uninformed claim about Stalin, or they’re criticising Stalin from an uninformed position. and i don’t blame them: i’m all for criticising mistakes, but we don’t need to make shit up to do that.

i get that as anarchists we’re suspicious of statist leaders, but i don’t get why it’s so hard to understand that statists would defend a communist state. even if you see them enemies, you would benefit from reading their theory to understand their position rather than going ‘uhhh, why do statists defend states so much? must be they can’t read, or they’re just stu~pid lol must be because they have daddy issues lol’

“Why is this group so stupid and wrong? No specifics, project your own opinions of stupid and wrong people here.”

When people talk about “Stalinism,” they usually mean one of 2 things:

1. Marxism-Leninism, the synthesis of Marxism with the advancements made by Lenin. Stalin synthesized Marxism-Leninism, so this gets called “Stalinism” despite Stalin’s minor contributions compared to Marx and Lenin.

2. The policies of the USSR while Stalin was General Secretary of the CPSU.

The former, Marxism-Leninism, is the largest tendency of Marxism by far. This is because it has proven its utility in practice, establishing socialism in many countries with varying local conditions and contexts. Lenin’s contributions to Marxism are near universally accepted by Marxists, and Stalin did not change from them in synthesizing Marxism-Leninism.

The latter, Stalin’s policy positions, are largely either contextualized and explained, rather than actively defended, or are genuinely good feats. For example, under Stalin, literacy rates skyrocketed from ~30% to 99.9%, life expectancy doubled, education and healthcare were made free at all levels, jobs were guaranteed, and much more. Genuine faults, like criminalizing homosexuality, are recognized as such by Marxist-Leninists.

As Weng Weiguang says, The Evaluation of Stalin is Essentially an Ideological Struggle. Marxist-Leninists don’t idolize Stalin. At the same time, Stalin synthesized Marxism-Leninism, and oversaw the world’s first socialist state during its most turbulent period. The CPC rates him as 70% good, 30% bad, and this rating is roughly orbited by most communist orgs. Those who denounce Stalin entirely, also denounce the USSR, and existing socialism.

Stalin was a committed Marxist-Leninist, and oversaw the world’s first socialist state for the overwhelming majority of its most tumultuous period. He was no saint, but at the same time was no monster either. He is remembered by liberal historians as far worse than comtemporaries like Churchill who in actuality were far worse than Stalin.

As Nia Frome says, we can either distance ourselves from Stalin, and by extension the USSR and actually existing socialism, or we can fight back against bourgeois narratives about Stalin and the USSR, acknowledging their faults while being able to uphold their tremendous successes as examples of the possibilities of socialism in power. Historical nihilism, and throwing Stalin and by extension much of the early soviet union under the bus, was ultimately what allowed for liberalization within the USSR and partially contributed to the death of socialism in eastern Europe.

If you want an intro to Marxism-Leninism, check out my new basic ML study guide!