Thread: Soviet Social-Imperialism: An Introduction

Originally Posted by sycld

how?

by heading such a harsh and brutal regime that people started to become severely discontent with the government?

In Mongolia? In Tuva? This thread is about Soviet Social-Imperialism and when it came to internal politics in the SSRs Stalin was actually in ways better than Lenin. He created institutions for Muslims (Spiritual Administration of the Muslims of Central Asia and Kazakhstan), condemned even SSR chauvinist attitudes towards ASSRs (e.g. Georgian SSR vs. Abkhazian ASSR), under him the Ukrainian language was strongly promoted (and probably saved the language from being irrelevant, as Russians in the Ukraine were forced to learn Ukrainian), and basically although the seeds for social-imperialism in the capitalist sense (trying to rule the world basically in a search for profit) were unintentionally sown, the results did not appear until the 50's, 60's, 70's, etc. under revisionists such as Khrushchev, Brezhnev, etc.

what do you think about yevgeny yevtushenko? i had the pleasure of performing in front of him a choral setting of his texts that shostakovich had composed in october of 2007.

He seemed like the type of guy Khrushchev needed to paint himself as a 'legitimate' Communist vis-à-vis Molotov, etc. during the 'thaw.' Then he supported Gorbachev later on. It's safe to say he isn't a Communist. Other than that I have no opinion.

Originally Posted by sycld

I know this thread about Social Imperialism, but I will never ceased to be amazed at how you seem to be incapable of thinking of things in any other terms other than "revolutionary" or "reactionary." What a tiny world you must live in.

Not really, and it's actually more like three: revolutionary, progressive and reactionary. For example, I'd say the NBPP would be progressive, or Dennis Kucinich would be progressive, but they would not be revolutionary. I'd say the Constitution Party or David Duke would be reactionary. For example, I'd say the Nationalist Movement Party in Turkey is somewhat progressive even though it's considered neo-fascist since they support Turanism (which I believe is impossible under capitalism considering national contradictions between the various bourgeoisie's of each state, so socialists could easily emerge from failed promises), but that does not make them revolutionary and indeed it would make them reactionary if revolutionaries were to seize control of the state, since the NMP would inevitably fight against said movement due the NMP having a petty-bourgeois base.

The goal is to figure out what movements are progressive (which means are not anti-communists or could at least help communism spread somehow) and which are reactionary (those which threaten the growth of communism). For example, neither Obama nor McCain are progressive, they would not have much value to communists except for those that are bargaining on Obama's failure as a way to help expand the support for socialism.

Of course things like this could always backfire. For example, in the early 30's the Soviets concluded that since social-democracy and fascism both attracted the petty-bourgeoisie and basically saved capitalism by welfare and 'reforms', then fascism was just the militant, 'revolutionary' variant of social-democracy. This naturally led the Communists to view the Nazis as petty-bourgeois socialists who were against the fascist state ergo they were progressive, so there was a brief Communist-Nazi alliance for a bit that obviously backfired.

So for example you can dig up fliers made in East Germany honoring Thomas Müntzer (16th century anti-Luther Protestant leader of rebelling peasants) to get Christians to support the SED or how Hoxha had left Bektashi Muslims relatively alone since like GDR Christians they served a progressive purpose in rallying people around socialism. There was also the Albanian Democratic Front (which was a mass organization that occasionally elected non-party tribal leaders), the East German National Front (which united various autonomous political parties towards SED goals), etc. Remember, even the DPRK has three political parties in a united front. In the end, Stalin allowing Muslims some autonomy doesn't sound too strange at all.

That's interesting, as it paints a picture in sharp contrast the characterisations of Social Imperialism in Mongolia and Tuva. That sounds a lot more like the "soft power" the Britih used in their colonies, where pandering to the wants and needs of the inhabitants of their colonies made them content enough to be ruled by an outside power.

You should read Tribal Nation: The Making of Soviet Turkmenistan and Affirmative Action Empire. Up until the 1940's, the SSRs were genuinely self-governing to an extent, especially in Central Asia. For example, during the collectivization campaigns, local party leaders in the Turkmen SSR demanded that peasants collectivize or else they would lose their voting rights and other rights, etc.

Stalin genuinely wanted collectivization to be a mass movement, which is why he condemned forced collectivization at times and in Pravda wrote an article called Dizzy with Success on the issue. (http://marxists.org/reference/archiv...1930/03/02.htm) Forced collectivization in the Turkmen SSR was pretty much a total failure (society wasn't even feudal, it was tribal) and it got to the point where the Soviets just gave up and basically let things stay as they were. Still, it wasn't until the 1960's that equal development of SSRs (well, as much as possible of course) was abandoned and by the 1970's the Central Asian SSRs basically just became colonies of the Russian SFSR.