Abstract
No significant scholarship in educational studies has focused on Lefebvre’s engagement with socialist state theory and his position against Stalin. As a result, when Lefebvre’s thoughts on the state and on actually existing socialism are mentioned, they are engaged completely uncritically. This essay addresses this crucial gap. Toward these ends, I critically engage Lefebvre’s work on one of the most important and central concepts of socialist state theory, the dictatorship of the proletariat. While Lefebvre embraces Lenin’s theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as spelled out in The State and Revolution, following Khrushchev, he argues that Stalin distorted it in practice. Given the recent beginning stages of the vindication of Stalin as a result of previously unreleased Soviet-era state documents, this essay could not be more timely. In addition, the popularity of socialism among US youth also warrants a more honest appraisal of the historical context and contributions of Stalin.
Joseph Stalin’s predecessor Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) dealt a heavy blow to the proletarian camp of the global class war. In his speech, Khrushchev argues that the cult of personality that grew around Stalin shielded him from all manner of scrutiny, leading to “a whole series of exceedingly serious and grave perversions of Party principles, of Party democracy, of revolutionary legality” (Khrushchev, 1956: lines 15–16). To build his case, Khrushchev cites a few passages from letters penned by Lenin expressing his concern regarding Stalin’s excessively rude, abrasive, and assertive personality. Khrushchev also cites disciplinary letters from Lenin to Stalin to further his case. After laying this foundation based primarily upon Stalin’s personality, Khrushchev goes on to accuse Stalin of crime after crime after crime against the people. In short, Khrushchev paints Stalin as a genocidal, bloodthirsty egomaniac more concerned with maintaining his own power than advancing socialism. As a result of Khrushchev’s speech, combined with generations of anti-communist propaganda in the US in particular, a grotesquely distorted image of Stalin has served as the primary evidence for the conclusion that while socialism is an egalitarian theory, in practice, it is hopelessly authoritarian, a barrier to human freedom, and even deadly. A classic example of this caricature found in a 1985 edition of Columbia history professor Henry Graff’s high school history book, America: The Glorious Republic (1985), is common fair: Stalin had consolidated his despotic power in the mid-1930s through a campaign of violence and terror conducted against his own people. On every side Stalin imagined conspiracies being hatched against him. Between 1936 and 1938 he carried out purges of the Communist Party, ordering the execution of perhaps 800,000 members … The total number of Stalin’s victims has been estimated in the millions. (p.693)
However, since the fall of the Soviet Union a steady stream of previously classified Soviet documents have become available to historians, which have fundamentally challenged the West’s picture of Stalin as a power-hungry terrorist. Responding to the first wave of documents released in 1991, Michael Parenti (1997) counters many of the gross exaggerations of Stalin’s purges (see below). Although it only took 25 years, even the mainstream business press is beginning to concede to this evidence and the fact that just as in his public persona, in his private affairs, Stalin was actually acting in the interests of preserving and advancing the worlds’ first socialist workers’ state (Harris, 2016). Yet, as we will see below, plenty of evidence for the objective observer existed even without the release of formerly secret documents to at least point toward the likely vindication of Stalin (Deutscher, 1949; Szymanski, 1979).
While American history books and Cold War tabloids specialized in spinning reports of Stalin the executer, more sophisticated writers constructed stories of Stalin as an enemy of philosophy. For instance, French philosopher Henri Lefebvre offers one of the most systematically constructed critiques of Stalin from a Marxist–Leninist framework. With the new work being produced exposing the picture of Stalin the terrorist as fictional, perhaps now is the right time to challenge the portrayal of Stalin as a betrayer of Marxism–Leninism. Fortunately, Lefebvre’s vast body of work has been gaining new currency of late.
For example, Lefebvre’s insights on the geography of the city have been significantly advanced and developed by scholars such as Marxist geographer David Harvey (2006), and subsequently taken up by Derek Ford (2013, 2016, 2017) in work on the pedagogy of the city, education and the production of space, and the educational encounter. Additionally, Sue Middleton (2013) has surveyed much of Lefebvre’s work, making gestures as to its educational implications in what is the only monograph dedicated to Lefebvre and education. And there have been a handful of other articles that have applied various aspects of Lefebvre’s thought to education (Atasay and Delavan, 2012; Christie, 2013; Taylor and Helfenbein, 2009). Nonetheless, no significant scholarship in educational studies has focused on Lefebvre’s engagement with socialist state theory and his position against Stalin. As a result, when Lefebvre’s thoughts on the state and on actually existing socialism are mentioned, they are engaged completely uncritically. This essay addresses this crucial gap. Toward these ends I critically engage Lefebvre’s work on one of the most important and central concepts of socialist state theory, the dictatorship of the proletariat. While Lefebvre embraces Lenin’s theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat as spelled out in The State and Revolution, following Khrushchev, he argues that Stalin distorted it in practice.
The focus of this essay is, therefore, necessarily narrow as it aims to offer a counter to Lefebvre’s outright dismissal and disdain for Stalin. In the process, I do not attempt to argue that Stalin is without criticism. Rather, I argue that a more nuanced and historically contextualized assessment renders the role Stalin played in the former Soviet Union consistent with Lenin’s position on the dictatorship of the proletariat and Marx’s insistence that theory should always be adapted to reflect often rapidly changing concrete conditions. Making this point in an important piece of activist scholarship, Richard Becker (2015), of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, comments that Lenin ([1902] 2015) did not write The State and Revolution “as a prescription for the Russian Revolution” (p.57). Since the Bolshevik Revolution emerged under “very different historical and social conditions” (p.57) than existed during the Paris Commune of 1871, the primary example The State and Revolution is based upon, Lenin’s predictions regarding the withering away of the state did not transfer to the Soviet Union. Examine the following: Lenin had envisioned a relatively short period in which a Commune-style workers’ state would defend the revolution and reorganize the economy on a socialist basis. Then gradually, as the revolution spread, social relations transformed, and growth of the productive forces reduced and then eliminated material scarcity, the state would wither away into the higher phase of communism. In practice, the historical experience of the Soviet workers’ state, isolated as it was and erected on the basis of great material scarcity, showed that, for it, the initial stage of socialist construction could hardly be easy or short …. (Becker, 2015: 57–58)
However, before engaging the philosophical critique of Stalin, I first offer a brief summary of Lefebvre’s approach to state theory and political actors. After these first two sections I offer a rebuttal to the critique of Stalin the horrible Marxist as well as Stalin the power-hungry terrorist. Finally, I reflect on pedagogical implications.
“Men of the state” and “statesmen”
In one of his first sustained engagements with state theory, delivered as a lecture in the 1960s, Lefebvre (2009) begins by arguing that all political programs “must choose between two directions” (p.53), either work within or against the state. That is, political projects either accept a given framework of the state and work within it, or they seek to reform or completely transform it. Lefebvre establishes this dichotomy or continuum in order to position Lenin on the positive side or end and Stalin within the negative domain. Both of these directions, Lefebvre observes, presuppose an understanding of how the state functions, including its laws and techniques of application. Consequently, “knowledge of the state,” for Lefebvre, “is the essential given of political action” (p.53), which suggests that all participants should be held accountable for their actions. Yet, the contemporary state is so complex that understanding where decisions are made and who makes them necessitates very difficult inquiries. Lefebvre refers to those who engage in scientific studies of the state as “men of the state.” Politicians, on the other hand, those who act to maintain or reform the state, Lefebvre names “statesmen.”
Socialist political thought, to be sure, is not bourgeois or progressive, according to Lefebvre, but presupposes the transcendence of the capitalist state, and is, therefore, revolutionary. For Lefebvre, those who do not begin with a careful analysis of the existing state in order to determine which aspects are already dead and require termination, what parts are acceptable with revisions, and what has to be created from scratch, do not qualify to hold the title of socialist. In the next section we will see that Lefebvre considers Stalin, based upon these requirements, one of those political actors who do not deserve to hold the title of socialist. However, for Lefebvre, while socialists must have an intimate understanding of the state, socialists are not men and women of the state. That is, there is “an incompatibility between being a man of the state and a socialist” (Lefebvre, 2009: 55). Lenin, from Lefebvre’s correct perspective, was a sort of socialist statesman and not a man of the state.
What made Lenin so effective was his intimate understanding of the social forces operating within the bourgeois state. Responding to the army’s unpredictable loyalty to the Tsarist state during the first and unsuccessful proletarian Russian Revolution of 1905, Lenin concluded that his party must set up specialized military branches to perfect the art of insurrection. While it was increasingly clear to Lenin and most socialists that the revolution was not going to be peaceful, it was assumed that the result of a successful uprising, initially, would be democratic but not socialist. That is, it was assumed that it would be anti-feudal but not anti-capitalist. Operating predominantly from exile, Lenin, responding to changing concrete material conditions that demanded an anti-capitalist position to mobilize the proletariat, successfully redirected his party’s orientation from the belief that they would have to share power with the emerging capitalist class to the position of all power to the Soviets. The point here is that Lenin the statesman played a crucial role in directing the workers’ rebellion toward the creation of a worker’s state (Deutscher, 1949). While we will see that Szymanski (1979) argued that Stalin too possessed these important skills and, thus, enjoyed widespread support during the most trying times in the Soviet Union, Lefebvre demotes him to an opportunistic man of the state.
Without the movement of the masses, without their spontaneous uprising, Lefebvre explains, the state appears still, seemingly motionless, chiseled in stone and unmovable. In such eras of bourgeois stability, men of the state reach their zenith, appearing correct or practical in their affirmation of existing conditions. However, when the people begin to move, change seems possible and statesmen of socialist persuasions are able to emerge justified in their disdain for capital and its state apparatus. It is within this context of the spontaneous uprising of workers and the oppressed that Lenin ([1902] 1975), the statesman, makes his famous case for organization, that is, for the party.
However, whereas Lenin and Marx theorize the transition from capitalism to socialism to communism as a developmental process contingent upon concrete conditions, Lefebvre’s conception of democracy as process seems to be purely theoretical and abstract. Lefebvre’s (2009) theorizing here contributes, fundamentally, to his critique of Stalin. Consider the following: Democracy is nothing other than the struggle for democracy. The struggle for democracy is the movement itself. Many democrats imagine that democracy is a type of stable condition toward which we can tend, toward which we must tend. No. Democracy is the movement. And the movement is the forces in action. And democracy is the struggle for democracy, which is to say the very movement of social forces; it is a permanent struggle and it is even a struggle against the State that emerges from democracy. There is no democracy without a struggle against the democratic State itself, which tends to consolidate itself as a bloc …. (p.61)
Making his case, Lefebvre points to the supposed “opportunism of the Stalinist party” and its “acceptance of the existing State in State socialist thinking” (p.65). For Lefebvre, Stalin was a State socialist who considered the State and the Russian State as the supreme goal of History, as the actualization and end point of history. It was a State socialism that endeavored to consolidate the State by all means. (2009: 65)
The dictatorship of the proletariat
Echoing Khrushchev here Lefebvre argues that under Stalin’s leadership the dictatorship of the proletariat took on a distorted and perverted character: “the Stalinist practice of the dictatorship of the proletariat was a revisionism of the genuine Leninist theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the withering away of the State” (2009: 70). Working in what seems to be purely theoretical terms, Lefebvre’s basis of critique is a reading of Lenin that suggests that while workers, organized as the class that rules, require a state, the withering away of that state should begin immediately, despite any possible concrete conditions unforeseen by Lenin. However, Lenin does acknowledge that the appropriate time for the proletarian state to begin withering away is not determined by abstract theorizing, but by an assessment of concrete conditions; Lenin admitted that it could be a lengthy process. As long as not only internal, but external, imperialist counter-revolutionary forces exist, the workers’ state must too exist, and perhaps even expand, to defend itself from economic sanctions and violent attacks in attempts to restore capitalism.
To strengthen his case against what he perceived to be Stalin’s refusal to let the state wither away, Lefebvre turns to Marx’s early writings where he finds the conclusion, contrary to Hegel, that men and women do not realize the fullness of their being within the modern state, but as a result of the transcendence from it. While this thesis remains consistent in Marx’s later writings, what Lefebvre fails to address, again, is the viability of the withering away of the state given the global situation.
Continuing his attack on Stalin, a decontextualized attack no doubt, Lefebvre argues that every state ideology is a form of religiosity that relates to itself as timeless and incontrovertibly necessary. Consequently, he argues that the cult of personality around Stalin was really a form of religiosity where critique was treated as a crime punishable by death. As we will see below, however, providing a larger global context to understand restrictions on dissent offers vindication for Stalin, and in the process, points to important insights for a communist party pedagogy, which are necessary if education is going to play a role in today’s communist movement. Interspersed with such errors, Lefebvre offers important truths worth reiterating.
For instance, Lefebvre is correct that even within the socialist state, within proletarian democracy, humanity remains partially alienated from absolute becoming. The state apparatus must wither away—socialism must be replaced by communism with the final defeat of global counter-revolutionary imperialist forces. Summarizing this point, Lefebvre argues that “true democracy is the disappearance of democratic politics itself,” which he takes from Marx and Engels. Again, while it is true that the state, as a contradictory entity, will inevitably disappear with the resolution of its central contradiction (i.e. “the contradiction between its theoretical definition and its real presuppositions” (Lefebvre, 2009: 82)), but when, how, and under what conditions this will happen are unknown variables that Lefebvre the philosopher does not adequately engage. Regardless, it remains true, as is the case with every entity, in so far as every entity is contradictory, that “the state carries within it the seeds of its self-destruction” (Lefebvre, 2009: 82). Consider the following: The State is not that which crowns society, realizes it or brings it to completion, that which elevates it to the level of reason or the moral idea, it is simply the product of antagonisms, contradictions internal to society, and it is a force that erects itself over society in order to resolve these contradictions in appearance, and in fact in order to put itself in the service of the ruling class. The State does not arbitrate conflicts, it moderates them by keeping them within the limits of the established order. (Lefebvre, 2009: 84)
Toward the end of his essay on the withering away of the state, Lefebvre acknowledges the role of the dictatorship of the proletariat suppressing their former oppressors from continuing oppressing and exploiting. Because the class that rules, the working class, is now the majority, Lenin, in 1902, argues that the people themselves, now armed, become the militia rendering the military, as an apparatus of the state, redundant. In this way then, the state immediately begins to wither away. In practice, however, due to external imperialist threats, this theory fell short and was in need of revision. That is, the immediacy of the proletarian state withering away proved impractical. Lefebvre does mention that Marx and Lenin critiqued the anarchists for wanting to move too fast, for moving straight away to communism, bypassing the whole phase of the temporary proletarian state. Perhaps Lefebvre’s overemphasis on the immediate withering away of the state was a set-up to challenge what he calls Stalinism, which he repeatedly maintains is a distortion of the dictatorship of the proletariat, rendering it a permanent state, one that never withers away.
Lefebvre is correct, ultimately, that democratic values will never lead to socialism. Only the suppression of the oppressors through the authoritarian use of force can lead to the establishment of a temporary proletarian democracy (i.e. socialism). From here, it is only the final defeat of the former capitalist counter-revolutionaries and external imperialists that a truly classless society can step forth, and, along with it, the withering away of the state.
At this point Lefebvre pauses to reassure his readers that he acknowledges this need for the dictatorship of the proletariat until all classes have been abolished allowing for a classless society. Yet, he does not retract his previous statement where he insists that the withering away of the state begins immediately after the proletariat takes state power.
As previously mentioned, Lefebvre does not address the external and internal bourgeois and imperialist material threats to the Soviet Union that the intolerance of dissent stemmed from. It is only in this context that the appropriateness of the restrictions on dissent can be assessed—something Lefebvre completely fails to do.
Summarizing this larger context, Becker (2015) observes that it is not just the external military threat of imperialist invasion, but it is the result of the Soviet Union’s isolation that prevented the withering away of the Soviet state. That is, by 1921, with much of the capitalist world still blocking trade with the Soviet Union, and having a predominantly peasant-based society, the “total production had fallen by 85% since 1913” (p.63), rendering the need for centralized planning imperative. In this context of civil war, “draconian measures, which came to be called ‘War Communism,’ had to be implemented to prevent a complete breakdown of the economy and society” (pp.63–64). Such measures included appropriating grain from more well-off peasants to prevent widespread starvation among the largely dispersed and desperate idle proletariat. The peasantry, who constituted roughly 90 percent of the population, had benefited from the post-revolutionary land reforms, the most well off of which hoarded grain due to the shortage of manufactured goods to purchase. It is within this situation that special reforms had to be implemented, some of which were temporary, like the capitalist accumulation of value produced by the peasantry in order to build up an economic base for production. Faced with a knowledge deficit amongst the working class, the state was also forced to reincorporate elements of the old managerial class to facilitate this process. Even though the revolution was successful and the working class held state power, the class struggle raged on. For these and other complex factors, the Soviet Union was in no position to facilitate the withering away of the state. Lefebvre’s analysis, therefore, reads as blind to the concrete, material conditions Stalin faced when he took power after Lenin’s death in 1924.
Rethinking the Stalin era against critical pedagogy
Albert Szymanski (1979), in his rigorous scientific analysis of the Soviet Union, offers an indispensable correction to the way the Stalin era has traditionally been approached. For both opponents and proponents of the era of Stalin there exists a tendency to “explain developments … in terms of individual personalities,” which Szymanski (1979) points out is a departure from the “materialist conception of history” (p.201). Rethinking Stalin and the Stalin era, however, is not just a matter of historical accuracy, but has consequences that “remain considerable for the future of the world-communist movement” (p.202). Summarizing these consequences with biting precision, Szymanski (1979) is worth quoting at length: What if Stalin really was one of the two most brutal despots of the twentieth century—responsible for the destruction of workers’ power in the USSR and the creation of a new bureaucratic class; responsible for the putting to death of millions for resisting his whims; and responsible for dealing with both domestic issues and foreign communist parties to the detriment of the development of socialism in the Soviet Union and the advancement of the Communist movement overseas? If all this is so, very serious questions are necessarily raised about the liberating promise of Marxism. If the mainstream of the world Marxist movement followed Stalin’s leadership for 30 years in spite of these gross injustices and abuses, are Marxists, now or in the future, ever to be trusted to come to correct analyses and inspire the workers’ movement towards communism? (p.202)
For instance, there continues to be strong debate within the communist movement regarding the legacy of Trotsky. For some socialists Trotsky represents a justified stand against the police state that emerged within the Soviet Union as a response to the external and internal bourgeois counter-revolutionary forces. In other words, there remains strong opposition to the Stalin faction of the leadership for handling the siege by imposing tight discipline on every sector of society, viewing all difference as potentially treasonous (and not just those associated with Trotsky’s Left Opposition). Another commonly cited example is the 1917 Bolshevik central committee members, the commanders of arguably the greatest achievement in the history of the working class, almost half of whom were executed under Stalin’s leadership. For many communists it seems unlikely that they were all part of a vast fascist fifth column, and, therefore, were incorrectly dealt with. However, there is a larger context here that Szymanski (1979) points to. Specifically, in the context of extreme hardship and external threat, Szymanski (1979) is confident that foreign covert counter-intelligence operations worked to subvert the unity of the CPSU, leading to what were most likely a number of unjustified executions, but far less than what bourgeois commentators (i.e. Montefiore, 2005) have claimed, as discussed below. Let us consider Szymanski’s (1979) own words on the matter of counter-intelligence: It is almost certain that the intelligence services of Japan and Germany were present in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and acting very much as the North American C.I.A. did in Eastern Europe in the late 1940s, and how other branches of the U.S. intelligence operate (e.g. the F.B.I.’s COINTELPRO to infiltrate and subvert the American left). In the late 1940s in Eastern Europe the C.I.A. did all it could to get the Soviets and local communist parties to believe that some of their best leaders and cadres’ were working with the C.I.A. This was designed to encourage divisiveness and demoralization and to eliminate some of the most effective communist leaders. (pp.207–208)
The threat that divisiveness poses to internal stability is so great that it is not uncommon for communists to this day to oppose Trotsky for his divisive tactics. Szymanski recalls the fact that nearly the entire Communist Party leadership advocated for removing Trotsky from a position of leadership due to his factional battles with Lenin and their sense that he did not have a realistic sense of what had to be done to get through their most difficult period. For example, Trotsky believed that socialism could not be carried out in the Soviet Union until socialism had been established in more developed capitalist nations, especially Germany. However, since socialist revolution in Germany had been subverted, Trotsky’s line was viewed as defeatist and unable to inspire the necessary unity between the working class and the peasantry needed to prevent the restoration of capitalism and the old ruling class.
Offering a similar analysis, Harry Haywood (1978), in his text, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist, makes a point to mention the importance of the unity between the working class and the peasantry as instrumental in the Soviet Union’s ability to survive the tumultuous decades after the Revolution: The Soviet working class, under the leadership of Lenin and the Bolsheviks, had vanquished capitalism over one-sixth of the globe; shattered its economic power; expropriated the capitalists and landlords; converted the factories, railroads and banks into public property; and was beginning to build a state-owned socialist industry. The Soviet government had begun to apply Lenin's cooperative plans in agriculture and begun to fully develop a socialist economic system. This colossal task had to be undertaken by workers in alliance with the masses of working peasantry. (Haywood, 1978: lines 14–17)
Some communists challenge Trotsky for not supporting this position because he did not believe the rural peasantry to be sufficiently sophisticated or progressive enough to be trusted to advance the communist revolution. Haywood (1978), therefore, argues that Trotsky’s position against Lenin was defeatist and corrosive to the solidarity the Bolshevik program fostered between the urban proletariat and the rural peasantry, which was literally the foundation of the Soviet Union. Trotsky argued that it could only be the global industrialized proletariat that would bring forth the communist era. However, since the working class communist movements in Germany, Bulgaria, Italy, and Poland had been severely crushed by 1923, signaling a communist recession in Europe, the Soviet Union had little choice but to build socialism in the USSR until other emerging communist states could be supported.
With Lenin incapacitated in 1923 from a series of strokes, and dead by 1924, Stalin was already in a position to take over, having been elected General Secretary in 1922. This was the context from which Stalin announced the dialectical strategy and campaign slogan of Socialism in One Country—dialectical, in part, because it was informed by the world as it existed concretely in the 19th century, not the world confronted by Marx in the 18th century or the world Lenin confronted when he penned his comments regarding the withering away of the state. Szymanski (1979) reminds his readers that Stalin’s campaign slogan gained currency among the CPSU not because of his aggressive intimidation tactics, but because it was not only practical, but it did what needed to be done at that time—it inspired the people to carry their revolution forward. Consequently, “Stalin came to symbolize commitment to building the future” (Szymanski, 1978: 205).
Stalin’s plan for rapid development was adopted, which, he argued, was needed to not only feed the people and strengthen their economy, but to build up their military in preparation for another imperialist invasion, which, in 1929, he believed would occur within 10 years. Soon after the adoption of his vision for the future, a cult of personality developed around Stalin. Rather than following Lefebvre and re-stating a passage or two against the cult of personality from Marx, Szymanski takes a Marxist position and examines the material conditions that gave rise to, and function served by, Stalin the positive revolutionary symbol. The symbol of Stalin, for Szymanski, therefore served the purpose not of inflating the power of Stalin, but of winning the support of the peasantry and the new working class. Since the peasants did not participate in the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the socialist project had to be personalized for them through statues, celebrations, and slogans. Such propaganda was fundamental in the short term for creating party loyalty as a form of self-defense from counter-revolutionary forces. Put another way, “the personality cult … serves a key social function when circumstances don’t allow for the much slower development of the class-conscious understanding and struggle needed to win people to a socialism …” (Szymanski, 1979: 206).
It is important to note that the path Stalin chose was not the only option in terms of responding to a tireless, imperialist aggressor. For example, Cuba has usually pursued the other policy path, greater openness in communication between the masses and the Party and more robust control over the state by the grassroots in the face of extreme difficulty. There was a failed effort to massively increase sugar cane production in the early 1970s, which not only failed to reach its goals but also caused serious economic problems because it diverted resources from other sectors. In response, the government apologized and held a series of mass consultations that resulted in the neighborhood assembly-based “People’s Power” electoral system the country uses today (before that there were no elections for high public office in Cuba). That was not nearly as serious a crisis as the Soviet Union faced, but during the Special Period which really did lead to extreme suffering (and a consensus in world bourgeois opinion that the revolution would be imminently overthrown) they actually amended the constitution to deepen the role of local people’s assemblies and increase the number of delegates they elect to the National Assembly. While this example is not provided as evidence to condemn the former Soviet Union, it is offered to remember that critique is central for advancing the proletarian camp of the global class war, as Lefebvre insists.
While critique is important, some communists maintain that Trotsky took it too far, arguing that Stalin’s position represents a departure from Marx’s global conception of communism. To this day, this Trotskyist line has been one of the primary sources of western Marxists’ charges that the Soviet Union was not actually Marxist, especially after the death of Lenin. But Marx’s approach was not dogmatic. Marx’s dialectical method charged the revolutionary communist Party to confront the world as it actually is, and not make decisions based upon an imagined or bygone reality. One might, therefore, argue that one of the unfortunate legacies of Trotsky is a tendency toward utopianism; an error Lefebvre is, undoubtedly, often guilty of. Far from advocating for Soviet isolationism, the position of Lenin, Stalin, and the Central Committee understood quite well the threat of imperialism as long as it existed. Advancing this insight with a precise clarity, Haywood (1978) is instructive: Stalin’s position did not mean the isolation of the Soviet Union. The danger of capitalist restoration still existed and would exist until the advent of a classless society. The Soviet people understood that they could not destroy this external danger by their own efforts, that it could only be finally destroyed as a result of a victorious revolution in at least several of the countries of the West. The triumph of socialism in the Soviet Union could not be final as long as the external danger existed. Therefore, the success of the revolutionary forces in the capitalist West was a vital concern of the Soviet people. (lines 79–82)
While the Trotsky line tends to be a critique picked up more often by the international Left, including Marxists, and socialist Parties such as the International Socialist Organization (ISO), the caricature of Stalin as a monster and mass murderer is more closely associated with bourgeois ideologists (i.e. Montefiore, 2005). In Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism, Michael Parenti (1997) investigates the evidence concerning the so-called crimes against humanity Joseph Stalin was directly responsible for. Introducing the topic, Parenti (1997) reflects on how, we have heard much about the ruthless Reds, beginning with the reign of terror and repression perpetuated during the dictatorship of Joseph Stalin (1929–1953). Estimates of those who perished under Stalin’s rule—based principally on speculations by writers who never reveal how they arrive at such figures—vary wildly. (p.77) What we do know of Stalin’s purges is that many victims were Communist party officials, managers, military officers, and other strategically situated individuals whom the dictator saw fit to incarcerate or liquidate. In addition, whole categories of people whom Stalin considered of unreliable loyalty—Cossacks, Crimean Tarters, and ethnic Germans—were selected for internal deportation. Though they never saw the inside of a prison or labor camp, they were subjected to noncustodial resettlement in Central Asia and Siberia. To be sure, crimes of state were committed in communist countries and many political prisoners were unjustly interned and even murdered. But the inflated numbers offered by cold-war scholars serve neither historical truth nor the cause of justice but merely help to reinforce a knee-jerk fear and loathing of those terrible Reds. (pp.78–79)
Parenti (1997) does not end his discussion here without failing to mention that, “we hear a great deal about the crimes of communism but almost nothing about its achievements” (p.84). It is, therefore, important to note that: During the years of Stalin’s reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women’s rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that “socialism doesn’t work” is to overlook the fact that it did. (Parenti, 1997: 85) … The underlying social system of the USSR is infinitely superior to that of the most developed, the most “glorious,” and the most “democratic” of the imperialist states. Whatever the drawbacks of the Soviet Union, whatever its trials and tribulations, whatever false policies have been imposed on the USSR by its leaders, it has nevertheless been able to achieve tremendous social, cultural, and material progress for the masses which no capitalist state could possibly have accomplished in the circumstances under which the USSR was originally founded and developed. (Marcy, 1977: lines 59–64)
While the above-mentioned advances represented a major leap forward for the lives of Russian peasants and workers, in the Soviet Union’s 74 years of existence it was never able to develop past the initial stage of creating communism due to economic factors and the external threats of imperialists and counter-revolutionaries. Lefebvre’s dismissal of Stalin for refusing to advance the withering away of the state, therefore, comes across as politically immature. Despite its own limitations and the perpetual external war waged upon it, the Soviet Union still represented a model for achieving equality and happiness capitalism could never compete with. It is precisely because communism is a superior system to capitalism that the imperialists have had to crush it violently and with extreme ideological manipulation.
The collapse of the Soviet Union and much of the proletarian class camp’s states, therefore, was not caused by the inherent defectiveness or authoritarianism of communism but by the imperialist counter-revolutionary offensive. That is, weakened by a US–Chinese alliance, the Soviet Union began to collapse, but, contrary to imperialist propaganda, it’s fall was orchestrated not by the Russian people themselves—77 percent of whom supported their communist state at the time of its fall—but by the US and its imperialist allies’ anti-communist war they had been waging since the end of World War II, when communism was at its height of influence after the Soviet Union defeated the Nazi war machine. Global anti-communism has been so corrosive and all-encompassing that it wound up influencing high-level members of the USSR’s Communist Party to become opportunistic and counter-revolutionary.
Of course the counter-revolutionaries from within the Soviet Union, adopting the rhetoric of democracy from US capitalists, presented their expulsions and purges of communists from the government, media, universities, the courts, and so on as “democratic reforms” (Parenti, 1997: 88). True to the allusions of freedom and equally within capitalism, truly democratic measures would not be able to restore capitalism in the Soviet Union due to the widespread support for communism amongst the people throughout Russia and the former republics. Repressive measures and “presidential decrees” were required to implement “market reforms” (p.88). In classic capitalist fashion, the Communist Party officials who resisted the subversion of the peoples’ Soviet workers’ state were labeled “hardliners” and “holdovers”, dogmatically impeding progress.
Parenti notes that the suppression of communists was not just something that happened after the fall of the Soviet Union, but was part of the process leading up to it. For example, Khrushchev’s speech discussed at the beginning of this essay was part of this process. As mentioned above, this move has proven devastating to the legacy of not only Stalin, but the Soviet Union more generally, in the eyes of much of the global Left. For example, negatively impacting the Black radical tradition in the US, WEB DuBois’ support for Stalin has been dismissed since it occurred before Khrushchev’s fictitious expose. Even in a relatively recent world history book entitled A People’s History of the World by Chris Harman (2008) the Khrushchev line is reproduced uncritically: … In February 1956 Khrushchev, the Communist Party general secretary, decided to reveal some home truths to party activists in order to strengthen his hand in the leadership struggle. He told the 20th party congress in Moscow that Stalin had been responsible for the murder of thousands of innocent people and the deportation of millions of members of national minorities. What is more, he said Stalin had been incompetent and cowardly at the time of the German invasion of Russia in 1941. The impact of these revelations on tens of millions of people across the world who had been taught to regard Stalin as a near-god was shattering, even if many tried to close their minds to them. (p.563)
The human tragedy of capitalism’s restoration
According to Parenti (1997), months before the official dissolution of the Soviet Union, Gorbachev announced that the “Communist Party of the USSR no longer had legal status. The Party’s membership funds and buildings were confiscated. Workers were prohibited from engaging in any kind of political activities in the workplace. Six leftist newspapers were suppressed …” (p.88). In the US these moves were praised as advancing democratic reforms. Gorbachev then demanded that the Soviet Congress disband itself, claiming it was a barrier to democracy even though democratic elections and debates were already in practice. The problem with the Soviet Congress, from a counter-revolutionary perspective, was that through democratic measures, it was firmly positioned against free-market reforms. What gave Gorbachev justification for the repression of communism was what Parenti (1997) characterized as a poorly planned coup against him that fell apart before it really even materialized. The emerging Russian capitalist class was the primary opponent of the workers’ state who repeatedly expressed their bewilderment at why so few Soviet workers embraced so-called democratic reforms.
It is argued that the real coup came when Boris Yeltsin “used the incident to exceed his constitutional powers and dismantle the Soviet Union itself, absorbing all its powers into his own Russian Republic” (Parenti, 1997, p. 89). In 1993 the resistance of the Soviet people, outraged at the subversion of their workers’ state, led Yeltsin to take further anti-communist steps as he “forcibly disbanded the Russian parliament and every other elected representative body … and launched an armed attack upon the parliamentary building, killing an estimated two thousand resistors and demonstrators” (Parenti, 1997, p. 89). For these and many other crimes Yeltsin was highly praised among the US bourgeois media and politicians for defending democracy and never wavering in his support for the privatization of the former Soviet Union. Yeltsin, Parenti reports, had political rivals assassinated and what remained of the people’s Communist Party suppressed. With the aid of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank money, the most sophisticated US electoral advisors, and a heavy-handed monopoly control over Russian television, Yeltsin was able to secure the re-election of his presidency. While Yeltsin was prepared to declare election results null if the Communist Party won, he was advised such a move would cause too much outrage and threaten the free-market reforms with outright rebellion. Part of the Yeltsin campaign’s rhetorical strategy was the use of fear, bombarding the public with the message that a communist victory would cause civil war. The subtext here was the threat of violence that Yeltsin was clearly not afraid to employ to ensure capitalism triumphed over the peoples’ desire for communism.
Perhaps one of the greatest arguments for communism can be found within what emerged in its absence. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, the communist ethic that sought to “provide a better life for all citizens” vanished and was replaced with the drive “to maximize the opportunities for individuals to accumulate personal fortunes” (Parenti, 1997: 106). The capitalist restorationists, cheered on by the western capitalist press, immediately began re-privatizing ownership of production and dismantling the vast network of social programs that had provided a guaranteed standard of living to its people. The Eastern Bloc was quickly transformed into a series of third-world countries, providing capitalist investors from within the imperialist centers of capitalist wealth sources of cheap labor and all manner of economic extraction. The once vibrant trade between former communist states ground to a halt as foreign investment worked to ravage and exploit workers of former communist workers’ states. With public coffers and programs obliterated and with production thrown into the global economy, production rates plummeted leading to skyrocketing unemployment and poverty (Parenti, 1997). The dramatic austerity measures further degrading Eastern Europe can best be understood within this context of capitalist restoration.
The end of communism also brought with it a return to dramatic gender inequality in the former Soviet Union. Because the reigning caricature of the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc more generally portrays them as male-dominated, hyper-Masculine, rigid dictatorships, it is worth quoting Parenti (1997) at length, summarizing the lost progress that had been made concerning gender equality: The new constitution adopted in Russia eliminates provisions that guaranteed women the right to paid maternity leave, job security during pregnancy, prenatal care, and affordable daycare centers. Without the former communist stipulation that women get at least one third of the seats in any legislature, female political representation has dropped to as low as 5 percent in some countries. In all communist countries about 90 percent of women had jobs in what was a full-employment economy. Today, women compose over two-thirds of the unemployed …. Instances of sexual harassment and violence against women have increased sharply …. The Communist party committees that used to intervene in cases of domestic abuse no longer exist. (pp.114–115)
While capitalist cheerleaders argued that the period of hardship after the communist fall was only temporary as it would take some time for the redistribution of wealth upwards and outwards to trickle back down and into the working classes, it should now be clear to anyone who did not believe Marx that capitalism induces immiseration and that only communist restoration will improve the lives of the Russian people. Growing inequality is one of the capitalist systems’ contradictions it cannot escape, without a qualitative change from capitalist production relations to socialist ones. Shifting from an economy designed to meet peoples’ needs, as highlighted in the above quote, to an economy designed to maximize accumulation, has severe implications that can only be resolved through communist restoration.
This point has not been lost to the Russian people. For example, it has long been noted that Russians of all ages, whose suffering since the fall of the Soviet Union has not abated, tend to hold a deep sense of patriotic nostalgia for their communist past. For many Russians communism does not represent an outdated authoritarianism but a society based on the genuine pursuit of equality and freedom and the end of all oppression and exploitation, which is quite appealing given the devastation brought on by capitalist restoration (i.e. the privatization of industry and agriculture for the accumulation of surplus value for an elite, capitalist class, built off the backs of exploited laborers). Russians remember the Soviet Union as a world communist leader endowed with a military rivaling the US, thereby keeping imperialist aggression at bay for the proletarian class camp of the global class war. Public opinion polls have consistently found that more than 60 percent of Russians view the collapse of the Soviet Union as a negative event (Weir, 2016).
While it was believed that Soviet nostalgia would eventually dissipate as the immediate hardships of the transition from communism to capitalism also faded away, the intensification of both has pressured the Kremlin to more closely align itself to the Soviet past, even if in rhetoric alone. However, these trends offer the proletarian camp in the global class war a sign of hope for what may come (i.e. communist restoration and expansion) (Weir, 2016).
Implications for communist pedagogy
As opportunistic as they are, it comes as no surprise that when the Soviet Union fell, bourgeois ideologist proclaimed the end of communism and even the end of history (i.e. Fukuyama, [1992] 2006). This proclamation, of course, is unsubstantiated, but the impact on even the Left within imperialist nations, such as the US, has been devastating. Even critical pedagogy, for example, is not based on the most rudimentary insight that communism actually does represent the interests of the worlds’ diverse working classes. Whereas communism identifies the peasantry and proletarian labor base as the global subject of historical change, critical pedagogy tends to disregard the global class war in favor of a diversity of subjectivities whose equally diverse desires constitutes a democracy of possibilities the monolithic communist end point subverts and ignores.
Within bourgeois critical pedagogy, unconscious of its own indoctrination, the interests and desires of people of color are incorrectly believed to be subverted by the economism of western communist ideology and practice. From a Marxist reading of the history of the world’s communist parties and workers’ states, on the other hand, the socialist project emerges as the true representative of the expressed interests and desires of millions of people of color around the world from China, Korea, Cuba, Burkina Faso, and far beyond. It is within a worker-controlled state that the worlds’ working classes, peasants, and oppressed peoples have come to see the possibility of complete emancipation. Stalin was himself a working-class national minority, a Georgian that is, who grew up in the Caucuses and was forced to learn Russian in elementary school as a consequence of the regions’ colonial-like relationship to Russia. Due to his vast knowledge of the numerous national minorities within what would become the Soviet Union, Lenin looked to Stalin, the younger statesmen, to help shape the Soviet Union to support the self-determination of all oppressed nations. This is the dangerous realization that bourgeois ideologists have, consciously or not, subverted.
The resulting negative, anti-communist dogma is so thoroughly saturated within every pore of foreign and domestic US policy, that is, within nearly every avenue of popular media production, and every piece of official public school curriculum, that when Paulo Freire brought the movement of radical pedagogy to North America in the early 1970s, receptive educators brought their American anti-communism to the field. Even the first real US Marxist education text, Schooling in Capitalist America by Samuel Bowles and Herbert Gintis (1976), reproduced capitalist imperialism’s rejection of not just top-level Soviet leadership, but the workers’ state (i.e. the Soviet Union) itself, while advocating for socialism in the abstract. We might understand this to be an anti-socialist socialism. This tendency exists right up to the present moment. The democratic socialist alternative advocated for by today’s US educational Marxists is based upon an incorrect assessment of actually existing socialism.
In Marx, Capital and Education: Towards a Pedagogy of Becoming, Malott and Ford (2015) offer six key aspects of a communist pedagogy, the first premise of which is a complete rejection of anti-communism. Building upon this, a communist pedagogy must be committed to contributing to national and international struggles against all forms of imperialism, national oppression, racism, and bigotry. In determining the appropriate orientation toward various struggles, a communist pedagogy must evaluate the class character of such movements. Following this line of evaluation, a communist pedagogy must direct its energy toward the communist future through the party form. The vindication of Stalin and openness to his contributions are fundamental to the advancement of a communist pedagogy.
Conclusion
Since critical pedagogy is a bankrupt concept in the context of the global communist movement, the theorization of a communist pedagogy is indispensable (Ford, in press-a; Malott, 2016b). Communist pedagogy is now defining the educational project for a communist future. As suggested above, communist pedagogy does not suffer from the anti-communism of Lefebvre’s generation of the Cold War Left. Stalin is not looked upon with disgust and disdain within the project of communist pedagogy. Rather, Stalin’s legacy and vision are vindicated, reimagined for a new generation to pick up his inspiring call to action: “there is no smoke without fire” (Stalin, [1925] 2016).
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.