Here is what Stalin thinks of your bourgeois discourse.

This image of Stalin is on the men's washroom door at a bar in my neighbourhood.

Yesterday at work, when I passed a poster advertising the schedule of one of the many marxist reading groups on campus, I was reminded about my intention to post something on Stalin/Stalinism that would be more substantial than my Trotsky-Stalin Mimesis piece from 2011, and more serious than my Young Stalin joke post that over-inflated my blog stats for a few months. The reason I was reminded about my intention to post on Stalin/Stalinism was because, according to the poster on campus, the first scheduled reading of this generic marxist group was entitled something like "Stalin's Betrayal of the Russian Revolution" with a cartoon depiction of Prophet Trotsky giving Evil Uncle Joe some sort of verbal smack-down. Beyond the obvious fact that a reading group focused on a sectarian interpretation of history––and whose theory is dependent on this sectarianism (i.e. no Trotskyism would survive if you remove its mimetic double, "Stalinism", that it itself has golemized)––will just produce a sectarian grouplet with unremarkable theory and near-cultish practice, there is also the fact that the now banal Trotskyist discourse of the Russian Revolution is remarkably similar to the bourgeois discourse of the Russian Revolution and Stalin.(A caveat… None of this is to say that specific marxist tendencies should not explain their theoretical line-struggle with other tendencies, or that holding to a specific theoretical tradition amounts to sectarianism, but only that the over-eager repetition of the whole "look out for Stalinism" thing has become as cartoonish as an actual "Stalinist" (i.e. of the Hoxhaite variety) talking about Trotsky's betrayal and the "social fascism" of Trotskyism. While I am not suggesting that these opposing tendencies should stop talking about their interpretations of history and reach some sort of liberal unity, I am only suggesting that an educational focus on the-bad-person-who-betrayed-the-revolution as part of a recruitment strategy strikes me as quasi-dogmatic.)Leaving aside my annoyance with this discourse of Stalin/Stalinism, encountering this discourse yet again was a good reminder of why we need to think through the historical problems raised by "Stalinism" and, in doing so, develop a critique of this phenomenon that is a critique from the left rather than from the right. While it may be true that there isn't really such a thing as "Stalinism" as a theoretical body of thought (despite the Trotskyist claim to the contrary,as "socialism in one country," that I have critiqued in my document), there is still a phenomenon that, for the sake of convenience, we can stamp with this name. Although my contention is that this phenomenon is something that is not reducible to the label of Stalinism, and would have still existed even without Stalin, in some ways it is appropriate to use this name because of its ossification during a historical process in which the figure of Stalin was involved.So what is this thing called "Stalinism" if it is not reducible to a coherent theory, let alone the Trotskyist definition of "socialism in one country"? For even if we dispense with this straw-person theory that was never the theoretical terrain of those who were branded "Stalinists", we are still left with a phenomenon that most people who use this word pejoratively seem to think possesses some sort of meaning. If we can give this phenomenon any sort of concrete expression, then it would have to be the kind of party organizing and structure that emerged in the Soviet Union under Stalin and was characteristic of every Marxist-Leninist organization that aligned itself with the Comintern. That is, the kind of monolithic, top-down, highly disciplined, and bureaucratized party that was produced by the historical necessity to defend the first socialist revolution. After all, when someone or some organization is branded as "Stalinist" this is usually synonymous with saying "authoritarian" or "overly centralized".While it would be a mistake to moralize about this phenomenon––since the proper historical materialist approach would be to understand it as necessitated by historical circumstances as an attempt to answer the problem of defending the dictatorship of the proletariat so as to accomplish communism––I am of the opinion that it is a phenomenon that consistently returns to haunt anti-capitalists movements, even those who mobilizethe memory of Stalin. Moreover, the only way to exorcize this ghost is to accept its historical necessity, understand why it emerged (rather than simply castigating it as the product of a single and supposedly "evil" man), and thus push beyond this terminal point of the terrain of Leninism.Although Maoism has made much to do about the "party of the new type" in an attempt to over-step the problem of Stalinist organization, past maoisms (Mao Zedong Thought, anti-revisionist Marxism-Leninism) have often fallen back into the monolithic and mechanical party-building process. That five-headed symbol of Mao Zedong Thought––Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Mao––is a metaphor of this kind of haunted Maoism. If we want Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, though, we have to accept that there is no such thingas Stalinism while, at the same time, accepting the phenomenology of Stalinism. Most importantly, any true over-stepping of this Stalinist phenomenon should be able to defend the Soviet Union under Stalin against the banal anti-Stalinism that is shared by reactionaries, liberals, anarchists, and some marxists; at the same time, and as aforementioned, it needs to critique this phenomenon from the left.Before suggesting a way in which to critique this phenomenon from the left, and arguing why this is important, I want to make a demarcation between this type of critique and the (all too common) critique from the right that masquerades as marxist or even anarchist. That is, the whole "Stalin was a very bad man who betrayed the revolution" discourse is a way of examining history that, usually in the interest of proposing a pure communism , lapses into historical idealism rather than remaining squarely within the analysis provided by historical materialism. At its very worst, this discourse uncritically accepts the highly questionable narratives of reactionary cold war historians, such as Robert Conquest, to go so far as to suggest that Stalin was responsible for genocide and was thus at least as bad as, if not worse than, Hitler. This kind of Animal Farm understanding of history tends to shut down any sort of critical debate about the Soviet Union under Russia due to its acceptance of an uncritical bourgeois moralism and an unwillingness to question historical accounts that were produced during the Cold War by unapologetic conservative historians whose job was to smear communism. While I am not arguing that we should instead just base our understanding of this period of history on the work of someone such as Grover Furr (but at the same time I am not necessarily saying that Furr is wrong, or should not be read––I think hebe read by those who would dismiss his claims without having engaged with his research), I am questioning the way in which a common sense discourse of communism has sunk into our consciousness to such a degree that we are angry if we are ever asked to think critically about its core assumptions.Or take, for example, another critique of Stalin and the Soviet Union that is raised by well-intentioned leftists and that simply reproduce the whole liberal "totalitarian" theory: Stalin collaborated with Hitler before joining with the Allies in fighting fascism. Thankfully, good Trotskyist historians think that this claim, based on an intentional misreading of the history around the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, doesn't hold water. For example, Isaac Deutscher in his book(which is a Trotskyist and definitely not a pro-Stalin biography) is pretty clear that this pact was the result of the Soviet Union's failure to convince the other European states to work together to defeat fascism (because many of these states, especially Britain, hoped that the Nazis would destroy the Bolsheviks) and thus a political maneuver to give the Soviet Union time to develop a war economy. That is, as Deutscher and pretty much every serious scholar on this issue has pointed out, the Soviet Union under Stalin was indeed planning to fight fascism (and evidence of this is that, when it did enter the war, itthe war against the Nazis and was responsible for the majority of the losses and victories), so the pact should be understood in the context of military tactics. The reason we now have a discourse that flies in the face of serious historical scholarship is because the imperialist camp, post-WW2, realized that, since the Soviet Union was primarily responsible for the defeat of fascism, they were dealing with a propaganda victory of communism over capitalism and so had to develop their own counter-propaganda: totalitarianism, Stalin's Soviet Union collaborating with the Nazis but then conveniently "switching sides" because of their totalitarian cunning, and thus no distinction between communism and fascism.(There is a reason that myself, and others critical of the "evil Stalin" discourse, tend to champion the work of J. Arch Getty and those other liberal scholars of that period of the Soviet Union who, at least within academia, are now seen as the primary experts in this area. We have disagreements with Getty's theoretical understanding of things, because Getty and that group of scholars are not communists, but we think it is important to read serious historical scholarship that, while never praising Stalin and being quite critical, also shuts the door on so much of the unsubstantiated anti-communist "scholarship" that was quite often justified by appeals to conservative authors of fiction such as Solzhenitsyn and Koestler.)Outside of these obvious replications of reactionary history, the entire "Stalin betrayed the Russian Revolution" approach to history is, as I know I've suggested elsewhere, not a very historical materialist approach to history. History's momentum is not produced by the actions of "great individuals" but is rather the product of social classes, and though this movement sometimes throws individuals to the forefront of history this does not mean that these individuals are themselves the prime movers of historical conjunctures; rather, they are ciphers of other complex social forces. Even if I was to accept that the Soviet Union under Stalin was a "degenerated workers state" (which I don't, though I think it is a critique worth examining), I could not accept that this degenerated workers state was the product of Evil Stalin kicking out Good Trotsky and remain a historical materialist. Whatever problems existed in the Soviet Union under Stalin, that would be transformed into clearly revisionist problems under Khruschev, there is no way that these problems are reducible to a single man and I think it is doubtful that they would not exist had Trotsky won the line struggle and purged Stalin. After all, there really is nothing in Trotsky's theory or practice that proves otherwise. Moreover, once we reduce the historical account of the eventual failure of the Soviet Union to the business of Stalin versus Trotsky, we will not be able to avoid an eternal sectarian exchange that is incapable of providing anything useful for our understanding of theory and our revolutionary practice––for the "Stalinist" can respond to the Trotskyist, and with the same amount of evidence, that "Trotsky betrayed the Russian Revolution" by claiming he was a wrecker.All of this is to say that critiquing Stalin/Stalinism from the position of an often unconscious acceptance of the "totalitarian" discourse is neither historical materialist nor useful. One of my good friends suggested that it might be reducible to a kind of "scapegoat" politics where, assuming that the masses have already accepted anti-communist ideology, seeks to undermine this anti-communism by blaming all of communism's supposed evils on a single person: "But that was just Stalin and we don't like Stalin––we're 'true' communists!" So maybe there are short term benefits that can be gained from what, at least in my opinion, is historical dishonesty… And yet these short term benefits need to be compared to the long term drawbacks of beginning with an endorsement of bourgeois ideology and, in this endorsement, promoting a platonic communism that can never be achieved because it cannot possibly be brought into being in the real world of messy social relations. It is far better to find a way to critique our past failures without lapsing into this kind of idealism and, by foreclosing on the rightist way of explaining Stalin/Stalinism, producing a critique that is useful for organizing.