Welcome again to everybody. Make yourself at home, just please pick up after yourselves. In the time-honoured tradition of our group, here is the weekly discussion thread.
• Matrix homeserver and space
• Theory discussion group on /c/theory@lemmygrad.ml
• Find theory on ProleWiki, marxists.org, Anna’s Archive
The meme “Stalin shouldn’t have stop at Berlin” turns him into a follower of Trotsky. It seems the intellectual condemnation of Stalin makes him morally bankrupt at the same time. Giving him the characteristics of a barbarian at the intellectual level puts Stalin at a primitive level regarding morality as well. Those communists who see Stalin as a violent badass are turning him into Trotsky… It was the red army leader who was a disturbing piece of shit, extremely violent and severely stupid.
Edit: damn… a lot of people here hate Stalin ig? Mmm, I wonder how many downvoters believe if labor is entitled to all it creates? Hint: labor is not entitled to all it creates.
I think you’re reading too much into a joke line.
Removed by mod
Ohh yeah. You’re that user who was defending nazi US soldiers and saying they were just following their material interests. Your deterministic materialism is just a form of bio determinism, aka neo eugenics. But whatever…
Not only is this not relevant but that’s also not what I was doing nor is it my position.
If you’re going to attack me then you should at least make sure you understand my actual position first.
It is relevant. It’s the lens that you use to analyze the world. Your deterministic worldview makes everything permissible on the grounds of “material interests.” But it’s exactly like liberalism since it always comes with an exclusionary clause. So a person can do anything to improve their material conditions at the expense of others. Morality is then completely gone.
til analyzing material conditions is liberalism, apparently
You would need to read Losurdo’s book on liberalism to understand the inherent exclusionary clause of liberalism, which is the dominant ideology of the West. It infects materialist thinking, including yours and mine. It’s something you have to consciously fight on a daily basis.
Let’s go back to the beginning: you accused comrades making jokes about Western powers being sympathetic to fascism of being Trotskyists. When I pointed out that this was silly you basically called me a liberal and insinuated I was pro-US imperialism.
I don’t think it’s me who needs to self-crit here.
Fuck off
Downvoters care to explain why you suck ass?
They did explain. You’re reading too much into a joke. A joke that is entirely rooted in hindsight. We all understand that the material conditions were such that this was not an option. That after losing 27 million of its people, the soviets were desperate for the opportunity to have peaceful development. It sure would be nice to not have to deal with the 4th Reich’s rise to power right now though.
Weird outburst aside, it’s actually kinda funny that the “shouldn’t have stopped at Berlin” line sorta touches on the OG key theoretical divergence of Trotsky vs Stalin over permanent revolution. Trotsky was firmly a “shouldn’t have stopped at Brest-Litovsk” guy in WW1 and if he were still alive by 1945 he would probably repeatedly point at “not stopping at Berlin” as proof of the USSR being a “degenerated worker state” and allying itself with capitalists.
I understand that the argument presented here was more moralistic and personalistic, but I like that it shines a light into the fact that, yeah, Trotsky wouldn’t have stopped at Berlin. He would’ve also probably gotten the USSR invaded and completely destroyed in the early twenties.
Its about hindsight. Its not about exporting revolution to europe but wishing Stalin had struck a crippling blow to fascist that they couldn’t recover from.
USSR thought incorrectly that the end of the 3rd reich would be the end of fascist aggression, at least for long enough that they could take care of domestic concerns without distraction.
Taking Berlin was only the first leg of defeating the threat of fascism. If Stalin knew what “peace” would look like maybe he would have just kept going instead of letting the fascists regroup and change tactics.
Fascism was on the ropes in 1945. Peace allowed them to turn USSR’s allies into enemies and change tactics to asymmetrical warfare, economic war and dirty war.
I gonna need the names of every user who downvoted this. Labor aristocrats are a social danger to everybody. Nietzschean leftists don’t even deserve to be here in the first place…