Except that the sincere revolutionaries were not interested in (actually quite hostile to) any one man holding absolute power rather than it being distributed between soviets at various levels. They did not revolt against the Tsar and fight a civil war simply to install a different Tsar (though that result may have been inevitable in Russia, at least at the time.) That made even those not actively competing with Stalin for power a threat to be eliminated if they had the ABILITY to compete. Otherwise Stalin could and probably would have gone the way of Khrushchev sooner rather than later. Stalin had not only to seize but to consolidate his power, and aggressively did just that, reducing giants of the revolution, like Trotsky, to dissident expatriates awaiting an assassins bullet.


Yes, but thereby hangs the tale: It is one thing to argue conditions necessitate ones policies, but quite another to recognize the absence of and therefore attempt to create those conditions to legitimize the policies. That is just a naked coup seeking validation through propaganda (a time honored tactic for dictators of every stripe.)


Stalin was a Stalinist, which he marketed by defining it as "socialism;" in that, as in so much else, he was identical to Hitler, but the rhetoric of neither makes them socialists. Just as communisms collective dictatorship implicitly requires a state in fact if not name, autocrats like Stalin and Hitler violate the basic collectivist premises of communism and socialism. I accept Mussolinis definition of fascism as the marriage of state and corporate power, and Stalins rule resembles that more than Marxism (though Premier Stalin was no more willing to sacrifice himself for "the proletariat" than il Duce was for Italy.) To be fair, communism could be argued on that basis to be essentially "democratic fascism" (since democracy has no INHERENT respect for individual rights, else Cleisthenes would never have been ostracized out of little more than jealousy,) but autocracies like Stalins fall outside that definition as well: A sham election remains only a sham, and a "collective" entirely controlled by a single man is in no sense Marxist.


Drop the "traditional" from that first sentence and I agree with it. Switching to a model that empowers peasant rather than industrial masses is hardly communism; Jefferson adopted that model for the US (while encouraging and even subsidizing technical and industrial development) but was no communist. Russias industrial base in 1917 was little more developed than Chinas (they still fielded mounted cavalry as late as WWII, after all) but Stalin and Mao saw the same route to power in both: Seduce the masses with the twin allures of collectivism and industrial prosperity. Of course, Mao faced an obstacle Lenin did not: The West knew too well communist revolution could gain popular support even in countries with a stunted industrial base, and was not preoccupied with a global war, so it made far greater efforts to support Chiang than it had to support the Romanovs. Only in the wake of another global war that left the Allies as exhausted and demoralized as the first could Mao expel Chiang. Whether Russian serfs or Chinese peasants, however, the revolutions that succeeded via empty promises to the largely unindustrialized masses can hardly be called "communist," and subsequent failed attempts to create industrialization and thereby make communism relevant do not change that.



Neither Stalin nor Mao remotely resembled professional scholars, so they might genuinely have believed their own rhetoric (though I doubt it; neither of them was an idiot whatever their backgrounds) but more likely merely recognized, as Lenin did, their respective countries' incompatibility with Marxism and attempted to rationalize it out of existence. It was a good try, and their supporters and critics alike were well served by conceding the point, but it remains an invalid point irrespective of who benefits from saying otherwise. It is analogous to Christian and Muslim zealots insisting violent jihad is intrinsic to Islam, ignoring the hundred of millions of Muslims who reject it as categorically as hundreds of millions of Jews reject stoning blasphemers: Fanatics on both sides believing and encouraging belief in falsehood for the sake of self-serving propaganda does not make it any less false.


That "communist" states are invariably discussed in terms of a single leader ought to be enough to invalidate them as communist or even generally Marxist. I agree we need not see communism in practice to know it cannot succeed, but because of common sense and human nature, not because individual dictators cloaking personal tyranny in the dictatorship of the proletariat failed. The latter is only relevant to the extent that the same vices exist within both collectives and individuals, and thus, while competing selfish interests can mitigate them in collectives, no power on Earth can eliminate them.


That is surely debate enough for one subthread; we can discuss whether the profit motive is compatible with the Golden Rule, love of money with the "greatest commandment, and the second... like it," another time.