Date: Fri, 5 Apr 1996 14:53:31 -0500 (EST)
Subject: The Old Man



The Trots will probably jump all over anyway, but I thought I'd put in a
word in the interest of fairness in response to the idea that Trotsky was
just the Stalin who lost:

1. T was ruthless in prosecuting the civil war, having hostages shot,
suppressing the Kronstadt rebellion, and so forth. Those policies,
however reprehensible, are not on a par with the disaster of
collectivization, the Purges, the utter extinction of independent thought
in the postwar USSR, etc. There's no reason to think that T ever viewed
the policies as more than regrettable wartime emergency measures. Insofar
as T supported the Bolshevik one-party rule and the suppression of the
independent power of the Soviets, he was in line with mainstrean Bolshevik
policy, e.g., Lenin's policies. Unless one wants to buy the idea that
Lenin was really a Stalinist, I think there is an important distinction to
be drawn.

2. T's agricultural policy was not Stalin's. In particular, while T did
advocate collectivization and industrialization, he was quite emphatic
that the former had to be carried out noncoercively, and that both had a
large role for markets for a long time. He opposed the forcible imposition
of central planning on the whole economy.

--Justin

On Fri, 5 Apr 1996, Rahul Mahajan wrote:

> of the vanguard."). I would add the constant invocation of Trotsky as some
> kind of figure who stood for freedom and justice against the ogre Stalin.
> True, Stalin was a paranoid monster who killed *everybody* he got his hands
> on, but they were both absolutely dictatorial. To me, the biggest
> difference between them is that Trotsky lost; only after he was removed
> from the prospect of power could he abandon the ways of a petty tyrant. His
> first break with Stalin over policy was that he wanted to murder the kulaks
> and force collectivization at a time when Stalin was still following a
> policy of appeasing the right. Later, Stalin did exactly what Trotsky had
> suggested, which resulted in a bloodbath and the persistent failure of
> Soviet agriculFrom owner-marxism2  Fri Apr  5 16:45:10 1996