Date: Tue, 06 Aug 1996 21:18:25 -0700
Subject: Re: Stalin explained


Jerry wrote:
>  > Maybe there would not have been several million dead
> > peasants, not to mention all those killed in the purges
> > in the late 1930s, including the cream of the Red Army
> > officer corps.
> 
> Perhaps not. We'll never know for sure. In any event, if the NEP was
> extended indefinitely it would not have prevented Stalin from doing any or
> all of the above.

Consider the merest possiblity that the correct economic approach under socialism may be 
something like the NEP. The idea that, in the transition from capitalism to communism, 
capital by necessity persists. What else other than guided capitalism (state capitalism) 
is possible in the first stage of socialism?

Our collective problem is that socialist revolution in backward and limited economies can 
only use brute force (i.e. War Communism) to survive, but we have raised this historical 
by-product into a collective objective. It is obscene that socialism has become reduced to 
bureactratic planning or its mirror opposite anarchic, "worker's control". 

NEP was no retreat from War Communism, the latter was monstrocity forced on the 
Revolution, essentially no different to any other society forced into a "state of siege". 
The NEP was a return to sane economic development (Bukharin's "equilibrum") which offered 
the opprotunity for the working class to guide the economy in their interests. The return 
to bureacratic planning represented nothing other than the defeat of the dictatorship of 
the proletariat by a rising bureactratic class. This is what Stalin symbolised.

It should be obvious today that the NEP deserves more attention than to dismiss it 
out-of-hand. I would draw attention to the fact that what Lenin stated in "The Impending 
Catastrophe" and "The April Thesis" was repeated in the "Tax in Kind" which initiated the 
NEP. There is no inconsistancy in Lenin's views on this subject, but there is a terrible 
inconsistancy in the traditional beliefs of the communist movement, molded as they were by 
defending Stalin as against Trotsky and vice versa when in fact both shared the same 
economic approach!

Perhaps it was Bukharin who was right all along! 

Greg Schofield
Darwin Australia



     --- from list marxism2-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---