Comments on: Greatest figures of the 20th century

By: Eric Rescorla

Eric Rescorla — Tue, 26 Aug 2003 01:16:51 +0000

I’m of course familiar with the “Lenin wasn’t that bad compared to Stalin” line, and I suppose that’s true. Still it’s pretty hard to come away from reading Conquest’s “Harvest of Sorrow” without feeling a little uncomfortable with this line of argument. True, Lenin didn’t engage in quite the same degree of mass terror that Stalin did, but isn’t the Ukrainian famine of 1921 bad enough to known Lenin out of the “great” category unless you’re willing to include Hitler and Stalin as well.

By: Martin Wisse

Martin Wisse — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 23:48:07 +0000

“From what I can tell, it’s almost an oxymoron: for whatever reason, the hard left (of which I’m a sympathizer or fellow traveler) doesn’t go in much for blogs. Max Sawicky is about as close as you can get. Mailing lists, websites, but not never blogs. It’s a puzzle.” Well, I’m a member of an unrepentent socialist party and believe that capitalism is a shite system that needs replacing sooner rather then later; hard left enough for you? There are a few others as well: Alister Black of Perspective, a comrade from the SSP, socialist sf writer Ken MacLeod, to name two. True, there are far less hard left bloggers than there are hard right bloggers; it might just be that leftists go for collective endeavours rather than something as individual as a blog….

By: Tom

Tom — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 18:37:43 +0000

Chris wrote: “Tom, the text of Rosa Luxemburg’s The Russian Revolution is here. After reading it, you may or may not still believe that “errmmm…I’m rather uncomformtable with what Lenin’s doing, but I’ll support it anyway” is a fair summary.” Before posting, I reread the final section (http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxembur/works/1918/rus-rev/ch08.htm), and I think [minus typos], saying that ““errmmm…I’m rather uncomformtable with what Lenin’s doing, but I’ll support it anyway” is a good two-line summary of her opinion. (It’s actually somewhat sadder than I’ve protrayed it; she can see the outlines of what’s to come [as she does earlier in the essay], but ends up making, in the last three paragraphs, what were to later become familiar excuses for atrocities under Leninism. Martov & Plekhanov made similar predictions, but they didn’t end with a mealy-mouthed apologism for Lenin). I’d also say history has shown her to be wrong in her argument with Bernstein.

By: Doug Muir

Doug Muir — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 16:21:41 +0000

Well, kudos for trying, and for acknowledging the difficulty of a satisfactory answer. I don’t really agree with your vision of Trotsky as a tragic hero, but I see where you’re coming from. A debate on the merits of this particular characterization can await a more appropriate time and venue. Lenin… well, for the record, I personally consider him a monster, albeit a much lesser one than the monster that followed him. No, Stalin was certainly not the inevitable result of Lenin; on the other hand, Stalin would not have been remotely possible without Lenin. You mentioned Applebaum’s Gulag. I haven’t read it yet, but I can’t imagine she fails to point out that the system originated under Lenin. Stalin of course vastly expanded it, but Lenin in turn had vastly expanded it from the (relatively) modest system he inherited from the czars. As to the counterfactual: IMO Bukharin is probably the least likely successor among the top Bolsheviks. Popular discussion of Lenin’s testament tends to focus on its trashing of Stalin. What gets forgotten is that he was nearly as scathing about all the other plausible successors. Sure, he described Bukharin as the party’s most valuable and best theoretician and the favorite of the whole party. But he then added that Bukharin’s theoretical views could not be regarded as fully Marxist, since Bukharin was “scholastic” and never “fully understood dialectics.” (Adam Ulam once remarked that this last phrase could best be translated as “He’s no politician.”) Lenin had been publicly critical of Bukharin on a number of other occasions—try googling for “inert and empty eclecticism”, frex. And Bukharin’s relative lack of political savvy means that, absent Lenin’s active support, he had zero chance of emerging as the heir. But put that aside. The NEP was probably doomed under any plausible successor—pace Bukharin, it’s pretty clear that Lenin viewed it as a temporary expedient. Collectivization of the peasants, frex, was hardwired into the Bolshevik DNA; private agriculture was viewed as irredeemably “petty bourgeois”. I note in passing that Lenin was just as capable as Stalin of scathing denunciation of the “kulaks”: they were bloodsuckers, had to be ruthlessly crushed, etc. etc. It’s certainly possible to imagine plausible successors who would have been less bad than Stalin. What’s hard is to imagine plausible successors who wouldn’t have been bad at all. But we’re now reaching a fairly extreme point of thread drift. So we should probably either start a new post, take it to e-mail, or let it lie for now.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 13:02:29 +0000

Doug, I can’t pretend to being able to give an answer to your very reasonable question which satisfies me. But I’ll have a go. You ask bq. what unique benefits did these two figures confer upon humanity, such that they should be considered morally, ethically or intellectually “great”? I’m not sure what, for you, amounts to the conferring of a benefit on humanity and it may be your idea of that is sufficiently capacious to include what I have in mind. Someone might ask the same question of Spartacus, or Toussaint L’Ouverture or Babeuf. They might say that since the efforts those individuals made came to naught, they shouldn’t be conceived of as great. Indeed it might be that, given the circumstances of their times, the efforts of Spartacus and Toussaint just inevitably had to come to naught and the projects that they conceived were just unrealizable. Even if that were so, I’d still admire them for what they did and the way in which they have inspired others with the possibility of a social order free of exploitation and oppression. And if that inspiration is a benefit (as you understand it) the question is answered for them at least. Are the cases of Lenin and Trotsky parallel to the ones I’ve outlined? I’m not sure what to say about that, but I think I can make a better case for Trotsky than for Lenin. Specifically, that when the dream of a more just social order had turned into the nightmare that was the Moscow Trials and the Gulag, and when half the world was repelled by Stalin’s regime and another half actually identified that regime with justice, Trotsky in exile and almost alone (there were others such as the POUM in whose militia Orwell fought), fought against that nightmare. That doesn’t mean I’m blind to his failings, either personal or political, or that I think that socialism-as-he-conceived it is a realizable ideal. But I’m not going to deny, either, my conviction that he was a heroic (and tragic) figure. On your counterfactual: even if I couldn’t imagine a “liberal Soviet regime emerging after Lenin’s death, under any plausible alternative successor” (all depends what you mean by “liberal”…) I can imagine many post-Lenin regimes that were a lot less bad than Stalin’s (hard to imagine anything worse). As it happens, the NEP was intellectually quite pluralistic, made extensive use of market mechanisms and so on. Is a NEP-like regime under Bukharin an unimaginable historical possibility?

By: Doug Muir

Doug Muir — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 12:24:01 +0000

Chris, I can understand you not being all that keen to continue this thread. But I do feel compelled to point out that you didn’t remotely answer my question. I asked how you’d justify including Lenin and Trotsky as “great” figures. You replied that 1) they weren’t responsible for the excesses of Stalinism, and 2) Churchill and other generally respected figures did things just as bad. Point #1 is IMO highly debatable (counterfactual: try to imagine a liberal Soviet regime emerging after Lenin’s death, under any plausible alternative successor), but let that go for now—I’ll concede it for argument’s stake. My question still remains: what unique benefits did these two figures confer upon humanity, such that they should be considered morally, ethically or intellectually “great”? BTW, I think that these lists are silly too… except insofar as they encourage us to do just what this thread is doing. That is, to apply some rigour to our value judgments, which tend to arise out of internal processes that are not rigourous or even rational. That’s IMO a worthwhile exercise.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 08:51:40 +0000

Tom, the text of Rosa Luxemburg’s The Russian Revolution is here. After reading it, you may or may not still believe that “errmmm…I’m rather uncomformtable with what Lenin’s doing, but I’ll support it anyway” is a fair summary. FWIW, I never suggested their inclusion on grounds of martydom, but because of their courageous opposition to WW1 from within Wilhelmine Germany.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 08:43:14 +0000

Doug, I’m not all that keen to continue this thread. But FWIW I don’t buy the line that holds Lenin (or Trotsky) responsible for the Stalinist dictatorship. Anne Applebaum, in her recent book on the Gulag (hardly a communist-friendly work) argues that there was a qualitative shift in the nature of the Soviet state in the 1930s, and I’d agree with that. Of course, that doesn’t excuse the actions of both those figures when they were directly in charge. I’m really not sure what I think about the extent to which we should contextualise or plead mitigation for the Kronstadt rising or the war against the Cossacks. But, just as an ad hominem point, it surely makes as much (and as little) sense to make allowances for the imperatives of the moment and the standards of the times in their case as in others. If people want to argue that persons responsible for what we would now call “crimes against humanity” should, ipso facto, be ineligible for a “great figures” list, then I’m happy with that. But note that Winston Churchill, who made the lists of both left and right-wing bloggers (presumably as an exemplar) would also be thereby disqualified. I wouldn’t want to exclude Churchill BTW. Perhaps this all just goes to show how silly such lists are!

By: Doug Muir

Doug Muir — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 07:13:04 +0000

I’m still trying to grasp how Lenin and Trotsky fit in here. They’re both directly complicit in the murder of thousands, and indirectly in the death and misery of millions. I live in a country where you can still see the discolored spots on walls where pictures of Lenin were scraped off. Most people here have a pretty clear idea of just how “great” Lenin was. In all seriousness, I’d like to hear just how you justify including these two. (I’m assuming that we’re using the “exemplar” rather than the “impact” standard.) How was Lenin morally, ethically, or intellectually “great”? I suppose you could argue with a straight face that Lenin was a great amoral realist—“There is no morality in politics, there is only expedience, a scoundrel may be useful to us because he is a scoundrel, a lie told often enough becomes the truth,” etc. etc.—and that this constituted greatness of a sort. But somehow I have the feeling that’s not where you’re coming from.

By: Tom

Tom — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 01:25:16 +0000

Jean Jaures, OK, but Luxemburg & Liebknicht? Nah; martyrdom doesn’t convey you into greatness; Jim Connelly would come ahead of them, and doesn’t have the equivocations that Luxemburg did “errmmm…I’m rather uncomformtable with what Lenin’s doing, but I’ll support it anyway”. Ummm, for socialists in the 20th century: Lessee, Bernstein, Jean Jaures, Keir Hardie, Bernard Shaw (barf-inducing stuff he wrote in the 1930s notwithstanding), Clement Atlee, Ernie Bevin (the guy who gave you NATO, folks), Milo Djilas, Willie Brandt, Imre Nagy, Alex Dubcek, Eugene Debs, Norman Thomas, Gro Harlem Brundtland, Olaf Palme, Oscar Wilde (if you count 1900, when he died, in the 20th century), George Orwell, and (continuing in the anti-communist vein) Sidney Hook & Max Schachtman. Ohh, and Albert Einstein was a socialist, also. (Yes, I’m essentially typing out from Irving Howe’s “Essential Works of Socialism”, now you ask).

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 00:18:13 +0000

Abiola, I don’t take much as “gospel” at all. If what you believe about Marx and Marxism comes from The Open Society and its Enemies, I’d advise you to read a bit more widely :)

By: Abiola Lapite

Abiola Lapite — Fri, 22 Aug 2003 00:09:50 +0000

“Abiola, I’m not sure why I’m bothering to reply to you, since I doubt that you are open to argument. Are you a mind-reader, to know whether or not I am “open to argument?” Or are you simply offended that there are plenty of people in this world who refuse to take it as gospel that communism is anything but an ideology of hatred? As for your historical claims, there, I really can’t be bothered.” How wonderful it is to come across such intellectual laziness! A debating opponent who concedes defeat at the first opportunity – what more could one ask for? I see that I gave you more intellectual credit than was warranted by the facts. You really are a morally obtuse individual. There is simply no good reason whatosoever to doubt that Luxemburg and Liebknecht, had they succeeded with their little “uprising”, would have subsequently instituted a regime any less bloody than all of the other communist tyrannies that have stained the face of this planet. It strikes me as intellectual dishonesty of the highest order to deny that communism, of the sort preached by Karl Marx, is an inherently violent doctrine. Given the fundamental assumptions of the communist belief system, it is simply ludicrous to deny that violent class hatred lies at the center of Marxian ideology – a point laid out clearly enough by Karl Popper in “The Open Society and its Enemies – Volume 2” (see Chapter 19, “The Social Revolution”). That communism has led to large-scale murder everywhere it has been tried is in no way an accident of history, but actually dictated by the internal logic of the communist creed. To ask any decent person to hold up its’ standard-bearers as “great” in any way is to commit oneself to a travesty of conventional morality.

By: james

james — Thu, 21 Aug 2003 23:20:09 +0000

Correct me if I’m wrong Norm, but wasn’t Trotsky the butcher of Kronstadt? And wasn’t he complicit in Lenin’s crimes?

By: Norman Geras

Norman Geras — Thu, 21 Aug 2003 21:00:45 +0000

Belatedly, Chris, can I just add here that my own entry (posted now at http://www.normangeras.blogspot.com/2003_08_17_normangeras_archive.html#106149515462801700) contained three of the figures you name: Luxemburg, Rawls and Trotsky.

By: T-squared

T-squared — Thu, 21 Aug 2003 19:16:56 +0000

What exactly is the meaning of great? Great as in Great Depression? Great War (original name for WWI)? T-squared