Russian Tensions
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“If Stalin’s name has again come to the fore, it is as a saint of the Russian Church, in ikons and holding a cross, with angels overhead. Also, St. Seraphim of Sarov, a Russian equivalent to Francis of Assisi, has been pronounced patron saint of nuclear weapons.”
What the hell are you smoking?
“As police officers stood guard [in May 2018], two Russian Orthodox priests wearing cassocks and holding Bibles climbed out of a vehicle and began sprinkling holy water on the stationary Topol and Yars intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Priests have sanctified S-400 surface-to-air missiles, nuclear submarines, tanks and fighter jets.
Vsevolod Chaplin, an influential priest and former spokesman for the patriarch, told the Vzglyad newspaper that nuclear weapons were the country’s “guardian angels” and necessary to preserve “Orthodox civilization.”
Patriarch Kirill has described the Kremlin’s military campaign in Syria as a “holy war” [Orthodox jihad?], while uniformed clerics embedded with the armed forces are being trained to drive combat vehicles and operate communication equipment.
Russia’s nuclear arsenal also has its own patron saint — St. Seraphim, whose remains were discovered in 1991 in a disused monastery in Sarov, a small town in central Russia that was home to several key nuclear facilities in the Soviet era.
Putin has memorably described Orthodox Christianity and nuclear weapons as “twin elements of Russia’s domestic and foreign security.”
Ideas such as these have been melded into a radical ideology described as “Atomic Orthodoxy” by Yegor Kholmogorov, a nationalist writer. “To remain Orthodox, Russia must be a strong nuclear power, and to remain a strong nuclear power, Russia must be Orthodox,” Kholmogorov wrote.”
(Orthodoxy in Dialogue)
https://images.app.goo.gl/xkL8rmifZJaBNCj7A
St. Josef Stalin.
https://images.app.goo.gl/BbBHfeUyVkwdr1FE8
Putin the Pious.
Seeing Stalin as the main problem of the Soviet Union is the same stand of the Trotskyists.
There were not any essential differences between Stalin, Lenin and Trotsky and he was a despot and criminal when he was in charge of the Red Army and it was shown during the massacre of the Marines
The main problem of the Soviet Union was state capitalism and Bolshevism which is a combination of the dictatorship of the vanguard party and the theory of the permanent revolution.
Stalin was a bolshevik and he knew what socialism is like many of them knew it but they supported state capitalism like Lenin, and there were not any essential differences between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks
Despite Trotsky opposition to Stalin he also defended state capitalism, the vanguard party, and the Soviet Union, and Stalin too. He also supported the pact with Germany
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Degenerate Workers State
In exile Trotsky played the role of “loyal opposition” to the Stalin regime in Russia. He was very critical of the political aspects of this regime (at least some of them, since he too stood for a one-party dictatorship in Russia), but to his dying day defended the view that the Russian revolution had established a “Workers State” in Russia (whatever that might be) and that this represented a gain for the working class both of Russia and of the whole world.His view that Russia under Stalin was a Workers State, not a perfect one, certainly, but a Workers State nevertheless, was set out in his book The Revolution Betrayed first published in 1936. This is the origin of the Trotskyist dogma that Russia is a “degenerate Workers State” in which a bureaucracy had usurped political power from the working class but without changing the social basis (nationalisation and planning).
This view is so absurd as to be hardly worth considering seriously: how could the adjective “workers” be applied to a regime where workers could be sent to a labour camp for turning up late for work and shot for going on strike? Trotsky was only able to sustain his point of view by making the completely unmarxist assumption that capitalist distribution relations (the privileges of the Stalinist bureaucracy) could exist on the basis of socialist production relations. Marx, by contrast, had concluded, from a study of past and present societies, that the mode of distribution was entirely determined by the mode of production. Thus the existence of privileged distribution relations in Russia should itself have been sufficient proof that Russia had nothing to do with socialism.
Trotsky rejected the view that Russia was state capitalist on the flimsiest of grounds: the absence of a private capitalist class, of private shareholders and bondholders who could inherit and bequeath their property. He failed to see that what made Russia capitalist was the existence there of wage-labour and capital accumulation not the nature and mode of recruitment of its ruling class.
Trotsky’s view that Russia under Stalin was still some sort of “Workers State” was so absurd that it soon aroused criticism within the ranks of the Trotskyist movement itself which, since 1938, had been organised as the Fourth International. Two alternative views emerged. One was that Russia was neither capitalist nor a Workers State but some new kind of exploiting class society. The other was that Russia was state capitalist. The most easily accessible example of the first view is James Burnham’s The Managerial Revolution and of the second Tony Cliff’s Russia: A Marxist Analysis. Both books are well worth reading, though in fact neither Burnham nor Cliff could claim to be the originators of the theories they put forward. The majority of Trotskyists, however, remain committed to the dogma that Russia is a “degenerate Workers State”.
Since the working class is the last class to be emancipated, how can you have a “workers’ state”?
With the last class emancipated, what class is there to rule or to be ruled?
Thomas_More
Participant
Since the working class is the last class to be emancipated, how can you have a “workers’ state”?With the last class emancipated, what class is there to rule or to be ruled?
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Even more, Marx dictatorship ( government ) of the proletariat was wrong too because the slave can not oppress himself or herself, although it was a concept only applicable to the condition of the XIX century, it could have conducted toward state capitalism, as well, the Communist Manifesto ( or German Manifesto ) contains certain clauses of State Capitalism
Which is understood by us because, unlike the Leninists, we don’t worship Marx as a god nor recite him like a Christian recites psalms.
Lenin knew that the soviet state was just another class and bureaucratic state, and Julius Martov told them that it was another capitalist state . He was the only who did confront them with real socialists principles. Martov swept the floor with Lenin State and the Revolution, and when Kautsky was a socialist Lenin was a midget in front of him. He also lied when he wrote the Renegade Kautsky because Kautsky changed his in 1900 instead of 1914
But in 1923 he had to confess: ( Lenin )
“With the exception of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Affairs, our state apparatus is to a considerable extent a survival of the past, and has undergone hardly any serious change. It has only been slightly touched up on the surface, but in all other respects it is a most typical relic of our old state machine.”
But this was not really a question of a “survival” from Tsarism. As Lenin noticed the new Bolshevik officials behaved in the same old bureaucratic way. What he was observing, though of course he did not realise it, was the gradual (but inevitable in view of the country’s economic backwardness) emergence of a new class structure in Russia. Lewin touches on this point in his book, though his view is heavily influenced by that of Trotsky and Isaac Deutscher.
Kautsky Russian dictatorship
Alan, the Indians are off the reservation again. This thread is meant to deal with the Ukraine conflict. Not a single post on page 156 is relevant. Care to keep your troops in line?
ALB, German Greens supported participation of German military forces in Kosovo and Serbia in 1999 and troop deployments in Afghanistan as part of the global war on terrorism in 2001.
As ALB has indicated this thread has digressed from the topic. (I was one of those who is to blame so mea culpa) but now another member of the forum has rightly complained.
Be reminded of these relevant rules
1. The general topic of each forum is given by the posted forum description…do not derail existing threads with off-topic posts.
12. Moderators may move, remove, or lock any threads or posts which they deem to be off-topic or in violation of the rules…
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15. Queries or appeals relating to particular moderation decisions should be sent directly to the moderators by private message. Do not post such messages to the forum.
From now on I will delete posts that as moderator I deem off-topic.
If necessary I may lock this topic thread as was done with the Hong Kong one but I am loathe to take such drastic action so please don’t force me to.
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