Marxism vs Peasants

the Soviet Union had no interest in the peasantry, they did nothing to improve the peasant and farmers' lot, they slaughtered them in huge numbers as a matter of policy actually; specially since they kept getting bailed out by the West, they didn't have to think rationally about their food production. The peasantry was their enemy from day one, they were nationalist and traditionalist, not in an explicit ideological sense but in an intuitive sense. They were foreign to ideology in the modern sense of the analytical term… This posed an obvious problem for the materialist "production obsessed" communist forces who needed to reduce human life and all social relations to centralized, planned economics.

question is, is this inherent to Marxism? Seems like peasantry around the globe tend to be nationalist, tribalist, spiritual and traditionalist in all the wrong-ways that undermine Marxist ideology, and they do this intuitively, as a matter-of-being, not necessarily through dialectic. So killing them would be simpler than trying to "convert" them to a new age materialist belief-system that reduces all life to economics. No?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization
twitter.com/NSFWRedditImage

Sources?

sources on what, peasants getting slaughtered or that they are typically traditionalist? it's common historical knowledge.
Do you need a source that WW2 happened?

If it's common where are your common sources?

sage

are you trying to Human Nature me?

Here's a kosher source that obviously doesn't tell the whole story and hides most of the details and uses euphemisms like "better-off peasants" (kek). This genocide campaign directly killed/enslaved/deported a few million peasants but then had the side-effect of causing mass famine and death for over 10million…

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dekulakization

Dekulakization was the Soviet campaign of political repressions, including arrests, deportations, and executions of millions of the "better-off" peasants and their families in 1929–1932.

All kulaks were divided into three categories: (I) to be shot or imprisoned as decided by the local secret political police; (II) to be sent to Siberia, North, the Urals or Kazakhstan, after confiscation of their property; and (III) to be evicted from their houses and used in labour colonies within their own districts.[1] OGPU secret police chief Efim Georgievich Evdokimov (1891–1939) organized and supervised the roundup of peasants and the mass executions.

A combination of dekulakization, collectivization, and other repressive policies led to mass starvation in many parts of the Soviet Union and the death of an estimated 11 million peasants from 1929-1933, including 4 million during the dekulakization campaign.[1] The results were soon known outside the Soviet Union. In 1941, the American journalist H. R. Knickerbocker wrote "It is a conservative estimate to say that some 5,000,000 [kulaks] … died at once, or within a few years."[5]

human nature is real, it's just not immutable. Sufficient damage can deform it.

Kulaks deserved it

And?

in official policy Kulak meant a peasant who could hire 1 worker for a couple of months. that was sufficient to get you into the category worthy of purging and your family as well.

but in actual practice Kulak had no meaning at all and almost anyone could fall into that category.

so Marxism, at least in the USSR had no interest in "the working class" the "poor" and so forth.

a peasant who could hire 1 worker for a couple months would be executed and his family sent to labor camps or deported or killed.

but in actual practice Kulak had no meaning at all and almost anyone could fall into that category, specially the mass of peasants and farmers who were mostly Christian, working class, poor, and had some patriotism for Russia.

...

That still doesn't prove they were "muh glorious tradishunalism"

Tankies get the FUCK in here

Bury the thread asap.

Peasants are technically petty bourgeois unless they are totally landless.

ohhh those poor grain hoarding oligarchs
a bloo bloo bloo
gulag for you

The people that died in the USSR were highly corrupt and a menace to the well being of society. Why is that so hard to grasp?
There's lots of corrupted people that simply can not live in society amongst us. These people will always try to fuck everyone else, they can not conceive living any other way, they only exist to fuck everyone else. People filled with greed, rage, hate. Get them out to gulags, immediately.

Stalin did an amazing job in keeping USSR society free of corruption, free from sociopaths.
Perhaps you're from USA, where is socially accepted to be corrupt, but try to understan taht here's lots of people out there that can not live in society, under any circumstances.

Who gives a shit, there's barely any of 'em left and they hardly deserve consideration as a particular group. Are we back in feudal China or Russia all of a sudden?

the first flaw in Marxism ?

nice logic Nazi

the highly corrupt people in the USSR that should've been killed were the central committee members and the ranking communists, not the peasants and farmers and working class normies

source plz

This thread is a joke, right

You people don't actually believe this shit

Anasheya

Stop hoarding grain.

ML approach to peasantry was critiqued since day one by basically all Marxist communists other than MLs. Early examples include Luxemburg in her exchanges with Lenin, Gorter's reply to LWC, Pannekoek and Bordiga in the Comintern, and this was long before the really heavy demonization of peasantry and vicious campaigns against it started.

What's ironic is that some ML or ML-inspirted regimes went the opposite way and in their holy quest to emancipate the peasantry into a modern proletariat culled all of the actually modern proletariat in an attempt to maintain order and simultaneous gradual development. In China for example, Shanghai actually had a very robust working class with a communist basis for many decades, and after it tried to make a Shanghai Commune it got massacred by the CCP for not towing its line.

Nice rebuttal.

Kill yourself

Actually, the Russian peasantry had little love for tradition, monarchy, and religion post-WW1.

Now, if you're referring to the 19th century, then yes, the peasants were resistant to even anarchist/narodnik agitation due to those reasons. But, World War 1, fought by the peasants, disillusioned them from the monarchy , which caused them to be some of the MOST revolutionary elements of February and October. The sailors of Kronstadt were peasants, often from a Ukrainian background. The greatest accomplishment of the Russian Revolution, besides the brief period of Soviet rule and worker's self-management, was the mass redistribution of land from the aristocrats to the mass of peasants. In fact, you can almost say that Russia's vast expanse of land naturally created a sort of Jeffersonian spirit amongst the peasantry.

And, this leads to the main issue between the Marxists and the peasants. Marxism literally denies or writes off the Jeffersonian society of yeoman farmers, which would be the revolutionary society in agrarian countries. It HAS to be feudalism - capitalism - socialism. The Bolsheviks merely wanted direct control of the capitalist process, whilst the Menshvieks would "let history run its course". Hell, this even applies to pre-capitalist artisan economies. Marxists frequently say "primitive capitalist" or whatever other malarkey to describe something that shares little in common with the wage labor and mass proletariatization that capitalism entails.

In fact, the whole idea of history running in stages on a linear path is sort of farcical. Slavery, feudalism, and Jeffersonianism can all exist at the same time/advance. (It has. See the American West/Switzerland contrasted with the American South/Brazil and both with France/Italy.) There are merely agrarian societies and urban industrial societies. (Primitive artisan societies sort of are an in-between, either having a palace economy or a guild economy.) This is not even counting the Oriental model of societies, where the bureaucracy/central government reins.

Anyways, the idea of small peasants owning their property was considered "backwards" by the Marxists, who wanted to crash-industrialize society to create the "conditions for democracy/socialism". Ironically enough, democracy was considered fit most for societies with equitable distributions of property, which fit the description for agrarian yeoman societies than with industrial capitalist societies. Of course, what Bolsheviks of the early 20th century considered to be "democracy" is the American/British model of "representatives". Parliament still existed, though now a "Congress of Soviets". (Though, the early Soviets were close to being direct democracies.) There were still ministers, now Commissars, and bureaucratic agencies. Marxism, ironically enough, takes a lot from liberal Whig Theories of History. Additionally, the peasants were quite nationalist, but the same can be said for the urban working class, or even more so.

Do note that Ukrainian nationalism has A LOT to do with these peasant movements against the Bolshveiks, and the main source for that was the intellectual Ukrainian "Renaissance" of the 19th century, which often was infused with the Narodnik ideology through the Zaporozhian Host. In fact, the Zaporozhian host was the inspiration of a lot of the peasant agitation in the Ukraine. The Ukrainian peasants saw themselves as descendants/heirs of the Cossacks, stripped of their freedom by the Tsar. Hence, local, often elected atamans leading small Green armies, Ukrainian republicans, and Black Army units, and the whole land seizure. (The Zaporozhain host was a democratic army based on direct democracy with atamans, the commanders, that are frequently elected, around once every 2 years. The Cossacks were a free or non-enserfed/small-holding people who had a pastoral society.) This nostalgia for the Zaporozhian host plays a large role in the rise of Ukrainian nationalism, Narodism, and even the rise of Makhno's Black Army, with the rank-and-file adopting Zaporozhian symbols which the anarchist intellectuals little understood. These intellectuals simply repeat the same anarchist/cosmopolitan/individualist talking points which ironically enough resonated less with the peasants and even workers than Zaporozhian nostalgia.

In fact, the peasantry saw the grain requisitions and collectivization as REVERSALS of the Revolution, not as the Revolution going too far. They even thought of it as the return of Tsarist serfdom.

Basically, peasants were SRs, Mensheviks/Bolshveiks were urban intellectuals, and workers, already poor and disadvantaged, didn't have the raw numbers or strong union organization required to impact politics like they did in the West. Hence, compare the workers' lack of response to losing self-management completely to the peasants' response to grain requisitions.

face it, OP made a great point and all the replies have been autistic screeching, or people falling for wacky USSR propaganda, despite us having all the documents and secret police records and stats that prove their "evil kulak" propaganda wrong.
Read history.
Even Zizek admits this period was an absolute failure.