He did nothing wrong

He did nothing wrong.

Prove me right.

10/10, pretty Based

I've always found it to be just plain bizarre that there are communists who hate this guy. I guess it can be hard to break out of the Cold War mentality though when there's almost nothing out there portraying him as anything short of the worst guy ever. I really didn't begin to question the mainstream view myself until I read Geoffrey Roberts' book on his leadership.

since this post may draw the interest of people who are not triggered by stalin, I will just post this
>>>/marx/

Stalin's Wars challenges a lot of those Cold Warrior Western narratives about Stalin's war record, especially coming from a Western bourgeois historian. Kotkin's biography of Stalin supposedly will do the same but with the narrative of Stalin's entire life, though only the first volume has been published so far.

His meme potential absolves him of all guilt.

>didn't give workers ownership of the means of production

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No, I wouldn't underestimate the extent to which an imperfectly realized worker's democracy existed in the Soviet Union. Party membership was largely drawn from the workforce, leaving strong working-class influence within the state. Obviously the excessive layers of bureaucracy muddied the effect and corruption existed but it wasn't on the level of what exists in liberal parliaments. Nobody ever claimed the USSR was some sort of worker's paradise, just that maybe it wasn't some evil empire ruled by a moustach twirling tyrant. Critics of Soviet communism usually tend to ignore that the post-war Stalin government was stable and widely popular.

All this sounds like bad excuses for the fact that the USSR smashed the soviets and destroyed any chance Russia ever had of achieving socialism.

lets turn this into a thread about the Soviet union during 1928-1939. I've been wanting to research on this period for some time, especially the great purges. Besides the Stalinist and Trotskyist classics on this period what are some good books? Are Arch Getty's books good?

Well he killed and Trotsky and probably Lenin so that's alright i guess.

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I began to question "Stalin was the worst guy ever dude I swear" because of zesty memes tbh

As a Marxist-Leninist, Stalin had horrible political economy. I don't really care if the state, the soviets or whatever owns the means of production but it is simply bullshit that they kept commodity exchange and the law of value.

Thats the reason why the ML states failed and reverted back to capitalism.

his economic politics just seemed unefficient, because of wwii.

They weren't inefficient, thats not what I am saying. Soviet political economy industralizd and so on, but they refusal to abandon "socialist" levers through the rubles is what led to their downfall.

If they had an economy based purely on use-values they could've industrialized in half the time with short working weeks and what not.

a pure use-values based economy is just a capitalist model, im not sure what are you refering to.

You are mixing use-value with exchange value comrade.

If the Soviet Union adapted an economy based off of the use-values of commodities and distributed them according to the needs of various industries instead of using the ruble to allocate insturments of production according to five-year plans then they would've had an economic base that would not have produced revisionism.

I'm not saying there is anything wrong with five-year plans; if the five-year plans were carried out to an economic system in which commodities, resources and instruments of production were allocated according to the needs of say the agricultural industry ( they calculate how many acres of land they have and in return they recieve so many tractors ) then the Soviet Union would have been truly bad ass.

A good book on this theory of centralized production according to use-values is Towards a New Socialism by Paul Cockshott.

You have no idea what you are talking about. One of the main goals of marxist socialism is to abolish the law of value, socially necessary abstract labour time and by extension exchange value. In a socialist society the only measure of value would be use value (which is non-quantifiable).