ComradeRat

This is quite Leninphobic

Yeah its a very cool book. It has a nice balance between defence of the ussr against liberalbrained criticism, but also acknowledgement of the shortcomings and ruthless criticism of anything standing in the way of fixing those issues

Molotovs also a good person to hear it from, because you know he isnt just some ultraleft westerner raving about how the ussr isnt real socialism, molotov himself saying "the ussr hasnt achieved socialism and saying it did so is harmful to actually achieving socialism" has much more weight to it

Molotov pretty much spent the rest of his life once he was kicked out of politics trying to figure out where things went wrong, and he's honest enough to admit that the leadership (including him) helped create the problems (in contrast to khrushchev blaming everything on Stalin). Molotov was writing letters to the Central Committee begging them to let him back in and to fix shit basically until he died, but was ignored. Poor guy

Always happy to share recommendations

These are some of the most interesting excerpts from Molotov Remembers imo (i've edited it to break up the paragraphs a bit for ease of reading):

Chuev, the interviewer asked Molotov:

"Is it true that after XIXth Congress [1952] Stalin said we had built a military-industrial dictatorship instead of socialism?"

Molotov replied:

He said something else. In private conversation he confessed that we no longer had a dictatorship of the proletariat. He didn't state this firmly, but he said it. Only to me. Perhaps he was testing me, or perhaps he was trying to understand something himself.

If you read our constitution thoroughly you will see that it contains many points which contradict the dictatorship of the proletariat. Of course, it's all said in a very transparent form. There is something like this: our Soviet power was born in 1917 as the dictatorship of the proletariat and became the power of all the toilers.

Notice, "all the toilers." That is why our country is administered by Soviets of Toilers' Deputies. Soviets have existed and remain, but they used to be Soviets of Workers', Soldiers', and Peasants' Deputies, fundamentally Soviets of Workers' and Peasants' Deputies. But this class division no longer exists. In my opinion this is a revision in diluted form: not the dictatorship of the proletariat but power of the toilers.

Molotov discusses the (lack of) theoretical talent in the party's leadership quite a bit:

"The Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR" was discussed at Stalin's dacha. "Any questions, comrades? Have you read it?" He gathered together the members of the Politburo, some seven or eight people. "What do you think about it? Any comments?" We said something or other. I mentioned something not terribly important.

Now I confess, we underestimated the work. We should have gone into it more thoroughly. But no one as yet understood this. Unfortunately, people were bad at theory.

The more familiar I become with Stalin's "Economic Problems of Socialism," the more defects I find in it. I reread it today. How could he write: "It is obvious that after the disintegration of the world market, the spheres of exploitation of the world's resources by the major capitalist countries, the USA, Britain, and France, will contract, yet the cyclical character of the development of capitalism, the growth and contraction of production, will nevertheless be preserved." This is true. But further on-and this was written in 1952-"However, the growth of production in these countries will take place on a narrower base, because the volume of production in these countries will contract." But nothing of the kind has occurred.

Chuev asked: Was Khrushchev adept in matters of theory?

No. He was extremely weak in that regard. We were all "practicals , " all practitioners. Before the Revolution we read all the books and newspapers, now we read nothing. Had I not spent so long in prison and exile, I wouldn't know many things either! I read publications written by our opponents too, and we had to participate in heated discussions.

This excerpt also has Molotov arguing not just that socialism hadnt triumphed completely in the USSR but also that the position/formulation 'the USSR is socialist; socialism has been achieved in the USSR' is simplistic and contrary to marxism-leninism (bold text is Chuev's context):

Khrushchev gathered writers together one day at Stalin's remote dacha, two hundred kilometers from Moscow. There he announced for all to hear that he had differences of opinion with me. His move particularly displeased me because he announced it at a nonparty gathering. It all started with an article in the journal Kommunist in 1955, where I argued that we had constructed only the foundations of socialism in our country. Shortly before that I had gathered reporters and distributed the article to them. There were some queries on the article. But I said I believed that socialism in our country was not yet complete

Under Khrushchev, Molotov was reproached for saying that in our country, only the "basis of socialism" had been constructed and not "socialism basically, " and he confessed his mistake in the journal of the Central Committee, Kommunist.

No, I had to. They forced me to. At a session of the Supreme Soviet I delivered a report on the international situation. By the way, I still believe that both conclusions were correct. Then, a letter signed by Pospelov and Rumiantsev was published. They contended that "socialism basically" and its "basis" had been built long ago. I then said at the Politburo: "I don't see any contradiction in terms there. One can say that both "socialism basically" and "basis" have been built. "Basis" is a narrower concept, which places greater emphasis on the economic side of things. "Basis" or "basically"-just so much talmudic hairsplitting. I wrote that both formulations were correct, consequently there could be no objections to my position as being incorrect, because "basis" is the same as "basically." To see a difference between the two one would have to be a pedant.

At that time Khrushchev started undermining you.

Why started? He had always been doing that.

They seem to have been eager to incriminate you somehow. They launched a campaign against you.

Not just over some issue or another. Not just any issue. This question was absolutely crucial. To say that socialism had triumphed completely and definitely was to oversimplify our achievements, and this contradicted Marxism-Leninism. No one wants to dig into this now, but exasperation with this situation is sure to mount. Younger people will take up the issue and agree that the wrong conclusion had been drawn. ...

Another of the interviewers, Ivanovich, said:

"We have brought an end to class struggle,"

We have not yet brought an end to anything.

Within the country.

Even within the country we have brought nothing to an end. We have only laid the foundations.

Khrushchev said we have completed the edifice.

It was not completed under Khrushchev, and it is still not completed. Quite the contrary, the ideology contained in the party program only hampers progress.

Good heavens! The program is incorrect!

Not just incorrect, it impedes the building of socialism. The workers toil and move the cause forward; the peasants, kolkhozniki, work slowly but are advancing. They lack genuine leadership. In reality the people are preoccupied with problems of daily life. A socialism in which money dominates is not the socialism of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. There is no such socialism. Just try to find it. Yet in our country such "socialism" exists. There is no genuine socialism in which two kinds of property exist, neither in Marx, Engels, and Lenin nor in a developed, completely built socialism. Instead of overcoming these vestiges of the transitional period, we have preserved them and applied the brakes to further progress. And we claim we are already building communism. It's absurd. That's what this ideology leads to.

In "Economic Problems of Socialism, " didn't Stalin address this problem correctly?

Correctly. He started off cautiously, but in the end he took a firm position. He alone addressed the question correctly. We didn't understand all of it back then. He made some mistakes, and I called them to his attention. He let me read the manuscript of a part which was then published, and the second part on which he was still working. But I repeat: there is nothing in Marx, Engels, and Lenin to suggest that you can have socialism while money, the purse, holds sway.

The kolkhoz is a transitional, and only a transitional, form. No socialism, no complete socialism, exists while there are two forms of property, state and cooperative. Yet we say that we have a developed socialist society, delude ourselves in this manner when in fact we are slamming on the brakes. We must liquidate this delusion and unleash the full energy of the people. This step will turn things white-hot but will work itself out.

Nevertheless, our present leadership [under Brezhnev and Kosygin] doesn't understand this, while those who slip them ineffectual memoranda are simply mindless, petty bourgeois ideologists. We have only built the foundations; true, this is irreversible. But lo and behold, they proclaim: "This is developed socialism! Let us pass on to communism!" and so forth. We are passing on to nothing.

Look, Brezhnev, in spite of himself, is one of those leaders who doesn't understand this, one of those who live according to a vulgar, petty bourgeois ideology. We have a lot of that around in our country, and it cannot but impede progress. Most interesting is the fact that you won't find any serious people pondering this problem. Have you heard of anyone who says that we must somehow change so as to build the socialism of Marx, Engels, and Lenin? You won't find such a person.

People need to read more ML's critiques of the USSR imo, Stalin did his best but as you say he (and the rest of leadership) were merely human and constrained by material conditions

Molotov Remembers is a very good work. Its somewhere between auto/biography and retrospective look at the USSR. Molotov is extremely critical, not just of Khrushchev and subsequent leaders, but also himself, Stalin, Kaganovich etc the whole 20s-50s core leadership. Molotov himself here talks about distortions in party democracy, excesses in the purges and collectivisation campaigns, the theoretical failings of the leadership, and Stalin's increasingly bossy and eratic behaviours. Imo it should be a must-read for anyone studying the USSR

Sheila Fitzpatrick has some good works on the ussr during stalin's time. "On Stalin's Team" is her main work about the leadership itself. It talks about the shifts over time from the collective leadership to stalin being the leader, and then the renewal of collective leadership during ww2 and decline afterwards with stalins increasingly erratic behaviour. Largely she confirms what Molotov said, but provided receipts bc she had access to the archives.

Cuba used to uphold that marxism was contradictory to being a catholic; their allowal of catholics into the party is a more recent (last 40ish years afaik) thing, resulting in part from the catholic church in cuba becoming less reactionary and partly from the party no longer worrying about these sorts of unproveable metaphysical debates. Being materialist requires, first and formost, starting from the premise of actual living people who must producr food before they can think, and secondmost investigatig the actual conditions and experiences before drawing a provisional conclusion, not a final conclusion for all time and certainly not adherence to this or that dogma as absolute truth.

For context, i come at this sort of topic with a lotta concern about how these sorts of views have resulted in chauvinist policies against indigenous peoples (including unfortunate examples of residential schools in the ussr to "exterminate superstition"). For all societies before europe in the 1600s, spiritual "metaphors" were the entire way they understood the empirical world; that is why, for example, so many of the life saving drugs stolen by western pharma from indigenous peoples, have "spiritual" stories attached to them to explain use, location, etc. When instead of examining the specific claims made by real people we dismiss them bc they dont align with dogma we fail to be materialists and pass into a phony idealist materialism that often makes us miss out on actually useful discoveries, as well as being chauvinistic.

Can you answer the question you were asked, or do you just like asking rhetorical questions to deflect?

But if you wanna serious take with no snark, Marx argues all the gods have existed insofar as people have believed and acted as they existed; this is a consistent line in his writings from his doctoral dissertation through to his death. Capitalism itself is a religion, with people acting as though things like "value" have real transhistorical existence rather than, treating commodities fetishistically ("personification of things, thingification (reification) of people" etc). The state too, in all its forms, is a religion, with people only recognising each other as people through it. The replacement of one religion for another doesnt take one any steps closer towards emancipation from religion. (Cf. "On 'The Jewish Question'" in particular marx's rejection of bauer's idea that jews move closer to emancipation by leaving judaism). These religions arise from the material and social relations in society. Until these material realities are upended, people will continue to consume religious opium, whether its sourced from the catholic church or from obama or from trump. There are no benefits to struggling against religious claims except and insofar as they are sources of oppression struggled against by many of the religionists themselves. To engage in the struggle of ideas, to think one has moved towards emancipation by replacing one idea for another, is idealism.

My own path to becoming a wannabe communist (because I am just a capitalist subject that wishes they weren't ) was abandoning my own religion first which allowed space for me to actually begin understanding how the world works.

And, like Marx when he abandoned deism, you concluded that all class societies (including capitalist society) are religious because they operate via fetishism, veiled relations between person and person and people and nature, and that struggling against religion means abolishing the conditions that give birth to it rather than any idealist conception of it being a matter of spreading the truth to combat false gods, right?

The guy youve named urself after said theres no contradiction lol. Cuba lets catholics into the party.

Starting all the way back with the Romans who were the first to do this.

Minor pedantic historical correction, but the Greeks also did a buncha colonial plundering around the mediterranean, leading to and culminating in alexanders wave of conquests (and ofc even the greeks werent the first; this process begins with class society and the state)

Refusing to talk to liberals is exactly the toss hands in the air and give up type nonsense lenin eviscerated in leftwing communism

Grimdark bloomer is a good way of putting it, pretty much where i'm at

The silver lining is that people ensconced in narrative control are less likely to be materially effective in the ongoing struggle. If they are comfortably online and unbothered by all of this, they are not likely to be forces to be marshaled for the benefit of capital.

This cannot be said loudly enough tbh. Organization happens offline, at best social media spreads the word. The only secure communication method is talking, and even then only when phones are left behind and you go into the woods.

Ive been thinking a lot about the need for underground/illegal organisations after reading shlyapnikov's memoirs of 1914-1917.

He talks a bit about how in less than a decade of semi-legality, so much of the illegal/underground infrastructure and skills atrophied and fell to the wayside (but still existed!) It took a few years for the Party (and the movement more broadly) to shake off the rust and get back into the groove of illegal/underground work.

The left in the west has like a century of rust to shake off, it will be interesting (and nervewracking) to see how we do