This blog is an edited version of an angry response I made to an anarchist turned marxist-lenist making gulg jokes and then trying to defend them on the basis that most sent to gulags were fascists.
There were very few ‘fascists’ in the gulags with the exception of the German POW system which I wouldn’t consider part of the gulags. Unless everyone who fell out with the Stalin era CP became a fascist by default.
This blog is an edited version of an angry response I made to an anarchist turned marxist-lenist making gulg jokes and then trying to defend them on the basis that most sent to gulags were fascists.
There were very few ‘fascists’ in the gulags with the exception of the German POW system which I wouldn’t consider part of the gulags. Unless everyone who fell out with the Stalin era CP became a fascist by default.
My own opinion is that Gulags mostly were not political at all, rather they served a similar role primitive accumulation played in western capitalist countries in an earlier period where rapid industrialisation was made possible through slavery, colonialism, and enforced dangerous working conditions. Rapid industrialisation in the pre automation period required the diversion of a huge amount of labour normally involved in food production for local use to be diverted to construction as well as industrial working. So deaths of workers due to over work and malnourishment is one part of the cost, so to are famines in the countryside (or colonies) due to too high food extraction and labour shortages.
In Britain this meant not only the colonial slaughter abroad but also the Enclosure and Vagrancy acts that ensured a supply of unwilling workers for the industrial cities where death rates exceeded birth rates. Almost every crime because punishable by execution or transportation as part of the British system. The Belgian Congo being another infamous example where mutilations were really about forcing people to abandon food cultivation to seek out rubber even though they knew this might well mean starvation.
Something similar to these processes happened in China during the Great Leap forward. The Soviet Union and China were unusual in that the costs of rapid industrialisation were almost entirely internal and at a time when mass literacy meant the crimes involved were recorded in detail. It is perhaps ‘unfair’ that history marks out these crimes as somehow being different to those of western imperialism but that ‘unfairness’ shouldn’t mean the left celebrates them.
This is the other aspect of the gulag joke, it opens the door for the intellectual denier to present the ‘facts’ about how things were really not as bad as you have been told. It wasn’t x million it was only y million etc. And sure other regimes are known to have killed z million so y million isn’t that bad.
As with holocaust deniers you get a selection of referenced ‘facts’ and are forced to either spend an enormous amount of time digging into the original material and its context or give up and move on. Holocaust deniers have a very much harder con to pull as their heroes lost long before they could cover their tracks (although they certainly tried, in the last year of the war the Nazis even put considerable effort in excavating the mass execution squad graves to try and destroy the bodies from 1941). With the gulags there are multiple competing sources of facts which means things like total imprisoned population, death rate and conditions are themselves fiercely contested between minimisers and maximisers (the maximisers also exist).
Do we believe those who experienced the camps as inmates or as guards?
I’d note that even the selected statistics above are in themselves pretty damning (84 hour work week) and also confirm what I posted above (the whataboutery comparison with Britisht industrialisation). Also even accepting an annual death rate that was ‘only’ 2.5% would mean 25% of prisoners died over the typical 10 year sentence and less than half survived a 25 year sentence. 2.5% only sounds low when you don’t multiply it out, a familiar risk assessment trick.
Beyond that I’d suggest people check the Wikipedia page – I’m actually a major fan of Wikipedia for these sorts of controversies as its where a load of people have spent a lot of time fighting with each other about sources. So if you don’t have the time/inclination to repeat the entire exercise it often gives a good summary not only of competing facts but also the arguments that are used for each
TL;DR if your road to socialism requires the minimisation of the gulags we are not on the same road
The more general question of ‘marxism-leninism’, anarchism and colonialism is rather enormous, I could see their being a few books in that! My long piece on the Chinese revolution as well as some of what I’ve written on the Zapatistas and Rojava touch on it. The western ML groups tend to be the least interesting except where they are exiled migrant organisations or reactions to the economism of the official marxist leninism of the old CPs.
The weird thing about the current western phase is precisely the cross over with the alt-right in terms of hostility to feminism etc through a sort of poisonous insecure masculinity. But again more of a pub speculation than anything useful except to say its quite odd as the intellectual roots of left ‘identity politics’ in the earlier Oppression Olympics form came out of western marxist leninism. And int terms of practise poor or authoritarian self-criticism sessions make Twitter spats look like the most pleasant of dinner parties.
Without writing that piece I think they question is what is the goal? Marxist – leninism in the colonial context has proved to be pretty good at rapid industrialisation but that success across multiple experiences also suggests its of little value for making any sort of transition to communism. The very methods that make it effective as a tool of industrialisation (relatively ruthless centralised state that suppresses capitalists but perhaps not ‘capitalism) lead at best to whatever it is you might call the system in China today, And at worst to fairly brutal and corrupt despotisms, often within quite confined regions. When confronted with that MLs become trotsky like, falling back on theories about cunning wicked step-uncles who tricked everyone. Or blaming it all on the Russians/ CIA, equally useless as they will always be with us this side of the revolution.
My contacts with non-western anarchists is different that yours although I’ve certainly seen the cultural punk derived stuff online and don’t doubt you’ve experienced it. Most of the non western anarchists I’ve met have actually emerged from marxist leninist groups and took up anarchism because they were looking for a theoretical explanation of the failure they observed that did not involve ditching the communist project all together. In a similar fashion the most positive examples of movements emerging from marxist-leninist strands clearly need a post/neo/ex prefix and have put out criticism and methodologies that are compatible with anarchism.
I think the idea that anarchism doesn’t recognise the need for military defence of the revolution is misleading if perhaps based on a real strand within anarchism (but its more prominent within marxism). Anarchism isn’t a set of rules – even if it often gets treated as such – but a particular way of understanding ‘what needs to be done’ that enters on the avoidance of centralised repressive power, in particular in party form.
Long before the Spanish revolution Spanish anarchism involved armed action against pistoleros, assassinations of repressive capitalists / politicians and for that mater the less spoken about details that make strikes effective under severe repression. That was what Durruti and some of the other prominent figures were respected for – not theoretical output of future utopias.
But the question for a revolutionary movement is how do you approach that need for military defence. Do you glorify it (as with the gulag jokes) or do you see it as a corrupting necessity that needs to be carefully corralled and limited because unchecked it eats the revolution. B y current example, if there is a military need for conscription perhaps you try and lessen the impact by just putting conscripts in local defence militias for instance and just taking one from each family and trying to maintain a distinct all volunteer force on the front. It’s still a harmful contradiction but you can’t always avoid these, the question is whether they are glorified rather than minimised. And who calls the shots, a party or the assemblies?
Finally and this is in danger of becoming that essay. I don’t think at this point in the 21st century anyone has solution to the ‘how do we get to communism’ question. All tendencies that claimed to be able to answer that question failed in the 20th century and some in quite disastrous ways that made finding the road very much more difficult. That’s another reason why celebrating gulags isn’t funny.