Episode 3: Stalinism and the Future of Socialism (Part I)

Victor's Children

Stalinism and the Future of Socialism (Part I) At the end of the 1920s a new social order emerged in the USSR. This Stalinist model later became the basis for reorganizing society in a series of other countries. It was criticized by anti-communists and supported by many people on the left, but other socialists challenged the claim that this was socialism. How socialists today understand what happened in these societies matters a lot. In this episode Simon Pirani discusses the emergence of the Stalinist social order in the USSR and some of the claims made by its defenders, while Kevin Lin surveys China from the revolution of 1949 to the present. Links: Simon Pirani http://simonpirani.blogspot.com An interview with Kevin Lin from 2020: How China contained Covid-19 and the dangerous world to come https://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article6494 A Marxist analysis of the USSR I recommend: What was the USSR? Part IV: Towards a theory of the deformation of value https://libcom.org/library/what-was-ussr-aufheben-part-4 If you're interested in the background to Stalinism: David Camfield, "Revolution and modernising counter-revolution in Russia, 1917-28" https://brill.com/view/journals/hima/28/2/article-p107_4.xml (paywalled, but may be available elsewhere online) If you're interested in China under Mao, a good place to start is Elliott Liu's book Maoism and the Chinese Revolution: A Critical Introduction https://www.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=778