This is the final failure of Stalinism.

campaign-2016-obama-clinton

The failure of the Soviet Union was not the end of Stalinism. The leftists read their Gramsci, moved from analysis of class to analysis of culture, and realized that running the bureaux was a revolutionary act.

If you control the bureaux you can control the funding of corporations and colleges. You can make the rules, particularly if you have political fellow travellers. Regardless of the rules, you control the application of the rules. With sufficient rules, you do not need Beria to find the crime in any man: all men are guilty. You control the application of the penalties.

If someone gets in the way, you denounce them or destroy them. Your excuses are not the dialectic, but patriotism: which you have redefined as adhering to the progressive narrative, as exemplified by the leader, chosen not for his virtue but her skin colour, approved perversions, or victim class status.

Lenin and Stalin
Lenin and Stalin

The classic marxist knows what this is, and that is Stalinism. From two Marxist sites, a definition of Stalinism.

First and foremost, Stalinism must be understood as the politics of a political stratum. Specifically, Stalinism is the politics of the bureaucracy that hovers over a workers’ state. Its first manifestation was in the Soviet Union, where Stalinism arose when sections of the bureaucracy began to express their own interests against those of the working class, which had created the workers’ state through revolution to serve its class interests.

From “socialism in one country” flow the two other main tenets of Stalinist politics. First is that the workers’ movement–given the focus on building socialism in one country (i.e., the Soviet Union)–must adapt itself to whatever is in the best interests of that focus at any given moment. Hence we find the Stalinists engaged in “a series of contradictory zigzags” (Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed), from confrontation with imperialism to détente and from seeming support for the working-class struggle to outright betrayal of the workers. In other words, Russia’s own economic development comes first, above an international policy of revolution–which was the Bolshevik perspective. The second is the idea of revolution in “stages” –that the “national-democratic revolution” must be completed before the socialist revolution takes place. This, too, runs contrary to Marxism. But because of this theory and as the expression of imperialism within the workers’ state–and, by extension, within the world workers’ movement–we find the Stalinists assigning to the national bourgeoisie a revolutionary role.
There is nonetheless a crucial cut here between Lenin and Stalin: while Lenin remained at this level, claiming the access to the “objective meaning” of the events, Stalin made a fateful step further and re-subjectivized this objective meaning. In the Stalinist universe, there are, paradoxically, ultimately no dupes, everyone knows the “objective meaning” of his/her acts, so that, instead of the illusory consciousness, we get direct hypocrisy and deceit: the “objective meaning” of your acts is what you REALLY WANTED, and your good intentions are merely a hypocritical mask. Furthermore, all of Lenin cannot be reduced to this subjective position of the privileged access to “objective meaning”: there is another, much more “open,” subjective position at work in Lenin’s writings, the position of total exposure to historical contingency. From this position, there is no “true” party line waiting to be discovered, no “objective” criteria to determine it: the Party “makes all possible mistakes,” and the “true” party line emerges out of the zig-zag of oscillations, i.e., “necessity” is constituted in praxis, it emerges through the mutual interaction of subjective decisions.

The collapse of the Soviet did not disturb the true Believer, for they had abandoned the Soviet and were following Gramsci, Alinsky included. If economic pressure would not produce a revolution, then subverting the structures of society, promoting a perpetual revolution globally, and increasing the monolithic power of corporations would cause a Fabian slow convergence, or, if that failed, a revolution.

The working and productive people were seen as without any potential, so a new proletariat was imported. Social media and talk radio were questioning the narrative, so they must be regulated. And the votes were too close to call, so the means of counting must be able to be hacked.

cu1sqaswgaapaze-jpglarge

The Solution

After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

Bertolt Brecht.

But the new other is bankrupting these technocratic stalinist states as surely as the military bankrupted the Soviet. You cannot afford to bring in ten, fifteen, twenty percent more people if they cannot or will not work. You can only confiscate things once. No matter how many loans you debase and default, as Thatcher said, eventually you will run out of other people’s money.

We are reaching that point in Europe. The Muslims consider that Allah has given them Europe and the peons deserve to pay them: what they are not given in benefits they will take.

It was not Allah. It was the cultural disciples of Stalin. And they will fall: this cannot continue. If we don’t reform, as the UK is trying to do with Brexit, there will be a counter-revolution, and this time the Bolsheviks are those without the guns.

This will be the end of Stalinist parties of the Left (and their “conservative” lapdogs) or the West. I’m betting on the West.

UPDATE. Infogalactic has rescued censored Wikipedia articles on cultural marxism, suppressed because of the current Stalinist turn of the progressives.