Date: Fri, 5 Sep 1997 00:28:27 -0400 (EDT)
From: "Jeffrey M. Hornstein" jhorn@wam.umd.edu
Some comments on John Marot's admirable, though flawed, review essay:
1. Why no mention of the "true" founder of anti-totalitarian social history, Moshe Lewin, who in a much more systemic manner outlined many of the relationships between state and society that Fitzpatrick seems to underemphasize. For example, how about the question of why the peasantry supported the Stalinist system? While I find Marot's analysis of the counterrevolution in the countryside convincing, if not original, it is not enough to say "the state" "caused" the destruction of the peasantry. First, this assumes that "the peasantry" was a uniform social class - which Lewin's work disproves - and, second, it makes the state into a black box. Here Fitzpatrick's old social mobility thesis comes into play; many people - workers, peasants, etc., did indeed willingly participate in building Stalinism, and many got "dizzy with success." Were all the builders villains?
2. Marot writes, "... the state under Stalin, despite continued and pervasive peasant opposition, had nonetheless subdued the peasantry as a class, had pulverized it as a cohesive social force. In sum, state coercion was an indispensable feature of the (putatively upward) 'social mobility' that forcibly transformed the direct producer in agriculture from peasant into kolkhoznik." This, again, presumes that all peasants before the Stalinist revolution from above were sort of yeoman farmers, and were, in fact, a class either in or for themselves. Not so, as Lewin has demonstrated.
In general, Marot tends, like many writers of the 19th century, to romaticize the mir as some sort of utopian communism. I'm not sure I agree.
3. Marot writes, "If political representation is to acquire legitimacy, even of a purely formal sort, certain minimal social conditions must be met." This conflates, of course, "political representation" with "democracy," and applies a particular liberal notion of politics to a distinctly nonliberal historical situation. This is not to endorse life under nonliberal regimes, but only to point out that they exist and are perhaps a crucial element in the capitalist world order. If the whole world were democratic, where would the multinationals find low-wage, high-repression labor markets?
4. Marot writes, "Among other things, Kotkin does for workers what Fitzpatrick does for peasants (and, to raise an uncustomary parallel, what many historians have done for black slaves in the antebellum American South): record the most varied kinds of individual acts of resistance, in word and deed, in the most diverse of settings." Here Marot is on to something. I have often made the comparison between the historiography on Stalinism and that on American slavery. Both have "totalitarian" as well as "revisionist" adherents, but there is, also, in both cases a more dialectical medium - in the U.S. case it is represented by Gramscian-influenced historians like Eugene Genovese, while in Soviet historiography it is represented largely by Lewin and others such as perhaps Siegelbaum and Andrle. These historians reject the "domination or resistance" dichotomy in favor of an approach which takes Gramsci's dictum about consenting to one's oppression to heart.
5. Foucault never said that "truth is what the ruling powers say it is." More accurately would be something Nietzschean like "ruling powers are what the truth says they are."
6. While I can agree that Kotkin tends to project Stalinism backwards almost comically, in the spirit of the least sophisticated political science which blames Marx for Stalin, his larger point seems to tie Stalinism to (a part of) the project of modernity. It was (and is) truly modern to use state power to industrialize - so it is a bit disingenuous to suggest that the counterfactual comparison ought to be whether "mass enthusiasm alone" would have built Magnitogorsk. Naturally it would not have, nor would it have built the transcontinental railroad in the U.S. The degrees of coercion and repression were perhaps unprecedented (in their time), but state-led or controlled development certainly was and is not.
In conclusion, while I agree with Marot's overall (Trotskyist) interpretation of Stalinism, I find some of the points mentioned above troubling and some what ahistorical.
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Jeff Hornstein
co-editor, Maryland Historian
Department of History
2115 Francis Scott Key Hall
University of Maryland
College Park, MD 20742
ph: 410-467-2284
fax: 301-314-9399
email: jhorn@wam.umd.edu
http://www.inform.umd.edu/ARHU/Depts/History/Histgrad/ newhist.html