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

What is class struggle? Why does it matter? What's happened to class

struggle in Canada? What are the implications for socialists? A discussion of these and other questions with Kate Jacobson (Alberta Advantage podcast, in Calgary) and John Clarke (former organizer with the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty, in Toronto).

Email:

victorschildren at gmail.com

Subscribe:

https://pod.link/1556511995

Alberta Advantage Podcast

https://albertaadvantagepod.com

John Clarke

https://johnclarkeblog.com/

Victor's Children is named after Victor Serge, so in this first episode

David introduces the podcast and interviews Suzi Weissman, author of the political biography Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope, about this socialist fighter and writer and why Serge matters today.

https://www.versobooks.com/authors/1615-susan-weissman