Liberatory

What would freedom actually require here? What are people already doing to build it, and what remains unresolved?

See the pedagogy document for what this lens does across all themes.

This is the lens where the theme’s central argument stays open, because the school does not hold a verdict on it and does not think the room should be handed one. Did these revolutions expand human freedom or crush it? Both, unevenly, and the accounts collected here will not agree. What they share is a refusal to look away, either from the literacy campaigns, the clinics, and the defeat of fascism, or from the camps, the purges, and the silencing of the revolution’s own left. The liberatory question is not “were they good or bad” but “what, in this record, is worth carrying forward, and what must never be repeated?” That is a question the room has to work out for itself. It connects to the questions of freedom in Anarchism, Mutual Aid, and Prefiguration and to the reform-versus-revolution argument at the movement’s source in Origins.

Anchor questions

• What in this experience genuinely expanded human freedom? What crushed it?
• Was Stalinism the fulfillment of the revolution, a betrayal of it, or something latent in it from the start?
• Kronstadt, the Cultural Revolution, 1956, 1968: how do we hold both the hope and the harm?
• Was Yugoslav self-management a real road beyond the command economy, or the same relations in a new costume?
• Can you have socialism without democracy? Did any of these societies have either?
• What would you refuse to give up, and what would you refuse to repeat?

Materials

All free unless marked otherwise. This set is deliberately built from opposing poles, defenders and critics of the record, each labeled. No position here is the school’s; they are the terms of an argument the room must have.

The revolution’s internal critics

• Rosa Luxemburg (1871 to 1919), The Russian Revolution (1918). Defends October while warning that killing soviet democracy would corrode the revolution. The great friendly critique. Free: marxists.org
• Alexander Berkman (1870 to 1936), The Bolshevik Myth (1925). An anarchist’s diary of disillusion, near Kronstadt in 1921. Free: marxists.org
• Ida Mett (1901 to 1973), The Kronstadt Commune (1938). The 1921 revolt for “soviets without parties” and its suppression. Free: theanarchistlibrary.org
• Maurice Brinton (1923 to 2005), The Bolsheviks and Workers’ Control (1970). The council-communist case that the bureaucratic outcome was built into Bolshevik practice, not only Stalin’s work. Free: marxists.org
• Raya Dunayevskaya (1910 to 1987), The New Class review (1957). If workers never ruled, was any of it socialism? Free: marxists.org

Defenders and the Stalin question

• Michael Parenti (1933 to 2024), Blackshirts and Reds (1997). A defense of the communist record against the fantasy of a “pure socialism” that never had to survive siege. No borrowable copy exists, and this publisher blocks automated checks though the page is live. Paywalled: citylights.com. Parenti’s lecture The Functions of Fascism carries the rational-fascism argument free, under a Creative Commons licence: archive.org
• Domenico Losurdo (1941 to 2018), Stalin: Critique of a Black Legend (2008). A revisionist reassessment, a strong defender pole to weigh against Mandelstam and the anarchists. Free from Iskra Books, which is the authorized English publisher and an open-access press, so this one is free by the rightsholder’s own choice: iskrabooks.org
• Ludo Martens (1946 to 2011), Another View of Stalin (1994). The furthest defender pole, included as a position to argue, not the school’s view. EPO, its original publisher, no longer carries it; the only legitimate copy is print on demand. Paywalled: lulu.com, and see the note on access.

The states in their own voice, and the Yugoslav alternative

• Kim Il Sung (1912 to 1994), On Some Points of the Juche Idea. The DPRK’s doctrine of self-reliance in its own words, a primary document of one pole. Free: marxists.org
• Juraj Katalenac, Yugoslav Self-Management: Capitalism Under the Red Banner. A left-communist critique: self-management kept wage labor and a ruling bureaucracy, so it was state capitalism. Free: libcom.org
• Kit Adam Wainer on Catherine Samary, “Yugoslavia: Behind the Fragmentation” (1993). The defense: self-management was a genuine alternative road, unravelled by debt and nationalism rather than doomed. Free: marxists.org

Video

• “The Kronstadt Rebellion Against Lenin” (The Great War, 2020). Roughly 14 minutes, about 220,000 views. Sympathetic to the rebels; pairs with Mett and Berkman. youtube.com/watch?v=oZVvs1NWk7o
• “Reflections on the Overthrow of Communism” (Michael Parenti, 1996). Roughly 80 minutes, about 54,000 views. The defender’s case that the collapse was a worldwide defeat for working people. youtube.com/watch?v=geAXmsb_TvU
• “Economic Update: The Rise and Fall of the USSR” (Richard D. Wolff, 2019). Roughly 29 minutes, about 354,000 views. The state-capitalism position, between defense and dismissal. youtube.com/watch?v=_Y-TWFKw4tU

Debates and disagreements

The whole theme is a debate, and this lens keeps it open rather than closing it. Some threads to hold, not resolve:

• Was it socialism at all? Trotsky says degenerated workers’ state; Cliff and Wolff say state capitalism; Djilas says a new class society; Dunayevskaya asks whether the word applies where workers never ruled; Parenti and Martens say yes, socialism under siege. The room will not settle this, and should not pretend to.
• The Stalin question. Losurdo and Martens against Mandelstam, Luxemburg, and the anarchists. A facilitator should make sure the defenders’ texts are read and that the victims’ testimony from the experiential lens is in the room when they are.
• Was there another road? The Yugoslav self-management experiment is the strongest candidate for a different model; Katalenac and Wainer disagree on whether it was one. Hold the question open.
• What is worth carrying forward? Free healthcare and education, mass literacy, the defeat of fascism sit on one side of the ledger; the camps, the famines, the surveillance, and the crushing of the revolution’s own left sit on the other. Carrying the theme forward means being honest about both columns at once.

Status

First pass, and it may be a while before there is a second. Contributions welcome, especially liberatory currents from within the Chinese and Vietnamese experiences, and feminist accounts of daily life under state socialism.