The Sources of Stalinism

It will seem a paradox, but basically, if one thinks about it, the vast majority of the critics of the Stalin era do not diverge from its defenders. The starting matrix of their social thinking is one and the same. It is constructed from the same blueprints. Both the defenders and the opponents of Stalinism conceive the movement toward socialism as a process of peeling away from a nascent socialism those parts that are alien to it. Both the defenders and the critics of Stalinism assume, in particular, that socialism is the elimination of diversity from the former system and, above all, the abolition of small-scale peasant production; that it is impossible to achieve the planning that socialism needs other than by diktat, without subordinating the economic life of the country to the center; that one can withstand the perils of a petty-bourgeois degeneration only through the proletarianization of society; that socialism begins with the "discarding" of bourgeois culture; and that the implantation of atheism ...