A Thought on Stalin Beginning from Lenin (original) (raw)

2016, Crisis and Critique

Translation of Judith Balso's Text "A Thought on Stalin Beginning from Lenin" One cannot write a text on Stalin without also, and at the same time, writing a text on Lenin. Based on precise documentation, it is a question of discerning the real effects of political thought, as well as the effects, no less real, of the destruction of such a thought. Otherwise, we remain confined to a sort of historical process, a process that shares the same rules with the accusation (Bianco) or the defense (Losurdo). The centre of gravity of this analysis is not the "Great Terror" at the end of the 1930s, but rather the period of the first five-year plan and of dekulakization, this analysis is essential if we seek to produce a judgment that is not regulated by morality nor by "efficiency," but by the effective conditions of a real process of emancipation, specifically: popular subjectivity as the new force capable of creating a political opening (I would point out, incidentally, that it is this that makes possible October 1917).