Chapter 4: The Dialectic Is What Gives A Marxist Their Power: It Surrounds Us, Penetrates Us, Binds The Galaxy Together: Part II

Cuba's personality cult is probably the simplest and the least important of the two. In a phrase, it's Che shirts. Che Guevara was a fairly effective guerrilla leader and strategist who oversaw the business end of Cuba's foreign policy, and did more than any other single white person to end white supremacy in Africa. As an object of a personality cult, he had the advantages of being a romantic revolutionary with an appealing life story, and more importantly to the Castros, of being somewhere far away from Havana until he died. His legacy is a useful way to mobilize proles worldwide in defense of the Cuban Revolution, and he's not around anymore to squander the effectiveness of the personality cult.

Using dead people to legitimize living communist regimes is the safest way to have a personality cult, but also has the limitation of having to interpret the ideas of the person anew for new material conditions without their input. Before Stalin acquiesced to being the object of his own personality cult, he tried to use Lenin to these ends. This is the reason we call ourselves Marxist-Leninists and not Stalinists; Stalin codified and finalized the ideology Marx and Lenin created, but he wanted to invoke them and not himself until it became imperative to have a living object of a personality cult. After all, Lenin died before the word "fascist" entered into common usage; although he used the word "imperialist" to get at the same basic idea, the Soviet people needed a more direct critique of their enemies in their personality cult.

All the same, the ideological and material conditions between Stalin's time and ours are similar enough that several communists have independently stumbled on the same basic idea: reviving the Stalinist personality cult. Stalin's critiques of fascism and capitalism are fundamentally valid and addressed to the right people in our time as well, and the bougie scaremongering about his life and career can now be turned against them. Every time they raise the spectre of Stalin and eleventy billion dead kulaks expecting that to be the end of the argument, we can lean into it and back our arguments with the implicit threat of a return of the gulags. Shocked and gasping liberals clutching their pearls on Facebook is one of life's little pleasures, and we can thank Uncle Joe for it. Whether every act of his is worth emulating or not is immaterial for the purposes of this personality cult: the point is that no regime before or since put so many bougies in jail or up against the wall, and his mustachioed memory puts the fear of God into smug liberals. In that sense, let every commie say boldly that Stalin did nothing wrong.

It nonetheless remains that nobody is perfect, and Stalin in fact did many things wrong. Off the top of my head, he gave Nikita Khrushchev a job, he gave Ayn Rand an education, he allowed Sergei Korolyev to be sent to the gulags by jealous colleagues making up bullshit accusations, he let Lavrentiy Beria grow powerful enough that even he couldn't prevent Beria raping whoever he pleased, he allowed his own senility to launch the Doctors' Plot to use antisemitism to leverage Beria out of power, the Doctors' Plot didn't stop Beria poisoning him anyway, he didn't solve the contradiction between the dictatorship of the proletariat relying more and more on petty bourgeois experts to keep up with the United States, he didn't repress the kulaks and wreckers nearly hard enough to prevent them from returning and being the basis of the Yeltsin-Putin regime, and he didn't ensure that a competent worker would take over for him.

But he did make Hitler eat a gun, he did bury an icepick Excalibur-like in the forehead of the world's biggest poser commie, he did end the Holocaust, he did trick the Nazis into helping him crush the power of the Polish nobility for good, he did prevent America holding the entire world to nuclear blackmail, he did create a modern industrial economy where there had been only medieval feudalism, he made the Soviet Union the only jailer in history whose inmates were primarily bougie, he developed the infrastructure of the entire Soviet nation from Kaliningrad to Kolyma, and he guaranteed that the entire second half of the twentieth century worldwide would be dedicated to catching up with the widespread social gains he had provided the Soviet citizenry. Without Stalin, the internet would be hand-delivered, censored, and written in German. Nobody is perfect, but Stalin is legitimately, failings included, probably the single most consequential force for good that lived in the twentieth century. This tribune of the masses and historical forces has as good a claim to being a "great man of history" as that spurious concept could ever stumble upon. Even in death, he makes petties squirm and talk out of the social democratic side of their mouths in abject terror. If there were ever a candidate for a communist personality cult, Stalin is the most obvious candidate since Lenin or Marx.

Continue reading Part III