It’s according to Molotov’s recollection. From Сто сорок бесед с Молотовым by Felix Chuev:
Stalin himself, I remember, said during the war: “I know that after my death, my grave will be piled with rubbish. But the winds of history will ruthlessly dispel it!
Huh… that’s odd. This is the exact same names and order as a list which I’ve got.
“Honestly, my stance on this isn’t gonna change. If people felt like we weren’t taking care of them, yeah, I would feel like we failed. If you wanna interpret that as a bad thing, you can, but you’re reaching pretty hard.”
Yeah, I’d say it’s about time for LTT staff to unionise.
I think that “taking care of people” smacks of the same rhetoric as “we’re like a family” and “I like to think that all staff are considered equals here” and just about any other lie I’ve heard from exploitative upper management types.
This is even funnier if you assume that those messages were sent at 3am
The worker’s councils were recreating the basis of capitalism and interfering with regional and national interests in favour of their own petit-bourgeois aspirations. They wanted to become a labour aristocracy and they threatened the economic foundations of proletarian democracy with their narrow, self-interested trade union consciousness. Yugoslavia’s model is a perfect example of what would have happened if this was allowed to proliferate and to threaten the revolution.
If the Mensheviks didn’t want to get outlawed then maybe they shouldn’t have aligned themselves with the interests of the aristocracy and the Kadets over the proletariat 🤷♂️
Imagine being salty that the October Revolution overthrew the bourgeois Provisional Government. The soviets had established themselves as the legitimate organ of proletarian power and they seized political power because the Mensheviks and the Constitutional Democrats did not represent them.
Lol, I’ll bite. How do you think that Lenin strangled the revolution in the cradle?
Do you mean libertarians, or “libertarians” as per Murray Rothbard’s quote:
“One gratifying aspect of our rise to some prominence is that, for the first time in my memory, we, ‘our side,’ had captured a crucial word from the enemy . . . ‘Libertarians’ . . . had long been simply a polite word for left-wing anarchists, that is for anti-private property anarchists, either of the communist or syndicalist variety. But now we had taken it over…”
Nah, I didn’t do that. I just pointed out that they are either a supporter of capitalism (or reactionary politics) or they support revolutionary/evolutionary socialism, all of which are inherently authoritarian in their own ways.
The material conditions that give rise to authoritarianism is a different question altogether. I was specific in my choice of words for a reason.
“We have liberated Europe from fascism, but they will never forgive us for it.”
— Marshal Zhukov
Let’s not pretend that your politics aren’t inherently authoritarian as well.
Either you support capitalism (or worse), which is grossly authoritarian as it inflicts massive violence not only via warfare but through mass starvation and deprivation, or you support socialism, in which case you have two options:
The violent overthrow of the current system (spoiler alert: that’s a very authoritarian thing to do!)
The gradual reform of the current system, meaning maintaining the status quo for an exceptionally long time as we ever so slowly creep our way to a more just economic system while countless people starve, go homeless, die without healthcare, end up in yet-another war and so on (which is a very authoritarian proposition, just throwing away the lives of the poor in your own country—not to mention those in the developing world—just so you can have a neat and tidy reformist approach that doesn’t rock the boat.)
I’m thoroughly enjoying watching Twitter xit itself
Yep. Chuev conducted a series of lengthy interviews with Molotov over the period of 1969 - 1986 and he kept extensive notes about what Molotov attested to.
While I can’t seem to find an English language translation of 140 Conversations with Molotov, his other work, Molotov Remembers, is frequently cited as a primary source by historians.
Given that it’s testimony from something which was said many years prior to the interview I’d hazard a guess that Molotov was paraphrasing because the chances of it being an exact quote are vanishingly slim but such is the nature of historical work; often the eyewitness testimony is going to be somewhat hazy, especially long after the fact.
I personally would feel comfortable in saying that Stalin had actually said something to this effect, if not exactly word for word, to Molotov.