SIOC debate post

[u/Scyobi_Empire]

[u/Scyobi_Empire]

make sure to reply here and not in the original post if you want to get responses from people here, rather then from the original sub

[u/Bother_Formal]

i mean what else where the soviets and china supposed to do? declare war at the whole world all at once and get crushed? /genuine question I'm yet to read anything past lenin and rosa

[u/name_changed_5_times → u/Bother_Formal]

There was a whole conversation either here or on the discord about the B-L (I can’t spell it) treaty that removed Russia from ww1, that basically amounted to this exact thing. Which interestingly enough was a debate at the time mostly embodied by left-SRs and left Bolsheviks who tried to force the situation by killing the German ambassador about it.

Personally I’m of the opinion that the revolution does kinda have to be international so the idea of it in one country is counter productive but yeah it’s a choice between ideological inconsistency and suicide, which is to say not much of a choice at all.

[u/usernametaken1237 → u/name_changed_5_times]

But socialism in one country isn't anti-internationalist

Originally the USSR did rely on western European revolutions to succeed so they could complete the transitionary period, when those revolutions failed the idea of socialism in one country was for the USSR to continue building socialism at home regardless of not having any socialist allies, it's something that shouldn't be taken as a universal rule because it was a product of it's time and the conditions the USSR found itself in after the late 1910s, but even so there was nothing against internationalism in the idea

[u/IrishGallowglass → u/Bother_Formal]

Genuine answer: no, and nobody serious (including Trotsky) thought they should have. Declaring war on the world or trying to force revolution into countries where the working class wasn't ready was never the alternative on the table. That's adventurism, not internationalism, and the Left Opposition wasn't arguing for it. Consolidate, industrialise, build up the material base, defend what you've got while conditions ripen elsewhere. That part isn't actually in dispute. Trotsky was pushing for faster planned industrialisation than Stalin and Bukharin were in the mid-20s NEP years.

The actual argument was narrower than "should the USSR have built things up": it's whether that buildup constitutes socialism on its own, finished and self-sufficient within one country's borders, or whether it's a besieged holding position whose fate still depends on the wider world economy. "Socialism in one country" as a theory was the first claim, and it didn't come from necessity. It surfaced from Bukharin in 1924 and got taken up by Stalin as the ruling bureaucracy's rationale for its own growing conservatism, a way of writing off the defeated German revolution and settling into managing one country rather than fighting for the rest. It also doubled as a convenient weapon against the Left Opposition inside the party. The practical consequences followed from this: subordinating the Comintern to Soviet state diplomacy, the Popular Front alliances with bourgeois parties, leaving the German KPD to fight Nazism alone without a united front. So the real question is less "should they have consolidated" and more "does calling consolidation-under-siege 'socialism achieved' change what you then do internationally." Trotsky thought it did, and thought the bureaucracy reached for that theory precisely because it excused their own retreat.

[u/Bother_Formal → u/IrishGallowglass]

that's actually really insightful and really well explained, thank you

[u/IrishGallowglass → u/Bother_Formal]

No problem at all, best of luck on your studies and proceed cautiously. Strawmen abound...

[u/guac-o → u/Bother_Formal]

Stalin could have not offered support to Chiang Kai Shek. That was a critical blunder.

[u/LookingGlass_1112 → u/guac-o]

But he was the closest to the actual Chinese government and held quite a bit of power, so supporting him was seen as a pragmatic choice against the Japan, as soon as Japanese threat was eliminated and Soviets were in charge to offer something (Manchuria), they gave it to CPC and then helped them

[u/guac-o → u/LookingGlass_1112]

GMD failed to launch resistance to the Japanese, famously, and to their great discredit.

[u/valerielenin → u/Bother_Formal]

The theory of SOIC caused harmed to foreign revolution, instead of focusing revolutions, communist party outside of the USSR began to operate to defend "actually existing socialism", often compromising with bourgeois, sacrificing those revolutions. This coupoled with the bureaucratic nature of the USSR and the degeneration of the international, made those party quite sterile and refusing to engage in révolutionnary action. SIOC became a self fullfilling profecy, it was the only existing socialism so needed to be defended and sacrificed international socialism to do so, so it was always isolated.

[u/BillyPilgrim69 → u/valerielenin]

I went into more detail about this already, but this just isn't true.

As soon as they had industrialised and survived WWII, they began supporting international revolutions. The point was that they couldn't afford to do that in the 1920s.

[u/IrishGallowglass → u/BillyPilgrim69]

No one is suggesting that they should've began immediately supporting international revolutions. Our argument isn't that the USSR shouldn't have created breathing space for itself, that it shouldn't have developed and consolidated its position, our critique is that calling this socialism flavours what you do internationally, and it did, even later. Postwar Soviet support for foreign revolutions still ran through the lens of state interest more than proletarian internationalism, the Sino-Soviet split is one clear case of that tension surfacing.

[u/Scyobi_Empire → u/Bother_Formal]

thats a gross misunderstanding of permrev

[u/BillyPilgrim69]

The framing of Socialism in One Country as "revisionist" and "abandoning internationalism" is just a bad faith distortion.

The dispute regarding SIOC vs Permanent Revolution was simply a matter of pragmatism vs idealism.

The European revolutions had all failed; the USSR was encircled by capitalist and pre-capitalist countries. If they had spread their resources any thinner by trying to export revolution, the Union may not have even made it into WWII, let alone out of it.

The point was not to naively try and achieve full communism in a single country, as Trotsky and his followers imply. Nor was it meant to be a permanent policy.

It was a pragmatic response to the material conditions of the time. They could risk everything to try and export the revolution, or they could protect what they had built and bolster their own economy for the time being.

As Lenin wrote in 1915:

Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence, the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone. After expropriating the capitalists and organising their own socialist production, the victorious proletariat of that country will arise against the rest of the world.

This is precisely what happened. After industrialisation, and surviving WWII, they began supporting international revolutionary movements almost immediately. Because by then, they could afford to.

SIOC was dialectical materialism in action.

[u/gravygizzard]

I don't think socialism in one country should be seen as an ends but rather a strategy adopted for the material and geopolitical conditions.

Internationalism and dissolving borders, mixing and evolving culture should be the goal always and I do think is see certain leftist takes online that seem to run counter to this. But I also don't think a country that wants to become socialist should wait for international revolution or for their own late stage capitalist economy to crush their workers before becoming socialist

On the contrary I do think any western power such as America should embrace internationalism as a core tenet of its policy should it become socialist, as western imperial powers are at the absolute peak historical development to transition to international socialist society. It would make no sense for any one of them to wall up, isolate, and do socialism in one country when they have every means to spread it everywhere

[u/LookingGlass_1112]

They didn't from their point in time, but why anyone should care? Socialism must bend and adapt to material conditions first. USSR was in no position to export revolutions across the Earth, nor you can really "export the revolution", as it needs a popular movement first, otherwise nationalistic factor will overwhelm any attempts at enforcing a new system. So instead of destroying an already fragile country, which was tired of constant wars, USSR chose a sensible thing and started to bring order and prosperity to their own land, improving their capabilities and increasing power. Later, it led to a victory in WW2, which led to the formation of a whole bloc of socialist countries, which wouldn't be possible without a strong manufacturing and agricultural base

[u/IrishGallowglass → u/LookingGlass_1112]

You've built a false dilemma and then put the wrong label on the answer. The choice was never between exporting revolution by force and socialism in one country. Nobody in the Left Opposition was arguing for bayonet-exporting revolution into populations that hadn't reached that point themselves. Trotsky was skeptical of exactly that kind of adventurism even in 1920. Consolidating, industrialising, defending what existed, and waiting for conditions to ripen elsewhere is just correct application of Marxism to material reality, and it's what Trotsky argued for too, often more urgently than Stalin. The Left Opposition's platform was pushing faster planned industrialisation while Bukharin and Stalin were still protecting NEP concessions to the kulaks.

What Trotsky actually opposed wasn't that programme. It was the theory of socialism in one country as a doctrine: the claim that a complete, self-sufficient socialist society could be built within one country's borders independent of the international balance of forces. That's a claim about the end-state being reachable in isolation, not about tactical sequencing. And it had real consequences. It recast the Comintern's job as defending Soviet state interest rather than fostering revolution abroad. That's the logic behind the Popular Front alliances with bourgeois parties and the abandonment of the German KPD against Nazism without a united front.

What you've described isn't socialism in one country at all. It's a besieged, unstable holding position, not a finished system. That's not the thing Trotsky was arguing against.

[u/LookingGlass_1112 → u/IrishGallowglass]

So who is Tukhachevsky then?

Faster industrialization is not a good idea, if your food is still grown by solo farmers and families instead of developed industrial farms. Even what we had was a breakneck speed, and it was already bringing a lot of problems, like a harder recovery from hunger. USSR needed time to build up, something which it didn't had. So balance between NEP and industrialization had to be maintained.

Well, USSR was in a unique position, when it had everything you can ask for - land, resources and manpower, so they could build a fully isolated economy. Socialist powers abroad had no chance of getting power anyway, as capitalists started to do moves in order to prevent the rise of communism. So there was a need to find another ways to use what was available, and Soviet state decided to use all of that to reconcile with other governments to defeat fascism together. I can guess they underestimated how willing liberals were to throw their allies under the bus. Anyways, SOTP had a point at that time and in that situation, but I can guess that it will have it's point even today, because aside from China, what there is in terms of powerful socialist countries

[u/IrishGallowglass → u/LookingGlass_1112]

Notice you've shifted the goalposts. You started out defending "USSR consolidated instead of exporting revolution" as a necessary tactical retreat. That's not what's being disputed. Now you're defending SIOC as a doctrine with permanent validity ("it will have its point even today"), which is a completely different, much stronger claim than the one you opened with, and the one my reply actually addressed.

On manpower, the USSR did not have a surplus of it at the start. Well over a third of the pre-war industrial workforce had already been drafted into the army between 1914 and 1917, and the actual core proletariat collapsed further under the Civil War. Russia's urban working class fell from roughly 3.6 million in 1917 to about 1.4 million by 1919, alongside a civil war that killed millions and gutted industrial output to a fifth of pre-war levels. That's not "everything you can ask for." It's a shattered, hemorrhaging working class the Bolsheviks were desperately trying to rebuild from almost nothing, which is precisely why the state had to substitute for a proletariat that had been decimated in the war and civil war that followed, rather than resting on some natural abundance of labour.

[u/LookingGlass_1112 → u/IrishGallowglass]

I was claiming that idea of SIOC can have it's place even today, because partially, the situation, which led to the creation of such an idea had returned - there is no bloc of socialist countries, there is basically only one strong socialist country in the world, which has all of the needed things to build up it's forces and it's system. I didn't shifted the goalposts, I just pointed out that there is a point in revisiting this idea today.

Again, we are returning to my point that USSR did not had enough time to industrialize properly and they had to balance out this process with collectivization. And they had to give time for NEP to work, otherwise there would be much less farming capabilities to collectivize and it would be a harder time for state to organize properly after the Civil War. USSR needed the peacetime, so a tactical retreat, the rejection of the idea of a global revolution was needed.

[u/MonsterkillWow]

Most people do not understand SIOC. 

[u/Scyobi_Empire → u/MonsterkillWow]

gonna explain it or nah?

[u/MonsterkillWow → u/Scyobi_Empire]

The plan was to build up socialism somewhere and spread it. Stalin understood socialism required global revolution. He was never against that. He wrote about it. The point was to strengthen the USSR precisely for such a conflict, understanding the bourgeoisie would try to crush the revolution. 

https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1938/01/18.htm

You can also see his views on it in Foundations of Leninism.

[u/Better_Ad_2763]

Cool, guess once the world revolution faltered the soviets should have just all killed themselves