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The key to understanding Stalin is right here, says Historicus: the tactics always, the strategy often, are expendable and replaceable; these are the party-line flipflops that make the headlines, but they do not change the core of theory and program. To understand the manipulable strategy and tactics, Stalin's followers — and his intended victims — have to understand the inner theory and program. Historicus puts his heaviest stress on Stalin's use of fixed theory right along with and intermeshed with shifting tactics. Stalin employs both, simultaneously. Most politicians of the West tend to bear down on one or the other, in a given situation.
Of Dialectic & Horse Thieves
The bedrock of Stalin's theory is Leninist-Marxism, and is known technically in the trade as "dialectical, historical materialism. "It is not new or secret, but it is what, in large measure, makes Stalin Stalin. Much of it was originated by Marx, modified by Lenin and picked up by Stalin. Since Stalin is the living actor on the stage, Historicus for convenience labels any of the theory Stalin consistently quotes as Stalin's theory.* All of Historicus' argument is based on Stalin's words, with Stalin's emphasis, not on the words of Marx or Lenin, except where Stalin repeats them with obvious approval.
The theory starts with this : what happens to social systems is not the result of men's ideas (which would be "idealism"), but the result of "material" environment. That is, social systems change primarily because of "objective" influences and not "subjective" influences (whereby people get the idea of making the change, and do it).
According to the theory, history is a succession of such changes in social systems. The changes occur because of "contradictions " (jargon for conflicts, struggles). The changes are not just the defeat of one of the forces in contradiction, but the evolution of something new, something different from both (this is the "dialectic"). The something new is always a step upward, the evolution by violent cross-breeding of a higher type of society.
Through all this historical process, everything is relative —meaning that although a slave-owning economy is viewed as deplorable today, it was once, when it had just succeeded the primitive communal system, a "step forward." In other words, there is no "eternal justice." Men's ideas, their point of view (their "consciousness"), are reflections of these contradictions, of these struggling, contending forces, and of their eruptions into new things. Says Stalin: "The material life of society . . . is primary, and its spiritual life secondary, derivative." An example (not Stalin's): in the U.S. frontier days, a man's life depended on his horse. Therefore, to steal a horse was a capital crime; tree gallows were handy for horse thieves. The material conditions created a deep feeling.
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