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In truth, I really do hate speaking on this topic. I really don't like handwaving human lives like this. The only reason I do this is because it makes people think communism is a force of evil worse than fascism; a sentiment that keeps the bourgeoisie in power, because the alternative is apparently so monstrous that the plunder and impoverishment of the global south, the eternal wars of the world, the destruction of the ecosystem, and the continuation of wage slavery are so so much better.

Are those numbers in dispute or wildly inaccurate? No. Those are the real figures, in truth. Anyone throwing around 20 million, 60 million, 80 million is talking straight bs.

The vast majority of gulag deaths happened in World War 2 when the supply chains broke down, causing many people to starve.

Indeed those people who died in the great purge weren't all "too dangerous to be left alive", the great purge went completely out of hand, there's no consolation I can give on this topic; some people put the blame entirely on Yezhov, because the VAST majority of deaths happened during Yezhov's leadership of the NKVD, but again putting blame on individuals like this is not Marxist, it was the fault of the party and the system as a whole at the end of the day.

On deportations, I can't speak on that or if those numbers are accurate. But think about what "deported during the 1940s" actually means, it means deporting people during World War 2, during the German invasion.

Also, you kind of skipped the next sentence of the Wikipedia article

According to historian Stephen Wheatcroft, approximately 1 million of these deaths were "purposive" while the rest happened through neglect and irresponsibility

Why can't I just say Stalin was a fascist or a traitor like most 'respectable' communists in the modern day? Because it just feeds in to a different liberal criticism of communism, which is that it always leads to dictatorship; I don't accept that premise and you shouldn't either. The Marxist conception is dictatorship of a class not individual dictatorship, even his biggest hater Trotsky didn't take Stalin as an individual dictator, but as the reflection of a degenerated worker's state (though I also don't accept this either as this is derived from Trotsky's distrust of the Peasant class). Stalin was a true communist. I suggest you read some of Stalin's writings, I've read quite a bit of them and there's not that much I disagree with, I don't think you'd disagree much either as a communist.

I'm obliged to say thought that Stalin is not nearly as important to Marxist theory as Marx, Engels, Lenin, or Mao as he hardly made new additions. But the possibility of Socialism in One Country as formulated by Stalin is to be upholded. In truth, I'm completely fine with people being critical of Stalin as long as they uphold his line (I'm also not posing Stalin's USSR as sunshine and rainbows as you can tell), but usually people who hate Stalin follow deviationist ideologies like Titoism, Trotskyism, etcetera, etcetera and that's the core of the original post.

You know what, I agree. The Naxalites are the only hope for India as of now, CPI(M) and everyone else are electoralist scum. There is no socialist revolution without the liberation of oppressed nations, and it is sad to see so called socialists, really social-chauvinists, condemn the People's War.

The post was directed towards communists, I didn't expect it to reach non-communists, but nevertheless I'll answer your questions:

I’m not sure I follow the logic here.

Requires a bit of context, but essentially what I'm saying in that paragraph is that this fear of Stalin and previous socialist experiments leads people to follow nominally socialist ideologies that don't lead to revolution. Examples include anarchism, libertarian socialism, Trotskyism, democratic socialism, vague Marxism, and on the off-chance small niche ideologies that a dozen people believe. It's not my fault that our predecessors who achieved proletarian revolution had respect for Stalin.

Wouldn’t it be better to then blame it all on Stalin?

Putting all the errors of the USSR on the individual of Stalin is not Marxist, it's practically great man theory. Decisions were carried out by the party, not by a single individual. That being said, it's not wrong to blame Stalin and his administration for their real errors.

It’s a lost cause from how well publicized Stalin’s crimes are so rather contraproductive to recruit people

That's what we call opportunism; short term gains, long term problems. Communists should stand firm on their principles and drag the world leftwards. Changing the narrative is not a lost cause, if it was then may as well abandon communism because most people have been have a hatred towards it.

On the topic of recruiting, if Stalin turns off people from joining Marxist-Leninist organizations, good. We don't need non-Marxist-Leninists in Marxist-Leninist organizations. non-MLs do have a place though, they can join left mass organizations. There's also no issue with MLs working with non-MLs, they just don't belong in an ML organization.

it requires to whitewash history and suppress history

It does require us to deny the claims of cold war pseudo-historians, yes. Such as Robert Conquest, who was affiliated with the Information Research Department, a secret propaganda department of the government of the United Kingdom during the cold war. Not all cold war sovietologists are as egregious as doing the work of a secret propaganda department, but there certainly was an incentive to write pure nonsense. The more negative you wrote, the higher the chance you'd get propelled to the higher echelon of prestige.

it prevents addressing questions on how and who accumulates power, how candidates are filtered and advance towards ultimate power and how to prevent for example sociopaths from claiming ultimate power

Doesn’t any modern communist theory HAVE to include ideas of how to prevent someone like Stalin from gaining power?

Not the right question to ask from a Marxist perspective, as its not the individual of Stalin that matters but the party as a whole. Marxism is in complete contradiction with great man theory; systems are what matters in this world, not individuals. The question should be, "How do we prevent the party from betraying the revolution?"

This is a topic of great importance, as the greatest threat to the revolution are internal as proven by history. Stalin's solution was the great purge, in my opinion this was not right, it didn't prevent or even delay the USSR from reversing course to capitalism because it didn't deal with any root issues but only the surface manifestation. Trotsky's approach was the permanent revolution, this was also not right as it hinged on Trotsky's disbelief of the revolutionary potential of the peasantry. Mao and Hoxha's approach was cultural revolution, though sharing the name had different approach with Mao's being bottom-up and Hoxha's being more top-down.

Again, these are the names of the leaders but in truth were the attempts of their respective revolutions to tackle this issue.

"I’m pretty sure there were Celtics or Picts in the Netherlands before Germanic/Frankish tribes" I think we might just have a completely different view of settler colonialism here if you think settler colonialism predated capitalism. Settler colonialism is not mere demographic change though settler colonialism always leads to demographic change, thinking that can lead to some dangerous conclusions.

Malaysia was a bad example, so my bad on that. I think I need to study that topic further. I was under the impression that though it does have internal settler colonies, it as a whole isn't a settler colony, but the comment below makes me think twice on that.

Oh no, I'm well aware that India and Malaysia (as well as many many other countries) have oppressed nations under them, I'm just making the claim that they aren't Settler Colonies themselves. Like Indonesia has settlers on West Papua, but Indonesia isn't a settler colony itself even despite its transmigration program. Please don't take this as me downplaying the oppression of oppressed nations, not my intention at all. Settler Colonies are a specific thing.

That point about Mozambique is moot, the creation of the nation is the result of colonial efforts and the reaction to it but the people are most certainly indigenous making it not a settler colony.

Its not true that 0.7% of Malaysia's population is native. 70% of the Malaysian population are Bumiputera ("natives"), though its good to keep in mind that Indonesians ethnicities are also counted as Bumiputera in the form of Anak Dagang. Anak Jati ethnic Malays though are most certainly native to the peninsula and have been there for a long time, though I can't get a good figure of their numbers since they're lumped in with Anak Dagang as ethnic Malays, they aren't a small part of the Malaysian population and do outnumber Anak Dagang Malays. Anak Jati also aren't just a product of shipping Indonesians and Indians to Malaysia in colonial times. Indians aren't even counted as Bumiputera. Orang Asli are indeed an oppressed group which has their indigenous lands taken, and I don't mean to downplay that.

As for India, Kashmir is a settler colony, but India as a whole isn't.

That's just not true man

Is Netherlands a settler colony? Is Malaysia a settler colony? Is Korea a settler colony? Is Mozambique a settler colony? Is India a settler colony? I could go on

Was more of a vent post than anything. I don't feel like an enemy of the people, an enemy would want what's worst for them, to the contrary I want what's best for all of us. I don't expect people to be automatically Marxist either, that would be commandist of me. But it grinds my gears how closed minded people are to class consciousness; it seems as if they are impervious to it.

But all this only emphasises the importance of a vanguard, and kills the idea of spontaneity. It seems that no matter how severely capitalism harms a person, it doesn't mean they're open to Marxist ideas; there's no tipping point where conditions will be bad enough that people will automatically do a socialist revolution.

People will see this and still blame the housing crisis on immigrants

oh i see

He's also against the theory of unequal exchange. He doesn't just have one or two mistakes, he consistently makes errors; there's a big difference. Bravo to Cockshott for inventing his own Marxist deviation that nobody follows.

Also, what's the source for the latter?

No point in speaking about it in the abstract. In practice its social murder against the mentally ill. It is another avenue of war against those this society has disgraced and harmed.

Depression is not as they say, just a "chemical imbalance". People are depressed for real reasons, not because their brain is faulty, it's a normal reaction to a hopeless situation; though predisposition to it varies. The point is to not have people be in a hopeless position.

He's also a homophobe:

https://paulcockshott.wordpress.com/2017/08/29/class-and-the-lgtb-lobby/ https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13169/worlrevipoliecon.11.1.0095

He's also against dialectical materialism, as if all socialists from from Engels to Mao have missed something this fundamental: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhEbKt3hFRs