I guess you win the argument through sheer verbosity.

Chris,

If you're personal ethics allows you to justify the killing of millions merely to preserve the worker state, then we have nothing to talk about. I think the class was shocked that anyone could be so dogmatic and inhuman so publicly. You're radicalism has usurped any shred of human decency and we have nothing further to discuss. I doubt many of your fellow sheep in the RSU would agree that the 10 million who were forcibly to starved to death, "Got what they deserved, and I have no sympathy for them." You have only confirmed what I have thought for a while, which is that the main problem with Marxism is not Marx, but Marxists.

Pierre's assertion in this thread was that marx had little to do with what Stalin did.
The jury is still out on that for me.

Chris' assertion in class, after he let Pierre do his dirty work for him in this thread, is that Stalin was justified in doing what he did. No jury needed on that one. I won't be sucked into a debate about the morality of genocide. This is something about which rational people cannot disagree. You've made your beliefs known. I hope you can live with it.

Well, I'll gladly bite the bullet on Stalin and Mao. Now allow me to lay British Imperialism at your doorstep, the unclaimed bastard child of Capitalism. More people have starved to death under British Imperialism in India, then all Communist countries ever. But here's the kicker, unlike the Soviet Union or PRC, the British actually had the food to give to India, often times, almost always, they simply refused and willfully withheld.

So, either Capitalism is a flawless system or Capitalism has the highest body count(and counting). How many people are justified in dying under Capitalism to perpetuate Global Capitalism?

Also, to be fair, I was arguing Lenin's use of requisition under War Communism during the Civil War with the White Russians. That's not my "personal ethics", it's Kantian Ethics.

You really have zero justification for attacking the RSU or it's members. You've never been to a meeting, nor do you know where any of those people stand politically.

I am curious how you would make a Kantian argument for the use of requisition.

Lenin implements War Communism. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_communism

Part of the policy is
"Prodrazvyorstka – requisition of agricultural surpluses from peasants in excess of absolute minimum for centralized distribution among the remaining population."

You'll notice, it's surplus grain. Grain that would feed the cities. So the law at the time is, "hey we're taking surplus and you'll be left with a minimum to feed yourselves and families." The kulaks responded by refusing to grow grain, slaughtering their animals and sabotaging equipment, those kulaks make a choice.

Now I take that choice to be very serious and this is where I am ruthlessly Kantian. When one makes the choice to withhold food and let a city starve, for me this becomes a maxim which can be universalized and in doing so, to not have a contradiction, they are subject to the same treatment.

Autonomy for Kant should not just be the liberal conception where people get to do what they want. People are allowed to make decisions, again, the decision to withhold food and let the cities starve, and part of making decisions means that one can be held accountable for their decisions. We also see this during the French Revolution with the law of the maximum. Everybody was told that they could not sell grain above a certain price. The penalty for breaking this law was death by guillotine. All information is disclosed so that those persons could make a decision, including the penalty for breaking this law.

Ok, I honestly feel like you make a good point.

But...

I don't think you are being fair to Kant. One of the basic claims of Kantian Ethics is that it is unethical to treat another human being as a means rather than an end, right? The policy of requisition basically said to the peasants "you will produce grain for us so that we can feed our soldiers." The Bolsheviks, in other words, were treating the peasantry as a means rather than an end.

And you can correct me if I'm wrong -- and I'm sure you will -- but wouldn't this be a real problem for Kant?

It would be one thing if the peasants were happy in their role of producing grain, and the Bolsheviks said "ok, we're happy to take advantage of that." At this point, the Bolsheviks would have no ethical duty to treat the peasants as anything different than grain producers. But it would be a very, very different thing if the peasants were unhappy in their role of producing grain for an army that supported a political system they had little interest in adopting. At this point, according to what I understand of Kant -- and it's been a lot of years since I've read Kant -- the Bolsheviks would be ethically bound not to treat the peasants as providers for an army the peasants don't support.

I'm not sure if what I'm saying supports a "liberal notion of freedom", nor do I care. I am fairly certain, however, that what I'm saying is consistent with Kantian Ethics, and that, if you're going to make strengthen your argument, you'd have to address it.

I also don't like the part of War Communism that, according to Wikipedia, said "discipline for workers was strict, and strikers could be shot." Intuitively, that feels very anti-marxist to me.

You can expect a response to this, but right now homework is taking precedence.

Of course, Tooms, you are right and it cannot be emphasized enough. In Kantian ethics no one is to be treated merely as means to an ends. What then are the implications of such an imperative? As both a matter of exercise and the very topic at hand, let apply this maxim to the Kulaks.

The Kulaks are a class of farmers, however they aren’t *just* sustenance farmers, they have the responsibility to grow food for the rest of Republic. This might seem like an odd way to phrase it, and indeed it is, given the context of our own society. However in a communist society, or in the case of the Soviet Union which was transitioning away from feudal and private property, there is no private property as such. The means of production, in this case a farm, belongs to the all of the workers of the Soviet Union. Farmland is not, as it is in a private property model, not subject to the whims of one persons preferences but rather it is subject to general will of rational deciders. A Kulak farmer, may seem on the surface to be farmer with large landholdings, but even if this is how he/she mis-identifies himself, they are not a landowners. The farmer retains stewardship over the land with goals laid out by the republic. His responsibilities are subject to the will of the people for the land.

Now as a matter of fact not everyone recognizes their duty. Some due to ignorance which might be to a lack of a certain type of education (or as Kant might say: not rational) or some might try to disavow their responsibilities to the general will due to some viciousness like greed (in which case Kant would say you lack a good will). Some might think that things should be like the “good old days” when landed rich could do whatever they wanted.

The judgment that I hear many people give on the Kulaks is something along lines of:
These poor farmers, how dare the state come in and say what they needed to do and then starve them to death when they refused. They were using them!

This is an interesting juxapostion to our contemporary debates on health care in which many of the same people who decry the inhumane treatment of the Kulak farmers in the very same moments have nothing but contempt for the capitalist health insurance moguls for holding the poorer hostage in health care. They claim in the case of the latter, that the insurance companies have responsibilities to people, that the insurance companies have given them the charge of securing their health care. They claim that their withholding of health care for the purposes of profits is monstrous.

Let us push this reasoning to the end. If were to say that such maxims should be categorical, that is to say, universal and without exception. Then the uniformal application of this reasoning has quite a strong analogy between the Kulak Farmers (the food monopolies) and our current America health crisis (medical treatment monopoly). If we are suggesting that it is monstrously irresponsible for health care industries for basically betraying the public institution of insurance because they are denying health care for purposes of profit despite the fact that we live in the context of private property. How would this same reasoning be applied to Kulak farmers betraying their duties to the soviet people in the context of commonly held property (of stewardship) instead of private property (where ostensible I can do what every I want with it)? It would also, if we follow the same reasoning, be a monstrous disavowal of responsibilities for the purposes of profit.

Ipso facto, just in the way that insurance monopolies are using us a means to building capital with everyone else’s blood and tears, so were the Kulaks. This is not only unethical in Kantian terms, but also specifically illegal in Soviet law.

Now the soviet state has the responsibilities under Kantian ethics to treat everyone like they are an end unto themselves and not as a means. This is true. Let us demonstrate this with a simple example. It the soviets pull in a bad harvest then the people’s grain gets distributed equinamitously according to need. (children don’t require as much food as adults etc…) No one gets more consideration (read food) then they are proportionally lotted lest the state be guilty of institutionally enforcing one person being used as means to someone else’s ends. (for instance a privileged elite getting more).

However this is not what happened to the Kulaks. Why?

Well as Chris pointed out. They had a duty. They chose to neglect their duty. This isn’t like being lazy and not taking the trash out last night, this is purposely destroying the people’s property for the purposes of getting more then everyone else which resulted in massive starvation in cities of Soviet Russia. This isn’t small potatoes were talking about. This would be like me going into everyone house and stealing all their food that they had or were supposed to have, and then going moving onto the supermarket etc… Most people would not only think this was unethical, but also monstrous, illegal etc. Well, if the rules of a society are the result of a general will, from a body of people that were good willed, rational, and universally applied (otherwise a Kantian formulation) then question is: If I had autonomy, why shouldn’t I be held responsible for my decision to starve people?

Kant, (and so far we are talking about Kant, Kantian ethics, and not merely deontology and so I feel warranted to say this), supported not only a robust punishment for people who committed crimes, but he also supported the death penalty. This isn’t to say that if Kant magically reincarnated today he might not feel different. But given the relatively well to-do Prussia of his time, he felt that he could categorically sentence anyone to death if their crime was heinous enough. In the far more desperate circumstances of Soviet Russia in the time of war, it is reasonable to suggest that he would think that the harshness of the death penalty would still be universalizable.

Is Kant saying that killing someone is using them as a means to an ends? No. You had a choice to fulfill your duty to not commit some crime against someone else, you failed that duty and now will be held responsible for your choice. In other words, one is punished for treating someone else as a means to an ends. To hold someone responsible for their failure in this regard isn’t using them, it’s “righting a wrong”. Now this might sound like some sort of restorative justice with a veneer of retributive justice at times, but you’ll need to take that up with Kant.

I believe that Chris is correct in asserting that their actions are within the scope of Kantian ethics for the reasons stated above.

Also, perhaps to preempt a misunderstanding, I think when word “liberal” read of Kant is used, it is more in the sense of classical liberalism in a historical sense. This means that this more popular understanding of Kant (the liberal read) is understood as a justification of private property, and understands republicanism more as expression of individual preference rather then general will against mutual domination. This more liberal read often includes the idea that there are very few duties that can be violated by omission. (Along these lines: it is not my duty to help people in Haiti, but *if I prefer it* I can give them charity, which is not a duty)

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That being said:

I do not equivocate ethically every instance of starvation even though they are all awful to some degree. I don’t feel the same way ethically if someone rich teenage girl dies of anorexia then if a toddler dies of starvation of Ethiopia. Likewise, even though it seems like the punishment for the Kulaks was more awful (and maybe even excessive, but this is debatable) I do not think that people who die of starvation because they failed in holding the Russia people hostage so that way they could make more money is ethically equal to why it is that people starve (to death in millions of cases) all around the world each year. The people that starve to death today do not do so because they are being punished in any legal sense. Their starvation is legal, so that way we can have farmers who can make high profits and sell things at the price they want.(and burn the rest, as in the case for people who starved to death in the great depression in the US about the same time) No, they starve so we can have rich farmers. They starve, and people starve around the world so that way we protect the rich people’s “rights”.

I am far more comfortable (though not completely) with people starving because there isn’t enough food and so we all equally suffer, or people starving as a punishment as for not fulfilling their duty to feed all the people, far more then people starving so we can have rich farmers, Paris Hilton, and three cars in our driveways.