Again and Once Again on the Bolsheviks [Archive]

Die Neue Zeit

11th July 2011, 14:25

There was a civil war going on. When Soviets in small towns foolishly voted for parties up in arms to overthrow the workers' government, just respecting "the will of the voters" would have been suicide, and not just for the Bolsheviks, but for the Russian working class.

Neither the Menshevik-Internationalists nor the Left-SRs outside Moscow were "up in arms to overthrow the workers government." In fact the Left-SRs outside Moscow staffed much of the Cheka.

Rosa Luxemburg, the greatest critic of the Bolsheviks, explicitly opposed that sort of thing and held up the Jacobins tossing the counterrevolutionary Girondins out of the French Assembly as a *positive example.* She disagreed with the Terror, but that was because she was insufficiently familiar with what was going on in the Soviet Union. Had she not been murdered by the German Whites in 1918, I am sure she would have changed her position on that, just like she did on soviets vs. constituent assemblys.

She was murdered in 1919, not 1918. She had ample time to criticize the anti-soviet Bolshevik coups d'etat of 1918 had she acquainted herself more with the situation. Ditto with the renegade Kautsky.

And of course the Paris Commune didn't give a damn about the overwhelming Versaillese support among the French peasantry, and rightly so. Had the Paris Commune defeated Versailles, you would have had a dictatorship, in every sense of the term, of the proletariat of Paris and Lyons and Marseilles and so forth over the French peasantry.

And who do you think would win the inevitable civil war with the French peasantry? :glare:

You, like Trotsky, openly admit that his take on "permanent revolution" is little more than civil war with the peasantry. Had the Paris Commune defeated Versailles, it would have been because of, among other things, a breakthrough military coup by a Committee for Public Safety formed by the central committee of the worker-artisan National Guard, against the squabbling Communal Council (http://www.revleft.com/vb/paris-commune-inspirational-t155624/index.html).

And then the Mensheviks and both Right and Left SRs, having lost the elections where it was most important, rose up in insurrection, and the SR's went on an assassination campaign, almost killing Lenin, and the anarchists were bombing Bolshevik headquarters.

They did that after the Bolshevik coups against anti-Bolshevik soviets, not before.

So the Red Terror was necessary and justified, and purging or dispersing Soviets with counterrevolutionary majorities even more so.

In the USSR, the Civil War demonstrated clearly that the working class in the USSR had only one party worthy of the name, the Bolsheviks. So what was most important was democracy within the Bolshevik Party, with everything else secondary.

I think they would not have advocated that some fraction of Social Democracy identify the DOTP with its own single-party rule from the moment they acquire state power, no.

I seriously think that more Bolshevik activism within the factory committees would have been the better way to go. Not "all power to the factory committees," but rather empower them, other worker-producer organizations, and tenant committees and other worker-consumer organizations with economic power - over and above those of the trade unions - while leaving political power explicitly with a mass Bolshevik party-movement (with a fully developed alternative culture at the expense of the state bureaucracy and flooding the latter upon assuming power) and its revolutionary provisional-government-'come-Sovnarkom. The soviets should have been little more than a revolutionary convention.

A Marxist Historian

22nd July 2011, 10:31

So you don't think the soviets voters had the right to vote for worker delegates of their choosing, or to recall ones they pleased. Gotcha.

Sure they did. And the central soviet had the right to override those votes. Democratic centralism, with both components being of equal weight normally, but with the centralism part more important while guns are firing.

And the Menshevik-Internationalists and Left SRs (other than the Moscow cell) were not engaged in violence against soviet power. And the Bolsheviks had started the antagonism by not abiding by the revolutionary workers' desire for a coalition government of all pro-soviet parties from the outset (that is, including the Left SRs, SR Maximalists, Menshevik Internationalists/Left Mensheviks, anarchists, and Bolsheviks).

The Left SRs were not engaged in violence against soviet power? What are you smoking? I want some!

In the first six-seven months of soviet power, you betcha they were not engaged in violence against the Soviet state. The deputy head of the Cheka was a Left SR, and there were countless Left SR officers at all levels in the Red Army. So that would have meant violence against themselves, as they were integral parts of the central component of all states, namely those "armed bodies of men" Lenin talked about.

After the failure of the Left SR Cheka coup, much if not most of the Left SR party went Bolshevik. Two small Left SR splinters kept up the old coalition with with the Bolsheviks, one of them being led by Mark Natanson, a central leader of the Russian Social Revolutionary Party going all the way back to Narodnaya Volya in the 1880s. Alexander Berkman's uncle. When his faction simply merged with the Bolsheviks he didn't follow suit, but he was a member of the Presidium of the Soviet Central Executive Committee till the day he died in 1919.

The "orthodox Left SR's" led by Spiridonova degenerated into an essentially terrorist organization, attempting to lead ugly peasant pogrom-revolts like Antonov's Tambov revolt, infamous for its practice of skinning female Bolshevik schoolteachers alive before killing them.

The Menshevik Internationalists split, twice. The left wings, led by Larin and then Lozovsky, merged with the Bolshevik Party. The right wing, led by Martov, merged with the Right Mensheviks, and Martov became the leader of the united Menshevik Party again.

He disapproved of the Right Menshevik policy of collaboration with counterrevolution, and expelled a few Right Mensheviks in extreme cases. But he never broke with the only really *important* Mensheviks, the Georgian Mensheviks.

They ruled Georgia, allied with first German and then British imperialism against the Soviets, had peaceable relations with the Whites, and brutally suppressed all the frequent peasant, minority and Bolshevik uprisings against them, justifying this on the basis that after all the Bolsheviks were doing the same thing.

Their chauvinist policy vs. national minorities has had ugly echoes resounding ever since. It is the reason why the Abkhazians and South Ossetians prefer Putin to the current American puppet regime in Georgia even nowadays.

Now, did workers initially like the idea of an all-socialist coalition government? Sure they did.

But when the Mensheviks and SRs sided with Kerensky vs. the Soviet regime, and then with the Constituent Assembly vs. the Soviet regime, workers became perfectly happy with restricting the coalition to pro-Soviet parties. As for Martov's Menshevik-Internationalists, the Bolsheviks would have been delighted to include them in the coalition, but they insisted the Right Mensheviks and the SRs had to be included too or no dice.

And when the Left SRs demanded that the Soviet regime go to "revolutionary war" with Germany, just which side do you think the workers and, equally importantly the peasants, and most importantly of all the soldiers, were on in that one?

The whole idea of the revolution was "peace, land and bread."

When the civil war was won, they neither allowed the pro-soviet parties to run, nor non-party workers, nor attempts by radical workers to set up their own parties and groups.

The civil war was not won till the Kronstadt, the Tambov and the quite similar but much larger Western Siberian "green" peasant insurrections were suppressed. By which point industry had collapsed, the country was starving, the trains were barely running, and the working class itself had largely disintegrated.

In that kind of desperate situation, the measures you describe were necessary, as a *strictly temporary* measure until the country could get back on its feet.

Unfortunately, like temporary government measures so often do, they became permanent, creating a suitable legal structure for Stalinism.

Why did this happen? For the reason Trotsky figured out. Because you can't build socialism in one country. The longterm cause. And of course the short term cause too, because Lenin and Trotsky lost their 1922-23 top level duel with Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin.

If you had an isolated workers' revolution that did not spread nowadays in Greece or South Africa or wherever, the same thing would be not unlikely to happen, quite regardless of whether its leaders considered themselves Stalinist or Trotskyist or anarchist or syndicalist or for that matter whatever political permutation you consider the best.

I think they would not have advocated that some fraction of Social Democracy identify the DOTP with its own single-party rule from the moment they acquire state power, no.

That conception was first advanced by Zinoviev in 1921, not by anyone before that, certainly not Lenin or Trotsky. It did tend to work out that way in practice after the coalition with the Left SRs exploded in summer 1918, but that was simply the course of events, not anybody's theoretical conception.

And don't be so sure about what Marx would have thought. Marx was not a Blanquist, far from it, but he thought they were the only revolutionary faction in the Paris Commune, he had low opinions of the others, and especially of the Proudhonists, who were the main First International group in Paris. And in one of his French pamphlets, he actually referred to Blanqui as the leader of the French working class. Not the Blanquists, but Blanqui personally!

Why don't you just become a Stalinist and stop kidding yourself. Your politics differ from them in no meaningful sense now or historically, with only an aesthetic preference for Trotsky rather than Stalin as the workers' dictator. The fact is after Kronstadt and the crushing of the workers' strikes in Moscow and Petrograd in 1921, workers melted out of the party and the soviets became functionally irrelevent. What you're incapable of seeing is it wasn't some magical idealist event that Stalin's clique (or some other which would've played the same role) came to exercise through the party elite a dictatorial power over the rest of the party as well. It was inevitable when the soviets and other forms of workers' democracy were shuttered, capitalism restored, and factions banned (which meant politics could only be conducted as facile patron-client relationships with the men of the Politburo, and which basically ensured he who controlled the party's administrative apparatus would end up on top). Trotsky sealed his own fate. The only alternative would have been if he had the personal political spine to lean on the Army. He didn't, because he was a political imbecile.

To quote you, "gotcha."

You really think Trotsky should have led a military coup? Resting on a peasant army a lot of whose officers were former Tsarist officers?

At best, this would have meant Stalinism under another name. More likely, after they finished arresting, shooting and jailing all the communists and workers who resisted, Trotsky the frontman would have been tossed into that dustbin of history, and you'd have a bourgeois military dictatorship under Tukhachevsky or somebody.

And what would we call the workers and revolutionary leaders organising resistance to the new dictators? The people that folk like me, and maybe you, would regard as our heroes?

Stalinists, that's what. Not a pretty prospect in my book. Nor Trotsky's either it seems.

The one Trotskyist who actually advocated this, Trotsky's military deputy Antonov-Ovseenko, went over to Stalin and was sent to Spain in the 1930s to oversee all the wonderful ways the Soviet Union helped out the Spanish Republic. Enough said.

Now as to the rest of your points:

Workers melted out of the party in 1921? Wrong. The Russian working class just melted period. The cities were starving, and most workers either joined the army, died (often doing both of course), fled to the countryside to grow food, or became Soviet officials.

Do you really oppose the partial restoration of capitalism under the NEP? If this had not been done, you would have seen economic and social collapse and suffering on a scale that would have made Stalin's forced collectivization look like a joyride. There was truly no alternative.

Martov's Mensheviks whom you admire so much wanted to go all the way, and simply go back to capitalism altogether. That was after all Martov's basic theoretical analysis, that Russia was not ready for socialism so you need to stick to capitalism and just complete the bourgeois revolution. Any other position on his part would basically have been opportunistic.

As for the Left SRs, who knows what they wanted, certainly the Left SRs didn't, other than overthrowing the Bolsheviks.

When the country did get back on its feet through the NEP, then as soon as the working class was reconstituted workers streamed right *back in* to the party.

First through Zinoviev's "Lenin levy," under which any worker who had stuck with the Bolsheviks during 1921 and not gone on strike under Menshevik leadership or something was welcome to join.

And then on a much larger scale during industrialization and forced collectivization, during which any worker who had been working in a factory for more than a year or two and was on board with Stalin's policies was practically dragged into the party, which in purely numerical terms made it an overwhelmingly huge and proletarian policy at the height of the Third Period.

The lure was tremenedous, as you also had a huge program of *promotion of workers into the bureaucracy,* through engineering schools as with Brezhnev and Kosygin or by more direct routes. About a million and a half Soviet bureaucrats were recruited off the factory floor in this period.

Not coincidentally, a million and a half is more or less the usual figure for the size of the Soviet working class at its nadir in the spring of 1921. As Robert Davies I think it was put it, the Soviet Union became a "dictatorship of the ex-working class."

These were by and large the workers during the Revolution and Civil War who had not been interested in the Revolution or in fighting in the Civil War, had just stayed home, survived, kept the family together, punched the time clock at the factory gates and, quite often, gone on strike under Menshevik leadership in the spring of 1921. They did not care for revolutionaries and radicals pushing them around, and especially did not care for Trotsky with his ideas of militarizing trade unions. So when Stalin had all those old revolutionaries shot in the Great Terror, and they were being promoted into their place, that made them all very happy.

Lastly, the banning of factions. Here you have *somewhat* of a point. I think it was necessary in spring 1921, with the party riven into multiple factions arguing about the essentially irrelevant question of the role of the trade unions in the economy, fiddling while Rome was burning. But it should have been *explicitly* made temporary then and there, only to last till the next party conference. Not doing it that way was a big mistake.

You did still have internal party democracy. That was proven when Lenin and Trotsky, misreading the situation, tried to kick the Workers Opposition off the party Central Committee in the fall of 1921 I think it was, and were overruled by the Central Committee. They did not realise that the country
had already stabilized itself sufficiently that the main danger the Soviet republic faced now was not disintegration and collapse but bureaucratization. The bulk of the Central Committee it seems knew better than they did.

This setback I think is what motivated Lenin to go along with Zinoviev's fatal suggestion to make Stalin the party General Secretary, an idea Lenin changed his mind about not long thereafter. Plus his desire to replace the then secretary, a supporter of Trotsky in the 1921 trade union debate. But the damage was done, as Lenin's health was disintegrating and Stalin worked fast to take control of the party. And Trotsky bent over backwards to stay out of this, as everybody knew Stalin and Trotsky hated each other bitterly, and he didn't want to look like a factionalist.

He didn't realize, as Lenin always did, that there are times when you have to be a factionalist and not care about what it looks like. A mistake Trotsky continued for several years after Lenin died.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

22nd July 2011, 11:35

Neither the Menshevik-Internationalists nor the Left-SRs outside Moscow were "up in arms to overthrow the workers government." In fact the Left-SRs outside Moscow staffed much of the Cheka.

Which is why the Left SR party disintegrated after the attempted coup in Moscow. Before then, there most certainly were never any incidents of Left SR soviets dissolved by Bolsheviks. I can assure you the Left SR Chekists would have objected to that forcefully and very effectively.

The Menshevik Internationalists had reunited with the Right Mensheviks by spring 1918 when you had soviet re-elections some of which were won by Mensheviks in some provincial towns.

And the Right Mensheviks and Right SRs were *at the heart* of the counterrevolutionary conspiracies that broke out in the summer, resulting in the constitution of counterrevolutionary White military dictatorships over much of Russia. Read Victor Serge's Year One of The Russian Revolution for a very good account of this.

The Left SRs dominated the peasant soviets, but were quite weak in the workers soviets. However, when the Left SRs came out for "revolutionary war," something virtually no peasants were in favor of, the peasant soviets tended to disintegrate, and had to be reconstituted by the Bolsheviks later.

She was murdered in 1919, not 1918. She had ample time to criticize the anti-soviet Bolshevik coups d'etat of 1918 had she acquainted herself more with the situation. Ditto with the renegade Kautsky.

January 1919, just two months after the November Revolution. Up until revolution broke out in Germany itself, she was highly critical of many aspects of Bolshevik policies. Under the impact of actual revolutionary experience, she changed her mind quite rapidly on many but not all of her criticism and disagreements.

Most importantly, she abandoned her central disagreement with the Bolsheviks, the idea that a constituent assembly was a better vehicle for workers rule than soviets.

I find it unimaginable however that she would have had any trouble with Bolshevik "coups d'etat" vs. Menshevik local Soviets. To her, that would simply have been the Bolsheviks following in the Soviet context the model she had recommended for dealing with the possibility of a reactionary majority in a Constituent Assembly, namely to do what Cromwell and the Jacobins had done and simply purge the right wing from them.

She did however object to Bolshevik jailings of political opponents and closing of counterrevolutionary newspapers. That, to her mind at least, was a separate and different question.

And who do you think would win the inevitable civil war with the French peasantry? :glare:

You, like Trotsky, openly admit that his take on "permanent revolution" is little more than civil war with the peasantry. Had the Paris Commune defeated Versailles, it would have been because of, among other things, a breakthrough military coup by a Committee for Public Safety formed by the central committee of the worker-artisan National Guard, against the squabbling Communal Council (http://www.revleft.com/vb/paris-commune-inspirational-t155624/index.html).

Marx's opinion, quite clearly expressed in his letters to Engels, was that the defeat of the Paris Commune was inevitable. And that its prime value was in the glorious example it set for the working class of the world, proving that revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat was the example to follow.

And he was right. Without the Paris Commune, the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia would have been much more difficult to carry out.

Russia in 1917 was very different from France in 1871. The French peasantry had gained the land in 1789, and was by and large pretty counterrevolutionary.

The Russian peasantry was engaged in their own 1789 right then and there. They had conflicts with the workers, especially when the Bolsheviks committed the ultraleft "war communism" error. But they almost always preferred the Reds to the Whites, for obvious reasons. And that is exactly why the Bolsheviks managed to win the Civil War with an army that was overwhelmingly peasant.

Peasants did tend to prefer intermediary parties and groups like the "Greens" or various Ukrainian nationalist and anarchist factions, or the Left SRs once the "revolutionary war" issue was no longer relevant. But in practice, peasants are practical people, and they realized that it was either the Reds or the Whites. Which is why you didn't have any really large scale peasant uprisings vs. the Bolsheviks till the Whites were *defeated.*

After NEP was instituted and the 1921-22 famine ended, the Bolsheviks were actually pretty popular in the countryside for a while. Things broke down mostly because of the Stalin-Bukharin "get rich" policy of deliberately fostering capitalist development in the countryside, which artificially created a kulak class that then started flexing its muscles vs. the Soviet state.

No doubt the same thing would have tended to happen sooner or later through natural evolution, but correct policies could have held this off for quite a while.

They did that after the Bolshevik coups against anti-Bolshevik soviets, not before.

I seriously think that more Bolshevik activism within the factory committees would have been the better way to go. Not "all power to the factory committees," but rather empower them, other worker-producer organizations, and tenant committees and other worker-consumer organizations with economic power - over and above those of the trade unions - while leaving political power explicitly with a mass Bolshevik party-movement (with a fully developed alternative culture at the expense of the state bureaucracy and flooding the latter upon assuming power) and its revolutionary provisional-government-'come-Sovnarkom. The soviets should have been little more than a revolutionary convention.

As to the factory committees, there was a brilliant article about them published in the journal Critique many years ago, by Chris Goodey, entitled "Factory Committees and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat." Issue #3, Autumn 1974. Still extremely worth reading, often referred to in subsequent historical literature on the subject.

The leaders of the factory committees tended to be the most skilled workers in the factories, and often were in conflict with the less skilled and lowest paid workers, especially women workers. The prime thing they were interested in was taking control over the Soviet economy and planning it, often in a very top down fashion. A remarkable number of the leaders of this movement became ultra-loyal Stalinist bureaucrats.

-M.H.-

Die Neue Zeit

23rd July 2011, 15:51

Where you ought to be raising your objections instead is to the Leninist party model, which seeks a party not of *all* the workers a la Karl Kautsky but of the advanced, revolutionary workers.

While as many workers being citizens in the party-movement is a key aim, Kautsky distinguished between the class as a whole and class movements - what you call "advanced, revolutionary workers." The pre-war SPD was the German working class for itself, yet not every German worker was a party-movement citizen or party member.

A Marxist Historian

23rd July 2011, 22:37

While as many workers being citizens in the party-movement is a key aim, Kautsky distinguished between the class as a whole and class movements - what you call "advanced, revolutionary workers." The pre-war SPD was the German working class for itself, yet not every German worker was a party-movement citizen or party member.

Yes, Kautsky wanted a party of the conscious workers, not just anybody who worked in a factory as with say the British Labor Party. That's why Lenin, when he wrote What Is To Be Done, was under the misimpression that he was just expounding Kautskyite orthodoxy.

Lenin however slowly came to the realization that the difference between revolutionary and reformist politics was not simply quantitative, but qualitative, and that the trade union bureaucracy and labor aristocracy provided a *social basis* for reformism and narrow trade union consciousness--i.e. ultimately bourgeois consciousness--in the working class.

So that the advanced, *revolutionary* workers needed a separate party from that of the "advanced," *reformist* labor bureaucrats and aristocrats. A conclusion Lenin did not fully draw until World War I proved that Kautsky's "party of the whole class" in Germany was an obstacle to the working class, not its leadership.

A "bourgeois workers party" as Lenin put it, whose consciousness was not that of a "class in itself," but of a class, if you do not mind the Hegelian pun here, "for others" in the sense of "for the bourgeoisie."

-M.H.-

Paulappaul

23rd July 2011, 22:51

I would think that as the forces of production advance, that the proletariat would prefer something more centralized than the anarchy of capitalist production, the war of all against all.

Here you are trying to conflate Decentralism with the "Anarchy of Production" and competition which just isn't true. Honestly I think the Centralism/Decentralism dichonomy needs to be transcended, both are bad products of Capitalism, the former which Engels railed aganist in "Socialism Utopian and Scientific" saying that Centralism brought to head the anarchy of production rather then eliminated it and the later the quality of Free Market Capitalism and Market Socialism.

Nowadays it doesn't. Anybody in America who thinks the American working class is spontaneously socialist, revolutionary, anti-racist etc. has probably never worked for a living.

As with your other post as well, you're just tossing around words and hoping we accept them as truth. "Spontaniety" taken literally means that the working class is one day revolutionary while the day before it wasn't. This is something which the so called "Spontaniests" and even Luxemburg rejected. What is meant by Spontaneity is that for one, the working class can achieve consciousness with a Revolutionary Party and that years of small struggles can in a short amount of time erupt quickly into a large struggle.

Look at American or World History for that matter and you'll see that when the working class unites as a class in and for itself it tosses out Racist and Sectarian elements. When it feels the strength of its class it pursues radical tactics. Look at Americas history of Wildcat Strikes, look at the Longshore Workers right now. Look at the world history of Workers from Conservative backgrounds fight on the streets with other Workers.

Jose Gracchus

24th July 2011, 04:55

A Marxist Historian

24th July 2011, 07:19

Good thing they have you to take them under your tutelage.

I never had much luck tutelizing when I was an active trade unionist. However, there were times I could get the ranks to go along with *practical* suggestions of mine.

American workers are extremely militant when given the opportunity to be, but have *no* socialist consciousness, or any other sort of political consciousness not shoved down their throats by the American capitalist class, which is very very good at that. Social backwardness of all sorts is rife. I mean hey, a lotta white workers really do like Sarah Palin. That's not just phony media hysteria.

But in action, they really do want to fight the bosses. They just have no idea how, which is why lately they aren't even trying very much, after the long string of defeats they have suffered over the last thirty years. The responsibility for which is *not* theirs, they always come through when given a chance. It is due to the incredibly horrible misleadership the American trade union bureaucracy provides, including those bureaucrats, not a rare species, who consider themselves "progressives," "leftists" or even "socialists."

And the tiny remnants of the US left are not helping, mostly providing bad examples for workers to laugh about if they are even aware of them.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

24th July 2011, 07:38

Here you are trying to conflate Decentralism with the "Anarchy of Production" and competition which just isn't true. Honestly I think the Centralism/Decentralism dichonomy needs to be transcended, both are bad products of Capitalism, the former which Engels railed aganist in "Socialism Utopian and Scientific" saying that Centralism brought to head the anarchy of production rather then eliminated it and the later the quality of Free Market Capitalism and Market Socialism.

Don't necessarily disagree, I was simply reacting, perhaps overreacting, to the worship of decentralization so common here. I actually rather like your formula about *transcending* the dichotomy. Quite dialectical.

As with your other post as well, you're just tossing around words and hoping we accept them as truth. "Spontaniety" taken literally means that the working class is one day revolutionary while the day before it wasn't. This is something which the so called "Spontaniests" and even Luxemburg rejected. What is meant by Spontaneity is that for one, the working class can achieve consciousness with a Revolutionary Party and that years of small struggles can in a short amount of time erupt quickly into a large struggle.

May I assume what you meant to say is that the class can get conscious *without* a Revolutionary Party? As written, if this were not a typo, you would be expressing excellent Leninism, which I assume is not your intention. And also Luxemburgism too I suppose. The differences between Lenin and Luxemburg were not as great as current-day "spontaneists" and certain would be "Luxemburgists" like to think.

Certainly Luxemburg just as much as Lenin believed that the existence of a revolutionary party was necessary for the working class to achieve consciousness. She however opposed Lenin's *concept* of what such a party should be, not seeing it as broad enough, and fearing that the intellectuals who dominated it in its earliest underground days would turn out to be just bourgeois revolutionaries, "Jacobins," rather than workers' leaders.

A bit ironical, as her Polish party was itself very "Leninist" in very much the same fashion as the Bolsheviks, for good or for ill.

In Germany however, she emphasized spontaneity because the German Social Democracy in its forty year existence had done much to revolutionize the German working class, but by 1905 the party and trade union leaders had become a break on the rank and file, who by then really were more revolutionary than the leadership. A point Lenin, as it happens, did not fully understand.

Look at American or World History for that matter and you'll see that when the working class unites as a class in and for itself it tosses out Racist and Sectarian elements. When it feels the strength of its class it pursues radical tactics. Look at Americas history of Wildcat Strikes, look at the Longshore Workers right now. Look at the world history of Workers from Conservative backgrounds fight on the streets with other Workers.

Yes, it is through struggle that consciousness transforms. But political consciousness does indeed have to be brought to the working class from outside its immediate trade union struggles, or this transformation does not take place.

The workers *do not* need to be taught how to be militant in their struggles. But consciousness of themselves *as a class* does not spring up naturally and organically.

If it did, the American working class, historically perhaps the most militant in the world in its economic struggles, would also be the most left wing, radical and socialist. Obviously it is not.

-M.H.-

Die Neue Zeit

24th July 2011, 17:10

Yes, Kautsky wanted a party of the conscious workers, not just anybody who worked in a factory as with say the British Labor Party. That's why Lenin, when he wrote What Is To Be Done, was under the misimpression that he was just expounding Kautskyite orthodoxy.

Lenin however slowly came to the realization that the difference between revolutionary and reformist politics was not simply quantitative, but qualitative, and that the trade union bureaucracy and labor aristocracy provided a *social basis* for reformism and narrow trade union consciousness--i.e. ultimately bourgeois consciousness--in the working class.

So that the advanced, *revolutionary* workers needed a separate party from that of the "advanced," *reformist* labor bureaucrats and aristocrats. A conclusion Lenin did not fully draw until World War I proved that Kautsky's "party of the whole class" in Germany was an obstacle to the working class, not its leadership.

A "bourgeois workers party" as Lenin put it, whose consciousness was not that of a "class in itself," but of a class, if you do not mind the Hegelian pun here, "for others" in the sense of "for the bourgeoisie."

-M.H.-

There were two models Lenin espoused: the pre-Comintern model and the Comintern model. The latter, of "advanced revolutionary workers" (more often than not led by a number of non-worker leaders) failed miserably. Even the renegade Kautsky upheld the workers-only voting membership principle.

It explains Lenin's distorted reiteration of the merger formula in Left-Wing Communism between revolutionary socialism and worker-class movements - the notion that the party must "merge" with the broader worker-class movements, rather than the party itself as the merger of revolutionary socialism and the worker-class movement.

Kiev Communard

24th July 2011, 22:00

If it did, the American working class, historically perhaps the most militant in the world in its economic struggles, would also be the most left wing, radical and socialist. Obviously it is not.

-M.H.-

You seem to be omitting the IWMA and IWW periods, when the U.S. working class was indeed one of the most politically revolutionary in the world. What happened to it later, is another question, most closely connected with the destruction of the IWW by the police-state repression and the impact of the "roaring twenties" and the New Deal welfarist policies on its consciousness.

Kiev Communard

24th July 2011, 22:11

Yes, Kautsky wanted a party of the conscious workers, not just anybody who worked in a factory as with say the British Labor Party. That's why Lenin, when he wrote What Is To Be Done, was under the misimpression that he was just expounding Kautskyite orthodoxy.

Yes, he was. In fact, the very fact that Lenin called Kautsky a "renegade" testifies to Lenin's belief that Kautsky betrayed his own doctrine by siding with Bernsteinians and other "open" reformists in 1914.

Lenin however slowly came to the realization that the difference between revolutionary and reformist politics was not simply quantitative, but qualitative, and that the trade union bureaucracy and labor aristocracy provided a *social basis* for reformism and narrow trade union consciousness--i.e. ultimately bourgeois consciousness--in the working class.

And that is why he decided the working class needs "proper" aristocracy in the form of the "vanguard party".

A "bourgeois workers party" as Lenin put it, whose consciousness was not that of a "class in itself," but of a class, if you do not mind the Hegelian pun here, "for others" in the sense of "for the bourgeoisie."

-M.H.-

Except that bourgeoisie is not necessary a mere collection of evil individual industrialists in hats, the former "revolutionary workers" of "the vanguard" are just as capable to fulfill its role if they monopolize both political power and, more importantly, the real control (i.e. ownership) of the "nationalized" economy after the revolution.

Paulappaul

25th July 2011, 09:57

I actually rather like your formula about *transcending* the dichotomy. Quite dialectical.

Centralize what needs to be Centralized. Decentralize what needs to be Decentralized. Mix up the two where they are needed. Honestly conditions will tell where which one or both are needed. Going into any situation with a rigid plan for anything is bad.

Certainly Luxemburg just as much as Lenin believed that the existence of a revolutionary party was necessary for the working class to achieve consciousness. She however opposed Lenin's *concept* of what such a party should be, not seeing it as broad enough, and fearing that the intellectuals who dominated it in its earliest underground days would turn out to be just bourgeois revolutionaries, "Jacobins," rather than workers' leaders.

Luxemburg believed workers could achieve consciousness on their own, she saw in the Party two things, A) the organisation of militants who contrary to most of the working class, knew the historical task of the class. B) saw in the Party the executing of the Political demands of the Proletariat. She saw Party as executing and guiding the political demands of the Political Strike.

But political consciousness does indeed have to be brought to the working class from outside its immediate trade union struggles, or this transformation does not take place.

You are conflating Political Consciousness with something achieved on the Shopfloor, rather then something realized outside the workplace. There is a kind of Political and Social exploitation which the class can get around outside the workplace and fight. Immediate Workplace struggles are good for showing basic class distinctions, for growing distrust and rooting Solidarity within the working Class.

Workers' Councils are the highest form of Political Consciousness of the working class, they do not form the immediate struggles on the Proletariat, but in a time when Political, Socially and Economically the class is persecuted and the question of power comes to head.

If it did, the American working class, historically perhaps the most militant in the world in its economic struggles, would also be the most left wing, radical and socialist. Obviously it is not.

When it was most Militant, the working class was Left Wing, Radical and Socialist. This has changed due to a change both in Political and Social Conditions as well as in the mode of production. We don't have militant workers because their generally aren't the conditions for that type of Militancy. Where there still is, where there is this heavy industry and peoples lives are invested into their trade, as in the Longshores Workers there is heavy Militancy. Where Workers are casualized and subjected to all kinds of precarious work it is hard for them to naturally be invested in workplace struggles. Which is why more and more we see class struggle taking on different forms, mainly outside the workplace and on School Campus and in Community's. Contray to what you contend, I think Class Struggle in America is more Politically Consciousness then it is Economically Consciousness. The Proletariat realizes it is being fucked big time by the government and the wealthy, but has not until very recently started the process of workplace organization. Such Workplace organization takes the form of Independent Unions, Flying Pickets, Solidarity Unionism and Solidarity Networks rather then traditional Trade Unionism or even Industrial unionism.

A Marxist Historian

25th July 2011, 22:16

There were two models Lenin espoused: the pre-Comintern model and the Comintern model. The latter, of "advanced revolutionary workers" (more often than not led by a number of non-worker leaders) failed miserably. Even the renegade Kautsky upheld the workers-only voting membership principle.

It explains Lenin's distorted reiteration of the merger formula in Left-Wing Communism between revolutionary socialism and worker-class movements - the notion that the party must "merge" with the broader worker-class movements, rather than the party itself as the merger of revolutionary socialism and the worker-class movement.

A workers-only membership voting principle is economist "workerism" of the worst sort. I would be interested in seeing your reference for Kautsky upholding such a foolish syndicalist notion.

Certainly something Marx and Engels, neither of whom were workers, would not have tolerated for a second if they had anything to say about it.

The Bolshevik Party, unlike German Social Democracy, was *not* dominated by intellectuals of bourgeois social origin. In 1917 it was a workers party sociologically as well as politically, with most of its Central Committee made up of factory workers. But even the Workers Opposition never suggested anything like what you suggest, not least because Alexandra Kollontai was the daughter of a prominent Tsarist noble.

As to your last paragraph, I recommend reading that orthodox Kautskyist statement, What Is To Be Done;)

-M.H.-

Vladimir Innit Lenin

25th July 2011, 22:23

A Marxist Historian

25th July 2011, 22:24

You seem to be omitting the IWMA and IWW periods, when the U.S. working class was indeed one of the most politically revolutionary in the world. What happened to it later, is another question, most closely connected with the destruction of the IWW by the police-state repression and the impact of the "roaring twenties" and the New Deal welfarist policies on its consciousness.

That is a sad misreading of what was going on at the time.

The IWW were the most politically conscious vanguard of the Amrican working class, often bitterly counterposed to "Mr. Block," the favorite IWW epithet for backward American workers among many such. They were very much a minority of the American working class.

Thus, IWW activist James P. Cannon, later the founder of American Trotskyism, attempted to win over his mentor, the IWW's best leader Vincent St. John, to the American Communist Party by telling him that the early American Communist Party, which he was one of the central leaders of, was simply "the IWW all feathered out."

Many of the best militants of the IWW became communists. The most famous leader of the IWW, Big Bill Haywood, died in Moscow and his ashes were buried under the Kremlin wall.

The IWW collapsed partially because of extreme government repression, but also because so many of its best militants joined the Communist Party, leaving behind anarchists incapable of building an organization.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

25th July 2011, 22:27

Wow, it's 1929/1953/2011 all over again:rolleyes:

I realise this is history, but give it a break with the factual/evidence dick-swinging in regards to Soviet history, guys.

Getting back on topic, it is difficult to marry OPs theory of 'upwards delegation' with the reality of the USSRs electoral process. Indeed, I don't see why any Socialist would argue for a centralised associative model above a decentralised one, aside from if they were in a party that stood to gain from a centralising power-grab post any prospective revolution...

Well, the moderators have, quite wisely, separated this thread out from the original thread for exactly this purpose. Look at the new title, "again and once more on the Bolsheviks etc." A good one.

Why go for centralised models over decentralised ones? Because they are more effective, more efficient, and get the job done better and quicker.

-M.H.-

Vladimir Innit Lenin

25th July 2011, 22:30

A Marxist Historian

25th July 2011, 22:37

Yes, he was. In fact, the very fact that Lenin called Kautsky a "renegade" testifies to Lenin's belief that Kautsky betrayed his own doctrine by siding with Bernsteinians and other "open" reformists in 1914.

And that is why he decided the working class needs "proper" aristocracy in the form of the "vanguard party".

Here your Bakuninism is overcoming your Marxism. The union bureaucrats and labor aristocrats of Germany had higher incomes and social privileges than the rank and file. Just exactly like the Soviet bureaucracy that was the social basis for Stalinism. Underground Bolsheviks most certainly did not!

Being determines consciousness.

Except that bourgeoisie is not necessary a mere collection of evil individual industrialists in hats, the former "revolutionary workers" of "the vanguard" are just as capable to fulfill its role if they monopolize both political power and, more importantly, the real control (i.e. ownership) of the "nationalized" economy after the revolution.

No they aren't. I am almost tempted to say that the history of the Soviet Union proves this point.

Now, Putin's people, after some initial nasty bumps, do lately seem to be fulfilling this role somewhat successfully from their point of view, though not that of the masses.

That is because they do not just control the means of production, as Stalin and Khrushchev and Brezhnev's people did. They own them. That makes all the difference in the world.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

25th July 2011, 22:43

Effective in what way? Efficient in what regard?

Get what job done better? Socialism? Probably not. Centralisation is only (realistically, as I don't want to go on a flowery theoretical dance with you...) possible if carried out as a Dictatorship of the Party. I'm sure you can see and accept that.

In the first year or two of the Soviet Union, everything was very decentralized, with factories and even military units run by elected committees. Led to economic collapse, if for no other reason than that running something by a committee is always the worst way to run anything. In economic life, "one man management," with oversight and input from below of course, turned out to be the best way to go. On the battlefront even more so.

I neither see nor accept the notion that centralization is only possible as a party dictatorship. An urban myth that floats about due to nearly a century of Stalinism.

-M.H.-

Vladimir Innit Lenin

26th July 2011, 00:58

A Marxist Historian

26th July 2011, 03:41

Surely you can see the folly in your own analysis and see that your 2+2 there does not add up to 4.

Fairly safe to say that in 1918/1919 the economy was not run on a decentralised basis as such. Not purposefully, anyway. At that stage, the Bolsheviks did not even control the entirety of Russia, economically and politically speaking. When you think of the Civil War and the opposition of the Narodniks, you can begin to understand that it wasn't a lack of central control that led to economic failure.

How can a centralised one-party state operate as anything other than a party/few people/one man dictatorship? How on earth can it operate as a truly inclusive Dictatorship of the Proletariat? Deep down, i'm sure you know that it cannot. It is nice and flowery and utopian to think that a centralised state with power vested in the party-state and, as you say, oversight and input from below, could work, but in reality the same thing as happened in the USSR would happen over and over.

Someone once said, "Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely". Well, that absolutely applies to this situation.

I have always thought that two plus two equals four. Narrow minded perhaps, but there you are.

There were a *lot* of reasons why things weren't going well economically in 1918, but decentralization and chaos were high on the list. All historians accounts from anybody except totally narrow-minded anarcho-polemicists agree on this.

The solution isn't just centralism, its *democratic centralism.* You've heard this phrase before perhaps?

How does it work?

You have democratic discussion and debate on economic plans on a local, national and ultimately worldwide basis. With democratic input into the planning at every level, both beforehand and during implementation.

Totally free discussion among all those who are for the revolution, as opposed to sabotaging it. Trotsky suggested in the 1920s you'd one day have political parties formed around issues such as what are the best energy sources.

If you had a world working class democratic government right now such parties would form instantaneously, with the solar/wind people, the nuclear people, and the people who say let's fix poverty first and worry about the environment and global warming later people forming a three party competitive proletarian democracy, more than likely.

Then the plans get implemented in a centralized, organized fashion, and if some coal miners in China or South Africa or West Virginia say to hell with global warming I want to keep my job, they wouldn't necessarily have the last word, if the world majority disagreed. For example.

This was fairly tricky to do in Russia in 1917, but now with the Internet in every African village, Leontief input/output formulas for economic planning, and a whole host of other things, might not really be that hard.

As for Lord Acton, the source of that quote you brought out, he had it exactly backwards.

The Bolsheviks *didn't have the power* to do the impossible and build socialism in one country.

After a revolution, lack of power corrupts, absolute lack of power (think of Cambodia under Pol Pot, an utterly hopeless situation for constructing *anything* without huge outside help) corrupts absolutely.

-M.H.-

Martin Blank

26th July 2011, 06:46

A workers-only membership voting principle is economist "workerism" of the worst sort.

Nonsense. Workerism is a petty-bourgeois fetishism and romanticism of the working class, specifically its perceived backwardness (e.g., Wohlforth's comments on hippies and gays in the late 1960s or early 1970s). The principle of proletarian self-organization is neither a fetish nor a romanticizing of the conditions under which we as workers live. It is, rather, a necessary precondition for the development of a broader revolutionary movement.

Certainly something Marx and Engels, neither of whom were workers, would not have tolerated for a second if they had anything to say about it.

Oh, really?

Considering that the I.W.M.A., according to the General Rules, is to consist exclusively of "workingmen's societies" (see Article 1, Article 7, and Article 11 of the General Rules);

That, consequently, Article 9 of the General Rules to this effect: "Everybody who acknowledges and defends the principles of the I.W.A. is eligible to become a member", although it confers upon the active adherents of the International who are not workingmen the right either of individual membership or of admission to workingmen's sections, does in no way legitimate the foundation of sections exclusively or principally composed to members not belonging to the working class;

That, for this very reason, the General Council was some months ago precluded from recognizing a Slavonian section exclusively composed of students;

That according to the General Regulations V, I, the General Rules and Regulations are to be adapted "to local circumstances of each country";

That the social conditions of the United States, though in many other aspects most favorable to the success of the working-class movement, peculiarly facilitate the intrusion into the International of bogus reformers, middle-class quacks, and trading politicians.

For these reasons, the General Council recommends that in future there be admitted no new American section of which two-thirds at least do not consist of wage laborers. (Emphasis mine)

Marx and Engels "would not have tolerated for a second if they had anything to say about it"?! Umm, they came up with it!

2. Section 12 (New York, American) of the North American Federation. -- Suspended by the General Council.

In the course of the debate on the credentials of Section 12, the following resolution was adopted by 47 votes against 0; abstentions, 9:

The International Working Men's Association, based upon the principle of the abolition of classes, cannot admit any middle class Sections.Section 12 was excluded by 49 votes against 0; abstentions, 9.

From two-thirds-workers to all-workers organizations in the space of six months!

To begin with, they adopt the high-sounding but historically false Lassallean dictum: in relation to the working class all other classes are only one reactionary mass. This proposition is true only in certain exceptional instances, for example in the case of a revolution by the proletariat, e.g. the Commune, or in a country in which not only has the bourgeoisie constructed state and society after its own image but the democratic petty bourgeoisie, in its wake, has already carried that reconstruction to its logical conclusion.(Emphasis mine)

To understand what is meant here by the democratic petty bourgeoisie carrying that reconstruction to its logical conclusion, see: social-democratic consensus, welfare state, Keynesian economics, the New Deal, etc. Reference for checklist: K. Marx, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League, part 1, March 1850.

If people of this kind from other classes join the proletarian movement, the first condition is that they should not bring any remnants of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, etc., prejudices with them but should whole-heartedly adopt the proletarian point of view. But these gentlemen, as has been proved, are stuffed and crammed with bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideas. In such a petty-bourgeois country as Germany these ideas certainly have their own justification. But only outside the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. If these gentlemen form themselves into a Social-Democratic Petty-Bourgeois Party they have a perfect right to do so; one could then negotiate with them, form a bloc according to circumstances, etc. But in a workers’ party they are an adulterating element. If reasons exist for tolerating them there for the moment, it is also a duty only to tolerate them, to allow them no influence in the Party leadership and to remain aware that a break with them is only a matter of time. The time, moreover, seems to have come. How the Party can tolerate the authors of this article in its midst any longer is to us incomprehensible. But if the leadership of the Party should fall more or less into the hands of such people then the Party will simply be castrated and proletarian energy will be at an end.

As for ourselves, in view of our whole past there is only one path open to us. For almost forty years we have stressed the class struggle as the immediate driving force of history, and in particular the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as the great lever of the modern social revolution; it is therefore impossible for us to co-operate with people who wish to expunge this class struggle from the movement. When the International was formed we expressly formulated the battle-cry: the emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself. We cannot therefore co-operate with people who say that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must first be freed from above by philanthropic bourgeois and petty bourgeois. If the new Party organ adopts a line corresponding to the views of these gentlemen, and is bourgeois and not proletarian, then nothing remains for us, much though we should regret it, but publicly to declare our opposition to it and to dissolve the solidarity with which we have hitherto represented the German Party abroad. (Emphasis mine)

Given that Marx and Engels were materialists, one can only conclude that their view that non-proletarian elements "should whole-heartedly adopt the proletarian point of view" is rooted in material conditions -- social being determining consciousness, after all. That is, they should cut their previous class ties and integrate themselves into the working class.

These are ones I can remember off the top of my head (the references, not the texts). I would imagine that a more thorough examination of all the contents of the MECW (or the new MEGA) would offer a more detailed path of development for these positions.

The Bolshevik Party, unlike German Social Democracy, was *not* dominated by intellectuals of bourgeois social origin. In 1917 it was a workers party sociologically as well as politically, with most of its Central Committee made up of factory workers.

I call bullshit. And I can prove it. I went through the biographies of every member of the Bolshevik Party Central Committee at the time of the 1917 October Revolution. Here is the list (alphabetized), with their class backgrounds listed:

Jan Berzin - petty bourgeois (peasant)
Andrei Bubnov - bourgeois (merchant)
Nikolai Bukharin - petty bourgeois (professionals)
Felix Dzerzhinsky - nobility
Prokofy Dzhaparidze - petty bourgeois (professional)
Adolph Joffe - bourgeois (merchant)
Lev Kamenev - petty bourgeois (first generation)
Alexei Kiselyev - unknown
Alexandra Kollontai - bourgeois (military-officer corps)
Nikolai Krestinsky - bourgeois (merchant)
Vladimir Lenin - nobility
Georgi Lomov - unknown
Vladimir Milyutin - petty bourgeois (peasant)
Matvei Muranov - petty bourgeois (peasant/politician)
Viktor Nogin - petty bourgeois (shopkeeper/artisan)
Alexei Rykov - petty bourgeois (farmers)
Fyodor Sergeyev (Artem) - petty bourgeois (peasant)
Stepan Shahumyan - bourgeois (merchant)
Ivar Smilga - petty bourgeois (forester -- sheriff of a lord's land)
Grigori Sokolnikov - petty bourgeois (professional)
Josef Stalin - petty bourgeois (artisan)
Elena Stassova - petty bourgeois (court official)
Yakov Sverdlov - petty bourgeois (intelligentsia)
Leon Trotsky - petty bourgeois (farmers)
Moisei Uritsky - bourgeois (merchant)
Georgi Zinoviev - petty bourgeois (farmers)

It is possible that Lomov and Kiselyev could have been from the working class, but I doubt it, given their roles in the Soviet government after the revolution. For the most part, the Bolshevik leadership was, at the time of the 1917 October Revolution, lumpen-intelligentsia*. Only Kamenev, Muranov and Nogin had a profession outside of being revolutionaries, and all three of them were petty-bourgeois occupations. To call these men and women "working class" in any way can only be the product of sheer ignorance or conscious deception.

[* Lenin would have called them "de-classed", as he did in What Is To Be Done?, in an attempt to confuse the issue. However, Marx's use of the term is much clearer; in both Class Struggles in France and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx used the terms "de-classed" and "lumpen" interchangeably -- i.e., as synonyms.]

But even the Workers Opposition never suggested anything like what you suggest, not least because Alexandra Kollontai was the daughter of a prominent Tsarist noble.

The Workers' Opposition didn't, because it was against the basic class interests of its leaders, as you imply. However, the Workers' Group of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), led by Gavril Myasnikov, did advocate it. And since the WG was organized along the principle of proletarian self-organization, they could back it up.

A Marxist Historian

26th July 2011, 07:22

Nonsense. Workerism is a petty-bourgeois fetishism and romanticism of the working class, specifically its perceived backwardness (e.g., Wohlforth's comments on hippies and gays in the late 1960s or early 1970s). The principle of proletarian self-organization is neither a fetish nor a romanticizing of the conditions under which we as workers live. It is, rather, a necessary precondition for the development of a broader revolutionary movement.

Oh, really?

Marx and Engels "would not have tolerated for a second if they had anything to say about it"?! Umm, they came up with it!

From two-thirds-workers to all-workers organizations in the space of six months!

Due to some quirk in the interface I don't quite understand yet, we don't get the Marx quotes here.

However, you're missing the point. That was as to "organizations," not individual memberships. Did Marx get to vote himself? He certainly did, I do believe.

The First International concept of bloc entry of entire organizations en masse, not on the basis of political beliefs, but on the basis of social class essentially, was not only not how the Third International worked, but not how the Second worked either. Rather, it was the way the British Labour Party works. Not a good idea, as Marx found out. Live and learn.

In that organizational context, in an organization not of the "class for itself" but of the "class in itself," insisting that only *working class* organizations could participate was a necessary measure to ensure that the First International was an organization of the working class, and not any other class.

By the way, Wohlforth's full statement, for those who might be curious, was,

"the working class hates hippies, faggots and women's libbers, and so do we."

In the year 1972, to a collective called the Buffalo Marxist Collective, whom he was trying to persuade to join his Workers League. Not successfully.

To understand what is meant here by the democratic petty bourgeoisie carrying that reconstruction to its logical conclusion, see: social-democratic consensus, welfare state, Keynesian economics, the New Deal, etc. Reference for checklist: K. Marx, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League, part 1, March 1850.

Given that Marx and Engels were materialists, one can only conclude that their view that non-proletarian elements "should whole-heartedly adopt the proletarian point of view" is rooted in material conditions -- social being determining consciousness, after all. That is, they should cut their previous class ties and integrate themselves into the working class.

In the manner of Fred Engels? He wholeheartedly adopted a proletarian point of view while running his textile factory for his father. Is that what you have in mind? Er, maybe not exactly?

These are ones I can remember off the top of my head (the references, not the texts). I would imagine that a more thorough examination of all the contents of the MECW (or the new MEGA) would offer a more detailed path of development for these positions.

I call bullshit. And I can prove it. I went through the biographies of every member of the Bolshevik Party Central Committee at the time of the 1917 October Revolution. Here is the list (alphabetized), with their class backgrounds listed:

Jan Berzin - petty bourgeois (peasant)
Andrei Bubnov - bourgeois (merchant)
Nikolai Bukharin - petty bourgeois (professionals)
Felix Dzerzhinsky - nobility
Prokofy Dzhaparidze - petty bourgeois (professional)
Adolph Joffe - bourgeois (merchant)
Lev Kamenev - petty bourgeois (first generation)
Alexei Kiselyev - unknown
Alexandra Kollontai - bourgeois (military-officer corps)
Nikolai Krestinsky - bourgeois (merchant)
Vladimir Lenin - nobility
Georgi Lomov - unknown
Vladimir Milyutin - petty bourgeois (peasant)
Matvei Muranov - petty bourgeois (peasant/politician)
Viktor Nogin - petty bourgeois (shopkeeper/artisan)
Alexei Rykov - petty bourgeois (farmers)
Fyodor Sergeyev (Artem) - petty bourgeois (peasant)
Stepan Shahumyan - bourgeois (merchant)
Ivar Smilga - petty bourgeois (forester -- sheriff of a lord's land)
Grigori Sokolnikov - petty bourgeois (professional)
Josef Stalin - petty bourgeois (artisan)
Elena Stassova - petty bourgeois (court official)
Yakov Sverdlov - petty bourgeois (intelligentsia)
Leon Trotsky - petty bourgeois (farmers)
Moisei Uritsky - bourgeois (merchant)
Georgi Zinoviev - petty bourgeois (farmers)

It is possible that Lomov and Kiselyev could have been from the working class, but I doubt it, given their roles in the Soviet government after the revolution. For the most part, the Bolshevik leadership was, at the time of the 1917 October Revolution, lumpen-intelligentsia*. Only Kamenev, Muranov and Nogin had a profession outside of being revolutionaries, and all three of them were petty-bourgeois occupations. To call these men and women "working class" in any way can only be the product of sheer ignorance or conscious deception.

[* Lenin would have called them "de-classed", as he did in What Is To Be Done?, in an attempt to confuse the issue. However, Marx's use of the term is much clearer; in both Class Struggles in France and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx used the terms "de-classed" and "lumpen" interchangeably -- i.e., as synonyms.]

Well, you got me there, live and learn. I thought by 1917 the CC had already been proletarianized. It hadn't been, as you demonstrate. It was steadily proletarianised after the revolution, getting more and more so as each year passed. Reaching the maximum level under Leonid Brezhnev. On his Politburo, there was one intellectual, and *everyone else,* without exception, was of proletarian origin, starting with Brezhnev himself naturally.

The *membership,* as opposed to the Central Committee, was over 90% proletarian in 1917 by social background, and all levels of the hierarchy below the Central Committee were mostly proletarian dominated.

Lomov by the way had an upper-class origin. You left out Shlyapnikov, wasn't he on the CC?

As to "declassed," in the Communist Manifesto Marx talks about the best of the bourgeois intellectuals going over to the side of the working class. He was talking, quite precisely, about himself and Fred, who at that time were playing a pretty prominent role in the German Communist League, the organization which issued the Manifesto. He also talks about the lumpenproletariat there in a very different fashion.

That sentence represented Leninism in a nutshell. Not accidentally, as the Communist League was definitely a "democratic centralist" cadre organization much more similar to a Third International party than any component of the First or for that matter the Second International.

Marx's faction fights and splits with Weitling and Schapper, etc. were conducted in a very "modern" twentieth century fashion, rather like those in the Bolshevik Party or various Trotskyist parties.

-M.H.-

The Workers' Opposition didn't, because it was against the basic class interests of its leaders, as you imply. However, the Workers' Group of the Russian Communist Party (Bolshevik), led by Gavril Myasnikov, did advocate it. And since the WG was organized along the principle of proletarian self-organization, they could back it up.

black magick hustla

26th July 2011, 09:58

Nowadays it doesn't. Anybody in America who thinks the American working class is spontaneously socialist, revolutionary, anti-racist etc. has probably never worked for a living.

I don't think anyone implies that the working class will be spontaneously "socialist." however the class struggle exists regardless if the people participating within it are racists, chauvinists, republican, etcetera. i think the fundamental point here is that whether they are "socialist" or not is not contingent to a leadership capable of stirring them otherwise. the sad state of the "left" (i put it in apostrophes because i don't think being part of the "left" is progressive in this current era) but to very concrete material conditions. i.e. there won't be a massive "socialist" consciousness if our resident american trots decided to change of strategy. the "party" if it is any party in the meaningful communist tradition, rather than a plethora of ahistorical and self-proclaimed vanguard sects, is an organ bound to the historical destiny of the world working class, and it emerges in periods of heightened class struggle and due to a peculiar alignment of events, its not a competition of who speaks louder or is better at proselitizing.

furthermore, "communism" as understood by marx is not only a program of specific demands, but it is a movement. marx talked about a victory of "our party" when commenting about the european revolutions of 1848. this where not because there where specific "communist" demands but because he saw within them the the seeds of a movement progressing towards communism. so in a sense, the "ahistorical" sects aborted by the death of the left, even if they carry "communist" consciousness, are much less part of the "historic party" than the uprisings that are happening in greece right now, or the class battles in the shopfloors of india. the latter might not have the "communist consciousness" or whatever, but they are indeed much more relevant in understanding the dynamics of capital and the law of value, than grouplets aborted by past historical epochs.

rather than berating normal working folk as not "being socialist" spontaneously or whatever. a better question to pose is how, if the communist tradition emerges ever meaningfully again in the U.S., will it emerge, and what conditions requires its emergence. in the U.S. and virtually everywhere, however the tendencies being the strongest in the U.S., the new generations of the working class are of different nature than the older ones. the rise of a precariazed and casualized labor force, with no self-identity and self-history in the same sense blue collar workers might have, has changed a lot of the variables, and i feel a lot of the trotskyist fixation with labourism and unions is going to get rendered obsolete.

Martin Blank

26th July 2011, 10:00

I can only devote a few more moments to this, then I have to move on to more pressing matters.

Due to some quirk in the interface I don't quite understand yet, we don't get the Marx quotes here.

It's the forum software. When we put in the newer version of vBulletin a year or so ago, we disabled "quote trains", which means that you don't get the long and repetitious messages.

However, you're missing the point. That was as to "organizations," not individual memberships. Did Marx get to vote himself? He certainly did, I do believe.

Marx's relationship with the International was constantly in flux. In many respects, I think it was his work for the IWMA that solidified his stronger classist position, since the International brought him into contact with a number of diverse organizations and individuals. In turn, he was able to see how these elements acted and reacted when beset by a proletarian victory (the Paris Commune). From looking at the correspondence of Marx and Engels, it does seem that their harder class positions begin with the fall of the Commune and only continue from there. It should also be understood that neither Marx nor Engels accepted any kind of leadership position in the German Social-Democratic Workers' Party, in spite of their ties and the occasional raising of the idea.

The First International concept of bloc entry of entire organizations en masse, not on the basis of political beliefs, but on the basis of social class essentially, was not only not how the Third International worked, but not how the Second worked either. Rather, it was the way the British Labour Party works. Not a good idea, as Marx found out. Live and learn.

Certainly, Marx did learn from the experience of the IWMA. Both he and Engels were firmly of the opinion that the next International would be openly communist in its principles and program, and proletarian in its composition. In fact, Marx had repeatedly told leading figures of the emerging Social-Democratic parties that he would not support a new International on the basis they were proposing. Specifically, he rejected the 1881 Zurich conference, which was the starting point for the Second International. For his part, Engels called for the disbanding of the German Social-Democratic Workers' Party in 1880, calling it a spent force.

Again, looking over the correspondence, it appears that Marx and Engels' vision for the new International was an accumulation of their experiences with the Communist League and the IWMA: It would have the level of principle and program found in the League, but would also have the proletarian composition sought out in the First International. It would be a concentrated merger of communist program and proletarian composition. Indeed, not how the Third developed, nor the Second.

In that organizational context, in an organization not of the "class for itself" but of the "class in itself," insisting that only *working class* organizations could participate was a necessary measure to ensure that the First International was an organization of the working class, and not any other class.

Agreed. And I think it's clear from the correspondence that Marx and Engels saw the next incarnation of the International as one that united those elements of the proletariat who understood and acted as a "class for itself" to educate and train the existing "class in itself" to join them in conscious formation. Moreover, in the context of this view, they both saw their role as consultative, not instrumental. Marx had always placed his trust in the ability of the working class to develop its own theory and practice, through its discussions and experiences, and he no longer saw a need for him to be a "leader" in the proletarian movement.

By the way, Wohlforth's full statement, for those who might be curious, was, "the working class hates hippies, faggots and women's libbers, and so do we."

In the year 1972, to a collective called the Buffalo Marxist Collective, whom he was trying to persuade to join his Workers League. Not successfully.

Right. That was exactly the quote I was thinking of. For those keeping score at home: the Workers League is now known as the Socialist Equality Party, the folks who produce the World Socialist Web Site.

In the manner of Fred Engels? He wholeheartedly adopted a proletarian point of view while running his textile factory for his father. Is that what you have in mind? Er, maybe not exactly?

You know that saying about a lie circling the globe seven times before the truth is able to put its shoes on? Umm, yeah....

Engels did not run his father's textile factory. Ever. From 1837 to 1841, 1843 to 1844, and 1850 to 1864, he worked as an office clerk in the mill. When his father died, he became a shareholder in the mill (not a manager or boss), but liquidated his shares in 1869 and never looked back. In 1842, he was serving in the Prussian volunteer army. From 1844 to 1850, he lived on and off with Marx, and wrote and translated articles for publications (i.e., he was a stringer). After 1869, he lived off the liquidated shares and money received from his writings. (Reference (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/bio/engels/en-1892.htm))

Now, if you think you've learned a lot already, here's something to really bake your brain: Why do you think the myth of Engels as manager continues to be propagated by self-described socialists and communists, even though all of the facts are to the contrary?

Well, you got me there, live and learn. I thought by 1917 the CC had already been proletarianized. It hadn't been, as you demonstrate. It was steadily proletarianised after the revolution, getting more and more so as each year passed. Reaching the maximum level under Leonid Brezhnev. On his Politburo, there was one intellectual, and *everyone else,* without exception, was of proletarian origin, starting with Brezhnev himself naturally.

Just a note before continuing: I am not looking to make this a competition or anything. That is, I'm not looking to "score points" in this discussion. Clarity and education are my goals, not making myself look good (I suck at that generally, anyway). Among us workers, political discussions should not be confessional, but educational and enlightening. Anywho,...

It is true that there was a proletarianization process after 1917 and the Civil War. The example that came immediately to my mind was the so-called "Lenin Levy" that Trotsky wrote about. By that time, though, the communist principle had been completely drained from the Bolshevik Party, and while you had a growing proletarian composition, it was based on the narrow backwardness of the bureaucrat, NEPman and police agent -- i.e., on the petty bourgeoisie. Again, it's not by composition alone, but by the merger of composition and program.

The *membership,* as opposed to the Central Committee, was over 90% proletarian in 1917 by social background, and all levels of the hierarchy below the Central Committee were mostly proletarian dominated.

Yes and no. Party membership in 1917 was actually hard to judge, due to the overall political situation. It was much more fluid in the period from the defeat of Kornilov to the establishment of the Soviet government, which is a natural outgrowth of the period. Have you read Rabinowitch's The Bolsheviks Come to Power? If not, I highly recommend it and its companion, The Bolsheviks in Power.

Lomov by the way had an upper-class origin. You left out Shlyapnikov, wasn't he on the CC?

Shlyapnikov was never on the Central Committee. He did serve as People's Commissar of Labor, but was removed after beginning to express objections to the re-imposition of one-person management in industry.

As to "declassed," in the Communist Manifesto Marx talks about the best of the bourgeois intellectuals going over to the side of the working class. He was talking, quite precisely, about himself and Fred, who at that time were playing a pretty prominent role in the German Communist League, the organization which issued the Manifesto. He also talks about the lumpenproletariat there in a very different fashion.

Again, looking at the biographies and correspondence of Marx and Engels, it does not appear that they were referring to themselves, but speaking more generally, more abstractly. But even if that is not the case, and I am wrong in that assessment, there is a larger point to be understood here: the view that elements of the bourgeoisie or petty bourgeoisie could become positive contributors to the proletarian movement was written in the context of the emerging bourgeois-democratic revolutions, not as a general principle.

We find this equivocation in the very passage you're referring to ("... in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character,..."), and it is only reinforced in subsequent statements.

It should also be mentioned here that Marx's view on these bourgeois elements changed very rapidly under the pressure of the events of 1848-1850, to the point that, by the time Marx wrote The 18th Brumaire, he had concluded that there was no longer a "progressive bourgeoisie" and never again raised the idea of a section of "enlightened bourgeois" coming to the aid of the proletariat. By the time he wrote The Civil War in France, that conclusion was beginning to be extended to the petty bourgeoisie.

As for Marx's use of the term "de-classed", it is pretty clear that it is not the same as how Lenin used the term in WITBD. Lenin's use of the term owes more to Karl Kautsky and Max Weber than to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Weber's market-oriented description of classes, as opposed to Marx's production-oriented description, allowed for the concept of an individual being able to remove themselves from the class structure (incidentally, this is fully in line with the Hegelian concept of the State as "Spirit ... elevated ... to the universal object" and the Universal Class from Realphilosophie), whereas Marx understood that only a revolution in social relations and the mode of production can make it possible for someone to step outside of the existing class boundaries. The concept of the lumpenproletarian itself was designed initially as a means of accounting for those who were outside of social relations tied to the mode of production. So it makes sense that Marx would use "lumpen" and "de-classed" interchangeably.

That sentence represented Leninism in a nutshell.

You lost me here. What sentence?

Not accidentally, as the Communist League was definitely a "democratic centralist" cadre organization much more similar to a Third International party than any component of the First or for that matter the Second International.

Yes and no. On the one hand, the Rules of the League did become the archetypical form for the statutes, rules and constitutions of a number of political organizations calling themselves socialist and communist. At the same time, though, the underlying content was vastly different from that found in the League. I hate to echo the words of an inveterate opportunist and petty-bourgeois dilettante like Louis Proyect, but he has a point when he cautions the rest of us to not romanticize past organizations.

The Communist League may have had a pretty organization on paper, but in reality it was a godawful mess. Many of the League's communities and circles were run like fiefdoms by individuals and cliques who regularly ignored decisions by the Central Committee. Members and emissaries would disappear for weeks or months at a time, often times making their reappearance as part of a different organization (and League funds being redirected to these groups). Only one issue of the League's Central Organ, Kommunistische Zeitschrift (Communist Magazine) ever appeared, and that was in 1847. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung was a personal project of Marx and Engels, listed as an "Organ of Democracy" (and later a "Political-Economic Review"), not a League publication. And the Willich-Schapper split in the League in 1850 effectively killed the organization, though it limped on for two more years.

The parties of the Second and Third Internationals were more organized and disciplined, but much of that came from them appropriating the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois methods of organization. The forms established by the League were kept to a large extent, but the underlying content -- the organizational culture -- was qualitatively changed. The parties of these Internationals, as well as those of the various components considering themselves a part of the distended 1938 "Fourth International", have much more in common with each other than they do with either the League or the IWMA.

Marx's faction fights and splits with Weitling and Schapper, etc. were conducted in a very "modern" twentieth century fashion, rather like those in the Bolshevik Party or various Trotskyist parties.

Again, yes and no. Analogies can only go so far before they begin to break down, and this one does it rather quickly. Until I see Jim Robertson challenge David North to a duel in Golden Gate Park, as Marx did with August Willich, I'm going to say there's not a lot of similarities.

Anyway, this is about all I can do for now. I have a few major writing obligations to meet before I can return to this discussion. So either have patience or we can agree to pick this discussion up some other time.

Die Neue Zeit

26th July 2011, 14:07

Oh, really?

Excluding some Slavonian precursor to a Student Left group? That's classic!

To understand what is meant here by the democratic petty bourgeoisie carrying that reconstruction to its logical conclusion, see: social-democratic consensus, welfare state, Keynesian economics, the New Deal, etc. Reference for checklist: K. Marx, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League, part 1, March 1850.

Time to rehabilitate Lassalle's One Reactionary Mass slogan for the most developed bourgeois societies, then?

These are ones I can remember off the top of my head (the references, not the texts). I would imagine that a more thorough examination of all the contents of the MECW (or the new MEGA) would offer a more detailed path of development for these positions.

What's MEGA? :confused:

For the most part, the Bolshevik leadership was, at the time of the 1917 October Revolution, lumpen-intelligentsia*.

[...]

[* Lenin would have called them "de-classed", as he did in What Is To Be Done?, in an attempt to confuse the issue. However, Marx's use of the term is much clearer; in both Class Struggles in France and The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx used the terms "de-classed" and "lumpen" interchangeably -- i.e., as synonyms.]

"Lumpen intelligentsia"? Please explain the combination of the two, as opposed to petit-bourgeois or non-worker intellectuals.

Die Neue Zeit

26th July 2011, 14:15

Reaching the maximum level under Leonid Brezhnev. On his Politburo, there was one intellectual, and *everyone else,* without exception, was of proletarian origin, starting with Brezhnev himself naturally.

http://www.revleft.com/vb/class-never-ruled-t154771/index.html

A number of Politburo members in that era were of peasant or more questionable background, such as Yuri Andropov. However, the combination of Andrei Kirilenko, Alexei Kosygin, Pyotr Masherov, Kirill Mazurov, Arvid Pelshe, Nikolai Podgorny, Nikolai Tikhonov, and Dmitri Ustinov speaks to how, historically, Trotskyism's successes have been limited to Sri Lanka - no success amongst peasants because of Trotsky's personal entertainment of, in his own words, "civil war with the peasantry" (driving peasants into the arms of the Maoists) and little results amongst workers because of Trotsky's own "Transitional Programme" *economism* (growing political struggles out of economic ones). For example, left unity in Russia cannot happen under a Trotskyist banner, but is most likely to happen under the RCWP-RPC banner.

It is true that there was a proletarianization process after 1917 and the Civil War. The example that came immediately to my mind was the so-called "Lenin Levy" that Trotsky wrote about. By that time, though, the communist principle had been completely drained from the Bolshevik Party, and while you had a growing proletarian composition, it was based on the narrow backwardness of the bureaucrat, NEPman and police agent -- i.e., on the petty bourgeoisie. Again, it's not by composition alone, but by the merger of composition and program.

See, the problem with "MH" here is that he wants a very different merger, that of program and "links" to the class, whereby "links" have a distinctly non-worker background.

Again, looking over the correspondence, it appears that Marx and Engels' vision for the new International was an accumulation of their experiences with the Communist League and the IWMA: It would have the level of principle and program found in the League, but would also have the proletarian composition sought out in the First International. It would be a concentrated merger of communist program and proletarian composition. Indeed, not how the Third developed, nor the Second.

The original Socialist International (i.e., "Second") may not have had a *concentrated* merger, but there was sufficient proletarian composition to consider it as the second of only two or three worker-class internationals (the would-be third being the IWUSP and not the Comintern) (http://www.revleft.com/vb/needed-revived-second-t128934/index.html).

The parties of the Second and Third Internationals were more organized and disciplined, but much of that came from them appropriating the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois methods of organization. The forms established by the League were kept to a large extent, but the underlying content -- the organizational culture -- was qualitatively changed. The parties of these Internationals, as well as those of the various components considering themselves a part of the distended 1938 "Fourth International", have much more in common with each other than they do with either the League or the IWMA.

How did the parties of the Second International "appropriate bourgeois and petit-bourgeois methods of organization"? :confused:

Bureaucracy /= red tape or excesses by bureaucrats. Not all careerism is bad, like maintaining full-time staff paid at skilled worker levels - and not grunt minimum wages or having fetishes for in-and-out volunteer work (http://www.revleft.com/vb/practical-issues-and-t150581/index.html?p=2031342&highlight=careerism).

Red Commissar

26th July 2011, 16:02

What's MEGA? :confused:

It stands for the the "Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe", a comprehensive collection of the works and writings of Marx, as well as many letters, drafts, articles, and what not from Marx and Engels that have previously been unavailable or only partially recovered.

It was originally a project envisioned between the CPSU and the SED, but their collapse put the it into limbo. It was picked up again by the IMES (International Marx-Engels Foundation, Amsterdam) and is currently in the process of being published, digitized, and localized in different languages.

http://www.bbaw.de/bbaw/Forschung/Forschungsprojekte/mega/en/Startseite#gb

And a German version of some of the completed documents are here
http://telota.bbaw.de/mega/

Kiev Communard

26th July 2011, 16:09

How did the parties of the Second International "appropriate bourgeois and petit-bourgeois methods of organization"? :confused:

Bureaucracy /= red tape or excesses by bureaucrats. Not all careerism is bad, like maintaining full-time staff paid at skilled worker levels - and not grunt minimum wages or having fetishes for in-and-out volunteer work (http://www.revleft.com/vb/practical-issues-and-t150581/index.html?p=2031342&highlight=careerism).

No, the bureaucracy is a principle of hierarchical organization where the low-ranking officials are accountable only to their superiors, not to their base. The experience of the Second and especially the Third International parties is just the characteristic example of the spread of bureaucratic forms of organization.

Die Neue Zeit

27th July 2011, 01:47

No, the bureaucracy is a principle of hierarchical organization where the low-ranking officials are accountable only to their superiors, not to their base. The experience of the Second and especially the Third International parties is just the characteristic example of the spread of bureaucratic forms of organization.

Forgive me, comrade, but I think the two of us have very different definitions of bureaucracy.

The most "effective" form of low-ranking folks being accountable only to superiors is found in the military, yet very few people see the military as a bureaucratic institution. In particular, yes-sir-no-sir cuts through a helluva lot of red tape.

By your definition, I'm as much against "bureaucracy" as you, not supportive at all of the idea of low-ranking officials being accountable only to superiors.

My definition of bureaucracy? Well, one of the features is that if somebody wants to deal with a particular issue, that person has to go through the right channels and have his or her issue prioritized like being in a lineup. Lineups are definitely not red tape.

Jose Gracchus

27th July 2011, 02:16

Your sloganeering is extremely patronizing. And only someone with no personal relationship to military folks would ever say that the military is not characterized by 'bureaucracy' and 'red tape.' The popular use of bureaucracy is due to bourgeois ideological influence, not realities. Corporations and military forces are highly bureaucratic, but since bureaucratic has become a "'small government' conservative" swear-word, it of course omits those bureaucratic darlings of right-wing business: the military-industrial complex and other major conglomerates.

A Marxist Historian

27th July 2011, 08:19

I don't think anyone implies that the working class will be spontaneously "socialist." however the class struggle exists regardless if the people participating within it are racists, chauvinists, republican, etcetera. i think the fundamental point here is that whether they are "socialist" or not is not contingent to a leadership capable of stirring them otherwise. the sad state of the "left" (i put it in apostrophes because i don't think being part of the "left" is progressive in this current era) but to very concrete material conditions. i.e. there won't be a massive "socialist" consciousness if our resident american trots decided to change of strategy. the "party" if it is any party in the meaningful communist tradition, rather than a plethora of ahistorical and self-proclaimed vanguard sects, is an organ bound to the historical destiny of the world working class, and it emerges in periods of heightened class struggle and due to a peculiar alignment of events, its not a competition of who speaks louder or is better at proselitizing.

It is absolutely true that mass working class parties emerge and have always emerged out of explosions of class struggle. History develops not smoothly but in sudden leaps.

But when the moment of revolutionary explosion happens, what emerges does indeed get determined by which leadership with which politics float to the top, which is in turn determined by whether their programs suit the moment and how well and successfully they expound them.

And how well they have rooted themselves in the organizations of the working class in periods of quiescence, when revolutionary work often seems like pounding your head against a stone wall.

Thus, even a small revolutionary group with a correct program and perspective right now could turn itself into a mass party in Tunisia and perhaps in Egypt or Greece, if it was rooted in the organizations of the working class.

Unfortunately, no such thing seems to exist in those three countries, as far as I can tell. Or much of anyplace else for that matter.

furthermore, "communism" as understood by marx is not only a program of specific demands, but it is a movement. marx talked about a victory of "our party" when commenting about the european revolutions of 1848. this where not because there where specific "communist" demands but because he saw within them the the seeds of a movement progressing towards communism. so in a sense, the "ahistorical" sects aborted by the death of the left, even if they carry "communist" consciousness, are much less part of the "historic party" than the uprisings that are happening in greece right now, or the class battles in the shopfloors of india. the latter might not have the "communist consciousness" or whatever, but they are indeed much more relevant in understanding the dynamics of capital and the law of value, than grouplets aborted by past historical epochs.

Here you are quite wrong. Whenever Marx refers to "our party" in 1948 he is referring to the Communist League, whose Manifesto he wrote. He and Engels quite seriously hoped that the Communist League would be able to play the role in Germany that the Jacobins did in France, and come to power in the course of the revolutionary struggle, by gaining the support of the peasantry vs. the Junkers. Marx dubbed this strategic plan "permanent revolution."

This was in retrospect overoptimism, but it is most certainly what he thought. And, by the way, Marx and Engels had not yet shed their youthful enthusiasm for Robespierre and the guillotine at that point. If the Communist League had in fact managed to seize power, there most certainly would have been a Red Terror vs. reactionary opponents, something Engels in particular discussed quite bluntly.

rather than berating normal working folk as not "being socialist" spontaneously or whatever. a better question to pose is how, if the communist tradition emerges ever meaningfully again in the U.S., will it emerge, and what conditions requires its emergence. in the U.S. and virtually everywhere, however the tendencies being the strongest in the U.S., the new generations of the working class are of different nature than the older ones. the rise of a precariazed and casualized labor force, with no self-identity and self-history in the same sense blue collar workers might have, has changed a lot of the variables, and i feel a lot of the trotskyist fixation with labourism and unions is going to get rendered obsolete.

To be replaced by what exactly?

Rotten as they are, the unions are the *only* mass organizations of the working class that exist. This was not always the case in the past in America, so if anything unions will be *more* important than in past times.

When the casualized workers revolt, they will do so by unionizing. Or not at all.

Of course, that unionization may not necessarily go through the AFL/CIO or Change To Win.

The revolt in Wisconsin, even though it is now looking like a flash in the pan unfortunately, was *totally* through the unions. This is indicative for the future.

Popular revolts in America in recent decades have been more revolts of minority communities, in particular the black community, than classic labor revolts. But such revolts, like the ghetto revolts of the Sixties or the Rodney King revolt, essentially have no prospects if not allied with the labor movement.

That's the most likely scenario for a revolution in America. Imagine a combination of Detroit in 1937 with Los Angeles in 1992, and the ruling class is toast, as the increasingly minority and working class army would go over, if the rebels have a clear program that makes sense.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

27th July 2011, 09:47

As this post is getting out of hand even without the Marx quotes I have snipped out some paragraphs, not quoting things I either agree with you about or simply am not moved to comment on at the moment.

...
Marx's relationship with the International was constantly in flux. In many respects, I think it was his work for the IWMA that solidified his stronger classist position, since the International brought him into contact with a number of diverse organizations and individuals. In turn, he was able to see how these elements acted and reacted when beset by a proletarian victory (the Paris Commune). From looking at the correspondence of Marx and Engels, it does seem that their harder class positions begin with the fall of the Commune and only continue from there. It should also be understood that neither Marx nor Engels accepted any kind of leadership position in the German Social-Democratic Workers' Party, in spite of their ties and the occasional raising of the idea.

Certainly, Marx did learn from the experience of the IWMA. Both he and Engels were firmly of the opinion that the next International would be openly communist in its principles and program, and proletarian in its composition. In fact, Marx had repeatedly told leading figures of the emerging Social-Democratic parties that he would not support a new International on the basis they were proposing. Specifically, he rejected the 1881 Zurich conference, which was the starting point for the Second International. For his part, Engels called for the disbanding of the German Social-Democratic Workers' Party in 1880, calling it a spent force.

Yes, they had serious problems with the merger with Lassalle's party and the concessions made to Lassalleanism. Engels changed his mind after the party's experience with being illegal and underground, which pushed it to the left and made it much more "Marxist." Not sufficiently so as it turned out. In Engels's last years, he did not realise that the rot had already begun to set in. But had he lived longer, my guess is he would have, though obviously we'll never know.

Until Engels died, the Social Democracy did put on a pretty good revolutionary show. As late as 1892, for example, Social Democratic trade unions *refused to sign contracts,* regarding this as compromising with the class enemy in best ultraleft IWW style.

By the way, most of the early Communist Parties were *extremely* proletarian in composition. Indeed in the USA, given that most of the membership were from overwhelmingly proletarian foreign language federations, the early CPUSA may well have had a higher proletarian percentage than did the IWW, which had a higher quota of bohemian petty-bourgeois intellectuals in it than labor historians generally like to admit. Melvyn Dubovsky's *We Shall Be All,* the best history of the IWW, discusses this.

Petty-bourgeois radicals in the Communist Parties, in the USA and elsewhere, is basically a phenomenon you start to see with the Popular Front, and rarely before that.

The CPUSSR itself was *highly* proletarian, though you did have a large but steadily diminishing number of revolutionary intelligentsia at the very top levels.

You know that saying about a lie circling the globe seven times before the truth is able to put its shoes on? Umm, yeah....

Engels did not run his father's textile factory. Ever. From 1837 to 1841, 1843 to 1844, and 1850 to 1864, he worked as an office clerk in the mill. When his father died, he became a shareholder in the mill (not a manager or boss), but liquidated his shares in 1869 and never looked back. In 1842, he was serving in the Prussian volunteer army. From 1844 to 1850, he lived on and off with Marx, and wrote and translated articles for publications (i.e., he was a stringer). After 1869, he lived off the liquidated shares and money received from his writings. (Reference (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/bio/engels/en-1892.htm))

Now, if you think you've learned a lot already, here's something to really bake your brain: Why do you think the myth of Engels as manager continues to be propagated by self-described socialists and communists, even though all of the facts are to the contrary?

I am fond of MIA, but it's not a terribly good source, it's put together rather like Wikipedia, on a volunteer basis, and has blunders in it all the time.

And in fact your reference doesn't prove your point at all, it says from '64 to '69 he was a "joint proprietor" of the factory. Not a shareholder! My impression has always been that the company wasn't a joint stock company at all, but what was much more usual in Germany at the time, a family business. And he was the son.

But maybe you are right, and it would be interesting if you were. But you'll have to do better than that to challenge this bit of received wisdom.
I've read a number of bios of Marx and Engels, by socialists and non-socialists, and that's the first time I've heard that claim.

Just a note before continuing: I am not looking to make this a competition or anything. That is, I'm not looking to "score points" in this discussion. Clarity and education are my goals, not making myself look good (I suck at that generally, anyway). Among us workers, political discussions should not be confessional, but educational and enlightening. Anywho,...

Couldn't agree more. I personally think I learn more and benefit more when I find out I was wrong about something, e.g. the composition of the Bolshevik CC in 1917, than when I get an empty victory of sorts on Revleft vs. folk who don't know the history as well as I do. Especially if they are teenagers, which I am not.[/QUOTE]

It is true that there was a proletarianization process after 1917 and the Civil War. The example that came immediately to my mind was the so-called "Lenin Levy" that Trotsky wrote about. By that time, though, the communist principle had been completely drained from the Bolshevik Party, and while you had a growing proletarian composition, it was based on the narrow backwardness of the bureaucrat, NEPman and police agent -- i.e., on the petty bourgeoisie. Again, it's not by composition alone, but by the merger of composition and program.

Yes and no. Party membership in 1917 was actually hard to judge, due to the overall political situation. It was much more fluid in the period from the defeat of Kornilov to the establishment of the Soviet government, which is a natural outgrowth of the period. Have you read Rabinowitch's The Bolsheviks Come to Power? If not, I highly recommend it and its companion, The Bolsheviks in Power.

Yes, I've read both of these books and like both of them, though I do think Rabinowitch overemphasizes the element of spontaneity a bit for his polemical purpose, which is to refute all those who think the 1917 Revolution was a coup by intellectuals not a workers revolution. Indeed, I was half expecting you to argue that the Bolshevik Party in 1917 wasn't a proletarian party, at which point I was going to refer to Rabinowitch.

Your point on the Lenin Levy is very relevant. Lenin *did not* want to see mass recruitment into the Bolshevik Party in his last year of life, precisely because he felt that in the atmosphere of NEP, you'd be getting non-revolutionary backward elements, which is what happened.

However he *did* think the best way to resolve the problem of who would replace him after he died was to double the size of the Central Committee and bring a lot of workers on, rather than just simply making Trotsky the leader. And that is what happened. So you had people like Kaganovich, Voroshilov and so forth joining the CC, and soon making it up to the Politburo. This did *not* help.

...
Again, looking at the biographies and correspondence of Marx and Engels, it does not appear that they were referring to themselves, but speaking more generally, more abstractly. But even if that is not the case, and I am wrong in that assessment, there is a larger point to be understood here: the view that elements of the bourgeoisie or petty bourgeoisie could become positive contributors to the proletarian movement was written in the context of the emerging bourgeois-democratic revolutions, not as a general principle.

That's not how Marx puts in the Manifesto. Indeed he certainly doesn't say that bourgeois and petty bourgeois socialists have a positive contribution to make to the movement, indeed many pages are devoted to arguing against that conception.

Rather, he says that the best of the bourgeois intelligentsia will *abandon their class,* declass themselves, and come over to the working class, breaking down the division between mental and manual labor that is one of the features of capitalism that Marx devoted quite a bit of attention to in his early writings, and later as well.

In my opinion, this is really the first roots of the Leninist theory of the party, Leninism in a nutshell.

We find this equivocation in the very passage you're referring to ("... in times when the class struggle nears the decisive hour, the progress of dissolution going on within the ruling class, in fact within the whole range of old society, assumes such a violent, glaring character,..."), and it is only reinforced in subsequent statements.

An odd reading, seems to me. The decisive hour of the class struggle is closer these days. At least I should hope so!

It should also be mentioned here that Marx's view on these bourgeois elements changed very rapidly under the pressure of the events of 1848-1850, to the point that, by the time Marx wrote The 18th Brumaire, he had concluded that there was no longer a "progressive bourgeoisie" and never again raised the idea of a section of "enlightened bourgeois" coming to the aid of the proletariat. By the time he wrote The Civil War in France, that conclusion was beginning to be extended to the petty bourgeoisie.

Here you're comparing apples and oranges. The bourgeois whom he hoped would still be at least somewhat willing to carry out a revolution in Germany in 1948 were *not at all* in the same category in Marx's mind with those bourgeois going over to the side of the proletariat altogether, completely in Marx and Engels's own case and to a partial degree with socialist Utopians like Fourier and Owen.

Be it noted that in the USA at least, the American bourgeoisie *was* still capable of leading a revolution against chattel slavery. Lincoln was a genuine bourgeois revolutionary, whom Marx, quite correctly, supported, albeit critically. So you had Communist League veterans becoming officers in the Union Army, with Marx's enthusiastic approval.

As for Marx's use of the term "de-classed", it is pretty clear that it is not the same as how Lenin used the term in WITBD. Lenin's use of the term owes more to Karl Kautsky and Max Weber than to Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Weber's market-oriented description of classes, as opposed to Marx's production-oriented description, allowed for the concept of an individual being able to remove themselves from the class structure (incidentally, this is fully in line with the Hegelian concept of the State as "Spirit ... elevated ... to the universal object" and the Universal Class from Realphilosophie), whereas Marx understood that only a revolution in social relations and the mode of production can make it possible for someone to step outside of the existing class boundaries. The concept of the lumpenproletarian itself was designed initially as a means of accounting for those who were outside of social relations tied to the mode of production. So it makes sense that Marx would use "lumpen" and "de-classed" interchangeably.

Lenin's ideas owe nothing to Max Weber, as Weber's writings by and large were published after WITBD, and in any case, it is unlikely Lenin ever read Weber. In general, Weber's sociology is best described as Marxism with the class struggle and all traces of it carefully excised. It is indeed strongly influenced by the ideas of German Social Democracy, which it was explicitly intended as a counterweight to.

If Marx truly believed that it was impossible for someone to step outside of existing class boundaries, then he would have remained what he was when he edited the old Rheinische Zeitung, namely a bourgeois liberal whose newspaper was funded by the local Jewish bourgeoisie.

Actually this is a quite silly argument. Do you really believe that everybody on Revleft, for example, whose parents are petty-bourgeois and even bourgeois, should therefore be barred from participating in the revolutionary movement as a class enemy? Come on!

As for the lumpenproletariat, it is a decomposition product of the working class, not of higher class levels. Obviously. It is the lumpenproletariat after all.

For that matter, though I don't go for the old Black Panther concept of the lumpenproletariat as the vanguard of the Revolution, replacing the proletariat, applying Marx's words on that subject mechanically to a very different contemporary reality would be a big mistake, especially in America, where it could have racist implications.

Theoretically speaking, the reason that the working class is the basis for socialist revolution is because it is the only class in society whose *objective interests* correspond to socialism.

But the whole point about being a member of the human race, a "species being" as the early Marx put it, is that humans *are not* rigidly chained to their objective positions in class society, because they are humans and not just animals, and have minds and can think.

You lost me here. What sentence?.

See the "nutshell" above in this posting.

Yes and no. On the one hand, the Rules of the League did become the archetypical form for the statutes, rules and constitutions of a number of political organizations calling themselves socialist and communist. At the same time, though, the underlying content was vastly different from that found in the League. I hate to echo the words of an inveterate opportunist and petty-bourgeois dilettante like Louis Proyect, but he has a point when he cautions the rest of us to not romanticize past organizations.

The Communist League may have had a pretty organization on paper, but in reality it was a godawful mess. Many of the League's communities and circles were run like fiefdoms by individuals and cliques who regularly ignored decisions by the Central Committee. Members and emissaries would disappear for weeks or months at a time, often times making their reappearance as part of a different organization (and League funds being redirected to these groups). Only one issue of the League's Central Organ, Kommunistische Zeitschrift (Communist Magazine) ever appeared, and that was in 1847. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung was a personal project of Marx and Engels, listed as an "Organ of Democracy" (and later a "Political-Economic Review"), not a League publication. And the Willich-Schapper split in the League in 1850 effectively killed the organization, though it limped on for two more years.

Well, it was the first time 'round, so naturally nothing worked smoothly. Though, come to think of it, the sort of thing described above is not exactly unheard of in the history of Communism and Trotskyism either, is it? Indeed, I'll even go so far as to say that in the early history of the Spartacist League, such things happened too...

This BTW is one notion definitely not original to me. The Spartacists were doing research in the archives, and found a copy of the *actual* organizational rules of the Communist League, and noticed that they were remarkably similar to their own rules, right down to some rather small details. And wrote about this in their theoretical magazine. I *think*this was in connection with their publication of the Comintern org rules as a bulletin of their Prometheus Library. That was my inspiration for this comment.

The parties of the Second and Third Internationals were more organized and disciplined, but much of that came from them appropriating the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois methods of organization. The forms established by the League were kept to a large extent, but the underlying content -- the organizational culture -- was qualitatively changed. The parties of these Internationals, as well as those of the various components considering themselves a part of the distended 1938 "Fourth International", have much more in common with each other than they do with either the League or the IWMA.

Again, yes and no. Analogies can only go so far before they begin to break down, and this one does it rather quickly. Until I see Jim Robertson challenge David North to a duel in Golden Gate Park, as Marx did with August Willich, I'm going to say there's not a lot of similarities.

Anyway, this is about all I can do for now. I have a few major writing obligations to meet before I can return to this discussion. So either have patience or we can agree to pick this discussion up some other time.

I am quite patient. Indeed I too have been spending rather more time on Revleft than I should, and am quite happy to wait till you discharge other more important obligations to continue this interesting discussion.

As to "organizational culture," I certainly have a low opinion of the "organizational culture" of all fragments of what used to be Trotskyism other than the Spartacists, so, leaving the Spartacists aside, I am not inclined to disagree.

Are you sure it was Marx challenging Willich to a duel? Thought it was the other way around. I must say that compared to the contemporary habit of so many alleged leftists of beating each other up, or even killing each other as in Japan, that does have a certain charm.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

27th July 2011, 09:53

Your sloganeering is extremely patronizing. And only someone with no personal relationship to military folks would ever say that the military is not characterized by 'bureaucracy' and 'red tape.' The popular use of bureaucracy is due to bourgeois ideological influence, not realities. Corporations and military forces are highly bureaucratic, but since bureaucratic has become a "'small government' conservative" swear-word, it of course omits those bureaucratic darlings of right-wing business: the military-industrial complex and other major conglomerates.

The organization in Washington most famous for the ability to cut through bureaucracy and red tape is, or at least used to be ... the CIA.

And, of course, a remarkable number of Stalin's speeches in the 1930s were devoted to the struggle against bureaucracy and especially against "red-tapists," one of his favorite epithets.

Essentially, Die Neue Zeit has a conception of bureaucracy that is more Weberian than Marxist. Except that DNZ does not quite agree with Weber's idea that bureaucracy is a good thing.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

27th July 2011, 10:14

http://www.revleft.com/vb/class-never-ruled-t154771/index.html

A number of Politburo members in that era were of peasant or more questionable background, such as Yuri Andropov. However, the combination of Andrei Kirilenko, Alexei Kosygin, Pyotr Masherov, Kirill Mazurov, Arvid Pelshe, Nikolai Podgorny, Nikolai Tikhonov, and Dmitri Ustinov speaks to how, historically, Trotskyism's successes have been limited to Sri Lanka - no success amongst peasants because of Trotsky's personal entertainment of, in his own words, "civil war with the peasantry" (driving peasants into the arms of the Maoists) and little results amongst workers because of Trotsky's own "Transitional Programme" *economism* (growing political struggles out of economic ones). For example, left unity in Russia cannot happen under a Trotskyist banner, but is most likely to happen under the RCWP-RPC banner.

And Andropov was the best, or at any rate least bad, of a very bad lot...

Civil war with the peasantry is a very old Stalinist slander, which should have died after Stalin actually *did* carry out civil war with the peasantry, but apparently hasn't.

Trotsky thought that, since the peasantry is not a socialist class, indeed not a class at all, but a "sack of potatoes" as Marx put it, that peasants wouldn't be actually in favor of socialism and willing to go collective until industry had progressed enough so that the factories could crank out enough tractors so that peasants, practical people that they always are, would figure that they would live better on a collective farm with state-supplied tractors than following a horsedrawn plough.

And that in the intermediary period the workers would need to exercise much tactical skill to keeping them by and large on the side of the workers instead of the other side, using force if necessary.

Certainly not a balancing act doable without an experienced revolutionary party to provide leadership! Stalin's course provided a truly horrible example of what *not* to do.

Have no idea what you mean by "economism" here.

But as for the Russian RCWP, not only are they not a basis for "left unity," it is questionable if they are a left party at all. They are virulent Russian chauvinists, anti-Semites, Chechen haters and gaybashers, much more interested in their "red-brown coalition" with Nazis, Cossacks and orthodox priests than in organizing workers, something they do rarely if at all. If Zyuganov's party is the "moderate" wing of the red-brown coalition, Putin's lapdogs, they are the "militant" wing, therefore perhaps even worse. They exist in a netherworld in between Stalinism and "National Bolshevism."

-M.H.-

See, the problem with "MH" here is that he wants a very different merger, that of program and "links" to the class, whereby "links" have a distinctly non-worker background.

The original Socialist International (i.e., "Second") may not have had a *concentrated* merger, but there was sufficient proletarian composition to consider it as the second of only two or three worker-class internationals (the would-be third being the IWUSP and not the Comintern) (http://www.revleft.com/vb/needed-revived-second-t128934/index.html).

How did the parties of the Second International "appropriate bourgeois and petit-bourgeois methods of organization"? :confused:

Bureaucracy /= red tape or excesses by bureaucrats. Not all careerism is bad, like maintaining full-time staff paid at skilled worker levels - and not grunt minimum wages or having fetishes for in-and-out volunteer work (http://www.revleft.com/vb/practical-issues-and-t150581/index.html?p=2031342&highlight=careerism).

Zanthorus

27th July 2011, 10:16

Oooh look, a marxological debate...

Whenever Marx refers to "our party" in 1948 he is referring to the Communist League, whose Manifesto he wrote.

I don't think that black magick hustla was referring to any of Marx's discussions of the party in 1848, but rather to his comments in a letter (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/letters/71_04_17.htm) to Kuglemann in April of 1871 that "the present rising in Paris – even if it be crushed by the wolves, swine and vile curs of the old society – is the most glorious deed of our Party since the June insurrection in Paris." I also don't think your characterisation of the Communist League as a Third International style party is correct at all, for the simple reason that Marx evidently did not see it as such. In his 'Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne' he is fairly adamant that the League was not at all a party but in fact a secret society which strove for the creation of a proletarian party:

Other secret societies aimed at organising the proletariat into a party, without concerning themselves with the existing governments. This was necessary in countries like Germany where both bourgeoisie and proletariat had succumbed to their semi-feudal governments and where in consequence a victorious assault on the existing governments, instead of breaking the power of the bourgeoisie or in any case of the so-called middle classes, would at first help them to gain power...

The “Communist League”, therefore, was no conspiratorial society, but a society which secretly strove to create an organised proletarian party because the German proletariat is publicly debarred, igni et aqua, from writing, speaking and meeting. Such a society can only be said to conspire against the status quo in the sense that steam and electricity conspire against it.

It is self-evident that a secret society of this kind which aims at forming not the government party of the future but the opposition party of the future could have but few attractions for individuals who on the one hand concealed their personal insignificance by strutting around in the theatrical cloak of the conspirator, and on the other wished to satisfy their narrow-minded ambition on the day of the next revolution, and who wished above all to seem important at the moment, to snatch their share of the proceeds of demagogy and to find a welcome among the quacks and charlatans of democracy.

(Quoting that last paragraph in full simply because I love the bit about the 'quacks and charlatans of democracy')

I think it is pretty clear to anyone reading this text that the Communist League was considered by Marx not as the proletarian party which would lead the assault against the bourgeoisie but rather as a secret society which aimed for the creation of such a party, and whose existence was made necessary by the lack of any form of political freedom. It is certainly not an endorsement of a militarised Third International style party, much less a Trotskyist grouplet bandying itself about as 'the party'.

black magick hustla

27th July 2011, 10:26

first i want to thank you because this is the most thoughtful reply i've gotten to my criticisms yet. maybe because i procrastinate too much and engage pslites too much

But when the moment of revolutionary explosion happens, what emerges does indeed get determined by which leadership with which politics float to the top, which is in turn determined by whether their programs suit the moment and how well and successfully they expound them.
more so than speaking about a specific ideological leadership gaining some impetus, i would argue that the true party is a congregation of militants from different political histories but who can grasp the communist program. i think a good example would be the comintern.

And how well they have rooted themselves in the organizations of the working class in periods of quiescence, when revolutionary work often seems like pounding your head against a stone wall.

i doubt it really. to be honest it probably has to do more with chance than anything else.

Thus, even a small revolutionary group with a correct program and perspective right now could turn itself into a mass party in Tunisia and perhaps in Egypt or Greece, if it was rooted in the organizations of the working class.

Unfortunately, no such thing seems to exist in those three countries, as far as I can tell. Or much of anyplace else for that matter.

lets be clear here. there are plenty of "anti-capitalist" moonbats trying to ride those waves right now. i don't think greece has a shortage of "ascetic third international" types with college degrees trying to do some mad entrysm into labor organizations. but maybe you mean they don't have the correct program or something along those lines?

Here you are quite wrong. Whenever Marx refers to "our party" in 1948 he is referring to the Communist League, whose Manifesto he wrote. He and Engels quite seriously hoped that the Communist League would be able to play the role in Germany that the Jacobins did in France, and come to power in the course of the revolutionary struggle, by gaining the support of the peasantry vs. the Junkers. Marx dubbed this strategic plan "permanent revolution."

well, to be honest you probably know more about marx than myself, and i am not interested too much in a marxological argument. i come from an "ultra-gauche" view-point and that is where my perspective of the party comes from.

To be replaced by what exactly?

i don't know. i don't have all the answers.

Rotten as they are, the unions are the *only* mass organizations of the working class that exist. This was not always the case in the past in America, so if anything unions will be *more* important than in past times.

first, i don't think unions will be "more important" because unions are going to continue downsizing. i don't think there is any hint except a few small unionization drives here and there carried on by the likes of the iww that unionization will spread beyond the traditional demographics it already dominates (teachers, public workers, blue collar workers, etc)

second, maybe permanent, mass revolutionary organizations outside revolutionary periods are an impossibility in this era? its certainly not my idea, it has been argued by plenty of people, both dead and alive.

When the casualized workers revolt, they will do so by unionizing. Or not at all.

that is a very narrow perspective. i think if anything, we can see in the revolts of the turn of the century, which have been led by casualized sectors, to say otherwise. i am not saying this revolts are revolutionary, i don't think we are in a situation yet, but i do think they at least demand some thought, rather than sticking dogmatically to organs born out of different historical specificities when most workers where members of the "traditional industrial working class" and where loyal to labor organizations.

The revolt in Wisconsin, even though it is now looking like a flash in the pan unfortunately, was *totally* through the unions. This is indicative for the future.

it is true the unions played a large part. but the revolt started by what where basically wildcat strikes (calling in sick). it wasn't a revolt mediated by the unions at all, they simply tagged a long.

Popular revolts in America in recent decades have been more revolts of minority communities, in particular the black community, than classic labor revolts. But such revolts, like the ghetto revolts of the Sixties or the Rodney King revolt, essentially have no prospects if not allied with the labor movement.

i think the labor movement has no "prospects" either. i don't think labor organizations in modern USA are capable of anything more than defensive struggles, and even that, i am not sure yet. i think if anything, if there is a communist revolt it will take the form of a mass strike which will also be posed against the unions (a lesson brought to us by the wildcat strikes struck against UAW and management by detroit autoworkers)

That's the most likely scenario for a revolution in America. Imagine a combination of Detroit in 1937 with Los Angeles in 1992, and the ruling class is toast, as the increasingly minority and working class army would go over, if the rebels have a clear program that makes sense.

-M.H.-

there are already dozens of sects with coherent programs. i don't think it has anything to do with the quality of your program at all, but of historic specificities.

A Marxist Historian

27th July 2011, 11:00

Oooh look, a marxological debate...

I don't think that black magick hustla was referring to any of Marx's discussions of the party in 1848, but rather to his comments in a letter (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/letters/71_04_17.htm) to Kuglemann in April of 1871 that "the present rising in Paris – even if it be crushed by the wolves, swine and vile curs of the old society – is the most glorious deed of our Party since the June insurrection in Paris." I also don't think your characterisation of the Communist League as a Third International style party is correct at all, for the simple reason that Marx evidently did not see it as such. In his 'Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne' he is fairly adamant that the League was not at all a party but in fact a secret society which strove for the creation of a proletarian party:

(Quoting that last paragraph in full simply because I love the bit about the 'quacks and charlatans of democracy')

I think it is pretty clear to anyone reading this text that the Communist League was considered by Marx not as the proletarian party which would lead the assault against the bourgeoisie but rather as a secret society which aimed for the creation of such a party, and whose existence was made necessary by the lack of any form of political freedom. It is certainly not an endorsement of a militarised Third International style party, much less a Trotskyist grouplet bandying itself about as 'the party'.

That text was a *defense statement* while the Communists were on trial. Its purpose was not to provide a historical judgment of the Communist League, but to help its members on trial avoid going to jail!

Moreover, by the time he wrote it, it was pretty obvious that the German Revolution of 1848 had failed, and that neither the Communist League nor anybody else was going to lead it to victory. By 1853, to put it in contemporary terminology rather than Marx's, it was clear that the Communist League was a propaganda group not a mass party, indeed one that had better lie low for a while. It dissolved itself on paper, but only on paper.

Read his earlier stuff, especially his letters to Engels not for publication, and Marx puts things quite differently. At that point the Communist League was *indeed* a pretty militarized party, looking for opportunities to seize power, and Engels, or "the General" as Marx called him, spent much time analyzing the military side of things in his letters.

And indeed, as far as Marx was concerned, the Paris Commune was the most glorious deed of his Party, because his Party was the working class. The party which Marx considered himself to be the leader of.

There is one fairly famous letter of Marx's, describing a meeting at which one of Marx's critics demanded to know how and why it was that Marx considered himself to be the leader of the working class.

His answer was (and here I think I am quoting exactly) "because I said so."

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

27th July 2011, 11:42

first i want to thank you because this is the most thoughtful reply i've gotten to my criticisms yet. maybe because i procrastinate too much and engage pslites too much

more so than speaking about a specific ideological leadership gaining some impetus, i would argue that the true party is a congregation of militants from different political histories but who can grasp the communist program. i think a good example would be the comintern.

I do too. In fact, that is good old fashioned Trotskyist orthodoxy, so I suppose that doesn't say much. After all, Trotsky himself was an opponent of Bolshevism until the year 1917.

i doubt it really. to be honest it probably has to do more with chance than anything else.

lets be clear here. there are plenty of "anti-capitalist" moonbats trying to ride those waves right now. i don't think greece has a shortage of "ascetic third international" types with college degrees trying to do some mad entrysm into labor organizations. but maybe you mean they don't have the correct program or something along those lines?

Certainly chance plays a certain role in being at the right place at the right time. As for Greece, bingo, you've got it.

The huge Greek alphabet soup all join "unite for unity" least common denominator nonrevolutionary coalitions, or don't grasp that this is a revolutionary situation and are looking to solve the problem just by higher taxes on the rich or something, or don't grasp that just cancelling the debt and leaving the EU and the Euro don't cut it by themselves, you have to see Greece as a springboard for Europe wide revolution, or a combination of the above and other mistakes too. There are even so called "Trotskyists" who oppose foreign immigration!

There is a Spartacist microgroup, which put out a leaflet last year I thought was almost perfect. But they only manage to put out a leaflet once a year it seems. You have to have *some* minimum level of size and functionality to intervene effectively in a revolutionary situation. Three people, only one of whom knows how to type, only one how to write, and only one actually has a union job, or whatever the "Trotskyist Group of Greece" amounts to, doesn't quite do the trick.

...first, i don't think unions will be "more important" because unions are going to continue downsizing. i don't think there is any hint except a few small unionization drives here and there carried on by the likes of the iww that unionization will spread beyond the traditional demographics it already dominates (teachers, public workers, blue collar workers, etc)

IMHO that is because, and *only* because, the leadership of unions these days in First World countries is so utterly awful.

In Third World countries, where union organizing is *much harder,* you have outright explosions of union organizing in all sorts of countries. Egypt most famously right now, but plenty of other places.

second, maybe permanent, mass revolutionary organizations outside revolutionary periods are an impossibility in this era? its certainly not my idea, it has been argued by plenty of people, both dead and alive.

And plenty of people argue that revolution is impossible in this day and age. I in fact see little difference between these two arguments.

that is a very narrow perspective. i think if anything, we can see in the revolts of the turn of the century, which have been led by casualized sectors, to say otherwise. i am not saying this revolts are revolutionary, i don't think we are in a situation yet, but i do think they at least demand some thought, rather than sticking dogmatically to organs born out of different historical specificities when most workers where members of the "traditional industrial working class" and where loyal to labor organizations.

Decasualizing the causualized is the first demand when the masses start rising. It's the single biggest demand right now in Egypt, where casualization is if anything a bigger problem than in Western countries.

Revolts of the casualized that don't have this as a goal are mere riots, very unlikely to accomplish anything.

it is true the unions played a large part. but the revolt started by what where basically wildcat strikes (calling in sick). it wasn't a revolt mediated by the unions at all, they simply tagged a long.

The sickouts weren't wildcats at all, they were exactly what the union leaders wanted, as actual strikes would have been too militant and got the unions into legal trouble. The unions didn't just "mediate" the revolt, they ran it completely, ran it right into the ground, or to be precise, into the Democratic Party. The militancy was provided by rank and file militants *within* the unions.

Now the revolt has turned into ... a doorbell-knocking movement to recall Republicans and replace them with Democrats. Organized by the same shop stewards who organized the sickouts.

i think the labor movement has no "prospects" either. i don't think labor organizations in modern USA are capable of anything more than defensive struggles, and even that, i am not sure yet. i think if anything, if there is a communist revolt it will take the form of a mass strike which will also be posed against the unions (a lesson brought to us by the wildcat strikes struck against UAW and management by detroit autoworkers)

Wildcat strikes in Detroit always have fizzled out uselessly, if they didn't have an internal union opposition backing them. And usually then too of course.

Given the incredible wretchedness of the UAW at this point, it is quite possible that you could have a mass strike counterposed directly to the union hierarchy. But it would have to be organized by a counter-hierarchy, most likely based in an internal oppositional caucus not afraid of going out and organizing the unorganized with or without bureaucratic permission.

Trying to organize a whole new IWW style revolutionary union movement probably won't fly. The IWW had a great advantage going for it, namely that it was industrial and the AFL was craft. Since unionism these days is mostly industrial, that could only happen maybe in something like the construction industry, and since the construction industry is one of the last bastions of union strength, it won't happen there either.

I mean hey, just think about organizing Wal-Mart. How could that even be done without millions of dollars for the organizing fund and thousands of organizers on the payroll, and who except the existing unions would have the dough for that?

there are already dozens of sects with coherent programs. i don't think it has anything to do with the quality of your program at all, but of historic specificities.

You can have the perfect program, and you *still* need to wait for the right historic specificities. I love the Spartacist program, but they at the moment are getting nowhere fast, and I don't think that is their fault, it is the fault of the whole situation.

But when they do come along, as inevitably they always will, then the quality of your program and your organization determines whether success is possible.

-M.H.-

Die Neue Zeit

27th July 2011, 14:02

Your sloganeering is extremely patronizing. And only someone with no personal relationship to military folks would ever say that the military is not characterized by 'bureaucracy' and 'red tape.'

The armed services proper are different from institutions for veterans affairs, the military-industrial complex, etc.

it of course omits those bureaucratic darlings of right-wing business: the military-industrial complex and other major conglomerates.

I have not ignored those at all, given the financial mess the US is in (private military-industrial oligopolies sure are the way to go, guys :lol: ). I know that corporations are quite hierarchical and bureaucratic (note my distinction).

but since bureaucratic has become a "'small government' conservative" swear-word

It's also a swear-word on the left, from populist mentions in Soviet Constitutions (1977) to Trotskyist sloganeering and further-left myth-making on the subject - as noted by my response to Kiev Communard above.

Essentially, Die Neue Zeit has a conception of bureaucracy that is more Weberian than Marxist. Except that DNZ does not quite agree with Weber's idea that bureaucracy is a good thing.

I don't agree with Weber's assertion that "Bureaucratic administration means fundamentally domination through knowledge." Weber focused too much on knowledge and not enough on bureaucracy as a process, bureaucratic processes, etc.

If we go further by what the wiki says:

Weber's ideal bureaucracy is characterized by hierarchical organization, delineated lines of authority in a fixed area of activity, action taken on the basis of and recorded in written rules, bureaucratic officials need expert training, rules are implemented by neutral officials, career advancement depends on technical qualifications judged by organization, not individuals.

Only one feature there is about bureaucracy-as-process ("action taken on the basis of and recorded in written rules" / proceduralism). Even then, there's no mention of going through the right channels, queues / lineups and other prioritizations, etc.

Leo

28th July 2011, 01:59

A brief note on the classes some of the Bolshevik central committee leaders were from:

Lev Kamenev - petty bourgeois (first generation)I don't know what this means, however Kamanev came from a working class family (his father was a railway worker) and he himself worked in the railroads.

Josef Stalin - petty bourgeois (artisan)Stalin did come from a petty-bourgeois artisan family (son of a cobbler, as is commonly said, although actually a cobbler who owned his own workshop), however he did work in the oil fields in Baku.

Matvei Muranov - petty bourgeois (peasant/politician)Again, although from a petty-bourgeois familiy Muranov worked in the railroads.

Stepan Shahumyan - bourgeois (merchant)Although he had a father who was a merchant, Shaumyan himself actually became a teacher - a job I personally consider to be proletarian.

Jan Berzin - petty bourgeois (peasant)Berzin also worked as a teacher.

Nikolai Bukharin - petty bourgeois (professionals)Bukharin's parents were teachers although I don't think he himself worked for a day in his life.

Grigori Sokolnikov - petty bourgeois (professional)Well, Sokolnikov's dad was a railway doctor, not sure if it counts as petty-bourgeois.

Vladimir Lenin - nobilityI'm not sure whether its fair to say Lenin came from the nobility. His mother was actually a teacher, and his father worked as a school inspector for a time, later rising a little bit in the bureaucracy and being awarded the title of unpropertied nobility because of his services to the state. Lenin himself briefly worked as a lawyer, and he was very unsuccessful.

Ivar Smilga - petty bourgeois (forester -- sheriff of a lord's land)Well, a forester is more of a ranger really. Smilga's forester dad actually ended up being executed by the Russian government following 1905.

Yakov Sverdlov - petty bourgeois (intelligentsia)Actually, I think Sverdlov's dad was an engraver rather than an intellectual, which would regardless categorize his father as petty-bourgeois but as an artisan.

Felix Dzerzhinsky - nobilityDzerzhinsky did indeed come from the nobility, but he himself was a worker. He worked in book-binding factories, and he worked as a shoemaker.

Only Kamenev, Muranov and Nogin had a profession outside of being revolutionaries, and all three of them were petty-bourgeois occupations.Again, other than Nogin (who was a petty-bourgeois artisan, a weaver who owned his shop), they were railroad workers - hardly petty-bourgeois occupations. Nor where they the only people who worked.

My sources for the info here have been, among with other things I've read, mostly wikipedia and spartacus.schoolnet so anyone curious can check them out.

Obviously this list doesn't sound very healthy for the Bolsheviks, but I think it is quite clear that "the Bolshevik leadership was, at the time of the 1917 October Revolution, lumpen-intelligentsia" or at least that it wasn't as simple as that. A good lot of these people were "party workers", they did not live comfortable lives of petty-bourgeois snobs - they lived quite hard and dangerous lives before the revolution. Their intentions, their conviction in the struggle of the working class was pure. Their problem wasn't about their class backgrounds, it was the problems in their theoretical framework. For one, I would say that the idea that you need your best militants outside the factories as professionals contributed to this picture. There were of course other problems with the theories and the practices of the Bolsheviks. However, I think it is important to be fair to them in drawing the lessons. The problem wasn't their class before the revolution - it was the class they ended up becoming after.

Martin Blank

28th July 2011, 02:27

A brief note on the classes some of the Bolshevik central committee leaders were from:

I don't have time to hit each of the points here, so my comments will be brief.

It is true that many of the Bolshevik C.C. members spent short periods of time in working class jobs, as Leo mentioned. But none of them did so for enough of a period of time for it to change their social being. Shahuyman, for example, was a teacher for a while. But what kind of teacher? Not all those considered a teacher are working class. Sverdlov was born to working-class parents, but he was adopted and raised by Maxim Gorky.

Lenin was from a noble family. His father had earned a noble title from the tsar and was called "His Excellency".

A forester in turn-of-the-20th-century Russia was an agent of a landlord. It is only in more modern terms that forester is akin to something like a ranger.

Finally, Muranov did spend some time working on railroads, but he was also a member of the State Duma up until the October Revolution.

Obviously this list doesn't sound very healthy for the Bolsheviks, but I think it is quite clear that "the Bolshevik leadership was, at the time of the 1917 October Revolution, lumpen-intelligentsia" or at least that it wasn't as simple as that. A good lot of these people were "party workers", they did not live comfortable lives of petty-bourgeois snobs - they lived quite hard and dangerous lives before the revolution. Their intentions, their conviction in the struggle of the working class was pure.

The road to hell is paved with good and "pure" intentions, comrade. Besides, it's not what was in their heads that counted, but what they did. And what the Bolshevik leadership did was kill the proletarian revolution in the name of preserving it.

Their problem wasn't about their class backgrounds, it was the problems in their theoretical framework. For one, I would say that the idea that you need your best militants outside the factories as professionals contributed to this picture. There were of course other problems with the theories and the practices of the Bolsheviks. However, I think it is important to be fair to them in drawing the lessons. The problem wasn't their class before the revolution - it was the class they ended up becoming after.

You're looking at this like an "either/or" argument. It wasn't one or the other; it was both. Specifically, it was the class backgrounds that created the problems in the theoretical framework. Social being determines consciousness. As long as the Bolshevik leadership was composed of petty-bourgeois elements, especially as concerns their theoretical and programmatic authors, it was practically inevitable that it would be reflected in their theoretical framework.

Nothing Human Is Alien

28th July 2011, 02:28

And indeed, as far as Marx was concerned, the Paris Commune was the most glorious deed of his Party, because his Party was the working class. The party which Marx considered himself to be the leader of.

"Citizen Marx has just been mentioned; he has perfectly understood the importance of this first congress, where there should be only working-class delegates; therefor he refused the delegateship he was offered in the General Council." - James Carter, Geneva Congress of the First International.

"...Victor Le Lubez ... asked if Karl Marx would suggest the name of someone to speak on behalf of the German Workers.' Marx himself was far too bourgeois to be eligible so he recommended the emigre tailor Johann Georg Eccarius..." - Karl Marx: A Life, Francis Wheen.

"...When such people from other classes join the proletarian movement, the first demand upon them must be that they do not bring with them any remnants of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, etc., prejudices, but that they irreversibly assimilate the proletarian viewpoint. But those gentlemen, as has been shown, adhere overwhelmingly to petty-bourgeois conceptions. …in a labor party, they are a falsifying element. If there are grounds which necessitate tolerating them, it is a duty only to tolerate them, to allow them no influence in party leadership, and to keep in mind that a break with them is only a matter of time. ...In any case, the time seems to have come.” - Engels, Strategy and Tactics of the Class Struggle (private letter to Germany's Social Democratic leadership), 1879.

"The General Council shall consist of workingmen from the different countries represented in the International Association. It shall, from its own members, elect the officers necessary for the transaction of business, such as a treasurer, a general secretary, corresponding secretaries for the different countries, etc." - The International Workingmen's Association, General Rules (emphasis added)

Leo

28th July 2011, 03:43

But none of them did so for enough of a period of time for it to change their social being.I'm not sure, given them actually having jobs and the lives they lived.

I'm sure its clear that they weren't the actual bourgeoisie or even the petty-bourgeoisie though in regards to their daily lives and practices. Lots of these people did lead many strikes after all, and it ain't easy for a shopkeeper to do this.

Shahuyman, for example, was a teacher for a while. But what kind of teacher? Not all those considered a teacher are working class.Of course. There are teachers who own their big or small schools and there are teachers who work. I don't think Shaumyan owned a school though.

Lenin was from a noble family. His father had earned a noble title from the tsar and was called "His Excellency".Well, again, Lenin's father was awarded a noble title because of his state services, which was not that uncommon a thing for upper-middle bureaucrats of the time. Obviously I'm not saying he was from a working class background, but he wasn't actually from the nobility, he simply had a father who was awarded a noble title, something like "sir" in England. I mean Sean Connery has been awarded the title "sir" and no one is gonna claim he is working class - far from it, but his father was a factory worker and his mother a cleaning lady.

A forester in turn-of-the-20th-century Russia was an agent of a landlord. It is only in more modern terms that forester is akin to something like a ranger.Well, you might be right but the fella in question was executed by the Tsarist state, so I'm not sure whether it was as clear cut in the turn-of-the-20th-century Russia either.

Finally, Muranov did spend some time working on railroads, but he was also a member of the State Duma up until the October Revolution.Sure. And people like Liebknecht and Rühle were members of the Reighstag. I am not saying it was the best call, but at least things like this were seen more or less differently in the movement at the time, rightly or wrongly. On this question, the line was not as clear cut - yet.

The road to hell is paved with good and "pure" intentions, comrade.Indeed, of course. The point is that it is not a question of intentions.

Besides, it's not what was in their heads that counted, but what they did. And what the Bolshevik leadership did was kill the proletarian revolution in the name of preserving it.True, but they also died as a part of the same proletarian revolution nevertheless.

I think the question is why this situation, the Bolshevik leadership killing the proletarian revolution in the name of preserving it, while dying as a part of it happened. Certainly, though, it turned out to be quite contrary to their own self-interest, namely that of surviving.

You're looking at this like an "either/or" argument. It wasn't one or the other; it was both. Specifically, it was the class backgrounds that created the problems in the theoretical framework. Social being determines consciousness.Well yes, but not in a mechanistic, automatic way surely. Otherwise every single individual worker would be completely class conscious, and as we all are unfortunately aware, this has never been the case.

As a general rule, social being does determine consciousness. Hence, an overwhelming majority of actually revolutionary organizations have always been made up of proletarians. However there has also been those generally from non-exploiting yet non-proletarian social strata and in some cases even from the upper classes who have came to the conclusion that only the proletariat can save the future of humanity (Engels, De Leon etc). In fact it was the same, definitely non-proletarian Engels who said "When such people from other classes join the proletarian movement, the first demand upon them must be that they do not bring with them any remnants of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, etc., prejudices, but that they irreversibly assimilate the proletarian viewpoint. But those gentlemen, as has been shown, adhere overwhelmingly to petty-bourgeois conceptions. …in a labor party, they are a falsifying element. If there are grounds which necessitate tolerating them, it is a duty only to tolerate them, to allow them no influence in party leadership, and to keep in mind that a break with them is only a matter of time. ...In any case, the time seems to have come" as NHIA quotes him. I wouldn't say these words are coming from someone whose consciousness was determined by his social being. In his case, actually, I'd say his consciousness was determined basically by Mary Burns, the Irish worker he fell in love with. As unlikely and exceptional as things like this may be, statistical chance necessitates that they happen from time to time.

Which brings us to the actual question:

As long as the Bolshevik leadership was composed of petty-bourgeois elements, especially as concerns their theoretical and programmatic authors, it was practically inevitable that it would be reflected in their theoretical framework. I don't think this is true. The Bolshevik Party was a very chaotic party quite contrary to its image, and was accordingly always open to zigzags and evolving. At some points we do see the influence of petty-bourgeois ideology in what they've been saying, and at some points we don't. There is a reason why the periods when we are seeing these tend to be periods of a low level of class-struggle, and why the periods we don't see these tend to be those of much more intense struggles. One explanation of this is that they were simply playing along, with the sole grim intention of taking power for themselves and themselves only, thus lying every time they called for all power to the workers' councils. I don't buy that for it goes into being an argument about their intentions. I think that being, as a party, solidly based on the proletariat, being overwhelmingly an organization of the militant workers, the Bolsheviks militants were effected themselves by the struggles of the proletariat and in turn managed to effect the whole party, including the not in any way overwhelmingly proletarian leadership. At the most decisive moments, like the WW1, Zimmerwald, the February Revolution, the July Days, the Kornilov affair and so on, it was not the class basis of the central committee but that of the whole party determining its actions as well as the actions of the leadership.

I do not deny that the theoretical mistakes of the Bolshevik's were effected by the class backgrounds of some of their theorists to an extent, and I am not saying that these weaknesses did not contribute to the degeneration of this process. I am however saying that they were not the main reason, which was something else, something bigger. History, after all, is made by bigger things than the theories, mistaken or not, of a small group of individuals regardless of their class backgrounds.

Os Cangaceiros

28th July 2011, 04:02

This is a good discussion. Very informative for me.

Don't have anything to add besides that. Carry on. :sleep:

Nothing Human Is Alien

28th July 2011, 04:33

American workers are extremely militant when given the opportunity to be, but have *no* socialist consciousness, or any other sort of political consciousness not shoved down their throats by the American capitalist class, which is very very good at that. Social backwardness of all sorts is rife. I mean hey, a lotta white workers really do like Sarah Palin. That's not just phony media hysteria.

"Marx believed that the conditions of life and work of the proletariat would force the working class to behave in ways that would ultimately transform society. In other words, what Marx said was: We’re not talking about going door-to-door and making workers into ideal socialists. You’ve got to take workers as they are, with all their contradictions, with all their nonsense. But the fact that society forces them to struggle begins to transform the working class. If white workers realize they can’t organize steel unless they organize black workers, that doesn’t mean they’re not racist. It means that they have to deal with their own reality, and that transforms them. Who were the workers who made the Russian Revolution? Sexists, nationalists, half of them illiterate. Who were the workers in Polish Solidarity? Anti-Semitic, whatever. That kind of struggle begins to transform people." - Martin Glaberman

A Marxist Historian

28th July 2011, 08:31

"Citizen Marx has just been mentioned; he has perfectly understood the importance of this first congress, where there should be only working-class delegates; therefor he refused the delegateship he was offered in the General Council." - James Carter, Geneva Congress of the First International.

"...Victor Le Lubez ... asked if Karl Marx would suggest the name of someone to speak on behalf of the German Workers.' Marx himself was far too bourgeois to be eligible so he recommended the emigre tailor Johann Georg Eccarius..." - Karl Marx: A Life, Francis Wheen.

"...When such people from other classes join the proletarian movement, the first demand upon them must be that they do not bring with them any remnants of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, etc., prejudices, but that they irreversibly assimilate the proletarian viewpoint. But those gentlemen, as has been shown, adhere overwhelmingly to petty-bourgeois conceptions. …in a labor party, they are a falsifying element. If there are grounds which necessitate tolerating them, it is a duty only to tolerate them, to allow them no influence in party leadership, and to keep in mind that a break with them is only a matter of time. ...In any case, the time seems to have come.” - Engels, Strategy and Tactics of the Class Struggle (private letter to Germany's Social Democratic leadership), 1879.

"The General Council shall consist of workingmen from the different countries represented in the International Association. It shall, from its own members, elect the officers necessary for the transaction of business, such as a treasurer, a general secretary, corresponding secretaries for the different countries, etc." - The International Workingmen's Association, General Rules (emphasis added)

And the First International was -- a failure. As an amorphous party of all workers, Marx finally decided it had to be dissolved, and he dissolved it.

That he didn't have any official position in the organization did not matter, because the worker-delegates, after the Bakuninists had been shown the door, knew that he was its leader nonentheless, and had faith in him. So when he told them it was time to dissolve it, they did so.

It was useful for the purpose of organizing an at that time unorganized working class. Its membership criteria reflected that, preventing middle class radicals from taking it over, as was attempted by bourgeois feminists in New York for example.

But after the Paris Commune put the issue of working class power on the agenda, it had passed its time.

Trying to build another First International all over again, almost a century and a half later, would be like a child trying to climb back into the womb.

-M.H.-

black magick hustla

28th July 2011, 09:10

The huge Greek alphabet soup all join "unite for unity" least common denominator nonrevolutionary coalitions, or don't grasp that this is a revolutionary situation and are looking to solve the problem just by higher taxes on the rich or something, or don't grasp that just cancelling the debt and leaving the EU and the Euro don't cut it by themselves, you have to see Greece as a springboard for Europe wide revolution, or a combination of the above and other mistakes too. There are even so called "Trotskyists" who oppose foreign immigration!

suprise surprise, the dominant ideas are the ones of the ruling class, and in times of crisis and working class combativity, the left wing of capital will try to play its cards.

There is a Spartacist microgroup, which put out a leaflet last year I thought was almost perfect. But they only manage to put out a leaflet once a year it seems. You have to have *some* minimum level of size and functionality to intervene effectively in a revolutionary situation. Three people, only one of whom knows how to type, only one how to write, and only one actually has a union job, or whatever the "Trotskyist Group of Greece" amounts to, doesn't quite do the trick.
even if the sparts had the amount of money the bourgeois parties do, i am almost certain that they would at best be marginal (rather than almost nonexistent). i think it is silly to think that the radicalized youth in greece is just waiting for the very peculiar and ghettoized politics the sparts have to offer. the communist program is not a question of PR work.

IMHO that is because, and *only* because, the leadership of unions these days in First World countries is so utterly awful.

and this is the problem of trotskysm, everything is reduced to a question of leadership. you'd be hardpressed to find unionization drives in the third world that deal with non-traditional demographics, like casualized youth. the unions are being displaced and turned irrelevant because of the nature of capitalism in decomposition, not because of bad leaders. decomposition and rot is just particularly acute in the first world.

In Third World countries, where union organizing is *much harder,* you have outright explosions of union organizing in all sorts of countries. Egypt most famously right now, but plenty of other places.

these countries have a larger "traditional working class" base, but that base will be eroded soon.

And plenty of people argue that revolution is impossible in this day and age. I in fact see little difference between these two arguments.
i think this is another problem of trotskyism. they fail at grasping what some people call "form" and "content". trotskysts are obsessed with specific "forms" i.e., the union, the mass party, democratic centralism, etc, but apt forms are variable and dependent on the particular specificities of the times.

Decasualizing the causualized is the first demand when the masses start rising. It's the single biggest demand right now in Egypt, where casualization is if anything a bigger problem than in Western countries.

i don't think there is going to be a "decasualization", i don't think today the struggles are struggles for gains. that is why there is no such thing as a minimum program today. maximum program motherfuckas. the greek working class is screwed if anything is short than world communist revolution.

Revolts of the casualized that don't have this as a goal are mere riots, very unlikely to accomplish anything.

i don't think people argue for just mere riots, but they are at the very least more interesting than trying to build a program or an organ out of an ahistorical nothing. riots are not just a particularity, they are contingent to the times and they accompany new ways of organization and struggle. they are ad-hoc to whatever its brewing in the putrefaction of all economic and social relations.

i'll try to answer the rest of your points later

Nothing Human Is Alien

28th July 2011, 10:41

A Marxist Historian

30th July 2011, 00:10

"Marx believed that the conditions of life and work of the proletariat would force the working class to behave in ways that would ultimately transform society. In other words, what Marx said was: We’re not talking about going door-to-door and making workers into ideal socialists. You’ve got to take workers as they are, with all their contradictions, with all their nonsense. But the fact that society forces them to struggle begins to transform the working class. If white workers realize they can’t organize steel unless they organize black workers, that doesn’t mean they’re not racist. It means that they have to deal with their own reality, and that transforms them. Who were the workers who made the Russian Revolution? Sexists, nationalists, half of them illiterate. Who were the workers in Polish Solidarity? Anti-Semitic, whatever. That kind of struggle begins to transform people." - Martin Glaberman

I would agree with all of the above, in fact a time or two I got to see that happening on a small scale. It is indeed struggle that transforms consciousness, not just left wing propaganda, necessary as that is.

Except for the last bit about Polish Solidarity. Was Poland "liberated" when Solidarity took power? Well, not according to Polish workers, who tremendously regretted their horrible mistake of having brought them to power.

Two-three years of Walesa as President, and the workers voted in the old "dictator" Jaruzelski to replace him, and the "reformed" old Stalinist party was back in office as the government for the next decade.

And lost it again because they didn't bring back what by then workers saw as the good old days, but instead just continued turning Poland back into a capitalist country, joined NATO, sent troops to Iraq, and all that.

When Walesa tried to go back to work at the shipyards, Jaruzelski had to send guards to protect him from being beaten up by his fellow workers.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

30th July 2011, 00:32

Forgot these too:

A long discussion then took place as to the mode of presenting the address and the propriety of having a MP with the deputation; this was strongly opposed by many members who said working men should rely on themselves and not seek for extraneous aid. - Minutes of 29 Nov. 1864, in Gen. Council F.I. 1864-66, [v.1], 54.

... part of the Englishmen on the Committee wanted to have the deputation introduced by a member of Parliament since it was customary. This hankering was defeated by the majority of the English and the unanimity of the Continentals, and it was declared, on the contrary, that such old English customs ought to be abolished. - Marx

In 1865 the General Council announced it had refused the proposal of a rich English lord who had offered an annual subsidy to be the organization’s “protector.”

"These benevolent patronizers, profoundly ignorant of the real aspirations and the real movement of the working classes, forget one thing. All the socialist founders of sects belong to a period in which the working class themselves were neither sufficiently trained and organized by the march of capitalist society itself to enter as historical agents upon the world’s stage, nor were the material conditions of their emancipation sufficiently matured in the old world itself. Their misery existed, but the conditions of their own movement did not yet exist." - Marx

What class are the leaders of the Sparts and it's offshoots? The CWI? The IMT? How about Jack Barnes and Mary Alice-Waters? David North? Bob Avakian? How about Callinicos, etc.?

There are ups and downs in the class struggle, booms and crises, etc.

I don't see anything in Marx's and Engel's that shows them backing away from drawing class lines. In fact, that increased as time went on.

Not that it would necessarily matter if it did, since I don't subscribe to the MECW as if it were Holy Writ. What matters is reality, and from the beginning of the modern workers movement until today there have been all sorts of elements from other classes that have attempted to wield the forces of the working class for their own ends, consciously or otherwise.

Toward the end of his life, Engels wrote:

"A whole generation lies between then [the founding of the League] and now. At that time Germany was a country of handicraft and of domestic industry based on hand labor; now it is a big industrial country still undergoing continual industrial transformation. At that time one had to seek out one by one the workers who had an understanding of their position as workers and of their historico-economic antagonism to capital, because this antagonism itself was only just beginning to develop. Today the entire German proletariat has to be placed under exceptional laws, merely in order to slow down a little the process of its development to full consciousness of its position as an oppressed class. At that time the few persons whose minds had penetrated to the realization of the historical role of the proletariat had to forgather in secret, to assemble clandestinely in small communities of 3 to 20 persons. Today the German proletariat no longer needs any official organization, either public or secret. The simple self-evident interconnection of like-minded class comrades suffices, without any rules, boards, resolutions or other tangible forms, to shake the whole German Empire to its foundations. Bismarck is the arbiter of Europe beyond the frontiers of Germany, but within them there grows daily more threatening the athletic figure of the German proletariat that Marx foresaw already in 1844, the giant for whom the cramped imperial edifice designed to fit the philistine is even now becoming inadequate and whose mighty stature and broad shoulder are growing until the moment comes when by merely rising from his seat he will shatter the whole structure of the imperial constitution into fragments. And still more. The international movement of the European and American proletariat has become so much strengthened that not merely its first narrow form — the secret League — but even its second, infinitely wider form — the open International Working Men’s Association — has become a fetter for it, and that the simple feeling of solidarity based on the understanding of the identity of class position suffices to create and to hold together one and the same great party of the proletariat among the workers of all countries and tongues. The doctrine which the League represented from 1847 to 1852, and which at that time could be treated by the wise philistines with a shrug of the shoulders as the hallucinations of utter madcaps, as the secret doctrine of a few scattered sectarians, has now innumerable adherents in all civilized countries of the world, among those condemned to the Siberian mines as much as among the gold diggers of California...."

Which is not something anyone here has suggested. On the other hand, you have voiced your admiration for the Sparts, which you just got done saying has rules (though obviously not practice or makeup) remarkably similar to those of the First International.

Not the First International, but the Communist League. And not the *initial* rules of Weitling's "League of the Just," which were indeed dictatorial Blanquist conspiracism, but the rules they adopted at more or less the same time they adopted the Manifesto, which were centralized but *also* quite democratic. Democratic centralist, to use the contemporary phrase.

That the First refused to allow supervision by ruling class members of Parliament or accept a subsidy from an English lord was very good indeed, and shows that it had more financial integrity than the ISO does now, with their quarter mill from an NGO.

As for the various leaders of contemporary leftism and their personal class background, I don't see why *that* is any more meaningful than the fact that the class background of Marx and Engels was not working class.

Weitling, by the way, agreed with you on this one, and did his best to drive those suspicious bourgeois Marx and Engels out of the movement he had founded. Plus he didn't like the way they criticized so many of his ideas, notably the one about how the communist program should include "nationalizing women."

The First International perhaps overdid it when it proscribed nonworkers, even Marx himself, from occupying official positions in the organization. But Marx was all for keeping out the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie by any means necessary, as the takeover of the International by bourgeois and petty-bourgeois radicals, Mazzini nationalists in Italy, feminists in New York, etc., was a *real danger.*

The danger was not that of individual people, but *entire bourgeois organizations* entering into the International and taking it over. The contemporary equivalent would be if say the Greens marched into a workers party and tried to take it over, or some splitoff from the Democratic Party.

If Ralph Nader were to wake up one day and decide he'd been all wrong all his life, and reject ecologism and become a communist, and if he were sincere about it, sure, he'd be a great asset to the movement. But the Greens are a bourgeois party, and anyone with any doubt about that should just look at the Greens in Germany, who are just as bitter enemies of the workers as is Merkel and her Christian Democrats.

*That's* the kind of thing Marx was worried about when he supported insisting that all delegates to the International be workers. Especially since he knew that old veterans of the Communist League who had been loyally following Marx since the 1840s were key functionaries in the organization, so he didn't *need* to have a post.

Finally, as to Engels's comments at the end of his life on the situation in Germany, obviously he was wrong, as the subsequent history of the Second International in general and German Social Democracy in particular clearly demonstrated. "Revisionism" broke out almost before his body cooled.

-M.H.-

black magick hustla

30th July 2011, 00:58

Except for the last bit about Polish Solidarity. Was Poland "liberated" when Solidarity took power? Well, not according to Polish workers, who tremendously regretted their horrible mistake of having brought them to power.

-M.H.-

this is missing the point though. every time there is a class struggle different bourgeois factions will try to wrestle control of it. the importance of the 1980s polish wildcat strikes was that it was part of the waves of class fights that began in the 70s and ebbed in the 90s. the soviet state was an enemy of the world working class, in as much as the western states were.

Jose Gracchus

30th July 2011, 01:35

I think its totally deluded to pretend that the Polish centrally administered economy had any legs of life left in it (that doesn't mean the various bourgeois policies offered were choices for the working class, just that "keep things the same" was not a credible working-class program).

A Marxist Historian

30th July 2011, 06:58

this is missing the point though. every time there is a class struggle different bourgeois factions will try to wrestle control of it. the importance of the 1980s polish wildcat strikes was that it was part of the waves of class fights that began in the 70s and ebbed in the 90s. the soviet state was an enemy of the world working class, in as much as the western states were.

Nonsense. Solidarity was funded by the CIA, took its leadership from the Polish pope, and was counterrevolutionary and reactionary through and through and to the core. No bourgeois faction wrested control over it, it was Walesa himself and the people around him who founded Solidarity who took the power, restored capitalism, and threw the workers who had put them into office out of their jobs, destroyed the social services, and slashed their wages.

Nor was this any huge surprise. As early as 1981 or 2 or thereabouts when Walesa came to America, he endorsed Reagan as a great president and had meetings with Wall Street bankers and corporate executives and *promised* them that when Solidarity took power, things would be run to their liking.

Solidarity, not the Soviet Union, were the enemies of the Polish working class. Unfortunately, the Polish workers did not realise this until it was too late. Which is of course ultimately the fault of the Polish Stalinist misleaders of the working class, but that is another story.

-M.H.-

Jose Gracchus

30th July 2011, 07:30

A Marxist Historian

30th July 2011, 08:06

The mass strikes of 79-80 were a product of the Polish working class. Thanks to the Stalinist repressions, all the communist and socialist elements in Solidarnosc (and they most certainly did exist) were destroyed, and only the Catholic social-patriots under the protection of the CIA had any capacity to survive during the martial law. Thanks to Jaruzelski, the fate of the Stalinist regime was sealed.

And of course, to the Spart it is always about whether we provide those workers with adequate "leadership" (of course, in the trade unions). I guess I take comfort in the fact your politics will quickly become as fossilized as dynastic intrigues.

It is clear to you the working class is nothing but a passive subject, for whom the only choice or agency is in having the good luck and good sense to pick its proper leadership.

Poland had been having working class rebellions ever since 1956. By the time Solidarity had been founded, yes leftist rebels had been repressed by Gomulka and his successors, though never with the brutality and thoroughness of other Soviet bloc countries. Which is why a Polish Spartacist group, founded *before* the fall of the Jaruzelski regime, exists now. They came out of a Marxist left wing in the old Polish CP youth group who got their education from veteran Polish Trotskyist Ludwik Hass, who'd gotten out of prison decades earlier.

Gomulka of course got *put in* by the first of those rebellions in '56.

There were *absolutely no* communist elements in Solidarity. None. Zip. Nada. Not even some wandering Maoists or other. Hatred for communism was the absolute Solidarity founding platform.

Something like Solidarity didn't *automatically* have to come out of the strikes in '79 and '80, which were simply strikes for higher wages, unlike previous working class rebellions which had tended to have a left wing political character. But it did.

At the founding convention of Solidarity, some old right-wing Polish Social Democrats tried to put up a motion calling for Solidarity to come out for socialism. They were, quite literally, laughed off the convention floor. Right from the getgo, it was an anti-communist, anti-socialist, Polish nationalist, Catholic organization, whose hero was not Karl Marx but Pope Paul II, at whose feet they quite literally worshipped whenever he visited Poland. Irving Brown, Mr. AFL/CIA himself, Jay Lovestone's bagman in Europe after WWII, attended the convention and was an honored guest, not least of course for all the CIA dollars he was funneling their way.

Working class agency can only be effective through the tool nowadays for working class power, a revolutionary working class political party.

Without that, yes workers become victims of bourgeois manipulation. As is going on right now all over the world, in case you hadn't noticed.

-M.H.-

Kiev Communard

30th July 2011, 08:47

Poland had been having working class rebellions ever since 1956. By the time Solidarity had been founded, yes leftist rebels had been repressed by Gomulka and his successors, though never with the brutality and thoroughness of other Soviet bloc countries. Which is why a Polish Spartacist group, founded *before* the fall of the Jaruzelski regime, exists now. They came out of a Marxist left wing in the old Polish CP youth group who got their education from veteran Polish Trotskyist Ludwik Hass, who'd gotten out of prison decades earlier.

Yes, the post-1968 Polish Left was at first promising and then proved a great disappointment. Perhaps this has something to do with Poland's legacy of irredentist nationalism, which tends to lead the local pro-socialist elements in the dead-end of nationalist policies.

Gomulka of course got *put in* by the first of those rebellions in '56.

This doesn't make him a "workers' state" leader any more than the fact a lot of Chinese emperors were "put in" by peasants' revolts and gave some concessions to peasantry meant that these emperors were leading a "deformed peasants' state".

There were *absolutely no* communist elements in Solidarity. None. Zip. Nada. Not even some wandering Maoists or other. Hatred for communism was the absolute Solidarity founding platform.

Oh, I do not think the majority of Solidanosc members were conscious anti-communists, at first they probably desired the Yugoslav-style "market socialist" system, but when it became clear that the latter was unraveling as well, they turned to Western corporate capitalism as to the only other "alternative" they probably knew. And here it is not their fault, but the fault of the Polish Stalinist regime in limiting the working class capacity to receive objective information from abroad.

Something like Solidarity didn't *automatically* have to come out of the strikes in '79 and '80, which were simply strikes for higher wages, unlike previous working class rebellions which had tended to have a left wing political character. But it did.

Well, the majority of trade unions (even some formerly revolutionary syndicalist unions, such as SAC in Sweden) are limited to the same kind of action, but you are still presumably in favor of their "revolutionizing", don't you? Then why do you write off Solidarnosc completely? After all, the modern Polish Party of Labor (even though it is practically reformist, it supports socialism in theory) was founded by disgruntled left-wing Solidarnosc members in the 1990s.

At the founding convention of Solidarity, some old right-wing Polish Social Democrats tried to put up a motion calling for Solidarity to come out for socialism. They were, quite literally, laughed off the convention floor.

Yes, because the only association these workers might have with the word "socialism" was Stalinism. I believe if the terms "revolutionary syndicalism" or "workers' democracy", for instance, had been used, the response would have been much more positive

Right from the getgo, it was an anti-communist, anti-socialist, Polish nationalist, Catholic organization, whose hero was not Karl Marx but Pope Paul II, at whose feet they quite literally worshipped whenever he visited Poland.

Oh yes, these stupid, backward Polish reactionary workers. How dared they not to follow the only true revolutionary party in the world - the Spartacists (which was busy denouncing their legitimate struggles for self-management and better working conditions as the plot of CIA agents) :rolleyes:?

Working class agency can only be effective through the tool nowadays for working class power, a revolutionary working class political party.

Without that, yes workers become victims of bourgeois manipulation. As is going on right now all over the world, in case you hadn't noticed.

-M.H.-

Except that the Leninist party-model you support has proved a failure in the 20th century, as save for Russia itself (where Leninists were just one of the general revolutionary socialist movement's factions, the "vanguard" parties failed everywhere even to take power in their hands, and where they did it, they turned from state capitalism to private capitalism pretty fast. And the majority of even Leninist parties that now participate in anything resembling a revolutionary struggle are Maoists (whom your party does not like too much), so the sterile Brezhnevism the Spartacists actually supported in the Cold War years as "deformed workers' states" is a total failure in all respects even from a strictly "vanguardist" point of view.

Jose Gracchus

30th July 2011, 08:49

Lol thar was even a spart groop in poland

black magick hustla

30th July 2011, 08:52

i imagine it was hard for a polish man to call himself a communist when "Communism" was giving his friends lengthy prison sentences and food shortages

Jose Gracchus

30th July 2011, 09:09

RedTrackWorker

30th July 2011, 10:35

It is just an outright lie, as well. Yes there were Catholic rightists in 79-81, but there were also socialists and leftists, Luxembourg and Marxism were discussed within the movement. Solidarity as a settled trade union was a reactionary movement, but this Spart just wants to impart his rigid fossilized political view on historical working classes, and damn them all for not reading enough Workers' Vanguard. Give me a fucking break, maybe when he's done shedding tears for Stalinists he can explain to us why Sparts call for U.S. troops to remain in occupation of Haiti for their own good. More evidence of their view of workers when they aren't being led by their Popes, I mean Sparts.

The SL line on the Polish revolution reveals all the worst aspects of their politics (see the LRP article here (http://www.lrp-cofi.org/PR/poland10.html)).

First, as The Inform Candidate points out, they try to write off the movement by attacking the politics of those in control of their mass organizations--one may as well denounce any AFLCIO strike here on those grounds.

Second, they put forward the disgusting line attacking the workers, saying

the strikers are demanding the biggest free lunch the world has ever seen. The Poles demand that they live like West Germans. There’s a joke in Poland: we pretend to work and the government pretends to pay us. In West Germany one works.

Third, it should not be forgotten that while they backtracked on the line on Haiti, they have not backtracked on their supporting, like the Wall Street Journal did, the Russian army to intervene "in their necessarily brutal, stupid way" (Workers Vanguard, September 25, 1981).

So their political line was calling for an end to worker unrest and an increase in labor productivity--if necessary at the end of an invading army's bayonets and definitely at the bayonet points of the local ruling regime.

A Marxist Historian

31st July 2011, 08:54

Yes, the post-1968 Polish Left was at first promising and then proved a great disappointment. Perhaps this has something to do with Poland's legacy of irredentist nationalism, which tends to lead the local pro-socialist elements in the dead-end of nationalist policies.

This doesn't make him a "workers' state" leader any more than the fact a lot of Chinese emperors were "put in" by peasants' revolts and gave some concessions to peasantry meant that these emperors were leading a "deformed peasants' state".

In 1956, with the Hungarian workers revolting against Stalinism and forming workers councils, and former Stalinist bureaucrats like Pal Maleter taking the helm of this movement under slogans of returning to Leninism, overthrowing Stalinism and bringing back workers rule, and the official Hungarian party leader Nagy bowing to this movement more or less, you had a Polish movement inspired by this revolution, which pushed out the Khrushchev loyal leaders and put Gomulka in power.

When Khrushchev threatened to invade Poland to kick Gomulka out, he mobilized the workers behind him and Khrushchev was forced to back down.

A comparison of this with peasant rebellions and dynasty changes in precapitalist China strikes me as absurd.

Unfortunately, Gomulka was simply a Polish not a Moscow loyal Stalinist, who wished to see socialism in one country in Poland instead of Russia. He and his successors undertook a deliberate policy of fostering Polish bourgeois nationalism and Catholicism, as a counterbalance both to too much Soviet influence and a rebirth of revolutionary Marxism.

The result thirty years later, after continual Polish Stalinist betrayals, economic failures and worker and student rebellions, was Solidarnosc.

Oh, I do not think the majority of Solidanosc members were conscious anti-communists, at first they probably desired the Yugoslav-style "market socialist" system, but when it became clear that the latter was unraveling as well, they turned to Western corporate capitalism as to the only other "alternative" they probably knew. And here it is not their fault, but the fault of the Polish Stalinist regime in limiting the working class capacity to receive objective information from abroad.

Well, I was around at the time and following events. Like everyone else, I at first had much hope for this movement, and when the Spartacists maintained that this had simply become a right wing movement for counterrevolution, I was initially skeptical.

Then I picked up the daily newspaper and read that at the Gdansk shipyards, the heart of the movement, the workers had forced the regime to rename the Lenin shipyards the Pilsudsky shipyards!

For those who do not know, Pilsudsky was the right wing dictator in Poland after WWI, who many argue was simply a fascist.

No, there was absolutly no interest whatsoever in the Tito model in Poland by then. Which marked a change. In 1956 the Hungarian and Polish workers were very interested in the Tito model, and the Hungarian workers councils were surprised and disappointed when Tito supported the Soviet suppression of their revolt.

But by 1980 Yugoslavia was already in huge economic trouble with extremely high inflation and unemployment, and no longer attractive to anybody, and least of all the Poles.

No, the founding convention of Solidarnosc in the year 1980 was very clear about what the movement wanted. It wanted capitalism, as in America and England and West Germany, where the workers seemed to them to be living so much better than in Poland. Its leader, Walesa, was visiting the West and hobnobbing with his good friends Reagan and Thatcher, who he frequently praised.

Was this the fault of the Stalinists? Of course. But that did not change the situation.

Well, the majority of trade unions (even some formerly revolutionary syndicalist unions, such as SAC in Sweden) are limited to the same kind of action, but you are still presumably in favor of their "revolutionizing", don't you? Then why do you write off Solidarnosc completely? After all, the modern Polish Party of Labor (even though it is practically reformist, it supports socialism in theory) was founded by disgruntled left-wing Solidarnosc members in the 1990s.

I had never heard of the party you are referring to. The main workers party in Poland, which at this point is very similar to the British Labour Party, is simply the organizational continuation of the old Polish Communist Party after a hasty face lift. I am not sure whether it still formally supports socialism or has rejected it in the Tony Blair fashion. It was re-elected to office not long after Solidarity came to power, as workers were horrified, disgusted and outraged by what Solidarity did to Poland and the workers, and voters in general, *wanted to bring Polish Stalinism back*!

The ex-Stalinists betrayed this working class aspiration, as they always have, and as their new mentors such as Tony Blair have in England. After a decade of their rule, they discredited themselves with the Polish workers in exactly the same way as "New Labour" under Blair and Brown discredited itself with the English workers. So now you have the Tories back in power in England and the political descendants of Solidarity back in power in Poland.

I am unfamiliar with left wing splits from Solidarity. There were many dissident movements and splitoffs from Solidarity, but usually they have been to the right, moving to extreme Polish nationalism and outright fascism.

I checked Wikipedia for this PPL, and it describes them as a tiny little party with no representation in parliament and little support. It can hardly be considered a true descendant of Solidarity, which at one point was a mass movement the great majority of the Polish working class supported.

Yes, because the only association these workers might have with the word "socialism" was Stalinism. I believe if the terms "revolutionary syndicalism" or "workers' democracy", for instance, had been used, the response would have been much more positive

Gomulka and his successors billed themselves as "reformers," and rhetoric about "workers democracy" and so forth emanated from official platforms quite regularly. They discredited all forms of left wing rhetoric, not just the usual "Marxist Leninist" dogmatism one heard in the Soviet Union, and prepared the way for Polish workers, jaded by the left in general, to prefer outright capitalism and Catholicism.

The real hero of Solidarity was Pope John Paul II, whose visits to Poland at the invitation of the government resulted in mass outbreaks of Catholic hysteria among the entire population, most certainly including the working class.

Oh yes, these stupid, backward Polish reactionary workers. How dared they not to follow the only true revolutionary party in the world - the Spartacists (which was busy denouncing their legitimate struggles for self-management and better working conditions as the plot of CIA agents) :rolleyes:?

Well, unfortunately for your argument, the Polish workers are not as stupid as you are, my friend.

There have been regularly repeated opinion polls in Poland since the victory of Solidarity in Poland as to whether Jaruzelski suppressing Solidarity in the 1980s was a good idea or not. Something much on the minds of many people in Poland.

During the '90s, Polish opinion was fairly evenly divided, but among workers, the majority thought that it was. And of course it was the workers votes who put Jaruzelski back in office as President, replacing Solidarity leader Lech Walesa.

In the last decade, opinion has been slowly shifting in the reactionary direction, but support for crushing Solidarity continues to be stronger among workers than other sections of society.

Except that the Leninist party-model you support has proved a failure in the 20th century, as save for Russia itself (where Leninists were just one of the general revolutionary socialist movement's factions, the "vanguard" parties failed everywhere even to take power in their hands, and where they did it, they turned from state capitalism to private capitalism pretty fast. And the majority of even Leninist parties that now participate in anything resembling a revolutionary struggle are Maoists (whom your party does not like too much), so the sterile Brezhnevism the Spartacists actually supported in the Cold War years as "deformed workers' states" is a total failure in all respects even from a strictly "vanguardist" point of view.

As you should know by now, I do not consider the Stalinist party model to be anything like the Leninist.

And the Spartacists did not and never did support "Brezhnevism." They simply supported the Soviet Union for the very same reason that they support any other union when it goes on strike against the capitalists, regardless of how reformist, bad and treacherous its leaders are.

The Cold War, which became hot in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Nicaragua and other places in the period between the Soviet defeat of fascism in World War II and the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, was simply a struggle between labor and capital on the grandest scale.

Those who supported the capitalist side in this struggle were scabbing. Polish Solidarity, for example.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

31st July 2011, 09:17

It is just an outright lie, as well. Yes there were Catholic rightists in 79-81, but there were also socialists and leftists, Luxembourg and Marxism were discussed within the movement. Solidarity as a settled trade union was a reactionary movement, but this Spart just wants to impart his rigid fossilized political view on historical working classes, and damn them all for not reading enough Workers' Vanguard. Give me a fucking break, maybe when he's done shedding tears for Stalinists he can explain to us why Sparts call for U.S. troops to remain in occupation of Haiti for their own good. More evidence of their view of workers when they aren't being led by their Popes, I mean Sparts.

I was around at the time, and I get the impression you were not.

Yes, in the very beginnings of the movement, which started after all as a strike movement for higher wages, it did not have a reactionary character from the getgo. But at its very initial founding congress, at which the very name Solidarnosc or Solidarity was first adopted, it became a reactionary movement. Failure to recognize that was just deliberate blindness.

Luxemburg is known to everybody in Poland as an opponent of national self-determination for Poland. All Polish nationalists hate her bitterly, and Solidarity was *nothing* if not a Polish nationalist movement. And Marx was a dirty word for Solidarity.

Various leftists attempted to attach themselves to Solidarity like fleas to a dog, and they talked about Luxemburg and Marx. They were tolerated, just as a dog tolerates fleas up to a point, but starts scratching if they start to irritate him. The fleas did their level best not to irritate, usually pretty successfully.

As for Haiti, yes the Spartacists fucked up big time over that, and afterwards engaged in a remarkable spectacle of public self-flagellation.

Though they never did, as you claim, "call for US troops to maintain occupation." And certainly don't now! What they did was *not* call for kicking them out of Haiti right after the earthquake and criticizing others who did, foolishly and falsely believing that this might interfere with earthquake relief operations.

I don't know of another left group in existence that is even *capable* of engaging in that kind of bitter public self-criticism after a blunder. In a sad way, it is evidence that the Spartacists are the best left group around, as at least they are capable of learning from their mistakes.

You want to know how it happened? Well, since you asked, here is the Spartacists' own explanation.

http://www.spartacist.org/english/esp/62/conf.html

-M.H.-

Jolly Red Giant

31st July 2011, 18:33

As for Haiti, yes the Spartacists fucked up big time over that, and afterwards engaged in a remarkable spectacle of public self-flagellation.

There is a hell of a lot more than that - if the Sparts engaged in 'public self-flagellation' over ever 'fuck-up' they had then it would be a long and very painful time for them.

Kiev Communard

1st August 2011, 20:17

A comparison of this with peasant rebellions and dynasty changes in precapitalist China strikes me as absurd.

A comparison of the full-scale bureaucratic capitalist ruling class with the mere trade union bureaucracy under private capitalism strikes me as absurd as well.

No, the founding convention of Solidarnosc in the year 1980 was very clear about what the movement wanted. It wanted capitalism, as in America and England and West Germany, where the workers seemed to them to be living so much better than in Poland. Its leader, Walesa, was visiting the West and hobnobbing with his good friends Reagan and Thatcher, who he frequently praised.

Do you refer to August-September 1980 congress of delegates? It was clearly far from pro-capitalist - only if you believe that such slogans as "free trade unions" and "the justice, democracy, truth, legality" (vague in themselves) constituted a conscious endorsement of Reaganism, which is hardly a reasonable claim.

Well, unfortunately for your argument, the Polish workers are not as stupid as you are, my friend.

Are you able to discern such thing as a 'sarcasm' at all :lol:?

There have been regularly repeated opinion polls in Poland since the victory of Solidarity in Poland as to whether Jaruzelski suppressing Solidarity in the 1980s was a good idea or not. Something much on the minds of many people in Poland.

During the '90s, Polish opinion was fairly evenly divided, but among workers, the majority thought that it was. And of course it was the workers votes who put Jaruzelski back in office as President, replacing Solidarity leader Lech Walesa.

In the last decade, opinion has been slowly shifting in the reactionary direction, but support for crushing Solidarity continues to be stronger among workers than other sections of society.

This makes me wonder why your organization and presumably you as well support the anti-Dengist resurgence in 1989 instead of decrying it as a "CIA plot". After all, the situation with Tiananmen was completely similar to that of Solidarnosc - in fact, the leading student activists (unlike Solidarnosc workers) there were explicitly right-liberal since the very outset. Is it not 'scabbing' from the point of view of the glorious Spartacist League to support such obvious reactionaries :rolleyes:?

As you should know by now, I do not consider the Stalinist party model to be anything like the Leninist.

You may think what you want, but the historic reality shows exactly that, for all his phony 'anti-bureaucracy' claims in 1921-1922 Lenin was firmly in favour of the Party oligarchy inherited by Stalin.

The Cold War, which became hot in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, El Salvador, Nicaragua and other places in the period between the Soviet defeat of fascism in World War II and the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union, was simply a struggle between labor and capital on the grandest scale.

Those who supported the capitalist side in this struggle were scabbing. Polish Solidarity, for example.

-M.H.-

But is not opposing an internal policy of a given state while supporting its foreign policy a bit...strange? Surely the tankie Stalinists would say that your party itself is hypocritical, claiming to support the USSR but simultaneously calling for the political revolution against the current leadership. From the point of view of simple logics, they would be completely right. It is impossible to be partially for and partially against a particular state. And that is the lesson Trotsky and orthodox Trotskyists, with their "deformed workers' states" never learned.

A Marxist Historian

1st August 2011, 23:55

A comparison of the full-scale bureaucratic capitalist ruling class with the mere trade union bureaucracy under private capitalism strikes me as absurd as well.

A ruling class? Nonsense, just a bureaucracy, with no individual bureaucrat having any organic claim to his privileges whatsoever. And with nothing other than who is momentarily in the good books of the leaders at the top demarcating a member of this "ruling class" from anybody else.

Just what was the relationship of this "class" to the means of production, other than snapping out orders sometimes as to what should be produced? Something most of them didn't do anyway? None whatsoever.

Do you think it is *impossible* for workers' government to become bureaucratized, for its leaders to be corrupted in the same fashion leaders of reformist trade unions are corrupted? If not, just how do you tell the different between a corrupt bureaucrat and a member of this mythical "ruling class"?

Do you refer to August-September 1980 congress of delegates? It was clearly far from pro-capitalist - only if you believe that such slogans as "free trade unions" and "the justice, democracy, truth, legality" (vague in themselves) constituted a conscious endorsement of Reaganism, which is hardly a reasonable claim....

The fact that a motion to endorse "socialism" at this congress taking place in a country that called itself "socialist" was laughed off the stage certainly indicated something.

These slogans were coined so that their meaning would be obscure enough so that anyone could interpret them as they pleased. Meanwhile Solidarity leader Walesa was making it *extremely clear* what they really meant, and not making any secret about it either.

For the delegates to give greetings to Reagan or something would have been foolish and provocative. Instead, you had Walesa's trip to Washington to tell his masters what he really meant, and the hosannahs at the conference to the real leader of Solidarity, John Paul II, the pope whose accession to the seat was cleared by the mysterious death of his liberal predecessor. Probably not inaccurately described in Godfather III, the least popular but most politically interesting of the Godfather movies. The CIA's man in the Vatican.

And the attendance at the conference of Irving Brown, Mr. AFL-CIA, with his usual bags of CIA money, donated to Solidarity under the usual thin "labor" cover.

And just a month later, the workers at the Gdansk shipyard, the heart and birthplace of Solidarity, *compelling* the authorities to rename the Lenin Shipyard as the Pilsudski shipyard. The event which persuaded me that the Spartacists were right when they said that Solidarity had been consolidated into a counterrevolutionary organization at that August-September 1980 conferrence.

This makes me wonder why your organization and presumably you as well support the anti-Dengist resurgence in 1989 instead of decrying it as a "CIA plot". After all, the situation with Tiananmen was completely similar to that of Solidarnosc - in fact, the leading student activists (unlike Solidarnosc workers) there were explicitly right-liberal since the very outset. Is it not 'scabbing' from the point of view of the glorious Spartacist League to support such obvious reactionaries :rolleyes:?

The students were by and large Gorbachevists, which is not at all the same thing as anti-communist counterrevolutionaries. They were hoping for assistance from Gorbachev, not Bush Sr. Though they, like Gorbachev himself, did indeed have plenty of illusions in "western democracy."

But you have seen too many deceitful western accounts of what was going on. The students in Tienanmen Square were merely the spark that touched off a nationwide essentially working class revolt vs. Dengism. The workers who fought police and burned and looted commercial districts in cities all over China were not revolting in favor of capitalism, but *against* Deng's pro-capitalist policies.

They were not erecting any "Goddess of Liberty" statues. In fact, all too many of them were wearing Mao buttons.

You may think what you want, but the historic reality shows exactly that, for all his phony 'anti-bureaucracy' claims in 1921-1922 Lenin was firmly in favour of the Party oligarchy inherited by Stalin.

Then why did he spend the last year of his life trying to get rid of Stalin? Being, frankly, a lot more militant about this than Trotsky? Just because Stalin offended his wife? Please.

But is not opposing an internal policy of a given state while supporting its foreign policy a bit...strange? Surely the tankie Stalinists would say that your party itself is hypocritical, claiming to support the USSR but simultaneously calling for the political revolution against the current leadership. From the point of view of simple logics, they would be completely right. It is impossible to be partially for and partially against a particular state. And that is the lesson Trotsky and orthodox Trotskyists, with their "deformed workers' states" never learned.

The Spartacists were for the *state,* but against the *government.* This was Trotsky's famous "Clemenceau thesis," according to which in case of war, Trotskyists would support the Soviet Union but attempt to toss out the Stalinist bureaucracy incapable of properly defending the Soviet Union, as Stalin very clearly showed he was during WWII.

Just as Clemenceau managed to toss out the Poincare government in France and replace it with his own during WWI, after Poincare's military failures had discredited him.

Nor did the Spartacists support Soviet foreign policy either. They did support the intervention into Afghanistan, which was very much an *exception* to overall Soviet policies of "peaceful coexistence" as Khrushchev put it with imperialism.

Neither did they support every move of the Soviets billed as "anti-imperialist." Thus they firmly opposed Soviet support to the murderous Ethiopian junta for example.

But where Soviet bureacrats for their own reasons saw fit to assist revolutionary movements in Vietnam or Afghanistan or El Salvador or Angola or Nicaragua, that they supported.

And they bitterly denounced the Soviet *withdrawal* from Afghanistan in 1989, which was a classic Stalinist counterrevolutionary betrayal.

-M.H.-

Jose Gracchus

2nd August 2011, 01:36

syndicat

2nd August 2011, 02:44

Jose Gracchus

2nd August 2011, 04:25

Do you have a source for that? I'd like it on hand.

syndicat

2nd August 2011, 04:52

Kiev Communard

2nd August 2011, 09:24

all of this shows that ML propaganda about how all the left groups were repressed because of armed uprisings against the soviet government are based on lies.

(dons the mask of A Marxist Historian) But...but..but, these evil groups were against the nation-scale union of the working class that was the Bolshevik Party, how come you do not see it :rolleyes:

Seriously though, A Marxist Historian's apologetics for the Soviet ruling class is rather hilarious. One may wonder whether he would have supported "the deformed peasants' states" of Inca Empire, the 3rd Dynasty of Ur and/or the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt, where no individual member of the ruling class officially owned any slice of land (which was officially owned by the gods - or, was it a "deformed divine state":lol:), or the Turkic states of the Medieval period, where the land ownership was usually mediated by the service to the centralized state (which would confiscate the land holdings of individual nobles as soon as the said service ceased) and the members of the ruling class were usually descendants of the former slaves (gulam or mamluk) who served in the military, just as the members of the Soviet ruling class often consisted of the descendants of the former workers.

A Marxist Historian

2nd August 2011, 09:35

I do love being talked down to by some guy for being too young (I imagine though there Menshevik hacks who did the same to the median-18-year-old Bolsheviks at the height of 1917 struggles too, in much the same fashion), who simultaneously fails to see the irony in talking down to an actual (apparently "stupid") denizen of one of these nation-scale "unions of the working class" that was a Stalinist state.

I always wondered where Stalinist apologists got that "union" = "Stalinist state" farcical argument. Of course we are not to trust striking workers in the USSR throughout its existance, workers who openly called the officialdom the "red bourgeoisie", no, we must all line up to receive holy communion from the keepers of the sacred truth, the "Spartacist" League. Now I know where they got this bad joke of an argument from.

Also I do adore the utterly anti-historical and anti-Marxist idea that the inviolate individual rights and power of an individual member of the ruling class is what gives the latter its identity. Apparently the Persian ruling class or the Chinese ruling class throughout much of its existence, did not really exist, after all they could rise and fall to utter heights or complete abandon depending on "who is momentarily in the good books of the leaders at the top demarcating a member of this "ruling class" from anybody else".

TIC, your problm isn't that you are too young, your problem is that, not being around at the time, and not apparently having studied the history, you don't know what was going on.

If you want an original source for the comparison, I'm sure there are many, but my favorite is James P. Cannon's comment in 1923 that the Soviet Union was the biggest strike in history.

I get the impression that all you know about Persian and Chinese history is a few glib comments you've picked up here on Revleft. Well, as Marx told Weitling, ignorance never did anybody any good. If you want to actually learn something about the Persian and Chinese ruling classes, read Perry Anderson's pretty easy to find Lineages of the Absolute State.

I can't believe people still maintain this mid-30s delusion that the Stalinists were somehow quasi-reformists eager to sell out to capitalism and imperialism, but then moved along without a hitch for another fifty years.

Enough bullshit: TMH, so were striking Polish workers asking for "the greatest free lunch the world has ever seen"? Are you disappointed that Soviet tanks did not run the streets red with workers' blood to end the workers' greed?

Wihout a hitch? WWII was a pretty big hitch seems to me, with 26 million Soviet citizens dying in the *successful* Soviet obliteration of Nazism from the face of this planet. That is the kind of thing that just might consolidate the bond between the Soviet people and their government and stabilize said regime, don't you think?

Were the striking Polish workers in 1979 and 1980 basically asking for a free lunch? Well let's see. What was the situation?

The Polish standard of living was considerably higher than the Russian, not least because of the subsidization of the Polish economy by the Soviet Union. Subsidization, of course, taken out of the hides of *Russian* workers, something not all of them were pleased about. Both Soviet and Polish bureaucrats for decades had been trying to end the continual Polish rebellions by, as the expression was at the time, "stuffing the people's mouths with sausage."

Now, Poland was at that time *deep* in debt to Western bankers. Was *anybody* in Solidarity demanding that those debts be repudiated? Of course not. That would be socialist or communist or something.

Instead, Solidarity was denouncing Russian domination, and at the same time basically demanding higher Russian subsidies for the declining Polish economy, more sausage. And describing that as "free trade unionism" etc. And offering no other solutions to Poland's economic problems. None!

Reasonable and natural at the beginning of a strike wave. But when you have an entire country on strike and Solidarity becoming for a while the political expression of the Polish working class, and its only economic program is the simple old Samuel Gompers program of "more," yes that's asking for free lunch in my book.

And no, I think it is a very good thing that Solidarity was suppressed with pretty minimal violence. Sorry to disappoint your bloodthirsty fantasies.

How come no workers did anything to defend their "workers' state"? Workers certainly do still show up to defend their beleaguered unions in the U.S., thus proving your analogy to be fatuous.

As for the Sparts' excuses for their treachery on Haiti: it is a total disgrace.

I wish it were true that workers always show up to defend their beleaguered unions in the U.S. Sometimes they do, sometimes they don't, because of the demoralization of the American workers by decades of chloroforming by the trade union bureaucracy. In case you hadn't noticed, there are a *lot less* spontaneous outbursts of working class militancy in America lately than even a decade ago. Even the Wisconsin experience was, in retrospect, tightly controlled from the top.

Just like the Soviet workers, demoralized and passivized by generations of Stalinism, sat there waiting for the call to come from the Party to rise in defense of the Soviet state. And when no call came, passively took counterrevolution in the neck by and large. Even though they oiverwhelmingly hated Yeltsin and his counterrevotion and bitterly opposed it, the Soviet Union not being Poland, where the revolution was imposed from the outside.

As for your fulminations vs. the Sparts over their brief blunder over Haiti, as somebody who has committed a vastly worse blunder, namely supporting Solidarity, whose victory threw the Polish working class into devastating poverty, misery and despair, you had better make your own self-criticism before pestering the Sparts over alleged inadequacy of their mea culpa.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

2nd August 2011, 09:56

(dons the mask of A Marxist Historian) But...but..but, these evil groups were against the nation-scale union of the working class that was the Bolshevik Party, how come you do not see it :rolleyes:

Seriously though, A Marxist Historian's apologetics for the Soviet ruling class is rather hilarious. One may wonder whether he would have supported "the deformed peasants' states" of Inca Empire, the 3rd Dynasty of Ur and/or the New Kingdom of Ancient Egypt, where no individual member of the ruling class officially owned any slice of land (which was officially owned by the gods - or, was it a "deformed divine state":lol:), or the Turkic states of the Medieval period, where the land ownership was usually mediated by the service to the centralized state (which would confiscate the land holdings of individual nobles as soon as the said service ceased) and the members of the ruling class were usually descendants of the former slaves (gulam or mamluk) who served in the military, just as the members of the Soviet ruling class often consisted of the descendants of the former workers.

Yes, in the Turkic states, and indeed in Islamic states in general by and large, you didn't have private property in land in the countryside, though you certainly did in the cities, and the caliph or his mamlukes did not interfere with that any more than feudal lords or kings did with property ownership in medieval cities. Or any less! In the countryside however it was theoretically all owned by the caliph, which really meant nobody owned it.

That is why Islamic cities flourished and sometimes were downright huge, whereas the Islamic countryside was largely uninhabited or inhabited by camel-riding nomads who had little or no relationship to the official state, but rather followed the lead of their tribal leaders. And Islamic agriculture usually meant gardens and olive and fruit groves inside cities.

As for Ur and Ancient Egypt, how much do we really know about how those societies worked anyway? The rule of law was a brand new invention then, and there is no reason to suppose whatever the "official" status of property was had much to do with real ownership. We don't really know what the relationship of the ruling classes was to the mode of production, we just have various speculations based on various interpretations of cuneiform legal code inscriptions. Assumptions from some quarters that membership in the ruling classes was simply at the whim of the rulers are only that, and probably incorrect.

Indeed, if I remember right, there was actually one "reforming" Pharaoh who did have some weird notions of some sort ancient Egyptian collectivism, which did not outlive his decease.

As for the Incas, I cheerfully confess to knowing little or nothing about the Incas. I suspect that who was in the ruling class and who were the peasants was no great mystery there.

In any case, *none* of those societies were capitalist, they all operated according to different rules altogether. You have argued that the USSR was a "bureaucratic capitalist" economy. What nonsense.

-M.H.-

Kiev Communard

2nd August 2011, 10:03

Just what was the relationship of this "class" to the means of production, other than snapping out orders sometimes as to what should be produced? Something most of them didn't do anyway? None whatsoever.

The same could be said of financial capitalists, who, in a moralistic account you present, "have not relationship to the means of production", save for "shouting orders" to their CEOs.

Do you think it is *impossible* for workers' government to become bureaucratized, for its leaders to be corrupted in the same fashion leaders of reformist trade unions are corrupted? If not, just how do you tell the different between a corrupt bureaucrat and a member of this mythical "ruling class"?

There is a big difference between the yellow trade union leaders serving the bourgeoisie and the bureaucratic capitalist who directly controls the means of production and is the bourgeoisie itself.

The fact that a motion to endorse "socialism" at this congress taking place in a country that called itself "socialist" was laughed off the stage certainly indicated something.

Yes, it indicates that the very word "socialism" was smeared by the Stalinists you purport to support - in foreign policy matters.

These slogans were coined so that their meaning would be obscure enough so that anyone could interpret them as they pleased. Meanwhile Solidarity leader Walesa was making it *extremely clear* what they really meant, and not making any secret about it either.

For the delegates to give greetings to Reagan or something would have been foolish and provocative. Instead, you had Walesa's trip to Washington to tell his masters what he really meant, and the hosannahs at the conference to the real leader of Solidarity, John Paul II, the pope whose accession to the seat was cleared by the mysterious death of his liberal predecessor. Probably not inaccurately described in Godfather III, the least popular but most politically interesting of the Godfather movies. The CIA's man in the Vatican.

And the attendance at the conference of Irving Brown, Mr. AFL-CIA, with his usual bags of CIA money, donated to Solidarity under the usual thin "labor" cover.

The U.S. wholeheartedly supported "Hungarian freedom fighters" of 1956 and the "Prague Spring" of 1968 - just as "the Peking Spring" of 1989 - as the latter was enthusiastically called by the Spartacists. If one follows your logics consistently, all these movements were CIA plots as well.

And just a month later, the workers at the Gdansk shipyard, the heart and birthplace of Solidarity, *compelling* the authorities to rename the Lenin Shipyard as the Pilsudski shipyard. The event which persuaded me that the Spartacists were right when they said that Solidarity had been consolidated into a counterrevolutionary organization at that August-September 1980 conferrence.

You may be surprised, but for many Polish workers Pilsudsky was viewed in the same way as Chavez or Peron by the Argentinian or Venezuelan workers. The right-wing liberals and agrarian conservatives of the 1920s, whom he overthrew (with the endorsement of Polish Socialists, the pro-Soviet Communists, and even the revolutionary syndicalist trade union federation ZZZ), were clearly closer to Reaganism than him. Of course, just as Peron, Pilsudsky was a xenophobic populist, but his official socioeconomic programme was perceived by many workers as "socialist", hence the possible connection between Solidarnosc and shipyard renaming.

The students were by and large Gorbachevists, which is not at all the same thing as anti-communist counterrevolutionaries. They were hoping for assistance from Gorbachev, not Bush Sr. Though they, like Gorbachev himself, did indeed have plenty of illusions in "western democracy."

The same can be said of the early Solidarnosc, which endorsed workers' self-management and directors' election by the workers - again, hardly a Reaganite programme.

Then why did he spend the last year of his life trying to get rid of Stalin? Being, frankly, a lot more militant about this than Trotsky? Just because Stalin offended his wife? Please.

Nope. Because they have tactical differences on the national and federal questions, but were firmly in favour of state-capitalist monopoly and the one-Party state. The fact that Lenin opposed Stalin in his later years doesn't make him a libertarian socialist any more than the New Dealists' opposing right-wing Republicans did not make them "socialist".

The Spartacists were for the *state,* but against the *government.* This was Trotsky's famous "Clemenceau thesis," according to which in case of war, Trotskyists would support the Soviet Union but attempt to toss out the Stalinist bureaucracy incapable of properly defending the Soviet Union, as Stalin very clearly showed he was during WWII.

This once again shows Trotskyists' delusion. They equate socialism with state-capitalism and believe that the mere change of governments might lead to some kind of "workers' democracy". The change of government in France in WWI did not lead to a qualitative change in the structure of the political regime, and the substitution of "evil" Stalinist bureaucratic government with the "good" Trotskyist bureaucratic government would not have changed anything.

Kiev Communard

2nd August 2011, 10:06

In any case, *none* of those societies were capitalist, they all operated according to different rules altogether. You have argued that the USSR was a "bureaucratic capitalist" economy. What nonsense.

-M.H.-

If you were not such a sectarian, I would advise you to read the books by Chattopadhyay and Walter Daum, where the concept of bureaucratic capitalism is defended with actual reference to both Marxian theory of capital and the empirical data from the Soviet economic statistics. Also, the Soviet authors themselves used the concept of "bureaucratic capitalism", when referring to such societies as Iran under the Pahlavis, South Korea under the 1960s-1980s military regime, and India under the INC governments. However, I see that you are too narrow-minded to deal with it, so, please, continue being deluded by the simplistic Trotskyism as long as you wish. I will no longer disturb your blissful political sleep.

A Marxist Historian

2nd August 2011, 11:08

"The Mensheviks After October" by Vladimir Brovkin. as he points out, the Left Mensheviks had 62 percent of the delegates at the Nov 1917 party congress and took control of the party away from the right-Menshevik minority. Later they expelled the right Mensheviks over their joining with the white uprising in summer of 1918. the stance of the Left Mensheviks was to not engage in provocative acts that would destroy their ability to organize democratically within workplaces, unions, soviets, produce their own press, etc.

the Russian anarcho-syndicalist confederation, another group repressed by the Soviet government, took a similar stance of opposing small group "expropriations" and uprisings by anarchists, and also tried to sustain their ability to organize in workplaces, shop committees, soviets, produce a press, etc. the maximalists took a similar stance but in 1919 the Cheka set them up, by faking an alleged maximalist armed action. I don't know the details about this but Israel Getzler refers to it in his book on Kronstadt. this was used to ban the maximalists. the small group expropriation of the car of the American Red Cross representative in the spring of 1918 was used as the pretext to ban the press and round up activists of all sorts of anarchist groups, including syndicalists....even tho syndicalists opposed that type of action.

all of this shows that ML propaganda about how all the left groups were repressed because of armed uprisings against the soviet government are based on lies.

I had a look at Brovkin's version. I took my description from Leonard Shapiro's classic account. One long lawyers' brief for Menshevism vs. Bolshevism, but like any good lawyer, he made sure to get his details right.

What I read from Brovkin didn't sound terribly different from Shapiro's version. Yes, *after* the bolshevik Revolution, Martov was no longer an isolated minority in the Menshevik Central Committee, with the center wing and even the right wing now being willing to listen to him. But there was no "left domination," rather all the Mensheviks united together from Left to Right, with the leadership gradually returning into Martov's hands again, and a compromise tactical position, because all the Mensheviks had noticed that the Menshevik policy of support to Kerensky was *very* unpopular with the workers.

The real leftists in the Internationalist wing of the Menshevik Party went over to Bolshevism, led by Yuri Larin, who had been the organizer of underground Menshevism in Petrograd during WWI and for several years before. There was *never* a split or expulsion of the Right Mensheviks, whom Martov stayed in the same party with until the day he died.

A few Right Mensheviks who joined outright White Guard insurrections and became ministers in openly counterrevolutionary governments were expelled, and usually allowed to rejoin after the White Guards threw them out.

The basic stand of the Menshevik Party under Martov was very simple. Martov did not believe that Russia was ready for socialism. Therefore he wanted to bring Russia back to capitalism.

Unlike the Right Mensheviks, he preferred propaganda and workers' strike action in order to bring back capitalism, instead of armed insurrection.

Anybody who considers himself a revolutionary, a socialist and a leftist who supports Martov and Martovism is kinda confused.

I don't know the details on the syndicalists and Maximalists, neither of which groups amounted to much is my impression. The Left Socialist Zionist Party, by the way, was legal until 1928, when Stalin finally decided they had to go. As for the anarchists, the problem was simple.

Anarchists have always been big on assassination and throwing bombs. After anarchists threw a bomb into the Moscow Bolshevik party headquarters in fall 1918, killing 83 Moscow Bolsheviks, Bolshevik tolerance for anti-Bolshevik anarchists dwindled.

Even before that, the anarchist role was very problematic. In the course of the Revolution, the prisons had all been smashed and all prisoners set free. Many common criminals took advantage of their liberation to reform themselves in the revolutionary atmosphere. Too many however did not, and would set up "anarchist communes" to rob and steal while waving black flags and claiming to be anarchists. This is well attested by many sources.

What did the Bolsheviks do about this? Well, here's a piece of oral history I heard a long time ago from somebody I trust, though I haven't seen documentary proof of this.

What I heard was that the Bolsheviks actually sent letters to the "official" anarchist organization asking the anarchists to simply find out which anarchist communes were real and which were just criminal gangs, and let them know. Unfortunately, the anarchist response was to refuse, regarding this as impermissible interference by The State in their affairs.

Which didn't leave the Bolsheviks a whole lot of choice as to what to do about this. Really, the only way they could tell which communes were real and which were criminal gangs was to send the workers militia to them, surround the commune and demand that they surrender their arms and see what they did. The criminals of course always surrendered. The sincere anarchists usually wanted to fight.

This did not improve Bolshevik/anarchist mutual relations.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

2nd August 2011, 11:25

If you were not such a sectarian, I would advise you to read the books by Chattopadhyay and Walter Daum, where the concept of bureaucratic capitalism is defended with actual reference to both Marxian theory of capital and the empirical data from the Soviet economic statistics. Also, the Soviet authors themselves used the concept of "bureaucratic capitalism", when referring to such societies as Iran under the Pahlavis, South Korea under the 1960s-1980s military regime, and India under the INC governments. However, I see that you are too narrow-minded to deal with it, so, please, continue being deluded by the simplistic Trotskyism as long as you wish. I will no longer disturb your blissful political sleep.

I'm unfamiliar with Chattopadhyay. I have read LRP materials on the subject, which are a parody of Marxism IMHO, basically a pseudo-Trotskyist ripoff of the idealist Maoist state capitalism theories of people like Martin Nicolaus. Daum argues that the Soviet Union was a workers state until the Great Purges of the 1930s!

From a purely moral point of view that is better than the Maoist idea that bureaucratic reformer Khrushchev brought in capitalism in 1956. But as a Marxist scientific analysis it is absurd. The Great Terror was a *purely* political affair, that in no way changed property relations in Soviet society. It simply was a purge of loyal Stalinists by ultra-loyal Stalinists. It did not even mark any change in the politics of the Soviet government.

As for the Third World regimes you mention, they really were examples of state capitalism, just like the US Post Office for example. The Soviet analysts are quite right about that.

In a Third World country where a capitalist class barely exists, one has to be constructed, and it is the job of the capitalist state to do that. The ultimate example was Burma, where at one point *all* industry was in the hands of the state. But the state was in the hands of the Burmese military, who were simply using that state ownership to prepare the ground for the current situation in Burma, where generals and colonels own everything in exactly the same fashion as capitalists own factories in the United States. Nobody on earth confuses the Burmese military dictatorship with any form of "socialism" I am quite sure.

If you can't tell the difference between the regime of the Shah of Iran and that of Brezhnev in the Soviet Union, then you are a blind man. One was an imperialist puppet regime where the poor were starved, oppressed, tortured and abused, and the brand new capitalist class Pahlavi patronized was flourishing. Whereas in the Soviet Union, rent and education was free, there was no unemployment, etc. etc. And individual ownership of capital was illegal.

-M.H.-

black magick hustla

2nd August 2011, 11:30

As for your fulminations vs. the Sparts over their brief blunder over Haiti, as somebody who has committed a vastly worse blunder, namely supporting Solidarity, whose victory threw the Polish working class into devastating poverty, misery and despair, you had better make your own self-criticism before pestering the Sparts over alleged inadequacy of their mea culpa.

i don't think anybody was "supporting" solidarity (the world support has lost its meaning in the internet). the argument was that the strikes of 1979-1980 were legit. in fact, the "ultraleft" and splits of trotskyism that supported the initial strikes wrote a lot about how solidarnosc was a sabotaging element.

black magick hustla

2nd August 2011, 11:31

http://en.internationalism.org/node/3025

Kiev Communard

2nd August 2011, 11:58

If you can't tell the difference between the regime of the Shah of Iran and that of Brezhnev in the Soviet Union, then you are a blind man. One was an imperialist puppet regime where the poor were starved, oppressed, tortured and abused, and the brand new capitalist class Pahlavi patronized was flourishing. Whereas in the Soviet Union, rent and education was free, there was no unemployment, etc. etc. And individual ownership of capital was illegal.

-M.H.-

Incidentally enough, the Pahlavi state presided under the same period of capital accumulation as the Stalinist one did, so that it would be better to compare the Shah's Iran with the Stalinist USSR, not a Brezhnevist one, where "the poor were starved, oppressed, tortured and abused, and the brand new capitalist class" Stalin "patronized was flourishing". As to your second point, a veritable eulogy to the USSR, I once again wonder why you consider yourself to be a Trotskyist at all. With such a view on the USSR, you would be much comfortable in some tankie-style post-USSR "Communist" Party, where they blame "those damned spoiled miners who had a free ride in 1989 and brought us capitalism".

With respect to Daum, I of course do not agree with his idealistic theory of "good" USSR before 1936 and "bad" USSR after that year. His work is valuable from the point of view of analyzing the capital-labour antagonism in the USSR under Stalin (which, not the "market" or the "individual ownership of capital" is a hallmark of the capitalist mode of production). I subscribe more closely to Chattopadhyay's views, though. One may find his works there (http://libcom.org/tags/paresh-chattopadhyay), with his seminal work being The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience (http://libcom.org/files/Chattopadhyay,%20Paresh%20-%20The%20Marxian%20Concept%20of%20Capital%20and%20 the%20Soviet%20Experience.pdf), the argumentative part whereof is much harder to dismiss than that of Daum.

A Marxist Historian

2nd August 2011, 12:33

The same could be said of financial capitalists, who, in a moralistic account you present, "have not relationship to the means of production", save for "shouting orders" to their CEOs.

There is a big difference between the yellow trade union leaders serving the bourgeoisie and the bureaucratic capitalist who directly controls the means of production and is the bourgeoisie itself.

The finance capitalists do not shout orders to the CEOs, as they have not the *least interest* in what the CEOs do or what gets produced, as long as they get their money. They *do not* control the means of production, indeed they have no interest in production whatsoever. All they care about is that their loans are paid back on time with interest. Period!

The bureaucrats OTOH *do* control the means of production, but unlike the finance or other capitalist, they don't own them and don't derive profits from them, just skim a bit off the top as bureaucrats always do in all modes of production. All the difference in the world.

Yes, it indicates that the very word "socialism" was smeared by the Stalinists you purport to support - in foreign policy matters.

Well of course, and not just in foreign policy. That's why Trotskyists call for a political revolution vs. Stalinist bureaucracies.

It is you purporting that I support Stalinist foreign policy. The invasion of Afghanistan was supported because it was basically an *anti-Stalinist* foreign policy, a revolutionary foreign policy.

So tell me, what do "Marxist Bakuninists" think of the support that the Soviet Union supplied to Vietnam during the Vietnam War? Was that a "Stalinist foreign policy"? Would "Marxist Bakuninists" have opposed the Soviet Union sending aid to the Vietnamese? If not, why not? And if so, how could you call yourself a revolutionary?

The U.S. wholeheartedly supported "Hungarian freedom fighters" of 1956 and the "Prague Spring" of 1968 - just as "the Peking Spring" of 1989 - as the latter was enthusiastically called by the Spartacists. If one follows your logics consistently, all these movements were CIA plots as well.

My logic is to tell the truth about what is really happening, not to just fall in with Stalinist propaganda in the fashion of the PSL. The question is not whatever maneuvers the CIA was attempting, but what was being done by the masses.

In Hungary the workers were revolting against Stalinism for *Leninism,* and forming workers councils after the 1917 model. They said so, loud and often. In China you had a working class revolt against Deng's "capitalist roadism." That was clear for anyone with eyes to see too.

Czechoslovakia was about Dubcek's "socialism with a human face," which Czech workers were initially quite suspicious of. The Spartacists were in fact not so sure about that one, but opposed Soviet intervention because the Soviets were intervening *not* because Dubcek was a rightist or something, or because their friend LBJ was praising him, but because the end of Stalinist repression could lead in the direction of the rebirth of revolutionary Marxism, which Brezhnev had a deadly fear of.

The Spartacist position on Czechoslovakia was to call for Czech workers to fraternize with the Soviet troops, and tell them that if they wanted to fight counterrevolution they were in the wrong place, they should go to Vietnam. And in fact many Soviet soldiers in Czechoslovakia were quite interested in Dubcek's "socialism with a human face."

Poland was as different from these three cases as night and day, a clearly and overtly pro-capitalist and anti-socialist movement.

You may be surprised, but for many Polish workers Pilsudsky was viewed in the same way as Chavez or Peron by the Argentinian or Venezuelan workers. The right-wing liberals and agrarian conservatives of the 1920s, whom he overthrew (with the endorsement of Polish Socialists, the pro-Soviet Communists, and even the revolutionary syndicalist trade union federation ZZZ), were clearly closer to Reaganism than him. Of course, just as Peron, Pilsudsky was a xenophobic populist, but his official socioeconomic programme was perceived by many workers as "socialist", hence the possible connection between Solidarnosc and shipyard renaming.

Pilsudsky was a populist right wing nationalist with fascist leanings, who was very friendly with Hitler, who had a high opinion of him. His torture chambers were infamous. Peron was pro-Hitler too by the way. Indeed the conservatives Pilsudski overthrew were Polish Reaganites. However Reagan was a right wing bourgeois democrat, and Pilsudski was a right wing military dictator, a Pinochet with populist trimmings.

Trotsky thought Pilsudski was simply a Polish fascist, an error on his part. But a highly understandable one. There was absolutely nothing "socialist" about Pilsudski's economic program, except in the sense that Hitler's National Socialist Party was "socialist."

By the way, the Spartacists, unlike so many so-called "Trotskyists," do not give any support either to Chavez's left-posturing Cuba-friendly bourgeois Bonapartism, or for that matter to Peron's even more dubious species. Still, comparing either of these figures to Pilsudskii is quite unfair to them. Both of them, including Peron, carried out reforms in the interests of the workers in order to gain popularity and enable them to have popular support to stand up to US imperialism a bit.

Pilsudskii attacked the unions and what few social reform measures you had in Poland as viciously as any other right wing military dictator. He was popular as a Polish nationalist military leader, not for any social reforms. And especially popular for leading an imperialist-backed assault on the traditional Polish national enemy, Soviet Russia. And I can assure you than no Polish patriots made any distinction between Bolshevik, White Guard, Marxist-Bakuninist, anarchist or any other form of Russian.

Polish workers who supported Pilsudskii did so because he was the Polish national hero vs. the Great Satan, Soviet Russia. Not for any other reason.

The same can be said of the early Solidarnosc, which endorsed workers' self-management and directors' election by the workers - again, hardly a Reaganite programme.

Why not? Reagan certainly had no objections. Given that no capitalist class in Poland existed whatsoever, "workers self management" was a quite plausible route to capitalism, just as it was in Yugoslavia. At that point, few Polish bureaucrats were interested yet in becoming capitalists themselves, and certainly would not have been the candidates Polish workers preferred to become rich capitalists, a role Polish workers dreamed of for themselves. After all, in America anybody can become a rich capitalist, don't you know?

As long as the Western bankers were paid off, something Walesa promised, why should western capitalists care who had the job of running the factories? From their point of view, the point was to overthrow "communism" and bring Poland over to the US side in the Cold War. Which, obviously, is what Solidarity was all about.

The workers wanted Poland to become a prosperous capitalist country like West Germany or the USA, in which they'd be paid West German or American wages. Which were a good bit higher back then, by the way. For this purpose, they wanted to be able to run the factories themselves and elect directors themselves -- so as to bring in American-style capitalism as quickly as possible, hopefully with some of them as factory owners.

Nope. Because they have tactical differences on the national and federal questions, but were firmly in favour of state-capitalist monopoly and the one-Party state. The fact that Lenin opposed Stalin in his later years doesn't make him a libertarian socialist any more than the New Dealists' opposing right-wing Republicans did not make them "socialist".

This once again shows Trotskyists' delusion. They equate socialism with state-capitalism and believe that the mere change of governments might lead to some kind of "workers' democracy". The change of government in France in WWI did not lead to a qualitative change in the structure of the political regime, and the substitution of "evil" Stalinist bureaucratic government with the "good" Trotskyist bureaucratic government would not have changed anything.

At the point Trotsky proposed the "Clemenceau thesis," in 1928, he was not calling for a political revolution, but for reform, believing that the Communist Party was still reformable.

After 1933, he did indeed believe that a qualitative and not just quantitative change in the regime was necessary, so he did not repeat that particular formulation. But the overall point remains the same.

As for "libertarian socialism," your brand of "libertarian socialism" sometimes seems to smell of Libertarianism in its current political meaning, an extreme pro-capitalist tendency.

Lenin as a believer in capitalism is simply your attempt to turn black into white.

As for one party monopoly, yes he thought that at that point in time, that was necessary temporarily under the circumstances, as just about all other political parties in the Soviet Union had gone over to counterrevolution in one fashion or another.

Unlike Stalin, he did not see this as something permanent or desirable. Which is why, as Israel Getzler explained in his biography of Martov, the Bolsheviks subsidized Martov's exile paper. (Keeping this secret from Martov of course.) Something ended by Stalin quite shortly after Lenin died.

Trotsky by the way explicitly argued publicly in the 1920s that at some point the Soviet state would have to become a multi-party workers democracy. He suggested that appropriate party demarcations might be around what kind of energy sources socialist society should rely on. An idea that seems very prophetic at this point.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

2nd August 2011, 12:47

i don't think anybody was "supporting" solidarity (the world support has lost its meaning in the internet). the argument was that the strikes of 1979-1980 were legit. in fact, the "ultraleft" and splits of trotskyism that supported the initial strikes wrote a lot about how solidarnosc was a sabotaging element.

Actually, the Spartacists thought the initial strikes were legit too. But they didn't have any politics, were purely economic. Unlike previous workers rebellions in Poland, of which there were several, and all of which had a left wing political character to one degree or another, with Polish workers wanting a reformed socialism in Poland.

At the 1980 Solidarity conference, Solidarity formed and acquired politics, right wing politics, and challenged the Polish Communist Party for control of Poland.

After which stikes by Solidarity were for the purpose of seizing power, on behalf of the Pope, the CIA and western bankers.

-M.H.-

RedTrackWorker

2nd August 2011, 13:00

I'm unfamiliar with Chattopadhyay. I have read LRP materials on the subject, which are a parody of Marxism IMHO, basically a pseudo-Trotskyist ripoff of the idealist Maoist state capitalism theories of people like Martin Nicolaus. Daum argues that the Soviet Union was a workers state until the Great Purges of the 1930s!

From a purely moral point of view that is better than the Maoist idea that bureaucratic reformer Khrushchev brought in capitalism in 1956. But as a Marxist scientific analysis it is absurd. The Great Terror was a *purely* political affair, that in no way changed property relations in Soviet society. It simply was a purge of loyal Stalinists by ultra-loyal Stalinists. It did not even mark any change in the politics of the Soviet government.

"Listen to the fool's reproach! it is a kingly title!"

The idea that the Purges marked no change in the politics of the Soviet government can find no place in Trotsky's writings of the late 30's. First, one can look at the relationship of the Russian government to, say, the Chinese revolution, the German fight against fascism and then the Spanish civil war. In the first two cases, Trotsky describes Stalinism in the realm of foreign policy as centrist. After the Spanish civil war? Counterrevolutionary. That was the word Trotsky used...no small change for a Bolshevik to note one would think, but insignificant to our red professor.

Second, on can look at some of Trotsky's final writings to see him talking of "a ball balanced on the top of a pyramid", the tendency for the bureaucracy to undermine the social basis of the regime, that the contradiction cannot last much longer, etc. No change there?

Third, to characterize as "purely" political the the re-constitution of the social basis of the regime, which one can see clearly if one looks at the purges of the officer corps, which far exceed those undertaken in any political revolution one could reference, one can see who the idealist is to suppose that WW2 washed away the contradictions of a workers' state ruled by a counterrevolutionary bureaucracy such that it could exist in that state for fifty more years.

A Marxist Historian

2nd August 2011, 13:39

Incidentally enough, the Pahlavi state presided under the same period of capital accumulation as the Stalinist one did, so that it would be better to compare the Shah's Iran with the Stalinist USSR, not a Brezhnevist one, where "the poor were starved, oppressed, tortured and abused, and the brand new capitalist class" Stalin "patronized was flourishing". As to your second point, a veritable eulogy to the USSR, I once again wonder why you consider yourself to be a Trotskyist at all. With such a view on the USSR, you would be much comfortable in some tankie-style post-USSR "Communist" Party, where they blame "those damned spoiled miners who had a free ride in 1989 and brought us capitalism".

But there was no brand new capitalist class, indeed no capitalist class at all. If you want to argue that the bureaucrats were some weird new social formation analogous to the rulers of ancient Sumeria or the Incas, go for it, there is precedent for that, in "bureaucratic collectivism." Extremely anti-Marxist, but does not fly obviously in the face of the facts, if you don't mind tossing Marxism out the window.

But claiming that the Soviet bureaucrats were a "capitalist class" is very much like claiming the earth is flat. I find it hard even to take it seriously. Ithink you would have great difficulty persuading an actual capitalist that the Soviet Union was a capitalist society, as they *know* what that is.

Things were indeed unpleasant in the USSR in the early '30s. But rather than creating a capitalist society, the objective was firstly to build up Soviet industry so as to be able to defeat Hitler fascism.

Which was successfully done, after which most Soviet workers, and even many peasants, forgave Stalin for his cruelties of the '30s, and the way was clear for the Khrushchev reforms, which increased the standard of living of the workers and the peasants dramatically.

You accuse me of "eulogizing" the Brezhnev years. Well, there is a reason why Russians feel so much nostalgia for those days, and even for Stalin, who as I am sure you know is surprisingly popular according to the opinion polls in Russia these days. (Likely not so much in Ukraine.)

But everything I stated in that "eulogy" was simply the facts, and if you indeed live in Kiev as your name indicates, you surely know this better than I do. There is of course a whole other side, which can be summed up as corruption, bureaucratic privilege and political repression.

As for the Soviet coal miners in 1989, that was not at all the Spartacist attitude.

For that, see http://www.icl-fi.org/english/wv/archives/oldsite/2003/USSR-809.htm

I quote:

"I’ll give one dramatic example of how we fought to mobilize the Soviet proletariat on the basis of a revolutionary internationalist program and perspective. That was at the October 1990 Soviet Coal Miners Congress held in Donetsk, Ukraine—the heartland of the mass strike wave the year before.

There were only two of us, but politically it was the ICL on the one side and, on the other, U.S. and British embassy representatives, the AFL-CIO’s Freedom House, the Russian fascist NTS and, last but not least, the scab British “Union of Democratic Miners” (UDM), an anti-Communist outfit formed and financed in an attempt to break the great British coal strike of 1984-85 led by Arthur Scargill’s National Union of Mineworkers (NUM). The Soviet miners had raised huge funds in solidarity with the British miners and their union during the strike. This Soviet aid was a powerful countermeasure to the red-baiting campaign against Scargill and the NUM conducted by the Tory government of Margaret Thatcher and the British ruling class in general. Now the “AFL-CIA” types were pushing Soviet miners to repudiate their past support to Scargill and demanded the NUM hand over the money to the scab UDM!

But the ICL spiked this attempt and caused a sensation. At the congress of 900 delegates, we sold over 600 copies of Byulleten’ Spartakovtsev and we exposed the scab role of the UDM. Various delegations took back whole stacks of our bulletin. We played a crucial role in the decision of the congress not to pursue the UDM’s appeal to join in denouncing Scargill. The remarkable thing about this was that the bourgeoisie was represented by every spy agency and fascist around, but the proletariat’s historic stake was represented by the ICL alone. Our singular role demonstrated that our program had an impact vastly, even explosively, out of proportion to our tiny size."

With respect to Daum, I of course do not agree with his idealistic theory of "good" USSR before 1936 and "bad" USSR after that year. His work is valuable from the point of view of analyzing the capital-labour antagonism in the USSR under Stalin (which, not the "market" or the "individual ownership of capital" is a hallmark of the capitalist mode of production). I subscribe more closely to Chattopadhyay's views, though. One may find his works there (http://libcom.org/tags/paresh-chattopadhyay), with his seminal work being The Marxian Concept of Capital and the Soviet Experience (http://libcom.org/files/Chattopadhyay,%20Paresh%20-%20The%20Marxian%20Concept%20of%20Capital%20and%20 the%20Soviet%20Experience.pdf), the argumentative part whereof is much harder to dismiss than that of Daum.

I suppose I should look at Chattopadhyay one of these days. If you could summarize his argument briefly, that would help. What struck me most about Daum was how similar his critique was to Maoist critiques of alleged Soviet "state capitalism." I think there was some borrowing going on, some of his formulations are reminiscent of those of Martin Nicolaus, the main American Maoist economic theoretician with respect to the Soviet Union.

The Spartacist issued an excellent pamphlet many years ago vs. Maoist, Cliffite, etc. conceptions of "state capitalism," which would be my reading recommendation for you, if it were available on the net. Title was "Why the Soviet Union is not capitalist." A very serious piece of work, hopefully somebody will scan it and post it one day.

Instead I will make do with a theoretical piece they posted primarily vs. Shachtman's "new class" bureaucratic collectivism theory, as it is my impression that your conceptions have much in common with that, judging by your references to the Incas and whatnot.

http://www.icl-fi.org/english/esp/archives/oldsite/NEWCLASS.HTM

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

2nd August 2011, 13:55

"Listen to the fool's reproach! it is a kingly title!"

The idea that the Purges marked no change in the politics of the Soviet government can find no place in Trotsky's writings of the late 30's. First, one can look at the relationship of the Russian government to, say, the Chinese revolution, the German fight against fascism and then the Spanish civil war. In the first two cases, Trotsky describes Stalinism in the realm of foreign policy as centrist. After the Spanish civil war? Counterrevolutionary. That was the word Trotsky used...no small change for a Bolshevik to note one would think, but insignificant to our red professor.

Second, on can look at some of Trotsky's final writings to see him talking of "a ball balanced on the top of a pyramid", the tendency for the bureaucracy to undermine the social basis of the regime, that the contradiction cannot last much longer, etc. No change there?

Third, to characterize as "purely" political the the re-constitution of the social basis of the regime, which one can see clearly if one looks at the purges of the officer corps, which far exceed those undertaken in any political revolution one could reference, one can see who the idealist is to suppose that WW2 washed away the contradictions of a workers' state ruled by a counterrevolutionary bureaucracy such that it could exist in that state for fifty more years.

And just who was it who formulated the Popular Front policy, and was the great breastbeater for it even before it was adopted?

Why, it was the editor of Izvestia, Nikolai Bukharin.

The Great Terror of 1937-38 had nothing whatsoever to do with the great turn to the right in the year 1934, which took place around about the time of the famous "Congress of Victors" in 1934, the vast majority of whose delegates died in the Great Terror.

Even better is the notion that the reconstitution of the *officer corps,* quite a few of whom, including Tukhachevsky, were former Tsarist officers, marked a change in the "social nature of the regime."

And by the way, just who was it who replaced all those Stalin-loyal popular frontist Spanish Republic admiring bureaucrats in the Great Purge?

The Brezhnev generation, almost all upwardly mobile former factory workers. In terms of pure social origin, the Soviet bureaucracy was "more" proletarian, in an Archie Bunker sort of fashion, after the Great Purge than before.

This was something Trotsky did not fully realize, or at least did not find it politically convenient to polemicize about for obvious reasons. Thus you had those formulations about a ball balancing on a pin. Of course, after the Soviet Union defeated Hitler, that ball was not balancing on the pin anymore, but welded fairly well to it, with adhesives that lasted pretty much until the World War II generation passed from the Soviet scene.

The ignorance of the LRP version of Soviet history is remarkable.

-M.H.-

Zanthorus

2nd August 2011, 14:31

Title was "Why the Soviet Union is not capitalist."

I've heard of it. The International Communist Party (Il Comunista) wrote a review in it's English press. Apparently the piece claims, among other things, that Bordiga's conception belongs to the 'reactionary utopias of anarcho-syndicalism', so yes, quite clearly a 'serious piece of work':

Trotskyists and the class nature of the USSR: The Charlatanry of the Spartacists (http://www.pcint.org/07_TP/006/006_trotskyists-class-nature-ussr.htm)

Die Neue Zeit

2nd August 2011, 14:55

Jose Gracchus

2nd August 2011, 17:27

So no explanation on the "free lunch" and calling for tanks in Gdansk? Say-so from "someone you trust"?

If you really are a historian, someone needs to yank your credentials. Jesus Christ.

syndicat

2nd August 2011, 19:22

The Brezhnev generation, almost all upwardly mobile former factory workers. In terms of pure social origin, the Soviet bureaucracy was "more" proletarian, in an Archie Bunker sort of fashion, after the Great Purge than before.

a person's class is determined by their current position, not where they came from. many cops and foremen and small business owners in the USA came from the working class.

Stalin was a great believer in upward mobility...for those loyal to the bureaucratic machine. during the first Five Year Plan he pushed aside others to put former workers & peasants, who were loyal party members, thru crash coures in the universities, to train managers and engineers, replacing many who were holdovers from the ancien regime. this was a process of "class formation" for the new bureaucratic ruling class.

A Marxist Historian

2nd August 2011, 21:18

I've heard of it. The International Communist Party (Il Comunista) wrote a review in it's English press. Apparently the piece claims, among other things, that Bordiga's conception belongs to the 'reactionary utopias of anarcho-syndicalism', so yes, quite clearly a 'serious piece of work':

Trotskyists and the class nature of the USSR: The Charlatanry of the Spartacists (http://www.pcint.org/07_TP/006/006_trotskyists-class-nature-ussr.htm)

I hadn't remembered that the pamphlet even mentioned the Bordigists. But I checked your link, and it seems it did, in, as this article puts it, an "offhand" fashion.

The article quotes the pamphlet as saying, "The idea of an economy without money or markets, completely administrative, is, in a situation of shortage, a reactionary Utopia pure and simple.The Soviet masses, which supported the militarization of labor under Stalin and who still must line up in a queue (...), would not view with a kindly eye the programmes of sharing out work per administrative decision and the general rationing of consumer goods." (I think "supported" is a mistranslation to and from Italian by the way, probably the original was "endured" or something.)

And it opposes this elmentary truism and goes on to criticize the Spartacists of all people as market socialists! Truly only a Bordigist could say something as silly as that.

I could go through all the foolishnesses in this piece at some length, but life is too short and I have been posting up a storm lately. It does remind me of a friend of mine's joke, after reading Bordiga's book on the subject, that the Bordigist version of state capitalism is that yes they did have a stock market in the Soviet Union, but they hid it in the basement of the Kremlin so that the workers wouldn't find out.

The only serious thing in it is its resurrection of the Trotsky quote about "running the film of reformism in reverse," an interesting question to which the Spartacists devoted much attention to in their brilliant 1992 Marxist analysis of the collapse of the Soviet Union. An article also written by Spartacist theoretician Joseph Seymour, as was the "state capitalism" pamphlet. Unfortunately not available on the Internet, I hope somebody transcribes it or scans it or whatever.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

2nd August 2011, 21:24

So no explanation on the "free lunch" and calling for tanks in Gdansk? Say-so from "someone you trust"?

If you really are a historian, someone needs to yank your credentials. Jesus Christ.

Hm? Reread my postings from last night, which I grant were quite profuse so maybe you missed it. I did indeed address the "free lunch" quotation, which I regard as legit if not dragged out of context.

As for calling for tanks in Gdansk, the Spartacist position was that they were for suppressing Solidarity, but they did not call for blood in the streets, and were quite pleased, and said so quite publicly (I could hunt down the quote from Workers Vanguard if you *really* care, I have good files) when it went down without any tanks and few incidents of violence, relatively speaking.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

2nd August 2011, 21:34

a person's class is determined by their current position, not where they came from. many cops and foremen and small business owners in the USA came from the working class.

Stalin was a great believer in upward mobility...for those loyal to the bureaucratic machine. during the first Five Year Plan he pushed aside others to put former workers & peasants, who were loyal party members, thru crash coures in the universities, to train managers and engineers, replacing many who were holdovers from the ancien regime. this was a process of "class formation" for the new bureaucratic ruling class.

Indeed, except that they were hardly a ruling class, just a bunch of bureaucrats, very much like the sort of folk who become bureaucrats in American trade unions, with similar social values when you get right down to it. "I'm all right jack," you know what I mean?

Like Jimmy Hoffa Jr. in the Teamsters, who even sorta inherited his position, like the Kim Il Sung dynasty in North Korea.

Robert Davies I think it was referred to this as the "dictatorship of the ex-proletariat." The Soviet CP recruited *a million and a half* workers off the factory floor during Stalin's "industrial revolution." Not at all coincidentally, this is about the same figure as the number usually given for the *size* of the Soviet working class at its numerical nadir in 1921 at the time of Kronstadt etc.

Of course those of them who were distressed and revolted by the Great Famine were purged when things settled down in the mid '30s, and those who made it through, thinking that's only peasants after all I'm a worker, eagerly replaced all the old, tired ex-revolutionaries shot or packed off to gulags during the Great Terror.

-M.H.-

Kiev Communard

2nd August 2011, 21:49

Indeed, except that they were hardly a ruling class, just a bunch of bureaucrats, very much like the sort of folk who become bureaucrats in American trade unions, with similar social values when you get right down to it. "I'm all right jack," you know what I mean?

Oh, god... Just once again, last time before I quit this discussion out of despair: THERE IS A BIG DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE SERVANT OF THE OUTSIDE RULING CLASS (I.E. TRADE UNION BUREAUCRAT) AND THE MEMBER OF THE RULING CLASS ITSELF, even if the two are defined in the same category by the juridical arrangements (just as like an "industrial capitalist" (i.e. manager), who gets a share of his profits as a "wage of administration" according to Marx, is NOT a proletarian, even if he and his wage workets are nominally waged employees of the one and the same firm). The analogies I used before with regard to members of ruling classes under state tributary/feudal society are just as applicable to state-capitalist regimes as well.

As for Chattopadhyay's views, I am too exhausted due to the work stress now to create my own summary. I would refer you to the following article (http://libcom.org/library/socialism-marx-early-bolshevism-chattopadhyay) by him, though. It will explain his, and my position pretty much well. Of course, if you call it a "nonsense" without reading it (as you seem to be fond of doing, if something does not fit your incredibly narrow theoretical concept of capitalism), be rest assured that I will no longer debate anything with you.

Jose Gracchus

2nd August 2011, 22:55

All this hand-waving to prove that the workers were somehow the ruling class, but had a problem with their picked leaders (and obviously all would be well with a Spart leadership; similar to your position on dead trade unions). It truly is breath-taking.

RedTrackWorker

3rd August 2011, 01:52

The Great Terror of 1937-38 had nothing whatsoever to do with the great turn to the right in the year 1934, which took place around about the time of the famous "Congress of Victors" in 1934, the vast majority of whose delegates died in the Great Terror.

Even better is the notion that the reconstitution of the *officer corps,* quite a few of whom, including Tukhachevsky, were former Tsarist officers, marked a change in the "social nature of the regime."

The Popular Front was not the same as shooting, torturing and destroying workers' organizations from the inside--which is what Stalinism did in the Spanish civil war. Stalinism brought the methods of fascism into the workers' movement and their organizations in the late 30's. If you cannot see the change their, then you're blind to what was clear to its victims across Europe, Russia and the world. The German Social Democrats did not kill worker leaders like Luxemberg themselves, they oversaw the government. The Stalinists killed Nin. They did not just give the orders from afar (though they did that too), they did not just participate in a bourgeois government that did it (like the German SPD did), they themselves carried out fascist-like attacks on workers and their organizations in Spain that the actual Republican government was not willing to do. They brought torture into the workers' movement from the inside, can you not understand the far-reaching social significance of the state apparatus becoming involved in fascist-like attacks within the workers' movement?

Trotsky saw the change, noted it and understood such a contradiction could not last long. Others still in the state apparatus, like Reiss, saw the change and broke from Stalinism for the Fourth International. And the Reiss faction Trotsky posited the existence of? Rogovin's work shows it was killed in the purges.

You want to use the corrupt union analogy? Then the analogue is the union that becomes an outright company union but keeps the outward forms of the union the better to maintain control over the workforce. The idea that Stalin at the Yalta conference--calmly dividing up the world--is the Jimmy Hoffa of a workers' state, and that this system persisted for almost fifty more years after makes a mockery of a claim to commitment to the liberation of the working class and through it, humanity.

Natalie Trotsky's words still ring true today:
(http://lrp-cofi.org/PR/natalia38.html)

Virtually every year after the beginning of the fight against the usurping Stalinist bureaucracy, L.D. Trotsky repeated that the regime was moving to the right, under conditions of a lagging world revolution and the seizure of all political positions in Russia by the bureaucracy. Time and again, he pointed out how the consolidation of Stalinism in Russia led to the worsening of the economic, political and social positions of the working class, and the triumph of a tyrannical and privileged aristocracy. If this trend continues, he said, the revolution will be at an end and the restoration of capitalism will be achieved.

That, unfortunately, is what has happened even if in new and unexpected forms. There is hardly a country in the world where the authentic ideas and bearers of socialism are so barbarously hounded. It should be clear to everyone that the revolution has been completely destroyed by Stalinism. Yet you continue to say that under this unspeakable regime, Russia is still a workers’ state. I consider this a blow at socialism. Stalinism and the Stalinist state have nothing whatever in common with a workers’ state or with socialism. They are the worst and the most dangerous enemies of socialism and the working class.

You now hold that the states of Eastern Europe over which Stalinism established its domination during and after the war, are likewise workers’ states. This is equivalent to saying that Stalinism has carried out a revolutionary socialist role. I cannot and will not follow you in this.

After the war and even before it ended, there was a rising revolutionary movement of the masses in these Eastern countries. But it was not these masses that won power and it was not a workers’ state that was established by their struggle. It was the Stalinist counterrevolution that won power, reducing these lands to vassals of the Kremlin by strangling the working masses, their revolutionary struggles and their revolutionary aspirations.

By considering that the Stalinist bureaucracy established workers’ states in these countries, you assign to it a progressive and even revolutionary role. By propagating this monstrous falsehood to the workers’ vanguard, you deny to the Fourth International all the basic reasons for existence as the world party of the socialist revolution. In the past, we always considered Stalinism to be a counterrevolutionary force in every sense of the term. You no longer do so. But I continue to do so.

In 1932 and 1933, the Stalinists, in order to justify their shameless capitulation to Hitlerism, declared that it would matter little if the Fascists came to power because socialism would come after and through the rule of Fascism. Only dehumanized brutes without a shred of socialist thought or spirit could have argued this way. Now, notwithstanding the revolutionary aims which animate you, you maintain that the despotic Stalinist reaction which has triumphed in Europe is one of the roads through which socialism will eventually come. This view marks an irredeemable break with the profoundest convictions always held by our movement and which I continue to share.
....
In the message sent me from the recent convention of the SWP you write that Trotsky’s ideas continue to be your guide. I must tell you that I read these words with great bitterness. As you observe from what I have written above, I do not see his ideas in your politics. I have confidence in these ideas. I remain convinced that the only way out of the present situation is the social revolution, the self-emancipation of the proletariat of the world.

A Marxist Historian

3rd August 2011, 07:51

Oh, god... Just once again, last time before I quit this discussion out of despair: THERE IS A BIG DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE SERVANT OF THE OUTSIDE RULING CLASS (I.E. TRADE UNION BUREAUCRAT) AND THE MEMBER OF THE RULING CLASS ITSELF, even if the two are defined in the same category by the juridical arrangements (just as like an "industrial capitalist" (i.e. manager), who gets a share of his profits as a "wage of administration" according to Marx, is NOT a proletarian, even if he and his wage workets are nominally waged employees of the one and the same firm). The analogies I used before with regard to members of ruling classes under state tributary/feudal society are just as applicable to state-capitalist regimes as well.

The problem is simply that the Soviet Union was not a capitalist society, state or otherwise. Marx explained what capitalism is and how it worked. That has little or nothing to do with how the Soviet Union worked.
I will get around to your theoretician sooner or later. I am in no hurry, and neither are you, as both of us have other matters to tend to. Which is fine.

May I assume that you will practice the same courtesy and look over and critique the link to the Spartacist critique of the idea that the Soviet Union is a new class society?

I am not in the habit of rejecting other notions than my own without reading them, as you seem to think. Quite the contrary. I did in fact read Daum's foolishness a while back. I've even tried to read Cliff, though that version of state capitalism does truly try my patience. I do have trouble taking theories of state capitalism seriously, as they strike me as being in the same category as flat earthism and creationism.

"Bureaucratic collectivism" is another matter. It does have a certain coherence and logic to it. Which is understandable, as it is simply a "Marxist" version of "totalitarianism," the basic understanding of the Soviet Union that is the more or less official capitalist interpretation of the Soviet Union. It is a workable concept, as long as you do not believe that classes and class struggle are the motive force of history.

Now, you refer to a union bureaucrat as a servant of an outside ruling class. The capitalist class is I assume what you are referring to. And indeed, that is what they are. But they are servants of that outside ruling class *within* an organization of workers, a trade union.

That is a good description of the Soviet bureaucrats as well, who were essentially middle men between the capitalists of the ouside world and the working people of the Soviet Union, and ultimately servants of world imperialism within the Soviet Union. Indeed "socialism in one country" is the perfect theoretical basis for such a role. This understanding of the Soviet bureaucracy makes sense, and helps you to understand how it actually worked.

Painting them as "capitalists" is simply foolishness, that is not how they operated, any more than they operated as if they were feudal lords or Inca god-kings or however that worked.

Should the former proletarians who made up the Soviet bureaucracy be described as proletarians, since they drew a "wage of administration"? Well, no. Trotsky described the Soviet bureaucracy as a *petty bourgeois* layer. I think this is a profound insight, which helps explain why petty bourgeois peasant guerilla leaders like Castro or for that matter Mao could become Stalinist bureaucrats lording it over deformed workers' states so easily.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

3rd August 2011, 08:40

The Popular Front was not the same as shooting, torturing and destroying workers' organizations from the inside--which is what Stalinism did in the Spanish civil war. Stalinism brought the methods of fascism into the workers' movement and their organizations in the late 30's. If you cannot see the change their, then you're blind to what was clear to its victims across Europe, Russia and the world. The German Social Democrats did not kill worker leaders like Luxemberg themselves, they oversaw the government. The Stalinists killed Nin. They did not just give the orders from afar (though they did that too), they did not just participate in a bourgeois government that did it (like the German SPD did), they themselves carried out fascist-like attacks on workers and their organizations in Spain that the actual Republican government was not willing to do. They brought torture into the workers' movement from the inside, can you not understand the far-reaching social significance of the state apparatus becoming involved in fascist-like attacks within the workers' movement?

So you are saying then that the German Social Democracy, Noske etc., were not really responsible for killing Luxemburg and Liebknecht. That is disgusting.

It's true that the actual hands that carried out the murders of Karl and Rosa were those of their Freikorps allies, not their own. But do you seriously think for one second that the Social Democrats were not involved in "fascist like attacks" vs. the German Communists themselves, by Social Democratic goon squads? If you think that, you don't know much about German Social Democracy, that's for sure.

In Prussia, the head police chief was a Social Democrat for virtually the entire Weimar period, and for quite a while you virtually had to be a Social Democrat to be hired as a cop in Prussia. And the Prussian police beat up, killed and used the "third degree," i.e. torture, on Communists, the homeless, unauthorized strikers, any sort of troublemakers, in very much the usual cop fashion.

And when Germany went Nazi, the great majority of these Social Democratic cops switched from the SDP to the Nazi Party without blinking an eyes.

And no, there was absolutely no difference between the Popular Front policy in general and the brutality by which it was applied by the Stalinists in Spain in particular. It's true that SP leader Caballero, who fancied himself as a "left Socialist" and the "Spanish Lenin," didn't like some of what was done, but he really didn't object too strongly.

And meanwhile, all those Stalinists and Bukharinists and capitulated Trotskyists and Zinovievists who supported the Popular Front policy in Spain were *baying for the blood" of the "Trotsky Fifth Column" in Spain at the top of their lungs, right up to the point that Stalin arrested them, and afterwards too.

If the Great Terror and the extermination of the vast majority of the old Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union had simply never happened, it is doubtful that that would have changed anything that went on in Spain by one iota.

Indeed, who was it who oversaw the Spanish persecutions? It was capitulated former Trotskyist Antonov-Ovseenko, who himself was shot by Stalin shortly thereafter.

I repeat, you simply don't know what you are talking about in terms of Soviet history. The LRP version of how the Soviet Union went capitalist was concocted as an experiment in coming up with something that would be different from everybody else's for marketing purposes, and might sound plausible to ignorant Americans. Nobody who knows anything about Soviet history can take it seriously.

Much though I criticize the other versions of state capitalism you see here on Revleft, if you say the Soviet Union was capitalist from the getgo, or if you say that it went capitalist in 1921 with the NEP and Kronstadt, or even the Cliffite notion that Industrial Revolution of the late 1920s meant the Soviet Union became "capitalist" then, at least you are correlating the birth of "state capitalism" to genuine changes in Soviet society, not just who was occupying the offices. The LRP theory is pretty much in the same category as the Maoist theory that capitalist roader Khrushchev woke up one day and "went the capitalist road."

By the way, I've read most of Rogovin's books, there is good stuff in them, but a lot of stuff has to be taken with a big grain of salt. Not least, of course, his fervent agreement with his leader David North that Joseph Hansen was an NKVD agent and the Trotskyist movement was riddled with Soviet spies. In general, like so many Soviet dissidents of the Brezhnev era, he was a conspiracist seeing conspiracies everywhere, which is why he and North got along so well. As a "Kremlinologist" he is not to be relied on, though when he talks about Trotsky's theories and Soviet society in general he is usually excellent. And he is absolutely *not* a state cap!

Trotsky saw the change, noted it and understood such a contradiction could not last long. Others still in the state apparatus, like Reiss, saw the change and broke from Stalinism for the Fourth International. And the Reiss faction Trotsky posited the existence of? Rogovin's work shows it was killed in the purges.

You want to use the corrupt union analogy? Then the analogue is the union that becomes an outright company union but keeps the outward forms of the union the better to maintain control over the workforce. The idea that Stalin at the Yalta conference--calmly dividing up the world--is the Jimmy Hoffa of a workers' state, and that this system persisted for almost fifty more years after makes a mockery of a claim to commitment to the liberation of the working class and through it, humanity.

Natalie Trotsky's words still ring true today:
(http://lrp-cofi.org/PR/natalia38.html)

So then you think Jimmy Hoffa's Teamsters Union is a company union? That was not the opinion of the Teamsters I worked with when I was a union activist, is all I can say to that. The logical conclusion of your remarks above is that if the Teamsters go on strike, nothing wrong with scabbing, since it's a company union after all.

As for Natalia, she was a good revolutionary but not a Marxist theoretician. And she was greatly under the influence in her last years of Grandizo Munis, the Spanish Trotskyist leader who was definitely an ultraleft. She felt that the Fourth International wasn't as revolutionary during WWII as her husband Trotsky would have wanted. And some of its steps, notably what the FI made out of Trotsky's Proletarian Military Policy mistake, explain why she might have felt that way.

So when Munis decided that the Soviet Unon had gone capitalist, she went along with that. Understandable, with Stalin having murdered her husband, several of her children, and a lot of her old friends.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

3rd August 2011, 09:07

As for Chattopadhyay's views, I am too exhausted due to the work stress now to create my own summary. I would refer you to the following article (http://libcom.org/library/socialism-marx-early-bolshevism-chattopadhyay) by him, though. It will explain his, and my position pretty much well. Of course, if you call it a "nonsense" without reading it (as you seem to be fond of doing, if something does not fit your incredibly narrow theoretical concept of capitalism), be rest assured that I will no longer debate anything with you.

Well, I just looked over the Chattopadhyay article. I was expecting, well, fearing to be precise, that it would be a subtle and complex theory that I would have to study at length and which it would take me huge efforts and hours of thought and writing to critique properly. LIke one of Cliff's or Daum's or Shachtman's or Bordiga's productions, a whole brand new revision of Marxism.

To my relief, that is not the case. The article is not "nonsense," indeed except for its central flaw it is a well written and intelligent piece, and some of his thoughts about the nature of a future socialist society strike me as well taken.

But that is all besides the point, as it is founded on a classic, elementary and very familiar misunderstanding, that has been discussed here on Revleft many times before. I would assume that he has a previous Stalinist background of some sort, as it is very much a misunderstanding stemming from the Stalinist distortion of the ideas of Marx and Lenin.

Quite simply, he confuses, as Stalinists usually do, socialism with the transitional period in betweeen socialism and capitalism, the period in which one has that basic Marxist concept that one does not see mentioned by him even once, the "dictatorship of the proletariat."

So just about everything in the piece is not so much wrong as irrelevant.

This seems an oddly innocent mistake on his part. Thus the last line in his comments on Trotsky's ideas is: "Confronted by the Mensheviks, Trotsky, in one of his writings concedes that 'there will be no state and no coercive apparatus in a socialist regime.'" Apparently this surprises him. He seemingly doesn't even realize that this is no "concession" on Trotsky's part, but an elementary truism that any Marxist should know.

But that Stalinists do not. Chattopadhyay seems genuinely not to understand that Stalin's ideas are a *revision" of the ideas of Lenin. This is, I suspect, because he is a former Stalinist himself, who had it driven into him at length the lie that Stalin was just the continuator of Lenin's work.

-M.H.-

Kiev Communard

3rd August 2011, 09:13

OK, I got it. Well, goodbye then. If you are incapable of addressing the major points of the essay, because its author was once a Stalinist, then it is clear there is no point in debating with you at all. Or was Engels a Stalinist when he said:

The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers - proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head.

Obviously this "crazy ultra-left Stalinist" "had no clue" that capital exists only when it is owned by supposedly free and separate individuals, as you, following von Hayek's notion of "private" as "individual" property (instead of the Marxian idea of "private" as "class" property) falsely assert.

And, by the way, Chattopadhyay addresses the false notion of "transitional period" that orthodox Trotskyists are so fond of in his larger book, so I urge you to read it before making unbased assumptions on his "stupidity" (although when have you ever taken the opposing views seriously?)

RedTrackWorker

3rd August 2011, 13:26

So you are saying then that the German Social Democracy, Noske etc., were not really responsible for killing Luxemburg and Liebknecht. That is disgusting.

How could you draw that conclusion from what I said? I did not say they were not responsible, I said they did not do it themselves.

It's true that the actual hands that carried out the murders of Karl and Rosa were those of their Freikorps allies, not their own. But do you seriously think for one second that the Social Democrats were not involved in "fascist like attacks" vs. the German Communists themselves, by Social Democratic goon squads?

I actually have not heard of SPD goon squads performing torture in secret prisons on German Communists or anything like that. Feel free to share. You give several examples from them as police which misses the point of comparison here, which is that for a state to set up a "Freikorps" like entity in another country suggests something about the social direction that state is headed.

If the Great Terror and the extermination of the vast majority of the old Bolsheviks in the Soviet Union had simply never happened, it is doubtful that that would have changed anything that went on in Spain by one iota.

Again, the whole notion of "contradiction" is thrown out the window if a workers' state can exist almost indefinitely with a counterrevolutionary leadership. The idea that the state appartatus of a workers' state can go into other countries to set up fascist-like agencies to destroy revolutions with no repercussions on the social basis of the state should have no place in a Marxist theory. You see no change from the Great Terror, but Churchill and Roosevelt sure did.

So then you think Jimmy Hoffa's Teamsters Union is a company union?

Again, I don't know how you're getting that from. My point was you can't compare Stalin to Jimmy Hoffa as you did, because Hoffa was the head of a genuine workers' organization whereas Stalin post-39 was not.

And some of its steps, notably what the FI made out of Trotsky's Proletarian Military Policy mistake, explain why she might have felt that way.

So when Munis decided that the Soviet Unon had gone capitalist, she went along with that. Understandable, with Stalin having murdered her husband, several of her children, and a lot of her old friends.

There is a political logic contained in her statement--she points to specific acts and ideas, to dismiss it as an emotional response is disrespectful. To throw in the PMP as a possible reason--whose importance in being confirmed once again in Tunisia and Egypt--is both unfounded speculation and yet another confirmation of your political tendency's sickness.

A Marxist Historian

3rd August 2011, 20:24

OK, I got it. Well, goodbye then. If you are incapable of addressing the major points of the essay, because its author was once a Stalinist, then it is clear there is no point in debating with you at all.

Well, if you need an excuse to end this argument because you can't answer me, well then that's as good a one as any I suppose. Since neither of us is likely to convince the other, perhaps it's just as well. And I, and you as well I gather, do have other things to do.

If you really want to try to persuade yourself that I am incapable of addressing the major points of his essay because the author was once a Stalinist, knock yourself out. It is a harmless delusion.

I did address the key points of his essay, as you would realise perfectly
well were you not in a state of denial. I didn't deal with what he has to say on the truly *key* issue because he didn't in that essay. Apparently he does elsewhere. Indeed I would be surprised if he didn't, as he didn't strike me as a petty charlatan.

Thanks for confirming my surmise that he is a former Stalinist. I do appreciate it when I learn I am right about something.

By the way, I do not consider Chattopadhyay "stupid," as you seem to believe. Even putting quote marks around it, as if I had said that about him. Stupidity, like craziness, is not a rare thing to find here on Revleft, so the distinction is easy to make. I consider him simply to be wrongheaded.

If you have a link for the section of his larger book dealing with the transitional period between capitalism and socialism, I'd be interested in having a look at it.

-M.H.-

Or was Engels a Stalinist when he said:

The modern state, no matter what its form, is essentially a capitalist machine, the state of the capitalists, the ideal personification of the total national capital. The more it proceeds to the taking over of the productive forces, the more does it actually become the national capitalist, the more citizens does it exploit. The workers remain wage workers - proletarians. The capitalist relationship is not done away with. It is rather brought to a head.

Obviously this "crazy ultra-left Stalinist" "had no clue" that capital exists only when it is owned by supposedly free and separate individuals, as you, following von Hayek's notion of "private" as "individual" property (instead of the Marxian idea of "private" as "class" property) falsely assert.

And, by the way, Chattopadhyay addresses the false notion of "transitional period" that orthodox Trotskyists are so fond of in his larger book, so I urge you to read it before making unbased assumptions on his "stupidity" (although when have you ever taken the opposing views seriously?)

A Marxist Historian

3rd August 2011, 21:02

How could you draw that conclusion from what I said? I did not say they were not responsible, I said they did not do it themselves.

I actually have not heard of SPD goon squads performing torture in secret prisons on German Communists or anything like that. Feel free to share. You give several examples from them as police which misses the point of comparison here, which is that for a state to set up a "Freikorps" like entity in another country suggests something about the social direction that state is headed.

Well, the huge, indeed *fundamental* distinction you are drawing betweeen whether they did it with their own hands or had somebody else do it for them seems very odd to me. For that to be meaningful you'd have to be cutting them some slack on responsibility, otherwise it makes little sense.

As for torture performed in prisons, secret or otherwise, that's the sort of thing done by the state, not private individuals. So the way the Social Democrats did that was by having the police, under their command in Prussia, do it. And indeed a remarkable number of Prussian policemen, right up to the top commander, were card carrying Social Democrats. As they did not command the secret police, they didn't get to do it in secret very much.

And the repressive entities set up by the Stalinists in Spain *were not* like the Freikorps, as the Freikorps were breeding grounds for Nazism, whereas the Stalinists, to give them their due, *did* fight Franco. Quite a few of the repressers died quite heroically on the battlefront vs. Franco.

Now I suppose you could say that the SD's did not set up the Freikorps, and I will save you the trouble by saying so myself. Not relevant.

Again, the whole notion of "contradiction" is thrown out the window if a workers' state can exist almost indefinitely with a counterrevolutionary leadership. The idea that the state appartatus of a workers' state can go into other countries to set up fascist-like agencies to destroy revolutions with no repercussions on the social basis of the state should have no place in a Marxist theory. You see no change from the Great Terror, but Churchill and Roosevelt sure did.

Churchill was in favor of the Great Terror (unlike Roosevelt), as he had a burning hatred for Trotsky, so I am not sure what point you were making there.

Of course Spain had no repercussions on the social base of the state. What is Stalinism? Socialism in one country. If you accept that theoretical premise as correct, they destroying revolutions in other countries would arguably be justifiable, if it were really true that the way to construct socialism was by building it in Russia and then spreading it to the rest of the world afterwards.

If anything, in the late 1930s the struggle vs. fascism in Spain was the most *popular* aspect of Soviet foreign policy with the Soviet working class, seen as living proof that Stalin really was a revolutionary and a fighter against fascism.

Stalin's tactics were morally disgraceful, to say the least. But if one accepts the theoretical premises of his revision of Marxism, as a huge number of Revleft posters do, as you may have noticed, they are all consistent with his version of Marxist theory, abstractly speaking.

Finally, what is this nonsense about a workers state existing "almost indefinitely" with a counterrevolutionary leadership? The American Federation of Labor has existed since the 1880s with a counterrevolutionary leadership for every minute. And when the Soviet Union collapsed, it collapsed like a balloon that had been popped. Hardly what you would expect from a "capitalist state."

The only reason Trotsky's prediction of the imminent collapse of the Stalinist regime did not come true is because the Soviet army, despite Stalin's misleadership, accomplished the world-historic task of tossing fascism into the dustbin of history, completely reversing the course human history was following at that point. That gave Stalinism an unexpected fifty-year lease on life, which is now over. And when the collapse did finally come, it came in ways remarkably similar to those predicted in Trotsky's book.

Again, I don't know how you're getting that from. My point was you can't compare Stalin to Jimmy Hoffa as you did, because Hoffa was the head of a genuine workers' organization whereas Stalin post-39 was not.

I got that from what you actually wrote, as opposed to your current hasty rewrite.

As for the Teamsters being a more genuine workers' organisation than the USSR, well, I'd check with old UFW activists on that, they have a different opinion. The level of corruption and brutality to dissidents never quite met the Soviet level, but only because the Teamsters even at their peak did not have the resources Brezhnev had.

There is a political logic contained in her statement--she points to specific acts and ideas, to dismiss it as an emotional response is disrespectful. To throw in the PMP as a possible reason--whose importance in being confirmed once again in Tunisia and Egypt--is both unfounded speculation and yet another confirmation of your political tendency's sickness.

Unfounded speculation? Her and Munis's unhappiness with how the SWP was carrying out the PMP is well known.

So you want a PMP in Egypt, with military training for army officers to be carried out in union-run training camps funded by the current Egyptian government? Are you serious?

Sounds like a great way to make sure that the Egyptian army has its hooks into the brand new unions that are forming. So please don't translate this notion into Arabic and publish it, Tantawi might read it and think it's a great idea, if his control over Egypt actually started slipping.

Though not at the moment, as the Egyptian army seems pretty firmly in the saddle, with illusions in a so-called "Egyptian Revolution" rapidly fading away.

-M.H.-

RedTrackWorker

3rd August 2011, 22:26

As for torture performed in prisons, secret or otherwise, that's the sort of thing done by the state, not private individuals. [snip] And the repressive entities set up by the Stalinists in Spain *were not* like the Freikorps, as the Freikorps were breeding grounds for Nazism, whereas the Stalinists, to give them their due, *did* fight Franco.

I guess you don't know that the Stalinist GPU had a "state within the state" in Spain, as described here (http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/spain/spain08.htm) and in the Red Spanish Notebooks and other places:

There we traversed luxurious offices with upholstered armchairs and silk curtains. Down we went; a floor below it was already little less hospitable – filthy and bare cellars, with grills before the windows, no daylight, air, beds, mattresses or coverings. But a large portrait of Stalin right in front of the door of our cell compensated us for a certain lack of comfort. We no longer doubted that we were, as had so often been repeated to us, in the hands of the Spanish state police, but what seemed to be rather strange was that in this curious state police, strangers of every nationality played a dominant role, often without speaking a single word of Spanish.

From our cells we went down yet another storey lower. This building was really a secret prison, expressly designed as such. There was even less ventilation, and the conditions of hygiene were intolerable. To each of our protests they replied by discharging revolvers, or by giving the guards the order to fire if we did not immediately keep silent.
[snip]
In this instance it is not a question of the state authority, but of a particular building in the same street that had been transformed into a Stalinist private prison.
....
The spectacle was capable of crushing the nerves of the very strongest. Fatigue, weakness, questioning, insults, the enormous electric lamp that lit up my face, and the dagger that threatened me, all mingled together in my brain. Hoping to get through the nightmare more quickly, I swore: “Yes it was me. Yes, that was me with Azaña and Companys!” It was the breakdown of all their hopes to make me confess. So the time had come to change the procedures. Dalmau stood up. “You know what you have to do – usual”, he said. Down we went. I was made to go into a bathroom. They threw a piece of soap into the bath and turned the taps on. I watched the spectacle without being able to grasp the intentions of these men. When they had finished their preparations, the questioning continued. After about half an hour Calero spoke to his aides: “What do you think about it? It only remains to put him in.” And without my being able to understand why anyone should want to make me take a bath at night and in outdoor clothes, I was thrown into the air, with my head towards the floor and my feet towards the ceiling.
Then the real torture began. A fresh question was put with my head touching the surface of the water. Naturally my replies were similar to the preceding ones. I already had no more than vague memories. My head was submerged to the bottom of the bath. I remember that my wrists, swollen by the pressure of the handcuffs, made me suffer cruelly.
At the bottom of the bath I tried to resist as far as possible. For some seconds I held my breath, but then I could resist no longer. The air gave out on me. I began to take in water by the mouth, the nostrils and the ears. Then I lost control of myself. The instinct for self-preservation alone survived, which defended itself passionately.
I do not know absolutely how long I remained in this position. When I came to, I had been thrown on to a chair, with my head hanging down one side and my legs over the other. I had vomited up a great amount; the soap was an excellent emetic. My head spun round as if I were drunk. But when I regained my strength, the interrogation began. Before systematically launching the questioning, in the middle of police injuries, I was yet again plunged into the bath. The police had lost total control of themselves. They struck me with all the brutality of which they were capable, punctuating their hand blows and kicks with vulgar phrases: “Son of a whore! Pimp of an anarchist! We are going to finish with all of you!”
[snip]
The interrogations at Santa Ursula took place at night. The interrogations were conducted by Russians, Germans, Hungarians, etc, all of them members of their respective communist parties. In view of the complete impossibility of obtaining confessions by the normal procedures, they have resorted to the most bestial brutalities. The hands of the prisoner are tied behind his back, and if the accused does not confess (generally there is nothing to confess) he is beaten. All night long the prison echoes with the groans and cries of tortured comrades. With broken teeth, holes in the head, lacerated sides and haemorrhages, in such a manner they are returned after the interrogations to their cells, sometimes carried along by guards. We spent six months in Santa Ursula. We did not know a single case of a real spy or a saboteur among those who were questioned in this manner.

These were not members of the Spanish state repressive apparatus. They were prisons set up, tortures and executions carried, directly by and only under the control of the Stalinists. If you think the Stalinist repressive apparatus in Spain was not like the Freikorps because they also fought Franco, you're mistaken, as the above accounts make clear, the GPU didn't fight Franco and as their respression got so bad, that workers began asking, "Can Franco really be worse?" (i.e. fighting Franco doesn't make you "better" ipso facto, some of the bourgeoisie or its hangers-on at least fought Franco--does that change what they were?).

So there are two important distinctions between the repression of the SPD and of the Stalinists:
1) the SPD was participating in the repressive apparatus of an existing capitalist state, whereas the Stalinists set up a repressive apparatus for a capitalist state facing a dual power situation,
2) the Stalinists fascist-like repressive apparatus was set up by a workers' state being destroyed.

On those SPDers who became cops, Trotsky said the fight that they break strikes as cops matters more for their consciousness than their party cards and Sunday meetings. What does it say about the consciousness and social basis of a state apparatus that sets up on its own initiative fascist-like repressive agencies to defend a capitalist state?

Of course Spain had no repercussions on the social base of the state. What is Stalinism? Socialism in one country. If you accept that theoretical premise as correct, they destroying revolutions in other countries would arguably be justifiable, if it were really true that the way to construct socialism was by building it in Russia and then spreading it to the rest of the world afterwards.

So because Stalinism was consistent on the level of ideas, there was no conflict with material reality? So I'm saying there must be a conflict with the material reality of the underlying workers' state--and you say, "Well, it doesn't conflict with this wrong idea that Stalin put forward, so what's the theoretical problem?"

The only reason Trotsky's prediction of the imminent collapse of the Stalinist regime did not come true is because the Soviet army, despite Stalin's misleadership, accomplished the world-historic task of tossing fascism into the dustbin of history, completely reversing the course human history was following at that point. That gave Stalinism an unexpected fifty-year lease on life, which is now over. And when the collapse did finally come, it came in ways remarkably similar to those predicted in Trotsky's book.

This is hardly worthy of reply, but might be an interesting argument if fleshed out. So the question is, why did the LRP write a whole book on the Stalinist states for marketing purposes as you say, but not a single other Trotsky tendency has a comparably in depth systematic defense and explanation of deformed workers' states and a degenerated workers' state lasting fifty more years? Could it be because of all the theoretical contradictions and fundamental revisions of Marxist theory that would become obvious if one said too much?

Unfounded speculation? Her and Munis's unhappiness with how the SWP was carrying out the PMP is well known.

So you want a PMP in Egypt, with military training for army officers to be carried out in union-run training camps funded by the current Egyptian government? Are you serious?

It is unfounded speculation that the PMP is why she broke with them over Stalinism.
And you do not understand the PMP if you think it is equivalent to calling for military training under trade union control in every situation.

For example, here is how to apply the PMP to Egypt (http://lrp-cofi.org/statements/egypt_lrp-isl_2-19-11.html) today:

The example of the working-class and poor masses becoming more organized in their struggle, building councils of democratically elected leaders, can have a great effect on the ranks of the army. Revolutionaries should encourage the ranks of soldiers to organize councils of their own and to fight for the right to elect their own officers. Fears among soldiers that officers appointed from above will order them to repress the masses can make such ideas particularly appealing. Revolutionaries should also call on the soldiers to help arm the workers’ organizations to defend themselves against attacks by the police and other counter-revolutionaries. The experience of struggle within the army will go a long way to proving to the ranks of soldiers that they must overthrow their officers’ chain of command and join the working-class struggle.

A Marxist Historian

4th August 2011, 09:38

I guess you don't know that the Stalinist GPU had a "state within the state" in Spain, as described here (http://www.marxists.org/history/etol/document/spain/spain08.htm) and in the Red Spanish Notebooks and other places:

These were not members of the Spanish state repressive apparatus. They were prisons set up, tortures and executions carried, directly by and only under the control of the Stalinists. If you think the Stalinist repressive apparatus in Spain was not like the Freikorps because they also fought Franco, you're mistaken, as the above accounts make clear, the GPU didn't fight Franco and as their respression got so bad, that workers began asking, "Can Franco really be worse?" (i.e. fighting Franco doesn't make you "better" ipso facto, some of the bourgeoisie or its hangers-on at least fought Franco--does that change what they were?).

In Germany, the Freikorps *were* Franco. Quite a difference! German Social Democracy during the first few months of the German Revolution played a *purely* counterrevolutionary role, and was steeped in workers blood in slaughters conducted all over Germany in the winter and spring of 1919. Side by side with the German Francos, not battling them as the Stalinists did in Spain.

I have no reason to disbelieve your account of the horrors inflicted by the GPU in Spain. But the GPU and its prisons were *very far* from the only aspect of the Soviet intervention into Spain. If GPU prison guards were not out fighting at the front, that is simply because that was not their specialty. The Soviet "state within a state" as you call it in Spain did a pretty good job of fighting Franco on the battlefront.

Of course, that came in combination with the atrocities of the GPU. But they were simply the program of the Popular Front in action, carried to its logical conclusion. Absolutely no different from the role of Noske and Scheidemann in Germany, and probably with fewer corpses resulting.

And no, very few bourgeois in Spain were on the side of the Republic. The Popular Front, as Trotsky put it, was an alliance with "the shadow" of the bourgeoisie, rather than the bourgeoisie itself, which was just about all enthusiastically on Franco's side.

You are sliding very close to saying that there was no difference between the Spanish Republic and Franco. Not surprising, since your group are after all "third campists," so why not in Spain too?

So there are two important distinctions between the repression of the SPD and of the Stalinists:
1) the SPD was participating in the repressive apparatus of an existing capitalist state, whereas the Stalinists set up a repressive apparatus for a capitalist state facing a dual power situation,
2) the Stalinists fascist-like repressive apparatus was set up by a workers' state being destroyed.

There was a revolution in Germany in the fall of 1918, and there most certainly was dual power in the first few months of this revolution, after the overthrow of the Kaiser by the workers and soldiers and sailors.

The repressive apparatus of the German state was rebuilt by the SPD precisely. And most certainly was "fascist-like," and committed repression against the revolutionary workers that was bloodier than what the GPU did in Spain.

So your distinctions are meaningless.

On those SPDers who became cops, Trotsky said the fight that they break strikes as cops matters more for their consciousness than their party cards and Sunday meetings. What does it say about the consciousness and social basis of a state apparatus that sets up on its own initiative fascist-like repressive agencies to defend a capitalist state?

That's right, a cop is a cop. But what does it say about a party that not only supports the cops, but runs the Prussian police force and recruits its members for the Prussian police force? That it is a cop party, a part of the German state apparatus, not a workers party? That would be exactly the same error you are committing here.

There is a reason why the unscientific epithet "social-fascist" was directed vs. the SPD, which, in the unscientific sense you are using it, indeed behaved in a very "fascist" fashion during the German Revolution.

The SPD very consciously and deliberately broke the German Revolution, not hesitating at large scale massacres of left wing workers all over Germany. And that was in their very own country, not somebody else's. So by your criteria, it was no longer a workers but a fascist party. And indeed that is exactly what the ultralefts in Germany believed at the time.

Why did not only Stalin, but people like Bukharin and Zinoviev hail the destruction of the "Trotzkyite Fifth Column" in Spain, carried out by former Trotskyist Antonov-Ovseenko, the actual organizer of that Stalinist "state within a state" in Spain? Just to make Stalin happy? Far from it.

It is because they believed that proletarian revolution was not on the agenda, and what the world needed was a "Peoples Front" of everybody from Stalin to Roosevelt to defeat the fascist menace. In that context, left wingers calling for workers revolution were seen as fascist Fifth Columnists disrupting the Peoples Front and doing Hitler's work, who had to be crushed. So a "state within a state" was needed to do the job, since the Spanish Republic wasn't up to it.

So because Stalinism was consistent on the level of ideas, there was no conflict with material reality? So I'm saying there must be a conflict with the material reality of the underlying workers' state--and you say, "Well, it doesn't conflict with this wrong idea that Stalin put forward, so what's the theoretical problem?"

The material reality was that the policies of the Stalinists in Spain were simply reformism and class collaboration equipped with prisons and torture chambers. Reformists in power *always* sanctify the prisons and torture chambers of the capitalist state. The German SPD merely being a particularly notorious example.

The British Labour Party or the French Socialist Party in power always conducted the very same colonial massacres in India or Algeria or Vietnam that the explicitly pro-capitalist parties conducted. In Algeria the SP-dominated French government of the mid 1950s turned torture into an art form. Does that mean that Stalin in his Third Period was right, and that all social-democrats are social-fascists?

This is hardly worthy of reply, but might be an interesting argument if fleshed out. So the question is, why did the LRP write a whole book on the Stalinist states for marketing purposes as you say, but not a single other Trotsky tendency has a comparably in depth systematic defense and explanation of deformed workers' states and a degenerated workers' state lasting fifty more years? Could it be because of all the theoretical contradictions and fundamental revisions of Marxist theory that would become obvious if one said too much?

Well, if page count is the measure here, the Cliffites have written whole scads of books, granted that they are just as bad or worse than yours.

The Spartacists can't match the LRP in page count terms, indeed to the best of my knowledge no Spartacists have written *any* books on *any* subject. But the material they have published in their theoretical magazine, their pamphlets and their Prometheus Bullets is in qualitative, if not quantitative, fashion vastly superior to what the LRP has produced.

Indeed, they had their very beginning as the *only* Trotskyist tendency that had an explanation, program and analysis of the Cuban Revolution that made sense. And they went on from this excellent beginning to precisely the "in depth comprehensive analysis" of Stalinism in our period you claim is missing.

Notably, the Prometheus Bulletin published in the '80s on the subject of the PMP, which did not merely analyze Trotsky's PMP error brilliantly, but went on to give the definitive explanation of just why the Stalinism was able to survive for fifty years after Trotsky died, despite Trotsky's prediction of the likelihood of its immediate collapse, an error not altogether unrelated IMHO to his error on the PMP. The major reason of course being something Trotsky quite naturally did not foresee, namely the Soviet victory over fascism.

Also, the brilliant materials published in their theoretical magazine and pamphlets on the collapse of Stalinism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, which also represent genuine advances in Marxist theory.

It is unfounded speculation that the PMP is why she broke with them over Stalinism.
And you do not understand the PMP if you think it is equivalent to calling for military training under trade union control in every situation.

For example, here is how to apply the PMP to Egypt (http://lrp-cofi.org/statements/egypt_lrp-isl_2-19-11.html) today:

No, she did not break with the FI over the PMP. The break was because she sympathized with Grandizo Munis and his ultraleft criticisms of the FI, which the statement from her you posted here was an expression of, not least in its state capitalism.

That Munis's break with the FI began earlier than this, and that the PMP and Cannon's trial testimony, which he sharply criticized, played a central role in this, is well known.

And yes, Trotsky's concept of the PMP was exactly military training under trade union control, funded by the state. No more, no less. Whatever the LRP calls for in Egypt today isn't Trotsky's PMP if it is anything else. Calling it the PMP is simply more false advertising for branding purposes.

-M.H.-

Jose Gracchus

4th August 2011, 10:04

This seems an oddly innocent mistake on his part. Thus the last line in his comments on Trotsky's ideas is: "Confronted by the Mensheviks, Trotsky, in one of his writings concedes that 'there will be no state and no coercive apparatus in a socialist regime.'" Apparently this surprises him. He seemingly doesn't even realize that this is no "concession" on Trotsky's part, but an elementary truism that any Marxist should know.

But that Stalinists do not. Chattopadhyay seems genuinely not to understand that Stalin's ideas are a *revision" of the ideas of Lenin. This is, I suspect, because he is a former Stalinist himself, who had it driven into him at length the lie that Stalin was just the continuator of Lenin's work.

-M.H.-

"Socialism is soviet power + electrification!"

"Socialism is the state capitalist monopoly made to serve the whole people."

Who said that again? Guess Lenin failed to grasp that "elementary truism that any Marxist should know".

RedTrackWorker

4th August 2011, 13:00

If GPU prison guards were not out fighting at the front, that is simply because that was not their specialty. The Soviet "state within a state" as you call it in Spain did a pretty good job of fighting Franco on the battlefront.
[snip]
Why did not only Stalin, but people like Bukharin and Zinoviev hail the destruction of the "Trotzkyite Fifth Column" in Spain, carried out by former Trotskyist Antonov-Ovseenko, the actual organizer of that Stalinist "state within a state" in Spain? Just to make Stalin happy? Far from it.

It is because they believed that proletarian revolution was not on the agenda, and what the world needed was a "Peoples Front" of everybody from Stalin to Roosevelt to defeat the fascist menace. In that context, left wingers calling for workers revolution were seen as fascist Fifth Columnists disrupting the Peoples Front and doing Hitler's work, who had to be crushed. So a "state within a state" was needed to do the job, since the Spanish Republic wasn't up to it.

Sounds like a good apologia for the Stalinists in Spain. I would suggest you submit it for publication, but I think it's been published enough.

The Stalinists "state within a state" did not do a good job fighting Franco. The Stalinist assistance on the battlefront was paid for with Spanish gold. When we're talking about the "state within a state" the phrase refers to the state functions that the Stalinists took on outside of their formal power in the government. What "state within a state" role did they play on the battlefront? The International Brigades--the grouping that they disbanded to appease the imperialists and put the ones who couldn't emigrate into concentration camps and threatened to shoot those who wanted to take back up arms to resist Franco when he made his way into Catalonia? You mean the Stalinists officers who shot workers for blowing up factories--or talking about blowing up factories--that Franco was about to capture? You mean the Stalinists who denied arms to key sections of the front to weaken the revolutionary workers--they "did a pretty good job of fighting Franco on the battlefront"? Or the Stalinists who gave the best weapons to the police in the rear? Which of these Stalinists "state within a state" agents were so great on the battlefront?

Many of the Spanish Stalinists--and many of the Stalinists from all over--who came to Spain fought and died heroically for the workers' cause. But the question is what of the ones who came as agents of Stalin--the "state within a state"? Can you point me to a single contribution of theirs to the fight against Franco?

And this is the whole problem with your "they thought they were doing right, because if it was all about the fight against Franco, you did have to get these people." No, the functionaries and leaders generally either knew that was a bullshit "big lie" or came to realize it through the process of carrying it out (and either became corrupted or broke with Stalin). The only "logic" to the Stalinist counterrevolution in Spain was the defense of capitalism as a system, which suggests something about the social direction of the state setting that policy.

A Marxist Historian

4th August 2011, 23:48

"Socialism is soviet power + electrification!"

"Socialism is the state capitalist monopoly made to serve the whole people."

Who said that again? Guess Lenin failed to grasp that "elementary truism that any Marxist should know".

I wouldn't even comment on this, except that this is a great example of dragging quotes out of context. Could be used nicely as an educational example, to explain to people when using a short quote is dragging it out of context, and when it isn't. But not today.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

5th August 2011, 00:14

Sounds like a good apologia for the Stalinists in Spain. I would suggest you submit it for publication, but I think it's been published enough.

The Stalinists "state within a state" did not do a good job fighting Franco. The Stalinist assistance on the battlefront was paid for with Spanish gold.

Yes, they did a first rate job of fighting Franco on the battlefront, and yes it was paid for in part by Spanish gold. And also, be it noted, by big popular fundraising campaigns in the Soviet Union. Since the bourgeois Spanish Republic got fair value received, I don't see a huge problem with that. A question could be raised about the NKVD running off with the Spanish gold reserves when the Republic collapsed, but otherwise the gold would have ended up in the hands of Franco.

I do not consider telling the truth, instead of convenient political fictions, an apologia for Stalinism in Spain, as the truth of what they did in Spain is bad enough without telling lies.

When we're talking about the "state within a state" the phrase refers to the state functions that the Stalinists took on outside of their formal power in the government. What "state within a state" role did they play on the battlefront? The International Brigades--the grouping that they disbanded to appease the imperialists and put the ones who couldn't emigrate into concentration camps and threatened to shoot those who wanted to take back up arms to resist Franco when he made his way into Catalonia? You mean the Stalinists officers who shot workers for blowing up factories--or talking about blowing up factories--that Franco was about to capture? You mean the Stalinists who denied arms to key sections of the front to weaken the revolutionary workers--they "did a pretty good job of fighting Franco on the battlefront"? Or the Stalinists who gave the best weapons to the police in the rear? Which of these Stalinists "state within a state" agents were so great on the battlefront?

There's some truth in what you are saying, Stalinists being Stalinists after all, but overall the Soviet contribution to the Spanish Republican military effort was hugely positive. That is elementary military history, which no serious military historian would dispute.

Many of the Spanish Stalinists--and many of the Stalinists from all over--who came to Spain fought and died heroically for the workers' cause. But the question is what of the ones who came as agents of Stalin--the "state within a state"? Can you point me to a single contribution of theirs to the fight against Franco?

Certainly. the Soviet intervention into Spain was not simply sending NKVD interrogators and tanks and planes. They also sent a number of Soviet military officers, whose military experience and knowledge was hugely useful to the armies of the Spanish Republic. They were certainly state functionaries.

The most famous being Antonov-Ovseenko himself, who had been Trotsky's right hand man in the Red Army during the Civil War, and who was the man in charge of the "state within a state." He oversaw all the repressions against Trotskyists and anarchists, but that was not in fact his main function, his main function being to help stiffen the Spanish armies vs. Franco. Which he did.

And this is the whole problem with your "they thought they were doing right, because if it was all about the fight against Franco, you did have to get these people." No, the functionaries and leaders generally either knew that was a bullshit "big lie" or came to realize it through the process of carrying it out (and either became corrupted or broke with Stalin). The only "logic" to the Stalinist counterrevolution in Spain was the defense of capitalism as a system, which suggests something about the social direction of the state setting that policy.

Some of the Stalinist functionaries and leaders got disgusted by what they were doing, most did not. And when everything was all over, which party became the mass party of the Spanish working class, while the memory of Spanish anarchism, POUMism and Trotskyism pretty much became forgotten? Why, the Spanish Communist Party. If your version of what went down was accurate, just how do you account for that?

If you really think that most of the Stalinists in Spain did not sincerely believe that everything they were doing was all a necessary part of the fight vs. Franco, then you know nothing about the Spanish Civil War. Do you think all those Stalinists who died at the battlefront around Madrid were sollely motivated by a desire to crush workers' revolution? Go read some Ernest Hemingway or something, and become less ignorant.

-M.H.-

S.Artesian

5th August 2011, 02:12

Some of the Stalinist functionaries and leaders got disgusted by what they were doing, most did not. And when everything was all over, which party became the mass party of the Spanish working class, while the memory of Spanish anarchism, POUMism and Trotskyism pretty much became forgotten? Why, the Spanish Communist Party. If your version of what went down was accurate, just how do you account for that?

Because the victors write history. And the PCE wrote it along with Franco-- that proletarian revolution was not on the agenda.

If you really think that most of the Stalinists in Spain did not sincerely believe that everything they were doing was all a necessary part of the fight vs. Franco, then you know nothing about the Spanish Civil War. Do you think all those Stalinists who died at the battlefront around Madrid were sollely motivated by a desire to crush workers' revolution? Go read some Ernest Hemingway or something, and become less ignorant.

Ah... there's a materialist interpretation of history for you. And this guy continues to call himself a "Marxist" "Historian"- he should add "Revolutionary" so he could be mistaken three times, like the Holy Roman Empire.

The fought, and if mere "fighting" was a "thing in itself" then their "sincerity," and your idealism, might matter. But it isn't and theirs, and yours, doesn't. They not only fought against Franco, they fought for a historic impossibility-- a bourgeois republic in Spain. They not only fought for the republic, they fought against the proletarian revolution.

Change your fucking tag. Truth in advertising requirements and all that.

Jose Gracchus

5th August 2011, 02:23

I wish I knew where to buy S. Artesian's rhetorical steel-toed boots.

RedTrackWorker

5th August 2011, 04:55

Certainly. the Soviet intervention into Spain was not simply sending NKVD interrogators and tanks and planes. They also sent a number of Soviet military officers, whose military experience and knowledge was hugely useful to the armies of the Spanish Republic. They were certainly state functionaries.
[snip]
If you really think that most of the Stalinists in Spain did not sincerely believe that everything they were doing was all a necessary part of the fight vs. Franco, then you know nothing about the Spanish Civil War. Do you think all those Stalinists who died at the battlefront around Madrid were sollely motivated by a desire to crush workers' revolution? Go read some Ernest Hemingway or something, and become less ignorant.

on the last point on reading Hemingway, this is the third time in this thread you've twisted my words into their exact opposite. I explicitly said that many of stalinists fought heroically and distinguished them from the stalinist leaders.

On the first point, I did put it too one-sidedly, but s artesian helps me make my point: the fight against Franco required a proletarian revolution. The stalinist military aid helped in some instances but by being the foremost fighters against proletarian revolution, they opened the gates to Franco. To chalk that up to their belief in a two stage revolution and to ignore the implications for the social basis of the workers state is idealism.

A Marxist Historian

5th August 2011, 07:16

Because the victors write history. And the PCE wrote it along with Franco-- that proletarian revolution was not on the agenda.

So then the Spanish workers were all brainwashed or something? Come on.

If it was really true that the *sole* role of the Stalinists in Spain were to crush the workers, nothing more, then the Spanish workers, on the receiving end, would be well aware of this, and spit whenever they saw a Stalinist walking down the street. I mean hey, do you think Spanish workers are stupid or something?

The victors may well have done a good job of persuading Spanish workers that proletarian revolution was not on the agenda. But if in fact the Stalinists were butchers of the workers no different from Franco, then there would be about as many Spanish workers supporting the Spanish CP as support Franco. Far less in fact, since it was Franco not the CP who won.

Ah... there's a materialist interpretation of history for you. And this guy continues to call himself a "Marxist" "Historian"- he should add "Revolutionary" so he could be mistaken three times, like the Holy Roman Empire.

The fought, and if mere "fighting" was a "thing in itself" then their "sincerity," and your idealism, might matter. But it isn't and theirs, and yours, doesn't. They not only fought against Franco, they fought for a historic impossibility-- a bourgeois republic in Spain. They not only fought for the republic, they fought against the proletarian revolution.

Change your fucking tag. Truth in advertising requirements and all that.

And just what was the difference between fighting for bourgeois democracy and fighting against proletarian revolution? None.

Nonetheless, Spanish workers, having been under Franco for forty years, understand deep in their bones that yes, living under bourgeois democracy is a hell of a lot better than fascism. An *extremely* material reality you don't seem to understand at all.

And it is a bit odd to say that a bourgeois republic in Spain was a historic impossibility, as that is exactly what you have now.

If the Spanish Republic had won, improbable but far from impossible, then the NKVD "state within a state" would have packed up their bags and went home, mission accomplished, and you'd have some sort of Pop Front government like the ones in France before and after WWII, probably with CP ministers, who would have been kicked out after a while like in France after WWII.

It is hard to say what impact this would have had on WWII. Perhaps very little, or perhaps the bourgeois democracies would not have collapsed quite as quickly before Hitler's Blitzkrieg.

But in any case it sure as hell would have been a lot better for the Spanish workers!

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

5th August 2011, 07:31

on the last point on reading Hemingway, this is the third time in this thread you've twisted my words into their exact opposite. I explicitly said that many of stalinists fought heroically and distinguished them from the stalinist leaders.

On the first point, I did put it too one-sidedly, but s artesian helps me make my point: the fight against Franco required a proletarian revolution. The stalinist military aid helped in some instances but by being the foremost fighters against proletarian revolution, they opened the gates to Franco. To chalk that up to their belief in a two stage revolution and to ignore the implications for the social basis of the workers state is idealism.

And so did some of the Stalinist leaders too, though certainly not all. Nothing is more authoritarian than war, not even revolutions, despite what Engels said on the matter. So Stalinists can sometimes shine in wartime, as in Stalingrad, Mao's exploits in the hills, Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam, etc.

In Germany, the foremost fighters against proletarian revolution were certainly not the Stalinists, but Social Democracy. So by your logic, the Social Democracy should indeed be characterized as "social fascists," and Trotsky's criticism of this notion was arrant class betrayal.

Indeed, this was not so far from Bordiga's opinion on the matter, rather relevant as Revleft has not a few Bordigists here. Bordiga's utter unwillingness to ally with the Italian Socialists vs. Mussolini when he was the Italian CP leader was not terribly different from Stalin's hideous policy in Germany, and had exactly the same results.

Trotsky *repeatedly* made the point that the Stalinist ideology of two stage revolution and socialism in one country was an ideology that *corresponded perfectly to the social nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy."

Now, when TIC scorns this notion he is at least consistent, as he regards Trotsky as bad news from the getgo pretty much. But you guys call yourself Trotskyist, and even see Trotsky's analysis of the Soviet Union as valid up to about 1936 or so!

Given that from the point of view of the Stalinist bureaucracy even *before* the Great Terror and the misdeeds of the NKVD "state within a state" in Spain, when by the LRP's lights the Soviet Union was still a degenerated workers state, betraying revolutions in other countries for the benefit of the Soviet socialist "promised land" was utterly consistent with the *material interests,* not just the ideology, of the Soviet bureaucracy, it is you who are being an idealist and not a materialist, not me.

-M.H.-

RedTrackWorker

5th August 2011, 08:43

If it was really true that the *sole* role of the Stalinists in Spain were to crush the workers, nothing more, then the Spanish workers, on the receiving end, would be well aware of this, and spit whenever they saw a Stalinist walking down the street. I mean hey, do you think Spanish workers are stupid or something?

But the revolutionary workers at the time did start to ask "How is this better than Franco?" The answer to your question is that the victory of Franco killed, overwhelmed and dispersed the memory of the hatred of Stalinism as such.

And just what was the difference between fighting for bourgeois democracy and fighting against proletarian revolution? None.

Of course if you mean fighting "for" democracy as a political end all--but if you mean fighting to defend it from Fascism by working-class methods, then the difference between fighting to defend democracy from fascism and fighting against proletarian revolution is the difference between victory and defeat.

And it is a bit odd to say that a bourgeois republic in Spain was a historic impossibility, as that is exactly what you have now.

If the Spanish Republic had won, improbable but far from impossible, then the NKVD "state within a state" would have packed up their bags and went home, mission accomplished, and you'd have some sort of Pop Front government like the ones in France before and after WWII, probably with CP ministers, who would have been kicked out after a while like in France after WWII.

To argue it was possible then because it exists now is nonsense, but hardly politically key, but what you don't get is that if they had won and established the form of a bourgeois republic, the NKVD only would've packed up if the workers were crushed--i.e. they would have finished the fascist's historic aim in crushing the workers' organizations--but from the inside and with the form of bourgeois democracy.

Given that from the point of view of the Stalinist bureaucracy even *before* the Great Terror and the misdeeds of the NKVD "state within a state" in Spain, when by the LRP's lights the Soviet Union was still a degenerated workers state, betraying revolutions in other countries for the benefit of the Soviet socialist "promised land" was utterly consistent with the *material interests,* not just the ideology, of the Soviet bureaucracy, it is you who are being an idealist and not a materialist, not me.

I'm having trouble following this but if I understand it correctly you are ignoring an earlier post of mine in this thread where I highlight the importance of the different kinds of betrayal--taking as an example the Chinese, then German, then Spanish. The Stalinists politically betrayed the Chinese revolution--but they did not strangle it themselves. They tied it Chiang Kai-shek who butchered the revolution. In Spain, they were Chiang Kai-shek--they strangled it themselves. This is the whole point that you keep missing in the changing political evolution of the Stalinists, which I argue must have a material base, and in the turn to actual capitalist counterrevolution, that "material base" is their destruction of the social basis of the workers' state.

There's a great discussion between Trotsky and CLR James at http://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1941/01/history-opposition.htm that takes this up. James wants to "telescope" the process of degeneration of Stalinism and say his betrayal of China was the same as that in Spain, Trotsky replies:

TROTSKY: Formalism. We had the greatest revolutionary party in the world in 1917. In 1936 it strangles the revolution in Spain. How did it develop from 1917 to 1936? That is the question. According to your argument, the degeneration would have started in October 1917. In my view it started in the first years of the New Economic Policy. But even in 1927 the whole party was eagerly awaiting the issue of the Chinese revolution. What happened was that the bureaucracy acquired certain bureaucratic habits of thinking. It proposed to restrain the peasants today so as not to frighten the generals. It thought it would push the bourgeoisie to the left. It saw the Kuomintang as a body of office-holders and thought it could put Communists into the offices and so change the direction of events ... And how would you account for the change which demanded a Canton Commune?

JOHNSON: Victor Serge says that it was only for the sake of the Sixth World Congress that they wanted the Commune “if only for a quarter of an hour.”

TROTSKY: It was more for the party internally than for the International. The party was excited over the Chinese Revolution. Only during 1923 had it reached a higher pitch of intensity.

No, you want to begin with the degeneration complete. Stalin and Co. genuinely believed that the Chinese revolution was a bourgeois-democratic revolution and sought to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.
[snip--but still Trotsky:]
But despite that, when Stalin wanted to strangle the Spanish revolution openly, he had to wipe out thousands of old Bolsheviks. The first struggle started on the Permanent Revolution, the bureaucracy seeking peace and quiet. Then into this came the German revolution of 1923. Stalin dared not even oppose me openly then. We never knew until afterwards that he had secretly written the letter to Bukharin saying that the revolution should be held back. Then, after the German defeat, came the struggle over equality. It was in defense of the privileges of the bureaucracy that Stalin became its undisputed leader....

So the two-stage revolution line was wrong for China, but a genuine belief. It lead the revolution to defeat and represented the viewpoint of a privileged bureaucracy of a workers' state. In Spain, they strangled the revolution--Trotsky does not and never fully followed through on this but realized that it meant the bureaucracy was moving to crush its social basis:

My idea is, that the ruling caste in the Soviet Union is an intermediary body – between the small bureaucracy and the new ruling caste. It depends upon the events on a national as well as an international scale, whether this intermediary body will desire also to smash away the present basis and will be transformed into a new ruling class. The tendencies exist. (April 1937, Dewey Commission (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/dewey/session12.htm))

RedTrackWorker

5th August 2011, 09:44

If it was really true that the *sole* role of the Stalinists in Spain were to crush the workers, nothing more, then the Spanish workers, on the receiving end, would be well aware of this, and spit whenever they saw a Stalinist walking down the street. I mean hey, do you think Spanish workers are stupid or something?

The effect of Stalinist repression on the workers' movement can be summed up by comparing the heroic defense of Madrid to the loss of Barcelona--the city of barricades--to Franco with a single barricade being raised. Of course the Stalinists sometimes still try to blame anarchism and Trotskyism for the failure--but the difference was not of political composition but of time, and the difference of time was that the bourgeois-Stalinist repression had had its effect.

This is described quite well by a leader of the Fourth International who was there (http://www.revolutionaryhistory.co.uk/rh0412/14.html):

The repression against the proletariat on the part of the Popular Front government, at a time when so much was being said about the necessity for maintaining morale in the rear, and for recreating the enthusiasm of 19 July, systematically destroyed morale at the rear.
....
Is it possible to fight the Fascist enemy at the front enthusiastically if you do not know whether you will be spending your days on leave (a thing a militiaman was always waiting for) in Republican prisons as a suspect or as a Trotskyist? Can you fight tenaciously and with an absolutely necessary spirit of self sacrifice, when you have a brother or a cousin in prison who is a tested anti-Fascist, or when you have just come out of prison yourself? ....

I can still hear the remarks that reflected the morale of the working class that it was possible to hear practically everywhere. These remarks throw a little more light now on the reasons that determined why Barcelona surrendered without resistance, and why the city of barricades fell without barricades: “Now then, when the scrimmage comes, I will stay quietly at home! Let the upper classes go out on the street a bit!”, said one of the ex-fighters on the barricades of 19 July.

“Resistir” [90], the slogan of Doctor Negrín, was the occasion for jeers and anecdotes, not only from the Fascists and the Fifth Column, whom the Communists went on about while favouring them, but also from brave workers:

Should I ‘resist’ when all the time the others are mocking me? When others are as plump as a young woman or a baby, whereas every day I am tightening my belt a bit more? Me, must I ‘resist’ , when a convicted concealed Fascist, an ex-member of the CEDA [91], is fatter than me, I, who was in the attack on the Altarazanas [92] or some other barracks on 19 July? Must I ‘resist’ while my comrades are still in a Republican prison, isn’t that the truth? In the end, I was always one of the exploited. The worker is always shoved about, whether it be by Negrín or by Franco, and I will always be pushed around. Let Negrín or Comorera ‘resist’ a bit!

Even when you read the CNT-FAI appeals signed by García Oliver or Vázquez urging the workers to allow themselves to be killed on the spot rather than give up terrain to the enemy, appeals for “all their blood” from the workers, you have to laugh. The CNT militants laugh – so what, then, must the rank and file workers say?

“All their blood” – that is a quotation. In spite of their good intentions, of which you can only approve, the authors of these appeals imagine that the worker gives his blood all the time and more easily than a good cow gives milk. They do not suspect that for the worker to ‘give’ all his ‘blood’ he must be convinced, and firmly at that, that he is fighting to liberate his brethren. Perhaps it is a pity, ex-minister García Oliver, that the worker is not a tap that you can turn on the moment you want to draw off red liquid. To lead the workers to sacrifice there must be a revolutionary policy. Yes, a policy, even if this word is repellant to you. The spontaneity of 19 July only comes about in exceptional situations, and it needs more than appeals for enthusiasm to maintain it.

‘Resist’ – but with what perspective? Of being master of the factories, of instituting a regime with neither exploiters nor exploited? No – that would be criminal Trotskyism. ‘Resist’, ask Negrín and Comorera of the Barcelona workers, in order to have a Republican prison instead of a Francoist one, run in accordance with all the precepts of the penal code and the prison regime. Resist on behalf of the legal government, and the constitution, so that treaties should be respected. Resist in the hope that one day the frozen heart of Chamberlain will melt and he will come to help us! The views quoted above were not invented by me, I heard them in my factory, and I heard them spoken by the workers who had been on the barricades on 19 July.
....
The repression, ‘Republican order’ and the Stalinist gangsterism not only had the effect of killing a few thousand workers, and yet again ‘wiping out Trotskyism’: the repression opened the way for Franco.

Do you begin to understand that this isn't a question of the "democratic-dictatorship" two-stage slogan? That it isn't a question of good fighting on the front with some regrettable repression in the rear?

S.Artesian

5th August 2011, 12:03

And just what was the difference between fighting for bourgeois democracy and fighting against proletarian revolution? None.

Priceless. "The Popular Front is the proletarian revolution." Thus speaks a pseudo-Marxist anti-historian.

Nothing more needs to be said.

A Marxist Historian

5th August 2011, 21:25

But the revolutionary workers at the time did start to ask "How is this better than Franco?" The answer to your question is that the victory of Franco killed, overwhelmed and dispersed the memory of the hatred of Stalinism as such.

Of course if you mean fighting "for" democracy as a political end all--but if you mean fighting to defend it from Fascism by working-class methods, then the difference between fighting to defend democracy from fascism and fighting against proletarian revolution is the difference between victory and defeat.

By the late 1930s, the Stalinists were not interested in working class revolution anywhere in the world any more than were the Social Democrats. But not any less either. In fact, whereas the Stalinists were sometimes willing to go along with, accept and make use of revolution, as was demonstrated after WWII (especially if we are talking about peasant revolutions), the Social Democrats were and are *utterly* committed to opposition to revolution in any form and at any cost.

OTOH, given that Soviet Stalinism was rooted in the Soviet Union not in Spain, it was possible for Spanish Stalinists to exceed Spanish Social Democrats in counterrevolutionary treachery *without* that having any particular significance for the class nature of Stalinism.

It is absolutely true that the horrors of Francoism made the crimes of the NKVD pale in the workers' memory. But even right in the middle of events in Spain, the Spanish CP had a fair amount of support from the less radical workers, though less probably than the SP or the CNT. The Spanish CP was *not* a bourgeois party, though it did indeed have a fair number of bourgeois members, being the most right wing of the workers parties and given the utter insignificance and irrelevance except symbolically of the official Spanish Republicans.

It's true that among the most revolutionary workers, some started to begin asking if Stalinism was any better than Francoism. They were wrong. The word for that is ultra-leftism. Moreover, a form of ultra-leftism that has the danger of leading to "third campism," which in the Spanish Civil War would mean counterrevolutionary treachery.

Another word for that could be LRPism.

To argue it was possible then because it exists now is nonsense, but hardly politically key, but what you don't get is that if they had won and established the form of a bourgeois republic, the NKVD only would've packed up if the workers were crushed--i.e. they would have finished the fascist's historic aim in crushing the workers' organizations--but from the inside and with the form of bourgeois democracy.

Nonsense. They had not the least interest in crushing the UGT, rather they wanted the CP to take its leadership away from the Socialists. Nor would they have crushed the UGT if this were unsuccessful, as the Stalinists could live with the Spanish Socialists, as opposed to Trotskyists, POUMists and anarchists.

It is only the *revolutionary* workers organizations that they wanted to crush. Just like the German Social Democracy wanted to crush the revolutionary workers organizations, but not their own. Only difference being that the Stalinists wanted to do this with their own forces, whereas the German Social Democrats preferred to use the Freikorps, which was essentially a fascist organization.

Indeed, if the NKVD had stayed on after the victory of the Spanish Republic, the objective would have been presumably to Sovietize Spain, which would have meant crushing not the workers, but the capitalists. Indeed it would have required mobilizing the workers to do the job, like in Czechoslovakia after WWII, where the Soviet Army, not then occupying Czechoslovakia, played no role whatoever in the Stalinization of the country. Which is exactly why they would have packed up and left, as that would have been very far indeed from Soviet policy in that period.

I'm having trouble following this but if I understand it correctly you are ignoring an earlier post of mine in this thread where I highlight the importance of the different kinds of betrayal--taking as an example the Chinese, then German, then Spanish. The Stalinists politically betrayed the Chinese revolution--but they did not strangle it themselves. They tied it Chiang Kai-shek who butchered the revolution. In Spain, they were Chiang Kai-shek--they strangled it themselves. This is the whole point that you keep missing in the changing political evolution of the Stalinists, which I argue must have a material base, and in the turn to actual capitalist counterrevolution, that "material base" is their destruction of the social basis of the workers' state.

There's a great discussion between Trotsky and CLR James at http://www.marxists.org/archive/james-clr/works/1941/01/history-opposition.htm that takes this up. James wants to "telescope" the process of degeneration of Stalinism and say his betrayal of China was the same as that in Spain, Trotsky replies:

So the two-stage revolution line was wrong for China, but a genuine belief. It lead the revolution to defeat and represented the viewpoint of a privileged bureaucracy of a workers' state. In Spain, they strangled the revolution--Trotsky does not and never fully followed through on this but realized that it meant the bureaucracy was moving to crush its social basis:
(April 1937, Dewey Commission (http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1937/dewey/session12.htm))

I didn't ignore it, rather I didn't focus on it as it seemed obvious to me that you were missing the point. So I'll explain.

In 1927, Stalin was a *centrist.* Something it is hard for you to grasp, as the LRP are also centrists. So yes, Stalin subjectively wanted to see revolution in China, but given his program, his leadership resulted in disaster for the Chinese Revolution.

After the victory of fascism in Germany, Stalin and the whole Stalinist bureaucracy simply *gave up* on the idea of world revolution, and henceforth were simply interested in socialism in one country. Which, given the social and economic backwardness of the Soviet Union, *inevitably* over the long term meant either collapse and counterrevolution, or maintaining a long-term unviable situation By Whatever Means Necessary. Mass terror, gulags, the whole nine yards. The alternative which Stalin preferred, of course, being Stalin.

The alternative path for Stalinist bureaucrats, the Bukharin path, would inevitably have led to collapse and bourgeois counterrevolution. As was demonstrated by our latterday Bukharinist Gorbachev.

Strangling revolution is something that reformists do, whether of the Social Democratic or Stalinist persuasion. How bloodily and thoroughly this is done is merely a tactical question, dependent only on the particular situation. Or putting it another way, in Spain the NKVD weren't Chiang Kai Shek. That role was played by Franco. In Spain the NKVD were Noske and Scheidemann.

The social base of Stalinism was *not* among Spanish workers, but among Soviet workers. Which really shows up what is wrong with the LRP analysis of the Great Terror. Which was directed against the Stalinist bureaucracy itself, and against marginal elements of Soviet society--former kulaks, petty criminals, members of minority nationalities whose fatherlands were aligned with Germany and Japan, survivors of the former ruling classes, etc.

It was *not* directed vs. the workers, unless those workers happened to be political dissidents, which numerically speaking few were. In fact, economically speaking it corresponded to a period of prosperity, rising wages and improved living conditions for the Soviet working class, which is one reason why there was almost no working class opposition to the Great Terror. Another reason was that Stalin used it to channel working class resentment of the bureaucracy into support for himself, blaming all the ills of Soviet society on the "Trotzkyite wreckers and saboteurs" being arrested and shot.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

5th August 2011, 21:52

The effect of Stalinist repression on the workers' movement can be summed up by comparing the heroic defense of Madrid to the loss of Barcelona--the city of barricades--to Franco with a single barricade being raised. Of course the Stalinists sometimes still try to blame anarchism and Trotskyism for the failure--but the difference was not of political composition but of time, and the difference of time was that the bourgeois-Stalinist repression had had its effect.

This is described quite well by a leader of the Fourth International who was there (http://www.revolutionaryhistory.co.uk/rh0412/14.html):

I definitely appreciate the quote you found, it would be nice to drill it into the heads of the Stalinists so common on Revleft, but who are avoiding this thread like the plague it seems. But I think it really proves my point not yours. If I have sounded like a "defender" of Stalinism at any point, it is only because I have been arguing here against your "third campism," whose logical conclusion would be to *agree* with and go along with the working class demoralization recounted so vividly by the FI leader, and give up future Barcelonas without a fight.

As he put it so well, "the worker is not a tap that you can turn on the moment you want to draw off red liquid. To lead the workers to sacrifice there must be a revolutionary policy." That is what the Stalinists, and their close allies like right wing Social Democrat Negrin, did not understand.

And just who was conducting that heroic defense of Madrid you refer to? The Stalinists of course. And who was leading the fight? Soviet military officers sent over by Stalin.

Isn't that awfully contradictory? Yes, there's a reason why Trotsky, when arguing against the LRP's original ancestor Max Shachtman, tried to teach him some dialectics.

Do you begin to understand that this isn't a question of the "democratic-dictatorship" two-stage slogan? That it isn't a question of good fighting on the front with some regrettable repression in the rear?

No, it was never a question of the Stalinists being good guys in Madrid but bad guys in Barcelona. Rather, the heroic role of Stalinists in Madrid and the treacherous role of Stalinists in Barcelona were simply two sides of the same coin, a reflection of the intermediary role of the petty-bourgeois Stalinist bureaucracy between world imperialism (English and French to be precise) on the one hand and the working class of the Soviet Union on the other hand.

And yes, it is all about Stalinists two stage revolutionism, just as with Social Democrats it's all about the Bernstein peaceful road to socialism through democratic elections.

When the Spanish workers tried to upend the Stalinist schema they had to be repressed. Just as in Germany, where the Social Democrats did not have a majority in parliament for socialism, it was all about the German workers wanting to have a German Soviet regime instead of bourgeois democracy.

With similarly bloody results in both cases.

And yes, that is putting everything on the plane of ideas. On the material plane, it was all about the material interests of the German labor bureaucracy on the one hand, and the material interests of the bureaucracy of the Soviet workers' state on the other hand. Which again is still simply two sides of the same coin, the material and the world of thought which reflects what goes on in the real world, but also has its independent existence and reacts right back onto it, as Engels explained. You do really need to learn how to think dialectically.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

5th August 2011, 22:00

Priceless. "The Popular Front is the proletarian revolution." Thus speaks a pseudo-Marxist anti-historian.

Nothing more needs to be said.

And Artesian is demonstrating that he is incapable of reading and understanding plain English. Or perhaps of telling the truth, but my suspicion is that he actually believes what he wrote, strange as it seems.

His quote allegedly from me is, of course, the diametric exact opposite of what I said. Indeed it would have been hard for him to come up with *anything* further from what I said if he tried. And apparently that is exactly what he did try to do, subconsciously at least.

-M.H.-

syndicat

5th August 2011, 22:56

It is absolutely true that the horrors of Francoism made the crimes of the NKVD pale in the workers' memory. But even right in the middle of events in Spain, the Spanish CP had a fair amount of support from the less radical workers, though less probably than the SP or the CNT. The Spanish CP was *not* a bourgeois party, though it did indeed have a fair number of bourgeois members, being the most right wing of the workers parties and given the utter insignificance and irrelevance except symbolically of the official Spanish Republicans.
only 40 percent of the PCE's members were workers. the PCE & PSUC explicitly oriented to recruiting from the middle classes -- land owning farmers, shopkeepers, lawyers & administrators, professionals, cops.

in regard to the UGT, to take over the UGT the PCE had to crush the Left Socialists. Once they had obtained control of the police by spring of 1937, they used the police to seize newspapers and union halls from the Left (Caballero-ist) wing of the UGT/PSOE. this left wing part of the UGT was in an alliance with the CNT in many places.

the Soviet Union's aims in Spain were conflicted, or "contradictory" as Marxists would say. On the one hand, looting the gold reserves undermined Spain's ability to fight. (value of the Spanish currency dropped by 50 percent on exchanges once word got out that 70 percent of Spain's gold reserves had been shipped to Russia.)

on the other hand, Dimitrov, at a meeting of the Communist International in July 1936, had said that the aim of the Communists should not be soviets and socialism "at this stage." They were operating with a stagist conception of the revolution. The first stage would be rebuilding the conventional, hierarchical police and armed forces of the Republic...which had gone over to the fascists or collapsed. Once the PCE had wormed its way into control of the police and army, it would then use this to entrench the party's position and eventually gain state power. a permeationist conception of revolution.

after the spring of 1937, and the crushing of the Left Socialits, the PCE gained greater influence in the UGT and by 1938 this was reflected in the program of the UGT that called for nationalization of the whole economy. Meanwhile, the Republic, under substanatial PCE influence, was incrementally moving to have the state take over the various industries that had been expropriated and self-managed by the workers in the revolution. and of course there was the setting up of the SIM secret police prisons where revolutionaries were tortured and murdered. the Communists had already said they'd do the POUM and anarcho-syndicalists what they'd done to their opponents in Russia.

the tendency, then, was for the creation of a completely state run economy under the control of a totalitarian party regime...what later was built in Eastern Europe. this was the PCE's conception of "revolution"....a bureaucratic revolution built on the ashes of a proletarian revolution they worked to suppress.

S.Artesian

5th August 2011, 23:03

His quote allegedly from me is, of course, the diametric exact opposite of what I said. Indeed it would have been hard for him to come up with *anything* further from what I said if he tried. And apparently that is exactly what he did try to do, subconsciously at least.-M.H.-

Yep, misread what you wrote on that, but not the rest of the garbage you produce:

So then the Spanish workers were all brainwashed or something? Come on.

The Spanish workers were not brainwashed but they were defeated and that defeat of the workers counts for more than the fact that it was the policies of the popular front, and the actions of the PCE in support of the popular front that led the revolution to slaughter.

Victorious revolutionary struggles can confront their own history, and engage directly with their own mistakes, weaknesses, etc. Defeated revolutionary struggles rarely do, instead preferring the blurring of the actual material course of the history in sad nostalgia. So Allende is viewed with affection, wistfulness in Chile. Hell,there are those in Argentina who still cling to the notion of Peron as a "revolutionary."

Why is this? Well for one, those who might actually confront the real course of the struggle are usually dead, or silenced in some effective fashion, so that those who play up the "tragic defeat of democracy" can whisper all the more effectively.

And secondly, the PCE reached points of accommodation with the Franco government in Spain after WW2.

If it was really true that the *sole* role of the Stalinists in Spain were to crush the workers, nothing more, then the Spanish workers, on the receiving end, would be well aware of this, and spit whenever they saw a Stalinist walking down the street. I mean hey, do you think Spanish workers are stupid or something?

See previous comment. Some workers were well aware of this. Others were not. So what? Doesn't change the material function that the Stalinists performed through their service to the popular front, which was organized first last and foremost to prevent a successful proletarian revolution.

I don't think Spanish workers are stupid. I think you raise that as a red herring rather than deal with what actually happens to a class that has experienced such a defeat. Nostalgia, and nostalgia for what never really was, replaces class consciousness.

Kind of like what's happened.... in the fSU itself, with the nostalgia for Stalin and the glory days of the USSR. And that, BTW, is one of the reason I don't think anything positive comes out of collapse of the fSU. The destruction is inflicted upon, and absorbed by, the proletariat, on the workers ability to organize themselves as a class. That trumps all the "realization" in the world as to how incapable the bureaucracy was etc etc.

And it is a bit odd to say that a bourgeois republic in Spain was a historic impossibility, as that is exactly what you have now.

Once again, proving your credentials as a non-historian. 1976 was not 1936. In the historical context of 1936-1939, with the conditions of the world markets being what they were, with the Great Depression in full force, the prospects of a bourgeois republic, a successful "modern" capitalism, developing in Spain as an alternative to proletarian revolution or military/corporatist dictatorship were less than zero.

History proved that, Mr. non-Historian.

If the Spanish Republic had won, improbable but far from impossible, then the NKVD "state within a state" would have packed up their bags and went home, mission accomplished, and you'd have some sort of Pop Front government like the ones in France before and after WWII, probably with CP ministers, who would have been kicked out after a while like in France after WWII.

If people in hell had ice water, they wouldn't be so hot. If the Spanish Republic had won... can you point to a popular front government, in the midst of the conflict within capital between means and relations of production, actually being "successful"?

Or perhaps we might say that the Spanish Republic was successful, as was Allende's Unidad Popular government because private property was preserved, which after all was the goal once the conclusion has been reached that "proletarian revolution is not on the agenda."

Anyway, back you go on the ignore list.

syndicat

5th August 2011, 23:22

If the Spanish Republic had won, improbable but far from impossible, then the NKVD "state within a state" would have packed up their bags and went home, mission accomplished, and you'd have some sort of Pop Front government like the ones in France before and after WWII, probably with CP ministers, who would have been kicked out after a while like in France after WWII.

As i pointed out in my last post, there is lots of evidence that refutes this, such as the tendencies after 1937 towards a completely statified economy, building of a party-controlled police state.

if the fascist forces had been defeated, there would be two possible outcomes:

1. a bureaucratic class dominated one party police state like in Eastern Europe after World War 2

2. a re-invigoration of the workers revolution through an anarchist/left-socialist alliance to defeat the PCE

but outcome 2 was made more dicey by the capitulation of the CNT to the Popular Front in Nov 1936. this weakened their position, and thus weakened the main proletarian revolutionary force.

but there was certainly NO possibility of capitalism continuing if the fascist forces had been defeated. the working class had mostly committed itself to a revolutionary transformation of Spain and a socialist society. if the PCE had been pushed aside, that's what would have happened. if the PCE had ended up in the saddle, with a nationalized economy, you'd have another dismal state bureaucratic mode of production. Capitalism would have been wiped out in either case.

A Marxist Historian

5th August 2011, 23:37

only 40 percent of the PCE's members were workers. the PCE & PSUC explicitly oriented to recruiting from the middle classes -- land owning farmers, shopkeepers, lawyers & administrators, professionals, cops.

in regard to the UGT, to take over the UGT the PCE had to crush the Left Socialists. Once they had obtained control of the police by spring of 1937, they used the police to seize newspapers and union halls from the Left (Caballero-ist) wing of the UGT/PSOE. this left wing part of the UGT was in an alliance with the CNT in many places.

the Soviet Union's aims in Spain were conflicted, or "contradictory" as Marxists would say. On the one hand, looting the gold reserves undermined Spain's ability to fight. (value of the Spanish currency dropped by 50 percent on exchanges once word got out that 70 percent of Spain's gold reserves had been shipped to Russia.)

on the other hand, Dimitrov, at a meeting of the Communist International in July 1936, had said that the aim of the Communists should not be soviets and socialism "at this stage." They were operating with a stagist conception of the revolution. The first stage would be rebuilding the conventional, hierarchical police and armed forces of the Republic...which had gone over to the fascists or collapsed. Once the PCE had wormed its way into control of the police and army, it would then use this to entrench the party's position and eventually gain state power. a permeationist conception of revolution.

after the spring of 1937, and the crushing of the Left Socialits, the PCE gained greater influence in the UGT and by 1938 this was reflected in the program of the UGT that called for nationalization of the whole economy. Meanwhile, the Republic, under substanatial PCE influence, was incrementally moving to have the state take over the various industries that had been expropriated and self-managed by the workers in the revolution. and of course there was the setting up of the SIM secret police prisons where revolutionaries were tortured and murdered. the Communists had already said they'd do the POUM and anarcho-syndicalists what they'd done to their opponents in Russia.

the tendency, then, was for the creation of a completely state run economy under the control of a totalitarian party regime...what later was built in Eastern Europe. this was the PCE's conception of "revolution"....a bureaucratic revolution built on the ashes of a proletarian revolution they worked to suppress.

A factually useful posting which I appreciate. In my *particular* argument with Red Track Worker you are actually giving me ammunition, except as to the percentage of workers in the PCE, on which I take your point.

By the time the gold reserves were shipped off to Russia, the Republic had already lost and the front was collapsing, so the practical effect was to keep them out of the hands of Franco.

Bureaucratized revolution built on the ashes of a rank and file proletarian revolution they worked to suppress is exactly right. Though in fact in Spain they were more interested in keeping Churchill and Daladier happy than any bureaucratized revolutions.

But this was a proletarian, not a bourgeois bureaucracy, as social reality in Eastern Europe demonstrated, once the ashes had blown away.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

5th August 2011, 23:59

Yep, misread what you wrote on that, but not the rest of the garbage you produce:

The Spanish workers were not brainwashed but they were defeated and that defeat of the workers counts for more than the fact that it was the policies of the popular front, and the actions of the PCE in support of the popular front that led the revolution to slaughter.

Victorious revolutionary struggles can confront their own history, and engage directly with their own mistakes, weaknesses, etc. Defeated revolutionary struggles rarely do, instead preferring the blurring of the actual material course of the history in sad nostalgia. So Allende is viewed with affection, wistfulness in Chile. Hell,there are those in Argentina who still cling to the notion of Peron as a "revolutionary."

Why is this? Well for one, those who might actually confront the real course of the struggle are usually dead, or silenced in some effective fashion, so that those who play up the "tragic defeat of democracy" can whisper all the more effectively.

That's right. So was Allende a bourgeois counterrevolutionary seeking to subject the workers to capitalist exploitation, a Pinochet in disguise? No, he was a reformist sellout Social Democrat, who after decades of Pinochet looks pretty good.

And even Peron, a bourgeois nationalist not a reformist, did indeed carry out a number of populist reforms in the interests of the workers, like Chavez in Venezuela.

So yes, you can definitely have working class nostalgia for Allende, and even Peron. And for the Spanish Stalinists during the Spanish Civil War despite everything, as the idea of sacrificing workers' power to beat Franco looked pretty good to Spanish workers after decades under Franco.

But if Spanish Stalinism was *simply* semi-fascist counterrevolution, then no, you wouldn't have a whole lot of nostalgia for them, and you certainly wouldn't have the underground Spanish CP becoming the mass party of the working class.

That would be like the Italian workers all swarming to a Mussolini party in Italy. Not something likely to happen.

And secondly, the PCE reached points of accommodation with the Franco government in Spain after WW2.

See previous comment. Some workers were well aware of this. Others were not. So what? Doesn't change the material function that the Stalinists performed through their service to the popular front, which was organized first last and foremost to prevent a successful proletarian revolution.

I don't think Spanish workers are stupid. I think you raise that as a red herring rather than deal with what actually happens to a class that has experienced such a defeat. Nostalgia, and nostalgia for what never really was, replaces class consciousness.

Kind of like what's happened.... in the fSU itself, with the nostalgia for Stalin and the glory days of the USSR. And that, BTW, is one of the reason I don't think anything positive comes out of collapse of the fSU. The destruction is inflicted upon, and absorbed by, the proletariat, on the workers ability to organize themselves as a class. That trumps all the "realization" in the world as to how incapable the bureaucracy was etc etc.

Yes, very much like that. Why? Because the Soviet Union, despite everything, was a workers state, and life under Brezhnev was *vastly* better than life under Yeltsin and Putin for the Soviet working class. To an extreme degree in fact.

The death toll among workers due to capitalist counterrevolution in the USSR, through hunger, homelessness, freezing to death, no medical care, etc., was far larger than the death toll from Franco in Spain.

Once again, proving your credentials as a non-historian. 1976 was not 1936. In the historical context of 1936-1939, with the conditions of the world markets being what they were, with the Great Depression in full force, the prospects of a bourgeois republic, a successful "modern" capitalism, developing in Spain as an alternative to proletarian revolution or military/corporatist dictatorship were less than zero.

History proved that, Mr. non-Historian.

If people in hell had ice water, they wouldn't be so hot. If the Spanish Republic had won... can you point to a popular front government, in the midst of the conflict within capital between means and relations of production, actually being "successful"?

Or perhaps we might say that the Spanish Republic was successful, as was Allende's Unidad Popular government because private property was preserved, which after all was the goal once the conclusion has been reached that "proletarian revolution is not on the agenda."

Anyway, back you go on the ignore list.

The question is not whether a Spanish Popular Front would have provided milk and roses, or even whether it would have lasted long at all.

The question is whether the Republic could have been defeated at the battlefront, and Franco vanquished.

If that had happened, you would have had bourgeois democracy in Spain for a good while. With or without Communists and Socialists in the government, not necessarily a pleasant prospect for the workers, but a very different situation from Franco Spain.

And, lacking a continued purpose, the Stalinist "state within a state" would have rapidly packed up its bags and flew back to Moscow--at which point Stalin would have had all its leaders taken out and shot. Doesn't require much guesswork, as that is what he actually did in real life.

His excuse, being Stalin, would likely have been their brutality to the Spanish workers. As they would have been coming home as triumphant heroes, public excuses would have been necessary.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

6th August 2011, 00:10

As i pointed out in my last post, there is lots of evidence that refutes this, such as the tendencies after 1937 towards a completely statified economy, building of a party-controlled police state.

if the fascist forces had been defeated, there would be two possible outcomes:

1. a bureaucratic class dominated one party police state like in Eastern Europe after World War 2

2. a re-invigoration of the workers revolution through an anarchist/left-socialist alliance to defeat the PCE

but outcome 2 was made more dicey by the capitulation of the CNT to the Popular Front in Nov 1936. this weakened their position, and thus weakened the main proletarian revolutionary force.

but there was certainly NO possibility of capitalism continuing if the fascist forces had been defeated. the working class had mostly committed itself to a revolutionary transformation of Spain and a socialist society. if the PCE had been pushed aside, that's what would have happened. if the PCE had ended up in the saddle, with a nationalized economy, you'd have another dismal state bureaucratic mode of production. Capitalism would have been wiped out in either case.

I think you are quit wrong in thinking capitalism could not have been re-established if the Spanish Republic had been victorious. Indeed, the Spanish Republic went pretty far on that road before its overthrow. All those nationalizations didn't mean a thing really. You had lots of nationalizations in France and Italy and so forth after WWII, and not all necessarily pushed for by CP ministers. De Gaulle was a great nationalizer.

I think it is *extremely* unlikely that Spain could have gone some sort of Eastern European route after the victory of the Spanish Republic. After all the efforts the Spanish CP had put in for bourgeois democracy, if the CP had tried something like that, all the bourgeois who had been siding with the CP would have revolted, and probably most of the Spanish generals so fulsomely friendly with the Spanish CP would have done an abrupt Chiang Kai Shek style turnaround.

To carry off a "bureaucratized revolution" in Spanish conditions, with a relatively small Soviet military presence and a thoroughly mobilized working class, energized by the defeat of Franco, would have required the CP to actually go out and mobilize the workers against the capitalists. I think that would have been tough at that point.

But even if none of the above were the case, it still would never have happened because it would have gone totally against Stalin's foreign policy.

Getting France and England on the Soviet side vs. Nazi Germany was *always* more important to Stalin than whatever was happening in Spain. Sovietizing Spain would have driven England and France into alliance with Nazi Germany vs. the Soviet Union. From Stalin's POV, the worst thing that could possibly happen.

-M.H.-

syndicat

6th August 2011, 00:42

By the time the gold reserves were shipped off to Russia, the Republic had already lost absolutely wrong. they were shipped at the end of September 1936. Durruti and Companys had just had a session with Caballero to get him to dedicate half or some substantial portion of the gold reserves to build a war industry in Catalonia. the workers of the CNT had taken over 283 metal and chemical factories and converted them on their own iinitiative to arms manufacture and to supply the mlitia. Caballero initially agreed but then stabbed them in the back when he let the Finance Minister, Negrin, a Communist tool, ship the gold out to Russia.

the FAI had worked up a plan just before that to block this maneuver by using the Land & Liberty regiment in Madrid to seize half of the gold reserves from the bank of Spain and truck them to the rail yards where a CNT rail crew would hightail it to Catalonia with the gold. this didn't happen because de Santillan got cold feet.

Catalonia was Spain's most industrialized and developed region. it had the capacity for a native war industry.

But this was a proletarian, not a bourgeois bureaucracy, as social reality in Eastern Europe demonstrated, once the ashes had blown away.this is a nutty thing to say. a bureaucratic class is a boss class, it has interests antagonistic to the working class.

the lack of any real control by workers in Eastern Europe and Russia is what paved the way for the revolution from above by the Russian section of this bureaucratic class, who greedily envied the western capitalists.

I think you are quit wrong in thinking capitalism could not have been re-established if the Spanish Republic had been victorious. Indeed, the Spanish Republic went pretty far on that road before its overthrow. All those nationalizations didn't mean a thing really. You had lots of nationalizations in France and Italy and so forth after WWII, and not all necessarily pushed for by CP ministers. De Gaulle was a great nationalizer.and Franco did nationalizations too. but what you ignore is that in Spain the capitalists and big landowners had been expropriated. what the PCE had in mind was a completely statified and state-managed economy.

of course it would probably have evolved into capitalism later...just as China, Russia, Yugoslavia have done. but it would have gone through a period of a bureaucratic mode of production.

After all the efforts the Spanish CP had put in for bourgeois democracy, if the CP had tried something like that, all the bourgeois who had been siding with the CP would have revolted, and probably most of the Spanish generals so fulsomely friendly with the Spanish CP would have done an abrupt Chiang Kai Shek style turnaround.
who are these "bourgeois"? the capitalists had been expropriated already. what was left were the small business, managerial, professional, bureaucratic middle classes.

To carry off a "bureaucratized revolution" in Spanish conditions, with a relatively small Soviet military presence and a thoroughly mobilized working class, energized by the defeat of Franco, would have required the CP to actually go out and mobilize the workers against the capitalists. I think that would have been tough at that point.again, what capitalists? and the PCE's suppression of the revolution had the effect of demobilizing and demoralizing the working class. but their strategy was based on a bureaucratic machine built on elements drawn from the middle classes.

But even if none of the above were the case, it still would never have happened because it would have gone totally against Stalin's foreign policy.

Not entirely clear. the usual scenario for a victory over Franco by both CNT and PCE was holding on til the civil war was absorbed into World War 2. the USA was quite willing to ally with Stalin in that war. why would they have not been willing to ally with a Spanish military force controlled by PCE or revolutionaries, such as giving them supplies? Britain, France would be in no position to do anything against a consolidation of revolutionary power in Spain during World War 2. and FDR had initially been in favor of aiding the Republic. he was prevented only by organizing by the Catholic Church, financed by Joseph Kennedy, which successfully lobbied Congress for the socalled Neutrality Act.

RedTrackWorker

6th August 2011, 04:33

Bureaucratized revolution built on the ashes of a rank and file proletarian revolution they worked to suppress is exactly right.

As much as you want to claim orthodoxy and keep twisting my words to pin third camp centrism on me, you keep evading the fact that you disagree with Trotsky here, that Stalinism strangled the revolution in Spain, it was counterrevolutionary not bureaucratic centrist revolutionary. If there was a bureaucratized revolution led by Stalinism post-36, you're right it would've looked like what happened in Eastern Europe, etc. after the war...it would've been a change in the form of capitalist oppression.

I'll repeat Natalie Trotsky's words (http://lrp-cofi.org/PR/natalia38.html):

By considering that the Stalinist bureaucracy established workers’ states in these countries, you assign to it a progressive and even revolutionary role. By propagating this monstrous falsehood to the workers’ vanguard, you deny to the Fourth International all the basic reasons for existence as the world party of the socialist revolution. In the past, we always considered Stalinism to be a counterrevolutionary force in every sense of the term. You no longer do so. But I continue to do so.

A Marxist Historian

6th August 2011, 14:31

absolutely wrong. they were shipped at the end of September 1936. Durruti and Companys had just had a session with Caballero to get him to dedicate half or some substantial portion of the gold reserves to build a war industry in Catalonia. the workers of the CNT had taken over 283 metal and chemical factories and converted them on their own iinitiative to arms manufacture and to supply the mlitia. Caballero initially agreed but then stabbed them in the back when he let the Finance Minister, Negrin, a Communist tool, ship the gold out to Russia.

the FAI had worked up a plan just before that to block this maneuver by using the Land & Liberty regiment in Madrid to seize half of the gold reserves from the bank of Spain and truck them to the rail yards where a CNT rail crew would hightail it to Catalonia with the gold. this didn't happen because de Santillan got cold feet.

Catalonia was Spain's most industrialized and developed region. it had the capacity for a native war industry.

1936? I thought it was '38. OK, live and learn. Point taken. Too bad the FAI didn't grab it and send it to Catalonia, definitely a better place for it than bank vaults in Madrid or Moscow.

However, if that idiot Caballereo went along with this, then it wasn't theft, as he was the head of state more or less. Of course, neither you nor I are big on the property rights of the Spanish bourgeois state...

this is a nutty thing to say. a bureaucratic class is a boss class, it has interests antagonistic to the working class.

the lack of any real control by workers in Eastern Europe and Russia is what paved the way for the revolution from above by the Russian section of this bureaucratic class, who greedily envied the western capitalists.

Except that there was no bureaucratic class. Just a bunch of bureaucrats.

Best proof of this is what happened when you had the only real honest-to-god successful left wing workers revolution against Stalinism, Hungary in 1956.

About a third to a half of this "bureaucratic class" went over to the workers! Not what capitalists do, bureaucratic or otherwise.

and Franco did nationalizations too. but what you ignore is that in Spain the capitalists and big landowners had been expropriated. what the PCE had in mind was a completely statified and state-managed economy.

of course it would probably have evolved into capitalism later...just as China, Russia, Yugoslavia have done. but it would have gone through a period of a bureaucratic mode of production.

What's that? No such animal exists.

who are these "bourgeois"? the capitalists had been expropriated already. what was left were the small business, managerial, professional, bureaucratic middle classes.

again, what capitalists? and the PCE's suppression of the revolution had the effect of demobilizing and demoralizing the working class. but their strategy was based on a bureaucratic machine built on elements drawn from the middle classes.

So that was their main mass base at that point. Did they want to see a nationalized economy? I kinda doubt it. So to get serious about creating even the most bureaucratic possible version of a non-capitalist economy, they'd have had to turn away from the small businessmen etc., their main support, and turn to the workers.

Which is in fact what the Spanish finally CP did, but it took quite a while, and the Spanish CP was in a *very* poor position in the late '30s to mobilize the working class to establish a new order.

Not entirely clear. the usual scenario for a victory over Franco by both CNT and PCE was holding on til the civil war was absorbed into World War 2. the USA was quite willing to ally with Stalin in that war. why would they have not been willing to ally with a Spanish military force controlled by PCE or revolutionaries, such as giving them supplies? Britain, France would be in no position to do anything against a consolidation of revolutionary power in Spain during World War 2. and FDR had initially been in favor of aiding the Republic. he was prevented only by organizing by the Catholic Church, financed by Joseph Kennedy, which successfully lobbied Congress for the socalled Neutrality Act.

Yes, entry into WWII would have changed things. But in the late '30s, trying to line England and France up against Nazi Germany was what Soviet policy was all about, until after Munich when it was obvious that that was not going to fly.

OTOH, once Germany attacked the USSR, Stalin would no longer have had any interest in Spain whatsoever, and would be trying to pull all Soviet forces out as soon as possible to bring them home.

And then, of course, there is the interesting question of just what Soviet policy towards the Spanish Civil War would have been during the Hitler-Stalin pact...

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

6th August 2011, 14:36

As much as you want to claim orthodoxy and keep twisting my words to pin third camp centrism on me, you keep evading the fact that you disagree with Trotsky here, that Stalinism strangled the revolution in Spain, it was counterrevolutionary not bureaucratic centrist revolutionary. If there was a bureaucratized revolution led by Stalinism post-36, you're right it would've looked like what happened in Eastern Europe, etc. after the war...it would've been a change in the form of capitalist oppression.

I'll repeat Natalie Trotsky's words (http://lrp-cofi.org/PR/natalia38.html):

The policy of the Soviet Union in the 1930s was not "bureaucratic centrism." It was *Stalinist reformism.* No different from Social Democratic reformism, really. And therefore counterrevolutionary during an actual revolution, just as is Social Democracy.

You keep evading my point about this, no matter how often I bring it up, and how obvious that this is central to the argument.

Why? Because you can't admit that the Social Democrats are just as bad as the Stalinists.

Why? Because you and your organization are, in the last analysis, left social democrats.

-M.H.-

syndicat

6th August 2011, 17:41

So that was their main mass base at that point. Did they want to see a nationalized economy? I kinda doubt it. So to get serious about creating even the most bureaucratic possible version of a non-capitalist economy, they'd have had to turn away from the small businessmen etc., their main support, and turn to the workers.

Which is in fact what the Spanish finally CP did, but it took quite a while, and the Spanish CP was in a *very* poor position in the late '30s to mobilize the working class to establish a new order.bullshit. if they didn't want a nationalized economy, why did the UGT, in 1938, when it had come under PCE domination, develop a new program advocating exactly that? And why did they push for the state to take over the industries that had been expropriated by the workers...which was virtually all of Spain's industry?

people who had been small business people have the experience of managing, of dominating employees...well suited to being recruited to be state bureaucrats in a bureaucratic class dominated economy.

and, no, the PCE during the civil war never "turned to the workers" in the sense of supporting the workers revolution. they did appeal to the more conservative workers and built a strong foothold in the UGT, which was divided between its more conservative and revolutionary wings.

However, if that idiot Caballereo went along with this, then it wasn't theft, as he was the head of state more or less. Of course, neither you nor I are big on the property rights of the Spanish bourgeois state...what are you, a fucking lawyer? the Soviet Union used its Spanish arm and its leverage as a weapons source, and its sympathizer Negrin, to loot Spain's gold reserves. who cares if it was technically legal by the laws in effect? when one country dominates another, its looting may be technically legal. that doesn't mean it isn't looting.

OTOH, once Germany attacked the USSR, Stalin would no longer have had any interest in Spain whatsoever, and would be trying to pull all Soviet forces out as soon as possible to bring them home.

And then, of course, there is the interesting question of just what Soviet policy towards the Spanish Civil War would have been during the Hitler-Stalin pact...
all the more reason why Spain needed to develop its own arms industry with its gold reserves rather than send them to Moscow.

A Marxist Historian

6th August 2011, 23:09

bullshit. if they didn't want a nationalized economy, why did the UGT, in 1938, when it had come under PCE domination, develop a new program advocating exactly that? And why did they push for the state to take over the industries that had been expropriated by the workers...which was virtually all of Spain's industry?

people who had been small business people have the experience of managing, of dominating employees...well suited to being recruited to be state bureaucrats in a bureaucratic class dominated economy.

They pushed for the state to take over industries expropriated by the workers for the obvious reason. As a transitional measure to turning them over to "progressive patriotic" capitalists, risen no doubt out of the ranks of all those "progressive patriotic" middle class types who had flocked to the CP as the "heroic fighters" for "democracy" vs. the fascist Fifth Column, and especially its Trotskyite and anarchist wing, in the CP version.

And no, small business people are *definitely not* the best people to become state bureaucrats in a Stalinist system. At least Stalin certainly didn't think so.

He shipped them off to gulags in huge numbers in the Soviet Union, while promoting factory workers off the floor to become Soviet bureaucrats, usually by way of "affirmative action" in college admission for workers and minority nationalities. The people who replaced the old revolutionaries killed in the Great Terror as the people in charge of the Soviet Union were *almost all* former workers. Hundreds of thousands of them in fact, indeed a very large percentage of the survivors of the Soviet working class of 1917. The "dictatorship of the ex-proletariat," as historian Robert Davies put it.

and, no, the PCE during the civil war never "turned to the workers" in the sense of supporting the workers revolution. they did appeal to the more conservative workers and built a strong foothold in the UGT, which was divided between its more conservative and revolutionary wings.

I meant during and after WWII, not during the civil war. During the civil war it's definitely *not* the workers the CP was turning to, that's my point.

what are you, a fucking lawyer? the Soviet Union used its Spanish arm and its leverage as a weapons source, and its sympathizer Negrin, to loot Spain's gold reserves. who cares if it was technically legal by the laws in effect? when one country dominates another, its looting may be technically legal. that doesn't mean it isn't looting.

all the more reason why Spain needed to develop its own arms industry with its gold reserves rather than send them to Moscow.

No argument there. As long as we are talking about revolutionary workers Spain, not the bourgeois Spanish Republic.

-.M.H.-

syndicat

7th August 2011, 03:31

They pushed for the state to take over industries expropriated by the workers for the obvious reason. As a transitional measure to turning them over to "progressive patriotic" capitalists, risen no doubt out of the ranks of all those "progressive patriotic" middle class types who had flocked to the CP as the "heroic fighters" for "democracy" vs. the fascist Fifth Column, and especially its Trotskyite and anarchist wing, in the CP version.

you mean you actually believe the PCE's propaganda about "a democratic republic of a new type"? you mean you don't think lying propaganda was a characteristic of stalinism?

when I present you with facts, you respond with mere speculation. You're just whistling in the dark because your weird ass theory doesn't conform to reality.

you also don't take seriously what Dimitrov said about "stages" in July 1936. remember he said: "At this stage, we won't talk about soviets and building socialism." that impliies that at some future "stage" they will.

And no, small business people are *definitely not* the best people to become state bureaucrats in a Stalinist system. At least Stalin certainly didn't think so.

prior to Stalin's prolertarianization campagin in 1929, the Communist regime used former owners, managers, engineers etc throughout the statist hierarchy. that was how a state-bureaucratic class set up was built initially, out of the existing human beings available at the beginning. no reason to think the PCE couldn't envision doing that again.

A Marxist Historian

8th August 2011, 00:15

you mean you actually believe the PCE's propaganda about "a democratic republic of a new type"? you mean you don't think lying propaganda was a characteristic of stalinism?

when I present you with facts, you respond with mere speculation. You're just whistling in the dark because your weird ass theory doesn't conform to reality.

you also don't take seriously what Dimitrov said about "stages" in July 1936. remember he said: "At this stage, we won't talk about soviets and building socialism." that impliies that at some future "stage" they will.

Well of course. Dimitrov believed that Popular Frontism was the right way to socialism. All Stalinists believed that, from Stalin himself down to the lowliest new Komsomol. And still do, including right here on Revleft.

In practice, Popular Frontism doesn't lead to socialism, it leads to reconsolidating capitalism.

Just as during WWII. Stalin may personally have believed that his policies were leading to socialist triumph in the long run. In fact I'm sure he did. He was wrong. Roosevelt and Churchill were absolutely right to think that Stalin's alliance with them served them, not Stalin.

The actual consequence of the great Soviet victory over fascism was to reconsolidate bourgeois democracy worldwide, which was under serious threat. So when Stalin said that the objective of the Soviet war effort was simply to defeat fascism, not for world revolution, he was telling the truth, whether or not he realized that himself. The fact that it expanded the borders of Soviet influence was, in the greater scheme of things, a minor consideration. And a temporary one, as history has demonstrated.

If the US/Soviet alliance had continued after WWII, Eastern Europe would have stayed capitalist after WWII, just as Republican Spain would have stayed capitalist if it had won, no matter how much Soviet presence you had and whatever the leaders of the Spanish Communist Party might have ben dreaming about.

The reason it didn't is because:

1, the Cold War had broken out because the US no longer *needed* Stalin as an ally any more, in fact Stalin immediately replaced Hitler as enemy number 1 almost as soon as Hitler's body cooled, as Hiroshima illustrated.

And 2, because most of Eastern Europe was occupied by Soviet troops, and militarily speaking the USSR dominated the European continent, and could have conquered all of Western Europe in a matter of weeks if it had wanted to, which it didn't. The US forces in Western Europe were pretty small, because the US army pretty much rebelled against the idea of serving as an occupying force after the defeat of Hitler and Japan, and most of it had to be sent home pretty quickly. And the Soviet troops would have gotten a much warmer welcome in France and Italy than they got in Poland or Rumania.

During and after WWII the whole emphasis of Stalin's policy was to *prevent* socialism and revolution in Europe. For one reason and one reason only, because for Stalin, his alliance with Churchill and Roosevelt was much more important than socialism in some place other than the Soviet Union. So Stalin issued orders, and the French and Italian Communist Parties told the workers to disarm, they joined the coalition governments, and were kicked out by De Gaulle etc. as soon as they were no longer needed.

Eastern Europe was communized because the alliance had broken down, and for no other reason.

In Republican Spain, there would have been no *reason* for Stalin to alienate his bourgeois allies by toying with some sort of bureaucratized Spanish socialism. So what would have happened in Republican Spain is pretty much exactly what happened in France and Italy. If anything quicker, because in France and Spain the Communist Parties really did have the allegiance of the great majority of the working class, so their was more resistance to this from their own ranks than you would have seen in the Spanish CP.

As for Dimitrov's words, or toying with nationalizations by the Spanish CP in the last days of the Republic, well, as Stalin put it once, "paper will take anything that is printed on it."

prior to Stalin's prolertarianization campagin in 1929, the Communist regime used former owners, managers, engineers etc throughout the statist hierarchy. that was how a state-bureaucratic class set up was built initially, out of the existing human beings available at the beginning. no reason to think the PCE couldn't envision doing that again.

Nonsense. This was all part of the New Economic Policy, *concessions* to private capitalism. So Bukharin told the kulaks "enrich yourselves," private merchants, NEPmen, flourished, and former owners and managers and engineers were kept on to run industry.

This was the Bolsheviks's concession to popular pressure from the working class and the peasantry to go part of the way back to capitalism. Kronstadt, the strikes led by Mensheviks, anti-Semitic peasant rebellions, etc. As the Bolshevik "war communism" policy was ultraleft, this kind of pro-capitalist feeling among the masses was unfortunate but understandable, so the Bolsheviks were doing the right thing.

The top state hierarchy during the 1920s was pretty small and feeble compared to what you later had with Stalin, and much of it got wiped out in the purges. And what *really* got wiped out was all those spetsy, NEPmen and kulaks.

And this was something that had happened quite recently, and that the Stalinists had made no secret of, in Spain or anywhere else.

So no, I don't think too many of the small businessmen supporting the Spanish CP were dreaming of becoming NEPmen and "spetsy." They all knew what happened to those folk. No, they took very seriously the promises from the CP that all that stuff was ultraleft ancient history not to be repeated, and that now the CP was the Party of Democracy.

If the CP tried seriously to create some kind of imitation of the Soviet Union in Spain, then its support would have evaporated, firstly from the generals in the Spanish army on the NKVD payroll, and secondly and even quicker from its petty-bourgeois mass base.

They would have had to turn to and mobilize the working class, and wouldn't have had much luck with that, as Spain was not Czechoslovakia where the CP had been the mass party of the workers ever since the 1920s, but a very different story altogether.

-M.H.-

syndicat

8th August 2011, 05:06

In Republican Spain, there would have been no *reason* for Stalin to alienate his bourgeois allies by toying with some sort of bureaucratized Spanish socialism. So what would have happened in Republican Spain is pretty much exactly what happened in France and Italy. If anything quicker, because in France and Spain the Communist Parties really did have the allegiance of the great majority of the working class, so their was more resistance to this from their own ranks than you would have seen in the Spanish CP.what bourgeois allies? the capitalists had been expropriated. and bourgeois technicians and managers were throughout various aspects of the Soviet economy & state in the '20s. This is why party members were put thru crash university coures to replace them, as well as takeover positions in the expanding statist economy.

In practice, Popular Frontism doesn't lead to socialism, it leads to reconsolidating capitalism.that's just abstract sloganeering. what you ignore is that in Spain there was a revolution and a mass socialist working class consciousness. this wasn't the Popular Front in France. again, the capitalists had been expropriated. so your speculations about Spain going the way of France or Italy is contrary to the facts on the ground.

the PCE's participation in the Popular Front in Spain was part of a permeationist strategy. perhaps something akin to this happened in Czechoslovakia. use of the control of armed forces to acquire state power.

and I think it is extremely doubtful that Stalin would have pulled out of Eastern Europe even if the U.S. had acted in a more restrained manner post-WW2. again, mere speculation on your part.

A Marxist Historian

8th August 2011, 22:28

what bourgeois allies? the capitalists had been expropriated. and bourgeois technicians and managers were throughout various aspects of the Soviet economy & state in the '20s. This is why party members were put thru crash university coures to replace them, as well as takeover positions in the expanding statist economy.

Well then, just who were the petty and sometimes middle bourgeois flocking to the Popular Front party in Spain? The CP's bourgeois allies of course, indeed the CP's main mass base.

They flocked to the CP's banner as they expected the CP to put an end to the syndicalist experiments in Barcelona, so that instead of being small capitalists under the thumbs of the pro-Franco overwhelming bulk of the capitalist class, they could replace them in an American or English or French style "democratic" capitalist system.

Not because they were dreaming of becoming NEPmen and "spetsy" and kulaks as in the Soviet Union in the 1920s. A foolish dream indeed.

And had the CP seriously tried to follow any other course, its mass support would have melted away like snow. The Soviet contingent in Spain was simply not big enough to dictate to an entire large country. To Sovietize Spain, the Soviet tanks would have had to make it all the way across the Pyrenees during WWII.

that's just abstract sloganeering. what you ignore is that in Spain there was a revolution and a mass socialist working class consciousness. this wasn't the Popular Front in France. again, the capitalists had been expropriated. so your speculations about Spain going the way of France or Italy is contrary to the facts on the ground.

the PCE's participation in the Popular Front in Spain was part of a permeationist strategy. perhaps something akin to this happened in Czechoslovakia. use of the control of armed forces to acquire state power.

and I think it is extremely doubtful that Stalin would have pulled out of Eastern Europe even if the U.S. had acted in a more restrained manner post-WW2. again, mere speculation on your part.

Italy had a revolution too, Mussolini and his mistress were hung up by the heels. And France was not far behind.

Would Stalin have pulled out of Eastern Europe if there had been no Cold War? Of course not. Rather, Soviet troops would have overseen the reestablishment of capitalist regimes, as happened in Austria and Finland. And you'd have Soviet bases all over Eastern Europe, just like the US has bases all over the world now.

As for Czechoslovakia, the Communist Parties in Eastern Europe were all quite weak, with the solitary exception of Czechoslovakia. In Czechoslovakia the party was extremely strong, and in the reasonably fair democratic elections there overseen by Benes, the leader of the Czech bourgeoisie, the CP was the largest party with a plurality.

It also helped that Stalin had decided to rescue the Slovak national insurrection against Hitler in 1944 instead of rescuing the Warsaw insurrection, which made the CP and the Soviet Union very popular in Slovakia.

So Soviet troops were pulled out, and Stalin let the Czech party have its own little "revolution," mobilizing the workers to overthrow Benes in a rather playacting fashion. It was extremely easy, as there really was no Czech bourgeois state, as Hitler had thoroughly destroyed it. Benes didn't have much popular support, and the CP was quite popular. Not least because it together with Benes had overseen the "ethnic cleansing" of the large German population, all of whom were expelled quite brutally. It wasn't an army coup at all.

All allowed by Stalin because, and only because, of the Cold War. Otherwise, Stalin would have ordered the Czech CP to help rebuild a bourgeois state for Benes, just as the French CP was ordered to do the same for De Gaulle.

-M.H.-

syndicat

9th August 2011, 00:07

Well then, just who were the petty and sometimes middle bourgeois flocking to the Popular Front party in Spain? The CP's bourgeois allies of course, indeed the CP's main mass base.
so self-employed farmers and shop keepers are "bourgeois" now? Far-fetched. And the middle classes included white collar professionals, managers, cops. That is, people who can aspire to be managers in a bureaucratic structure.

in the history of capitalism itself many of the cadres of the "new middle class" of managers and professionals have come from families of the declining small business/farmer class.

They flocked to the CP's banner as they expected the CP to put an end to the syndicalist experiments in Barcelona, so that instead of being small capitalists under the thumbs of the pro-Franco overwhelming bulk of the capitalist class, they could replace them in an American or English or French style "democratic" capitalist system.Many members of the small business class may have looked to a future for small property, and the PCE may have envisioned this as a harmless island within a basically nationalized and managerialized economy, on the model of the USSR.

as to the "revolution" in Italy after World War 2, it wasn't a social revolution or anti-capitalist. the capitalists weren't expropriated. not the same thing by a long shot. again, you're stretching in farfetched ways.

and as to Stalin going for re-assertion of capitalism without the cold war, that's just pure speculation on your part. and, to repeat, it is contrary to what Dimitrov said in 1936 about socialism arriving in Spain thru "stages", and about rebuilding the "democratic republic" as just a stage on that path...since it would enable the PCE to permeate the armed bodies being rebuilt.

Red_Struggle

9th August 2011, 04:02

And had the CP seriously tried to follow any other course, its mass support would have melted away like snow. The Soviet contingent in Spain was simply not big enough to dictate to an entire large country. To Sovietize Spain, the Soviet tanks would have had to make it all the way across the Pyrenees during WWII.

That's taking an extremely defeatist stance on the policies of the PCE. Yes, they were allied with other leftist and bourgeois parties and this policy was dictated upon them by the class and ideological circumstances that existed worldwide at that time (the rise and fear of fascism). There are many individuals even today that would rather settle with bourgeois democracy than open fascism, whether that person is more to the left or right.

The object of the Spanish Popular Front was to unite all possible anti-Franco forces during the civil war, until a bourgois democratic republic had been declared. From there, the PCE, being the main workers' party and the largest party of the popular front, would have been in an even better position to advance towards socialism. It is absolutely true that the PCE did not call for immediate revolution, but it would be false to claim that they completely threw the idea of long-term revolution to the wind and gave up on organizing workers.

Stalin would have ordered the Czech CP to help rebuild a bourgeois state for Benes, just as the French CP was ordered to do the same for De Gaulle.

Stalin would have ordered the reconstruction of a bourgeois state? That sounds pretty ridiculous seeing as how the USSR would not have benefited from the rebuilding of a pro-capitalist state right next door. If that were true, Yugoslavia and the Soviets should have been best friends. And I don't see how Stalin could have personally ordered a specific action onto another party. The COMINFORM was the international body that revolved around the policies of the different parties. Even still, they did not and could not dictate every single party and every single party member from above.

The PCF is a bit more complicated. The PCF was in a tough spot. It followed the Comintern in condemning the former French Cabinet that had dissolved itself with the surrendering of the French Government and the establishment of “Vichy France” under Pétain. At this same time, however, it was told to not openly antagonize the Nazis. The line of the PCF was to operate within the limits of both the Comintern and the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. There were many violations of the PCF’s line by various PCF members who immediately took up resistance against the Nazi occupiers, and the PCF’s line went from a strong rejection of the former French Government as composed of imperialists and colonialists while accompanied by a timid condemnation of Nazi occupation, to an open call for unity among anti-fascist groups and a dedicated struggle against the Nazis in 1941 after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. The communists did not collaborate with the Nazis in France, they simply bowed to Comintern dictates and worked within them to strengthen their own position in such troubled times.

A Marxist Historian

9th August 2011, 09:21

so self-employed farmers and shop keepers are "bourgeois" now? Far-fetched. And the middle classes included white collar professionals, managers, cops. That is, people who can aspire to be managers in a bureaucratic structure.

in the history of capitalism itself many of the cadres of the "new middle class" of managers and professionals have come from families of the declining small business/farmer class.

What is a petty bourgeois. It's a small bourgeois who wants to be a big bourgeois. Plain ordinary English grammar shows you that.

And the petty bourgeois flocking to the Spanish CP weren't exactly Fidel Castros. They saw the Popular Front as *protection* against socialism and the revolt of the working class.

They weren't dreaming of positions as high-paid, insecure lackeys of an allegedly socialist state with one ear to the door every midnight waiting for the knock on the door to haul them away. No, they wanted Spain to be like America not the Soviet Union, and if they wanted to be managers, they wanted to be respected corporate managers, not Soviet style "spetsy," well paid but with no social status, no respect, no security and no stock options.

During the Bolshevik Revolution, how many middle class types saw the Bolsheviks, whom you consider as just a bunch of capitalists, as the wave of the future and the boat to tie their fate to? Just about none!

The intellectuals and urban middle classes hated Bolshevism like poison, engineers sabotaged their factories, and bank officials had to be forced to open the vaults at gunpoint.

Only after four years of bloody civil war did *some* of the intelligentsia and engineers reluctantly decide to work for the new finally victorious workers' state, for lack of any other alternative. And it's well known that few were happy about it.

No, the middle class CP base took the democratic capitalist rhetoric dead seriously, and saw no reason why once the fascist businessmen paid for their crimes, that they couldn't fill in the vacuum. And were all in favor of nationalizing the fascist businessmen, as how else could they get their hands on their property? Just as they were in favor of "nationalizing" worker cooperatives too, for the same reason.

Many members of the small business class may have looked to a future for small property, and the PCE may have envisioned this as a harmless island within a basically nationalized and managerialized economy, on the model of the USSR.

as to the "revolution" in Italy after World War 2, it wasn't a social revolution or anti-capitalist. the capitalists weren't expropriated. not the same thing by a long shot. again, you're stretching in farfetched ways.

and as to Stalin going for re-assertion of capitalism without the cold war, that's just pure speculation on your part. and, to repeat, it is contrary to what Dimitrov said in 1936 about socialism arriving in Spain thru "stages", and about rebuilding the "democratic republic" as just a stage on that path...since it would enable the PCE to permeate the armed bodies being rebuilt.

If th Spanish CP seriously wanted a "nationalized and managerialized economy," it would have had to organize mass forces to fight for it, and that was an impossibility, because the masses who wanted socialism were, to say the least, not followers of the CP.

You seem to think that this could have been done by permeating the armed forces with Soviet agents. Well, Spain was not Afghanistan, it wasn't a socially ultrabackward Soviet semiclient state with an officer corps desperately wanting to modernize the country and mostly trained in the Soviet Union in the first place. It was a major country more socially advanced than Russia itself and riven by proletarian revolution. Such games would have blown up in their faces.

And that's not speculation, as that's exactly what happened anyway. Some of the CP's favorite generals turned on the CP in the last days of the Republic, in particular their very favorite general, Jose Miaja, who participated in a coup against them whose leader unsuccessfully tried to make a deal with Franco.

The Italian revolution wasn't socialist or anti-capitalist for two reasons. First, because that was against Soviet policy and the CP in Italy, unlike Spain, was the dominant political force in the working class. And, of course, because the US and British armies were there watching the Italian CP like a hawk.

But that the Italian workers wanted a socialist revolution was well known. Red flags were flying everywhere, and in several cities, until the underground CP emerging out of the underground got the party line from Moscow, yes factories were being seized and workers councils elected.

As for Stalin in 1945, that he was going for re-establishing capitalism all over Europe, in the guise of Popular Front regimes, was no secret, that was the party line, expressed loudly and clearly.

And the party line was *absolutely no different* in Czechoslovakia or Poland than it was in France or Italy. And the initial actions of the new coalition governments in the first year or two were absolutely no different either, except somewhat in Yugoslavia, where even from the getgo Tito not Stalin was in charge. In '45 and '46 and '47 Tito had a "more Stalinist than thou" policy, which Stalin got increasingly unhappy with.

With a much higher level of repression in Yugoslavia than anywhere else in Eastern Europe either. Though some of those murderous bourgeois nationalists in Yugoslavia *needed* to be sent to labor camps or shot. As subsequent events illustrated. However, Tito did not repress only them, he also repressed all working class dissidents, of whom there were a decent number.

-M.H.-

syndicat

10th August 2011, 00:51

You seem to think that this could have been done by permeating the armed forces with Soviet agents. Well, Spain was not Afghanistan, it wasn't a socially ultrabackward Soviet semiclient state with an officer corps desperately wanting to modernize the country and mostly trained in the Soviet Union in the first place. It was a major country more socially advanced than Russia itself and riven by proletarian revolution. Such games would have blown up in their faces.

And that's not speculation, as that's exactly what happened anyway. Some of the CP's favorite generals turned on the CP in the last days of the Republic, in particular their very favorite general, Jose Miaja, who participated in a coup against them whose leader unsuccessfully tried to make a deal with Franco.I didn't say the PCE could pull off their goal of a nationalized, managerialized economy. I said that was their plan. Not bringing back capitalism. Since most of the working class supported the revolutionaries...CNT or Left Socialists or POUM...the PCE would inevitably would have faced an internal revolt if Franco had been defeated.

That's taking an extremely defeatist stance on the policies of the PCE. Yes, they were allied with other leftist and bourgeois parties and this policy was dictated upon them by the class and ideological circumstances that existed worldwide at that time (the rise and fear of fascism). There are many individuals even today that would rather settle with bourgeois democracy than open fascism, whether that person is more to the left or right.

The object of the Spanish Popular Front was to unite all possible anti-Franco forces during the civil war, until a bourgois democratic republic had been declared. From there, the PCE, being the main workers' party and the largest party of the popular front, would have been in an even better position to advance towards socialism. It is absolutely true that the PCE did not call for immediate revolution, but it would be false to claim that they completely threw the idea of long-term revolution to the wind and gave up on organizing workers.
what a joke. the usual CP line. you ignore the little fact there already was a proletarian revolution that seized the means of production and built a workers militia of 120,000.

the PCE did what it could to undermine that revolution and undermine autonomous worker power, because its aim was a bureaucratic class dominated mode of production, as in the USSR.

Die Neue Zeit

11th August 2011, 14:27

Civil war with the peasantry is a very old Stalinist slander, which should have died after Stalin actually *did* carry out civil war with the peasantry, but apparently hasn't.

It's not slander. It's Trotsky's own words, as dug up by the independent historian Lars Lih on the subject of permanent revolution in the Second International (http://www.revleft.com/vb/trotskys-permanent-revolution-t149111/index.html).

And that in the intermediary period the workers would need to exercise much tactical skill to keeping them by and large on the side of the workers instead of the other side, using force if necessary.

That "force" is nothing less than civil war between a proletarian demographic minority and a peasant + urban petit-bourgeois demographic majority, as Trotsky admitted.

Have no idea what you mean by "economism" here.

Growing political struggles out of mere economic ones. I mean, "sliding scale of wages" was raised on the level of the shop floor in Trotsky's text, not called for as national policy!

But as for the Russian RCWP, not only are they not a basis for "left unity," it is questionable if they are a left party at all. They are virulent Russian chauvinists, anti-Semites, Chechen haters and gaybashers, much more interested in their "red-brown coalition" with Nazis, Cossacks and orthodox priests than in organizing workers, something they do rarely if at all. If Zyuganov's party is the "moderate" wing of the red-brown coalition, Putin's lapdogs, they are the "militant" wing, therefore perhaps even worse. They exist in a netherworld in between Stalinism and "National Bolshevism."

Um, the Russian Communist Workers Party - Revolutionary Party of Communists (http://www.revleft.com/vb/russian-left-unity-t155794/index.html) is not Zyuganov's Communist Party of the Russian Federation (Russian chauvinists, anti-Semites, Chechen haters, homophobes, etc.).

S.Artesian

11th August 2011, 14:49

It's not slander. It's Trotsky's own words, as dug up by the independent historian Lars Lih on the subject of permanent revolution in the Second International (http://www.revleft.com/vb/trotskys-permanent-revolution-t149111/index.html).

Yes, it is. It is your particular twisted way of making a prognosis about the future into a program of advocacy. Here's the whole quote from your earlier post:

Originally Posted by Lars Lih
Many on the left see Lenin as undergoing a conversion to Trotskyism in 1917. Lars T Lih takes on this myth and reveals a Lenin, who while converging with Trotsky in certain respects, still has a different strategy. There is also the possible influence Kautsky exerted on Lenin [...]

The part on which Trotsky was by himself - and very often you hear about the Trotsky-Parvus theory, but Parvus denounced this, and Lenin and Parvus were closer on this original question - was his idea that the provisional revolutionary government would be long-lasting, would be a regular government. That is the step he took that the others were unwilling to take. That is why he criticised the Bolsheviks; he considered that they were utopian to think that the provisional revolutionary government would stay provisional.

The question then arises, how did he deal with the ‘axiom of the class ally’, and get around what seemed to everyone else an impassable barrier? He could have done it by saying that the peasants will support socialism, but that is exactly what he didn’t say. The Socialist Revolutionaries (who, by the way, in July 1905 had argued for a “permanent revolution” going into socialism - before Trotsky had ever used the term), coming from the populist tradition, thought that the peasants were ready for socialism’. But Trotsky did not go that route. As a matter of fact, while Trotsky and Lenin may have disagreed about the democratic revolution (and even there I think it was only a matter of emphasis), they certainly did not disagree about whether the peasants were ready for socialism.

My feeling is that Trotsky kept to the letter but violated the spirit of the axiom of the class ally. He thought that in the first part of the democratic revolution the peasants would support you and in the second part, when you go on to socialism, they would not support you. Therefore, unless you have an international revolution, there will be (and this is his own phrase) ‘a civil war with the peasantry’. He agrees that you can’t have socialist government without majority support. But, in a rather peculiar way, he says you can’t have socialism because there will be a civil war with the peasantry. He says we will be discredited if we do not make the provisional government long-lasting.

But to me a civil war with the peasantry seems fairly discrediting, and the idea that a socialist government should end in civil war with the peasantry was blasphemy among Russian social democrats.Well, first Lars T. Lih calls his analysis his "feeling," quite a bit less than a conclusive proof, no?

But to go on......

So absent an international revolution, a civil war with the peasantry was inevitable. That's quite different from advocating a civil war with the peasantry, from making a civil war with the peasantry a programmatic demand; a basis for action.

And how did the history turn out minus that international revolution? Exactly what would you call the forced requisitioning of grain? The expropriation of foodstuffs by the Red Army during the civil war? What would you call the first 5 year plan?

Oh wait... yeah I know, you call it "primitive socialist accumulation"-- like you call slave labor primitive socialist accumulation.

Like your Stalinist fellow travelers, DNZ you are a falsifier of history.

Die Neue Zeit

11th August 2011, 14:58

Yes, it is. It is your particular twisted way of making a prognosis about the future into a program of advocacy. Here's the whole quote from your earlier post:

Well, first Lars T. Lih calls his analysis his "feeling," quite a bit less than a conclusive proof, no?

But to go on......

So absent an international revolution, a civil war with the peasantry was inevitable. That's quite different from advocating a civil war with the peasantry, from making a civil war with the peasantry a programmatic demand; a basis for action.

And how did the history turn out minus that international revolution? Exactly what would you call the forced requisitioning of grain? The expropriation of foodstuffs by the Red Army during the civil war? What would you call the first 5 year plan?

There was already civil war with the peasantry even with "international revolution," if you count "class war in the countryside" (Lenin's euphemism for Civil War measures re. the peasantry) as part of such. There's a difference between Lenin getting caught off guard and Trotsky admitting such yet proceeding with it anyway and not backtracking on this in exile!

I already explained my position re. the Policy Triangle within the discussions leading to the First Five-Year Plan (industrialization, worker conditions, peasant conditions).

Oh wait... yeah I know, you call it "primitive socialist accumulation"-- like you call slave labor primitive socialist accumulation.

Like your Stalinist fellow travelers, DNZ you are a falsifier of history.

No, I just realize the absurdity of proletarian demographic minorities seizing power and establishing their own class dictatorship over other non-worker but non-bourgeois classes. Fortunately for them, though, there is a viable political alternative to both this and tailing their bourgeois rulers.

RED DAVE

11th August 2011, 15:44

No, I just realize the absurdity of proletarian demographic minorities seizing power and establishing their own class dictatorship over other non-worker but non-bourgeois classes. Fortunately for them, though, there is a viable political alternative to both this and tailing their bourgeois rulers.And what, pray tell, is that?

Hold your breath, Comrades, pop some popcorn, and then stick to your screens as DNZ is going to reveal his personal alternative to permanent revolution.

Could it possibly be CAESARIAN SOCIALISM?

RED DAVE

S.Artesian

11th August 2011, 17:13

There was already civil war with the peasantry even with "international revolution," if you count "class war in the countryside" (Lenin's euphemism for Civil War measures re. the peasantry) as part of such. There's a difference between Lenin getting caught off guard and Trotsky admitting such yet proceeding with it anyway and not backtracking on this in exile!

I already explained my position re. the Policy Triangle within the discussions leading to the First Five-Year Plan (industrialization, worker conditions, peasant conditions).

WTF are you talking about? You claimed Lars T. Lih "proved" Trotsky embraced, advocated civil war against the peasantry. He proves no such thing. He doesn't even argue that Trotsky advocated such a course. What Trotsky did realize is that the peasant attachment to private/communal property and subsistence production made it a highly unstable "player" and that it would resist the necessary rationalization of agriculture needed to sustain industrial development.

As far as the Bolshevik policy prior to and during the civil war, it was precisely that--the Bolshevik policy, not Trotsky's personally, but the Bolshevik policy fully advocated, endorsed, supported by Lenin.

And post Lenin? Who's policy re the peasants dominated the Soviet program? Trotsky's? Not hardly. Again you ignore the actual content of the struggles in the fSU, the actual content of the five year plan, in order to twist these events into fitting with your ideological distortions.

Short version: You're a liar, but a liar with a purpose.

No, I just realize the absurdity of proletarian demographic minorities seizing power and establishing their own class dictatorship over other non-worker but non-bourgeois classes. Fortunately for them, though, there is a viable political alternative to both this and tailing their bourgeois rulers.

Uh... no there isn't as the history of the fSU, China, Vietnam, Bolivia, Ecuador, has proven.

A Marxist Historian

11th August 2011, 22:36

I didn't say the PCE could pull off their goal of a nationalized, managerialized economy. I said that was their plan. Not bringing back capitalism. Since most of the working class supported the revolutionaries...CNT or Left Socialists or POUM...the PCE would inevitably would have faced an internal revolt if Franco had been defeated.

what a joke. the usual CP line. you ignore the little fact there already was a proletarian revolution that seized the means of production and built a workers militia of 120,000.

the PCE did what it could to undermine that revolution and undermine autonomous worker power, because its aim was a bureaucratic class dominated mode of production, as in the USSR.

As for your critique of Red Struggle, I see no need to quarrel again with your "bureaucratic mode of production," I'd just be repeating myself. Your basic point is obviously true.

Now, did the Spanish CP subjectively at some level want to see their version of socialism and thought that their two stage revolution model would lead to that? No doubt they did. But that did not matter.

Stalinism is a false ideology, and like all false ideologies serves to delude its practitioners as to their actual social role. Objectively, the role of the Spanish CP was to restabilize bourgeois democracy in Spain, just as that was the role of their mentor Stalin on the world scale.

And that is what matters.

-M.H.-

A Marxist Historian

11th August 2011, 22:51

syndicat

11th August 2011, 22:52

Stalinism is a false ideology, and like all false ideologies serves to delude its practitioners as to their actual social role. Objectively, the role of the Spanish CP was to restabilize bourgeois democracy in Spain, just as that was the role of their mentor Stalin on the world scale.

and that's why he did such a good job of establishing "bourgeois democracy" in eastern Europe, USSR, China, etc. in fact, nowhere.

A Marxist Historian

11th August 2011, 22:57

and that's why he did such a good job of establishing "bourgeois democracy" in eastern Europe, USSR, China, etc. in fact, nowhere.

Took a while in Eastern Europe and the USSR, job not finished yet in China.

But much more important was the yeoman's service he provided for the restabilizion of bourgeois democracy in the heartlands of capitalist imperialism, Western Europe and Japan, where it was under very serious threat during the worldwide revolutionary explosions at the end of WWII.

That after all is what the Popular Front was all about.

-M.H.-

Die Neue Zeit

12th August 2011, 03:17

And what, pray tell, is that?

Hold your breath, Comrades, pop some popcorn, and then stick to your screens as DNZ is going to reveal his personal alternative to permanent revolution.

There's no need for spoiler tags, and it's the subject of another thread. However, the answer is a flat-out, emphatic yes.

WTF are you talking about? You claimed Lars T. Lih "proved" Trotsky embraced, advocated civil war against the peasantry. He proves no such thing.

Lars Lih did prove it. Remember, he's (thankfully) a key spearhead to a Kautsky Revival for the modern left. "Trotsky kept to the letter but violated the spirit of the axiom of the class ally," wrote Lih as a "feeling." Well, the broader context behind my assertion is that Trotsky in exile had the chance to correct this, but stubbornly went back to his take on permanent revolution.

What Trotsky did realize is that the peasant attachment to private/communal property and subsistence production made it a highly unstable "player" and that it would resist the necessary rationalization of agriculture needed to sustain industrial development.

And yet he still encouraged proletarian demographic minorities outside Russia and the Soviet state to seize power. This is the strategic blunder I'm referring to.

As far as the Bolshevik policy prior to and during the civil war, it was precisely that--the Bolshevik policy, not Trotsky's personally, but the Bolshevik policy fully advocated, endorsed, supported by Lenin.

Lenin backtracked. Trotsky didn't (by re-affirming his take on permanent revolution in exile).

Uh... no there isn't as the history of the fSU, China, Vietnam, Bolivia, Ecuador, has proven.

Like I said to Red Dave, that's discussion for another thread.

Die Neue Zeit

12th August 2011, 03:25

To Trotsky that was something to be avoided, not embraced, and indeed was, according to your own posting referenced, why he believed the solution was international revolution not socialism in one country. So one of the purposes of the theory of permanent revolution was to *avoid* civil war with the peasantry.

And the historical fact was that there was a certain amount of low level civil war by peasants against the Bolshevik regime, the Tambov insurrection and so forth. So it would seem Trotsky's prediction was right.

You're focusing on the more famous half of permanent revolution re. "international revolution" (despite key errors in that assumption, like spreading to immediate neighbours vs. further into Europe). I'm focusing on the first half of permanent revolution, the part about proletarian demographic minorities somehow being capable of "democratic tasks" as the ruling class without being in equal partnership with another class.

See, Lenin's revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry stressed less on "international revolution" and more on "democratic tasks." The proletariat in equal alliance with the peasantry would form a provisional government to carry this through. The equal alliance, in turn, would prevent civil war even if "international revolution" didn't pan out.

And the reason for this was not Trotsky's theories, but because the Bolsheviks turned away from ultraleft policies to the NEP concessions to capitalism policy, which Trotsky was the *first* to advocate among the top Bolshevik leaders. When the NEP was adopted, the Bolsheviks quickly were able to gain peace with the peasantry.

And Trotsky was also the first to call for an end to the NEP? What's your point?

http://www.revleft.com/vb/stalins-economic-machiavellianism-t157285/index.html

As you'll see from my original posting, I wasn't referring to Zyuganov, but to the more *militant* social-fascists. I'm not familiar with the particular faction you are referring to, but there is an entire milieu of Russian chauvinist anti-Semitic Chechen haters and homophobes calling themselves "communist," who do not confine themselves to the parliamentary reformist methods of Zyuganov, but agitate for physical violence against their targets.

The original leader of this tendency back in 1991 was a fellow named Anpilov, though I think he personally has dropped away and this milieu has split into a myriad of ugly factions.

-M.H.-

Anpilov once belonged to the Russian Communist Workers Party, but since 1996 he left.

A Marxist Historian

12th August 2011, 21:48

You're focusing on the more famous half of permanent revolution re. "international revolution" (despite key errors in that assumption, like spreading to immediate neighbours vs. further into Europe). I'm focusing on the first half of permanent revolution, the part about proletarian demographic minorities somehow being capable of "democratic tasks" as the ruling class without being in equal partnership with another class.

See, Lenin's revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry stressed less on "international revolution" and more on "democratic tasks." The proletariat in equal alliance with the peasantry would form a provisional government to carry this through. The equal alliance, in turn, would prevent civil war even if "international revolution" didn't pan out.

The purpose of Lenin's RDDPP was to carry out the *democratic* tasks of the revolution. He *hoped* that this would touch off proletarian revolution in Germany etc. making possible a further development, a second stage of a two-stage revolution. He was also quite clear that if this *did not* happen, this RDDPP would be a temporary affair, like the Jacobin "reign of terror" in France, that would give way to the rule of the bourgeoisie, but on a broadly democratic basis. He even went so far as to refer to this as the "American" path at one point.

So is this then your position? That the Bolshevik Revolution, in the absence of worldwide proletarian revolution, ought better to have ended by turning Russia into America?

Impractical in Russian conditions. The return of bourgeois rule would have drifted rapidly into a Russian species of fascism in Russian conditions, as the Whites had already demonstrated, including where White rule began as the rule of the "Constituent Assembly," with Menshevik and SR ministers in popular front style coalitions.

And Trotsky was also the first to call for an end to the NEP? What's your point?

http://www.revleft.com/vb/stalins-economic-machiavellianism-t157285/index.html

This is a popular misconception. Trotsky did no such thing as call for an end to the NEP and a return to the methods of "war communism." Rather, he wanted to fuel industrialization with higher tax rates on the more prosperous kulaks and NEPmen. In short, he wanted to "tax the rich," which is not at all a bad idea on the basis of proletarian as opposed to bourgeois state power.

Abolition of capitalist relations in the countryside and of private capital in the cities could not be carried out by fiat as Stalin attempted, with disastrous consequences.

Instead, what was needed was a policy favoring the poor peasants not the rich, the workers not the NEPmen, and an orientation to planned industrial development to make possible transcending NEP in *the future,* as revolution spread to the rest of the world.

In short, if you want to collectivize, first you build the tractor factories and crank out enough tractors to make the idea attractive to peasants. Not the other way around! And, of course, don't let the kulaks have any access to tractors, if a peasant wants to stop using a plough and join the modern world, then he can join a collective that the state has given tractors to.

Anpilov once belonged to the Russian Communist Workers Party, but since 1996 he left.

In the early '90s, the RKRP were simply the militant wing of Russian social-fascism, mobilizing against persecuted minorities in the streets instead of just trying to pass laws in the Duma after the contemporary fashion of Putin's tame lapdog Zyuganov. Marching side by side with fascists, Cossacks, monarchists and orthodox priests.

If the RKRP changed course after its original leader Anpilov departed, that would be a good thing, but I very much doubt it from all I've heard. The vicious hatred of almost all Russian Stalinists for homosexuals is famous, as is their anti-Semitism. Their hatred for immigrants, who are subjected to fascistic violence in Russia on a level worse than anywhere else in Europe, is less well known outside Russia but effectively even worse on a day to day basis. Not even to speak of their Russian-patriotic hatred for Chechens and enthusiasm for Putin's genocidal war against Chechnya.

-M.H.-

Die Neue Zeit

13th August 2011, 05:47

He was also quite clear that if this *did not* happen, this RDDPP would be a temporary affair, like the Jacobin "reign of terror" in France, that would give way to the rule of the bourgeoisie, but on a broadly democratic basis. He even went so far as to refer to this as the "American" path at one point.

So is this then your position? That the Bolshevik Revolution, in the absence of worldwide proletarian revolution, ought better to have ended by turning Russia into America?

Impractical in Russian conditions. The return of bourgeois rule would have drifted rapidly into a Russian species of fascism in Russian conditions, as the Whites had already demonstrated, including where White rule began as the rule of the "Constituent Assembly," with Menshevik and SR ministers in popular front style coalitions.

I don't think the RDDOTPP in the worst-case scenario ever envisioned "rule of the bourgeoisie but on a broadly democratic basis." These long videos are worth a look debating the two stances:

http://vimeo.com/17271793
http://vimeo.com/14808875

This is a popular misconception. Trotsky did no such thing as call for an end to the NEP and a return to the methods of "war communism." Rather, he wanted to fuel industrialization with higher tax rates on the more prosperous kulaks and NEPmen. In short, he wanted to "tax the rich," which is not at all a bad idea on the basis of proletarian as opposed to bourgeois state power.

Of course Trotsky didn't call for a return to War Communism. Nobody did. There was a consensus that War Communism was a temporary policy, not to be taken as virtue everywhere. In fact, the reason NEP was adopted was because the Bolsheviks were enthusiastic about its prospects for socialist transition!

Trotsky wanted to end NEP precisely because he wanted to boost the shifting planning apparatus, whether in Vesenkha or Gosplan.

Abolition of capitalist relations in the countryside and of private capital in the cities could not be carried out by fiat as Stalin attempted, with disastrous consequences.

Stalin didn't attempt to "abolish capitalist relations in the countryside" at all. Kolkhozization meant neither state ownership nor state responsibility over agricultural risks. That would have been the case with sovkhozization, though.

Instead, what was needed was a policy favoring the poor peasants not the rich, the workers not the NEPmen, and an orientation to planned industrial development to make possible transcending NEP in *the future,* as revolution spread to the rest of the world.

In light of the Scissors and Depression crises, what was needed first and foremost was breakneck sovkhozization by hook and by crook, considering the lack of any revival whatsoever of the old obshchinas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obshchina) against the legacy of the Stolypin reforms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolypin_reform). The greater surpluses for industrial equipment could have avoided the artificial depression of urban workers' real wages (by over half) that actually took place!

http://www.revleft.com/vb/defense-trotsky-s-t156790/index.html?p=2157302

If the RKRP changed course after its original leader Anpilov departed, that would be a good thing, but I very much doubt it from all I've heard. The vicious hatred of almost all Russian Stalinists for homosexuals is famous, as is their anti-Semitism. Their hatred for immigrants, who are subjected to fascistic violence in Russia on a level worse than anywhere else in Europe, is less well known outside Russia but effectively even worse on a day to day basis. Not even to speak of their Russian-patriotic hatred for Chechens and enthusiasm for Putin's genocidal war against Chechnya.

-M.H.-

I think Kiev Communard has got more expertise on the Russian political situation than either you or I.

A Marxist Historian

13th August 2011, 21:43

I don't think the RDDOTPP in the worst-case scenario ever envisioned "rule of the bourgeoisie but on a broadly democratic basis." These long videos are worth a look debating the two stances:

Lenin's *best* case scenario was that the democratic revolution in Russia would touch off a proletarian revolution in Russia. He never ever once suggests that socialism in one country was at all possible in Russia, no Marxist at the time did, that was Stalin's creative "revision" of Marxism.

And he explicitly compared the RDDOTPP with Jacobin rule in France. Which, as we all know, after a short period led to the rule of the bourgeoisie, first Thermidor, then Napoleon. In fact Robespierre was himself basically a representative of the bourgeoisie--a weakness in his analysis that the Mensheviks made much use of when polemicizing vs. Bolshevism, accusing the Bolsheviks of just being bourgeois Jacobins.

http://vimeo.com/17271793
http://vimeo.com/14808875

Of course Trotsky didn't call for a return to War Communism. Nobody did. There was a consensus that War Communism was a temporary policy, not to be taken as virtue everywhere. In fact, the reason NEP was adopted was because the Bolsheviks were enthusiastic about its prospects for socialist transition!

Trotsky wanted to end NEP precisely because he wanted to boost the shifting planning apparatus, whether in Vesenkha or Gosplan.

When and where did Trotsky call for an end to the NEP? Never, to the best of my knowledge.

The idea that the NEP was adopted was because Lenin thought it was a wonderful way to get to socialism is absurd. Lenin called it a "retreat," which is exactly what it was. A retreat towards capitalism, as he bluntly stated.

Stalin didn't attempt to "abolish capitalist relations in the countryside" at all. Kolkhozization meant neither state ownership nor state responsibility over agricultural risks. That would have been the case with sovkhozization, though.

In light of the Scissors and Depression crises, what was needed first and foremost was breakneck sovkhozization by hook and by crook, considering the lack of any revival whatsoever of the old obshchinas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obshchina) against the legacy of the Stolypin reforms (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolypin_reform). The greater surpluses for industrial equipment could have avoided the artificial depression of urban workers' real wages (by over half) that actually took place!

http://www.revleft.com/vb/defense-trotsky-s-t156790/index.html?p=2157302

It is true that kolkhozization were, as Trotsky pointed out, a disguised form of continuation of capitalist relations in the countryside. This was inevitable, as one cannot after all build socialism in one country in a mostly-agricultural country like the USSR, or anywhere for that matter.

Trying to actually abolish capitalism altogether, as in your idea of "breakneck sovkhozization," would have led to an even larger scale disaster than the one that ensued.

That labor productivity was far higher on kolkhozes than sovkhozes is very well known, not least of course to Stalin himself. That is because a peasant who in theory at least *was a part owner* of the enterprise getting a share of what he he produced, as opposed to just drawing a wage, was motivated to work, at least after the option of folding your hands and refusing to work in protest against collectivization had led to the famine disaster and so many peasants dying.

Socialist methods can't be effectively imposed on a recalcitrant population by brute force, as the famine demonstrated.

The reason that the Soviet Union was able to function fairly effectively economically, beat Hitler and so forth is that, until the Brezhnev era, the majority of the Soviet working class did regard the Soviet Union as its state, so were willing to work to make it work.

As that dribbled away during the Brezhnev years, finally coming to an end altogether under Gorbachev, the Soviet economy, before that performing all sorts of economic miracles, first slid into stagnation and then crisis.

I think Kiev Communard has got more expertise on the Russian political situation than either you or I.

Well, he isn't here expressing an opinion. I have no idea what he thinks on the matter. Of course, he tends to think Bolsheviks in general are pretty much like how I have described the RKRP in one way or another, so I'm not sure his opinion would be helpful.

I have myself been to Russia, talked to people etc., so I am not ignorant here.

-M.H.-

Die Neue Zeit

13th August 2011, 23:07

And he explicitly compared the RDDOTPP with Jacobin rule in France. Which, as we all know, after a short period led to the rule of the bourgeoisie, first Thermidor, then Napoleon. In fact Robespierre was himself basically a representative of the bourgeoisie--a weakness in his analysis that the Mensheviks made much use of when polemicizing vs. Bolshevism, accusing the Bolsheviks of just being bourgeois Jacobins.

You didn't address my statement directly. The worst-case scenario I referred to was an RDDOTPP administering some form of prolonged and extensive state capitalism, without which the bourgeoisie can form.

The idea that the NEP was adopted was because Lenin thought it was a wonderful way to get to socialism is absurd. Lenin called it a "retreat," which is exactly what it was. A retreat towards capitalism, as he bluntly stated.

Wrong:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/jules-guesde-lenin-t102192/index.html

It is true that kolkhozization were, as Trotsky pointed out, a disguised form of continuation of capitalist relations in the countryside. This was inevitable, as one cannot after all build socialism in one country in a mostly-agricultural country like the USSR, or anywhere for that matter.

Trying to actually abolish capitalism altogether, as in your idea of "breakneck sovkhozization," would have led to an even larger scale disaster than the one that ensued.

Actually, breakneck sovkhozization would have led to less disaster if any. The sovkhozization in Central Asia didn't produce the kind of famines that plagued the Ukraine. The reason is that wage relations in the countryside would be strengthened. Kolkhozization was a disguised form of continuation of pre-wage relations in the countryside.

That labor productivity was far higher on kolkhozes than sovkhozes is very well known, not least of course to Stalin himself.

Um, I don't know what universe you're coming from, but in fact the reverse was true:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovkhoz ("state farms were viewed as more productive and more profitable than collective farms")

That is because a peasant who in theory at least *was a part owner* of the enterprise getting a share of what he he produced, as opposed to just drawing a wage, was motivated to work, at least after the option of folding your hands and refusing to work in protest against collectivization had led to the famine disaster and so many peasants dying.

Somebody here needs to understand basic business management. Under the kolkhoz system, the peasants bore all the business risk. The state dictated high quotas at artificially lower prices. Who would want to work that hard to get so low a sales revenue? Heck, all the production from the private plots could not have been possible without the usage of materials provided by the bigger farms! Just look at today's tenant farming and sharecropping arrangements (or, to use a retail analogy, look at the supplier bargaining power of like Wal-Mart)!

On the other hand, under the sovkhoz system, the state bore all the business risk. Farm workers had to appease red directors like future Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, but the wages were much more reasonable. In fact, in the early Stalin era the "getting a share of what he produced" in the sovkhoz took the form of "socialist piecework," Stakhanovism, etc. That's why industrial food production today is way more productive!

A Marxist Historian

15th August 2011, 00:47

You didn't address my statement directly. The worst-case scenario I referred to was an RDDOTPP administering some form of prolonged and extensive state capitalism, without which the bourgeoisie can form.

Wrong:

http://www.revleft.com/vb/jules-guesde-lenin-t102192/index.html

I am quite puzzled by your posting this link with the quote from Lars Lih, which seems if anything to support my point here and refute yours.

I see Lih as an eccentric scholar some of whose notions are valid and some are not. I vastly prefer, as you might have guessed, the analysis of Joseph Seymour in the Spartacist pamphlet "Lenin and the Vanguard Party." Not available on the web alas, but has been reprinted recently and can be ordered from their website for $2, no shipping charges. I suspect you'd find it very interesting.

http://www.spartacist.org/otherlit/litlist.html#pamphlets

Actually, breakneck sovkhozization would have led to less disaster if any. The sovkhozization in Central Asia didn't produce the kind of famines that plagued the Ukraine. The reason is that wage relations in the countryside would be strengthened. Kolkhozization was a disguised form of continuation of pre-wage relations in the countryside.

Would that were true!

In fact the Kazakhstan famine in proportion to population was *worse* than the Ukrainian famine. Due to the absence of censuses and indeed any form of population records for a then-nomadic society, how many people died is a mystery, a mystery not helped by the current government of Kazakhstan, notorious for engaging in fraudulent misrepresentation of population statistics for political purposes, around Russian vs. Kazakh population statistics.

But there is no question but that it was worse than the Ukrainian famine.

I'm afraid this huge error of yours makes it harder for me to take the rest of what you say below seriously. I suggest that you read Wheatcroft's book, The Years of Hunger, the definitive study of the great collectivization famine.

The book is in fact the most recent (I think!) in the series of works on Soviet history begun by E.H. Carr so many years ago, and continued thereafter first by Robert Davies and then by Wheatcroft. The series is really the gold standard for objective history of the Soviet Union.

I'll take Wheatcroft over Wikipedia any day.

Um, I don't know what universe you're coming from, but in fact the reverse was true:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovkhoz ("state farms were viewed as more productive and more profitable than collective farms")

Somebody here needs to understand basic business management. Under the kolkhoz system, the peasants bore all the business risk. The state dictated high quotas at artificially lower prices. Who would want to work that hard to get so low a sales revenue? Heck, all the production from the private plots could not have been possible without the usage of materials provided by the bigger farms! Just look at today's tenant farming and sharecropping arrangements (or, to use a retail analogy, look at the supplier bargaining power of like Wal-Mart)!

On the other hand, under the sovkhoz system, the state bore all the business risk. Farm workers had to appease red directors like future Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko, but the wages were much more reasonable. In fact, in the early Stalin era the "getting a share of what he produced" in the sovkhoz took the form of "socialist piecework," Stakhanovism, etc. That's why industrial food production today is way more productive!

I would imagine that by the Brezhnev era or thereabouts, agriculture had been sufficiently proletarianized in the USSR that the cultivators thought of themselves as farmworkers rather than peasants, at which point going from kolkhozes to sovkhozes would make sense from everyone's POV, and especially that of the farmworkers themselves.

-M.H.-