1917-Revolution is on Putin's Mind

[Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist]

http://www.wrp.org.uk/news/9562

despite how shitty everything is these days, at least we can all sit down and agree on how stupid this is

this quote is from another unrelated article:



SUNDAY night’s meeting between the Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov and the US Secretary of State, John Kerry, has shown conclusively the counter-revolutionary nature of the Stalinist bureaucracy and their dread of the working class.


delicious

[Prometeo liberado]

Putin himself warned yesterday that experts were warning that Ukraine was undergoing a revolution

Godamn! If your trying to effect revolutionary change then please start by constructing proper sentences in your paper.:confused:

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Well, these are the people who agitated for the spreading of the Ba'ath and Iranian "revolutions" into the Soviet Union. What always amazes me is how well-respected they were. I guess that when Healy was alive, they could always hide their fundamentally idiotic views behind "dialectical" rhetoric. Torrance doesn't have the talent for that.

[Yet_Another_Boring_Marxist]

Well, these are the people who agitated for the spreading of the Ba'ath and Iranian "revolutions" into the Soviet Union. What always amazes me is how well-respected they were. I guess that when Healy was alive, they could always hide their fundamentally idiotic views behind "dialectical" rhetoric. Torrance doesn't have the talent for that.

I've never heard of this before, could you elaborate? Because that sounds positively stupid.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

As far as I can tell, Newsletter, the former central organ of the (united) WRP, doesn't have an online archive, so I can't specify article numbers and so on (I will try to track these numbers down, though). But yes, when the Iraqi Ba'ath government killed 21 communists for forming a military cell, the WRP hailed this, commenting on how Ba'athism was "a thousand times more progressive than Stalinism" and that the "Arab revolution" needs to spread to the "Soviet client states in the region" and ultimately to the USSR. Likewise, when the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan started, the WRP proclaimed that Soviet actions were due to the "fear of the Soviet bureaucracy" that the "Iranian revolution" would spread in Soviet Central Asia. The article then called for the mullahs to do just that.

It was stupid - but it was hardly unique. The IMT came close to proclaiming Syria under Jadid a workers' state. The US SWP were also big fans of the "Iranian revolution". Generally, a lot of Trotskyist, or rather "Trotskyist" currents were disillusioned with the proletariat in the poswar period, so a "new mass vanguard" (to use Mandel's term) had to be found - whether students, Islamists or whatever.

[Five Year Plan]

It was stupid - but it was hardly unique. The IMT came close to proclaiming Syria under Jadid a workers' state. The US SWP were also big fans of the "Iranian revolution". Generally, a lot of Trotskyist, or rather "Trotskyist" currents were disillusioned with the proletariat in the poswar period, so a "new mass vanguard" (to use Mandel's term) had to be found - whether students, Islamists or whatever.

...or Stalinist bureaucrats (who could magically create deformed workers' states).

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

...or Stalinist bureaucrats (who could magically create deformed workers' states).

There was nothing "magical" about it, though. Spartacists, who I suppose this comment was aimed at, claimed that the mostly petit-bourgeois struggles led by Stalinist parties could result in a deformed workers' state - but only under exceptional circumstances. Benin, for example, could never have become a deformed workers' state. And the creation of a DWS wasn't due to the Stalinist bureaucracy, whether the one in Moscow or in the various Soviet-influenced states, but the proletarian property relations that prevailed in the Soviet Union. The bureaucracy sometimes extended these relations, but always in a sub-par and confused manner; sometimes it held them back or worse - participated in attempts to destroy them (as the Chinese bureaucracy tried with Vietnam, Cambodia etc.).

[Five Year Plan]

There was nothing "magical" about it, though. Spartacists, who I suppose this comment was aimed at, claimed that the mostly petit-bourgeois struggles led by Stalinist parties could result in a deformed workers' state - but only under exceptional circumstances. Benin, for example, could never have become a deformed workers' state. And the creation of a DWS wasn't due to the Stalinist bureaucracy, whether the one in Moscow or in the various Soviet-influenced states, but the proletarian property relations that prevailed in the Soviet Union. The bureaucracy sometimes extended these relations, but always in a sub-par and confused manner; sometimes it held them back or worse - participated in attempts to destroy them (as the Chinese bureaucracy tried with Vietnam, Cambodia etc.).

You remarked, quite incisively, that various "Trotskyist" groups became disillusioned with the revolutionary agency of the proletariat after WWII. You then gave examples of various non-proletarian forces that Trotskyists were falling over themselves to credit with performing various 'revolutionary' tasks. Why not add Stalinist bureaucrats to that list of non-proletarian forces doing revolutionary things? Many Trotskyists, including you it seems, feel that they pulled off workers' revolutions throughout Eastern Europe. Are you implying that Stalinist bureaucrats are proletarian? If not, you either should add them to your list, or qualify your statement about how terrible it was that Trotskyists looked to non-proletarian elements to advance the socialist revolution.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

You remarked, quite incisively, that various "Trotskyist" groups became disillusioned with the revolutionary agency of the proletariat after WWII. You then gave examples of various non-proletarian forces that Trotskyists were falling over themselves to credit with performing various 'revolutionary' tasks. Why not add Stalinist bureaucrats to that list of non-proletarian forces doing revolutionary things? Many Trotskyists, including you it seems, feel that they pulled off workers' revolutions throughout Eastern Europe. Are you implying that Stalinist bureaucrats are proletarian? If not, you either should add them to your list, or qualify your statement about how terrible it was that Trotskyists looked to non-proletarian elements to carry out the socialist revolution.

I would say the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union - and the "mature" glacis states - was a stratum of the proletariat. This doesn't mean that an orientation towards the bureaucracy was acceptable - the proletariat has reactionary layers in addition to progressive ones, and the bureaucracy was decidedly a regressive layer, with a petit-bourgeois outlook and a contradictory, middleman role.

What I dispute is that the Spartacists, Samarakkody's group, the SWP of the forties and fifties, etc. were oriented towards the Stalinist bureaucracy like the International Secretariat was. Sometimes, of course, these groups supported certain actions of the bureaucracy - the Spartacists, for example, supported both the intervention in Afghanistan and the suppression of Solidarnosc. But they never claimed that the bureaucracy could "approximate a revolutionary orientation", like Pablo. During the dissolution of the Soviet Union, for example, the SL gave no support for the August Coup, for the SED leadership in Germany etc. Pabloites would have fallen in step with the Union of Toilers and similar formations. Spartacists agitated for a workers' revolution to overthrow both the conservative bureaucracy and its open capitalist-restorationist wing.

And calling something a "deformed workers' state" is hardly a compliment.

[Five Year Plan]

I would say the bureaucracy in the Soviet Union - and the "mature" glacis states - was a stratum of the proletariat.

Could you elaborate on why you think the top layers of the Stalinist bureaucracy were a stratum of the proletariat?

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

Could you elaborate on why you think the top layers of the Stalinist bureaucracy were a stratum of the proletariat?

Sure. The bureaucracy did not own the means of production - either individually, as I understand the LRP thinks, or as a group, as Draper, Shachtman and others alleged. Furthermore, they did not receive a significant portion of the surplus value extracted from workers, as the managers and executives of a modern capitalist enterprise receive. Their wealth was to a significant extent the result of corruption, a sporadic and unreliable phenomenon (and we don't say that e.g. corrupt union bosses are not part of the proletariat).

In fact I would say there is a perfect equivalency between the labour bureaucracy of the trade unions in capitalism, and the Stalinist bureaucracy.

[Anglo-Saxon Philistine]

In fact, to expand on the trade union analogy, Trotsky once described a degenerated workers' state as a "corrupt union that has conquered power". Now, do unions as they presently exist, i.e. non-revolutionary, corrupt unions, run by the labour lieutenants of the bureaucracy and staffed mostly by career idiots, sometimes win reforms and concessions that are valuable to the workers? They do. To say anything else would be to deny empirical fact.

Does recognising this mean that we have substituted the trade union bureaucracy for the proletariat as a "new vanguard"? No. We recognise that the corrupt, pro-boss trade union was only able to win concessions due to the proletarian elements it contains - due to its still proletarian, albeit degenerated nature.

Likewise with the Soviet Union and the glacis states. The Stalinist bureaucracy didn't particularly care for the formation of deformed workers' states in the region - in particular, the Soviet leadership did anything they could to postpone the final decision on Germany. But it was the pressures, both of the domestic proletariat and the peasantry, and the pressures arising from the nature of the Soviet economy itself, bolstered by the upswing due to the Soviet victory in WWII, that resulted in the formation of state on the Soviet model in China and Eastern Europe.

[Five Year Plan]

Sure. The bureaucracy did not own the means of production - either individually, as I understand the LRP thinks, or as a group, as Draper, Shachtman and others alleged.

This would be an argument as to why the bureaucracy weren't capitalists, not why we should consider the bureaucracy a proletarian stratum.


Furthermore, they did not receive a significant portion of the surplus value extracted from workers, as the managers and executives of a modern capitalist enterprise receive. Their wealth was to a significant extent the result of corruption, a sporadic and unreliable phenomenon (and we don't say that e.g. corrupt union bosses are not part of the proletariatTrotsky's analysis, which self-professed "Orthodox" Trotskyists adhere to was that the Soviet bureaucracy skimmed surplus from the workers without owning the means of production. This means that exploitation did occur, but not on the basis of class ownership of the means of production. Your analogy to the modern-day executive is perfect. He doesn't own the company, but receives some portion of the surplus by participating in a process of exploitation (though "orthodox" Trotskyists would call that process of exploitation a class one, since shareholders do own the corporation.)


In fact I would say there is a perfect equivalency between the labour bureaucracy of the trade unions in capitalism, and the Stalinist bureaucracy.The labor bureaucracy, which is also petty bourgeois and not a stratum of the working class. Unless you want to consider all members of the petty bourgeoisie "proletarians."

To be honest, I've never seen any Trotskyist, orthodox or otherwise, make the claim before that you are trying to defend here.

[Prometeo liberado]

Not to change the subject but did anyone see the Ukrainian ex-president crying at a news conference stating that he should never had trusted the Russians to peacefully lease the Crimea port?
On my ass laughing.
Carry on.