http://www.revleft.com/vb/micahel-pa...ml#post1064900 This article made me reflect again a bit. One of the reasons I don't call myself a left communist is that I am a little bit reluctant to stamp past "communist" regimes as state-capitalist. I have read quite a bit about it, and I do sometimes gravitate toward that viewpoint. I agree that because revolution never spread, the USSR had to participate in the imperialist arena as every other state: making geopolitical alliances, backing certain "national liberation" movements to spread the political sphere of Moscow, making extremely reactionary intetventions like Hungary 56 etc. VIolently supressing "dissenting" communists etc. Since the fall of the USSR and the "socialist menace", however, workers have been experiencing a rollback in living stadards. I don't know this is just my convulted thoughts. I think all those pseudo-trotskyists and stupid social democrats that celebrated the fall of the USSR were extremely reactionary. The USSR was the first to bring completely free healthcare, high education, womens suffrage etc. I don't know, I sometimes feel too reluctant to have to choose either capitalist or socialist when discussing the USSR. By the same token I don't like the trotskyist argument because it seems to me its based on nothing but nostalgia. Why arent there degenerated bourgeois states? I think political power and economic power are intimatley linked, and you cannot have one without the other. Even in bourgeois dictatorships, the haute bourgeosie did hold political power because they effectively controlled "directly" the means of production etc. What makes me gravitate towards the left communist viewpoint is the intense internationalism and an honest, without the whole "proletarian international means solidarity between nationalities" bullshit--they are honest about wanting to abolish nations, and they are honest about how the bourgeosie is not progressive anymore. Meh, I dont know if I made a point. Damn
well, as for many of the current crop, like china and slightly less so Viet Nam, i call them capitalist totalitarianism. but where you meet left communism is where i depart from it- i dont like that position on nationalities, and i dont take 'no war but class war' literally.
Marmot As you point out internationalism is the foundation of Left Communism and what marks it out from the Left of capital. It is not a question of choosing either East or West, if we mean the Soviet bloc or Stalinism. They were both expressions of the same capitalist system. For revolutionaries it is a question of choosing the side of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie not matter how it dresses itself up. The free health care etc in the Eastern bloc was simply a means of distributing austerity, you do not mention the USSR bloc war machine or its imperialist ambitions. Nor do you address the question of the states dependences upon brutal repression. This does not mean that democracies are anymore friendly to the proletariat simply that they do not have to use (or did not) such brutal levels of repression.
ern: taken out of context, i agree pretty much completely with your position (except that no state on earth is a democracy, they just have varying degrees of democratic elements). but i dont see why internationalism and national liberation are, in your opinion, mutually exclusive
