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Per the recent controversy re: Syria, I composed this piece to provide a
brief ideological background, I think it goes very deeply into an Old Left
fight between Trotsky and Lenin.
http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/11/10/what-spain-in-1936-teaches-us-about-syria-in-2015/
I can hardly see how the two "opposing" theories can hold at the same
time. The very passage from "The Foundations of Leninism" you mention is
very telling. It concludes that
" every step [...] along the road to liberation, even if it runs
counter to the demands of formal democracy, is a steam-hammer blow at
imperialism, i.e., is undoubtedly a revolutionary step."
But a step in Stalinist vocabulary is something autonomous, to be
necessarily completed per se and in isolation from any further "step" in
the Stalinist time line.
The equation antistalinists = fascists of the Spanish civil war, was not
a temporal caprice of JV Stalin, but a faire corollary.
If the Spanish Democratic State is to defeat the fascist coup, before
and in abstraction of anything else, namely the proletarian revolution,
then any independent proletarian political activity is an opposition, an
obstacle to the very "democratic" step and thus "objectively" helps the
fascists.
And if these proletarian attempts persist, then the political group who
express them is apparently funded by fascists or imperialists to serve
their political goals. Elementary Watson!
And since this is the case it is perfectly legitimate to exterminate
that group if not as imperialist agents then because they "objectively"
interrupt the " objectively revolutionary step" . And in Syria it turns
out that the absence of a well defined and visible political group of
that kind, poses no problem. Never mind if there is no in situ political
mediation to denounce, the bombs need no political mediation to
exterminate any spontaneous proletarian resistance .
Where Stalin seeks to just restore in power the good guy of the
imperialist conflict, namely the one who signed a peace pact with the
soviet bureaucracy , Trotsky seeks the revolution: he looks "forward and
not backward".
Stalinism is not dead. The echoes of these "arguments" are on the air.
But they are not less catastrophic for the cause of the proletariat.
They are just far more reactionary, and in many cases reactionary
enough to meet Putinism and even National- Bolshevism.
JA
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