Thus Marcus Johannensis spake: >===== Original Message From [EMAIL PROTECTED] ===== > >Bolshevism (and especially its High Stalinist incarnation) served to re-furnish >the capitalist division of labour within the space of the Tsarist empire, but >... this was historically inevitable, and for good and profound reason >connected with >the emergence of the Kantian social episteme. In short, Kantian transcendental >dualism has a social correlative in the capitalist division of mental and > manual labour. Like I say, none of these are my ideas, and everything is >referenced there. Why, in view of my repeated characterisation not merely of >Stalinism, but of Leninism, in this light, both Stalinists/anti-stalinists >hailed/demonised me, I have no idea. Probably it's because I essentially agree >with Eric Hobsbawm's judgment about Stalin and WW2 - without Stalinism, Russia >would have been destroyed by the Hitlerites. But the "Kantian social episteme" has social roots itself, already envisaged by Marx on his Theses (Third, Fourth?). The link is with the bourgeois modes of production, but I find you reverse it. Instead of blaming V.I. Lenin, and, for that matter, J.V. Stalin, for what was a result of the conditions in which socialism had to be built, Mark seems to try to explain that given the Kantian positions of Lenin (he was overtly anti-Kantian, see his work on Mach which is not exceptional but stresses the anti-Kantian position), the full course of the 20th. Century was what it was. I am the first to acknowledge the overwhelming importance of Lenin�s figure, and if I am not wrong, I have commented repeatedly that one of the tragedies of the dying century is that Churchill and Lenin exchanged longevities in a way that proved disastrous for all of us. But Mark�s statement goes, at least in the way he puts it, a bit too far. I once wrote to Mark, privately, that Stalin had been the heirdom of Lenin to the Russian state, that is to the ultimate coercive apparatus that is now known as NKVD. He told me that if he had understood me correctly, he was in agreement. The time has come to explain this out. When I say that Stalin was the legacy of Lenin to the NKVD I mean that, even though Stalin became the historic representative of the NKVD against the creativity and elan of the Russian masses (same masses who had made the first socialist revolution in history, had defended it, and had been able to remain alive), he was in more ways than one the representative of the Russian revolution against the NKVD. But this legacy lacked a material basis unless the masses were unleashed against the NKVD which Stalin had come to represent. Of course Stalin saved the USSR of Hitlerism. Germans lost the war in Stalingrad, didn�t they? But I will still contest many things around this general truth. Stalin�s policies, in his brutal representativity of the NKVD, helped strongly generate Nazism, in the first place. In the second place, let us accept that Stalin�s henchmen and himself did a good job in beheading the Red Army immediately before the war started. And probably a good deal of the effort made by the Soviet peoples in the interwar period would have not been spoiled in waste had the country been organized differently than a giant military prison. If we consider the feats they DID accomplish, then we have a measure of what would they have been able to accomplish. I do not agree in that, whether due to a "Kantian heritage from V.I. Lenin", or due to some kind of material unescapable constriction, the ways the Soviet Union were managed had been determined by history once and for all on the aftermath of October, 1917. It was not "inevitable" in the sense Mark put it. The division of mental and manual labor implies the whole host of contradictions of the bourgeois mind that Lukacs so clearly exposed in "History and class consciousness", and it is not a matter of chance that this book was Satanized by Stalinism: it gave the clue of the power of the bureaucratic clique, the ideas in it, if taught to the Soviet masses, would have been a strong weapon against bureaucratic rule. But it was precisely this bureaucratic rule which generated the conditions of Kantism. The "educators" separated themselves from the "people", much in the way of an Owen, and the "people" could not "educate the educator" (Marx). To reinforce their power on society, the "educators" (let us go down to Latin: those who are the guides, those who "lead from", which is the original meaning of "educator") imposed, very naturally and unconsciously, the Kantian paradigm on the Russian society. In this, they showed that they were not the true descent of Bolshevism as Mark believes, but the true descent of Bernstein. Social democrats without a bourgeoisie... Thus, I can�t agree with the definition of Bolshevism as a kind of "capitalist strategy" shared by Tahir Wood and Mark. And, according to Mark, also by Lenin, which is highly contestable even if Mark and Tahir were right. > >And this is unquestionably the case (and Lenin understood Bolshevism's tragic fate >no later than 1922, IMO. This is the real reason why Lenin + Krupskaya asked the >Central Committee for permission to commit suicide; it cannot have been Lenin's >ill-health. Since this was habitual and progressive and he had long been inured to >its effects and had conditioned himself to combat them, suicide was never either >psychologically or politically an option in respect of his chronic illness. No, it >was political despair that drove them both to make this request, and this is >surely something unprecedented in history: which other great historical leader, >still at the highpoint of popularity and power. considered suicide because he came >to see a shortfall between reality and dream? It is another of the ways in which >Lenin was unique. He shared the angst of his followers and did not disown them - I >am sure that John Reed and many, many others felt equally distraught and >helpless.). Ill-health and despair may have combined. But once the CC did not allow them to commit suicide, Lenin fought his last battle, as Trotsky called it. I still do not believe that the Russian Revolution was a great mistake (something perspiring Mark�s current positions, which are not exactly the same that he held a year ago), in the sense I still do not believe the Paris Commune was. But what�s more, transition to a "national revolutionary capitalism", a kind of Russian Kemalism, or Peronism, would have been smoother with Lenin alive and not with him dead. Yes, you have the encirclement. But this is not the only factor to take into account. In fact, had Trotsky accepted Lenin�s offer to form a bloc against the bureaucrats, history might well have run along a much better road. Trotsky�s great mistake in 1922/23 was to be excessively cavalier towards his (and Lenin�s) enemies, which did not include Stalin in a strategical sense in those times, though did include him tactically. The Stalin we finally came to know was forged at the same time that, particularly after those eventful and fateful years, he put on his face the iron mask of the old Tsarist bureaucracy, found it comfortable, and incarnated that curse of Russian history in the new age. This took long, and Lenin and Trotsky may have been able, had Lenin been alive, to stand the strong winds of counterrevolution until a new revolutionary wave appeared. In the meantime, the division between bureaucrats and masses would have received immense blows from the very heart of the party and the State, blows that would have left Mao�s Cultural Revolution the size of a flea. SO THERE. Lic. N�stor M. Gorojovsky Direcci�n de Estad�sticas del Sector Primario Instituto Nacional de Estad�stica y Censos Argentina Tel.: (0541) 349-9728 _______________________________________________ Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
