>>> "Mark Jones" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 08/02 4:18 PM >>>
now I think about it, my few caveats are backed up by the
colossal sacrifice of
the Russian people in WW2, and by the great historical fact
of their victory over
Nazism. If Bordiga had his way, Hitler would have won.
But Mark, this is precisely the point where the debate
either ends (after all who would have wanted Hitler to have
won?) or else it can get more interesting. My uncles fought
in the Egyptian desert against Hitler and then came back and
lived quite comfortably under apartheid. All my life we have
been conditioned to accept that the defeat of Hitler was the
ultimate defeat of the greatest evil imaginable. This may
just be a serious collective mental block. You don't know,
and no-one else does too, what it would have meant had
Hitler "won". But what is unquestionable is that fascism did
not die with Hitler and it will be reborn and is being
reborn over and over under captitalism. To support the
democratic fraction of capital against the fascist one just
does mean that one is laying the conditions for the future
return of fascism, whenever the ruling class gets into
difficulties with its ability to manufacture consent.
Just as a little historical example: in advancing the
bourgeois revolution under a somewhat popular, somewhat
authoritarian regime, did the Bolsheviks (or Mao or Fidel)
do all that much of a better job than, say, Franco? In terms
of the outcome, I mean, not the ideology. By what indices?
The Bordigist approach is not to say fascism is OK, it is to
say "down with fascism and down with anti-fascism", i.e.
down with capitalism. Can there be anything more relevant to
our times and the purposes of this list than an allout
mobilisation against wage labour, money, commodity
production and the state? I'm open to discuss this, but
let's not use our favourite bogeyman, Hitler, to short
circuit the proper theoretical and practical debates. Rather
than being "infantile" the Bordigist approach might just
have been a little ahead of its time.
The appropriate legacy of Bolshevism to consider is not
whether it saved the world from fascism - there is simply no
basis whatever to conclude that we are safe from fascism
today - but that it brought marxism into disrepute, by
renaming state capitalism as "socialism" and by stigmatising
all other approaches as infantile, sectarian, etc., so that
99% of marxists today don't even know that there were
alternatives in the 1920s (that didn't owe their origins to
Kautsky, etc.) I don't think that Bordiga had all the
answers - I haven't even read enough of him to know how many
of the answers he had - but, coming back to the starting
point of this discusion, I do appreciate, Mark, having a
non-sectarian forum for discussing this very urgent
anti-capitalist project. As long as the discussion stays
open in that way, and doesn't degenerate into emotive
rhetoric, I'll stick around.
Tahir
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