Tahir wrote: > > 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. I'm inclined to agree, altho I can only repeat that we ought not to get sidetracked into historical 'what-ifs'. It's not the purpose of this list. One of the historiographical scenarios I've always struggled against is the one which equates Hitler Germany with Stalin's Russia, and sees them both as similar, and equally-nasty, totalitarianisms. In fact, however, there is a lot of superficial truth in the analogy, and any honest appraisal can only take this into account. Prewar Germany and Russia were both exercises in state-building which depended on closed borders and internal terror, and a mass politics of mutual denunciation and recrimination; both had charismatic 'supermen' for leaders. Both Germany and Russia adapted to the facts of their exclusion from the world-market, and of their 'containment' by outside powers, and in broadly similar ways, ie by mass mobilisations, pursuit of the 'Bright Future', planning in conditions of autarky, etc. Both Soviet Russia and post-Weimar Germany had their roots in the Versailles peace treaty of 1919. It's no accident that the October Revolution was never (and still is not) very resonant among ordinary Russian people, who find that whole era utterly remote and incomprehensible. World Revolution? What on earth was *that* all about? But what they DO seem to still relate to (often quite positively, and opinion surveys show this) is the 1930s, ie, High Stalinism. Incidentally (this is for Nestor's benefit) I have not changed my opinions about any of this during the past year, or for a long time before that (can't teach an old dog new tricks). Putin understands all this by the way, and plays on native Russian chauvinism and longing for the good old days of the 1930s. The more he talks the talk and walks the (Stalin) walk, the more his ratings climb. >You don't know, > and no-one else does too, what it would have meant had > Hitler "won". Hitler might have defeated Russia but not the USA, surely. So there would have been an accommodation between the Axis and the USA. There would have been a different kind of Cold War, but presumably the end result would have been much the same. At the end of the day, these different what-if variants are just inflections within a global historical process whose logic, dynamics, and outcomes are not going to be changed by the phenomenological *surface-forms* which they in fact drive. The metalogic of capitalist accumulation imposes its own evolutionary discipline on the actual histories of real states, peoples, continents etc. If there was a difference between Stalin and Hitler it was that the former had a much better grasp of that metalogic than the latter. But then, Larry Summers understands it pretty well, too. So does Joe Stiglitz, and Herman Daly. > 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? But is this really the issue? Do we want to redebate Mattick and Luxemburg and council communism v. Bolshevism? History has passed a negative judgment on the lives, work and political bequests of BOTH Luxemburg AND Lenin. We have to accept that and move on. Incidentally, our own Nestor Gorojovsky is very good on this, and I've just been reading him in the archives of different lists. Well, there is some point in looking again at Grossmann, Schumpeter, Goldman, I suppose and at Franz Neumann's 'Behemoth' and again at Alfred Sohn-Rethel. There is some point in a focussed discussion of what Fed chairman Alan Greenspan the other day called 'changes in the process of change', in reference to the dynamics of the technical and social recomposition of capital. Anything which helps us get a handle on what actually is going on in the so-called New Economy.... As far as the 'outcome' of different regimes is concerned, the danger of equating Franco and Fidel is that we then enter a zone of complete alienation and political passivity. Isn't that the problem with the Council Communists? Their irrelevance and marginality? Behind lies a kind of slavish awe about the power of capital: 'Whatever we do makes no difference, we have no power to influence events, the best we can do is cry "Plague on both your houses!" and keep our purity that way.' This is the danger I see in the slogan: > > 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. We have to not be passive, we have to be active, and this means beginning with the fact that capitalism is not directly present in our lives, (altho arguably, now more than ever it is!), it is only present thru the myriad mediations of family, neighbourghood, social class, state, geography, ethnicity etc: in other words, all the discourses that constuitute the political realm which is the only place where we can actually act and make a difference. 'Down with fascism and down with capitalism!' could only have ended in the victory of fascism, but there is a difference and I'd rather live in Roosevelt's USA than Hitler's Germany (and I'm not a black, a Jew, or a woman or a gypsy...) >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. I really AM in favour of this, and let us indeed talk about the labour process, and the recomposition of the working class, and let us loom at Toni Negri too. BUT when will Negri et al be prepared (which to judge from his last book, is not yet) to acknowledge the possibility and even the PRESENCE of Crash and of terminal crisis? The passivity and fatalism of Mattick and the Council Communists (so it seems to me) is because actually they believe that somehow capitalism is eternal and indestructible. I've just been rereading James O'Connor's book 'Natural Causes' (Guilford 1998). O'Connor too does not escape the passivity and fatalism of his 'Autonomist' origins: behind all his revolutionary rhetoric and his notion about uniting ecological politics with class struggle, is a really pitiful kind of reformism, itself based on what I can only conclude is a kind of psychological paralysis: he absolutely does not believe in what HE HIMSELF is saying, about ecological crisis and so forth. No, he is sure that capitalism is eternal and will always find a way of dealing with its own externalities. This lethal fatalism not only marginalises O'Connor, it makes him unable to theorise what is going on. This actually is not all that complex, I think. Let's even by ad hoc about it and START from the premise that the world-system is crashing, is in terminal crisis, and work backwards from that. > As long as the discussion stays > open in that way, and doesn't degenerate into emotive > rhetoric, I'll stick around. Me too. Mark _______________________________________________ Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
