>===== Original Message From [EMAIL PROTECTED] ===== >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 > >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. [list of similarities follows, but let us snip it] In fact, the confusion was solved by people in Western Russia and Ukraine AFTER they discovered what did the German invasion actually mean. The experience of imperialist rule was very vivid and definitory. Not few Jews in those areas fell victim to this illusion, dutifully propagated, by the way, by the West (since many of these Jews had family ties with other Jews living in the West, basically in the USA, they were very receptive to the illusion) and rejected Stalin�s attempts at relocation across the Urals. Their fate was one of the elements that allowed the masses to reconsider their confusion. They were different systems, AFTER ALL. What is the use of all this debate for us on this list? Mark�s following lines give, IMHO, part of the clue: >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. The question now is how long will this last if it remains an external, void, mass media operation of delusion. Stalin�s allure and methods were accepted by ordinary Soviet citizens in so far it expressed a national necessity, but can they be accepted today, when they seem to serve as a justification for a policy that carries Russia to an abyss of abjection? Of course, after the Yeltsin experience, every ruler who at least vocally proposes to "restore the greatness of Russia" WILL be, at first, warmly received by the victims of the destruction of the "socialist Ancien Regime". However, the limit lies in the following: the justification for socialism as the only means to keep Russia at a high level of international influence (the core of the "Socialism in one country" message to the masses) was acceptable if, at the same time, this influence implied an observable increase in the levels of welfare of the Russian people. This issue had been settled in February 1917, in a certain sense. No Imperial Russia that did not bring the masses upwards from their abjection could last any more, and Tsardom was doomed due to this reason IN THE FIRST PLACE. The fact that the name of Leningrad was turned St. Petersburg (and not Petrograd) is a symbolic expression of the fact that the current Russian regime does not acknowledge this hard fact from history. The reactionary dream of a resurrected Russia with swarms of Russians dying literally of hunger cannot hold for too long. The current Putin rule is, thus, a transitional one. Where will the situation bend to, is subject to debate. Not only on this list, not essentially on this list in fact, but of debate in the way history debates, of debate in the mind of millions of people who are now seeking some way out of the nightmare. Since we are trying to get prepared for the moment when the whole building crumbles down, it is not out of place on CrashList to discuss the way out of the "socialist in one country" state of mind, a state of mind which has (Hegel again and again) ended without socialism and without a country. The alienation of the Russian masses from the October experience, an experience that put them at the frontline of a battle that encompasses the whole of humankind, and which was reinforced during the High Stalinism years (as Mark aptly calls them, don�t know if quoting someone else), is one of the main targets of our eventual action. It would be extraordinary to devise a means by which a dedicated party or group of parties in the Soviet Union recovers the broken thread of October, where the national interest of the Russian people was discovered to be inextricably interwoven with the general interest of humankind. The existence of this party or parties is one of the issues that we should be thinking about on this list, or so it seems to me. [Later on, Mark says that] > 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. I am not so sure that Mark is right here. In general, I do not give too much trust to the idea that there is a disembodied "metalogic" of social processes that does not arise from the material action of humans. The expression of this metalogic is, in fact, the reified consciousness of humans acting their own history. But this consciousness is, in itself, a battlefield. Thus, the metalogic that Mark (and so many very respectable and serious people) alludes to is, IMHO, an undue objectivation of a peculiar form of consciousness. Its pervasiveness and its cancerous character does not make it less a form of consciousness, does not set it apart from the whole of human history and its struggles. Had Stalin had so better a grip of that metalogic, he would not have helped to create the conditions which gave Hitler the possibility to get to power. And WE, if we actually have that grip or try to, should act differently than what he did (Mark would add "and Trotsky, and Lenin", probably; well, maybe, but we know better than they did even though we cannot still be compared to them). [snipping not without a sigh; Mark then expands his ideas further] >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, thank you, man. But protect your liver. Consistent reading of my postings produces cyrrhosis (spelling?), it is an established scientific fact. However, I am not fully in agreement with your historic diagnosis, though I am fully in agreement with your prescriptions. Yes, we need to move ahead but the only way to move ahead is to dialectically understand what is worth revitalizing, and what is not, in the writings and actions of those great revolutionaries. They do have an important message that is as alive today as it was a century ago. I left a lot of excellent stuff unreplied, but I have to leave now. There will be some opportunity later. 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
