At 12:10 AM 3/6/01 +1100, you wrote:
>G'day all,
>
>Indignant sermon alert.
>
>Why, oh why, does every list with a couple of lefties on it have to talk
about
>Stalin?
>
Because the meaning of the first step taken by socialism is still not fully
understood, it is still hotly contested, and it has huge significance for
how we proceed now to deal with the problems you listed.
It's very easy to say, let's get on with it, but the question remains get
on with what, specifically, and how? Like it or not, the struggles against
capitalism and all its sequelae presuppose a series of struggles over how
to make our fight. It's messy, but it's the nature of the beast. These
choices can not be evaluated intelligently in the absence of evaluating
historical experience, any more than they can be reduced to a mere replay
of that experience.
I find the fight over Stalin to be exceedingly tedious, but I find myself
in it again and again, because anti-Stalinism has become the cornerstone of
the left-anti-communism that, in my own opinion, has gutted an effective
politics of resistance in my country and others. That's not being an
apologist for Stalin. It's saying that painting the Stalin era in the
simply strokes of good or evil, then endlessly trying to justify one
polarity or another has stripped us of the dispassionate and fair analysis
that can shed the clear light on that experience and on our current struggles.
Mao, who himself had his differences with Comrade Stalin, said this, and
assessed Stalin's accomplishments to be 70% and his mistakes 30% of his
tenure.
All of us who are serious should be asking, given our current experience
with the demonization of Saddam, Quaddafi, Milosevic, Aristide, and others,
how much of the anti-Stalinist text can be supported by the real evidence,
and how this demonization--while Suharto and Kissinger and Churchill and
Reagan are passed over--is instrumental against us. Because anything the
ruling class is so enthusiastic about is definitely against us. That may
be a logical non-sequiter, but it conforms to historical experience.
It matters. Sorry it troubles some of you. Life is unfair.
"...all truly great scientific abstractions are both universal and simple.
They are simple not because they explain so little but because they explain
so much. Generality does not arise because an abstraction represents
everything that could possibly happen, but because it remains valid no
matter what happens."
Alan Freeman
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