Rob Schaap:
>
> Indignant sermon alert.
>
> Why, oh why, does every list with a couple of lefties on it have to
> talk about
> Stalin?
I'd agree with all you say, indeed I do, and I'm glad to see you getting on
the apocalypticist bandwagon, at least when you post to CrashList. And you are
right, all historical discussion needs to be contextualised, otherwise it's
just home-grown (or 'hand-reared' as they say in the Royal Navy) philosophy.
HOWEVER, let us not forget that you also like to bare your Menshevik soul from
time to time:
>>"Marxian thought is like chess: quite easy to grasp and
difficult to master. In practice it's about pursuing the democratic control
over the means of production by collective trial and error. Kautsky writes
in *The Dictatorship of the Proletariat* that a transformation based on an
educated populace, general participation and civil liberties has a better
chance of timing its putsch and sustaining the revolution. That's the bit
that had Lenin calling him 'renegade', but it's a bit that might just be
more appropriate to our time (or one to come, at any rate) than it might
have been in the Russia of 1917. But then I'm a menshevik.<<
...As you put it, here, on 13 January. And the issue is real. The problem you
have not faced is that the best educated populaces, living in the freest civil
societies, are also the highest consumers of energy etc, ie they are the
problem not the solution, and they show no collective signs of changing their
ways. How long do you suppose we have for this 'collective trial and error'
process to produce a result? The answer surely is, not long enough. So it will
be revolutions in the peripheries, led by Leninist parties. Or it will be
annihilation. This is the nettle we have to grasp.
Mark
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