G'day comrades,
>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.
What, you don't think I sound apocalyptic enough on LBO and Pen-L? I'd've
thought my recurring themes there are economic crisis and the death of the
cultural diversity and appropriateness necessary to confront social crisis.
My focus is different, but I'm as much a sombre doomsayer as most, I'd've
thought ...
> HOWEVER, let us not forget that you also like to bare your Menshevik >soul from time
>to time:
> ... 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.
Well, I think both statements are true. That's a problem. I've tried to
argue that a Leninist party is not likely to produce this collective changing
of ways in 'core' societies. No use repeating myself. My arguments haven't
convinced anyone anywhere else, either, as you know.
>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.
I thought it was I who suggested such strategies might work for a while in the
periphery? Mind you, it'd be nice to have a 'core' elite democratically
accountable enough (ie with a sufficiently knowledgeable, self-aware and
politically potent populace) to be constrained in its usual response to such
upheavals in the periphery (ie remote butchery).
G'day Stan,
Yeah, I agree there was much to celebrate in the Soviet Union. Livelihoods
for all, zero-interest development funds to LDCs, good public education and
health regimes. All crucial stuff. And a lot of the reasons for a lot of the
bad stuff was to do with hostile international environments. Yep. But there
was mass murder, a social panopticon-culture, justified fear of a centralised
authority, and concomitantly lousy economic planning and obscene waste, too.
And Stalin's running of foreign policy up to and during the first half of the
Great Patriotic War (a tag the genesis and theoretical value of which might
make for interesting chat) was outrageous! Which is what can happen when you
give that much power to one man or one centre. If pure desperation hadn't
finally made Stalin listen to Zhukov et al, with the Fascists at the Volga and
Stalingrad all but lost (and, if memory serves, he needed much persuading
concerning the ultimately decisive Kursk strategy, too), well, those of us
left alive might all be conversing very carefully in German right now.
G'day Nestor,
>History is not the "knowledge of things past" but the conscious
>evaluation of past, present and future human actions.
Well, this quote absolutely convinces me. So let's talk about the present in
historical terms, and not the past in historical terms - at least articulate
the tendrils of association. I must admit the relevance of much of this
debate to what confronts us is eluding me.
Cheers,
Rob.
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