Charles Brown wrote:
> CB: You buy this based on the statement of the wife of his mortal
> enemy ?
I think you're missing the point a little here. My fault for not being clearer
no doubt. What's interesting about Haimson's book, which is supposed to be a
sympathetic account of Menshevik lives, is what a bunch of losers they look.
Haimson wrote the book on the basis of interviews with key Menshevik leaders
who were active in the *first* 1917 Russian revolution (which happened in
february that year) but who after the Bolshevik-led October Rising went into
exile, mostly in the US. They are condemned out of their own mouths, and you
leave the book with the inescapable feeling that if this was the alternative
to Lenin's Bolshevik methods, then it was really no alternative at all,
because the Mensheviks were powerless to intervene in events and they felt and
knew their own powerlessness, altho they never came to terms without it. Left
to them, Russia after the collapse of Tsardom (February 1917) would have been
a happy hunting ground for the 'Black Hundreds' and other Nazi precursors, and
the imperialist powers who invaded Russia in 1918 would have stayed, and have
carved the country up in a colonial settlement which would have destroyed
Russia (more or less what's happened since 1991, in fact). The lesson is that
failed revolutions do not give rise to social-democratic social peace, they
open the door to black reaction. Social-democracy, of the kind Rob seems to
preach, is a phenomenon of core countries, ie of big imperial states who need
to strike a deal, or make a 'historic compromise', with "their" working
classes. Thus, social-democracy at home and imperial plunder overseas always
went together, and still do go together.
Of course, history is a baleful dialectic of what-ifs: for instance, if in
1917 (at the height of the First World War, with bloody stalemate in the
trenches), there had been no Bolshevik revolution to scare the pants off the
vengeance-seeking British and French, they would have never agreed to
Armistice with the Kaiser's Germany: they would have fought on until
unconditional surrender, as they did in 1945. But in the conditions of 1918,
it is at least likely that such a cataclysmic continuation of the war would
have plunged Germany into the abyss, and what was the failed revolution of
Karl Leibknecht/Rosa Luxemburg might have become a *successful* revolution:
the epicentre of class struggle then would have moved west, from Petrograd to
Berlin, with incalculable consequences.
A successful *German* revolution on the back of a failed *Russian* revolution,
reversing the actual course of events, is a what-if scenario few have toyed
with; but such an outcome might have been much more of a death-blow to world
capitalism than was the actual course of events. Thus it can by hypothesized
that Lenin's successful rising in October 1917, far from triggering World
Revolution as he hoped, had the exact opposite effect, because it forced the
warring imperialist powers to call a truce, and once the Armistice was
declared and the carnage in the trenches, and hunger in the great German
cities, was stopped, the moment for revolution in western Europe swiftly
passed. Nonetheless, I am sure Lenin was right to do as he did and make the
October Revolution, (still the greatest single event in history), because none
of us are seers and no-one, even Lenin, has the right to second-guess history.
Lenin was right to lead the (at times unwilling, leaden-footed) Bolsheviks
into battle. He was not in Germany, he was in Russia, and that was where his
work as a practical revolutionary, and his duty in fact, both lay.
The Mensheviks on the other hand are condemned by their own cowardice, bytheir
fatal inability to rise to the occasion, their hopeless lack of
responsibility. They abdicated their leading role, in practice by July 1917
and long before that, in theory. They could not *lead*. This is really what
Lydia Dan *herself* admits to: a very damning admission before the bar of
history.
>The first comment she makes, by the way, seems to imply the
> opposite, i.e. , Lenin sees a role for types of people that she
> seems to disdain in an elitist way.
Indeed, you are right, and everything she says in her weaselly way, has to be
read like mirror-writing.
> Secondly, a central issue in
> _What is to be done ?_ is Lenin arguing that workers should be
> involved in politics and the Mensheviks (Economists , anyway)
> arguing that they shouldn't, but should be represented by the
> intellectuals in politics.
Exactly so: on the one hand, the Mensheviks disbarred the workers from
*politics*, arguing "the time is not right"; and on the other, they (the
Mensheviks) sat around wringing their hands whenever a *political* crisis
happened, saying in effect "we intellectuals have no right to give orders".
Thus is the Judas-song of petit-bourgeois treason, which is always sung to the
music of sanctimonious self-justification and toe-curling hypocrisy, salted
with a resolute refusal to carry words into deeds and to *take
responsibility*. As I understand , this is exactly the point which Slavoj
Zizek has grasped; but unfortunately for him, revolutionary parties are not
seminars, and revolutions are not tea-parties.
Mark
BTW In an earlier posting, I called Jo, June, in error. Sorry.>
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