Thanks Dave,
I haven't really been reading much of this thread I'm afraid but
reading your reply here I counldn't help but agree with every word.
I thought I would just say (for the record!)
John
> Simon shows all the signs of evolutionary menshevik thinking.
> Because for him the LOV is universal to class society, he can't see
> that the revolution in Russia was a qualitative change. Nor that the
> deformed revolution that followed in China was also. He cannot see
> that the reason that the imperialist powers campaigned for 70 years
> to defeat the revolution was that it posed a genuine alternative to,
> not just a slightly less efficient model of, capitalism. He
> counter-poses to that actual history, where Lenin used the term
> 'state capitalism' in a very different way to mean the survival of
> the market in a workers state, a blueprint of 'real socialism'. This
> is the quiescent, academic "world party of socialism" intellectuals
> offering their blue print to the masses, covered by the patronising
> bullshit about 'self-activity'.
>
> Frankly, this is a petty bourgeois rendition of marxism. It has its
> material roots in the non-historic but nonetheless reactionary role
> of petty bourgeois intellectuals who must attach themselves as
> parasites to one or other of the main classes to survive. Those who
> attach themselves to the working class attempt to suck it dry.
> Today the western pb intelligentsia is reviving classic menshevism
> by exploiting the current period of historic defeats of workers
> with the disintegration of the SU and other DWS's. Its theme is
> that the revolution has not happened yet (October was premature, the
> Bolsheviks were substitionist blah blah) and will not until
> capitalism has exhausted its developmental potential for creating
> privileged jobs for the petty bourgeois. But the reality is that in
> this whole century capitalism has been objectively ripe for
> revolution, and it was the Bolsheviks, particularly Lenin and Trotsky
> who developed marxism beyond Eurocentric menshevism to take
> advantage of that reality.
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