Hi again, Hugh.
I'm terrifically busy just now, so can't answer in detail.
>The automatic linking of Bolshevism with Stalinism, and the idea that
>Stalinism grew necessarily and organically out of the revolutionary
>Bolshevism of Lenin and Trotsky.
I've never made the Bolshie>Stalin link appear automatic. Just a tendency
built into the Bolshie-fashioned political economy (often for historical
reasons, whereby Lenin and his comrades didn't have the room for manouevre
they needed - but that's nto the point today or tomorrow, when altogether
different realities will press upon the revolutionary movement).
>Perhaps Rob would be more willing to recognize himself in figures
>like Allende in Chile and Ortega in Nicaragua though? But can he see
>how they betrayed the historical needs of the working class?
>Especially Allende, who delivered the class and the country into the
>hands of one of the most vicious dictatorships of this century by
>refusing to follow revolutionary Bolshevik policies.
Waaay too hard on Allende! He was a left social democrat, I'll admit. But
I'm of the impression his card was marked (decisively in Washington)
regardless of what he did after the nationalisation programme was announced.
Maybe he'd have had a chance if he'd opened his polity completely to Soviet
bloc troops, military aid and Moscow hegemony, but the latter would have had
to move quickly and decisively - and anyway, perhaps Allende didn't like
putting Chile under that sort of direct foreign control. He was a
nationalist, too, I think - a defensible position for a democratic leftie in
a small country, I reckon.
>This is important. What deal of responsibility does revolutionary
>Bolshevism bear for the Stalinist counter-revolution, Rob?
Well, I'd like to see more analysis of what things Lenin and Co did because
of special circumstances (eg the Germans in '17-'18, the Allies in '19-'20,
and the internecine struggle from '20) and what things he was doing because
they were generic road-to-socialism stuff (I realise the two categories are
ever integrated in reality, natch). The concentration of all state power
implicit in the April Theses; the dissolution of the Assembly just when it
was pumping out unprecedented revolutionary resolutions; the Taylorism that
dawned with the War Economy, but survived through the NEP; the putting down
of the Moscow Steelworkers; the massive blood-letting between socialist
forces at Kronstadt - all these things were producing not only an
unassailable (and ever more externalised) core, but a mentality that allowed
for only two types of people (those who were entirely right and those who
were entirely wrong). I reckon sustained good NEVER comes out of that mix.
It reminds me of Gibbon's comment about the best human mode of organisation
being under the sway of a benevoilent despot. I know it sounds offensively
conservative to the likes of you and Dave, but I think Acton was onto
something with that 'absolute power corrupts absolutely' line. That means
my aspirations are not for
communism-under-the-party-as-most-advanced-component-of-the-class - with all
the rational allocation of resources and standardised welfare guarantees
implicit there-in, but, rather more modestly, for a market-socialism
organisation, under a multi-party political framework, where the credit
sector (including insurance), utilities, and necessarily large enterprises
have been wrested from the bourgeoisie and that public ownership legally
enforced in perpetuity. Where an incomes policy is strictly enforced. And
where a roof, a feed, an education, health care, and a weekly labour limit
are guaranteed. This requires a revolution in political and economic
control, which requires a social revolution, but it does (if properly worked
out, as Nove tried to do) have in it the sort of constituents imaginable and
desirable to an otherwise much varied class. It recognises the need for
signalling mechanisms in the business of allocating use values. It also
allows for some diffusion in political and economic power. Sure some modes
of alienation would persist, but some would not. That'll do me.
>Stalinist tyranny as an automatic consequence of
>Bolshevism and not as a diametrically opposed aberration.
Again, I'm not arguing 'automatic' or 'inevitable', but a one-party state is
a state where 'democratic centralism' exists purely by the grace of that
party. Its transition to bureaucratic centralism would be hard to resist.
In pursuing too much in the medium term, we give away too much at the outset
(democratic checks and a separation of political and economic power).
What's more there is an inbuilt lack of flexibility (over both space and
time) in any centralised organisation. Sure, a small group can move more
quickly than a large one, but the large one is a much more varied body of
interests, constraints and options than the small group could begin to
imagine, never mind direct. And moving a mass like that from the centre
invariably entails some coercion, creating us-and-them sensibilities all
over the place (and I'm not talking about logically opposed classes here -
just different workers in different settings).
>Two is a double point: a) dismissing topics for discussion as a
>priori treachery is sectarian blockheadedness,
Which it is.
>b) anyone who lets themselves be put off by this kind of blockheadedness
doesn't really
>*need* a revolutionary change in society in every fibre.
That doesn't follow at all. They might just not see any forum where such
blockheadedness prevails as a promising one in which to pursue the change
they feel they need.
>Right now it's not the same, but it's still the
>case that anyone who feels the need for revolution and has fire in
>their belly won't get put off by a few jumped-up bureaucrats standing
>in the way. Pissed off but not put off.
I would if they had the guns! And I'd be in the business of stopping them
getting at the guns long before then.
>Let's put it this way -- you'd never tolerate your knowledge of the
>way the media and communications work in society being dictated to
>you by the mass of your students, particularly not the most passive
>and uninterested ones.
But I've the reading behind me and the everyday examples at my fingertips to
bring the class around to acknowledging my (relative) expertise. Only when
we come to the 'what is to be done' question do the more interested ones
among them pipe up - comfortable that we're now in the province of
imagination and opinion. Their solutions generally solve the technical
problem at issue, but also generally produce other problems, and ignore the
institutional power and interests that produced and sustained the first
problem! Anyway, from me they expect facts. The good 'uns reckon the rest
is up for grabs, and it is in the nature of the modern university that we
leave it there. I dutifully listen to quite a bit of stuff that makes my
skin crawl, as it happens. It's my job.
More importantly, the majority see in my modest person (and that of every
academic) the thin edge of a big institutional wedge, are quite comfortable
to be at the mercy of such authority, and don't even consider disagreeing
with me. They have what Fromm called 'a fear of freedom' - and they (well,
not all of 'em) have more of it with every passing decade. To generalise:
they don't like it when they have to choose between two authoritative
sources; they don't like being left to find their own sources, they don't
like making up their own research questions, and they don't like being left
to their own devices in cyber-seminars. I spend no little time in trying to
cajole/seduce them into settling into a bit of such freedom, but I don't
have long enough with most of them to get them to the point where
naturalised power relationships are spontaneously interrogated for their
legitimacy.
This latter is part of the hegemonic face of high capitalism du jour. And
(I speculatively submit), you might find a lot of this sort of thing in
Russia, too - where the formal platitudes of western liberalism never got a
chance to take hold, and where that value system has never run headlong into
the daily material contradiction of just those formal commitments. That
would have made it a good political culture within which to unite masses
behind during times of strife and legitimation crises (like 1917), but bad
for checking the excesses of those made powerful as a consequence of 1917.
There's the Kautskyist in me coming to the surface, eh?
>Again the automatic identification of Bolshevism with Stalinism!!! Is
>it an academic reflex, Rob, or what? Where does it come from?
>Deutscher? Kautsky? Anti-Trotskyist CP historiography?
Well, I have read some Kautsky, but it doesn't come from there. I've never
been particularly anti-Trot, either. I've read a lot more of him than of
Stalin and his pet theorists (amongst whom only Lukacs ever left a mark on
me). I'm a conservative personality, with the very reservations of the
intellectually honest conservative (as opposed to the cold war warrior
type), who has been convinced by what he sees around him to realise massive
transformation is urgently needed (you can't be conservative in a world in
constant flux, that is this cruel and, in the aggregate at least, so
self-destructively stupid). Of the options available, Marx and Engels made
more sense to me than anyone else. Sounds daft, but there 'tis.
>It depends on what it's being taken into account for. I don't see it
>as determining the fundamental course of the class struggle -- that
>is determined by the relationship between the development of the
>forces of production and the relations of production in much more
>general and objective terms. I think you do so it as determining the
>fundamental course of the class struggle -- we disagree on what
>constitutes "fundamental".
I'm talking about what the left should be doing and saying right now - and
what it is they should be noticing and addressing at this point. You can't
predict the moment of structural crisis (it could be tomorrow and it might
never come in the form we might expect, as we gradually turn into some
Scumpetarian technocracy - something that is neither capitalism nor
communism, but manages still to reproduce all the alienation and human
limitations of the former), but you can work on giving people the benefit of
your commitments. Make your publicly visible activism educative, and your
words sensitive to where they're thinking in the moment. I agree that those
objective tensions are paramount, but the humans that drive history do so
from we're their minds are at. Social responses to manifestations of
capitalist contradiction need not be socialist at all, as you know. It all
depends on the subjective state of the people to whom the contradictions
happen.
>Political movements are about the social material interests of a
>class or part of a class. Political sects might resemble churches,
>but they aren't.
Political movements are about the social material interests of a class or a
part of a class, *as perceived by those involved*. The socdem party
machinists know this (else how does Blair get his constituents to slash
their own wrists?).
>Like to see there's some life in the old dog yet!!
>(Ow! my ankle....)
I see myself more as an irksome yapper here than a biter of legs.
Cheers,
Rob
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