hari kumar <[email protected]?subject=Re:%20Trotskyism%20as%20the%20flip%20side%20of%20Stalinism> asked, "Which was the original sin, or the original gulp?"
I am not certain but I have two candidates, one analytical and the other political. The first is Marx's brief outline of "historical materialism" in his 1859 preface to *A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy*. The book was published under strict Prussian censorship laws and written somewhat evasively to get around them. In *Marx's Fetters: A remedial reading <https://econospeak.blogspot.com/2024/11/the-more-contradition-develops.html>, *I reconstruct what Marx *might* have meant by "filling in the blanks" with corresponding passages from the Grundrisse, which was written just months earlier addressing the same "fetters" of capital and "contradiction between the forces and relations of production." The second was Marx's initial ambivalence and subsequent enthusiasm for the Paris Commune, after it had been defeated. Should Marx have engaged earlier? Should he have tempered his post-debacle ferver? I have no idea. But the fallout contributed to the demise of the International. Neither of these examples is a world-shattering "error" but one can construct a "path dependency" from either that leads to disasters of almost diametrically opposite kinds -- the first toward complacency, the second toward insurrectionism. Cheers, Tom Walker (Sandwichman) -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#34316): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/34316 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/110224367/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
