>Brad De Long wrote:
>>E.P. Thompson would disagree... and if I recall correctly had a not
>>unreasonable case. Whatever else you might think of E.P. Thompson, he was
>>not stupid: to faithfully follow every twist and turn of the PCF line
>>from the Nazi-Soviet pact onward... is that not the essence of what we
>>call "Stalinism"?
>I'm no Althusser connoisseur, nowhere near it, but it seems to me that his
>philosophical contribution, whatever you think of it, amounts to more than
>the slavish tailing of the Soviet line.
>Actually I think reducing the whole Soviet experience, and that of the
>world's Communist parties, to "Stalinism" is pretty unfair too.
>Doug [Henwood]
As for the fairness of reducing the whole Soviet experience and that of the
world's Communist parties to "Stalinism"... Look: this is not an identity
imposed on but an identity chosen by Communists themselves. At each stage
in the process of the identification Communism = Stalinism = slavish
obedience to the Kremlin (or the Great Leader, or the Dear Leader, or
whatever) the door was open to say "wait a minute: this isn't
Communism"--whether we are talking about the suppression of the Soviets or
the power struggle after Lenin's death or the tactical alliances with the
Nazis to fight the German Social Democrats or the Ukrainian famine or the
Great Terror or the extermination of POUM or the Nazi-Soviet pact or the
rejection of Marshall Plan aid or the Slansky trial or the invasion of
Czechoslovakia or the attempted suppression of Solidarity. Yet until the
late 1970s and the emergence of Eurocommunism, to say "wait a minute: this
isn't Communism" would trigger a declaration by the party leadership and
membership that said "yes it is Communism, and you are now an
ex-Communist."
The European communists did something that led the societies they ruled a
lot further away from utopia than were the social democracies of western
Europe... or even the not-very-social democracy that is the United States.
That disaster seems to have had *something* to do with (i) contempt for the
ethics of political communication ("ideology"), (ii) contempt for all forms
of due process ("state apparatus"), and (iii) contempt for human happiness
("humanism"). As far as I understand Althusser, he was leading the charge
on all three...
Brad DeLong
