|
>The problem, unfortunately, is there has never been
anything other than a "scorched earth march to fully developed capitalist
property relations" --anywhere, ever. Therefore, the issue becomes: is such a
march historically progressive, despite the human toll? Marx, of course,
answered in the affirmative in relation to pre-existing modes of development.
You know all this. Marx wasn't around to witness the failed experiments to leap
over the capitalist stage in both China and the USSR in the 20th
century.<
Comment
When it all falls down the ceiling crashes on everyone head
without regard to the politics or ideology contained in each head. Without
question industrial society and all its boundaries of development set the basis
and stage for the communist society Marx spoke of. After many years of
considering these questions . . . my own personal opinion is that the communists
were more than less doomed by the constrain of the last boundary of history . .
. especially so . . . in the absence of public property relations in the
advanced industrial countries.
Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, Mao ZeDung, Uncle Ho and the paramount
leader Fidel are not causes but effects and as such are banners or direction of
a particular detachment of communist leaders.
Nor could social revolution be exported to the advance
industrially developed countries. And we most certainly could not carry out
insurrection in the absence of social revolution in America. To the same degree
this is what the Soviets faced and also China.
Yes, the Great October Revolution was socialist . . . meaning
its leaders held a vision of communism but above all it was the acceleration of
the industrial revolution with all its consequences for market exchange and the
law of value. The goal of communism has never been public property but the
abolish of property on the basis of its last historically evolved form . . .
bourgeois property. One cannot have this as a practical task in a more than less
agricultural society.
I have arrived at the conclusion that the key to what happened
in the Soviet Union and what is taking place in China resides in our own
history. Not in the sense of us overthrowing the bourgeoisie but curve of
development.
No one beats the machine of history and overthrowing a
bureaucratic order is impossible until history steps into the social arena and
erode the basis upon which an "order" is established. China is more complex
because it was a national democratic revolution led by communists. The National
Democratic Revolution is bourgeois by definition. And the communist of China
have carved themselves a noble page . . . chapter in history.
The last time history placed social revolution on the agenda
in the American Union was the Civil War. The Civil Rights Movement was not
social revolution but a reform movement to allow the expansion of the industrial
system and the mechanization of agriculture.
There was no magical "workers uprising in Russian" but an
economic and social collapse as the result of a catastrophic war time defeat
during the passing from feudal economic and social relations to industrial
relations. Today on a world scale we face the industrial bureaucracy in all its
property forms and relations.
The intersection is going to be complex and profound.
The world has been more than less industrialized and we are at
the beginning of this enormous leap to a post industrial world that may take a
century of two. We have no way to chart this curve . . . yet.
We cannot make anyone . . . especially our own working class
do something it does not want to do or understand as rational. Nor could we even
maintain our orientation during the past 30 years of assaulting the bourgeois
order. Marx said that we hold the key and our actuality was the future of all
the areas of the world . . . . economically drawn forward in our wake . . .
industrial curve of development.
I utterly reject as foolishness that we have failed in
discharging our responsibility to our working class because some group was
Trotskyists . . . or Stalinists or studied the Thought of Ma ZeDung or practiced
Buddhism or "didn't really understand Marx."
China is going to face and is facing the exact same social
revolution we face in America. Their future resides with their proletariat and
not her peasants. The people of China are deciding their fate . . . just as the
people of America are deciding our fate. People fight for what they believe in
and if no one believes in industrial socialism . . . then we need to understand
its objective and subjective dimensions.
We need to understand the lesson of the Soviet Union and Putin
. . . or rather the counterrevolution that overthrew Reconstruction in America.
If a ruling class can have the specific form of its economic base shattered and
reemerge as a freaking ruling class . . . then we are in for a rough ride.
Communist revolutionaries have not and cannot survive on a
hostile economic terrain . . . period and each new generation sublates the last
. . . and the vision is restored and further clarified. Communism and its
vision is as old as Christ for God sake.
We need to look as class formation and class fragments on the
basis of our own history.
The Slave oligarchy was overthrown and became the landlord
planter class . . . and Bush . . . as a historical figure and not a Texan . . .
is attempting the impossible. His class has an eye to reconstituting itself on
the basis of a new mode of production and it would be extremely premature to
rule out the CIA and intelligence agencies from carrying out the insurrection
that lead to communism.
Not peaceful transition but how classes and class fragments
are sublated in history. Here is the internal kernel that becomes the class
struggle and inner party politics.
I hold in contempt a discussion of China on the basis of the
suicide of an 18 year old boy . . . when every generation of communist in our
history . . . no matter what their ideological bent . . . has offered their body
up for the blood sacrifice fighting to realize the impossible dream. People
commit suicide all the time and murder . . . homicide.
This political panhandling - over an 18 year old who could not
go to college . . . is designed to weaken the communist spirit and impart the
democratic prejudices of the petty bourgeoisie onto our militant workers. What
about our own kids?
The people do not fight for the ideas in ones head . . .
although our ideas inspire us during the death march. The harsh machine of
history crushes us all . . . but a new vision has opened where industrial logic
and the industrial machine and its bureaucratic order is to be consigned to
history along side the spinning wheel. We inch closer to the vision of
communism.
Melvin P.
|
