Julio Huato wrote: > The sources of Stalinism, bureaucratism, authoritarianism, or > whathaveyou do not lie at the top. It's not bad or evil or > power-hungry people.
Right, though we have to remember that there are some "bad or evil or power-hungry people" out there. (There are some people who think like thugs, while others work for the police, etc.) More often, however, it's people who see themselves as "good" but identify what's good with what gives them more power: they think stuff like "all these other people can't do it, so I have to do it _for_ them." > The phenomena at the top is just the external > manifestation of the real thing. Right: the person who wants to do good _for_ us is allowed free rein because of the weakness of the base (its poor organization, low level of consciousness). It's wrong to put too much weight on the role of individual leaders. The rise of Stalin and his "ism" was not due to his greed for power (or the weakness of his competitors, such as Trotsky) as much as because of the collapse of the political organization of the Russian working class, the conflicts between workers and peasants, the invasion by imperialist powers, the continued power of the "White" opposition, the economic problems, etc. It made total sense at the time -- and was likely based on good intentions -- to suppress or co-opt independent workers' organizations. After all, the revolution had to survive! > The real source lies at the base, in > the conformity and apathy of the masses conditioned by a millennial > history of external expropriation that then got internalized. It's a > Sisyphean torture to dismantle alienation and take full ownership over > our social relations. Alas, the people who want to do stuff _for_ us (to liberate us) too often become entrenched and then even corrupted by power. Then they fight to protect and maintain their power against the people they think they want to help. The rise of Stalin's "ism" was cemented when anti-revolutionary methods of "protecting the revolution" (sketched above) became more important than the revolution itself and became methods of defending the power of the entrenched power of the Communist Party. This likely happened before Stalin himself took power. Leadership shouldn't be about liberating people (doing it _for_ them) as much as to help people liberate themselves, raising their degree of self-organization and collective consciousness. -- Jim Devine / "In science one tries to tell people, in such a way as to be understood by everyone, something that no one ever knew before. But in poetry, it's the exact opposite." -- Paul Dirac. Social science is in the middle.... and usually in a muddle.
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