Re: [Marxism] Stalinist-Trotskyist bromance
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. * Actually Trotsky was focused on the contradiction between the forces and relations of production (and associated norms of distribution), i.e. how the inadequacy of the former hamstrung efforts to move beyond bourgeois forms of the latter Re-read the paragraphs cited (which are at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch09.htm ) That contradiction was also the main one pointed out by Mandel. On Tue, Nov 4, 2014 at 11:41 PM, michael a. lebowitz via Marxism marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu wrote: 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. * Louis wrote: From The Revolution Betrayed: 'The Soviet Union is a contradictory society halfway between capitalism and socialism, in which: (a) the productive forces are still far from adequate to give the state property a socialist character' On this matter, they clearly shared a focus on the primacy of the productive forces--- in contrast, eg, to an emphasis upon the relations of production. michael -- - Michael A. Lebowitz Professor Emeritus Economics Department Simon Fraser University University Drive Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6 Home: Phone 604-689-9510 Cell: 604-789-4803 _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/ options/marxism/acpollack2%40gmail.com _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Stalinist-Trotskyist bromance
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. * On 11/5/14 9:41 AM, Andrew Pollack via Marxism wrote: Actually Trotsky was focused on the contradiction between the forces and relations of production (and associated norms of distribution), i.e. how the inadequacy of the former hamstrung efforts to move beyond bourgeois forms of the latter Re-read the paragraphs cited (which are at: http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1936/revbet/ch09.htm ) That contradiction was also the main one pointed out by Mandel. But there's another side of Trotsky that has to be acknowledged. He did emphasize the relations of production at certain points so strongly that there was some confusion over the differences between him and Stalin. After all, when Stalin moved against the kulaks and went full-blast toward industrialization, it led some to conclude that he had adopted the left opposition program. Plus, there's that weird salute to atomic power and eugenics in If America should go communist, plus his statement that capitalism will eventually make India the equal of Britain. All that being said, he was unique in the late 30s for opposing the idea that the USSR was socialist. What we are dealing with today, as I pointed out in my original post, is a kind of neo-Stalinism in which nostalgia for the old USSR trumps the reality of what was really taking place in Eastern Ukraine, as if the preservation of Lenin statues was the main task facing socialists. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Stalinist-Trotskyist bromance
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. * On the relations of production...it was so much an emphasis on this that confused people, rather it was placid: the Left Opposition wanted to see the USSR industrialize as it was an increase in production and the forces of production (Labor + capital investment) that could lay the basis for a stronger collectivized economy, etc etc) which hitherto the country was not doing despite the NEP. The LO wanted a 'balance' in production that commodities could be traded, at least in kind, with the peasantry which some sectors (Kulaks and others) had accumulated during NEP. The threat of starvation of the cities was still there despite a generalized increase in production in the countryside and this had to re resolved. Stalin in his form of industrialization did so on steroids with an almost exclusive focus on heavy industry. And in fact, it wasn't just some who were confused, many Left Oppositionists went over to Stalin because they thought, along with this new found 'revolutionary socialism right this instant' under the Third Period analysis, thought that he had adopted the LO program, if not in name, in effect. They were of course incorrect. (this respresented the first wave of LOers capitulating to the Stalin faction). Eugenics: Trotsky was fascinating with science as many Marxists were...in fact Marxists generally were far more interested in science before the 1960s than afterward. So new theories that abounded were always taken seriously and this was a true for Trotsky as for most intellectually inclined communists. All this tied in with the need to increase the productive forces so as to eventually create the material basis for socialism (despite the current fad of 'anti-productivism' as excemplified by writers like Chris Williams, such views run contrary to almost all of Marxism at least historically). So science and technology were highly emphasised in the new Soviet state and continued into the Stalinist corruption of that state. Trotsky in one article that Louis notes goes into the idea of humans creating a 'new man'. Trotsky was no expert and was opining on the 'what if?' as many a columnist does today outside of their own expertises. This is no different. Read this in the essay Louis notes but here are the two quotes from the article: One-year, five-year, ten-year plans of business development; schemes for national education; construction of new basic lines of transportation; the transformation of the farms; the program for improving the technological and cultural equipment of Latin America; a program for stratosphere communication; eugenics – all of these will arouse controversy, vigorous electoral struggle and passionate debate in the newspapers and at public meetings. and While the romantic numskulls of Nazi Germany are dreaming of restoring the old race of Europe’s Dark Forest to its original purity, or rather its original filth, you Americans, after taking a firm grip on your economic machinery and your culture, will apply genuine scientific methods to the problem of eugenics. Within a century, out of your melting pot of races there will come a new breed of men – the first worthy of the name of Man. That's it. Now, there is another essay but I can't find it where he goes into this a bit more. Nuclear energy: the *entire* left was interested in nuclear power for peaceful purposes. Both the Daily Worker, The Militant, New International, Fourth International and Labor Action supported nuclear energy up until the mid-1960s when the tie between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons appeared to be locked at the hip. The first anti-nuclear stuff on the left didn't deal with safety so much as over the question of the Bomb, but until then the Bomb and energy were polemically separated in these articles and counterpoised to each otherby the left (correctly IMO). David _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Stalinist-Trotskyist bromance
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. * I think Trotsky's encouragement of speculation on how socialist people could use science (and not vice versa) is more relevant than ever with climate change and its interaction with capitalism's waste, infrastructure, etc. As for Louis's point on latter day Stalinism, that's something a lot of us have been wondering about -- especially the new lease on life of campism. It's obviously not just a vestige of old-fashioned Stalinism. Nor is it just social democracy in a new form. It draws on both in its own unique mix which needs to be documented and analyzed. On Wed, Nov 5, 2014 at 10:29 AM, DW via Marxism marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu wrote: 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. * On the relations of production...it was so much an emphasis on this that confused people, rather it was placid: the Left Opposition wanted to see the USSR industrialize as it was an increase in production and the forces of production (Labor + capital investment) that could lay the basis for a stronger collectivized economy, etc etc) which hitherto the country was not doing despite the NEP. The LO wanted a 'balance' in production that commodities could be traded, at least in kind, with the peasantry which some sectors (Kulaks and others) had accumulated during NEP. The threat of starvation of the cities was still there despite a generalized increase in production in the countryside and this had to re resolved. Stalin in his form of industrialization did so on steroids with an almost exclusive focus on heavy industry. And in fact, it wasn't just some who were confused, many Left Oppositionists went over to Stalin because they thought, along with this new found 'revolutionary socialism right this instant' under the Third Period analysis, thought that he had adopted the LO program, if not in name, in effect. They were of course incorrect. (this respresented the first wave of LOers capitulating to the Stalin faction). Eugenics: Trotsky was fascinating with science as many Marxists were...in fact Marxists generally were far more interested in science before the 1960s than afterward. So new theories that abounded were always taken seriously and this was a true for Trotsky as for most intellectually inclined communists. All this tied in with the need to increase the productive forces so as to eventually create the material basis for socialism (despite the current fad of 'anti-productivism' as excemplified by writers like Chris Williams, such views run contrary to almost all of Marxism at least historically). So science and technology were highly emphasised in the new Soviet state and continued into the Stalinist corruption of that state. Trotsky in one article that Louis notes goes into the idea of humans creating a 'new man'. Trotsky was no expert and was opining on the 'what if?' as many a columnist does today outside of their own expertises. This is no different. Read this in the essay Louis notes but here are the two quotes from the article: One-year, five-year, ten-year plans of business development; schemes for national education; construction of new basic lines of transportation; the transformation of the farms; the program for improving the technological and cultural equipment of Latin America; a program for stratosphere communication; eugenics – all of these will arouse controversy, vigorous electoral struggle and passionate debate in the newspapers and at public meetings. and While the romantic numskulls of Nazi Germany are dreaming of restoring the old race of Europe’s Dark Forest to its original purity, or rather its original filth, you Americans, after taking a firm grip on your economic machinery and your culture, will apply genuine scientific methods to the problem of eugenics. Within a century, out of your melting pot of races there will come a new breed of men – the first worthy of the name of Man. That's it. Now, there is another essay but I can't find it where he goes into this a bit more. Nuclear energy: the *entire* left was interested in nuclear power for peaceful purposes. Both the Daily Worker, The Militant, New International, Fourth International and Labor Action supported nuclear energy up until the mid-1960s when the tie between nuclear energy and nuclear weapons appeared to be locked at the hip. The first anti-nuclear stuff on the left didn't deal with
Re: [Marxism] Stalinist-Trotskyist bromance
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. * On Nov 5, 2014, at 9:41 AM, Andrew Pollack via Marxism wrote: Actually Trotsky was focused on the contradiction between the forces and relations of production (and associated norms of distribution), i.e. how the inadequacy of the former hamstrung efforts to move beyond bourgeois forms of the latter Actually, no bolshevik (including Koba-Stalin, whose Okhranik/Petrine program for the reconstruction of the Empire was still carefully concealed)) could say that the productive forces (foremost among which was the abysmally low cultural/technical level of the laboring masses) inherited from the Czars were remotely close to the requisites for development of a socialist society. Thus the total unanimity on the impossibility of constructing socialism in a single backward country like Russia. In 1918 Lenin went so far as to state that for us, state capitalism would be a step forward. And by 1921, after three years of indescribably devastating civil war, soviet Russia's productive forces had deteriorated (deaths, destructions, emigration of the technical intelligentsia) far beyond their already miserable level. For the bolsheviks the only hope for socialism in Russia was their incorporation into a European soviet republic. Nevertheless, thanks to the enormous cultural impetus of the proletarian revolution, soviet Russia under NEP was in the 1920's able to advance as far as a relatively democratic state capitalism that equalled and even exceeded pre-revolution levels of economic output--a mixed economy with state- owned industrial trusts and banks alongside private businesses, commodity production for domestic and world markets, peasant-owned agriculture, and generalization of waged labor with real trade unions defending the rights of workers. Thus along with the political relations characteristic of a bureaucratically-deformed workers' state (as Lenin characterized the USSR in 1922) went a set of entirely capitalist relations of *production*. As the bureaucratic deformation of the bolshevik regime proceeded, thanks to the maleficent organizational genius of Koba-Stalin and the political incompetence of old bolsheviks like Zinoviev and Bukharin, by 1929 the Stalinist counterrevolution was able to emerge into full daylight. Stalin sent NEP To the Devil with his total forced collectivization of agriculture and breakneck industrialization. Over the next nine years the necks broken included virtually all the remaining bolshevik cadre together with millions of workers, peasants, artists, writers, and technicians. What remained at the end of the purges (when Yezhov was liquidated and Beria took over the secret police establishment from which the present Czar, Putin, was to emerge) was now a *totalitarian* state-capitalist regime (as Trotsky stated, Stalinism and Fascism are symmetrical phenomena) with a new bureaucratic ruling class. The state-capitalist relations of production that had existed under NEP were changed *in form* to those characteristic of fascism--wage labor, commodity production, managerial absolutism, all enforced by unremitting police-state repression. The resulting monstrosity retained from soviet Russia only the brand name USSR (as a vampire state it had as much right to that brand as any of the Undead has to his predecease name). When Trotsky was writing The Revolution Betrayed it was already a stretch to believe, as he did, in the possibility of a revived bolshevism. By the time it had been published that hope was tenuous in the extreme. Two years later it had been definitively murdered. But, entirely isolated from any contact inside Russia, Trotsky still refused to give up that dream. That the inevitable defeat of Nazi Germany in the coming war might lead to a regeneration of the Russian workers' state, this was the slender reed to which he clung when he wrote in 1939 that The Nature of the Soviet Union is not yet Decided by History. Alas, the Decision had already been made. The Stalinist state-capitalist form of Czarism, still with us today in somewhat more Westernized form, had become unshakeable. By playing word games with phrases like productive forces, property forms, and production relations the Orthodox managed for fifty years to pretend that under the Stalinist USSR brand they were buying a Degenerated Workers' State. Some pretend that Russia even now is a workers' state! In the 1950s-1960's the dominant faction of the Fourth International even expected a socialist revolution to be introduced to western Europe through invasion by
Re: [Marxism] Stalinist-Trotskyist bromance
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. * On 11/5/14 11:36 AM, Shane Mage via Marxism wrote: By playing word games with phrases like productive forces, property forms, and production relations the Orthodox managed for fifty years to pretend that under the Stalinist USSR brand they were buying a Degenerated Workers' State. Some pretend that Russia even now is a workers' state! In the 1950s-1960's the dominant faction of the Fourth International even expected a socialist revolution to be introduced to western Europe through invasion by the Russian Army (by the early 1960's the same types, then as now, moved their trust onto a new brand--the Arab Revolution of the Boumediennes and Qaddafis). So weird to see Shane fulminating against the Fourth International for adapting to Stalinism when his primary role on Marxmail is to serve as a transmission belt for RT.com talking points. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
[Marxism] Stalinist-Trotskyist bromance
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. * One of the things I find so disturbing is the growing affinity between a part of the left that has its roots in the Trotskyist movement and the Novorossiya project in Donbass and Crimea. It involves people like Roger Annis in Canada, Renfrey Clark in Australia, as well as currents associated with John Rees's Counterfire, et al. Today I was reminded of how much of an affinity there is between neo-Stalinism and ortho-Trotskyism when an interview with Colonel Cassad cropped up on CounterPunch. An interview with the guy who blogs as Colonel Cassad was conducted by Jo and Dylan Murphy, members of Peter Taaffe's Socialist Party in Britain. This is the mothership of Socialist Alternative in the USA. They god his name assbackwards: An Interview with Rozhin Boris--it is actually Boris Rozhin. Anyhow, Rozhin is a passionate fan of Joseph Stalin as this article from GlobalVoices indicates: If this is the case, 32-year-old Sevastopol native Boris Rozhin is bucking the trend. Rozhin, who runs the popular blog Colonel Cassad, is unrepentant in his admiration for the Soviet Union, particularly its military achievements in the Second World War. Rozhin is also unapologetic about his admiration for Joseph Stalin, whom he credits with winning the war and accomplishing the Soviet Union's rapid economic growth in the 20th century. His blog carries the half-ironic subtitle, “The Mouthpiece of Totalitarian Propaganda.” The biggest influence on his writing, Rozhin claims, are his communist beliefs, which “incline [him] towards class and dialectical conclusions when analyzing one event or another.” http://globalvoicesonline.org/2014/07/30/russia-eastern-ukraine-unfiltered-colonel-cassad-crimea-stalinism/ The interview is filled with the usual bullshit you get from Borotba, Boris Kagarlitsky and other mouthpieces of a Great Russian chauvinism that hearkens back to Stalin's riding roughshod over lesser nationalities. This final exchange between the ortho-Trots and Colonel Cassad is enough to induce projectile vomiting: Q: The war in Eastern Ukraine has led to an influx of foreign volunteers going to fight for the self-defence militias of Lugansk and Donetsk. According to a report in August by Paula Slier of Russia Today a brigade of international volunteers is to be formed called ‘United Continent’. Do you think parallels can be drawn between this force and the International Brigades that fought against fascism in the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s? A: First you need to understand that the major part of the army of Novorossia are local residents. Volunteers from Russia make up about 10-15 % of the militia. 1-2% of the volunteers who serve in the militias come from other countries – the US, Germany, Italy, France, Spain, Brazil, Colombia, Serbia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Abkhazia, South Ossetia and a number of other countries. The main motivation of these people is to fight against fascism. With the increase in the number of left-wing and communist units in the armed forces of Novorossia (especially in the mechanized brigade, known as the “ghost” Alexey think-tank, which openly advocated the elimination of large capital), this analogy with the International Brigades has become even more apparent. It is understood that, in combat units there are people across the political and ideological views – in one battalion can be found Christian believers (Orthodox, or Mormons), and atheists, communists, and anarchists. The fight against Ukrainian fascism has drawn these seemingly polar ideological and political currents together. It is therefore to strengthen the Armed Forces of Novorossia that Lenin portraits can peacefully coexist with icons. One commander who does not love communists, can still raise people in an attack with screaming, “For the Homeland! For Stalin! “. For many in the the Russian Federation and Europe – this is not just a war, this is our Spain 1936-1938. The present bloody war reflects the profound contradictions of the contemporary global capitalist world. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Stalinist-Trotskyist bromance
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. * Not suprising. Both Stalin and Trotsky agreed, contra Lenin, that Russia was socialist. The infamous Socialism in one country delusion. T -Original Message- From: Louis Proyect via Marxism marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Sent: Nov 4, 2014 3:28 PM To: Thomas F Barton thomasfbar...@earthlink.net Subject: [Marxism] Stalinist-Trotskyist bromance 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. * One of the things I find so disturbing is the growing affinity between a part of the left that has its roots in the Trotskyist movement and the Novorossiya project in Donbass and Crimea. It involves people like Roger Annis in Canada, Renfrey Clark in Australia, as well as currents associated with John Rees's Counterfire, et al. Today I was reminded of how much of an affinity there is between neo-Stalinism and ortho-Trotskyism when an interview with Colonel Cassad cropped up on CounterPunch. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Stalinist-Trotskyist bromance
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. * On 11/4/14 4:34 PM, Thomas wrote: Both Stalin and Trotsky agreed, contra Lenin, that Russia was socialist. Not to sound pedantic, but Trotsky adamantly refused to describe Russia as socialist. From The Revolution Betrayed: The Soviet Union is a contradictory society halfway between capitalism and socialism, in which: (a) the productive forces are still far from adequate to give the state property a socialist character; (b) the tendency toward primitive accumulation created by want breaks out through innumerable pores of the planned economy; (c) norms of distribution preserving a bourgeois character lie at the basis of a new differentiation of society; (d) the economic growth, while slowly bettering the situation of the toilers, promotes a swift formation of privileged strata; (e) exploiting the social antagonisms, a bureaucracy has converted itself into an uncontrolled caste alien to socialism; (f) the social revolution, betrayed by the ruling party, still exists in property relations and in the consciousness of the toiling masses; (g) a further development of the accumulating contradictions can as well lead to socialism as back to capitalism; (h) on the road to capitalism the counterrevolution would have to break the resistance of the workers; (i) on the road to socialism the workers would have to overthrow the bureaucracy. In the last analysis, the question will be decided by a struggle of living social forces, both on the national and the world arena. Doctrinaires will doubtless not be satisfied with this hypothetical definition. They would like categorical formulae: yes – yes, and no – no. Sociological problems would certainly be simpler, if social phenomena had always a finished character. There is nothing more dangerous, however, than to throw out of reality, for the sake of logical completeness, elements which today violate your scheme and tomorrow may wholly overturn it. In our analysis, we have above all avoided doing violence to dynamic social formations which have had no precedent and have no analogies. The scientific task, as well as the political, is not to give a finished definition to an unfinished process, but to follow all its stages, separate its progressive from its reactionary tendencies, expose their mutual relations, foresee possible variants of development, and find in this foresight a basis for action. _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
Re: [Marxism] Stalinist-Trotskyist bromance
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. * Louis wrote: From The Revolution Betrayed: 'The Soviet Union is a contradictory society halfway between capitalism and socialism, in which: (a) the productive forces are still far from adequate to give the state property a socialist character' On this matter, they clearly shared a focus on the primacy of the productive forces--- in contrast, eg, to an emphasis upon the relations of production. michael -- - Michael A. Lebowitz Professor Emeritus Economics Department Simon Fraser University University Drive Burnaby, B.C., Canada V5A 1S6 Home: Phone 604-689-9510 Cell: 604-789-4803 _ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
