Neil throws a turnip:
Trotskyisms shameless defense of state capitalism...,
etc
Shume mishtake shurely- or does anyone else, apart from Trots, indulge in
this befuddled conceit?
Russ
What befuddled conceit? State capitalism or the idea of degenerated and
deformed workers states?
Trotskyism never defended the Stalinist regimes of these degenerated
(USSR), revolutionary but deformed (Yugoslavia, Vietnam, China, Cuba) and
deformed workers states. It characterized them as counter-revolutionary
regimes and the implacable enemies of the world working class. Which has
been demonstrated. The regime is not the same as the state.
State capitalism begs the whole question of private bourgeois ownership as
the legal basis of the capitalist mode of production. It's essentially
unhistorical, cos it doesn't take into account any transitional form of
state or mode of production between capitalism and communism. No real
proletarian dictatorship, no proto-socialist mode of production, nothing.
Pure hypocritical petty-bourgeois utopianism. Manifested in the useless
policies offered by the SWP in Britain over the years in the major battles
of the working class nationally and internationally.
Dave B's comments are more interesting, but too high-pitched and very vague.
This discussion about the war and its results is the absolutely central
issue for revolutionary Marxist workers parties, and it needs time,
tolerance and seriousness to reach a useful conclusion. Which means that
Dave must be a lot more explicit about what he means when he accuses the
left of not defending Yugoslavia in Kosova. Since he doesn't mention the
need for Kosovar Albanian self-determination, which he himself has
defended, this leaves an opening for interpreting his position as the usual
Staliinist crap about "forget all the democratic shit, let's defend the
progressive side", as if the Milosevic regime was progressive. As if the
Yugoslav state was a viable workers state, and as if its control of Kosova
was the most natural thing in the world.
As to the results themselves, it's the kind of indeterminate, loose-ended
shit the Brits are only too happy to roll around in. As I've said umpteen
times already. We've got the protectorate. We've got total confusion as to
who does what and who controls what. NATO claims to defend the Kosovars,
but Yugoslavia is still sovereign. In fact the situation is perfect for
hypocrites like Blair, because the ground is laid for an Ulster situation
where both the Kosovar Albanians AND the Serbs can be relied on to provoke
each other into violent incidents that can be labelled as terrorism and
used as the perfect excuse for continued occupation.
Imperialism has a foothold in the Balkans, with split and weakened,
unviable statelets rotting in the region. At last. What Dave says here is
right, but vague. It must be trumpeted out that the only thing that held
the imperialists back for so long was the Yugoslav revolution. And that the
Milosevic regime (along with the other Balkanized petty-bourgeois
nationalist freaks running the statelets) is a counter-revolutionary
perversion of this revolution, not its continuation.
I haven't got time at the moment to go into the relations between the US
and EU and Russia with respect to all this, but at the moment would be
inclined to see it as a stalemate between the US, Germany and Russia on the
surface, and a gain for British imperialism in terms of position in the
imperialist constellations.
Cheers,
Hugh
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