Tuesday, November 13, 2018

In Defense Of The Russian October Revolution-Understanding The British Leftist Blog-Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism

In Defense Of The Russian October Revolution-Understanding The British Leftist Blog-Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism


Click below to link to the Histomat: Adventures in Historical Materialism blog  


Frank Jackman comment:

While from the tenor of the articles, leftist authors featured, and other items promoted it is not clear to me that this British-centered blog is faithful to any sense of historical materialism that Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin or Leon Trotsky would recognize I am always more than willing to "steal" material from the site. Or investigate leads provided there for material of interest to the radical public-whatever that seemingly dwindling public in need of timely re-enforcements make be looking which lately now that we are deep into an age of serious night-takers, not that they were not there before, had been for the last forty plus years ever since they came hell-bent from out of paradise’s lost battles to raise hell on earth with what amounted to mostly gentle angry people seem to be coming out of the woodwork in the seemingly end tiems days we are be muscled through.

Of late the site of necessity had taken to publicizing more activist events particularly around the struggle to defend the Palestinian people in Gaza against the Zionist onslaught, the endless and unfathomable civil war in Syria, the slaughter Saudi is imposing on Yemen and a thousand other brush-fire wars civil, and uncivil. That is to be commended. However, in the main, this site continues to promote the endless conferences on socialism, Marxism, and Trotskyism that apparently are catnip to those on the left in Britain all the while touting the latest mythical "left" labor leader who is willing to speak anywhere to the left of the Genghis Klan (although I hesitate to involve his name as barbarian since he too has his defenders who argue that cleaning out cesspool of Asia and heading west had a progressive character-you have to love the intellectuals of the academy for this kind of “defense” is like catnip to them. I continue to stand willing with the original comment above about "stealing" material from the site though.      

No question since the demise of the Soviet Union as a flawed but vital counter-weight to world imperialism and the rise of the basically one-superpower world socialism, communism as poles of attraction except in spots (like South Africa or Greece and the edges of other places in Europe) to the working and oppressed masses of the world has taken a serious hit. Have become seen something of “utopian” schemes by labor militants in the world despite the desperate situations today in many parts of the world, including America and Great Britain, Great Britain in the equivocal age of Brexit, which cry out to high heaven for socialist solutions.

As the weight of that demise has set in there has been a corresponding demise in the level of programmatic and theoretical understandings by those who still espouse the cause. The events and works by socialist commentators emphasized by this Histomat blog amply demonstrates the proposition that in the post- Soviet period (if not before) there has been a dramatic tendency to throw out all the experiences since the Russian Revolution of 1917 and try to begin anew as if that event never occurred. Unfortunately meaning generally to go back to pre-World War I theories of revolutionary organization (and in some cases to forgo the necessity of revolution at all as if capitalism were now the highest permanent condition of humankind). The main organizational form to face the scrap heap is Lenin’s theory, a theory many times honored more in the breech than in the observance, of the “vanguard party” of conscious revolutionary intellectuals and advanced workers working as full-time professionals as revolutionaries.           

The clearest example of this is the revival of certain pre-World War I (a war to sever all pre-war illusions for those who could see right in front of themselves) theorists like the “Pope of Marxism,” Karl Kautsky, although interestingly not back to Marx and Engels of the post-1848 period when they argued for something very much like Lenin’s concept in the wake of the defeats of the working class and it allies in the 1848 struggles. A main organizational concept of Kautsky’s German Social-Democratic of which he was a leading theorist was the “party of the whole class,” a concept which denied, or muted the differences in the working class movement in the interest of numbers (numbers of votes in parliamentary elections really) that would somehow be worked out in the course of the revolution. Well life itself, with many, many examples, had shown how worthless that type of organization was when the deal went down. When a revolutionary situation popped up as recently in Greece for example. There are, granted, many new concepts necessary in the 21st century to reach the masses in order to revive the socialist message with the new technology, the new urgency, and the new allies necessary to fight for socialism but the threadbare theory of the “party of the whole class” is not one of them.        
Additional Jackman comment:

I place some material in this space which I believe may be of interest to the radical public that I do not necessarily agree with or support. One of the worst aspects of the old New Left back in the 1970s as many turned to Marxism after having “tasted” about fifty other theories which did not work out (mainly centered on some student-based movements that were somehow to bring down the beast without a struggle for state power, hell, they/we couldn’t even bring down the milk toast university administrations never mind the armed to the teeth imperial state) was replicating the worst of the old Old Left and freezing out political debate with other opponents on the Left to try to clarify the pressing issues of the day. That freezing out , more times than I care to mention including my own behavior a few times, included physical exclusion and intimidation. I have since come to believe that the fight around programs and politics is what makes those of us who proudly claim a leftist mantel different, and more interesting. The mix of ideas, personalities and programs, will sort themselves out in the furnace of the revolution as they have done in the past. 


Off-hand, as I have mentioned before, I think it would be easier, infinitely easier, to fight for the socialist revolution straight up than some of the “remedies” provided by the commentators in these various blogs and other networking media. But part of that struggle for the socialist revolution is to sort out the “real” stuff from the fluff as we struggle for that more just world that animates our efforts. So read on. 

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