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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