Markin comment:
In 2007-2008 I, in vain,
attempted to put some energy into analyzing the blossoming American
presidential campaign since it was to be, as advertised at least, a watershed
election, for women, blacks, old white anglos, latinos, youth, etc. In the
event I had to abandon the efforts in about May of 2008 when it became obvious,
in my face obvious, that the election would be a watershed only for those who
really believed that it would be a watershed election. The four years of the
Obama presidency, the 2012 American presidential election campaign, and world
politics have only confirmed in my eyes that that abandonment was essentially
the right decision at the right time. In short, let the well- paid bourgeois
commentators go on and on with their twitter. I, we, had (have) better things
to do like fighting against the permanent wars, the permanent war economies,
the struggle for more and better jobs, and for a workers party that fights for
a workers government . More than enough to do, right? Still a look back at some
of the stuff I wrote then does not a bad feel to it. Read on if you like
************Stalinist Bric-a-Brac
On more than one occasion in the recent past I have had to reflect on the devilish harm that Stalinism has done, and still does, to the international working class movement. Here I am not just reflecting on the political gangsterism, the labor camps, the freezing of political life in the Soviet Union and elsewhere where Stalinists had influence. Those things certainly occurred under various Stalinist regimes but I refer here to the underlying crime, from a political perspective, of the conscious effort on the part of those regimes and parties to act as a road block to an international socialist society-the only way out of the crisis facing humankind in the age of international imperialism. The net result is that the fight for socialism has been pushed back, way back, and our fight is infinitely harder than it was at the start of the last century. With that in mind here are a couple of random comments on Stalin and Stalinism:
I
have been recently reading Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore (Knopf, New
York, 2007), which I will review more fully later, about the early years of
this much misunderstood figure in world socialist history. Misunderstood? Yes.
I have long argued that the Bolshevik revolutionary Leon Trotsky, among others
including myself, never took the full measure of this foe. That lack showed
itself in Trotsky’s writings on Stalinism placing it as simply a counter-posed reformist
trend, like post World War I social democracy, in the international workers movement.
Further evidence can be found in his sense that Stalin was, in the end, merely
a rather vicious representative of another reformist trend in the movement. I
confess that I also have shared those same misunderstanding even at the times
when I was very close ideologically to Stalinism (especially my infatuation
with the ‘third period’ Stalinism of the early 1930’s).
Welcome Home, Gorby
And that is exactly the
point. These Stalinist bureaucrats, and third generation Soviet bureaucrats at
that, could only envision some kind of social-democratic merging of the Soviet
economy with Western ‘social’ capitalism. Well we know that all those
convergence theories, no matter how appealing for public consumption, were
houses of cards. Christ, in the end they
could not even envision saving their own hides.
When the deal went down, as
Lenin and all serious Bolsheviks knew, over the long haul either socialism or
imperialism had to win. We have reaped the sorrows of that defeat for the
international working class.
Leon Trotsky once called
Stalinists Mensheviks (Social Democrats) of the second mobilization. That is,
as the revolutionary energy of the Russian Revolution ebbed and the Stalinists
usurped power and changed the purposes for which the Soviet Union was created
their political positions resembled the old Menshevik (and post World War I European social democratic) positions of limiting the fight for socialism
to some far away future. I have long
argued that Stalinism without state power is just another garden variety
reformist façade. As an example, in America, where the Communist Party was
historically weak, it was hard to tell the difference between them and an
average Democrat, except for the goon squads they brought into play when they
wanted to protect the ‘liberals’ from those to their left. And that, my friends, is why Gorby’s new post
is an appropriate place for him. As for us- we fight for new Octobers.