Date: Mon, 24 Feb 1997 00:08:32 +0000
Subject: M-G: Re: M-I: Again on Zarembka


Mark finishes his latest reply to Zarembka:

 No, we do not need to abandon Marxism-Leninism, we need if 
> anything to be  more intransigent than ever in defending it. 
> If lenin had lived (I don't like what-ifs but I'm going to indulge
> myself this Sunday morning) then Rapallo and NEP would have been, as
> Lenin meant them to be, no more than short-lived tactical expedients,
> and in 1931 Weimar would have fallen to the KPD.The purges of cadres
> would have assumed a different form in Soviet Russia, and the revolution
> would not have been bled of so much vitality. The second world war 
> would not even have occurred. Europe would have fallen peacefully to
> socialism. 
> It did not happen. But it could have. Anyway, I am happy to debate the
> hypothesis, which entails a far harsher critique of Stalin than Zarembka's 
> in reality. But when push comes to shove, I would still call myself a 
> Stalinist.
> -- 
Mark, I do not understand from what you have written how you can say you 
would still call yourself a Stalinist.  The heroic struggles of the 
soviet workers in peace and war are not to be credited to Stalin or 
Stalinism but occurred in spite of Stalinism, and are credited to the 
gains of the revolution, undermined by the Stalinists from the 1920's 
until the final overturns after 1989.  I think you parallel with the labour 
bureaucracy is accurate. We don't rank labour bureaucrats with the class 
enemy, but we say they are counter-revolutionary and must be smashed.  
Stalinism, the rule of the bureaucratic caste and its politics and ideology, 
betrayed the revolution in order to promote its narrow caste 
interests as parasites on workers property. They were the labour 
lieutenants of international capitalism. 

We cannot be sure had Lenin lived that the bureaucracy would not
have prevailed, anymore than Trotsky's failure to prevent the 
Stalinists from consolidating power. They were the petty bourgeois 
class agents who filled the vaccum in  a backward and isolated 
workers state. But I would say that Lenin would have been in the left 
opposition fighting alongside Trotsky,  and his authority would have 
made some difference in the decisive turning-points of history that 
you talk about.  And when push came to shove, Lenin and Trotsky would 
have fought to the death to overthrow the Stalinist bureaucracy and 
to put revolution back on the agenda. 

So in my understanding when you say that you are a Stalinist, you do 
more than stand alongside the heroic struggles of the SU to defend 
the gains of the revolution against all its bourgeois detractors,  you 
also apologise for the Stalinist bureaucracy which put its own caste 
privileges -"socialism in one country" - before revolution. In my 
view you end up in the same camp as those who will not condemn 
the historic betrayals of Stalinism on the false grounds that Stalinism was 
actually politically part of the gains of the revolution. I would 
like to know how this is possible. How the betrayals of 1933, 1939, 
Potsdam and Yalta, Indochina, Indonesia, and on and on, are part of 
our  revolutionary heritage.  I do not say this as a Trotskyist 
knee-jerk reaction to Stalinism. I think it is consistent with 
fundamental Marxism.

Dave.



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