Date: Mon, 24 Feb 1997 12:20:26 +0000
Subject: M-G: Re: M-I: Reply to Dave Bedggood


Mark,

I too value my time in these debates. Thats why I think it necessary 
to be clear. You cannot justify the politics of the Stalinist 
bureaucracy in the name of history. To say that some `iron law' made 
stalinism necessary is to hide behind an abstraction. Its a false 
abstraction because we all know that Stalinism was the concrete 
result of concrete class struggles, not the least important the 
menshevik/social democratic betrayal of the German revolution.
 
If Lenin died of syphilis at least he was the part-author of his own 
demise, unlike Trotsky.  There is absolutely no need to justify any 
aspect of Stalinism when it is clear that stalinism always detracted 
>from the gains of October.  If the bureaucrats defended workers 
propety this was because they lived off it, not because they saw it 
as superior to capitalism. Obviuosly for them it ceased to be superior to 
capitalism which is why the bureaucracy ultimately had to restore 
capitalism. 
Why did stalinism last so long, and why did it collapse when it did? 
Well not because of some ahistorical iron law which originates in a 
Kantian mind-set, but because workers property, despite all the shit 
the imperialists threw at it, survived for so long. It collapsed when 
it did, starved of worker support internatiionally, and exhaused through 
loss of blood sucked out of it by the parasitic bureauracy.
So we come back to the point that Stalinism was an historic 
excrescence on the backs of workers holding them back, betraying 
their struggles from 1923 onwards,  the ultimate betrayal being the 
restoration of capitalism after 1989. To say that Stalinism was 
anything but counter-revolutionary is to sow illusions in the past 
struggles and for the future. It is consistent with the menshevik 
marxism of many on this list, who if they don't think that October 
was a mistake, consign history to a series of stages in which the 
working class comes under the tutelage of the enlightened petty 
bourgoeis intelligentsia.  In this schema, stalinism is was a 
necessary evil.  That's not good enough.  The working class will make no 
headway until it settles accounts with Stalinism. 
I'll read you stuff on the Red Army if you read Malecki's latest 
Cockroach (39) in particular his reply to a 'Russian Communist".
Dave.



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