Date: Mon, 24 Feb 1997 07:34:22 +0000
Subject: Re: M-G: Re: M-I: Again on Zarembka


DAVE: 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. 

KARL: The above passage makes little sense. If the heroic struggles
of the Soviet workers during the second world war were workers in
uniform and thereby formed part of the state apparatus. Consequently
they functioned during the war as an arm of the state and not as the
independent self-organization of the working class. In this they
dutifully executed the autocratic orders of the Stalinist
state. This means that they were so subordinated to the Stalinist
oppresive state that they apparently enthusiastically sacrificed
themselves to this anti-working class state. If anything this is an
index of how submissive and downtrodden was this class. The virtual
absence of any serious revolt by the working class against the
despotic character of the Soviet state for decades years when the
Poles, Hungarians and Czechs were rising up against the system is
further evidence of the truth of this view of mine.

Trotskyism lacks principle. Being a blood relative of Stalinism it,
in many cases, paradoxically supports and criticises Stalinism at the 
same time.



                                      




                          Yours etc.,
                                     Karl   


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