Date: Thu, 27 Feb 1997 10:50:11 +0000
Subject: M-G: Re: M-I: Time to Move On


> Date:          Wed, 26 Feb 1997 12:43:52 -0500 (EST)
> To:            marxism-international-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
> From:          Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
> Subject:       M-I: Time to Move On
> Reply-to:      marxism-international-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU


Well I  see Proyect has taken time out from indulging in his personal
spats and ventured forth with another avuncular lecture
 about list culture.  In short, yes he would like to quarantine 
Trotskyism and let Stalinism off the hook. 
But as  Shane Mage also pointed out, any iota of 
Stalinism left in the workers movement will handicap  its 
revolutionary development. 

Those who defend stalinism as some sort of 
necessary evil are fools or villains because they don't understand or 
cover up the fact that the material roots of stalinism, - the petty 
bourgeois, the labour aristocracy and bureaucracy, -  are still 
present  as barriers to revolution today. These elements still 
assert their influence over the workers movement in the 
absence of a revolutionary leadership 
capable of exposing and destroying them.

Why does the term `menshevik' rouse such hostility among the 
mensheviks ?  Because it exposes the class roots of their rotten politics - 
that evolutionary schema which says that history progresses in stages,  
during which each stage is announced by the petty bourgeois intelligentsia, 
and led by a bunch of bureaucrats.  

Hence the common theme of the mensheviks on this list is that the 
necessary evil that followed the Russian revolution was the result of 
a premature revolution.  Sorry conditions were not ripe.  Not enough 
workers.  Not enough machines.  Wait until the imperialists have had 
another 50 years super-profits, then maybe history will grant 
permission for a revolution. The Bolsheviks called this `social- 
imperialism'. They want to avoid this `mistake' today by 
making sure that workers [who are they? where are they? they ask, 
which just goes to show, had Russian workers followed the mensheviks 
advice, they would still be waiting to be re-discovered] are REALLY 
ready for each stage. At the moment, unfortunately, and especially 
since history has passed judgement on October,  colonies and neo-colonies 
have to first fight for democracy before they can create the pre-conditions for 
socialism. Social-Imperialism.

 Of course, that buys into the biggest lie of the 20th century, 
that democracy [and national liberation from imperialist oppression 
which is a democratic right] can be won without a socialist revolution. 
>From China 1927 to South Africa 1994 the facts shout in your face.  
China is about to follow the SU into the bosses maw, and SA 
`liberation'  cannot even provide a nice democratic facade for the 
imperialists super-exploitation. 

So mensheviks [and Paul is wrong to say that the term does not 
exhaust Stalinism - it is the genus to Stalinisms species] start by 
rejecting  the Bolsheviks analysis, continued by Trotsky, of the 
necessity of October, and turn it into a grand counter-revolutionary 
historic schema,  in which they, and not the workers, are at the 
centre.

The obvious corollary of this is that the mensheviks dont want any 
competition from revolutionaries.  They are totally hostile to a 
vanguard party because it would make them historically 
redundant. The arguments against vanguardism based on bureaucracy or 
substitutionism, are manifestly hypocritical, given the mensheviks  inflated 
conception of their historic role.  What is at stake here is 
not some dead boring historic issue, but the possibility of a future 
revolution. Thats why you wont succeed in quarantining Trotskyism on this 
list unless you  adopt openly stalinist methods of shutting us up.

Dave. 



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