File spoon-archives/marxism-general.archive/marxism-general_1997/marxism-general.9707, message 1


Date: Tue, 01 Jul 1997 12:25:19 -0400
From: Vladimir Bilenkin <achekhov-AT-unity.ncsu.edu>
Subject: Re: M-G: Reply to Vlad on the Russian Question!


>  Vlad I am sending this out to the "Red Cabbage" list which I think you should
> be on. It is a list started by and ex Spart and BTer. Where many who claim the
> title of being "Trotskyist" have suddenly appeared. Unfortunately it appears 
> that
> everybody is quite conciously avoiding the discussion of the "Russian" question.
> Both criminal and idiotic. At least you in your own way are trying to take 
> the Russian question on! More then I can say for many of those who claim to 
> be Trotskyist today. Appears that we have a fucking orstrich tendency 
> Internationally of sticking ones head in the sand!


Dear Bob, thanks for your comments.  The "orstrich tendency" in regard  
to the former SU, shared by all denominations of the Western left, is 
indeed scandalous.  I must say though that occasional pronouncements on 
this subject aren't much better. I recall a recent instruction from some 
big trotskyist in London who promised eternal damnation to all those who 
refuse to work within Zuiganov's KPRF.  With friends like these we
don't need Jeffrey Saks and IMF to build capitalism in Russia. 

Unfortunately, as your own reading of my modest paper shows, I don't see
any possibility for a fruitful discussion of "Russian question." It
appears that you already know everything worth knowing about it, as well
as of any other country in the world.  Also, discussion implies at least
a bourgeois respect to what your opponent says.  It means that it is bad
to misrepresent or to twist his argument.  It means that one puts at
least a modicum of reflection between naming and denouncing one's
opponent.  In short, communist discussion is impossible, without 
upholding the bare minimum of conditions established long ago by 
the bourgeoisie and even prior to that.  One of the terrible 
consequences of Stalinism was the obliteration of these simple
principles
from political discourse.  And this indicates a deeper affinity between
you and Stalinism.  Namely, the one between the empirist (Stalinist) and
the metaphysical (Trotskyists), the fatalistic and the voluntaristic 
polarities of the bourgeois consciousness.  Here is one example. 

Bob writes:

> The above is quite a lot of stalinist baggage that you want to take
> down the road along with the Russian proletariat. In the first place
> you are mixing up capitalist counter-revolution with the possibility
> of a fascist solution to the woes of the former Soviet Union. Naturally
> the one (capitalist counter-revolution) is a reality whereas the
> fascist solution is only a possiblity. It is the classical Stalinist
> motivation for popular front politics that Stalinists used for years
> in order to defend there bureaucratic priviledges. 

Let's leave aside your ignorance of the ABC of Marxism (your "mixing up"
counter-revolution with restoration, and the view that fascism is a
solution
to the "woes" of countries, not classes). Let's look more closely what
you understand by "reality."  For marxists "reality" is not a fixed
state 
of affairs but a *process* of development of its inherent
contradictions.  
The reality of the Weimar Republic bore within itself the contradictions 
and tendencies that resulted in fascism, as the reality of  the
restorationist 
France contained those that resulted in 18th Brumaire.  When one, like
you, does not understand this, one is destined to Stalinist politics.  

 >It is the classical Stalinist
> motivation for popular front politics that Stalinists used for years
> in order to defend there bureaucratic priviledges. 

Every word here is pure rubbish both in its own merit and in relation to 
what I wrote.  The "classical"  Stalinists (i.e. not of your imagination
but real) used exactly the same logic as you do now re Russia.  They 
"motivated" the popular front in France precisely by separating the 
"reality" of the bourgeois France from French fascism as only 
"a possibility."  They did the same in China.  To say that they did it
"in
order to defend their priviledges"  is another piece of vulgar marxism 
that puts you, as a Marxist, in their company. 

But your Stalinist alter ego goes much further than that. You actually
offer the Russian workers the "solution" that Stalin imposed on the 
German workers before 1933.  This is what you are saying to them: 

You have to fight "counter-revolution" which is "real" instead of
fascism
which is not.  This is why you need to isolate yourself from the
absolute
majority of the country (70%).  Don't even try to take a political
leadership over the petty-bourgeois mass.  Let them do what they want. 
Your
real enemy are all other classes of Russian society. Just be
"independent" 
and the Kingdom of Heaven will be yours.  Well, Bob, theirs will be the 
Kingdom of Hell should they follow your advice.   

>Only now you want
> to use this kind of stuff, and alliance of capital,the bureaucrats,
> the mafia, the generals, the lumpen intellectual, (did I miss any?)
> as some sort of fascist conspiracy against "all classes". Then you come
> with the classical Stalinist popular front program of a program of
> "National Salvation" and to rally around it the "petty bougeois strata".
> You reasoning is if the workers and their party don't do it then the 
> fascists will!

Right, this is what happened in Germany. and this may well happen in 
Russia unless the proletariat attracts the petty-bourgeois layers on
its side.  There is no contradiction between the cause of proletarian
struggle and that of national salvation, i.e. the salvation of the
vast majority of the nation from social degradation.  Moreover, this 
salvation can come about only from the hands of the proletariat. 
And only if it proves its ability to lead the the petty-bourgeoisie.  
Bob twists my description of the simple dilemma faced by Russian society 
and misrepresents is as a call for a struggle not against the 
regime of restoration, in which fascist tendencies are inherent, but as 
a call for a "popular front" (his idee fix) against some "possibility"
of fascism. Here's what I wrote:

>Against the criminal organization of
> the bourgeois dictatorship, the proletariat advance its own
> revolutionary organization.  Any delay in creating it can be 
> lethal.  If Russian workers fail to advance their own program 
> of national salvation and to rally around it the petty-bourgeois
> strata this will be done by a program of fascism."


Do I "propose a program?"  By no means.  Programs without real class
organizations behind them exist only in the deluded mind of trotskyists 
like Bob. I do not propose.  I state a simple dilemma faced by Russian
society.
The regime of restoration is taking the society to the brink of an
abyss.
Either the proletariat advances its own program and attracts to its side
 the petty-bourgeois masses or they will be
carried away by the forces of fascism.  Again, this is the ABC of
Marxism.
from Lenin's "Infantile Decease" to Trotsky's TP.  Who in his right mind
can read into this a call for a "popular front?"  Nobody, except Bob
Malecki...and Adolfo!  Again the same paradox, as I've noticed above. 
Once Bob
is compelled to deal with *conctrete* problems of class struggle, he
finds
himself in the same boat with Stalinists vis-a-vis orthodox Marxism. 


> I remember quite well Vlad when you over a year ago or so were begging
> the "left" here in the west to help you build a "anti fascist" front
> against the impending fascist catastropy! And basically this is just
> another slick version of the same thing you were purposing a year ago.
> The Russian workers do not need a program of "National Salvation", nor
> do they need and anti-fascist front. They need a Bolshevik Party of
> the Leninist model and a program of Proletarian International Revolution.
> Fundementally a Trotskyist Party in a reforged Fourth International
> which can lead the Russian workers towards a new October Revolution
> and setting up a real dictatorship of the Proletariat. And this must be 
> done independently of all other classes. 

Again, this is a blatant misrepresentation of what I wrote back then.
It was an appeal for solidarity with Russian workers on the eve of
the presidential elections when the ruling clique threatened to unleash
a civil war should they give their votes to Zuiganov.  To call this 
act of solidarity a "anti-fascist front" or any "front" is to degrade 
conceptual language and make any social analysis impossible.  

> Now to the party question where you wrote;
> 
> "                               6
> 
>  
>  The lesson of the Soviet catastrophe.  In  any circumstances,
> there is one ultimate criterion for Marxist politics: that
> is good that raises class consciousness, that is bad that inhibits it.  
> The decades of bureaucratic absolutism not only threw far back 
> the political consciousness and social imagination of the Soviet 
> workers; they also obliterated the theoretical tradition of orthodox 
> Marxism and the very ideals of the movement.  All forms
> of opportunism - which, in the last analysis, the present Russian 
> communist movement is all about - have their social and ideological
> roots in the Soviet past.  In ideology, they derive from the 
> fetishism of the state and technical progress, and from the 
> rejection of the theory of class struggle and proletarian
> internationalism as the foundations of Marxist epistemology
> and politics.  These are also the main features of  
> false consciousness in the working class. But in our workers 
> we also find important elements of an advanced consciousness
> that transcend the limited horizon of Western workers and 
> facilitate the radicalization of labor movement in Russia.
> Unlike their counterparts in old capitalist countries, Russian
> workers don't have to solve the "secret" of the origin of 
> private property.  They clearly see on it not an halo of "sacredness"
> but the fingerprints of thieves and gangsters. Their memory and 
> habits of Soviet production for satisfaction of needs rather
> than for profit make the consciousness of our workers less 
> vulnerable to commodity fetishism that underlies all forms
> of false consciousness under capitalism.  Finally, even the
> most ferocious reaction cannot erase from the memory of the class
> its heroic period.  In their first attempts at organized struggle 
> Russian workers find in the soviet a form created by their forefathers."
> 
> I think the above statement by you very honest Vlad. 
> But politically dead wrong! On the one hand you take your
> hate of the bureaucracy and its "fetishism" to task and as
> a solution unfortunately make "Soviets" a fetishism! In fact 
> if I rember my history correctly the Soviets between February
> 1917 and October 1917 were in fact and obstacle to the October
> Revolution. In fact  because it really depends on who is 
> leading those Soviets where and not that putting a pair of
> blue jeans on and saying i am a member of the local Soviet 
> makes me revolutionary! In fact Soviets are fighting 
> expressions of the proletariat in pre Revolutionary and
> Revolutionary times just as trade unions are and expression
> of the proletariat in more peace eras. But the point is
> who is standing at the head of these mass organisations
> of the Proletariat and where this leadership wants to take
> the Proletariat.

Again, a typical Stalinist denunciation worthy of Vyshinsky.
If some one says that the Russian workers use in their struggle 
the truly proletarian form of organization created by their
forefathers it amounts to fetishization of the soviets, and therefore
to the depreciation of the role of the Party, and hence, to that of its
leadership, and finally of Comrade Stalin.  How can the proletariat
defend itself from this new fascistic assault on its sinews of strenghts
by the trotskyite-bukharinite gangsters?  Even the bourgeois
philanthropes
(the Webbs) would agree this time on the right of the proletariat to use
any mesures in self-defense.  Does bob realize that by making fetish out
of the party, more exactly, the "leadership" (the catch-word of modern
trotskyism) he finds himself again on the side of Stalinists? Why?
Because, like them, he is a vulgur marxist, incapable of grasping the 
dialectical relationship between the organizational forms of the
proletarian dictatorship (the soviets) and its vanguard, the party.
His thought moves within reified contents of the bourgeois
consciousness.
He separates the soviets and the party like he does counter-revolution
and 
fascism.  He doesn't see the dialectical unity underlying them.

> 
> So with your popular front analisis of impending fascism in
> the former Soviet Union connected to both a program of
> "National Salvation" in alliance with alien class forces,
> and making a fetish of the mass organisations of the Workers
> like Soviets I believe it honestly to be a formula for
> a new round of disasters for Russian workers. 
>You complete neglect
> of a *real* Bolshevik/Leninist/Trotskyist revolutionary 
> Internationalist Party with sections in all of the former
> republics in a reforged Fourth International with the program
> and goal of overthrowing every ruling class in every country in
> the world connected to political revolutions in those deformed
> workers states that still exist China,Korea, Vietnam and Cuba,
> well the workers in the former Soviet Union will only be 
> tricked into a new round of bankrupt neo Stalinist politics
> that will not take them anywhere nor give them any power.

Your ad nauseum repetition of this fake revolutionary rhetoric
has nothing to do with Marxism as Lenin and Trotsky understood it.
Marxism is nothing if it is not the science of the real.  And real
is concrete.  Tell me about the *concrete* program of struggle, the
concrete *actions* of your fake "*real* Bolshevik/Leninist/Trotskyist 
revolutionary  Internationalist Party with sections in all of the former
republics in a reforged Fourth International."  And if you don't
I WILL PUBLICLY DENOUNCE YOU AS A LIAR WHO WORKS AGAINST THE REAL
ORGANIZATION OF EURASIAN PROLETARIAT BY PROMOTING GHOST COMMUNIST
ORGANIZATIONS, LIKE IT HAS BEEN DONE BY FBI AND OTHER SPECIAL SERVICES
IN THE WEST. 


Vladimir Bilenkin


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