Date: Wed, 09 Jul 1997 23:11:43 -0400
From: Vladimir Bilenkin <achekhov-AT-unity.ncsu.edu>
Subject: Re: M-G: Russian Worker Speaks


dr.bedggood-AT-auckland.ac.nz wrote:

>  Vladimir,
> 
> I appreciated the translation and posting of Shishkarev's speech.
> But what is the point of the posting? 

The point was to attract attention of working class organizations
in the West to the struggle of their Russian comrades.  I've just
received a request from one of these organizations to help them to
get in touch with Shishkarev and MUW.  

>Is it an example of the leading
> forces in the workers movement? 

I don't think there is any leading force in this movement simply
because the movement itself has been so far too fracturedin a number 
of ways.  But people, like Shishkarev, and their network
of councils  represent, perhaps, the most independent and politically
active
part of the class. Here is the address to Russian workers by the Moscow
MUW that is relevant to Dave's question:
_____________________________________
		Esteemed Comrades!

In view of the pressing need for the workers of Russia to unite,
the Moscow Union of Workers has a proposal to all working class
organizations (Soviets, initiative groups, workers committees, et al.)
to establish permanent communication between them for mutual support,
coordination, exchange of experience and information, etc.

Only on the basis of a united nation-wide movement (regardless of 
whether its participants are party members or not) we can really defend 
our rights and sooner or later will take power in our hands.

With comradely greetings,

The Soviet of the MUW
__________________________________
Do you agree with its politics or
> not?  I agree with your often made point  that no revolutionary
> movement can arise without its roots being in the material conditions
> of the day.  But that also includes an analysis as to why this MUW
> speech  focused on a partial and pre-revolutionary  reading of Lenin?

My often made point is rather trivial but not that trivial as the one
about the "material conditions."  What I time and again remaind to
better marxists than myself is that revolutionary party, in a marxian
sense, is unthinkable without being organically linked to the struggling
class.  This is alpha and omega of revolutionary socialism, its ontology
and epistemology.  And this answers your question, or rather puts it
on its feet.  There are no *real* answers because the class has not yet
given birth to *real* party.  

Another problem with your way of positing these
questions is rather common with trotskyists and, forgive me, stalinists
as well.  I have in mind the propensity to make short-cuts between an
isolated pronouncement, observation, constatation of fact, and even
single
words, on the one hand,  and the political-ideological nomenclature that
exist in you minds, on the other.  There seems to be no space for
analysis in between.  How can I answer your question if it already
contains
its own answer?  And why to bother answering you since you already know
the right answer?   

In marxism analysis preceeds conclusions.  When you answer your
own questions to me without letting me know how you've  arrived at 
them I have no choice but see them as a purely rhetorical device.

> It seems to me that Malecki's point directed at you is correct.
> It is one thing to base onself on today's conditions. But not to
> critique workers' speeches today as themselves the products of
> material conditions, in this case capitalist restoration after
> decades of Stalinist dictatorship, is not marxism. It is fatalism. To
> select from the past some lessons of Lenin before the revolution,
> is to revert back to the stage of an incomplete  bourgeois national
> democratic revolution, without first doing a serious balance sheet
> of the development of the USSR or of  the causes of restoration.

1. Again, give me your analysis of Shishkarev's speach.  Show me how
you have arrived at your conclusions.  

2. Is  your "critique" of Shishkarev and myself is exempt from material
conditions?  And if not, could you provide it with your self-critique
which
in its turn being of this world will necessitate a critique of your
self-critique,
and so on.

3.  Consider also a possibility that there are people, even among
marxists, 
who do not think they know everything worth knowing about social reality
around them; that these people prefer to listen to its voices, study it,
analyze,
and only then draw conclusions.

4. On "fatalism."  Marxism is not about criticizing workers speeches.
Its task
is to provide them with a scientific understanding of their position in
modern
 society in general and at its every concrete juncture.  The scientific
power of 
Marxist analysis rests on its method directed toward the concrete. 
Shishkarev's
speech is a grain of the concrete totality that I study.  To understand
its meanings
and significance is to relate it to that totality (i.e. that of the
relations of Russian
proletariat to other classes nationally and internationally).  This is
much
harder to do than to admonish the worker for the failure to quote from 
"What is to be done ?" in a five minute speech.  The problem is to
understand
why he didn't do this.  And it takes a lot of knowledge (concrete) of
the social
reality and the political context within which he speaks.  I would
expect a
foreign marxist (in my understanding of this word), who is not very
familiar 
with the situation in Russia, to flood me with questions after
reading this piece.  E.g., what political forces organized and dominated
the conference? why did Shishkarev chose these particular quotes from
Lenin
on this occasion?  what is Kirsanov's conception of the restoration in
his book
mentioned by the speaker ( How many auto workers you know, Dave, who
have written books, like this?), what is the political orientation of
the Vorkuta
Committee whose representatives Shishkarev taught to think?  What is
behind
Shishkarev's sarcastic remarks about "social scientists" and his
rejection
of Khibarova's anti-workers remark? And so on.  This is what I would
expect from a marxist.  Apparently, by marxism we mean different things.

> As Maleki points out, the soviets without the Bolsheviks, were simply organs
> of workers democracy contained within the bourgeois state.  Where are
> the other references to Lenin's "What is to be Done" which challenged
> the accommodation to economism and spontaneity? Where is the
> insistence on the leading role of a vanguard party?

"Simply"?! Everything is  "simple" for the "leadership" except putting
their act together, if only in cyberspace!  Yet without these "simply
organs" there would've been nothing that came later, including the
"leadership" and even trotskyists.  And if at some point these 
simple things spread in Europe with even 1/10th of the Russian sweep
of 1905 we wouldn't be talking today at this cyber closet.  

But what puzzles me in Dave's criticism of Shishkarev's piece is 
that I can't find in it any reference to "economism," "spontaneity,"
and the soviets.  By profession, I am literary critic.  The first thing
I teach my students is to draw careful distinctions between the diverse
points of view or voices of the text and their own opinions (which
very often have nothing to do with it).  Dave's critique does not
do justice to the text.  He thinks up things that S. doesn't say because
he has a preconceived idea of what "simply" workers may say when
they are not enlightened by a "vanguard party."


> 
> Without the conscious leadership of a revolutionary party, how can we
> defeat the bourgeois propaganda? -  e.g. that the Bolshevik revolution was a
> Leninist coup, or that Trotsky or the collective leadership betrayed
> the revolution. 

Well, Shishkarev does precisely this.  He defeats the bourgeois
propaganda
skillfully and patiently, without alienating his class brothers,
speaking
to them in the language they understand.  And he defeats this propaganda
at the most important site, in the minds of the leaders of labor
movement.
(The Vorkuta Council is one of the most organized and militant class
organizations in Russia today).

>All of these explanations point to revolution
> as being spontaneous/fatalistic, either on time only to be subverted
> by enemies of the working class, or premature, in which case lets try
> again by reviving the soviet!. 

Which explanations?  To explain to the workers that what they're doing 
in accordance with  their class instinct was conceptualized and taught
by 
Lenin is to "point to revolution as being spontaneous/fatalistic"?!  I
don't
see how you have  arrived at this proposition.  Just another short-cut,
I guess.

>None of these accounts of history has
> any place for the role of revolutionary marxism in the form of the
> vanguard which unites objective and subjective reality in its programme.

I would suggest that instead of getting yourself intoxicated over the
early
Lukacs you learn some Russian and move there where shishkarevs dream
Lenin's dream of the kitchen maids administering the affairs of state.
This is not a wild thing to suggest to a builder of an "international
party",
isn't it? I can assure you that shishkarevs will not be repelled by you
being a trotskyist.  They will appreciate your act of internationalism
and listen to you carefully if you speak to them as their comrade and
their equal.  And who knows, perhaps, you'll both learn something new
from each other and make a step or two toward the formation of a new
vanguard in Russia.  But if you speak to them in the above-quoted
kind of jargon, with the smugness of the know-all "marxist" they
would show you to the door (politely, I hope) saying: Thank you, but
no, thank you.  We have enough of our home-made muddlers."

Vladimir


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