File spoon-archives/marxism-general.archive/marxism-general_1998/marxism-general.9803, message 59


Date: Mon, 23 Mar 1998 16:12:26 -0500
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-G: Re: M-TH: World war II, the Soviet Union and Stalin


At 08:36 PM 3/23/98 +0100, Hugh Rodwell wrote:
>Vlad capitulated completely to the Stalinist falsification of history in
>his post on M-general by arguing empirically that because the Soviet state
>defeated the Nazi state, it must have had good leadership.
>
>The reason behind this capitulation is two-fold.

The real reason for Vladimir abandoning Trotskyism is that he has been
listening to you and Malecki for the past year or so. This would drive
anybody into collecting Paul Robeson records and keeping Enver Hoxha
posters on the kitchen wall.

Poor Vladimir. I can't imagine what it's like to go through the experience
of walking around making bombastic calls for proletarian revolution. Ooops.
Of course, I do. I was a Trotskyist myself from 1967 to 1978. I did manage
to keep an ironic distance from the whole thing, however. I have always
been a bit of an existential outsider.

I remember my first branch meeting back in 1967. It was the occasion of the
expulsion of Arne Swabeck, a founding member of the party who had defected
to Maoism. (He was one of the talking heads in Warren Beatty's "Reds.")
Everybody got up to denounce him like he had taken a dump in the urinal or
some other unforgivable act.

I sat there bemused trying to figure it out. Susan Lamont, an aspiring
hack, turned to me and asked me what I thought. I said that if he's guilty,
then he should do the time or something like that. Meanwhile, I was decked
out in my wide-waled, bell-bottomed gold corduroy pants that I had spent
$25 for on St. Mark's Place that day. I guess I was hedging my bets. If the
socialist thing didn't pan out, I'd go join the hippies. Susan spotted my
rather outre trousers, grabbed the broadest section near the ankle and
flapped them back in forth like a sheet. She said, "Petty-bourgeois,"
referring to my garment and me too I suppose. I should have joined the
hippies.

Louis Proyect



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