From: "Siddharth Chatterjee" <siddhart-AT-mailbox.syr.edu> Date: Fri, 3 Apr 1998 03:00:05 +0000 Subject: Re: M-G: An Open Letter from S.Chatterjee to President Yeltsin Vladimir Bilenkin: >Actually, I am very angry. I don't have time for silly bickering and >all that. Instead of directing your anger at potential allies, you should channel it into constructive activity and refrain from branding persons like Mao Tse-Tung as traitors and counter-revolutionaries without the least bit of analysis. This is not science but its parody. And yet you seem to want to raise the current status of Marxism to a science as it once was according to you. This is paradoxical behavior. >I want to talk with independently thinking marxists who >realize that one cannot stop this madness by quotations from Dear >Leaders, that we must finally begin thinking with our own heads. >Twelve workers committed suicide during the ongoing strike in >Saratov. Neither Marx, nor Lenin, nor Trotsky, nor Mao can explain >to us why they didn't build a baricade and smashed someone else's >heads instead. The suicide of the 12 workers is a terrible tragedy. It shows the progression of the inhuman counter-revolution all over the world Please tell us what we on this list can try and do to prevent such occurrences. Recently, over a hundred farmers in a state in India committed suicide. Near Calcutta, mill workers are killing themselves due to lock-outs by the comprador employers and because of unpaid salaries over past several months. These are glimpses of the barbaric future we are heading for. > What do you want me to do with this "devastating >critique" of Trotsky? Hang it on the wall? Tell me better how to >stop the counterrevolution and I will become a Chatterjeeist. Please remember the context of the original discussion. You upheld Trotskyism and dismissed Maoism as something like a 'nationalist' aberration like many academic western leftists. If you and the others wish to give an "activist" orientation to this list, let us go ahead and discuss what can be done. Group letter writing to newspapers, magazines about issues that concern working and oppressed people (e.g., MAI, WTO, GATT) and protesting atrocities could be a good beginning. >If you want a serious discussion be serious yourself. You may not >agree with words like "Bonapartist," "bureaucracy, " etc., but you >must know that these are not mere words but concepts based on a >rather rigorous analysis. Analogies with the French Revolution were >constantly in the back of the Bolsheviks' minds. And some of them >talked about the bureaucratic degeneration of the party before >Trotsky. I am serious, that's why I posed the questions. I do not have all the answers. It is my opinion that blanket concepts like "Bonapartist bureaucracy" as applied to Russia (after Lenin) and China by Trotskyists are not rigorous at all. They are escapist words rather than explanatory. The incorrect application of historical analogical method, specifically in this case, of applying concepts derived from the French Revolution to the very different social and political conditions in 20th century Russia and China has lead to great blunders in undertanding the nature of reality. >As to your questions, I do not find it possible to >answer them for a number of reasons. They are posited in an >abstract way, both historically and theoretically. How did you >arrive at them? What is their relevance to our present, e.g. for >India? Open your cards. Are you interested in another >feat of "unmasking" Trotskism or in understanding what is going on >and what we can do about it if anything? You do not have to answer anything, comrade. The questions were posed to people on this list specifically in regards to what happened in the USSR and China. Sorry if that did not come out clearly. And I arrived at them from the various posts to this list including those of your own and some personal reading. One relevance to the present is that we have to understand past historical mistakes in order not to repeat them in the future. But, of course, this may not be the most important matter at this time in this forum. Finally, I do not have to unmask Trotskyism. Its theoretical, ideological and practical weaknesses have been exposed long ago. S. Chatterjee --- from list marxism-general-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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