From: dr.bedggood-AT-auckland.ac.nz
Date: Sat, 9 Nov 1996 22:48:40 +0000
Subject: Re: M-I: Re: Elections under a bougeois system


> Date:          Sat, 9 Nov 1996 15:04:53 +1000
> To:            marxism-international-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
> From:          rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au (Rob Schaap)
> Subject:       M-I: Re: Elections under a bougeois system
> Reply-to:      marxism-international-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU

> First of all - I'm not so much a 'self-proclaimed' menshevik as one who is
> locating himself in a debate he has never had before.  I didn't know what a
> menshevik was until Dave told me.  And that's why this is such a bloody
> good list. Now, to business. If the Mensheviks could not have 
brought about a revolution (and Dave convinces me that they could not 
have, and perhaps did not want to) in pre-1917 Russia, that is an 
important point. A point specific to the conditions that prevailed 
then and there, perhaps, but an important point.

[yes but what is the point? Surely the point is that once the 
February revolution was underway, the question was: either  to stop with the 
bourgeoisie in power, so that Russia would remain a super-exploited 
semi-colony embroiled in imperialist war [menshevik line] or go on 
under the leadership of the Bolsheviks to take power, stop the war 
and repudiate the debt to the imperialists,i.e. peace,bread,land etc. 
Until April, the Bolsheviks were aligned with the Mensheviks around 
the slogan "Democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the 
peasantry". This is no more than a bourgeois government because it 
contains all the peasantry (and the rich peasants are bourgeois).  
In April, in the famous `April Theses', Lenin moved to adopt a line 
very close to Trotsky's, that is the "Dictatorship of the Proletariat 
leading the poor peasants".  The Bolsheviks fought for this line in 
the Soviets and gained a majority just before the revolution. It was 
the solidarity of the leading layers of workers and poor peasants 
that made this revolution, not just the Bolshevik leadership.
This was also shown in the rallying of the army to the revolution, 
first in August against Kornilov's attempted coup, and in the actual 
insurrection when very few lives were lost.]

> On the other hand, surely Karl is right in asking the questions he does
> about Bolshevik Russia?  While I realise a Marxist revolution is
> definitively ongoing, and certainly fragile in the short to medium term - I
> can not get around my suspicion that the sort of people who are good at
> winning military revolutions and/or opportunistically installing themselves
> in the hierarchy of the only formal locus of power (and, in their
> respective ways, this is true of Lenin, Stalin and Trotsky) are not the
> sort of people best equipped to ensure a 'dictatorship of the proletariat'.
>  
[do we know of a non-military revolution? A revolution is the armed 
seizure of power. There is no way the bourgeoisie will give up power 
if we just put flowers in the barrels of their guns. There is not 
something wrong, then with those who lead revolutions, arms in hand, 
but something right. They are exactly the people you want to lead a 
dictatorship of the proletariat. Trotsky, the "second-banana" and 
"dog" to Antony Caruso, led the Red Army.  According to Karl, led a 
dictatorship over the proletariat, and the greens!. Because the workers state 
was at war, those who undermined the war effort were shot. How else 
is the dicatorship of the proletariat going to survive against the 
dictatorship of the bourgeoisie?]
   
> Military and bureaucratic rationality are categorically goal-oriented and
> hierarchical.  Weber convinces me that the whole idea behind the
> establishment of an institution easily gets forgotten if all power resides
> at this level (and yes, Dave, I acknowledge that this constitutes an
> argument against reformist parties too - albeit not as fundamental an
> argument in my view, as such a party is neither constitutionally nor
> discursively as powerful).
>
[the point here I think is that the bureaucratisation of the 
Bolshevik party was not something inherent in the Bolshevik 
organisation, or the dictatorship of the proletariat,  or the 
relative weakness of the working class, but the proponderence of the peasantry 
and petty bourgeois.  The bureauracy was forced onto  the workers 
state by its isolation and encirclement, which means ultimately, by the 
bureaucratic  2nd International parties which held back revolution in 
Europe. Max Weber's self-fulfilling prophesy]]

> Anyway, a lot of good people died horribly at the hands of just the sort of
> people who prosper under militarily constructed totalitarianism (because
> that's what I think we're talking about).  Killing workers because they are
> not in the vanguard of class consciousness (eg peasants, anarchists, the
> more candid mensheviks etc) is absolutely against the whole idea of any
> Marxism I can stomach.  As Mick Armstrong says (admittedly in another
> context), blaming the workers is elitist and it is incorrect.  Using terror
> to impose the party line on them is the ultimate form of this incoherence. 
> 
[no workers were not shot because they lacked class consciousness as 
such - how could you tell? a questionnaire then bang wrong answer? - 
 but because they actively opposed the workers state.
 If you read Trotsky on Kronstadt you will see that the mutineers
 were given every opportunity to surrender peacefully.]
  
> Now, I'm sensitive to claims that my earlier assertions were not sensitive
> to other historical trajectories (Matt is right about the paucity of choice
> in the US - and I have made my position on Clinton clear before - I
> wouldn't piss on him if he were on fire)  But, to my mind, if we establish
> institutions to promote Marxism within a bourgeois system (like a new
> reformist party), we have a channel for a voice comfortable in the power of
> its argument in the context of its time. Such an organisation may have only
> fleeting significance, before the real-politik of western 'democracy'
> claims its moral rent (and I would *never* favour coalition), but
> significance it has. 

[Well its important to fight for a new Labor Party in the USA. There 
never has been a mass party which emerged out of the labour movement. Of 
course, I would argue that that party should become a revolutionary 
party, and rally workers to rebuild their unions, build massive 
strikes and armed pickets, and prepare to take over state power and 
expropriate capitalist property].
 
> In effect, we would be saying 'you are the most educated proletariat in
> history; under late capitalism women and men have become united in their
> grievance; the core proletariat is being forced by circumstance to
> recognise his/her solidarity with peripheral proletarians; you live in a
> time when the logic of capitalism is at its most nakedly implausible and
> indefensible; as capitalism assumes its most powerful expression, its
> contradictions have become most unmanageable,' and so on.  If it doesn't
> work - well, the time and place have effectively proven themselves as
> inappropriate to bolshevik revolution as they have to menshevik
> progressivism.  And no-one has died.  Doesn't that little bonus matter?

[what's this about "nobody dying"? People are dying in their 
thousands every day all round the world. Thats what will push them to 
a Bolshevik revolution. That is the only way to put an end to the 
causes of death under capitalism. The Bolshevik revolution was 
relatively bloodless, the capitalist counter-revolution against it 
was very bloody, as was the stalinist internal counter-revolution. 
Everwhere there have been menshevik `revolutions',e.g. China in 1927, 
Spain 1936, Chile 1973, the killing has been horrendous.]
 

> 
> 
> 
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