Date: Wed, 20 Nov 1996 08:28:31 -0500 (EST)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-I: Broken records


On Wed, 20 Nov 1996, bookmarks wrote:

> 
> 1) Supporting a struggle against imperialism has absolutely nothing to do
> with the class nature of the state under attack - see Trotsky's writings on
> Abyssinia or China in the 1930s. Morte recently, I'm sure that everyone on
> this list would have supported Nicaragua under the Sandinistas against the
> USA, but did anyone believe that the Sandinistas were building a
> proletarian regime? The Sandinistas didn't.
> 

Louis: I don't think you get what I mean by support. I am not talking
about verbal support. I am talking about the kind of support the group I
worked with gave Nicaragua. We sent computer programmers, engineers and
other skilled people to help Nicaragua during the contra war. After they
returned, they organized meetings, distributed petitions, etc. to stop the
US aggression. An article in an ISO/SWP paper stating that it is good that
Somoza has been overthrown by petty-bourgeois readicals doesn't constitue
support in my book.


> 2) When Louis talks of *the proletarian revolutions in Cuba, Vietnam and
> China* he's using the term proletarian in a metaphysical sense. The actual
> proletariats in Cuba, China and Vietnam were bystanders in the nationalist
> revolutions. In China, the Red Armies sent ahead orders to the cities they
> were about to enter arguing against strikes, and calling on the police etc
> to remain at their posts until they were replaced.
> 

Louis: Oy gevalt, another state capitalist who can summarize 3 revolutions
in a sentence. Do you people get special cadre training to learn how to do
this? Were you around when I was explaining the dynamics of the Cuban
Revolution? Do you have any books on Cuba in your bookstore, other than
those written by people like K.S. Karol? Will you volunteer to be the
first state-capitalist to debate me on Cuba?



> 3) The big question the left today still has to confront is the question of
> Stalinism. OK, it can be simply used as a term of abuse - so can most
> political terms; it doesn't mean that they cease to be useful. How is it
> that a movement for human emancipation could become transformed into a
> police dictatorship? 
>    Tony Cliff's theory of state capitalism (see his State capitalism in
> Russia, newly reprinted by Bookmarks) gave a materialist explanation of
> Stalinism as rooted in the collective class interests of a new class of
> exploiters, and allowed an understanding of the crisis that engulfed the
> Stalinist regimes of 1989. I could go on about this, but the key point is
> simply this: do we characterise the regimes in Russia, China etc as what we
> mean by socialist or not? And if not, how do we fit them into a Marxist
> explanation of the modern world?
> 
> Charlie Hore, Bookmarks Bookshop   
> 


Louis: What is the deal? Did Jorn Anderson take a leave of absence and you
have been assigned to replace him on this list? One of the things I find
ever so tiresome about the way you folks talk about China and Cuba is that
you never add anything new to the discussion. God bless Adam Rose. He is
going to supply us with some new, interesting information about the 18th
century English working-class. You, on the other hand, have not stated
anything in this post that I haven't heard a thousand times from
Cliffites.



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