File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1996/96-12-15.190, message 51


Date: Thu, 12 Dec 1996 16:03:18 -0500 (EST)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: Re: M-I: Turkish Crisis


Simon, are you operating in semi-clandestine conditions and can't
use a last name, even a made up last name like the one I used to use when
I was in the Trotskyist underground in Albania: Meshabob?

Can I assign you a name? You are now Simon Fruffleberg. How is that?

I am glad that you could dredge up a quote from Trotsky to help the
Turkish left. Is that what Trotsky did in the early 1900s when he was
trying to understand Russian society? Why do you suppose Lenin spent all
that time studying land distribution statistics in the Czarist court
offices when he was working on "The Development of Capitalism in Russia"?
Wouldn't he have been better off reading Plekhanov? What books did Engels
rely on when he was writing "Conditions of the Working Class in England?"?
You might be startled to learn that this book is based on his walking
tours of places like Manchester and a close reading of the daily
newspapers of the time.

Why is it that Trotskyists seem to lack all curiosity about the real
world? Are you a new type of gnostic religion?

Louis Proyect

On Thu, 12 Dec 1996, Simon wrote:

> 
> Allow me a quote:
> "Russia's (read Turkey's) development is first notable for its backwardness. But 
> historical backwardness does not mean a mere retracing of the course of the advanced 
> countries a hundred or two hundred years late. Rather, it gives rise to an utterly 
> different 'combined' social formation, in which the most highly developed achievements 
> of capitalist technique and structure are integrated into the social relations of 
> feudal and pre-feudal barbarism, transforming and dominating them, fashioning a unique 
> relationship of classes."
> 
> It's from Trotsky "Three Concepts of the Russian Revolution". 



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