From: "Esbati, Ali" <17428-AT-HHSS.SE>
Subject: M-I: RE: Re: Defining through practice
Date: Mon, 27 Jan 1997 14:38:03 +0100


I believe that the unpropotionally strong outbursts regarding my remark
on the Lenin-Stalin theme shows partly that I wrote in a too unprecise
and easy-to-misunderstand manner and partly that this is a question that
challenges the fundamental dogma of some people on the list.

So: What did I NOT mean with my post. I actually did not mean to
question the historical importance of Lenin. I do believe - and I wrote
this - that Lenin is a political and philosophical thinker of huge
proportions. I do believe, that Lenin's (in contrast to Stalin's)
writing and thought can be very useful for a revolutionary movement of
today. Actually, I have no problem with saying that Lenin is THE most
important marxist thinker when it comes to spotting and suggesting
solutions to practical poblems of a truly revolutionary movement.

What I did react against was the lack of willingness to really - beyond
dogma and ideology - analyse the roots of Stalinism. Lot of thinking has
been made around the effects of this despotic and bureucratic era on the
further deveolpment of Socialism. But I believe that very little has
been said and written on important question: Why did this happen? Was
the rise of Stalinism a totally specific, almost haphazard development
or is it possible to understand it in a more general way, to connect it
somehow to what the communists in Russia and the rest of the world
thought was correct and used as their model of thinking. And there is a
reason why I want this process. It's not that I want to see a war on
Marxism-International, of course not. It's because I think this is
important for not falling into se same pit-falls once again.

I'll try to comment a few of the posts commenting my intervention.

Jason (which, unlike others, starts by accepting my existence :-))
replies by throwing out a long Mandel quote. Well, I can really almost
buy it all in that quote. But it doesn't change much change. You can
take some early Lenin writings and show almost anything with. You can
even take som late Lenin writings, or the constitution of the Soviet
Union, or speeches made by comrade Stalin. As long as there is a huge
gap between what was said and done - there is not much value in that. I
can agree, to a very large extent, with the interpretation that Mandel
does. The point here, is that things went different, and that I believe
you can find it in Lenin's basic concept of democracy.

How can you characterize Stalinism? One way of doing it is the word
"Control" (this is for instance the core of the Swedish marxist Lars
Bergquist's analysis of Stalinism). The fierce control was ment to
guarantee the correct development of the revolution. Of course, you
don't have control just for its own sake, you have control to be able to
correct, in one way or another. This is, as I see it, not something
invented by Stalin, but present as a very important part of Lenin's
concept of democracy and the role of the state. He write in State and
Revolution: "Registration and Control, that is what ABOVE ALL, is needed
to get the _first_phase_ of the Communist society 'straight on the right
track'" (This is not an authorized translation, but my own from the
Swedish text). The state will then successively turn this function to
"the armed people". When the marjoity of the people "autonomousely and
everywhere" starts conducting such registration and control "of the
Capitalist (who have now become civil servants) and of those
intellectuals who have preserved capitalist habits", he writes, then it
this control will be "truly universal and will comprise all people" and
thus it will be "impossible to withdraw from it".

One has to be pretty unwilling not to see the seeds of confine
repression beeing sown here. The fundamental problem is that you create
a model for upholding the Socialism Society, where you see the opression
of the bugouisie as a legitimate role for the state. At the same time,
you automatically suppose that the working people will be with you, or
if they are not that they have to be severely controlled in some
fashion. Is it so hard to imagine this model being turned into exactly
the monster it did become under Stalin? My answer is no. I think you
have to see the problems conntected to the very notion of DOP to
understand Stalinism.

Hugh says that Stalin tuned the "authority of the DOP *against* the
working class". Well, yes. But to make a clear  distinction, it's not
enough to simply say "In the whole of Lenin's revolutionary practice,
the majority was not opressed. In Stalin's it was". First point: who
says 'the marjority' was not opressed by Lenin's revolutionary practice?
Second point, and much more important: What says that this was because
of the differences between the two in understanding the role of the
opressive appartus and not because the latter simply continued a
development already started? I think the latter explanation is much more
in accordance with reality.

Hugh also wants me to enlighten him in terms of similarities between
Lenin and Stalin when it comes to the handing of disagreements and
opposition. I can't do this be quoting, but surely you must know that
there were acts of "rinsing" in the party, among the land-owning farmers
and among scientist already when Lenin was leading the Soviet State.
Lenin was a son of Tsarist opression. He never hesitated in using the
death penalty as a way of putting things right. It's virtually
impossible to read him without having this pretty well understood. Of
course there was a big difference here between Lenin and Stalin. But the
question is, once again: Were the Moscw Trials just an outburst of
Stalin's sick mind making up theories or a quite natural mechanism
coming into work in a self-correcting universal dictatorship?

So, finally Louis Proyect thinks I was "trying to take" the discussion
somewhere just to "blow this list sky-high". He also thinks that this
sort of discussion would lead to pro-This and pro-That debates, ending
up in Moscow Trials. This is not the reason I raised the subject. I'm
not very interested in discussing the Moscow Trials. I'm interested in
an understanding of what went wrong, based on something else than
ideological clashes were people are unwilling to see realities if they
disturb their circles. I'm engaged in an every-day struggle againt
capitalism and for Socialism. I don't want this struggle to end up in
something completely different than what I'm fighting for dreaming of.

/Ali Esbati




     --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---