From: m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se
Date: Sun, 16 Mar 1997 10:11:25 +0100
Subject: M-I: No way our history includes Stalin, Mao, & Kautsky!


Carrol C makes a gloriously inclusive declaration:

>We have to accept *our* history,
>however we judge some or many of its details. And our history includes
>Stalin, Mao, Ho, Kim (and also Kautsky et al)


So we've just got to take the good with the bad, eh? And ignore the fact
that *our* history includes organized, explicit alternatives to all these
treacherous leaders! That revolutionary alternatives were worked out and
proposed every step of the way against the Stalinists and others in their
attempts to choke the emancipation of the working class with nationalist,
class-collaborationist and bureaucratic policies.

Carrol is confusing the history of socialism as a broad historical
movement, in which the treacherous leaderships not only of Stalinists and
Social-Democrats, but also the not so much treacherous as openly
class-hostile leaderships of social liberals and petty-bourgeois
nationalists (eg Peronism in Argentina) have  a given place, and the
history of revolutionary Marxism, in which it is inadmissible to include
these traitors and enemies as part of "our" tradition. They are against our
tradition. Their policies destroy our tradition.

As long as Carrol and others with him insist on the historical "unity" of
Stalinism and Bolshevism-Leninism they won't get anywhere and they'll be at
the mercy of charlatans like Adolfo O brandishing their snippets of Lenin
the way Pardoners brandished the bones of Christ in the Middle Ages.


Carrol showed that he doesn't react to Stalinist methods when he swallowed
Louis P's smear of me as the greatest liar ever produced by the Trotskyist
movement. Louis didn't even specify what the lie was supposed to be. But
Carrol didn't react at all to that. All he did was complain that Louis had
responded to one of my posts.

We've got to *regain* our real revolutionary tradition -- and that means
dumping counter-revolutionary usurpers of the names of Marx and Lenin.

Cheers,

Hugh




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