From: dr.bedggood-AT-auckland.ac.nz
Date: Mon, 17 Mar 1997 23:07:31 +0000
Subject: M-I: (Fwd) With Friends Like These...


------- Forwarded Message Follows -------
From:          "David Bedggood" <d.bedggood-AT-auckland.ac.nz>

I don't think this message got posted on M-I so I am sending it 
again. If it appears twice I apologise in advance. 
Dave.

Yoshie said commenting on recent un-comradely behaviour on M-I:

> With friends like Mark and Adolfo, who needs enemies?
> 
I agree with the sentiment, but I don't regard Mark and Adolfo as 
class enemies.  We should struggle to make this list communist in 
practice as much as possible, and as well as refusing to put up with 
death threats, sexist and homophobic language,  try to explain why 
self-identified communists succumb to this behaviour.

Johns says its because the list has no working class roots. I agree 
that it is  biased towards academics and intellectuals, but it 
is not isolated from the working class. Most people on this list 
are workers, if mainly mental workers. I think that  Mark's 
explanation of his `alleged homophobia' - that the language he used 
is part of the working class culture that he has learned in the 
past is correct. But it is no less homophobic for that. Therefore 
while it would be good to get more participation from a wider range 
of workers, that is not the problem, nor is it the solution.    

The problem is that we are living through a period of working class 
defeats.  The former SU which many on the left either saw as 
socialist, or at least as post-capitalist, has disintegrated.  
Workers of all ethnicities and genders are being smashed back by 
neo-liberal attacks accross the world.  Yet in many places the 
resistence is there and workers are putting up a struggle.  It is 
because we all want these struggles to lead this time to a successful 
revolution that we are at loggerheads and very antagonistic to 
political traditions which we judge to be reformist at best or 
counter-revolutionary at worst.

Thats why this list is a microcosm of the debates raging across the  
whole political world. The emotional investment of sometimes decades 
of hard political slog won't be wished away.  Raging at each other on 
the computer just excecerbates the differences that are already 
there.  All marxists must start from the position that inside the 
working class there is a revolutionary proletarian line and a 
competing petty-bourgeois line. The question is:  which on this list 
fall to either side of that line?

Adolfo and the Stalin defenders cannot accept that Stalinism was  
counter-revolutionary; for them it must be Trotskyism. For 
Trotskyists vice versa.  Neither side can be shifted from its 
entrenched position unless the historical record is confronted 
honestly.  I am a Trotskyist so therefore I take that side of the 
argument.  I am prepared to debate vigorously that Stalinism was 
counter-revolutionary on the one hand,  but to debate just as 
vigorously that the former SU [and other such states] was a workers 
state and not state capitalist. 

However, in arguing these positions I have to come up with a 
dialectical materialist explanation.  Stalinism must therefore be an 
expression of petty bourgeois influence inside the working class. But 
this does not make Trotskyism automatically the proletarian line. In 
my view pre-war Trotskyism continued the Bolshevik tradition.  
Numerous debates on this list have strongly  defended that claim 
notably those of Hugh and Bob.  However, Post war Trotskyism 
underwent a collapse into centrism,[by which we mean politics which 
`talk' revolution but `act' confused, vacillating between revolution 
and reform.]  Post war Trotskyism too, then succumbed to petty 
bourgeois influences so that in my view no healthy revolutionary 
Trotskyist international exists. 

To create a new revolutionary international we have to ruthlessly 
criticise all the weakness and betrayals that all petty-bourgeois 
political tendencies introduced into the working class. We have 
to prove again and again to each new layer of radicalising 
militants, that petty bourgeois class interests lead to a 
division between theory and practice which means that 
intellectuals propose historical schemas unrelated to events, 
while workers are left to fight without revolutionary theoryl or 
programmatic leadership. Which is not to say that the working class 
is already revolutionary and could have staged a revolution if it 
were not for the petty-bourgeois misleaderships. In reality workers 
cannot spontaneously arrive at a revolutionary consciousness without 
the active intervention in their struggles of a revolutionary 
vanguard. It takes marxism to explain that exploitation 
comes from surplus-value during production and not deduction 
>from wages in exchange and distribution. Spontaneism  is `workerism' 
- a form of idealism. 

So I would like people on this list to get back to the politics of 
proposing  what they would say and do on the side of workers in 
Albania. Apart from the self-identified Troskyists on M-I, only two 
others have commented on what is happening in Albania to my 
knowledge. Here is a massive armed uprising in response to the 
reintroduction of the market in a former deformed workers state which 
threatens to destabilise Europe and possibly the former SU.   Here is 
a good chance to debate the politics and leave the flaming for the 
real class war.

If the stalinists still on this list want to prove that Stalinism was 
[and is] a progressive force, explain how it is that the masses are 
arming themselves and forming proto-soviets to get rid of former 
stalinists. Here is an actually existing armed struggle in an 
impoverished country. Does Adolfo advocate a democratic stage of 
struggle or a struggle for socialism now? 

If the state caps on this list want to claim that the former 
Albania was state cap, let them explain why the former `ruling class' 
abandoned their state property and now promote the market.  Why didnt 
they switch to the market decades ago? Perhaps it was because 
then Albania had full employment based on a bureaucratic plan, and 
the Stalinist dictatorship could maintain sufficient support and 
still live off the backs of the workers while the plan survived. 

Whatever position, here is an opportunity to argue the `correct line' 
in a rapidly developing revolutionary situation which will become a 
test for all of us. 

 Dave 
For Permanent Revolution (and on this 
list).


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