File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-04-03.022, message 19


From: dr.bedggood-AT-auckland.ac.nz
Date: Tue, 1 Apr 1997 16:36:54 +0000
Subject: M-I: Mark Jones - fatalist


>Mark Jones on the Stalin list forwarded this defence of 
Stalin as upholder of the Bolshevik revolution:

[snip] 

> 5.   
   The failure to liquidate the family was the most 
> fundamental and in the end the most lethal failure of the 
> Bolshevik revolution. 

Hardly, as by your own argument, the bourgeois family is subordinated 
to class relations.  This was a big failure, but a much bigger one 
was the failure of the working class to retain power in the SU. Why? 
because if  the workers had kept power, the family would have been a 
demolished. Of course one of the reasons why the working class did not 
retain power was the resurgence of petty bourgeois commodity 
production, and the bourgeois family under NEP, then rehabilitated by Stalin. 
> 
> But this was an enforced defeat: it was a step backwards 
> taken to defend the revolution, just as NEP was, just as the 
> liquidation of left-oppositions was. The failure of the 
> Bolshevik cultural revolution to take real root 
> foredoomed the Soviet Union to become an empty shell 
> encrusted with military hardware. But this failure was pre-
> ordained in the absence of World Revolution (Mirovoya 
> Revolyutsiya).
>
You conflate three conscious decisions here. 
First, how was the rehabilitationl of the bourgeois family justified in 
the defence of the revolution? It was women workers who sparked off 
the February revolution. Women played a key role in the October Revolution.  
Why does locking women up in the family defend this revolution? 
Of course it doesnt. It has the opposite effect, that  of suppressing the 
role of women in the working class, undermining the working class as a 
revolutionary force by dividing it along gender lines, and saving the skin of 
the bureaucracy as a usurping parasitic caste rooted in the petty 
bourgeois patriarchy.
This is a blatant rationalisation to justify what you see as Stalin's 
progressive policies of "defending socialism in one country". 

Which brings us to: Second, NEP. Probably no one is going to 
challenge you on this, as the NEP was necessary to feed the country. 
But it was the Left Opposition that was clearest about the restoration of the 
law of value through NEP and conscioiusly challenged the bureaucracy 
to tax the accumulation of profits. Stalin's knee-jerk suppression of 
the kulacs was a desperate political act to retain power which 
set-back the development of the countryside for years.  

So even in the case of the NEP we have to say that Stalin did not 
fully understand what it represented, since he was influenced by the 
non-dialectical Bukharin to think that the law of value was an 
optional extra in history and not a deadly poison in the workers 
state. So Stalin had nothing to do with the introduction of the NEP 
and everything to do with it getting out of control. Hows that for 
defending the revolution?

Third, so the left oppositionists were also eliminated to save the 
revolution?  Virtually all the old bolsheviks too?  Most of Stalin's 
trusted henchmen at some time got their chips. What was it that the 
LO were doing that was so threatening to the revolution?  Of course, 
they were fighting to proletarianise it and internationalise it! 
Funny that,  the very things that Mark says were lacking and 
instrumental in the collapse of October.  Perhaps if the LO had won 
over Stalin the revolution could have been saved. But of course, 
Trotsky would not have subordinated the world revolution to the 
defence of the socialist fatherland by entering into political alliances 
with Hitler or with bourgeois parties in the popular fronts. Nor would 
he have stooped to the suppression of the revolutionary upsurges 
at the end of the war to keep his part of the bargain in restoring 
imperialist order in the world. 

No it was not the oppositionists that should have been eliminated but 
the bureaucracy. Mark goes on about the "tragedy" of the collapse of 
October.  As I understand it "tragedies" occur when we make the wrong 
choice based on our perception of our interests. Otherwise it is fate.  
The Tragedy of October for the working class was the rise of the petty 
bourgeois based bureaucracy that in the name of "socialism" [i.e. the 
perceived interests of the working class] collaborated with the international 
bourgeoisie to stay in power at the expense of the international working 
class,  including women.
   
> Thus, the west's policies of 'encirclement' and 'containment' 
> struck at the heart of Bolshevism from the first. Every 
> attempt by the Party to overcome or transcend the baleful 
> consequences of this defeat failed. The material and social 
> bases of the October Revolution simply were not strong 
> enough to make the thing viable in the long term.

Here Mark is trying to excuse the conscious retreat of the 
bureaucracy from revolutionary politics by pointing towards an 
insuperable external objective situation.  Bullshit!  "Every attempt 
by the party".!!!  What defeatism! What abject bowing under the to 
sob story of the Stalinists." It was too much for us". It wasnt too 
much to send out agents to murder Trotskyists. It wasnt too much to 
hold mock trials and mass executions. It wasnt too much to behead the 
revolutionary movements in China, Spain, Italy, Greece and Indochina.
This is the tragedy of the legacy of October.  That the revolutionary 
opportunties that abounded following that lead, were deliberately 
sabotaged in the name of "socialism".. Not only were these avoidable 
defeats done in the name of socialism, as they got more rotten and more 
destructive of the international revolution, they also turned the 
legacy of October into its opposite- the rationalisations and 
pretentions of the Stalinist Dictatorship which are now parrotted and 
forwarded to these lists from Mark Jones and Olaechea. 
 
> 
> All of these adverse subjective and objective (material, 
> psychological, external and internal) factors conspired to 
> slowly drain the revolution of its real content. 
> 
This is a melange of indeterminacy.

> The enormous loss of life from 1918 to 1945 effectively 
> decapitated the Russian working class and stole from it any 
> residual chance of a reflux of revolutionary vitality after 
> 1945. The Hitler War bled the Soviet working class white.

True.  But so did Stalin,  who was more "responsible" for the loss of 
Russian lives than was Hitler. Why do I say this?  Because Stalin subverted 
the European revolution as early as 1923.  He was primarily 
responsible for the victory of Hitler in 1933. Olaecheas' rubbish 
about Trotsky subverting the united front, rather than Stalin, is 
based on projecting his own fear of revolution [and hence fatalism]
onto the German working  class. German workers were ready and 
willing to fight. The communists made no attempt to bloc with the 
social democrats. They even preferred Hitler until it was too late.  
How pathetic to blame Trotsky for not being willing to enter a 
popular front, when the CP would not enter even a military bloc 
with a bourgeois-democratic party because it was supposed to be 
"social fascist"!   Olaechea's third period stalinism is set in formaldehyde.
Then of course Stalin killed off most of the general staff just 
before the war. Trotsky at the time condemned these actions as those 
of a criminal incompetent prepared to risk  the defence of state 
property to maintain his dictatorship.  

] 
> I am sure that, just as Kollontai supported Stalin until her 
> death, any honest revolutionary would have done the same, 
> would have accepted the tragic consequences of the initial 
> weakness of the revolution. Kollontai's predicament was 
> tragic, but tragedy is a proletarian and not a bourgeois fate 
> in this epoch and we have no choice to accept that 
> Revolutions which fail or only partially successful, are 
> essentialy tragic outcomes of the hsitrocial process and are 
> bound to be endures as such by their creators.

More crap which conflates tragedy with fate. It reinforces my view 
that you really see tragedy as fate. Hence your fatalism.

> Blame Ebert and the failures of the Sparticists.

Yes and why?  They were mensheviks at heart and did not see the need 
to build a bolshevik party. Stalin was quite happy to keep up the 
tradition of the mensheviks even in October 1917.  He got the chance 
to revert openly after 1924.

> Blame the 'miracle on the Vistula'.
> Blame Woodrow Wilson and the Fourteen Points.
> Blame the indescribably awful interwar foreign policy of 
> the British.

 None of these are worth commenting on.
 
> In the end however, we should blame no-one. We should 
> rather, continue to try to emulate the  unprecedented 
> achievements of the Bolsheviks, who took 
> the burden of emancipation on their shoulders and were 
> ready to pay any price, even the most tragic, which not 
> only did they pay, they knew from the beginning, they 
> would have to pay. 

Comeon Mark. This is your trademark. Throw out a whole lot of 
historical stuff to fit your preconceived defence of Stalin - he did 
what he had to -  then turn on the soppy music and get misty eyed 
about bullshit notions of  human dignity in  general.  There were 
lots of generals quoting human dignity as they marched to war. 
I don't trust human dignity as an end for which many means can be justified.
The Bolsheviks were not motivated by nostalgia or a romantic sense of 
self-sacrifice. They were motivated by the drive to remake the world. 
 

 It is right to be revolutionary, right to 
> struggle with all we have and are, that our dignity and 
> human dignity in general can only be sought and found in 
> this struggle, wherein lies all the true comradeship  and 
> sororality we shall ever find. That to be a communist is the 
> best and noblest thing there is, even if we suspect our 
> hopes will remain dreams inherited by a future generation, 
> as the Bolsheviks themselves well knew.

Im sure that the Bolsheviks i.e. those who died at Stalins hands, 
would reject substituting a materialist marxist analysis of the 
cause  of their deaths for platitudes about "true comradeship" and 
"communist nobility".  
> 
> Revolution would still be the inescapable destiny of 
> humankind if for no other reason than that humanity can 
> only discover itself through its endeavour to slough off the 
> hypocrisy and sham freedoms of this world, through 
> revolutionary comradeship and shared sacrifice and 
> struggle. 
>
You would do well to start with yourself. Slough off the hypocrisy of 
Stalins apologetics.  Slough off the "sham freedoms" which millions 
had to die unnecessarily for under  stalin's dictatorship. Recognise 
that the true comradeship and shared sacrifice in struggle has been 
made historically by those who opposed Stalin's counter-revolution 
and paid with their lives. 
 
> But this is not the only reason why proletarian revolution is 
i inevitable.The world is a much more incendiary place today than it 
> was in 1917. The falsity and hollowness of late capitalism, 
> the glittering surface, is just a thin crust over a boiling, 
> volcanic magma.
> 
Its nice to think this, but there is no inevitable socialist 
revolution. There are no impossible situations for the bosses. They 
can always try to wipe us all out if they dont need our labour. 
Revolution wont happen like a force of nature. First we have 
to build a revolutionary international that can lead 
the working class to its magmanimous victory. 

> Take this very question: the question of feminism, of sexual 
> freedom, of gender difference, of the double-burden, the 
> differential exploitation of women in the reproduction of 
> the only commodity which capital still cannot produce, the 
> commodity labour-power, which is also the only value-
> producing commodity (this concept, the central Marxist 
> concept, defines in itself the entire parasitism of capitalism, 
> and also shows how the fate of women and the nature of 
> the domestic burden are not merely relevant to Marxism, 
> they are at the very heart of value theory) -- and see how 
> this question has evolved and becoming completely 
> symptomatic, florid with symptoms, of the general crisis of 
> late capitalism.

This is quite good in an abstract sort of way. But how do you create 
a revolutionary movement that can incorporate women in the leadership 
when you have just given a whole lot of reasons why taking them out 
of the leadership was necessary to save the revolution in the SU?
What woman, or man for that matter, is going to take you seriously? 
And it won't be a question of writing off women as mere "feminists". 
That is to say that workers can't be citizens. Or that it is not 
progressive to fight to gain and retain equal rights of citizenship 
under capitalism when they are under much attack not only in the case 
of oppressed groups such as women, or blacks, but for the whole 
working class. 
 
>  For the whole period since 1917 international
> reaction waged and still wages a bitter counter-offensive and
> in no sphere is this more vigorous than the sphere of the 
> family, gender and sexuality. Today capital is launching a
> vast new many-pronged offensive in this sphere whose goal is 
> nothing less than the Faustian dream of eliminating live labour 
> from production, of overcoming its instrinsic parasitism by learning
> how to produce the commodity labour-power.

This would be a good thing. It would eliminate domestic labour for a 
start. But as Marx argued the working class will 
not sit around while it is displaced from pre-history by machines. We 
will take over the machines, including ones which displace us, and 
use them in socialist production.  Your  historic fatalism which 
consigns workers to the margins to justify stalin, also consigns them 
to the streets in the industrial city.  What about the class struggle 
Mark?
> 
> We have to analyse our tasks as revolutionaries in the light 
> of ex-vitro embryology, of the deconstruction of the human 
> Genome, of human sexuality, of mind/brain difference, 
> of the already-envisaged Huxleyian artificial 
> wombs, of the commodification of human characteristics 
> and human subjectivity: of the onrush of cloning, memory-
> download and other technologies whose impact on 
> humankind are, in the hands of capital, insupportable, 
> intolerable, a total, in-your-face, outright onslaught on the 
> essence of what it is to be human. 
> 
Again, here is the passive working class as laboratory subjects, 
having their genes duplicated while they watch TV. This is  crediting 
capital with the ability to replace workers without a fight. 
 After rationalising the collapse of the first October, you are now 
predicting no need for a  Second October because the working class 
has no interest in revolution since its labour power will no longer 
be expropriated. Wake up!

Dave
For Permanent Revolution (including this list).



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


   

Driftline Main Page

 

Display software: ArchTracker © Malgosia Askanas, 2000-2005