File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9801, message 245


Date: Fri, 16 Jan 1998 14:15:53 -0500 (EST)
From: louisgodena-AT-ids.net (Louis R Godena)
Subject: M-I: Re: On Lenin



You write:

>I think Pipes and Carr are worlds apart, even though there opinions may
>converge
>on the question of Trotsky or Buhkarin.  Carr was a serious scholar,
>about the
>best that the bourgeoisie can produce.  Pipes is an ideologue, who's
>work is
>much cherished by the most rabid reactionaries; Carr is out of print,
>probably
>because he's a bit too sympathetic.

Well, Carr is not out of print, though you have to go to Macmillan (London)
to get his magisterial *History of Soviet Russia*.  There is another
difference.  Carr always wrote for commercial publishers; his work depended
on widespread public acceptance to remain in print.  Practically everything
Pipes has written has come to us through the agency of a university press,
the standards of which do not rest on strong commercial sales.

As for their similarities, I've already given you a number of citations.
Have you read Pipes? 



>This is really wrong: Nazism justified itself as defending Western
>civilization
>against the Communist, asiatic horde, and here you're saying they had a
>point.
>Fascism was stongest in Italy and Germany because those countries had
>experienced
>powerful revolutionary waves that nearly toppled the old order.  The
>roots of the
>Nazis where in the freikorps, who fought German communists long before
>they fought
>Russian ones.  Look, I *know* you're not anit-Lenin or anti-Communist,
>but sometimes
>you say things that clearly converge with reaction; it seems to be more
>deliberately
>provocative than iconoclastic.


Agreed.  This is exactly what I'm saying.  The ferocious character of the
Nazi holocaust against the Jews, the working class and the Communists may
not have directly stemmed from capital's fear of the Soviet Union, but the
very fact that they were able to take power certainly does.  Where is the
problem?   I follow Dimitrov very closely on this.  


>You say over and over that Lenin "lusted for power".  People like Lenin
>and Mao
>knew that political power was fundament, everything was geared towards
>it's
>conquest.  The bourgeoisie always try to paint this as "see, they're
>just like
>us, they crave power for it's own sake", distorting the fundmental
>difference of
>power for the class vs. personal power.  I think you blur the lines here
>a lot.


I said (echoing, again both Carr and Pipes), "Lenin wanted power, the others
didn't", just as I have said that, today "Yelstin and international capital
want power in Russia, and the Communists don't.  The latter simply want to
share in the spoils and enjoy their bygone privileges".  Lenin *did* lust
for power, but not for himself, he wanted to seize control on behalf of the
proletariat (however one defines "proletariat").  This to me is incontestable.  


>You've also said elsewhere that the Bolsheviks didn't have working class
>support,
>that they launched a coup.  This clearly converges with reaction. 1)
>they were
>able to win majority votes in the Soviets (read your Carr!) by sticking
>to their
>principles and exposing their rivals among the Mensheviks, Anarchists,
>etc. 


I did read Carr, notably the very essay I quoted from the Pipes' volume. I
suggest, instead, that you read it.



>Had it only been a coup, they would have been unable to hold power in
>the face 
>of opposition both by the reactionaries and the people.  Over the course
>of the
>civil war they were able to win over large sections of the poor
>peasantry which
>they didn't have before, to say nothing of mobilizing large sections of
>the 
>working class to fight the war.  Anarchists always bring up Krondstat to 
>prove that the Bolsheviks betrayed the revolution; we must understand
>there
>deep contradictions within the class, but to go to the extreme position
>that
>the Bolsheviks had no working class support is both ahistorical and
>liquidates
>the whole notion of the party of the working class.  I think you are too
>influenced by your own perceptions of what the U.S. Left is today.


I have never brought up the issue of Krondstat, on which you and I pretty
much agree.  This has nothing to do with my labeling the October revolution
with what it was, essentially a *coup d'etat* by a tiny elite of determined
revolutionaries.  Due to the anemic nature of its opposition, the coup did
not need mass support to succeed, though the Bolsheviks (as you point out)
*did* later amass considerable support in the countryside, as well as among
selected sectors of the working class. But that is unrelated to what we are
speaking about here. 



>I'm too uneducated to know what "pecululation" means, but deception and
>double-dealing?
>Marx, Lenin, etc. NEVER where deceptive about what they wanted -- look
>at what Marx
>said in the Manifesto. Social dems. and revisionist who claim to want
>socialism
>but then betray the class -- they apply deception and double dealing. 
>Perhaps you
>meant Lenin was willing to deceive and double-deal with the
>reactionaries -- you 
>should make this clear.  And even then the Bolsheviks make honest
>treaties with
>the reactionaries.  One of the things that should distinguish the
>communist from
>the opportunist is precisely on the question of honesty and
>double-dealing.

You're beginning to sound like my aunt Agnes when she discovered that Jesus
may have had sex.  *All* politicians lie, double-deal and worse.  It is the
nature of the system in which they move.  Your scenario of certain men
standing above history possessing only the purest of motives, honest and
self-abnegating at all times, is simply too silly to waste powder and shot
on.  Yours is a coloring book version of what motivates historical actors.
For me, the issue is not the "honest" or "dishonest" character of an act or
personality; it is the nature of the change being sought and resisted.  As I
wrote last year to Adolfo; "whatever advances the destruction of the
bourgeoisie and the cause of communism, is moral, whatever retards them is
immoral."  


>Fine.  Just don't throw out the baby with the bathwater.  The reason I'm
>going
>on about this is that I think you've shown some bad judgement in your
>posts: you've
>been charged with being anti-Semetic and now anti-Communist.  I know you
>are not
>those things, but the way you word things you create doubt and undermine
>your
>credibility as moderator.  It's not that you should pander after []
>(who in my opinion is about as "Marxist" as any other penny-a-dance
>Trot), but
>that you should aim a little better before you shoot.

I reject completely the charge that anything I've ever written on this list
is anti-Semitic, or, for that matter, that I am anti-Communist in any
meaningful sense.  I do stand four-square against the lumpen gangsterism of
the "vanguard" groups and those among their number, past and present, who
persist in behaving in their old ways.   This list, while I am moderator,
will never succumb to the Thought Police, of whatever stripe and carrying
whatever credentials.

Louis G



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