Date: Fri, 28 Mar 1997 21:32:46 +0000
Subject: M-TH: Forwarded from LeninList


Dear X



I'm bound to say, without prejudice to your criticism of my own 
allegedly intemperate style, that it is a bit of a cop-out to talk about 
'defeating them politically' with 'sharp arguments.' That, after all, is just 
what we have tried to do but if we manage to score the odd point we are 
shouted down, accused of infant-eating etc. One cannot win arguments 
with people whose purpose is simply wrecking, especially when the 
chief moderator tacitly supports the wreckers. 

There *is* a political struggle going on in these lists, but it is 
wrongly seen as being *in addition to* 'debates' 'discussions' and 'seminars'. 
In fact that struggle is the central thing and not an irksome adjunct, 
or just noise, flaming etc. Wherever you  stand, it is something that has 
to be dealt with other than by prescribing 'sharp arguments' or failing that, 
killfiling. 

The failure of the Jefferson Lists to generate more than heat 
and smoke testifies that no space exists within the
Academy, even on the net, for revolutionary as opposed to 
spoon-fed Marxism. That is backhanded affirmation of the continuing 
importance of revolutionary Marxism. It also makes it absolutely 
necessary to acquire the technical means for organising lists 
independently ourselves. This is not just a practical matter, 
it is a crucial question of principle. Hence Leninlist.

Every debate is a political struggle and only revolutionary 
partisanship will carry us forward, and not reliance on parliamentary 
canons or on the norms of scholarly objectivity (clearly another
fetishism).

We need to be openly partisan. Meaning, if we agree these people are 
scum, as you say, then we must start from that and organise accordingly
-- the alternative is to progress through thread after sterile thread
like a medieval queen (no homophobic pun intended) 
progressing through the slums of London holding lavender-
drenched hankies to her nose and with gaze averted. 

The point about sharp arguments is that sooner or later someone has to
be impaled on the point of them, otherwise what *is* the point?

You wrote: 
> the way you should comport in a fight with
> opportunists and liberals is the way Lenin did. With clarity and wit. You
> were simply throwing a tantrum. Tantrums do not win arguments.

Lenin was not the Mr Nice Guy you imply, not that it makes any 
difference if he was. We don't need to ape anyone. In fact he was 
an incendiary, not just a flamer, and his personalised polemical style upset
people pretty much as say Adolfo's does. But his purposes were the 
ruthless search for revolutionary clarity,  the ruthless exposure of 
opportunism, conciliationism, backsliding, betrayal, cynicism. You 
know the history as well as I do. 

Lenin's targets were people who also called themselves revolutionists and 
hated to be badmouthed by Lenin, hated his uncompromising manner. 

People wondered for instance how it was possible to denounce 
Vera Zasulich as Lenin did when he first met her in Switzerland. 
Were they not both  impoverished political exiles who had given 
themselves to the struggle against absolutism? 

But Lenin  was merciless, unsparing in his criticism of  Zasulich's
equivocations. 
Why, then, is it wrong today to be equally merciless in criticising 
the obvious errors of ZeynepTufecogliu, merely because of her 
personal circumstances? Actually it is even more unforgivable to 
forgive her than it would be to forgive some English 
feminist living in middle class Islington for mouthing nonsense. 
No-one expects such a person to behave differently. Everyone knows 
what such women are about. 
No-one important, i.e. no worker, really listens to them. But if the 
constant flattering portrayals of Tufecogliu are true, she actually 
is influencing workers in struggle. Humouring and indulging her 
therefore is wrong.  

But second and more important, Lenin's *prerevolutionary* politics was
still conducted under the general rubric of Enlightenment freedoms: 
Russian social-democrats were denied the normal bourgeois freedoms
 and therefore fought for them. This fight, and not some apriori insight,
was what first drove them into conspiratorial activity and to a 
'Bolshevik' style of agitation, polemic and theorising. But the rational kernel 
of the Bolshevism of the future was still contained within the mystifying shell
of parliamentary, polite discourse. That is why Lenin's prerevolutionary
style is a poor guide to how we should fight and how we should conduct
ourselves to counter-revolutionaries nowadays, when there can simply no 
longer be any excuse for humouring and indulging the vipers in the nest.

We are not playing parliamentary games. The whole tragedy of the working class
this century is that it precisely began to play such games (femal suffrage,
birth of the British Labour Party etc etc) *after* 1918, ie exactly at the 
moment when it was possible and necessary to abandon all illusions,
and they obviously were illusions, about parliamentary roads to socialism.

In other words, the proper Lenin to use as a role model is the post-revolutionary
Lenin, the Lenin whose true heirs and successors were indeed Stalin,
Mao, Ho Chi Minh, Gonzalo et.


It was forced on them, by censorship,  the secret police, the denial of 
democracy, all of which they fought against. They strove for bourgeois
 rights and freedoms in the same way, as goals in their own right.. 

But later, after their successful revolution, the Bolsheviks moved on from 
and finally abandoned bourgeois rights and freedoms. I am 
sure that you personally do not, and psychologically cannot, accept the 
implications of this. You have no moral defence of Stalinism against the 
attacks on its alleged denial of rights, Gulags etc. This lack of a defence 
of the real history of the international workers' movement this 
century tends to vitiate your whole politics and it leaves you 
constantly floundering in the marshy centre. You will hate me 
for saying this, it seems impossibly smug, condescending and also 
implies that I am an 'apologist' for Stalin's crimes etc.

But  until we stop being forced on the back foot about Stalin,
until we abandon a reflexive defensiveness, we will never get anywhere. 

The plain, simple and unarguable fact is that Stalin defended socialism 
He made mistakes and committed crimes in the process. That matters,
 but not so much as the fact that he defended socialism (those who argue 
for a state-cap USSR have been driven back to about 1923 by now; 
so at least we can console ourselves that all of Stalin's crimes, like Hitler's, 
like the crimes of the US in Vietnam etc., were committed by capitalists 
after all). 

As long as capitalism exists socialists will be forced to either accept 
defeat or to wage revolutionary war on capitalism on the only terms by 
which victory can be won, the terms of  Bolshevism, as interpreted 
by Lenin, Stalin and Mao. There is no other path to socialism but this.

It will be a bloody fight to the finish because bourgeois human rights 
and freedoms and parliamentary politics are a hypocritical charade. Socialism
cannot happen unless it is won by people's war. Any kind of discussion circle,
any kind of activity, must begin with that. And it is obvious as soon the absolute
unarguable necessity for people's war is grasped, that anything else is simply
wasted time, red herrings, diversions, emptiness.

Those who have visceral abreactions to this idea 
must get a new life and stop calling themselves revolutionaries and socialists.

The French Enlightenment itself, and the political reorganisation of 
European life it fostered, was possible only because marginal Europe,
 which until the 16th century was generally at least 400 years behind 
Asia, mercilessly plundered the New World. 

Colonial plunder fuelled capitalist accumulation. The French 
Revolution was christened with the blood of tens of millions and 
hundreds of millions of humans: hecatombs of native Americans, 
Africans, Asians, were human sacrifices at the altar of capital and 
its hypocritical nostrums: 'Democracy', 'Inalienable Rights'; 'Free 
Speech' etc. 

So the hypocrisy of bourgeois rights was present from the outset.

Property rights and market-relations have always been sanctified in
rivers of blood. How is it possible in any way, from any viewpoint,
to sincerely suppose capitalism will be displaced, other than by 
warfare? How is it possible to argue against people's war started 
by the proletariat in colonial countries, or that it should not begin exactly
 there, where the conflagrations that destabilise world capitalism and 
precipitate social crises, economic depressions and wars have ALWAYS 
begun? And always will begin -- right there in the marginal, unstable
hotspots, the dark colonial peripheries where bourgeois  rights 
have no meaning, even theoretically? Revolution is impossible 
without armed uprisings: Marx said it. Engels said it. Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, 
Mao, practised it.

Revolution broke out in Russia for exactly this reason: because it 
was a semi-periphery. Then what should a revolutionary socialist who finds 
herself in such a locale be doing? How is it possible for a woman 
allegedly conducting revolutionary struggle in such a semi-peripheral 
society to not see the truth of this, to not wage intransigent struggle 
against the hypocrites who want to disarm the working class, to not understand 
that nowhere in the world, for instance, is the false consciousness of 
bourgeois scholarship, the values of debate etc., entrenched more deeply 
than in debating clubs like the Jefferson salon, or Monthly Review, NLR, etc?
Whatever merits such publications have cannot blind us to the truth that there is
not one atom of revolutionary practice in them. 

It is sometimes  argued that the strategy of people's war in colonial 
countries is wrong because core-periphery relations are subordinate 
and the real relationship is between capital and labour. That is simply 
wrong. Even when capitalism, fuelled by its fantastic plunder of 
the New World,  released the mechanism of perpetual 
economic growth, which no other world civilisation had ever done 
before, it still reproduced colonialism and plunder and super-exploitation, 
and had to do so, and the Law of Uneven and Combined Development 
shows exactly how value transfers from peripheries to metropoles 
are intrinsically a part of capitalist accumulation and shows how
the colonial peripheries are imbricated into 
the overall reproduction of world capitalism, of capitalist social relations
in general. 

The detachments of the proletariat and peasantry located in colonial 
countries are reproduced as a class by and in the overall global 
capitalist process of production. High Victorian imperialism came 
after the epoch of primary accumulation, not before it. Now the 
veil of hypocrisy over imperialism has intensified 
to a fantastic degree, but nothing fundamental has changed. 

Even today, the whole of eastern Europe and central Asia is being 
thrown back into a dark colonial savagery. The ideologues are 
having problems explaining this away. Even now, six years after 
the collapse of the Soviet Union, they scapegoat the legacy of 
socialism, Stalin etc. The state-capitalists are in a worse shape, 
in fact they have the political consistency and straightness of a 
pretzel when it comes to explaining how, for example,
the Soviet collapse is such an epochal, seismic event if actually it
was capitalist all along anyway.

Red October was made under the sign of World Revolution, not 
Russian Revolution. As the Bolsheviks' revolutionary ambitions 
became globalised, i.e. with 
the creation of Comintern, Bolshevik methods ceased to
be just an enforced adaptation to Tsarist political backwardness and
autocracy and became a general critique of the falseness, hypocrisy and
mystificatory intent of the whole French Enlightenment, a critique in
historical practice just as Marx's main achievement was arguably the
critique of Enlightenment ideas of equity in theory (equal exchange is
at bottom unequal exchange between labour and capital). 

This generalising of Bolshevik politics and its theoretical absolutising
was not a piece of theoretical trickery or an ex post facto
rationalising of the bolshevik 'coup', the bolshevik 'illegitimate
seizure of state power' etc., but rather, the way that bolshevik
methods of conspiracy, partisanship and repudiation of bourgeois 'manners',
bourgeois notions of scholarly objectivity became no longer a 
specific adaptation to Russian autocracy but the correct implementation 
in practice of the Marxian critique of the Enlightenment. Of course,
terrible errors were made (Lysenkoism, repudiation of relativity 
etc in science -- everyone has their own list.) Yes, the first steps 
humankind took away from commodity production left bloody footprints.

But that doesn't change anything. Lysenkoism is not a reason
for re-embracing the ghoulish cruelties of Englihtenment 
rationalism. On the contrary (in any case, the dog has barked its last
bark under the rubric of post-modernism, and obscurantism
has cloaked science). Even the mistakes made in the Great 
Proletarian Cultural Revolution only underline the point: Enlightenment 
science has nothing to offer.

Someone wrote to M-Sci the other day:

> ...the world is knowable and facts
>approximating reality can be generalised from scientific experiments. This
>is the legacy of the Enlightenment and one that Marxists should indeed
>defend in the face of postmodernist trash about the relativity of truth and
>the uknowable nature of the world.

Louis Godena agreed with this, but I do not. Enlightenment Science, 
a very bad phrase by which I mean more or less what the person 
who wrote the above paragraph means by science, is a product
of a division of labour within a commodity-producing society.
It is therefore an entirely fetishised, mystificatory kind of rationalism 
and science which is incapable of making the world knowable, as it has
itself discovered and which is precisely why post-modernism has
 disowned the very idea of knowledge. But that is their problem, not ours.
We do not claim to be scientists, even proletarian ones. We claim to be
revolutionaries interested in creating communism, i.e. a world without
a division of labour and hence without that set of activities known
as science. 

Marxism-Leninism, which includes within it some of the intellectual
legacy of Stalin, Trotsky, Mao and many others, is the critical and 
historical liquidation of the Englightenment. More, Marxism-Leninism pre-
figures communism, in which there will be no heroic programme called
big-science or any kind of science as we know it now. The GPCR
was an important political prefiguring of this and is therefore, as Adolfo 
rightly says, inspirational. Our rejection of Enlightenment (bourgois)
rationality is therefore obdurate, intransigent and total.

When the Bolsheviks repudiated parliamentarism they merely
continued a conspiratorial practice which appeared on the face of it to be
nothing more than the accidental result of their specific encounter, 
historically-speaking, with the Russian autocracy. But the absolutising
and generalising of Bolshevik methods (in which Trotsky played a role)
revealed a deeper reality, and showed that what was at stake was not
just conspiratorial methods as such but a frontal attack on the entire 
intellectual inheritance of the bourgeois Enlightenment, which even in 1918
was a corpse walking improbably into the new century, at a time when 
Poincare and Mach and Einstein had already destroyed  its Reason, and 
where Red October had already ripped out its heart.

So Bolshevik methods corresponded historically, and were
politically the concrete form-of-appearance,
of the invasion of history by the masses, the eruption of the working
class onto the global, systemic level of capital reproduction. When
 the proletariat burst through the confines of factory, trade unions, the
nation-state, the swamps of social democratic political appeasement etc. 
and instead rushed onto the international plane they did so with a clear 
and unequivocal revolutionary intent.

This incidentally is why the highly respectable anti-Communist
marxological scholar HillelTicktin is wrong to argue that 'Stalinism' was 
just  another kind of 'nationalism' etc. On the contrary, in contradictory 
ways the Soviet experience broke with nationalism both internally 
(Soviet nationalities policy, in which the centre pumped value out to the 
peripheries, which was working class fraternalism concretely 
overcoming age-old national and ethnic backwardness and difference) 
and internationally (the creation of the United Nations being the supreme
 manifestation of Soviet foreign policy).

The destruction of illusions about Enlightenment freedoms in theory
(Marx) and in practice (Lenin, Stalin), which tore the veils of deceit and
hypocrisy from the Academy, from parliamentary politics, from the whole
trickery of human rights etc., meant that the bourgeoisie and its satraps
and agents have not had for eighty years at least, any interest in being
'debated', in being 'subject to sharp arguments' etc. If you were to win
the arguments, the next sharp object would be a bayonet in your guts.

That is why there can be no more pathetic illusion than the one that it 
is possible to create a forum for Marxist debate which is both relevant 
and parliamentary in its methods. Such a thing is impossible. All that 
can be created is a venue for time-serving careerists, or raving idiots,
 or professional wreckers and provocateurs, policemen in other words.

That is why those of us who set up the Leninlist have taken such an
uncompromising line about our purposes.



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