File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9805, message 186


Date: Wed, 13 May 1998 15:31:04 +1000
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: M-TH: (reply to Chris Bailey)


A quick recording of (profound) difference with Hugh,

Hugh writes to Chris Bailey,

>On the one hand "new possibilities and realities", on the other "outdated
>revolutionary rhetoric".

I'm with Chris.  And Chris is not contradicting Marx.  Chris is being
consistent with Marx's materialist conception of history as dialectical
process.  Ever new possibilities and constraints and therefore the need to
re-evaluate rhetoric and strategy at every turn.

Marx does not ask Marxists to abstain from ruthlessly criticising Marx, and
the Marxist is certainly not constrained from criticising Lenin (as Trotsky
did in the Menshevik *Nachalo* before the 4th Congress) and as I have the
hide to do on these lists.
- I do not accept the theory of uninterrupted revolution as the only
possible interpretation of the young Marx's exhortations to the Communist
League in 1850,
- I do not think the 1905/6 revolution failed due to insufficient resolve.
- I do not think 'revolutionary defeatism' was ever going to end up with
anything better than the Brest-Livotsk outrage and Eichorn's assistance in
organising the all-too-ready Whites.
- I do not think the February 1917 revolution was down to bolshevism -
there is, in fact, a case to be made for what Trots call (derisively)
spontaneism.
- The April Theses were fine strategy but not good tactics.  At the social
level, the undeveloped proletariat and amorphous peasantry were not
equipped to go beyond the February gains (hence the tragedies that
followed, eg Kronstadt); and at the institutional level, the organisational
centralisation of political and economic control involved in the universal
nationalisations and the convergence of state instruments made too powerful
too (untried) few - and I still reckon the seeds of Stalinism were thus
sown.
- I also think that mass starvation is an obscenity *in any circumstance*
and that Kronstadt was murder on a grand scale.
- The NEP was full of holes, and too late too.

Whilst comrades Bedggood and Pilling (sorely missed) have convinced me of
the singular virtues of Lenin's theory of imperialism, I don't reckon Lenin
was right in 1917-21, and I certainly don't reckon he has anything to tell
us about tactics in the here and now.

So there.

Cheers,
Rob.




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