Date: Wed, 3 Aug 1994 14:56:09 +0700 From: djones-AT-uclink.berkeley.edu (donna jones) Subject: Re: Trotter on Stalin You have made a strong case that the fight against fascism begins with the fight against bolshevism. Perhaps capitalism will attempt to preserve itself in forms only apparently socialist or marxist. And the historic success of such attempts surely forces us to rethink root and branch the project of proletarian emancipation. And to be sure only a few, very few revolutionists have taken on that responsibility. And here I mean the council communists: Pannekoek, Korsch and Mattick. But what proof is there that Stalin is to be blamed entirely or primarily for the failure of the revolutionary left in Germany or elsewhere? That he had a role is not even denied by even some of its most faithful supporters. But let's say that there had been no Russian Revolution, then what? The Sparts would have won? So the right blames Hitler on Stalin--the necessity of fighting an even greater barbarism with barbarism. So that's Heidegger and Hayek. And now the ultra-left blames Hitler on Stalin. Without Stalin, German capital would not have had an organizational model for fascism; without Stalin, the German working class would have been more predisposed towards communism. Stalin scared the working classes away from communism. Isn't this what Pannekoek said. Well, we don't need counter-factuals anymore. No one is here to scare anyone off from commuism anymore, and still the leaders and intellectuals are as revisionist as ever (underconsumptionists like Bennet Harrison and disproportionality theorists like the regulationists). And still there is a considerable proto-fascist population in this country. After all, we do have to deal with all those who have become accustomed to the priviliges of membership in the world's leading power--the privilige of taking minor talent onto the world's movie screens and airwaves that "our" capital owns (and it doesn't hurt that so many have been forced to speak English); the privilige of all the advertising jobs that come when global industry must penetrate the market that comes from capital rushing over here; all the white-collar jobs that come from recycling the world's debt and petrodollars; all the jobs provided by our special military projects for our friends the fascist dictators; the privilige of owning so much of the world's telecommunications that everyone has to pay to use; and the priviliges that come from gobbling up some of the world's best technical talent so our national players can innovate and command extra surplus value and then spread some of it around (but not to the immigrants tortured at the border). The fifth column is inside this country, generated by imperialism itself. That the resulting divisions appear racial is both easily explained and,yes, only apparent (for example the US is importing many reactionary Asian rentiers who pose a problem for any communist politics). But there's no reason to ignore the divisions. And there is no reason to hope that the working class, especially in the US, will now unify automatically around communism, now that they are free--as they always were--to imagine an anti-Stalinist communism. In short, the growth of fascism is not checked by the end of Stalinism. Quite the contrary, I believe. d jones ------------------
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