Subject: Re: Ariel Sharon and Stalin Date: Tue, 21 Mar 95 14:56:24 +0000 From: wpc-AT-cs.strath.ac.uk Chodos: If we reject the idea that there is an important connection between the understanding of Marxism that informed Bolshevik practice and the ultimate Stalinist outcome, or that this connection is insignificant compared to the material circumstances under which the Bolsheviks toiled, then all we are left with to explain Stalin is the idea that he was a tyrannical despot who took advantage of the chaos of the revolution to somehow worm his way into the leadership of the party and the state. Given the historical experience, at the very least, this would seem to be something that revolutionaries and Marxists need to know how to avoid in the future. ---------- I think that there is a connection, but not the connection that most liberal critics advance. The Leninists retained ultimately a bourgeois aristocratic concept of the proletarian dictatorship that is in one form or another shared by their critics. The Leninists believed that the dictatorship had to be led by the most class conscious, the best elements, of the working class. As such, a theory of rule by the best, it is ultimately an aristocratic theory of government. The liberal criticism replaces party rule by parliamentary rule, but this just replaces one aristrocracy by another - a proletarian aristocracy by a bourgeois one, and is the fastest possible route to counter revolution. Lenin understood this in his suspension of the constituent assembly. The left Marxist criticism of Leninism, aghast that the proletarian aristocracy sometimes degenerates into tyranny proposes to counter it with 'Commune' type or Council type indirect elections of delegates instead of parliamentary elections. But this political form is what led to Bolshevik domination in the first place. The question of how to avoid this in the future is indeed open. I would advocate a combination of a property qualification for the franchise - those with property don't get it - along with random selection of delegates to the soviets as to a jury. The objective is to ensure that sovereign bodies are dominated by representative members of the propertyless classes rather than by the propertied or by political machine men. --- from list marxism-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu --- ------------------
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