Date: Mon, 04 Mar 1996 08:17:02 +0100
From: Luciano Dondero <DOND001-AT-IT.net>
Subject: Re: Eternal Glory to the Jacobins (Article in NLR)


Carlos wrote:

You(Carrol) wrote: 
>. . .the
>revolutions of the 20th c have not been anti-capitalist (despite the
>wishes or programmes of their protagonists or the fears of some of
>their enemies) but rather the same as the revolutions of the last
>century."
>
    Carlos:

    This characterization is not far from that sustained by several
    schools of Marxism, particularly in Latin America and Asia that
    argued that the "February 1917 was the last revolution of the
    past century and October 1917 the first of this century.  The
    February revolution is the model of the democratic political
    revolution, October represent the anti-capitalist trend ...."
    and "What happened afterward is a regression to the old             
    revolutionary forms, the forms of bourgeois revolutions disguised
    as anti-system revolutions ... it is all a question of the
    retreat of the working class consciousness ...."   

    Comparing the jacobins, though, with the leaders of other           
    revolutions of this century is a disservice to the Jacobins.
    The Jacobins were the most advanced of the old, Stalinism was
    the most backward of the new.

    Comradely,
    Carlos


Luciano: I think Carlos is probably right. But there is a grouping within
the Trotskyist movement, the Italian Voce Operaia some of whose supporters
are also subscribers to this l*st (Workers Voice), who argue that Jacobinism
is a trait that unifies the various Stalinist-led social revolutions in
China, Vietnam, Cuba and elsewhere.

These comrades actually posit that the very fact that the Stalinists are a
petty bourgeois and not a proletarian formation makes it possible to regard
their achievements - notwithstanding the concomitant horrors of their
regimes - in a positive way, because they were endowed with a revolutionary
quality, namely Jacobinism.

By the same token, they (VO-WV) tend to dismiss a number of
"fake-revolutionaries" throughout the world for lacking that spark.

On another level, Ted Grant's (Militant-GB's founder) views about
"proletarian bonapartism" in various countries of Asia tend to follow a
similar path. It would be interesting if somebody from Militant better
acquainted with these views than myself would want to expand on this point.

Comradely,




--Luciano Dondero--



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