Date: Fri, 02 Aug 1996 21:30:29 -0700
Subject: Re: people's militias and other final thoughts


MARK ADKINS wrote:
  
  The fact that Stalin
> was able to further consolidate power through the pre-existing
> Bolshevik institutions does not seem to make some people think twice
> about the design of such institutions.  Those who are ignorant of
> history are doomed to repeat it.

Thanx for the philosophical history lesson, let me return the favor.

Stalin was head of the party when Lenin died.  He was given this position because 
Lenin and Trotsky felt that the party organization should be sublimated to the 
material goals of the Revolution. Unfortunately they underestimated a few (f)actors 
that I will enumerate for you here.

Lenin and Trostky greatly overestimated Stalin's theoretical orientation.  
Stalinism is heresy to true Marxist's; especially those dedicated to the liberation 
of the human soul.  Stalin lacked a Marxist eshatological orientation.  Here I 
simply mean that he did not understand the final results of the Marxist project.  
He was unable to envisiion the role of the bureaucracy in the mission towards 
ultimate equity and transcendence of alienation.  

the Soviet became fat and materially bifurcated (and therefore possessed the 
essential elements of class society).  Stalin, because of his own alienation and 
psychological sublimation/internalization to the ideolgical values and norms of 
capitalistic wealth, didn't lead the party to its own destruction.  He failed the 
revolution.  State capitalism is Capitalism, not socialism, not communism.  
Stalin's state capitalism can not be blamed on Marxism, marxist theory, or Lenin 
and Trotsky.  The blame is to be shared by the historical position of 
pre-revolutionary Russia and Stalin's own failure to READ Marx and Lenin, and to 
understand what it was he was attempting.  Stalin misuderstood the role of the CP 
and was in a position to use it to his own egotiscal fantasia.

This situation is much like yours.  You need to READ [period] before you come here 
and tell the list that they need to read stuff outside of our ideological camps.

> people who isolate themselves in a cult-like fashion
> from information sources which don't tow their ideological line would
> do well to read it.

I can't speak for the whole list, but I've read (or was it force fed?) so much 
bourgoise philososphy, media, worldview, etc. , that I could convince you that I 
worked for the World Bank.  Seriously, everything we had ever been given to read in 
the educational system was ideologically loaded and therefore skewed irreparably 
>from reality.  We read marxist theory to counter all of the crap that pervades our 
existence.  

Really, if you want to recommend books outside of my ideological camp, go for it, I 
could recommend as many if not more.  If you are lookin for a good, down home 
American, bourgieous account of the Soviet experiment take a look at Oliver 
Coolidges _The makers of the russian revlution_.  If you want a counterpoint, 
historical materialist account of the revolution you would do well to check out 
_the revolution betrayed_ by Leon Trotsky.  This is an especially interesting book 
because it sheds so much light on "why" the USSR eventually collapsed.

On a side note: You should stop trying to combine what happened in the Russian rev. 
to Marxist theory.  Unfortunately they are not the same thing.  Good theory is 
incredibly difficult, good praxis is much harder.  A marxist sholar must have a 
disciplined mind and a successful marxist revolutionary would have to be a person 
of the highest human character.  Marx didn't believe the Rev. would occur in a 
historical backwater like Russia.  It hadn't sprouted but the meagerest capitalist 
social organization by 1917.  The productive force of capitalism is essential to 
the imperatives which a planned economy demands of its society.  I know that this 
is a bone of contention among marxists, but it seems to have that great quality of 
self evidence which good understandings our founded upon as well as the historical 
reality of socialist experiments to reinforce this position. 

Sincerely

Christian


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