Re: AUT: State capitalism?

["Nate Holdren" <nateholdren@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Harald-

you wrote-

>In any circumstances, more relevant than what the Soviet Union
>was, beyond being a class society,  is still why the revolution so
>terrible failed. Still relevant, even if the world has changed much
>since then.

I agree completely. At the same time I've largely avoided reading about the
USSR, perhaps an allergy that remains as a hold over from the painful
process of breaking from vanguardism.
Holloway's new book is interesting on the question of the state and statist
revolutionary perspectives. I'm not familiar w/ other work he and others
have done on this so maybe it's not as new to others as it is to me.
What's interesting to me about this in relation to the USSR is the light it
throws on some of the different accounts of the USSR and the friction that
arose (and still does) between some marxists and some anarchists over this
question. (This issue recurs and takes on a new importance when some fairly
sophisticated folks like Zizek start calling for a return to Lenin and the
party.) I know a lot marxists for whom Russia 1917 is something like what
the Spanish revolution is to some anarchists - a time of tremendous
accomplishments and even greater possibilities, all of which was dashed,
thus the romance and continuing power to fascinate of these periods. I know
more about Spain than I do about Russia (and it seems to me that there were
huge possibilities opened up in Spain).

It seems clear to me that in Spain the Communists were little more than (and
increasingly over time) counter-revolutionary.
What I wonder about is what the case was in Russia, what the role of the
Communists was then. I realize there's a vast amount of material on this
(much of little value as you noted, another part of why I've not started
looking at this period before). A lot of the status of Leninism seems to
hang on how one assesses this time period.
(Negri, for example, in my limited reading seems to think that at the time
the leninist model was appropriate but is not so any longer.
I have my suspicions though that this was never a very good model.
I don't have the knowledge to back these up or even investigate them very
well, though.)

Nate


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