AUT: partridges and icepicks

[andrew robinson <ldxar1@xxxxxxxxx>]

"Calling oneself "a trot" is no innocent thing. If not
a postion based on complete ignorance, it implies taking
a principled stand for the mass-slaugthering, oppression
and exploitation of workers and peasants, and signals
support to the ultra-rightist theoretical and practical
policies of Trotskii, Lenin, Dzerzhinskii, amongst others."

Good one Harald!  Though I suspect most people who call themselves Trotskyists are in denial about what Trotsky actually did, or else simply don't know.  If you've only read Trotsky's own work, you come out with the impression the Kronstadt uprising was organised by the White Army in the middle of the Civil War!

The strange thing about the NEP is that the very same ideas Lenin has denounced at the time of Kronstadt as utterly counter-revolutionary and not even negotiable (the only demands of the Kronstadt insurgents which were not simply Bolshevik demands from 1917, regarding restoration of property rights to the small peasants and producers and of market-based trade instead of command economics in agriculture)  formed the core of the programme adopted by the Bolsheviks not long after!  So much for non-negotiable.

In my view the whole Bolshevik agenda demonstrates the insidious functioning of essentialist conceptions of class.  Look at Trotsky's essay on Kronstadt.  Everything comes down to class "interests" - the real nature of a historical force is not about its immanent meaning-production or its social phenomenology, but comes down to where it fits into a pre-drawn cartography of classes and their "interests".  In this way, the whole operation of disciplinary power is not only retained but exacerbated.  Foucault's version of the scientific binary - "man"-as-observer versus "man"-as-object - finds its expression in the dictatorship of the observer, the "knower".  Clinging to power for the knower becomes the single overarching goal, which leads in fact to the creation of a "new class" - on the basis of the very social relations which are reified into aspects of "objective" theory by the Bolsheviks and before them, by the whole tradition of western science.

		
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