BHA: Emergent realities

[MSPRINKER@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx]

               State University of New York at Stony Brook
                       Stony Brook, NY 11794-3355

                                            Michael Sprinker
                                            Professor of English & Comp Lit
                                            Comparative Studies
                                            516 632-9634
                                            10-Jun-1998 09:08am EDT
FROM:  MSPRINKER
TO:    Remote Addressee                     ( _bhaskar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx )

Subject: Emergent realities

Further to Hans's recent post.

Let's take the case of Stalinism.  There was, I think we'll all
agree, a real, historical personal, Josef Stalin, who in the
late 1920 established control for himself and his clique within
the Bolshevik party over the Soviet state.  Stalin and his
minions then proceeded to exile or purge all political rivals
and to embark on a program of forced collectivization of agriculture
with the aim of rapidly industrializing the economically backward
Soviet Union.  Subsequently, the institute an absolute reign
of terror that only abated after Stalin's death, and was officially
condemned only three years later in Khruschev's Secret Speech
to the 20th Party Congress of the CPSU.

But even after Stalin's death, many of the features of what came
to be know as Stalinism persisted, both in the Soviet Union and
in Eastern Europe, also in not a few of the Western European and
Third World Communist parties. Nor is the phenomenon entirely absent
from the contemporary political scene, where it could said that
the People's Republic of China practices what my friend Richard
Smith terms "market Stalinism," which involves coercion by the state
to create ever more institutions of the free market.

In other places--the US, for example--the coercive mechanisms that
would make Stalinism a truly causally efficacious power have by and
large disappeared, save among small sects, some of which still
demand the kind of automatism that was required under classical
Stalinism in order to maintain standing in the sect.  And in
addition, though not so named (like ideology itself, Stalinism
rarely if ever says its own name), the tactics and familiar practices
of Stalinism are alive and well among small, self-proclaimed
revolutionary groupuscules who attempt to enforce the correct
revolutionary line on all left discourse.  The discourse of
Stalinism remains a powerful rhetorical weapon, even as the reality
of Stalinist organizations has become increasingly circumscribed.

With some qualifications, then, one might say that effectively
Stalinism (the coercive institutions) has ceased to exist, even
as Stalinism (the rituals and practices) flourish--often among those
who know little or nothing about the origins of Stalinism as the
governing practice of a global mass movement.

Fraternally,

Michael


     --- from list bhaskar@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---