Purges/Das erste Tribunal

["Chris, London" <100423.2040@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

My German is not good enough to get right in the middle of the
debate, with safety, and I am not sure that Wolfgang and Gerwin's
positions are fully mutually exclusive, but it looks a very important
debate.

Although quantitative changes may have led to qualitative ones,
and although organisational forms introduced under Stalin may have
given a whole new dimension to it, I sympathise with Gerwin's
point about Lenin's custom of denouncing, deviations and
revisionism (and opportunism)

1. I have been influenced by a psychodynamic lecture about "The Totalitarian
Personality", the desire to annihilate your enemy mentally. We all do it
at times. Doing it systematically, and self-righteously with powerful
intellectual rigour, was a method Lenin used in forging a powerful
Bolshevik party, when he had few other weapons at his disposal. But at the
time of his death there was not very sophisticated way of summing up
party debates. See the almost pathetic and worrying character of the
warnings in his "Last Testament" about both Stalin and Trotsky.

2. The concept of a deviation, implies a historically linear view of knowledge,
not a theory of more or less complete networks of knowledge, and knowledge
that may vary in its applicability to the circumstances.

3. Earlier this year I posted a three piece article on the steps leading to
the outbreak of what I called the Marxist Civil War, between Stalin and
Trotsky at the time of Lenin's death, just taking the chronology of
articles in Stalin's selected works. I quoted the most ominous passage
from Stalin comments on "The Discussion" published in Pravda Dec 15th 1923,
quoting from Lenin.

Although the Lenin quote did not logically apply to former Mensheviks like
Trotsky who joined the Bolsheviks previously, the passage IMO was intended
to have major analogies. It illustrates what I understand to be Gerwin's
point about Lenin's wars against opportunism, and how Stalin built on them.

" Every opportunist is distinguished for his adaptability ... and the
Mensheviks, as opportunists, adapt themselves 'on principle'
so to speak, to the prevailing trend among the workers and assume a protective
colouring, just as a hare's coat turns white in the winter. It is necessary
to know this specific feature of the Mensheviks and take it into account.
And taking it into account means purging the Party of approximately
ninety-nine out of every hundred of the Mensheviks who joined the Russian
Communist Party after 1918, i.e. when the victory of the Bolsheviks
first became probable and then certain." (see Vol XXVII p 13)

I hope this debate continues in both English and German.

Chris, London.



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