Re: Stalinism And Standards of Intellectual Discourse

[Jeffrey Booth <booth2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

        This is a really good observation and something else follows from
it:  every CP member I've ever known has been a shameless ass-kisser of
the trade union bureacracy.  They also routinely hide their politics and
are, in effect, indistinguishable from liberals and trade union
bureacrats.  I can only think of one person I would exempt from the above
and he has only recently fallen into the Stalinist CPUSA.
        All this talk on the list about Stalinism being an incorrect or
obsolete term is completely wrong from a theoretical AND PRACTICAL point
of view.

                                -- Jeff Booth
        

On Thu, 21 Dec 1995, C N Marley wrote:

> Somewhere (I can't remember where -- was it "The Struggle for a
> Proletarian Party") James P Cannon, described the Stalinist bureaucracy
> as akin to the bureaucracy of a trade union in a capitalist state. That
> is, conservative in nature, due to its material interests; but that
> those material interests were derived from a material base (the trade
> union or the workers state) whose historical interests were incompatible
> with the interests of the bureaucracy.
>
> Selling out a strike may be in the interests of the trade union
> bureaucracy, but not in the interests of the striking workers.
> "Socialism in one country" justified the conservatism of the Stalinist
> bureaucracy, but did not help any workers anywhere. The trade union
> bureaucracy stamps out internal democracy, the Stalinist bureaucracy, on
> a different plain, had their purges.
>
> I think Cannon's analogy is profoundly useful, both in explaining the
> contradictions of the Stalinist bureaucracy, _and_ raising the question
> of which side of the barricades should a revolutionary be on when the
> bureaucracy is under attack by the capitalists.
>
>
> Simon.
>
>
>
>
>
>
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>


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