Re: Hot Pursuit

[David Bruce <dave_bruce@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 08/10/99, you wrote:

>Now that I am sober, I will make this
>point: what is needed is solid historical and economic research about
>Yugoslavia.

No disagreement here - what I was asking you to comment on properly was
Owen Jones' perfectly legitimate complaint about intemperate language. But
let it go.


>So in the Trotskyist press, from Worker's Liberty to Solidarity to Green
>Left Weekly, where nobody reads the language, nor has access to the sort of
>journals I am referring to, there are all sorts of facile characterizations
>of the Milosevic regime.

I am sure you are right but I will take it on trust - I don't read the left
press any more. Some years ago, I edited a "Trotskyist" newspaper in which
I tried to set boundaries for discussion similar to those that operate on
this list. Readers enthused but I fell foul of our "proletarian" leadership
and lost my job in the usual manner. Things have not got better since.

> Is this the way that Trotsky analyzed the USSR in "Revolution Betrayed"?

Certainly not - it was, I'm certain, Trotsky's finest work, even including
his "History of the Russian Revolution". His analysis of the bureaucracy,
especially given the conditions under which he worked, is a masterpiece of
dialectical thought which has yet to be bettered. By anyone.

>Is this the way that the Trotskyist movement came to terms
>with the East European transformations after WWII? Of course not.
>At that time, it was filled with many serious Marxist scholars.

Are you serious? Have you actually read some of the garbage that passed for
analysis in the post-war period? Tony Cliff? The SWP (US)? On my way out of
the organised Trotskyist movement, I wrote a piece showing how the movement
had failed to grasp what Trotsky's analysis was about - hence all the
nonsense about the dual role of the bureaucracy, Stalinism being
"counter-revolutionary through and through", the vacillation from one
position to the other, the muddle-headedness of the 1953 split and so on. I
argued that it might be forgivable in the aftermath of war and the
complexity of events, but it could not be forgiven in the 1980s. I was, of
course, dubbed a "capitulator to Stalinism" and edged out. The piece was as
"solidly researched" as I could make it.

The muddle you correctly identify in the left press does have roots in the
failure to understand the post-war period. To illustrate the point, no-one
sided with the fascists in the Spanish civil war - by mistake. Now it's a
lottery as to which side each little left group is on. The ONLY Trotskyist
groups outside Iran to denounce from the start the clerical fascism of
Khomeini were the Spartacists. (!) Many leftists cannot spot a
counter-revolution if they fall over it - hence the nonsense about the KLA
with people actually calling for it to be armed. You have correctly made
the point before that no "left-wing" protest ever affects the politics of a
bourgeois regime. Sometimes, that's not a bad thing. (BTW, that's "bending
the stick".)


>I am not opposed to people staking out one position or another on
>Yugoslavia. What I am opposed to is superficiality.

Quite.

Dave
==========================================
David Bruce, Strathaven ML10 6QF, Scotland
Tel: +44 1357 440459 Fax:+44 1357 440464
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