Re: need for apology ?

[Jurriaan Bendien <j.bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Carol writes:

>I think Jurriaan owes both Charles and the list an apology for introducing
>this mode of polemics.

My reply is reasonably lengthy:

You shouldn't prejudge somebody's stance before you've verified what it is.
It hadn't occurred to me that I was engaging in "polemics". I was making
the point that the view of history as a inevitable "process without a
subject" determined by laws impervious to human wills and occurring in a
necessary sequence of stages, is a deformation of Marxism that is of
Stalinist origin, and that this deformation had a specific ideological
function to play in the political atomization of the masses of the people.
This is analogous to, for instance, the reified depiction in technocratic
economic theory of an economy as a kind of "engine", to be engineered and
doctored by specialists. The reason that it is important to know this, is
because it has had an enormous effect on the further development of Marxist
thinking in the 20th century.

Apart from this I refer to the difficulties involved in assessing questions
of "historical inevitability", considered seriously, and not as porno talk.
It is true that Marx occasionally talks about specific historical
developments as "inevitable", but always on the assumption of the existence
of specific conditions, and without suggesting that conscious human
interventions in these conditions couldn't produce a different result. That
is to say, people make their own history under conditions not of their own
choosing, but nevertheless they make it, and they are capable of
consciously changing their conditions. Hence their history can be
rationally understood in a dialectical relationship of objective
circumstances and subjective states.

I am fully aware of the limits of the Trotskyist critique of Stalinism, and
I realise also you cannot blame all the problems of contemporary Marxism on
Stalin. But its amusing to me how you would now like to censor me. In my
academic past I found I wasn't allowed to mention anything about the
Stalinist perversion of Marxism, because Stalinism was "real communism",
real "Marxism-Leninism". Now I am not allowed to talk about it, because to
do so might be construed as "anti-communism", the implication being that
Stalinism is weighed in as a "lesser evil" after all.

This is all just intellectual garbage if you ask me. The very idea that
anti-Stalinism ineluctably leads to anti-communism is I think itself a
Stalinist-type idea, the idea of the bureaucratic-managerial mind seeking
to forestall that certain "dangerous ideas" might arise in the dumb masses.
It's like saying we shouldn't discuss instances of political repression in
Cuba on the list, "because it might harm Castro's position".

What Perry Anderson popularised in the Anglo-Saxon world as "Western
Marxism", from Sartre to Althusser, arose precisely in reaction to Stalin's
and Mao's peasant ideology. But many Anglo-Saxon academic readers of those
beautifully designed, overpriced books by NLR/Verso don't understand this,
they don't understand the context, the meaning, and the overall destructive
effect of Stalinist "Marxism-Leninism" on Marxist culture, and they don't
understand the real politics that gave rise to all the sophisticated
conceptualisations and postmodernist rationalisations.

They don't realise either that the Stalinist faction is responsible for the
murder of at least a million communists, including most of the cream of the
Marxist intelligentsia of the time. They ponder the meaning of Althusser's
abstractions, and may think themselves very hip in their linguistic and
metaphorical sophistication, without realising that Althusser was a chief
ideologist of a party which sided with French imperialism in the Algerian
war and in 1968 actively tried to prevent a revolutionary upsurge of the
French working class and the students. Note well, I am not saying that the
deplorable political practices of the PCF invalidate Althusser's arguments
as such, but to repeat the old bugger himself, "there is no innocent reading".

I'm not a communist, actually, I'm a socialist, and the book I am reading
at the moment is "De Laatste Oorlog - Gesprekken over de nieuwe wereldorde"
[The last war - discussions about the new world order] by Jan Marijnissen
and Karel Glastra van Loon, which is about the Kosovo/Serbia war and the
response of the Dutch polity to it. Jan Marijnissen is the main leader of
the Dutch Socialist party, the only party which came out against Dutch
military intervention in Serbia with NATO. I am also very interested in
particular strands of Marxist thought. But like Marx himself, I'm not a
Marxist, and one important reason for that is that I think Marxist culture
has never fully understood or recovered from the experience of
"Marxism-Leninism" of which Stalinism was the central expression. And
further I think some of the features of Stalinism actually originate with
Lenin. Lenin's outlawing of political opposition and the ban on factions is
wellknown. But it was - for instance - also Lenin who was in the habit of
swearing and cursing at his opponents in the most vile (well nigh racist)
manner, and it is Lenin who comes out with semi-religious howlers such as
that "Marxism is omnipotent because it is true" (a way of thinking which in
my view has nothing to do with Marx's endeavour). It is Lenin, in fact, who
wants to forge Marxism into a clearly defined, closed ideological-doctrinal
system that can be understood by any peasant and so on. You can kick me off
the list if you like, but I don't apologise for anything I have said.

Cheers

J.