Not fade away

["Jurriaan Bendien" <bendien@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

For the record, I have never denied the unquestionable progressive
achievements of Soviet planned economy, anymore than I deny that if Israelis
turn the desert into an olive grove etc. that this is progressive. But my
argument is that those undeniable achievements occurred at a human cost
which outdid most of the achievements that were made. If you say that the
decline of the Russian population is simply attributable to the imperialist
defeat of the Soviet Union, then this is just totally schematic ideology.
If, for ideological reasons, you wish to stress the achievements of Soviet
planning, then really you might miss the wood for the trees in many
respects. What you need to explain is the negativity, cynicism, absurdity,
somberness and nihilism which very large numbers of Russian people feel in
articulating their outlook on life, society and culture today, in human
terms. Attempts to explain this simply in terms of Russian ethnic
characteristics are just racist and stupid, a bourgeois fiction. There are
jolly good social, material, political and historical reasons for that, at
least from a Marxian point of view.

The brutality of Stalin's dictatorship and Stalinist "shock therapy"
involved among other things simply suppressing and killing anybody who
thought or did something different from the CPSU line, and the flat denial
by the police state that certain human characteristics even existed among
the population, or that their expression was valid. That had enormous,
enduring consequences, because if you are willing to engage in selective
(cultural and human) extermination programmes in order to "redirect the
course of history" then you might just wipe out intergenerationally a pool
of talent and culture that is vital for the survival of your society, you
inflict longlasting damage on the moral fibre of a whole population, and you
damage it even at the spiritual level. You don't have to be a sensitive
Anatoli Lunacharsky to understand that, (try reading Antonov-Ovseyenko's The
time of Stalin, for example, or Kuusinen's Stalinism under Stalin; one of
the points being made being that you were overall better off in a Czarist
prison than a Stalinist prison).

Nor do I deny the enormous impact which the Nazi imperialist war had on
Soviet society, the demographic and social repercussions of which still
continue today. But even if you look at the precise way in which the
military defence of the USSR was conducted, you must conclude that
disastrous errors were made in the pursuit of the war, purely because the
Stalinist leadership had killed or suppressed a lot of talented people that
would have powerfully assisted the war effort against the German wehrmacht.
The Stalinists in practice took a very cavalier, blase attitude to human
life and regarded their minions as "expendable", and it is very well
documented, just how they thought about it, and these thoughts included a
mentality that "if the Nazi's do it, then we do it too" (a bit like Sharon
aping Bush). "Just as in the civil war", which the CPSU leaders remembered,
they were going to crush the Nazis, no matter what it took to do so, but in
so doing, a semi-psychotic mania set in, according to which it did not
matter how many human sacrifices were made to win the war, and what those
sacrifices were. A British Marxist expert on this (pseudonym Emma Forrest)
has analysed this in detail.

(In Marxian military theory, starting with the insights of Engels, it is
never the case that human morality can be dispensed with in the pursuit of a
military war, because Marxists consider that human morality is vital to the
successful pursuit of the war and a successful conclusion to that war. If
you therefore read what Leon Trotsky actually writes in "How the Revolution
Armed", you will see very clearly and incontrovertibly, that he places
strong emphasis on the morale and moral conduct of the army, and that not
just anything goes, however barbaric the opposition might be. Admittedly
Trotsky himself did some things which are, at least to me, indefensible, but
okay, it is easy to say that afterwards. This concept of military morality
was incidentally also applied in another way by the Sandinista's in
Nicaragua (a weaker nation than Russia in so ways), who deliberately did not
execute a number of Somoza's butchers, and the moral understanding of the
Sandinista's was also so high, that they were prepared to cede power, faced
with an impossible situation created by imperialist encirlement and murders.
The Sandinista's could have stuck it out, but this would have meant that the
condition of the Nicaraguan population would have deteriorated even more.
And in this sense, the Sandinista's retained a sober, level-headed moral
understanding of means and ends. I am not recommending this as a policy for
Cuba by any means, I am just making a general theoretical point. I say these
things also for two other reasons (1) because the more stupid communist
dilletantes still ranting on about "the defence of the USSR" without having
a clue about what it means, distort the issues in the guise of polemics
about red-baiting, and (2) the argument against imperialist liberation
through "regime change" must focus on the moral core of the imperialist
argument, and if you talk idiocy about the USSR you don't score any points
against Condoleeza.

Jurriaan








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