Color Me Gone...

["dmschanoes" <dmschanoes@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

...comrade Melvin can explain the object of reference in the above subject
line, perhaps better than he can explain some other things...

I looked in on Marxmail from Milan this morning and actually sent a comment
to the moderator which never made it to the list, if it made it to him. But
no matter, I'm back and not for long so I will sum up what I said and then
take my leave.

What did I find from Milan?  Well, the list has had rip-roaring discussions
about margarine, thermodynamics,  reports on holidays, and ah yes the return
of the repressed-- the great Stalin debate, which the moderator likes to
refer to as "the past madness."  And madness it is, at least as it is
presented here, since is detached from the real content of its history.
So.... so that comrade Nestor can talk about the "progress" of the Soviet
Union under the bureaucracy  measured by the death of fewer people, and
then, without batting an eye or drawing a breath, blame the failures of the
Soviet Union on the failure of the Western European left and the defeat of
the European revolution, without one word of the responsibility  of that
"beacon of light" in the very defeat of those revolutions.  What, does
anyone seriously think the council-communists, the Trotskyists, were
responsible for the defeat of the world revolution?  Let's be serious
comrades, those groups weren't strong enough to impose poor strategy and
programs on the workers struggle-- no, it takes something much more
powerful, like a state power capable of financing, organizing, sustaining a
collapse of revolutionary struggle.  That's the reality, the straight
razor's double edge, of Soviet progress.

Then we have comrade Melvin, whom I truly love as brother, a fighter,
talking about Trotsky as a petty-bourgeois loudmouth whom Lenin called a
fool at least a thousand times. And Melvin says Trotskyism always and
everywhere was a movement of the petty bourgeois without depth in the
working classes.  Comrade Melvin should expand his investigations to
material outside that provided by Progress Publishers and look at the Twin
Cities Teamster Strikes, the struggles leading to the CIO, the Spanish Civil
War, the Vietnamese anti-colonial resistance.  Was Trotsky a loudmouth?
Loud enough to be elected president of the Petrograd Soviet twice by the
workers, loud enough to convince Lenin that permanent revolution had placed
the issue of proletarian power directly on the table and thus into Lenin's
April Theses, loud enough to be entrusted with negotiating the revolution's
withdrawal from WWI, loud enough to organize the Red Army, loud enough to
reorganize the shattered transportation system of Russia, and loud enough to
articulate the criticality of international revolution regarding the Soviet
state.

But you know what, we're all loudmouths when you get right down to it.  And
petty bourgeois to boot.  Lenin was trained as a lawyer after all.  No shame
in that.

It's only history, I know, but that's the problem.  History really is class
struggle, concentrated economics, the social relations of production.  And
what is so enduring about these discussions of history on the list is the
absence of the class struggle-- so we talk about Stalin and the soviet
bureaucracy without an analysis of the conditions of the working class
inside and outside its borders; we discuss Post when we are really stalking
the horse of Brenner without consideration of his central thesis-- that the
decline of feudalism, the transition to capitalism was marked by continuous
class struggle-- that it was the result of that class struggle that created
various distinct agrarian structures...

Well, it's all too much, and not enough for me...  I'm just a petty
bourgeois loudmouth....

dms



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