Let us not get astray, please

["Nestor Gorojovsky" <nestorgoro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I got three answers that do not broach my basic question, cdes.

Of course, I am not blaming a class, not even a leadership (according 
to not a few interpretations, even Rosa made a mistake in 1919, a 
mistake which cost her life). I am not saying that the Chilean 
working class and the whole mass of the Chilean people did not stand 
a chance in 1973. I am not saying that there was _no other course_ in 
Argentina, 1975/6.

The single thing I am saying is that the reasons for the immobility 
of the proletarians in metropolitan Western countries cannot be laid 
at the door of Soviet leaders, not exclusively at least; and 
certainly not primarily. In 1919 there were no Stalinists to take the 
blame, comrades. 

The fact is that the Social Democratic trend (in the worst sense of 
the word) had a strong mass foundation. The peculiar kind of Marxism 
that became mainstream Marxism in Western metropolitan countries is 
not only a matter of a "mistaken", "immature" or "treacherous" 
leadership. It expressed (and expresses) a concrete kind of working 
class.

The Stalinist leadership made gross mistakes. And I am the last on 
Earth to forget that. Even crimes. Betrayal to Revolution, if you 
want. But all and every one of these developments was triggered by 
what happened in the West.  And this is what Vadim is trying to 
explain.

In order to understand what happened in the East, it is essential to 
keep always in mind that the lever was in the West, not in the East. 
That lever failed to move. The Tsarist Empire was left to itself and 
its revolutionary masses were decimated. And even under these 
conditions there were background battles against bureaucratism (even 
from Left Stalinists against Stalin, after the Moscow trials). Not to 
speak of LDT, of course.

Maybe the KPD had the key of the situation in the 30s, and under 
orders from the SU they let it fall. However, all these explanations 
don't answer the original question.  The KPD was probably the only 
communist party in the West that _could_ disobey Moscow. Its rank-and-
file did not do it. Nor did the rank-and-file Communists in France 
and Italy disobey their leadership when they were ordered to disarm 
in 1945. Can we explain away such massive passivity by simply 
speaking of immature leaderships?

Vadim's answer is, in a sense, that Lenin was wrong: the labor 
aristocracy was more extended that he ever dared to dream.  Mine 
runs, more or less, on similar tracks.

That is, we are trying to follow Mark Jones's ideas on what was 
evitable and what was not evitable during the first half of the 20th 
Century in the Soviet Union.  Not everything that took place in the 
Soviet Union was inevitable, we are agreed on that. But let us also 
agree on that not everything that happened in the metropolitan West 
was.

Probably the "wretched of the earth" had a very important role in all 
the period:  that of reminding even the most revolutionary of the 
metropolitan Western proletarians that they _did_ have things to lose 
that were not only their chains.

I am not placing "blames" on anyone. I am just trying to debate, 
together with all the cdes., up to which point the conservatism of 
the metropolitan working classes is a form of "false consciousness" 
or is simply the reflection of their privileged situation as regards 
the mass of the population on Planet Earth.

And this is not a futile academic exercise. This would save us lots 
of time when, for example, some know-it-all appears on our radar 
screen explaining that the "Bring the boys home" slogan is "too 
Reformistic".  My own opinion is that if it is "too Reformist", then 
it has a very good chance to be the adequate one in the current 
situation. For the reasons above.

Néstor Miguel Gorojovsky
nestorgoro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

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"Sí, una sola debe ser la patria de los sudamericanos".
Simón Bolívar al gobierno secesionista y disgregador de 
Buenos Aires, 1822
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