On a method of discussion that leaves ALL the questions unanswered

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

 Nestor wrote: "Would it be too much of a request to
ask German workers not to harp on Stalinist deficiencies but on the
German government's role in Eastern Europe?"

I have a counter-question.  How can German workers possibly harp on "the
German government's role in Eastern Europe" without considerable discussion
of  "Stalinist deficiencies"? For more than four decades, there was no such
thing as "the German government" but two governments..

About twenty million Germans -- the overwhelming majority of them working
people -- lived for all those years under the the East German regime.  After
that experience, they not only did not lift a finger to defend what they
had -- or what others thought they had or some combination of the two --
against absorption by imperialist West Germany.  In fact, they participated
in actions, such as the tearing down of the wall and bringing down the
Honecker government, which, in the concrete situation,  contributed to this
result.

Nestor may look down on them for this, but I suspect that Nestor doesn't
rasp what they confronted in East Germany any more than these working people
understand the character of Peronism.

Perhaps Nestor thinks they should be sorry for what they did, and ashamed of
their role.  But be that as it may, isn't it an  unanswerable condemnation
of East Germany  and what these workers experienced that after 40-odd years
of "progressive" rule, they overwhelmingly and peacefully accepted
unification under the imperialist German state. They were not conquered,
they are not occupied, and noone seems to be fighting for restoration of the
former status quo.

I don't deny that serious social and political divisions are likely to exist
between eastern and western Germany that can have explosive consequences in
the future,  but the state unification of the two Germanys under a single
imperialist German state is simply a fact.

 How can the workers of eastern Germany play down the "deficiencies" of the
regime and the society that led to this outcome. Should they fight for a
repeat performance, or for goals that are more in line with their class
interests?  It is not enough to point out that conditions have grown worse
since then.  First of all, it can be shown that they were already
deteriorating before, and that this deterioration helped set off the final
crisis.  Given the developing economic crisis of world capitalism and the
absence of an organized working class fighting politically for its
interests, worsening conditions was the only way things could go.  But isn't
it legitimate for German workers to try to figure out why, when the world
economic crisis began to take hold in the 1980s, the government, state, and
society where capitalism had been overthrown after World War II turned out
to be the weak link in the chain. And likewise for the
Soviet Union and the rest of Eastern Europe.

If the German workers are going to concentrate on the role of the German
government  in Eastern Europe, can they ignore the rather important role of
the East German government?

In an earlier article, Nestor -- like many others -- presented near
universal alcoholism in Russia as a product of the fall of the Soviet Union.
He attributes this to privatization and low prices.  This is wrong. The
problem has continued to multiply but it long predated and had assumed the
proportions of a colossal epidemic long before Yeltsin or Gorbachev.  You
can't take into account the scope of this  "deficiency" in the current
procapitalist regime without understanding the depth of the "deficiency" in
the   "socialist" regime that preceded it.

>From the beginnings of the rise  to power of the bureaucratic regime in the
Soviet Union, the Left Opposition had pointed to the establishment of the
state vodka monopoly as potentially a source of social catastrophe.  They
warned that it gave the regime a financial stake in  alcoholism, and that it
would undermine the fight against alcoholism.

>From that time to its end,  the vodka monopoly made alcoholism a source of
wealth to the bureaucrats as well as a contributer to pacifying the masses
and stabilizing the political situation.

By the end of the Soviet Union, alcoholism was already an  overwhelming
plague.  It reflected not only the policies of the regime, but even more
importantly the depth of the alienation and hopelessness that the masses of
working people were feeling.  This, and not cheap vodka prices and
privatization, is the main source of the univesality of the plague today.

As in East Germany, things have grown worse socially and economically since
the fall, which Soviet working people did nothing to prevent and, to the
extent that they were mobilized, helped bring about.  They passed judgment
on the regime they had experienced, as they were entitled to and just as
they will pass judgement on what they confront today.  But the problems of
declining production, growing unemployment, disintegration of free medical
care and old age pensions, homelessness, worsening health and declining life
expectancy all can be traced back to the glory days of the Brezhnev regime.
(The character of the Brezhnev era as a specific period of reaction in
Soviet society -- in the context of the overall counterrevolutionary process
that took root in the 1920s and is best analyzed in Trotsky's Revolution
Betrayed -- was almost totally missed in the rest of the world due to the
foreign policy clashes with Washington, aid to Cuba, and illusions about the
progressive character of the ruinous adventure of occupying Afghanistan.)

When Nestor is challenged on questions like this -- and especially when his
concrete factual and analytical arguments are a little weak (which is not
the case on many subjects) -- he tends to respond with denunciations of
those who disagree on the grounds that they live in imperialist countries.
The questions of the role of the workers in these countries has an
independent importance of its own, but it makes no more sense to answer
arguments about the "deficiencies" of the Soviet or East European
governments or of Saddam Hussein or whatever with arguments about the
workers in the imperialist countries than it would to answer arguments about
the latter with denunciations of Brezhnev and Honecker.

There is a touch of demagogy in this.

There is no particular reason why fighters in the imperialist United States
or Germany should be obliged, out of guilt, to blind themselves likje
Oedipus to the differences between the bourgeois nationalists Saddam and the
Baath Party, for example, and Arafat and the Palestinian movement;  or to
the very differences between leaders who can be  placed in a very broad
"bourgeois nationalist"   category like the revolutionary Chavez or  Allende
and Peron; or to the difference between the Sandinistas and Fidel; between
Fidel and Honecker; the Vietnamese leadership and Pol Pot;  Maurice Bishop
and Bernard Coard, etc.


I fail to see how the irreconcilable struggle against "our" imperialist
rulers is weakened by such  efforts to understand what we are up against and
where our allies and enemies are located in a given circumstance, and I
think it is sometimes actually vital, including for fighters in the
imperialist countries.  (I remember how important it was to grasp the
differences between the course followed by the Vietnamese and Cambodian
regimes after the defeat of the imperialist puppets, and how in one case it
led  toward more conflict with imperialism and in the other toward alliance
with it.  The same was true of the Iraq-Iran war, the clash between the
bourgeois-nationalist Saddam regime and the Iranian national revolution.)
Fred Feldman


~~~~~~~
PLEASE clip all extraneous text before replying to a message.