[Marxism] Reply to J. about the Soviet Union

["Jurriaan Bendien" <andromeda246@xxxxxxxxx>]

Scotlive@xxxxxxx <Scotlive@xxxxxxx>
  The role of the Soviet Union in socialist history is the reason for the
factionalism and disunity which plagues the far Left.
  Wouldn't you agree?

  Scot
I would say it is part of the reason - the fate of the USSR became an enigma
for Western Marxists, and they were unable to analyse it and develop a
position on it that was truly credible and convincing. bDogma got in the
way. I am currently translating a book about that topic. Part of the reason
is plain ignorance or lack of familiarity about Russian society and language
difficulties, part of the reason is that independent or critical political
voices were routinely squashed in the USSR, and that Westerners and Russians
could have little genuinely free contact for a long time, and part of it is
the difficulty of weighing up the gains and losses of unprecedented
revolutionary change in the scales of history, morally or scientifically.
Behind that there's the material stakes, and a dialectic of partial conquest
probably operates - once you've made a definite political gain, risking that
gain to make more gains becomes harder. Even a profound thinker like Roy
Medvedev titled his book about Stalin's crimes "Let History Judge" which
postpones a moral evaluation - this raises the question, well what does it
take to make a moral evaluation, what exactly do you need for it ?

My personal view is that the 1917 revolution was defensible, but that forced
collectivisation of the peasantry and the forced industrialisation programme
in the USSR was indefensible, in terms of the human cost in deaths and human
misery, and I think the Left and Joint Opposition showed that alternatives
were possible. I think that in many if not a majority of cases, the "class
interests" which communist propaganda claimed to detect in the 1920s were
fictitious, rhetorical or imaginary, and just an ideological rationalisation
for forcing through policies which guaranteed the survival of the political
regime.

I think after Lenin's death, Trotsky basically wanted to show that
alternatives existed very clearly, and thereby save the "honorable moral
intent" or "moral integrity" of 1917 for future generations. But like I
said, he didn't have a completely "clean slate" himself, to the extent that
he was partly implicated in creating the party-state that subsequently
bulldozered over the concerns of great masses of peasants and workers.
Trotsky himself proclaimed prior to his expulsion, "my party is my party,
right or wrong", the spirit of what Lenin called "partiinost" (partyism).
But neither was he a genuine party apparatchnik. Both those factors weakened
his position. The way I would describe Stalin's policies would be gigantic
"overkill".

It's in a certain sense similar to the policies of GW Bush subsequent to the
provocation of  9/11, which was also massive overkill, which leads to a
result which is precisely contrary to what is intended. Behind that overkill
is excessive fear and anxiety, and an insufficient flexibility of thought,
causing in turn excessive aggression, which, of course, can happen to anyone
under extreme pressure. GW Bush as leader could however have responded
differently to 9/11; he could have initiated a serious moral debate, and a
serious debate about where the world is really going. That would have been
in the longterm interest of the USA, and in the longterm interest of the
world. He could have won that debate, since the terrorist attacks were
morally not defensible, and there's other ways to make a point.  But he
didn't do it, and if he didn't do it, it was because he had no immediate
interest in doing it, and because he was under political pressure to "do
something", and "hit back" at something. And that became the opportunity for
hitting at "something" that was in the geostrategic interest of the USA
anyway, and for which the plans had been sitting in the policy cupboard for
some time already. Bush bought himself into a fight to show who's the boss,
but I think time will tell it isn't Bush. He hopes he will win, even if he
loses, but I don't think so.

The dispute about the morality of the Russian revolution and its aftermath
feeds into the dispute of the morality of revolutions as such. But in
reality no revolution every happened with a moral justification attached to
it. A revolution doesn't come with a moral price tag and it cannot be
"made". It bursts onto the scene, often taking most people by surprise. The
justifications come afterwards - things are done, and then the intellectuals
debate whether they should have been done, or not.

But part of the reason for the factionalism and disunity of the far Left is
simply the lack of constructive alternatives and a constructive vision of
the future. Capitalism may be doomed, but what the answer is, is not truly
clear. The number of thinkers who seriously try to tackle the topic of what
a feasible socialism (or any sort of better alternative) would look like, or
what effective political organisation would look like, is very small. A
clear ethics is lacking. Leftist outfits will publish books about what is
wrong with the system, but they publish few books about exemplars about what
should happen instead, or what could happen instead. Most far Left politics
is a negative politics or oppositionist politics, or anti-politics. Indeed,
to be "Left" often becomes almost synonymous with highlighting failures,
such that a culture of failure develops, rather than a culture of success.
The idea that there could be a future, which is better than what capitalism
can achieve as an underperforming system, is dismissed as a dreamy fantasy
or science fiction. In contrast, somebody like Michael Moore really tries to
aim for a culture of success, but many Leftists hate him for it. He's trying
to say, we're not stupid, they are, so come on ! He tries to invert the
reifications, the ideology.

Neoliberalism wins essentially, because a critical mass of people still
believe that there really is "No Alternative" to capitalist markets, and if
so, then the only thing that mobilises people into struggles, is if they
personally have no other choice than to fight for their rights and needs,
because capitalist markets do not work for them personally. The media finds
that pretty interesting, but not for the same reasons as Leftists do, of
course. The neoliberal argument is, that you can get everything you want
through capitalist markets, so why fight it ? If people cannot get what they
want through capitalist markets, then it's a human interest story exhibiting
how different people can be. And in response the Left tends to focus either
on things you cannot get through capitalist markets, or on how capitalist
markets screw people up, but the way they do that is often not all that
convincing, because ordinary folks want to know how the hell else you would
do it. There are victims, yes, shit happens, yes, but now what. Then, the
next problem that you have, when you do arrive at real alternatives, is that
many people will pounce on you, to discover ways to make capitalism work
better, with your ideas. And that means that the way you go about presenting
alternatives has to be thought through, because it is so easy to be
ransacked, or bought out by people you don't even agree with.

Personally I don't talk much with Trotskyists these days, because they are
mainly interested in talking about how the objective situation is not
conducive to socialism, or maybe, how the objective situation is conducive
to socialism here and there, sort of like, there's a light at the end of the
tunnel if you will fight for the revolutionary programme now. But that way
of framing the issue is not really one in which I am personally interested.
The way I see it, there's so much light, I feel like goin round wearing
sunglasses and deepening my knowledge of meteorology.

When I think of the Left these days, I think of the old Beatles song "Can't
buy me love". This is an optimistic, slightly naive number which is sung
from the point of view of a guy who isn't yet completely clued up about his
style and his own act. But you see very clearly in that song, that he wants
a girl to "say" something which expresses the fact that she accepts him, and
loves him for what he is, not for what he owns. In other words, none of this
material girl shit. He longs for a specific type of communication: "Tell me
that you want the kind of things, that money just can't buy", which is
genuine, freely given intimacy. And he takes a kind of cool dude attitude,
and he says effectively "the money doesn't matter", implying this proves he
is being genuine, his "persuasion act" is that money is not his primary
concern, he seeks a love on a principled basis, a genuine affection
unmediated by haggling or material considerations. The whole point however
is, that he is trying to get the girl to say what he wants her to say, but
he only gets as far as pleading, and he says he "will do anything" for her.
That pleading is balanced by his cool dude attitude about the irrelevance of
money, a sort of streetwise but sensitive approach. But it's actually
slightly ambiguous, because he says "I don't care too much for money" which
means he DOES in fact care to some extent about the money, he cares about it
enough. All he is trying to say is that he is not greedy, or that he doesn't
think that possessions are what really matters, he has some idealism. The
cool dude image is sustained by the fact that he is in a phase of life where
he has sufficient money, so that he can buy her anything she wants
(including a diamond ring, he says) if she tells him what he wants to hear,
that's the deal. But that is just to say it is a slightly naive song,
containing a level of either guile or uncertainty. That song would thus
appeal to a type of girl who values sincerity and authenticity in a man, but
even so, she must be slightly naive, because she wouldn't understand fully
the ambiguity or contradiction in the song, or maybe his hope is, that if
she did understand it, that she would be sufficiently charmed by it, to fall
for it.

Jurriaan


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