Re: [Marxism] Radek and National-Bolshevism

["Carlos A. Rivera" <cerejota@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message -----
From: <dwalters@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

> "We could debate if Radek would agree with Liminov today, but this would
> be
> like debating if Engels would agree with today's SPD."
>
> Carlos, you've got to be kidding? This is where you are projecting
> Radek's 'soft spot' for the KADP's approach to the Ruhr Valley nationalist
> workers groups and confusing it with was is essentially modern day Russian
> fascism (IMO).

Actually not. Because I am sure that Engels would have joined, say, the RAF
rather than the SPD, if given the choice. He was in his core a Che-like
military adventurist after all.

So Radek would in all probability be against the NBP of today. But this is
irrelevant and speculative. People live in the history they lived, and it is
politically futile to transport them into our current reality. WWJD is not
materialism, after all.

Zivko denies that Radek was a national bolshevik, and remained essentially
so in his career (you correctly point out that inspite of being a LO, he
agreed with Stalin on China, and a whole other things, based on nationalist
grounds).

This is simply not true, Radek in the early 1920s described himself as a
national bolshevik, so Zivko is factually wrong.

And while later he denied and even attacked "national bolsheviks", his
politics remained pretty strongly so.

And as I mentioned Bela Kun also descirbed the revolution he led as a
"National Bolshevik" revolution. National Bolshevism was an important, if
problematic, part of the Bolshevik tradition at its birth, and has remained
so, by other names, to this day.

That Limonov and his post-fascist croonies appropiate the name, a
ecclecticly capture certain ideological tidbits here and there is irrelevant
to the question. Zivko is being ahistorical, and hence, is wrong.

You point towards an important fact regarding Radek, how he helped educate a
lot of cadre from a place that would later be know for the greatest
synthesis of nationalism and socialism: Maoism. This is no coincidence,
methinks. I would go as far as to say that as much like Kautsky was the
original Leninist, Radek was the original Maoist, in that he set the basis
for it.

Which doesn't change the historical fact that he was a national bolshevik.

sks


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