Mao, NB and Left-wing communism etc (was Re: [Marxism] Radek and National-Bolshevism

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

----- Original Message -----
From: "Zivko Vukolaj" <zivko_vukolaj@xxxxxxxxxxx>

> Just who exactly do you think you are to believe that you may tell me that
> I have no right to speak?

I was quoting Mao. Fight with him, not me.

As to respect, I suggest you read the first email you wrote in the subject.

I can be rather forceful in debates, but I do try to be respectful even with
profound differences exist. Yet your response triggered mine.

You don't throw the first punch as expect to come out unscathed, do you?

> > From: "Carlos A. Rivera" <cerejota@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
>
> Well, since I don't believe you to be in any measure right here, I will
> have to ask for sources.

Ican't find primary source material on the internet, but I have read the
documents Goldner probably uses as reference:

> From a book review of the post-marxist journal "Race Traitor":

An American National Bolshevik
by Loren Goldner
http://www.home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/yockey.html

"The term "National Bolshevik" refers to an ambiguous minority current that
appeared in the revolutionary wave in Europe immediately following World War
I. The term was first used by Bela Kun, head of the short-lived Communist
government in Hungary in 1919, and cropped up in some statements of Karl
Radek, the Communist revolutionary who conducted Comintern business from his
prison cell in Berlin in the same year, meeting with members of the German
business(4) and military elite as well as with the German radical left."

> From the same author:

> From National Bolshevism to Ecologism
(This article originally appeared in the Diario de Noticias (Lisbon),
Historical Supplement,   (March 18 1980)
http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/nationalbolshevism.html

"it was Bela Kun, head of the Hungarian revolutionary government during its
three months of existence in l918-19, who first used the term "National
Bolshevism".

(notice how the article predates the NBP, yet does somewhat haphazardly
connect NB to fascism)


This is peripheral, but speaks of a contemporary knowledge of
"National-Bolshevism" as part of the communist experience in germany.

Why the German Revolution Failed
by Walter Held (its seminal but flawed, I AM STILL A TANKIE, eat me!)
"It is questionable whether the result would have been different if the
German party had started the uprising on a fixed date in October 1923. Just
as it was certain that Trotsky was correct in his evaluation of the
political crisis in Germany, so it was also certain that his attempt to
correct the policies of the German party was too late. The conception of the
German party was not adequate from the very beginning. Its relations to the
masses and to itself were not sufficiently analysed and its practical,
concrete policies were incorrect in all decisive events, beginning with
January 1919, likewise in the Kapp Putsch (1920), the March Action (1921)
and so too in the year 1923. The mistake of 1923 did not begin with the
failure to organise the uprising but with 11 January, the day of the
occupation of the Ruhr by French troops. Thanks to its unstable
national-Bolshevik policies, the party was so disoriented in October that an
attempt at uprising could hardly count on a successful outcome."



> Don't you see, if we take your definition of National Bolshevism in
> effect, then consequently Gramsci, Stalin, Mao, Hoxha, and so on and so
> fourth, were all National Bolsheviks.

Actually, I said the Radek was a proto-maoist. So you are not off-mark. I do
think further study is needed to the question, but a hunch tells me Radek is
under-rated, for reasons of his purge, as a theorician of national
liberation. Which was all National Bolshevism meant when it was born.

Here is were you are correct, National Bolshevism today, and National
Bolshevism in the 1920s were two different animals. I have not argued
otherwise.

What I have argued against is that instead of sitting down, invastigating,
and finding out facts, you simply assume that Radek was not a National
Bolshevik because he was a Bolshevik. Such precious logic!

This is your equation:

The NBP represents fascism today -> Karl Radek was an anti-fascist -> So
Karl Radek couldn't have been a National Bolshevik.

That is a wrong method.

My equation is this:

There was National Bolshevism in the 1920s -> Karl Radek was a National
Bolshevik in the 1920s -> A fascist party un-connected to this original
National Bolshevism captures the name for itself today -> Today national
bolshevism is fascism.

This are of course simplifcations, but they clearly illustrate how
ahistorical and illogical your method is, and how correct mine is.

> I'm sure that National Bolsheviks would apreciate you thinking in these
> terms,

Ah! Since they put Che Guevara all over their websites, I should stop
thinking of Che as revolutionary?

After all, the National Bolsheviks appreciate Che Guevara!!!

> but it just doesn't seem historically justified.

Why not historically justified? I have provided you with ample grounds for
self-study on the question, and demonstrated to you how weak your equation
is. Now, it is up to you to either continue to hold to pre-concived ideas
that have no hold on reality, or like David did, throw some fact based holes
into my theory. No study, no right to speak.

I am by far more historically justified than you.

> If it has, where is it? I would really enjoy reading a document, written
> in the time period that you speak of, proclaiming the emergance of a new
> and autonomous ideology of 'National Bolshevism'. I'm sorry, but I can't
> help feeling rather uneasy about your claims on this.

Not autonomous ideology. Early National Bolshevism was a tendency within the
Bolshevik movement, much like, say, the Workers Opposition, Left-wing
Communism (of which National Bolshevism was a part), etc. It was also a
well-known faction of those who left the KPD to form the KAPD, but who left
before the first congress. And that is very much easier to verify with
souces than Bela Kun as originator of "national-bolshevism" as label.

I have not argued anything else, so, please, don't put words in my mouth.


> Well, each and every one of those examples points directly to the
> ambiguity of the meaning of the term in that period. It's much like the
> bourgeois usage of 'communism' as a political designation.

Now we change the goal post!

Faced with thrid party evidence that "national bolshevism" was not a term
invented, nor politically developed outside of Bolshevism, now you retreat
into calling it "ambigous" and "much like the bourgeois usage of 'communism'
as a political designation".

This is a convinient retreat, and further strengthened because it IS
ambigous, althought not in the vague, partisan manner as communism is used
by today's bourgeoise.

National Bolshevism,
in its original period, clearly designated a specific trend within the
bolshevik movement and the Comintern, specifically the "left-wing" tendency
around Radek and Bujarin (ie those who opposed Brest-Litovsk on "national"
grounds) and the Hungarian Soviet of Bela Kun.

There is no ambiguity. Furthermore, the term was only used, to my knowledge,
within the left and not always as an insult, but usually so (Trots specially
liked it in the 30s and 40s, I guess as a way of calling commies, fascist
without the emotional content it would have had at the time). It was never
used by the bourgeoise.

Even Hal Draper used the term in that manner well into the 60s to describe
Cuba and Vietnam.

That Dugin and Liminov try to tell us they re-discovered the term, and you
believing them whole-heartedly, doesn't change history. You are simply
ideologically capitulating in the face of their mis-apropiation of the term
for their purposes.

You capitulate in front of the fascists, I slap back at them with truth.


> I'm taking National Bolshevism as it defined itself, that is, as a
> program, and not as some play on words by early Bolsheviks. The only thing
> that National Bolsheviks and Radek have in common is the syntax. You
> probably still have trouble identifing the Swastika with Nazism. It would
> be too "ahistorical".

Your analogy doesn't work. You are being ahistorical because you see the
present and then define the past (exactly what marxism IS NOT about).

I have not argued that Radek would belong to the NBP, quite the contrary. I
simply pointed out he WAS a national bolshevik while alive, in the way it
was defined THEN. Radek being a national bolshevik has no political,
immediate, relationship with the NBP's self designation, TODAY.

It is actually your method ahistoricism which would turn a Hindi devout
cleric into a Nazi because he wears a Swastika, TODAY.

Better yet, you would DENY that a hindi could possible wear a swastika,
after all it is the symbol of the Nazis!!!

Such is your lack of historical perspective!

> Oh please realize that I just simply rephrased your own "opinion of it's
> history", which you actually designated as pedestrian knowledge.

No, what I designated as pedestrian knowledge were facts, not opinion.

Since you quoted Wikipedia, I will do the same thing:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left_communism

"The KAPD was unable to reach even its founding Congress prior to suffering
its first split when the so-called National Bolshevik tendency around
Wolffheim and Laufenburg appeared (it should be noted that this tendency has
no connection with modern political tendencies in Russia which use the same
name)."

Stress that National Bolshevism, in the communist/revolutionary socialist
melieu at the time, had no connection to fascism (even if indeed many a
national bolshevik, and just plain bolshevik, *became* a Nazi, as well as
the other way around).

anti-fascist greetings,

sks


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