Re: [Marxism] If Marxism is a Science...

[Einde O'Callaghan <einde@xxxxxx>]

Louis R Godena wrote:

> > [T]he definitive defeat of the Russian working class wasn't in
> > 1989-1991 but 60 years earlier...
> > This is why the working class didn't come to teh defence of the
> > regime, because the regime was just another bunch of exploiters.... I
> > don't think you can provide me with one example where teh working
> > class,or even a section of teh working class, went into struggle to
> > defend the existing political system or the associated organisation of
> > the economy. The workers didn't feel it was their state and sat on
> > their hands.
>
>
> If this is true, why didn't the Russian working class rise in defence of
> "their" state in the 1920s?  And if the working class didn't care about
> "their" state back then, how do you explain the ferocious resistance to
> the German invasion?   Most reputable studies I've seen (Fitzpatrick,
> Getty, Thurston, Siegelbaum) posit a fair amount of popular for Stalin
> during the 1930s.  Did such support exclude that of workers?   A picture
> *can* be credibly drawn of Russian workers as victims of corrupted
> power, drilled into passivity, but it seems to me that these and other
> seeming contradictions have to be addressed first.
This is one of the questions that Kevin Murphy's book is attempting to
address. But, briefly and rather crudely, one factor is that the working
class of 1917 had ceased to exist as a self-conscious class by 1920/21 -
even Lenin admitted as much and the party was ruling in the name of a
barely existent or even non-existent class - substitutionism on a grand
scale. The new working class that emerged during NEP was ultimately
unable to reimpose its control over the party and particularly over the
state bureaucracy. There is nothing particularly controversial about
this - at least among those from a Trotskyist background - since this is
basically what the Left Opposition said during the period before its
defeat in 1927 and what Trotsky also argued even after that.

Einde O'Callaghan

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