[Marxism] The Soviet Union Versus Socialism

["Charles Brown" <cbrown@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Tom Chisholm:

The designation is to
differentiate them from Marxist-Leninists, who
believed in the necessity of centralizing state power
to protect the revolution from imperialist
encirclement and, as you put it, suppress what they
deemed as "counter-revolutionary" tendencies in the
country (which resulted, as anarchists like to remind
us, in the repression of the Kronstadt workers' revolt
and, later, even of Bolshevik "Workers Opposition" to
strict party control of trade unions).

^^^^
CB: _Wasn't_ a semi-militarized organization of society, let alone a
centralized state power, necessary to protect the revolution from war and
invasion by imperialism, with its vastly superior industrial technology
which translated into advanced industrial military technology ?

Chomsky is so good at analyzing imperialism's hi tec nfariousness today.
Can't he extrapolate back in history a little more thoughtfully and
realistically on the viciousness of imperialism in the day of the Russian
Revolution ? The implications of that world historic war machine for that
time ? Surely, with his knowledge of the Viet Nam war, he understands why
the VietNamese needed Marxism-Leninism to defend against American
imperialism. Can't he see the analogy between backward Russia , and its need
for Leninism to defend against imperialism then ?

Also, with Chomsky's theory of the non-Party, the Bolsheviks never would
have taken state power in the first place. And don't count on the Soviets
electing Chomskyites circa 1917 to anything in the workers' movement.


So, we have Chomsky criticising the Bolsheviks for not switching over and
acting like Chomskyites after the insurrection has been won, when the
theoretical Chomskyites of that day did not and could not have won the
insurrection in the first place. It took exactly the "iron discipline" and
democratic centralism of the Bolshevik party clubs and organization to win
the insurrection, as Lenin said.

 Chomsky wants to arrogate power to his train of thought all in his
imagination, none of it in the real world of the Russian workers' and
peasants struggle of the early 1900's ;or the ghastly world of capitalist
imperialism in the Fordist mass production era, including mass production of
giant cannon and machine guns, et al. World War I demonstrated the leap in
the capitalist military's ability to do mass slaughter.

Not only that, "everybody" agrees that the Russian population
post-insurrection did not just "fall out of the sky" as a bunch of tabala
rosas. Most Russians were not anywhere near Communists or Marxists or
anarchists. There were a whole lot of people with what can be summarized as
reactionary and feudal thinking and world views.   Majority votes of the
populations of Russia at that time on most matters would not likely be
revolutionary or even democratic. Voting, the form, does not guarantee
"democracy" or the best decisions.


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