Lenin and Hegel

[Louis N Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

At 01:57 PM 10/8/97 -0700, Bill Burgess wrote:

> I'd also be interested in whether
>the Johnson-Forest tendency (Anderson's political pedigree) agreed with
>Trotsky's emphasis on dialectics in opposing the characterization of the
>USSR as capitalist (see_In Defence of Marxism_), since Anderson lumps
>Trotsky in with all the others who forgot the Hegel in Marx.
>

News and Letters shares the Johnson-Forest "state capitalist" theory
which, if anything, is a completely undialectical understanding of states
like Cuba and the former Soviet Union. This theory won't accept anything
as deserving of the name socialism unless it is blemish-free. There has to
be full democracy, worker's control of the economy, equality of income,
etc. The problem is that these societies come into being when there are a
million mitigating circumstances. Whatever flaws they had, they did not
produce on the basis of profit, but social need.

One more thought on the question of the need to read and understand Lenin
in order to avoid disasters like WWI. This is really the wrong way to
understand the socialist vote for war credits in 1914. Philosophy was not
the problem, it was the accomodation to their bourgeois milieu.
Parliamentarians and trade union officials had begun to see the world the
way the bourgeoisie did because it was a privileged layer. This, and not
vulgar Marxism, was the problem.

Trotsky made the same sort of error in his fight with James Burnham in the
SWP in 1938. Burnham's philosophy--a mixture of Marxism and John
Dewey--did not have the disorienting effect on the Schachtman group that
Trotsky predicted. The Schachtmanites were the most militant defender of
trade union rights on the left during WWII. What accounted for this was
their proletarian composition and fighting spirit.


Louis Proyect