Stoller: IMPORTANT NOTE: None of this is intended to be a glorification of war or terror or any of the very ugly measures that accompany all revolutions. Personally, I'd prefer to see the capitalist minority 'come around' and surrender their militias and missiles when the overwhelming proletariat finally confronts them. However, as this would constitute a historical aberration, communists should not expect such easy going! Instead, in order to be honest, they must inform the workers that the struggle for class rule WILL be a violent struggle. To expect otherwise is foolishly utopian and / or disingenuous.: Why is it an abberation? Where has it ever been tried before?
Never---that's my point.
: Thats cobblers that has been subsequently throroughly disprooved, cf. Ida Mett's 'The Krondstadt uprising' published by solidarity - the committee of the mutiny was made up of experienced sailors, who were there in 17, and plenty of the rest were of the old guard as well - this is an olllld canard.
Irrelevant. Whether or not Lenin and Trotsky themselves participated in the Kronstadt mutiny, the nascent Soviet state was right to suppress it under the conditions. Trotsky's regret that innocents died was honest enough.
Stoller: The Cheka, as I've stated previously, was originally the Revolutionary Military Committee, a body created to fight sabotage, profiteering, hooliganism and, later, the counterrevolution itself.
: But which became a secret police - i've called Trots Red Fascists to their face before for defending secret police, and I'm doing it again. you, Barry Stoller, are a Red Fascist. Socialists cannot, ever countenance a secret police force, the logic is completely unstoppable - the working class cannot control them, they must subjugate and divide the working class themselves, a secret police is utterly against our class interest.
So busy name-calling that you missed much of my post’s content.
The Cheka continued PAST the civil war because the civil war, in many instances, became a cold war of indeterminate length. That, as I see it, was the tragedy of the October revolution: that the underdevelopment of industry and the 'overdevelopment' of petty proprietorship prevented the Bolsheviks from successfully carrying out their aims. But, as I had hoped the Engels quote at the end of my post would illustrate, seeing failure could under no circumstances 'inspire' Lenin et. al to turn their back on their proletarian instincts and accept leading a bourgeois nation.
And if you want to insult me, you'll have to do better: the name-calling stakes have gotten pretty high around here since SDF has joined the Green party's 2000 campaign...
Stoller: I feel that it is altogether too EASY for quasi-socialists (and anarchist quacks) to criticize the October Revolution. As a matter of fact, it's pretty common these days to disown it. But have any of these critics faced famine while the enemy class hoarded grain in the hopes that the population, dropping dead in the streets of starvation, would permit them to restore the rule of capital? Let's see all these quasi-socialists (and anarchist quacks) face a situation like the one the Bolsheviks faced---without resort to force, without resort to terror, without resort to desperation. THEN I'll be impressed by all their grandiloquent yak about peaceful, 5-minute revolutions and the like.
: We disowned [the October Revolution] in 1917, when it wasn't fashionable...
What an effort!
