: SDF: Well, first of all, "communism" is going to get nowhere if its defenders are endlessly tied up in the defense of mass murderers like Lenin, whose Third International did more than anything to destroy Communist Parties around the world : Andy: That's a bit of a crappy summary of Lenin's contribution don't you think?
SDF: I would imagine that a good Leninist would proclaim the history in Part 2 of Julius Braunthal's HISTORY OF THE INTERNATIONAL to be a lie, since accepting it would create some real cognitive dissonance. At any rate, Braunthal, a socialist, describes Lenin's efforts to purge the Communist Parties of Europe of people who did not sign on to the Twenty-One Points and who did not accept leadership from Moscow. The effect of it, in many countries, was to create small Communist Parties and larger Socialist Parties, allowing doctrinal bickering between the two factions to prevent any real attempt at revolution and perhaps aiding in the ascendancy of leaders such as Benito Mussolini in Italy. However, it appears that Lenin actually did think of such purges as a central part of his overall strategy, for such a strategy is explained in detail in his book LEFT-WING COMMUNISM: AN INFANTILE DISORDER. If you'd like to do a close reading of that book, I'd be happy to oblige. If you just want to purge me from your Party, then I'm out.
Andy: 1) Do you too succumb to the critics of Lenin who tell us he "ruled with an iron will"? (How many times was Lenin outvoted on the Central committee?)
SDF: He seemed to like the idea. Go back and read Lenin.
Andy: 2) Is the dictatorship of the proletariat legitimate? (ie can you suppress a counter-revolution or are you "revising" Marx?)
SDF: Frankly, Andy, I don't care to worship Marx either. What Marx left of value was the notion of historical materialism, the idea that history could be judged not by the "great men of history" whose deeds are still worshipped in American public schools today, but rather that history was an evolution of material conditions of human existence guided by the social accumulation of technologies. The mistake that is exemplified in the writings of Engels is that historical materialism had at that time become a "science," rather than a good theory in bad need of some serious reworking, fact-checking, and development. If historical materialism is a "science," then does Lenin count as a "scientist," or was he just a little boy playing with matches, given that his "experiment" failed? Do we usually dub "scientists" those engaging in science (chemistry, for instance, or physics) whose experiments end in failure? (I myself want no title as a practicioner of historical-materialist "science" -- IMHO the theory is still not there yet.)
Some unsolved problems that might get in the way of any idea that the Leninists developed a science: Marx and Lenin hubristically overestimated the size and the quality of allegiance of the "proletariat" of their time. Even you concede this w/ respect to Lenin. Lenin had to confront the problems caused by this overestimation by his instution of the NEP, a retrenchment to petit-bourgeois cultural practice. Gorbachev, a self-proclaimed Leninist, tried the NEP strategy for a second time so that the Soviet Union could lamely compete with the rest of the world in technology, for instance the Internet, the medium of communication we're using now and ultimately a product of the US Department of Defense, and guess what? The proletariat selected another dictatorship! So the combination of Leninism and realism in the late 1980s produced what?
Lenin also tried to fight off the possibility that the working class might embrace capitalism by purging the Party of reformists. However, isn't it true that the embrace of capitalism grows stronger daily by virtue of the strength of the culture industry, regardless of capitalism's constant ripoff of the surplus labor of the working class? Capitalism may have led the world to starvation, but it has given the world the gift of Coca-Cola, which the world has accepted.
Isn't it curious that all revolutions calling themselves "Marxist" have taken place in thinly-industrialized countries (Russia, Cuba, China, Vietnam, North Korea)? (The only singular exception I can think of is Chile in 1974, and that took place by democratic election, not by Leninist tactics.) One would think otherwise from a reading of Marx, rather, that the most industrialized countries would go Communist. (I would love to put "or are you revising Marx?" here, but there is no "dripping with sarcasm" key on this keyboard.) Or is it true, on the other hand, that in fully industrialized countries, the working class is more apt to fight for reformist gains regardless of their sufferings under capitalism, as Craig Calhoun notes in his book THE QUESTION OF CLASS STRUGGLE?
The notion that the world could be won by armed struggle would appear to have ended when the Government of the United States acquired an arsenal of globally-deployable atomic bombs. August 6, 1945 was a bad day to be a Leninist, and one would think that the passage of such days would make debates like this one unnecessary. One also wonders what would have become of Vietnamese communism had the US dropped the Bomb on Hanoi, as was repeatedly threatened during the 1960s and early 1970s. Perhaps there are worse things than re-entry into the community of capitalist nations as one of the world's poorest.
The theory of the decline in the aggregate rate of profit, as explained in Volume 3 of CAPITAL, is supposed to produce some observable effects upon the culture of corporate capitalism WHEN?
Andy: 3) Did the Bolsheviks make some serious mistakes under no pressure from BOTH the antagonists of WW1? (or did the Bolsheviks make some very serious unforced errors?)
SDF: When in doubt, point to your enemies. Stuart Gort's debate strategy.
Andy: 4) Did the Third International destroy any Communist Parties around the world or was Lenin's big mistake
SDF: I stopped reading here. "Mistakes were made." -Ronald Reagan. The revolution will not be won through alibis.
Andy: While I disagree most heartily with the author you replied to, just who is the utopian and who is the Marxist?
SDF: Marxism as such IS a utopia (here we're playing with a false choice between "utopianism" and "science" that was the basis for Engels' book SOCIALISM UTOPIAN AND SCIENTIFIC, if the reader is getting impatient with us at this point.). If the messianism of the coming Socialist Revolution would appear to have no basis in objective fact, then how is its advance publicity "scientific" and not "utopian"? (On the other hand, if we decide subjectively that we want a utopia, why, we might even have some success at it!)
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earlier I said:
: SDF: Well, anyway, today the masses are in a trance brought on by excessive exposure to advertising, a trance which will end when capitalism collapses with certainty, i.e. not soon, but possibly within your lifetime. Only then will communists have a dim outside chance of making anything of the ensuing chaos.
: Andy: Bloody hell! If we let capitalism collapse, then we're all stuffed! Listen up all you budding anti-capitalists - Socialism (and then Communism) can only exist with socialised production. The ONLY task we have left is to socialise ownership or control of production. If we let capitalism collapse, by definition capitalist production collapses. Even the greatest crimes of Stalin, Hitler and 20th century United States Presidents all put together won't pale in comparison to the mass starvation & mayhem that would occur in the "ensuing chaos".
SDF: Then maybe the threat of such chaos will move people to change their embrace of the status-quo. But if the world just stays on the current wave of capitalist hubris, there's no way the world will become "communist," for the people who would make it "communist," few as they are today, are set against each other in endless bickering about ideas that will not end through any call to dogmatic purity such as Braunthal described.
