Trotskyism? Maoism-Stalinism? Leninism?
Generate excitement....Create a rumpus...Sow division, hatred and violence...Come out on top by sending criminals to beat up your opponent and leave him for dead.
The political cults and old Sinn Fein hens practise this game learned from the classes of gamers and horse- and filly-fanciers such as John West,Declan Mc Laughlin,Ronnie Hussey and others in the legal and nursing business.
Does that not sum it all up better than a million weighty volumes by wordy buffoons in England,France or Germany?
The question of statecraft,compromise and nation-building is best left to people like Clement Attlee,Iosip Dzhugashvili and Roosevelt and myself .
11.2.2021
Stalinism? Nationalist socialism or 'world' socialism? Internationalism?
Historically there is a conflict between the two due to the dichotomy between locality and world. The balance between locality and world is that which embraces nationalist socialism and internationalism.
Airy fairy notions about international revolution must be contradicted by the great truth of Karl Marx that socialism develops in local,regional and national circumstances under preexisting conditions.
21.2.2021
Lenin. Stalin. Russia.
First in the Russian dilemma,there came Stalinist autocracy after Lenin's belated attempt to head off White Armies. Lenin instituted autocratic government by closing the Constituent Assembly and by the banning of rival parties. Those developments occurred in November 1918.
What followed Lenin was a grand terror and autocracy. Stalinism as a complex of ideas was based on the theory of underdevelopment priming (or the self-sufficient path to national development). That path led to the chaotic financial collapse after 1991 because it had remained the prevailing economic orthodoxy.
Russian Communism's mistake lay in INFLEXIBILITY and the failure to move to a MULTI-PARTY DEMOCRACY earlier,much earlier.
Democracy
Read Lenin, the later Lenin,to find that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the "democracy of the 99%", nothing more, nothing less. Leninism failed to deliver anything remotely resembling national democracy. Argument and counter-argument are lost in dusty old history books.
Marxist economics in 1917-21
Somewhat contrite,Lenin ducked and weaved in 1921,realising that starvation in Leningrad in 1919 was primarily his fault.
The problem?
His revolutionary cookbook political schema combined German-style cartels (Lenin, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, 1916) with the granting of dictatorial powers to factory managers. Lenin brought to the industrial equation Marx's formula that factory managers made industrial capitalists irrelevant (Karl Marx,Capital,Volume One,1867). What Lenin did not know was that the ,,Managier" in German is part of die Mittelstand,factory owners owning one or two or three factories.
Because Russia is traditionally a strong state (otzovist, Lenin, 1913) the Bolsheviks and subsequent rulers show little respect for ordinary people unlike the United States where rights are cherished and usually enforced.
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The New Economic Plan
In 1922 Lenin sought to backtrack on his revolutionary dirigisme by talking about cooperatives.
However irreparable harm had already been done to the cause of Russian revolutionary socialism from which there is no recovery this side of hell freezing over. In 1991 the vultures took over Russia and the mice gathered around the works of Lenin and other excellent Soviet economists.
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1.2.2022
Stalinism
Stalin writing in Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR (1952) comes across as Mandelstam's Kremlin Mountaineer whose "every word rings like a horseshoe,to the body,to the head,to the groin..."
Stalin was that which is called by Russians "a chief technocrat". In Russian eyes,he was a malevolent, threatening,murderous and dictatorial bizmen at that whatever about his single-minded achievements.
For an insider's account of the history of Russia after 1924,read the works of Stalin,long unfashionable in the former Soviet Union and equally unpopular now too. However it may taste on your literary palate,the translations of these works of Stalin by old Rothstein are tetchy but the greater meaning is not lost. (Only the leading works of Stalin have survived).
Guidance from socialist booksellers? Bookmarks in London?
Ignore political dictators in the TUC bookshop,Bookmarks,and other socialist bookshops who want to tell you what to read. Nobody buys the silly, obscurantist, foolish and contradictory literature which they recommend to you. Those booksellers and the undercover policemen answering the telephone in those places are connected to inconsequential little groups of ideologues. Their books have no broad contemporary importance and represent only the concerns of a few hundred individuals in the whole of the United Kingdom.
The politics of all Trotskyite political sects are those of mind-numbing rhetoric,bizarre "interventions" and endless cycles of meetings, conferences and rallies.
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10.5.2022
Cliff's invention. "Deflected permanent revolution"
In his childish invention,Cliff to pardon Trotsky's nakedness after the signing of the Treaty of Brest Litovsk claims that "permanent revolution" can be "deflected".
A revolution can be defeated,but it can not be avoided where there is what German Communists call a cataclysmic economic "Konjunktur".
What we see as true in Cliff's invention is rather that revolutionists can be impeded, obstructed and harassed wherever they put their head above the parapet. That said,we must always bear in mind the great truth that change comes eventually. Sometimes it takes the form of a violent overthrow which can never be turned back.
No force in government or in the police underworld can alter the outcome of a successful revolution. The result(s) soon become(s) deeply embedded. Revolution brings a new form of stability and stability is the passion of everyone with a balanced mind. Only a contortionist desires permanent chaos and disorder and we count amongst the 'chaos theorists' both Lenin and Trotsky, though not,in truth,Stalin.Marx believed in short,sharp outbursts of political violence not prolonged episodes of insurrectionary terror but his earlier works talk of the Revolution in Permanence (The Communist Manifesto, 1848, Brussels/ London).
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The Irish parallel
Like O Riordain,Marx was a man of staid if unconventional tastes. We read, in Marx and Engels' writings, however,of a very novel approach to political history and economic science which they created by the pen,the studious labours of more than one erudite German scholar,one from a Jewish background. O Riordain was a a copyist and outrider for others in radical politics attached to syndicalist trade unions and the Irish nationalist parties.
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2.10.2022
The reaction by states to protest?
Lenin's account can be summed up in the phrase he used in Brussels in 1901-2-3 when he philosophised about Die Panikmache (figuratively," Panic stations!"). This was how he may have been incapacitated before his exile and conceivably rendered doubly incontinent by the street players and whores and 'biddies' of his day. (To support the latter contention, let us remember once again what became of the author of Dr. Zhivago,Boris Pasternak, and Gogol and Tolstoy. The KGB claimed that Pasternak "slept in his own filth" in 1965 (Moscow News,1988-1991). This Russian-American-German phenomenon is emblematic of societies without proper legal safeguards because of 'public interest immunity' pleas).
In Brezhnev's Russia the reflex police response to protest was actuated by an internal intelligence service which had been indoctrinated in a degenerate form of ideology.
Parallels exist to Dublin in our lifetime, particularly the period from 1988 to 1991 in the crippled society created by the disgraced politicians of Fianna Fail, Sean Doherty, Albert Reynolds, Raymond Burke, Liam Lawlor, Robert Ahern and the Gardai.
Regarding Free State policing, Karl Marx wrote,"A Free State is one where police and judicial satraps are free to do what they want...". The model for Southern policing was created in 1922. It was and is a fascist state which is not law-governed.
East and West, comparisons
A way of life perished in the East in 1991. A way of life established in America by Churchill at Fulton,Missouri in 1948 is likewise dying and dying very quickly because it was based on a mixture of hot air and fear. Leading politicians in the US realise the Cold War is over.
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The deadbeats
One thing that you can be sure of is that when people excoriate what they refer to as Trotskyism,they are trying to portray themselves as men of action. In contradistinction to this "show of ceaseless activity" (Marx),read sloth and a national audience which numbers no more than ten or twelve Old Believers.
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The arguments between democrats and dictators once again rage openly in our unhappy and disturbed country. In Ireland we are long habituated to terrorists on both sides of politics. Here real argument animates no more than a few people with links to University College Dublin.
In Ireland neither Stalinism or Trotskyism play any role in politics not even amongst those claiming their mantle.
In Britain most people know that Trotskyists are mere plagarisers of progressive literature and that they are either very rich or very poor and that they are all connected to the Jews and their publishing houses.
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The thing about most revolutionaries of a certain age or demeanour is that they try to get workers to run before they are able to walk. That occurs in situations of social and political backwardness.
This in turn leads to mental exhaustion on the part of rebel ringleaders,what Cliff called "deflected permanent revolution" .
The permanent revolution of rebels imagination is better catered for by the democratic process all things being equal. Where you get a vassal state arrangement or a revolutionary downturn,you get people such as Communists,Trotskyites, Walter Mitty types who cannot see that the balloon has gone up and that all was never in play or that the revolutionary moment has passed.
That happened in Northern Ireland in 1972, something seen only by the Compromisers.
It is a case of "See a chance,take it".
In all revolutionary endeavours and we do not count those killing their Protestant neighbours for their farms as revolutionaries,timing is key.
Democracy has come to a revolutionary state because like everything else,the time for the dictatorship of the working class had given way to a movement for democratic rights and political obligations.
People like the Workers Party and Communists are like Oisin i ndiaidh na bhfianna,people gan faic no fiud.
The Provos are only conspirators like the Blanquists. No amount of dusty old books can revive authoritarian movements as they once existed.
Joseph Paul Mc Carroll
