antipopper

The PCI Stalinist? In 1975? Eurocommunist more like – no Stalinist would pander to Christianity like that.

by mark on 13 February 2006 at 8:54 pm. #

pah! My problem is that you are blaming Stalin(ism) for the sins it is precisely not guilty of (viz. social democratic revisionism, cozying up to the bourgeoisie) as well as the ones it is, hence ‘Stalinism’ comes to simply mean ‘bad’. Eurocommunism could never have happened had Stalin not been denounced and broken with.

by mark on 14 February 2006 at 5:10 pm. #

torino. a city where the nation was plotted by the savoia cabinet, gramsci breifly operated, fiat industrialised that northern triangle of the country, sucked up large injections of rural southern populace, the communist party monopolised (for a time) the workforce, the few relevant publishing houses were founded, italian intellectuals take their own life, where french intellectual and culinary culture is still vaguely hegemonic, where nietzsche’s folly got the best of him after commencing his work on wagner, where a large satanic superstition is still deeply rooted.

torino, the most interesting of all italian cities, maybe because the less italian.

by leonardo on 15 February 2006 at 1:07 am. #

Oh YEah – I meant to tell you I saw a great SHroud of Turin lightbox at Sacre Coeur in Paris…… I wish they’d had some on sale tho……

by mayhem on 15 February 2006 at 12:03 pm. #

I was kinda joking about the Trot thing, and I’m not particularly trying to hang onto the “Stalinist” label, but I also think you’re being a bit literalist here by taking people at their word. So I’ll jump in and take it further!

If the literal renouncement of Stalin and “cosying up the bourgeoisie” is all that’s required for a Stalinist party to cease being “Stalinist”, sure, but other things need to be taken into consideration. To be a bit trotty: after Ernest Mandel and others, I’d suggest that there’s a great continuity between Stalinism and Eurocommunism on the whole question of “socialism in one country”, and that this was a vital, defining feature of Stalinism. So it’s not really that much of a stretch to describe the authoritarian engineers of the “historic compromise” — which was to ensure the enshrinement of national productivity above anything socially revolutionary (remind you of anyone?) — as practicing a variant of Stalinism.

As for the Cliffites being trots or not, that’s up to one’s interpretation of either their pseudo-programme or their actual behaviour, not just what they profess about their love of Trotsky; although their members have been wont to impress me by quoting stuff like “Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard…”, on the level of programmatic adherence, I personally agree with the Sparts — the SWP/ISO aren’t really trots at all — there’s a complete abandonment of the analysis of the Soviet Union as a degenerated workers’ state, and a transformation of a principled united front tactic and the truly strategic elements of the Transitional Programme into what the Sparts would characterise as the empty populism of bourgeois coalitionism and toadying up to social democracy. Surely they’re not worthy of the name “Trot”! :)

“Percyists” is my particular term for the Democratic Socialist Perspective and Resistance, given the tendency to name tendencies after leaders in Leninoid groupuscles. :) They formally renounced Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution (i.e. a major defining feature of Trotskyism) in the 1980s, sought formal unity with the literally Stalinist SPA shortly thereafter, and then proposed that the October revolution could be restored from above by the bureaucracy. So while the Marcyites claim to be Trotskyists while following an essentially Stalinophilic line, the DSP could be interpreted as simply being Stalinophiles.

And yet despite all this, “we” still call the DSP and the ISO “trots”, and not without reason — not because we can simply go on stuff like the Cliffites’ professed Trot-love, but because in many ways, the DSP and ISO still act like Trotskyists. They’ve inherited the same claustrophobic, authoritarian instrumentalism that completely outweighs their social base, the same inability to actually engage with the grassroots movements they try to lead unless it leads to actual defection from the party or endless splits, the same tendency to project their lack as a state-in-waiting, born of a depressed state of constant, loyal statist oppositionism, with no captured state machinery to call their own… It’s “small man” syndrome writ organisationally large (something you can identify without actually believing in being successfully patriarchal or masculinist), and this is what’s always characterised Trotskyism for me, over and above its contradictory programmatism. (Sorry Trot readers — and I know I have at least one reader who maintained an orthodox Trostkyist committment for a number of decades — but you know, it’s true, at least in the West, regardless of whatever good stuff Trot activists might do in spite of their formal committments…) Of course, none of these things are exclusive to Trotskyism, but I think such habits are generally distinguishable from other (nonetheless centralist, authoritarian and cultlike) Leninist parties with 3rd International heritages, which have either enjoyed a broader, more socially embedded base in labour, peace and national liberation movements, or didn’t feel like they had anything to prove, unlike Trots, who in their formative stages were a small, apparently renegade opposition movement to what was widely misrecognised as the leading edge of the international proletariat — the government of the USSR.

So if we can define trots as trots for qualitatively complex reasons that transcend literal affiliation and programmatic fidelity, then I can at least throw the word “Stalinist” around, right? :) Anyway, this is a rather transparent and “sectarian” attempt to procrastinate, so that’s it for me…

by jebni on 17 February 2006 at 3:36 pm. #

Ben,

I really appreciate your long reply, which has a nerdiness that sets my pulse racing.

If Eurocommunism is continuous with Stalinism, it is to a lesser extent than Stalin’s continuity with Lenin. I’m not a Trot, and I fail to see the discontinuity between Stalin and Lenin – I’m completely convinced that the real discontinuity is 1953-6, the seisure of power by the bureaucracy. And even if you disagree with that structural assessment, the explicit disjuncture around Kruschev cannot be ignored. It was Lenin who strove to build socialism in one country, who introduced the NEP, who killed people in the tens of thousands, who suspended democratic centralism in the Communist Party. I don’t like the word Stalinism anyway, since it implies falsely that Stalin had a substantial theoretical program, but if you have to use it, use it to describe real unrepentant anti-revisionist Marxism-Leninism, not Eurocommunism, like the parties which are fraternal with the PTB. The SPA/CPA btw aren’t that – they’re something intermediate, Brezhnevites, believers in parliamentary politics and peaceful coexistence.

This analysis of the DSP is crap too – ‘Percyism’ I think is less apt than ‘Cannonism’. And I think it’s fair not to call them Trots simply because they actually say that they disagree with Trotsky, not, like the IST, that Trotsky understated how bad Stalinism was. The Sparts complete dogmatic inflexibility is itself not Trotskyist, Marxist, or anything else, but simply Sparticism.

The Marcyists are really interesting precisely because they manage, and in my view not particularly incoherently, to be simultaneously Trotskyist and Stalinist.

by mark on 18 February 2006 at 1:08 am. #

jebni

mark

you both scare me alot

jebni

As you may well be aware, i was in a Percyite sect back in my hose beast days, and like I went to the weird internal school and sat through the freaky seminaires that TRACED THE ENTIRE HISDTORY OF EVERY FRIGGIN OBSCURE TROTSKYITE SECT ON THE PLANET and it was almost as obscure as the last posting…….

like

what the fuck?

On the other hand, there a great new book out about the knrostad uyprising in 1912. i think its oin french – but it shows that freaky old trots DO have a place in academia

sigh

I was thinking of posting the same knowldge on indymedia when theflame war started after the latest percyite dissolution. Yeah like wotthafuck. Australia loks up kiddies and legistlates dictatorships, and, and the whoel place is fucked, and people still argue about friggin kronstad!!!!!

we are an English colony.

Acomplete island of total space cakes, disconneted from where we live or when we live.

Its a kind of cool postmodern reality like funthing, but its also quite, quite mad……..

by mayhem on 18 February 2006 at 12:09 pm. #