Date: Wed, 12 Aug 1998 14:27:17 +0100 From: Mark Jones <Jones_M at netcomuk.co.uk> X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.5b1 [en] (Win95; I) X-Accept-Language: ru MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: Re: Andrew Kliman was re: Efficiency References: <003801bdc5b7$592c3b80$dfa2fbd0 at default> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Andrew Kliman wrote:
> Moreover, I don't think that planning can overcome such problems
> as long as the law of value holds sway. The Russians thought
> they were planning production, but the laws of capitalist
> production were controlling the Plan, if you know what I mean.
> Because they wanted to catch up with and outstrip "Western"
> capitalism, they had to do things like scrap the tractors they
> had just produced and buy tractors from Ford, in order to
> compete.
I really HATE this kind of crap, which state-caps like Hugh Rodwell and Andrew Kliman think a textual study of Cap I allows them to utter: that, and a lot of egregious bullshit about 'stalinists' apparently so stricken with napoleonic vanity they have to submerge their alleged pathological hatred of humankind beneath treacly popular front sloganising etc (I am after the sense of Kliman's thinking). No, it is not that; it is that we stalinists think that problems like global economic crisis and anthropogenic climate change are serious enough to sink personal differences and make common cause (and we don't demand the role of leader either, as anyone who follows our painstaking and utterly non-sectarian debates on Leninist International must know).
As for blacks and communism (about the practice of which Kliman evidently understands nothing good) actually, it's to the undying glory of those US blacks who put theirParty first (not something Kliman will ever be guilty of).
And as for his utter BILGE about Soviet planning, it's made me do what someone just asked and repost here a posting I made to Johnson's Russia List coupla years back, in answer to a Pentagon War College professor whose anti-sovietism was not a millimetre distinct from Andrew Kliman's (he's wrong about the TRPF and rising OC, too, as a matter of fact).
Mark
Subject:
Socialism (by an English honorary proud-to-be-Sovok)
Date:
Mon, 18 Nov 1996 23:39:34 +0000
From:
Mark Jones <majones at netcomuk.co.uk>
To:
Dear David Johnson
Perhaps you think I wrote a turgid convoluted apology for Stalin and that makes me a loonie toon not worth an email, but the truth is that I am an honorary Sovok and I am traumatised by what happened, like millions of other Sovki (I lived through it all, I still have family in Russia, and I was not some cosseted ex- pat either). Probably that explains why I have trouble formulating my thoughts. Post-traumatic-shock syndrome. Ask any Russian not driving a foreign car. It makes you feel timid, confused, apologetic, easy prey for overconfident Washington professors toting quack nostrums and iron verities. If I now overcompensate with irascibility, forgive. When I first went to Russia (1985) I was a self-confessed socialist. Three weeks of Moscow life morphed me into a Thatcherite. But ten years later I see it differently. There never was socialism in Russia (there never was socialism in Britain either, or anywhere else -- yet -- so Blank, when he says there was, is tilting at the wrong windmills, and his anticommunism is just the usual all-American all-white chauvinism and paranoia, and obviously not based on any reading of actual history or socialist literature (Oh! Those tedious patristics! But of course, none of you have actually read Marx or Lenin or any of them, have you? People like Orlando Figes and Richard Pipes openly brag about not reading them, and it doesn't stop their lousy fiction-histories from being acclaimed -- so why should Blank or any other minor luminary bother?). Yes, there was no socialist Russia, but no trade union or agri- co-op or woman's group is ever socialist, either. What they all have in common is they are attempts by ordinary people to take matters into their own hands, a process which inevitably sooner or later brings them not to socialism but into conflict with banks and commodity-exchange, followed by US marines, body-bags, covert operations, disappearances, then USAID, professors from Washington to help reconstruct -- well, we know the rest. I am a historian and I have just finished a book about 13th century Mongol invasions of China. It took Genghis-khan a year to break Beijing in a siege. By that time, the inhabitants were eating each other. The city fell without a fight in the end, and after the required massacre and looting, Genghis-khan sent in food parcels and other forms of aid. Nothing changes. After the seventy-year siege of Russia, the citizens turned to cannibalism. The reasons bear thinking about, since hunger was not among them. And now that the victor powers have completed the looting of the place and imposed their quisling peace, they also send certain kinds of aid. They also are sufficiently confident of their mission for the strut-your-stuff intellectual Rambos like Blank to find common debating ground, and announce shared feelings of pity, with handwringing Quakers and angst-ridden well-intentioned American liberals, (I'm not sure who is the more odious). (Genghis-khan enjoyed long earnest talks with a Chinese sage, as a result of which he did not after all turn north China into pasture, so perhaps there is some point to JRL). Evidently my idea that there are positive things to be said about Soviet Russia is too outlandish to contemplate (unless you are BN wanting reconcilaition, it seems). But the argument is simple enough. It hasn't changed. It goes like this: Capitalism is one, single, world system. Poles of plenty (you live in one) plunder zones of poverty. The rich get richer. Russia will now be like Africa, no longer of inrterest since already plundered. Nothing can stop this process- except struggle. The idea that Germany or Japan are counter-instances, and that alternative devleopment strategies are viable, is wishy-washy utopian nonsense whose only purpose is to get more of your subscribers onto grant-aided thinktank gravy trains, and incidentally allow them to make more of those colourful visits gathering imprressions of misery and squalor in aforesaid hinterlands. Postwar miracles happened only because of the existence of the USSR. Read the history! (You have no time for history, I see, but I have no time now to go into the reasons, either, especiually as I am more than half certain you have already deleted this file without reading even this far). Since the USSR no longer exists as a threat or (from the point of view of ordinary people in 1945) a valid alternative, there is no reason not to just plunder Russia. There will be no earnest young US Marshall Aid experts helping Russians get heavy industry back on its feet. None of those fireside chats Ike made to the Germans explaining to them the benefits of trade unions (yes really) and constitutions and the like. Just hectoring Chicago boys... Actually, Genghis-khan was better than I credit him for, comparatively. Your lot are much worse. And since those doing the plundering know as well as anyone the lessons of history, there is no point whatever in all the handwringing and abject pleading, begging your rockribbed readers to lay off a bit and stop the quiet genocide, give the poor folks down on the kolkhoz a chance etc. No-one is listening. You must ahve felt that last night when you (and I, and three other people) grasped the awesome significance of the Chubais tape, and then found that not a single British or American newspaper ran it, except the miserable piece in the Washington whatsit. But you better watch out -- once they've made their revolution in Russia, your turn wil be next. America, pace Blank, does not believe in democracy anywhere, including America, and certainly not in the southern hemisphere, or Africa, or any place except possibly China. America believes in plunder, and if anyone wants to know why the Dow is on the up-and-up, it's realy no surprise -- check producer goods and raw materials prices and see how the plunder of eastern Europe and the super-exploitation of Asian workers has done wonders for inflation and corproate profits in the past eight years. As for the ludicrous idea that Russians like what is happening and are glad of the new freedom etc, well, you've seen the place and so have I. They have just lived through one of the most heroic and horrific sieges in history, and they are demoralised and defeated. People in Russia are scared witless by what is happening and has happened and if they cling pathetically to BN it's for the same reasons Jews in camps collaborated with their SS tormentors. You know it's true, David. Capitalism hans't changed. It is just as predatory as ever. Therefore the old mole is still digging, because capitalism can only produce war and dictatorship, and crises at the margins. You can bury Lenin a million times, my friend, you can steal the dead from the living, but it won't change a damn thing. In fact, capitalism today is more unstable than ever in its history, and the dangers facing all life on the planet, greater than ever. You want to know why Russians are so boringly timid? Why they don't come into the streets, despite everything? Not only because they are sick and starving and traumatised and defeated, don't trust themselves any more, don't believe in anything and can only die in quiet and darkness. They don't struggle much for the same reason workers don't struggle much any place. Because, for one thing, no-one has any illusions any more. Everyone knows that revolution is nasty and messy and terrifying and not a think to go in for chanting verses by William Morris or singing battle hymns. Everyone knows, apart from a few American professors, that the era of social reforms is over. People (I mean workers, ie the majority on this newly-urbainsed planet, and capitalists too for that matter) know that there is just no point (I'm not talking about neighbourghood eco- kindergarten-clean-streets struggles). Nowadays, even the tiniest struggle has revolutionary implications, or none at all. It is that knowledge, now seeped deep into the collective pschosis of the Beltway political class, which has turned the US into not just any global gendarme, but a panting paranoiac Schwarzennegger cyborg, with tinny little loudspeakers somewhere around kneecap level that spout words like 'socialism in Russia from 1917-91 was evil ... millions murdered ...ecological and demographic disasters for all involved etc. ... overwhelming evidence on this score ... for all our numerous faults, West is better, one need only ask those who voted with their feet ...' voices of people with names like Blank, who obviously do not really exist except in the weird dreams of some Pentagon lab. That's what the vicitms hear as they drown and suffocate and are trampled. I have been catching up on some reading and read two excellent books recently. One is Walter Laqueuer's 1992 book 'Black Hundred' about the rebirth of the Russian far right (it reads like a RAND report written when Zhirinovsky suddenly began to get pluralities; Laqueur concludes that there is nothing to worry about, the Russian right are so mad people will prefer to live like Africans and eat grass than support them, and anyway Russians are by now inoculated against all forms of totalitarianism, right or left. So that's OK.) Laqueur goes on about 'the unmitigated disaster' of Russia's 1917, which destroyed the country perhaps irreparably, and infected the free, generous, kindly Russian soul with a moral leprosy which made the camps not just thinkable but a mass activity. To reassure his Beltway readers, Laqueur goes on about why Russians embrace democracy and have come to hate the hopelessness of the old regime, with its tawdry symbols, its pokazukha, its endless corruption, its Alice-in-Wonderland logic which made progress impossible, which left everyone straitjacketed, which resolutely disallowed personal initiative and looked with hard and gloomy eyes at anyone intelligent enough to be visible above the vast grey mass (I paraphrase). Communism as conspiracy, pathology, a social virus like National Socialism or fascism. Of course, there is truth in this. And the seeds were always there. Lenin was a great conspirator, I don't deny it. But it is a half truth which ignores the fact that 1917 was inevitable, was not the work of one man's will, not an act of historical irresponsibility on Lenin's part. It happened because Russia lost a war to an enemy which was the defeated itself, and could not inflict a victor's peace. A historical and geographical vacuum briefly existed in central and eastern Europe, and two forces rushed in -- socialism from the east and the American agenda for the coming century from the west: Wilson's Fourteen Points. Sorry to bang on about history after all, David (why are all Americans innoculated against it, even the professors? Especially them?). But I have to come back to this question of the starting- point. I mean, what happened when the World Revolution didn't. You may think, boring, I know all this, but hang on a minute! If you know it, all of you, why is it never reflected in your discourse? Look, the creation of a militarised party and a huge standing army were the first results of the 1918-21 Civil War -- itself the product of the defeat of revolution in Germany. And these mutations -- Cheka, monolithism, suppression of the SRs etc. -- were further accelerated by other acts of the outside capitalist world -- of the subsequent "Encirclement" and "containment", put in place after Rappallo (1923) and while Hitler was brewed in the beast's belly. The distortion went deeper. Lenin said that soviet democracy, for all its shortcomings, was a 'million times more democratic' than bourgeois democracy -- because it was not based on private property and the alienation of the worker from the products of his labour, or of the peasant from the land; or of the alienation of the whole community from the natural world -- yes, he said all that. What we got was the opposite -- but why?