I wasn't being kind at all, I was being tetchy. The reason is because you are on the royal road out of Marxism and probably out of the left: the road whose exit door has 'I.K. was here' on the lintel. The road thru which many good souls have been lost to us including Gorter, Pannekoek and the Council Communists.
>I did not respond to him
> privately on Stalinism because I have neither studied the violence of
> the collectivization process nor the liquidation of
> Bukharin and Preobrazhensky in the Soviet Union nor the council communist
> critiques of the Soviet Union
Well, if you insist I can make allowances for these imaginary holes in your knowledge. I think the points I made actually do not require a knowledge of anything beyond a cursory grasp of medieval Catholic ethics, which you can get from reading Virgil's dialogues in the Inferno. You don't need to know Stalin's life to make judgments about the moral dilemmas st stake.
> I do think Richard B Day's critique of Stalinist political economy in the
> Crisis and the Crash (Verso, 1981) tellingly reveals the degeneration of
> debate and theory in the 1920s and 1930s. The degeneration in philosophy
> seems only more monstrous.
Rakesh, how can a 'degeneration in philosophy' be 'monstrous', unless such things are willed, rather than inevitable outgrowths of material circumstances, ie determined 'behind the backs' of the actors? You are framing the question so that you can deliver a kantian judgment. But we need proletarian revolutionary politics, not a morality fable.
>
> I do have a theoretical interest in several Stalinists: TA
> Jackson, Christopher Caudwell, Alfred Sohn Rethel, William J Blake and of
> course Henryk Grossmann, but it seems to each and every one of them was
> either expelled or marginalized--
Dunno about Jackson, who he? But Caudwell died a loyal and respected member of the BPGB and his memory was always honoured. As for Sohn-Rethel, he was not marginalised that I cna recall. You mention Blake much and I have filed some of his stuff you downloaded, but you need to tell us more of his background. As for Grossman, he's a special case.
>bearing out the critique of the
> Bolsheviks by Luxemburg and the left communists: Pannekoek, Gorter, Rolst
> (those dismissed by Lenin as infantile as he backtracked from the radical
> promises of State and Revolution).
But who was right, Luxemburg or Lenin? Better to make a revo than float around in the Kiel canal.
>freedom means that the product no longer dominates the producer; it
> means a free association of prouducers as they build relations among each
> other from the bottom up.
Freedom first of all means life. The council communists would have led Russia to the abyss if Russians had followed their prescriptions. What Stalin and Castro did/do was to defend their beseiged states. They used methods very familiar in history. In a siege, the 'abstract' call for more 'freedom' is concretely an expression of support for the enemy.
>It does not mean the state control
> of production;
Yes it does if the alternative is to be overrun by Nazis. This is so simple, so obvious, is it not?
-- Mark Jones http://www.geocities.com/~comparty