> OTOH, a bit of good, historically accurate dish about stalinISTS vs
> trots would be welcome -- if only in this teeny little corner of the list.
> But please feel free to ignore my request. It is certainly not an urgent
> one.
Tracy,
Observation: All the facts we are probably ever going to have are in, so what remains are endless polemical selections and endless interpretations intended not to arrive at historical truth but to build up this or that current sectarian interest-- or worse yet, the spoutings of provacateurs designed more or less intentionally to head off any political discussion that might carry us forward.
I suspect if you subscribed to the unmoderated marxism list you could easily trigger all the discussion of S vs T you want. All you would need to do is post any old proposition off the top of your head, and the wild horses, like the U.S. Air Force, will be off to the wild blue yonder.
I suspect the archives of either marxism[1] (at Spoons) or of the current leninist-international list would easily quench your thirst for such "debate."
There is some value in imbibing a bit of the endless hassle. It was on the old SPOONS marxism[1] list that I learned that the labels "Stalinist" and "Trotskyist" (even when self-applied) offered no real clue to the actual politics of the person so labelled (or self-labelled) -- and that in the previous 25 years I had needlessly generated agony and wasted time and thought trying to define my "own" position on the debate.
One tentative and uncertain generalizations: Ex-Trotskyists usually turn super-conservative, but those that don't are excellent comrades. Ex-Stalinists tend to join the Democratic Party. Probably there are too many exceptions to make this a useful rule of thumb even.
Carrol