Remedial Class Struggle

Louis Proyect lnp3 at panix.com
Wed Jun 3 08:19:14 PDT 1998


Rob Schaap:


>All true. But are you saying questions of organisation are not relevant?

They of course are relevant, but they have to be placed in an historical context. For example, if we discuss bureaucracy in the Teamsters Union in the 1950s, we have to consider the defeat of the Trotskyists in the early 1940s, the connections to the mafia, the prosperity of the 1950s, Hoffa's early history as a trade union militant, etc. Otherwise you end up with some really dry and useless bullshit that would find a proper place in a Sociology 101 textbook. The truth is concrete.


>Well, I was speculating in order to make a point about organisation. If
>this bit's wrong, all you need to do is tell me where it's wrong.

Your methodology is wrong. Weberian sociology is wrong.


>How do you arrive at this conclusion? I understand the bolshies had 88%
>of the workers' electors and only half a dozen reps in the Duma. I'm no
>fan of the Duma. But then, I wasn't talking about the Duma.

History involves concrete choices. The Duma or the Soviets--that was the choice. The United States had a choice in 1860. The slavocracy or the Northern industrialist abolitionists, as compromised as it was. To posit "ideal" alternatives to real history is anti-Marxist.


>Alright, class consciousness in Russia in April 1917 - the one Lenin calls
>'insufficient' in the April theses. And are you saying there's no link
>between that category and Lenin's idea of 'uninterrupted revolution' (as
>manifest in the 2nd thesis from memory)?

I don't have the April Theses in front of me, but I am familiar enough with this period to correct your deliberate obfuscations:

Lenin declared in April that a proletarian revolution was necessary to achieve bourgeois-democratic goals of land reform, elimination of feudal privileges, separation of church and state. Unless there was a proletarian revolution, all gains made in February would be threatened. This of course was borne out by Kornilov's counter-revolution. In August, the workers began to respond to Bolshevik appeals but the peasantry was not sufficiently mobilized. So, Bolsheviks urged the workers to have patience. In November, the entire society was ready for the overthrow of Kerensky. There was little resistance to the revolution, and fewer people were killed than by auto accidents on a holiday weekend.


>Even if it was not foreseeable that this would make you neurotic - indeed,
>even if your dad thought it necessary to lock you in the basement in the
>prevailing circumstances - would it not be of interest now that you are in
>fact neurotic? If we don't want people to develop neuroses, then the
>exercise is not one of blaming your dad, but formulating alternative
>responses to recalcitrant boys.

Good, let's chat about my neurosis. I think we will make real progress here. But let's stop wasting LBO-talk's bandwidth trying to unravel the problems of the Russian revolution until you make a committment to understanding the underlying class dynamics.

Louis Proyect

(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)



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