The Nazis annihilated 20 million Soviets. Americans cannot comprehend how much the Soviet people are wise and determined in the struggle for Peace.
Do the American People know that the Russian space station is named Peace ?
Gorbachev, an organic intellectual in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (after all its trials, tribulations and crimes,) was the superior humanist and species-being Marxist in his theory of universal human values. What bourgeois politician ever came near that ?
It is the working classes of the former "Great Powers" that have not carried out their historic task of clasping hands with the Russ/Soviet working class in international proletarian revolution.
Marx said the Paris Commune was a folly of despair, but supported the workers when they took up the fight, and Lenin draw the lessons from that experience. Now we have a giant commune experience; we must draw the new lessons and get to what is to be done.
Mir,
Charles
Mark writes,
>>>...I think that most ordinary Russians are
likely to be insulted by the suggestion that they are not capable of anything
more cute about the past than 'nostalgia', which is a code-word used by everyone
from Richard Pipes to Yeltsin himself meaning 'they're too fucking stupid to
remember how it really was'. But they're not stupid, in fact.
and
...The main thing to remember is that if the Soviet Union really was just an episode internal to the history of capitalism, then its tragedies and farces tell us more about the pathologies of capitalism than they do of socialism. But insofar as it pointed to horizons beyond capitalism, the Soviet Union and the Soviet people were collectively more daring and more courageous than the Americans ever have been, weren't they?>>>
Tom Condit wrote:
> At 07:43 AM 5/11/1998 +0100, Mark Jones wrote:
> >
> >
> > Odd how many Russians yearn to be back in that 'police state': ...
>
> Odd how many Frenchmen yearned for the return of Bonaparte, or Scots for the
> Stuart monarchy. For that matter, I met Italians in the 1950s who yearned
> for the good old days of Mussolini when the government finally brought
> running water to their villages, and Peronism still has a grip on large
> sections of the Argentine working class. Also note the Teamsters who plan to
> vote for Junior Hoffa because the union was strong back when his father was
> the Duce.
>
> The politics of nostalgia are an interesting subject for another discussion,
> but I suggest that rather than look at how many Russians would like the old
> regime back (not that huge a number, judging by both size of demonstrations
> and votes in the elections), he should look at how many wanted to get rid of
> it while it was there.
>
> The fact is, when the one and only Gallup poll among Russians and Ukrainians
> was done in the Gorbachev years, it came up with only 10% supporting
> "socialism as we have known it", 17% for Reagan-Thatcher style capitalism,
> and the rest fairly evenly divided between "democratic socialism" and a
> capitalist welfare state like Sweden. Since there wasn't any real democracy
> in the old SU (and isn't in the Russian Federation today either), the "real"
> debate devolved into a quarrel among the apparatchiki as to whether they
> could best loot the country under the old bureaucratic system or the new
> capitalism, with no democratic alternatives allowed.
>
> The only way to get mass participation in real planning for intelligent use
> (and preservation) of natural resources is to have a system under which (a)
> people can put forward and argue for solutions to problems without the prior
> permission of any self-appointed philosoher kings and (b) those responsible
> for carrying out decision can be tossed out from below, not merely judged by
> their peers like a gang of feudal barons.
>
> As the Internationale so well puts it:
>
> "We want no condescending saviours
> To rule us from a judgment hall;
> We workers ask not for their favors,
> Let each consult for all."
>
> Tom C.