Anarchism vs. Marxism-Leninism: Marxism-Leninism wins !

[Alexandre Fenelon]

At 10:14 17/12/99 -0500, you wrote:
>
>
>>>> Jamal Hannah <jah at iww.org> 12/17/99 04:34AM >>>
>On Mon, 13 Dec 1999, Charles Brown wrote:
>
>> >Then you agree with Stalin and Bukharin that socialism is possible in a
>> >single backward country? An international revolution may not have made
>> >the USSR utopia, but it would have helped.
>> 
>> They were not completely wrong. A international revolution was not possible
>> in  1921 and the survival of a state dedicated to spread revolution in all
>> other countries would be troublesome, at least. So the only alternative was
>> to build socialism in one country. 
>> 
>> ((((((((((((
>> 
>> Charles: I see it this way too. The idea was NOT "build socialism only in
one country, and be against revolutions in France, Germany, England, the
U.S." , but rather the idea was " if  no "advanced " country has a socialist
revolution, we are not going to call ours off. " How could the Soviets make
a revolution in another country ? The failure of there being revs. in other
countries was not the fault of the Soviets.
>
>If one builds socialism in one country, they must not create a police
>state as exists in Cuba or North Korea, because this is worse
>than losing the class war... it makes socialism into it's exact opposite:
>tyranny.
>
>((((((((((((((
>
>Charles: The dictatorship of the proletariat has a state apparatus ,which
is to say a dominance on repressive force , red police and red armies
(standing bodies of armed personnel), prisons, etc. , prosecution of wars,
because during the transition from capitalism to communism there are still
bourgeois states with all the same. This self-defensive red state apparatus
is the only way to win the class war with the bourgeoisie. This is a
difference between Marxists/communists and absolute pacifists. 
>
>The anarchists' pretense that socialism can be built  without these
defensive red apparatuses means that they are not serious about building
socialism, pursuing a utopian never-never land. Anarchists' beliefs that
their failure to establish any actually existing socialism by shunning
establishment of red state apparatuses makes them morally superior to
communists who have are derivatively utopian. That is to say the moral
superiority you think you have to communists is illusory.
>
>CB
>
I don't know if Socialist countries have an absolute necessity of a large 
security apparatus like the USSR. This might be justified in  context of
civil war, but it's difficult to defend the necessity of Stalin's Great
Purges and forced collectivization. Maybe they may have been counter
productive from the point of view of economic development. It's even
more difficult to explain the madness of The Great Leap Forward and
Cultural Revolution. I think that all this could have happened due to
lack of democracy, since no one could really talk about was happening
those times. I also don't understand why a socialist country must be
a one party dictatorship. I understand the objective circunstances that
led the USSR to a dictatorship, but I still think that many human 
suffering could be avoided with more democracy (even if it was democracy
only inside the PCUS), and, maybe a socialist and democratic USSR could
have survived the Cold War (this is a hope, not a scientific statement).

                                                Alexandre