>>> Michael Pugliese <debsian at pacbell.net> 03/31/00 05:22PM >>>
CB: As Herbert Aptheker points out "factions" are political parties, and the
Founding Fathers were against a multiparty system. Ironic , since the U.S.
makes mulitiple parties an acid test of democracy when it wants to make war
on some country.
Aptheker is a better historian on slave revolts, than as a political theorist. For his belief in multi-party democracy see his polemic of 1957, "The Truth About Hungary, " Surprise, the CPUSA historian says the Hungarian rebels, some Communists, some anti-Communist, all lied to by the radio broadcasts of Radio Free Europe that the Dulles "Rollback" liberation was coming, were fascist counter-revolutionaries.
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CB: But you have not established that you are correct on Hungary and Aptheker is not. You just presume it and assert it with no argument.
Why would Hungary, which was crawling with fascists in 1943, be completely fumigated of fascists in 1954 ? Seems the presumption should be that the 1954 revolt did have lots of crypto-fascists involved in it. The US was sheltering lots of them and helping them organize counter revolution, in Hungary and all over Eastern Europe. ______
and for CB and CC here is an excerpt from an article in Telos by L. Pellacani entitled, "Modernity and Totalitarianism, " on comrade Lenin on terror and democracy. Sorry the EBSCO database chopped off, the footnotes, at fn. 53, but I have a hard copy of the issue of Telos, that contains the citations from Lenin's Collected Works.
Michael Pugliese, social democratic running dog, Woof, Woof! I am not now, nor I have ever been a consultant for the National Endowment for Democracy, as an election observer, or for the Carter Center or the American Enterprise Institute.
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CB: Maybe an unwitting dupe of them :>) .
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A Trotskyist friend tells me, that an ex-boyfriend of a friend, employed by the State Dept. as a "temp" on a contractual basis, is helping to write the constitution of one one of the more remote republic's in the fSU, Turkmenistan, I think he said. Jeez, not even a career foreign service officer, a temp! I'm with the wrong agency!
Magazine: TELOS, SUMMER 1998
MODERNITY AND TOTALITARIANISM, L. Pellacani ...> Contrary to the legend spread by the Marxist-Leninist Left after the
XXth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.(n62) Stalinism was not a degeneration of Leninism or a system extraneous to the communist tradition. Rather, it was the logical outcome of Lenin's program.
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CB: And Marx's program , too.
Not one of these type articles. Please.
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In Lenin's writings, the revolution in power has the task of "clean Russian soil of any damaging insects -- fleas, scoundrels,bedbugs, the rich, etc."(n63) Russia is a "moral morass"(n64) that must be disinfected by resorting to "systematic violence against the bourgeoise and its accomplices."(n65) This is a merciless operation, but one absolutely necessary it the "greed, the sordid, hateful, frantic greed of the money bags"(n66) is to be uprooted. At any rate, what rights have filthy "parasites,"(n67) who live like "vampires"(n68) feeding on the workers' blood? To eliminate them is a moral duty.
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CB: As Lenin teaches, some feint hearted "Marxists" think that Marx didn't really mean it when he coined the concept of the revolutionary "dictatorship of the proletariat" , and that the proletarian state is an apparatus for repression of the bourgeoisie.
Sometimes you get spy agents mixing some of accurates things with distortions etc. But in general , perhaps you are not familiar with _The State and Revolution_, War Communism and Red Terror, and the fact that Lenin ordered that the Czar and his family be shot.
Lenin's chilling "moral legacy" is consistent with all this. In 1922, he
wrote to Stalin: "we will purify Russia for a long time."(n69) In the
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A terrorist state, the communist state
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CB: ALL states are terrorist states. "Terrorist state" is a redundancy. See _The State and Revolution_ .
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The sacred texts of the revolutionary gnosis prefigure a model of the
state which is the exact opposite of the modern state. According to
Marx' and Engels' classical definition, the modern state "has civil
society as a natural base, the individual of civil society, i.e., the
independent person, bound to others only by the link of private interest, of unconscious natural necessity, the slave of work for profit, the slave both of selfish need and the selfish needs of others. In the universal rights of man, the modern state recognizes that this is its
natural foundation: ... modern, civil society, the society of industry,
of general competition, of private interests all freely pursuing their
aims, of anarchy, of natural and spiritual individuality."
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CB: The idea that Marx and Engels had some Kautskyist conception of the state or the socialist revolution as non-violent is refuted by Lenin in _The State and Revolution_
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(n82) While
the modern state is based on law and acknowledges the autonomy of civil society, the communist state is "bound by no law."(n83) It pursues, with all the means at its disposal and at whatever cost, the annihilation of the corrupt and corrupting petty bourgeois. That subsequently the Soviet state obsessively pursued the development of its productive forces by using the scientific and technological know-how created by Western civilization does not mean that it has been, as many continue to believe, a totalitarian variant of the modern state.(n84) It only means that the Bolshevik Party sought to create an industrial economy by adopting a political organization which, in a masterful essay written immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution and anticipating Wittfogel's thesis, Marcel Mauss defined as "byzantine."(n85) However, an. industrial economy directed by a "byzantine" state,
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CB: As we used to say in anthro, is that Marcel Mauss , cousin of Mickey Mouse ? Ah , oui, Le Essai sur Le Don, reciprocity etc. We have so much revolutionary accomplishment based on comrade Mauss' theory. _______
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The conclusion must be drawn that totalitarianism... _________
CB: "Totalitarinism" theory ?! Get that shit outta here. :>)
Liberalism is closer to Nazism than Communism is. The greatest totalitarian regime in the world today is the neo-liberal USA.
CB