>>Attacks on those who have been called Stalinists (which in America
>>have been the same as attacks on not only the CPers but also anyone
>>who doesn't denounce the Soviet Union & the Communist Party
>>ritualistically) have narrowed the limits of acceptable political
>>discourse considerably (this is the point that Ellen Schrecker,
>>among others, has made), to the extent that your view (despite
>>enthusiasm for the ACLU and all that), too, is not acceptable in an
>>American philosophy department, for you have never dismissed Marx
>>and Marxism altogether as the *discursive origin* of the show
>>trials, etc., which is the ultimate litmus test of the official
>>anti-Stalinism in America.
>
>I would have said that the essence of Stalinism is the claim that
>the absence of freedom of speech, freedom to move, freedom to
>organize political parties, freedom to organize unions, and so forth
>*didn't* *matter* *much* because Stalin's regime had the *only*
>thing necessary for Utopia: state ownership of the means of
>production.
>
>And I think it is fair to say that this mode of thought is deeply
>rooted in the writings of Karl Marx, who spent so much time
>denouncing private ownership of the means of production as a blocker
>of human liberty and so little time detailing just how and in just
>what dimensions Communism was supposed to make people more free.
Thanks for taking the trouble of exemplifying official anti-Stalinism (which is to say anti-Marxism). But as I said, as long as you can't resist writing posts like this on LBO, you won't get an offer of a regular column on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times like Paul Krugman (instead of page D2).
Yoshie