In fact, I am - and I'm pretty sure Kagarlitsky is - well aware of many of the 20th century currents mentioned here. I am also well aware of the tension between the social and the individual in that train of thought, and others as well. Hence Kagarlitskys' formulation of "collectivism" as it stands, is one sided. He should actually mean to say (perhaps he does) "social individual".
But are you aware that the American, more than anyone else on this earth, is _sorely_ in need of precisely an emphasis on the social and collective, rather than the individual? There is _too much_ _mindless_ individualism here in the USA, and it deeply affects American leftists as well - it is why they have the most basic problems, such as a failure to grasp the significance of political organization. They really do believe they can do whatever the fuck they want - just like Uncle Sam does in the world at large.
That is the real, concrete situation that faces us as soon as we even open our mouths. Finally I would add that Bolshevism is _also_ one of the currents of revolutionary and socialist thought, whether you like it or not. It is certain that, as we reconstruct the working class and socialist movement in the 21st century, key elements of Bolshevism _will_ be incorporated in a synthesis with many other currents.
And you did not address one of Kagarlitskys' central points: the Russian Revolution was the vital condition that made the liberal/social democratic reforms in the West possible, and that the dismantling of the Soviet Union - a counterrevolution from above launched by the ruling "middle classes" (i.e., "bureaucracy") seeking to become capitalists, but celebrated by some (perhaps on this list) as some glorious triumph of "freedom" - has opened the way to a new period of restoration and counterrevolution analogous to the post French Revolution period, featuring the attempted rollback of those social democratic reforms that we see all around us at present.
This effect of the Russian Revolution was the primary fact of the 20th century.
-Brad Mayer Oakland, Ca
>Brad, what is Kagarlitsky saying here that is not simply an attempt
>to recycle Lenin? He trots out Trotsky's analysis of the Soviet
>Thermidor, placing the onus for the failure of the Russian Revolution
>on the growth of the beaurocracy - in other words, a phenomenon
>rooted in the post-1920 period, which accelerated after Lenin's
>death.
>
>He then counterposes left 'collectivism' to capitalism as an
>ideology for development, and takes the framework for left
>activity from Lenin's 'What is to be done?', particular the bit
>about importing a new consciousness into the proletarian masses.
>
>So basically Kagarlitsky's programme is Lenin re-hashed. And the
>lessons of post-1917? Well, there don't seem to be many...
>
>Kagarlitsky totally skirts a huge number of problems. For instance,
>what of the evidence that the Soviet beaurocracy was a result not
>of the degeneration of the Russian Revolution, but a natural
>result of Bolshevik policies? Maurice Brinton's 'The Bolsheviks and
>Workers Control' documents in quite a bit of detail how the Bolsheviks
>consciously organised against workers control of the means of
>production, in favour of control through a state beaurocracy. Go
>read it, its on the Net.
>
>Then the question of the relation between 'collectivism' and freedom -
>well, the fact that 'collectivism does not always guarantee freedom'
>doesn't seem to be worth a second thought. This is despite the
>fact that a big chunk of 20th Century leftist thought - e.g. the left
>currents in (and then outside) the Comintern in the 1920s (e.g. Karl
>Korsch, and to some extent Lukacs), ex-Trotskyists like Dunayevskaya,
>James, Lefort and Castoriadis, the whole structuralist /
>post-structuralist debate - all these contain in them the tension
>created by the question 'how does the free development of each
>and the free development of all interrelate' (this question, of course,
>plays itself out across discussions of culture, workplace organisation,
>philosophy, mental asylums, parties, classes, etc.).
>
>And now Kagarlitsky, and you, come back at the start of the 21st C. and
>dismiss this legacy of concerns with nothing but disdainful silence.
>Somehow it looks a bit inadaquate...
>
>Peter
>- --