"In reality, Stalinism as a doctrine is actually closer to Bakuninism than it is to Marxism. Stalin maintained that you could build socialism in one country, Russia, but at least he thought you could raise the level of productivity. Bakunin thought you could have anarcho-communism in a Russia that was basically on a primitive peasant base. In both cases there's a divorcing of what could be called social psychology from the economic basis. In other words, there's a denial of the fundamental premise of Marx that right cannot stand higher than the economic structure of society and the cultural level conditioned thereby. And that's the real answer. Ultimately the Stalinist bureaucracy is a product of the continued world domination of capitalism, which prevents the raising of the general level of productivity in deformed workers states, like China. The more intellectually honest anarchists actually recognize the similarity between certain strands of Stalinism and Bakuninism, so that anarchist intellectual Paul Avrich argues that Maosim and Guevarism-- which really maintain that socialism is basically a change in psychology in the masses with no relation to the level of production-- were actually closer to Bakuninism than Marxism, and he was right."
It does seem peculiar that Anarchists and Stalinists (like the Worker's World Party) were the main radical elements involved in the so-called "anti-capitalism" protests. It seems that they sort of play off of one another, the IAC used the "actually existing socialist nations" dogmatically as a way to proceed on actions in the U.S., and the anarchists react by saying that the IAC is "authoritarian." This makes up a few megs worth of the bulletin boards on indymedia...
In a message dated 8/5/2 8:41:19 PM, you wrote:
> From the UK Trotskyist historian of fascism http://www.dkrenton.co.uk/ ,
Dave
>Renton.
>http://www.dkrenton.co.uk/cpgb.html ("The Communist Party of Great Britain
since
>1920.")
>http://www.voiceoftheturtle.org/articles/dave_anarcho.shtml
>Michael Pugliese