Dimitrov Date: Wed, 20 Feb 2002 23:25:38 +0200 From: "Hakki Alacakaptan" <nucleus at superonline.com>
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Hakki,
Yes, keep thinking about it. You still have not made an argument as to why "open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital " is not a splendid definition . Nor do I recall you providing a different defintion. Making jokes and hurling insults is not an argument, and I'm not the type who wouldn't notice that they are not an argument. Kneejerk anti-Stalinism is not an argument either. The fact that Stalin organized mass murder and represssion in the Party and in the SU does not mean ,amazingly, that he didn't have a brain , as Justin thinks, or couldn't make theoretical contributions. That's just the way the world is. It is not neat and tidy such that " evil = dumb " . Sometimes bad people do smart things or have good ideas. This is a species of the rule against ad hominem in logic. You have to make arguments against Stalin's arguments, not his personal immorality. So what is your argument ,not your attitude ?
Of course, part of Dimitrov's argument is the whole of Lenin's argument in _Imperialism_, in which finance capital is located as the bourgeois ruling class in this period. Then people like Herbert Aptheker have done historical work demonstrating the connections between the Nazis and finance capital. So, you are going to have to make a pretty big argument.
Perhaps this will help. Look at the U.S. right now. The ruling class is finance capital. Bush etc. is an agent of finance capital, as was Clinton ( Bush, Reagan, Carter....) Yet, that is not obvious. Similarly, the German ruling class did not make it obvious that the Nazis ( or the prior governments) were their agents. The bourgeoisie do not rule openly.
Perhaps that "openly" is the problem. The idea is not that finance capital ruled openly, but that the terrrorist dictatorship was open, whereas in "normal" bourgeois democracy the terrorism of the state is not as open and notorious as in fascism.
Charles
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To Greg & Charles:
After reading :
Unity of the Working Class against Fascism Concluding speech before the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/dimitrov/works/1935/unity.htm#s1
which Charles was so kind to provide, I see Georgi in a different light. Let me explain.
His opening line at the 7th comintern congress that goes:
Comrades, fascism in power was correctly described by the Thirteenth Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International as the open terrorist dictatorship of the most reactionary, most chauvinistic and most imperialist elements of finance capital.
has always put me off. Dimitrov went eyeball to eyeball with the fascists and stared them down (the Leipzig trial) only to become a perfect stalinist stooge, and he dutifully demonstrates his loyalty to the chief by mouthing the comintern BS about "dictatorship of the baddest meanest finance capital". Why not the fattest, most constipated owners of textile mills?
However, the speech Charles sent me, where GD traces an overall panorama of world fascism and antifascist struggles, shows that the guy knows what he's talking about much more than he let on at the 7th. Shame, really, that a mind like GD's was imprisoned in the carcass of an apparatchik.
Hakki