CB: Oh, do you mean that both the SU and US are revolting , like the masses ?
Tahir: Yup I was suggesting that they both are/were revolting in certain respects. I didn't say that the masses were revolting - I did however make fun of your unfortunate choice of words.
CB: with Khruschev, I said Stalin's crimes were serious and unforgivable. Maybe you were so busy seeing in what I wrote what you had heard so much before that you didn't pay attention to what I actually said. I just feel that Stalin should have been able to settle differences within the Party without resorting to mass murder and repression. But I wasn't there.
Tahir: And why do you think he didn't settle them in that way? Just a particularly nasty streak in an otherwise okay guy's personality? Nothing ideological there at all? ....
CB: The brilliant thinkers like you must have special privileges even in socialism . You're just special , aren't you, and the dumb workers don't understand that. You should be able to say anything you want. the struggle against the counterrevolution be damned for your brilliance must be allowed to shine forth at all costs.
Tahir: This argument is the same one that you repeat over and over, as if you're talking to a bunch of half wits. You don't even get the point, that in turning marxism into the dry, dogmatic and reactionary doctrine that it became in the SU, brilliant communists had to be sacrificed. It is here that the counter-revolution, which you like to talk so much about, starts. The official "marxism" of the SU itself represents the counter-revolution. The repression here is the state cap/nationalist reversal of communist-inspired revolution.
CB: And what exactly do you think Marx meant by the "dictatorship of the proletariat" ? That everybody but the petit bourgeois intelligentsia would be under strict revolutionary discipline , or what ?
Tahir: I reject the right of people like you to decide that so and so is a counter-revolutionary and must be shot or silenced because they oppose a reactionary dogma. Why don't you stick to the topic here, if you can? The dictatorship of the proletariat as everyone knows simply means the rule of the proletariat. But you stupidly pre-judge that this must mean a type of fascism.
CB: We have heard this armchair revolutionist mantra a thousand times before. Where exactly has the Bordiga line changed the world in the slightest ?
Tahir: 'Changing the world' is not always the most positive thing: Stalinism made the world an immeasurably poorer place. Whatever you might like to say about Bordiga, he did not bring marxism and communism into disrepute like your heroes did (jeez a total mediocrity like Kruschev - do you honestly expect the next revolutionary wave to base itself on the legacy of men like that?) If we are to get more of the like of Stalin and Kruschev, well I think the armchair is not so bad compared to that. By the 1920s already Bordiga was able to show that the SU was leading the international counter-revolution and that it was capitalist through and through. Famously, he told Stalin these things to his face. He resisted utterly the false Trotskyist option that propping up the 'degenerated worker's state' was somehow defending the cause of 'socialism'. Bordiga realised, however, that his days as leader of the Italian CP (which he had founded) were numbered and he quit the party shortly af! ter his face-to-face with Stalin, taking thousands out with him. He was replaced by the more compliant Gramsci and Togliatti. (I would like to think that had Gramsci lived he would eventually have taken a Bordigan turn, but I think he would have become a Eurocommunist or social democrat). Today Bordiga's legacy is alive, vital and inspiring (just take a trawl through Sinistra, the archives of the Italian left, and see for yourself). And that matters. Big time. Who the hell could be inspired by a Kruschev?