>sounds to me like the debate's being sacked by an anarchist who would
>rather attack marxism on a more superficial level. you have already said
>you think the anarchists understand marxism best (thus the "accuracy" of
>the anarchist critique), so to the extent that you think this area is the
>critical one in the marxist-anarchist debate, as you say here, the argument
>that marxist-anarchist debates get sidetracked by the issue is
>tautological, afaict.
I'm not "sacking" any debate, nor do I have any need to attack marxism "on a more superficial level" [with the possible exception of the space and time constraints in carrying out a debate over short e-mails back and forth]. I never said that anarchists understand marxism best, in fact, I believe it is Marxists who understand marxism to then greatest degree. Rather, I think Anarchism provides a better theoretical framework for understanding the effects of marxist revolutions in history, and critically analysing them, than marxism itself does. In short, the self-criticism of marxism is often false, and when it isn't [in the case of Gramsci, etc.] it leads to libertarian conclusions that are fundamentally at odds with Marx's writings [except, perhaps, his writing on the Paris Commune, which contradicted all his other writings and which he and Engels later denounced].
>maybe i missed something and i admit to not following every sentence of the
>exchange between you and justin, but that's sure the way it's seemed to me.
>you seem predisposed to see marxism as economic determinism at its core,
>and then try to dismiss arguments that marx's general outlook is not so
>simple, and particularly his view of the revolutionary state, on the
>grounds that you were just talking about the marxist-anarchist debate,
>which comes back to how marxism is economic determinism at its core.
I have no interest in merely "dismissing" the wealth of revolutionary and theoretical tradition that stems from marxist thought. I'm not a marxist, but I study it heavily, have several marxist volumes, and learn from local dialectical materialist study groups and such [the cold reality is that there aren't any practical revolutionary ventures being conducted by marxists in north america that are transparent enough to learn from right now].
When discussing the marxist claim for the historical neccessity of a "revolutionary" state, I find that the debate is often impeded by the inability of most marxists to acknolwedge the complete failure of all marxist states in history. If we look at Lenin's "State and Revolution", and what the Bolsheviks actually did in power, we see a glaring disparity, notably through policies like the NEP which, no matter how many material conditions you blame them on, were counter-revolutionary attempts to impose a form of state-capitalism, modelled [as Lenin enthusiastically noted] after the Germans [because they, of course, were more "advanced"].
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