From: jimhillier99 at aol.com Subject: Re: Statement by ethical anarchists on London Bombings
... I am with Trotsky on this question. Their morals and ours, and all that. What makes these bombs wrong is not that 'innocent' people were killed. ...
*** *** *** *** *** *** Oh dear. If you really think that then you are on the same moral turf as the terrorists who have just killed working class Londoners on their way to work.
"Innocent people" are not empty tokens in your great game, a game in which elites (some 'marxists' being one) decide who lives or dies.
Trotsky's thinking opened the door for Stalinism; an regime which saw the people as no more than pawns to be sacrificed during its continuing struggle to maintain power.
It seems to me that such ideas have their home in bourgeois alienated society, a society in which people are reduced to things and stripped of their humanity. People are not goals, but tools. That appears to be the way you think, Jim Hillier, but it is a mindset that Marx opposed.
No wonder Marx said 'je ne suis pas marxiste'. Marx, I, and I suspect at root you are involved in the attempt to build socialism because it is the only way humanity can escape from the barbarities of capitalist society. Isn't that supremely a moral mission in anyone's language? Why would any of us devote so much to the cause of socialism unless we thought it the right thing to do?
For all his many great merits, comrade Trotsky knew nothing about moral thinking. If he had, perhaps he would have avoided disasters such as Kronstadt, which have so much damaged the world struggle for socialism.
The revulsion workers feel at the many barbarities wrought by so called 'socialists' cannot be underestimated. In my experience, it is one of the greatest barriers we face.
Richard Canterbury