[lbo-talk] Re: China [was: Blowing Up an Assumption]

[Peter Lavelle]

Michael this kind of commentary has no bearing on
today. Everything you mentioned I remember and most of
it I read - but it does not help me understand the
present. Oddly I was trained as an academic historian,
but my later experience in consumer marketing (I will
be honest: of toothpaste, shampoo, shower gel,
toothbushes, etc for Colgate-Palmolive in EEC during
the mid 90s) and high paid and mostly irrelevant
investment banking in Poland and Russia (late 90s into
early 21th C) inform me that the highbrow discourse of
anti-communism - reformed communism of the 80s is
completely empty and meaningless when dealing with the
problems of the post Soviet space.  

--- Michael Pugliese <michael.098762001 at gmail.com>
wrote:


>    In the 80's I hoped for a "reform communist"
> renovation of the
> USSR, along the lines of (Italian ;-) Eurocommunism.
> A Trotskyist
> inspired, "political revolution, " (ala Poland with
> Solidarity) seemed
> to me, to be highly unlikely. But, once Gorby
> started to take the lid
> off after the yrs. of Brezhevite stagnation, the
> accumulation of
> (overdetermined) structural economic, social and
> political crises,
> imploded the Soviet system, given a push by the
> Reaganite arms race
> and the debacle in Afghanistan.
>    Russia will never be "Western style liberal
> democracy, " whatever
> Michael McFaul, etc. wishes for but, Chris'es
> continual shilling for
> Putin is annoying.
>    As for the gangsterization/privatization, under
> Yeltsin, any reader
> of Telos in the 70's, with its pieces by Victor
> Zaslavsky, among
> others, or Dissent, New Left Review, TNR, Soviet
> Studies, Problems of
> Communism, International Socialism of the Cliffite
> Trots,
> International Viewpoint of the Mandelite Trots,
> familiar with
> an analysis of the Soviet social formation as a New
> Class society,
> where the highest ranks of the CPSU nomenklatura and
> factory managers,
> in a society where the MOP where owned by a
> state-party appeartus,
> that had by the late 20's eviserated forms of bottom
> up, proletarian
> democracy, negated any illusions in , "really
> existing socialism,
> "wasn't surprised.
>    As for the USSR being a counter-weight to the US
> Empire see the
> debates in, "Exterminism and Cold War, " Verso. I
> tend to see both
> blocs like Thompson, as exercising blackmail over
> their respective
> spheres, to the mutual benefit of the ruling classes
> in each bloc.
>    Gorbachev roomate in college, Zdenek Mlynar, who
> was on the
> Czechoslovak CP CC during the Prague Spring of '68,
> wrote in his
> memoir, "Nightfrost In Prague, " that Brezhnev
> called LBJ, to see if
> there would be any response with teeth to a Warsaw
> Pact invasion. The
> answer was essentially, we respect your right to
> fuck with the
> subjects of your dungeon as well as you respect
> respect our right to
> rain napalm down on Vietnam or arm Guatemalan death
> squads.
> 
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