Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>I suspect this attitude has something to do with
> why Trostkyists and anarchists - two different kinds of purists -
> have had so little impact on real-world politics.
Indeed. If you want to see _a_ (not _the_) 'Trotskyist' perspective in action, go to the following, http://www.marxsite.com/ and download the paper by Jeffery R Webber, "Reflections on Morales first 100 days (Word document)." You probably won't want to read very much of it (it's over 10,000 words in length), but browsing in it will give the flavor.
A couple footnotes.
One of the more annoying habits of those in the "Trotskyist" tradition, a habit still often indulged in by those who have shed _most_ of such annoying habits, is that of throwing the labels "stalinist" and "maoist" around, as though those labels unambiguously named definite political positions. They don't of course, if they ever did. This is also true of the label "Trotskyist," as is being exhibited almost daily on the Marxism list. (I illustrate this below.) Hence, though it makes the rhetoric clumsier, I think some what ought to be found to indicate this variety of positions under the single label "Trotskyist." (See, for example, the posts on the Marxism list of Joaquin Bustelo, strongly defending Chavez & Morales against other (dogmatic) "Trotskyist" critiques.
Certainly articles like Webber's or posts like Chuck's do make the epithet "purism" tempting, but I think that label should be avoided, for it is misleading as to the source of such dogmatism. (And the term "dogmatism" itself ought to be used to describe a structure of argument, not the alleged or intuited personal style of the dogmatist involved.) The following is an almost archetypal instance of dogmatism as the assumption that theory directly translates into practice:
****** (Subject Line: Against or for Morales?)
[Q wrote]: "In 2002 a coup was attempted in Venezuela, during which Chavez was deposed for three days. It was the masses that overturned that coup, evidence of the simple fact that Chavez would be nothing without their support. The notion that Chavez stands apart from the Venezuelan people buys into the characterization of him as a dictator by Rumsfeld, et al. He is not. He is the manifestation of a revolutionary current from below which in Venezuela had been fermenting and brewing amongst the poorest section of society for many years before his rise to power."
Hello. The German masses rose up to defend social-democratic traitors from a general, Kapp, in 1920. And there is August 1917 and Kornilov in the Russian case. Just because people rise up to defend someone doesn't mean they aren't heading up a bourgeois state apparatus.
Your comments on revolutions "from below" never succeeding. What I mean is revolutions that destroyed the old state machinery and reconstructed it from the ground up, of course having to rely on some of the staff of the old regime, but still reconstructing the state on a new basis, as a new instrument to serve the revolutionary classes. Yes these are the only revolutions that have by any measure succeeded in overthrowing capitalism and reproducing at least some of the accomplishments of the "bourgeois revolutions" of the European world. The Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales-led models are not new, they have been tried in various places and failed-which is why in my post I asked what is new about these events that should lead us to forget "Critique of the Gotha Program," "Reform or Revolution" and "State and Revolution." Still waiting for a thoughtful answer. ******
We don't need to know anything about Morales & Chavez but the fact that each is a leader of the existing state. But we 'know' (Marx & Lenin told us so) that the old state is the old state and its leader is a servant of capitalism. This is dogmatism -- but JS I would argue that the author, JS, advances it for the same subjective reasons that a physician would prescribe an anti-biotic for a severe case of bronchitis: both believe that the prescribed action will bring about the desired end. That is _not_ "purism" in either case, for it is unlikely that either the physician or JS holds the belief for the sake of holding the belief, on the grounds that the belief, as it were, is good for one's soul, that salvation is through faith alone! The physician is correct, JS is terribly wrong, but there is no difference in their subjective states, as the label of "purism" would imply.
Lenin and Marx were, incidentally, almost certainly correct -- but neither of them would have wished their arguments to be regarded as a direct guide to practice. "Smashing the State" may be in some fundamental way a necessary part of the building of socialism, but why should the process necessarily take two weeks, two months, three years, a decade? And so forth. JS's dogmatism (his assumption of a direct link between theory and practice) makes him incapable of _using_ the theory he attempts to wield.
But while it may score debating points to call him a purist, that hampers rather than contributes to better political understanding. It is foolish to expect electro-magnetic theory to determine the correct oven temperature to roast a given leg of lamb, but that does not disprove electro-magnetic theory; nor the ultimate relationship between that theory and the operation of an electri oven.
Carrol