<div>This is a bit old, but I couldn't see it in the archive. <a href="http://lists.topica.com/lists/lit-ideas/read/message.html?sort=d&mid=1715065406&start=3655">http://lists.topica.com/lists/lit-ideas/read/message.html?sort=d&mid=1715065406&start=3655 </a></div> <div> </div> <div>(snip)</div> <div>...</div> <div>DS No one doubts your integrity. It is your analysis which is questionable. If democratic governments can be a threat to the bourgeoisie, then it is surely wrong to say, as you wrote in the Manifesto, that the "executive of the modern state is but a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie." KM Well, was I that much off the mark? Is it not the case that all governments are constrained by capitalism's own structures? That, when all is said and done, they are forced to do all they can to ensure its profitability, train its workforce, repair its failures, and mop up the debris it excretes on the way? And they all do it, all slaves to the imperatives of capitalism: the left and the right and the middle and the socialists and fascists and liberals and greens. Once in power they must keep the show on the road. If the show runs well, then they tax and spend and redistribute this and that and help the poor and the sick just as the Victorians did. When the profits roll in they bask in morality and ethics. When profits decline and the economy enters into one of the economic cycles I had predicted, philanthropy is discarded like an ageing mistress. Then your good bourgeois discovers that you cannot tax and spend, that the unemployed are scroungers, that public medicine costs too much, that single mothers are feckless. The conscience of the bourgeoisie is closely wired to the vicissitudes of the stock exchange. DS And what about the intellectuals? KM Second-rate theorists; in reality the paid lackeys of the rich. The thing about bourgeois scribblers is that they always theorise after the event. They pick up intellectual garbage, polish it up, call it theory and serve it up as science. Rebellion against capitalist modernity takes the form of religious fanaticism and they call it "a clash of civilisations." Communism falls and the "end of history" is proclaimed-Oh poor Hegel, what would he say? The first time a great thinker, the second time a Fukuyama farce?</div> <div> </div> <div>DS Calm down. Let's move on. I've got to ask you this: the Soviet Union, the gulag, communist terror. KM I thought you would. I must admit that I am as vain as the next person and all this personality cult and Marx-worship did get to me. It did tickle me to see my face on banknotes of the old DDR and a Marxplatz in every Prussian city. Of course, thanks to Engels's marketing skills and the efforts of Bernstein and of that tedious man, Kautsky, I became the grand guru of the socialist movement soon after my demise. Consequently Russian westernisers had to take me as seriously as electricity. So I was not surprised when Lenin decided to turn me into the Bible. Lenin was a clever politician with good instincts. But he was also a fundamentalist determined to find in my works the justification for whatever it was he wanted to do. He made "Marxism" up as he went along. This detestable habit, typical of religions since time immemorial, spread everywhere. I began to have the feeling that even my shopping lists were being drafted into the service of this or that faction of the movement. Take the notion of the "dictatorship of the proletariat." This was a formula I had devised to suggest, following its ancient Roman usage, an exceptional government in a time of crisis. I must have used this expression no more than ten times in my life. I can't tell you my surprise when this resurfaced as a central idea of Marxism, used to justify one-party rule. What can I say? And I was rather surprised when the first so-called socialist revolution occurred in such a deeply backward country run by Slavs-of all people. What the Bolsheviks were doing was accomplishing the bourgeois revolution that the Russian bourgeoisie was too small and stupid to carry out. The communists used the state to create a modern industrial system. If one must call this the "dictatorship of the proletariat," well, so be it. DS But the purges, the crimes, the blood.... KM I did say that capital is born dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt. DS I mean communism not capitalism. KM The Russian revolution was not a socialist revolution waged against a capitalist state. It was a revolution against a semi- feudal autocracy. It was about the construction of modern industry, modern society. Industrial revolutions always occur at great cost whether led by communists or pukka bourgeois. Your modern political accountants, as they scavenge through history to make the case for the prosecution, have they totted up the deaths caused by colonialism, and capitalism? Have they added up all the Africans who died in slavery on their way to America? All the American Indians massacred? All the dead of capitalist civil wars? All those killed by the diseases caused by modern industry? All the dead of the two world wars? Of course Stalin and co were criminals. But do you think that Russia would have become a modern industrial power by democratic, peaceful means? Which road to industrialisation has been victimless, and undertaken under a benign system of civil liberties and human rights? Japan? Korea? Taiwan? Germany? Italy? France? Britain and its empire? What were the alternatives to Lenin and Stalin and the red terror? Little Red Riding Hood? The alternative would have been some Cossack- backed antisemitic dictator as cruel and paranoid as Stalin (or Trotsky; frankly I have no preference), far more corrupt and far less efficient.  </div>