[lbo-talk] Political abstension

[James Heartfield]

I suspect that if Loren or Gerald were in Vietnam in 1945, or Spain in 1936, 
they would be arguing against the revolution, on the grounds that there were 
leaders involved, or bloodshed was likely, or that the class struggle should 
not be mixed up with which political elite was in charge.

The issue is not Left Opposition vs Stalinism, but whether or not you think 
that the struggle for political power is an issue for the working class.

In essence Loren's position is political abstension. He considers the 
national question to be a distraction from the Peter-pure workers struggle 
(that exists in such a form only in his head). That is what is so 
disingenuous in this appeal to the Vietnamese Trotskyists, and their 
struggle to liberate the country.

Gerald reveals the symbolic uses of the Vietnamese Trotskyists by putting 
them in the same category as the Kronstadt Sailors. Of course, it was 
Trotsky who commanded the assault on the short-lived Kronstadt soviet. The 
Vietnamese Trotskyists would presumably have thought him right to do so.

Loren puts the Vietnamese Trotskyists in with Rosa Luxemburg. In his 
isolation, Trotsky was guarded in his criticisms of Rosa Luxemburg, but the 
truth is that he did not share her worship of spontaneity:

"Rosa's theory of spontaneity ...By the fact that it was often directed 
against Lenin's work of building up a revolutionary apparatus, it revealed 
... its reactionary features." 
http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1935/06/lux.htm