[lbo-talk] Robert Frost Defends Robespierre, Lenin, Mao

Eric Beck ersatzdog at gmail.com
Sun Apr 26 09:37:43 PDT 2009



> But it's not like they were somehow betraying their ideals while in power.
> The belief that society should be turned into a concentration camp in the
> interests of historical development - that was their ideology, not just some
> hypocritical behavior.

Even though I share your dislike of Lenin, Trotsky, and the like, this is a pretty unfair statement. I don't see, for instance, that much that separates Lenin and Chomsky on these questions. Trotsky et al.'s ideals, or whatever you want to call them, weren't what you say they were, and even if they were, ideology doesn't matter. What matters is what happened when their revolution won. What matters isn't whether Trotsky was a jerk but what Stalin's gulags and executions--which were just the political version of Lenin's and Trotsky's economic gulags, forced collectivization and Taylorism in the factories--say about the vicissitudes of maintaining a statist revolution.



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