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

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Mon Apr 27 02:04:01 PDT 2009


Mike Beggs wrote: "I think a dictatorship of a party is not a Dictatorship of the Proletariat." I agree, and I think Trotsky and Lenin would have agreed, too. The suspension of the soviets was not a decision that they welcomed, nor saw as permanent, but as an emergency measure that if it persisted would lead to bureaucratic dictatorship. Lenin said so at the time, Trotsky made Lenin's warning the organising principle of the next great battle in his life.

My parents were anarchists (who sold 'Freedom' in the pubs of Leeds) and though there was a lot of creativity in that movement, in the end I don't think it had the answer to the problem of workers control. I did know some of the Solidarity group that the late Maurice Brinton led. They did good work around the child abuse panic here, having a keen instinct for civil liberties. But if you look at Ken Weller's intervention into the car workers' disputes of the seventies 'The Blue Book', you can see the basic problem. Among themselves the group had some interesting discussions about bureaucracy and planning, but in their engagement with working people in a struggle, they were too embarrassed to challenge them, only echoing the arguments of the most militant section.



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