On Aug 18, 2011, at 9:35 AM, c b wrote:
>
>
> But I don't know that it was a new class. Mostly a disguised old
> privileged class.
> Joanna
There you go quoting Lenin again!
>
> ^^^^^
> CB: As often is the case from where I sit, many people considered
> Stalin as dumbly trying to rationalize his "authoritarian" methods of
> rule when he said the class struggle sharpened with the advent of
> socialism in the Soviet Union. Turns out there is some truth in that
> notion.
You've been sitting with your CP "many people" friends in that ideological outhouse way too long. Of course Stalin believed that class struggle "sharpened" when his totalitarian national socialism was declared. He was the one who "sharpened" it by massacring the revolutionary generation and building in its place, around the "old privileged class" that Lenin and Trotsky had inveighed against, a pseudo- technocracy of careerist bureaucrats who were to make damn sure that if they themselves were too poor to afford capitalist luxury their offspring would inherit the power that would enable them to be *private* capitalists in their own right.
Gorbachev may have at times pretended that he was doing something to revive Leninism. But that pretense evaporated on November 3, 1987, when he marked the 70th anniversary by hailing the victory of Stalin over the Bolshevik-Leninist opposition and maintaining the Vyshinsky Court's sentences (including exclusion from "Soviet" citizenship) against the founder of the Soviet State. Gorbachev was sponsored by the then-head of the KGB, which was to use him to cover the transfer of supposedly "state" finances into the hands of its creatures (the Putins operating abroad) and then toss him aside like a squeezed lemon in the double-cross coup of August 1991.
It's amazing that anyone (except those naïfs who imagined that some sort of socialism existed in the USSR and that the shadow-boxing match between the Russian and American empires really was a Cold War) would consider such a cipher as a world-historical figure.
Shane Mage
"scientific discovery is basically recognition of obvious realities that self-interest or ideology have kept everybody from paying attention to"