On Aug 18, 2011, at 10:12 AM, Shane Mage wrote:
>
> 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"
>
>
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