I have to say that Julio Huato's sketch of Hobsbawm and James Heartfield's essay have helped a lot in my attempt to understand why the few communists I got to know in yore were such a turn off.
Julio and Jim put flesh on Trotsky's History and My Life where he starts his attacks on Stalin. There are two Trotsky essays that deal with the early Chinese Revolution in the late 1920s when Stalin backed Chiang Kai-shek and then a few years later where Trotsky anticipates the outcome of the Spanish Civil War, which amounted to the Chinese road to ruin.
Why obsess about ancient history? Because I spent most of my political life, what little there was, believing in reform. I had seen it work in one small section of the department of education for a few years in the early to mid-70s. Our program officer in DC had been a civil rights lawyer with the NAACP and got his job through recruitment in the early OEO days. There is a great feeling of solidarity when you meet a mid-level government official who actually understands your problems with state institutional change (UC System) and supports the local program efforts.
Those limited experiences lead me to believe the system could be reformed with the right people in the right places. That might still be so, in the abstract, but such a case will never come again. It was made clear that former era was dead just last year working under an ARRA project. The whole federal grant mentality has altered into the all pervasive community business partnership model. What about the people community partnership? Where the hell is that?
Trotsky went into great detail about the struggles with various reform or parliamentary elements from February to October. Why couldn't a true parliament of honestly elected representatives not work? Because, behind that apparently liberal solution, lay the vast wealth and power of the big capitalists and they had no intention of giving up their power and wealth, or allow those to be limited or controlled by a state, period.
The above dynamic is particularly important for Egypt to learn, doubly so since the military elite are part of and in league with their capitalist class.
I went back to reading Marx and the same theme, the poverty of reform, emerges over and over in all the twists and turns of the French efforts to get back to a republican form of government. An even more sorry tale comes from Marx's studies in England. Just a couple of nights ago, I decided, well finish the David Harvey course on Capital. Sort of a homework exercise.
Where I left off was in the sections leading up discussions of surplus value, relative surplus value and bunch of apparently archane matters. Ah, but this time was a little different. All those essays on this and that in France and England re-infused Capital with some life it didn't have before. All the detail on the machinations of the capitalist techniques of managing labor power now had a more living relationship to the ancillary studies. And of course we can see a nearly identical array of systems large and small throughout the Asian miracle where petty producers in Taiwan and elsewhere feed the vast mainland manufacturers with their special parts like circuit boards, miniture motors, etc, and items that require a more diverse technical manufacture. These speciality shops also feed the US assembly plants. It turns out that power wheelchairs are right in the center of these systems, since they require both heavy and light industry and high tech combined into a single commodity.
While socialist and communist parties and political movements might be dead, the realities and insights of Marx, Trotsky, et al are still very much with us.
CG