[WS:] Typical American male arrogance cum provincial ethnocentrism - insults instead of arguments. Is that what they teach in Yank "education"?
I thought for a while you were a smart guy, but you are a Nicodemus Dyzma - if that reference from the Polish pop literature means anything to you.
If not see it here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Career_of_Nicodemus_Dyzma
Wojtek
On Thu, Nov 14, 2013 at 12:59 PM, Shane Mage <shmage at pipeline.com> wrote:
>
> On Nov 14, 2013, at 12:29 PM, Wojtek S wrote:
>
> Shane: "Possible, yes. But wrong. The "Soviet system" was the clearest
>> example of direct class rule through the state apparatus. That class, the
>> decisive elements of the apparatus, known to itself and all others as the
>> "nomenklatura," ruled on its own behalf and, after the curtains came down
>> on its "socialist" farce, continued to rule over all important parts of
>> the
>> empire: from the KGB colonel in the Kremlin to the Aliev dynasty in Baku
>> to
>> the various despots of the various Korruptistans. The Stalinist class
>> system moved so smoothly from
>> state-capitalism to state-monopoly-capitalism that some people, a
>> quarter-century later and three-quarter-century after the definitive
>> overthrow of the proletarian regime established by the November
>> revolution,
>> still call the FSU a "workers' state!"
>>
>> [WS:] How is it wrong fro chrissake? What you described is the nearly
>> total dissociation of the state apparatus from society and its class
>> structure
>>
>
> To say that the people who make up the state apparatus--those people with
> the institutional authority to order the killing or jailing or destitution
> of other people--are not part of society and its class structure is
> violative of all social science as well as common sense. It is nothing more
> than Hobbes's Stuart-apologetic "Leviathan."
>
> the Soviet nomenklatura is...not a class from a marxist perspective...
>>
>
> What entitles Wojtek to pronounce what is or isn't "a Marxist
> perspective?" A Polish "education?" Ever since its consolidation of power
> in the Great Purge, Marxists have always regarded the nomenklatura as an
> incipient (Trotsky) or actual (CLR James) capitalist class. The class
> character of the FSU has long since been "determined by history" (as
> Trotsky said in 1940 would very soon be the case) and the historical
> outcome fully visible today has determined, beyond a shadow of doubt, that
> its class character was capitalist.
>
>
>
>
> Shane Mage
>
>
> This cosmos did none of gods or men make, but it
> always was and is and shall be: an everlasting fire,
> kindling in measures and going out in measures.
>
> Herakleitos of Ephesos
>
>
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
> http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
>
-- Wojtek
"An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."