[lbo-talk] [pen-l] Re: What Caused the Holodomor?

Cox, Carrol cbcox at ilstu.edu
Sat Mar 25 16:06:54 PDT 2017


I think usually it is silly to respond to the various silly diatribes against the USSR. The premise of those diatribes is the (quite absurd) premise that (a) the only alternative to capitalism is socialism, (b) that we know both what socialism is and 'should' be, and (c) that this utopian (because prophetic) concept of socialism is achievable any place any time. The late Mark Jones knew better. He defined the USSR, China et all not as either socialist or non-socialist but liberated zones. Liberated zones exist in a world controlled by capitalism but "shelter" their population from the direct horrors of capitalism. Of course they were not socialist, but so fucking what! We owe to Stalin that the "official" language of most of Europe and the U.S. is not German!

Lou has to hate Stalin and hold to a utopian version of socialism because of his fundamental adherence to a moralistic view of human activity, and hence merely to ideas in his own head, separated from any sense of material possibility or necessity. (The either/or of "possibility" and "necessity" is that the nonsense spewed out by Proyect's friend Henwood swallows _necessity_ with (his subjective view of) possibility. Hence both he and Lou ultimately ignore (even reject) history in favor of their own limited views of "the possible."

But of course to ground one's thinking in the concept of "possibility" is Left Crackpot Realism, and leads to abject surrender to capitalist conceptions of the future.

As Gould among others has tirelessly informed us, the future is INVISIBLE and unpredictable. This was Marx's own point of departure: "The anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape," or, as Ollman has suggested, History must be written backwards.

I don't know whether my friend Furr's history is accurate, but it doesn't matter. A politics grounded in "anti-stalimism" has always been doomed to irrelevance. (So has a policy which has no other grounding that "pro"-Stalinism, but that is another matter. (Grover operates quite will in the context of the non-sectarian practice of the Radical Caucus of the MLA.

Carrol

-----Original Message----- From: pen-l at mail.csuchico.edu [mailto:pen-l at mail.csuchico.edu] On Behalf Of charles1848 Sent: Saturday, March 25, 2017 10:06 AM To: Progressive Economics Subject: [pen-l] Re: What Caused the Holodomor?

For those of you in the San Francisco Bay Area, on the other side of the continent from the Unrepentant Narcissist: Reclaiming the History of the Russian Revolution

Mar 26, 2017, 11:30 am The Russian Revolution proved that workers could begin to build a new society. The many lies about Stalin prevent us from critically evaluating this experience. Errors made by Stalin and the Bolsheviks were the errors of pioneers. In this sense, then, these “errors” were part of the process of learning how to build communism. A new and better communist movement can only be rebuilt upon a sound foundation of historical truth, not upon the sand of anticommunist lies. Grover Furr will discuss his new book Yezhov vs Stalin and other anticommunist lies about the heroic “Stalin period.”

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