Liberty and Solidarity

Jesus wept thats pretty awful.
To be honest even most soft trots I know would find that point of view pretty abhorrent, especially the term ''examples'' ffs

that is pretty incredible - isn't that essentially taking the side of Trotsky and Lenin over Makhno and the Kronstadt sailors?

which given that Makhno was one of the key authors of the platform is pretty bizarre, to say the least.

Ahem...

"In the context of Venezuala I think that the logical conclusion of anarchist principle is (to borrow a useful phrase from trot parlance) 'military but not political support' for Chavez, and working to develop links with, and power for Venezualan social organisations of the left. At the same time the popular frontism of the left in its support for the Venezualan nationalist bourgeoisie, and uncritical support of Chavez is clearly bollocks. I don't support that. But it's clear that the "nuances" (vast expansive gulf?) between what I am advocating, and uncritical support for Chavez, are lost on some comrades here."

Political analysis does not consist of cutting and pasting decontextualised quotes from other message boards to support ad hominem argument.

Well argue it then. Where do we lack pragmatism?

As a moral statement, yes.

Sadly history and society is not changed or acted upon by ideas and ideals, but rather material circumstances straiten decisions. Were the most right-on anarchist polity to have obtained following the Russian revolution, the same general trajectory of history would have followed, and Stalinism would have occured under a red and black flag. To pretend otherwise is idealistic, and a misreading of history.

This is the issue here. You've framed the issue morally and decided there were goodies and baddies, and nobody wants to bat for the dark side. But at the end of the day the quote you discuss wasn't to do with ideals, goals, morals or vision, but just a statement about material realities looking at history in hindsight.

If you want a nice little quoteable snippet to plug away with for more frothing ad hominem, it's this.

I basically agree with the Bolsheviks that the Russian revolution was doomed to failure because of the failure of Germany to have a successful workers revolution; studies have shown that the raw materials and minerals need to support an autarkic economy exist in sufficient abundance to support socialism under a blockade only in the very whole of the Americas or all of Eurasia; anything less than that and there will be shortages and poverty. This meant that with the economic blockade, the country was deprived of essential resources and capacity to make socialism work. That is leaving aside the disputed but nonetheless very substantial number of imperialist task forces and white rebellions, which led to a bloody civil war which saw the deaths of more people than those killed during the first world war, and led ultimately to the seizure of the peasants seed grain to support the continuation of work in the factories controlled by the Bolshevik government. In effect had the most thorough-reaching direct democracy been achieved in Russia (obviously it wasn't), the same decisions would still have been faced by that anarchist regime as faced by the Bolshevik government, many of the same decisions would have been taken, and situations like Kronstadt would still have emerged and forced that regime to choose to crack down on its own population. And I think that would inevitably have led to Stalinism under a red and black banner. I don't think Kronstadt took place because the Bolsheviks were especially nasty. I think that's a misreading of history.

This forum will trawl thru the ad hominem until the last of them have shook their fist and shouted 'reformist/stalinist/rightist' and all the rest of the blah blah blah so I'm not going to take comments here seriously. You want to discuss that stuff, I'm happy to go into it on ABC, where there is some moderation.

You know, and have been advised, better than that posi.

If the Bolshevik revolution failed in 1919, then there wasn't a "socialist project" to save in 1921 by breaking up strikes and gunning down workers like partridges.

Except there was no Anarchist Party, given that anarchists had been against vanguardism and the political revolution from the very beginning. For this reason, to speak of an "anarchist regime" arising instead of the Bolsheviks as a historical inevitability is absolute nonsense. If you look at the Spanish example, the difference between anarchist organization and Stalinism become even more clear (esp. as they existed side-by-side unlike in Russia, where Bolshevik victory was built on the annihilation of opposition)
Yes, the white counterrevolution would have perhaps succeeded had the "red" counterrevolution not stepped in to militarize labour, impose democratic centralism and crush the workers' resistance. That doesn't make the latter's eventual triumph closer to socialism.

Rhetorically implying that the Bolsheviks were right to make examples of unruly workers is more than just making a statement about material realities.

I'm sorry, but this is exactly the argument that the Bolsheviks made, and that the Trots today make. The point of the anarchist critique is exactly that there was, and is, an alternative to a centralized, repressive revolution.

Maybe you don't accept that argument, but that's another matter.

which, again, suggests that you don't accept the anarchist (platformist or otherwise) critique of Bolshevism. The Bolsheviks sought to take control of the revolution from the beginning. They conducted a military coup in the name of 'all power to the Soviets'. The very next day they announced that 'all power to the Soviets' actually meant 'all power to the Bolsheviks', and then went on 4 years later to brutally massacre the same military forces they'd used to get themselves into power.

How on earth that isn't especially nasty is beyond me.

I have little interest in yet another sodding 1917 argument, but...

Have you read the "Pragmatism as Ideology" article mentioned there? I think that does a good job of showing the unpractical nature of much self-proclaimed anarchist "pragmatism". For a concrete example, how about this:

If "pragmatism" leads us to lend support to existing hierarchies, rather than combating them, and our goal is to abolish them, then it is counterproductive and not actually practical. At all.

Do you make propaganda (as L&S, not LCAP or IWW or whatever)? If so, what? If you require theoretical agreement, then why is another member on here saying that that article directly contradicts L&S's positions? Surely you can't deny that you don't present yourselves as being avowedly anarchist - I thought that was the whole point of the L&S project?

It's exactly what happened. The CNT didn't sweep away the bourgeois state. Instead it co-existed with it and then joined it.

There could be no clearer example of the kind of flailing about I was talking about, a purist stance leading directly to an opportunist stance and both leading to failure. One of the most telling things about the lack of seriousness of the Anarchist movement is that they view Spain as a glowing chapter in their history rather than a complete disaster which must be learnt from in that light.

Man, wouldn't you love to be a Trot? No seriously...

So IR, at what point do you think the USSR became counter-revolutionary and how many groups have you denounced for disagreeing over the exact year?

I think it adds to our argument that the only person defending Dundee here is irrationally, a member of the Socialist party, which Dundee appears to be trying to emulate with a red and black logo...

We could go more into the Russian revolution, but i think what would be more useful is to talk about the bankruptcy of these ideas in the 21st-century Britain.

I pointed out a list of ridiculously unpragmatic tactics and strategies on the "pragmatism" blog post linked to above. So Dundee, if you want a list try there.

I could summarise a few here though quickly: your tiny group of people trying to manage the working class, your similarly tiny group trying to establish apprenticeships for all people aged 14 above, your trying to establish a bank to fund "workers businesses", your trying to organise space workers, your claim of getting 15,000 members in Glasgow IWW by next year, your claim for communists to need nuclear weapons to fight imperialist aliens, your claim that communists should try to strategise on how to take over the port of Rotterdam... do you really want me to carry on?

obviously no one is saying (!!) that what is morally right of itself determines history.

But what you seem to be excusing - the violent crushing of the proletariat and its political and industrial organisation - did in fact happen, and did lead to the horror of Stalinism. So in what sense it's supposed to be hard headedly realistic to advocate making 'examples' of people, having them 'dealt with' I don't know: it happened, and it was a world historic disaster fo the class.

You're also using a terribly crude version of trotskyist history: making the degeneration of the revolution solely a matter of its 'objective circumstances', nothing at all to do with politics. I'm sure we're all sophisticated enough in this discussion to realise that both material scarcity and Bolsheik ideology were factors. You're simply slipping back into an incredibly crude reading, that even better educated trots are moving away from.

Indeed. Which is why I wrote.

"Were the most right-on anarchist polity to have obtained following the Russian revolution, the same general trajectory of history would have followed, and Stalinism would have occured under a red and black flag. To pretend otherwise is idealistic, and a misreading of history."

It would not have been the same. But there would only have been the same outcome (or as IR points out perhaps the revolution would have been lost more quickly). The truth is the project was failed from the start because it did not encompass a geo-region capable of sustaining it, or enough industrial production capable of propelling it.

I'm not saying anarchists would have been shooting sailors like patridges, but ultimately some form of dictatorship or scarcity driven system would have evolved, if the revolution succeeded. That part is not a product of ideology. It's material circumstance. Altho clearly Bolshevik ideology saw the Bolsheviks do things from the get-go that anarchists would find abhorrent.

High handed bluster. You know damn well what I was saying. This is why there is no sense in discussing anything seriously here. Even halfway analytical people like you posi jump into 'yah boo!' mode and discussion becomes a roundabout way of shouting about how big everyone's cock is.

The reality the traditional anarchist reading of history goes something like: there were lots of baddies. There were goodies. There were some baddies who pretended to be goodies, and they got the better of the baddies, because they were baddies. It's important that we remember so that we are always goodies and not baddies.

Why the fuck are we even discussing the Russian revolution here?

Well let's talk about the practical motivations of anarchists, and what they do to build working class power in the here and now. Apparently there are some people on here who think that L&S is neither very practical nor very pragmatic when it comes to this rather more important here and now question. Given that there is now four pages of thread to gasp in sheer horror and double takes about the terrible terribleness of that group, perhaps we can have something more substantial than that bloke Dundee_United (who is one of their members) is really mental and has some mental views.

Or maybe personality driven gossip is more fun, more salacious, and altogether more serious and clever.

and the sentence before,

I'm not at all surprised that you can't answer the question.

In all the time I've spent around Anarchists I've never once got a straight answer to that one nor for that matter to almost any serious question about strategy in a revolutionary period. There is no anarchist programme worth discussing, because Anarchists are supremely uninterested in examining or developing their own ideas.

Anarchism, even in its class struggle form, exists only as a moralist's critique of Bolshevism. It has nothing to say for itself.