S. Artesian's questions

In the ‘That’s not how that [communization] shit works…’ thread I was trying to examine how people knew (Khawaga it happened to be) how communization works. And I referenced the communization of people in Russia from 1917 onwards. This question has to do, obviously, with the nature of a transitional state (or dictatorship of the proletariat).

My points were twofold.

Firstly, I wanted to know how one can know how something works if it has never worked, that is, never happened. This is the knowledge that Khawaga (other people do this all the time too of course) claimed to have by writing the sentence, in regard to communization.

I know that he could have meant: “That’s not how that [communization theory] works”.

But since the poster he was responding to had related the theory to actual events, it must be presumed that Khawaga was saying more than: “Communization is a theory that has not been tested out in practice, so we have no idea if it will work or not, therefore the communizers are pushing communization as an 'article of faith', an ideal, particularly when they dress it up with any sense of scientific foundation or inevitability, however small.”

But Khawaga did not say this he just said: “That’s not how that shit works.”

My second point was that the communizers claim they have abandoned the idea of the transitional state but in fact, if one examines it carefully, there is a practical requirement for a transitional state that cannot, and will not, from the evidence of history, be willed away. Pennoid agreed with this in the really good brief exchange beginning here:

https://libcom.org/forums/theory/that%E2%80%99s-not-how-communization-shit-works%E2%80%A6-06072017?page=1#comment-595632

However, once S. Artesian got onto the thread at post number 7 the thread went off the rails.

He has asked me a series of questions. He has refused to contextualize them properly for me. But I think they are telling questions anyway. So I am going to answer them without the context he places them within.

Because they are ‘out of context’ the questions are loaded and they are designed to either reveal that I don’t know very much or that I am a liberal counter-revolutionary. At that point in our ‘discussions’ I think it would be fair to say that S. Artesian thought I was an anarchist, and so his strategy is also to show how anarchists have got things wrong or are weak in the theoretical and knowledge-of-history department.

My answers will prove S. Artesian right of course within the terms he has been obliged to reveal over the course of ‘discussion’ with him, that is, his adherence to leftism (or Leninism of some kind).

Before Artesian formulated his questions properly he formulated them thus, post 51 (two upvotes):

As I said, I support the Russian Revolution; I think the April Theses were a correct assessment of the course that needed to be taken to prevent the destruction of the revolution at the hands of reaction. I support, FWIW, the seizure of power at executed by the MRC of the Petrograd Soviet.

Do you support that seizure of power? Yes or no?

If you do, then that objectively makes you a supporter of Lenin, of Trotsky, a Leninist, a Trotskyist, a Bolshevik, as much as it does me.

If you don't....just say so... so I can ask you about your "soft spots" for provisional bourgeois governments, constituent assemblies, participation in inter-capitalist wars, etc.

That's the condition, answering that question, for any further discussion.

So yes or no, and if you can't give a yes or no answer to that question, to that critical moment in the history of class struggle, then you are truly a time-wasting dilettante.

I had already told him that I did not want to ‘discuss’ with him, I wanted to discuss with libertarian communists, since whatever he is politically, I have had the same experience before when ‘discussing’ with self-proclaimed Leninists.

Artesian prefaces his more formal questions (post 83) with this:

I am not a Leninist. I do not buy the "theory" of the vanguard party. I do not buy Lenin's theory of imperialism.
I am no more, and no less a Leninist than Rosa Luxemburg was in her evaluation of the Russian Revolution.
Which doesn't stop me from disagreeing with certain aspects of her analysis of capitalism and her analysis of the Russian Revolution.
I think the April Theses are a correct evaluation of the situation in Russia, following as they do, Trotsky's explication of permanent revolution.

But I defy anyone to explain what this really means, which is why I asked him to explain, rather than leaving me to guess.

Anyway, since there is no context then I will answer the questions based on my knowledge of what happened in the Russian Revolution and which people were crucial within certain soviets and committees, and the Bolshevik party itself, and how they contributed to the tragedy that continued into the reign of Stalin.

See my other forum topic: Can we ever escape Leninism?

I support the overthrow of the bourgeois Provisional Government as executed by the Military Revolutionary Committee established by the Petrograd Soviet. Do you?

No.

I support the dispersal of the Constituent Assembly. Do you?

No.

I support the formation and deployment of a Red Army against the counterrevolution. Do you?

No.

And his supplementary question is:

So answer the concrete questions on the Russian Revolution-- or the US Civil War, since you brought it up: A "tragic conflict" brought about be capitalism causing the death of 500,000 or 600,000 "proletarians" on both sides? Or a conflict requiring the abolition of slavery, and producing a valiant, if constrained, attempt to establish racial equality in the former slaveholding states, and worthy of the support of the IMWA?

My answer to this is:

The US Civil War was indeed a war, like the war of the USSR government against the people of Russia, that contained elements of tragedy and the drivers of progress that were required at the time for the further development of capitalism. This does not mean I do not hate slavery more than waged-labor, for how can I not? But Black people in the US are still laughing at the gripes of whites who complain about the history of wage-slavery they and their ancestors have had to endure down the years. The term wage slavery supersedes mere ‘slavery’ as the great white focal point of Marxist ideology.

I would also ask here. Does your support for what you term as “a conflict requiring the abolition of slavery” (the US Civil War) mean that you support the conflict that required the abolition of fascism during the period 1939 to 1945 in Europe?

But you may have gone now, S. Artesian, and our fireside chats may be over.

In which case my challenge to others here on Libcom is to also answer the questions above. Perhaps only the first three though, as they are more straightforward. They do indeed force one to choose a side. But that is just the first step.

And for the context I set my answers in, see the forum topic: “Can we ever escape Leninism?”