Harry's Place

Thanks for reminding me of Kolakowsky, and the letter. You are right it’s brilliant, and useable against every form of totalitary thinking.

Kowlakowski did not attack communism. He didn’t understand communism nor did he undertsand what sort of society Soviet Russia was.

The Bolsheviks established state capitalism under a one party dictatorship. Communism isn’t just the abolition of private proerty in the means of production, it is also the abolition of buying and selling, the abolition of commodity production on the basis of wage labour.

But let’s see what Lenin thought:

Lenin – To the Workers Who Support the Struggle Against the War and Against the Socialists Who Have Sided With Their Governments

Written at the close of December (old style) 1916.

“The truth, of which only a few were theoretically convinced at the beginning of the war, is now becoming palpably evident to an increasing number of class-conscious workers, namely, that a serious struggle against the war, a struggle to abolish war and establish lasting peace, is out of the question unless there is a mass revolutionary struggle led by the proletariat against the government in every country, unless bourgeois rule is overthrown, unless a socialist revolution is brought about.

And the war itself, which is imposing an unprecedented strain upon the peoples, is bringing mankind to this, the only way out of the impasse, is compelling it to take giant strides towards state capitalism, and is demonstrating in a practical manner how planned social economy can and should be conducted, not in the interests of the capitalists, but by expropriating them, under the leadership of the revolutionary proletariat, in the interests of the masses who are now perishing from starvation and the other calamities caused by the war.”

http://trotsky.org/archive/lenin/works/1916/dec/30.htm

and in 1918:

“State capitalism would be a step forward as compared with the present state of affairs in our Soviet Republic. If in approximately six months’ time state capitalism became established in our Republic, this would be a great success and a sure guarantee that within a year socialism will have gained a permanently firm hold and will have become invincible in this country.”

It’s wonderful that one can always rely on a blithely unselfconscious ideological clone like cpgb gray to pop up and present a near-perfect parody of exactly the processes of regurgitated Socialistspeak that Kolakowski takes apart.

Very sad to hear of Kolakowski’s death. His answer to EP Thompson is an absolute classic, and these them days there’s a convenient one-volume version of the invaluable Main Currents Of Marxism available for purchase. Every household etc.

“He didn’t understand communism nor did he undertsand what sort of society Soviet Russia was.”

I suggest to spgb gray that he actually reads the aforementioned volume first, then comment on this topic.

Communism is over, spgb, and it ain’t never coming back.

It never fails to amuse me, as a liberal lefty (this adds particular spice), when people step up to defend communism (SPGB am looking at you in this instance) with the usual ‘no, no, the (insert critics name) doesn’t understand’ or the classic ‘ah, well you see the (insert country name) didn’t actually implement communism (or what ever stripe of marxist leninist thought under discussion) correctly’……….

See, the thing is, everytime a communist or socialist (the latter in the Eastern European/ Central/South American sense) system has been implemented there is always in short order a police state or worse. Every single time in a country of any meaningful size. A pretty damning picture I think most people would agree.

why not actually read what Lenin was saying, eh?

State capitalism for Russia in 1916, State Capitalism for Russia in 1918. All under the dictatorship of the Leninist Vanguard.

If you equate such a dictatorial state capitalist system with socialism/communism then you are either a bloody fool, dishonest or both.

Kolakowski stands in a rich tradition of the anti-totalitarian Left: men like George Orwell, Albert Camus, Adam Michnik, Marceau Pivert, Sidney Hook, Ignazio Silone, Arthur Koestler, Norberto Bobbio and others.

And they are the most deluded of all. There is no “anti-totalitarian” socialism. Every single socialist experiment without exception, from Robert Owen’s in New Harmony, Indiana onwards, has resulted in the rapid emergence of a despotic leadership which insists on micromanaging the lives of a commune members. The only reason that the word “totalitarian” was coined in the 20th and not the 19th century is that it was possible for members to leave the social experiment when it was clear to all that it had failed. The participants forced into taking part in the 20th century experiments had no such escape route.

Yeah, social democracy in Western Europe has lead to totalitarianism. Let’s see, Denmark for example is rated by #1 in the world for free specch and free press by Reporters without Borders.

USA #22

UK #28

http://arabia.reporters-sans-frontieres.org/article.php3?id_article=11715

He didn’t understand communism nor did he undertsand what sort of society Soviet Russia was.

A curious oversight given the number of books he wrote and the 23 years he spent living in a society ruled by Soviet Russia. Still, that understanding has been vouchsafed to you and not to those who experienced it.

Or perhaps your view is a neat illustration of what Kolakowski was saying.

it is also the abolition of buying and selling, the abolition of commodity production on the basis of wage labour.

But communism achieved all of this. As goods sold by the state were often unobtainable, exchange had to be made through barter. Many factories in many socialist countries (though I am thinking of Ramiz Sadiku in Peja in particular) continued production though they ceased to pay their workers, the workers gaining their living from working the land and by seeking work outside the country.

So what if he did write books? He was politically backward when compared to some Poles – e.g.

The class situation in Poland has not been better analysed from within the country than by Jacek Kuron (now a Solidarity MP, whose name was even one of the three proposed by Walesa to General Jaruzelski for the post of Prime Minister) and Karol Modzelewski in the Open Letter to the Party they wrote in 1968 (earning themselves a three-year jail sentence):

“In our system, the Party elite is, at one and the same time, also the power elite; all decisions relating to state power are made by it and, in any case, at the top of the Party and state hierarchies there exists, as a rule, a fusion of responsible posts. By exercising state power, the Party elite has at its disposal all the nationalized means of production; it decides on the extent of accumulation and consumption, on the direction of investment, on the share of various social groups in consumption and in the national income; in other words, it decides on the distribution and utilization of the entire social product . . . The worker is thus exploited, because he is deprived of the ownership of the means of production; in order to live, he must sell his labour. From the moment he performs that act, which to him is indispensable, i.e., when he sells his ability to do a given job in a given time, his labour and its product no longer belong to him but to those who have bought his labour, the owners of the means of production, the exploiters. To whom does the worker in our country sell his labour? To those who have at their disposal the means of production, in other words, to the central political bureaucracy.”

The class Kuron and Modzelewski call here the “central political bureaucracy” is the same as what everyone in Poland now calls the nomenklatura. It was a class that was imposed on Poland by the Russian army after the last world war as a mirror-image of the Russian ruling class. Through its party, the Communist Party, it has ruthlessly governed Poland for the past forty years, jailing opponents and brutally suppressing strikes by discontented workers.
(from Socialist Standard, October 1989)

spgb gray – “Kowlakowski did not attack communism. He didn’t understand communism nor did he undertsand what sort of society Soviet Russia was.”

Listen you silly little child, you can define “Communism” as you please and argue that Kolakowski did not understand your little fantasy version because he never heard of it, but one f**king thing you cannot say, you little turd, is that he did not understand what sort of society the Soviet Union was. He lived it you little sh!t. For decades. Whereas you have done what? Warmed a seat in the Students’ Common Room? Arse.

“The Bolsheviks established state capitalism under a one party dictatorship. Communism isn’t just the abolition of private proerty in the means of production, it is also the abolition of buying and selling, the abolition of commodity production on the basis of wage labour.”

Sure. Which is just what the USSR did. For a while. Even when they brought money back, it bore to resemblance to real buying and selling because all prices were set by the State.

And if you read a word that Kolakowski had to say, even his nice rebuttal of E. P., Thompson you would have noticed him pointing out the inherent contradiction between running a socialist economy and democracy. The USSR is what you logically get when you abolish buying and selling.

What a little tantrum “So Much for Subtlety”.

The Soviet Union did not abolish buying and selling. If you are thinking of “War Communism”, that was a very brief, chaotic, period during the post-WWI and the Civil War years. It was marked by hyperinflation, where many traded by barter because the rouble currency was basically worthless. (For sure, there was the odd Bolshevik, like Preobrazhinsky, who thought this was a move towards the abolition of money.)

The economic policy of the Bolsheviks, shortly after, was NEP. That was described in an American University textbook on economic history (from the 1920s) as “state capitalism”. Lenin also called it a policy of state capitalism.

The argument you present is that of the Stalinists and the Trotskyists; they actually agree on this point about the non-capitalist nature of the Soviet economy. The real difference is the Trotskyists viewed the Stalinists as a bureaucracy that had smashed workers’ power (the degenerate workers’ state thesis), but where the economy was nevertheless socialist in character. The Stalinists said they had established “socialism in one country” ; in fact, notice how they themselves never called the USSR “communist”, as – in their ideology – “socialism” was building the foundation for “communism”. So even on their arguments, you and Kolakowski are nothing but a couple of soft jessies for attacking a “Soviet Communism” that didn’t exist!

The revolution, proper, happened in Spring 1917 and it would have been fascinating to see how that would have developed had it not been hijacked by the authoritarian and anti-socialist Bolsheviks. As it is, the Bolsheviks grabbed power and instituted the dictatorship of the Party on the basis of a state capitalist economy.

The USSR did see the end of individuals holding legal proerty rights to the means of production as well as to the state planning production and fixing prices. That did not mean an end to capitalism, though. Commodity production on the basis of wage labour increased and the “bureaucracy” became a new ruling, capitalist class (the nomenklatura).It was because the centrally planned state capitalist system was so inefficient that Gorbachov initiated his reforms.

Lenin started the modern political method of “give us food aid or we will starve our own people.” This was soon enthusiastically taken up by the LN. UN. and a whole plethora of dictators since!

I think those arguing with SPGBgray should note that Kolakowski’s work is called “main currents of Marxism” and not “small sidelined excuses from a tiny sect based in South London.”

Thompson was not a Eurcommunist by any means. He was part of the First New Left and stayed with it. Althusser was not a Stalinist either: Althusser had attacked ‘humanism’ as a theoretical approach – being adopted by the CPSU at the time. His real target was Guadrey – then PCF ideologue in chief, now an anti-Semite Islamicist (and prosecuted by the courts for denial of the Shoah). Althusser always backed humanism as a moral principle. And he ended by attacking the PCF for its ‘democratic centralism’ notably in, Ce-que ne plus durer dans le Parti Communiste.

Kowlakowski’s three volume tomes on Marxism are riddled with contentious judgements – though beautfully written and an excellent starting point. His analysis of Kautsky for example neglects to underline how much Kautsky attacked Leninism. Or to get way from conventional banalities about his ‘positivism’ evolutionism etc. Few seems to have read Kautsky today and he could get away with this. The anti-totalitarian Marxist left began there, on the far left with such figures as Victor Serge, and rather less than marginal figures in France who it’d be tedious to list.

Nor is he more than superficial about the New Left. Frankly writing a work with such ambitions is bound to get many judgements wrong. I suggest a better starting point on the nature of Socialism and Marxism in politics (rather than this grandly over-blown attempt to link high theory, intense world-conflicts, with day-to-day political reality) are the volumes published some time ago under G.D.H.Cole’s name. Further back Beer’s History of British socialism. Or indeed, much more recently, A Hundred Years of Socialism by Donald Sasson.

Grand efforts to synthesise very abstract political philosophy with political practice, written by political tyros, are naturally a major fault of, say the Second New Left. You appear to be following in their footsteps – from the other side.

For the evolution of Althusser’s ‘humanist’ target, Roger Garaudy,

See:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roger_Garaudy

Yeah, yeah Makhno. Don’t talk so bloody daft. Had he written about Leninism, then we might agree. But how typical really to try to connect Lenin’s political thinking (and that of the Bolsheviks) to the social, political and economic milieu of Western Europe. Bolshevism was very much a product of the Russian anti-Czarist, populist milieu.

Lenin wasn’t the super-Marxist you try to paint him out to be given he rejected such central ideas as the working class emancipating itself (he developed a Vanguard Theory of revolution) and distorted others (such as equating state capitalism with socialism and that this was the lower phase of communism to which Marx was referring).

But as was once put:

Every opinion based on scientific criticism I welcome. As to prejudices of so-called public opinion, to which I have never made concessions, now as aforetime the maxim of the great Florentine is mine: “Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti.”

Lenin wasn’t the super-Marxist you try to paint him out to be

Well as I pointed out compared to yourself and your thirty odd friends Lenin was an absolute historical non-person.

The Socialist Party of Great Britain has never been alone in pointing out the authoritarian, anti-marxist, nature of Leninism. It was, though, pretty much alone in pointing out the dictatorial state capitalist economy established under Lenin. To its credit, the SPGB was exposing the Stalinist myths, despite threats of CPGB violence in the 30s and 40s.

But you have no intellectual honesty or integrity, do you Makhno? You would rather write us out of history than deal with actual facts and ideas that obliterate the rubbish Kolakowski and associated idiots like you hold dear,

I did not write you out of history.

You failed to write yourselves into it.

I did not write you out of history.

You failed to write yourselves into it.

pwned!!

Member of tiny, obscure political sect that has achieved precisely nothing in something like a century of existence: “You would rather write us out of history…..”

If there’s a more laughable example of pompous self-delusion displayed on HP this year I’ll be surprised. Even Shayler looks normal compared to this guy.

Dave is a typical example of the default idiocy of the Left and Right, who have no case and know it. So all they can do is make childish remarks….

More Lenin, as the idiots obviously need a help or don’t want to read what is in Black and White for all to see:

2. State Capitalism in the Proletarian State and the Trade Unions

The proletarian state may, without changing its own nature, permit freedom of trade and the development of capitalism only within certain bounds, and only on the condition that the state regulates (supervises, controls, determines the forms and methods of, etc.) private trade and private capitalism. The success of such regulation will depend not only on the state authorities, but also, and to a larger extent, on the degree of maturity of the proletariat and of the masses of the working people generally, on their cultural level, etc. But even if this regulation is completely successful, the antagonism of class interests between labour and capital will certainly remain. Consequently, one of the main tasks that will henceforth confront the trade unions is to protect in every way the class interests of the proletariat in its struggle against capital. This task should be openly put in the forefront, and the machinery of the trade unions must be reorganised, modified or supplemented accordingly; strike funds, and so on should be formed, or rather, built up.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1921/dec/30b.htm

I am terribly sorry if this points out the fact that Lenin and the Bolsheviks had a policy of state capitalism for Russia.

I’d plead for a preservation order for spgb gray so we can go on enjoying the way he keeps on getting more and more unintentionally self-parodic, but there’s clearly no need for one. I thought about describing him and his like as being as enjoyable as getting Japanese knotweed on the garden, but then Japanese knotweed spreads like wildfire, and the spread of such obscure cults as the SPGB is….. Never mind, spgbgray, keep swallowing the Lenin.

But then we get the much more sophisticated Andrew Coates who attempts to depict Kolakowski as a superficial political tyro. Evidence offered=swallow these lengthy tomes by a sequence of true believers. If he’s an example of depth and political experience, I’ll stick with Kolakowski.

‘Kowlakowski (sic) did not attack communism. He didn’t understand communism nor did he undertsand what sort of society Soviet Russia was.’

Kolakowski experienced the worst of Stalinism in Poland (prior to Bierut’s death and the ‘Polish October’ of 1956) in which the PZPR did it’s best to ape its Soviet counterpart (although it had the common sense not to impose collectivisation). He experienced the illusory period of ‘liberal Communism’ under Gomulka, and left in 1968 – the year the regime decided to respond to popular demands for reform by inciting a state sponsored campaign of anti-Semitism. So I think he understood full well what Communism was all about. But perhaps you’d like to tell me what first-hand experience you’ve had of living under a Communist system, Mr Gray?

Oh, and if you are going to criticise someone’s arguments, at least do them the courtesy of trying to spell their name right.

Highly amusing all round.