Last Friday @strike-another-match @birdmenmarxist and I (and another comrade) finished Losurdoās essay Flight From History? and also started Anna Louise Strongās This Soviet World.
The section we finished of Losurdoās was actully just the last one. But we ended up discussing it a fair amount as we went through it.
So the final section is called Marxism or anarchism? Think through Communist theory and practice in a fundamentally new way
Iām gonna post the opening paragraph here because I think it speaks for itself. Itās quite good:
The historical events introduced by the October Revolution have led to certain conclusions for many leftists that might serve as negative models. Very often the degeneration and the collapse of the USSR and the āsocialist campā are explained by tracing everything back to Stalin. This attitude is translatable into the sigh: Oh, if only Lenin had lived longer! What a terrible misfortune that his place was not taken by Trotsky or Bukharin. Too bad that the Bolshevik leadership did not understand how to follow the path Marx would have wanted ā the path of the āauthenticā Marx ā as understood by one or another of the inflexible judges over the history of āreal, existing socialism.ā And if perchance one of them (like Rossana Rossanda) had held power instead of Stalin, we would not have had the return of the Czarist flag and the Duma to Moscow. Not at all, we would have the victory of the soviet system and the red flag over New York. If that analysis were correct, we would not only have to go back to Marx, but at least as far as Plato and his idealism.
It really is hard to imagine a more radical liquidation of historical materialism. The objective circumstances are of no interest at all: the condition of Russia and its historical background; the class struggles domestically and internationally; power relationships in the areas of economics, politics, and the military, etc. Everything was the result of the crudeness, the brutality, the will to power, the paranoia ā in any case, the character of a single personality. Ironically, it is just this type of explanation that reproduces the fundamental errors of Stalinism. These are reproduced even to a greater degree, because the objectively existing contradictions are forgotten and a weak and prejudicial recourse is made to the concept of ābetrayal.ā Mind you, not to a specific act, but rather to almost seventy years of history regarded as one long uninterrupted ābetrayalā of Communist ideals. All of this committed by Stalin, who is thus to be delivered over to the execution squad of the historians, or better yet, to the journalists and ideologues.
One of my comrades adored this one phrase in the following paragraph: āAnd here once again we see an overarching idealism; deception and betrayal by swashbucklers is supposed to explain all of world history.ā
And here we get to a big idea. The waning enthusiasm some years after a revolution and the beauty of those early ears is gone:
It is not reasonable to compare the inspiration and encouragement of the initial stages of the battle against the old regime needing to be toppled with the later more prosaic and more difficult phases. Here a new government must be built in spite of all the difficulties and in spite of contradictions of every sort, including those that derive from having too little experience. It would be like condemning a marriage or partnership (including the successful ones) in the name of the unique and irreplaceable moments experienced when one first fell in love. It appears that in the developmental stages of a revolution the original enthusiasm of the participants can suspend for a time the mundane division of labor and everyday business. Still these will eventually again demand our attention.
We all really liked the simile he used in regards to the long-time partnership.
In this next section, where Losurdo critiques the concept of the withering away of the state, it first starts out by restating his repeated point about āthe objectively contradictory character of consciousness and the knowledge processā.
In order to get beyond the idealist types of pseudo-explanations, it is necessary to replace the concept of betrayal (that really plays a minor role) with that of learning. The victory of a revolution can only be considered secure when the class that has carried it out succeeds in giving its sovereignty a durable political form. All of this takes place in the middle of a long and complex learning process marked by conflict and contradiction, experiment and error.
And hereās the meat and potato:
Whether we look at it from the point of view of its historical or psychological origins, the theory of the withering away of the state flows into an eschatological vision of a society without conflict that consequently needs no norms of legality to regulate or limit conflicts. The abstract utopian quality of this watchword is something of which Marx and Engels at definite times seem explicitly conscious. For example, they obviously oscillate between speaking of the withering away or demise of the state in general, yet on the other hand refer specifically to the āstate in its contemporary political senseā and āpolitical force in its own peculiar sense.ā Furthermore, the state, as they quite appropriately analyze it, is not only an instrument of class domination, but also a form of the āreciprocal rightsā and āmutual securityā that exist between individuals and the class in power. It is not at all clear why one would find ārightsā and āsecurityā superfluous for the individual members of a solidified society after the disappearance of classes and class struggle.
In any case, waiting for the withering away of all conflict and the demise of the state, and political force generally, makes it impossible to solve the problem of how to transform the government that emerges from socialist revolution. This expectation privileges the continuing existence of inflexible āoverturners,ā whose perspective is incapable of giving concreteness or stability to the emancipation of the subaltern classes. After the October Revolution, there were outstanding revolutionary socialists who proclaimed that āthe idea of a constitution is a bourgeois idea.ā With this as oneās basis, it would not only be easy to justify terroristic measures during emergencies, but also extremely difficult or impossible to make a transition to constitutional normalcy, especially since this is branded as bourgeois from the start. In this manner, exceptional circumstances privilege utopianism, and utopianism makes exceptional circumstances more extreme.
One of my comrades also commented that this reminded them of anti-civ talking points that seem unable to reconcile the need for modern production but also demand an immediate abolition of the state entirely.
Hereās the penultimate section posted all in one go. Itās not too long so:
In general, one can say of Marx and Engels that politics, after playing a decisive role in the conquest of power, apparently disappears along with the state and the use of political force. This is all the more true when (in addition to the disappearance of classes, the state, and political power) the division of labor, nations, and religions, in short all possible sites of conflict, are thought to have disappeared.
This messianic vision ultimately leads to anarchism, and has also played a deleterious role in regard to the economy. A socialist society is quite unthinkable apart from a more or less extensive public sector (or one regulated by government) within the productive apparatus as well as within the service industries, the functioning of the public sector being decisive. The solution to this problem can be left to the anarchist myth of the emergence of the ānew type of person,ā who, it is alleged, will spontaneously identify with the collective without the appearance of any sort of conflict or contradiction between private and public, individual and individual, social group and social group. This is obviously a secular version of the religious notion of āgrace,ā which would make the law unnecessary. Or the solution can be sought in a system of rules and incentives (both material and moral), and of controls that are intended to secure the transparency, efficiency, and productivity of this sector. Certainly all of this is made more difficult, if not impossible, by an (anarchistic) phenomenology of power that situates domination and oppression exclusively in the state, the centralized power, and the general social rules. In this manner, the dialectic of the capitalist society as Marx described it is quite reversed. In āreal, existing socialism,ā anarchism led to terror as compared to a civil society. This terror became all the more unbearable as exceptional circumstances faded, and the philosophy of history that promised the withering away of the state, of national identities, of the market, etc., increasingly lacked credibility.
It reminds me of the criticisms Kim Jong Il made before about Eastern Bloc Socialist countries taking a mechanical approach to consciousness and economic construction. They were unable to maintain revolutionary zeal in the later generations after distance from the conditions of the pre-revolutionary societies had been made.
In their polemic against my position with regard to the withering away of the state, it appears to me that comrades Luigi Cortesi and Walter Peruzzi do not present arguments that can make plausible the idea of a society without conflict or the need for legal safeguards. Instead they give vent to their disappointment that no properly inspired vision of a postcapitalist society leaps forth from my pages. Many a comrade might even go further, and question whether it is worth the trouble of fighting for a future society that does not bring with it the elimination of all conflict and contradiction. This is a little bit like the religious notion that life on earth does not really make any sense without the prospect of an afterlife beyond.
There are a lot of criticisms Losurdo makes in this essay using religion as a basis for his smilies and metaphors. It works quite well in my opinion.
The wisdom of Gramsci would be a fine counterweight to these basically anarchistic and religious tendencies. He accomplished an enormous historical task as the first to have deliberated about an effective and radical project of liberation that never viewed itself as the end of history. It is really a matter of drawing a clear line of demarcation between Marxism and anarchism, and thereby taking leave once and for all from abstract utopianism, while at the same time demonstrating the historical reasons why it arises. We can also make good use here of a piece of advice from Engels, who observed the following, while comparing the revolutions in England and France: āIn order to secure even those conquests of the bourgeoisie that were ripe for gathering at the time, the revolution had to be carried considerably further. ā¦ This seems, in fact, to be one of the laws of evolution of bourgeois society.ā [45] There is no reason not to apply the materialistic method developed by Marx and Engels to the real historical movements and revolutions they both inspired.
And thatās my notes on Flight From History? !
The study group will be covering This Soviet World next week. :0
We read the intro but it was mostly setting the stage for the book.
Annaās stuff is so fun to read so Iām excited.
