by Jacques Camatte

Publishing Bordiga's texts on Russia and writing an introduction to them was rather repugnant to us. The Russian revolution and its involution are indeed some of the greatest events of our century. Thanks to them, a horde of thinkers, writers, and politicians are not unemployed. Among them is the first gang of speculators which asserts that the USSR is communist, the social relations there having been transformed. However, over there men live like us, alienation persists. Transforming the social relations is therefore insufficient. One must change man. Starting from this discovery, each has 'functioned' enclosed in his specialism and set to work to produce his sociological, ecological, biological, psychological etc. solution. Another gang turns the revolution to its account by proving that capitalism can be humanised and adapted to men by reducing growth and proposing an ethic of abstinence to them, contenting them with intellectual and aesthetic productions, restraining their material and affective needs. It sets computers to work to announce the apocalypse if we do not follow the advice of the enlightened capitalist. Finally there is a superseding gang which declares that there is neither capitalism nor socialism in the USSR, but a kind of mixture of the two, a Russian cocktail ! Here again the different sciences are set in motion to place some new goods on the over-saturated market.

That is why throwing Bordiga into this activist whirlpool (and we also put ourselves there) provoked fear and repulsion. Nevertheless, running the risk of being carried along by this infamous mercantilism seems necessary because, on one hand, in every case, as Marx remarked "Can one escape dirt in ordinary bourgeois intercourse or trade ? Precisely there is its natural abode." (Marx to Freiligrath, 29.2.1860.), and, on the other hand, the myth of Russian communism began to be washed fundamentally from the minds of those who searched and struggled and corrupted them less and less after the movement of May 1968. Bordiga's texts could be useful because of this, for passing from myth to reality and helping in the understanding of the coming communist revolution.

After Lenin died, Stalin managed to take over the Soviet Union. He vilified Trotsky, Lenin's right hand man who also recognized the need for world revolution. Beginning ion 1929, Stalin tried to achieve "Socialism in One Contry" in the Soviet Union, an inherent contradiction. Trotsky was expelled from the Soviet Union in 1928, and was murdered by KGB agents in 1940.

Trotsky recognized that the Soviet Union would either move forewards to world revolution, or move backwards towards the reinstatement of Capitalism. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Trotsky was proved right.

Trotsky thought that the Soviet Union was a "deformed workers state". I tend to think that it was "state capitalism". The Soviet Union as a state operated in the same way as corporations under capitalism. Thus the soviet Union had to expand or die, the same way that capitalist corporations must expand or die. Stalin and his successors in the USSR exibited the same sycopathic behaviour exibited by major capitalist corporations.

[ 20 August 2005: Message edited by: Left Turn ]

quote:

---

Lenin knew that the Russian Revolution of October 1917 was only the first step in the establishment of socialism in Russia. He knew that the socialism could not be achieved in the Soviet Union as long as capitalism continued to dominate on a world level. To this end, Lenin worked with other communist parties in the communist international to try and achieve other socialist revolutions. Lenin died in 1924 having not reached his goal.

---

quote:

---

So, if Lenin had not died so young, if he had lived until 1955 for example, the result would have been different?

Or do you mean that Stalin misunderstood Lenin's instructions?

---

He is indefensible Fidel. Defending his actions as a way of "defeating fascism" is pure evil. He did terrible things that led to my family being forced out of the Ukraine or face starvation in the largest campaign of genocide known to man (holodomor claimed more lives than the Holocaust but lacked the industralization). The Katryn Forest is another lovely example of what old Uncle Joe did.

An estimated 50 to 80 million people were missing throughout Europe and Asia after WWII and the corporate-industrialist-Nazi war of annihilation against communism in Russia. No, Hitler was a more deliberate and efficient mass murderer over a shorter period of time. And Hitler was aided and abetted by western corporations and banking elite.

PB, anywhere from six to thirteen million children will starve to death around the free trading capitalist third world, this year and the next and the one after that. Which IMF leader or proponents of a murderous ideology can we lay blame on for this?. That's a holocaust every year, don't you think ?. Or is it politically expedient to focus only on specific periods in recent history and isolate Time Magazine's man of the year for 1943 and his decisions in historical vacuum ?.

A Dynasty of Mass Murderers

[ 21 August 2005: Message edited by: Fidel ]

That Hegel quote is interesting. I wish that Fidel(who should be taken with a spec of grain) would awknowledge that he is more on the Hegelian side of things then Marxist. Even though Marx had a terrible conception of the state, he did want anarchy, even though he had a bad way of getting there. One of the reasons he parted with Hegel, and was a left-hegelian to begin with was because of that type of view expressed in that quote. A quote which is indeed a good precurser to fascism.

And Fidel, red hering all you want the fact is a man and more importantly an idea that did not have the western support, and the industrial materials, still killed more people. More commies(the real kind) then Hitler could ever hope. The Ukranians at least had an idea who they were fighting initially before they were taken out by those who would be communists.

Stalin was such a monster to the Ukrainians that when the NAZIs conquered Ukraine the locals were elated. Then they realized that there would be no relief from tyranny. Even to today the pains of Stalinism echo around the country. I have friends who have visited the nation. Corruption is everywhere because old ex-Soviet overlords enforce ridiculous rules their own appaling way.

quote:

---

Originally posted by Papal Bull:
Fidel, estimates on Holodomor range from 8-13 million. Hitler shipped away 600'000-800'000 to camps or had them executed.

---

The following web ref says that many Jews alone were slaughtered by the Nazis during barbarossa. About two-thirds of Ukraine's Jewish population were pulled out of Ukraine and sent to Russia ... on orders from Josef Stalin in 1941. For every German killed in Ukraine, Hitler demanded that 20 Uke's be murdered. Hitler ordered scorched earth policy as the Red Army liberated Ukraine from the Nazi butchers. Millions starved to death and died of exposure as they wondered across a bleak and frozen Russia and Ukraine. As Churchill and Roosevelt drove for hours to Yalta, they passed by levelled towns, villages and burned-out tanks by the thousands.

quote:

---

Stalin was such a monster to the Ukrainians that when the NAZIs conquered Ukraine the locals were elated. Then they realized that there would be no relief from tyranny.

---

According to some accounts, the Nazis found willing collaborators in the Baltics and Eastern nations that would later be liberated by the Red Army.

A friend of my family's doesn't praise Stalin either. She has venom for Stalin. Her father was a doctor in Odessa, I think. He was sent to Siberia before the Nazi occupation. He lived and so did the rest of his family who left the Ukraine. Another woman fled Poland to Russia and some of her family went to the Russian camps and some volunteered for the Russian front with many more Jewish Partizanis at the time.

Two women, both with differing opinions on Stalin which I found interesting. But when I asked them about Hitler on separate occasions, both of them had the same response - They wept.

[ 22 August 2005: Message edited by: Fidel ]