Owen Jones wrote: Mac, Comrade, you seem to miss the point. It was the nature of the Soviet Union - i.e. a deeply degenerate and corrupt workers' state ruled by a privileged caste of bureaucrats - that made the restoration of capitalism inevitable unless the bureaucratic rot was cut out with the knife of a workers' political revolution. Of course it was not "capitalist", but rather it was a society stuck in transition between capitalism and socialism - sharing features of each - that could have gone either way. However, the regimes of Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler were essentially identical, and the distinctions we draw between Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany are between the property relations of both, that made the former a workers' state and the latter a capitalist state (ruled by a fascist bureaucracy which served as a hireling of the bourgeoisie, but had usurped political power from them). ____________________________ "Essentially identical"? How deceived, then, were those, including those in Auschwitz and other essentially identical places in Europe, who eagerly listened to the approaching roar of Soviet artillery! What a pity they did not have the benefit of theis enlightening instruction from Mr. Owens' predecessors, who at that time were only cleaning their typewriters in the US Army propaganda units. _____________________ Of course, Trotsky's predictions were not entirely accurate despite perhaps the claims of some of his more devout followers. He believed that the Second World War would trigger the fall of the Soviet bureaucracy. Quite to the contrary, this caste emerged strengthened with domination of half of the European continent. However, the bureaucracy did undertake capitalist restoration in order to form the new bourgeoisie - a conversion from a "social" caste to a property-owning class - though fifty or so years after he thought this possibility would be confronted. And indeed the restoration of capitalism did not plunge the former bureaucratically deformed workers' states into civil war with the working classes on the barricades defending the social conquests of their revolution, but either they were passive or indeed supportive of counterrevolution. But clearly this would not have happened were it not for the fact they were so tortured by the rule of the bureaucracy. One has to wonder what drove half the Polish working class to their knees at the feet of the Pope. ___________________________ "Tortured"? By khruschevs and brezhnevs? If so, why these workers and peasants did not overthrow this bureaucracy, indeed, the master-"torturer" Stalin, when they were all armed to the teeth during the war and for years after it? Could it be that they saw the "essential" diffrerence between Stalin's and Hitler's regimes, indeed, between Stalin's and capitalist regimes who "tortured" the Soviet people for the entire life of the Soviet Union? And when the Ober-Torturer Churchill arrived to Fulton did not he say something "essentially identical" to what Mr. Owen is saying today about the Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union? And did not a many of Mr. Owens political ancestors rallied, in their appropriately left disguise, to the battle cry of their imperialist masters, as Mr. Owen and his ilk are now rallying behind the imperialism "with human face." Anton Baumgarten http://www.left.ru Workers of All Coutries, Unite! _______________________________________________ Leninist-International mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international
