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On 2/8/15 5:28 PM, James Creegan via Marxism wrote:
True to form, you are once again evading the question with one of your
indiscriminate, red-herring denunciations of Platonism, sectarianism etc,
and guilt by association (e.g. that I belonged to the Spartacist League 30m
years ago) Once again, the question is whether you agree with Varoufakis's
assertions that attempting to go beyond capitalism is impossible, and the
only course for Greece is to help stabilize capitalism and the EU by means
of cross-class alliances and superior policy recommendations to the
bourgeoisie?
Of course it is impossible for Greece to "go beyond capitalism". Haven't
you read Karl Marx, V.I. Lenin, or Leon Trotsky? They didn't believe
that socialism could be built in a single country. Even after 1917, the
Bolsheviks only considered Russia to be a beachhead even if Lenin began
to oscillate between that view and the view that would be more openly
defended by Stalin. Here is Lenin's latest thinking:
"It is not easy for us, however, to keep going until the socialist
revolution is victorious in more developed countries merely with the aid
of this confidence, because economic necessity, especially under NEP,
keeps the productivity of labour of the small and very small peasants at
an extremely low level. Moreover, the international situation, too,
threw Russia back and, by and large, reduced the labour productivity of
the people to a level considerably below pre-war. The West-European
capitalist powers, partly deliberately and partly unconsciously, did
everything they could to throw us back, to utilise the elements of the
Civil War in Russia in order to spread as much ruin in the country as
possible."
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1923/mar/02.htm
Russia was a country with enormous resources and an immense
battle-tested military but there is little doubt that unless victorious
revolutions took place in a country like Germany, all would be lost. In
fact, that is why Lenin and Trotsky made such bad mistakes in Germany.
They were taking shortcuts that would backfire. That, of course, is a
matter for another time.
My own approach to the situation is most closely approximated by
the article by Stavas-Michel at the following address:
(although I know nothing of the work of his political group apart from what
he says in the article).
http://forum.permanent-revolution.org/
"It has some features of a Kerensky type of government in a transitional
period towards the decisive class confrontation in the struggle for power."
Verbal Bolshevism. Five cents per word.
BTW: On what grounds to you characterize the Communist Party of Great
Britain as a sect?
Any group in 2015 that festoons its website with hammers and sickles is
a sect.
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