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Here we go again... Assumptions, ahistorical representation of problems of "underdevelopment," and the following completely anti-materialist, anti-class basis for "analysis": "Professor Losurdo uses here comparative method: how did liberal and “democratic” countries behave in their history, facing an external threat and facing the risk of the destruction of their national community and the State? This is the problem of total war in 20th century. And exactly in this problem Losurdo reveals the roots of “total mobilization”, a political phenomenon that in all countries involved in the crisis of the *Jus publicum europaeum* brings to a suspension of *habeas corpus*, to laws punishment of “collective responsibilities”, to executions by martial law, mass deportations, mass imprisonments and working fields, to a strong regimentation of society, to the terror against political enemies and people suspected for conspiracies and accused of being “objective enemies”..... Against today’s historiographical mainstream, Losurdo asserts that on this political background Stalin has been an outstanding leader with his clearness of thought and temperance. Again and again he tried to bring some “normality” into political and social life of his country. “During the three decades of Soviet Russian history led by Stalin, annotates Losurdo, “the most important aspect has not been the passing from party dictatorship to autocracy but the recurrent Stalin’s attempts to bring his country out of the state of exception to a relative normality”. However, these attempts failed. But they compel all fair historians to admit that Soviet history and Stalinism cannot be understood through the concept of “totalitarianism”. This history tells us instead of a gradual and contradictory establishment of a development of dictatorship”, by means of which Stalin tried to mobilize and “rehabilitate” the energies of his country in order to overcome a centuries-old Russian underdevelopment”. In other words, he tried to foster an accelerated development and to concentrate in few years the same course untwined in developed countries during many centuries." Comparative method to the democratic countries? That's a real Marxist, class, and honest analysis, no? And exactly what is "bringing normality into political and social life"? What is the content, the substance of such normality? All this faux-erudition says is that all the problems were due to Russia's lack of development, its isolation, and need to defend exactly that isolation-- that socialism is one country. There is nothing new, different in this-- it's the same old same old ideological horse galloping around the ring of the same circus under the same tent. Look, this "honest assessment" of Stalin is based on opposition to a phony "libertarianism"-- the bourgeois attack on Stalinism as totalitarian, and then conflating the phony libertarianism with actual Marxist critique to discredit such Marxists critiques, to avoid the material analysis of the relations of classes, internally and internationally, and what the "attempt to bring....a relative normality" meant concretely to those classes and their struggles. Marxist analysis does not begin nor end with a critique of "totalitarianism." It's not at all surprising that those who support, rationalize, the CPUSA's pseudo-Marxist support of "liberal" [in the US political menaing of the word], progressive, bourgeois democrats cannot distinguish between those liberal critiques and actual Marxist analysis when it comes to something they, the supporters, hold dear. ----- Original Message ----- From: "Dogan Gocmen" <dgn.g...@googlemail.com> ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
