On Sun, Nov 9, 2025 at 10:46 AM, Tom Walker quoted Charles Andrews: > > The explanation for this turn of history in the first two socialist > countries must lie in the earlier years of socialism. This explanation > remains to be done.
Just wondering, Charles, how familiar you are with the "new communist movement" of the 1960s-1980s and specifically the expulsion of Martin Nicolaus from the October League. There are immense archives at marxist.org on the exponential mitosis of anti-revisionist lines among a multitude of sects that arose from the the fractioning of sects during the period. How would you situate your analysis relative to that multitude? I have to confess that I was an observer of this activity during the 1970s and more recently became interested in the Nicolaus saga. Nicolaus, as you may know, translated the Grundrisse into English. He also wrote some articles in the 1960s about "the unknown Marx" that sparked interest in the English-speaking world in the Grundrisse. He was awarded the first Deutscher Memorial Prize for those early essays. Martin Nicolaus did graduate studies at my alma mater, Simon Fraser University, and I have good friends who studied with him and were deeply influenced by him. In the late 1960s, the Students for a Democratic society fractured into Weathermen, Marxist-Leninists, "flower children", etc. and Martin eventually drifted into a group called the October League from which he was expelled in 1975 as a "revisionist." You can read all about it on marxists.org. My superficial summary of the expulsion is that it was presumably about competing analyses of the "restoration of capital in the Soviet Union" but it was actually a version of Sayre's Law, "Academic politics is the most vicious and bitter form of politics, because the stakes are so low." The disputes among the various anti-revisionist factions were academic. Please forgive me if I quote, with tongue in cheek, from Martin's reply to his expulsion, "Countless experiences in the history of the communist movement have shown that it is only in course of Struggle against the incorrect line that the correct, Marxist-Leninist line emerges and moves forward." To me, "struggle against the incorrect line" is a quest for the holy grail. The incorrect line is a whack-a-mole. But it is one with a long history: > > If we take the history of our Party from the moment of its inception in > 1903 in the form of the Bolshevik group, and follow its successive stages > down to our day, we can say without exaggeration that the history of our > Party has been the history of a struggle of contradictions within the > Party, the history of the overcoming of these contradictions and of the > gradual strengthening of our Party on the basis of overcoming them. > I sure Charles can identify the author of that statement ( https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1926/11/22.htm ). Over the course of 99 years, the struggle against the incorrect line went through a subtle transformation. In the beginning the struggle was about building socialism in the Soviet Republic "as a torch of international socialism and as an example to all the labouring masses." quoting Lenin. In the 1970s, it was about the correct line on the restoration of capitalism in the Soviet Union. Comrades, we have come far in the last half-century, now the struggle is about the correct line on the restoration of capitalism in the former Soviet Union and China! -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#39189): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/39189 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/116179785/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/13617172/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
