On Wed, Dec 3, 2025 at 8:27 AM David Walters via groups.io <david.walters66= [email protected]> wrote:
> How is this relevant to anything we've been discussing?? > > For more of her writings on the Marxists Internet Archive go here: > https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/strong-anna-louise/index.htm > A legendary writer. Her late Son was a political theorist at UC, San Diego, Tracy Strong, who co-wrote a biography of her, Tracy B. Strong and Helene Keyssar (1983). *Right in Her Soul: The Life of Anna Louise Strong <https://annas-archive.org/search?q=Right+in+Her+Soul%3A+The+Life+of+Anna+Louise+Strong#:~:text=RIGHT%20IN%20HER%20SOUL%20The%20Life%20of%20Anna%20Louise%20Strong>*, New York: Random House. Anna was a Great-Aunt. Tracy Strong has a chapter entitled, "Lenin and the Calling of the Party," , in an award winning volume, "*Politics Without Vision: Thinking without a Banister in the Twentieth Century <https://annas-archive.org/md5/42a9c1074011d016770d6bb205a424ba>." From the preface, this reference to Max Weber, made me recall an article by the late Erik Olin Wright on Lenin and Max Weber on Bureaucracy. "* TO CONTROL OR TO SMASH BUREAUCRACY <https://www.jstor.org/stable/41035214>: WEBER AND LENIN ON POLITICS, THE STATE, AND BUREAUCRACY" Originally published in the Berkeley J. of Sociology, it was reprinted in, ,"Class, Crisis and the State <https://www.versobooks.com/products/1071-class-crisis-and-the-state>," published by Verso Books. A free d/l <https://annas-archive.org/search?q=erik+olin+wright+#:~:text=44%20%C2%B7%201-,Class%2C%20Crisis%20and%20the%20State,-Erik%20Olin%20Wright> via Anna's Archive. *"*Portions of earlier versions of material in chapters 3 and 5 appeared in “Entitlement and Legitimacy: Weber and Lenin on the Problems of Leadership,” in Constitutional Government and Democracy: Festschrift for Henry Ehrmann, ed. Fred Eidlin (New York: Westview, 1983). Would be interesting to compare the two texts. *Scrolling, a bit more, through my pdf copy of that chapter, on page 195, is this footnote, referencing a work by Anna Louise Strong . ~~~ *36. "There was a good deal of violent resistance to the attempt to bring something like the rule of law to feudal patriarchal tribes, especially when the cadres were women. The Five- Year Plan is much more extensive and complex than the collectivization of the kulaks. See Moshe Lewin, La paysannerie et le pouvoir soviétique, 1928– 1930 (Paris: Mouton, 1966); and Anna Louise Strong, Red Star in Samarkand (New York: Coward- McCann, 1929) (also cited by Lewin). See also Fitzpatrick, “Cultural Revolution and Class War.” On pages 215-216 a letter from Lincoln Steffens to Anna Louise Strong is quoted. Note the wrong spelling of Shactman, with a ,"c," after the capital,"S." -- Tracy Strong :"Even without succumbing, there are, however, human consequences to this. In 1934, the left - wing American journalist Anna Louise Strong was in Moscow, composing a book entitled I Change Worlds: The Remaking of an American, 94 the autobiography of her life up until then. She conceived of it as the ~~~ 92. Ibid., 519. 93. "Thus Lenin’s serious ambivalence about the Kronstadt Rebellion of 1921, on the one hand, dismissing it to a correspondent from the New York Herald Tribune (Collected Works, 36:538) and, on the other, returning to it three times (in response to criticism from Alexandra Kollontai and others) in the “Address to the Tenth Congress of the RCP(B),” in Collected Works, 32:165– 271. There is considerable debate as to the degree to which (if any) the Kronstadt sailors had contacts with or were encouraged by counterrevolutionary forces. See the material collected at www .marxists.org/history/ussr/events/kronstadt/index htm. 94. The book was reissued by Seal Press (Seattle) in 1980. The title is almost certainly taken from Gertrude Stein’s 1925 The Making of Americans. See, Strong and Keyssar, Right in Her Soul, chap. 8 ~~~ document that would get her admitted to the American Communist Party. In her early days in Moscow, she had been personally close to, and, perhaps, intimate with, Leon Trotsky, who had, in fact, written the preface to her first book on the Soviet Union. At first, her writing of the autobiography was all wrong. She wanted to talk about Trotsky and the others who had been so important to her in the 1920s but were now either exiled (as Trotsky was at that time in France) or under arrest, or about to become so. Her friend Mikhail Borodin patiently turned back preliminary drafts, explaining that Trotsky was not important because he could not be part of the world to come, the future world that her book and her person were to illuminate. Distressed, she sent a draft to her old friend Lincoln Steff ens, who, long ago in Seattle, had urged her to go “over into the future,” the future, famously, that “works”—the new Soviet Union. Steff ens replied as follows: You have a big story, you know. To make and cross a bridge from one age to another, from one whole new unified philosophy to another is something that was never done in any other transition in history. You see, I say doing—for the first time. Max Eastman can’t do it, not even personally. And you can’t quite. Your difficulties with Trotsky is [sic] the sign of your failure. That great man . . . matters to both you and Max [Schachtman]. Certainly you can see, can’t you, that under our old culture justice must be done to him and that, under the new Soviet culture, justice is for the people. Don’t answer that justice is for both. . . . In your case your concern is not with Trotsky. You get the sense of the mass moving along the “line” and that’s what you once did not have and what your readers over here do not have, and ought to get, from your story. Well, hang on to that glimpse, strengthen it, and make us see it. That we all have to stick together on that until it is established in our habits. Then we can, and shall diff er on points and details. It would be better for you if you would master the Trotsky thing; see what Borodin and the Party have to say, but if you can’t, make a separate chapter of the book of your experiences with that man. He was a hero to me once too, but when he put “right” before unity and broke out front to be right, I, from here, recognized that he was not of the New Day, but the old. He says to the world what is only for the Party. I have things I would like to say about the Party, but I can feel in my bones that I must not say them at this stage to the enemy. As against Labor or even the millions in Russia, Trotsky does not matter. Get back on the line, Anna Louise, and go back knowingly; and tell that. It’s one of the biggest questions we “Christians,” we capitalists, have to learn. The truth is from now on always dated; never absolute. Never eternal.95 Strong went back to Borodin. “You lucky person,” he told her, “to be able to move from one world to another, from the internal to the external. As for me, for a long time now, my inner life has consisted only of the dictates of the Central Committee.”96 Truths were, thus, correctly analyzed facts. Correctly analyzed facts were ones that enhanced the movement toward peace and the progress of socialism. Hence, truth must repose in the only vehicle that could lead in that direction, in, that is, the Party. The solution to the question of authoritative foundations is to structure oneself as a being entirely at one with the whole element that can count as moving toward the realization of truth in history. Were one to use a Kantian vocabulary, it would be as if one thought that the categories of understanding would over time lead to the thing- in-itself. Lenin, of all those considered I this book, retains not a banister—I have tried to show that he conceives of political action as being without one—but the promise of a banister. The year spent studying Hegel’s Logic was not without its effect, I suspect. Borodin, in the account offered above, is able to accept and even take pleasure in the fact that his “inner life . . . consist[s] only of the dictates of the Central Committee” because he explicitly thinks, not only that the future of mankind rests on what happens in the Soviet Union, but also that eventually history will unequivocally ground a society built on social justice. In immediate and practical terms, Lenin is faced, like the others I have discussed in this book, with the problem of giving an understanding of the world without being able to base that understanding on any kind of absolute. On s’engage et puis on voit, said Napoléon of military campaigns. Here, that understanding is extended to the world as a whole. The consequences of an act are never assured—the future is never given. For Lenin, the worst approach is to hold to a position as if it were finally true. If truth is historical, then in pursuit of a goal that will be beyond history one can only change one’s tactics as conditions require—there is no moral imperative to hold on to them at any moment." ~~~ 95. Strong and Keyssar, Right in Her Soul, 159– 60. Max Schachtman (1904– 72) was an important early member of the American Communist Party who, in 1928, became a supporter of Trotsky’s and was expelled from the American Party. 96. Anna Louise Strong to Lincoln Steff ens, October 1934, accession 1309-001, Anna Louise Strong Papers, Suzzallo Library, University of Washington. _._,_._,_ > , a letter ftom Lincoln ,_ > > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#39625): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/39625 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/116549413/21656 -=-=- 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]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
