by Gary Tedman
The organized and deliberate horror of the system that
produced Auschwitz stands as a kind of philosophical toll-booth at which we
cannot seriously pay in the same old currency anymore, and once we have passed through
it everything must be in a new currency, a different one. Let me put this even
stronger: fascists made Auschwitz and the other death camps, and Communists
opposed it, all those who are not with the Communists, are with the Fascists,
it is not possible to take any other position: that system forbids this, completely and utterly.
To be sure, the WWII and post
WWII situation was and is complex, and the lines to be drawn are not easy, but I
maintain these are the real lines.
Notwithstanding,
many people, groups, have passed through this toll-booth without changing their
currency and are, as it were, living the illusion that things remain the same
as before.
The
rationalization for this is invariably 'Stalinism' and the associated 'Gulag'.
The image of an equal and opposite horror to Hitlerism is there and keeps the
old currency going in this new territory, it is there to rewrite history,
in the end it is there, no matter its reality, its reasons for being, or not,
for the moment, to tell us that the Auschwitz system did not really exist, or
if it existed, it was just the opposite of an equally horrible horror that it
opposed, in effect, to tell us that it is 'just like' an extreme version of the
daily politics that we all know so well.
This means most people are in fact, though they don't know it, communists. They are because they obviously oppose this fascism,
but they do not know they are communists. There are a few fascists who have the
knowledge of what they are doing, and they are largely in positions of power and
wealth, although of course there are also fascists among the poor and working
class, those who have been brutalized. Nevertheless, low level fascism (for
want of a better name) represents a quite different phenomenon to high level fascism.
The Brownshirts (the Sturmabteilung) functioned as a paramilitary
organization of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (or Nazi Party)
are an example of this difference, and they had to be dispatched by the higher
level Nazis, as we know, in the infamous 'Night of the Long Knives'. The key to grasping
this difference is that the Brownshirts could not be trusted to 'do the right
thing', which was to attack and blame minorities, chiefly for economic
problems, rather than the ruling class.
Allow me to
provide an example that will make this philosophical-political position clearer:
In Greece
there was a coalition government (February 2012), which coalesced because they
all agreed on some basic principles, and wanted to 'rescue' the Greek economy
and nation, one method to do this was to introduce some extreme 'austerity
measures' for the population: - sackings, redundancies, public and private
sector wage/salary cuts and freezes, increased taxes, privatizations. The
coalition was formed by the two main parliamentary parties PASOK ('socialist')/New
Democracy (rightist) plus some extreme rightist fascists. These parties were led
respectively by Georges Papandreou, Antonis Samaras and Georges Karatzaferis,
the latter a party leader who has openly used anti-Semitic phrases and slogans.
Essentially, the fascist held the deciding vote, in spite of the fact that he
represented a tiny minority of the citizens of Greece in electoral terms. This coalition was led by an 'installed' (by
the Eurozone state apparatus) Prime Minister, Lucas Papademos, described as a
'technocrat' whose political affiliation remained 'officially' undecided but
who was a banker with a history not unconnected with the causes of the crisis.
The
question arises: why would anyone, or any party, enter into an alliance with
the extreme rightist, fascist party unless they had something in common with them? We were of course made
aware officially that this was not the case. The other leaders always disavowed
any connection of this type. Yet here
we have, de facto, a close political
relationship.
My argument
is that what we saw in front of our eyes, we saw because it is true and fact, it is the reality.
The coalition
represented at bottom like minds, it
represented agreements, similar goals and aspirations, and so on. It means that
they are the same, an identity. This means conversely that the opposites that we
thought the apparent left Socialists and right New Democracy were, in fact,
fake. In reality they are performing a double act, a false dialectical piece of theater that allows us to vote for each
party as if we were deciding a sports match, who after the spectacle share in
the spoils.
Why? They do this because they
do share in the spoils, because they share class interests, and these
interests are their private interests. In the Greek coalition of that time it reached
a point in the economic crisis where those interests were best served through
an alliance with the fascists. This is because any individual party holding power
would be held to blame as responsible for the austerity that they both wanted
to impose, so a coalition would neatly spread the blame and unpopularity as
well as allow each to blame the other, in other words it allows the false
dialectical double act to continue relatively unscathed (in theory, because this
was happening against a backdrop of continuous protests). But it only allowed
this to continue with the assistance of the fascists: only the fascists had the
same interests at heart. Only the fascists had the same ruthlessness and
brutality.
The two
major left parties did not enter into this coalition and opposed it. This group
included the Greek Communist Party (KKE), ostensibly a Stalinist party. We have,
therefore, here the fascists versus the communists, although few involved would
have accepted this as an accurate description, in fact they would of course have
rejected it outright in indignation. And the reason why this description would
not be accepted, and so strenuously, is because parliament must (it is an
imperative), function as a stage on which political conflicts take place and
argue democratically, and this entails
of course that they are and must be opposed
to each other, except in times of necessary national unity or emergency; i.e. they
must really be opposed for this to be
a genuine democracy, because democracy means choice. If we were to find that these parties were not really
opposed but in fact shared their outlook, we would realize that we were living
in a plutocracy, a dictatorship, not a genuine democracy, because changing the
one to the other by election would really be no change at all.
Now, it is
not that real opposition never ever happens in
this structure. The fact of the necessity to perform on this stage means
that they must do certain things, intervene, make political decisions, and so
on, politics must be seen to be done and so it must often be done in fact on
the stage that is parliament. However, the idea that they are opposed in any
fundamental way is false as far as this structure is concerned; they are only
opposed as factions within the one position of the rule of the ruling class.
This is the key to understanding all bourgeois democracy. It is its
classical form, as with the English Parliament (there are of course always
exceptions).
We are using
the metaphor of a stage here, but this is more than a metaphor; it really is a
stage with actors performing roles. The political effect is chiefly the
response of the audience to this performance, not the laws they put into
effect. The laws are always decided beforehand by the class that the
politicians are drawn from, or that they now de facto represent as politicians. The role of the parliamentary
politician is to sell these political decisions. Apart from a stage performance
with the actors, the process also more than resembles the performance of a
conjurer, as well as has something of a comedic double act, with the classic
straight man (who is funny and who is straight depends on your sidedness) or the
classic nice cop v nasty cop routine. It is therefore no accident that the
parliament resembles a stage set, it is a
stage set. It is a place in this sense where art meets politics in a very
pure way, the design must be right, the rituals and aesthetics of it all must
add to the effect, in fact you might say it is a site where there are 'special
effects' and a special atmosphere created. If politics is show business for
ugly people, then this is their special stage.
All modern political arguments seem to lead to a single argument and
question: to Stalin versus Hitler. It was for this reason that Godwin
created his 'law' of blogs, although it mainly refers to Hitler and Nazi
comparisons (although it may also be expanded to imply any of this type of
figure); Wikipedia:
"Godwin's law (also known as Godwin's Rule
of Nazi Analogies or Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies[1][2])
is a humorous observation made by Mike Godwin
in 1990[2]
that has become an Internet adage. It states: "As an online
discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or
Hitler approaches 1."[2][3]
In other words, Godwin observed that,
given enough time, in any online discussion—regardless of topic or
scope—someone inevitably criticizes some point made in the discussion by
comparing it to beliefs held by Hitler and the Nazis.
(…)
There are many corollaries
to Godwin's law, some considered more canonical (by
being adopted by Godwin himself)[3]
than others.[1]
For example, there is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet
discussion forums that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished
and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever debate was in
progress.[8]
This principle is itself frequently referred to as Godwin's law. It is
considered poor form to raise such a comparison arbitrarily with the motive of
ending the thread. There is a widely recognized corollary that any such
ulterior-motive invocation of Godwin's law will be unsuccessful.[9]
Godwin's law applies especially to
inappropriate, inordinate, or hyperbolic comparisons of other situations (or
one's opponent) with Nazis."
Whilst the 'law'
does not and should not prevent genuine discussion of Nazism and Hitler or
fascism where this is relevant, it is often used (wrongly) on blogs in
precisely this way, to prevent discussion of the history, specifically of Europe and its last world war. At the same time, the 'blog
law' tends to function to deny (whilst secretly recognizing it as a phenomenon)
that all blog discussions seem to be inexorably drawn towards the political
issue that the last world war was fought over: fascism versus communism.
Blogs
are merely an example of a kind of cultural injunction, almost a
taboo that exists in this space. In this sense it tends to act as a prohibition
against recognizing everything stated above about the two great
camps of politics. Stalin/ism is the real focus of the law. The
argument regarding Stalin, Stalin's existence, acts as the universal position
that says we may pass through the toll booth without changing our
political-philosophical currency. It also says that any defense of Stalin is 'beyond
the pale', even more so than Hitler. We may not discuss Stalin even in the
context of Nazism, because to do so would be to challenge the accepted
ideological norm of a 'balance' of forces, of bourgeois politics as the great
balancer between two extremes that are essentially the same, two forms of evil,
which of course we all know as the Cold War ideology.
This
ideology was the post war switch in the Allies entire ideological position from
support as an ally of the Soviets to outright antagonism. It was the switch
necessary (whatever the actual complex circumstances) so that the ruling class
and capitalism could return to its pre-war narrative of the evils of socialism,
a switch it had to make, and was successful in making. For this reason the
anti-Stalin position is essential to this ideology. The existence of an evil figure on the Left is essential to
the modern concept of democratic politics and the entire notion of political
'extremes' of Left and Right balanced by universalist humanism, extremes which, on the contrary, are the only real political positions that exist today, after the Holocaust.
Are we
saying that Stalin and Stalinism did not really exist, that the 'phenomenon' is
a figment of bourgeois illusion making, that it is not as evil or equal to
Hitlerism, are we saying that Stalin's opposition to Hitler was pure and
progressive, 'the good', etc? No, such would hardly be a
proper Marxian analysis; but it will be worth looking at the trajectory of the
main proponent of the 'evil Stalin as equal to Hitler' ideology.
The Great
Purge is supposed to be the fault of Stalin/Stalinism and 'his evil'; Wikipedia
(I must say I support this mode of information and see no problem with it) again:
"The Great Purge was a series of campaigns
of political repression and persecution
in the Soviet
Union orchestrated by Joseph Stalin from 1936 to 1938.[1][2]
It involved a large-scale purge of the Communist
Party and government officials, repression of peasants, Red Army
leadership, and the persecution of unaffiliated persons, characterized by
widespread police surveillance, widespread suspicion of "saboteurs",
imprisonment, and arbitrary executions.[1]
In Russian historiography the period of the most intense purge, 1937–1938, is
called Yezhovshchina (Russian: ежовщина; literally, the Yezhov regime),
after Nikolai Yezhov, the head of the Soviet secret police, NKVD.
Conquest then joined the Foreign Office's Information Research Department
(IRD), a unit created for the purpose of combating communist influence and
actively promoting anti-communist ideas, by fostering relationships with journalists,
trade
unions and other organizations.[1]
In 1956, Conquest left the IRD and became a freelance writer and historian.
Some of his books were partly distributed through Praeger Press, a US company
which published a number of books at the request of the CIA.
(…)
Some critics have argued that examination of
archives following the USSR's collapse in 1991 challenge many of Conquest's
statements.[15]
Now, Robert
Conquest's personal role in this construction is pivotal in that it is his work
that generally feeds into the mainstream media and consciousness as 'the truth'
about the Soviet Union (SU) and Stalin as an evil figure representing the SU,
and it turn representing all forms of (should we say consistent or
authoritative) Left socialism. It is not exactly difficult to detect that he is
an agent (whether factually or not) of that thing known as 'the west' (if we
treat this term as synonymous with advanced democratic capitalism), and that
his ideology fits into the rightist framework of understanding history, and the
fact that he started as a Communist only adds to this.
One of the primary ways
that he derives huge figures for death rates in the purges is by adding
together the deaths from famines. Apart from this simple subterfuge, these
famines were a feature of Russian life (and death) long before the Soviets came
to power, and the Soviets were of course trying to eradicate them. The other
salient aspect of this, however, is the background ideology or philosophy at
work here, and the concept of the 'terror', the idea of an all powerful evil
force to which any death or destruction may be attributed in a society. Now, it
is noticeable that such an ideology is itself rather 'Stalinist', in the sense
that it really believes and asserts repeatedly that such an evil overarching
quasi-mystical force is actually possible and exists and operates as a factor
in history.
The Marxist
philosopher Louis Althusser has already remarked on this in his criticism of
the rightist interpretation and critique of Stalinism, and counterpoised to
this a very different left critique of same that looks at the problem of the
cult of personality (in Essays in Self
Criticism).
In November
2005 Conquest was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George
W. Bush, a president infamous of course for cajoling the fabrication of the
existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) as the excuse for the gung-ho invasion
of Iraq to effect 'regime change'. It is noteworthy that President Bush, acting
for his class, after the terrorist atrocity of 9/11 used the concept of a widespread 'War
on Terror' as the reason to justify the invasion of another nation unrelated to
this act of terrorism, and as a rationale for many other reductions in US civil
rights at home, also unrelated (unless we mention class). In this way the
rightist vision of history of the SU functions to generate just the kind of
political conditions that are conducive to the rightists own political aims for
a 'strong state', and very peculiarly in other words 'Stalinist' conditions, but
minus any socialistic content. To put it more simply: Stalinism here becomes
the rationale for Stalinism.
From
another direction, may we not assert that Stalinism, or more specifically
Hitlerism (which we seem to have forgotten), may justifiably be a real excuse
for Stalinism, or a 'strongman', if we are faced with fighting a truly terrible
despotic force, one of those earthbound mundane evils that may not have
mystical projective powers but certainly cause a great deal of grief and
destruction. Every nation, even democracies, do indeed have a way to resort to
emergency laws, martial law, and the 'strongman', and we all know that
Churchill represents just such an historical figure, a hero for most, but who
also had a personal history and reputation that on close inspection cannot be
denied of being ruthless and at times cruel (i.e. earlier in Africa, or as
regards the firestorm bombing of Dresden and Hamburg).
Attached to
all this is the way this same rightist fantasy of evil and good ultimate powers
leads also to the repeated insistence on peace as opposed to violence, as if
one side (the rightist one) somehow owns the rights to peace as such. The
suggestion is that there are, again, two fundamental forces at work: those who
want peace and those who are hell bent on 'mindless' destruction and death.
Lately (in 2011) this argument came to be used against the Arab Revolutions in
the Middle East and North Africa, and against the uprisings of the Tunisian,
the Bahraini, Libyan, Egyptian, Yemeni and Syrian peoples, etc. The suggestion
is that these uprising have been generated by a kind of will to violence and
that the existing state and the stasis it produces is in contrast necessary for peaceful
'stability'. What we find is that the institutions of the state, because it
only presents a bureaucratic violence which is insidious and hidden, is framed
as peaceful, while protesters who resist repression with an open vigor are
regarded as 'violent'.
Recently this same argument has been leveled at Greek
protesters in the context of the (seemingly never ending) negotiations by the
Greek government with the troika (the ECB, IMF and EU) that offered to the
Eurozone currency group of nations even further austerity measures that were
forcing the nation into penury and its people into ever deepening poverty.
Protesters, normally peaceful, are in Greece often accompanied (except for the
Communists who resisted this) by groups of other protesters (or rioters) who
act in an immediately and rather too ready way with violence against the state
riot police, who then have the convenient excuse to heavily tear-gas the
protesters.
On one
occasion in Greece during such protests (February 2012) it was (on video
evidence that is widely documented on the internet) the riot police which first
began the violence by firing down into the packed crowd of protesters, only
after this did the stone throwers begin attacking the riot police, who began
their familiar routine of surrounding the mass of peaceful protesters and
herding them by copious amounts of teargas. To cut the story short, on this
night many shops and buildings, including historic ones, were the next day
reported as burnt out, smashed and looted. Some were ostensibly targets of Left
wing rage – such as the HQ of the fascist party (Laos), or some were loosely
connected to this apparent agenda (the cinema which had been used as a Gestapo
torture chamber, as well as banks). The destruction was quite widespread. Naturally
the Greek press and the government mostly, but not totally, avoided the
question of parastatal elements involved in agent provocateur acts, and
described the violence in terms of wanton thuggery and 'mindless evil'.
In the UK comparisons
were made sometimes to the recent English riots and looting (which nevertheless
also gave rise to questions over the sudden reluctance or inability of the
nation's police to contain it). The narrative was clear: protest against the
state was a form of terror and evil that had to be eradicated, and reflected
that there was something fundamentally wrong with the Greek people. This came
after months of descriptions on blogs etc of Greek people as lazy and inefficient,
too expecting of 'entitlements', and 'not living within their means' and thus
needing constant loans in the crisis.
The Greek
people, and its kind of state, were essentially becoming the scapegoats for the
global capitalist crisis in the western media. The case of Ireland was
financially at least as grave, if not worse, than Greece, but all the
concentration was on the plight of Greece as a 'special case'. This barely hidden
racism, since it had no justification in rationality (in fact in the blogs it
was hardly concealed at all, and was allowed as if 'fair comment'), on a
broader level was reflected in the insulting name for the badly affected
southern states, PIIGS (for Portugal, Ireland, Italy, Greece and Spain).
Tellingly,
these are all states which still had unfinished business to deal with after the
last world war: for instance the legacy of the Junta in Greece and of Franco in
Spain; Greek people were actually still in the process of trying to gain some
war reparations from Germany over a well known massacre of civilians. Disregarding
the doubts over who is responsible for the violence of the protesters, we have
here, I would argue, two kinds of violence presenting itself: the one is state
violence and the other is people's force resisting this. Part of the state
violence, when it is not tear-gassing people, is 'peaceful', in the sense that
it presents itself ostensibly at least through lawful methods and bureaucratic
processes to implement austerity. Some of these methods are doubtful in terms
of their Greek constitutional legitimacy, but we can leave that aside too.
What
is austerity? It is the systematic reduction in the living standards and
welfare benefits of the ordinary people of Greece (and other nations). These
are generally not the people who were or should be held responsible in the
sense of punishment for the global crisis, but who seem to be being treated as
such, and we must place this in the European context of big bankers still
receiving colossal financial rewards even for their total failure and need to
be bailed out from the public purse, i.e. the very people who were being
'punished'. The people of Greece were and are very angry about this situation
and they resist it. They feel
(obviously) justified in this
resistance.
What
happens? A few buildings, property, some historic, get burnt in the struggle,
little proof of who did it (the earlier Marfan bank atrocity may be the
exception). The bourgeoisie are generally horrified. In actual fact the media horror
expressed at the buildings and shops being burnt down as a result (apparently)
of the anger over the severe state imposed austerity seems to be far higher
than, say, passion against the massacres of civilians taking place concurrently
in the city of Homs in Syria, who the UN and Arab League have failed miserably
to protect even in words. For this we get mere sadness and some mild hand
wringing, even prominent Left figures (such as Seamus Milne of The Guardian
newspaper) walks away from the Syrian issue saying it is too 'toxic' and
offered no plan of action even for the Left.
In the UK, persons have been arrested and imprisoned for supporting and
encouraging the riots in words only, such as through the new social media. So
in this sense free speech is being curtailed over an issue that could be aired
in this respect: is violent rioting (even, in contrast to protesting) never
legitimate? Is the expression of anger by the people never justified?
Let us
forget for the moment the easy way in which the rightists will confuse and conflate,
deliberately and for their own project, riots with protest. Is it never ever
justified? Wanton destruction is only wanton and mindless when it has
absolutely no point to it. To fulfill this it would have to be to all intents
and purposes mad, i.e. psychopathic, and
in that sense would lead us to a different problem since psychopaths are not
considered responsible subjects. Such destruction as we have seen in Greece is not
psychopathic though, it is anger about something and in response to a definite
political event. You might say it is an expression (if genuine) of – if you
attack me this way, I will attack you this way. The working class and people
are unable to defend themselves or express their anger through legal
constitutional means from the austerity measures that are (against the legal Greek
constitution anyway, and even against the principles, at least, of the European
Charter) reducing their lives in fact, so all that is left is (apparently)
illegal methods.
It is clear that by calling these methods 'mindless' (the
repeated refrain in the press) as well as naming it 'rioting' is a way to link
ordinary peoples protest to the general idea of 'terror'. To fight this
'terror' the (Greek in this instance) state feels justified in its violence or
its own 'terror' as a way of combating it, so it resorts to the 'Stalinist'
position (or perhaps we should say the Hitlerist in this case). If we add to
this the suspicion that the state is encouraging and/or allowing this response
and see that parastatal elements are included, then a picture emerges of a
state itself going beyond legality, becoming an illegitimate state, a state
which is no longer interested in performing its democratic function with regard
to its people but only interested in its survival as a form of power become
arbitrary and beyond law.
It is this
kind of arbitrary power, which is being ascribed to radicals constantly under
the name of Stalinism, yet arises from the position of Stalinism (or Hitlerism),
which says we must not voice this position as the people, even as a concern
about power, and we must accept that we all want 'peace', even though this is a
peace which kills us: what is, we must
ask, the ultimate austerity measure, do we not already know? Yes we do, it as
Auschwitz. The same people who would call this hyperbole would call those who
alluded to the early indications of the rise of the Nazi party and its dangers
as conspiracy mongers and paranoiacs.
There is a fundamental and deep hypocrisy
at work here and it can be simplified down to this: they, the bourgeoisie, feel
it is wrong to make a revolution, to overthrow an oppressive regime if there is nothing for them to gain from it.
In Libya
there was something to gain for capitalists from intervention: politically
Gaddafi had appeared sometimes in the popular press as 'socialist', so intervention
could be seen to be both anti-socialist (a strategic political gain), and there
was oil present, plus the geography and demography helped, it was 'doable'. In
Syria this was not the case, and the much vaunted democratic moral imperatives
did not play a strong role, all the capitalist nations failed (at least in the
first months, as I began to write this) in their self appointed 'duty'
(including China and Russia). If Syria is a bourgeois revolution with working
class components as well as an independence struggle against foreign tyranny,
and as well as against home grown corruption and despotism, the world's
bourgeoisie can only, at the moment, see its working class aspect, its courage
and real violent resistance, as a
threat.
Note
An additional aspect of the problem of Stalin and Stalinism is a historical
difficulty: if this were to be taken as true, how may we approach the bare fact
that the Soviet Union and Stalin was an ally
during the war and that our (say, British) press was affectionate towards the
figure of Stalin (Uncle Joe etc)? Should we 'westerners', to be consistent, say
that this 'realpolitik' (at best) was complicity in war crimes? This would of
course be very awkward and in fact of course it does not happen, in its place
there is a void, the question is not confronted, it is simply never grappled
with. Instead a kind of historical anachronism is produced, wherein, if 'we'
ever think it, for the duration of the war it was 'normal' to be allies with
the Soviet Union, but now, after a certain dividing line in time, it is not,
and this 'doublethink', although contradictory, coexists. Common ideology has
no inbuilt necessity, after all, to be consistent.
The
existence of this line of demarcation, the division of future from past and the
inability to rationally configure the one by and with the other, creates an
historical anachronism and leads to a kind of violence in the present, based on
it. For, if we cannot address this, it is a kind of repression. What is being
repressed? If we were projected back to, say, Europe 1943, a British subject
could not so easily openly exclaim "Stalin is an evil bastard", but
now it is the reverse, if you do not claim he is an evil bastard you are an
evil bastard. The violence here is that which prevents us from examining this
as a genuine historical and ideological problem. It prevents us from
researching the subject matter in a serious way. The only option that appears
to be open to us is to strike the rightist attitude and interpretation of
history.
As stated, this rightist attitude does not exactly replace the figure
of Stalin with anything much other than its own vision of a 'strong man', i.e.
with its own Stalinism (e.g. Putin for instance). The violence of ideology is
always based in this rejection of rational discourse, but the rejection does
not appear so much in ideology, since it is irrational and therefore in a sense
outside of ideas, but in affective
practice, or in the affective practice that accompanies the ideology and
appears at the moment it becomes aware that the line of demarcation and the
prohibition is being challenged somehow, which in this case is a kind of
historical line. In other words, it surfaces as an emotional response. This
emotional response is, after the fact, usually excused through moral and
ethical terms: with indignation, horror, astonishment, bluster, apoplexy, and a
shutting down of the lines of rational communication, and then, censorship, the
final act of which is to actually kill. And yes, ironically, Stalinism (if it
is indeed what they say it is) itself followed this course, even (and this is
the sad aspect of it) after it became unnecessary for the ruthlessness of war.
We have in the Stalinist insistence on the end of class struggle in socialism
the illusions of the post war Soviet state, since a state, of course, cannot be
the end of class struggle given its end is the ending of the necessity for a
state (this is the simple, basic, Leninist principle).
This is why here, on this ground, socialism grew its own, home grown, false
dialectic. On the one side we have the notion of gradualism and total cessation
of struggle in Stalinism, and on the other the ideas of the total continuation
of continual revolutionary struggle in Trotskyism. What this represents is
actually the same repression, in the end the repression of the science of
social change that is Marxism, by being happier with the condition of stasis
produced by holding apart these two sides and preventing synthesis. Why should
this happen within socialism (ignoring the antagonistic pressure from outside)?
A provisional answer may be this: socialism has no magic immunity from
ideology, and especially from the ideology of its own victories and
disappointments. There is an ideology of Marxism as much as any other politics,
in fact even more so because of what is at stake.
