Tony Cliff in his book of this name made a very valuable contribution to the study of Russia but was badly mistaken in stating that the bureaucracy represented a class or was on the right. He does not seem to have grasped that a class must possess certain property which it has the power to sell or otherwise dispose of,in law. There was no property-owning class in the the Soviet Union. The state owned all property.
State capitalism (1921)?
By "state capitalism" Lenin meant labour incentives and a mix of private and public industrial ownership,a step back from full socialism. There were wide differences in social entitlements such as wages and salaries and it makes little difference who owned how much. Cliff's followers were and are what Pope Benedict would call the English Leninists followers of an "ideology" or what most people believe is a"cult". They shot themselves in the foot in their plans to build a mass socialist party by sticking too closely to their unshakeable tenets of faith.
Our times
Trotskyism is a fading political force. Putin has re-established state socialism in Russia and bases it on the Leninist model of the New Economic Plan.
Cliffites in the slow lane
The Russian situation of 1989 required a democratic political revolution and that was brought about by the All-Russia Congress of Trade Unions in the period from 1988 to 1991.
Putin and the changes of his reign
The current political situation embraces a mixed economy, the same as instigated by Lenin in 1919-1922.
Cliff and his legacy
We must all compromise,something Cliff and the nationalist-socialists both could not see because they were dictators. Their ways simply amount to a dictatorship of a small, unrepresentative minority or totalitarian absolutism.
Putin's approach is neither fish nor fowl. He mixes collectivity with authoritarianism and that does not appeal to the revolutionary milieu of students and riff raff.
Democratic centralism as practised by leftists
Having had associations with socialists and German social democrats for 44 years,I say,"Do not to be so intolerant and accept that others have an equally valid perspective. Your opponents are big businessmen and spivs (and cutthroats employed by them) not the British Labour Party or most people in government, not even the Tories".
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A great truth of history and a message for our times outside the US and in all civilised countries
Dickheads such as Tony Blair,John Major, political butterflies and sundry spoofers propose but trade unions dispose.
Unity is strength. Trade unions and democratic unity unites the left not the "circle spirit,"(Lenin),the "sectish spirit" (Lenin) or "peculiar dogmas"(Marx and Engels').
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14.9.2021
The philosophers
Those who called themselves dialectical materialists, those who claimed that they believed, "The only constant is change" could not accept that fundamental change was required in Russia. They refused to accept political reality and were plentiful not just in the East but in the US, South America and Britain.
The Russian economy in the post-War period
The Soviet Union was falling ever further behind economically.
The Western left was painfully ignorant that the olive branch held out by Gorbachev had been rejected by Germany and NATO and the US.
British financial oligarchies and US imperialism were creeping relentlessly forward aided by the greed of the Russian bureaucracy and endemic political unrest. That occurred amid some international concerns about probity in public life in the West and East in the late 1980's.
The 1990's
The enduring legacy of the post-Soviet era is that western capital has lost its grip on the world economy and China,a formerly marginal country, and Asia are now very much in the ascendant.
Those who write frivolous nonsense about "The Collapse of Communism " and the defeat of Soviet scientific materialism should wise up and stop tinkering at the edges of society. Look at the modern Russia and China,a mixture of public and private enterprise and public endeavour.
People like the Richard Boyd-Barrett and other Trotskyite radicals should go and take a long cold shower.
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We say,after Dolores Ibarruiri," Nothing can stop the march of history". That was something which negated entirely public and solely private endeavour in Russia.
Capitalism and its inner and outer workings has also dictated the loss of Western industrial, financial and economic monopoly to China and a more flexible,Western-friendly, integrated approach in Russia. Nothing is better proof of dialectical materialism and the interpenetration and interrelation of opposites than the fall of Soviet Socialism.
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10.4.2022
Tony Cliff's other revolutionary cookbook nonsense regarding " deflected permanent revolution"?
There is no way to deflect a revolution no more than there is of trying to deflect a runaway train.
Lenin said of the Bolshevik Revolution that it was "like lifting a feather".
The democratic revolution of 1991 was smooth and straightforward but Ireland has its own Dublin Socialist Club resident experts-on-everything-under- the-sun who shun those who do not believe in their uneducated schoolboy rhetoric.
Illustration?
Examples are those emanating from the pen of Tony Cliff and London middle-class "proletarians".
They know better!
These fractious elements spread destructive doctrines and the sectarian tropes of little groups.
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27.8.2023
Nationalised trusts under socialist managers and factory committees were the chosen economic system of Lenin and the Bolsheviks from November 1917 to April 1918 when industrial production fell to 30% of 1913 levels and continued falling thereafter.
War Communism was launched by the Bolsheviks. They deployed the military as rebels because in 1919,industry collapsed and the cities starved.
War requisitioning ('War Communism') was introduced because there was no viable means of payment for country produce or means of exchange acceptable to either peasant or farmer.
Later came payment in gold (according to contemporaneous schema from Lenin's pen). He advocated payment by the state in gold and food rationing.
Between 1921 and1928, society reverted to market relations until the Stalin phenomenon became unstoppable.Stalin emerged from the chaos of the Revolution with a plan to keep managers watching their back, the revival of nationalised trusts and 'watch' committees in every factory, workplace and army barracks in the country.
The secret of his 'success',1928-1953?
The iron fist!
And...
Tony Cliff's bookworm perplexity?
His and Trotsky's sources in the GRU did not know that there was success in Stalin's iron grip,but none in Lenin's bookish temerity.
Ireland. The parallel?
For Lenin,read the Adams echelon. For Stalin,read Mc Guinness and the Security Unit,the Green Book and Active Service Units. For Trotsky read hurlers on the ditch in the universities.
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14.9.2023
Lessons for all countries ruling elites
The fruit of planned change in political and in social terms is flexibility. Flexibility was an epithet which I tried to teach the 'Iron' Chancellor, Gerhard Schroeder in December 2004. Like all Germans who came from the post-War generation,he could only bring himself reluctantly to make hard choices,the hard choices made by Khrushchev and Gorbachev which have set not just their own countries' free but liberated the developing world from Marxist tyranny. Schroeder flunked a true reform course of cutting bureacracy and reducing regulations. Ignorant Quislings in the British Labour Party and the Cambridge types believe otherwise and see in Germany a success story,something it has never been and can never be.
Russia,1956?
1956 was the year the Russians should have as a great power embraced international change. Khrushchev tried to decentralise economic enterprises and give them autonomy in a centrally-planned economy.
This mixed up thinking satisfied no one in the CPSU and met stiff opposition from the bureaucracy.
A philosophical tenet
The ball must not leave the air in terms of social progress,political reasoning and geopolitical logic. My creation,the internet keeps "men and ideas in motion".
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Gosplan is gone and Stalin's reign is but a memory,so let us celebrate Russian political flexibility and economic diversity,small enterprises and big undertakings AND REMEMBER OUR MISTAKES.
Pay no heed to the inflexible, socialist star gazers and,worse again,tree-huggers in our own country.
Nothing bears out the essential truth of dialectical materialism better than the fate of the Soviet Union between 1917 and the present (and Leninism is but a memory in the developed countries).
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18.12.2024
Extremists such as the intellectual elite in tiny ultra-left groups such as those left behind after Lenin's first stroke in 1922,are constantly arguing about what they call "Ways and Means" (Eoin O Murchu,Official IRA,1972) or about The Politics of Irish Freedom (Adams, Provisional Sinn Fein).
The truth is that without intelligent theory and firm direction,all parties fall apart and are cast to the four winds.
The International Socialists/SWP micro-groups is no closer to truth than historical truth than Trotsky. Cliff called Stalin a rightist.
Stalin was no more right-wing than any apparatchik. He was a Party man who was determined to confront fascism and outwit Hitler.
His internal policy of The Communist Manifesto was The Revolution in Permanence. That is ultra-leftism. He is no more right-wing than Chairman Mao who launched The Cultural Revolution,another period of paranoia,turmoil and upheaval.
It is only spies and those out to unseat existing governments of a socialist nature who talk of right deviations.
The Soviet Union had already settled on a culture of bureaucracy and obstruction after Lenin was challenged by the White armies firstly and foreign intervention.
The Soviet Union was in its later more expansive and industrialising phase described as "bureaucratic collectivism" by a French writer in 1935.
Anyone who like Cliff described a faraway country as state capitalist and Stalin as a counter revolutionary did not know what he was talking about no more than a splitter and eternal malcontent such as Trotsky but one thing we can say in that school' s favour is that they clearly recognised was that Stalin was a gangster and a murderer.
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What I hope can be seen by my didactic remarks on the early years of the Soviet experiment was that it was run U.B.S.
Unions,Bureaucrats and sophomores (juvenile philosophers and high school students).
The constant series of crises were resolved by what Lenin referred to as "trade union government" until Stalin installed those well-practised yes-men,the bureaucrats in complete control and reduced trade union participation in government to workplace committees.
As Marx observed,"The only constant is Change".
The Old Mole proved right yet again in his earliest Theses on Feuerbach,1843).
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