22 October 2024.
I am not feeling well at all, so I am issuing this less cohesive, truncated version of the opening discussion on the new policies of Gladsnost (Cordialness) and Politstroika (Political {up}Standing). I will so call that planned formal article something like 'Report Outlining Problems on the Left for the Policies of Gladsnost and Politstroika', as opposed to the informal title of this article.
Contents:
I. The Left's Discounting Friendship
II. Disowning Fellow Communists
III. Multitude 'One-Parties' and the Mess of Terrors
IV. A Comrade's Freedom of Personal Thought (and Agency)
V. The Stalin Problem and Soviet History
VI. Miscellanies
VII. A Final Word for the Future
I. The Left's Discounting Friendship.
The Left does not appreciate the importance of friendship, nor does it see any value in treating man as an end in himself. I have seen this cruel conduct in many of the Leftist parties and spaces, but it is as well an important, and tragic, piece of the Soviet experience. That these revolutionaries could so callously execute each other so often, seems to me an atrocious deficiency.
I think, as it is known, that both vanguardism and particular idealist world-views exert a large influence in this perpetrating an unfriendly atmosphere of orthodoxy, dogmatism, and opportunism. I intend to read Popper's Open Society, Comrade Khrushchev's Internal Speech, and Comrade Ryutin's Platform before the creation of the official Outline Report, in search of answers to this question. Kolakowski may be read, too.
The importance of friendship is as a binding agent of comradery in all party and inter-Leftist affairs. When the social unity of friendship falls into a compromised state, either in the sheer number of friendships, or the strength and seriousness within said friendships, the health and cohesion of the party/organisation is at stake. The same is true of insular, factional relationships, which do not extend very far outside of the internal fellowship. In this instance, friendships by contrast adversely stoke the hostilities and grudges in the organisation. It must be pointed out that to substitute the party and its institutions for social connexions betwixt comrades is a dangerous position to place everyone in.
II. Disowning Fellow Communists.
The Left is frighteningly all too glad in the jettison of erstwhile comrades in positions of social/intellectual leadership for a new analysis, faction, or tendency. This is not surprising, of course, for we have seen this attitude levelled against party members and fellow revolutionaries at the individual purview. Leadership is much more visible, thus open to attack from all sides. Pioneering leaders are essential to every political movement, so the pillorying of our intellectual leaders for ,,deviation'' and ,,diversion'' is in a sense unbelievable, yet we have stated just how pervasive it is, that we all have seen it at some point. Any kind of intellectual movement whatever which does not afford some tolerance for exploration is doomed to be outmanoeuvred by its counter-parts.
As I have been open about, beginning of late, I have for some time now been more amicable towards and amenable to the plight of Comrade Bukharin. Any one who has been with Thoughts of a Comrade a long time will know that I for a long time have taken a stance of mere disagreement with Trotsky, rather than of holy crusader hostility. I have never truly been anti-Brezhnev, even in my first party days of rejuvenated conversion, and I have always found hostility to Comrade Deng to be deeply suspicious. Obviously, I had to hide all of these ,,heretical doctrines'' (including my developing criticisms of vanguardism and particular idealist world-views) during real-life venues, for fear of being purged or expulsed, possibly from the entire Left.
I am advocating a new set of policies, named Gladsnost ('Cordialness') and Politstroika ('Political {up}Standing/Reconstruction'). For indeed, if Comrade Trotsky is not excluded from these comradely rehabilitation, then certainly the chief rehabilitator himself can not be. Now I realise that this decision will not sit well with many otherwise amenable, kindly comrades, some of whom can not stand even the primary rehabilitator; because in my view Gorbachev is at worst just an incredibly misinformed idiot, I can, in the interest of my two policies, offer a wider net of forgiveness. Those who regard him to be a traitor, akin to Yeltsin, or who have to live with the consequences of his ill-conceived actions, understandably are not as willing to pardon him as, say, a Trotsky or even a Ryutin. Comrade Khrushchev is mostly unworthy of blame in my eyes as to not really require a rehabilitation (but perhaps a 'reasoned assessment'). We are not speaking of agreement, but merely of comradely respect in our disagreements, and the mutual retention of unity and friendship amongst communists. Howbeit, I believe that the good of rehabilitating such contentious comrades is higher than any harm. When Gorbachev was yet alive, my answer may have been different. The comrade is dead, his mistakes haunting him in the grave. What more is made the point by attacking him further?
I must clarify something, since I am still the steward of The Philosopher's Interior Onlinifed (formerly New Political-Economic Knowledge): unlike my comrade, whose project that site was in its initial form, I am not seeking to advocate a form of libertarian-market-socialism. Although my views likely are closer to his now, I still strongly disagree with his libertine attitude. Exempli gratia, I oppose vanguardism from a 'reformist' ground, as I do not believe that any other type of party can successfully initiate and wage the revolution. I do firmly believe, however, that mass-parties and club-organsations are vastly superior for building up to the revolutionary conditions, and afterwards in the actual building of socialism. Vanguardism is a tool with a proper implementation to fill; it is when this tool is not switched for another more suited one after completing that instruction set that I criticise it. I disagree with his stridently pro-Gorbachev (and ministers) stance, and I do believe that Comrade Mao was a socialist. I am a market-socialist, but perhaps ironically in the way that Comrade Stalin was a market-socialist (id est it is only a step, another tool). I abhor the implementation of Perestroika, unlike him, and view that æra of the Soviet Union conversely as the death of true socialism. But I absolutely support the wider purpose of his project in opening free discourse for respectful dialogue.
Comrade Ryutin and Comrade Zamyatin I expect will also be seen as controversial. The former is purported by some circles to have plotted for the assassination of Comrade Stalin, and the latter to have been an anti-Communist mouthpiece hostile to the USSR and socialism. Personally, I believe neither of these claims: in Ryutin's case, it is opportunistic fear-mongering, and in Zamyatin's, a conflation of a comrade's critique with the propaganda of that hostile outsider Blair/Orwell. Ryutin and Zamyatin are both fellow Bolsheviks, so let nay communist reprimand them for the cause of critique, a just and Bolshevik cause!
III. The Multitude of 'One-Parties' and the Mess of Terrors.
One of the core objectives of Politstroika, is to attempt some kind of resolution for the mutually exclusive party trench-warfare that specially plagues the US and the UK, preferably in a way which avoids forcing parties to merge on hurt of withheld recognition (that is which respects every party).
The two primary systems I propose are not entirely without precedent, but they have also never been accepted by the contemporary leaderships then ascendant. The first system, proposed by Comrade Bukharin (and perhaps also Comrade Trotsky starting in 1938, but this is unclear) is simply the allowance of multiple parties, so long as they accept the structure of the Union Council of Communist Parties (exempli gratia the Court of Socialist Hearing, and potentially the Constitution-Compositum). The second system is a decentralised socio-political apparatus of clubs and orders. The clubs of the French Revolution and the historical formation of the Newcastle Literary and Philosophical Society serve as the basis for this model.
For a substitution of the vanguard model, I propose the overseer council model as represented by my hypothetical construction betitled the 'Union Council of Communist Parties'. The elected and appointed leaders of this system are called together a troikomm, or tricomm— for troika-kommißariat made from the top three highest voted nominees (which must be from three separate parties). For inter-party and internal party disputes alike there will be the Court of Socialist Hearing, whose leadership and organisation is likewise comprised of troikomms.
To return to the UCCP, its leadership is not a troikomm, but the Executive Committiet, its members Committiers. The EC is formed from three members of the three highest voted parties' central committees, and of the two lowest parties', for a total of fifteen 'appointive members', added with twenty 'universal members' generally elected to the EC for a complete body of thirty-five members.
The UCCP is not to enforce a particular party-line of its own except in relation to matters of UCCP elections and positions, for which it will rely on all-member democratic centralism. Parties and organisations are still allowed to have contrary positions, and are able to internally criticise official policies, so long as they adhere to the policies of the UCCP, CSH, et cetera publicly and materially.
All of these details are, of course by nature, provisional in their rendering here. The chief aim of what some may object to as a complicated, messy, or utopian project is to retain the successes of socialist party building, which includes democratic centralism, but to prevent some of the most unfortunate excesses of the mishandling and abusive-handling of these processes. It is hoped that the UCCP overseer-council model will mitigate what is to me the most dangerous form of division on the Left: Leftist infighting, personal(ity) grudges, and ,,one true party'' paranoia are the primary sources, or instigations of the the Yezhovshchina and partially of the Cultural Revolution.
Any one who seeks to escape the question of terror and purges by blaming Stalin, Mao, even Yezhov, is being dishonest with his comrades and with himself. The epidemic of 'ghosting' comrades returns us to the first subject, that being the discounting and shallowness of friendship on the Left. The hatred which Comrade Stalin, Comrade Trotsky, and Comrade Ryutin all felt for each other was in my opinion quite real, none being less genuine or more opportunist than the others. We can see this inter-Leftist hostility even in the time of Lenin (Kautsky), even of Marx and Engels (Proudhon and Lassalle)! This is nay ,,Stalinist'', not even Soviet phenomenon. The US Left is far more internally bitter and wrathful than the Soviet Left during the Purges, it is simply the want of opportunity (specifically legality) and lack of external pressure which stays the bullets of the US Left.
IV. A Comrade's Freedom of Personal Thought (and Agency).
This section will certainly make me labelled a Bukharinite or Khrushchevite, if I have not been labelled so already. Yet this section my opponents will find more nuanced, hopefully more agreeable. After all, there must be a reason I do not share Comrade Khrushchev's denunciation of our and my Comrade Iosif Vissarionovich, the Soviet Man of Steel. Indeed, I am still a Marxist-Leninist in formal designation, neither a Bolshevik-Leninist, social-democrat, nor an anarchist, and a market-socialist only so far as a description of influence upon my Marxist-Leninist development and analysis. I believe in a centralised party and in democratic centralism, I even believe that a vanguard could be the necessary vehicle to carry out a successful revolution.
Party members will obviously be under different obligations opposed to the freedom enjoyed by independent comrades, but limits on this obligated control/discipline must be placed and be made extremely clear and accessible. Socialist legality, or socialist rule of law, is for this reason very important. It must be stressed that non-party, perhaps non-organised too, comrades have an essential role, specially in connexion to this subject at hand. Party health is reliant to a gross extent on the party's ability to accept material, videre licet critique and analysis, from the liberty in external conditions, that comrades may reformulate such material in a class-conscious way.
On the other side of this conversation, as hinted, is the party itself as an institution. To tie the party up would be libertarian dreaming, nice and unrealistic. That being said, the libertarians are quite correct to regard the party as a potentially dangerous weapon. The parties ought to observe collective leadership, thus they must author a (collective) party-line, which includes theory, policy, and historiography. It generally holds, however, that the fewer and less adamantly matters are ordered in the party-line, the less is there a chance for tyranny, dogmatism, or abuse to manifest— all of this being clearly at the expence of the party's strength and cohesion.
The party is a general-staff, meaning that it will inevitably have to sacrifice some in its ranks. This is but one reason why comrades who chuse not to enter the party barracks must not be looked down upon as inferior. There are many important positions in the movement that the party may not with cadres fill, as we have discussed.
Let us say a few words about smaller subjects pertaining to this subject ere the closing: revisionism, orthodoxy/canonicity, and hostile literature or critiques.
Revisionism as an insult, as a negative, anti-communist activity, is too much heard. Lenin, most communists rightly admit, was in the strict sense a revisionist, revising Marx's and Engels' less developed theories of revolution and imperialism. At the other end, Mao's revisions were more harmful than useful as Lenin's have been. Let the ossified bureaucratic rallying cry of revisionism be retired into the rubbish bin of unchanging history. The next Lenin will be done nay favours if this fearful reaction is left blocking his way. For is not revolution itself an act of societal revisionism? Arresting development is impossible, Yezhov has already tried!
Orthodoxy, catechesis, and canons may all be alluring, but these forms of regimentation come at a far too often unrecognised intellectual, hence development cost. Whatever is gained by party cohesion may be undone by opening the conditions for terror. Do not look only at the benefits, and do not consider only the immediate, or the consequences could be grosser than you had anticipated.
We have touched upon hostile literature to an extent, both earlier in this subject indirectly, and earlier in the article with Ryutin and Zamyatin, whose outstanding charges are equally of hostile literature and the propagation of anti-communist sedition. If the party can not respond to outside critique with civil rebuttal, then there is a problem, which might explode into a yezhovshchina at any moment. Socialist legality must reign, and that means somehow giving an allotted space to serious disagreement, most specially when it is fellow comrades who are issuing the disagreements. You can not rightly wave Comrade Ryutin's and Comrade Zamyatin's critiques away with a claim of nay-true-Bolshevism; such, indeed, is anti-communist (and uncomradely) behaviour.
V. The Stalin Problem and Soviet History.
My response here to the question of Stalin and wider Soviet history, let me forewarn, may be unsatisfying or unintuitive. This question is still deep in the phase of examination and reforming, for such a difficult and fragile problem it is, with equally serious implications for however it is treated. I am still actively reading into it, actively studying it.
I presently adhere to what might be called a Bukharin-Brezhnev line, or a Tempred Historicity, which makes me in terms of the historical Glasnost and Perestroika a conservative, even a reactionary what with my obstinant refusal to denounce Stalin. Practically this means moderated public support (per Gladsnost/Cordialness), and internally the right to serious discourse on these sensitive matters (per Politstroika/Political Upstanding). The historian Robert Service seems to hold a similar, if more burgher-like position as this one, though his harsh criticisms of Comrade Trotsky are perhaps over-corrective, and his apparent dismissal of Comrade Bukharin is right baffling.
In contrast to Tempred Historicity, many historians and activists professing to be Leftist observe an 'anti-Stalin Stalinism' or more accurately a Yezhovist mindset. Stephen Cohen and many avowedly Trotskyist or social-democratic historians have not learned the lesson of Comrade Stalin. They fall into the same error as he himself had in elevating otherwise just instances of disagreement amongst comrades, into suspicious plotting by devious subversives and saboteurs. The 'anti-bureaucrat scenario', as Lars Lih has named it, is certainly playing an influence in this discussion, whereby Stalin is transformed from a revolutionary hero standing against the bureaucratic machine of 'Communist anti-communists', into that same bureaucratic machine. Then someone like Trotsky, Bukharin, Khrushchev, or Gorbachev et cetera is given Stalin's role. The tragic (in the literary and emotional sense) truth/nature of this process is that both Trotsky and Stalin engaged in it, using it as their primary frame of mind, to disastrous effect. I imagine that most competing Leftists fall back upon this conspiratorial anti-bureaucrat scenario against each other, and it is something which must be abolished forthwith.
It has hitherto been impossible to disagree in communist parties, the point, however, is to make it legal (at the least). What good may come of executing Comrade Stalin and purging his supporters? How many Marxist-Leninists will the Trotskyists, say, have us kill? But the social-democrats will afterwards argue for the killing of these blood-soaked Bolshevik-Leninists as well, lest that bloodthirsty tyrant Trotsky may rise again. And we Bukharinite-Brezhnevite Tankies with a yell of 'NO SURRENDER!' will bash everyone in sight. The fascists will arrive to murder us, only to exclaim 'what in mein Fäilure's befehle; we missed all the action!'. Avakian, Marcy, Žižek, Unruhe, Sanders, Maupin, Sims, and Wagenknecht (to say naught of the very one writing this): must all of them die in turn to sate this eternal feud? What a policy, what a movement!
Nay one is satisfied by Brezhnev until the moment is past. Gladsnost and Politstroika, as the treatment of the Stalin Problem indicates, are fundamentally Brezhnevist in their objects and sensibilities, not portrayal to their resemblances' author. I understand well the exciting freedom that emerges in discovering the promises of Comrade Gorbachev, specially with all of the corruption which seems to plague the US Left. When I first dismissed the self-proscription I had placed on myself about all things Glasnost, Perestroika, and Gorbachev, I truly felt a weight of tyrannical gagging of my intellect lift off of my cleared conscience. It was exciting, and was probably similar to how academics felt in exploring the Soviet archives. Gorbachev and ministers, however, did not use this newfound exploration of knowledge responsibly, leading to the outcome that in large regard despoiled the good gains thereto made. And those to the Left of a Brezhnevist stance pointed to this catastrophe to say that all reform is foreordained to cause like ruin.
This struggle, this desire for the liberation of the personal intellect is also influenced by the Protestant Spirit and the Ethic of Individualism, and that is not an entirely bad spirit, by any means. Vanguardism is similar to a certain type of 'Catholic Spirit', if we may speak of one at all, where the morality of any one individual leader is discounted for the reputation of the whole institution. Obviously, from an individual perspective, quietly condoning immoral behaviour is wretchedly unsatisfying for our 'souls' or consciences, what have you. A man will tend to feel as though he has become complicit in the immorality by doing nothing like this. I should argue that such a reaction in man is good, and more communists ought to heed the Protestant Spirit when they see the unseemly.
To recapitulate and summarise, the legacy of the purges is important to critically analyse, but until the return of 'socialist power', whatever this is interpretted to mean, it must be conducted behind closed doors— not necessarily behind closed party doors, but certainly only with comrades. Blaming everything and nothing on Comrade Stalin both arise from laziness, and a disinterest for any number of reasons for grappling with those fraught and cloudy circumstances of Leftist history. There is nay inspired, inerrant Word to instruct on this. The historiography of Stalin, the Party, and the USSR has undergone major changes, quite a few of which may be considered advances or at any rate intriguing innovations.
VI. Miscellanies.
Two small matters to address remain. The severe excesses of the specially opinionated anti-Stalin tendency have spawned a diametrical (or might we say dialectical?) tendency in opposition. This tendency could be called the 'omni-Stalin school', where Comrade Stalin is deified instead of dæmonised. Grover Furr is the most well-known practitioner of this tendency to-day. Whilst he has his place, as the very 'cult of personality' itself was for, in serving as a tool for less advanced, less inquisitive comrades, more advanced ones are well advised to ignore and avoid utilising him. The same care ought to be exercised in Soviet resources of the Stalin period (really any period when it comes to contentious subjects). Furr, Cohen, and Conquest are all stuck, to varying depths, in the Deluge of Stalin-Delusion.
This final matter may prove the most controversial one yet. It is also the most personally subjective. There are two processes which I strongly believe to contribute to the atmosphere and conditions for purges against fellow comrades. The first process is Leftist organising as a whole. It seems to me that the more time is spent in Leftist organising/activism, irrespective of structure, tendency, or form, the higher the propensity for uncourteous and belligerent attitudes, and ultimately behaviour, becomes amongst individual comrades and larger divisions therefrom. Greet the faction, which is the most advanced division that is not innately given to be combative. Oppositions, then tendencies, are the first stages on the path to contestive irreconcilability. Though not nearly a sufficient solution, I never the less propose two helpful measures: comrades must be made to take short but persistent holidays from organising (from all political affairs, really), and comrades who are coming under severe or sustained criticism, specifically if it is coming from a particular group or comrade, ought to be given some reprieve, either organisation-mandated or through the organic initiative of comrades generally.
The second process which contributes to purges is perhaps a particular idealist world-view itself. Obviously this requires some explication. It has been my experience that the particular idealist world-view is used to dogmatically shut down alternative views, and to denounce any heterdox views which contradict majority orthodoxies. I have never quite been able to express this tyrannical inclination or aspect in the particular idealist world-view, but the YouTube video by Shifting Concepts betitled 'Dialectical Logic in the Soviet Union' (here) appears to in part be illuminating the origins of my concerns. Particular idealist Leftists adopt either demeaning and uncomradely forms of collective/particularist individualism, or refuse to defend a specific, genuine/firm position, antagonising those who do. It is ironic that Stalin may in this light perhaps be argued the ultimate student of particular idealism, at the expence of Marx, Engels, and Lenin, though the particular idealists vociferously refuse to so much as discuss the claim in a personally-removed manner. Just as he is the omni-Stalin, the CPSU is already omni-sided; if you should disagree, then you are by nature engaging in anti-dialectical, one-sided reaction. I will say nay more here, until I have finished reading The Communist Postscript and Igal Halfin's works.
In the absolutely worst cases of particular idealist world-views on the Left, idealism is worshipped as an unquestionable heavenly dogma, and dialectical and historical materialism are replaced by theological hermeticism and gnostic mysticism, which seems to me corroborated by Magee's work, myself having only discovered it recently despite my long-standing suspicion, even notion, on this front.
Left-particular idealists are in practise allergic to the Kantian principle of treating man as an end in himself, and seem to be rather ignorant of Kant in general; Kant has by most of them been purged for counter-revolutionary activity to undermine the Party, id est undermining ultra-Leftist ends-meansism. Furthermore, the thesis-antithesis-synthesis model is not Schelling’s, but the much brighter Fichte's, whose model I yet still have modest reservation about. Every Leftist ought to instead study de Spinoza, Kant, Fichte, and Feuerbach, alongside the classics of Marxism, including Colletti and Althusser. Want religion? Get particular idealism or Schelling.
My final point to add is that past comrades can be wrong, and we should not be using the classics as a weapon to stifle innovations, to dissuade comrades from intellectual (including literary and apolitical!) exploration and pursuits.
VII. A Final Word for the Future.
This, in brief, is the project of Gladsnost and Politstroika. If even one comrade is saved from being purged, or even two organisations open dialogue, then these two movements will have proved a success.
Too often Marxists, who should theoretically know better, desire merely to overthrow and deconstruct, which aside from being accelerationist at best, vengeful at worst, and reckless all the same, is un-Marxist. At the other end, there are those slightly more justified Marxists who, recognising (or considering) themselves to be too uneducated or too exhausted, advocate for the strong arm of party, committee/büro, or secretary/premier. As Comrade Stalin said, Marxists are not hoping toward the charity of great men for change.
My point for the above is that many impatient Marxists in the West do not understand that Comrade Brezhnev, and to-day Comrade Xi, are evidence of socialist success. Modern Leftists are more impressed with chaotic and severe struggles betwixt larger than life characters, rejecting the weekly statistical readings at technical committee meetings attended by 'dull', soft-spoken bureaucrats, as representations of good governance in successful socialism. That this good governance has been rejected so purges and intense rivalries have become ubiquitous with ,,successful socialism'' is shameful.
In order to rectify these drastic errors, the Left will have to actually engage with alien questions which do not possess typical dogmas. Gladsnost and Politstroika will necessarily lead to a less monolithic, less ,,faithful'' Left, and indeed, new battle-lines and orthodoxies might be drawn, but necessary this remains. Gladsnost and Politstroika provide us a chance to look into what the business as usual has been, and to evaluate its improvement. I will continue to develop these two programmes and their policies, in the endeavour to strengthen that which is good.
Long live Gladsnost and Politstroika; for Cordialness and Political Upstanding!
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