From: Paul Zarembka (zarembka@BUFFALO.EDU)
Date: Wed Jul 18 2007 - 23:34:18 EDT
Ah, but what of Kronstadt, a focus Brendel's critique in the forwarded
chapter?
Paul
--On Wednesday, July 18, 2007 11:23 PM +0100 Paul Cockshott
<wpc@DCS.GLA.AC.UK> wrote:
> Jurrian
> --------
>
> The first Soviet government came out of a situation of war chaos, in
> which people were dying like flies, but people forget this, and get
> disappointed that a "pure workers state" corresponding to its true
> concept didn't arise. But if that is your reading of history, then I
> don't think you'll be much good at making history. In that case, you're
> in for a lot of disappointments, because real history just won't
> correspond to your concepts. It's so easy to allot praise and blame, long
> after critical events testing human beings to the maximum have happened,
> but really it gets in the way of understanding what objectively speaking
> was a success and what was a failure, and why that was. Then, despite the
> beauty of your idea, you don't learn much from history at all.
>
>
> Paul
> ----
> Bravo!
>
> that echoes Roosevelt:"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who
> points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could
> have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the
> arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives
> valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is
> no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great
> enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause;
> who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and
> who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly,
> so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew
> neither victory nor defeat."
>
> Paul Cockshott
>
> www.dcs.gla.ac.uk/~wpc
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: OPE-L on behalf of Jurriaan Bendien
> Sent: Wed 7/18/2007 9:40 PM
> To: OPE-L@SUS.CSUCHICO.EDU
> Subject: [OPE-L] Cajo Brendel
>
> I kinda like Brendel, he was a good man, a good communist, I regret not
> meeting him before he passed away, but I still don't agree with many of
> his points. I think a worker's state did exist in the immediate aftermath
> of the 1917 insurrection, for better or worse, and in fact Brendel
> himself provides evidence for it. And for example, Deutscher and the late
> Mandel were also critical of Trotsky's militarisation-of-labour strategy
> (actually Trotsky shot himself in the foot with it, since lateron, when
> he sought to rally the workers against bureaucratisation, they remembered
> his militarisation schemes and his opponents called attention to it
> again).
>
> A lot of this left-communist discussion is ludicrously out of touch with
> the raw situation pertaining at the time, which any leader had to grasp,
> to get anywhere. When you are confronted with problems of mass famine,
> economic dislocation and threats or acts of foreign invasion, you have to
> do something, and do it quick, and if you don't do it, there are
> consequences. And if you are fighting a military war, you cannot very
> well ask the enemy "if they will please consent to play by your own
> rules" in the interest of promoting soviet democracy! I mean, I am not a
> warlike person as anyone knows, I like nothing better than a bit of
> peace, but I do claim to have a basic understanding of what a war is.
>
> The first Soviet government came out of a situation of war chaos, in
> which people were dying like flies, but people forget this, and get
> disappointed that a "pure workers state" corresponding to its true
> concept didn't arise. But if that is your reading of history, then I
> don't think you'll be much good at making history. In that case, you're
> in for a lot of disappointments, because real history just won't
> correspond to your concepts. It's so easy to allot praise and blame, long
> after critical events testing human beings to the maximum have happened,
> but really it gets in the way of understanding what objectively speaking
> was a success and what was a failure, and why that was. Then, despite the
> beauty of your idea, you don't learn much from history at all.
>
> Jurriaan
>
>
************************************************************************
(Vol.23) THE HIDDEN HISTORY OF 9-11-2001 "a benchmark in 9/11 research"
(Vol.24) TRANSITIONS IN LATIN AMERICA AND IN POLAND AND SYRIA
Research in Political Economy, P.Zarembka,ed, Elsevier hardback
********************* http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/PZarembka
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