Could you briefly put forward what revolutionary socialism means for international relations, in concrete terms, in 2007?

Uhhh ... analysis of imperialism as reason for US/British invasion of Iraq. Concept of 'crisis of over-accumulation' for understanding present-day global financial markets. Bonapartism as a tool to analyse Venezuela. Bureaucratic collectivism as conceptual framework to consider dynamics of Chinese society. There's four.

The whole crowd going on about "Islamo-fascism" being the biggest threat we face have a bit of a problem. Namely, that the terrorist threat exacerbated by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan does not parallel the Blitz. If there were suicide bombings being attempted every day in the UK, their argument would be stronger, but fortunately this is not the case. As it stands, climate change and energy security are a bigger threat.

Victor Serge and Leon Trotsky were the first to use the term "totalitarianism," no? So I don't think that Marxists need worry about avoided the term.

Alan Johnson's political conversion has convinced that there's something innately wrong with Shachtmanite Marxism, inasmuch as so many of its adherents turned to the right, keeping "bureaucratic collectivist" theory but dumping "the Third Camp" (this includes Johnson!).

I don't understand how any Marxist can stick with the particulars of BC theory today. It's easy to show that the ruling group in the USSR did not have the attributes of a class -- in property, in inheritance, in security of position, etc. Furthermore, in the USSR this "class" was not overthrown -- it "overthrew" itself!!

Dave. Is that article on Normblog by THE Alan Johnson?

And I dont mean the reporter.

Jason, it was Mussolini and Gentile who are normally said to have been the first to use the word 'totalitarianism' - positively. I think you may find plenty of echoes in the twenties.

In any case Kaminer is just so *wrong* about Hannah Arendt. It's extremely hard to claim her for any 'side'.

In fact her relationship with Marxism is complex. Bleucher, her partner, was a former German Communist Party member (right opposition), who retained some affinity to Marxism and influenced her.

Arendt's whole theory of imperialism - which foreshadowed what she called 'totalitarianism', with its patriotic 'classless' mob, drew on Rosa Luxemberg's views on the reproduction of capital - the need to expand into 'non-capitalist' areas by colonialisation (Arendt's particular turn on this is at the centre of much recent Marxist writings on the topic). Her writing on Nazism and Stalinism (which she very careful not to identify with Lenin's period of leadership), did give them some common features, such as calling them a 'secret societies operating in broad daylight', but again never boiled their nature down to a single essence.

Finally, while Arendt criticised Marxsim (in The Human Condition) for conflating the social with the political and not giving the latter its proper autonomy, she strongly supported workers' councils as a new form of democracy (in the post-first world war uprisings, and Hungary - see On Revolution). Arendt did not back imperialism one itota (her book, Imperialism, shows this, at the very least). She preferred the 'political' American 'revolution' and its constitution to the French 'social' Revolution and its Declaration of the Rights of Man (Arendt was always critical of what we would now call 'liberal universalism'). But, she was scathing about American conformism and the influence of commerce on politics.

The Origins of Totalitarianism is not a simple-minded Cold War tract, a kind of airfix model of 'totalitarianism'. It ferociously attacked the system of fear and concentration camps that existed in Stalinist Russia, and the extermination of the Shoah (and made their differences apparent as well). It contains deep reflection on the nature of propaganda, and political parties, political psychology, imperialism, racialism, and the natrue of freedom. It is not a 'complete' book, and is filled with obvious flaws - a gap in the economics of the Soviet Union (or socialist political economy, apart from Luxemberg's critique she was shallow on the centrepiece of Marx - Das Kapital) being only one of them, as well as the common tendency of its time to generalise wildly about 'mass' society, without much concrete data on what the masses themselves thought. She wasn't too hot on the alternatives to Stalin and Hitler either.

See: Hannah Arendt: for the Love of the World. Young-Bruehel. (2nd Edition 2004).

I am deeply ignorant about the whole American Trotskyist route into Cold War liberalism, or now into neoconsrvatism. It's a culture which I'm afraid is completely alien to me, as a leftist formed by European socialism. Still, mMuch of what Arendt wrote resonates because it comes from that European - not US - context. Regardless of how she has been used, and her faults, Arendt was a brilliant writer, whose principal objective was to make human beings *think* and live their lives in freedom.

I would have said that the events of 1989/90 pretty much confirmed that the bureaurcratic collectivist analysis of the Stalinist states was correct: certainly much nearer the mark than any sort of "workers state" theory or the incoherance os any of the multitude of "state capitalist" theories.

Trotsky was virtually a bureacratic collectivist by time of his death.

Btw: there is nothing I can see about the bureaucratic collectivist analysis that draws its supporters to liberalism or the right: plenty of "workers statists" and Stalinists went over to the right (as recorded by James P. Cannon in gloating detail in "The History of American Trotskyism" and elsewhere) and here in the UK we have a very long list of ex-IS/SWP and SLL/WRP people who've ended up on the right (eg Roger Rosewell).

Jim Denham wrote:

here in the UK we have a very long list of ex-IS/SWP and SLL/WRP people who've ended up on the right (eg Roger Rosewell).

good point

wasn't Jim Fritzpatrick in the SWP?

also, I heard that Peter Hitchens was a mouthy student SWPers as well?

Both Peter and Chris, if truth were told, Mod: plus a lot of other establishment figures, liberals, New Labourites and right-wingers, too numerous to mention. And as Alan Johnson's route from the AWL to liberalism went via the SWP, I refuse to take any crap about Shachtmanism being a conduit to the right, from that shower of ignoramouses.

To Jim D: Shachtman's analysis made out that the Stalinist regimes were here for a long time, they were a new form of class society. They lasted but a few decades -- 1929 to 1991 in the Soviet Union; 1947-48 (roughly) to 1989 in Eastern Europe; 1949 to sometime in the 1980s I reckon for China. We still have of course Cuba and North Korea, but they are (tiddly) exceptions that test the rule.

I know that Pablo rabbited on about centuries of degenerated workers' states, and other postwar ortho-Trots saw the SU as a dynamic challenger to capitalism (so did Western commentators in the 1950s and 1960s), but Trotsky, for all the problems with his 'workers' state' line, did see the SU as a temporary feature in history.

I think that the Shachtmanite theory did play a part (not the main part) in the degeneration of many of that current from Marxism to social democracy and worse because it saw Stalinism as a long-lasting parallel to capitalism, one that organically couldn't afford to the working class what we have gained in at least some capitalist countries. This gave an excuse to support capitalism against capitalism, if one abandoned the Third Camp of the working class.

The real question here is why the AWL decided to adopt Shachtmanism after the collapse of the Soviet Union refuted one of its main theories. I guess the lack of a Shachtmanite group in Britain did offer it a distinct niche in the marketplace of the British left. How much use that will be in the AWL's attempts to become the leading Marxist current here, I wouldn't like to say.

Paul,
Seven decades is quite respectable in term of the longevity of ruling classes.
You say "I think that the Schactmanite theory did play a part...in the degeneration of many...from Marxism to social democracy and worse because it saw Stalinism as a a long-lasting parallel to capitalism, one that organically couldn't afford to the working class waht we have gained in at least some capitalist countries":
Paul: which part of that description of Shachtmanism is *wrong*, according to you? Or is it necessary to deny reality in order to remain a socialist?
Btw: the AWL's decision to "adopt Shachtmanism", as you put it (I presume you mean our adoption of the bureaucratic collectivist analysis of the Stalinist states) took place well *before* the collapse of the Soviet Union - contary to what you say. And the collapse of the USSR and the other Stalinist states, rather decisively confirmed the bureaucratic collectivist analysis: i'd be most intersted to hear how, exactly you think the collapse of state Stalinism "refuted" it?

Jason.S "in the USSR this "class" was not overthrown -- it "overthrew" itself!!"

No it didn't, the dominant section of the bureaucracy in the USSR broke the power of the Communist Party, but it didn't abolish its own privileged position.
On the contrary; it freed itself from the remaining political restrictions preventing it from accumulating capital and became even *more* privileged.
Trotsky's quote about the bureaucracy as the "organ of the world bourgeoisie within the workers' state" floats spontaneously into consciousness at this point.
When it became clear that all this was leading to a massive flight of capital and the third-world-isation of Russia, the more "patriotic" elements within the bureaucracy reasserted themselves and lurched back to a form of stalinist nationalism, which is prepared to tolerate capitalism as long as its Russian Capitalism.

Jim Denham: "Trotsky was virtually a bureacratic collectivist by time of his death."

Other than a few speculative passages concerning the future evolution of Stalinism and Fascism, there absolutely is no evidence for this assertion, especially in terms of the position Trotsky took at the outset of World War 2. It's quite clear from his writings at the time that Trotsky was a "Soviet Defencist", while being fiercely opposed to Stalinism.

It's interesting to note that the supposedly increasingly "totalitarian" Venezuelan media had this interesting TV programme on Trotsky's legacy yesterday:

http://www.marxist.com/caracas-leon-trotsky-assassination200807.htm

Alex -- you're largely saying what I was trying to say. If the rulers of "bureaucratic collectivist" states were a class, then according to Marxist theory, the end of BC society should have required this class's overthrow. But it wasn't overthrown in the USSR.

The late lamented Julius Jacobson, who held to the BC analysis, once wrote:

'In the Russian Republic -- as in most nations of the dismembered USSR -- there is the anomaly, tragic and farcical, of leading elements of the former Communist ruling class, driven by personal and social instincts of survival, mauling each other as they scramble and strain to self-metamorphose into the executive committee and financial elite of an artificially created and militantly anti-Communist bourgeoisie. A unique kind of one-dimensional “class struggle” in which a ruling class is fiercely fighting to overthrow itself.' (New Politics, Winter 1995.)

But this makes no sense in Marxist terms. A ruling class of one sort can't just transform into a ruling class of another sort.

Anyway, I don't know of very many ortho-Trots who moved out of socialism entirely. Can anyone name names?

(For the record, I hold more-or-less to Hillel Ticktin's analysis of Stalinism, not to the orthodox Trotskyist version.)

Jason, you could write a book about ortho-trots ending up crossing the floor.

I'll start: John Ross and the Redgraves.

Jason: where, exactly, do you want to start on "orthodox Trots" who "crossed the floor": Britain or America? For the US (as I said previously) read Cannon's "History of American Trotskyism"...and since then consider such more recent names as Lyn Marcus - a.k.a Lyndon La Rouche - (now not far off fascism), Bernie Cornfield (capitalist fraudster) and Paul Wolfowitz (in his youth, as I understand it, a member of the youth secytion of the Cannonite "orthodox" SWP)... the list could go on. In contrast Hal Draper and his comrades stood firm on the revolutioanray left.

In Britain, one could cite (in addition to Ross and the Redgraves - already cited by pmg), Derek Hatton, John Bird (the founder of the Big Issue -not a bad man, but now clearly part of the ruling class)and, probably most importantly, Jock Haston, who ended up as a sidekick of Frank Chapple in the EPPTU - again, not personally a bad man, but his "orthodox" Trotskyism didn't prevent him becoming a servant of the most right-wing forces ever to become a force within the British labour movement. I have limited myself here, to "orthox" (ie "workers statist") Trots, and not gone on to any of the multitude of ex-IS/SWP'ers who have gone over to Liberalism, New Laourism, the Tories and worse, over the years...

Alex Nichols: I haven't the time or inclination to go into detail here (but would be willing to on a future occasion), about Trotsky's latter-day moves towards bureacratic collectivism, but would recommend my comrade Sean Matgamna's book "The Fate of the Russian Revolution - lost texts of Critical Marxism Vol 1", which deals with this matter in detail and cites all sources.
Sean comments: "If we take Trotsky's final assessment of the Comintern and of Stalinist expansion in 1939-40 together with his summation of the class content of the 1928-30 struggle in the USSR, they add up to an enormous step towards the idea that the bureaucracy is a new ruling class".

But there's a huge gap between recognising the bureaucracy as a new ruling class, and seeing the mode of production as 'bureaucratic collectivist'. It's equally plausible (and equally unprovable) that Trotsky was moving towards a 'state capitalist' analysis.

And seven decades is quite respectable in term of the longevity of ruling classes? Hardly - individual members of the ruling class, perhaps. But the British capitalist class has been around since at least 1750, the feudal ruling classes (cue lengthy debate) had at least a seven hundred year innings - even the Romans managed a lot better than seven decades. Though of course if the Romans hadn't withdrawn their troops so hastily we might have avoided the Dark Ages...

Dave - how on earth does the 'conceptual framework of bureaucratic collectivism' help us understand China today? Since when is the mass production of consumer goods for the international market a hallmark of bc?

Another Trot who's crossed over is Colin Meade. I used to be very friendly with him back in the 70's and lost touch. He ended up working for the USec in Paris in the '80's, but now I see he blogs (under his own name) as an avowed neo-conservative. It amazes me, I can understand how you can be disilllusioned with socialism (or rather whether it will ever be realisable) but to actually flip over into actually supporting the greatest forces of imperialism in the world, like you've forgotten everything you ever learnt, is honestly incredible to me.

I remember Colin. I was in the same South London Trot cell as him. He always seemed more or less on USec message.

I frequently ponder the idiocy of the left myself. But however bad the left gets, it won't provide an excuse for flopping over to the right.

Sean comments: "If we take Trotsky's final assessment of the Comintern and of Stalinist expansion in 1939-40 together with his summation of the class content of the 1928-30 struggle in the USSR, they add up to an enormous step towards the idea that the bureaucracy is a new ruling class".

Well you'll have to come up with an arcane Trotsky quote from after January 24th 1940 to support the argument that this was already a fait-accompli by then. It be more impressive if Matgamna had come up with one before 1991 too.

Trotsky clearly thought that the USSR had overthrown capitalism in the Baltic States and Eastern Poland by 1940. (see "From a Scratch to a Gangrene", his polemic with Shachtman and Abern.)

Although he believed that the overall trajectory of the bureaucracy was towards capitalist restoration, he also said that where it achieved military victories, it would be impelled to overthrow it.
That followed from his analysis that the bureaucracy had its roots in a workers' state, which in turn determined his attitude to the Second World War.
One can argue with the timescale he proposed, but prediction is always fraught with difficulty.
Postdiction though, is generally worthless.

I guess my knowledge British Trotskyism isn't as complete as I thought it was. And I'd forgotten about Lyn Marcus/Lyndon LaRouche coming out of the SWP.

Wolfowitz was a Cannonite? Really? First I've heard of it. And I thought Vanessa and Colin Redgrave were still leftists.

I thought John Ross ended up more-or-less a Stalinist -- or is this a different John Ross? I'm used to ortho-Trots drifting towards Stalinism -- cf. Sam Marcy and his Workers World Party in the US, Socialist Action in the UK.

I didn't know what happened to Haston after he left "the Club." I know Felix Morrow -- one of Haston's co-thinkers on the FI's sober post-WWII wing -- left the movement and moved severely to the right, though in the 1970s he moved again to the left.

By the way, wasn't Hannah Arendt a cousin of Walter Benjamin?

I never realized that a crank like Lyndon LaRouche was an ex-Trot ?

(from Public Eye)

"Tim Wohlforth

I met Lyndon LaRouche Jr. when we were both members of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), the main Trotskyist group in the U.S. and about as far left as you could be in those days. I was an SWP member from 1957 until 1964, and so was LaRouche. At that time he went by his party name, Lyn Marcus. He told me that he had visited India as a soldier at the end of World War II and the revolutionary ferment he had witnessed there convinced him to become a radical. After a short period around the Communist Party, he joined the Trotskyists in Boston. When I first knew him, LaRouche was inactive in the SWP and was earning a living as an economic consultant in the shoe industry. "

he's a very strange person, see http://www.nizkor.org/ftp.cgi/people/l/ftp.py?people/l/larouche.lyndon/larouche.010
http://www.publiceye.org/larouche/

Seriously state capitalism is nonsense, and its equally silly to suggest that Trotsky was moving towards a state capitalist analysis. If you take say Harman's description of capitalism in this issue of ISJ and compare it with Cliff's original description of state capitalism, then the two simply have nothing in common.
tbh I don't really care what you call the old USSR etc. given that they no longer exist, but I should point out that even the IMF/World Bank did not consider them capitalist and described them fairly accurately in my view, as centrally planned economies.
What's important to understand is the effect of capitalist restoration on the period today. Clearly if these states were already capitalist, then capitalism couldn't be restored. The fact that capitalism was restored is the reason why the world economy was able to escape the stagnation of the 1970s/80s - which in turn, when combined with the defeats of that period - explains the isolation of the left today.
It's all perfectly obvious really.

Has capitalism been restored, though? Not successfully, I'd say. Recommended reading:

http://www.solidarity-us.org/node/461/print

Well the issue is successfully for who? Obviously not for the working class, which is after all to be expected given the overthrow of planning in favour of production for profit - but successfully for the capitalists? Without a doubt.
The article totally fails to prove its major assertion that Russia is disintegrating. It palpably isn't. In fact quite the opposite, Putin has through a series of state capitalist renationalisations of major raw materials and industrial sectors, overseen the re-integration of the Russian (now) capitalist economy, on the back of the surge of production going on world wide. Such that Russian GDP has grown from 2002 $344 bn to 2007 $1181.
What's more this surge of the emerging capitalist economies has been a general phenomenon on such a scale that it has dragged the entire world economy out of stagnation - with this year the longest sustained period of growth since the 1960s.
OK there's been a bit of a roller coaster on the old financial markets over the last few weeks - but far from proving the fragility of world capitalism it proves it ability to overcome even such a massive crisis as the collapse of the sub-prime sector.

``I frequently ponder the idiocy of the left myself. But however bad the left gets, it won't provide an excuse for flopping over to the right.''

If you want to leave, retreat to a position of ``enlightened skepticism'' seems appropriate, but most folk seem to find this a hard stance to stay with.

The only John Ross I know of is the one that lives in Mexico, and writes for The Texas Observer and Counterpunch. He might best be described as being on the left but also being in the tradition of Ambrose Bierce.

Well Paul, as I say, it is only Marxism and neoconservatism that offer coherant paradigms. It's kinda shit or bust.

"The only John Ross I know of is the one that lives in Mexico, and writes for The Texas Observer and Counterpunch. He might best be described as being on the left but also being in the tradition of Ambrose Bierce."

Different John Ross.
The one referred to previously was formerly a leader of the IMG and is currently an economic advisor to Ken Livingstone.
I'm don't think his current salary levels indicate a conversion to "neo-Conservatism", although there does seem to be evidence of bureaucratic degeneration in his group "Socialist Action".

Alex (Nichols): You state that Sean Matgamna's argument that (Trotsky was moving towards a bureaucratic collectivist analysis by the time of his death), would "be more impressive if Matgamna had come up with one (ie: a quote from Trotsky-JD) before 1991". Do I take that as an admission, on your part, that the collapse of Stalinism was indeed, a vindication of the bureaucratic collectivist analysis?

As for "arcane Trotsky quotes" to back up this proposition, I don't think Trotsky's famous polemic against the obscure Bruno "R" (Rizzi - virtually unknown, as opposed to Shachtman, so why did Trotsky chose to polemicise against the less significant figure?), "The USSR in War", can properly be described as "arcan": in it Trotsky concedes most of the "new class" case (claiming that it adds nothing to the programme of the Fourth International (ie, not arguing that it is *wrong*): he then goes on, famously (in educated Trot cicles, anyway) to list the circumstances in a hypothetical future, in which the stalinist bureaucracy would have to be recognised as having been "already transformed" into a new ruling class: all those circumstances would be met, as was clear after Trotsky's death. The Old Man had written down a description of his own, never-to-be-fulfilled, political evolution. It's there for us in black and white.

I wrote a reply to Jim Denham's last point which now seems to have disappeared. Any reason?

People ought to read the article he quotes because it proves him wrong.

Reply to Jim D: Six and a bit decades (1929-91) not seven, but I'll let that go) for a ruling élite is not at all long. But it's not just longevity. Shachtman and many others (right, left and centre in politics) saw the Soviet Union as a new form of class society, one that had a real chance of paralleling and even overtaking capitalism.

The reality is different. What we can call 'High Stalinism' (massive repression, rapid hot-house growth, low personal consumption) lasted under 25 years (1929 to 1953), then a period of reform Stalinism under Khrushchev and then Brezhnev (much less repression, slower growth, growing personal consumption), leading to a final period (late 1970s, 1980s) of deepening stagnation.

The crisis of Stalinism was terminal; there was no way out within the confines of Stalinism. One could go towards genuine socialism, or try to reintroduce the market, which is what the élite has tried to do (naturally enough from its point of view). Capitalism will always find a way out of a crisis of profitability, however barbaric the methods. Stalinism suffered from a tendency for diminishing physical return on investment; as industry became more sophisticated, the physical return tended proportionally to decline.

We can now see that after no more than 50 years Stalinism had tipped into a terminal decline. And in Eastern Europe and China, it lasted a lot less. This is historically very short indeed; to me this shows that we did not have a new form of society. Rather, the Soviet socio-economic system was an historical accident, the result of a workers' state being isolated in a backward country, and a new élite trying to modernise the country in a hot-house fashion. It had but a short life in front of it. That may well not have been clear in the 1940s or 1950s, but was clear enough by the 1980s or 1990s.

As you can imagine, I go along with Hillel Ticktin's analysis, which I reckon explains the rise and decline of Stalinism much better than Shachtman's attempt at it.

Dr Paul

Dr Paul wrote:

The crisis of Stalinism was terminal

no doubt it was

but isn't it rather strange that out of all the collective political pundits on the Left, Right or wherever, few, if any predicted, beforehand, the nature or timing of the break-up of the Soviet Union in the form of any detailed analysis

of course, there were people who said "Stalinism will collapse" as a mantra, but that doesn't really count

for many Stalinism seemed, if a bit shaky, solidly embedded and with the benefit of hindsight we can see why that was an illusion, but the break-up was a shock to many

and if we need any confirmation of this, we just have to look at the Left's (contemporary) reaction to it, without employing hindsight, in the early 1990s

after events everyone is wise, but throughout the 1970s and 1980s you would be hard put to find a political paper or briefing which seriously argue that the USSR and Eastern bloc countries would disintegrate shortly (leaving aside generalised statements of "they will collapse under their own contradictions", which had been heard for decades and don't really count as analysis)

so all in all, the collapse of the Soviet Union was a shock even to the most violent of anti-Stalinists

Alex

If your comment disappeared, that is almost certainly down to collateral damage in my ongoing war against spam. Apologies.

No legitimate comment has ever been deleted for political reasons in the history of this blog. The only house rule is no crude apolitical abuse.

Please feel free to post your argument again.

Dave

I don't know what Hillel Ticktin's analysis of the collapse of the USSR is, but the periodisation and argumentation described by Paul seems pretty good to me,notwithstanding my adherence to Trostky.
I think personally this is basically a historical question as these states no longer exist. I think the key is recognising these states were not capitalist and therefore, when capitalism was restored betwen 1989-91, this provided the material basis for globalisation and for capitalism to escape the stagnation of the 1970s/80s.
Ticktin's analysis of contemporary Russian society, just seems out of date to me, arguing that there's no labour market, wages aren't paid and such like, which certainly characterised the transition period, but aren't really correct today.
There's a good report by Deutsche Bank on it here;

http://www.dbresearch.com/PROD/DBR_INTERNET_EN-PROD/PROD0000000000214153.pdf

Re Modernity's posting. Yes, the collapse of the Soviet Union took practically everyone by surprise. Mick Cox, a colleague of Hillel Ticktin at Critique, edited a collection of articles on this, and he makes that very point (Rethinking the Soviet Collapse, London, 1998). I'll have to re-read Ticktin's articles in Critique to see what he wrote pre-1991, but I'm pretty sure that he felt that the SU was on the way out at some point or another, and (in my opinion) he had the analysis that understood its decline.

What is amusing is that the Cold War people saw the SU as, on the one hand, an impossible socio-economic formation and, on the other, a mortal threat to the West. You can see in some Cold War material the 'stopped clock' analysis: the system is doomed to fail, it cannot work, even at the height of Soviet advance in the 1950s; whilst its growth at that time was seen as an economic and military threat. It's amusing (and I thought it funny at the time) to see right-wingers in the 1980s -- as late as that -- seeing the SU as a looming threat to Western civilisation.

On the left, there was a strong tendency by anti-Stalinists to overestimate the capability of the SU. Look at orthodox Trotskyist publications in the 1950s, Tom Kemp and Ernest Mandel rabbiting on about how the SU will soon outstrip the USA. Isaac Deutscher was even more positive. Some state capitalist adherents (especially Tony Cliff)saw the SU as the ultimate development of capitalism. Such views continued after then, albeit some of them with simultaneous predictions of imminent problems.

I have done a detailed analysis of the various viewpoints on the SU during 1929-41 (hopefully out soon as a book), and what is disturbing is that despite the availability of far greater amounts of information and (in respect of the Cold War analysts) funding, the actual quality of analysis of the SU post-1945 was not much better than that of the period I studied in depth, when information was far less forthcoming. The shock produced by the collapse of East Europe and the Soviet Union 1989-91 is an expression of that lack of analytical rigour.

Dr Paul

[last post seem to vanish?]

Dr Paul,

I am glad we agree that it was a shock to most, and I think your point about "is an expression of that lack of analytical rigour" is good

but isn't it all more surprising when the Soviet Union was the focus of so many people's attentions, and in particular those on the Left?

concerning Ticktin's vs. Shachtman's analysis, surely it would be as easy to explain by considering that Shachtman did his analysis many years before Ticktin and may not have had access to the breadth of information, etc that Ticktin had?

again as Shachtman's analysis was contemporary with the development of the Soviet Union, he was at disadvantage, whereas my impression is that Ticktin's view was shaped by hindsight and more available information, so would benefit from it and that might help explain any disparity between the two

To Modernity: Yes, Shachtman and the many others who accepted the idea that the Soviet Union represented a new form of society, or (to put it another way) a new mode of production, were around at a time when the Soviet socio-economic formation had only just come into being -- the First Five Year Plan took off in earnest in 1929. Many people, left, right and centre politically, thought the world was heading into a statified future.

The dynamics (or lack of them) of the Soviet socio-economic formation could, I reckon, only be seen once the initial period was over and indeed only when the system went into decline. An analogy is that Marx could not have written Capital 25 or 30 years previously, as the laws of motion of capitalism could not have been ascertained. So Ticktin did have the advantage of seeing the system as it went into decline. He also lived there for some time, I believe in the late 1960s, and saw how inefficient and wasteful it was compared to advanced capitalism.

What is remarkable is that many observers, not least the Cold War school, were taken by surprise by every change in the SU. De-Stalinisation, the Sino-Soviet split, Glasnost came as a shock. They could not see that such things were possible until they took place.

There was also a tendency, typified by Isaac Deutscher, who felt that the Soviet system was reformable, that enlightened elements in the élite and mass pressure from below would push the system towards a democratic form of socialism. This was far too optimistic; they greatly overestimated the possibility of change, just as the Cold Warriors underestimated the possibility of change.

Shachtman got it wrong, but his error can be understood. What I can't understand are those who adopted Shachtmanism when the SU was clearly in a state of decay.

Dr Paul

Dr Paul,

They could not see that such things were possible until they took place.

I think maybe because these events didn't follow pre-set patterns, which people expected? rigidity of thought?

I'd be interested in reading some of Ticktin's work

it seems that only bits of the journal (http://www.critiquejournal.net/ ) that Ticktin edits is on-line, and not the back copies

perhaps when you next converse with Prof. Ticktin or his colleagues you might suggest to them that they bring their journal into the 21st century and put complete back copies on-line for anyone to access?

I appreciate that's a bit much to ask, but if Prof. Ticktin and Critique's contributors really want Marxist theory and their to become more widespread and relevant, then Critique will have to make their work more accessible, on the web