John Hollingsworth:
>While definitely not a Stalinist, or a Trotskyist, or an idealist for that
>matter, I don't see what is idealist in analyzing things "in terms of the
>class struggle".
>
>There are structures of power that transcend the particular manifestation
>of power held by individuals. Clearly this is based upon their positions
>as capitalists, workers, bureaucrats, etc. within the current "order of
>power".
>
>To think that all history is made by individuals, such as Hitler or Stalin,
>is to overlook the historical conditions and political cultures from which
>those individuals rise to power.
I have said something foolish. I would like to pretend that it was because
I wanted to get people who are lurking out there in the cybernetic swamp
back on the list, but in all honesty, I can't. It was merely foolish, said
because I wanted to get back at Eva because she referred to something I said
as "a load of xyz***!!!". So, I thought, what can I say to her that is
equally insulting? What label can I use to put her in her place? Well, why
not call her an idealist? That would surely do it.
I myself am an idealist, but a fallen one. I've lived through much of this
century and see it as an era of betrayal. At one time I knew a lot about
Stalin, and Lenin and was really pretty good at Marxian economics. I read
my first book about Stalin when I was about eleven - not a book, really,
more of a pulp magazine written by a leftist writer named Dyson Carter. How
I admired the great man! What hope for the future! At about that time, my
older brother worked in a gypsum plant in Winnipeg, and a lot of his
co-workers were communists, bursting with pride at what was being
accomplished in the Soviet Union. We used to buy technicolour magazines
called "Soviet Union Today" which showed happy peasants dancing in the
fields, rosy cheeked "Young Pioneers" marching into beautiful schools and
happy health clinics, and of course Stakhanovite workers having medals
pinned on their proud chests. As a university student at the beginning of
the Cold War, I attended clandestine meetings, lights low and blinds drawn,
feeling absolutely certain that our side, the capitalist side, was wrong,
and their side, the side of the peasants and workers, was right. It was not
only Russia that I was sure of, but having read Edgar Snow, having gloried
in the long march, I also marveled at what Chinese peasants and workers were
accomplishing under Mao and Chou. Even in Korea, "they" were right and "we"
were wrong.
I'm not quite sure of when I lost my virginity. I remember Stalin's death,
and feeling that a great being had passed into history, but not before he
had nobly set a course for the world that would last at least a millennium.
So it must have been after that. Perhaps it began when the leadership which
followed Stalin - Molotov, Malenkov and Beria - began knocking each other
off. Perhaps Kruschev's speeches on the cult of the personality and on how
so much power should never again be invested in one individual began some
kind of osmotic process in my brain. I don't know how or when it happened,
but over the years I became hardened, and - yes indeed - very cynical about
the paths that Russian and China had taken.
I do agree with both Eva and John that things can be analyzed and understood
in terms of the class struggle. I myself still at times look at the world
that way. The class struggle has been going on for a very long time. In
the advanced economies of the west it has resulted in a compromise in which
the rights and proscriptions of both workers and capitalists are elaborately
defined by laws and institutions. Where, in the west, it continues in its
rawest and most antagonistic form, it usually boils down to a struggle
between those who are included and those who are excluded from the
advantages of the laws and institutions - blacks in the case of the US, who
comprise just over 10% of the total population but make up over 40% of the
prison population, or aboriginal people in Canada who fare similarly. Where
there is an elaborate system of laws and institutions and a long history of
due process, as in the west or Japan, I would agree that "structures of
power transcend ... the particular manifestation of power held by
individuals" and that conditions exist which enable capitalists, workers,
bureaucrats, etc., to counter each other's excesses. Even the sexual
excesses of presidents can come under powerful scrutiny. However, long
histories of due process are still very much the exception in the world.
Those that existed in pre-colonial times have been obliterated and often
replaced by something that is a mockery of how both democracy and the rule
of law should function.
My point is that we cannot know whether people are either naturally good or
evil. All we know is that many are self-serving and that, as my friend
said, power corrupts. What we have learned - or some of us have - is that
we cannot trust our leaders, and that is why we must circumscribe their
behaviour by laws and process. Where there is no rule of law, where there
are few widely accepted and time-nurtured democratic institutions, the
situation is ripe for despotism.
I know that I keep referring to Stalin ad nauseam. But I do so because he
represents the great betrayal of Twentieth Century idealism. Ever so many
people wanted to believe that what was happening in Russia during the early
to mid-decades of the century was the creation of an ideal society, a place
in which people of all classes and backgrounds worked for the common good.
This was a farce, and Stalin knew it, but he fed and perpetuated it because
it served his interests. Instead of a classless society of free
individuals, he created a rigid and repressive society based on fear, exile,
torture and murder. Apologists have excused this by saying that this is how
industrialization and modernization had to be done in Russia, but I find
this unacceptable.
So here I am, a one time idealist who has become something close to being a
cynic. If I believe in anything it is in the power of democratically
established laws and the circumscription of leadership. Whenever I return
to Canada from travel abroad, I thank my lucky stars that I don't have to
trust my political leaders because they have to obey the same laws as I do.
Ed Weick
