"The Leninist antagonism to the most essential features of socialism was evident from the very start."

Most of those lefties of my younger years who maintained a romantic view of Lenin, the Soviet Union, Communism, etc.  Those who held the torch, then the feeble candle for those traditional concerns of such people, the ability of Dalton Trumbo to get a movie credit for the scripts he wrote, the innocence of the Rosenbergs, weren't exactly high-brows or scholars.   Though most of them had college credentials, most of them got whatever they knew about such things from self-interested propagandists, magazine scribblers trying to break into or maintain a position in the tiny little market of lefty scribbling or the equally tiny market of lefty electronic distribution of such lore.*  The true believers are the kind of people who, as I've pointed out, believe historical distortion in such products as The Crucible and Inherit the Wind are historically accurate when they are anything but that.  They're not much brighter than those who have gotten their idea of history from shit like Gone With The Wind, The Pony Express or, in more extreme cases of that fascism that has been called "Americanism" "Americanist", Birth of a Nation.  

The short essay by Noam Chomsky I excerpted yesterday could serve as a very good introduction into the reality of the utter corruption of the various American Communist and associated parties, the real damage they have done to the struggle by the real left, those never taking orders and money from "Russian" dictators and carrying water for them, the people who have had no effect in American politics except to discredit the real left and who, in their post-Communist form, are carrying water for the post-Communist gangster Czar of Russia in all the implication of that accusation.  So I'll excerpt the passages from right before the part I excerpted yesterday. 

The terminology of political and social discourse is vague and imprecise, and constantly debased by the contributions of ideologists of one or another stripe. Still, these terms have at least some residue of meaning. Since its origins, socialism has meant the liberation of working people from exploitation. As the Marxist theoretician Anton Pannekoek observed, “this goal is not reached and cannot be reached by a new directing and governing class substituting itself for the bourgeoisie,” but can only be “realized by the workers themselves being master over production.” Mastery over production by the producers is the essence of socialism, and means to achieve this end have regularly been devised in periods of revolutionary struggle, against the bitter opposition of the traditional ruling classes and the ‘revolutionary intellectuals’ guided by the common principles of Leninism and Western managerialism, as adapted to changing circumstances. But the essential element of the socialist ideal remains: to convert the means of production into the property of freely associated producers and thus the social property of people who have liberated themselves from exploitation by their master, as a fundamental step towards a broader realm of human freedom.

The Leninist intelligentsia have a different agenda. They fit Marx’s description of the ‘conspirators’ who “pre-empt the developing revolutionary process” and distort it to their ends of domination; “Hence their deepest disdain for the more theoretical enlightenment of the workers about their class interests,” which include the overthrow of the Red Bureaucracy and the creation of mechanisms of democratic control over production and social life. For the Leninist, the masses must be strictly disciplined, while the socialist will struggle to achieve a social order in which discipline “will become superfluous” as the freely associated producers “work for their own accord” (Marx). Libertarian socialism, furthermore, does not limit its aims to democratic control by producers over production, but seeks to abolish all forms of domination and hierarchy in every aspect of social and personal life, an unending struggle, since progress in achieving a more just society will lead to new insight and understanding of forms of oppression that may be concealed in traditional practice and consciousness.

The Leninist antagonism to the most essential features of socialism was evident from the very start. In revolutionary Russia, Soviets and factory committees developed as instruments of struggle and liberation, with many flaws, but with a rich potential. Lenin and Trotsky, upon assuming power, immediately devoted themselves to destroying the liberatory potential of these instruments, establishing the rule of the Party, in practice its Central Committee and its Maximal Leaders — exactly as Trotsky had predicted years earlier, as Rosa Luxembourg and other left Marxists warned at the time, and as the anarchists had always understood. Not only the masses, but even the Party must be subject to “vigilant control from above,” so Trotsky held as he made the transition from revolutionary intellectual to State priest. Before seizing State power, the Bolshevik leadership adopted much of the rhetoric of people who were engaged in the revolutionary struggle from below, but their true commitments were quite different. This was evident before and became crystal clear as they assumed State power in October 1917.

That is a pattern of virtually every subsequent self-declared Marxist government and a pattern which virtually no Marxist entity in the United States which gained any traction ever seemed to be much bothered by.   The Marxists' largest contribution, by far, to the history of the 20th century was in service to one or another of the strong-man-gangster regimes in other countries.  In the period up to the 1960s, that was almost uniformly, in the West, to Leninism, then Stalinism, with a splinter faction who took the thug Trotsky's part in the power struggle with Stalin (and who, in large numbers took the tiny baby step into capitalist-fascism) then, as Khrushchev discredited Stalin by a minimalist exposure of his crimes against humanity, went on to a devotion to Maoism even as he was matching or outdoing Stalin in committing murder.   

That is what is on display at the fucking Left Forum later this month, that is what has been on display at every one since it evolved out of an earlier "socialist" forum which, mostly, did a lot of that ideological distortion of the meaning of "socialism" that has made the word political poison to the majority of the American electorate.   I think the baggage of that ideological distortion and the damage  to the label has made it an obstacle to the goals of genuine socialism, a better and more just life for us, for economic justice.  Complaining that that distortion is unfair to the label is nothing but a continued hampering of achieving those goals by democratic means and under a different name.  It was one of the greatest revelations of my reading of Marilynne Robinson that she pointed out there were indigenous American paths for achieving such goals, things which are not "socialism" but which will be far more certain to achieve those goals of, by and FOR THE PEOPLE.  When Lincoln used the word "People" he certainly didn't mean the same thing as the word in the names of so many Communist dictatorships.  He delivered liberation, they were gangsters who only sought their own empowerment and enrichment.  

*  I am interested in the role that the cumbersome process of fact checking the claims of such scribblers for most people when that checking had to take the form of looking stuff up in large libraries through the information retrieval by consulting ink on paper, books, bibliographies, card catalogues - going up and down stairs - played in the naive faith of the readers of such claims in the ink on paper magazines and in phonied up theatrical and movie history.   I can guarantee you that having access to online publication of complete texts of primary source documents, easily found, easily searched by the use of search terms has made an incredibly huge difference in my understanding of these things.  If we survive long enough for the regime of ink on paper to give way to effective training of that former mid-brow ersatz intelligentsia, the old myths of the old left are totally unsustainable.  I am very relieved to find that my more intellectual nieces are not as susceptible to buying into that garbage as I was.  Marxism is dead, it's not wanted anywhere where people had a real experience of it.  Those who held its torch here were of most use to those who used them as a foil to attack traditional American liberalism.   Such young people may be more open to the slogan "democratic socialism" but they should never fool themselves that they constitute an effective majority or a margin of the electorate that can swing most elections.  They can't even manage to win an election in Britain where the word has been less damaged and seem to be failing in one place after another in Europe, too.