Another useful piece of gossip. It is nice to have all the positions
of all the different groups on 1991 in one piece, for a referent.
The AWL Shachtmanites, from their consistently counterrevolutionary
POV, have a great time with the inconsistencies of the various
allegedly trotskyist centrists and reformists who have made fools of
themselves over the most im****tant event since WWII, the collapse of
the Soviet Union.
I will comment below about how they deal--or don't deal--with the
group I like, the Spartacists.
>...
> The strict logic of the "degenerated workers' state" formula should
> imply some sup****t for the coup as the only visible attempt to check
> or halt the drive to capitalism. Yet - as far as I know - only one
> tiny splinter of the Trotskyist movement drew that conclusion clearly.
> The "Bolshevik Tendency" a splinter from the Spartacist League,
> *****sed the coup as an attempt by "a section of the rapidly
> disintegrating Stalinist bureaucracy... to strike against the
> principal forces of capitalist restoration." (Quoted in Workers'
> Vanguard 27/09/91).
>
> The Spartacist League itself - a small group, but representing the
> fraction of the "Trotskyist" spectrum most fervent about "defending
> the workers' states" - remonstrated that the coup programme "comes
> down to perestroika minus glasnost: the introduction of the market but
> not so fast, and shut up." (Workers' Vanguard 30.8.91).
>
Sounds about right.
> That *****sment - shared by most of the Trotskyist factions - would
> imply opposition to the coup. But in fact the Spartacist League was
> distressed at the defeat of the coup.
As readers can probably guess, my POV on this is parallel to that of
the Spartacists.
Was the coup a good thing? Obviously not! It was precisely the coup
which precipitated the collapse of the Soviet State and the triumph of
Yeltsin. Had it not happened, the Soviet state would have limped along
a little longer, and there would have been more time to recreate a
workers revolutionary movement of opposition to capitalist
restoration, before the feces hit the fan.
Once it happened however, the main enemy, as Mao liked to put it, was
Yeltsin not the pathetic drunken coupists, who had not the least idea
of what they were doing.
>
> August 27 - The working people of the Soviet Union, and indeed the
> workers of the world, have suffered an unparalleled disaster... Soviet
> workers are facing a disaster of catastrophic pro****tions: every gain
> for which they, their parents and grandparents sacrificed is on the
> chopping block...
Now, 15 years later, is there anybody who can seriously deny that this
was the absolute truth? If so, they have absolutely no conception of
what has been going on in the Soviet Union ever since. Even the AWL
people do not dare to directly polemize against this obviously
truthful and accurate statement.
>
> As the crowd of yuppies, students and assorted Russian nationalists,
> including fascists and priests, gathered at the start of the coup
> outside the Russian parliament, Yeltsin's "White House", a call on
> Moscow workers to clean out this counter-revolutionary rabble was in
> order. Yet the coup plotters did not mobilise the workers...
> " (Workers' Vanguard, 30/08/91.)
>
> All other would-be Trotskyist groups - with two bizarre exceptions, as
> we shall see - opposed the coup. They then faced a dilemma: didn't
> sup****t for the anti-coup movement mean sup****t for a counter-
> revolution which was destroying the "workers' state" and replacing it
> by capitalism?
Yup.
> And why did the "workers' state" have no defenders but
> a ragged crew of old Brezhnevite bureaucrats - or maybe not even them,
> since most agreed that the coup-makers did not differ fundamentally on
> economic policy from Gorbachev?...
This very im****tant question was answered quite definitively by the
Spartacists in the theoretical articles dealing with with this precise
question in Spartacist No. 47-48, spring 1993 I think it was. This has
been discussed here on apst in the past.
Do the AWL not deal with this in this lengthy gossip piece because
they are unfamiliar with the Spartacist arguments? Of course not. It
is because they cannot answer them.
-jh-
|
