The main point I've gotten from Slavoj Zizek Presents Trotsky: Terrorism and Commumism is that there is an important problem to be solved regarding the transition from a capitalist to a socialist/communist/Marxist society.
The classic presentation of this problem can be stated in terms of the recent health care debate.
The most intelligent, reasonable president, obligated to the rich and powerful that funded and backed his campaign, was elected after the last one was perceived as a total fuck up.
And what was Obama met with, after winning out over Mccain? A sense of renewal, of hope, and covering up of the public's complicity in the previous regime's crimes. And on the other side, we had a mobilization of politically ignorant, marginalized bastards of John Birch, who were manipulated into viewing this utter gentleman and steward of capitalism, who was willing to reform it so that it might last longer and hurt less it's participants, as a socialist, antichrist, muslim, savage, atheist, and non-citizen.
Some on the left called Bush a fascist, but that wasn't quite the party line of the democrats. And Bush did take steps, along with Cheney and others they hired into their administration, to violate the rights of people they decided were bad, and the rights of Americans in general. They advocated torture. None of this is necessarily Fascistic. The appeal to the nation as something which must be defended at the cost of individual rights is rather Fascistic, but, again, this wasn't the main designation of the mainstream left for GW.
Attributing to Obama every sort of evil feared by their white, upper to lower class Americans that the Republicans want to keep with them, is, however, the tactic of the right.
Again, we are talking about an upper class capitalist, well integrated into the ruling class and beholden to numerous capitalist lobbies. He professes Christianity and the importance of our vast military. He believes in wage slavery and the preeminence of America.
But among the opposition, the merging of corporate backed Republicans, with vaguely ideological conservatives, and half-libertarians has resulted in a muddled ideology of anti-government sentiment that faithfully supports the governments wars and abuse of people it calls bad, believes the solution is to return to a past whose inventors they've never heard of, and thinks that a free economy, separated from the government, has something to with American history or the constitution.
But see what this moderate advocate of the modern Welfare State has become.
For proposing national healthcare, which other first world capitalist countries have, he is called a socialist, for not sharing the Left-Behind, Born-Again, Stay in the Closet, Defend Defintions, theology of that sect of Baptist Christianity which has, of late, enjoyed the patronage of the highest levels of government, for all this he is declared to be a fake Christian, an antichrist, and a Muslim.
The hammer and sickle are now, for much of the right, symbolic of Obama. He is compared to Pol Pot, Mao Ze Dong, Stalin, and Hitler.
This is how much of the wealthiest factions of capitalism responds to minor reforms.
They organize the mob, work them up to the point where they utterly believe that they are fighting for there very lives, and set them loose.
A lot of them are ready to see Obama dead. If he did die, a lot of people would shrug and say something like "Well, what did you expect? People can't be expected to just take this laying down."
When the Kennedy brothers were killed, a whole lot of people were happy. Right wingers knew that the Kennedys weren't real Americans. They knew that they were pope worshippers, commie-sypmathizers, nigger lovers, and all the rest.
And now you see these freaks with guns, and the tree of liberty crap, that was written in defense of poor people unable to pay taxes (who were under attack by the rich.)
This is where Trotsky comes in. Trotsky had a debate with Kautsky on representational government.
Trotsky's answer to the allegation that the Bolsheviks had invalidated themselves by throwing away parliamentary democracy was to say that parliamentary democracy was a vehicle by which the capitalists retained power and prevented any sort of proletarian empowerment.
And that's pretty much what's happened. The poor and disadvantaged get more alms, while most of the money still goes to domination of other countries, and campaign contributions and the like to dominate this country.
Unions are scattered, disregarded, and seen as a hindrance to progress in the mainstream.
But Trotsky was accused of terrorism, and he acknowledged that terrorism was exactly what he was engaged in.
The major powers of the world united against the Bolsheviks early on, and the White Guard inside Russia was ready to do whatever they could to kill and wipe out the workers uprising.
So Trotsky said terrorism was needed against the the capitalists, and royalists and the rest.
And he was partially right. They got rid of the enemies, and they also got rid of the power of the soviets.
They spoke for the proletariat, then seized power in the name of the workers, and then maintained power in the name of the soviets, and then killed all kinds of people and set up their party as the sole power.
And in all this, the power of the soviets was kicked aside in the name of the power of the bolsheviks, and the party hierarchy. Then Stalin got control of this,closed off the revolution for good, and dedicated Soviet Intelligence to killing it abroad.
Meanwhile, leftists, socialists, and even anarchists tried their best to believe in this image of Socailism, the closest thing they had yet seen to a victory of the proletariat over the domination and oppression of the capitalists.
And what they got for it was the association of party dictatorship and savage cruelty with their ideals.
And when the Spanish Civil War came around, Stalin was their to organize the worlds socialists (by which I mean those that signed up for communism, as well as anarchists) against any part of that uprising that would compete with the Soviet Union for revolutionary status.
And the capitalist enemies of liberation were completely satisfied with Lenin's right wing deviation, and agreed that he and Stalin were in fact, the truest Marxists one could ever imagine.
So, on the one hand, Trotsky's defense of state terrorism is valid in the context of revolution, but when that party has no mechanism of accountability to those it claims to represent,you end up with just the party speaking to itself and accountable only to whoever can seize power.
And the Bolsheviks domination of the socialist movement took away the power of the people and, simultaneously, gave the defenders of capitalist oppression an effortless method of hunting down and completely discrediting socialists: linking them with Russia. Many socialists were in fact linked up with the comintern or Russia.
And down to the present day, the idea that having an impoverished class is caused by the economic/power structure we live in is immediately and conveniently dismissed as Communism, Socialism, and Marxism, all of which were ideas seized by the Soviet Union and ruined for those who seek liberation for the poor.
But, the problem of liberation is that among the rich, as seen with the moderate attempts of Obama, there will always be those who must wipe out anything that grants power to that class which they rely on for their profits.
Terrorism and seizure of the state is not the solution. Terrorism encourages more of the same, as well as bitter enemies who never forgive the regime for its crimes. Seizing state power has lead to preservation of the state at the cost of revolution.
But reform through popular politics is also ineffectual. Millions of dollars went into making Obama president, and millions of dollars went into fighting healthcare reform, and billions of dollars went into keeping up moribund companies who stifle the economy, and billions of dollars are going to Afghanistan, and Iraq, and the thousands of soldiers in military bases our government maintains throughout the world.
To reform the state through it's mechanisms leads both to the villification of a moderate like Obama and too the state tyranny of the Soviet Union.
All this bad mouthing, I hope, serves to illustrate my lack of practical solutions. The most beneficial solutions that I can see in our society, are the consensus model among anarchists, unions, consensus as promoted by therapists in familial relations, and the promotion of atheism against the few sects trying to seize power in this country.
That's enough for this morning.
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