In responding to my post about the USSR, Dennis Redmond wrote:
"I just don't see the point of selecting the bright points of Soviet
society, labelling these "socialism", and comparing these to the worst
aspects of American, or German, or Indonesian society: dialectics is
about thinking critically about ALL societies, and analyzing the
tendencies of a very large, complex and antagonistic world-system in an
attempt to stop the incessant and continuing slaughter of capitalist
pre-history."
I agree of course. Genuine Marxists, much more than pro-capitalists,
want to understand the failures (and successes) of the former Soviet
Union. I would agree that it is one-sided ("undialectical?") to only
compare the bright side of Soviet society with the destructive side of
capitalism, but I would argue that many of the posts on WSN recently
were doing exactly the opposite---condemning the entire historical
experience of the Soviet Union while conveniently ignoring the brutality
of capitalism. And this is not just tired sloganeering. I could bring
forward statements from friends who had family murdered by CIA-funded
Death Squads in El Salvador, but I'm not sure that such first person
testimony adds anything constructive to the discussion. I certainly
didn't intend to bring one-sidedness into the debate; on the contrary, I
(and a few others) were simply pointing out the extremely heavy
one-sidedness of the anti-Marxist flow. Look at the content of many of
those messages and judge who was being anti-historical, anti-contextual,
anti-dialectical.
Alan Spector