technology dominating nature; painting by Bansky
I have just finished reading Isaac Deutscher’s much criticized biography of Josef Stalin. Although it has been criticized as an attempt to rehabilitate the Soviet dictator, I learned (or reviewed) a lot about Stalinism, especially as viewed by a Marxist-Leninist. (For a long but comprehensive essay in opposition to Deutscher see (https://www.marxists.org/archive/shachtma/1950/09/deutscher-stalin.htm. I don’t agree with Schactman here; Deutscher’s notion of Stalin’s revolution from above was in response to the failure of communist revolution in the West. )
I am writing this blog because it is often difficult for conservatives unfamiliar with the USSR and generally down on progressivism, to tell the difference between different factions of “the Left” and the mass media won’t touch this subject, lest they reveal their own covert (?) “moderation” that places themselves in the sane middle, while their opponents are nuts.
Thus Bernie Sanders can pass himself off as a “democratic socialist” and run with the progressives, while implicitly denying that he is any kind of “extremist.”
No person educated in the basics of Marxism or Leninism would fall for this charade. I should not have to say this again, but Big Government is an elitist ploy by former laissez-faire capitalists to adapt to Red “proletarian internationalism” by a sharp move to the [populist] Left. See the explicit program of such as The Nation editor Oswald Garrison Villard in 1919, while Europe was in revolutionary turmoil. (https://clarespark.com/2012/07/19/communist-ideas-go-mainstream/, and https://clarespark.com/2009/09/19/populism-progressivism-and-corporatist-liberalism-in-the-nation-1919/.)
The communists of the 1930s were largely Stalinists, believing that capitalism was oppressive and would inevitably be overthrown by the (conscious) industrial working class, led by the USSR. They were underground, professed to be pro-technology, anti-racist and anti-capitalist (but not always anti-American), and were deeply shocked by Krushchev’s “revelations” of Red hanky-panky during the Stalin era (which Deutscher pooh-poohs as an attempt to elevate Stalin’s successors).
All that changed with the turn toward agrarian nostalgia in the Maoist New Left, which elevated peasant revolts and was anti-imperialist. It is thus no accident that today’s Red/Pink Greens have seized upon the ostensibly bourgeois assault upon “Nature” as the centerpiece of their ‘revolutionary’ program, a program that Sanders (like Obama) endorses, for their anti-urban sentiments allege that the big, bad bourgeoisie were out to dominate Nature, and that “Nature” hath decreed that our species should be “rooted”.
Image by Hannah Yata
Nothing worse than a “rootless” cosmopolitan; and here their “multicultural” argot agrees with post-WW2 Stalin about to embark upon a second Holocaust. The only point where today’s social democracies agree with communism (Russian style) is in their ever more obvious anti-Semitism.
The Clare Spark Blog 
[…] In my last blog, I figured out that, beneath all the “political history” written by the moderate men (the Centrists of both Left and Right), was a common antipathy toward the too rapid development of “technology,” culminating in nailing our catastrophic domination of Nature/women. (https://clarespark.com/2016/05/14/the-difference-between-communists-and-social-democrats/) […]
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