Michael Goldfield
Melvin Rothenberg
Line of March Publications
<I>The Myth of Capitalism Reborn: A Marxist Critique of 
Theories of Capitalist Restoration in the USSR</I>
San Francisco, 1980, pp. 102-4

"We think there are two theoretical absurdities: 1) That
restoration is impossible. 2) That if it took place
it would be a quiet process that was not accompanied by
bloodshed and massive violence, visible for the whole
world to see. . . .The response by the Soviet working
class would not have to be discovered in obscure reports,
but would be visible nightly on TV news and in the
thousands of corpses that inevitably accompany
massive class warfare involving tens of millions of people."

[Why this quote is wrong:
At a time when MIM did not have the money to print
a newspaper, Line of March was printing and selling
books that were quite the fad. Although the Soviet Union
was to collapse in just a few years, Goldfield and Rothenberg
gave up their Maoism. The Communist Workers Party took
a similar line--both despite struggle by MIM and others; although we
can say Line of March was on the way before there were
any MIM or MIM predecessors.

We can be thankful that Goldfield and Rothenberg 
told us that it was their geo-political 
preconceptions that shaped their view of the 
Soviet class structure and thus led to egregious 
stupidity. "Until two years ago the authors of the 
present paper were among those who accepted the 
Chinese and Albanian position on the restoration 
of capitalism in the Soviet Union. During that 
period we had several reservations and differences 
with the Chinese foreign policy which in our 
opinion stemmed from a certain type of analysis of 
the Soviet Union." (p. 2) 

Today we still see countless "Stalinists," such as the
Workers Party of Belgium determine the mode of 
production in a country based on subjective
preferences for its foreign policy.]