[The following is a MIM polemic on the "Leninlist," which was an offshoot from the "Marxism Space" with even more pretensions than the "Marxism Space." Adolfo Olaechea, Quebec-based Socialist Action and assorted individuals invited MIM on the "Leninlist" briefly, but the point was for Adolfo Olaechea to prove how "moderate" and "reasonable" he is by purging MIM within days to the delight of social-democrats on the list. A few months after purging MIM from the list, there was an internal fight on the "Leninlist" in which the Khruschevism came to the fore on the issue of Cuba. The Khruschevites continued to speak favorably of ex-Soviet Union "socialism" and continued to sing the praises of Fidel Castro without missing a beat. The open capitalist restoration in the Soviet bloc apparently did not happen in the eyes of this collection of social-democrats, anarchists and open Khruschevites. The essay below is from Adolfo Olaechea and amounts to a pitiful begging to be taken back into the swamp of respectable labor bureaucrats of various ideologies. The Khruschevites managed to carry out a coup that left Adolfo Olaechea and other pseudo-Maoists irrelevant.]
From mim3@mim.org Tue Feb 17 16:56:40 1998
Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 16:56:39 -0500 (EST)
From:
[The following is an essay from Peruvian exile Adolfo Olaechea. MIM comments follow.]
TWO KINDS OF DICTATORSHIP IN LENINLIST - PROLETARIAN AND BOURGEOIS - REVOLUTIONARY AND REACTIONARY [by Adolfo Olaechea]
It is convenient to set-out publically the revolutionary position regarding the events in LeninList, in which an unprincipled revisionist coup d' etat was staged by J. Hillier and is now supported by a tiny band of political prostitutes who illegally pose as "moderators" in Hillier's bogus version of LeninList, which he is still running.
[MIM3@mim.org replies: Oh, poor, poor Adolfo Olaechea purged MIM from LeninList in June, 1997 while retaining open Khruschevites and others best-described as anarchists. Now the swamp has found him too swampy and it wants a real split based on Cuba! So now Adolfo Olaechea is purged.]
The aims and principles upon which LeninList was originally founded clearly implied - and spelled out - the firm revolutionary compromise of a panel of 6 moderators to uphold the principles of the United Front and to work for the advancement of a Marxist and revolutionary platform in which all actions would have to be adopted by the moderators by consent. This "dictatorship" had the clear and overtly spelled out purpose of preserving this platform - won at the cost of hard struggle - as a revolutionary and not a revisionist or counter-revolutionary voice in Internet.
[MIM3@mim.org: What a laugh! Adolfo Olaechea means that Maoism is revisionism. That's why he tossed MIM and kept Khruschevites.]
It is now an unquestionable fact that of all the moderators who undertook this solemn revolutionary compromise, only J. Hillier has betrayed it. In violating the principles and rules of LeninList, Hillier could not hide his putchist and Napoleonic intentions. Announcing his coup, he already mimicked Julius Caesar when on the road to invest himself as tyrant of the Roman Republic:
>Anyway, the die is cast. Comrades now have to choose which direction to >go down.
> >In struggle >-- >Jim
And thus Caesar Hillier "crossed his Rubicon" and went on likewise to establish a dictatorship in his bogus and illegitimate version of LeninList. He recruited for this purpose every resentful loser and opportunist "Triumvir" he could lay his hands on: J. Blaut, K.McKinsey, Alan Dover.
[MIM3 replies: Yes, Jim, you made a mistake! Take back Adolfo Olaechea! Bridges can be built in a day in this year of 1997. Caeasar didn't have these advantages!]
People who had not contributed an iota to the original struggle to set up the LeninList, but who were mere subscribers representing no political force other than their own base conspirational ambitions and whose contributions to LeninList itself had consisted basically of a collection of obscure mumblings designed to throw shadows upon the light of Marxist understanding.
[MIM3 replies: So Adolfo Olaechea admits he spent his time with people casting shawdows on Marxism.]
What kind of dictatorship is this that Hillier has taken upon himself in the manner of a Praetorian Guard invested "purpurate Emperor"?
It is a bourgeois, reactionary and fascistic dictatorship aimed against the revolutionaries, the proletariat and the people. It is a Khruschevite style dictatorship of revisionism aimed against Marxism, aimed against LeninList and geared towards the restoration of the bogus "marxist swamp".
[MIM3: Sorry Adolfo Olaechea; no one is going to believe your complaints about Khruschevism now. You tossed MIM in favor of the Khruschevites in June. You are a little late to make this discovery. Either way, by not recognizing it or by conciliating with it after you have understood it, you stand exposed.]
What is the "theoretical and practical" basis of this reactionary revisionist dictatorship? It is the systematic and open violation of the most basic principles of the United Front for the revolution, by means of the use of sanctimonious, unscientific and Inquisitorial methods in order to prohibit revolutionaries from expressing their points of view.
What are the basic Marxists principles that permit a United Front of revolutionaries to struggle and defend common principles and common causes?
- The recognition of each others independence and unrestricted freedom of platform within the framework of the defence of the common principles and the common causes for which such a United Front exists.
It was Karl Marx himself who established these principles, as the following quote from V.I. Lenin, his disciple and developer clearly attests:
""If you must enter into compromises, Marx wrote to the Party leaders, enter into agreements to satisfy the practical needs of the movement, but never enter into ideological agreements, never make any theoretical concessions". V.I. Lenin
[MIM3: You leave Lenin's name out of anything to do with that swamp of Khruschevites, anarchists, back-to-Lenin-Gorbachevites and Castro revisionists and outright Mensheviks like Proyect!]
It is obvious that no person claiming himself a Marxist can demand from others what he would not as a matter of principle be able to accept himself in order to enter "into agreements that satisfy the practical needs of the movement".
That is why the "rule" upon which the bogus Hillier "LeninList" has been established is an anti-Marxist rule, since this rule demands that the defence and elucidation of the thesis that the Cuban regime is a social fascist regime and not a socialist one should be banned from LeninList.
It was Richard Bos - who himself belongs to a school that holds that the Castro regime is a socialist regime - who blew-up sky-high the cynical maneouvre performed by Hillier, by pointing out:
"Jim is wrong because he knows that Adolfo is not a madman, and throwing words like that around are designed to stir up a flame war. The reason for that, only he knows. Surely he must have known what Adolfo's political line was before this list even started, so why is he surprised and shocked when he states it?" (Richard Bos)
And this is very true, because it is indeed the position of all the genuine Maoist parties - and the PCP is one of these - that the regimes of revisionism have a social-fascist content and not a socialist one. This position is a well known one as comrade Richard notes, and corresponds to the historical view of Chairman Mao that the revisionist regimes are bourgeois dictatorships which in the process of capitalist restoration could not but turn into their opposites, "changing the dicatorship of the proletariat into a fascist bourgeois dictatorship, and the Communist Party into a counter-revolutionary, a fascist party".
It is obvious that Hillier intentionally - and feigning to be ignorant of well known views of mine - plotted a sinister coup d' etat and found a sanctimonious pretext in the fact that I spelled out this Maoist thesis in direct application to the Cuban regime, and proceeded, as I most times do, to dispense with euphemisms, and to call a "spade a spade".
Hiller thought that he couldm use this sanctimonious pretext to break the unity of the revolutionaries, and began to argue - falsely - that such a view did not correspond to the views of the PCP, or to anyone else but the "madman and lunatic Adolfo Olaechea".
[MIM3: Hillier has Adolfo Olaechea there, because there is no way Marxism-Leninism-Maoism-Gonzalo Thought in anyway conciliates with Khruschevism, Castroism or Menshevism. Hillier is quite right to conclude that Adolfo Olaechea does not even stand for Marxism-Leninism-Maoism-Gonzalo Thought.]
However, not only have the genuine Maoists rallied to our side, but also every genuine revolutionary who has proceeded to think about the issues involved is now doing the same.
Here below, I quote from a letter I have received from a LeninList subscriber who is not a member of the moderators panel, nor is he comrade Louis Godena, or any other comrade involved in the debate since Hillier attempted his coup d' etat:
"I have been thinking about your ideas on Cuba which has created this current impasse - but this cannot be denied: Cuba is on the capitalist road. So when people claim that it is still socialist or has socialist elements, they deny this sad fact that Cuba (has and) is transforming into its opposite - the same thing that happened in the SU and China. Only the blind do not see it".
And now it should become clear that reason and telling argument has begin to win the day for the revolution even among people who before had not fully realised the extent of the problems for the revolution posited by the counter-revolutionary actions of the Cuban regime.
That beyond the political question of whether or not to characterise the Cuban regime as a social-fascist regime may, or not, be an extreme position at present (and in that respect, of course, each one would have different initial perceptions since not everyone is engaged directly and in the same manner in fighting against the Cuban regime's concrete counter-revolutionary actions today) the REAL - as oppossed to the feigned - reasons for the Hillier coup d' etat, have to be sought in his desperation and sense of continuos and persistent ideological defeat. His aim was simply to prevent this very kind of consciousness regarding the CURRENT REALITY OF THE CUBAN REGIME - this very assimilation into the "cognitive processes" of the revolutionaries - from arising and embodying itself among LeninList subscribers.
That contrary to Lenin's words and spirit, Hillier's is a Rightist line of the most stubborn preserving of illusions and the most determined revisionist striving for lulling people to sleep, rather than a line of the "casting away of illusions and the preparing of people for struggle".
That the entire aim of the Hillier conspiration and his Bonapartist bourgeois dictatorship, is simply to prevent the truth about the Castro regime being revealed by the revolutionaries. To keep the mask of revolutionary firmly glued to the face of a revisionist regime.
That his - and Blaut, Dover and McKinsey, his accomplices - is merely a revisionist dictatorship that wants to prevent debate with the purpose of protecting the counter-revolution and facilitating the tasks of the capitalist restorationists.
. . .However, the Hillier style dictatorship is a step - and more than one step, since it is now evident that he has opened wide the doors to all the caricatures of Maoism we had formerly kept out of LeninList by the legitimate moderators process - directly back into the sanctimonious swamp from which LeninList itself set itself apart, proudly and defiantly, and in the midst of battle, demonstrating in practice that it was possible for genuine revolutionaries to advance the cause of revolution and genuine Marxist understanding in the Internet.
Ours is a dictatorship, but no one can complain - not even people like Proyect, Henwood, Gary McLlelan - that their views - outside the
[MIM3 replies: Here Adolfo Olaechea is explaining that he has been even more friendly with a former Trotskyist member of the Committees of Correspondence (Proyect) and a chauvinist social-democrat Doug Henwood.]
parameters we have set out in the interests of Marxism and the revolution - were in any way curtailed or supressed, and that no one ever called for them to be banned from expressing these views or in any way insulted them in an uncomradely fashion, like it was the daily practice - on all sides, as it could not be otherwise, in such circunstances - of "debating" in those lists where we first made our acquaintance.
[MIM3: He is referring to the "Marxism List" where they met and where apparently Adolfo Olaechea thought the revolutionaries were too rude to the revisionists and social-democrats.]
That is why ours is a genuinely proletarian dictatorship, applied against counter-revolutionaries and counter-revolutionary actions, but never against any serious ideas or well presented points of view which conform to, or, at least, do not blatantly violate the basic tenets of our platform.
[MIM3 replies: It is a platform of obvious revisionism and nothing in common with Marxism-Leninism-Maoism-Gonzalo Thought. Vacillating, Adolfo Olaechea has represented the Peruvian national bourgeoisie in its interests in establishing Peruvian revisionism. Mao said there was a role for people like Adolfo Olaechea at this stage of the Peruvian Revolution, but we must not allow him to confuse the Maoist ranks.]