What is Stalinism? It is the liquidation of Marxism. More precisely, it is the liquidation of the Marxist self-consciousness and theory of the proletarian socialist party — it is also the practical liquidation of that party. What is most troubling about the history of “Marxism-Leninism” AKA Stalinism is, like with the Jacobins, not their ruthlessness towards avowed counterrevolutionaries, but rather the Revolution eating its own — the unjust and murderous turn against the loyal revolutionaries themselves. The problem with Stalinism is the lies it entails — the lies against the revolutionaries, and against the Revolution itself. And the lies never end.
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Behind society’s deeply damaged attempts to become aware of its own direction, the current, more or less deformed, intellectual instinct already indicates that the world has changed. What is the reality of the past in the present?
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The reversion to capitalism by the “socialist camp” was certainly an eye-opener. It laid bare the fact that society had not undergone a fundamental transformation in the relations of production and the social superstructure. There was nothing comparable to the way capitalism had made itself immune to a relapse into feudalism or something similar.
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Nearly two and a half centuries after the storming of the Bastille, does our historical present still have something to learn from the French Revolution?
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I think we can all agree, for a start, that the weaponization of the transgender issue by Donald Trump, Ron DeSantis, and the minions of the Republican Right — and their outrageous claims — are reprehensible. But the “transgender-affirming” Left isn’t much better — they too have weaponized the issue, turning one’s subjective sense of gender identity (especially among minors, who are too young to even qualify for a learner’s permit for a driver’s license!) into an objective “alternative fact” — to invoke Kellyanne Conway’s infamous phrase.
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