Kids, don't try this at home!

Petrograd, 24th October 1917.

Russia is in chaos as the Provisional Government, formed after the February Revolution and the abdication of the Tsar*, tries to stop the German military machine with a rapidly disintegrating army and the Women’s Battalion of Total Death**.

The central committee of the Russian Social Democratic Party (Bolshevik) are meeting in a clandestine location, planning for the final push against the Kerensky Government when there’s a screeching of car tyres, followed by a squealing of adolescent girls.

Nikolai Bukharin stirs. “Trotsky’s arrived.”

Josif Vissarionovich Stalin is less than impressed

“Oh, fuckin’ great. Trotsky’s here. Whoop-de-fuckin-do, Trotsky’s here. I mean, why are we hiding here in this God-forsaken shithole when all the police have to do is look for the swarm of girls who follow Trotsky around? Jesus!”

Lenin tries to smooth things over.

“You shouldn’t let these things bother you, Josif Vissarionovich. It’s the beard. Chicks dig beards.”

Stalin takes a closer look at Lenin’s beard and grunts – unconvinced.

“It’s not just that Vladimir Ilyich. He keeps calling me ‘sweetie’. I mean, what sort of Marxist calls people ‘sweetie’?”

The door to the room bangs open and Lev Davidovich Trotsky himself bursts in, looking astonishingly like Johnny Depp, and starts glad-handing the assembled revolutionaries.

“Comrades, comrades, what a splendid day to overthrow a corrupt bourgeois republic. Grigorii Ovseyevish Zinoviev, how’s it going? Have you finished that letter yet? Josif Vissarionovich! Sweetie! How’s the new pseudonym going – it’s ‘Stallin’, isn’t it?”

Stalin grunts again.

“It’s Stalin, Lev Davidovich. You know it’s Stalin. And don’t fuckin’ call me ‘sweetie’.”

“Whatever, whatever. Anyway, I can’t hang around here, I’ve got governments to overthrow” and with that he’s gone.

In the silence that follows, Stalin mutters “if he calls me sweetie again, he’s fuckin’ dead”.

* And possibly the Czar as well.

** I’m not making this up.

Mid-week history lesson.

The foreign policy of the Soviet Union between 1928 and 1933 is commonly described by historians of the era as “third period communism”.*

The thinking of the boys** at the Comintern was that western society since the revolutions of 1917 had moved in three distinct phases; the “first period” of the initial revolutionary challenge, the “second period” of seeming capitalist revival characterised by the boom of the 1920s and the final “third period” characterised by the Great Depression and the rise of fascism.

The thinking was that fascism was the “final stage” of capitalism and that as the mask began to slip, more people would embrace the revolutionary policies of local communist parties. To that end, local communists were instructed to bring down democratic governments, even if it meant collaborating with local fascists.

The comrades did as instructed and, to take the example of Berlin, worked happily enough with the Nazis to bring down the local Social Democratic state government.

Gee – didn’t that work out well?

These cunts have form when it comes to backing the wrong horse.

* And unofficially described to me by an historian at a party as “a fucking disaster for all concerned”.

** You note I don’t say “the boyars at the Comintern”. Marvel at my restraint.

Prussians but not proles, it seems.

Much brouhaha about the latest Tom Cruse flick Valkyri, which details the 1944 plot to kill Hitler.

Leaving aside the merits of the film, what nobody wants to discuss is the internal politics of the plotters. With Hitler out of the way, they intended to strike a separate peace with the western allies, the UK and the USA, leaving Germany free to continue the war against the Soviet Union.

This is clearly a less than optimal response and I can’t imagine “Smilin” Joe Stalin would have been too impressed.

It was all nonsense, of course. The west had clearly ruled anything other than “unconditional surrender” was unacceptable and the war was well and truly lost for Germany by then but the plotters’ vision for Germany was an authoritarian state, closely modelled on its Imperial past.

So a group of Prussian aristocrats try to assassinate Hitler, completely fuck up and bingo-bango, they’re (belatedly) national heroes.

Meanwhile, the real German resistance to Hitler centred on thousands of working class trade unionists, Social Democrats and communists who fought for basic human rights and a decent society (except the communists, of course, who fought for a Stalinist dictatorship).

And people like Georg Elser, a carpenter and communist party supporter who, in 1939, probably came closer than anyone to knocking off the big H.

But we can’t have Tom Cruse portraying a working class, trade unionist, communist party supporter now, can we? The marketing people would have a fit.

Dialectical materialism made easy!

People often come up to me and say “Ramon, you filthy Marxist. Explain the concept of dialectical materialism or we’ll kill your cat.”

To which my response is always, “Yeah, fine, go for your life. She’s a vicious, furry anarchist thug and poses a threat to the peace and security of the neighbourhood.”

To which they usually say “Umm, well, we won’t actually kill the cat, but can you explain the concept of dialectical materialism anyway?”

Only too happy to oblige.

The concept of the dialectical goes back to ancient Greece but the concept was refined by the nineteenth century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – or “Fred” to his mates.

Hegel believed society progresses through the conflict of opposites and that everything contains within it the seeds of its own negation. Essentially an existing condition (thesis) gives rise to its opposite (antithesis). Conflict between the two produces a new condition (synthesis) which in turn becomes the new thesis.

Marx accepted the idea but applied it to the material world, rather than the world of ideas, thus “turning Hegel on his head”*.

In Marx, the feudal order saw the rise of the bourgeoisie who gained power in the great revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, only in turn to face the challenge of the proletariat.

So there you have it.

Pers. trot this out at parties and any woman you desire will be putty in your hands.

*Which I believe was a popular pastime in 19th century Germany.