askchapo

My recollection was a bit hazy but here is one I could find. He’s mentioned it a couple more times before but it’s probably buried somewhere.

KARL FITZGERALD: And distilling all of these stories of various revolutions and battles against the state, if you could distill the theory of change, how was change meant to occur, from the real life conversations you had?

MICHAEL HUDSON: You always had to be aware that most of your followers are going to be FBI plants pretending to be people who they weren’t and would be writing up reports that were not usually very accurate, as I later found from the FBI files on my father and my friends.

They wouldn’t talk so much about the future change. They talked about where things went wrong. Especially how Stalinism had really destroyed Russia and what Russia really would have done if it would have been a truly socialist country as it set out to be instead of the way that it actually went.

So it was really where things had gone wrong. It wasn’t how to do it right. It was an awareness of all the things that can go wrong and all of the dangers.

KARL FITZGERALD: Just on McCarthyism — what was it like living through that period?

MICHAEL HUDSON: Well, none of my friends or people we knew were attacked. That was basically against the Stalinists at that time and gradually, by the time I wrote Super Imperialism, as I mentioned before, I was amazed when I was given a top-secret security clearance, because the FBI said they’d gone over my report and they knew for sure that I wasn’t Stalinist and wasn’t pro-Russian.

So all of a sudden all the McCarthyism sort of knocked out the Stalinists, and many of the liberals I knew were all standing up to the Stalinists, imagining that they were wrongly prosecuted like the Rosenbergs, and yet it was the Rosenberg’s cousin that had introduced Trotsky’s assassin, Jackson, to Trotsky, as his girlfriend.

So I was not very sympathetic with the Stalinists who were being attacked at that time.