File spoon-archives/marxism-general.archive/marxism-general_1997/marxism-general.9712, message 28


Date: Thu, 4 Dec 1997 15:52:02 +0100
From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se>
Subject: M-G: The RCP, Marxism and class struggle


John W writes:

> James=92 reminds us all the heroic defeat of the miner=92s strike. The same
>strike in which the RCP was attacked and it paper The Next Step was
>attack and burnt by those striking miners. The resentment at the RCP
>siding with the Coal Board, the Thatcher government, the scab miners, the
>Labour Party and the TUC against the striking miners was so severe that
>they had to change the title of their paper to TNS to avoid recognition.

This just about says it all, doesn't it. Wrong then about the miners and
wrong now about the Liverpool dockers.

Once again we see Marxism used as some kind of chic label and sterilized
from all  contact with the working class and the poor. John continues:

>They sell their rather costly glossy magazine LM in leading retail
>outlets, outside Universities and in the smarter shopping areas.
>
>Contradict me if I=92m wrong but they do not sell them in working class
>housing estates, or outside local shops in run down areas (where I can
>say You=92d be lucky to get 30 pence never mind 3 pounds!) They do not sell
>it at unemployment benefit offices, prisons or community centres.
>
>Instead they target shoppers and students, questioning them on the latest
>=91vogue=92 issues. They try to win them over to their ideas and convince
>them of the logic of their peculiar positions. This otherwise laudable
>endeavour appears odd when taken out of the context of political
>struggle.

The dividing line between our various subscribers and their political
tendencies probably goes between those who could tell you something about
working class housing estates, run-down areas and the rest from their
immediate experience, and those who could tell you about the newest
Manhattan deli or its local equivalent instead.


>It strikes me that this has far more in common with the Idealism Marx
>tries to counter in Hegel. His discussion of =91class=92 is a case in point=2E
>It is seen as more analogous to Hegel=92s =91Spirit=92. He talks about the
>class struggle being eternal and is happy to quote Marx private
>correspondence. But in his and Engels published work they make quite
>clear the class struggle is not eternal. Marx argues for a Communist
>(that=92s what the C in RCP stands for) Society and defines it as a
>classless society. Engles makes it clear that there were indeed primitive
>societies without classes.

Yup. Petty-bourgeois ideology dressed up with academic finery and some
pretty Marxist feathers for a touch of pink. Though their extreme
anti-worker positions are a bit nostalgic these days, I mean the French
wannabes all reneged on the class struggle a couple of years after 1968,
not two or three decades later.

All this ogling of Marxism without grasping its essence in the emancipation
of the working class and with it humanity through the conscious class
struggle of the revolutionary proletarian party!

It's as if they'd all been transfixed by the sight of some incredibly
desirable woman, and instead of making out and living with her, they look
at her through chinks in a fence, occasionally try to brush up close in a
crowd and even snatch a hair or some other little souvenir in passing. Then
they set shop behind the fence: "Look at this! I've got the real thing -- a
genuine hair off the head of Belle Desire!" And whole schools of fetishists
grows up around this and all the other little trinket collectors and lays
down the law about Belle, and god help the poor devil who's actually living
with her!

You see, the price for living with Belle is active participation in the
class struggle (I'd better add: on the side of the workers and poor
people).

(Ladies, etc, change gender markers where needed.)

More on the rewards of revolutionary class struggle some other time. The
cost of rejecting it is clear enough -- bitter frustration and irrelevance,
and the condemnation of future generations (or at best oblivion).

Cheers,

Hugh





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