File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1996/96-12-30.023, message 23


Date: Sat, 28 Dec 1996 19:54:23 -0500 (EST)
From: Kevin Cabral <kcabral-AT-freenet.columbus.oh.us>
Subject: Re: M-I: Re: What Will Socialism Look Like?


On Sat, 28 Dec 1996, Louis R Godena wrote:

> >I suppose that means you are giving up on Marxism? 
> 
> I mean no such thing,  sir.   This post,  like most of those I fashion for
> M-I,  is an attempt to locate Marx and Marxism in my thinking on a number of
> issues relating to the struggle for socialism.     I view both as dynamic
> and evolutionary.    

	Agreed. 
			
> bible of emergent capitalism.   Today the changed economic scene has
> invalidated some of his postulates,  and altered our view of some of his
> predictions and injunctions.    Marx had even profounder insights of
> genius;  he not only foresaw and analyzed the impending decline of
> capitalism,  but provided us with fresh tools of thought to uncover the
> sources of social behavior.    But much has happened since he wrote: and

	While understanding, and enthusiastically supporting, your 
thoughts on re-appraising socialism I think it's fundamentally important to
establish, as Doug Henwood has been doing valiently, that the economic
scene has not changed since Marx's time. We do not live in a
post-capitalist world, or one that means the Marxian project is fatally
linked to an archiac economic system. It is true that the conditions of 
exploitation and alienation have changed; but that does not mean they have
dissapeared or even made negligable. The levers that must be pulled to
make a revolution have changed considerably since the turn of the century
in the first-world: the conditions of work for the majority of workers,
ignoring those in illegal sweatshops, has improved tremendously since the
beginning of the 20th century, and no longer can workers be murdered for
their organizing activities. The world of Upton Sinclair, and Fred Engels 
is not that of Mike Davis, and Michael Moore. These conditions no
longer exist in most of the advanced capitalist economies, even though they 
may exist in much of the rest of the world. Nonetheless the existance of
exploitation and alienation has not changed, and neither has the objective
possibility, desirability, and feasibility of socialism. If anything
socialism has become much more feasible since Marx's time; though I should
make it known that the socialism I advocate is market socialist and not of
the planned variety which arguably would benefit most from computing
technology. 

> Alternatively,  Kevin asks:
> 
> >Or are you [merely] giving up on the industrial working class...       
> 
> The industrial working class ("proletariat") was at the heart of the Marxian
> scheme for revolution.    However,  the role of the working class --and even
> the class itself, as defined by Marx -- was to undergo a number of subtle
> but significant changes from 1848 onward.     The English and French
> proletariat would have to pass through the bourgeois-democratic,
> bourgeois-capitalist phase on its way to the achievement of socialism,
> while the German working class might pass immediately from the bourgeois to
> the proletarian revolution.     Marx himself defined generically the working
> class in different ways at different times under different conditions.
> He also created some confusion in generalizing about nationalism,  and the
> role of the proletariat in resisting its blandishments.   Many of Marx's
> postulates,  which were based on British and French experience,  foundered
> when applied to central and eastern Europe.    And,  of course,  Marx,
> writing in England,  famously assigned only a subsidiary role to the
> peasantry,  a lacuna filled by Lenin himself in 1905 with his declaration of
> a "democratic dictatorship" of workers and peasants,  subsequently the
> official doctrine of the October revolution.    Gramsci,  Lukacs,  and Mao
> further modified the role of the industrial working class in both the
> European and Asian revolutions in the decades following Lenin's death.    It
> is a doctrine that is still evolving in the light of changing circumstances.

	This I agree with: the industrial working class was the heart
of Marx's theory of revolution adapted practically for the material
conditions of his own era, but for Talmudic Marxists it should be
acknowledged that there is nothing canonical about this view. There is
nothing anti-Marxist about reappraising the material conditions of one's
era, and adapted a revolutionary theory to it. In fact the Old Man, dead
now for 113 years, began to do just that in his later years in pondering
the possibility of a Russian socialism. 
					
> So,  in my estimation it is you,  as well as the estimable Doug Henwood and
> Louis Proyect (not to mention the dreadful *coterie* of present-day
> hagiographers skulking perennially in the wings) who are unduly pessimistic
> in re-assessing the priceless legacy of Marxism-Leninism in the context of
> our own churlish and unpredictable reality.
> Louis Godena  

	Lou, I am not committed to preserving the legacy of
Marxism-Leninism in the same way that Josef Stalin, or officially your own
party was. I'm not even sure, at this infantile stage of my political
development, whether Lenin and Leninism as properly understood is of any
use to a modern revolutionary politics. I have a difficult time
understanding why Louis Proyect, for example, spends much of his time
trying to ressurect Lenin, or provide a "revisionist" historical viewpoint
of Lenin's Comintern and the 3rd Congress. I wish he would write more on
feasible socialism, and spend more time investigating the arguments of
opponents of central, complete, planning; or investigating the condition
of the working class in the United States, as he has indirectly been doing
recently in his well-organized seminar, instead of trying to figure out
why Zinoviev was such a stiff. Does the Soviet Union of 1917 still matter?
Isn't it more appropriate to study, as Godenas has been doing, France of
1968, Germany of 1920, or Italy of 1924-1926? Could these events help us
to understand something about the G-7 world of 1997, and the potential
levers to pull within it without being electricuted. 
									
	To express this in the type of language Doug often enjoys, though 
a few Puritanical "Marxists" have sometimes objected to it, how do we 
"get it up" and once it is up how do we "keep it up" until climax, and then
what happens afterwards. I read your statement about "short and brutish"
lifespans of regimes owing their power to the support of the working class
as being indicative that you felt Marxism, understood as revolutionary
theory in the total interests of the working class, is permanently impotent.
Would you care to discuss why you think this is not the case? Specifically
what classes must a revolutionary regime appeal to support from in order to
promote its life without becoming tyrannical? 

Kevin
Columbus, Ohio 





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