File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1996/96-12-30.023, message 29


Date: Sun, 29 Dec 1996 16:54:14 +1000
From: rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au (Rob Schaap)
Subject: M-I: Re: What will socialism look like


[At the risk of further outraging Louis Godena, who dislikes 'the constant
re-iteration by those who seek merely to regurgitate,  in more or
less their original forms,  the ideas and prejudices of those long dead and
apply them to situations and in contexts which their authors could not have
foreseen,' I quote from the effervescently living Louis Proyect's most
recent post:]

'George Plekhanov, eighteen years before the publication of "What is to be 
Done?" stated that "the socialist intelligentsia...must become the leader 
of the working class in the impending emancipation movement, 
explain to it its political and economic interests and also the 
interdependence of those interests and must prepare them to play an 
independent role in the social life of Russia." In 1898, Pavel Axelrod 
wrote that "the proletariat, according to the consciousness of the Social 
Democrats, does not possess a ready-made, historically elaborated 
social ideal," and "it goes without saying that these conditions, without 
the energetic participation of the Social Democrats, may cause our 
proletariat to remain in its condition as a listless and somnolent force 
in respect of its political development." The Austrian Hainfeld 
program of the Social Democrats said that "Socialist consciousness is 
something that is brought into the proletarian class struggle from the 
outside, not something that organically develops out of the class 
struggle." Kautsky, the world's leading Marxist during this period, 
stated that "socialism and the class struggle arise side by side and not 
one out of the other; each arises under different conditions. Modern 
socialist consciousness can arise only on the basis of profound 
scientific knowledge."'

[Why are these utterances of the 'long dead' of no relevance today?  Bob
Malecki or Dave Bedggood might argue 'because they've never been sufficient
(true?)', but Lou Godena intimates (I think, for I'm still not sure it's my
position he's criticising - although I have been doing my share of
reiterating long-dead people's thoughts) that things are significantly
different today.  How?  How are the institutions in which Marx saw
opportunity for socialist agitation, in which Gramsci saw the locus for
counter hegemony, so different today from 1872?  What exactly am I missing?

I don't know what the future holds, but I do know we're not taking much
part in these all-important days.  If the world in which we live is a
capitalist world, then it is within that world that our praxis must be
done, for only there can it be seen and heard to be done.

And I'll keep reiterating until I get something better than *The Renegade
Kautsky* (I still think Kautsky a good Marxist, but a better political
theorist than he was an economist) or some criticisms From Lou G. of the
style of my argument (actually using Marx's and Gramsci's words to reflect
on today) rather than its content.  

I do this because I think the issue a crucial one.

Rob.







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