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. --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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