Date: Tue, 4 Mar 1997 17:02:19 +1000 From: rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au (Rob Schaap) Subject: Re: Trotskyism or self-emancipation was Re: M-I: Quickies on Engels, gays, The case against (for want of a better term) bureaucratic Stalinism having been put often of late, Gary very neatly puts the case against Trotskyism (as timeless universal programme for transition anyway): >But there is another line in Marxism and it springs from the concept of >self-emancipation. It cries out against the distortion of the Marxist >method that Hugh and his trotskyist comrades practice on this list. What >Hugh cannot see and cannot know is that because he is always everywhere. >Because his method is for all time and all situations, he is never actually >anywhere, nor is he relevant to any particular time. That dear Hugh is the >cruel remorseless dialectic that has contemporary Trotskyism in a vice like >grip. Obviously, if we accept both arguments (as I currently feel bound to), then the job at hand is one of identifying the time and space specificities that pertain today. That is, what is it about today that renders old transition programmes obsolete? How do we avoid the defeatist tendency to passive stageism (I have already publicly diagnosed myself as one such sufferer)? We can not simply wait for 'the revolutionary moment' - there's no socialism at the end of the road if socialism hasn't actively travelled that road. Economism won't do (Gramsci's notion, but I'll have it), because this is precisely what passive stageism comforts itself with. We must perceive objective developments as tendencies, sure, but not signposts to inevitable socialism. Having identified the socio-economic tendencies (which we haven't - predictions, like mine, of impending explosive social trauma in the west are probably as much the manifestation of a Marxian inclination to expect crises as they are the consequence of actual analysis), we must understand and seize the discourses and material realignments for our practice. We must, per force, do this within our own countries (the nation state still has a role - and a citizen of a nation state has more formal clout than a global comrade) because only there can we interpret the discourse with any confidence. Oh, and this must be guided by a consensus-based international co-ordinating forum, lest we have yet another hapless, isolated little revolt. Easy. Gulp. Rob. --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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