File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/97-03-06.201, message 8


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.






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