File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1997/marxism-international.9706, message 356


Date: Fri, 20 Jun 97 11:42:08 EDT
From: boddhisatva <kbevans-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: M-I: Failure of imagination




		
		Andy,


	First, you have to understand that this was a response to Lou Proyect
specifically.  Comrade Lou is always touting his peasant rebellions as the
model for modern socialism because he is a tired old man who thinks he is Che
Guevara.  Therefore he substitutes analysis of third world politics for a
coherent theory of socialist revolution, because he and all his hippie ilk
are failures in the modern industrial world.  


	I am not by any means defending capitalism (except in the way that
Marx himself acknowledges its positive aspects) only suggesting that
asceticism, especially comfortable, academia-nourished asceticism, is a
poor substitute for socialism.  This 20-hour week nonsense, first proposed
as an "answer" to France's problems might well be a boon to worker
lifestyles.  It is also simple reformism.  Now it may be that enough
reformism will make the capitalists mad and then they make the workers mad
and so on, but it is not a very sophisticated plan of attack. 
Fundamentally, the short work week, high minimum wage and massive benefits
plan are reformist redistribution.  They are also things I support under
capitalism.  They are NOT socialism.  Socialism is not simply a
redistribution of goods, but a redistribution of rights.  Welfare state
socialism substitutes one bourgeoisie for another.


	I do not, by any means, think that socialism is the road to
serfdom, quite the opposite.  For that very reason I reject the shortened
work week by edict as simple rationing.  Socialism is bound to inherit the
capital of capitalism without the tethers of surplus value extraction.
This is an incredibly powerful commercial model.  Lou Proyect, and others
fear commerce because they don't understand it.  Therefore, they
immediately construct ways to kill commerce along with capitalism.  They
want to regulate it and calculate it to death because they fear it, and
they fear giving actual economic power to the proletariat because the
proletariat likes to shop and Walmart instead of natural food stores in
Greenwich Village.  Of course this kind of false asceticism has a long
history under capitalism.  


	I, on the other hand, envision giving workers direct ownership of
their factories, and letting the chips fall where they may.  That is
because I see that our world does not so much suffer from what it lacks,
but the disease that it has : capitalism.  The cause of that disease is
capitalist ownership.  Therefore, I eliminate that first.  This is not
China in 1948.  Redistribution should not be our first aim.  We have the
means at hand to create a first world, worldwide.  We will not do it under
capitalism, clearly.  


	
	World socialism is the goal, clearly.  It is also a philosophy
used as a dodge by those who obsessively defend the great peasant
rebellions in the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, etc., as socialism.  The very
idea that socialism must somehow spring up everywhere with near
simultaneity or it will not at all, is silly defeatism.  Certainly the
first socialist nations wil take their lumps, but if they are developed
nations, they should survive.  Then the model will spread because it is
more appealing and also because it will take over the reigns of
multinational corporations.  	


	I may be an iconoclastic socialist, and I may have to spend a lot
of time here reminding my comrades of the revolutionary aspects of
capitalism, but I am a socialist, nonetheless.  




	peace








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