Date: Sun, 24 Aug 1997 23:40:43 +1000
From: Rob Schaap <rws-AT-comserver.canberra.edu.au>
Subject: Re: M-I: Critique of Cronin's article


G'day all,

I have to take my leave of this list for a good while, so I thought I'd
treat myself to parting rant.

Chris, Jim and Sid have us back to revisionism versus orthodoxy or
reformism versus revolution:

Sid writes:

>As to Chris's contention of unfounded charges of "revisionism" being
>labelled at Cronin, he should realize, especially today, after the
>counter-revolution and capitalist restoration in the ex-USSR and China,
>(all done under the name of "Marxism" and to fight against "Stalinist"
>tendencies), and the changing of the names of 'communist' parties in
>Europe and elsewhere to 'socialist' parties, the attacks by all sorts
>of people wearing the leftist mantle against what they call Marxist
>orthodoxy, the deliberate building of a firewall between Marx and those
>leaders who came after him, that revisionism today is a real phenomenon
>and is a great danger and is not a creation of one's imagination.
>This is what the history of the twentieth century teaches us.

Let's throw out the word 'revisionist' just for a minute.  What then?

Well, we'd have to entertain the possibility that tenable readings of Marx
can lead to more than one place.  Just as the bible is seed to Mother
Theresa and Ian Paisley or Desmond Tutu and Dr Verwoerd, so have all on
this list issued from the polysemic and open-ended text that is Karl Marx.

All I'm getting at is that this is a Marxism list, and all voluntarists
(the Vanguardists?), crisis-spontaneitists (Louis Godena's last post?), and
'hopefully-pedagogic-struggles-for-reform' fence-sitters like me can claim
commensurability with the canon.  Our 'interpretations' are not much
different (Marx was not particularly open-ended on this), our conceptions
of the 'change' part of the thesis are what divides us.

And I'm not really sure any of us should worry too much about that.  In our
moment all we can be sure of are the 'why' and the 'what from'.  If
dialectics means anything, if, indeed 'revolution from below' means
anything, the 'how' and the 'what to' will be mass determinations at a
particular point in space/time.

Revolutionaries need agree only that capitalism will end, that socialism is
a candidate for the succession, and that socialism can be that successor
only if the actual changers of the world are in possession of Marx's
interpretation of that world.

In that light, disseminating Marx's interpretation of the world constitutes
changing the world - and, right now, in the only way we can, and perhaps in
the only way we should.  Those who accessibly and publicly articulate the
theoretical context of their struggle to protect and promote reforms are
revolutionaries in my book.

I've spent a year on this list looking for compelling alternatives and I've
not found them.  Not all reformists are revolutionaries, but I am more than
ever convinced that all revolutionaries are reformists.

Anyway, that's me.

Hope to be back when circumstances allow.  After all, I have yet to find
this enticing balance of passion and intellect anywhere else.

Love to all.
Rob.


************************************************************************

Rob Schaap, Lecturer in Communication, University of Canberra, Australia.

Phone:  02-6201 2194  (BH)
Fax:    02-6201 5119

************************************************************************

'It is questionable if all the mechanical inventions yet made have
lightened the day's toil of any human being.'    (John Stuart Mill)

"The separation of public works from the state, and their migration
into the domain of the works undertaken by capital itself, indicates
the degree to which the real community has constituted itself in
the form of capital."                                    (Karl Marx)

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