Date: Wed, 24 Sep 1997 22:26:12 -0400 Subject: M-I: G.A. Cohen Interview in Philosophers' Web Magazine (Part 2) From: farmelantj-AT-juno.com (James Farmelant) This is the second part of a three part interview with G.A. Cohen that is appearing in the Philosophers' Web Magazine (http://www.cix.co.uk/~jstangroom/). Part 3 will not appear until November. James F. Socialism and Revolution Professor G. A. Cohen Interviewed Scannella: You also argue that the conditions that Marx stated for a revolution will never come into existence, so you argue that the basis for the motivation of the proletariat is a desire to get rid of injustice as opposed to a desire to rid themselves of a state of abject poverty in the face of unjust oppression. The latter would unquestionably be seen as a strong enough motivation, but do you really see the former as a strong enough motivation for people to risk their relatively, historically speaking, comfortable standard of living? Cohen: Well, the challenge to me is deeper still than that, because my point about the transformation of the conditions of a capitalist society is that the proletariat itself in the classical sense simply does not exists anymore. There is not even this body of people who are the mass of the population and who can really count as a proletariat. It is obvious that if you forecast that people whose existence would otherwise proceed under an oppressive yoke will rise in revolution, then you are on much safer ground than if you forecast that people will come to see that a certain way of life is unjust, unworthy and contemptible and will therefore get rid of it. But I am not forecasting that: I am only advocating it. You could ask, "Does the advocacy of that sort of revolution have any realism in it? How are you going to have a revolution just because people who are not particularly oppressed think that the present order is wrong and that another would be superior. Why should they risk what they have?" I think that to answer to that question, you have to distinguish among meanings of the word "revolution". I think that the word "revolution" has borne four meanings in the socialist tradition. We can distinguish four senses of "revolutionary change" as opposed to "non-revolutionary change", senses which correspond to four meanings of "revolution": 1. A revolutionary change is a violent one rather than a peaceful one. 2. It is unconstitutional, rather than occurring within the rules of the constitution. 3. It is sudden rather than gradual. 4. It is comprehensive rather than superficial. Now, if you think about it (and please do – it is a worthwhile exercise) you will see that each of these features is logically independent of the other three. You can have any combination of those four features, and because of that you can mean many different things by "revolution". People on the left are often confused, they don’t really know what they’re talking about, when they say you can have or can’t have a revolution, because these four different features are mingling in their minds, and they haven’t distinguished them and pinned them down. I think that if you are talking about a violent, unconstitutional and sudden change on the basis of people’s perception of what is right and wrong, of course that is out of the question, whereas it may well have been in question for people suffering from massive oppression and material want. But if you are talking about a comprehensive transformation of society, which could be something which happens gradually, peacefully and constitutionally, then I do not think that we know that people are unable and unwilling to produce that sort of change. There are a lot of things now that are a lot less lousy than things were in the past and one of the reasons why the mass of people accept the way things now are is that they know that what they have is miles better than what their parents and grandparents had. But that does not mean that there are not a lot of oppressions in their lives and indignities and subordinations to market forces which are extremely unattractive, which they might come to resent more when memories of bygone worse things have faded. They might come to care more about the admittedly lesser oppressions than it now seems possible that they would ever care about them. I am not saying that I know that, I am just saying that nobody really knows that it is not so. Scannella: You seem to suggest by your last answer that a socialist society can be reached through a liberal democratic path, which if we look at the recent state of the British Labour party seems very unlikely. Do you believe that socialism can be reached through this way? Cohen: Well, I don’t know if socialism can be achieved at all. I have not claimed it can be achieved, but I am 100% certain that if I can be achieved then it can be achieved through a liberal democratic path. The reason is that I do not believe it can be achieved through any other path in a society which is a liberal democracy. That’s to say, where you have czarist dictatorship, where people do not have the suffrage and therefore cannot express themselves politically and can only express their political will violently, then of course there is no liberal path to socialism. But if you have a society in which the popular will can be expressed through the ballot box, then the only reason why you would want to produce socialism non-democratically is because it is not properly consonant with the popular will, and if it is not consonant with it, then you will not get socialism. You cannot impose socialism on people. Socialism, the collective ownership of the resources by the people as a whole, has to be something that people willingly engage in, as a centrepiece of their lives. This does not mean that there cannot and will not be violence on the road to that socialism. You see, you have to distinguish between constitutionality and peacefulness. For example, you could envisage a socialist government being elected which has to take very severe measure against private ownership. Those who enjoy private ownership will try, and might manage, to suborn parts of the violent apparatus of the state – the military and the police or whatever – to prevent serious inroads against their power. If the legitimate socialist government successfully used violence to defeat them, that would be a case of violent without (on the part of socialists) extra-constitutional behaviour. Take the example of the loyalist government that was elected liberal-democratically in Spain. Franco organised the capitalist and reactionary forces against it, and there as a war. Suppose the loyalist government had won that war. Well, in that case you would have had what I would regard as a constitutional transition to socialism, in the sense that at least the socialists did nothing unconstitutional, but it would also have been a very violent transition. Socialists should not abandon liberal-democratic norms as an integral part of their socialist project, but they must anticipate that others will, if they reach a certain degree of success in their project. Post-Soviet Socialism Scannella: Do you feel that the role of traditional left of centre Labour parties in the west has changed since the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union? If so, what do you see as their new role and to what extent do you fell that the British labour Party is fulfilling this role? Cohen: Well, in the short term the collapse of the Soviet Union has had, and will continue to have, profound anti-socialist effects for the consciousness of people in the west. This was the grand attempt to institute socialism and this was one of the grandest failures in history. In the longer run the consequences of the collapse of the Soviet Union may be quite different. With the removal of the Soviet Union and societies like it from the scene, and with the gradual loss of memory of what they were like, people’s complaints about capitalism will less and less be answerable by "if you don’t like it here, why not go over there?" So it is conceivable that the removal of bastard socialism from the scene, which is an unachieved and deformed form of socialism, could increase rather than decrease the degree of resistance to capitalism. Now I say "could", not "would": I do not say more than that. The transformation of labour and socialist parties in the wake of the demise of the Soviet Union is simply the short term effect. The long-term effects could be different. As for the British Labour party in particular, a very large question mark hangs over what will happen when, as I am sure they will, they form the next government of Britain, because it is an open secret that the left of that Party has been as silent as it has indeed been because 18 years of Tory Power have put an anti-Tory victory as people’s prime goal and they are willing to sacrifice everything to achieve it. Just yesterday in my home in Oxford I was canvassed by the local elections Labour party candidate and I told her that I was strongly considering voting Liberal Democrats nationally because they are actually to the left of Labour. She said, "Yes, I know, I find it very difficult." Now a woman like that, who herself admits that the Liberal Democrats are to the left of Labour in their posture in this election, is nevertheless not going to say this and make a fuss about that to the detriment of Labour’s chances, but she is not gong to keep her mouth shut once Labour are in power: and there are tens of thousands like her. There are enormous expectations despite the fact that the Party said they will stick to a Tory budget for the first two years, which means that there will not be a significant change in, for example, the NHS waiting lists and the crisis in the health service, which also means that there will not be an improvement in the living standards of the poorest people in society. So although they have no commitments which would be broken by their failing to attend to urgent deprivation in the first two years of their term, they have expectations surrounding them which will be severely dashed and I think there will be strong conflicts and I do not know how they are going to respond to these conflicts. The present election is the most boring I have experienced and this is the tenth election I have experienced since coming to Britain in 1961. This is the most amazing election, where issues are not discussed, where the issue is, "Is he saying the same thing he said last week?" and "Does he mean what he says?" It is not the content that counts but these secondary features and that is partly because there is so little difference between all three parties and partly because the hegemony of the media, which have induced a situation where newsworthiness comes from error. It’s banana skin politics, where everybody is waiting for someone to make a big mistake, so everybody just tries to avoid making mistakes. So although the election is the most boring I have ever known, the post-election will be interesting because of the pickle Labour will be in. It will also be interesting to see the bear garden that the Tory party will become as they tear themselves apart and vote for a leader that not everybody will want. Anyway, I cannot give an evaluation of the Labour party at the moment because I just don’t know what is going to happen. Scannella: To what extent do you fell that Blair is himself a closet socialist? Cohen: I believe that Blair is not a socialist and therefore I do not believe he is a closet socialist, in the sense of socialist that I articulated. But we know that Blair is enormously electorally conscious and will adapt lots of strategies in order to win, so it would be extraordinary if every single piece of ideological manipulation which he has engineered reflects his own personal, electorally uninfluenced views. There must be lots of changes which he has engineered which were for electoral purposes. That is not to disparage him by any means. His syllogism is: we have to do everything we can to get into power; unless we change in these ways we do not get into power; therefore we have to change in these ways. It’s a very seductive syllogism and that is why so many people who are not Blairite have been won over. You can question it in various ways. You can raise long versus short term perspectives: if, in order to get in power, we have to do these things, then is it worthwhile trying to get power now? Or you can question by saying that even if we have to trim to get into power, it does not follow that we have to be maximally cautious. So he has engineered changes for electoral rather than for independent reasons. It does not follow that if and when he does get into power he will retreat from these changes, because he will then have as large a motive for staying in power as he did for achieving it in the first place. Click here to read a major response to this article. The third part of The Philosophers' Magazine's interview with Professor Cohen will follow in November. --- from list marxism-international-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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