File spoon-archives/marxism-international.archive/marxism-international_1998/marxism-international.9804, message 348


Date: Wed, 22 Apr 1998 22:13:45 +0100
From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se>
Subject: M-I: The welfare state & the Marxism lists


As the Spoons Marxism experiment is having the plug pulled on it, Gary and
Barkley are saying nice things about the people who have provided the wall
on which we have been able to put up our wall posters. They have also
raised questions about the secrecy and haste of it all -- although once you
discover how simple it is to cut a list's throat (M-Fem) or  throttle a
list to death (M-Gen), each subsequent atrocity comes that much easier.

I feel about the Spoon lists a bit like I feel about the welfare state. I
have benefited enormously from free medical checks and vaccinations, free
dietary supplements, free milk at school, free school and so on. Yet was it
the administrators of the health service or the education system that I
owed this to? I don't think so. It was the revolutionary pressure of the
British working class during and after the war that forced the concessions
of the welfare state and nationalized industries on to British imperialism,
whereas the administrators and providers were often unenthusiastic and
reactionary about what they were doing (just think of any headmasters or
senior officials you might have come into contact with!).

The test of the attitude of the welfare and nationalization administrators
comes with attacks on the system. They caved in. For them, as for the
politicians that shepherded the legislation through parliament, the whole
show was temporary and conditional on good behaviour and fair weather. Not
their good behaviour, but ours, meaning forelock-tugging gratitude for the
provision of basic democratic rights. As soon as storms set in, in the
shape of reactionary attacks on these rights, the administrators refused to
fight, and said things like "You can't expect something for nothing" and
"If some scroungers take too much pie, there won't be any pie left at all"
-- ignoring the fact that capitalists expect something for nothing through
their god-given right of exploitation, and as such are professional
scroungers and pie-grabbers. In other words, the bourgeois version of the
welfare state was temporary, always vulnerable to clawing back, and it was
seen as charity, largesse donated to the undeserving poor by the benevolent
rich. In addition to which it was hamstrung by poor funding, hostile
management and intolerable tensions between its official speech-day goals
of equality of opportunity and redistribution of social wealth and the
realities of capitalist exploitation and greed for profit.

Well, the Spoon Collective has the same top-down "white man's burden"
attitude to the lists. They're seen as a charity provided by a noble bunch
of self-sacrificing do-gooders to a gang of undeserving and ungrateful
oiks. Temporary, conditional on good behaviour and fair weather.

In the same way as the welfare state was marked for destruction as a result
of the anger its children aroused in the bourgeoisie in the 1960s, the
Marxism lists have been marked for destruction because Karl Marx and his
ideas and the movement they created refuse to take on the anaemic
mealy-mouthed kowtowing drawing-room Marxian persona that the ivory tower
petty-bourgeois imagination has constantly been demanding with varying
degrees of truculence.

That said, obviously some of the Spooners are not all bad, and there is a
good deal to be said for the good experiences (though temporary) that we
have had with a real unmoderated list (Marxism-General) and a sensibly
moderated list (Thaxis, and the original International with Jon, Zeynep and
Godena as co-moderators), as well as the occasional flashes of brilliance
on unevenly (M2) or downright badly (Godena's International) moderated
lists.

Perhaps the transitions that have been mentioned will turn out OK. I
certainly hope this is the case for Thaxis, and we shall see if General can
be resurrected elsewhere, and if this happens, and Spooners have really
been as helpful as they say they are trying to be, then it will probably
have turned out to be a blessing in disguise.

Real democratic discussion is not a luxury or a sherry-sipping charade
round the prof's digs to impress the Man, but a vital necessity. We're
addicts because it's a fundamental social need, at the very least it
provides us with the roughage we need to purge our bowels of the dross of
everyday media discourse in bourgeois society. At its best it sharpens our
minds and our analyses and makes us more effective class warriors. It
creates comradeships that sustain us against the hostility of everyday
capitalist attrition and it provides an instrument that subverts the
bourgeois monopoly of news and opinion when class war flares up.

The scope and seriousness of the discussions we've seen here have been a
real education. They have ranged from Marx's value theory to socialist
ideas on morality and sexuality, from the development of socialism in the
workers states seen from the violently clashing perspectives of Trotskyism,
Stalinism and state capitalism to the role of Hegel and dialectics in
Marxism, from the way different party traditions present their views on
what is happening in the world to the way different traditions treat
opponents and their ideas.

It's the content that's the thing -- all the Athenians needed was a column
or two or a grassy river bank, the rest came from the democratic openness
of the city-state (despite its slave-holding foundations). We don't need
much more, and we can surely do better than any slave-owners or exploiters!

Actually, it feels more as if our joint efforts to understand and apply the
ideas of Marx and Engels are only just beginning, and the Spoon experiments
have been a bumpy and rather grating prologue. So I don't feel at all
maudlin or inclined to go round saying adieus or shedding any tears!

On to victory!

Hugh







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