From: "Russell Pearson" <r.pearson-AT-clara.net>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Lukacs + Heidegger
Date: Mon, 15 Sep 1997 20:48:37 +0100
Date: Tue, 16 Sep 1997 07:30:46 +0200
From: Hugh Rodwell <m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se>
Subject: M-TH: Re: Lukacs + Adorno


Dennis R wrote:

> The same world-system which is
>preying unceasingly on the global peripheries may yet witness a
>cyberrevolution from those peripheries. If this sounds improbable, well,
>May 1968 must have seemed even more improbable to radicals in 1965, even
>though the thing itself was latent.

"Radicals" is too vague. Stalinists and centrists dismissed the possibility
out of hand, and denied the scope of the events as and after they were
happening. The reason of course was their constitutional refusal to see the
revolutionary potential of the working class. Orthodox Trotskyists had
little trouble recognizing the impact of the events for what it was, as
they have constitutional confidence in the revolutionary potential of the
working class under capitalism -- even though historic defeats for the
class such as the Stalinist/Social-Democrat capitulation to Nazism in 1933
in Germany may put the struggle back a bit, and historic victories such as
revolutions may push it forward.

>And of course everyone, including me,
>thought in 1989 that the Warsaw Pact regimes had crushed their
>workingclasses with properly Chilean efficiency.

Same problem here, no dialectical appreciation of the revolutionary
potential of the working class. Orthodox Trotskyists were well aware of the
flimsiness of the crust sitting over the working classes in the degenerate
and deformed workers' states. A whole series of explosions forming a clear
trend of political revolution against Stalinism had rocked the Soviet bloc,
from Berlin 1953 and Hungary 1956 to the later upsurges in Poland in the
seventies and early eighties. There are disagreements as to the degree of
reactionary control of the working class and the extent of the restoration
of capitalism, but the potential of revolutionary explosions against the
Stalinist regimes has always been there consciously for orthodox
Trotskyists.


> global Marxism has to cognize
>and nurture that subjectivity, it has to break the bourgeoisie's monopoly
>over such and democratize the subject (via multi-culturalism, mass-media
>activism, feminism, gay and lesbian liberation etc. etc.), instead of
>subjecting those subjects to yet another monopoly (the bitter lesson of
>Maoist China, post-War Vietnam and post-Guevara Cuba, or indeed of any of
>the national revolutions all the way back to 1789 and 1776).

What on earth and who on earth is "global Marxism". Only a conscious
revolutionary subject would be capable of following such a programme as
this, and conscious revolutionary subjects take the form of parties. I
could accept "revolutionary Marxism" as a vague gesture at such a subject,
as it can be linked to actually existing parties with programmes and
activities. But there's no such animal as "global Marxism" in this sense,
as isolated, non-organized intellectuals (or "radicals"), say, don't
constitute even a potential actor on the historical stage.

Cheers,

Hugh




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