File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1997/marxism-thaxis.9710, message 166


Date: Sat, 18 Oct 1997 18:34:28 -0400
From: Louis Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: M-TH: G.A. Cohen's blueprints


G.A. Cohen:
  
> Marx used to say when he was asked
>   what socialism would be like, "I do not want to write recipes for
>   future kitchens." He thought the issues of socialist construction
>   would come up in the future and that they could only be addressed in
>   the future. That was one of his biggest mistakes because unless
>   socialists have a tolerably definite conception of the socialist
>   society which they favour, they will not attract anyone else to their
>   vision. You cannot get people to abandon capitalism in favour of
>   socialism just because socialism sounds good. You need a tolerably
>   detailed prospectus. If I say I am going to build you a wonderful
>   house and that it is going to meet all your dreams and you will love
>   it, and you then ask how many rooms it will have, how will it be
>   heated, and so forth, and I say "I cannot answer any of these
>   questions, but, believe me, it will all work itself out," you will
>   rightly be sceptical. So socialists need to provide maps and
>   blueprints and discussions about practical issues about how socialism
>   would function for the political purpose of winning people to the
>   cause. They also need to do that for the more evident direct reason
>   that if and to the extent that socialists gain some power, they have
>   to be intelligent about what they are going to do with it, and if they
>   do not do a lot of prethinking they are going to get into a mess; and
>   that’s been the record of history.
>   

I have never seen such a clear-cut formulation of the "blueprint" concept
of socialism. It is absurd, isn't it? Maps and blueprints are not what is
needed. What is needed is clear-cut analysis of the workings of capitalism
and a general strategy grounded in such an analysis.

The AM school seems to have run out of steam. Except for an occasional
hiccup from Justin Schwartz and Kevin Cabral, I never hear it referred to
on the Internet. New Left Review, Science and Society and Monthly Review
don't seem to pay it much mind either. There are also defections from
within the camp itself, judging by Jon Elster's recent trajectory toward
psychology.

What a strange movement AM was. It was composed of Oxford dons who never
made the slightest attempt to communicate in the language of ordinary
people, it never tried to influence political or social institutions like
trade unions or parties, and it very rarely tried to apply its
"methodology" to concrete historical or political questions. Can you
imagine an AM analysis of post-apartheid South African? I can't. Mostly it
is intellectual games revolving around hypothetical situations. How sterile
can you get.

A lot of this is very much driven by the combination of events that
typified the late 1980s and early 1990s: collapse of the Soviet Union, the
seeming invincibility of the free market, Fukuyama's proclamations. So
postmodernist Marxism and AM were straws some people clutched at to figure
all this out.

The latest New Yorker magazine has a fascinating article on the relevance
of Marx. If you read the article, you will discover no reference to the
need to improve Marx with additives such as Lyotard or John Rawls. It
recommends Marx straight, with no chaser.

Louis Proyect




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