File spoon-archives/marxism-thaxis.archive/marxism-thaxis_1998/marxism-thaxis.9803, message 849


Date: Thu, 26 Mar 1998 16:11:35 -0500
From: Doug Henwood <dhenwood-AT-panix.com>
Subject: Re: M-TH: Doug fails to get it -- again


Hugh Rodwell wrote:

>What Doug never understood, doesn't understand and will never understand is
>that such changes in social conditions result from the pressure of the
>working class on society and its effects on the political superstructure.
>Revolutionary pressure equals social concessions from the bourgeoisie to
>buy off the threat of extinction.

Hugh, baby, not only do I understand that, I've said and written
substantially the same thing more times than I can count. You can read one
instance on the web, at <http://www.panix.com/~dhenwood/Globalization.html>:

"But that's not a worry for Korten, because there will be a revolution in
consciousness, which will unleash a new cooperative spirit "of those
within the system -- including those who head our major corporations and
financial institutions -- in addition to the efforts of citizen
movements working outside it." There's a habit in books like this to
present what seems like a reasonable set of demands and think our rulers
will suddenly slap their foreheads, saying, "Ah! We were wrong!" There's
no awareness that a serious transformation of corporate behavior would
require a serious political threat to private ownership; without that
threat, even New Dealish reform is impossible.

Or, another instance, from p. 302 of Wall Street, a book you'll never read:

"So any call for financial transformations has to be considered only as a
part of a broader attack on the forms of capitalist social power. As this
is written, that seems almost unimaginable. What once seemed like mild
social reforms - even the bare minimal aspects of a social democratic
welfare state we've seen in the U.S. - are viewed by our rulers as an
intolerable trespass on their God-given rights. The intensification of the
attack on the welfare state in the U.S. and Western Europe since 1989 has
made it clear that the boss will grant such concessions only as long as
there's a credible threat of total expropriation, which is what the USSR,
for all its countless faults, always represented to them. As impossible as
expropriation may seem today, it pays to remember the old slogan from Paris
1968: be practical, demand the impossible."

No doubt the language isn't sufficiently redolent of the Transitional
Program(me), for which I don't apologize.

>That's why he's not a Trotskyist, but an empiricist, impressionistic
>crypto-Stalinist.

Hell, and I thought I was just a petty bourgeois exploiter of youthful labor.

Doug





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