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 --- from list marxism-thaxis-AT-lists.village.virginia.edu ---
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