Date: Wed, 28 Sep 94 14:06:27 EDT From: Andrew.Daitsman-AT-mail.cc.trincoll.edu (Andy Daitsman) Subject: Re: Hayek, USSR, and All that.. (fwd) Wes Cecil wrote: >democratic. It is awfully clear that Marx was not a big fan of >democracy, that the U.S. is both a fully functioning democracy and a >repressive/exploitative society, and that any imagined overthrow of >international capitalism is going to have to involve crushing the middle >class values which support the democratic system. >Wes > > Maybe I'm incapable of thinking for myself, but I just read this yesterday and it made sense to me: "...at its core, the classical Marxist project of communism is inextricably infused with a profoundly emancipatory vision, based on the dis-alienation of human beings in every arena of their existence and activity. It is an idea intended to extend and expand the formal definition of democracy, in its understanding of the people as subject rather than subjected, as the determining rather than the determined element, as the authors of their own histories. It celebrates democracy as a people empowered, as a society that has reabsorbed into itself the authority that formerly stood above it. Egalitarian popular participation in detemining and carrying out public policy and in directly controlling the process of production lies at the center of the Marxist definition of socialist society, although it is only a sketch in the body of Marx's work. Participation informs Marx's differeneces with the fromal definitions of democracy; it becomes both the means by which individuals will develop to the fullest their capacities and the manifestation of those freedoms. Nor did Marx see the actualization of this idea as a distant goal, an abstract ideal made possible only by the "construction" of socialism. Rather, it is the very means by which all other goals--the transformation of both the individual and the society as a whole--are to be achieved." Carollee Bengelsdorf, _The Problem of Democracy in Cuba_ (Oxford, 1994), pp. 3-4. My dad at different times in his life identified himself to me both as a Stalinist and as a Jeffersonian democrat, and he never renounced either identification. There's got to be something in the ideology that could allow such contradictory statements. See ya, Andy Daitsman Trinity College ------------------
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