File spoon-archives/marxism.archive/marxism_1994/94-09-30.000, message 155


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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