From: cbcox-AT-rs6000.cmp.ilstu.edu (Carrol Cox)
Subject: Re: Eternal Glory to the Jacobins (Article in NLR)
Date: Mon, 4 Mar 1996 18:19:23 -0600 (CST)


Re Lucian and Carlos on All Honor etc:

    You both may be right, but nothing that either says has anything
to do with Riesco's argument. He argues that *all* communist revo-
lutionaries, including Lenin, of the 20th c. have, willy nilly, because
of objective historical conditions and independently of their wills
brought about "Jacobin" revolutions. In is argument the October
revolution would only be the completion of the February Revolution.

    I vaguely recall in one of Marx's works some justification for
this: someplace he argues that only the working class has the will
to carry through the bourgeois revolution. Riesco would only add that
in the 19th & 20th c. the workers were not strong enough to do *more*
than that, so what they and their "willy-nilly Jacobin" leaders did
was to clear the way for us to carry out the Communist revolution in
a wholly modernized world.

    As I said, I haven't tried to think Riesco's position through, so
I have no strong position on it--I just think it's interesting.

    But let's not dilute it into one or another of the positions
we (all Marxists) have had as to which revolutionaries were the
"truest" ones. Wrong or right, Riesco says something different.
1
    Carrol













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