Date: Sat, 3 Aug 1996 12:59:44 +0100
From: m-14970-AT-mailbox.swipnet.se (Hugh Rodwell)
Subject: Lenin's bastard offspring with a pink eggshell finish


Mark A writes from Cloud-Cuckoo-Land:

>Furthermore, gradualism makes sense... Even intelligent men can't always
>predict how their planned changes will work in practice.  We need to make
>fundamental changes, not just tinker, but we need to do it gradually,
>both to see how these changes affect the system and to gain and retain
>the popular concensus needed at each step.

>I think too many leftists have a tendency to throw up their hands
>and say the system won't change.  This ignores the vast systemic
>change which has occurred since 1789.

>Replacing the somewhat unresponsive system with an even
>less responsive, more rigid dictatorship, will not solve these
>problems.  This "final solution" is an illusion.
>
>Revolutionary socialism only scares ordinary people away, and
>provides the authorities -- who have enormous human, monetary,
>technological, legal, and military resources -- with an excuse to
>deny legitimate social grievances and repress legitimate social
>movements.
>
>Dividing the people up into classes of friends and enemies --
>workers and bourgeoisie -- will not advance the cause of social
>justice, democracy, or socialism.  This isn't to say that we don't
>need good political economy to help the people understand what is
>going on and how the system works.  This inevitably means a discussion
>of classes, the current power relations between these classes, the
>relative privileges and burdens of these classes, how the
>resources and spoils of society are divided up among these classes,
>and how this division results in an inequitable distribution of
>social, economic, and political power.
>
>But any argument that ends with the demand to replace the so-called
>bourgeois democracy with a class dictatorship instead of with a fuller,
>more meaningful, more egalitarian democracy, is anti-socialist and
>probably doomed to failure.
>
>The demise of the Soviet system provides a potential for socialism,
>genuine, democratic socialism, to develop.  People will, over time,
>no longer automatically associate the word socialism with
>economically inept authoritarian police states.  But only if
>socialists provide an intelligent, compelling vision of a better, more
>democratic tomorrow, and not a vision of class dictatorship similar to
>the phony socialism of Lenin and his bastard offspring, who set the
>cause of socialism back a thousand years -- far worse than any
>capitalist conspiracy could have.


So, as you can see, the Second International is undead and earning its keep
in Arizona. Our Mark ought to apply for a transfer to write speeches for
Tony Blur in England instead. There's a better market there for this kind
of anti-Marxist red-baiting with a pink eggshell finish.

Unless of course his sponsors can see a greater threat in the emergence of
a vital Marxist current among academics in America. Good news for us, bad
news for him, as he ricochets between rock and hard place in his attempts
to win our hearts and minds.

I once heard a Portuguese lecturer remark about the dictator Salazar: 'Such
a waste of a fine style!', and shake his head. It's too bad a style's no
use unless the content is worth reading.

Cheers,

Hugh




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