Date: Tue, 1 Oct 1996 21:39:08 -0400 (EDT)
Subject: Re: the state redux & socialism



I give up. The IS crowd has worn me out. They've fallen back on the last
refuge of the Marxist fundamentalist: the "utopianism" argument, that is,
we neednot move beyond Marx's The Civil War in France and Lenin's State
and Revolution because The Working Class Has Spoken. Ignoring the vast
variety of working class attempts at self-organization worldwide, this
argument picks out, quite selectively, two brief canonical experiments in
other circumastnces long ago: the Paris Commune of 1871 and the St.
Petersburg Sovirt of 1905 (with some pretense that for some time in 1917
the latter model had any bearing on events), and treats these as the only
acceptable basis for thinking about a future society. 

Of courese these models are picked because the Holy Fathers wrote about
them; the thought of actually doing one's own reserach is too much. These
experiences are then described in the exact terms used by the sacred
texts, because thinking through what they might have actually involved is
forbidden if it departs from the scripture. Ant any problems that might be
raised by this model--for example, the thought that there might be reasons
all the Council models are short lived part from bourgeois repression, or
that they might have some intrinsic problems of their own that were not
solved in their brief lives, this is dismissed as heresy, uh, bourgeois
reformism. 

Frankly, it's tedious. I guess I'd like to have all the answers too, but I
recall an old Yiddish saying. "Someone is right one time in tine? That's
very good, better than most. Someone is right half the time? A miracle!
The man is a scholar. Someone is right all the time? Run for your life?
He's a fanatic, a zealot, insane and dangerous."

I had no hope of persuading the religious, but I was hoping that, as
happened sometimes in the market socialism discussion, either someone
would make some good objections that would make me think, or the
discussion would draw in some others, as well as illuminating concerns for
lurkers who didn't want to participate. Well, maybe it did the last, but
for the rest, it didn't happen.

Signing off this thread.

--Justin




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