At 05:30 PM 3/21/97 -0500, Peter Dorman wrote:
You may be right about the early 20th century (although I think I would
disagree about that too), but this option -- "a rather vague promise" --
is no longer open to the left. The main reason is that the experience
of the USSR and its client
I don't think there is a contradiction between envisioning full-blooded
alternatives (utopianism) and engagement in existing struggles. On the
contrary, each of these work better when enlightened by the other.
There are many ways to push immediate issues; some go in a socialist
direction, and
I think that the Left succeeded at the beginning of the 20th century not
because it offered an alternative vision of the economy (Marx wrote little
about how socialism should look like), but because they offered a reasonable
and-well understood explantion of people's plight and the
At 04:25 PM 3/21/97 -0500, Peter Dorman wrote:
At the present time, in my opinion, left political practice is in crisis
primarily because the majority of leftists no longer have confidence in
a reasonably well-understood alternative vision of the economy. I think
this crisis is unnecessary:
In the latest New Left Review, there's an interesting article by Pat Devine
and Fikret Adaman titled "The Economic Theory of Socialism". It is a survey
of various models of socialism from the centrally planned variety conceived
by Maurice Dobb, to various stripes of the market-oriented.
There is
