Patrick Bond wrote: >Things are rough all over. Was reading these messages about radical >economists who lose their sense of praxis and it reminded me of the >editorial from the third issue of our SA journal "debate" a couple of >years ago, in a special issue entitled "Intellectuals in Retreat": . . . [etc.] I read Patrick's message with its excerpt from the "debate" editorial after meditating on the Eighteenth Brumaire. The transition was seemless. Allow me to retrace my steps . . . I was responding to Rob Schaap's point about how "the issue has been dressed up" and his question about new literature. What I wanted/started to say is that the "new literature" awaits the insurrection that will blast history out of its stale continuum. I went back to the Brumaire to review Marx's lines about how the living "conjure up the spirits of the past" and "borrow from them names, battle slogans and costumes in order to present the new scene of world history in this time-honoured disguise and this borrowed language." I had been thinking about Zimmerwald and Serbia and Social Democracy: the first world war as tragedy, the NATO action as . . . well, you know the rest. But I hate to cite out of context without assuring myself that the allusion means, in context, what I think it means. So I skimmed through the Eighteen Brumaire and was jolted by two other passages: one on the social revolution of the 19th century and the other on Social-Democracy. These are, like the tragedy/farce passage, famous passages. With due regard to the irony of using the expressions, the passages are timeless, priceless. On the social revolution: "The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself before it has stripped away all superstition about the past. The former revolutions required recollections of past world history in order to smother their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content. There the phrase went beyond the content -- here the content goes beyond the phrase." On social-democracy: "The peculiar character of social-democracy is epitomized in the fact that democratic-republican institutions are demanded as a means, not of doing away with two extremes, capital and wage labor, but of weakening their antagonism and transforming it into harmony. However different the means proposed for the attainment of this end may be, however much it may be trimmed with more or less revolutionary notions, the content remains the same. This content is the transformation of society in a democratic way, but a transformation within the bounds of the petty bourgeoisie. Only one must not get the narrow-minded notion that the petty bourgeoisie, on principle, wishes to enforce an egoistic class interest. Rather, it believes that the special conditions of its emancipation are the general conditions within whose frame alone modern society can be saved and the class struggle avoided. Just as little must one imagine that the democratic representatives are indeed all shopkeepers or enthusiastic champions of shopkeepers. According to their education and their individual position they may be as far apart as heaven and earth. What makes them representatives of the petty bourgeoisie is the fact that in their minds they do not get beyond the limits which the latter do not get beyond in life, that they are consequently driven, theoretically, to the same problems and solutions to which material interest and social position drive the latter practically. This is, in general, the relationship between the political and literary representatives of a class and the class they represent." regards, Tom Walker http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/covenant.htm
