Mark I wonder if I am the only one perplexed by this long and very interesting post of yours. You seem to me to be more of the "gigantic paradox" than Lenin, to whom you applied this epithet. Where is the Stalinist Mark Jones of so many other texts that we have seen? I am very clear that over the last year or two that I have rejected the state capitalist, people's democracy, national democratic, "delinked", etc. etc. regimes of Leninism and Maoism that were so much part of my own thinking (but who am I next to some of the intellects on this list?) in favour of a turn to left communism. I don't believe that state capitalism is a waystation to socialism anymore and I'm at least clear that that is what I think today. But are you saying something different here? The key question of the century that we are leaving behind seems to me to be What was Bolshevism? I think it was a (capitalist) strategy for developing backward countries, a popular but also authoritarian way of completing the bourgeois revolution and the transition to capitalism. And having completed this project, it has nowhere else to go. There is no way from state capitalism in one country to socialism. Absolutely none. Thus this project was never relevant to the advanced countries and never will be. Eurocommunism and Social Democracy have also largely passed into history. Trotskyism was never anything more than a dissident section of Stalinism. All these remarks are consistent with what you say below. And if anyone wants a better exposition of this line of thinking than I can give then check out Loren Goldner's piece at: http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/Lobby/2379/gold62.htm But what do you say Mark; where exactly do you disagree with me? Because I tried several times to have this debate on L-I and Marxism, to no avail, and I think people there are still too busy dreaming their Gramscian or Cuban dreams. Regards Tahir I think it was Scipio the Younger who ended every speech with the words 'Et delendus est Cartago', Carthage must be destroyed. He got his way in the end and probably you will too, but I still feel that there is another way of deciding strategic priorities. Yugoslavia and Colombia are not, actually, strategic priorities, IMHO, any more than abortion rights or other m-fem issues are strategic priorities. No doubt this is throwing a hostage to fortune, but it's not as if I don't think these are important things in their own right, I do. I just think there are more overarching, global life-and-death issues, and that you can only make sense of Yugo, Colombia, Cuba, the fate of the ex-SU or the fate of women, in terms of the overarching issues which not only form a theoretical synthesis (when anaylsed) but which also form the only possible basis for a political synthesis, ie for the constitution of a class-for-itself, through whose struggle for existence and power these *subordinate* issues can be resolved. Most people here do not think questions like gender rights, homophobia, commodification of women etc, are subordinate. On the contrary, there is a consensus (as far as I can see) that these very questions are *the* decisive, watershed questions. Thus the struggle against the WTO, the IMF, manifestations like Seattle etc, are seen as synthesising a global class struggle against capitalist hegemony, with a generalised struggle for emancipation, for social solidarity, for social justice and the redistribution of wealth and power. On the streets of Seattle, libertarian, anarchist, feminist, trade unionist, etc struggles came together with the causes of the third world - the struggle for women's rights in Asia, the struggle of peasant farmers against rapacious landlords and US agribiz, etc. This is true, but not the whole truth. Unfortunately there is another and more basic truth, a more depressing truth and it is this: there is a split, a schism, which runs to the heart of the global emancipatory project which the workers' movement inherited from the French Enlightenment. This split has several causes and many effects: firstly, no-one any longer has a self-evidently viable project for post-capitalist reality (if they ever did have; the Bolsheviks did not have, nor the Maoists nor the Gramscians). I say the Bolsheviks did not have a scheme: that is not quite true. What they invented, mostly after they actually got power, was a scheme for recreating capitalist social relations within a socialised Russia. Their ideas of development + emancipation, of economic growth + full employment + social justice, fuelled the workers' movement for almost a century and informed almost all its thinking. But this notion was always wrong, and today its is just the bars of an intellectual prison. As Jose Perez quite rightly says, in Nicaragua as in post-Soviet Russia, the workers have come to accept gross inequality of wealth. There is little indignation left. They do not question the existing order any more. This is not because they believe TINA, but because they *don't* believe in the socialist alternative. They know that "development" is a chimera, and that in some ways there is more human dignity to be found in the blind, impersonal (non-patronising) oppression of the markets, than there is to be found in the corrupt paternalism and bureaucratic self-seeking of Actually-Existing Socialisms of all types. Until you deal with this kind of issue you are not dealing with anything, in Colombia, Yugo, the US or anywhere. Besides, people have other good reasons for hanging hedonistically onto what they have got: ie, the subliminal but growing awareness that there is an alternative, and it is not an inviting one, since it is shaped by pandemics, population pressure, global warming, ecosystem collapse and energy and water shortages. Neoliberalism's main buttress is not the glowing optimism of its panjandrums but precisely the bleakness of its forecasts, the utter hopelessness of the world outside your own front door. All talk of 'sustainability' (the other term of the Seattle equation) founders between the Scylla of the hard facts of known unsustainable realities, for eg, inertial demographic growth, eg climate change, eg resource-depletion, and the Charybdis of neoliberal TINA. It is not that there is no alternative, it is just that most people find it hard to equate living in a bender off the scraps of the land, pretending to be the Skokomish and trading with shells instead of money, is equivalent to emancipation, progress or any kind of consummation of the Enlightenment dream. If that is Marx's ideal of rus in urbes, you can stick it, is how most people no doubt rightly feel. The furthest people will go is growing their own vegetables on a weekend allotment (I know a famous socialist publisher who does exactly this, but he does not believe that this is any kind of utopian prefiguring of the post capitalist Mecca). The left gravitates between two mutually-exclusive poles: on the one hand, is the traditional ideal of collectivism, selfless work for others, solidarity, and sacrifice for the bright tomorrow. On the other hand, there is the single-minded pursuit of self interest, epitomised in single-issue causes, in the solipsistic formalism of Western feminism, in the glorification of self, self, self as the ultimate object of emancipation and gratification. These poles seem to be the glorious past of the worker's movement ("I have seen the past, and it works" - except that it didn't, unfortunately) and the unpleasant, genetically-engineered future. Between these two axes is our ignominious, marginalised present. Lost in the failure of any kind of totalising, historically-transcendent rationality, on which triumphant proletarian hegemony might be realised, is also the complete loss of faith in science, any science. Instread we have astrology, blind faith and the neoliberal's throw of the dice ("probably we'll find some mroe oil"; "probably the slimate won't change"). Marxism was probably the last hurrah of Western enlightenment rationalism, the ideal of science promoted by Bacon and now ridiculed as mere "scientism", another white male middle class aberration/tool for hegemony. A century ago people had blind faith in the ratiobnality and scientificy of Marxism, as explicatory tool, as programmatic instrument. Now you can barely find a literate human being (outside these lists) who doesn't think it's anything more than snake oil and who doesn't despise Marxism as a particularly nerdish and impotent kind of huckterism. One adaptation to this is that you stop talking so much, and take up the gun (again), and finance yourself in thev traditional Bolshevik ways (rob banks, smuggle stuff). This idea is actually more widespread than it seems, but what it is the progenitor of is a new kind of groupyism, and an idea of illicit underground brotherhoods with secret handshakes, secret codes etc, and romantic noms de guerre, all highly reminiscent of the clandestine Brotherhoods which prolferated in the oppressed nationalities of 19th century Austria, Russia etc. It is precisely what "Leninism", if that ism meant anything, was articulated *against*. It is a paradox that some modern proponents of Leninism have seized on Bolsehvism's own secret history as an illegal organisation of exiles, to produce a model consisting of all the kinds of political behaviour which Lenin struggled to surmount. Of course, Lenin himself was a gigantic paradox, someone who perfected the art of open conspiracy by making all of politics a matter of public intrigue, by turning the party inside out and making the private realm of a voluntary organisation into a substitute civil society, and under the sign of this 'proletarian hegemony' the Soviet masses for 70 years became mere spectators of their own process of 'development'. No, Leninism is also not an unproblematic model for would-be revolutionaries to adopt. Since we no longer believe in science, however, we are inevitably reduced to atomistic forms of political action, of mysticism, obscurantism, wish-fulfilment, crazed sectarianism and the like. We have no common compass to steer by. There are those, I repeat, who believe that if persuasion with words won't work, persuasion at gunpoint will. They take Mao's homily to that effect as a starting-point, but it is obvious that the first objects of this persuasion at gunpoint are going to be the workers themselves (and actually they not only don't deny this, they openly declare it, and glory machismatically in it). Of course, it is true that ideas only become hegemonic when they are backed up by force. States and organised religions have always been based on this fact. However, force may be a condition of existence for ideational hegemony, but cannot be the ultimate cause. Ideas become hegemonic because they work, albeit only briefly and in highly relative ways. Bolshevism worked because the time was right for grandiose experiments in development: the 20th century saw a great economic, scientific and technical upswing, a huge increase in social productivity, an incredible cheapening of factors of production other than labour, a relative privileging of labour, and above all a colossal enrichment of the energetics-basis of social production. Neoliberal hegemony is secured because all those indicators long ago went into reverse. Of course, the plateau is rocky and its existence not very clear until you already descend: as the petrogeologist Jean Laherrere puts it: "the central limit theorem ... says that adding a very large number of independent objects (from independent actors) gives a symmetrical (normal) curve. The problem is that in fact there are many cycles (it is why the peak is fuzzy or multiple: the world* s oil supply has already peaked in 1979) and that the objects are not independent as they depend on economics and politics. Most of production curves in decline I know display almost symmetrical cycle or cycles." The issue is particularly clouded because what we have is not so much fuzziness in the data is intense clouds of reality-obscuring contradiciton. In the past century a central predicition of Marx's came about, and now more than half the human species lives in cities. This decanting of rural 'free'workers into cities, and the losses and benefits they cumulated thereby, is the great drama, the whole history of civilisation of the past 150 years, in the USSR as much as the West, and today in the Rest. Enornmous gains in social emancipation, general cultural levels and living standards were realised. Mass psychology is deeply conditioned by awareness of those intergenerational changes and the expectations and optimism they aroused. But strong as this process was (it depended on 100 000-fold increase in net per capita energy consumption over precapitalist, 'advanced organic' societies) there is a still stronger undertow which is pulling society back in the opposite direction, for which we have no answers, and which is already in many parts of the world, liquidating the benefits of urbanisation and plunging humankind into deep distress. Since no-one believes in science any more it is no longer possible to convince people that there is even a problem. The response to the science is not growing awareness that anything is wrong, but a chorus of catcalls about 'Cassandras', boring apocalypticists, etc. This suggests what we have is bnot political movements any more, but just lemming-like collective suicide pacts, and a Gadarene rush to grab what you can before it's too late.As Marx said, he whom you seek to persuade, you acknowledge master of the situation, and therefore I am not wasting my own time any more speaking to the resolutely unconverted. But my advice to you, since you are self-described red-green activist, is to draw up a list of political and personal priorities which more truly reflect not just the contingencies of the hour (the latest scandal to scandalise about, in Yugoslavia or anywhere else) but which on the contrary, relfect and embody the real underlying dynamics of history. You know what they are, by now. Mark _______________________________________________ Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist _______________________________________________ Crashlist resources: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/crashlist
