>>> "Julien Pierrehumbert" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 08/27 9:30 PM
>>>
Tahir,
>This unfortunately is turning out
>to be as true of Cuba as it is of China. It has been
claimed
>that this is the only viable model of development that
>emerged in the twentieth century. It is not
>...
>a rate of environmental
>degradation which is possibly even worse than that of
>western capitalism; a repulsive emphasis on national
>interests masquerading as anti-imperialism.
I don't know much about Cuba, but this looks unfair.
Remember that forwarded
piece about organic farming in Cuba?
You have spliced two different parts of my message together.
If you look carefully, what I said about Cuba was that like
China it "never showed any potential whatsoever for
advancing beyond the same capitalist project". In my
opinion, but not in that of many list members, this would be
true. Regarding environmental degradation, this has in fact
been a feature of "state capitalism" (or bureaucratic
socialism) in general, e.g. Eastern Europe, China, etc. You
could if you want draw the conclusion that I was saying the
latter about Cuba as well, rather like a magician drawing a
rabit out of the hat, but it was not intended by me. I might
as well also add that Cuba represents a more benign form of
this regime than the others mentioned, and I have no doubt
that it also has a better environmental policy by the same
token. If I gave the opposite impression then this was
carelessness on my part. I promise to be more circumspect in
the future. So there you are.
>Capitalism on a world scale develops by feeding off the
>non-capitalist world until there is nothing of that left.
>This is the way that the fall of the rate of profit is
>delayed or retarded - I have no doubt.
May I ask you how do you measure the rate of profit for
starters? I don't want to
put doubt where there is none for you, but I'm not sure to
understand what
you're talking about.
Ask Nestor. I was responding to his claim that all this
anti-imperialist struggle brings down the rate of profit.
Did you miss that? So ask him how you measure it. He must
know if he says things like that?
>Actually an excellent example is Iran. ...
Good point, although I'm far from sure that the Iranian
situation is worse than
the one of other muslim countries.
Nobody said that. That is bad enough anyway and those
countries are not usually claimed to be anti-imperialist.
Tahir, when I said that you don't need to abandon marxism to
support
something else, you laughed. But here you are arguing just
that!
I am arguing that the revolutionaries should not do the
bourgeoisie's job for them by administering a capitalist
state.
In case you
still don't see the connection, do do what you say, who will
you support? Not
insurrectional groups, I guess.
Let me answer you historically in this matter. Karl Marx did
not think that the insurrection leading to the Paris commune
was a good idea because he saw that it would not succeed,
but once it had happened of course he supported it. Who else
should he have supported? The enemy?
And, would you also say that subversion of capitalism is
also to be supported
in such situations which are in fact by far the most
frequent? What I mean?
Cooperatives, fun cultural subversion, etc.
I am not a prude - I like having fun and subverting things
myself occasionally. But a lot of this activity is just
carried out by rich kids while they're waiting for their
parents to die and leave them their money. It's nice to put
a little intellectual and revolutionary veneer onto your
fun. Know what I mean?
>As Bordiga says:
>Capitalism is the agrarian revolution.
So I'm not the only one talking about the importance of land
ownership
structures. Interesting.
>It doesn't require bourgeois democracy at all. It can be
done
>by authoritarian rightists just as well as by authoritarian
'leftists'.
Or anarchists, but I don't want to restart the spanish
thread.
There is no evidence that anarchists are able to manage this
sort of process at all (capitalist modernisation). However
there is some credit in this fact, since as I've said, it is
not the task of revolutionaries. The bourgeoisie would have
found a way of doing it themselves anyway.
>It says that national liberation through
>the struggle against imperialism is a precondition for
>socialism. It never suggests, however, that the dismantling
>of nation states is itself a precondition for socialism.
And
>this is where its fundamentally bourgeois nature is
exposed.
>In other words socialism can be achieved within the context
>of the state (forgetting entirely that the state is the
>instrument of class domination in marxist theory).
Good stuff here.
>But what then happens is a
>theoretical conflation of the dictatorship of the
>proletariat with socialism itself. So you then have the
>bastard theoretical notion of the "socialist state".
And what about the theoretical conflation of dictatorship of
the proletariat with
dictatorship over the proletariat which lead to a police
state?
Well this is really the whole point. All that the
'dictatorship of the proletariat' means in marxist theory is
a transition to socialism. And a rather messy and unpleasant
process it would probably be at times. I don't believe that
this should be embarked on now unless there is sufficient
indication that the transition on an international scale is
possible. Otherwise the rapid degeneration that you have
described will occur because the revolutionaries in effect
have allowed themselves to be caught in the trap of having
to administer a capitalist state. (To be fair, with the
benefit of hindsight we can now see that this was Lenin's
dilemma circa April 1917.) 'Plan B' is then better, to push
the envelope within the capitalist state to make the
conditions for socialism more favourable without falling
into the trap of doing the bourgeoisie's job for them, i.e.
taking over THEIR state and running it for them. This
position is not reformism - it is still aimed at the
overthrow of capitalism at the very first moment that it
becomes possible. Reformism is something that says that
capitalism is not so bad if you can eliminate the nasty bits
like fascism, racism, sexism, etc. I don't buy this for one
moment. The forward movement towards the goal of socialism
and the dismantling of nation states is everything.
>... The "highest stage"
>notion is an attempted freeze frame: Let's stop the dance
so
>that we can watch it more clearly!
Could you explain that more clearly?
I think that if you look at my polemic with Nestor you'll
see that what I'm criticising here is the mechanistic view
of capitalism and history as being divided rigidly into
stages. I think that what is at stake are different moments
of a process that is almost infinitely malleable, variable
and adaptable (the 'dance' of capital itself). This also
relates to my questioning on the rate of pofit issue and the
categorical assumption that capitalism is really
fundamentally challenged in this way by the kinds of
'anti-imperialism' that were being put forward. So the
freeze frame is stopping this dance at somewhere around 1910
and saying "now we know what the final stage of capitalism
is all about". I think this is rubbish. Globalisation as we
know it today is something not at all projected in Lenin's
pamphlet, nor is Lenin's imperialism such a definitely
different 'stage' than the capitalism already described
comprehensively by Marx. As I said this is a mechanistic way
of thinking, characteristic of the second and third
internationals, and it derives from thinkers such as
Kautsky, who turned out not to have a very sound grasp of
Marxism as it maybe appeared to Lenin and others at the
time.
Hope that answers your questions satisfactorily.
Tahir
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