>>> <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 08/31 7:17 AM >>>
In a message dated 8/30/00 12:58:52 PM Pacific Daylight
Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
writes:
<< You don't like the marxists beginning of a plan, because
we haven't
succeeded yet. >>
If I remember correctly, marxism has had over a half century
on one continent
(at least) and most of the natural resources of that area
with which to
succeed, if it was going to succeed anywhere. Or was it
simply the wrong
century? Or were there hints of corruption within the
leadership--kinda like
capitalism, don't ya know? Is it possible that marxism does
not make
sufficient allowances for human frailty?
Sorry, to be petty, but I grew up on readings of 'Animal
Farm' (my uncle was
one of Joe McCarthy's little 'pinkoes', and I don't recall
any of his cronies
as particularly noble.
Joan I'm sure you're right, and that's why the left turn in
the anti-capitalist movement internationally is for me so
important. I'm not an anarchist or a council communist but
the sheer "uninspiring-ness" of the old bureaucratic
communism makes me feel much more at home with the new young
"ultra-lefts" than I am with the old rightwing commie types.
I know I keep quoting Loren Goldner, but this man's work is
just so rich and if I can't get any of you to go to his
website I will have to keep posting snippets. Joan the
quotation which now follows, speaks wonderfully to the type
of person that you describe:
"(Introductory Note, August 2000: The following essay is a
kind of "thought experiment", attempting to trace the career
and impact of the "man of negation", ultimately theorized by
Hegel as the "Prussian monarch" who "universally labors" in
the realm of the state (and hence art, philosophy and
religion) but whose "labor" does not transform nature, does
not engage in what the Theses on Feuerbach call "sensuous
transformative activity". Nature for this figure was and is
what Hegel viewed as the realm of mere repetition, and
"boring". Hegel's "universally laboring" Prussian state
bureaucrat is the most elaborate definition of the social
type who ultimately became dominant for an epoch (1875-1975)
in the "left", counterposed (as Marx put it in the
Grundrisse) to "the individuality as all-sided in its
production as in its consumption, and whose labor no longer
appears as labor, because an historical need has replaced a
natural one". The international era of the state civil
servant in the "left" demarcates the era of the centrality
first of German Social Democracy and above all of the
Russian revolution and the centrality of the "Russian
question" for the international definition of the left.
Today, it is possible to see the true meaning of the "line
of continuity" from 1789 to 1848 to 1917 to 1975; the
meaning is the evolution of mercantilism and not of
socialist revolution. The line of continuity is from St-Just
to Fichte to Nechaev and Tchachev to Stalin, Mao, Ho and Pol
Pot.) "
Tahir
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