Carol,
Apologies for my previous reply to this message of yours. I was under the
misaprehension that it was made in response to the Simultaneous Policy
proposal which, I now see, it probably wasn't - sorry.
John
----- Original Message -----
From: "Carrol Cox" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Cc: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Sunday, September 03, 2000 9:32 PM
Subject: Re: [CrashList] What is really worth talking about
> TAHIR WOOD wrote:
>
> > >>> "John Bunzl" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 09/01 6:56 AM >>>
> > Changing the system means a) a vision of a new
> > system as a target to aim for, and, b) a way of getting from
> > the system we are in now to the target in a responsible and
> > secure manner which everyone can understand and support.
> > It's as 'simple' as that and that is what I suggest we
> > mainly discuss.>>>
>
> The following observations are more topic sentences than a developed
> argument, but
> they might be of some use. Marx (before he ad even himself became a
> marxist) wrote
> what remains the definitive comment on (a) above: "It is not our thing
> to write recipes
> for the cookshops of the future." Through our understanding of the
> present we can
> glimpse, in the vaguest terms, what *must be* if we (as a species or a
> 'civilization') are
> to survive. But it is not from such glimpses that the concrete future
> comes: that arises
> within the struggle to destroy that which is destroying us. "Positive"
> visions are at best
> foolish -- at worst totalitarian nightmares.
>
> For one thing, not one of us (or probably even our grandchildren) will
> live in that future. Our
> lives and the lives of generations to come must be lived out in the
> midst of a struggle for a
> world we will never see. It is a cruel mockery to pretend that that
> future can be our "reward"
> for the struggle. It also mocks the lives of all who have already died
> in the struggle -- and those who are dying today.
>
> That does not mean that Rosa Luxemburg was wrong in affirming (in
> opposition to Bernstein) that 'The final goal is everything, the process
> nothing,'
> but in grasping her truth one must remember that she was a historical
> materialist,
> not a utopian dreamer. Marx observed that we can understand the ape
> better
> through knowing the human: put otherwise, what we know is history, and
> to know
> the present we must see the present as history, which is to look back on
> the present
> from the perspective of the future. (Bertell Ollman is very good on
> this.) The final
> goal is everything in that it is only by our (very general) grasp of
> what must be,
> from the perspective of the classless future, that we can understand,
> make
> sense of, and organize the present struggle. But as a target to aim for,
> as the reward
> as it were for struggle, that future is nothing.
>
> John's (b), "a way of getting from the system we are in now to the
> target,"
> is incoherent. Such a way does not exist nor will it ever exist. Mao
> noted that
> Marxists have no crystal ball (and neither do anarchists or social
> democrats)
> -- and it would require a most amazing crystal ball indeed to map out
> such a
> route from a chaotic present to a distant and only vaguely grasped
> future.
>
> Napoleon said something to the effect that is military plan was to act
> and then
> see what happens. We can work out general principles of struggle (though
> most have
> long since been worked out, so it is more a matter of archaeology than
> "new"
> thinking), but revolution (or even major reform) cannot be planned in
> advance.
> The world is too contingent. Hence the demand that a plan be prepared
> "in a
> responsible and secure manner which everyone can understand and
> support"
> is in fact a demand that the world never change. It accepts the present
> capitalist
> world as eternal -- history has indeed ended.
>
> Carrol Cox
>
>
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