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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