Re: [CrashList] Re: Warning Signs?

[TAHIR WOOD]

>>> "Charles Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 10/05
5:18 PM >>>
without the Russian Revolution and its incident revolutions
( China, explosion of national liberation revolutions in
colonies after WWII) , Marxism has not changed the world,
begins to become suspected of scholasticism, i.e. nice
sounding words, that don't work in practice. We would
probably not even be talking about Marx, if it had not been
for Leninism and the Russian Revolution. He would be an
obscure, crackpot, oddball.                                 
                           
                                                            
Charles, this is an interesting 'what if' speculation. I
wonder whether we would have been better or worse off.
Marxism would not be as discredited as it is, but I must say
I doubt that it would have been unknown. But these sorts of
speculations can become a scholasticism of their own, can't
they? One could say that having gone through the leninist
experiment, we are the better off because we now know its
likely limitations, which have shown themselves more than
once, as you imply. The 'national liberation revolutions'
that you refer to, of course do not derive from Marx at all
- they are cast in a quasi-marxist terminology by Lenin and
then removed even further from Marx than that by other
nationalist ideological elaborators. I don't know whether
you would, for example, refer to the South African
experience as such a revolution, but I can assure you that
there's nothing much going on here that can credibly be
attributed to Marx. It is wholly to the discredit of Lenin,
however, that current developments here CAN be defended on
leninist grounds, and this leninist quasi-marxism (for
example of the SACP) does just that all the time. I couldn't
imagine an ideological orientation that does less to address
the concerns of this list.

Tahir
                                                            
                                                            
                                                            
                                                            
                                                            
                                                            
                                                            
                                                            
                                                            
                                                            
                                                            
                                                            
                                                            



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