In solidarity Gojko, Your first sentence is an excellent response to my message: > "present development of productive forces is so high there is no need for > capitalism which now become the destructive force of all planet" should > be > explained to working people of US and that should be main task of that Mass > party.
I agree that is a main task in terms of education. You are obviously a person who appreciates and has benefited from education, including 'higher' university education. In your first message to this list you mention your intellectual debt to the Praxis group of university philosophers in Yugoslavia who were very active from the mid-1960s to mid-1970s. They were critical of the "socialist" system in Yugoslavia; they had some influence on me as i was radicalizing and developing socialist political views in the late 1960s and 1970s. I remember reading about the Praxis group in a large book edited by Erich Fromm titled "Socialist Humanism"; here is a reference to a site which has Fromm's introduction to the book and a link to the entire text of the book: http://marx.libcom.org/library/socialist-humanism-international-symposium-edited-erich-fromm Some of us activists in the socialist and antiwar movements in the U.S. were influenced by the Praxis-era student uprising at the University of Belgrade in 1968: https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3913-yugoslav-students-in-the-1968-wave-of-revolt-an-interview-with-dragomir-olujic The Belgrade students renamed their university the "Red University Karl Marx" and we used that idea of the "Red University' where the university would be at the service of the working class (instead of the capitalist class) in our student movement work here. In his message on this thread, Glenn wondered what makes you think you know what most people on this discussion list think. At least many of the people i know on this list don't have any illusions that the Soviet Union was socialist in any ideal sense. I think Cuban socialists have done a better job despite the difficulties of working to build a socialist society on a small island which has been under constant attack from the nearby major capitalist imperialist nation in the world. Also on this thread Andrew Pollak has recommended reading Catherine Samary on Yugoslavia. Over the years i have seen several articles on Yugoslavia by Samary; i am inclined to agree with her views. Here's a little bit about her: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catherine_Samary If you go the site Andrew has shared with us https://www.iire.org/node/864 you will see several reviews of the recent book Catherine Samary co-edited along with the Table of Contents. Samary wrote the initial article and the concluding article along with an article in each of three sections of the book. Her article in the second section is titled "Plan, Market and Democracy: the experience of the so-called socialist countries." I haven't read the book and i don't know if i will ever have the time and opportunity. Given your 40 years in Yugoslavia i hope you are motivated to read it; Samary's article in the first section is titled "Yugoslav self-management: a balance sheet". Growing up in capitalist USA under the educational, cultural, intellectual hegemony of the U.S. capitalist class i was taught that the Soviet Union was socialist. There has been a tremendous effort to also convince us that the Soviet Union under Stalin's dictatorship was a consummation of Lenin's objectives in leading the October revolution. Some of the writers who helped me to see that this was a lie, just capitalist propaganda, were Marcel Leibman who published "Leninism Under Lenin" and Moshe Lewin who published "Lenin's Last Struggle." Very few people know that Lenin had the first of several partially paralyzing and eventually fatal strokes in May of 1922 and that in his last year from his sick bed before he died in January 1924 (basically under Stalin's quarantine/house arrest) Lenin tried his best to get Stalin removed from his leadership role in the Communist Party. Of course deciding whether to call a society "socialist" raises deep issues of definition for thoughtful people. You say in the last sentence of your first message that "... we should talk about communism in Marx sense,..." I think most revolutionary socialists today consider using "socialist" to potentially describe the social system that immediately succeeds working class overthrow of the capitalist class with "communism" as the future goal. Considering how to use these words "socialism" and "communism" should make us aware that we use words and language in an effort to describe reality - but we shouldn't confuse words with reality. You seem to think that once Marx had sketched out his thoughts and ideas on "communism' that all the necessary preparatory work had been done. To the contrary, Marx was clear that "philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it." Marx didn't confuse his vision of what a socialist or communist society would be like with also being a strategy for actually building such a society. I think that Marx's strategic perspective was somewhat primitive and simplistic - as reasonable people would expect to be coming from an early pioneering revolutionary socialist. We should study and learn about revolutionary strategy from Lenin. He succeeded in actually leading the overthrow of the capitalist class in Russia. Lenin didn't expect to be able to immediately create socialism in relatively underdeveloped Russia. He understood that the Russian revolution developed at a weak point in the global capitalist system. Unlike Stalin and Plekhanov Lenin had an internationalist perspective and saw the prospect of building socialism in Russia in the near future tied to the spread of socialist revolution into capitalist Europe. Gojko, what is your strategy for 'explaining to the working people in the U.S. that capitalism has become destructive and is no longer needed'? On Thu, Feb 25, 2021 at 8:28 PM <goj...@hotmail.com> wrote: > > in Solidarity Dayne, > "present development of productive forces is so high there is no need for > capitalism which now become the destructive force of all planet" should be > explained to working people of US and that should be main task of that Mass > party. The present corona crise showed that most of services should be public > and free and that could be easily finance by government. > > If you continue using Castro or Lenin as some example for society they > created , especially Lenin, there is no hope for any Maas party in US. > Workers in Russia during Lenin and after him did not have any power . All > power was in hand of Bolshevik party. and that was happen everywhere where > socialism was tried inspired by Lenin. All power was within communist parties > manly in top leadership. Socialist movements were created to give power to > people , that workers got control over their lives, not that everything to > be decided by nomenclatura and party apparatchiks as during Lenin time and > later, and in all others so called socialist country , Cuba included. If you > read those quotes from Marx about the future communist society there was no > trace of any of that in any so called socialist country. In Yugoslavia some > of that was tried, but ,as I already said , it was spoiled by desire of > Communist party to control everything. They never give freedom to workers to > decide something for themself , and make mistakes, from which they can > learn. But they did not learn anything and when they got freedom to vote > freely they choose the worst, nationalism, worst kind of capitalism , like in > former Yugoslavia and now Russia. > -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. 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