Justin writes:
>I would add to this analysis that I think the democratic Marx was a lot
>more popular until the rise of the USSR; you see this in people like Rosa
>Luxemburg ... But the Soviet Unuion claimed the mantle of Marx and
>squelched democracy, So in the shadow of its prestige, the democratic Marx
>went rather by the wayside, to be salavged in margins by people like Draper.
This is the problem. Most working people and many intellectuals go with
"what works in practice." They looked at capitalism, which was giving them
quite a bad deal during the period after 1917 and compared it to what they
saw in the USSR. The USSR was getting a lot of criticism from the bourgeois
press, etc., but since those organs lie about so many important issues,
these folks thought that they must be lying about the USSR, too. (This
impression was reinforced when the bourgeois press accentuated the negative
and ignored the positive.) The USSR was the "lesser of two evils" and
besides, it was far away and not threatening, or at least much less so than
the boss who's breaking the union or speeding up the labor process. The
USSR claimed to be "Marxist," while most people don't know much about Marx
-- especially since most of the "democratic Marx" writings came to light
very late -- so many equated the USSR with Marxism. A similar process
encouraged the rise of a different version of Marxism during the 1960s &
1970s.
>I agree with Brad, too, that Marx's refusal to think about recipes for the
>cookshops of the future didn't hepp.
Marx didn't try to develop recipes for the cookshops of the future (utopian
schemes) because he predicted/hoped/wanted workers to take control over
their own lives in their own way (a democratic way). He only described the
future of socialism at the most abstract way (in places like "Critique of
the Gotha Programme") until he could learn from the empirical reality of
events such as the Paris Commune.
I think, however, the fault doesn't lay with Marx as much as with his
followers. The problem is that there's no reason to restrict one's source
of insights to only Marx and Engels. We can learn from all sorts of other
socialist theorists (including the utopians). BTW, Marx himself never said
that he was the only source of Truth.
Justin is right that utopian descriptions of a possible socialism are
useful. As Draper [sorry!] points on in his description of Marx & Engels'
views of the utopians, they agreed. Workers' discussion of utopian schemes,
they thought, were part of the process of workers's self-education and
self-liberation.
Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] & http://liberalarts.lmu.edu/~jdevine
