Rod,
"Everything"? Really? Ponomaesh Russki yazik?
Barkley Rosser
-----Original Message-----
From: Rod Hay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Friday, May 19, 2000 7:11 AM
Subject: [PEN-L:19273] Re: Re: Re: : withering away of the state (fwd)
>I have read everything.
>
>Rod
>
>[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
>
>> What did you read about Soviet socialism?
>>
>> Mine
>>
>> >Interesting musings Carrol, but words have meanings, and what most
people
>> >mean by the word socialism is not what was seen in the USSR. You can
call
>> >it what you want, but I don't call it socialism.
>>
>> Rod
>>
>> Carrol Cox wrote:
>>
>> > Rod Hay wrote:
>> >
>> > > Perhaps Marx was utopian. But we will have to wait until we have a
socialists
>> > > society, in order to find out. The Soviet Union called itself
socialist but it
>> > > wasn't.
>> >
>> > This I think is utopian. Socialism is a movement, not a platonic form
against
>> > which you can measure any state and say it is or isn't "socialist." It
would
>> > seem to me wrong to assume that there will not be many more episodes
>> > in the socialist movement which will go greatly astray in one way or
another,
>> > many more defeats. THe struggles of 6 billion people and their
descendants
>> > to find their way out of capitalism will almost certainly contain
episodes
>> > at least as unpleasant as the USSR at its worst. The struggle for
socialism
>> > has to be essentially <g> self-justifying at each step, regardless of
the
>> > (temporary) final outcomes of each struggle. If the only or even the
>> > chief reason to fight for socialism is the achievement of the socialism
>> > for our great-grandchildren, then socialism is a bust.
>> >
>> > This is *not* to disagree with Rosa Luxemburg that the final goal is
>> > everything, the struggle is nothing. The role of that final goal is the
>> > understanding we achieve through it of the present. Hence the
>> > struggle depends on the final goal *independently* of whether or
>> > not we ever achieve that final goal.
>> >
>> > Marx, as I understand him, did not propose the classless society and
>> > the withering away of the state as a prize to reward us at the end. He
>> > saw that just as feudalism could be understood from the perspective
>> > of capitalism, so capitalism could only be understood from the
perspective
>> > of communism. We can only understand the capitalist state (and
therefore
>> > organize our struggle against it) by seeing it from the perspective of
>> > the society in which the state has withered away.
>> >
>> > [I really think it would help if a larger proportion of marxists
suffered
>> > from depression. That would help dampen the galloping optimism
>> > that blithely says the USSR was not socialist -- for the implication
>> > of that evaluation is that socialism of just the sort we want will be
>> > easily attainable if we just have the right ideas. Horse Feathers!]
>> >
>> > The evil at the heart of capitalism (or of any social order of which
>> > the market is the central institution) is that Reality becomes
>> > the Future, while the past and present become mere appearance.
>> > I began to see this by reading and re-reading Plato's *Republic*
>> > and attempting to explain it to undergraduates. In Plato's timarchy
>> > (in effect a landed aristocracy of some sort) the Past is the Real.
>> > The present is merely a recapitulation of the past and is emptied
>> > of reality. In what he called an oligarchy (a state ruled by those
>> > whose motive was the accumulation of wealth [=money?],
>> > the past was non-existent, and the present only the shadow of
>> > the future. Action becomes meaningless in itself, since it cannot
>> > exhibit ambition (which is the struggle to maintain what the past
>> > has given us) nor can it be its own end. Since anything resembling
>> > capitalism was still nearly 2000 years away, it was remarkable
>> > that even in the piddling financial manipulations of his day Plato
>> > could see this. The core capitalist metaphor, that of *investment*
>> > catches up this trivialization of the present by the future.
>> >
>> > The *demos* Plato discarded with contempt: they *chose* (he
>> > implies) to live only in the present, their lives dominated by a
>> > lowly lust for immediate satisfaction. (One of the many modern
>> > equivalents of this is the accusation that unwed mothers have
>> > babies in order to make money off of public aid.) There would
>> > have been no way to theorize this in Plato's world, for that
>> > depended on the development of wage labor under capitalism
>> > and its theorization in Marx's conceptions of surplus value
>> > and alienation. The working class, by definition, is that class
>> > which *must* live in the present (that being the main thrust
>> > of the assumption that labor power is purchased at is value).
>> >
>> > And it is this (unavoidable) attachment of the working to the
>> > present (which implicitly is also a valuation of the past such as
>> > the investor dare not allow him/herself) which makes the working
>> > class a *potentially* revolutionary class. Its revolutionary task
>> > is to free humanity from the tyranny of the future.
>> >
>> > Carrol
>>
>> --
>> Rod Hay
>> [EMAIL PROTECTED]
>> The History of Economic Thought Archive
>> http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/index.html
>> Batoche Books
>> http://Batoche.co-ltd.net/
>> 52 Eby Street South
>> Kitchener, Ontario
>> N2G 3L1
>> Canada
>
>--
>Rod Hay
>[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>The History of Economic Thought Archive
>http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/index.html
>Batoche Books
>http://Batoche.co-ltd.net/
>52 Eby Street South
>Kitchener, Ontario
>N2G 3L1
>Canada
>
>
