I strongly believe in Marxist education. One of my main criticisms of
the "Marxist-Leninist" left has been its tendency to reduce the ranks
to passivity. You have a kind of division of labor with the top
leadership of the party deliberating on theoretical and strategic
questions and the lower ranks acting on their deliberations. This
flies in the face of Marx's description of the task that faced the
movement in his day: the ruthless criticism of the existing order,
ruthless in that it will shrink neither from its own discoveries, nor
from conflict with the powers that be. And, of course, in order to be
able to criticize the existing order, you really need to understand it.
When I proposed an Introduction to Marxism class to the subscribers
of Marxmail and the readers of this blog, I had an ulterior motive.
While the class was primarily meant to explain some basic concepts
such as imperialism, the national question, I wanted to educate
myself on "crisis theory", an area of Marxist economics that I was
aware of for a number of years but had never really dug into. It
seemed like a particularly good time to attack this subject since the
bourgeois press is filled with articles now about whether we are
facing "another 1929?.
I especially was looking forward to reading Henryk Grossman, the
subject of a biography by Rick Kuhn that is the latest recipient of
the Isaac Deutscher prize. Grossman, along with Paul Mattick, has the
reputation of being associated with what some might regard as
"millenarian" tendencies. They get lampooned in those cartoons with a
guy in a long beard carrying a picket sign with the words: "The end
is near" as in the example above.
full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2008/04/12/the-end-is-near/
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