Louis Proyect wrote: >Marx and Engels did respect what they were doing since utopian publications, >with their "hatred for every principle of existing society", are full of "the >most valuable materials of the enlightenment of the working-class."<
That's right.[*] According to my reading, the main problem that Marx and Engels had with utopian socialism was that it was absolutely no good as a guide to strategy and tactics. Worse, most of of it involved some intellectual telling people "this is the way society should be organized; if you just follow my orders, everything will work out for the best" (sometimes put into practice in an amazing number of utopian colonies, mostly in the New World, where land was cheap to white folks). M&E instead focused on capitalism's tendency to create its own grave-diggers, the proletariat. In this context, they saw utopian literature as only part of working-class collective self-education (and ultimately helping to create collective self-empowerment). The problem, as Louis suggests, is that at present the working class is "falling down on the job" of transforming capitalism into socialism. (It's not its fault, of course: capitalism has divided and conquered it, at least for now.) So utopian socialism has generally been ripped out of the context in which M&E saw it as having a positive role. Instead, as Louis writes, utopian thinking is almost entirely an academic game, even when the thinkers aren't officially part of academia. That said, however, I can see nothing wrong with a little utopianism. It awakens the imagination, getting people to think that maybe the world could be different that the cruelty of capitalism, and spurs discussion. Back before the end of the 1980s, a major kind prop allowing many to think that the world could be different was the existence of the USSR (and usually an idealized picture of that country) and the old social-democratic governments (also idealized). But now that's gone. Even so, utopian thinking -- such as Moore's putting-forward of worker co-ops -- should not be immune to criticism. Criticism is part of collective self-education. -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. [*] Here we have an echo chamber: I'm agreeing with Louis' (elided) agreement with me. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
