As they say in club meetings, I would like to be identified with Comrade Devine's remarks below. Well said !
Charles ^^^^^^^ From: Jim Devine As I understand it, Marx & Engels rejected blueprints for socialism mostly for tactical and strategic reasons. When they wrote, "socialism" most often showed up in one or two forms. First, there were the utopians, many of whom had blueprints for ideal societies (the way the money libertarians of today and yesterday have blueprints for the ideal market system). The usual shtick was a leader would take his followers to the New World, take some land stolen from the natives, and try to follow the blueprint under the benign dictatorship of the leader. Some of these "colonies" were religious in nature. Most of them didn't succeed, often turning into cults or being absorbed into the broader society. Second, there were those who called for government subsidies for workers' cooperatives. Marx & Engels had a lot of respect for the "utopian socialists" (Owen, Fourier, Saint-Simon, etc., even Proudhon) and saw this kind of socialism as something that could be studied and learned from. In fact, it was part of the collective self-education of the working class which was part of the social-democratic parties of the day. But they rejected the idea of imposing idealized frameworks on reality. Instead, they saw socialism as linked into the predicted process of historical development and coming from below, i.e., from the working class movement itself. So, for example, Marx's most concrete statements about socialism came from his study of an actual struggle, i.e., the Paris Commune. (If you want a blueprint from Marx, that's it.) Of course, when the rubber hit the road (actual practice), it did not work out as M&E predicted. In the simplest possible terms, the world was split between the imperialist powers (where the working class was strongest) and the dominated countries (where capitalism was weakest) rather than combining a strong working class with weak capitalism (the true recipe for Marxian socialism). The Revolution happened in a "backward" country where capitalism was weakest (Russia). Once Lenin and the boys got into power, they clearly didn't have a blueprint. The workers', peasants', and soldiers' soviets (which had been the main basis for the Revolution) lost their enthusiasm and increasingly became a liability in the context of civil war and imperial invasion. (If the White Guards are attacking, how can a military commander deal with an independent soldiers' soviet?) Marx's writings on the Paris Commune became increasing irrelevant as this revolution from below faded. Lenin _et al_ developed most of their system of governance in the context of civil war, invasion, social backwardness, and economic underdevelopment. The little bits of blueprint that M&E left weren't very useful. The CRITIQUE OF THE GOTHA PROGRAM was very abstract (slogans!) and mostly a critique, not a positive program. In fact, it's unclear in this historical context that a blueprint would have helped. M&E and the social democrats had a lot of doubts about creating socialism in a poor country, especially one that was isolated and encircled by enemies. This is why the early Bolsheviks said that the revolution had to be international to succeed. In desperation, a lot of the Bolsheviks made a virtue of necessity. "War communism" (a totally planned economy aimed at defending the country) became an ideal, replacing democratic ideas about the Commune. Eventually, after some twists and turns, something like that was instituted under Stalin, as a machine for promoting national economic development. In this context, any respect for utopian socialism was anathema, since it implied a critique of the Soviet _status quo_. Engel's "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific" became interpreted as "Socialism: Utopian _versus_ Scientific," where "Science" became an idealized image of physical science and attached to Marxian political economy (which is not that kind of science). I wouldn't blame Stalin on the allergy to blueprints. Like Carl Dassbach, I'd blame the material conditions faced by Russian in 1917 and after. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
