From: Jim Devine <[email protected]> > This Country Needs a Few Good Communists > > Posted on May?31,?2010 > > By Chris Hedges
> Hope in this age of bankrupt capitalism will come with the return of the > language of class conflict. It does not mean we have to agree with Karl Marx, > who advocated violence and whose worship of the state as a utopian mechanism > led to another form of enslavement of the working class, but we have to speak > in the vocabulary Marx employed. < what? Marx didn't say any of this. ^^^^^ CB: Well, he didn't say exactly that, but lets not get to "utopian" about Chollie. It's pretty clear that he thought quite a bit of armed struggle would be necessary for successful revolution. He certainly advocated use of force in self-defense. He was explicit about supporting the North's use of violence in the US Civil War. "Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one. It is itself an economic power. " http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch31.htm Obviously, he didn't think of the state as a "Utopian" mechanism, but he advocated a socialist state in the transitional period between capitalism and communism. In 1907, Mehring, in the magazine Neue Zeit[4] (Vol.XXV, 2, p.164), published extracts from Marx's letter to Weydemeyer dated March 5, 1852. This letter, among other things, contains the following remarkable observation: "And now as to myself, no credit is due to me for discovering the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this class struggle and bourgeois economists, the economic anatomy of classes. What I did that was new was to prove: (1) that the existence of classes is only bound up with the particular, historical phases in the development of production (historische Entwicklungsphasen der Produktion), (2) that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat, (3) that this dictatorship itself only constitutes the transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society."[5] _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
