On 2011-01-27, at 9:22 AM, Louis Proyect wrote: > On 1/27/11 9:12 AM, Marv Gandall wrote: > >> Can you and Louis elaborate a bit about your current problems with Jacoby? >> I'm not familiar with how his thinking has evolved. > > The latest contretemps with Wright has an added dimension. Although you > might not have figured it out from Jacoby’s review, Jacoby is a > long-standing utopian socialism theorist...
Yes, this was apparent as far back as The Last Intellectuals. > But I think the whole idea of utopia has very little use in the class > struggle today. As an old fashioned Marxist, I think the focus has to be > on the here and now. As American Trotskyist James P. Cannon once put it, > the art of politics is knowing what to do next. > > I don’t think there is any great harm in dreaming up utopian solutions > to our problems. Erik Olin Wright’s endorsement of Mondragon will not > set us back in the class struggle, nor will Jacoby’s musings do much > harm either. I suppose. They seem to be more in tune with the zeitgeist on the Western left at any rate. There's no longer a working class trade union and socialist movement, even one as attenuated as it become by the 60's, to influence and attract youthful radicals, so it's to be expected that in its absence socialism, as before Marx, will express itself as a utopian vision rather than practicable goal. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
