Patrick wrote:
For an antidote to this misperception of yours, comrade Louis, see especially John Saul's work in the SR. Probably the one strategic point that I've found nearly all the SR comrades agree upon, is the importance of the national state as a primary site for contesting power, nationally and globally. That's perhaps the seminal difference with Hardt/Negri. Surely you wouldn't read the SR tradition differently?
Okay, I don't think it is helpful when the SR trudges out old arguments about how we have to transcend ideologies about the dictatorship of the proletariat, etc. For example, Gindin and Panitch wrote an article titled "Transcending Pessimism: Rekindling Socialist Imagination" in the 2000 issue that includes the following: "Marx's central concepts of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat', 'smashing the bourgeois state' and 'the withering away of the state' all obscured rather than clarified the fundamental issues; and Marxists in the 20th century did not go nearly far enough in overcoming the limits of this legacy. Yet it is at the level of the political that transitions from one socio-economic order to another are effected - or come to grief in the attempt." As far as I am concerned, it is this sort of thing that typifies the autonomists, the anarchists and the entire anti-globalization left from Naomi Klein to John Holloway. You have all sorts of powerful critiques of the capitalist system but a deep discomfort with the one thing that defines Marxist *politics*, namely how to seize power and maintain it. If anything, we need more attention paid to Lenin's "State and Revolution," not less. Furthermore, the article proposes that the left spend more time thinking in utopian terms. I don't think this would be a good idea at all. For that matter, the academic left is far too consumed with questions about what socialism will look like or how it should work. This is an obstacle to thinking politically about strategy and tactics, matters that SR tends to disdain altogether. Let me repeat. I think that SR is a valuable journal. I have been buying it every year since 1990 and plan to continue. Meanwhile I let my subs to Monthly Review (mostly out of aggravation with a certain personality), New Left Review, Science and Society and CNS run out. This might sound like damning with faint praise, but it is not. I thought the article in the 2004 issue titled " Human Rights as Swords of Empire?" was worth the price of the entire volume. -- www.marxmail.org
