On 1/2/07, Mark Lause <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Yoshie, you are comparing the golden apples of liberal and libertarian
rhetoric to the grubby oranges of state socialist reality.
If you want to compare the comparable, compare the liberal/libertarian
"idea" of the state to the Marxist "idea" of a very different kind of state
(not just the same tool in different hands). A state in Marxist theory is
even lovelier than that of a libertarian on crack.....
Marxists have written a lot about the capitalist state, but they have
written comparatively very little about the revolutionary socialist
state in transition from capitalism to communism. There are some
lovely images, e.g., Marx and Engels on the Paris Commune as the
dictatorship of the proletariat, Lenin's pamphlet on the future of a
communist state in The State and Revolution, etc., but very little on
the revolutionary socialist state as a functioning modern state, much
less (if anything at all) on civil liberty in particular and liberty
in general under such a state. This just seems to me to be a big hole
in Marxist thinking.
There are a few exceptions, though, but mainly in the area of Marxist art, e.g.:
<blockquote>For example, the learning play The Measures Taken
confronts the audience with basic questions of revolution: violence,
discipline, the structure of the party, the relation to the masses,
revolutionary justice, and so on. In the plot, revolutionaries are
forced to sacrifice a comrade to advance the aims of the revolution
and he submits to the discipline. There is no "correct doctrine" set
forth; the actors are to present a scene and then discuss it with the
audience. Indeed, I saw a performance of this play in the 1970s and it
elicited strenuous debate among the members of the audience --
Stalinists, Trotksyists, members of the New Left, liberals, and
hardcore anti-communists -- about politics and morality. (Douglas
Kellner, "Brecht's Marxist Aesthetic,"
<http://www.uta.edu/english/dab/illuminations/kell3.html>)</blockquote>
Most Marxists avoid the kind of hard questions that Brecht sought to
compel the audience to consider.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
