Re: M-TH: Re: Meszaros article: Communism Is No Utopia
But Engels upheld the main thesis. Only some programmatic particulars were out of date, not the main thesis of historical materialism, dictatorship of the proletariat, struggle up to and including barricades and revolutionary war. CB "The World Socialist movement (via The Socialist Party of Great Britain)" [EMAIL PROTECTED] 12/02/99 07:26PM Dear Charles, A preface to the Communist Manifesto. I couldn't remember the exact year, but it was a few years after Capital 1 came out I think. Simon P.S. They said something like "although this would be written very differently now, we leave it as an historical document". S. -- "The World Socialist movement (via The Socialist Party of Great Marx disavowed this 1848 solution a couple of decades later: already he considered the barricade/ dictatorship of the proletariat route to be past its sell by date in europe. ((( Charles: What is your evidence of this ? CB --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
Re: M-TH: Re: Meszaros article: Communism Is No Utopia
"The World Socialist movement (via The Socialist Party of Great Marx disavowed this 1848 solution a couple of decades later: already he considered the barricade/ dictatorship of the proletariat route to be past its sell by date in europe. ((( Charles: What is your evidence of this ? CB --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
Re: M-TH: Re: Meszaros article: Communism Is No Utopia
Dear Rob, Where I am with Simon is the sensibility that we're not at the planning stage until lots'n'lots of people are engaged. And then they'll be part of the planning, too, eh? I've never worn that 'saviours waving the programme at the masses' stuff. Don't reckon it gets you to democratic socialism, you see. Also don't reckon it'd be as useful an agitational banner as it once was, either. But that's me. Cheers for the support. Glad to know someone else here gets the point that precisely when revolution IS on the agenda the vanguard isn't... Simon Wise up, Rob and Simon, and read Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, John Reed's Ten Days that Shook the World and any decent history of 1917. You'll enjoy the yarn, and to your amazement you'll discover that "lots'n'lots of people" were engaged in the bodies of dual power -- the Soviets, and in actions throughout the cities and the whole nation. The Bolsheviks and the other currents competing for leadership (remember Trotsky's current was not fused with the Bolsheviks officially till the summer) were NOT "saviours waving the programme at the masses", unless they were intent on swanning off into the sunset out of the arena of history and policy-making. In fact the reactionaries including of course Kerensky and the Provo government were the ones doing the abstract saviour waving the programme and the flag stuff -- until they got pissed off at the lack of respect shown by the masses and sent in the same old troops as the Tsar had used to bludgeon the workers and the peasants. The agitational banner of the Bolsheviks was Bread! Peace! Land! -- as both of you choose to forget for the sake of the old anarchist, syndicalist, state-cap, Pure Socialist, no transition, no reality arguments about formal democracy in the midst of a raging class war (petty-bourgeois failure to see the wood for the matchsticks). For chrissakes look around you at the insane greed and incompetence of the imperialist governors of the world! Talk about democracy! Blair trying to force Ken Livingstone to swear to every jot and tittle of a local election manifesto before it had even been written -- and everyone knows that rigidly regimented official candidates don't hold such documents worth a pulled hen, even if they write them themselves. Yet you duck out of the battle to get things where they should be from the mess in which they actually are by nitpicking at those who are slogging it out on the field and getting covered in mud in the process. Get stuck in and help steer the battle-waggons in the right direction, if you know so much about cause and effect and undemocratic degeneration! Stop the rot. Don't just be "saviours waving a programme" of Purity and Light at the rest of us! As for the vanguard not being on the agenda when revolution is, that's nothing but phrasemaking of the most superficial kind. Because the bureaucratic usurpers of the Bolshevik mantle, the Stalinists, often found themselves in such a situation (the Cuban CP backing Batista, the Russian embassy in Nanking fleeing to Formosa with Chiang Kai-Shek, etc), but these traitors were in no sense a vanguard, so the whole rhetorical flourish is a case of Simon's armwaving getting so exuberant he ends up hitting himself in the face. Cheers, Hugh --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
M-TH: Re: Meszaros article: Communism Is No Utopia
I enjoyed and appreciated the Meszaros article very much (as I seem to whenever he puts pen to paper). Thanks to Jim for the post. Writes John: It was not political control that was at the heart of Communism but the control of the means of poduction, short and simple. Communism is effectively about people controling there own production. In fact, in the sense he seems to be inferring, political control (i.e. via the state) is precisely what communism seeks to surplant. The phrase 'the withering away of the state' as a definition of communism comes to mind. I'd remind John that, given the circumstances that pertained, and given Bolshevik responses to those circumstances, 'actually existing socialism' in the SU was indeed marked by close political control at the centre - throughout its 70-year history. Economic control resided there, too. And there was trouble in Moscow's streets by 1920 for this very reason. I'm not interested in rearguing whether there was any alternative to the April Theses and to what I see as their bureaucratically centralist legacy, I just suggest that the communist rhetoric vis the death of the state was not quite what happened in fact. Communism is exactly about the question of production. Without large scale production (regardless of its relation to other countries) it would be impossible to bring about the radical shift necessary from a largely backwards, peasant-ridden, mostly agricultural society (as almost all these countries were) into an industrial one. But perhaps Meszaros' view of communism has more in common with Proudhon and some anarchists view of small farmholds. A sort of peasant society without the feudal lords and other classes bothering them. There can be no move to what Marx's means by communism except in relation to the improvement of production to provide for all and not just a few. I happen to think 'socialism in one country' was not ever gonna cut it in the SU. It's just what they were stuck with. And communism is about the democratic control of production, John - or at least a path coherently laid in that direction. I dunno if that's what was happening in the SU. The other problem with Meszaros' obsessive attacks on so-called Stalinist communism is that he does what many do when attacking these countries and that is to start out by attacking first a hate-figure like stalin and then the communist parties and then to slip un-noticed the 'fact' that these countries were Communist. Meszaros is a real comrade, for mine. This article is not anti-communist, John. For Meszaros, communism is humanity's only hope in the long run, I think. It is not a mere oversight that the Union of Soviet SOCIALIST Republics was not the USCR as it made no claim to have attained Communism, the state had far from withered away (in fact it was quite openly a dictatorship of the proletariat). We all seem to have different ideas as to what a dictatorship of the proletariat means. That transition is a difficult and fragile time, requiring organised responses and much vigilance, is fair enough. Muscovite proletarians and a lot of hitherto loyal sailors and an awful lot of peasants quickly got to find out that whatever kind of dictatorship was in train, they were most definitely not part of it. They did not claim that one could build 'communism in one country'. Fair enough. They got left holding the baby after Germany went pear-shaped, and no mistake. Eventually it was officially decided that this was to be the new revolutionary warcry, and Lenin's name was invoked in its defence. What they achieved was not communism but what they did show was that a break from Capitalism in the intense period of Imperialism was no longer merely a Utopian pipe-dream. Less so now than then, I reckon. But for now the problem is not one of sustaining the revolutionary project; it's one of seeing if we can't help people to see their interests and potential as we see them (we're not at third base in terrible times; we're reaching for first in times that seem politically tantalising to some - well, to me, anyway). That's the bit concerning Meszaros now, I reckon. It bothers the hell outa me, anyway. Those who condemn these countries out-of-hand (such a Simon's 100 year old SPGB) have to come to terms with the fact that their belief in the transition to Communism - if not a Utopia - has not got off the planning stage. Where I am with Simon is the sensibility that we're not at the planning stage until lots'n'lots of people are engaged. And then they'll be part of the planning, too, eh? I've never worn that 'saviours waving the programme at the masses' stuff. Don't reckon it gets you to democratic socialism, you see. Also don't reckon it'd be as useful an agitational banner as it once was, either. But that's me. Cheers, Rob. --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
