Chris writes:
>As far as revolutionary change in the west is concerned Hugh seems to make
>the mistake of arguing that because Gramsci's approach implies 10,000
>changes in the superstructure will be part of the process, it will
>nevertheless be a gradual evolution. Turbulence and sudden change could
>occur. It might still be right to fight a war of position, until it turns
>dialectically into a war of movement.
So what do you prepare for -- the thousand automatic adjustments in the
bourgeois democratic regime or the decisive moment of political transition
when it will be possible to remove bourgeois political institutions and
replace them with socialist ones?
None of the Soviet-Stalinist CPs *ever* prepared to or even tried despite
being unprepared to take over power. Those CPs that did -- in Yugoslavia,
Vietnam and China -- had a military and popular base that had forced
distance between themselves and Moscow, most dramatically in the case of
China, and soon developed features of their own mimicking the bureaucracy
and Stalinism of the Soviet Union. Including the refusal to prepare for the
take-over of power internationally, again most dramatically in the case of
China and its relations with the Indonesian CP leading up to 1965.
Gramsci analysed the bourgeois superstructure, or what amounts to the same
thing, the Political Regime, the State, as an abstraction lacking a
decisive qualitative watershed between bourgeois and workers state power.
So his scientific work was passive in the sense that it prepared party
members for changes in areas of civil society that are not decisive in
relation to socialism. If he'd analysed bourgeois society as Marx, Lenin or
Trotsky did, he would have pointed up the contradictions that could explode
and create conditions for a revolutionary party leading the working class
and its allies among the exploited peasantry and poor people to take power.
But this line of discussion won't get any further unless Chris tells us why
he thinks Gramsci is not revisionist, and in what way he embodies the
fundamental principles of revolutionary Marxism in his work.
I've stated my views clearly enough now, and Chris has stated his
disagreement. So it's time he justified his disagreement.
I'm surprised no-one else is joining in -- is Gramsci dead for the academic
world now that it's temporarily impossible to sweep away the glaring
contradictions from the class struggle? Are only the regulationists left to
smooth the theoretical paths of capitalist accumulation? Will the left
cover for the reformists and traitors be restricted to ex-Trotskyists like
Cyril Smith from now on?
Interesting indication of a strong upsurge in worldwide mass mobilization
if the anti-revolutionary ideologues of the workers movement and the
petty-bourgeoisie are shifting left this way!
Cheers,
Hugh
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