Carrol Cox is a Thaxis alumnus. ^^^ [Pen-l] Newsweek: Blame the libertarians
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [Pen-l] Newsweek: Blame the libertarians From: Carrol Cox < -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- raghu wrote: > That's a fair point. Being unproven is, of course, a big problem for > socialists and especially communists. No. Socialist struggles are never, actually, struggle for socialism to begin with - that enters only at a very late stage, and almost by accident as it were. They begin with struggles against (almost always, I think, a saying No) some particular horror of the capitalist society (Jim Crow in the South), and as they develop more and more within them see that more is at issue than the particular aims of the struggle. It branches out. The struggle becomes against capitalism (with only an active minority thinking specifically in terms of an alternative). By the time Socialism becomes the order of the day there is _still_ no need to "prove" or even argue for socialism: it has simply become the only alternative available. And it is within that struggle that the specific features of the particular socialism in question get hammered out, with any formula for socialism we might excogitate now being pretty irrelevant. It is even more problematic for > anyone who believes a socialist revolution has to be worldwide or not > at all. This is probably true, but it still poses no problem of prooving anything in advance. A popular mass movement within a given country does not start all over the place at once. Sometimes it simply starts at one lunch counter or someone getting ticked off in the streets of Watts. (The riots were every bit as important as the more formal pats of the civil-rights movement.) Similarly, a "woeld-wide" revolution (or a widely spread revolution in several major areas to be more realistic) can't be planned in advance. If a really massive struggle happens in one nation, and if the conditions sparking it are widely spread, it may may trigger struggles elsewhere. One can't write recipes for the cookshops of the future. There is no hard-and-fast-theory of what a revolution is. It is a mass struggle that sudenly becomes more than itself, and the people in it have to start using their fucking brains as best as they can. The world can, perhaps, rightly be skeptical of the wisdom of > any such large scale experiment. "Experiment" is a really bad, even disgusting, word to use here. There are no controlled laboratory conditions in human history. Carrol This message has been scanned for malware by SurfControl plc. www.surfcontrol.com _______________________________________________ Marxism-Thaxis mailing list Marxism-Thaxis@lists.econ.utah.edu To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxism-thaxis
