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 Only some programmatic particulars were out of date, not the main thesis of historical materialism, dictatorship of the proletariat, struggle up to and including barricades and revolutionary war.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 Simon P.S. They said something like "although this would be written very differently now, we leave it as an historical document".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
Ian you wrote that: the official verdict of the CCP that Stalin was 70% correct and 30% wrong is far too kind.There is a good evaluation of internal CPSU evidence in *New Left Review* The official verdict or the evaluation of the CPSU evidence is hardly an arbiter of any view on the subject. It is like putting the sole assessment of Thatcher or Regan in the hands of the Conservative Party or the Republicans. As if that settled the debate. Social change depends on collective action, disillusion with the current system, and hope in prospects of a new beginning. Action - Disillusion - Hope Are they not any other factors that can bring about social change such as the material productive forces coming into conflict with existing relations of production ! ! ! The task [of social revolution] only arises when the material conditions for its solution exist, or are a least in formation. I may be wrong but that was a contribution made by a certain person in his analysis of political economy, but perhaps he was mistaken. Just being disgruntled with a society and hoping for the future is one sided. When Marx and Engels discuss Utopian Socialism they point out that sections of the aristocracy are equally disillusioned with socialism and hope for a new beginning. But their collective action is futile - as without favourable material conditions of production they are left, like Don Quixote, tilting at windmills. This is not to say I am in favour of the opposite extreme of strict economic determinism or technological determinism (aka Cohen ?) which I think is equally un-Marxist. While we cannot make revolution or attain communism merely by wanting it hard enough or convincing the masses that they would like it better, on the other hand, we cannot sit and wait for the course of history to do all the work for us (perhaps a vanguard party might have a use afterall ;-) ). Marx spoke of the necessity of the working class being schooled for 20, 60, etc years in struggle for social change before it is fit for governing society (and production). Don't forget that the bourgeoisie from its birth in the 15th or 16 century took about 300 years to get to the position of governing society - so historically we are doing well. The necessity of a time delay between the physical revolution and the a self-governing and self-productive classless society is the big problem in Simon's arguments. Although I cannot find a nice quote from Marx, my good old friend Engels points out that - following the revolution - communism 'will develop more quickly or more slowly according to whether the country has more developed industry, more wealth, and a more considerable mass of productive forces'. Finally just on the bit where you wrote: Well, I agree. In fact, I suggested that feudal culture lives on in our society more than we might suppose. I mentioned pre-revolutionary Russia and China as cases where that was especially rather than exclusively so. Yes, I thought that is what you must have been the case. The problem with emails (especially in regard to philosophical and political debate) is that it is very often difficult to clarify exactly what someone means. As Stalin said 'Everything is connected to everything else' and if one has a consistent philosophy one's position on what minor issue effects the logic of one's argument in relation to another. Yours in clarification and consistency. John --- 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
Can anyone supply the original ref or URL for this article? Russell __ Get Your Private, Free Email at http://www.hotmail.com --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
Re: M-TH: Re: Meszaros article
John, You wrote: Were we reading the same article as mine was littered with vilifications of Stalin and the Bolshevik revolution. You talk of some on the left of turning Marxism into a secular religion well the charge could be made that others have turned it into a secular witch-hunt. While I would not normally go out of my way to argue against these sorts of attacks I did so because his vilification obsured the nature of that society. It set up an Aunt-Sally in order to make his argument look like the only reasonable way forward way. I suppose one person's reasoned critique can be another person's vilification. I think, though, that while the vilifications of Conquest, Solzhenitzen, (and, in a different way, some supporters of Trotsky) are over the top, the official verdict of the CCP that Stalin was 70% correct and 30% wrong is far too kind. But I don't want to argue the historical record. There is a good evaluation of internal CPSU evidence in *New Left Review* a few years ago that supports Meszaros' position, I think. This is what I think is the danger of projecting a future communism society. As if this was some objective reality which will come about in a specific and detailed form which we can ever predict from within a class-based society. That it will happen is a prediction that Marx could make from the particular historical point from which he wrote. But he knew only too well that a detailed sketch was beyond his analysis. I don't want a detailed sketch. Social change depends on collective action, disillusion withe the current system, and hope in propsects of a new beginning. These things develop historically and through the conditions of life. But they still need to develop, and they will require more than a blind leap of faith. Collective ownership of the means of production will call for capacities for sensible collective action, which Marx thought workers would be schooled in sufficiently by the factory system. Marx also spoke of the necessity of the working class being schooled for 20, 60, etc years in struggle for social change before it is fit for governing society (and production). This seems a serious underestimate of the time required. Will I live to see it? I don't know. You point about feudal culture existing in pre-revolutionary Russia, China etc. was a bit confusing as did not feudal culture continue post-revolution and does it not still occur in bourgeois society right up to today. I notice that both you and I still live in a Bourgeoie society with an hereditary head of state and 90 artistocrat still sit in its second chamber. Feudalism may have died but the body has not decayed away yet. And where it may no longer exist in an economic sense its cultural aspects still continue. Well, I agree. In fact, I suggested that feudal culture lives on in our society more than we might suppose. I mentioned pre-revolutionary Russia and China as cases where that was especially rather than exclusively so. cheers, Ian-- Associate Professor Ian Hunt, Head, Dept of Philosophy, Director, Centre for Applied Philosophy, Philosophy Dept, School of Humanities, Flinders University of SA, Humanities Building, Bedford Park, SA, 5042, Ph: (08) 8201 2054 Fax: (08) 8201 2556 --- 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] ---
M-TH: Re: Meszaros article
Ian H writes: I do not have the time to say too much, but would like to say that I also found Meszaros' article a really good read, and would like people to take up the challenge to articulate a clear vision and strategy for socialism unemcumbered with the baggage of our political past I'd like him to be a bit more specific about what he thinks is useless baggage from our past and what he thinks is valuable knowledge and experience -- I assume there's something in the past that's worth keeping? Cheers, Hugh PS Whose past is "our" past, by the way? --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
Re: M-TH: Re: Meszaros article
The past is valuable regardless of allegiances. Mistakes are valuable if we learn from them. What I was referring to is some of the more totemistic, charismatic styles of thinking and writing that socialist movements have been plagued with, which Meszaros' article is blissfully free of. Trotskyist groups, for example (and only an example), are a source of lots of ideas and experiences (I don't know whether you could speak of great "successes" -eg, Mandel's writings, value-form school) but some of them (here Sparticists come quickly to mind) operate as though they were some sort of secular religion. We can do without worship (or vilification) of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, etc. I sometimes worry about the praxis rather than techne side of human capacities for socialism when I look at the spectacle of derivative "communist" parties and even home grown ones, throwing up "the cult of personality" with chilling regularity. I have to remind myself that feudal culture has a stronger grip on our imaginations than we sometimes realise (especially in pre-revolutionary Russia, Chine, Korea, perhaps even Yugoslavia), and that elevating military authority structures in communist parties to the status of an absolute organisational principle rather than temporary expedient provided fertile soil for such a culture. In my darker moments, I ask whether we will ever be really up to the demands of the the collective ownership of the means of production (but only in darker moments, and only wondering - I am knowm usually for my irrepressible optimism). But this has probably cost me more time than I really have. Ian H writes: I do not have the time to say too much, but would like to say that I also found Meszaros' article a really good read, and would like people to take up the challenge to articulate a clear vision and strategy for socialism unemcumbered with the baggage of our political past I'd like him to be a bit more specific about what he thinks is useless baggage from our past and what he thinks is valuable knowledge and experience -- I assume there's something in the past that's worth keeping? Cheers, Hugh PS Whose past is "our" past, by the way? --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
M-TH: Re: Meszaros article
I am copying my response to the Meszaros article on the Socialist Register list. --Jim Lawler I have just read Istvan Meszaros' very thoughtful piece on communism. I agree with him that we are headed downhill, spiraling into catastrophe. What does that mean? It means great economic disruption and generally chaotic conditions. The question will become, what to do about the chaos? There will be two possibilities: an end to democracy, with military rule by the very people who are responsible for the catastrophe, or a radically different kind of society -- a free society in which the great potentials of modern science and technology are made use of in an earth-friendly way so as to allow human beings the freedom to express themselves freely. Because of the turmoil that Meszaros predicts, people will be looking for alternatives that make sense. The society that he describes can be presented as amazingly sensible, while the alternative -- the world we are living in now, with the addition effective dictatorship -- as insane. What we need to do now is to formulate the vision that Meszaros describes in simple, attractive and concrete images, so that ordinary people can picture the alternative. The communist alternative is really very simple. If enough people see that soon enough, the "barbarism" side of the alternative will be rejected. Has anyone tried to do this? --Best wishes, Jim Lawler ___ Dr. James Lawler Philosophy Department SUNY at Buffalo Buffalo, NY USA 14260 Base e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] forwards to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Work phone: 716-645-2444 x770 Work fax: 716-645-6139 Home phone: 905-687-6651 ___ Dr. James Lawler Philosophy Department SUNY at Buffalo Buffalo, NY USA 14260 Base e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] forwards to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Work phone: 716-645-2444 x770 Work fax: 716-645-6139 Home phone: 905-687-6651 --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
Re: M-TH: Re: Meszaros article
I do not have the time to say too much, but would like to say that I also found Meszaros' article a really good read, and would like people to take up the challenge to articulate a clear vision and strategy for socialism unemcumbered with the baggage of our political past I am copying my response to the Meszaros article on the Socialist Register list. --Jim Lawler I have just read Istvan Meszaros' very thoughtful piece on communism. I agree with him that we are headed downhill, spiraling into catastrophe. What does that mean? It means great economic disruption and generally chaotic conditions. The question will become, what to do about the chaos? There will be two possibilities: an end to democracy, with military rule by the very people who are responsible for the catastrophe, or a radically different kind of society -- a free society in which the great potentials of modern science and technology are made use of in an earth-friendly way so as to allow human beings the freedom to express themselves freely. Because of the turmoil that Meszaros predicts, people will be looking for alternatives that make sense. The society that he describes can be presented as amazingly sensible, while the alternative -- the world we are living in now, with the addition effective dictatorship -- as insane. What we need to do now is to formulate the vision that Meszaros describes in simple, attractive and concrete images, so that ordinary people can picture the alternative. The communist alternative is really very simple. If enough people see that soon enough, the "barbarism" side of the alternative will be rejected. Has anyone tried to do this? --Best wishes, Jim Lawler ___ Dr. James Lawler Philosophy Department SUNY at Buffalo Buffalo, NY USA 14260 Base e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] forwards to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Work phone: 716-645-2444 x770 Work fax: 716-645-6139 Home phone: 905-687-6651 ___ Dr. James Lawler Philosophy Department SUNY at Buffalo Buffalo, NY USA 14260 Base e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] forwards to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Work phone: 716-645-2444 x770 Work fax: 716-645-6139 Home phone: 905-687-6651 --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] --- --- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
