>Michael Catolico wrote:
>
> a thought or two on some recent threads:
>
> while i agree that forecasting what the world will look like "after the
> revolution" is naive or pre-mature, "imagining" a better future is
> indispensable for going beyond the immiseration of the present. how else
> can a mass, sustainable change take place without some utopian
> motivation or evolving blueprint?
In debating the agitational pros and cons of making promises about the
future (or what "the revolution" will bring) it is easy, too easy, to
forget that the central importance (for Marx and, I hope, most Marxists)
of positing a communist future is _not_ primarily as a motive for
struggle but as a way of understanding the present.
More and more it has come to seem to me that the single most crucial
sentence in all the works of Marx is that in the _Grundrisse_, "The
anatomy of man is a key to the anatomy of the ape." Understanding this
is, I think, a key to understanding Marx.
Several points.
1. He DOES NOT SAY that the anatomy of the ape explains the anatomy of
man, for it doesn't. One can study ape anatomy (by itself) for centuries
and not find a single hint of the coming of homo sapiens. (Gould is
crucial here with his emphasis on contingency: that if one could play
the tape of life over again many times, it is very doubtful that the
same species would develop each time. Had an asteroid not hit the earth
66 million years ago, we would not be on this list today, since the
dinosaurs would still dominate the earth.)
2. Knowledge is knowledge of _relations_, and cannot be reduced to
knowledge of "the facts." (This and the next point are crucial in the
debate between me and Stephen Block over Plato -- a debate to which I
intend to return.) Many radicals who also consider themselves Marxists
(and are Marxists in many ways) stumble on this point, as can be seen in
their tendency to pile up endless facts re the evils of capitalism, a
tendency which leads to a bourgeois understanding of capitalist evil.
All class societies are brutal and exploitative. _That_ by itself does
not raise the possibility (I would say the _necessity_) of socialism and
socialist revoluton.
3. Relations are _processes_, not static (Platonic) forms. One can see
this operating in Lenin's great work, _Imperialism: The Latest Stage of
Capitalism_. Lenin got many facts wrong in that work -- but its heart
lay in his recognition that the relations between imperialist powers and
dominated lands were _internal_ relations -- i.e., that imperialism was
not a choice or a policy (as Kautsky, for example, argued) but the very
mode of existence of modern capitalism. There is doubtless a connection
between Lenin's rereading of Hegel and his concern with internal
relations in _Imperialism_. But this emphasis on the "non-visibility" of
relations is also central to Lenin's much maligned earlier work,
_Materialism and Empirio-Criticism_. Lenin was unfair to Mach, who was
an important physicist and thinker, but Mach had refused to accept the
existence of atoms on the basis that they were invisible (as are
relations), and that was the core target of Lenin's work. Of Lenin it
can be said, as Lewontin and Levins said of Engels, he "got it wrong a
lot of the time, but [he] got it right where it counted" (dedication of
_The Dialectical Biologist_).
4. Marx was a communist before he was a Marxist. (Marx's much quoted
assertion that he was not a Marxist was in a very particular context -
his rejection of a small band of self-described and sectarian French
socialists. It has no general significance.) This is my reason for
objecting so sharply to Stephen Block's claim that "Marx was first and
foremost a philosopher." Marx was first and foremost an adherent of the
early 19th-century workers movement. Before that he had indeed studied
philosophy, but in so far as he became in any sense a philosopher it was
in the (quite successful) attempt to make sense of that movement -- to
raise it to the level of theory. And that was when, from being a mere
academic and a mere adherent of the workers' movement, he became a
Marxist. That movement gave a dim glimpse of the future - i.e., provided
a perspective from which one (or at least Marx to begin with) could
_could look back on the present_, see the present as history, and
could, from understanding the anatomy of communism understand (looking
back) the anatomy of capitalism. That explains both Marx's reasons for
sketching the nature of communism in broad strokes _and_ his refusal to
develop recipes for the cookshops of the future.
This is not to reduce marxism to a mindless morass of "concrete
struggles" and "pragmatic choices" as one poster suggested a few months
ago, but it is to recognize the _very_ limited power of theory to
project the future, and to doubt as well the practical usefulness of
such broad generalities as "socialism is a system in which workers have
taken power and are using this power to re-make the social order," and
on the basis of this generalization declare authoritatively that "Cuba
does not fit this definition." Whatever else socialism is, it is a
_process_, not a frozen status, and I would venture to predict that it
will only be a few generations after socialism has been achieved when
people will be able to look back and say "_That_ was when we made the
turn." I would repeat my claim that, looking backwards on the 20th
century, we can see that the various socialist revolutions (Russia,
China, Guinea-Bisseau, Angola, Mozambique, Vietnam, Yugoslavia, Albania,
Cuba, Germany 1919, Laos, Nicaragua, Grenada) were as successful as
could have been expected. They are all part of our history - and we do
not _have_ a history, we _are_ our history. To deny those revolutions in
the name of a formula is to deny ourselves and foreclose the future.
5. The history which constitutes us also includes pre-capitalist
struggles for democracy and the millenia-long struggle against views of
humanity which, directly or indirectly, deny history. That is part of
the importance of the remarks on Athens, Protagoras, & Plato which I am
developing in other posts.
Carrol
P.S.
X. Come the Revolution, we will all have strawberries and cream.
Y. But I don't LIKE strawberries and cream.
X. Come the Revolution, EVERYONE will love strawberries and cream.
P.S. 2 (from the 1930s)
Labour Party Member: The Labour Party is carrying on the Class Struggle
CPB Member: I agree. It is deovoted to carying on and carrying on and
carrying on the Class Struggle for ever. It just doesn't want to win it.
__________
bwanika
url: www.idr.co.ug
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