Subject: Subject: Re: the state redux & socialism
Date: Wed, 02 Oct 96 16:56:00 EST



Fine Justin, sign off. Actually this thread went longer than I thought. But 
don't expect us to not have a last word.

 ----------
  >  From: Justin Schwartz
  >  To: marxism2-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
  >  Cc: marxism2-AT-jefferson.village.Virginia.EDU
  >  Subject: Re: the state redux & socialism
  >  Date: Wednesday, 2 October 1996 11:39AM
  >
  >
  >  I give up. The IS crowd has worn me out. They've fallen back on the 
last
  >  refuge of the Marxist fundamentalist: the "utopianism" argument, that 
is,
  >  we neednot move beyond Marx's The Civil War in France and Lenin's State
  >  and Revolution because The Working Class Has Spoken. Ignoring the vast
  >  variety of working class attempts at self-organization worldwide, this
  >  argument picks out, quite selectively, two brief canonical experiments 
in
  >  other circumastnces long ago: the Paris Commune of 1871 and the St.
  >  Petersburg Sovirt of 1905 (with some pretense that for some time in 
1917
  >  the latter model had any bearing on events), and treats these as the 
only
  >  acceptable basis for thinking about a future society.

Ignoring the fact that this an obvious exaggeration, the Paris commune (on 
which we dwelt hardly at all) and the October revolution are cited because 
these are the only times when the proletariat has taken state power. I would 
have thought that these examples would have been of disproportionate 
interest given that we were discussing what a society with workers in 
control would look like

  >
  >  Of courese these models are picked because the Holy Fathers wrote about
  >  them; the thought of actually doing one's own reserach is too much. 
These
  >  experiences are then described in the exact terms used by the sacred
  >  texts, because thinking through what they might have actually involved 
is
  >  forbidden if it departs from the scripture.

See above. These models were picked because these were actual occassions 
where workers took state power.
We could of chosen lots of other examples of short lived workers control - 
Barcelona 1936, Hungary 1956, France 1968 - I for one would be happy to 
discuss them.

Isn't it strange how marxists have written about all these events.

I don't remember anyone quoting "the Holy Fathers" at all. See the thread on 
socialism in one country on Marxism1 if you want quotes. The stalinists are 
throwing plenty of them around

  >  Ant any problems that might be
  >  raised by this model--for example, the thought that there might be 
reasons
  >  all the Council models are short lived part from bourgeois repression, 
or
  >  that they might have some intrinsic problems of their own that were not
  >  solved in their brief lives, this is dismissed as heresy, uh, bourgeois
  >  reformism.

Justin, you have consistently made claims about these events which fail to 
take in the material conditions in which these events occurred.

I think that proletarian democracy after the October revolution was 
distorted by the fact that the armies of the world's capitalists invaded, 
that production in the cities collapsed, that increasingly the most 
politically able workers were being killed at the front or starved to death, 
that internally there was a campaign of sabotage and assassination.  In such 
conditions the workers government had to resort to undemocratic measures and 
rely increasingly on the old tsarist bureaucracy in order to survive. Such 
conditions could only last a short time without disaster until a revolution 
in the West could alter the material circumstances. It didn't happen and 
disaster, in the form of Stalin, occurred.

I don't think that things will be so desparate next time around. One of the 
main reasons (a material one) being that the extent of the working class and 
the level of production is greater now in almost every country on earth than 
it was in Russia 1917. But the capitalists will resist ferociously - I 
wouldn't put the use of nuclear weapons past them, and they have honed their 
ability for sabotage and assassination to a fine art - and once again 
liberal democracy or nice proletarian democracy (whatever you want to call 
it) may not be possible for a time. Its got nothing to do with committee 
structure or human nature.

By not basing your analysis on material reality you immediately put yourself 
outside a marxist analysis.  In our society the bourgeoisie mystify material 
reality by engaging in idelaism in order to maintain their hegemony. 
Marxists have to sharply cut across that sort of analysis.

  >
  >  Frankly, it's tedious. I guess I'd like to have all the answers too, 
but I
  >  recall an old Yiddish saying. "Someone is right one time in tine? 
That's
  >  very good, better than most. Someone is right half the time? A miracle!
  >  The man is a scholar. Someone is right all the time? Run for your life?
  >  He's a fanatic, a zealot, insane and dangerous."
  >
  >  I had no hope of persuading the religious ...

Please try and understand... Religion is a form of idealism. Marxism being a 
materialist theory stands in opposition to both religion and liberalism 
which are idealist theories. Maybe we start up a thread on the differences 
between materialism and idealism

Tony Hartin
 


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