I bet if we took a count more people would consider the USSR socialism (communism
even) than not.
CB
>>> Rod Hay <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 05/18/00 09:15PM >>>
Interesting musings Carrol, but words have meanings, and what most people mean by
the word socialism is not what was seen in the USSR. You can call it what you want,
but I don't call it socialism.
Rod
Carrol Cox wrote:
> Rod Hay wrote:
>
> > Perhaps Marx was utopian. But we will have to wait until we have a socialists
> > society, in order to find out. The Soviet Union called itself socialist but it
> > wasn't.
>
> This I think is utopian. Socialism is a movement, not a platonic form against
> which you can measure any state and say it is or isn't "socialist." It would
> seem to me wrong to assume that there will not be many more episodes
> in the socialist movement which will go greatly astray in one way or another,
> many more defeats. THe struggles of 6 billion people and their descendants
> to find their way out of capitalism will almost certainly contain episodes
> at least as unpleasant as the USSR at its worst. The struggle for socialism
> has to be essentially <g> self-justifying at each step, regardless of the
> (temporary) final outcomes of each struggle. If the only or even the
> chief reason to fight for socialism is the achievement of the socialism
> for our great-grandchildren, then socialism is a bust.
>
> This is *not* to disagree with Rosa Luxemburg that the final goal is
> everything, the struggle is nothing. The role of that final goal is the
> understanding we achieve through it of the present. Hence the
> struggle depends on the final goal *independently* of whether or
> not we ever achieve that final goal.
>
> Marx, as I understand him, did not propose the classless society and
> the withering away of the state as a prize to reward us at the end. He
> saw that just as feudalism could be understood from the perspective
> of capitalism, so capitalism could only be understood from the perspective
> of communism. We can only understand the capitalist state (and therefore
> organize our struggle against it) by seeing it from the perspective of
> the society in which the state has withered away.
>
> [I really think it would help if a larger proportion of marxists suffered
> from depression. That would help dampen the galloping optimism
> that blithely says the USSR was not socialist -- for the implication
> of that evaluation is that socialism of just the sort we want will be
> easily attainable if we just have the right ideas. Horse Feathers!]
>
> The evil at the heart of capitalism (or of any social order of which
> the market is the central institution) is that Reality becomes
> the Future, while the past and present become mere appearance.
> I began to see this by reading and re-reading Plato's *Republic*
> and attempting to explain it to undergraduates. In Plato's timarchy
> (in effect a landed aristocracy of some sort) the Past is the Real.
> The present is merely a recapitulation of the past and is emptied
> of reality. In what he called an oligarchy (a state ruled by those
> whose motive was the accumulation of wealth [=money?],
> the past was non-existent, and the present only the shadow of
> the future. Action becomes meaningless in itself, since it cannot
> exhibit ambition (which is the struggle to maintain what the past
> has given us) nor can it be its own end. Since anything resembling
> capitalism was still nearly 2000 years away, it was remarkable
> that even in the piddling financial manipulations of his day Plato
> could see this. The core capitalist metaphor, that of *investment*
> catches up this trivialization of the present by the future.
>
> The *demos* Plato discarded with contempt: they *chose* (he
> implies) to live only in the present, their lives dominated by a
> lowly lust for immediate satisfaction. (One of the many modern
> equivalents of this is the accusation that unwed mothers have
> babies in order to make money off of public aid.) There would
> have been no way to theorize this in Plato's world, for that
> depended on the development of wage labor under capitalism
> and its theorization in Marx's conceptions of surplus value
> and alienation. The working class, by definition, is that class
> which *must* live in the present (that being the main thrust
> of the assumption that labor power is purchased at is value).
>
> And it is this (unavoidable) attachment of the working to the
> present (which implicitly is also a valuation of the past such as
> the investor dare not allow him/herself) which makes the working
> class a *potentially* revolutionary class. Its revolutionary task
> is to free humanity from the tyranny of the future.
>
> Carrol
--
Rod Hay
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