What did you read about Soviet socialism? Mine >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 [EMAIL PROTECTED] The History of Economic Thought Archive http://socserv2.mcmaster.ca/~econ/ugcm/3ll3/index.html Batoche Books http://Batoche.co-ltd.net/ 52 Eby Street South Kitchener, Ontario N2G 3L1 Canada
