Carrol Cox wrote: > I agree 70% with Jim (70% a metaphor not a mathematical estimate).
70%? is that like a C? > We do > have to talk about democracy, but there is an important sense in which we > should make no effort at all to describe the details of a post-capitalist > order. The young Marx rejected writing recipes for the cook shops of the > future ... Marx said so, but we have to take into account the fact that large numbers of people want to know what, specifically, we mean by "socialism" and similar abstract nouns. _They_ want to discuss it -- or to equate "socialism" with what they see as the failed systems of Castro, Mao, Stalin, _et al_. (Somehow, no-one mentions Enver Hoxha. Go figure.) So why not discuss it with them? (Humility helps.) In any event, as I've perseverated about before, Marx & Engels saw discussion of what "what will socialism be like?" as part of workers' collective self-education. (See Draper's book on Marx's political thought.) What they objected to were specific predigested plans thought up by intellectual types who wanted to impose their utopian visions on people. As Marx wrote in his Theses, "The materialist doctrine [of people like Robert Owen] concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society." He objected to the idea that the "revolutionaries" were somehow superior to the workers and could "do the thinking" for them. > Mao noted that Marxists had no crystal ball. That's true, but it's a mistake to quote that kind of top-down thinker who believed in both the "science of socialism" and "the dictatorship of the Party Leadership" (as long as he was part of that Leadership). > ... I think I can include both Jim & > Rosa [Luxemburg] by positing as the Final Goal a Constituent Assembly. We > cannot dictate > what that Constituent Assembly will do, but we can posit it as a goal which > implicitly includes democracy without the arrogance of saying what the > demos, in power, "must" decide. It's nice to be lumped with Rosa L. Thanks. The key thing is the principle of democratic sovereignty. No elite, no matter how enlightened it sees itself as being, should impose its will on the working class. The workers should have the right to reject that elite. -- Jim Devine / If you're going to support the lesser of two evils, you should at least know the nature of that evil. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
