On 10/29/06, Louis Proyect <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Yoshie:
>Sure you do. We just have to be open-minded about how other people do
>things in other countries.
Sorry, I am not interested in being open-minded about how Lula or
Ahmadinejad do things.
Well, there is no evidence that people in Brazil or Iran would prefer
a Louis Proyect or a Doug Henwood to Lula or Ahmadinejad. That's the
reality.
>If a dictatorship of the proletariat doesn't command enthusiasm even
>among Marxists outside the West, let alone among broadly defined
>leftists inside the West, there is a historical reason for it. While
>rejecting gross distortions and exaggerations peddled by professional
>anticommunists, we have to reckon with the record of democracy, or
>lack thereof, under formerly and actually existing socialist
>countries. It seems to me that revolutionaries in Venezuela and Nepal
>are trying to avoid the errors of the past in this respect.
You don't seem to understand what the reference to the dictatorship
of the proletariat means. This is not about throwing dissidents in
Gulags. It is a technical term for a kind of state as exemplified by
the Paris Commune.
The Paris Commune exemplifies only the Paris Commune, it seems to me.
It's one of a kind, and it didn't last.
>Moreover, today in many countries in the world, including Venezuela,
>regular workers in the formal sector are a smaller, most privileged
>sector among working people than those who manage to make a living one
>way or another in the informal sector. And it is those who get by in
>the informal sector, living in urban slums, that are the most ardent
>supporters of the Bolivarian Process. That, too, gives the process in
>Venezuela a special character, different from Nepal and different from
>most revolutions in the 20th century which were driven by peasant
>grievances and opposition to colonialism. Given a rapid pace of
>urbanization and a huge growth of the informal sector in many
>countries, the Venezuelan experience can tell us more about the wave
>of the future than classic socialist revolutions in the past or
>Marxist texts that came out of them.
Again, I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. Are you
referring to some sort of "third way"?
When a country has a large informal sector and the informal sector
produces most political activists on the Left, what kind of political
and economic program might make sense? That's not the same as the
program that is good for a largely peasant country or a country whose
workers are largely employed in the formal sector.
>As I mentioned earlier, Gramsci and Amin, from the Marxist tradition,
>are probably the most useful theorists who can help us understand the
>nature of actually existing struggles today.
I have trouble with references to Gramsci, who was forced through
prison conditions to be elliptical in ways that Lenin or Trotsky did
not have to be. Stuart Hall's Gramsci is not my Gramsci. On Amin, you
have to be a bit more specific.
I'm thinking of Amin's writings on the multi-polar world order.
>Not at all, but it's not necessary for a leftist to go on a warpath
>whenever other leftists have this or that loopy idea either, whether a
>loopy idea is held by Chavez or anyone else.
Quite right. I happily ignored Chavez's musings on 9/11. If, however,
he was subscribed to PEN-L and was bent on promoting some loopy idea
5 times a day for months on end, my attitude would be a bit different.
There is always a filter. I'm subscribed to more lists than I can
count, and I have no time to read all of them. Maybe I catch just one
percent of postings.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
