Louis Proyect wrote:
> Actually, I think that base-superstructure Marxism is not Marxism at > all. If you prefer arguing with straw men, be my guest. ...
I agree: people like G.A. Cohen built strawmen and then embraced them. raghu wrote:
I cannot claim to have the knowledge of Marx that Louis undoubtedly has, but the Communist Manifesto repeatedly refers to the victory of the proletariat and the overthrow of the bourgeoisie. Surely Marx had some kind of alternative system (an utopia?) in mind when he was advocating the overthrow of capitalism? How is this a "caricature" of Marx?
while Marx and Engels had a lot of respect for the utopians (learning from them, etc.) they were not utopians themselves. The movement in the direction of talking about "what socialism will be" in the _Critique of the Gotha Program_ is entirely a matter of looking at what the workers' movement (or its leaders) was proposing and then criticizing it, suggesting (very abstract) ways to go. Similarly, the _Civil War in France_ praises the Commune, but it (the book) was based in the actual movement of the workers, not in the idea that capitalism morally _should_ go in the direction of some utopia. Marx and Engels saw socialism in terms of the _collective self-liberation of the proletariat_. They advised the proletariat but didn't pretend they could tell the class where to do. By the way, the proletariat is hardly only urban (as the United Farm Workers showed years ago). The connection between the organized proletariat and urbanism comes from the fact that workers have an easier time organizing and gaining class consciousness in the city, where they were concentrated in Marx's time. There are some utopian tinges to CAPITAL, but they aren't really about what social will or should be. Marx saw socialism as arising from the actual, concrete, process of history. Specifically, that meant from the laws of motion of capitalism (which was, and is, conquering the world). The two main elements in CAPITAL that are "precursors" are (1) worker-managed cooperatives; and (2) the centralization of capital (into the corporate form) which allowed the separation of ownership from management. Methinks these go together rather than be separate: he was looking for a worker-managed centralized economy. But again, it sprung not from his imagination (as with utopians) but from the normal inner workings of capitalism. Of course, the world is more complicated than just capitalism. Even (the modern) imperialism, which was a product of capitalism, made things more complicated by spawning uneven development of capitalism between areas, which mixed things up quite a bit. (Up to World War II, wealth and the workers' movements grew most in the center, while the crises hit the periphery most. In Marx & Engels' original story, it all happened in one place.) -- Jim Devine / "Because things are the way they are, things will not stay the way they are." -- Bertolt Brecht
