On 12/30/06, Carrol Cox <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> The problem is that, just as the material basis of liberalism has
> disappeared, socialists have become, by and large, liberals. They
> have no alternative ideology.
I think this is askew. We still have the same fundamental theory, that
of commodity fetishism and the historicity of capitalism.
On such questions as race, gender, and sexuality, most of them are
content with the liberal discourse of rights; on such questions as
religion and civil liberties, most socialists' understanding of them
is essentially the same as liberals' (except that many socialists
still practice a residual double standard excusing the absence of
civil liberties under actually or formerly existing socialist
government in a way they never would excuse it under other forms of
government). It seems to me that, on a lot of important questions,
socialists -- having observed the experience of state socialism --
have implicitly accepted that liberalism is superior to socialism,
though they don't admit it openly.
That has a lot to do with the loss of faith in the theory of
historicity of capitalism as far as the future is concerned. It is no
longer possible for most socialists to believe that they or their
descendants can build a better world than the capitalist world.
Perhaps that explains the zeal with which some debate the historical
question of how exactly capitalism arose, for the past can be still
historical for them though the present and the future are not.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
