I wrote:
> According to Draper (and I agree), Marx's theory of revolution can be > summed up by the notion that the liberation of the working class can > only be truly won by the working class itself.
Yoshie:
It seems to me that the working class have and will be always politically divided, between those who struggle for liberation, those who struggle against liberation, and those who are apolitical and just want to mind their own business ... So, "the working class in and for themselves" have not and will not make any revolution.
we can help them liberate themselves. And if your assertion that the working class will _always_ be divided says that they will never be totally liberated. Maybe, but that doesn't mean that positive reforms can't be won in the meantime.
> This principle applies even in non-revolutionary situations under a > lot of different situations. The Cuban revolution, for example, has > achieved a lot of liberation of the Cuban people not because of the > smart and principled leadership of Fidel Castro. Rather, it's because > of the participation of the Cuban people in decision-making (partly as > a result of the Bay of Pigs invasion, which mobilized people).
Yoshie:
If that were true, workers, allied with peasants, could override the decisions made by the leadership to restore capitalism, rapidly as in the USSR or gradually as in China. But they didn't in the USSR and they haven't in China.
that doesn't make any sense. If the working class is divided here in the US, why can't it be divided in the USSR or China? given such divisions, the working class can lose when the USSR or Chinese leadership controlled the military power. The workers in those two countries mostly struggled to preserve what they had, the more welfare-state aspects of bureaucratic socialism. Besides, Marx's statement about the self-liberation of the working class is referring to the transition between class society (capitalism) and non-class society (socialism that precedes communism). The USSR and Chinese cases were transitions from one class society (bureaucratic socialism) to another (capitalism). The latter is a much easier transition than the one Marx was talking about. It's like the transition from feudalism to capitalism, in which many feudal lords became capitalists and the two ruling classes penetrated each other (despite various real conflicts). Many CP party leaders became capitalists while new capitalists took on bureaucratic power. me:
> This principle is a replacement for those of liberalism. Liberalism -- > as I understand it -- relies on notions of inherent human rights. But > human rights have to be won via struggle (or luck, but we can't rely > on that).
Yoshie:
Liberals don't disagree that rights have to be won. The theory of political liberalism arose from struggle -- beginning with the English Civil War in the early modern period -- to win rights to begin with.
yes, but most liberals don't see it that way. Mostly liberalism is about ahistorical and individualistic (abstract) assertions of rights. me:
> before that, we also had socialist barbarism (e.g., rule by Stalin, > Mao) alongside capitalist barbarism (imperialism).
Yoshie sees
Two problems here: Can we still claim workers are the agents of their own emancipation when they let themselves be ruled by Stalin, Mao, etc.? In no socialist revolution has there been a successful revolution within the revolution, of the sort that Trotsky, et al. hoped for, against the bureaucratic power elite that came to dominate it and eventually decided to restore capitalism.
have you read any books about the decline of the October revolution? about how the working-class part of the revolution was centered in a number of large cities which were isolated from each others in many ways? about how much of the revolution arose from the peasantry, which was mostly about land hunger and was not united with the working class on broader issues than overthrowing the old regime? about how the Civil War and severe economic problems more than decimated the Russian working class? about how the Soviets lost power and were turned into organs of the state? about how the state, desperate to preserve itself and its country's territorial integrity, rapidly increased its own power and violated the principles that the Bolshevik leaders had favored in 1917? Not only did the revolution decline, but the CP itself became more of a military-bureaucratic organization. (it really wasn't a "democratic centralist" organization -- i.e. run in a bureaucratic way -- in 1917.) When Stalin took power, all the conditions for him to take power were already there. (When Trotsky tried to mobilize the youth against this trend, it was already too late and he didn't have an organization.) After that, forced collectivization of agriculture and industrialization created a whole new working class, which had to start from Square One, working toward organization. Much -- too much -- of the struggle was very economistic, a matter of "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." That meant that the USSR's economy didn't work very well, but wasn't the precondition for a revolution from below.
Do socialists today still really believe that workers in the West will one day desire socialism and establish it in their rich countries, despite the memory of socialist barbarism that weighs like a nightmare on their brains? If they do, do they have any ideas about how?
I'm afraid that the rich countries are in the process of downward harmonization with the standards of the poor countries, an end to the long period of global uneven development that divided the rich from poor countries. The rich _people_ of course won't suffer much from this, but the rich countries are suffering and will so. Socialism -- if it comes -- will likely be a global matter. It's quite possible that we'll have a fascistic interlude in the rich countries, as people fight to preserve national privileges. (Yeah, I know. Some pen-pals see us as already having fascism. You ain't seen nothing yet?) It's possible that this might reverse the trend toward the end of global uneven development. Lou Dobbs as the new fascist dictator, defending the "middle class" with jackboots? -- Jim Devine / "Young people who pretend to be wise to the ways of the world are mostly just cynics. Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but it is the farthest thing from it, because cynics don't learn anything. Because cynicism is a self-imposed blindness, a rejection of the world because we are afraid it will hurt us or disappoint us." -- Stephen Colbert.
