On 12/31/06, Jim Devine <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
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.
It seems to me that rights are of necessity an abstract notion.
Historicize rights, and you end up relativizing and deconstructing
them, rendering them much less emotionally powerful and compelling in
struggles, for history shows that no rights are "inalienable." That
is why adding liberalism to Marxism is unconvincing, though almost all
Marxists defend civil liberties in the language of liberalism, for
there really is no other coherent doctrine.
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.
The working class will be always divided under class society, and so
are other classes. That's why social and political struggles in class
society will always pit workers against workers, peasants against
peasants, and so forth, and all political factions -- from
pro-capitalist to pro-socialist, pro-imperialist to anti-imperialist
-- in any country will all contain workers. The difference between
social compositions of political factions has and will continue to be
a matter of degrees, not of kinds. That difference in degrees, often
slight, only rarely great, is the crucial stuff of politics.
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?
Some political theorists, like Theda Skocpol, suggest that peasants,
not wage workers, have more of what it takes to make social
revolution, contrary to Marx and Marxists' suggestion that wage
workers are to be the main collective agent of it.
While the Skocpol school goes too far, since there have been primarily
urban revolutions like the Iranian and Sandinista Revolutions, I think
that it may be true that proletarianization, beyond a certain degree
of it, makes social revolution less not more likely, for
proletarianization and its often attendant effects, especially social
atomization, dissolve not only feudal institutions but also workers'
own institutions of self defense and mutual support eventually.
> 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.
The workers in those two
countries mostly struggled to preserve what they had, the more
welfare-state aspects of bureaucratic socialism.
Some of them did, but others didn't. During their respective reigns,
I believe Stalin, Mao, etc. had popular support.
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.
Leaders always control military power in any modern state, from
capitalist to socialist, under normal circumstances. Monopoly of
legitimate violence is one of the enduring definitions of the state.
> 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.
All previous revolutionary waves went beyond national borders, if not
quite global phenomena. But at present there is not even a ripple
here in the West.
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?
If America goes fascist, there is no hope for the survival of
humanity, is there? The old axis powers were not nuclear powers.
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
