Re: Heroes, causes and Marx

[Margaret Trawick <trawick@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Hugh Rodwell wrote:

>>
>> b) Not any old revolution will do. So far the only "classical" revolution
>> led by a genuinely Marxist workers party has been the October revolution in
>> Russia, led by the Bolsheviks under Lenin and Trotsky. This is still the
>> touchstone. Later revolutions that overthrew capitalism and instituted
>> workers states, such as those in Yugoslavia, Vietnam, China and Cuba all
>> lacked fundamental characteristics either in relation to the party or to
>> Marxist understanding, due to the degeneration that set in with the
>> usurping of power in the Soviet Union by the Stalinist bureaucracy. In the
>> first place they were all nationally limited by the Stalinist doctrine of
>> Socialism in One Country. In the second place they all had ferociously
>> repressive regimes that perverted the revolutionary Marxist concept of
>> workers democracy.
>>

Does a revolution have to be Marxist to be good, successful, correct?  What if
the revolutionaries are ideologically eclectic - they take some ideas from
Marx, some ideas from other places, and put it all together into something
uniquely their own?

The Bolshevik revolution may have been pure to start out with, but it quickly
succumbed to old and new evils.  No ideology can be of any value if it does not
actually work, if it fails to deliver the goods, so to speak.

In the twentieth century, Marxism as an overall program has not succeeded, nor
has it failed.  It has made, and will continue to make, a great contribution
toward the liberation of human beings from their own self-destructive devices.
But is it not possible to learn from the mistakes, and to revise the Marxist
program accordingly?  I know that "revisionism" has resulted in corruption,
destruction, and fallbacks to old established systems of domination.  But can
we not look to a greater vision, incorporating the wisdom of Marx,
acknowledging his mistakes, and building upon the many unexpected lessons
learned of the past century?


>> c) The arms of a revolution (witness the Albanian uprising of a couple of
>> years ago) come from the disintegrating forces of the repressive state more
>> than any other source. The revolution needs people with conviction, not
>> money.

Completely agreed.  Look at the LTTE.


>> d) To say we're over a barrel is to put things in far too fatalistic a
>> fashion. Consider again the preconditions for socialist revolution in 1916
>> Russia (Trotsky's book on the History of the Russian Revolution will help
>> out) -- they were a damn sight worse than anything we're facing today --

Not agreed.   The problems and the challenges are greater now.

>> with the exception of the existence of a tempered revolutionary workers
>> party, the Bolsheviks, and the experience of workers power gained in the
>> even more improbable 1905 revolution.

Yes.  And improbable things are happening now.  Things that could not have been
predicted then.  Repeat: the Bolshevik revolution failed.  Good things came out
of it, but in the long run it failed.  I think we have to look at it and see
why it went wrong, and develop a new program that corrects the failures.

>>
>> A useful trick is to look at the conclusions people draw when they stress
>> the changes they see in the economic system. If they conclude that
>> socialist revolution is no longer on the agenda, then they're not Marxists
>> in Marx's tradition.
>>

Some things change, some things stay the same.  Forgive the triteness of this
quotation from some popular song.  But I think we have to look objectively at
what has changed and what has stayed the same.  Also, it is foolish to reject
the thoughts of people who are not Marxists in Marx's tradition.  Marx is not
some kind of god.  He was a brilliant man who made a great contribution to
human thought.  But he was also fallible.  He made some conceptual errors.  The
minute you deify him, you kill the contribution.

People who think that socialist revolution is no longer on the agenda are
simply blind.  It does not matter whether they are Marxists or not.  Anyway,
who cares who is a Marxist and who is not?   You do.  I don't.  I care about
who sees clearly the world as it is, and who has the courage to say what they
see.


>>
>> And since Marx has explained very clearly how the development of the forces
>> of production explodes the constraints put in their way by any historically
>> inadequate set of relations of production (in the case of capitalism, by
>> the private appropriation of wealth being in antagonistic contradiction to
>> the social production of wealth), we can assume that capitalism will not
>> last for ever, and neither will the capital relationship it rests on.
>> "Flash in the pan" it might well appear to be to people living a millennium
>> from now, but for us it means not just our own lifetime but that of many
>> generations preceding us. Let's hope it won't oppress many after us.
>>

I think there is a serious problem in assuming that capitalism will inevitably
lead to its own demise.  Two serious problems.  First, nothing is inevitable.
We cannot assume anything.  Whatever happens will be made to happen by human
beings - you, me, and everyone else - acting of their own free agency.  Second,
assuming inevitability is a form of fatalism.  It encourages inaction.

We may work and fight to make what we perceive as inevitable happen sooner.
But really what we are working and fighting for in this case is the well-being
of ourselves, our own children and our own grandchildren.  It can go no further
than that.  The ruling classes care about exactly the same thing.  They want
themselves, their children and their grandchildren to continue with their
privileges.  This is a matter that can be worked out.

>>
>> Money represents value produced by labour. It's the collection of this and
>> its divvying up that creates the confusion. Again Marx clarifies this in
>> the Grundrisse, in the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
>> and in Capital itself. He shows the fundamental relationship between money
>> and commodities, and demonstrates the various ways in which fetishism acts
>> to give the impression of real phenomena to things which are only
>> derivative and secondary (like profit, interest and wages) as opposed to
>> the scientific reality and primacy of things which appear to be abstract
>> and insubstantial (like value). This fetishism produces the smoke and
>> mirrors, the ghosts and the hallucinations.
>>

All agreed.  Previous comment retracted.

>>
>> Marx did think about it. In Capital I he has the chapter on commodity
>> fetishism. Much of the Grundrisse is devoted to this kind of theme, and
>> almost of Capital III deals with the processes of fetishism of surface
>> reflections of value that lead to profit, interest, wages and the various
>> financial instruments that preoccupy so many people who should know better.
>>

This is why I advocate more concern for the local,  less universalism, and less
globalization.  So that people will not be alienated from the fruits of their
own labor.  Clearly, people of different localities must support one another,
so that if a crop fails here, food will be provided from the surplus produce of
there.  Capital (money) is the most convenient means of exchange.  It is also
the most convenient means of domination.  I do not see any way to stop
capitalist exploitation except from within the capitalist system itself,
through anti-trust legislation and the like.

>> >  And the rich can make total mincemeat of the poor, and the poor can
>> >do nothing about it.  When they try, they get even more minced.
>>
>> Unnecessary fatalism. If a nation of benighted peasants such as Russia can
>> make mincemeat of an apparently eternal ruling class and the rich as it did
>> in 1917, so can a nation of workers such as the US. The question is not if,
>> but how and when.
>>

All I can say to this is, look more to the present.  Get out of the USA.
Fordism reigns there, and the workers of the USA are nationalistic to the
hilt.  They consider their enemies to be people who come from other countries.
An international union of workers is the farthest thing from their minds.

>>
>> a) that the regime of the capitalist US state is irrelevant to the solution
>> of the underlying problems of its people -- sure it's better to live under
>> a welfare state regime than a fascist dictatorship, but exploitation and
>> misery don't go away. The point is to change the state (ie put a workers
>> state in place of the bourgeois state) not to tinker with the regime;
>>

The workers of the USA rightly consider that they have a pretty good deal.
They are better fed than the workers of any other country, and they want to
keep it that way.  They know that they are members of the global ruling class.
Sure they are exploited by the hyper-rich and they know that, too.  They deal
with it by means of their own mini-capitalist enterprises.  They would be out
of their minds to try and overthrow the American Way.

America is the home and center of global capitalism.  It is more internally
stable than any nation is or ever has been.  If you want to fight capitalism,
you have to fight America, and you have to fight the American working class.
Good luck.

>> b) that the current set-up, however eternal and set in gold it might seem,
>> is nonetheless historically transient, and will be the more transient the
>> more people realize this and work to get rid of it.

Yes.  What goes up will come down.  But for America it will take another
century at least, and things will happen beyond your imagining or mine in
between.

>> >cause.  A meaningful death, they call it.
>>
>> Couldn't agree more. This is the point Margaret started with. The point
>> again is to make such sacrifice yield a permanent gain in terms of a better
>> society.
>>

All I can say is to look outside modern America for the sacrifices to happen.
See them, join them, renounce the American nation.

MT