RE: [Marxism] What other world is possible? (Dialectic of transition)

[João Paulo Monteiro <jpmonteiro@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

«You have the wrong idea concerning what was stated. I am a communists
but I 
was also a trade union leader in the UAW and did 30 years. I wrote from
a 
communist standpoint and not that of an abstract man fighting on every
front. I was 
also Executive Board member of the American Writers Congress. Also
Executive 
Board member of the Detroit Coalition of Black Trade Unionists. Also
editor of 
the Southern Advocate in the early 1980s. Founding member of the League
of 
Revolutionary Black Workers. Founding member of the Communist League.
Founding 
member of the Communist Labor Party.» 




Well, I clearly got a wrong idea of you.
Funny thing, the internet. One keeps building mental pictures of the
"other" on the opposite keyboard and most of the time they are just so
wrong.





«Abolition of private property is no abstraction. It is the urgent
question of 
the day. The program of Communists has always been abolition of private 
property. The various slogan's of the social movement are temporal. Read
the 
Communist Manifesto again, for the first time. 
Really.» 





Melvin, I have most surelly read the Communist Manifesto about a dozen
times, as well as most of anything that was ever written about it of any
substance. Believe me, I am marxist fanatic. I'm writting a biography of
Marx. My last book was entitled "The strange case of the death of Karl
Marx". I even look like Marx. I have developed something of a Marx
mimetic syndrome.

You seem to be taking a defensive position towards Marx. We all do so, I
guess, given the frequence we keep hearing 1000 ass-holes proclaiming
him dead or surpassed all the time. For twenty years I have been saying
that Marx in the man for the XXI century.

Quite another thing is the position you seem to be taking that, well, if
there's any thinking to be done, just go read Marx. Everything you need
will be there. A program? Why bother? The Manifesto has it all. No, we
need to do some very serious, comprehensive, bold and original thinking
if we are to get our act together as a revolutionary movement.

Of course our goal is the abolition of private property. That's why we
are called communists. But the focus of my essay is on a strategy for
the transition on a global scale. You can't just take power and issue,
as ukase nº 1: private property is abolished, effective today. To begin
with, you don't take power on a world scale. The point is to create a
world-wide movement that has set itself a transitional strategy designed
globally. Think globally, act nationally or regionally. That's the
challenge of our epoch. It's a whole new thing, in relation to the
perspective set by the III International that was: national development
and devising an original national path to socialism that would somehow
"converge" later on with the other sister nations.

Best regards,


João Paulo Monteiro




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