[Marxism] Marx belongs to no party

["Walter Lippmann" <walterlx@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

(Radio Miami, from whose website this was taken, is one of those very
rare institutions, a voice in that city which is friendly toward the
Cuban Revolution. Max Lesnik is its director and it also features a
range of other voices such as Havana City Historian Eusebio Leal,
Andres Gomez, and others. It's an internet-based radio station.)
=====================================================================

PROGRESO WEEKLY
January 18, 2009

Marx belongs to no party
By Lorenzo Gonzalo

http://tinyurl.com/22xg3p

After the latest news from Venezuela, I'm inclined to think that new
winds are blowing in relation to socialism. Among other things, Karl
Marx will cease to be the scapegoat. Until recently, his thinking was
the object of politicization. Everything indicates that this trend
will give way to the study and development of the social theory he
expounded, which revolutionized social sciences and set the bases so
the scholars in that field could contribute to their enrichment.

Most assuredly, once we understand the changes that are needed to
overcome the ills created by capitalism, we'll no longer talk about
Marxists, or Leninists, or Trotskyites. I don't think we'll again
hear those expressions, which place limits on the development of
thinking in general and social sciences in particular.

To call oneself Marxist is to limit Marx's thinking, whatever his
contributions to this science -- which, of course, were many. 
Let us imagine that Einstein had called himself a Newtonian, or that
psychoanalysts insisted in calling themselves Freudians and that, as
a consequence, some power had decreed inviolable certain parameters
established by those precursors. Well, that's what happened with the
social thinking that attempted to find the best way to change the
order of things to overcome (or at least mitigate) the injustices
created by capitalism.

As a result of all this, Marx became the scapegoat for all the
deficiencies through which we have traveled in the need to create a
new State. Humanity has never managed to institutionalize the
coexistence that arises from the new relations established by humans
in their historical sojourn, without long suffering and a varied
gamut of successes and mistakes.

Let us remember the long road of capitalism to become those republics
we now know. Even in the United States, where conditions were more
favorable than in Europe because of the absence of feudal relations,
the process of constitution of the new State and people's access to
the freedoms enabled by the system took more than 100 years. Of
course, it would have taken less time had the racial discrimination
practiced by the so-called Founding Fathers not existed.

To be fair with the road traversed by the material precursors of
socialism, we must point out that politics is the practical
expression of social theory and concepts. Because Marx was the most
prominent theoretician when the Bolshevik Revolution took place, the
exercise of his ideas inevitably turned his name into a battle
banner.

About 100 years have elapsed since someone attempted to organize a
State different from the capitalist State. In that time, a huge
wealth of experiences has accumulated, and the great majorities of
humanity have become aware of two important facts:

. First, that capitalism enables the largest productive force that
has ever existed.

. Second, that the individual mechanism that initiated capitalism
generates an unequal distribution of the wealth produced. This
inequality is not susceptible of being controlled by any law, lest it
creates confrontations with the major beneficiaries of the productive
order in which we live.

That awareness and the understanding that future production can be
possible only through great concentrations forces us to reevaluate
the productive order in which we live.

The current events make us think that Marx will definitely be freed
in the future of any partisan militancy.

Journalist Lorenzo Gonzalo is deputy director of Radio Miami.


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