Re: Idea of Rapid Withdrawal from Iraq Fast Receding

[Jim Devine <jdevine03@xxxxxxxxx>]

I wrote:
> > ways of working together and institutions are very important stuff,
> > but it's also good to have the ever-changing world view has some
> > tendency to converge to some sort of unity.

I don't see how Yoshie's comment below responds to what I said above
in any wa. Nonetheless, she wrote:
> The Marxist tradition once had a world view, a world view (more
> specifically a philosophy of history) of inevitable dialectical
> progress, from pre-capitalism, to capitalism, to socialism, the world
> view that the Marxist tradition borrowed in part from Christianity and
> in part from liberalism.  It no longer does, though it remains useful
> as it supplies a theoretical framework and analytical tools.

NB: this wasn't Marx's view as much as it was the Marxism of the 2nd
and 3rd internationals. There's also been a tradition within the broad
Marxist trend of voluntarism and/or spontaneity.

> A school
> of thought can be built around a theoretical framework and analytical
> tools, but a social movement cannot be.

why is that? Is it because cross-class movements are required? In
Marx's original view, of course, a mass social movement _could_ be
built around a theoretical framework and analytical tools because
there were no inherent conflicts within the working class and the
superficial ones would be washed away by the acid of capitalism. If a
cross-class social movement is needed, then the polarization
tendencies of capitalism would tend to split the movement, encouraging
the use of different theoretical frameworks.

> A social movement, especially
> one with an ambition to present an alternative to capitalist
> modernity, needs a world view, a world view that inspires people to
> have faith in the work they must do in the face of adversity.

doesn't Marxism have the potential to do that, especially if it sheds
a lot of the old crap (Stalinism, Trotskyism, social democracy,
third-worldism, etc.)?
--
Jim Devine / "Because things are the way they are, things will not
stay the way they are." -- Bertolt Brecht