> Mark wrote:
>
> >>'Us' - you know who: Those among us who do not believe in reforms.<<
>
> That surely is a typo.
Not at all.
When I say 'revolution' Doug mutters 'Spart'. Words like 'marginal' appear. 'Mad monk.' I think Heartfield calls me Ayatollah. Please yourselves. But IMHO all you are doing is looking for a safe place to lie in, a lowest common political denominator.
Doug Henwood wantonly identifies revolutionaries with Sparts because the alternative is unbearable, I guess. But they are not identical. What's wrong with the Sparts is that they are not so much evolved as de-evolved, as Woody Allen put it. Spart = clinical idiot. Sparts believe in more freeways and hamburger joints. LM believes in tobacco, dams, and more global warming.
Of course, there is scope for reforms. Paula is right; there are tons of things which are easy to do and which are actually in capitalism's own interest to do, if capitalistst weren't collectively more asinine than Sparts they would do them themselves; 'enlightened' capitalist have understood since the Factory Acts and the campaign against child labour led by that great human rights activist and social reformer, Karl Marx, that without such things as trade unions, social security and other socialist ideas, capitalism would have gone the way of the raptors by 1919.
But arguing for reforms is not an alternative to pointing insistently to the inevitability, necessity etc of revolution -- and to ORGANISING REVOLUTIONARY MOVEMENTS.
On the contrary, Pointing to the corrupt, irrational inhuman and transient nature of capitalism is a great way of cheering workers up, making them feel less cowed and overawed and giving them more confidence in their struggle to right wrongs here and now. Working class folks who have not read Capital or subbed to this list can be forgiven for feeling that their indignation about 'life' can be assuaged by reforming the more obviously obnoxious bits of the cancer, capitalism.
But there is no excuse for people here to have similar delusions (I exclude Brad deLong and Max Sawicky, for obvious reasons: 'Napoleon' and 'Teapot' we call them in my house. They are like the two doolally sisters in the famous James Stewart film about the Depression, who knew that the whole town was a little crazy, except for them).
Most people around here HAVE read Capital and therefore know that capitalism is not really a sempiternal substrate of human existence. That being the case, we need to do revolutionary things more often. I commend John Lacny's C-Span initiative, over on Lou P's Marxism list, as an exemplar.
There is always a surplus of Max's and Brad's, to earnestly procure necessary reforms. We don't need to do their stuff for them. I'm half inclined to bung my friend Chris Burford in the same box with them, now he's begun stubbornly wittering on about 'structural reforms'. Chris has recently been promoting the idea of Hong Kong leasehold tenure as a hedge against the final collapse. Leasehold tenure, Chris, probably had something to do with the fact that Britain never owned all of Hong Kong but only leased much of the place. But in any case, your monomania with that matter is tending to locate you in the loony sister camp. Pity, you're almost the best Marx-scholar we've got. You ought to reread Vol 3 and elsewhere about R-E-N-T, IMHO. As for Tobin, this is a red herring which is so old and mouldy that even the cat will walk by it.
Reforms serve to make everyday life a little easier, and they give the vampire a stay of execution. Meaning, reforms let capitalism grow bigger and nastier until the whole planet faces ecosphere- destruction (try as I might, I have never succeeded in getting Heartfield, Sawicky, deLong et al to do more than raise their eyebrows and make noises: 'Pshaw! Piffle! Faugh! Stuff and nonsense!' when I mention words like 'anthropogenic climate change'. I have the same problem with Greg Nowell, who is very charming and wrote a rather a good book about the oil industry earlier this century. Greg: I just read your PR stuff for the American Methanol Institute. Wow, man! You must have been DRINKING the stuff when you wrote it: no wonder it came with your own health warning. What's all this about coalbed methane? Hydrates?? Hydrogen from SEAWATER??? One other thing: let me tell you, I've actually been to the Yamal Peninsula, where people think the next century's gas is coming from, and my cautionary note is: it won't. That, incidentally, is why no-one wants to buy Gazprom. As for fuel cells -- well, OK, they are a happening thing, and as you rightly say, Greg, they are only 10x more expensive than gasoline engines right now, so who knows? But somehow I don't think it will put off the Great Oil Crash, which I'm glad to see we now agree WILL happen. Me, my money is in bicycle stocks.)
Let me put my problem about reforms this way.
Let us suppose that Chris Burford's 'structural reforms' DO get implemented, perhaps by some desperate World Underground of Plutocrats (WUP), faced with market meltdown, jihad, the 4th Russian Revo, and the first IWW Million Wobblie March on Washington. Under the banner of Tobin, enlightened partiarchs -- Wuppies -- march to the bright new postkeynesian future of reopened Korean, Thai, Chinese, Indian, S African car plants, and Greg Nowell's inspirational vision of one billion gasoline vehicles by 2010 is realised.
Do you think, my dear friend Chris, that this would be good for the planet, on the whole? (The Chinese better make those little amphibious cars if they're sensible, so they can motor straight off the Round-up Ready-laced paddies and down onto the 100-mile wide, globally-warmed Yangtse River...)
hugs and kisses Mark