The Triviality of Capital Ownership

Carrol Cox cbcox at mail.ilstu.edu
Sat Dec 12 11:06:22 PST 1998


Max Sawicky wrote (on LBO):


> Red-green discussion here seems possessed by the
> delusion that popular or democratic ownership of
> the means of production will engender a revolution
> in ecological consciousness and policy. This is
> not nearly as obvious as it seems.

Max,

Agreed, but so what? The point of revolutionary (or progressive reform) action is not any certainty (or even probability) that the resulting ensemble of the social relations will solve this, that, or any other "problem," but that the ensemble of social relations in which we find ourselves caught up will be necessarily destructive. That too may be in error, but it is merely rag-biting to call it "a delusion."

It is a very real possibility, even a probability, that a socialist revolution will fail to stem the disastrous tendencies which have generated the green movement. But it is a certainty that liberalism (of any variety) will not forestall that disaster.

One of the major sources of such drivel as *The God That Failed* 50 years ago was an idealist understanding of Marxism; that is, of Marxism as being primarily or even substantially concerned with the future: Marxism is a response to the present and lives only in the present, its main task being to destroy the grip of the future on humanity. (I think I have mentioned in earlier posts, on this or other lists, that the greatness of Engels, whatever his philosophical or political errors, lay in the pessimism that periodically gleams through his work.)

Carrol



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list