>>> "Mr P.A. Van Heusden" <pvanheus at hgmp.mrc.ac.uk> 08/18/99 07:17AM >>>
On Tue, 17 Aug 1999, Carrol Cox wrote:
> Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> > Seems to me
> > you push where you can - more unionization, more worker control of
> > the workplace, more socialization of consumption and investment (free
> > day care, education, health care, etc.), more democratic forms of
> > land use planning, regulatory and other constraints on corporate
> > power. . . .
>
> I would like to see a scenario for this. My own suspicion is that as
> difficult (perhaps impossible) as revolution may be, this process is
> even more wildly improbable. If this is the only route, Red Rosa's
> alternative of barbarism seems most likely.
I'm with Carrol on this one. I think Marx's critique of the early Utopian communists in the CM (Only from the point of view of being the most suffering class does the proletariat exist for them.") has in it the seeds for a critique of any kind of attempt to 'rationally and reasonably' plan one's way to communism.
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Charles: Isn't Marx's focus on the working class as the gravediggers of capitalism some scientific, rational and , reasonable planning on the route to communism ? Historical materialism is a rational plan. Some of the road to communism is outlined by theory ,and some is discovered in revolutionary practice. In the aphorism "without revolutionary theory, there is no revolutionary movement (practice)" , the notion of "theory" has a sense of rational planning in it.
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At the core of Marx's understanding of history is his understanding of history as unfolding as an active process. The question of the possibility of communism will always be a practical one, because "The question whether objective truth can be attributed to human thinking is not a question of theory but is a practical question."
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Charles: Yes, Marx emphasized this. Yet, this section of the Second Thesis on Feuerbach seems to imply that practice is the only final test of truth of thinking or a theory ,not directly that the human thinking becomes objectively truthful only through practice. Human thinking can use imagination to reach a truthful theory, but it can not prove that truth except in practice.
I agree that the final test of the validity of any plan, theory or prethought about how to get to communism is practice, but planning, theorizing or prethinking about how to get to communism as well as experimentation and industry based on that planning ( Engels defined "practice" as experimentation and industry) are part of the Marxist approach.
Charles Brown
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