Rakesh writes in response to Jacob:
> Jacob, such ethical socialism is the central theme of misty pre
> Marxian revolutionary thought. Marxian socialism has an objective
> foundation. As Rosa Luxemburg put it:
>
> "According to Marx, the rebellion of the workers, the class
> struggle, is only the ideological reflection of the objective
> historical necessity of socialism, resulting from the objective
> impossibility of capitalism at a certain stage. Of course, that does
> not mean (it still seems necessary to point out those basics of
> Marxism to the 'experts') that the historical process has to be, or
> even could be, exhausted to the very limit of this historical
> impossibility. Long before this, the objective tendency of
> capitalist development in this direction is sufficient to produce
> such a social and political sharpening of contradictions in society
> that they must terminate. But these social and political
> contradictions are essentially only a product of the economic
> indefensibility of capitalism. The situation continues to sharpen as
> this becomes increasinly obvious. If we assume with the 'experts'
> the economic infinity of capital accumulation, then the vital
> foundation on which socialism rests will disappear. We take refuge
> in the mist of pre Marxist systems and the schools which attempted
> to deduce socialism solely on the basis of the injustice and evil of
> today's world and revolutionary determination of the working
> classes."
This speaks only to the eventuality of class upheveal, not what human
life would be like after such upheveal. Without the conceptions of
human nature and human activity laid out in the Paris notebooks and
the theses on Feuerbach, the answer to the question that the end of
accumulation poses -- "Socialism or Barbarism?" -- might as well be
barbarism.
Another point: why do you characterize the description of human beings
as "species beings developing themselves" to be a tenet of ethical
socialism? It's an anthropological speculation, not a moral
injunction.
On the broader topic of how to consider the former USSR and the
still-with-us PRC, Guy Debord claimed in _Society of the Spectacle_
that the economic conditions weren't ripe for revolution in those
societies and called the collectivization of argiculture in the USSR
"history's most brutal primitive accumulation of capital ever" and
that these revolutions preserved "all essential aspects of market
society, not least the institution of labor-as-commodity." At the
risk of causing a new flame war, I have to say that I'm inclined to
agree with this analysis, but am willing to be convinced otherwise.
--
Curtiss