>>> "Michael Hoover" <hoov at freenet.tlh.fl.us> 10/29/99 05:44PM >>>
> Socialism utopian and scientific. "Soviet" means council.
> Popcorn, peanuts, popcorn socialism.
> Mark Solomon says when socialism comes to the U.S. it will be called
> baseball.
> CB
I noticed that 'progressive populism' somehow disappeared from my list...
btw: While it is an exaggeration to say that KM left us no conception of socialism, his and Engels' remarks were relatively few (with respect to corpus of their work), pretty generalized, and often embedded in their critique of capitalism. Seems clear that M thought that socialism would substitute conscious, overall planning for market exchange as dominant social process for economic coordination. But his fairly consistent references to 'associated producers' also makes it clear that he perceived planning as associative, cooperative, and democratic, not bureaucratic or elitist.
(((((((((((
CB: Did we mention cybercommunism ?
One might say that Marx and Engels had a negative dialectic to socialism.
But seriously, my opinion is that , since Karl and Fred, the working class has had a lot of experience that must be used in the trial and error (scientific) method to project more positively the elements of socialism. And certainly actually existing socialism has confirmed the proposition in your last sentence above. That conclusion is in some ways trivial ,but I think more a simple profundity. In The Manifesto they dub the working class as the ruling class as the institution of democracy.
All power to ALL the People,
CB