I'm confused - surely it was Lenin who more than any other twentieth century politician insisted upon the role of the subjective factor in history, while all around him took refuge in clap-trap about the objective trends of race and nation.
In message <p04330114b6b5edf26637@[166.84.250.86]>, Doug Henwood
<dhenwood at panix.com> writes
>Carrol Cox wrote:
>
>>That's about it. Your post reveals the voluntarism of much political
>>thought that can't learn from Lenin. You are demanding that we claim
>>prophetic rather than analytic power. Those conditions are not only
>>unspecified, they are in material reality _at this time_ unspecifiable.
>>The analogue for claiming otherwise are those ads for Free Psychic
>>Readings in the back of _TV Guide_. I think Marxists should exercise a
>>minimal honesty in their claims of what they know.
>
>I'm learning so much. Involuntarism is much to be preferred to
>voluntarism. So we just kick back, open a beer (oh, no, we have to be
>good ascetics, sorry), wait for some spontaneous uprising, then go
>try to claim leadership of it because we're so much more profound and
>disciplined than the spontaneists. In the meanwhile, what?
>
>Doug
-- James Heartfield