>>> aramsdell at yahoo.com 05/31/01 06:14PM >>>
I'm here at Chicago's Harold Washington Library, about
to check out the Ollman book. The intro starts by
targeting "four major onslaughts" against Marxism.
One of these is "officialism,": "or its adoption, beginning in 1917, by a variety of underdeveloped countries as the official doctrine of the regime, with a subsequent shift in Marxism's meaning from an analysis and criticism of capitalism to a rationalization and organizing ideology for a 'socialist' state." My question is, since the left today, and those more profoundly influenced by Marx, lack organization (or, as Carrol prefers to put it, the left simply does not exist), does Marx's value lie only or mostly in his analysis and critique of capitalism, rather than any ideological agenda he proposed as a means of actively reaching "socialism"? What Marx would I want to check out on this latter score?
(((((((((
CB: On the latter score, _The Manifesto of the Communist Party_
and
CHAPTER III THE STATE AND REVOLUTION. EXPERIENCE OF THE PARIS COMMUNE OF 1871. MARX'S ANALYSIS
1. WHEREIN LAY THE HEROISM OF THE COMMUNARDS' ATTEMPT?
It is well known that in the autumn of 1870, a few months before the Commune, Marx warned the Paris workers that any attempt to overthrow the government would be the folly of despair. But when, in March 1871, a decisive battle was forced upon the workers and they accepted it, when the uprising had become a fact, Marx greeted the proletarian revolution with the greatest enthusiasm, in spite of unfavourable auguries. Marx did not assume the rigidly pedantic attitude of condemning an "untimely" movement as did the ill-famed Russian renegade from Marxism, Plekhanov, who, in November 1905, wrote encouragingly about the workers' and peasants' struggle, but, after December 1905, cried, liberal fashion: "They should not have taken to arms."
Marx, however, was not only enthusiastic about the heroism of the Communards who, as he expressed it, "stormed Heaven." Although the mass revolutionary movement did not achieve its aim, he regarded it as a historic experience of enormous importance, as a certain advance of the world proletarian revolution, as a practical step that was more important than hundreds of programs and arguments. To analyze this experiment, to draw tactical lessons from it, to re-examine his theory in the light of it -- that was the task that Marx set himself.
The only "correction" Marx thought it necessary to make in the Communist Manifesto, he made on the basis of the revolutionary experience of the Paris Communards.
The last preface to the new German edition of the Communist Manifesto, signed by both its authors, is dated June 24, 1872. In this preface the authors, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, say that the program of the Communist Manifesto "has in some details become antiquated," and they go on to say:
"One thing especially was proved by the Commune, viz., that 'the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and weild it for its own purposes.'"[13]
The authors took the words that are in single quotation marks in this passage from Marx's book, The Civil War in France.
Thus, Marx and Engels regarded one principal and fundamental lesson of the Paris Commune as being of such enormous importance that they introduced it as a substantial correction into the Communist Manifesto.
It is extremely characteristic that it is precisely this substantial correction that has been distorted by the opportunists, and its meaning probably is not known to nine-tenths, if not ninety-nine hundredths, of the readers of the Communist Manifesto. We shall deal with this distortion more fully further on, in a chapter devoted specially to distortions. Here it will be sufficient to note that the current, vulgar "interpretation" of Marx's famous utterance just quoted is that Marx here allegedly emphasizes the idea of slow development in contradistinction to the seizure of power, and so on.
As a matter of fact, e x a c t l y t h e o p p o s i t e i s t h e c a s e. Marx's idea is that the working class must b r e a k u p, s m a s h the "ready-made state machinery," and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.
On April 12, 1871, i.e., just at the time of the Commune, Marx wrote to Kugelmann:
"If you look at the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire, you will find that I say that the next attempt of the French Revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another but to s m a s h it" (Marx's italics -- the original is "zerbrechen "), "and this is the preliminary condition for every real people's revolution on the continent. And this is what our heroic Party comrades in Paris are attempting." (Neue Zeit, Vol. XX, 1, 1901-02, p. 700.)[14] (The letters of Marx to Kugelmann have appeared in Russian in no less than two editions, one of which I edited and supplied with a preface.)[15]
AND THE REST