> What's the political relevance of a social theory cut off from a
social movement to go with it, though? A social movement (even
before it becomes big enough to score a big victory) can provide
resources -- money, manpower, institutions, weapons (moral,
intellectual, and material), etc. -- but a social theory without a
movement can't.
That's a problem, innit? But it's not an objection to my view. It's just a description of our situation. Certainly the social theory by itself cannot change the world, only interpret it. Certainly our task to change the world. There'[s a disconnect. But I didn't create it. It's there for all to see.
At 1:57 PM -0800 2/9/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>as a _movement_ Marxism has collapsed.. . . This is not going to change.
> How do you know?
You mistake who has the burden of proof here. Don't you think, as a proclaimed adherent of a defeated view the number of whose adherents in this country, never large, are now statistically insignificant and shrinking, and whose adherents worldwide are in headlong retreat, that you have some responsibility to explain to sympathetic skeptics why you think your ideology has a politically relevant future?
But to adopt the burden I do not have, I will say this. First, Marxism has been in decline -- politically I mean -- for roughly 50 years. There had been decades of talk about renewal, but when renewal came, it came as perestroika, which turned out to be the flush before dying. Second, there is no place in the world where Marxism is reviving as political force, on the contrary, for eaxmple, Lula has made a reconciliation with reality; the SACP the same, the Italian CP is now the PDS, the French CP will shortly fall below the 5% mark, etc. Third, I can think of no instance in history when an ideology or movement that has suffered the kind of defeat Marxism has suffered has made a comeback. Oh, there have been views like Christianity that suffered persecution for centuries to ultimately triumph, but, Christianity never fell has Marxism has. Fourth, if it were to come back in two hundred or five hundred years, there is absolutely no reason to think that it would come back in an
y form that would be recognizable to you.
Of course I am not asserting any sort of historical inevitability here. What we have are trends, tendencies, operating against a background of well-esatblished but not explanatorily deep generalizations. Marxism could buck the trend. It could become the only movement in human history that, ground in the dust and having lsot almost all its adherents, nonetheless revived in something like the form that its most idealistic adherents would like it to have. But I would not bet my life on it, which is in effect what you are asking me to do if you say, You should be a Marxist.
Pandora's box is open. The troubles are loose. Have you anything to offer but idle hope?
> One of the actual concerns of real people today is the rise of
fundamentalist Islamism and the goals and tactics that it has chosen.
politics abhors vacuum, and where Marxism as a political project has
been disappeared, other political projects have stepped in.. . .
> That's just one example of forces that have stepped into the
political vacuum created by the disappearance of Marxism.
(Elsewhere, other reactionary forces have played the part played by
fundamentalist Islamism in the Middle East.) I don't know how more
actual the concerns of real people can get than this state of affairs.
--
We may agree that the vacuum left room for awful things to flourish. In a hypothetical world where Marxism had not collapsed, maybe that wouldn't have happened. But Marxism has collapsed. All the king's horses and all the king's men can't put it back together again. You can't fill the vacuum, or displace what has taken root there, by saying that Humpry Dumpty is still on his wall, or will be in 50 years, when the king's horses and men get done.
Historical materialism is a great theory. But Marxism as a movement, hammers and sickles, red flags and banners of Marx and Lenin, workers singing The Internationale -- that's over. There's no more movement. The more time we spend mooning about how sad it is and hanging on to our old faith in the hope that in a few centuries it will come back, the more time of what we have here and now we waste when we could be thinking and acting on building a radical social movement that might resonate today.
jks
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