>>> Thomas writes:
>>>
>>> "I started to post a long response to this but have
>>> spared you :) I would like to hear what others think
>>> about the above observation."....[that democratic communism is not
>>> possible]
>>
>> But this is the most elementary Marxism (as to be found
>> in "State and Revolution").
>
> Does Lenin get the last word on what Marxism is?
If "communism" means the social relations a community composed of "universally developed individuals" would create, then "democratic communism" is a pleonasm not an oxymoron.
I've tried to show that that this is what Marx means by it, but most of the content is derived from others. For instance, Goethe makes imagined life in such a community the moment to which one could say "stay."
Faust also makes the point that this community can't be the gift of a messiah (however this is conceived, e.g. as a "vanguard"). It is of the nature of such a community that it must be the creation of the individuals composing it. It requires for its creation the developed capacities needed for full participation in the relations of mutual recognition that define it. This point is also implicit in the consequences that follow from the fulfillment of Faust's penultimate wish.
This is the point of the third thesis on Feuerbach.
"The materialist doctrine concerning the changing of circumstances and upbringing forgets that circumstances are changed by men and that it is essential to educate the educator himself. This doctrine must, therefore, divide society into two parts, one of which is superior to society.
"The coincidence of the changing of circumstances and of human activity or self-changing can be conceived and rationally understood only as revolutionary practice."
The point is ignored by conceptions of "social constructionism" that have no logical space for self-determination (psychologically consistent with this, such conceptions are usually combined with the idea that "the will to power is acted out in all that happens" so that relations other than relations of domination and submission are unimaginable). It's also ignored in the following claim by Zizek.
"The problem here is much more general; it goes far beyond Leni Riefenstahl. Let us take the very opposite of Leni, the composer Arnold Schönberg. In the second part of Harmonielehre, his major theoretical manifesto from 1911, he develops his opposition to tonal music in terms which, superficially, anticipatelater Nazi anti- Semitic tracts. Tonal music has become a 'diseased,' 'degenerated' world in need of a cleansing solution; the tonal system has given in to 'inbreeding and incest'; romantic chords such as the diminished seventh are 'hermaphroditic,' 'vagrant' and 'cosmopolitan.' It's easy and tempting to claim that such a messianic-apocalyptic attitude is part of the same 'spiritual situation' that eventually gave birth to the Nazi final solution. This, however, is precisely the conclusion one should avoid: What makes Nazism repulsive is not the rhetoric of final solution as such, but the concrete twist it gives to it.
"Another popular conclusion of this kind of analysis, closer to Leni, is the allegedly fascist character of the mass choreography of disciplined movements of thousands of bodies: parades, mass performances in stadia, etc. If one finds it also in communism, one immediately draws the conclusion about a 'deeper solidarity' between the two 'totalitarianisms.' Such a formulation, the very prototype of ideological liberalism, misses the point. Not only are such mass performances not inherently fascist; they are not even 'neutral,' waiting to be appropriated by left or right. It was Nazism that stole them and appropriated them from the workers' movement, their original site of birth. None of these 'proto-fascist' elements is per se fascist. What makes them 'fascist' is only their specificarticulation -- or, to put it in Stephen Jay Gould's terms, all these elementsare 'ex-apted' by fascism. There is no fascism avant la lettre, because it is the letter itself that composes the bundle (or, in Italian, fascio) of elements that is fascism proper." Zizek Learning to Love Leni Riefenstahl <http://www.inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=359_0_4_0_C>
This idea is repeated in the following from the essay recently posted by Doug. (<http://www.lacan.com/iraq1.htm>)
"Marx said about the petit-bourgeois that he sees in every object two aspects, bad and good, and tries to keep the good and fight the bad. One should avoid the same mistake in dealing with Judaism: the "good" Levinasian Judaism of justice, respect for and responsibility towards the other, etc., against the "bad" tradition of Jehova, his fits of vengeance and genocidal violence against the neighboring people. This is the illusion to be avoided: one should assert a Hegelian "speculative identity" between these two aspects and see in Jehova the SUPPORT of justice and responsibility. Judaism is as such the moment of unbearable absolute contradiction, the worst (monotheistic violence) and the best (responsibility towards the other) in absolute tension, the same, coinciding, and simultaneously absolutely incompatible. In short, one should gather the courage to transpose the gap, the tension, into the very core of Judaism: it is no longer the question of defending the pure Jewish tradition of justice and love for the neighbor against the Zionist aggressive assertion of the Nation-State. And, along the same lines, instead of celebrating the greatness of true Islam against its misuse by fundamentalist terrorists, or of bemoaning the fact that, of all great religions, Islam is the one most resistent to modernization, one should rather conceive this resistance as an open chance, as »undecidable«: this resistance does not necessarily lead to »Islamo-Fascism,« it can also be articulated into a Socialist project. Precisely because Islam harbors the »worst« potentials of the Fascist answer to our present predicament, it can also turn out to be the site for the »best«. In other words, yes, Islam effectively is not a religion like others, it does involve a stronger social link, it does resist being integrated into the capitalist global order - and the task is how to politically use this ambiguous fact."
The kind of individual open to persuasion by fascist demagoguery can't be transformed into a universally developed individual by a word from a master.
Ted