who did?
> People like Patrick Bond (who should be back on this list in a few days)
> argue that this is a strength - "one no, many yesses." That just won't
> do, when the ruling class has a pretty good idea of what they want, and
> lots of power to back it up.
Right. which is why Hayek's vision succeeded and also why lefty visions, no matter how inchoate or well-articulated, fail. that does not mean we have to sit around and wait 'til conditions are ripe for revolutions. rather, it requires that we create and transform those conditions:
"That the workers desire to establish the conditions for co-operative production on a social scale, and first of all on a national scale, in their own country, only means that they are working to revolutionize the present conditions of production, and it has nothing in common with the foundation of co-operative societies with state aid. But as far as the present co-operative societies are concerned, they are of value only insofar as they are the independent creations of the workers and not protégés either of the governments or of the bourgeois." (guess who?)
>On the left today, we're in the opposite situation - we have a movement
>(not just the global justice movement, but even the Dean phenom), but few
>ideas.
... "Now the program does not deal with this nor with the future state of communist society.
Its political demands contain nothing beyond the old democratic litany familiar to all: universal suffrage, direct legislation, popular rights, a people's militia, etc. They are a mere echo of the bourgeois <../../../../../glossary/orgs/p/e.htm#peoples-party>People's party, of the <../../../../../glossary/orgs/l/e.htm#league-peace-freedom>League of Peace and Freedom. They are all demands which, insofar as they are not exaggerated in fantastic presentation, have already been realized. Only the state to which they belong does not lie within the borders of the German Empire, but in Switzerland, the United States, etc. This sort of "state of the future" is a present-day state, although existing outside the "framework" of the German Empire.
But one thing has been forgotten. Since the German Workers' party expressly declares that it acts within "the present-day national state", hence within its own state, the Prusso-German Empire its demands would indeed be otherwise largely meaningless, since one only demands what one has not got it should not have forgotten the chief thing, namely, that all those pretty little gewgaws rest on the recognition of the so-called sovereignty of the people and hence are appropriate only in a democratic republic.
Since one has not the courage and wisely so, for the circumstances demand caution to demand the democratic republic, as the French workers' programs under Louis Philippe and under Louis Napoleon did, one should not have resorted, either, to the subterfuge, neither "honest" [1] nor decent, of demanding things which have meaning only in a democratic republic from a state which is nothing but a police-guarded military despotism, embellished with parliamentary forms, alloyed with a feudal admixture, already influenced by the bourgeoisie, and bureaucratically carpentered, and then to assure this state into the bargain that one imagines one will be able to force such things upon it "by legal means".
Even vulgar democracy, which sees the millennium in the democratic republic, and has no suspicion that it is precisely in this last form of state of bourgeois society that the class struggle has to be fought out to a conclusion even it towers mountains above this kind of democratism, which keeps within the limits of what is permitted by the police and not permitted by logic.
That, in fact, by the word "state" is meant the government machine, or the state insofar as it forms a special organism separated from society through division of labor, is shown by the words "the German Workers' party demands as the economic basis of the state: a single progressive income tax", etc. Taxes are the economic basis of the government machinery and of nothing else. In the state of the future, existing in Switzerland, this demand has been pretty well fulfilled. Income tax presupposes various sources of income of the various social classes, and hence capitalist society. It is, therefore, nothing remarkable that the Liverpool financial reformers bourgeois headed by Gladstone's brother are putting forward the same demand as the program."
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch04.htm