Jacek Kuron, dies aged 70.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/click/rss/0.91/public/-/1/hi/world/europe/3815963.stm
Kuron and Modzelewski wrote an Open Letter to the Polich CP in the mid-60's that got them imprisoned. http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/contemp/pamsetc/socfrombel/sfb_8.htm Loren Goldner http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/poland.html (Note his comments on the Third Way or Road)
>... In 1964, Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski wrote their "Open Letter to the Party". This pamphlet-length work is, without question, the most interesting analysis of the Stalinist system ever written in the Soviet bloc during the postwar period. It is a rigorously Marxist attempt to locate the dynamic of the "state socialist" system (a challenge in which the theoreticians of civil society evince not the slightest interest), which is characterized without hesitation as a new form of class rule and against which only a "new proletarian revolution" offers a meaningful perspective. Kuron and Modzelewski situate Polish state socialism" (a term to which they, in contrast to most post-Marxists, give a real definition, whether one accepts it or not, and sharply distinguish from Marx's own project of abolishing the state along with social classes) in a thoroughly international framework, clearly recognizing, like the Bolsheviks before them, the impossibility of revolution in Poland without revolution throughout the Eastern bloc and ultimately in the capitalist West. In the "Open Letter", Kuron and Modzelewski have none of the illusions about the capitalist West which crept into their politics in the course of the 1970's, under the impact of such short-lived phenomena as the "Euro-communism" of the PCI. The retreat of the Polish opposition from the perspectives of the "Open Letter to the Party" of 1964 is the real story of what happened in Poland after 1970 and particularly after 1980. The "Open Letter to the Party" was translated and distributed throughout the world in the 1960's , and was read everywhere for what it was, the most advanced statement of Marxism, based squarely on a call for international revolution, east and west, ever written in the St alinist bloc after 1945.
>... 8:SOCIALISM FROM BELOW
>...Such an approach was presented most clearly in the open letter to the Polish Communist Party written in 1964 by two young rebels Jacek Kuron and Karol Modzelewski. Kuron and Modzelewski argued persuasively that the Polish working class is exploited by 'central political bureaucracy' that controls the economy in the interests of state competition:
... all means of production and maintenance have
become or centralised national 'capital'. The
material power of the bureaucracy, the scope of
its authority over production, its international
position (very important for a class organised as
a group identifying itself with the state) all
this depends on the size of the national capital.
Consequently, the bureaucracy wants to increase
capital, to enlarge the producing apparatus,
to accumulate.
And Kuron and Modzelewski knew that, if this situation was to be changed and genuine socialism created, the conclusion was inescapable:
The revolution that will overthrow the
bureaucratic system will be a proletarian revolution.
In Eastern Europe, then, working class action has exposed the lies and hypocrisy of the 'socialist' states. At the same time, western capitalism has exposed its violent, militaristic, inhuman face. Military madness has re-emerged on a terrifying scale. The world is now spending $1.3 million per minute on the means of destroying human life. The United States is in the midst of the biggest peacetime arms build-up in history--and Russia is scrambling frantically to catch up. With each such escalation in the arms race, the threat of war--global nuclear war- -looms larger.
At the same time, the world capitalist system is sliding once more into depression. (More catastrophism follows...)
Michael Pugliese, supposed semi-neo-con ;-(