From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> Re: [lbo-talk] Election 2004
Mere cynics, such as Wojtek, are saps for the most naive of philosophies: What is, shall be.
He imagines, also, that those he argues against are as naive as he and claim to be able to predict the future. He has never read, or is incapable of understanding, the emphasis I and others who agree with me have for years placed on contingency. There _will_ be change, but the direction and extent of that change is quite unpredictable. Wojtek fancies he possesses a crystal ball that enables him to see the future; unfortunately, his crystal ball is a cracked mirror in which he can't even see the present very well.
^^^^^^^^ CB: Yes, but isn't this too onesided for a dialectical approach ? Don't you have to , as a Marxist, consider contingency in unity with its opposite, determinism ? See Engels's discussion of the dialectic of chance and necessity. I think it's in _Anti-Duhring_. Social laws assert themselves amidst a welter of chance (contingent) events. To claim absolute unpredictability would make Marx's many mentions of "laws of development" a waste of time. For example, capitalist free competition gives rise to its opposite, monopoly.
There will be change, and it is not absolutely unpredictable. It is relatively unpredictable. For example, we know that captialism won't change into a rabbit. We can narrow it down to a range to , say , socialism or barbarism or extinction .
Of course, 1917 was an insurrection. The revolution is what happened afterwards. The insurrection occurred in Cuba in 1959. It is still in revolution today.
****
No introduction to a book on dialectics written in the last days of 1991 can ignore the implications of the revolutions in Eastern Europe for the validity of Marx's approach. Many writers, of course, have interpreted these events as tghe demise not only of particular regimes and forms of social organization but of the Marxist world view to which, at least verbally, their leaders seemed so attached. Leaving aside such obviously important questions as whether and to what extent these rgimes were socialist, let alone Marxist, I would just like to point out that the most striking feature of all the social explosions of the last few -- and remarked upon by virtually every observer -- is just how unexpected they were. What existed before, however one valuated it, was taken as given and unchanging; just as most people treat the situation that has emerged as a new given and equally unchanging. It is the same mistake that was made in 1789, again in 1848, and again in 1917. These revolutions, too, surprised almost everyone, and as soon as they happened almost everyone alive at the time thought -- wrongly -- that they were over.**** Bertell Ollman, _Dialectical Investigations_ (New York & London: Routledge, 1993), p. 3.
Carrol