Marvin Gandall wrote:
>
> It's an internal debate as old as the labour and socialist movement,
> and always resurfaces because, beginning with Bernstein, the left has found
> the overthrow of capitalism and the replacement of the traditional parties
> to be a much tougher slog than it had bargained for.
>
> You're a frequent participant in this debate, including in the past few
> days, so I don't know what you mean when you say "I never have and never
> will discuss socialism on this list." Anyway, keep doing so.
Requests (particularly on this list) for a discussion of socialism seem usually to be based on the assumption that socialism is the carrot that moves the donkey (working class) along. It is in that sense that I have regularly refused to discuss it. I do assume (without pretending to know details) that socialism involves working-class rule, from which it follows that the "working class" (however we define it) must fit itself for that role, presumably in the process of overthrowing capital. But the workers do that not from following the carrot but from discovering the necessity, within their own struggles, of "going beyond." I've experienced that happening, and I've watched it happening in the lives of others.
So I will discuss (have endlessly discussed) the socialist _movement_, but I will not engage in waving the carrot before the passive masses, or before intellectuals who have to know everything before they will do anything.
Revolutionaries, incidentally, never _begin_ revolutions; capital moves to crush non-revolutionary mass movements, who in self-defense move towards insurrection. So it is also absurd to paint a scenario for revolution. Consider the following silliness, which appeared on the list a year or two ago:
****I understand, even sympathize with, the blueprint problem, but you're asking people to sacrifice the familiar and stable and embrace revolutionary politics for what? A completely unknown quantity?*****
No one that I know of is asking anyone to "sacrifice the familiar" at the present time -- and no one ever will. The writer seemingly cannot imagine that conditions will be any different than they are now. But the conditions under which one would ask others to "embrace revolutionary politics" would be conditions under which that would NOT be asking them to "sacrifice the familiar." Revolutionary politics now, in so far as the phrase is meaningful, consists in raising mass oppsition to the u.s. war crimes in Iraq.
Carrol