Manjur,
Maybe we could just pick someone like, say, Stalin, and make him a scapegoat for a version of Marxism that guarantees success ( Although , old Joe doesn't strike me as that naïve). Then we can move forward from here in some comradely unity on that issue.
I must say though, that I don't think Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky or any of the gang thought that achieving socialism was determined and certain. Rather, on the contrary, they recognized that the struggle would be _so_ tough that without a sense that history had a tendency in favor of the working class winning, people would be hopeless. And exactly because the original Marxists had a radical concept of human agency, they knew that people without hope could not be the agents capable of carrying out such a difficult task. Does Lacan understand this about subjectivity ?
In other words, I think Marx, Lenin and the rest were more clever psychologists than some of these folks have realized. In the practical world ,you have to know how to inspire your people, bluff the enemy, and the like, even at the level of your fundamental theory. There's a touch of the Advertising Age in _The Manifesto of the Communist Party_. Why not err on the side of optimism , say socialism is inevitable,if it will encourage more agents to fight for it ? Afterall since we believe in radical agency and don't believe history is on automatic, we also believe we won't get to socialism, if human beings don't struggle hard for it.
When you say you find a way "to defend the October revolution, have a great deal of respect for Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky" and the rest you mention briefly below, it makes me want to join your "International" !
I'm willing to bounce around the dialectics ( or non-dialectics) of nature a little if you want. Seems to me the discovery that there is no ether , i.e. no absolute rest, is a really fundamental confirmation of Engels formulation that there is nothing but matter and its mode of existence is _motion_. Then the old idea of "fixed stars" gets knocked out by more recent astronomy full of more motion. That the solar system has a history is a dialectical principle. That the universe has a history is a dialectical principle. The punctuated equilibrium idea is exactly what a dialectician would predict that paleontology would come to as a modification of Darwin's totally gradualist evolution. Another name for "dialectics" is basically "evolutionism". Engels' discussion of the dialectic of chance and necessity reminds of modern chaos theory. The transformations between forms of matter and energy seem to be all over new science. Furthermore, the unity and struggle of opposites is rife. Sexual reproduction, Russell's paradox, Cantor's paradox, Goedel's proof, no more excluded middle in logic, binary logic in computers. Quantity to quality to quantity..is all over the place. Holism and the relation between the part and whole is critical so often. On and on. I'm not a professional natural scientist, though I study it as much as I can. I am constantly amazed how major developments the natural sciences after (and before) Engels make the theories more dialectical in the senses he articulated so well in several books. In a way, it is so fundamental that it is trivial to say that nature is dialectical.
Peace and Power,
Charles
Manjur writes:
Sidney Hook, before he became a die hard cold warrior tried to combine Marxism and pragmatism, an attempt the CP didn't approve. IMHO, it is possible to combine a sense of contingency, open-texturedness, and indeterminacy with a radical Marxist project. To borrow Stuart Hall's phrase- that's what "marxism without a guarantee" (or was it Milliband who first used the phrase?) is all about. That's a problem that I have with Laclau and Mouffe's post-structural reconceptualization of "Hegemony." Unlike L/M, I don't think poststructural re-reading of "hegemony" has to (although they didn't articulate their position in terms of logical necessity, but that's the impression one gets) lead to a position of left-liberal radical democracy. I would argue that it can easily be reconciled with a revolutionary socialist politics. That is a major crux of my post-marxism. In the end of the day, it does not matter whether I call it neo-Marxism, poststructuralized Marxism, post-Marxism, or simply Marxism. I use the label "post-marxism," because it gives a sense of theoretical coherence to my understanding of contingency, Lacanian subjectivity, and radical agency.
I defend the October revolution, have a great deal of respects for Lenin, Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky (my friends tease me that I am the only postmodern Leninist they know of), defend Cuba, support revolutionary movements all over the world, support Maoists against state terror in my part of the world (India, Nepal, Bangladesh), criticize the reification of bourgeois democracy and so on, but I do that without making revolution or "Marxism-Leninist" a theory of all-encompassing certainty. These are all different, sometimes conflicting, sometimes overlapping, sometimes complementary, moments of emancipation which one can be committed to without being a MARXIST in a "certain", meta-theoretical" sense.
BTW, the thing that I don't like about Anti-Duhring (and Dialectic of Nature) is the way Engels applied the dialectical method to nature. What was supposed to be a terrain of social analysis (in ontological, epistemological, and historical senses- all these three moments are present in Marx's method), Engels, positioning himself against the positivist trend within the Second International, tried to make it a method of the understanding of nature. There are indications that Marx approved that, but at least there is no similar effort in Marx's own texts (which may not be a sufficient ground for creating a Marx-Engels divide as some Marxist-humanists have done). But Lukacs, Gramsci, Sartre, all within the Marxist tradition, criticized that specific Engelsian position.