andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>
> But I _am_ a liberal. I am also a socialist, but for
> reasons I have explained, I am a liberal and I think
> you should be too and many of you probably are.
The term "liberal" seems pretty empty -- as is partly shown by the fact that each time you apply it you feel the need to provide a fairly long list of the beliefs it encompasses. But the sentence, "I am a liberal," it occurs to me, is _merely_ a biographical statement, difficult to translate into the proposition, "I support the program of liberalism" or "liberalism represents the route to the future." No one can argue with the proposition "I am a liberal," unless we were to demand that you repeat after a dose of sodium pentatol. But Liberalism (out there in the world) seems to have flunked the same test that 2d & 3d international socialism flunked: It didn't work. Its results simply haven't _remotely_ measured up to the claims made for it over the last couple of centuries, and no one seems to be actively building support for it as a practical political program anyplace on earth.
What are the grounds for believing that liberalism (as a world-wide system) can triumph in the next half-century or so while dealing with the growing certainty of destructive global warming, along with the struggle for energy as populations of the undeveloped nations cease to consent to their present immiseration?
Incidentally, I do think Charles's implict assumption as to what one does with Marxism is wrong, and I've debated him on this point in the past. He seems to believe that the core Marxist activity is persuading others of the truth of Marxism. This seems to me to reduce Marxism to a religion. Nothing particularly follows from becoming convinced of the truth of _Capital_ or _18th Brumaire_, etc. I do not even attach much importance to persuading people that "socialism is good" or "we need socialism." That recognition must occur in the process of struggle against one or more of the evils of capitalism, and when I have (1968-71) moved people to a recognition of the necessity of socialism, it has mostly been by listening, not preaching. Persuading people directly to Marxism tends to generate those who mostly wish to sit by the side of the road (as academics or journalists) and lecture those engaged in struggle. Marxist theory has to be held tacitly, for the most part, as the shape of revolutionary thought, not as its content.
And I was making a sober empirical observation, not generating zen koans or whatever when I wrote that most of those who make a socialist revolution, and even many of the leaders, won't think of themselves as Socialists, let alone Marxists.
Carrol