[lbo-talk] Russian revolution material

[andie nachgeborenen]

Carrol thinks that politics, like love, is blind. Not
only must any new social and economic formation emerge
from the activity of the people who bring it about
without the intervention of any prior theoretical
reflection, it must also emerge without a sideways
glance at what other people are actually doing. So it
would not have mattered elsewhere if Luxemburg had
lived and participated in a German revolution that
might, on standard Marxist assumptions, have taken a
different course than a Russian one alone. (Lenin
certainly thought so!) Because revolutionaries
elsewhere would not have been influenced by events in
Germany, anymore than they were by events in Russia.
(Ooops. . . . ) This is a genuinely Hegelian view, the
cunning of history at work. 

Of course this is not Marx's view. For him the
socialist revolution was different from prior ones in
that it was a conscious process, not a blind one. When
he had a model -- yes! a model -- in Paris Commune, he
seized on it with glee and wrote a lot about it. And
Engels, who might have known a thing or two about what
Marx meant, said that if you want to see what the
dictatorship of the proletariat looks like, look at
the Commune. That did not mean that they were laying
down rules about what people elsewhere ought to do,
but they were more than strongly suggesting that
people elsewhere should take a close look at the
Commune. I am sure that this implies that on their
view, revolutionaries elsewhere ought to study the
revolutionary process in places where it does occur
like Russia, and, if it had been successful in
Germany, there too.

--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:


> 
> 
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> > 
> > We disagree about the value of theoretical
> modeling of
> > economic alternatives,
> 
> Leave aside that disagreemen; any "economic
> alternative" would be
> introduced by a political not economic process. It's
> that political
> process for which we can have no model. We can't
> even have the faintext
> idea of what sort of context for that political
> process will exist. The
> context would obviously have been different in
> Germany 1921 than Russia
> 1918. It's different in Venezuela than it was in
> Cuba or China. And so
> on. The struggle during the last 5-10 years before a
> socialist movement
> achieves some sort of political power determines
> that context -- for
> example it determines how many of those who made the
> revolution are/were
> revolutiobnaries (only a minority probably), how
> many of the
> revolutionaries were socialists (also probably a
> minority of a minority)
> and how many of those socialists are marxists (a
> minority of a minority
> of a minority). Most followers of Trotsky never
> realized that socialist
> revolutions have to be made by men and women who are
> neither socialist
> nor marxist nor revolutionaries. But there is no way
> of knowing the
> proportions until after the fact. Hence the
> absurdity of speaking of
> models for this process.
> 
> Carrol
> ___________________________________
>
http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk
> 

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