What do Marxists have to contribute to any of these four topics*? (*Mass Movements; Revolution; Money; Socialism.) [Note: I assume that a revolution is merely an event that, contingently, sometimes occurs within a mass reform movement - unpredictably and un-'programmable.']
MASS MOVEMENTS/REVOLUTION:
Nothing specific, that non-marxists could not as easily say. But Marxists within such movements tend (or should tend) to bring to them a certain style, grounded in awareness of the historicity of capitalism. They do NOT, repeat NOT, focus on "converting" others to marxism or to revolution. If anyone wants to become a revolutionary or a marxist they're on their own, or should be, until they have decided they want to, at which point marxists and/or revolutionaries hould be prepared to share their efforts in that direction. Agitational efforts (and even most propaganda activity) are aimed at involving people in mass struggle for change WITHIN capitalism, and one need not even have heard of Marx to become very good at doing that.
MONEY
I don't see how anyone can very intelligently or usefully say anything about Money without grounding her/his discussion in Marx, finding there that Money is a social relation under specific historical conditions (Capitalism). Money (as Marx discusses it) did not exist before capitalism and cannot exist after capitalism. Just as it proved impossible, on this e-list, to discuss unpjroductive labor, it is impossible, on this e-list, to discuss money usefully. The goal of such a discussion is not to decide whether money is needed or not deeded, desirable or not desirable, but to understand more deeply capitalist society (ALL possible capitalist societies, past, present, future: Marx's _Capital_ refers to the capitalism of his day only for illustratory purposes, not as evidence for his theses, because _Capital_ aimed at explaining all possible capitalist societies, not merely the empirically existing one of Marx's own day. Capitalism, incidentally, is the only social order that can thus be studied; contingency rules too strongly in all other social systems.)
Doug seems to want someone to persuade him to revolution or socialism. Fuck that. I don't give a damn whether he is or not. Socialism and revolution are not the subject of academic debate and cannot be. No one ever "converted" me to either socialism or revolution; I discovered the necessity of them in political practice/struggle, and ONLY THEN did I begin to study what they were.
Marxism is not a religion, and it has no truck with the Christian slogan of "The Truth Will Set You Free." There is no virtue or even particular use in believing in Marxism as such. It is a way of looking at the world that one moves towards as one tries to change the world. It is embedded in one's thought and practice without the need for proclaiming it as a slogan or faith. (Except when I have explicitly claimed otherwise, not a single post of mine over tha last 10 years on this list has presupposed the truth of marxism or attempte to persuade others to be marxist. They have been, rather, in one way or another, focused on the task of building mass movements for change within capitalism)
SOCIALISM
There isn't really much to say about socialism, and the way in which all attempts to discuss it diverge into trivial chaos is evidence of this. Useful discussion of socialism is (as I have said many times) for the purpose of deepening one's understanding of the present. Socialism is implicit in capitalism, and one's understanding of capitalism is deepened by grasping this fact. Whether or not socialism will ever be achieved is a nonsense question, involving use of crystal balls and palm reading. It's clear enough that every serious movement against capitalism leads to the discovery/rediscovery of the necessity of socialism, but whether that necessity will ever be realized in human practice is not knowable.
[Note: Besides being the Discoverer of Capitalism in the same sense as Newton was the Discoverer of Gravity and Einstein the Discoverer of Releativity, Marx _also_ had many interesting and wonderful things (sometimes correct, sometimes not) to say about all sorts of things: history in general (there is no sicence of history), politics; revolutionary thought, anthropology, epistemology, industry, the particular capitalism of his day, human capacities, history, culture, etc etc etc. Personally, I think any intellectual who doesn't explore these things in Marx is cheating him/herself, but none of these things belong to "Marxism" rigorously conceived, which is the theoretical understanding of capitalism.]
Carrol