But this is off point. The point I was making vis a vis Doug's comment on the bankrupt of right wing ideas and policy is that we on the left have a similar situation. Our own attempts at exercising state power had partial successes and ended in a collapse even more total than that if the neolib right's today.
I do not think this was because Stalin and Mao were monsters, your words not mine, although they were. I think it is probably and most deeply because Marx's original idea that you cannot build socialism in one country and a backward one that that was correct, and also (you will disagree but this is what I think) we have failured to anticipate the limits of planning that Hayek outlined. Both of these are structural factors. For the present it doesn't matter whether they are right either for my purposes or for yours.
Even if other structural factors are more important, even if random or individual factors predominate, the result is the same: the left is as bankrupt or more so in terms of ideas as the right, and our "institutions" don't exist.
So again, I say in response in Doug's comment, "who are we to talk?"
'
--- On Sun, 10/12/08, Angelus Novus <fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com> wrote:
> From: Angelus Novus <fuerdenkommunismus at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] David Brooks, so worried
> To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org
> Date: Sunday, October 12, 2008, 9:52 AM
> --- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
> >
> >
> > andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> > >
> > > I was thinking of Stalin and Mao, et al.
> >
> > Oour triumphs are triumphs of collective struggles
> > of people.
>
> Exactly. And the corollary of this is that our enemy
> is a reified social relationship, not a group of
> individuals who are easily slotted into a category.
>
> Andie's personalization ("Stalin and Mao the
> monsters") is merely the flipside of "Jews are
> behind
> finance capital" or "George W. Bush is hurting
> America".
>
>
>
>
>
> ___________________________________
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