Her insistence on escaping entrapment in the present is clearer yet in the conluding paragraph of the second speech, with its explicit focus on Bernstein's opposing slogan:
<block quoete> And then the well-known statement [by Bernstein] in the Neue Zeit: "The final goal, whatever it may be, is nothing to me: the movement is everything! " Anyone who says that does not stand for the necessity of seizing political power. … Like the Roman Cato, we must say sharply and clearly, "In addition, I am of the opinion that this state must be destroyed." The conquest of political power remains the final goal and that final goal remains the soul of the struggle. The working class cannot take the decadent position of the philosophers: "The final goal is nothing to me, the movement is everything." No, on the contrary, without relating the movement to the final goal, the movement as an end in itself is nothing to me, the final goal is everything. [end quote]
Let me reword this provisionally for the situation of leftists in the United States in 2009. Our current struggles - I have in mind whichever struggle you think is currrently most important - are meaningless except from the perspective of a future coherent left, nor can we assume that those struggles themselves will mutate into such a left: that is precisely the philosophy that the movement is everything. But still, somehow, in the midst of that present movement, we must turn some of our attention to the need to historicize our present, to find a perspective beyond it from which to view our current activity. Doubtless there are a number of ways to do this. I want to suggest and illustrate just one: projecting what, when some sort of coherent left again rises in the U.S., as it will, might be the demands that will characterize it. We can do this in discussions within local anti-war or living wage groups, or we can do it theoretical journals. To do so will I believe improve our convrsation a bit. We could do with far fewer lectures, articles, and e-mails proving that things are very bad now and are going to get worse, or giving endless reams of advice (which will never be heard) to those in power of how they could solve the present crisis. I have stopped reading on left e-mail list from terminal boredom with this literature. We cannot, I think, profitably speculate on organizational forms; that will have to be worked out in practice. Neither can we, I think, speculate profitably on which elements of the population will be a the forefront of future struggles. Almost always such speculation reveals itself as nostalgic for a dead past, not a perspective on the future. But I do believe we can speculate profitably, shocking ourselves out of our present entrapment in our present, by speculating on what would be the reforms such a left, arising presumably in a time of rising public discontent, would demand, such demands and the struggles for them would then, of course, becomr the present of that left, requiring in their turn to be historized from some future perspective. My thoughts were first driven in this direction by debates on left maillists in which, always, what dominated discussion were the constraints of current public opinion. I became increasingly convinced that, somehow, leftists must begin to emphasize not what was possible but what was necessary. Try thiese four:
Close down the Prison System
Open Borders
Stop all Foreign Aid
Four Day Week
Remember now: we are not talking about the present. We are in a hypothetical future of great popular discontent & the kind of spontaneous struggles that emerge during such periods. We may be, as a result, in a period of heightened state repression, especially of such a promising scapegoat as "illegal aliens." Very probably of an intesified war on crime/drugs. Such campaigns will enhance police powers and turn the prisons into even more efficiennt Institutions of Organized Torture. Ther will be continued aid to repressive states around the world, with left liberals calling for aid to be refocused on more humane objectives, such demands undoubtedly resulting in minor cosmetic reforms, such as giving a few hundred thousand to some small country for "green development." You know the rap.
To head off misunderstandings that arose on an e-mail list in respect to such principles, I do not regard them either as recipes for a fouture social order or as transition program to socialism but as demands which should be regarded as practical reforms within the present system. They may not be gainable in any form, though that is not certain, but the fight for them will be undoubtedly educational both for those within left organizations and for a broader public.
One great immediate advantage of such proposals as these is that it focuses attention on power, as shown by a recent discussion, which I triggered, on the Pen-L maillist. A most interesting discussion of followed, one which I hope to pursue in the future. The first post below is from Hans Ehrbar, the distinguished Marxis scholar who also has done extensive research on ecology, particularly on the threat of global warming and the need for renewable energy.
HaNs ehrbar replied:
Carrol, I don't think the slogan "Stop all foreign aid" is defensible. Since the US has historically emitted a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere, the US owes the developing nations a lot of aid to compensate them for the cost of climate change and to help them pursue a development path based on renewable energy. Almost nobody is talking about this, this is not part of common consciousness. If the Left promotes the slogan "Stop all foreign aid" they co-operate with this conspiracy of silence and put themselves in opposition to the necessities dictated by the present climate emergency. See The Greenhouse Development Rights Framework: The Right to Development in a Climate Constrained World.
Then I responded:
This is the third time I have enountered this argument though the occasion was different each time.
I can't remember the details of the first time, but it involved an exchange between me and an ISU professor of political science who had been in Nicaraguar shortly before the Sandinistas took power. He thought we should urge the U.S. to provide aid to Nicaragua; I suggested that the best thing the U.S. could do for Nicaragua was leave it alone. He argued vigorously that the country was so poor, the earthquake had done so much damage, that they could not possibly survive without u.s. aid.
Well we know that the U.S. sent aid in the form of the Contras.
The second debate on this issue I remember concerned Iraq. Shortly aftert the U.S. invasion there was a discussion on another list over the proper position of the anti-war movement. Several writers urged that the left pressure the u.s. government to repair the damage it had done before leaving. Part of the evidence for this position was a poll in Iraq which showed that a large majority of Iraqi citizens held this position, while only 14% were for immediate withdrawal. But of course the longer the U.S. stays, the greater will be the damage that must be repaired, the more likely will be a savage civil wqr after the u.s. departs. The U.S. nevere repairs the damage it has done but simply increases the damage.
And Hans Ehrbar responded: Carrol, do you think the developing countries, if left to their own devices, will embark on green development? They will do the only thing feasible for them to lift their populations out of poverty, and this is development based on fossil fuels. Which will grill the planet. By telling the United States to keep out of the rest of the world you are implicitly promoting a paradigm based on nation states. If we want to survive as a species, we have to overcome this paradigm, we need world-wide co-operation forced on the nation states by a world wide mass movement. Whether this is realistic or not, this is what I think is needed; if someone has better ideas, please speak up. Hans.
My response in part: O.K. I'n all for mass movements, and I certainly want various po.icies foreced on the U.S. (as well as on the EU, Japan, Russia, China, etc.), but when you speak of compulsion the argument beomes empty except in the context of power relations. It is easy to say, "Mass Movementk"; I do it all the time. And the answer I usually get is some version of the question, "How do we get from here to there?" And the answer I am always tempted to give, and sometimes do give, is "We don't; we can't; starting here we can only stay here." In short, any line we draw from here to there ends, as you say, in our being cooked.
And I quoted Rosa Luxemburg on political powerj, then continued: Now we are not talking about the overthrow of the state here, but we are talking about political power in a more limited form, the power of a mass movement to compel the state to carry out an extraordinarily complex set of operations on a global scale involving trillions of dollars expended in scores of areas with different local conditions and in different stages of political development. We seem to be moving towards the writing of quite complex recipes for what I fear will be an ever-receding future.
And a temporary closing point. The paragraph Hans quoted from my post ends with, "Keep conversation going on such topics within both local organizations and national forums." This has been such a coversation, one I hope goes a bit further. That is one of the purposes of slogans. [end quote from post]
I went on further in the post, but that is sufficient here. We do need to talk about power, not merely how bad things are or what good things someone should do or what leftists should want done. And I think talking about such slogans for the future as I listed above, as shown in this exchange from Pen-L, is one way to do it.