Chuck Grimes wrote:
>
> No! Not only do we not _need_ to have an idea about what to do (50 years
> from now) "when it does happen," but it is positively WRONG, reactioary,
> totalitarian, to have such ideas. Carrol
>
> Yeah, I'd like to hear a little more from Dennis why "we" must have
> political answers before the questions have even been asked. And the
> idea that politics is about deciding how to limit and control people
> is even more bizarre. Eric Beck
>
> ------------
>
> I think this is not correct. Think about it. What does liberation mean
> in concrete terms? It basically means changing law. Every revolution I
> can think of, after taking power, set about to overhaul the laws that
> govern the society.
This is tricky. I have no wish to repudiate those other revolutons. Criticism would have to be based on the premise, that I reject, that socialism was in any serious sense "on the agenda" of the 20th century. What those revolutions achieved was different from what they aimed at, but it brought those nations into the 20th-c, and it broke the grip of Euro-US capital on the world, ut they did not arrive at socialism, they arrived at capitalism. I doubt it could have been otherwise.
But they did conduct those revolutions 'under the red flag,' and thus it is not only possible to think of them as a 'model' (negative or positive) for current struggle but a model for revolution itself. So when in the following, I try simply to describe, nto judge or "criticize," those revolutons, but I describe in order to _criticize_ current conceptions of revolution, such as Chuck here offers. (Whatever my tone may have been, I think my discussion of Weather should be regarded in this way: a _description_ not a judgment of Weather, a _criticism_ of those who _today_ romanticize or look for curren guidancee to the Weather people.)
Liberation does NOT mean changing law; it means eliminating law. That is why even the most successful revolution of the future (if) will not immeidately be able to achieve its goals of liberation but will only achieve conditions in which liberation may (repeat MAY) be possible. Actual liberation can only be amatter of further (perhaps painful) struggle. And we not only cannot we must not try to prescribe in advance the nature of that struggle. In so far as a revolutionary socialist regime sets abut changing laws, adopting new laws, "to govern society," that regime has not yet entered on the real struggle for liberation; it is still involved in the negative task of clearing away the rubbish of the past.
Now the revolutions Chuck refers to _used_, for their own purposes, this need for a 'transitional' state as a justification for what they were actually doing (and which was probalby, unmder wold conditions, all they could have done -- hence my refusal to "critiicze" them, but my insistence that they not model the future for us). [But keep on reading Lenin and Mao and Trotsky and (yes) even Stalin. Not to avoid their "mistakes" or crimes (which are not repeatable: we will commite our own errors and crimes) These struggles to modernize, to catch up with Europe (for that was their ultimate sugbstance) ALSO (from their revolutionary socialist ideals) involved fragments and embryonic efforts that, however partial or abortivve, of actual liberatory struggle from which we can learn if we keep firmly in mind that these fragments are only fragments.
>
> Also, `capitalism' is a legal construction of the economic system, that
> is the rules under which trade in goods and services, and the rules of
> how labor are performed. These are laws that rule on process, with
> possible criminal penalties for individual misconduct.
No. But I've only got a weak grasp of this. Read Postonme. Read Albritton. Read ARthur. Read the Historical Materialism symposiums on some of these writers.
>
[clip]
[The rest raises many interesting questions which would concern the reform demands of a mass left mvoement, but I won't try to deal with them here.]