Ted Winslow wrote:
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> In what sense is this description of "what socialism will be ... embryonically if not overtly authoritarian"? In particular, how can it be imposed "on the masses for their own good"?
First, a crude answer with an old anti-communist joke:
"Come the revolution, everyone will have strawberries and cream." "But I don't like strawberries and cream." "Come the revolution, EVERYONE will love strawberries and cream."
Closer to the passage, this seems to me to be Marx thinking on paper, and moreover paper -- speculating onw what _might_ be the eventual results of a fully socialist society. I may speculate, in fact in this know from past experience, that if I pedal an exercycle for 30 minutes 5 times a week, I will rise in the mornign with cheerful energy. But that is no guide to how first to arrange my day so that no conflict occurs with other activities or obligations and secondly to actuaslly carry out the scheduled activity. And it certainly is no guide at all as to how to achieve the desired end if I happen to b reak a leg. And the quoted words from Marx do only specify what a result will be from a socialist organization of human activity; they do not either describe that organization or how it is to be arranged.
And finally, I do not trust _anyone's_ defintion of "true human essence." Only history can, after the fact,determine that.
The inhabitants of Long Bow, in their village Congress, ruled that the property of a red-army soldier who had died in action rather than his wife (who also was one of the more valuable members of the Communist cell in the village. The Communists had worked for a year to get this Conggress created. Its firs major decision was obviously and horribly WRONG. (It's been years since I read this and I probalby have some details wrong.) This was _not_ a dialectical contradiction. If they did not reverse the decision, a serious injustice would be done, at the same time reaffirming one of the pillars of male supremacy in the old Chinese society. If they reversed it, they would reduce to meaninglessness a whole year's efforts to empower the vilalgers. They decided against the wife and for male supremacy, accepting the decision of the Village Congress.
O.K.,we know that the Chinese Revolution, as great as it was, had no chance actually to create a socialist society, but this episode I think, properly generalized, exhibits the _sort_ of thing that will be happening over and over again during a perod of transition to socialism. And of course it _also_ reflects a _de facto_ context: the struggle to build democracy at the local level (in China) presupposed authoritarianism 'at the top' -- which was right for Chiina _then_ but not of course for (most conceptions of) socialism. But some variation of that would occur even in a nation that was (as they say) "ripe" for socialism. We know that representtive institutions pretyy much are incompatible with democracy, but it's not at all clear how in a nascent socialism even provisonal democacy can be achieved. And so forth. And I think it is wrong to attempt to specify a 'solution' to any of those problems in advance. A socvialist rgime will have to oeprate without constitutional or other limits on the regime's power, and to win democracy out of such a context will necessitate require ongoing struggle with many errors. Surely a leadership could, in all sincerity, could be tempted to impose the "correct" solution.
Marxists (and Marx) have no crystal ball.
Carrol