On 2010-02-13, at 10:24 AM, SA wrote:
> Carrol Cox wrote:
[...]
>> I just know that capitalism gurantees a disastrous
>> future. "Socialism" is the provisional name we give to the seisure of
>> power by an anti-capitalist movment.
>
> Yes, I guess that's what I thought you meant. But when I try to wrap my mind around what this means, I always find it leads to a logical conundrum. Let's say I proposed to you (just for the sake of argument) that a movement that leads to Swedish-style social democracy (like, for example, the Swedish SAP) is an "anti-capitalist movement." I presume you would disagree. But then presumably you must have a definition of capitalism in mind, such that Swedish-style soc dem still counts as capitalism. The problem is that if you have that definition of capitalism in mind, it implicitly defines, in at least certain key ways, your vision of what an "anti-capitalist" society would look like. You're basically saying: "Capitalism in its essence has the following specific features. An anti-capitalist movement seeks to eliminate those specific features." But that is *already* defining certain key elements of a socialist society in advance. I suspect you wouldn't accept that conclusion, but I think the conclusion is inescapable if you think about it carefully.
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Adding to what SA has been saying, I can understand and share, as I think most of us do, Carrol's impatience with blueprints, but he typically overstates from an habitual impulse to draw the lines more sharply than they need be.
The movement which existed historically rather than in Carrol's imagination had a program which, while falling short of providing a detailed plans of how a socialist society would function on a daily basis, did indicate that it would be centrally defined by public rather than private ownership of the means of production, distribution, and exchange.
The movement subsequently split into a reformist wing which abandoned that perspective in favour of a mixed economy in which private ownership and markets would continue to play a prominent role and a revolutionary one which fought against such concessions. These doctrinal disputes were as relevant as the tactical divisions which split the movement, and were in fact intertwined, underscoring the unity of theory and practice in the life of the movement itself.
Carrol is fond of reminding us that you can't speak of a unified "left" in the abstract. By the same token you can't talk of "socialism" or a "socialist" movement as abstractly as he has been doing in this thread.
Yesterday he opined that an (undifferentiated) "socialist" movement would actively engage "at most" 20% of the adult population which, by my calculation, is a very formidable (and improbable) 45 million socialist activists, backed by a huge army of the already converted. Be that as it may, whatever it's size, at least some in Carrol's army are going to ask him what he means by "socialism", and when they do that, he will be inescapably required to engage, despite his obvious reluctance to do so, the theoretical questions which have split the movement since it's inception.
Most of these have turned quite directly on how "socialism" is conceived and how it operated in post-capitalist China and the former Soviet Union or, for that matter, in Sweden in terms of the meaning ascribed to it by the social democrats. They may appear to be stale controversies in the context of political activity reduced to small study circles in university towns, but they would not be if the type of mass socialist movement which Carrol envisages were ever to re-emerge.