oh. OK. my bad. you've never mentioned it and spend a good deal of time obsessed with criticizing the people on this list who openly say they are.
as for your comment about un-democratic, ok. sure. you can have your interpretation. I don't share it.
i was taking the comments about refusing to be a vanguard of intellectual leadership, telling everyone what the slogans and banners were. rather, marx argued that such banners and slogans were unnecessary. he prefers it happens not through anticipation of the future, but through critique of currently existing conditions: "for it means that we do not anticipate the world with our dogmas but instead attempt to discover the new world through the critique of the old."
but i can see where you get your interpretation. *shrug* what i find annoying is that, instead of just coming up with your own answers, you appear to think that it's a great idea to ask your fellow socialists what the answers are. why? if it's that important to *you* and it isn't important to *them*, then what's the point? if you think it's important that we have such answers, then come up with them. if i don't want to provide them, why should you care? why do i have to get on your bus. similarly, if carrol tells you that it's a bad idea to try to anticipate the future with ready made blueprints, why do you care? ignore him and come up with them on your own.
doss keeps saying that carrol thinks we can't predict the future. it's not that we can't. it's rather a question of whether we should.
marx clearly says no, it's a bad idea: "If we have no business with the construction of the future or with organizing it for all time, there can still be no doubt about the task confronting us at present: the ruthless criticism of the existing order, ruthless in that it will shrink neither from its own discoveries, nor from conflict with the powers that be."
I can't think of any statement more clear: "we have no business with construction of the future or with organizing it for all time...."
but please, do plan away. i'll read what you have to say and wish you luck in your endeavors.
as for the Gotha programme, the point is that it's practically the *only* place where Marx engages in such talk --something that's frustrated people for a long time.
ta,
shag
>>there are a bunch of passages in marx that point to the anti-democratic
>>character of blueprint drawing. here's the one i like most
>
>I don't see where Marx says "blueprint drawing" is anti-democratic. He
>certainly dislikes specific aspects of the blueprints he's criticizing.
>But here, as I read him, he's arguing not that blueprint-drawing is
>undemocratic, but that it's counterproductive. ("[W]e wish to influence
>our contemporaries above all. The problem is how best to achieve this.")
>He's saying it would be more effective to demonstrate to workers and
>communists the implications of their own actual struggles. In other words,
>rather than saying "here's *our* blueprint," they should say "look, here's
>*your* blueprint - you didn't even know you were drawing it." But Marx
>still believes he knows what the blueprint is. Don't believe me?...
>
>http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1875/gotha/ch01.htm
>
>>Within the co-operative society based on common ownership of the means of
>>production, the producers do not exchange their products...Accordingly,
>>the individual producer receives back from society -- after the
>>deductions have been made -- exactly what he gives to it. What he has
>>given to it is his individual quantum of labor. For example, the social
>>working day consists of the sum of the individual hours of work; the
>>individual labor time of the individual producer is the part of the
>>social working day contributed by him, his share in it. He receives a
>>certificate from society that he has furnished such-and-such an amount of
>>labor (after deducting his labor for the common funds); and with this
>>certificate, he draws from the social stock of means of consumption as
>>much as the same amount of labor cost. The same amount of labor which he
>>has given to society in one form, he receives back in another.
>>
>>Here, obviously, the same principle prevails as that which regulates the
>>exchange of commodities, as far as this is exchange of equal values.
>>Content and form are changed, because under the altered circumstances no
>>one can give anything except his labor, and because, on the other hand,
>>nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means
>>of consumption. But as far as the distribution of the latter among the
>>individual producers is concerned, the same principle prevails as in the
>>exchange of commodity equivalents: a given amount of labor in one form is
>>exchanged for an equal amount of labor in another form....
>>
>>But these defects are inevitable in the first phase of communist society
>>as it is when it has just emerged after prolonged birth pangs from
>>capitalist society. Right can never be higher than the economic structure
>>of society and its cultural development conditioned thereby.
>
>Besides, even if it were true that Marx thought it was undemocratic to
>talk about "blueprints," don't you think it's relevant that he lived
>before 1917-1991 rather than afterward?
>
>SA
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