SA wrote:
>
> shag carpet bomb wrote:
>
> [clip]
>
> There's something odd about this position. Both you and Carrol say
> you're always encountering people, both sympathetic and not, who, once
> socialism is mentioned, very much want to talk about what exactly this
> socialism is. So clearly a lot of people *want* to talk about it. Yet
> you and Carrol both want to more or less forbid discussion of it. And
> then you say it's those who *do* want an open discussion who are somehow
> being undemocratic!
Talk about socialism will occur, willy-nilly. No one either could or wants to "forbid" it. We are talking abut it now. I just won't talk aboaut it myself except as a process that emerged 210 years ago with theexecution of Baboeuf (sp?) and will go on for quite a while. One woman on the psn list described her vision of socialism clearly enough for Doug to excllaim, "That would be hell for me." I more or less shared his response, thogugh I think it rather more important to try to grasp the souces in current social realtions of sucvh localism than to argue either for it or against it. Like all ideas, correct or incorrect, localism and primitavism did not drop from the sky or have a virgin birht in some recalcitrant peron's mind: they emerge from a focus on real and at the present time insoluable issues in our world.
My own tuess is that consistent concrn about "what socialism will be" has two sources.
The first emerges from a person's conception of capitalism. If a person sees it as just one excploitative system among many, a 'natural' evolution of human hisotry, then the impusle is to jsut make it evolve further in terms of a clear goal for that evolution. Then, as occurs everys so often someone will argue that the only difference between evvolution (progress) adn revolution is that the latter will get us there quicker. The other source is the capitalist ideology, first really 'dramatize' id Paradise Lost that all changes have to be grounded in the free choice of the isolated individual. Socialism is then such a _choice_, and how can one choose untless one knows in advance what one is choosing.
In my last post I mentioned important passages from Hesiod.One got into Pound's Cantos,but I can't find the page and can't quote it exaclty, but it contains phrases like the following: "sun down; rest," "dig well; drink of the water": "plant seed; eat of the grain." If you focus on this long enough you can see why fascism exerted such strong imaginative force on so many modernists intellectuals. A month or so a go I threw out a definition of freedom as "unity of act and motive." That is what capitalism profoundly denies us, and recognition of this was probably one of the sources of what M&E called "aristocatic socialism." Many modern concervatives from the 17th-c on have 'rebelled' against this separation of act and motive which is fundnamenal to capitalist social realtions. Only Joanna responded to that -- and agreed with me. Capitalism is a really odd duck: it is a totality, in its essecne strains towards being a totality. (Jim Blaut and his followers cannot understand this. Some of them think the only difference between Marx and Ricardo is that Marx emphsizes exploitation -- which simply blots out everything that is distinctive aboaut capitalism and makes it _necessary_ and not merely desirable to destroy it. Humanity could lvie for many millenia not too unhappily under various froms of tributary society (feudalism, etc.), and probably gradually progress under them technologically and politically (the latter by various ways of modifying and limiting 'aristocrtic' or 'royal' power. Such societies do not lead inevitably to barbarism.
So we MUST destroy capitalism to survive. That process usually takes the form of attack on particvular grievances in a particualr capitalist state. Prisons. Helath Care. Police brutality. Municipally authorized low wages. More free time. And so forth. There is no theoretical way of predicting which of these tousands of grievances triggers a real public explosiion, but when one occurs within that struggle lots of people, as I say, willy-nilly wil spend a lot of time talking about socialism, and the topci will lead all over the place and never result in a clear picture of socialism but that is because no such static entity is possible in a really dynamaaic process.
Capitalism must be destroyed (delenda est was the phase?) It will be, but whether by the process we know as socialism or by a series of increasingly more horrendous authoritarian states is up for grabs.
Carrol
Carrol