On 2010-03-18, at 11:36 AM, Eric Beck wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 9:31 PM, Marv Gandall <marvgandall at videotron.ca> wrote:
>
>> Eric could clear up any confusion by citing those statements in the article which could only be made by someone writing from a Trotskyist perspective.
>
> That the masses need education and direction. That representation, in
> all its meanings, is a neutral and necessary mediation, one best
> executed by a class-conscious group of artists and intellectuals. That
> the only problem with democracy is that there's not enough of it. That
> the capitalist state is totalizing in its control. All this stuff you
> know is there.
>
> I sometimes wonder if I'm being ridiculous for thinking that such
> politics still exists and that people still believe in it…
=========================
I very much doubt you think any differently. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were were at least open in their belief that change required the leadership of a "vanguard" drawn from the revolutionary intelligensia and what Gramsci later referred to as "organic" working class autodidacts educated by struggle. The social democrats were equally "elitist" but declined to articulate it as theory, although some like the Fabians did so, and in quite egregious fashion. The anarchists scorned political action and political parties but replaced formal structures of control with informal ones, as anyone who passed through student groups like the old SDS or today's activist collectives will readily testify
In any case, what of it if Walsh or the Webbs or students breaking with the prevailing culture of the masses or, for that matter, 99.9% of the people on this list believe that "the masses need education and direction" and that such a task necessarily falls to "a class-conscious group of artists and intellectuals"? How does that invalidate their social criticism?
Again, you really need to be specific and point us to those statements in Walsh's text which illustrate how his Trotskyist affiliation has uniquely distorted his views on the shortcomings of current culture relative to that which flourished in the context of a strong social movement.