[lbo-talk] The Horrible Swiss

c b cb31450 at gmail.com
Tue Nov 30 08:33:56 PST 2010


Carrol Cox Agreed. At least if "science" in mid-19th c German means what it usually means to us today. I have some references on that I haven't yet read.

Within the socialist movement (workers' movement) there also exists considerable differences over what exactly that emancipation was to consist in.E. P. Thompson, for example, believes that it consists in the working class becoming the ruling class. I am pretty convinced by Tamas that it consists (according to Marx) in the Working Class abolishing itself. That is another debate, and for it to be a meaningful debate it has to take place within a mass movement against capitalism. And that raises questions of what such a movement would be. I would argue (at least this is where I am now) that it would be a mass 'reform' movement compelled by repression to overthow the state or give up.

As to the "theoretical expression of the proletarian movement," that has in practice been conceived as being formulated by an elite vanguard. That s what led Paul Sweezy to deny that socialism _could_ be a science. At least in the current sense of "science," it is the realm of an intellectual elite. Whatever socialism turns out to be, it won't be analogous to quantum mechanics or the theory of relativity, something planned in advance and taught to the lay congregation of workers. It will be worked out democratically within the struggle, both before and after a successful insurrection.

And there is no certainty that any of this will actually happen. The future remains cloudy at best. And to bring it back to what trigtgered my post in the first place, debates now about what a socialist society should/must/ reflect authoritarian tendencies in those who conduct these debates. They are also silly because social systems simply are not competing brands of canned string beans.

Carrol

^^^^^ CB: We know only one science, the science of history. In winning the class struggle and building socialism, if socialism is built, the revolutionaries will not be starting from scratch. Rather they will have to draw on the experience of the first 160 years of efforts to build communism even as many or most of the lessons are frighteningly negative. The number one negative lesson is that the bourgeoisie are even more selfish, ruthless, nihilistic, irrational, evil than the way Marx and Marxists have portrayed them; or at least the winning factions and sections of capital as of today are. And Jay Gould's dictum concerning the revolutionary class is way too true -"I can hire one-half of the working class to kill the other half."- especially for foreign wars and occupations in derogation of the plea that workers of the world unite



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