[lbo-talk] They're printing another trillion...

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Mon Oct 11 19:35:14 PDT 2010


Dennis has it pretty right as far as he goes.

I thought I had written a good deal lately on my rejection of one-party hegemony over the mass movement. Like generals, leftists are apt to think in terms of the last war -- but the last war (the '60s) is better as a model than the war before the war before the last war (e.g. 1917, the '30s). I conceive of future struggles as involving something like the Movement of Movements which constituted the '60s I have also been emphasizing Luxenburg's perception that there was no pattern to history, that nothing about capitalism leads systematically to socialism -- and in factd revolution should be regarded as bringing not "socialism" but merely the possibility of a struggle for socialism. One of the few Mao quotes I still cling to is "Marxists have no crystal ball." Expanded: History is not a science but is disrupted by contingency, and all politics grounded in empirical prediction are mistaken. (That is why I attack attempts to explain what socialism is: that is crystal-ball gazing.

We know what will NOT happen -- there will be no orderly march, one step at a time, to a better world. We know what is a high probability: barbarism. That is what we have and have had for a century. That is what without conscious struggle on an unpredictable terrain is all to apt to be our future.

But what I retain from Lenin is not any political theory but merely the perception (for which his life is a model) that one must struggle regardless of the probability of success and the impossibility of providing scenarios of either relvolution or socialism.

Carrol

DRR wrote:

On Mon, October 11, 2010 5:17 pm, Marv Gandall wrote:


> What's there to discuss? You should belong to a revolutionary Marxist
> organization. They may all be marginal at present, but they
> wholeheartedly share your perspective that no matter how bleak the
> period, the main task is to accumulate "cadre" in preparation for the
> next explosion of class struggle.

That's not Carrol's position. He's critiquing the groupuscules who think revolution consists of assembling the masses, like they're some mindless raw material, but he's also critiquing the liberal reformists of Empire, who are satisfied with assembling voters as if they're some mindless electoral material. The point is to engage those masses -- the hard, messy work of teaching, agitating, educating, organizing.

-- DRR



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list