[lbo-talk] Crises and left opportunity

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed Feb 16 07:02:31 PST 2011


The political question is what will move millions of people to take to the streets.

The answer is we do not know and we cannot know.

So what do we do?

Carroil

-----Original Message----- From: lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org [mailto:lbo-talk-bounces at lbo-talk.org] On Behalf Of brad Sent: Wednesday, February 16, 2011 8:31 AM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Crises and left opportunity

I have no idea how you misunderstood what I wrote so fundamentally, Carrol. My understanding of your "observations on what has in fact been capitalist history for 200 years" (I have a special love for those that use the term facts to describe what their opinions are) is that it is only during good times that workers and the left ever make advances. Out of this comes a voluntarist position: we can struggle in little bits now, but the real fight is on the horizon, once things get better.

My point was precisely that contingency must be part of our understanding and political orientation. We must not wait until the time is right for change, we have to make the time ripe for change. This combined with a general historical observation that when people get desperate enough they stand up and fight. Not because it is automatic, but because the veil over the oppression of the current system is removed and they are open to new interpretations. It is not I who claim that there is a prescribed correct moment to act, that is you.

Brad


>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
General Point: Those that think "the left" can just act and turn things around have a special responsibility: Go out and do it! Some of us, really, never stopped 'doing it' as 'the 60s faded. And they faded, and faded into the distant past. We did save a few lives in the process; we made some people in El Salvador and elsewhere feel a bit less lonely, we made a S.A. counsul skedaddle here and there; we scared the Zionists a couple times.

But that is water over the dam. The fact is that whatever anyone did, "the left" as a coherent force has retreated or dissipated worldwide: it's not a domestic problem only.

I don't know exactly how brad understands my arguments, but they aren't really even 'arguments': They are observations on what has in fact been capitalist history for 200 years: Periods of left resurgence, of serious challenge to bourgeois hegemony, have been scattered and brief, and they have been so for other reasons than any "failure" or "mistakes" on the part of left forces. Rosa Luxemburg, viewing the great war from her prison cell, was the first (after Marx himself) to put here finger on the main source of this record: Contingency! History has no pattern, no direction, no predictable events, and it cannot be forced. (Leftists really should, I think, read as much of Stephen Jay Gould as possible; they should live with and contemplate the fact that we (the species) are here only because a wandering asteroid hit the earth 60 million years ago!

Marx had said it too: What I think we should take as his substantive 'final wors,' in answer to a reporter's question, "What is? Old Whiskers paused long, and had one word: Struggle (with no prediction of victory in the struggle).

If I understand Brad here (I quite possibly do not), the perspective he pushes has a name: Voluntarism, that which there are few worse errors. (Dennis R's post is mostly acceptable, though I reject his "dying empire" as a misunderstanding of how contemporary "imperialism" works.

This is not quietism. Though I see Lenin as primarily an activist rather than a theorist, there was an implication in his life and thought that remains firm, and I thought my earlier posts implied it: We do keep struggling; we don't theorize "correct preconditions" (as the Mensheviks did in 1917), but neither do we assume (as Trotsky did and too many of his followers still do) that with the "right" leadership and the "right" strategy the contingency of history can be overcome. You might take a glance at an essay in Lenin's Collected Works, Vol. 8, in which he reacts to a statement by Trotsky that there would never be another Father Gopin (sp?) and therefore the Marxists must do it themselves. We must keep up the struggle inways open to us but must recognize that only events neither predictable nor controllable can make that struggle meaningful.

Carrol ___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk



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