[lbo-talk] On 20th century socialism

[Carrol Cox]

All versions of socialist endeavour can and should be classified into two
principal kinds, one inaugurated by Rousseau, the other by Marx. The two
have opposite visions of the social subject in need of liberation, and these
visions have determined everything from rarefied epistemological positions
concerning language and consciousness to social and political attitudes
concerning wealth, culture, equality, sexuality and much else. It must be
said at the outset that many, perhaps most socialists who have sincerely
believed they were Marxists, have in fact been Rousseauists. Freud has
eloquently described resistances to psychoanalysis; intuitive resistance to
Marxism is no less widespread, even among socialists. It is emotionally and
intellectually difficult to be a Marxist since it goes against the grain of
moral indignation which is, of course, the main reason people become
socialists.

One of the greatest historians of the Left, E.P. Thompson, has synthe­sized
what can be best said of class in the tradition of Rousseauian socialism
which believes itself to be Marxian.1 The Making of the English Working
Class is universally – and rightly – recognized to be a masterpiece. Its
beauty, moral force and conceptual elegance originate in a few strikingly
unusual articles of faith: (1) that the working class is a worthy cultural
competitor of the ruling class; (2) that the Lebenswelt of the working class
is socially and morally superior to that of its exploiters; (3) that
regardless of the outcome of the class struggle, the autonomy and
separateness of the working class is an intrinsic social value; (4) that the
class itself is constituted by the autopoiesis of its rebellious political
culture, including its reinterpretation of various traditions, as well as by
technology, wage labour, commodity production and the rest. Whereas Karl
Marx and Marxism aim at the abolition of the proletariat, Thompson aims at
the apotheosis and triumphant survival of the proletariat.

Gáspár Miklós Tamás: Telling the truth about class

http://www.grundrisse.net/grundrisse22/tellingTheTruthAboutClass.htm

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The revolutionary movements of the 20th-c, successful and unsuccessful,
belonged to the tradition of Rousseau, not Marx. Their achievements were
nevertheless quite wonderful, and certainly we need to be acquainted with
those struggles. That they did not achieve socialism was NOT due to any
failure of leadership, any betrayal from inside; that "failure" was imposed
on them. They did not achieve socialism or anything resembling socialism
simply because the so-called "bourgeois revolutions" had never been
completed, and it was, in retrospect, the "task" of those rvolutions to
complete the bourgeois revolution -- to achieve formal equality (that is,
the equality of citizenship, liquidating the divisions of "caste" or
"estate" which characterized all earlier social formations.

Discussions of 20-th c. socialism then must be grounded in the recognition
that  there was no such thing, nor could there have been.

Carrol