I don't think Carrol is advocating a hair shirt conception of socialism. Rather, I think Carrol is referring to a definition of conservativism (among the defs Corey Robin challenges in his book!) as essentially a position in opposition to change?
At 10:12 AM 4/28/2012, Alan P. Rudy wrote:
>On Saturday, April 28, 2012 at 8:44 AM, Carrol Cox wrote:
> > I still believe that change is on the whole evil -- unless absolutely
> > necessary.
> >
> >
>
>What silliness. We're now either going to have to get into a useless
>discussion of absoluteliness or of necessity or of when and how it is for
>this or for that that quantitative changes become qualitative and
>therefore more real in their changiness. And you, of all people,
>appealing to evil? C'mon.
>
>The issue is never change or stability it is the combination of the pace
>of and participation in and directionality of change.
> > It is necessary for human survival to destroy capitalism. And
> > this is relevant to the debate over austerity. Austerity is the NORMAL
> > condition of capitalism, violated for a short time after WW2. Normal
> > processes of change ("Progress") after 1970 returned capitalism to its
> > normal state. How did that quote from Benjamin go, re stopping the train
> > we're on?
> >
> >
>
>Again, really? This kind of meta-analysis, while very attractive for
>polemical, assumes a singularity and continuity to capitalism over the
>last 150 years in order to assert some sort of homogeneous normality. For
>that matter, it wholly collapses capitalism and the state as if there was
>a straightforwardly abstractable essence associated with the myriad
>expressions of capitalist modernity.
> >
> > Once when Marx had returned to England from a vacation in Germany where his
> > aristocratic friends had wined & dined him, someone pointed out to him that
> > that would not be possible under socialism. His reply: I'll be dead by
> then.
> > It seems to me that Marx was a conservative in the sense defined above.
> >
> >
>
>
>Oh please, perhaps there's some sort of textual foundation to this account
>but, even if it's true and Marx had an ascetic vision of/for socialism,
>these days the idea that a redistribution of the aggregate wealth produced
>by capitalism would restrict the distribution of high quality amenities
>embraces far too much of a natural and social limits discourse.
> >
> > Carrol
>
>Alan
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