[lbo-talk] Faith-Based Marxism

[Carrol Cox]

"In reality, it was Rosa Luxemburg's 1915 "Junius Pamphlet" (The Crisis of
Social Democracy) which was, for the first time, clearly to pose the
alternative socialism or barbarism as the historic choice confronting the
working-class movement and the human species. It was only at thay specific
moment that Marxism broke radically with any linear vision of history and
with any illusion of a "guaranteed" future. And it was only in the writings
of Walter Benjamin that would at last be found a critique in depth, on the
basis of historical materialism, of the progressivist ideologies that
disarmed the German and European working-class movement by drugging it with
the illusion that is could get by merely through "swimming with the current"
of history."

(Maclcolm  Lowy, in Monthly Review, November, 1998)

Angelus did not give the date of the quotation from Luxemburg, but it was
presumably before 1915. And of the writer's quoted, only a line or two in
this passage from RL exhibit any assurance that the Non-Barbarism future is
inevitable. It seems to me that the moment one eliminates this suggestion of
inevitability (which, as Lowy points out is a leftover from Bourgeois
theories of Progress built into history) -- only this gives even the weakest
peg on which to hang babblings of "Faith." All of them assume that history
is not theorizable, or as Sweezy argued, socialism is NOT a science, and
hence cannot be predicted (Scenarios are anti-Marxist). The implications of
The Present as History is that capitalism is so totally destructive that, if
not overthrown (and that cannot be predicted) the result will be barbarism
and the possible destruction of humanity.

All the arguments are  if. . .then; all cite human struggle with its
unpredictable oucomes, as the only _possible_ means of avoiding the probable
barbarism of humanity.

All assume the necessity of enduring defeats because the (incredibly
foolish) insistence on a scenario guaranteeing victory constitutes a final
surrender to the inevitability of barbarism.

If that grim prognosis, that total rejection of the Ideology of Progress, be
faith, we need more of it.

Carrol

All things fall and are built again,
And those who build them again are gay.