On 2012-01-25, at 12:49 PM, shag carpet bomb wrote:
> Out of curiosity, what could that statement have possibly meant, had
> Marx uttered it?
>
> in other words, he'd have to have been working from some generalizable
> claim about why an executive would always side with the bourgs, while
> the legislators would be contested?
>
> what theory of class interests is at work here?
I haven't seen the "contested terrain" quote attributed to Marx, and can't comment beyond what I said earlier - that if he did see the legislature as an hopeful arena of struggle for the working class, it would have been as the logical extension of the mass struggles then being waged by workers to eliminate property restrictions on the right to vote.
As opposed to the anarchists, both revolutionary Marxists and reformists following Marx preached participation in "bourgeois democratic" parliaments. Social democrats like Keir Hardie in Britain and Edward Bernstein in Germany believed the workers could use the vote to elect new political parties sponsored by the unions to preside over a gradual and peaceful transition to socialism, understood to mean public ownership of the commanding heights of the economy. Revolutionary Marxists has no such illusions in a peaceful, parliamentary road to socialism, but regarded electoral politics as an opportunity to raise the consciousness of workers and to mobilize them against the bourgeoisie and their own reformist "misleaders" as a necessary prelude to the revolutionary overthrow of the bourgeois state. Lenin, for example, famously urged the newly-formed British Communist Party to enter the mass Labour Party and to support it electorally "as a rope supports a hanged man", ie. to show the workers, through their own experience, the limits of that party and the treacherous behaviour of its reformist leaders.
Don't know whether this answers your question, which wasn't entirely clear to me.
>
> <> On 2012-01-24, at 11:54 PM, Doug Henwood wrote:
> <>
> <>>
> <>> On Jan 24, 2012, at 8:37 PM, Marv Gandall wrote:
> <>>
> <>>> The bourgeois state cannot be pro working class by definition.
> <>>
> <>> Wasn't Marx's view that the executive branch was the bourgeoisie's
> <>> domain, but the legislative branch was contested?
> <>>
> <>> Doug
> <>
> <> If so, this view would have been formulated in the context of mass
> <> struggles for the universal franchise, when expectations for what it
> <> portended for the political organization of the working class and the
> <> conquest of state power were higher than subsequently turned out to be
> <> historically warranted.
> <>
> <> Certainly, I wouldn't today draw that separation between the
> <> legislative and executive branches of the state or any of its other
> <> agencies. The influence of "the 99%" is negligible in all parts of the
> <> state apparatus. There is so little to choose between Democrats and
> <> Republicans in Congress and social democratic and conservative
> <> parliamentarians in Europe that it seems preposterous to suggest they
> <> are proof that these legislatures are in any way "contested" arenas
> <> which pit the working class against the bourgeoisie. Insofar they are
> <> are "contested terrain", the conflict is strictly between the liberal
> <> and conservative wings of the bourgeoisie.
> <>
> <> This understanding, however, does not prevent my supporting the
> <> political goals of the mass organizations which have ofttimes been
> <> realized, even if only partially, through legislation typically
> <> supported by the left-centre parties and opposed by those on the
> <> right. Gains have been made which need to be defended by parliamentary
> <> and extra-parliamentary means.
> <>
> <> But my understanding - which I'm not confident is shared by many
> <> others on the far left and social democratic left, as this discussion
> <> has shown - is also that these reforms always require that the
> <> bourgeoisie see them as consistent with the political and economic
> <> needs of capitalism at certain conjunctures. If there is no ruling
> <> class imprimatur they will be rejected, and the movements pressing for
> <> the reforms will be ignored or repressed. There are, of course,
> <> internal debates within the ruling class as to whether and when such
> <> reforms are necessary as well as ongoing disagreement over what levels
> <> of taxation and spending are required to maintain social peace and
> <> economic growth, and these debates, as noted above, unfold in the
> <> legislatures and other state institutions.
> <>
> <> So, yes, I continue to believe in the primacy of class and that the
> <> bourgeois state cannot be pro working class by definition.
> <>
> <> As to Somebody's discovery that the nature and depth of reforms vary
> <> between what he concedes to be "bourgeois democratic states", I've
> <> also understood that to be the case for some time.
> <>
> <>
> <> ___________________________________
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> <>
>
>
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