[lbo-talk] "The Masses" -- some historical obsrvations

[Carrol Cox]

Clearly "the masses" has been reduced to a joke or worse -- but I suspect
the term (at least originally) named an actuality not otherwise easily
identified: It referred to a collection (a very large collectin) of abstract
-- isolated -- individuals (or those having (in Marx's term in Grundrisse)
only a dot-like existence, or the mere free worker. Serfs & other
npn-aristocrats would not have been referred to as "the masses:; they had a
concrete identity: they could not be moved or move fromone slot to another;
they were tied to the land.  Neither the miller (The Miller) nor the
carpenter (The Carpenter) in Canterbury Tales could have been referred to as
belonging to "The Masses." 

So whn the t4rm, "the masses," becomes unavailable to us, we have _also_
loss the language with which to refer to a very real social fact, a social
fact which has not other name but which is the single most important fact of
modern society.

Carrol

P.S. the _real_ error, a very serious one, in seth's post was not the use of
an unfortunately 'dead' phrase but in its assumption tha tit was
historically and politically correct to "talk about socialism." Talk about
socialism that goes beyond the few vague paragraphs in Capital is pretending
that one has  a crystal ball and anc predict the future. We can speak of
_necessity_ but we can not speak of any specific details whatever of that
_necessary_ future. Rosa Luxemburg proposed state power as the label to use
for our "final goal" rather than some vague notion of some future society.
That has its defects; I would suggest "constituent assembly" as our final
goaol which can make current activity intelligible, and that term does not
imply a crystal ball: we are NOT predicting it but !merely! affirming its
necessity as the only route to human survival.