[lbo-talk] Where ARe We

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Tue May 27 18:44:07 PDT 2014


This is extracted from an MR support appeal from Robert W. McChesney, but it is obviously of general interest:

****What this means for the great mass of people in the United States and the globe is also clear: increasing poverty and unemployment; gaping increases in inequality; tremendous downward pressure on wages and benefits; collapsing infrastructure and decline in public services; systematic political corruption; environmental degradation in the pursuit of profit; and endless militarism. Capitalism is a system that gives every sign of being on its last legs. It is eating the future to stay alive today.

All of this seems to offer a new opening for the left. In the past four years I have given some two-hundred-fifty talks across the United States, and this is what I have discovered: The term "socialist" is no longer a pejorative, especially among young people. The blind ideological commitment to the free market is disappearing faster than the polar icecap. There is a willingness to engage with a radical assessment of capitalism and the prospect of a socialist alternative that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. As one public opinion pollster put it recently, when one looks at the stances of the people on issue after issue, the United States is in a "pre-revolutionary" moment. The Occupy movement, while it lasted, was a clear indication of the deep wells of dissent in the society that are today seeking release.****

I want to explore the claim, " All of this seems to offer a new opening for the left."

This may be true -- but there is no certainty whatever that general misery, even general loss of capitalist legitimacy, takes us a step closer to the overthrow of capitalism. The stagnation, even the complete collapse , of the economy at a given time is by no means the same as the "collapse" of capitalism as a system of productive relations. Barbarism (which is assured and has been the experience of the last 100 years) is not quite the same as a triumph of "the left" (and of course that phrase, "The Left," has no material referent at the present time. (I hope people do respond to MR's appeal for funds, but that is not, _at this time_, contributing to what does not exist, "The Left.") If capitalist stagnation is to lead to left insurgency, we have to build a left. Mere endless insistence on the evils of capitalism or the horrible inequality and misery of the present do not in themselves constituter anything but so much empty caterwauling; merely another form of the endless process of interpreting the world while the point is to change it.

No one gives a shit that Capitalism is utterly irrational (from some abstract point of view), that it is inconsistent wit human dignity and human happiness; that it is destructive of the planet and offers only endless war and endless misery. That is all irrelevant except if it coincides the growth and coherence of a movement to overthrow capitalism.

And the rule over which the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks split remains the central issue facing the left. Left activity not embodied in formal organization is not left in any serious sense.

Any high school student as Lening mentioned may agree with revolutionary principles. But we need something more than any high-school student or any angry individual left intellectual.

Carrol



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