[lbo-talk] [pen-l] Fwd: Reading the fine print in Seth Ackerman’s blueprint for a new party | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Tue Nov 22 19:20:20 PST 2016


Robert Naiman (Tuesday, November 22, 2016 8:30 AM) wrote: The "new party" people have to answer: what's your strategy for dealing with the AFL?

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Probably there are too few 'active' posters to pen-l (or lbo-talk) for this discussion to be useful, but I'll write as though the list were still alive de facto as well as de jure.

My own belief is that attempts _either_ to build a "New [electoral] Party" _or_ to "reform" the DP will lead to the dissolution of current potential for forming a new left movement in the U.S. I do believe, thanks to Black Lives, The Undocumented Movement, and Fight-for-15 there does exist, for the first time since the collapse of the Panther Party, a reasonable (though small) hope for the emergence of a loosely coordinated set of radical left movements. Such a 'collection' is, I think, a necessary precondition for any more formally organized U.S. Left.

Carrol

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On Tue, Nov 22, 2016 at 7:43 AM, Carrol Cox wrote:[clip]

I suspect I would agree with Lou's arguments were he to post them. I'm not interested in following to a blog. E-Mail lists are worthwhile because they generate discussion. Mere spam referring to completion elsewhere violates the spirit of discussion.

Carrol

-----Original Message-----

From: pen-l at mail.csuchico.edu [mailto:pen-l at mail.csuchico.edu <mailto:pen-l at mail.csuchico.edu> ] On Behalf Of Louis Proyect

Sent: Monday, November 21, 2016 2:05 PM

To: Activists and scholars in Marxist tradition; PEN-L

Subject: [pen-l] Fwd: Reading the fine print in Seth Ackerman’s blueprint for a new party | Louis Proyect: The Unrepentant Marxist

Issue #23 of Jacobin, which I received today, is devoted to an

examination of “The Party We Need”. Since I have been advocating a new

left party for the past 35 years both on and off the Internet, I was

curious to see what the DSA supporters on the editorial board had to say

on this topic. I probably will be evaluating other articles in the issue

but want to start off with Seth Ackerman’s “A Blueprint for a New Party”

that was available at least a month before it came out. It made sense

that Ackerman’s article would be highlighted since it encapsulates

perfectly the fence-straddling politics of DSA today, especially the

youth wing that has made Jacobin its semi-official voice.

To start with, I was wary about Ackerman’s title since the word

blueprint is antithetical to Karl Marx’s approach. Keep in mind that he

once wrote in defense of the “critical analysis of actual facts instead

of writing recipes for the cook-shops of the future”. Of course, when

Marx wrote this he was referring to the sort of grand designs for

classless societies found typically in Albert-Hahnel’s Parecon and not

how to build parties. That being said, Ackerman has displayed a

susceptibility to recipe-writing in the past as we can see from his

Jacobin article “The Red and the Black”:

Why, then, are radicals so hesitant to talk about what a different

system might look like? One of the oldest and most influential

objections to such talk comes from Marx, with his oft-quoted scorn

toward utopian “recipes” for the “cookshops of the future.”

Ackerman felt that Marx violated his own rules in “Critique of the Gotha

Programme”, where he supposedly wrote “his own little cookshop recipe”

that “involved labor tokens, storehouses of goods, and an accounting

system to determine how much workers would get paid.”

One imagines that Ackerman was referring to Marx’s reference to a worker

receiving a certificate based on the amount of labor he has contributed

and that could be used in turn to purchase goods equal to the amount of

labor embodied in the certificate. That is not only the sole reference

to certificates in “Critique of the Gotha Programme” but in Karl Marx’s

entire body of work.

full:

https://louisproyect.org/2016/11/21/reading-the-fine-print-in-seth-ackermans-blueprint-for-a-new-party/ <https://louisproyect.org/2016/11/21/reading-the-fine-print-in-seth-ackermans-blueprint-for-a-new-party/>

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