12.16.07
Unsubbed (again) from Science for the People: The Unknown Marx
I got unsubbed again from Science for the People, for about the fourth time. No problem, I have ways to sneak back on using my 10^10 internet aliases. Addlepated shmucks calling themselves leftists.
Readers here may have noticed forwarded posts from that source.
I notice this week ’still another round of menshevik/Bolshoy ballet’ debate, in the usual cantankerous mode: to veil slightly the participants here’s the
whole month of posts.
It’s no use taking sides anymore, its seems it’s all rot, meanwhile Chavez is pining away for the ‘true route to socialism’ while the cadres bicker.
Without producing frenzy in certain people by declaring Marx a closet Menshevik, I would suggest reading (or rereading in my case) an old book by Michael Harrington, Socialism, from the early 70’s. It is remarkable, despite obsolete sections, how acute his reading is, once you consider his unpopular stand for the times: categorical rejection of the USSR nexus (for the seventies) and the independent analysis of socialism on that basis.
Be that as it may it is worth reading the chapter called The Unknown Marx to grasp how confusing Marx is, in part because of the confusing nature of the different propaganda systems that purport to explain him to us, for and against.
But Harrington shows how (as does Hal Draper in his short book Dictatorship of the Proletariat), once you examine the changes in position in Marx/Engels during and after the 1848 revolutions and the Commune period, the tactics of Marx/Engels changed. All the invective thrown at the Mensheviks later was thrown at Marx/Engels in this period, e.g. by such as Bakunin. It is the evanescent revolutionary periods that left Marx tarred with the confusion over the totally misleading phrase ‘dictatorship of the proletariat, whose usage is now distorted beyond recognition. After 1850 Marx and Engels changed their strategy, and decided to work along the lines of what later came to fruition in the movement of German Social Democracy. This period consumes by far the larger segment of Marx’s life, and it is premised on democratic action. Somehow the monumental nature of this peaceful achievement has fallen from view as the unfair equation of Marx with Leninism remains. I merely mention this without suggesting this resolves the debate, but as historical data in the wake of massive distortions.
It is a frustrating and sad history because the movement they created was a splendid success, and just on the verge of parliamentary breakthrough it suffered its calamity during the first world war, and was destroyed. What might have been we will never know. So the great achievement of Marx was a parliamentary juggernaut in association with the organizations of labor.