fragments of an attempted writing.


HT Pactum Serva.

2 comments:

  1. I tend not to believe most anti-capitalist rhetoric. Having been a Marxist, I always think to myself: "are they willing to go all the way, and do they realize how much bloodshed that would entail?" That is why most Marxist lost their nerve at some point, and capitulated to the needs of capital. (Even Zizek is wishy-washy regarding this, and I am just not speaking as an old Trot.)

    Even your own recent intervention on my blog regarding liberal finance capital was a bit moralistic and impressionistic. There is no "better or worse" members of the bourgeoisie. Some are just more useful than others. A real Trotskyist (non-Pabloite like the SWP) looks at the question as one of balance of forces. The liberal bourgoisie can prove more useful in that they have the loyalty of a strata of the working class, and thus a united front with those strata will be necessary in order to educate the workers' class consciousness. In this sense, a direct education through a transitional program (Trotsky) and structural reforms (Mandel) will lead the workers to see that even elementary demands for a thirty hour work week or public health care cannot be one in alliance with the bourgeoisie and capitalism. But for that you need the vanguard party, etc. etc.

    But I am a cynical bastard, which is why I like Zizek so much (probably). I am betting against the socialist revolution, even if I think nothing viable will take its place. Any talk about this stuff amongst people like us is just pissing into the wind. Nothing gets dirty but our pant's leg.

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  2. Arturo,

    By "better" there I meant "more useful." The language of say, CPUSA, veers into moralism because they are trying to present an argument in terms that are common to the American political scene, and thus they use moralistic terms. When you talk to CPUSA leadership in private they all acknowledge that liberal bourgeoisie are simply more useful at this time than other bourgeoisie. Most communists I know who would categorize liberals along moral lines view liberal capitalists as worse than conservative capitalists because they want to have their feel good do good cake and eat capitalism too.

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