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Don't know what you mean by "Marxism" here.  It's hard for me to describe the Soviet Union as a "variant of Marxism" when I know that Marx predicted the rise of socialism "in the most advanced nations," and Russia ca. 1917 was hardly one of those.  Marx also had nothing to do with the "socialism in one nation" doctrine of Joseph Stalin.

Sort of like you've never had a full blown picture perfect Chicago school neoliberal 'reform', doesn't mean that we can't speak of the real world implementation of that philosophy. Nor does it mean that the Soviet Union was the only possible form of implementing a Marxist inspired system. But to deny that it was an example of that is absurd.

Was Marx supposed to have predicted global warming?  And is the labor theory of value supposed to lead automatically to Marx's endorsement of industrialism?
If you want to find it in Holy Writ, look up those passages in Engels' Dialectics of Nature where he suggests ending the division between countryside and city, because that's where all of this is leading.

I haven't read that Engels piece and I'll take a look. I have read plenty of Marx and it isn't a question of not predicting global warming, again that's just a constraint on any system. It's more his conception of what Progress means - i.e. more and better stuff, better working conditions with more leisure, and the destruction of traditional cultures and means of production and their replacement by a homegenizing and  homegenous system - first capitalism for the bulk of the dirty work of destruction, then socialism.  He also didn't have much love for rural lifestyles. Marx was a  brilliant thinker but also a creature of his time and you can no more take out that notion of progress from Marxism and have anything coherent remmain than you can from the ideology of liberalism (using it in the non American sense).

Are you suggesting that world society shouldn't change its bad environmental behaviors?  Social change will be necessary to adapt to ecosystem change.

No, I am saying that attempting to achieve both radical socio-economic change and adapting to new environmental constraints is more difficult than doing one or the other and the radical green attempt to link the two would make both less likely to happen.

I really don't understand how anything I said is "Leninist" in any way, least of all in the doctrine of "democratic centralism" being repudiated here.

It has to do with your view that the working class' desire for higher income and less hours constitutes a false consciousness and that they will eventually 'understand' that instead they should want revolution. That was the Bolsheviks' first step down the path to deciding that the working class, and the population in general, has to be repressed in their own interest. Of course you're not there yet but what happens if people consistently vote against what you want - you've already decided that it's a sham democracy... What's the next step?

by MarekNYC on Thu Apr 24th, 2008 at 01:30:23 PM EST
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