Let me try a metaphor. Socialists and left neolibs are on a train, headed to California via Chicago. Socialists think that Chicago is no great shakes, barely better than Jersey. Left neolibs think California is weird, and want to get off at Chicago. However, the train has barely pulled out of Penn Station into Jersey. It's a long ride, and the malefactors of great wealth are making it longer.
There is no reason for socialists and left neolibs to squabble, since the malefactors are slowing both of them down. They should wait at least until the train reaches Cleveland. And that's still far away.
On the money Max. I would add the thitd big mistske of those who expect any single event sparking mass socialist rebellion requires an already existing mass socialist movement among the population. We have nothing of tbe sort. Even social democracy in the US is a multi decade treak… more than a marathon. I consider myself a socialist and I was fortunate that when I began college in 1968 I was recruited by a group of very mature and serious an Arco communists of the sort that existed in Spain in the 1930s. That kept me from joining any pro authoritarian Left organization, though we worked with them against the war. For some years now I have avoided a specific political or ideological label. Instead, when asked, I respond that my ideology if you will is based on three principles: more democracy, more transparency, and more equality. My politics are anything that advances any of those principles is something I support. At my age, the light last thing that interests me is a sterile debate among leftist as to who is really a revolutionary, and who is a revisionist or opportunist or any other sectarian label. People affiliated with such groups tend to want to be marginalized because it reinforces their need to feel like they are some special vanguard when in fact, they are mostly irrelevant. Great peace and I congratulate you for the courage to use real history referring to Bernstein and Kautsky and Rosa who most young leftists have never heard of.
Max wrote: “I basically did my 20s all wrong (from 1969 to 1979), in pursuit of the unattainable, at possibly great personal cost.”
1969-1979: I think we were (correctly) conscious that both capitalism and Stalinism were unsatisfactory and we were searching for an alternative. Some went toward Maoism (Progressive Labor); some toward Trotskyism (SWP). Some of us had interest for a while in the NCLC.
Harringtonism (DSOC and then DSA) was left social democracy. That’s where Max seems to have wound up. But I discovered a very different “third way” . . . a different kind of post-capitalist alternative: the “greening of society” broad movement with its sub-movements of Green politics, Deep Ecology, Social Ecology, Extinction Rebellion, bioregionalism, conservation biology, eco-communitarianism; ecovillages as lifeboats vis-a-vis the coming Long Emergency crisis and as basecamps for green social change. Not all Greens have a post-capitalist consciousness, but most do: https://www.ecologicalcitizen.net/pdfs/v03sb-02.pdf
"These two delusions have dire political implications. They lead socialists to await a radical rupture than provides a golden opportunity for an insurrection to seize state power."
These two delusions also descend from a plausible misreading of Marx. I say plausible because Marx was ambivalent about the prospects of collapse, immiseration, and insurrection. "Marxists" have tended to simplify Marx by selection of the headier, more militant rhetoric.
Great piece.
Let me try a metaphor. Socialists and left neolibs are on a train, headed to California via Chicago. Socialists think that Chicago is no great shakes, barely better than Jersey. Left neolibs think California is weird, and want to get off at Chicago. However, the train has barely pulled out of Penn Station into Jersey. It's a long ride, and the malefactors of great wealth are making it longer.
There is no reason for socialists and left neolibs to squabble, since the malefactors are slowing both of them down. They should wait at least until the train reaches Cleveland. And that's still far away.
On the money Max. I would add the thitd big mistske of those who expect any single event sparking mass socialist rebellion requires an already existing mass socialist movement among the population. We have nothing of tbe sort. Even social democracy in the US is a multi decade treak… more than a marathon. I consider myself a socialist and I was fortunate that when I began college in 1968 I was recruited by a group of very mature and serious an Arco communists of the sort that existed in Spain in the 1930s. That kept me from joining any pro authoritarian Left organization, though we worked with them against the war. For some years now I have avoided a specific political or ideological label. Instead, when asked, I respond that my ideology if you will is based on three principles: more democracy, more transparency, and more equality. My politics are anything that advances any of those principles is something I support. At my age, the light last thing that interests me is a sterile debate among leftist as to who is really a revolutionary, and who is a revisionist or opportunist or any other sectarian label. People affiliated with such groups tend to want to be marginalized because it reinforces their need to feel like they are some special vanguard when in fact, they are mostly irrelevant. Great peace and I congratulate you for the courage to use real history referring to Bernstein and Kautsky and Rosa who most young leftists have never heard of.
We need to make Bernstein great again.
The Mensheviks were probably correct!
Not as much as the Womensheviks.
Max wrote: “I basically did my 20s all wrong (from 1969 to 1979), in pursuit of the unattainable, at possibly great personal cost.”
1969-1979: I think we were (correctly) conscious that both capitalism and Stalinism were unsatisfactory and we were searching for an alternative. Some went toward Maoism (Progressive Labor); some toward Trotskyism (SWP). Some of us had interest for a while in the NCLC.
Harringtonism (DSOC and then DSA) was left social democracy. That’s where Max seems to have wound up. But I discovered a very different “third way” . . . a different kind of post-capitalist alternative: the “greening of society” broad movement with its sub-movements of Green politics, Deep Ecology, Social Ecology, Extinction Rebellion, bioregionalism, conservation biology, eco-communitarianism; ecovillages as lifeboats vis-a-vis the coming Long Emergency crisis and as basecamps for green social change. Not all Greens have a post-capitalist consciousness, but most do: https://www.ecologicalcitizen.net/pdfs/v03sb-02.pdf
"These two delusions have dire political implications. They lead socialists to await a radical rupture than provides a golden opportunity for an insurrection to seize state power."
These two delusions also descend from a plausible misreading of Marx. I say plausible because Marx was ambivalent about the prospects of collapse, immiseration, and insurrection. "Marxists" have tended to simplify Marx by selection of the headier, more militant rhetoric.