blake 3:17
30th July 2006, 13:14
The article quoted and linked to is a kind of meta-view written by a very 'commited intellectual', one of the '68ers whose radicalism hasn't diminished. Cutting ourselves off from this generation, and its most thoughtful, is very destructive for any creative possibility of a NEW new Left!!!!
PM me and maybe we could start a study circle..
Below is the beginning of a document by Daniel Bensaid, a leader of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), the French section of the USEC Fourth International. A paragraph I've omitted at thebeginning points to the density of the full paperwhich can be found via the link at the bottom.
I decided to put a link to it because I'd found it inspiring AND confusing.
Theses of resistance by Daniel Bensaid
In the course of the last decade (since the disintegration of the Soviet Union and German unification), something came to an end. But what? Was it the “Short 20th Century” of which Eric Hobsbawm and other historians speak, beginning with World War I and ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall?
Or is it the short period that followed World War II, marked by the twin superpowers of the Cold War, and characterized in the imperialist centres by sustained capital accumulation and “Fordist” regulation?
Or again, is it the great cycle in the history of capitalism and the workers’ movement, opened by the capitalist development of the 1880s, subsequent colonial expansion and the blossoming of the modern labour movement, symbolized by the formation of the Second International?
The great strategic analyses of the workers movement date to a large extent from this period of formation, before World War I: for example the analyses of imperialism (Hilferding, Bauer, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Parvus, Trotsky, Bukharin); the national question (Rosa Luxemburg again, Lenin, Bauer, Ber Borokov, Pannekoek, Strasser); party-trade union relations and parliamentarism (Rosa Luxemburg, Sorel, Jaurès, Nieuwenhuis, Lenin); strategy and the road to power (Bernstein, Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky).
These controversies constitute our history as much as those of the conflicting dynamics between revolution and counterrevolution inaugurated by the world war and the Russian Revolution.
Beyond the often intense differences over orientation and options, the workers’ movement of that time displayed a relative unity and shared a common culture. What remains of this inheritance today?
In a very unclear editorial in the first issue of the relaunched “New Left Review”, Perry Anderson estimated that the world has not been so lacking in alternatives to the dominant order since the Reformation. Charles-André Udry is more definite, arguing that one of the characteristics of the present situation is the “disappearance” of an independent international workers’ movement.
We are then in the middle of an uncertain transition, where the old is dying without being abolished, and where the new is making an effort to emerge, caught between a past which has not been transcended and the increasingly urgent necessity of an autonomous research project, which would allow us to orientate ourselves to the new world opening before our eyes. Because of the weakening of the traditions of the old workers’ movement there is a danger that, given the theoretical mediocrity of social democracy and other opponents to our right, we could resign ourselves to just defending old theoretical conquests, which today are of limited value. Certainly theory lives off debate and confrontation: we are always to a certain extent dependent on the debates with our adversaries. But this dependency is relative.
It is easy to say that the great political forces of what is called in France the “plural left”, the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the Greens, are not very stimulating in their approach to fundamental problems. But also it is necessary to remember that, in spite of their naiveté and sometimes their youthful excesses, the debates of the far left of the 1970s were much more productive and enriching than they are today.
We have then begun the dangerous transition from one epoch to another and we are in midstream. We must simultaneously transmit and defend our theoretical tradition, even if it is threatened by conformism, while at the same time boldly analysing these new times. At the risk of appearing shocking, I would like to face this test with a spirit I would describe as “open dogmatism”. “Dogmatism”, because, if that word gets a bad press (according to the media’s common sense, it is always better to be open than closed, light than heavy, flexible than rigid), in all matters of theory, resistance to voguish ideas has its virtues. The challenge of versatile impressions and the effects of fashion demands that serious refutations are made before a paradigm is changed). “Open”, because we should not religiously conserve a doctrinaire discourse, but rather enrich and transform a world view by testing it against new realities.
I would propose then five theses of resistance; their form deliberately emphasizes the necessary work of refusal.
1 Imperialism has not been dissolved in commodity globalization.
2 Communism has not been dissolved in the fall of Stalinism.
3 The class struggle cannot be reduced to the politics of community identities.
4 Conflictual differences are not dissolved in ambivalent diversity.
5 Politics cannot be dissolved into ethics or aesthetics.
I think these theses are demonstrable propositions. The explanatory notes explain some of their consequences.
His argument and proofs. (http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/article.php3?id_article=14)
PM me and maybe we could start a study circle..
Below is the beginning of a document by Daniel Bensaid, a leader of the Revolutionary Communist League (LCR), the French section of the USEC Fourth International. A paragraph I've omitted at thebeginning points to the density of the full paperwhich can be found via the link at the bottom.
I decided to put a link to it because I'd found it inspiring AND confusing.
Theses of resistance by Daniel Bensaid
In the course of the last decade (since the disintegration of the Soviet Union and German unification), something came to an end. But what? Was it the “Short 20th Century” of which Eric Hobsbawm and other historians speak, beginning with World War I and ending with the fall of the Berlin Wall?
Or is it the short period that followed World War II, marked by the twin superpowers of the Cold War, and characterized in the imperialist centres by sustained capital accumulation and “Fordist” regulation?
Or again, is it the great cycle in the history of capitalism and the workers’ movement, opened by the capitalist development of the 1880s, subsequent colonial expansion and the blossoming of the modern labour movement, symbolized by the formation of the Second International?
The great strategic analyses of the workers movement date to a large extent from this period of formation, before World War I: for example the analyses of imperialism (Hilferding, Bauer, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Parvus, Trotsky, Bukharin); the national question (Rosa Luxemburg again, Lenin, Bauer, Ber Borokov, Pannekoek, Strasser); party-trade union relations and parliamentarism (Rosa Luxemburg, Sorel, Jaurès, Nieuwenhuis, Lenin); strategy and the road to power (Bernstein, Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky).
These controversies constitute our history as much as those of the conflicting dynamics between revolution and counterrevolution inaugurated by the world war and the Russian Revolution.
Beyond the often intense differences over orientation and options, the workers’ movement of that time displayed a relative unity and shared a common culture. What remains of this inheritance today?
In a very unclear editorial in the first issue of the relaunched “New Left Review”, Perry Anderson estimated that the world has not been so lacking in alternatives to the dominant order since the Reformation. Charles-André Udry is more definite, arguing that one of the characteristics of the present situation is the “disappearance” of an independent international workers’ movement.
We are then in the middle of an uncertain transition, where the old is dying without being abolished, and where the new is making an effort to emerge, caught between a past which has not been transcended and the increasingly urgent necessity of an autonomous research project, which would allow us to orientate ourselves to the new world opening before our eyes. Because of the weakening of the traditions of the old workers’ movement there is a danger that, given the theoretical mediocrity of social democracy and other opponents to our right, we could resign ourselves to just defending old theoretical conquests, which today are of limited value. Certainly theory lives off debate and confrontation: we are always to a certain extent dependent on the debates with our adversaries. But this dependency is relative.
It is easy to say that the great political forces of what is called in France the “plural left”, the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, the Greens, are not very stimulating in their approach to fundamental problems. But also it is necessary to remember that, in spite of their naiveté and sometimes their youthful excesses, the debates of the far left of the 1970s were much more productive and enriching than they are today.
We have then begun the dangerous transition from one epoch to another and we are in midstream. We must simultaneously transmit and defend our theoretical tradition, even if it is threatened by conformism, while at the same time boldly analysing these new times. At the risk of appearing shocking, I would like to face this test with a spirit I would describe as “open dogmatism”. “Dogmatism”, because, if that word gets a bad press (according to the media’s common sense, it is always better to be open than closed, light than heavy, flexible than rigid), in all matters of theory, resistance to voguish ideas has its virtues. The challenge of versatile impressions and the effects of fashion demands that serious refutations are made before a paradigm is changed). “Open”, because we should not religiously conserve a doctrinaire discourse, but rather enrich and transform a world view by testing it against new realities.
I would propose then five theses of resistance; their form deliberately emphasizes the necessary work of refusal.
1 Imperialism has not been dissolved in commodity globalization.
2 Communism has not been dissolved in the fall of Stalinism.
3 The class struggle cannot be reduced to the politics of community identities.
4 Conflictual differences are not dissolved in ambivalent diversity.
5 Politics cannot be dissolved into ethics or aesthetics.
I think these theses are demonstrable propositions. The explanatory notes explain some of their consequences.
His argument and proofs. (http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/article.php3?id_article=14)