Left Economism: sounds familiar?

[Die Neue Zeit]

"As discussed earlier, the third section of the Manifesto outlines the nature of the merger between socialism and the worker movement in the negative forum of showing how not to do it. In the third of the five targets attacked in the third section, Marx draws a contrast between the German 'True Socialists' and the German communists. As described by Marx, the True Socialists were a set of intellectuals who 'hurled traditional anathemas against liberalism, against representative government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois right, bourgeois freedom and equality.' They were so eager to use socialist demands as a way of discrediting any striving for political freedom that they became tools of the nobility and the German absolutist governments." (Lars Lih)



Is the quote above telling of what has prevailed over much of the Left today (the dismissal of the struggle for extending political rights and freedoms)?

[MarxSchmarx]

Today, most of the left seems to be quite adamant about expanding political freedoms. Many are often explicitly against the national-security state and state intervention in personal decisions, for example.

But this is based only on my own experience where the sort of pre-enlightenment concerns Marx raised have been thoroughly rejected by the broader society except for religious institutions, and where the left has historically been stridently anti-clerical.

[Rascolnikova]

"As discussed earlier, the third section of the Manifesto outlines the nature of the merger between socialism and the worker movement in the negative forum of showing how not to do it. In the third of the five targets attacked in the third section, Marx draws a contrast between the German 'True Socialists' and the German communists. As described by Marx, the True Socialists were a set of intellectuals who 'hurled traditional anathemas against liberalism, against representative government, against bourgeois competition, bourgeois freedom of the press, bourgeois right, bourgeois freedom and equality.' They were so eager to use socialist demands as a way of discrediting any striving for political freedom that they became tools of the nobility and the German absolutist governments." (Lars Lih)



Is the quote above telling of what has prevailed over much of the Left today (the dismissal of the struggle for extending political rights and freedoms)?


What do you mean by telling? Do you mean, does it describe it?

I'm not sure whether you intend to pass some kind of value judgment on this analysis, or what kind of responses you wish to provoke.

[ComradeOm]

Is the quote above telling of what has prevailed over much of the Left today (the dismissal of the struggle for extending political rights and freedoms)?That's not my reading of the above quote at all. Marx here was condemning the reflex condemnation of liberalism regardless of circumstances by socialists who had grasped the rhetoric of class struggle but little else. These were 'tools' of the state only in that they divided the opposition to the ruling feudal structures. The point has little to do with the rights themselves but rather the dangers of blind/vulgar ideological attacks

[Die Neue Zeit]

http://www.revleft.com/vb/rediscovering-lenin-t97390/index.html

Some interesting remarks by Lars Lih (although the word "freedom" may not be appropriate):

I think that the socialist attitude toward political freedom needs serious attention. In my book, I stress the primordial importance of political freedom as a goal for Lenin and the Bolsheviks. But this is only half the story. The main reason the Russian social democrats wanted political freedom was to be able to spread their own version of the truth. When they got into a position of ‘state monopoly campaignism’, their drive toward political freedom turned (dialectically?) into its opposite: lack of political freedom for their opponents now helped them spread their own version of the truth.

And this is not just some Asiatic deviation of the Russian Bolsheviks. On the contrary, European socialism as a whole was sceptical about the benefits of political freedom in bourgeois society and did not really see much need for political freedom in socialist society. And their scepticism was, of course, highly justified, then as it still is today. So the solution is not just to say, ‘Let’s recognise the importance of political freedom.’ The proper attitude to adopt is a complex and difficult issue. But from where I sit I cannot see any real grappling with the problem.



[FYI, my personal take on the "broad economism" question is one of demarchy - random-sortition-based "democracy without elections."]

[davidasearles]

incredulously the person describing himself as "Jacob Richter" asks whether there has been on the dismissal of the struggle for extending political rights and freedoms.

das:

I say that it is incedulous because the question comes from a person who makes it a science of avoding calling for the use of the political rights and freedoms that we do have, to openly clearly and consistently call for collective worker control of the industrial means of production and distribution.

_____________

"Revolutionary Marxism"

Is besides the point