From: Jurriaan Bendien (adsl675281@TISCALI.NL)
Date: Tue May 09 2006 - 09:16:19 EDT
This issue of course has nothing to do with Marcel's book, it's something I raised... I meant not just socialist societies but socialist movements. In the modern era of socialism, there was a major split between the official communists and the social democrats, each espousing their own kind of socialism - each opposed to the socialism of the other. Beyond that, there have been many sectarian socialisms. Then you have the socialist imperialism of e.g. Russia and China, destroying national minority cultures and forcing the migration of whole peoples. And finally you have strongly despotic socialisms such as Khmer socialism. All of these variants laid claim to socialist ideas and traditions, and many referred to Marx's legacy. "Orthodox" marxists like to introduce a dividing line between revolutionary socialisms and reformist socialisms, but this is of course a crude simplification, since there has existed a very wide spectrum of socialist beliefs and practices from christian socialism, Fabianism and communitarianism, to social democracy, Nasser-type or Sankara-type socialism, to bolshevism, Maoism and Stalinism etc. Hal Draper was IMO one of the top ten Marxian scholars that ever lived, and his book "The Critique of other Socialisms" is certainly worth reading (Incidentally, a posthumous fifth volume of his magnum opus has also been added by E. Haberkern on "War and Revolution"). The academic response to Draper's work was mainly one of stunning silence, and he is rarely cited. Perhaps that is because Draper systematically exposed the whole tissue of academic lies about Marx and Engels. Draper's early essay on the "two souls of socialism" is interesting, because implicitly he recognises that there isn't just one kind of socialism, but many, motivated by different ideas about progress and the routes to human emancipation. That is a very progressive, pluralistic thought which honours the real beliefs that people may have about socialism. The main distinction in his text seems to be, between a socialism which organically grows out of the struggles of people to free themselves from the conditions that oppress them, and a socialism which seeks to *impose* a new social order on people by law or by force. It's a suggestive idea, but analytically it does not go very deep, because it does not explicitly come to grips with the ideas of freedom and power that define the contrast - in fact, by using the theological metaphor of "souls", he runs together a whole series of dialectical polarities, such as: - elitism vs egalitarianism, - revolutionism vs reformism, - gradualism vs direct action - negotiation vs forcible action - compromise vs principles - self-emancipation vs emancipation by others, - progress vs regression, - freedom vs equality, - cooperation vs competition, - autonomy vs dependence etc. His implicit aim, like many others writing on this subject, seemed to be to define a "true socialism" as a socialism from below, but this intention would appear to conflict with his own admission that there are many different socialisms, which may be inspired by many different motivational complexes and historical situations. Which socialism is "true", may be known only after life has been lived, and some socialisms may by nature not be liveable at all, existing only as a hope, dream or ideal. As for Prof. Alex Callinicos, he went on record as saying that souls don't exist, because there is no scientific evidence for them (sic.). Tough luck, Hal... Jurriaan
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