{"id":2207,"date":"2009-04-20T00:00:03","date_gmt":"2009-04-20T05:00:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=2207"},"modified":"2021-11-18T13:58:57","modified_gmt":"2021-11-18T18:58:57","slug":"re-imagining-socialism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/?p=2207","title":{"rendered":"“Re-imagining socialism”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Chris Cutrone<\/h2>\n

Letter in <\/em>The Nation<\/strong> April 20, 2009<\/a>.<\/em> [PDF]<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher Jr.\u2019s article, and the forum in reply, exhibit a glaring disparity between the breadth and depth of the crisis and the timidity of response, in particular Robert Pollin\u2019s reversal of the 1960s-era slogan \u201cBe realistic, demand the impossible!\u201d to \u201cBe utopian, demand the realistic\u201d to push Obama\u2019s reforms further.<\/p>\n

There was an earlier formulation of reality and utopia by C. Wright Mills in his 1960 \u201cLetter to the New Left,\u201d the injunction that any purported left \u201cbe realistic in our utopianism.\u201d After the 1950s declaration of the \u201cend of ideology,\u201d Mills recognized that the only realistic possibility of political responsibility was in the \u201cutopian\u201d and frankly \u201cideological\u201d program of socialism, which Ehrenreich and Fletcher treat as the dirty S-word.<\/p>\n

Mills warned that socialism needed to be reinvented, on the basis of the best of the Marxist tradition. He enjoined his readers to \u201cforget Victorian Marxism\u201d and \u201cre-read Lenin and Luxemburg\u201d and recall what socialism once meant. But we now have a rehash of the worst of socialism. The global problems of capitalism will not find solutions derived from Lula\u2019s Brazil or Ch\u00e1vez\u2019s Venezuela, 1970s-\u201980s Swedish policies, takeovers of closed factories in Argentina or community gardens in Detroit\u2019s emptied lots. Mills called such perspectives the politically irresponsible combination of \u201cliberal rhetoric and conservative default\u201d in the ongoing absence of a true left.<\/p>\n

While there are much worse things than living under the Swedish welfare state or eating homegrown vegetables, this is not a realistic prospect for saving the majority of the world\u2019s people, or even the majority of Americans, from the ravages of capitalism.<\/p>\n

When Christian Parenti\u2013-who, with Liza Featherstone and Doug Henwood, wrote a fine critique of \u201cLeft anti-intellectualism\u201d in Action Will Be Taken, invoking Adorno\u2019s critique of unthinking \u201cactionism\u201d\u2013-notes the virtue of Marxism so even a semiliterate Indian public could grasp the dynamics of international capitalism better than their US counterparts, we have arrived at the reversal of Marx\u2019s 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, that hitherto we have tried only to understand the world, while the point is to change it.<\/p>\n

Only what the present \u201cleft\u201d deems \u201cutopian,\u201d \u201cfull-throttle socialism\u201d\u2013-starting and pursued to conclusion in the United States, the core of global capital, where the crisis and its potential solution find their nexus\u2013-has any hope of making a true diagnosis of our problems and a prognosis for overcoming them. While the revolution envisioned by Marx has never occurred, it still might and, indeed, must if we are to begin to address the manifest problems of capitalism recognized clearly so long ago. | \u00a7<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Chris Cutrone Letter in The Nation April 20, 2009. [PDF] Barbara Ehrenreich and Bill Fletcher Jr.\u2019s article, and the forum in reply, exhibit a glaring disparity between the breadth and depth of the crisis and the timidity of response, in particular Robert Pollin\u2019s reversal of the 1960s-era slogan \u201cBe realistic, demand the impossible!\u201d to \u201cBe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[11,16,15],"class_list":["post-2207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-essays","tag-11","tag-marxism","tag-obama-era"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2207"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3240,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2207\/revisions\/3240"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/chriscutrone.platypus1917.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}