[Marxism] Socialists and/or communists?

[Aaron Aarons]

>From: "Joaquin Bustelo" <jbustelo at gmail.com>
>Date: Tue, 30 Sep 2008 20:53:59 -0400
>Subject: Re: [Marxism] Attention McKinney supporters
>
>Eli writes: "Yeah, us "hyper-socialists" thought it might be a good idea to support someone who doesn't think the word "socialism" is an epithet. Imagine that."
>
>Whether "socialism" is an epithet is U.S. society depends not at all on what the illuminati of the left imagine it should mean to people, but what it does, in fact, mean to masses of people.

WHICH masses? The majority of the U.S. population that has, even after the events of the past few weeks, a material interest in the maintenance of imperialist global inequality? Or the substantial minority which socialists (or communists or anti-imperialists) should be trying to organize.

>In my experience, socialism means Big Brother state control of your life, like under Hitler and Stalin, at best, the Gulag or a firing squad at worst -- like under Hitler and Stalin. Unless you get real unlucky and get a Pol Pot and half the population of country gets exterminated in a year or two.

The greatest anti-socialist and anti-communist hysteria in the U.S. occurred at a time when Pol Pot was studying technical subjects at a school in Paris. And I doubt that many people at that time, a few years after WW II, thought of Hitler as a Socialist. I think Joaquin is reading too much right-wing propaganda, or hanging out with a bunch of right-wingers.

The only people I run across who have the attitudes towards "socialism" that Joaquin describes are anarchists.

>This all reminds me of a talk I heard Peter Camejo give a third of a century ago, as best I remember. He was speaking to a Young Socialist Alliance convention, motivating signing up for petitioning teams to put the SWP on the ballot in as many states as possible, and relating his experiences petitioning in upstate New York in 1960 to meet a "distribution" requirement.

New York had a rule back then that, to get on the statewide ballot, you had to have at least 50 signatures from each county, including small rural counties far from New York, Buffalo or other concentrations of leftists.

>He explained how you got these statements from the ACLU or a judge or something in favor of third parties being allowed to participate and this being part of democracy and all that, and used that statement on an index card to cover up the name of the party and the candidates at the top of the petition sheet. And he related going up to a middle aged woman and recounted the motherhood-and-apple-pie spiel he presented --basically, if you didn't sign, you were a Benedict Arnold running guns to the Brits at the Battle of Bunker Hill and trying to sink Washington's rowboat while crossing the Potomac-- and the woman was just about to sign when she hesitated and said, "you're not communists, are you?"
>
>And Peter, play acting himself, put on an outraged face and said, feigning tremendous offense, "Excuse Me!!!!"
>
>To which, as he related it, the woman replied, "of course not," and signed.

The trouble with Peter, at least back then when I knew him, was that he was just as dishonest in dealing with his opponents within the movement as he was with the class enemy.

>IN FACT, the whole "socialism" bit is a dodge. The correct dictionary term that takes into account the history and etymology of the terms for the followers of Marx is NOT "socialists" but COMMUNISTS. Properly speaking, not in popular terms, "Socialists" are social reformers who want to ameliorate the evils of capitalism BUT NOT carry out a revolution to establish a community of goods. The latter are the communists, and that is the difference between the two currents going way back to Marx's time and before.

I hate to argue with Joaquin Webster, but the only people I've come across or read about who considered themselves "communists" but not "socialists" were anarchist communists and, perhaps, council communists and other left critics of Leninism.

>Marx and Engels were never comfortable with the term "socialist" and somewhat chagrined that it came to be identified with their followers, as Engels made a point of stressing late in his life in the introductions to the Communist Manifesto, if I remember right.

I haven't been able to locate this, and it seems a strange thing for somebody to say who had, around that time or later, written a pamphlet entitled "Socialism: Utopian and Scientific".

>Those who insist on proudly bearing the euphemistic label "socialist" as a matter of principle should, of course, listen to Eli.
>
>Those who aspire to BE *communists* should listen INSTEAD to Marx and Engels, when they explain that communism is not a DOCTRINE but a MOVEMENT.

Or, as comrade Bernstein taught, "the movement is everything, the goal, nothing".

>AND WHY, in the German Revolution of 1848, they took to the field of battle as "Democrats" -- that was the actual word they used -- and consciously DID NOT present themselves as "communists," in FACT, to the end of their days they believed it would have been sectarian idiocy to do so.

Yes, I read their famous work from that time, "The Democratic Manifesto"! Unfortunately, I can't locate a copy.

>Joaquin

 - Aaron