Monday, July 12, 2004
Some Explaining
I've been meaning to do some explaining about just where this blog is coming from.
The subtitle describes my politics as "pseudo-Marxist" (tongue-in-cheek, don't you know). This is on the basis that I don't think you can in good conscience call yourself a "Marxist" if you haven't read Das Kapital*, which I haven't got around to doing yet, not to mention a reasonable amount of the volumnious "secondary" literature, i.e. "the Marxist tradition". Alternatively I might describe myself as a tentative socialist: socialist, because I believe that the construction of a truly democratic society (i.e. one that is a social and economic democracy, not only a political one, such as exists today) is incompatible with the undemocratic, unaccountable and illegitimate power of capital; tentative, because the task that thus presents itself is a rather daunting one, in all sorts of ways, and given certain historical experiences is probably best approached with caution.
More soon, if you're interested.
*This brings to mind a nice bit from John Banville's The Untouchable, based around the Cambridge spies, which I'm just coming to the end of:
"...the majority of us had no more than the sketchiest grasp of theory. We did not bother to read the texts; we had others to do that for us. The working-class Comrades were the great readers - Communism could not have survived without autodidacts. I knew one or two of the shorter pieces - the Manifesto, of course, that great ringing shout of wishful thinking - and had made a determined start on Kapital - the dropping of the definite article was de rigeur for us smart young men, so long as the pronunciation was echt deutsch - but soon got bored."
The subtitle describes my politics as "pseudo-Marxist" (tongue-in-cheek, don't you know). This is on the basis that I don't think you can in good conscience call yourself a "Marxist" if you haven't read Das Kapital*, which I haven't got around to doing yet, not to mention a reasonable amount of the volumnious "secondary" literature, i.e. "the Marxist tradition". Alternatively I might describe myself as a tentative socialist: socialist, because I believe that the construction of a truly democratic society (i.e. one that is a social and economic democracy, not only a political one, such as exists today) is incompatible with the undemocratic, unaccountable and illegitimate power of capital; tentative, because the task that thus presents itself is a rather daunting one, in all sorts of ways, and given certain historical experiences is probably best approached with caution.
More soon, if you're interested.
*This brings to mind a nice bit from John Banville's The Untouchable, based around the Cambridge spies, which I'm just coming to the end of:
"...the majority of us had no more than the sketchiest grasp of theory. We did not bother to read the texts; we had others to do that for us. The working-class Comrades were the great readers - Communism could not have survived without autodidacts. I knew one or two of the shorter pieces - the Manifesto, of course, that great ringing shout of wishful thinking - and had made a determined start on Kapital - the dropping of the definite article was de rigeur for us smart young men, so long as the pronunciation was echt deutsch - but soon got bored."
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Fair play for your candour about the fact that you are only just dipping your toes into the cold waters of *cough* Marxism.
If you are interested, could I suggest that you check of the website www.worldsocialism.org/spgb - look upon the articles on the site as water wings. ;-)
http://invereskstreet.blogspot.com/
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If you are interested, could I suggest that you check of the website www.worldsocialism.org/spgb - look upon the articles on the site as water wings. ;-)
http://invereskstreet.blogspot.com/
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