I want to thank the participants in our debate on antisystemic
movements and offer a few comments on your comments.
To Stephen Sanderson: I appreciate your concurrence.
To Mark Langevin: The so-called antisystemic movements do not "restrict"
capitalism. They expand and strengthen it by addling the consciousness of
millions of people previously ineligible for its so-called benefits. As
in, "Hey, I'm gay [or Chinese or black or female], but I can get rich,
too!" Marx hit the proverbial nail on the head when he wrote in the 1844
Manuscripts that "an enforced increase of wages would therefore be nothing
but better remuneration for the slaves, and would have won, neither for
the worker nor for labor, their human significance and worth." Even
Proudhon's equality of wages would not transform the system. It would
simply turn society into an "abstract capitalist."
To Gernot Kohler: I am not disqualifying anybody and least of all
feminists, so long as they're willing to come on board the revolution.
But let's be sure they're actually ON board and that they know what it
MEANS to be on board. Lenin screwed up, in many ways, but Tony Blair
isn't even trying. Do you really want to argue that the Blairs of the
world have "won" something for socialism just because they win elections?
Were Theodore Roosevelt's "Square Deal" or Franklin Roosevelt's "New Deal"
examples of "successful change" or were they simply engines for helping
capitalism save itself?
To Adam K. Webb: Yes, yes, three cheers for the moral community, but we
need to build a new one, not shackle ourselves to the literally incredible
and fratricidal creeds of earlier civilizations. Faith in what I call the
unity and destiny of humankind is not modern capitalist anomic
individualism. Revisit my sixth point. But it is also not a grab-bag of
conflicting "thick moralities" from the precapitalist past. The
precapitalist past was a bloody time. Most of it needs renouncing, not
reviving. If men and women alive today do not possess, in the vision of a
socialist humanist cosmopolis, the basis for a new and higher moral
community than anything known in history hitherto, then we are damned
indeed. I choose to believe, however, that men and women alive today do,
or can, possess such a vision and that they are capable of living sociably
and productively in a world without property, boundaries, or opiates. Of
course I applaud your post of September 23 in which you inveigh against
"relativistic coexistence" and speak of building "a higher civilisation
blending the best of all worlds," but I fear we may differ on what
constitutes "the best."
To Victor Woronov: You and I may lack a common ground of discourse
because you do not think dialectically and I do. The piecemeal reform of
capitalism is, to me, a pipedream. There are always plenty of capitalists
eager to fill our pipes.
To Nikolai S. Rozov: I agree that we need a consensus on "values of
general significance" and that without such a consensus there is little
possibility of a just world order that can ensure the conservation and
equitable sharing of the earth's resources. This is rather like Webb's
"moral community." But I think we need a richer array of values than
those you cite, an array that would include faith in the unity and common
destiny of humankind and in the commandment, "Thou shalt not exploit thy
fellow being." I also insist that this be a militant and maximal, not a
passive and minimal, faith. We need a faith that will move mountains,
because it is mountains that must be moved! And yes, it would demand
tolerance and respect for human diversity of all kinds--but with one vast
exception: it would withhold respect from faiths that are NOT tolerant of
human diversity. This is where I part company with most of contemporary
multiculturalism. Cultures that would enslave or destroy or marginalize
dissenters and apostates cannot build Cosmopolis.
To Bill Schell: Gradual reform receives another defender. I will let
Webb speak for me here. Gradually transforming the world-system from a
capitalist into a socialist order is very much like the gradual
transformation of a car from right- to left-hand drive.
To Gernot Kohler again: All the above was written before I came across
your post of September 28, with its list of assumptions about the World
Party and its economic program. I agree with those assumptions.
Obviously the World Party would not exist simply to bring about a
socialist world-government: it would have all kinds of programs and
policies on all kinds of global issues, as delineated in part in my SHORT
HISTORY OF THE FUTURE. But I don't see any World Party accomplishing the
goals you mention inside the capitalist world-system with its network of
quasi-sovereign armed states and oligopolistic megacorporations. It is
not in their interest to see most of these goals achieved, and they will
not be achieved so long as the system remains intact.