I'm afraid that I haven't had the time to read all of the
contributions to the Marxism/Stalinism/Foucault debate, but I want to
express my opinion anyway, since I have read enough to see what the
issues are.
Marx suggested that "every shopkeeper knows enough to distinguish a
person (or an economic system) from its opinion of itself." Obviously
we may now say that he was too optimistic. Today, at least in Time
magazine, and in most university lecture halls, "a socialist economy"
is usually defined as any economy governed by a state with a
red-coloured flag.
By this, the STANDARD criterion of "socialism" according to most
intellectuals and TV pundits, the United States would turn socialist
tomorrow if the Democratic and Republican Parties changed their names
to the "People's Democratic Party" and the "Socialist Republican
Party" respectively, and if the US flag was replaced with a red flag
covered with 50 yellow stars.
Ultimately, the key here is to distinguish between nominalist
"socialism" and essentialist "socialism." If socialism is simply
anything that gets called "socialism" by people who speak fluent
English, then that's fine. But then we have to distinguish between
the hundreds of different sorts of thing that get called that:
German "National Socialism", the British Labour Party, Bismarkian
"State Socialism," Marx's socialism, Mao's, Olympia Dukakis's,
Stalin's, Einstein's, Oscar Wilde's, Gorbachev's, Picasso's, Pol
Pot's, GB Shaw's, Luxemburg's, Mandela's, Zinoviev's, Sartre's,
Negri's, Chomsky's, and William Morris's socialism.
I don't object to the explicit and self-aware use of "socialism" in
this extremely broad and basically vacuous sense. But when one says
that since both Pol Pot and Antonio Negri called themselves
"Communists," therefore they must have had the same politics -- that
is clearly not a thesis that a sensible person could take seriously.
And when one says anything about what "all socialists" or "all
communists" or "all Marxists" say or do or desire, one had better be
saying something vacuous, otherwise one is almost certainly saying
something inaccurate.
If, however, "socialism" is used in an ESSENTIALIST sense, then we are
entitled to say that it means something like "a society in which the
full and free development of every individual forms the ruling
principle" (Marx's definition in the first volume of CAPITAL) or "an
association in which the free development of each is the condition for
the free development of all" (Marx's definition in the COMMUNIST
MANIFESTO). This, though counter-intuitive to readers of Time
magazine (or Lingua Franca, for that matter), has the merit of
actually ruling out some contenders (or pretenders) for the name
"socialism." For example, it rules out Stalinism, "market socialism,"
and "Swedish" social democracy.
As for the idea that everyone who advocates proletarian dictatorship
as a strategy for achieving a society of free human self-development
must be in the grip of some cult of purification or must somehow be
racist, I defer on this question to Foucault:
"When the proletariat takes power, it may be quite possible that the
proletariat will exert towards the classes over which it has just
triumphed, a violent, dictatorial and even bloody power. I can't see
what objection one could make to this. But if you ask me what would
be the case if the proletariat exerted bloody, tyrannical and unjust
power towards itself [i.e., toward working people], then I would say
that this could only occur if the proletariat hadn't really taken
power, but that a class outside the proletariat, a group of people
inside the proletariat, a bureaucracy or petit bourgeois elements had
taken power." (MF, in his debate with Chomsky)
Here Foucault offers an "essentialist" account of worker's power ("the
dictatorship of the proletariat"), and thus rejects the idea that any
red-flag-flying dictatorship counts as a dictatorship of the
proletariat. He agrees with Marx that one must look beyond favoured
public self-descriptions in order to discern the actual character of a
social order. One only counts a social order as a proletarian
dictatorship if it is a social order in which workers are in control
of their workplaces, their communities, their relationships and their
projects of self-invention.
Foucault continues: "What the proletariat will achieve by expelling
the class which is at present in power and by taking over power
itself, is precisely the suppression of the power of class in
general." That is, it is not "purity" that one seeks to attain
through the suppression of exploiting classes, but liberation from
what Marx called "the ossified particularizations of the capitalist
division of labour." That is, one seeks to free oneself, along with
one's fellow workers, from a society in which "each person has a
particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him or
her and from which he or she cannot escape" (Marx, GERMAN IDEOLOGY).
Thus, at least for Marx and Foucault, the dictatorship of the
proletariat is desired, not for the sake of purification, but because
the suppression of exploiting classes is necessary if we are to create
for ourselves what Marx calls a "communist society, where nobody has
one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in
any branch [of activity] he or she wishes" (GERMAN IDEOLOGY).
A concluding word on liberalism: Much of the above holds for
liberalism as wwell as socialism. But notice the difference between
the "subversiveness" of someone like Marx as contrasted with careerist
politicians and TV pundits promoted as "subversive" by someone earlier
on this list (e.g., Jesse Jackson or Camille Paglia[?!]). Marx
actually wants to do things of which rich and powerful people would
disapprove, which ought to be the bare minimum criterion of
"subversion."
Steve D'Arcy
New Socialist Group (Toronto)
(Check out our web page, if you want to read a "real" socialist
publication: http://www.web.ca/~newsoc)