[DEBATE] : Re: (Fwd) Crit of new UK climate blahblah

[Dominic Tweedie]

I don't think you can separate good reforms from bad reforms so easily.
There are no reforms that are purely revolutionary, obviously. Nor is there
any revolution that springs in a single leap to permanent completeness
without any subjective process.

If reform was Bernstein's substitute for revolution, then imaginary
revolution as a substitute for reform simply takes us another step further
away.

Rosa is a saying that there is no dichotomy. Reform is part of revolution,
or nothing. Nor can there be revolution without reform.

We have to work with the historical processes as they exist and the
subjective social reality as it is, and move in a dialectical way towards
the opening up of revolutionary possibilities. This includes the ripening of
all bourgeois processes for all of those who are in pre-bourgeois
circumstances. For example "land to the tiller", even if the peasants and
other petty bourgeois are likely to get "mown" by the big bourgeoisie as
Rosa puts it later in the book.

This book of Rosa's is really very good.


-----Original Message-----
From: debate-bounces at lists.kabissa.org
[mailto:debate-bounces at lists.kabissa.org]On Behalf Of Patrick Bond
Sent: 31 October 2006 07:10 AM
To: debate: SA discussion list
Subject: [DEBATE] : Re: (Fwd) Crit of new UK climate blahblah

Dominic Tweedie wrote:
> >From the Introduction to "Reform or Revolution?" by Rosa Luxemburg:
> ...
> "The question of reform or
> revolution, of the final goal and the movement, is basically, in another
> form, but the question of the petty-bourgeois or proletarian character of
> the labour movement."
>
Full respect to Rosa here, but the point isn't just about the dangers of
petit-bourgeois conceptions of 'win-win' 'market solutions to market
problems' that we so often hear from carbon-traders and their supporters
in Greenpeace and similar groups. Moreover, opposition to Brown's carbon
trading isn't going to come from a philosphically purist, proletarian
labour movement. I was driving at something that can be argued within
the radical petit-bourgeois array of forces I tend - for good or bad -
to inhabit when emailing, namely, that some reforms strengthen
capitalist hegemony; and some weaken it. I wish the SACP would address
this division, when thinking through strategies of financial sector
reform, for instance - I think that's been a particularly serious waste
of resources and legitimacy for Communists - but stand to be corrected,
Dominic.