Dear Editor
Dear Editor Marx Mixup Gus Tyler's "Evolution of a Millennium" (NL, October 18) is yet another tour de force by The New Leader's resident polymath. His historical analysis is cogent and fully...
...Does this include Germany...
...But Marx did clearly lay down the guidelines for the kind of society that should follow the proletariat's achieving power...
...The U.S...
...Mixed Messages In "Lessons of World War I" (NL, September 20-October 4) Michael Lind rightly criticizes the Great War revisionism of Pat Buchanan, Niall Ferguson and others...
...Make that today's Germany...
...Would that this would occur in the new millennium...
...He did believe great social movements produce great men, and that he was one of the chosen...
...He asked: "Can global revisionism be far behind...
...By the "revisionism" of the Federal Republic of Germany, I meant its goal— shared by the United States—of replacing the Cold War order by bringing Eastern Europe, Eurasia and ultimately other regions into the expanding circle of social-market democracies...
...San Francisco, Cai Anthony D'Agostino Michael Lind replies : I believe now, as I did in 1991, that Germany, Japan and possibly India belong on the Security Council along with the United States, Russia, Britain, France and Communist China...
...have been willing to promise Russia the Straits of the Dardanelles and Bosporus, as Britain and France eventually did...
...Should the American fleet have taken Kiaochow from Germany by force...
...Has Lind changed his views...
...should have beefed up Britain's decision to make ententes with the Franco-Russian alliance...
...Shaping the society to come, to use Kugler's words, would be the "task of the working class itself...
...This indeed is fruitful conjecture, but it cannot be imposed from above...
...The European great powers at the turn of the century were not in the same bedraggled state as in 1945...
...He does not stop there...
...The future will no doubt hold somethingfar different...
...He argues that Imperial Germany could and should have been faced down at the turn of the century "by an American-led alliance...
...I, for one, believe that the current globalization of capitalist enterprise is ushering in a worldwide counterforce to the "free market" and the "bottom line...
...In The Communist Manifesto, he writes: "The proletariat will use its political supremacy to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralize all instruments of production in the hands of the state...
...I fear that what we have here is a rather woolly attempt to project upon the past some reflexes of the U.S.-Soviet confrontation in the Cold War...
...Does this mean the U.S...
...Yet one might wonder...
...He analyzed historical forces and predicted what could happen...
...Backed Britain against the Boers...
...He described the class antagonism between labor and capital as being rooted in the arrogation of "surplus value" produced by labor...
...the means of production and exchange would instead be collectively owned by 'the people,' either through producer cooperatives, through government ownership in a democracy, or a mixture of the two...
...Should the U.S...
...In describing Marx' contribution, however, Tyler falls into an error that has been repeated by many "Marxists" and "non-Marxists...
...In a New York Times OpEd piece in 1991, Lind noted that "The new Germany, like its predecessors, has proved that it is a revisionist power, intent on reshaping Europe...
...This unthreatening form of geopolitical revisionism resembles the revisionism of Imperial Germany as little as the Federal Republic's government and society resemble those of the Kaiserreich...
...And how would that have prevented war with Germany and Austria...
...Tyler then goes on to state that "when the economy was socialized, when—in effect—there was no longer a capitalist class as distinguished from a working class...
...Supported the Anglo-Russian spheres of influence in Persia...
...His historical analysis is cogent and fully applicable to our world today...
...The Cold War was a time of unique situations and unique victories...
...should send the message that "elites reminiscent of Imperial Germany's" should not "even think" about embarking on a path of aggression in the future...
...Supported French revanchism on Alsace...
...should approve of Germany's ambitions, he said, "because the U.S., too, is a revisionist power...
...All kinds of theoreticians—Eduard Bernstein, Karl Kautsky, Rosa Luxemburg, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and even George Bernard Shaw—had their schémas of what the workers should do...
...Queens, N. Y. Israel Kugler Giis Tyler replies: Israel Kugler is quite right when he says that Marx was, in the first instance, someone who analyzed forces in history rather than someone who wrote prescriptions for a future utopia...
...There is one movement that can embody this drive toward a humane society: the organized free labor movement...
...I expected readers of my New York Times Op-Ed to recognize the irony of the comparison...
...To best understand its challenges, it would be useful to make a more sober effort to understand the past...
...I hope so...
...Marx never "proposed revolutionizing the economic system so that the working people would get the full fruits of their labor...
...None of them had labor in the key positions of the struggle, developing proposals and democratically pursuing the control of society...
...Lind says the U.S...
...Marx proclaimed that the liberation of the working class was the task of the working class itself...
...He lays out 10 specific steps that are to be taken after the proletarian revolution, including the "abolition of property in land," the "abolition of all rights of inheritance," and the "centralization of credit in the hands of the state...
...He never drew a blueprint of what would and should happen to the means of production and exchange...
...Today, of course, it is fashionably facile to say that the notion of a Socialist society is a thing of the past...
...And doesn't his counterfacrual speculation go a bit overboard...
...Marx did not believe great men made great social movements...
Vol. 82 • November 1999 • No. 14
