BBC Radio 3 in general

[Serial_Apologist]

....well they won Euro's and World Cup a few year back....

[eighthobstruction]

....Yep the 5th Republic has supplied the best football....

[Serial_Apologist]

... and what would 'success' mean anyway?

As often I go back to the French Revolution - do we see the Terror, Napoleon, France post-1815, - as 'a success' in any way that the intellectuals and others behind 1789 might see it?

.

Probably wrongly and by dint of ignorance I don't go back that far for ideological explication. My so-called school education taught me that the indirect strategic and tactical operational subtleties of the British in exercising colonial power had conferred comparative "domestic" advantages and encouraged the landed gentry in taking a stake in the new capitalism. By contrast the colonial direct control French were disadvantaged in coming late to the capitalist feast and by the sharper part-resulting dividing line between the aristocracy and the new bourgeoisie; hence the violent revolution, hence the founding British principle of change by gradualism. In both cases fundamentalist Marxists would see the end results, namely the establishment of capitalism as a "necessary" staging post on the way to eventual socialism etc, as both successful and justifying the means deployed.

I did have a pamphlet outlining a debate between Trotsky and the American liberal philosopher Dewey on the "ends justifying means" principle. it was never returned, but from what I recall Trotsky argued the case in favour. The argument falls, this being one of several reasons why I fell out with Trotskyism in the early 1980s and have since had misgivings over a number of hubristics in Marxism in part unfortunately attributable to the old man himself - one being that oppressed people will always fight back, another implying that no matter by what means the ends will always be in justification. Hence Lenin's injunction to the Irish Republicans in 1916 when the balance of forces objectively favoured British goals leading to where we are today; hence Scargill's bending NUM strike faciltating rules to maintain a doomed struggle to save pits; hence (from sublime to ridiculous) long prison sentences for Stop Oil protesters. A little paperback by Geoff Hodgson of 1975 titled Trotsky and Fatalistic Marxism had a transforming impact on me. Leaving aside overlooking the realities that people are changed, de-humanised psychologically let alone materially by what they may do in the name of justice, the fact of the entire leadership of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution having been wiped out by Stalin's shown trials and GUP operations abroad are lessons many who still argue for revolution over reform catastrophically overlook.

Notwithstanding Mr Hodgson's subsequent employment as an economic advisor to New Labour, one can still, I think, be a thinking Marxist while not over-claiming on a number of its basic assumptions, especially when they have been too often amenable to use as quasi-religious substitutes. I could elaborate but I'll leave it at that.