My one true Marxist state

[KXX4493553 at aol.com]

In einer eMail vom 15.07.2002 23:40:49 Westeuropäische Normalzeit schreibt 
lycidas2 at earthlink.net:


> TRP
> is not a Marxist. 

With this I agree. Pynchon has more sympathies with anarchism - even you have 
to be very careful what you say about the "political Pynchon". Good and very 
good literature is no agitprop, thanks God! But do you remember one of the 
most beautiful scenes in a book of P., the scene with the dancing anarchists 
in Crying Lot? The difference betweeen (non-libertarian) anarchism and 
marxism is: the anarchist believes that the masses can act spontaneously, the 
marxists believe they need organisation (with a or without a Communist 
party). And P. is on the side on the anarchists in this point. But I think 
it's his utopia, but he's also a realist, and he shows that the things are 
far more complicated. 

Marxism never had a chance in America, and this has its reason in the 
destruction of the worker's movement in the US (P. speaks a lot about it in 
Vineland), NOT in the cold war and the Mc Carthy era. And this is the main 
difference between the European and the US political culture: it would be 
very interesting to compare the "two cultures" in this point: when an 
American speaks about "state", "market", "communism", "anarchism", 
"liberalism" or whatever s/he never means the same as an European with these 
words/these terms. The terms are coded totally different, and this is the 
source of permanent and constant misunderstandings between Europeans and 
Americans. This all has of course its origin in the history of the worker's 
movement in Europe and America, in Europe it was very strong, and in America 
very weak - cum grano salis. You can say it also the other way round: in 
Europe anarchism never had a chance, because the worker's movement in Europe 
was very state-fixed (see the anarchists in the Spanish civil war and their 
oppression by the communists, especially in Barcelona), already in the 
beginning of the social democrat parties.

Well, a Marxist state is indeed an anachronism, because Marx himself wanted 
that the state should die after a transitional time, and Lenin was already 
cynical and sarcastic as he said the state should be ruled by cookers - at a 
time when he already saw that that would be impossible in "his" soviet union. 
But be careful: Marx said not much about that what he called "communism" - 
his statements about it are more or less diffuse and vague. The rest is 
history as we know it. 

P:'s Europe is a very American one (in GR, in V. a. s. o.). Keep that in mind 
when you speak about him as a "political writer" - there are a lot of 
subtexts in his texts, and they are very open for interpretations.

kwp
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