Ed note: These were left by Wayne in a comment in yesterday’s posting, but I think they deserve a posting of their own – rwd
To elaborate on this thought-experiment, a re-injection of the Spinozist side of Marx has been vital for a whole series of thinkers attempting to revitalize Marxism. The new emphasis on Spinoza coming out of France and Italy is I think attempt to fully develop the challenge of democracy. Spinoza places the demos or the multitude as the source of power. In Spinoza power comes from below. All of this is in Marx and Marxism, but it is not theoretically into analytic categories.
What I call, following Star Trek, the prime directive, is the idea that the exploited and oppressed have to liberate themselves. Marx, said this any number of times, but it often gets rolled under Marxist economic categories. It also is usually called the dicatatorship of the proletariat and given the histories of dictatorships over the proletariat, it is wise to be careful (if I may understate the case).
The multitude, the masses in action, is the active form of democratic power. The multitude is not a sociological category it exists in the streets when people go out to reclaim their power. It is a kind of anti-theater of collective power.
Socialism is marked by the creations of institutions of mass democratic power or the democratic control over power.
When people chant “this is what democracy looks like” they are calling for a society that is egalitarian in terms of both wealth and power. In our context they are both an active critique of societies that have elections but no longer seem democratic.
I share your reservations about Cuba, so without entering into a specific discussion of Cuba, I want to go into a discussion of metaphysics and politics. Spinoza, is famous for his radical solution to the mind-body problem,for those of you who stumbled onto our discussion hoping for more politics and less theory this is essentially a political discussion. The political point is that the mind-body split is a typical division of power where the leader (the boss under capitilism or the party in socialist politics) takes the position of the mind, and the masses or the working-classes are in the position of the body. So if you start things from the body and refuse a certain conception of the mind-body split it is a way thinking about a world in which people collectively control power or actively participate in the decision process.
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