This kind of discussion is esactly what I got on this list for. I think
Mark is essentially right, and incredibly eloquent in the bargain. I hope
I am not a disabled Marxist, but a realistic one.
That said, I have to unsubscribe for a while, I'm going to be in Mexico
and Haiti until March, and completely out of contact with my computer, I'm
afraid, and I'd never have the time to catch up with the thousands of posts
when I get back. So when I get back, I'll eagerly scan the archived material.
I wish everyone the best, and hope progress is made. I also hope people
aren't getting off the list because of "ideology." It's honestly not a bad
word, and it can't be considered a distraction. No political issue could
be more critical in some respects. But politics is about power is about
struggle. Ideology does matter, because incorrect ones lead to ineffective
strategies. We must struggle over this. It's part of the process.
It's, as Frederick Douglas pointed out, the necessary storm to get the rain.
Best to all.
Please unsubscribe.
Stan
At 01:12 AM 8/12/00 +0100, you wrote:
>Tom Warren wrote:
>
>> 1. Is the discussion/deconstruction of Marxism heading anywhere?
>
>Tom, yes, some people have unsubbed (others have joined). People who are
>bored by this discussion can go away. If there is some other list where
>people discuss the crash in a better or more focussed way, I'll unsub and go
>there myself. I don't know of such a list. I get as irritated as anyone with
>perambulatory discussions, verbal muggings with other people's ideological
>baggage etc. But I'm also guilty of these things. This is an open list. The
>criterion for being here is that you believe that the capitalist
>world-system is unsustainable and that this is a problem for us in our own,
>contemporary, time and not one that we can defer to our grandchildren's
>time. Most people still don't believe this and even most people on this list
>only believe it some of the time. There is a psychological self-defence
>here: if we believed it all of time, we'd be institutionalised.
>
>We have to move forward together, but we have to take people with us. We are
>living in a unique moment in history; human use of fossil fuels can only
>encompass a period of 2-300 years, it's (as has been said before) like a
>flash of light in the deep darkness of geological time, both before and
>after us. We are right at the end of that period, right at the cusp of
>profound and terrible change. Most people are sleepwalking thru it. Those of
>us who are wakeful must try to learn what we can and to rouse the folks
>around us, but not lose our dignity, humanity and sense of proportion in the
>process. We must help each other to do this. I think that people in 50 years
>time will retrospectively boggle at the generalised insanity of these
>Gadarene times, but those of us who see the moment for what it is will later
>on look like beacons of sanity.
>
>I don't think we should be hubristic or crazy enough to be system builders.
>None of the systems I've seen, avoid obvious flaws in logic or historical
>understanding (or grasp of human psychology). We are no more capable of
>planning futureworlds than Thomas More was. What we can do, and should do,
>is relentlessly analyse and fixate the everyday world we live in, and make
>it transparent and intuitively explicable to others. And we should focus on
>prefiguring the alternative future we seek, not in terms of policy
>prescription (no-one in power today is going to enact our policies anyway)
>but in terms of creating institutes of accord and understanding, in terms of
>celebrating the things that are divine about the merely human (even if God
>too is only our own invention, we are part of the material world whose laws
>we inhabit and inherit, and if the laws of nature are not arbitrary, but
>fixed and determinate, then that in itself is a great cause for hope).
>
>I've just been reading Heidegger on technology and I've reached the
>conclusion that in one important respect, Heidegger was right: the search
>for ultimate states where all is known and predictable, is also a natural
>human concern for the avoidance of suffering, but it is inherently
>unrealisable. There is no ultimate state (capitalist or socialist) which we
>can either imagine, or which is within history's gift to bestow, and where
>everyone is secure, where technology delivers even immortality and all the
>great existential questiosn are somehow answered or us. That is a definition
>of hell, not utopia, and this too is why we should not be system-builders.
>
>. What we can do (all that we can do) is militantly combat the injustice,
>corruption and egotism of the present and do so without hope of reforming
>the present, but in the real hope and expectation of forestalling
>catastrophe by overturning the present. Either there will be a sustainable,
>just and humane and tolerant human lifeworld, or our species will be extinct
>and the planet will revert to the unconscious blackness that existed before
>us. It seems self-evident to me that we cannot survive unless we substitute
>cooperation for competition, and a profound sense of solidarity for the
>solipsism of capitalist society. These values have to be instituted at the
>heart of collective consciousness, they have to become the everyday frame of
>reference for every individual's lived life.
>
>It is obvious that the states we live in are corrupt and empty machines and
>have to be destroyed. But that can only happen when huge numbers of people
>do not only passively resist, but actively impose a different framework.
>Conspiracies do not work. Only mass activity works, and that requires
>seismic changes in mass consciousness. We have to work patiently and
>systematically to achieve this. We have to appeal to self-interest, and show
>people that for instance that the reason gas prices are hiked and brownouts
>are deepening is more fundamental than Saudi geopolitics.
>
>We are so weak and marginal, our voice is so drowned out, that we have no
>chance even to be heard, unless our core message is true and is dramatically
>confirmed by events. But if we are right (we are) then we will be heard, and
>that is why we have to work very hard now to make sure we are saying the
>right things, that our arguments are unanswerable and our principles are
>invincible.
>
>I agree with you that what fatally disables most "Marxist" and also most
>green thinking is the
>
>>sense that what is implied is that it is a settled issue that
>> �Malthus was wrong� and that �there is no doom approaching�.
>
>That complacency is within us too and we have to intransigently fight it.
>
>Mark
>
>
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"If insurrection is an art, its main content is to know how to give the
struggle the form appropriate to the political situation."
-Vo Nguyen Giap
"Rather than seeking comparabilities in statistical terms among what are
all too often superficial features of different situations, comparabilities
must be sought at the level of determinate mechanisms, at the level of
processes that are generally hidden from easy view."
-Eleanor Burke Leacock
"Every day one has to struggle that this love to a living humanity
transform itself into concrete acts, in acts that serve as examples, as
motivation."
-Ernesto "Che" Guevara
"Mask no difficulties."
-Amilcar Cabral
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