>>> "THE WORLD SOCIALIST MOVEMENT(via THE SOCIALIST PARTY
So only the great men of history, who have the time to study rather than
work, can make the revolution? The working class is limited to trade union
consciousness not from any lack of will but because they can't put aside
eight hours a day for study of marxist texts? I've been accused of
arrogance before, and sometimes probably rightly, but this is breathtaking.
The road to science is a long and hard one, yes: but I don't have to
recapitulate the works of Faraday, Maxwell and the like every time I switch
on a kettle, or even if I want to make one: the work has been done, and
besides the advance of understanding of the world generally would make the
understanding of a kettle a trivial thing even if it did not yet exist. In
the same way The socialist works which it took literally lifetimes to
produce can be understood with reasonable facility, just as a builder does
not need Pythagoras to use the 3 4 5 triangle rule.
((((((((((((((((
Charles: And I think Marx himself said in some way that he was a dwarf standing on the
shoulders of giants. An important dimension to the accumulation of human knowledge is
that later generations do not have to repeat the whole climb up the steep mountain
that previous generations made, but can shortcut some the prior steps and therefore go
further than the past. In fact, at a basic level every parent generation seeks to
teach its children generation based on its learning from hardknocks so that the
children generation does not have to go through those same hardknocks, so that it can
learn theoretcially what the parents learned practically. The tradition of Marxism
must be able to convey the substance of Marx, Engels, Lenin and the experiences of
actual socialism in a concentrated and synoptic form to the new generations of Marxism
so that they can build on the tradition without starting from scratch. The proverbial
thought is we shouldn't have to reinvent the wheel every g!
eneration.
CB
--- from list [EMAIL PROTECTED] ---
