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I agree with Louis's advice, but understand that the hammer and sickle and iconography of the old USSR carries few of the negatives for people under 30 because it all went belly up over 20 years ago. In fact, I understand how the stuff's actually been largely appropriated by opportunistic yuppies eager to plunder what's left... But this could change overnight if it were worth a minor media and education offensive on it, and I agree entirely, that's its unnecessary baggage. Still, this is Darwinian more than Marxist. But, in any event, the bric-a-brac are NOT our goals but only the symbols of those goals. And they're not really the symbols of our goals to the people we're trying to reach--and to whom we have to make our ideas understood. Finally, we have no way of telling what the symbols of our goals will be in the future. I'd guess that the red flag, which so predates the USSR, will probably reemerge as a fitting symbol for working people, but largely because of its identitifation with struggles abroad against austerity measures, etc..... I also agree with Louis on tapping "our own radical traditions," especially those that emphasize an interracial solidarity without which "proletarian internationalism" in America is and always will be a complete and utter hoax. However, I suspect that those traditions are appreciated far less today than they were even in the 1950s in the wake of the World War which had the effect of riveting working class attention on political and social developments on the grand scale. Since we've not only experienced a pervasive neglect of history...in the culture as in the schools...but also the concerted effort of the power structure to transform American radical traditions into harmless icons... Which is the bottom line, isn't it? Symbols of real, living struggles are important. Iconography isn't. ML ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: [email protected] Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
