In a message dated 7/24/2004 12:50:39 PM Central Standard Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
>I think your last reply to donoloc was the clearest expression yet of your formulation of the problem of the transition to socialism and its limits in the industrial system, including the sources of counter-revolutionary restoration. Howeevr, there needs to be some debate and development of a response to the implication that socialism is doomed and communism impossible -- until when? how? Are we condemned to die fighting for a noble but lost cause?< Reply Part of the politics of engagement with our class enemy on a hostile economic terrain reminds me of the glory of John Brown and Harpers Ferry. Abolitionists propaganda and the antislavery cause was fought out for more than half a century before the Civil War. We have engaged the class enemy in distant corners of the world and on the most difficult terrain right here in the good ole US of A. Ideological firmness and individual political will to resist and fight is very important. We are abolitionists on the side of the proletariat. It has been traditional to date the antislavery abolitionists movement from William Lloyd Garrison began publication of The Liberator, the great abolitionist newspaper in Boston at 1831. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4i2982.html My personal view of the social process dates the leap . . . or transition that would become the rise of the abolitionists movement . . . at 1790 when more than 30,000 slaves were freed in the North when the market collapsed and slavery simply was uneconomical. In the literary sense "Walkers Appeal" - 1829 represents the polarization of the abolitionists movement with Walker on the extreme "left" or calling for the immediate abolition of slavery. David T. Walker was part of the free community of blacks in Boston . . . home and birth place of The Liberator. The abolition of slavery was historically inevitable as a consequence of the growth of productive forces and the internal boundary and limits of slave (manual) labor and became a political antagonism with industrial relations in the North. The political antagonism was 300,000 slaveholders calling the economic and political shots for the entire country which had different economic and social needs. The overthrow of slavery had to be fought for. It was not a lost cause. Even after slavery was overthrown the conditions of the ex-slaves remained the same or got worse with the defeat of Reconstruction and remained in this state until the mechanization of agriculture provided Southern agriculture with the economic legs to stand upon. The African American masses have waged a determined and militant struggle against oppression and exploitation . . . in unison with millions of whites . . . but we are still faced with the objective logic of history. Every social revolution must proceed from, stand upon and develop from an economic revolution. It is not possible to truly liberate slaves or proletarians without replacing them with more efficient energy. At the time of Emancipation, there was no such economic revolution in the means of production connected to Southern agriculture. Here we face the materiality of the dialectic of transition in the flesh. The only way to truly free the proletariat as a class is by breaking its connection in production and this cannot be done until more efficient forms of energy - an advance technological regime emerges, that renders huge sector of labor superfluous to the production process or the production of commodities. Such a moment in history has finally appeared. In this sense one can speak of the destruction of value and the unraveling of the commodity form. To destroy value requires social revolution on the basis of the new technological regime that cannot gain supremacy because of the bourgeois property relations. The bourgeoisie is hitting the historical wall. Melvin P. If We Must Die If we must dieâlet it not be like hogs Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot, While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs, Making their mock at our accursed lot. If we must dieâoh, let us nobly die, So that our precious blood may not be shed In vain; then even the monsters we defy Shall be constrained to honor us though dead! Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe; Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave, And for their thousand blows deal one death blow! What though before us lies the open grave? Like men weâll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back. --Claude McKay, 1922 This email was cleaned by emailStripper, available for free from http://www.papercut.biz/emailStripper.htm _______________________________________________ Marxist-Leninist-List mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/marxist-leninist-list
