Carrol wrote: >> Why Do Popular Movements Vanish? >> >> And Do They Have To? >> >> >> >> Marxist-Humanist Initiative invites you to a two-part exploration of the >> recent history of failed revolts, and the questions they raise for the > future. > > Bull shit. People have to go back to work eventually: they can't stay in the > streets forever.
People should not reflect. People should not problematize the world. They just should know. Everything is so obvious. Except that people keep seeing *this* as a problem, because *it is* a problem! This is our recurrent problem, the problem of working people sustaining the political initiative, on which most everything hinges, which is the problem of "organization," the problem of creating robust, lasting structures and the problem of the relationship between the organs of representation on the one side of these structures and their constituencies on the other side. Resolving this issue concretely, i.e. in dealing with concrete situations, learning from concrete experience, is something that will recur whether Carrol gets impatient with it or not. Time for a re-plug of S&S, 2012, 76-4: The old problem of the "revolution in permanence" (again, of sustaining the combative momentum of the workers' movement in Europe in the conditions of the late 19th century and early 20th century) that puzzled Mehring, Kautsky, Lenin, Luxemburg, Trotsky, Parvus, et alia is the subject of an ongoing debate on S&S. Here's David Laibman describing it. I do not necessarily share David's negative comparison with today's left. I think if a solution to this problem exists, we're much closer to get to it than Mehring and all those people ever were. And before letting you alone with the quote, I should add that by "solution" I do not mean a definitive solution (which would be some convergence to the communist nirvana), but a way of motion, a dialectical (Heinrich says you should ask me what I mean by this!) solution to the contradiction. So, again, here's David: "Sometimes a book review becomes more than a book review (this is a different matter entirely from a book review becoming bigger than it should be!). We asked Lenin scholar Lars Lih to review the important new book edited by Richard Day and Daniel Gaido, Witnesses to Permanent Revolution: The Documentary Record, and what emerged was a major re-reading of the 'permanent revolution' concept, as it appeared in the thinking of German and Russian Social Democrats in the early decades of the last century. Lih’s position is controversial -- how could it not be? -- and we anticipate further rounds of debate. Here I will just record my sense of the richness of this discussion, and of how sophisticated, in certain ways, thinkers like Kautsky, Lenin, Mehring, Luxemburg, Ryazanov and Trotsky were, in comparison to present-day left conceptualizations." http://www.scribd.com/doc/130556744/Science-Society-Vol-76-No-4 _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
