On 2013-09-16, at 3:10 PM, raghu wrote: > On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 1:25 PM, Julio Huato <[email protected]> wrote: > Abstractions like peace, bread, and land? > > I'd like to hear Carrol elaborate. I'd agree with the assertion that "Real > struggle has always been about abstractions. Never about so-called "concrete > needs."". > > To me that would mean abstractions like justice, but Carrol has been known to > reject such moralizing notions.
However, people have supplied their own content to abstractions like "justice" and "freedom", encapsulated in slogans and demands reflecting their concrete needs - most famously, peace, land, and bread, as Julio notes. But they have also rallied for the right to vote, to speak, to publish, and to assemble, and to organize unions and political parties; for shorter hours, a living wage, safe and healthy workplaces and neighbourhoods; against discrimination on basis of race, sex, and other factors; for material support when old, unemployed, ill, impoverished, or disabled, and so on. Whether these demands result in a revolutionary struggle for power or reforms of a major or minor character mainly depends on the balance of class forces in the society and the capacity of the existing system to satisfy them at least in part. Intellectuals, on the other hand, are typically drawn to these domestic and international struggles on the basis of their sustained exposure to ideas rather th! an their direct experience of the material conditions which give rise to them. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
