Re: [PEN-L] Response to Stan Goff

[Waistline2]

> I like Daniel's statement, but I can think of another, less important reason -- how imperialism deforms imperial societies.  Both victories and defeats have negative consequences. <     Comment     Bingo!   But even this statement runs the risk of being misunderstood, given our status as the most imperial of all imperial sectors of the world. Sure, there is much data to support the conclusion that economic dislocation and crisis creates an environment for political revolution (and the fascist onslaught), but our deformity as a society and more importantly, how the peoples of America, in their class and stratification's, experience this alienating impact is extremely important.     Most of us over 50 were won over to Marxism and the idealism associated with a vision of a new society on the basis of a profound sense of morality and we should never forget this. We may have been catalyzed by the dimensions of the Civil Rights Movement or the antiwar movement or even the struggle for industrial democracy, as we understood it, or even the demand for economic equality and parity with people doing the same work, or gender equality demands, but it was a sense of idealism and an awareness of the absence of something better that inspired and drives a person for a lifetime.   I am convinced beyond doubt that it is fundamental to win a broad cross section of the people over to the idea that it is nobler and lofty . . . yea, lofty, to ensure the creation of an economic and social bottom beyond which the individual cannot fall, even if they wanted to.     And today . . . in the real world, this is affordable. It is a general truth that no one starves to death in America. Crime is connected to poverty not family values because any individual can commit crime but we taking about the prison industry and spending $45,000 to jail a person but have crying bloody murder about having no money for schools. If the penal system ain't a state and local issue then schools aint a state and local issue.   I think we can advocate a Third Edition of the American Revolution - in those terms, and the peoples of America will listen to this. Bush W. is not advocating a Third Edition of the American Revolution but fascism - flat out police state everything, because he is scared that more freedom means the end of the last form of slavery in America and our old way of life.   Even if some folks outside America do not adequately understand the specific of the evolving political struggles in an advance post industrial society, this should not stop us from doing what we intuitively understand about our country and society. In a mature bourgeois constitutional regime, and America is the benchmark, rather than Russia or "Europe," the social struggle cannot take the form of class against class as in workers against capitalist because of the stratification of the workers themselves. As American society passes out of the industrial era, the fight takes the form of class segments colliding in on themselves, because the workers are not and cannot be economically equal to one another.     Various segments of the working class strive to shape society in its image and based on it's own transition from the old industrial order to the new unshaped social order. This means that segments of the working class have to be won over to a general common vision of freedom. Our own history has to be the index. All who took part in the destruction of the slave system were not necessarily interested in the personal freedom of the slave. In fact a huge segment of people hated the slave as their direct competitor and some folks felt that it was important to obey the law and until slavery was outlawed fighting against it made no sense. Some opposed slavery on moral grounds because they felt it was not the will of God.   The point is that we cannot rely upon anything other than doing what we sense and know to be true to our own history.   We forget from time to time that the terrorist of our past, were stated to be men like John Brown and Shield's. Freedom is the solution to terrorism, even when it does not look like it is.   And yes . . . some folks are going to campaign to Vote Democrat for this election. So What! Half the time I do not vote and simply do not care about voting in the main, as an individual.     Melvin P.