Editorial: The Revolutionary Role of the Human Mind ”I freed a thousand slaves. I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.” - Harriet Tubman, abolitionist and a conductor on the underground railroad. The historical truth of Harriet Tubman's words applies, not only to those held in human bondage, but also, to the indispensable role of the human mind in human liberation. She and the other abolitionists who fought to end slavery knew that as long as white Americans believed in, or complacently accepted, the existence of human slavery the country would never be able to free itself from the tyrannical and immoral sway of the slave power. They took every instance of injustice and cruelty and forced America to look not only at the barbarity of human bondage, but to look at itself, to judge itself against the ideals it espoused to the world. They forced whites to see that none could be free while millions remained in bondage. In so doing, they played the role of revolutionaries throughout history - freeing the mind to envision a different world, making possible the creation of something new. Society today is undergoing a great and perilous transition, or leap, one far more profound and far reaching than the transition to industry which began the break up of the slave order. The article “Capitalism” examines the inner workings of capitalism and explores this shift and its meaning for revolutionaries. Electronic production has introduced a radically new means of production into the economy that is destroying capitalism – the current stage of private property. As the report of the LRNA Standing Committee “Private Property or Communism?” shows this revolutionary new technology wreaks havoc wherever it is introduced, tearing up the old order, and creating the possibility of a break in the continuity of private property itself. A new society will have to be built. But what will that society be and in whose interests will it be constructed? The American people will not be able to resolve this question in their favor unless they hold a vision of where they want to go and what they want to be. Revolutionaries are like the abolitionists of old, called to unshackle the mind, disseminate a vision of what is possible, and a strategy for its realization. As conditions grow worse, and they see their futures slipping away the American people are becoming more discontented, more restive. Yet, the American people still yearn to believe, are still tied by a million threads to the capitalists, are still vulnerable to their hope that their lives will be salvaged somehow and all will be as it was, or even how it was promised. full: _http://www.lrna.org/2-pt/v18ed4art3.html_ (http://www.lrna.org/2-pt/v18ed4art3.html)
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