From the monthly archives: July 2011
Joe McDonnell
“And you dare to call me a terrorist
while you looked down your gun
When I think of all the deeds that you had done
You had plundered many nations,
divided many lands
You had terrorised their peoples,
you ruled with an iron hand.
And you brought this reign of terror to my land.”
My good friend Aaron Ptkf found these great quotations from Friedrich Engels responding to claims that Marx and Engel’s materialist conception of history reduces all to economics and economics alone.
“According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. [...]
”Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasize the main principle vis-à-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction.” - Frederich Engels to J. Bloch (1890)
”Hanging together with this too is the fatuous notion of the ideologists that because we deny an independent historical development to the various ideological spheres which play a part in history we also deny them any effect upon history. The basis of this is the common undialectical conception of cause and effect as rigidly opposite poles, the total disregarding of interaction; these gentlemen often almost deliberately forget that once an historic element has been brought into the world by other elements, ultimately by economic facts, it also reacts in its turn and may react on its environment and even on its own causes.” – Friedrich Engels to Mehring (1893)
“Thereby the Bolsheviks solved the famous problem of “winning a majority of the people,” which problem has ever weighed on the German Social-Democracy like a nightmare. As bred-in-the-bone disciples of parliamentary cretinism, these German Social-Democrats have sought to apply to revolutions the home-made wisdom of the parliamentary nursery: in order to carry anything, you must first have a majority. The same, they say, applies to a revolution: first let’s become a “majority.” The true dialectic of revolutions, however, stands this wisdom of parliamentary moles on its head: not through a majority, but through revolutionary tactics to a majority – that’s the way the road runs.” – Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, 1918
“We are engaged in a social, political, and cultural war. There’s a lot of talk in America about pluralism. But the bottom line is somebody’s values will prevail. And the winnergets the right to teach our children what to believe.” – Gary Bauer, conservative Republican candidate for president 2000
“A new survey from Insite Security and IBOPE Zogby International of those with liquid assets of $1 million or more found that 94% of respondents are concerned about the global unrest around the world today.”
(Source: WSJ.com: “Why The Rich Fear Violence in the Streets“, 6 July 2011)
Rachel Maddow calls for the assassination of Libyan journalists!
“[I]t’s hard to keep potent historical truths bottled up forever. New data repositories are uncovered. New, less ideological generations of historians grow up. In the late 1980s and before, Ann Druyan and I would routinely smuggle copies of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution into the USSR – so our colleagues could know a little about their own political beginnings.” – Carl Sagan
Some pictures from the final rally and plenary at Socialism 2011: Revolution in the Air.
For audio and video of talks at the conference, visit WeAreMany.org.
“It is further to be recognised that, since a deterministic and mechanical conception of history has wide currency (a common-sense conception bound up with the passivity of the great popular masses), single individuals (seeing that, despite their non-intervention, something nonetheless happens) are led to think that in actual fact there exists above them a phantom entity, the abstraction of the collective organism, a species of autonomous divinity that thinks, not with the head of a specific being, yet nevertheless thinks, that moves, not with the real legs of a person, yet still moves, and so on. [...]
A collective consciousness, which is to say a living organism, is formed only after the unification of the multiplicity through friction on the part of the individuals; nor can one say that ‘silence’ is not a multiplicity. An orchestra tuning-up, every instrument playing by itself, sounds a most hideous cacophony, yet these warm-ups are the necessary condition for the orchestra to come to life as a single ‘instrument’.” – Antonio Gramsci, Q15§13
With the warmest regard for the labour, courage, and memory of Tatiana Schucht, Gramsci’s sister-in-law, without whose efforts to preserve Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks past both Mussolini and Stalin’s censors, at great threat to herself, we would have lost a great communist corpus.
Socialist Politics:
Recommended Readings
