Doug asks:
Can Marxists be funny? Lou, you're a Marxist and you're funny, but why has the Marxist left (at least in the U.S.) been so fucking drab?
Charles - I agree that this is ,well, an important issue. Fun is important. Sounds silly when you say it, but that's part of the problem.
I propose a Boston Tea Party of a new type because there clearly is an American revolutionary sense of humor at work in that event. Marx in his portrait of LIncoln (posted earlier) emphasizes Lincoln's sense of humor in the manner in which Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, referancing Hegel to the affect that humorous logic is superior to grandiloquent logic, which I take to be tragic or melodramatic logic.
Then there is the Detroit Cabaret, the old mardi gras of the people idea.
Angela Davis' current book is on three "cabaret singers", Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday. She treats them as sort of organic, culturally subversive intellectuals. Their methods involve a lot of fun. They really knew how to party. I think Angela's message is in part that the left must learn how to be less drab and a drag, boring the hell out of the working class.
Hey, Doug and Lou, how about a party once in a while on the lists ? One idea would be a masquerade party, where people have to do different intellectual personalities than they ususally do, that is wear "masks" ? Also, sometime I could give a lecture on Marxism-Chicken Little-ism and the sun burning up and the sky falling in. This would be part of my theory of crisis.