From: "Daniel" <drdq at m5.sprynet.com> To: <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Subject: The International Date: Sat, 28 Nov 1998 15:48:43 -0800 MIME-Version: 1.0
Henry's remarks about the "ownership" of another "marxist" list, reminds me of the history(?) of the proletarian anthem. I have no documentary evidence, but I was once told by someone who ought to know that two brothers Degeyter (sp?) met in court to litigate a suit over the ownership rights to the song. Does anybody know anything about this? I've told the story two or three times through the years, and it wouldn't be right to be wrong, since I suppose I do tell it to make a point. If any list would harbor someone knowledgeable about this sort of trivia, I doubt not this list could be one of them. Maybe this someone also knows about the so-called Pierre Degeyter Club (formed sometime in the '30s I guess) for serious American composers with a leftist urge, such as Aaron Copland?
Is it polite just to lurk on a list? I feel that I should introduce myself. I am a musician. I played for twenty years, mostly in "showbiz," but now am able to dedicate myself exclusively to my own music, which I like to call "classically inspired." I confess, I'm a hopeless elitist. Still, whenever I have lived and worked with other people, I have championed one cause or another, if you can call peace a cause, or the musician's union for that matter. Most recently I worked with various people at the so-called Peace Center in Los Angeles, which housed all the groups opposing American policy in Central America. But, that is already almost eight (and more) years ago. My, how time flies.
I read with pleasure, again some years ago, various issues of LBO, and found myself wondering recently what Doug H. might be saying about the crisis. I found his website, and, through it, this list. Since then I've been reading on a pretty much daily basis, never ceasing to be amazed at the sheer volume generated by the participants.
I've enjoyed many of the posts, that's a fact. But, I admit, my daily reading of the list seems to come from the same place as another compulsion that causes me to tune into Dr. Laura whenever I'm in my car. I daresay you could call it fascination. Of course, fascination is a pathetic response, especially when it's roused by the shiny glint of a gun barrel pointing in an inconvenient direction. After all, Dr. Laura certainly rises to the level of a genuine social menace, reaching millions of people every day.
Yet, I have also found the list to be troubling in its own insidious kind of way. I think it is because I have become overly sensitive. I live now in splendid isolation at the top of a mountain in the Sierras. In the little village down the hill I don't ever see homeless people, though of course the poor are always with us, even in the resorts. I don't work for Maggie's Farm no more, driving the freeways back and forth, so I don't have to deal with people being stinkers to each other on a continuing basis. It's true, I do read the papers, but even so it is easy, living close to nature, to get into the sanguine optimism that imagines that somehow and somewhen, something new might come into life, something original and free, something fresh and clean that might alter the human equation, drawing us all in a kinder direction.
Sometimes when I read the list, dark moments come so that I sigh and say, it cannot be. It is, as the poets often say, as if this life is a stage play, each of us playing a pre-assigned role. The denouement is already written. So little has changed in the years that I have been, allow me to say, politically conscious (roughly since the sixties). And, now, having been "out of it" for most of the nineties, I turn on the set and the same programs are playing.
It was a thrill to begin reading the list, seeing that I would be hearing from "marxists" for a change. I don't hear enough about revolution and liberation, and where else should one find a revolutionary viewpoint than among "marxists?" Am I setting myself up for a let down? Didn't the Russian workers and peasants also want to hear something about revolution and liberation? They too came to listen to the "marxists."
While I realize that not everybody on the LBO list is an avowed "marxist," those who are "marxist" are having the same arguments about who is a "marxist" as their forbears one and two generations before them. They are citing the same texts, and preparing the same outrages for one another. (They are busy with the occupations of academics and ecclesiastics, pursued by these castes in all cultures, through time as it is told from the beginning.) And people who are not "marxist" are looking on with the same bewilderment.
It is one thing to observe how the Democratic Party of LBJ has reproduced itself in the party that we know and love today. I suppose one could say that is to be expected. Troubling though, to see that the opposition has and is also reproducing itself, as if by DNA. For it is not just the "marxists" who are playing old games. Are we so pleased with what we accomplished in the guise of our forebears (and in the guise of our youthful selves), being who we were, that now we must be just the same, doing the same things over and over again until the world expires out of sheer boredom? Or foolish fascination?