>>> Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu> 11/06/99 12:06PM >>
Here, you are resisting a late modernist cultural impulse toward an
automatic preference for fragmentation. Your position on centralization
makes sense, however, only if you are still hopeful (if not certain) of a
future socialist appropriation of socialized powers of production. Without
your hope, your comments would degenerate into a simple apology for
financial concentration. No future, no desire, no struggle, no truth.
Trust me when I say: "The good (or bad) of any human endeavor cannot be
correctly evaluated from the point of view that doesn't posit a future
without classes (and keep in mind that this future is not guaranteed in a
Hegelian fashion -- it is what we can but may very well fail to create)."
That is the historical materialist view of the present (contra Fukuyama's
End of History as well as late modernist cries of 'No Future!'). 'No
Future!' = the eternalization of the market in futures.
retrofitting the future in service of the present struggles,
(((((((((
Charles: As the "league's leading hitter" these days, Yoshie keeps those hits coming above.
I think the fact that "the future is not guranteed " but "is what we can but may very well fail to create", is the way that Marx and Engels, and Lenin understand the socialist revolution. But they place the emphasis the other way, on the possibilty, not the very well may fail. So, they say it is "inevitable" or that "this is the era of world revolution" because talking up its POSSIBILITY even to "certainty" helps to make the masses and 10's of millions fulfill what they CAN do. They accentuate the positive, because the level of mass confidence is a factor in whether or not they actually fulfill the possibility.
So, Lenin subtitles _Imperialism_, "the last stage of capitalism" as a positive spin on the possible. Hope and Reality instead of Despair and Utiopia.
The "power of positive thinking" is not idealist when it is aimed at masses in collective action , because "when an idea grips the masses, it becomes a material force".
CB