the tragedy of sex

Johannes Schneider Johannes.Schneider at gmx.net
Fri Jan 12 05:26:23 PST 2001


Doug Henwood wrote:


> The latest installment of my favorite feature of Workers Vanguard,
> the p. 2 box anchored by photos of Trotsky and Lenin and usually
> containing a quote from one of those two sages, has unusually a quote
> >from Isaac Deutscher's "On Socialist Man":
>
> "May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic
> tragedies - hunger, sex, and death - besetting man." Sex?
>

This quote should not be so unusual for the Spartacist League since it is incorporated in one of their basic documents: Declaration of Principals and Some Elements of Program International Communist League (Fourth Internationalists) http://www.icl-fi.org/ENGDOP.HTM

As Isaac Deutscher said in his speech, "On Socialist Man" (1966):

"We do not maintain that socialism is going to solve all predicaments of the human race. We are struggling in the first instance with the predicaments that are of man's making and that man can resolve. May I remind you that Trotsky, for instance, speaks of three basic tragedies-hunger, sex and death-besetting man. Hunger is the enemy that Marxism and the modern labour movement has taken 0n...Yes, socialist man will still be pursued by sex and death; but we are convinced that he will be better equipped than we are to cope even with these."



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