>>> cbcox at ilstu.edu 06/06/01 06:22PM >>>
Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Charles Brown wrote:
>
> >CB: What about the struggle continues, victory is certain ? The
> >revolution is not over yet. Amandla.
> "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly
> into the past."
A beautiful cadence & image, but I can't remember the source. It always
irritated me when British scholars would not translate a Latin quote or
give a citation for some quote they assumed "everyone" (who counted)
would recognize. But that's by the way.
>
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CB: Since this poetry is introduced as political criticism , it must now withstand political criticism. What is the political theory of this line ? What is its political point ?
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I am not the cheerful type and I by no means think victory is certain.
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CB: "The struggle continues: victory is certain" and "Amandla" , "Power to Blacks", are slogans of the South African People in the movement to end apartheid. So, in this case , victory was won. With that success in this concrete situation, it is not a bad idea to at least start from the slogan associated with practical-critical, that is revolutionary , effectiveness in deriving a slogan for practical work in the next phase of the South African revolution. Surely, ending neoliberalism seems an easier task than ending aparthied, which was just now achieved !
Practice , practice, practice , my friends, that is the test of theory , slogans , poetic tropes, whatnots, whatever. In this case, Carrol's militant pessimism forgets the roaring practical success of overthrowing apartheid, as does Doug's writing off the ANC as a failure of nationalist-internationalist organization, because of its steps backward into neo-liberal embrace. How quickly we forget. How readily we see as permanent every bourgeois triumph of just yesterday. What specific victorious socialist struggle has been won guided by the slogan " socialism or barbarism " ? Lenin wrote a pamphlet on "The pending disaster and how to deal with " to paraphrase. I think we should bounce around " Socialism or extinction " in 2001 with nuclear weapons, genetically engineered biological weapons, AIDS , computer viruses ( just kidding).
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It is, however, a rather obvious empirical fact both that the struggle continues and the revolution is not over yet.
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CB: On that we agree
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And it seems a rather fluffy intellectual point to think that it is remotely possible to get back to the past. (E.g., Baghdad was a modern city, and hence it could not retreat to the past and past medical/sanitation practices) when it was bombed -- instead its children died because the 'choice' was between modern medicine and no medicine at all.)
But in any case no one has ever seriously suggested any alternative to Rosa Luxemburg's "barbarianism or socialism," nor has anyone ever seriously proposed any route to socialism other than forceful smashing of the central capitalist states. I remember someone on this list jestingly proposing a gradual legal shift to socialism in the U.S. But no one with any sense of reality could propose that. The result even of any initial success of a parliamentary movement towards socialism in the U.S. (and even that is a pipedream) would be a blood bath that would make WW 2 look like a minor gang clash in South Chicago.
While revolution (through insurrection) is highly unlikely in the U.S., any other scenario is too absurd to even argue against.
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CB: The following quote is not exactly on point , but I think if our theoretical discussion here is optimistic about the success of revolution where there is material basis for saying there has been some recent success ,as in South Africa, our theory is more likely to grip the masses in the U.S. The international bourgeoisie love U.S. lefties, who were active in the anti-apartheid movement, to write off the South African revolution as a failure and soldout because of its neoliberal political peccadillos :
"The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.... "