What's the political relevance of a social theory cut off from a social movement to go with it, though? A social movement (even before it becomes big enough to score a big victory) can provide resources -- money, manpower, institutions, weapons (moral, intellectual, and material), etc. -- but a social theory without a movement can't.
At 1:57 PM -0800 2/9/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>as a _movement_ Marxism has collapsed. Formerly Marxism, identified
>as such, was a great rallying cry that wion the allegience of
>millions, that inspired important socail movements, that was in some
>sense the ruling ideology of a third of the world, that provided the
>vocabulary for practical engagement of movement sof the oppressed to
>better their situations. Never in America, of course, though
>self-identified Marxists did important work here, but elsewhere
>Marxism mattered socially. That is not true any more. The Marxist
>states are gone, except for a handful to which almost no one looks
>for inspiration. The Marxist parties have withereed and died.
As far as the past and the present are concerned, there is no major disagreement here. The disagreement concerns the future:
At 1:57 PM -0800 2/9/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>This is not going to change.
How do you know?
At 1:57 PM -0800 2/9/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote:
>better to address actual concerns that real people have
One of the actual concerns of real people today is the rise of fundamentalist Islamism and the goals and tactics that it has chosen. Politics abhors vacuum, and where Marxism as a political project has been disappeared, other political projects have stepped in.
***** Hussein al-Tawil is a member of the People's Party, formerly the Communist Party, in the West Bank. His son Dia blew himself up in Jerusalem, in March 2001, on a Hamas mission. Amira Hass, an Israeli journalist for Ha'aretz who has intimate knowledge of life in the occupied territories, talked to friends of the father, former Communists, and some of the son's friends, who are members of the Hamas group at Beir-Zeit University. The two groups of friends don't mix. The father's friends claim that Dia was "brainwashed" by Hamas, causing great pain to a father who loved him and did what he could to send his son to the university to study engineering. For Dia's friends from Hamas, who chanted at his funeral, on the other hand, he is a heroic martyr to the Islamic cause.
<http://www.nybooks.com/articles/15979> *****
That's just one example of forces that have stepped into the political vacuum created by the disappearance of Marxism. (Elsewhere, other reactionary forces have played the part played by fundamentalist Islamism in the Middle East.) I don't know how more actual the concerns of real people can get than this state of affairs. -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>