On 1/14/07, Jim Straub <
> our estrangement from the cultural mainstream
Secular intellectuals on the Left in the USA are largely inorganic intellectuals: our ideas are for the people, but not of the people. In this one respect, the USA is very much like Iran, its official enemy number one today, where the ideas of secular intellectuals on the Left have always been profoundly inorganic, for the people but not of the people.
Iran and the USA are only the most striking examples of the norm, however.
The only country in the world where the mythical ideal of the Marxist tradition -- the working class in class struggle with their own domestic ruling class -- has been organic to the working class is France, where politics -- from 1789 to 1968 -- approximates that mythical ideal the best. Social revolutions on the Left in other places have been peasant and/or anti-colonial/neo-colonial ones. That is not surprising, for Marx developed his thought by examining Germany philosophy, English economy, and _French politics_. -- Yoshie
^^^^^ CB: This is an interesting criticism/self-criticism for US left intellectuals.
Tommorrow is ML King's Birthday celebration. King was an organic , left intellectual, and to the extent that U.S. Marxists follow King's legacy , we remedy to some extent our lack of organicism.
Organic Intellectual's speech: ' We have just completed the celebration of the birth of the Prince of Peace, and now we honor one of his loyal disciples of peace, Dr. Martin Luther King. So, We are duty bound to speak out in this time against the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Dr. King made a profound and courageous speech on April of 1967 breaking the silence of dissent against the war in Viet Nam. We recall it now because the import of such historic moments today is how we apply their moral and political lessons to our own situation. Really, we are practicing elementary Martin Luther King philosophy in resurrecting his voice for peace in 2007. Wouldn't that be what he would want us to do ? Oppose these wars in his name .
In that speech King said
"I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a 'thing-oriented' society to a 'person-oriented' society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable of being conquered.. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death. .... We still have a choice today; nonviolent coexistence or violent co-annihilation"
Sadly, these words are still pertinent to U.S. policy today !
King also said:
MLK quote: There is at the outset a very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America. A few years ago there was a shining moment in that struggle. It seemed as if there was a real promise of hope for the poor both black and white through the Poverty Program. There were experiments, hopes, new beginnings. Then came the buildup in Vietnam and I watched the program broken and eviscerated as if it were some idle political plaything of a society gone mad on war, and I knew that America would never invest the necessary funds or energies in rehabilitation of its poor so long as adventures like Vietnam continued to draw men and skills and money like some demonic destructive suction tube. So I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such.
Today: The Federal government has no urban policy anymore and boldly declares so. billions to Iraq would do a lot in our cities instead today.
MLK quote: Perhaps the more tragic recognition of reality took place when it became clear to me that the war was doing far more than devastating the hopes of the poor at home. It was sending their sons and their brothers and their husbands to fight and to die in extraordinarily high proportions relative to the rest of the population. We were taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them eight thousand miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in Southwest Georgia and East Harlem. So we have been repeatedly faced with the cruel irony of watching Negro and white boys on TV screens as they kill and die together for a nation that has been unable to seat them together in the same schools. So we watch them in brutal solidarity burning the huts of a poor village, but we realize that they would never live on the same block in Detroit. I could not be silent in the face of such cruel manipulation of the poor
Today: our youth are dying for oil profits