Because this one won't come true, and it's contrary to Marx's own better insight, too. You do not escape commodity fetishism in the world of capitalism, so you never face with sober senses your real conditions of life, and your real relations with your kind. Taking this insight seriously means that people, including those who are here, will fight their struggle in and through commodity fetishism, ideology, not after having directly confronted and comprehended real conditions of life and real relations with one another.
> are you lamenting this state of affairs, like some freshly hatched
> neocon who's just been "mugged by reality," or are you
> embracing it?
"Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." Then, the task is first to take stock of the existing circumstances, transmitted from the past, under which we are making history.
> Does the fight against U.S. imperialism so dominate
> all other concerns for you that you'll cheerlead - from
> the prosperous safety of Columbus, Ohio - for forces
> that would like to cover you from head to toe because
> the exposure of your mere forearm would be an
> intolerable provocation?
It's an obligation of all who live in the United States to stop sanctions on Iran, to prevent what we have allowed Washington to do to the Iraqi people from being done to the Iranian people. We are failing to perform this obligation, as usual.
It's up to the Iranian people to change their government if they wish, though I'd advise them, based on history, that now is probably the time to carefully avoid adventurism, as there is a good chance that it will compel them to re-live 1953 or worse.
On 7/15/07, andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> We have not seen
> effective resistance under relatively advanced
> capitalist conditions for almost a century, true. But
> we did see it, and so did Marx, and interestingly
> enoughly the Paris Commune, the German Revolution,
> even the Spanish Revolution, were not animated by a
> spirit of ascetic leveling.
None of them lasted, for internal and external reasons.
On 7/15/07, andie nachgeborenen <andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Incidentally Marx would be contemptuous about the
> views expressed sometimes on this list that human
> progress or survival or socialism/communism require a
> halt to economic development or innovation.
It is the US government, not those who question the cult of progress, that has imposed economic limits on Cuba, Iran, and many other countries through unilateral and multilateral, formal and informal means; insisted on strict enforcement of intellectual property rights; pressured all to adopt the Washington Consensus; and so on -- all actions that obstruct innovation and development for the peoples of the South. -- Yoshie