[lbo-talk] Sipping Wine (was Zizek: "Where to look for revolutionary potential?" )

[andie nachgeborenen]

Khmelniki wasn't an intellectual for sure. And if he
was a revolutionary, then I'm agin it. His memory
haunted Jews for hundreds of years. My Hungarian
grandmother, whose family came from a town on the
Ukrainian border, would spook us as kids by telling us
that if we did this or that or other otherwise
misbehaved, Khmielniki would come for us. When as a
teenager, I found out the bogeyman was a real person,I
asked whether she knew this, she didn't; it was
something her mother had used to keep her own kids in
line. Then I learned more and found out why. 

As to the "intellectual" issue, a measured and
sensible approach is in order. Woj is just being his
usual bombthrowing self when he says that
intellectuals made revolutions, with the workers as
marionettes dancing at the end of their strings. If it
were that easy we'd have had a revolution or ten by
now. The workers do have a say in what happens, really
a decisive one. If they stay home, all those
string-holding intellectuals have an empty stage. But
their ideas do shape the landscape and the terms of
the fight when the workers do come out. Without them
you get blind revolts. With them, of course, there are
other risks, like thinking they are puppeteers and the
workers are puppets to be manipulated. 

--- Chris Doss <lookoverhere1 at yahoo.com> wrote:


> 
> --- Wojtek Sokolowski <swsokolowski at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> > 
> > [WS:] He must have been smoking some really good
> > stuff.  All revolutions were made by
> intellectuals:
> > Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Fidel, Pol Pot...  The proles
> > were just tools in their hands. 
> > 
> > Wojtek 
> > 
> 
> Lots of uprisings in Russia were led by peasants and
> Cossacks (a subset of peasant). Does Emil Pugachev
> count as an intellectual? I doubt he knew how to
> read.
> (He wasn't very successful though.) Bogdan
> Khmelnitsy?
> 
> 
>  
>
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