[lbo-talk] raw human energy

Julio Huato juliohuato at gmail.com
Fri May 7 06:56:31 PDT 2010


shag carpet bomb wrote:


> julio - could you explain more? you often talk about political motion, so i
> was wondering about the "raw human energy" that is a "fuel."

These are the links:

http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2009/2009-October/014107.html

http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2009/2009-October/014210.html

http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/2009/2009-October/014211.html

My point is that human action has objective consequences regardless of how people perceive and rationalize it. And that almost any struggle against oppression can lead to challenging capitalism, or help prepare the challenge. My favorite illustration is the Mexican and the Cuban revolutions, since I view myself as a child of these two processes. Most people got involved in them in reaction to some personal grievance or even driven by petty or superficial motivations, but the process transformed them. The revolution revolutionized the revolutionaries -- turned protorevolutionaries into full revolutionaries. How far they pushed things depended, of course, on more than their intentions and energy.

I'm not claiming that people can build communism without conscious deliberation or without preconditions. All I'm saying is that we start wherever we are at. There's as much basis to fetishize or idealize the revolutionary moment as there is to view an orgasm as all that matters in lovemaking or, more broadly, in a relationship. Not that I consider myself an authority on these matters, but orgasms would be little without what the staring and teasing preceding them, and their effects would last little without the cuddling and the cooing. Since I'm at it, to stretch the metaphor a bit further, I'll add that one enters a relationship with certain preconceptions and intentions, often predicated on imaginary traits one blithely attributes to one's lover, but the process of relating to another complex human being transforms everything -- oneself, the lover, the relationship, and many things around them.

I should now go and order a good coffee. :-)



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list