Speaking of Fun, here's an old thaxis post on fun
OK, I admit I called for a Tea Party of a new type in 1998. Mea Culpa.
Charles
http://lists.econ.utah.edu/pipermail/marxism-thaxis/1998-March/007419.html
On Hegel and seductrion, didn't he indicate that comedy is superior to tragedy ? Couldn 't that be helpful in coming up with something that women of color , lesbian and thespian might find fun ? We learn from Antigone. Now we will learn from Bessie Smith.
We need a party of a new type, a mardi gras of the people, a Detroit cabaret. Communists cannot rally workers to revolution with the dullness of the classic approach. It is time for our seriousness, which has accomplished so much, to turn into its opposite.
This would be in the spirit of the Boston Tea Party. A masquerade ball that crossdressers could enjoy. White men dressed as Red men, Sisters With Voices, dressed in Black and joys.
When we have everybody laughing and rolling in the aisles, having a roaring good time, dancing (everyone wiggling their hips) and singing, reading poetry until the wee hours of the morning, we reveal ourselves as philosophers, thaxists.
Our new comradely revelers will say I want to learn how you do this.
Then we could discuss a few paradoxes , why the insides the outside in this Cline bottle; and show how they are contradictions and quote Hegel's craggly melodies, putting all to sleep perchance to dream , of idealism and materialism.
Then wake up the next morning and prepare a feast; and plan a holiday, weeklong of this party of a new type, this comedic mode of seduction. And read Engels' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. Keep doing it and keep doing it; and modify it based on what the women of color like .
Has anyone seen Angela Davis' new book on The Blues Tradition and Black Feminism: Ma Rainey, Bessie Smith and Billie Holiday ? Now those women knew how to party The type of thing women of color might like. We can play their CDs at our party of a new type. The working class knows how to party better than the bourgeoisie, because they need more powerful forms of transcending alienation(sadness) than the bourgeoisie. Hegel ain't got nothin' on Speakeasy philosophers when it comes to lifting comedy up over tragedy.
Angela Davis is a Marxist, you know. Her other book Women, Race and Class might inform the discussions here on social movements, and how Marxists might contribute to uniting the several struggles. and that ain't all....
C.B.