Eric gives the reason I have never gone back to the marxmail list since unsubbing a few years ago, and the reason I recently created a new inbox sub-foler with the label, Pointless Squawks, where quite a few Pen-L & Lbo-talk posts lie unopened.
Carrol
Of Eric Beck Sent: Wednesday, July 18, 2012 1:54 PM To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] libor?
I haven't been paying much attention, but every time I've read about it, I've gotten the feeling it's all about the search for a bad guy, someone(s) to personify and blame for the cyclical brutality of capitalism. But I could be wrong.
^^^^^^^
CB: Marx and Engels opposed the Big Man theory of history, but it is interesting how many "personages" people Marx's classic historical materialist text; even the title has a personage.
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire/ch01.htm
The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Karl Marx 1852 I
Hegel remarks somewhere[*] that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Caussidière for Danton, Louis Blanc for Robespierre, the Montagne of 1848 to 1851[66] for the Montagne of 1793 to 1795, the nephew for the uncle. And the same caricature occurs in the circumstances of the second edition of the Eighteenth Brumaire.
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. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language. Thus Luther put on the mask of the Apostle Paul, the Revolution of 1789-1814 draped itself alternately in the guise of the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire, and the Revolution of 1848 knew nothing better to do than to parody, now 1789, now the revolutionary tradition of 1793-95. In like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue