Savant's words

Thee are many Marxists who would call into question Stalin's "socialism. " And I don't mean just Trotsky. Socialism, at least on the Marxian view (and Stalin regarded himself as a Marxist), entailed the WORKERS theselves taking power and creating a cooperative society. In Stalinist Russia, the workers had no power at all. Apparently for you, as for most orthodox Marxist Leninist (who are here also in agreement with rightists), socialism is identifiable with centralized state control. The party/state bureaucracy (in the name of the workers) holds absolute power over workers and peasants. Only in Nazi Germany were workers as powerless as in Stalinist Russia. I will grant that Stalin probably saw himself as a socialist, and his supporters would agree. But such claim are debatable at best. And some of the best socialist minds (Marxist and non-Marxist) would challenge Stalin's socialist credentials

-Savant


_______________

Ish Tov wrote:

Maybe it's happening. It will be interesting to note how violent will be the official response to Walmart demonstrations as they grow more common and larger.
See how intricately state power is linked to capitalist power. This must end, in every country, worldwide.
True democracy means rule of the PEOPLE! AMAZING, isn't it, that to say this in the USA sounds radical and even seditious!!!
How far we are from realizing the dream of freedom of this country!

Howard Zinn, at Johns Hopkins U in Bmore, once said that fundamental liberation changes in society will not come from one big movement, but from many movements over a period of time.
The Occupy MOvement emerges and subsides (though it still has a presente in Bmore, and its members helped organize relief during Sandyhook hurricane). Low paid American workers rise up in resistance to economic deprivation at thehand of their bosses at Walmart, MacDonalds and other establishments. MOral Monday protests erupt in North Carolina against Republican reactionary efforts to suppress the Black and Latin vote (and votes of others ss well).
The struggle continues. I am not disheartened by the setbacks suffered by Black people or any other oppressed people. The struggle will continue. Freedom will rise like the Dawn.


-Savant



____________________________





Capitalism here to stay? Yeah. Kind of like "eternal Rome" and the Roman empire,
It's true that a few people have become wealtheir than ever before, but averate person becomes increasingly more impoverished than before, and the gap between the haves and have nots have grown--often by leaps and bounds--over the past 30--35 years.
Governments, to protect this system of privilege, will be compelled to resort to increasing political repression or at least severe curtailment of civil liberties.
Capitalism is living on borrowed time. And unless an alternative is found and actualized the whole of civilized life may collapse with it.

-Savant

______________________



At some point the standard of living DID increase, especially after Stalin (and among some urban dwellers during Stalin). But for me that is aside from the point. You can't create a more just society by dictatorially imposing your agenda top down, and shoving it down peoples threads.
The Bolsheviks usurgped the soviets, coralled trade unions, suppressed every other political party (socialist included) but their own, dispersed the contituent assembly, formed a secret police with virtually unfettered powers in 1918, and crushed the Konstadt revolutionaries in the name of the revolution!
YOu canno create freedom while extinguishing freedom. Even Lenin said that you cannot create socialism--ie, a cooperative society self-governed by workers and common folk themselvs--without democracy. But extinguished all democratic initiatives WITHIN the left, not to mention outside the left.Rosa Luxemburg was spot on with her critique of Bolshevik politics.

-Savant



______________


One ought never to assume that what has not been cannot be. Or even that what has been cannot be again.
Even the ideas of the Declaration of Independence were once seen as radical, idealistic and unrealizable.
Thinkers who believe men can live without kings were thought mad. Yet their "madness" prove to be more rational than the "realistic" voices of the Establishment.

Hence, I might say that it is reasonable to believe that what certain left visionaries espoused HAS NOT happened--which is obvious. I don't think it reasonable to ASSUME that it CANNOT happen.
As for Marcuse, one might say that there's a 'realistic" streak even in his radical "idealism." At least on his interpretation, Critical theory critiques a given social order and its injustices in light of a possible new social order which would radically deepen and expand the range of human freedom and happiness.
But that critique is based on possibilities already existing at the present time. Early in ONE DIMENSIONAL MAN (often seen as a pessimistic work), Marcuse argues that any given society has an ascertainable measure of material and intellectual resources which might be used differently to improve human life. In industrial societies, these resources are quite sizeable. They could allow the ABOLITION of poverty both domestically and globally if used and organized in a more democratic fashion. In his ESSAY ON LIBERATION, he infers that "Utopian POSSIBILITIES are inherent in the technological of advanced capitalism and socialism: the rational utilization of these forces on a global scale would terminate poverty and scarcity within a forseeable future." (p. 4)

As we know, those technological forces are greater now than in 1969 when Marcuse wrote this. Greater than they were in the late 1950s and 60s when Dr. King was inferring (though from a non-Marxist perspective)very similar conclusions about the possible ending of poverty and the unprecedented expansion of freedom.
Many others --statesmen, philosophers, and even some economists--have inferrred that the possibilities of ending poverty, toil and unfreedom is greater now than before. But it doesn't fit well the interests and agendas of ruling elites in either East or West.



A society without slaves, without the subjection of women, seemed unrealistic to most Greeks and Romans--even to distinguished minds like Aristotle and Plato.
Today, a life wthout poeverty, toil and misery, without racism, exploitation and war, seems "unrealistic" to many.
But history, which sometimes shows us that we can be worse than we realize, also at times shows that we can be BETTER than we imagined.
So, while I am not a gambling man, if I had to gamble--to make some Pascalian wager--it would be on the possible freedom and liberation of the human being. A new order of things that which will make liberated lives of dignity and decency the birthright of every man, woman and child on earth.
That's te aim of any true revolution: FREEDOM RISING!

-Savant

http://www.topix.com/forum/afam/TB0LQ4NM9CP3T25HP/p59

________________



For example, in her lecture on Frederick Douglass she conceptualizes alienation as the absenceor loss of an "authentic identity--aconcption perhaps compatitle with the Marxian concept of "alienated labor,: but still a very different idea. It's implicit background is the experience and thought of Black peooples and colonized peoples generally, more so than the exploited proletariat.


-Savant


___________________

StAG_R_LEE wrote:

Thanks, George Jackson's name is seldom mentioned and I was surprised when I came across Savant's comment.. Indeed,his book, " Soledad Brothers" should be read by Black men; it's more important now than it was in the past.(This is not to say that I agree with every point in the book, but his views--especially as they are related to unemployment and prison conditions--give sharp insights to the conditions Black men confront.)

I think there's another flic, possibly orignally a PBS program (not sure) on George Jackson called "Day of the Gun." Angela Davis and a number of other Soledad brothers (including, I believe, Fleeta Drumgo) are interviewed in that flic. Angela reminds us that George wanted to "transform the black criminal mentality into a black revolutionary mentality."
George Jackson was also a talented writer. SOLEDAD BROTHER became a classic both here and abroad.
BLOOD IN MY EYE, Jackson's last book (published days before his death) has been re-issued by BLACK CLASSICS PRESS. A publishing company out of Bmore run by elder warrior Paul Coates, former head of the Bmore Black Panther Party (and friend of my family).


-Savant

_________