Robert Lucas on 1 Mar 2001 18:26:08 -0000 |
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[Nettime-bold] Re: <nettime> In Defence of a Modest Proposal |
> >"The Napoleonic grandeur of radical thought from Marx to Debord has an > >intrinsically anti-democratic cast. Its a question of making the masses > >into a tool for a mission not of their making." I'd just like to chip in a few little quotes from Marx's "Political Indifferentism" to the general debate about Marx's apparent intellectual flights of totalitarianism...: "Workers should even less desire that, as happens in the United States of America, the state whose budget is swollen by what is taken from the working class should be obliged to give primary education to workers' children; for primary education is not complete education. It is better that working men and working women should not be able to read or write or do sums than that they should receive education from a teacher in a school run by the state. It is far better that ignorance and a working day of sixteen hours should debase the working classes than that eternal principles should be violated." "In expectation, therefore, of this famous social liquidation, the working class must behave itself in a respectable manner, like a flock of well-fed sheep.... and offer itself up uncomplainingly as cannon fodder." Did anyone fail to see the irony in the two above quotes? To make it a little clearer, Marx goes on to declare such attitudes insults, and spends the rest of the article refuting them; they are written as parodies of "the apostles of political indifferentism", the "doctrinaire bourgeois and displaced gentlemen" who would subordinate the real need for progress for the working class to "eternal principles." Marxism wasn't the tragic cramming of a society into an abstract ideal that would never work; it was an attempt to do completely the opposite- to view realistically and scientifically the necessary movement of the working class within capitalism; it wasn't a forcing of the workers towards a messy future: it was a statement of what would necessarily develop- for Marx the workers were to be a moving force in history infinitely more than he ever was- he assumed the position of scientific observer... It's pretty obvious really from a basic knowledge of Marxism, and should hardly need going over again and again and again.... Find a little totalitarianism in Marx himself if you're anxious to really find it- that'll be a lot more interesting if you manage it. Cheers, Rob Lucas. _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. _______________________________________________ Nettime-bold mailing list Nettime-bold@nettime.org http://www.nettime.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/nettime-bold