On Wed, May 9, 2018 at 4:28 PM, Windows Live 2018<yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:--Thanks Biko for your perspective that demonstrates that a lot rests on interpretation. Your diachronic comparisons even with the events in Nigeria underscores that Marx clearly envisaged a global movement parallel in significance to what the Christian founding fathers did with respect to Christianity. His contributions to actualization in places like France makes his own case more self- gratifying than the case of Christ who did not live long enough to see the fruits of his labour against Rome the oppressors of the day.
I have often compared his fate to that of Aare MKO. Both waited for higher interventions to consolidate the success of their movement which never came. This pperhaps underscores the contradictions GE noted about the Bible. There is the faction that wanted to point to Christ as the victimized lamb of God who did no wrong while there is ample evidence in his teachings ( in the coded message of the kingdom of God coming even in the life time of his contempiraries) that something was most likely in the offing to overthrow the suzerainty of Rome and liberate Judea. We will never know what this plot was beyond the allegation he pronounced himself King of the Jews.
MKO declared himself the President of Nigeria on the results of a legitimate mandate given to him by Nigerians. That was sufficient for Abacha the usurper to pronounce him guilty of treason. MKO looked forward to a deux ex machina in the form of intervention of the international community which never came in his life time but conveniently after his murder in captivity Christ sought help from 'above' in the cryptic message that if possible his impending fate be averted ;the expected intervention for his miraculous release never materialized before his execution. It only came ex post facto in the apocryphal sightings and ascension to heaven who were dumb struck that their invincible leader had in fact been executed like a common thief.
Christ in all probabilities was an actual political revolutionary against the powers of the day-Rome- rather than a meek religious teacher (like Marx who modeled himself after him and used science rather than religion the science of antiquity- after all Newton led the way in showing the correspondence between embedded metaphoric religious codes in the Bible and their actual scientific verities which was no secret to Freud and Marx on one hand and Einstein who actually perused and pursued as well as extended the legacy of Newton in this respect )
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-------- Original message --------From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>Date: 09/05/2018 12:13 (GMT+00:00)To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.comSubject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx's Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
The lumpen were called scum because they were easily bought with stomach infrastructures and therefore needed a more conscious class to lead them. Marx did not advocate for only the proletariat. He advocated for indigenous peoples who were subjected to genocide, for peasants who were driven out of their land to make way for sheep, for enslaved Africans who were hunted as prey, and for women and children who were subjected to abuse, or simply, for what he called the human race. Contrary to the assumption that only the lumpen suffered from the infantile disorder of left wing communism, it was petit bourgeois intellectuals who sat at their desks to advocate nothing but violence or anarchism. For instance, there is evidence that the ideologues of genocide are not the lumpen but the pseudo intellectuals who rationalized that all is fair in warfare and that starvation is a legitimate weapon of war in Biafra. The leaders of the Rwanda genocide have been described as part of Africa's murderous professors just like the Nazi philosophers. It was against such tendencies that Joe Slovo defended the importance of a national democratic revolution in accordance with Lenin who named his party Social Demicratic and in line with Luxembourg. Edwin Madunagu holds the same line against bourgeois advocates of bloody revolution in Nigeria.
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Biko--
On Tue, May 8, 2018 at 9:39 PM, Kenneth Harrow<harrow@msu.edu> wrote:"left wing communists" seems a strange descriptor to me.
I would contrast the movements called Maoism, say, or troskyite communists from Stalinists or western Europeans, in the 1960s. in fact, without designating the period, we have nothing to compare.
Marx was generally hostile toward the lumpenproletariat, and represented himself as an advocate for the proletariat.
I think the ones being critiqued here might qualify vaguely as lumpenproletariat.
But that was for another century, another economic order.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Tuesday 8 May 2018 at 20:18
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx's Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
Biko
On Tue, May 8, 2018 at 6:35 PM, Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
<emeagwali@ccsu.edu> wrote:
The context of the quote is circa 1880 when Marx assisted French intellectuals in writing the program for the Parti Ouvrier de France (worker's party of France). The Parti Ouvrier wanted a program and Marx helped Jules Guesde write said program...............................
.....................................................................................................
Thanks for the comment.Well I wondered about the context of the statement. It seems that it was about Marx' displeasure with some perks given to workers. He felt that such goodies would undermine their determination to change the system.
It was all about the interpretation and implementation . This raises some exciting questions about the theory itself.
GE
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>
Sent: Monday, May 7, 2018 12:17 PM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx's Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
Thank you GE about your observations on Christ. I almost included that in my earlier postings. I have often wondered if there is indeed a second coming Christ would be able to reconcile himself to all the edifice erected in his name. Quite a modest man belonging to a Spartan brotherhood. However we need to take Marxs denials with the pinch of salt. Why go to all that length to systematise your thinking then recording and preserving correspondence letters if you dont wsnt to be associated with marxism when the point is that you ARE Marxism .
The workers demonstrations showed that they succeeded in awakening a generation of 'disciples" to which their writings were directed and who would be the nucleus of the vanguard they wrote about.
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-------- Original message --------
From: "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emeagwali@ccsu.edu>
Date: 07/05/2018 15:55 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx's Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
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Some of the working class did not have access to his writings but hand outs and pamphlets were apparently made from time to time by union organizers etc. When the 1848 protest movements erupted around Europe in terms of strikes and barricades, his populist writing on Communism emerged.....the famous "Workers of the world unite......" So it seems that he and his supporters actually tried to reach ordinary workers.
On another note, Biko, do you know that Francis and Taylor are charging about 40 dollars for a
print-out of your article on Marx. If that is not exploitation and price gouging then nothing is.
Well Fidel once said that he was not a Marxist and so also Marx, it is claimed. When your theory
and ideas become unrecognizable in the hands of pundits and interpreters you may well have to make a disclaimer. It could be that Christ would probably say the same thing, namely, I am not a Christian. I doubt that he would support the pedophilia that emerged in one of the esteemed sects of the Christian church.
Professor Gloria Emeagwali
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Windows Live 2018 <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>
Sent: Monday, May 7, 2018 4:11 AM
To: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx's Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
How many of the 99% of the working classes who were the target of Marx's activism had (and still has) access to Marx's writings? We're they really his targets?
Ayinka Agbetuyi
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-------- Original message --------
From: Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu>
Date: 05/05/2018 14:20 (GMT+00:00)
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx's Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
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This kind of attack on marx is typical of the red scare anti-communist movement from the 19th century on through the 20th. derrida distinguished between marx and Marxism, or what the various movements made of marx. To equate a figure like stalin with Marxist thought is abusive of history. Stalin is responsible for Stalinism. That he came on the heels of a Marxist revolution doesn't mean that the totalitarian regime he engineering, the purges, the statism, the "revolution in one state," in short the repressive regime, had anything to do with an ideology that conceived of the state "withering away" as the bourgeoisie was converted—not slaughtered—to a class with higher consciousness.
Every one of the reproaches of Marxism is built on this false connection of authoritarian abuse. It really strikes me as a playground level of thought, and it always amazed me that my students would parrot the conflation of Marxist thought and anticommunist propaganda.
There is really a core to this that needs to be reasserted. Marx built his political activism on the idea of mobilizing the working classes, and attempting to put the interests of the working class, the 99% we'd say in this country, above those of the 1% who ruled and imposed their ideology on the rest of society. A simple notion that is replicated again and again. a simple notion of a just society, deflected by pieces like this wall st. editorial.
I don't think we should begin to accept it by acknowledging that the killings and dictatorships of regimes like cambodia's or china's embody the ideals or even ideas articulated by marx. The answer is not that Marxism is responsible for fewer deaths than the conquistadores, but that marx's ideals would run counter to such regimes that represented an abuse of marx's thought.
ken
Kenneth Harrow
Dept of English and Film Studies
http://www.english.msu.edu/people/faculty/kenneth-harrow/
From: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of "Emeagwali, Gloria (History)" <emeagwali@ccsu.edu>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 4 May 2018 at 15:41
To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>, usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Re: Marx's Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
Half of the population of Libya was killed by the Italians and one third of Namibia by the Germans.
Has anyone been able to count the dead in the Americas?
Professor Gloria Emeagwali
From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu>
Sent: Friday, May 4, 2018 3:16 PM
To: dialogue
Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Marx's Apologists Should Be Red in the Face - The Wall Street Journal.
Marx's Apologists Should Be Red in the Face
Download the Wall Street Journal app here: WSJ.
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