I should have added a "d" to "experience." Sorry.
Meant to say that stuart hall said, we can't change the history that we experienced.
He says that we are something like between, or a combo of, being and becoming. Being in that we share a common history (we, in his case, referred to people of African descent, but it is true for all groups of people who share a history); but becoming in that we make of that history what we will, i.e, we recount it, we narrate it, in our own fashion, and in the process fashion ourselves. He is clearly avoiding essentializing with "becoming," but affirming a base, if not an original, for a community, a community identity. the same move made by Gilmore in Black Atlantic.
By the way, the poem you are reaching for must be blake's, right?
Marx surely anticipated blood from revolution. He lived through two in his life, 1848 and 1870, the great paris commune. That's hardly the same as the gulag and Stalinist blood. Hardly the same spirit, the same intent.
Stalin used slave labor, like all those damned totalitarian and dictatorial states of the 20th century, in order to industrialize.
Resistance in the paris commune was in the name of the people; Stalinist repression was in the name of the state, and against the people's lives and freedoms.
I guess I am practicing stuart hall's words: I write one history of the communist movement, of Marxism, and you another. We choose where to place our ideals.
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 Windows Live 2018 <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Monday 14 May 2018 at 11:19
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.
Marx would disagree with Raymond Williams that we can't change the history that we experience. That is what Marxism is all about: how we can change the history that we experience. That was why Lenin spent decades pursuing the goal of the Russian Revolution ( going into exile and back)until it was secured. That was why Nigetians never despaired until they chased the soldiers back to the barracks with their votes.
When I was teaching the Russian Revolution I came across the statement that socialism was the inevitable part and parcel and outgrowth of western capitalism. Trade unions could not but attend the Industrial Revolution in Britain where conditions were bleak for labour and children as early as 11 had to be factory hands for pittance with faces covered in soot ( I believe subject of one of Coleridges poems. Of course Marx and the intelligentsia saw all of this and voted to fight for an end to these in a systematized way. This was why Marx was quoted as saying we have to think for them ( the lower classes) But problem is how many of 'them wanted a level playing ground of a classless society and not a reversal of roles where they would join the oppressor class.? No matter what we might say of Stalin, Lenin (the intellectua- it was a matter of background and outlook in the endl) tried as hard as possible to keep faith with Marx's intellectual legacy.
Again problem is Lenin endorsed the Bolsheviks gory tactics of the murder of the Czars family which led to the civil war between the Whites and the Reds (I actually supervised a graduation thesis of the various divisions within the contending factions of consolidation ideologies post Bolshevik takeover a couple of years ago). There were problems with which was the best method forward and the intellectual class joined the fray with blood on the carpet. So applying Marx's template was not a straight forward affair even with the best of intentions. Yes, it led to collosal loss of lives across the globe, which was where this thread started from.
To argue that Marx one way or the other did not envisage this would happen is not conceivable. That he did not envisage that the clarion call for workers of the world should RISE UP and unite against their masters if heeded would lead to resistance from the capitalist would suggest that Marx was not actually Marx and that his Einsteinian E=mc2 equivalent which is the thesis vs antithesis= synthesis was never penned by him. Surely the implications of his equation meant conflict (including physical conflict and military takeover.) His vanguard in Russia had no qualms about that and mobilised the proletariat in that direction. They created stories of mobilisation that changed history.
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------
From: Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu>
Date: 11/05/2018 14:23 (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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Let's move on to the larger point being debated.
If I write about social issues, inequalities, do my writings have to be comprehensible to the masses of the people about whom I write for them to be valid? Do I have to live in their conditions to understand them, and to have validity conferred on my points?
I do not believe in the old-fashioned notions of conscientization, which means something like political awareness. I think people are aware; they just choose rightwing or leftwing views. I don't think it requires direct experience of a phenomenon for me to understand it. if that were the case, we would understand only ourselves, or our group.
I do believe that perspective is different from knowledge, and that to have the perspective or another requires some kind of close familiarity. I am telling you this because I am not too worried about contradicting myself.
The last time I stayed in Africa for a spell—about a year—I arrived with fairly strong notions about outside pressures placed on the continent, imf and world bank, and agency being compromised. I had notions about the issues. Well, if you read about what's happening in a place, you form ideas. But the focus of my ideas changed as time went by; my perspective changed radically, I saw things in terms of the issues that presented themselves to me on the street, as I walked in the morning to get my newspapers and bread, as the talibe children came up; as I read about the pirogues I passed jogging daily, about the things that the dakarois concerned themselves with and expressed in the press or conversations, etc.
I located myself in a different range of concerns. My views changed.
I don't think marx, as a philosopher, as the great thinker who wrote about historical materialism, needed to prove his bona fides, or that engels's money made a whit of difference in the value of his philosophical writings, any more than gramsci's analyses became more valid because he was in prison, or that trotsky's exile made his revolutionary thought more correct. The translation from the material to the ideational is never direct; it is mediated by our own thought, which can be shaped by our experiences.
But to imagine that experience "determines" thought is to be naïve. Trump supporters come from all walks in life, and each has his or her own reason for making racist, populist, stupid choices, just like the rest of us.
I am trying to shun easy determinisms, or identity politics, as explanations for our thinking or agency. At the same time, I agree with materialist, relative materialist, reasoning. Like Raymond Williams. He convinces me, along with stuart hall when he writes that we can't change the history that we experience, but we can create our own stories about that history, and it is in the combination of those two things, only, that we can talk about something like identity.
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 Windows Live 2018 <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Friday 11 May 2018 at 00:07
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.
If you say so...
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------
From: Kenneth Harrow <harrow@msu.edu>
Date: 09/05/2018 23:36 (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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Despite engel's aid, marx lived in relative poverty. Thanks to engel's aid, marx was able to live.
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 Windows Live 2018 <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: Wednesday 9 May 2018 at 14:29
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.
Sent from my Samsung Galaxy smartphone.
-------- Original message --------
From: 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>
Date: 09/05/2018 16:47 (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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Private possessions do not automatically transform people into counter revolutionaries. Engels was a freaking millionaire. What Marx, Lenin, Mandela, Castro and Fawehinmi had in common was that they were trained bourgeois lawyers but what made the difference is that they developed revolutionary consciousness.
To expect workers to autimatically support revolutionary praxis is to expect poor white trash and poor nazi scum to oppose white supremacy given their working class backgrounds. That would be mechanical materialism as opposed to historical materialism.
Marx called on the working class to lead other oppressed classes because they are better organized and have higher class consciousness, not because they are angels immune to the bourgeois hegemony that persuaded working class Italians to hold the keys to the fascist jails that held their leader, Gramsci.
Fanon reminds us that part of the apathy of the peasants can be explained by the failure of the phantom bourgeoisie to mobilize them and educate them with revolutionary literature.
Biko
On Wed, May 9, 2018 at 7:46 AM, Emeagwali, Gloria (History)
<emeagwali@ccsu.edu> wrote:
OK but he felt that peasants were potentially counter-revolutionary
given their property holdings in livestock and farm land.
True?
Professor Gloria Emeagwali
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