Re: YA BASTA! - and French & German strikes & other musings

[Siddharth Chatterjee <siddhart@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, 6 Jun 1996, Doug Henwood wrote:

> At 11:50 AM 6/6/96, Rahul Mahajan wrote:
>
> >Also, the political platform invokes civil society far
> >more explicitly than it does any movement of workers and/or peasants.
>
> This "civil society" thing needs some serious critical analysis. It's
> everydamnwhere now. Didn't it gain currency from the Havelites in the late
> 1980s, who were using it in a consciously anti-socialist sense? Yet now you
> hear lefties using the word with abandon. On the first page of the
> Grundrisse, Marx defined civil society as the "society of free competition,
> [in which] the individual appears detached from the natural bonds etc.
>
> Doug
>


This is just a tangent from the "civil society" about the extremely "civil"
and "popular" Havel. This great man, who is hailed by bourgeois
intellectuals as the author of the "Velvet Revolution" loftily proclaimed
in the corridors of power some time back about his own discovery of the
laws of human and social evolution: (paraphrase)"There are two things in
this world: Good and Evil". Good is associated with the free-market
freedom loving system which overthrew the the totalitarian anti-human
system of the other bloc. This bold discovery of the laws of dialectics
immediately brought forth millions of dollars in aid and loans for
Czechoslovakia, although, curiously, the great man has not yet been
awarded the Nobel Prize (Peace or Economics).

Sometime back, it was reported in the Far Eastern Economic Review, that
this man of "peace" was pimping for the Czech arms industry in Southeast
Asia (probably,Thailand or Malyasia).




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