Re: China's "Communist" Status

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Frederick Douglass, a self-emancipated slave, was a contemporary of Marx's. 
Douglass
at one point got into a physical fight with one of his masters, and the master 
sort of
backed down. I always thought that this and other raw experiences with absolute 
power
may have been the reason that he codiscovered with Marx some of the 
fundamentals of
revolutionary dialectics, as captured in the famous Douglass maxim.

"If there is no struggle , there is no progress. Those who profess to favor 
freedom,
and yet deprecate agitation are men (sic) who want crops without plowing up the
ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning, they want the ocean 
without the
awful roar of its waters. "

CB

>>> Carrol Cox <cbcox@xxxxxxxxx> 10/07/99 09:02PM >>>
Nestor has provided a fine gloss on Marx's "Struggle." Let me expand
it a bit more by raising a warning about wanting too satisfactory an
answer to the questions originally raised. I speak of what (using
the title of a book published back in the 1940s) one might call "The
God That Failed" syndrome. Actually the syndrome is much older.
It consists on having too pat a conception of what marxism is -- and
then when reality doesn't fit the conception perfectly, it is all
marxism's
fault. It is a god that failed, though it never really promised to be a
god
to begin with.