Re: Robin Kelley reflects

[Jim Drysdale <jimd48@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

ok LP, as my paraphrased reply to this post seemed to yourself, *like junk*
(not at all a substantial criticism but possibly warranted on the length and
depth of reply) I'll step through this post and comment.   I do so, solely
in the interests of rational thought.




Chronicles of Higher Education, June 7, 2002

Finding the Strength to Love and Dream
By ROBIN D.G. KELLEY

Like most of my comrades active in the early days of the Reagan era, I
turned to Marxism for the same reasons I looked to the third world. The
misery of the proletariat (lumpen and otherwise) proved less interesting
and less urgent than the promise of revolution. I was attracted to
"small-c" communism because, in theory, it sought to harness technology to
solve human needs, give us less work and more leisure, and free us all to
create, invent, explore, love, relax, and enjoy life without want of the
basic necessities of life.

JD:  Firstly, as a communist, I have no idea of what can possibly be meant
by *small-c communism*.
That is, communism is the highest form of society and arises from socialism.
No where else.
And, certainly not from within speculative thought.   I realise, that for
some, who remain ill-informed
that rational discourse can be a hard discipline.  But, it is, of necessity,
required.

I fell in love with the young Marx of The German Ideology and The Communist
Manifesto, the visionary Marx who predicted the abolition of all
exploitative institutions.

JD: a close reading of Marx, young or old, will reveal the consistency and
evolution of his thought.  Of course,
for those who won't, as Marx insisted, take the hard road to scientific
socialist thought then, the low thought of
subjective speculation is their lot.

I followed young Marx, via the late English
historian Edward P. Thompson, to those romantic renegade socialists, like
William Morris, who wanted to break with all vestiges of capitalist
production and rationalization. Morris was less concerned with socialist
efficiency than with transforming social relations and constructing new,
free, democratic communities built on, as Thompson put it, "the ethic of
cooperation, the energies of love."

There are very few contemporary political spaces where the energies of love
and imagination are understood and respected as powerful social forces.

JD:  there is no possibility of anything *but* stunted and travestied human
relations under capital relations.
Even Lennon (J) knew that.

The socialists, utopian and scientific, had little to say about that, so my
search for an even more elaborate, complete dream of freedom forced me to
take a more imaginative turn.

JD:  The crux *is* this *imaginative turn*.

Thanks to many wonderful chance encounters, I
discovered Surrealism, not so much in the writings and doings of André
Breton or Louis Aragon or other leaders of the Surrealist movement that
emerged in Paris after World War I, but under my nose, so to speak, buried
in the rich, black soil of Afro-diasporic culture.

JD:  I see no emancipation from the yoke of capital, from any of the above.
I see some humans attempting to
be human and failing.   As Aristotle observes.....you need to be animal or
god to exist outside of society.
As far as I can tell.....we still exist in capitalist society.   And, as
Marx says.....nothing that is human is alien to myself.   Indeed, but I
would hope that Marx sometimes got a tad upset at ignorance through
laziness.

In it I found a most miraculous weapon with no birth date, no expiration
date, no trademark. I traced the Marvelous from the ancient practices of
maroon societies and shamanism back to the future, to the metropoles of
Europe, to the blues people of North America, to the colonized and
semicolonized world that produced the likes of Aimé and Suzanne Césaire and
Wifredo Lam. The Surrealists not only taught me that any serious motion
toward freedom must begin in the mind, but they also have given us some of
the most imaginative, expansive, and playful dreams of a new world I have
ever known.

JD: Hegel, as the mighty thinker, the idealist mighty thinker...would even
blush at this form of *dogmatic* idealism.
The rest of this *manifesto for the imagination* offers little in the way of
more comment.


comradely,

Jim.

PS:  You're corrrect LP, I should have learned by now that not all who use
the list can see the difference
between junk thought and rational paraphrase.  I'll not paraphrase too often
in future.  This, solely in the interests of the dissemination of rational
thought.  i.e. based on real material reality.


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