Straight Quotes

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I think starbird/anzalone intended this to be posted publicly. And if it
was meant privately, I don't think she'd mind if I shared it with the rest
of you.

Lou

************

Trivia ATTACK: Actually Boogie never uttered the line, "Play it again Sam."
in Casa Blanca, and Krushchev, never uttered the words you attribute to him
[the promise that "we will bury you."]

During a heated cold war U.N. debate (I believe the issue was whether or
not the U.S. should be allowed to dictate policy to a souvereign nation;
Cuba?) Krushchev spoke/cajoled, yelled and beat his shoe against the table.
Krushchev, who liked to use stories from his culture to narrate his
political points made reference to a well known (in the USSR) folktale
about a widow who sought justice/acknowledgement repeatedly and
tenatiously, even from beyond the grave.

The U.N. translator, unable to adequately (and expiditiously, translations
being simultaneous) provide the cultural context for the colloquialism
Krshchev employed blurted out the phrase you and the rest of U.S.
subsequently attributed to Krushchev while pumping down the wastebin our
nation's every available tax dollar for a massive nuclear melt down.

We get more interesting lessons from history when we get the facts
straight, but we don't get them straight very often in the U.S. despite our
technologically fancy data bases and infastructure. Isn't that interesting?

"I am among people whose daily lives have nothing to do with socialism."

For me the issue of alienation, which is the struggle to be fully human
including our productivity, is the issue that must be the guiding principal
for those of us "in the belly of the beast" (an Indian analogy that works
nicely in discussing us malcontents in Capitalist culture). It is daily.

Being fully human means being connected to other humans. (We are a herd
species). Being fully human and connected to others means I cannot, without
risk to my humanity, exploit others (nor allow myself to be exploited).
That is my struggle on a daily basis as a consumer and worker in a
Capitalist economy. That struggle is my touchstone on a daily basis with
the collective that is humanity. In that daily connection I am connected to
socialism and all manner of other visions, including the vision of cultural
freedom.

Collective effort and mutual and equal distribution is what  distinguishes
collective production from Capitalism economically. (And spiritually)

It is no accident that Marx's Historical Materialism which began with the
search for a society without hierarchy or inequity (which he found only
among the pre-literate/nomadic/hunter gather and nascent agricultural
societies) is still studied in sociology as a prerequisite for
understanding group interaction/societies.

The daily struggle to be fully human (i.e. not a slave rented nor owned for
the service to an exploiter) is the obligation of our consciousness. It is
the precious thread we share like pearls on a strand of time from the dawn
of humanity to present day with tribal people, the free and the would be
free.

We are not slaves while we struggle against slavery. As long as we hold to
a "utopian" vision of equality, and try to figure out how to achieve that
reality dispite the machanical infastructure allowing inequity to prosper,
we have not submitted/nor has anything within us died.

There is plenty of "daily" involved in these struggles to keep us card
carrying members of the tribe of humanity. I think you don't notice it
because you are so caught up in it. This daily struggle you have become so
enured to that you don't notice doing it colors my choices to attend union
meetings instead of getting home early, or informs my hope as I  coast past
the Standard Oil on E to another station in solidarity with workers from
Africa I will likely never know face to face. We share a covanent with the
past and an obligation to the future. In that space is our humanity. In
those inconveniences is our culture of daily spiritual obligation.

Yours in Solidarity, Ellen Starbird

>I found the passage from Stephanie Koontz describing the meanness of 19th
>century Lakota society posted on the Marxism-International mailing-list
>most interesting. Stephanie was in the SWP around the same time as me, but
>I never got to know her that well. She was very close intellectually and
>politically to Evelyn Reed, the party's official "woman's liberation"
>theorist and anthropology expert. Evelyn was married to George Novack, who
>I got to know fairly well. In the process of accumulating material on the
>American Indian from the Columbia Library, I took a look at the essay
>written in 1949 by George in his "America's Revolutionary Heritage." It is
>appalling. It has the usual moralizing about how unfortunate it was for the
>Indians to get exterminated, but--after all--it was part of the
>historically necessary bourgeois revolution. When the workers overthrow the
>bourgeoisie, the accounts will be squared. It is just this kind of Hegelian
>nonsense that people like Stephanie and I were raised on.
>
>Stephanie makes the case that there was gender oppression and other forms
>of inequality in Lakota society as bourgeois society began to impinge on it
>more and more. Does this preclude the possibility that there is something
>resembling an Indian world-view that predates these social relations, and
>that is egalitarian and ecological on its own terms? It is as if someone
>argued about the value of socialism and was answered with the facts of the
>brutal history of the USSR. The ideal of socialism exists independently of
>the history of the USSR. Furthermore, we can even see traces of this ideal
>in the living history of the USSR, no matter how venal the behavior of the
>government. The resistance of the Soviet people in Stalingrad to Hitler
>rested on such beliefs, just as the Wounded Knee uprising rested on the
>beliefs of Crazy Horse and his ancestors.
>
>Socialism is defined in the speeches of such thinkers as Marx, Engels, Rosa
>Luxemburg et al. The beliefs of American Indians are defined in their
>poems, songs, stories, prayers and art. They have an independent existence
>that sustains them no matter the particular fortunes of Indian peoples at a
>given moment in time.
>
>On Saturday night I went to a pow-wow put on by the Thunderbird Dance
>Company at the Theater for the New City on the lower east side. This space
>is usually devoted to Brecht plays, performance art, etc., but once a year
>this company takes it over. The proceeds go to a scholarship fund for needy
>American Indian youth. I went there expecting to see a bunch of left-wing
>Jews in the audience like myself, but was surprised to discover that at
>least half of it was American Indians.
>
>They made no effort to look Indian--no feathers or buckskin--but their
>features spoke loudly. I wondered what they did for a living? Where did
>they live? I suspect that many lived on Long Island and probably had the
>same kind of jobs as other working-class people. I also suspect that they
>had the same foibles as other working class people. The men beat their
>wives, the kids took drugs, they all watched too much television.
>
>Meanwhile, they had trekked over fifty miles into the lower east side of
>Manhattan to see other Indians perform songs and dances from a distant past
>that had no connection to their daily experience. What kind of nostalgia
>trip was this?
>
>And then it dawned on me. What difference is there between them and me?
>When I attend a Brecht Forum weekend conference on the Communist Manifesto,
>I am among people whose daily lives have nothing to do with socialism. We
>are nostalgic for a set of ideas and a way of life that appears all but
>dead. The Paris Commune only lasted a few months, but somehow it has the
>power to inspire people like myself long after the event has entered the
>dustbin of history.
>
>A Hopi story-teller spun out a tale of her people coming to a pow-wow and
>celebrating the old ways. The  site of the pow-wow was a beautiful clearing
>where the grass was green and the flowers were in bloom. Her mother and
>father danced and they had a look of joy on their faces. Her final words
>were something to the effect that the pow-wow was just a dream, but it is a
>dream that will not go away.
>
>The dream of such peoples and our own dreams as Marxists--and I will use
>the word "dreams" just to steam a few people up--are dialectically related.
>The communalist vision of the Hopi, the Lakota, the Mayans, the Quechua,
>the Yanomami et al lacks a material base. Bourgeois society mitigates
>against it.
>
>Meanwhile our own communist vision is morally, spiritually and politically
>exhausted. We have failed to provide an alternative to capitalism, except
>on the basis of doing what they do better. From the pen of one of its most
>sophisticated thinkers--Leon Trotsky--we discover that capitalism is a
>"straight-jacket on the means of production" and socialism will remove it.
>What a telling analogy! A straight-jacket is used to restrain a violent,
>insane person. So the goal is to remove the straight-jacket? Is this the
>kind of system we desire? From Krushchev, one of our cruder thinkers, we
>get the promise that "we will bury you." In other words, we will do the
>same thing you do, but better. As it turns out, capitalism was equal to the
>task of out-producing the socialist countries. East Germany et al failed
>because their economies could not keep pace with the West. As it turns out,
>the best thing that these economies could have done was produce a modest
>standard of living for the entire population while raising their moral and
>spiritual level through goods that can not be priced, like free ballet,
>theater, parks, recreation, leisure, etc.
>
>In trying to work through this dialectic of the clash between precapitalist
>societies and Marxism, I find myself drifting back to the values I clung to
>long before I became a Marxist myself. The beat poets, especially Gary
>Snyder, were a big influence. I found their resistance to the consumerism
>of American society deeply attractive. I could never understand back in
>1957 why automobile tail-fins had such an important role in our lives, when
>a rose could mean so much to someone like William Blake who hated the
>industrial revolution. Frankly, I am happy to draw a line between myself
>and those Marxists who would want to compete with the capitalist class on
>its own terms. I will continue to use Marx in the fashion he should be
>used, as a guide to understanding the dynamics of this sick system and as a
>way of mobilizing the class power to overthrow it. I will never lose track
>of the deeper beliefs that keep me going and that preceded my involvement
>with Marxism. They are found in the words of Gary Snyder's poem:
>
>FOR ALL
>
>Ah to be alive
>on a mid-September morn
>fording a stream
>barefoot, pants rolled up,
>holding boots, pack on,
>sunshine, ice in the shallows,
>northern rockies.
>
>Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters
>stones turn underfoot, small and hard as toes
>cold nose dripping
>singing inside
>creek music, heart music,
>smell of sun on gravel.
>
>I pledge allegiance
>
>I pledge allegiance to the soil
>of Turtle Island,
>and to the beings who thereon dwell
>one ecosystem
>in diversity
>under the sun
>With joyful interpenetration for all.
>
>
>Louis Proyect