Popular issues and mass work

["Craven, Jim" <JCraven@xxxxxxxxx>]

I agree with tom (as usual). There is enormous **agitational** value
behind 
the films Jim forwarded.  I have already used them to good effect today.

Now of course in  terms of advancing theory they may be of limited 
value.  But the fact that they are enjoyable should not be held against 
them.  Just for once in our lives can't we Marxists have fun while we
smite 
the enemy.

Being boring isn't always the best way forward you know!

regards

Gary

You know the old definition of a "Puritan": Someone who lives with the
haunting fear, in abject terror, that somehow, someone, somehow, might
be having a good time." I wonder if that might apply to some
self-described Marxists as well.

Serious is doing one's homework (Al Gore was a "journalist" in an
abbreviated tour in Vietnam kept under relatively safe conditions, but
nonetheless did volunteer to go and as an enlisted man although he would
have been qualified for OCS--for the same reason as Kerry as a
"credential" for future political office he was already plotting to go
after; Kerry was a swift boat commander in the brown water navy--a
"river rat") and serious is taking causes that matter to people (but may
not matter much in the scheme of things) and turning them into issues
that do matter. For example, this issue with Bush and the Guard opens up
all sorts of other issues (class privilege, those who send men and women
to war never see their own kids go, the class system and how the "right
to life" is determined by class privilege, hypocrisy as Bush was active
at Yale promoting the Vietnam War, the real nature and interests of the
Vietnam War and parallels with Iraq, etc etc). I can't tell you how many
veterans I know who are now reading Marx, and at first there would have
been no way, but starting with an issue they knew and cared about, they
were taken to whole new issues (the contradictions and imperatives of
capitalism, imperialism, no "glory" in being a tool of imperialism etc,
"throwaway"{ vets who get used up, marched in some bullshit parrade and
then thrown away etc) and levels of consciousness about the system, who
runs it, what their real roles were in it etc.

I'll use whatever hook I can find. If I start out with the "18th
Brumaire" or "State and Revolution", of the value-price transformation
problem all I get is what the fuck are you talking about and what does
it matter to me?
Too often we see leftists talking to themselves, in language they
themselves can barely understand, about cloistered or esoteric issues,
leading to no one or nothing on the mass level. That is exactly what
"the Man" wants: talking around and above the masses about issues that
matter only to a few rather than starting with issues that do matter and
them taking those issues, step-by-step, to a whole new level linking the
popular issues with others typically discussed at other cloistered
levels. It is a step-by-step process and there are few shortcuts.

"The Philosopher's have only interpreted the world in various ways; the
point, however, is to change it."
Karl Marx, 11th Thesis on Feuerbach, inscription on the tomb of Karl
Marx at Highgate cemetary, London,

Jim C.