ONE THOUGHT ON “OPINION — THE MELTDOWN OF INTERNATIONAL SOCIALIST ORGANIZATION: HOW ANTI-FEMINISM, RACISM, AND BUREAUCRACY LED TO ITS DEMISE”
Dick Burkhart
JUNE 4, 2019 AT 10:17 AM
[While it is true that capitalism, as we know it, is justifiably losing credibility in many quarters, socialism also needs to get its act together. For example, in last week’s elections for the European Parliament, it was the Green’s who gained, not the socialists. And here it is the Bernie Sanders type democratic socialists who are on the rise, not the hard left.
Scandanavian type social democracy has a demonstrated track record because it has served the people in very practical ways, free from stale ideology. The Green New Deal is promising precisely because it has solid science and solid history behind it – a very practical form of social democracy. A carbon tax and dividend would be a new, but very effective, form of public ownership of the “means of production”.
Socialists need to think about new forms of “public ownership”, of “accountability”, and of “participatory democracy”, and how to be strategic in the realignment of power structures.]
So many Marxist " vanguard parties " are GONE WITH THE WIND. What are left are not even marginalized; they are SUB-MARGINAL. This is a really a big story not getting enough attention even by political science majors. And yet greedy capitalism is more inhuman and rotten than ever.
I have studied the sudden degeneration of the Socialist Workers Party led by Jack Barnes beginning in the late 1970s . The Socialist Equality Party still led by charlatan " enterprising Jew " David North was a bizarre, sectarian personality cult from the beginning .
I do think that Marx's analysis of capitalist exploitation and oppression is as valid as ever. But something about Marxist materialist philosophy was always repugnant to the real working class. I guess " HISTORY on our side " is just as foolish as thinking GOD ( especially in war ) is on the side of this or that nation-state ruling capitalist class. I do have reasonable faith in SCIENCE but I just cannot get giddy over the wonders of MATTER -IN-MOTION. I still chuckle when I hear the now dead and dated astronomer Carl Sagan on " Cosmos " video wax euphoric about " what hydrogen atoms can do " after some billions of years of cosmic evolution.
After two centuries the revolutionary potential of the working class remains at least problematic . So many of the world's 7 billion human beings are still starving, ignorant wretches . To be sure , they are always capable of horrifying violence - but of constructive violence ?
At age 74 I will probably not be around to see any dramatic conclusion of the CLASS STRUGGLE. But I can guess that CIVILIZATION will survive in a post-capitalist world with a NEW, unexpected elite replacing the effete plutocracy. Can LIFE in general ever cease to be a desperate struggle for existence ? What is the far off future of any INTELLIGENT species in a seemingly INDIFFERENT universe ? To be sure the MIND OF GOD is hardly metaphysical nonsense. DUMB MATTER learned how to think all by itself ? The minds of Plato and Aristotle and Aquinas and Augustine and Newton and Einstein were all potentially there in the chaos of quantum foam NOTHINGNESS before the BIG BANG ? But God, where are YOU ?
As long as human beings are HUMAN they will never stop looking beyond cruel MATTER-IN-MOTION, never stop looking for the Eternal Father and the Heavenly Mother and the LOVE THAT NEVER DIES. Sometimes pleasant hallucination is preferable to bleak reality.
Albert Camus
“A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe suddenly divested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. This divorce between man and his life, the actor and his setting, is properly the feeling of absurdity.”
― Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
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Ron