Franz J.T. Lee, September, 2009
Venezuela: The principle of hope against global United States military bases
A year ago, our graduate department of political science at the University of Los Andes, Merida, Venezuela, offered a Diploma in Marxist Studies, to elevate the class consciousness of our youth, students and comrades. Jutta Schmitt and I gave some introductory lectures on Ernst Bloch's philosophic principle of hope, his concrete utopia, on epochs of social revolution, 'zeitwenden' (turn of the times), revolutionary youth and human creativity.1)
Over the next three days a fervent debate resulted with reference to the Bolivarian Revolution and its future. Amazingly the result was a very enthusiastic interest in such new topics, especially in relation to the current nearly hopeless situation in many countries, to the class struggles stuck in the doldrums of reformism, to the global depression, economic recession, violent fascist repression. Also there exists a general repudiation against the genocidal killing at whim of millions of innocent peoples in the Middle East and elsewhere by social, by State order. The victims of corporate imperialism ... of the United States war economy, financing hundreds of military bases across the planet ... are countless. Aggressive, violent capitalism never ever had respect or any humane feeling for natural, human and social life, it converts everything on the planet even itself into ossified and cossified relations, into capital, wares, money, death. According to Karl Marx, in a footnote of his monumental work, Capital, Volume I, Part VIII, Chapter 31, "If money, according to Augier, 'comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,' capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt." 2)
This is what has to be annihilated, any alliance, any joint adventure with the ruling class enemy , that is, any reform project is tantamount to sacrificing ourselves on the postmodern Phoenician altar of Baal, of the golden calf. We have no alternative, our principle of hope against 'military humanism' is launching the New, that is, the turn of the millennium, youth and creativity, in short, emancipatory praxis and theory.
Hence, like elsewhere, among the socially less 'privileged' Venezuelan youth, especially among popular groups, a general frustration can be detected, which very often results in psychological evasion, pathological consumerism, sublimation and capitulation vis-a-vis the brutal onslaught of the current 'second conquest.' Progressively this critical situation is shattering many of our juvenile anticipations, expectations and hopeful daydreams. Big Brother, the Empire, slowly are catapult us into the devouring vortex of the ravenous Moloch of capitalism, of the greenback, yes ... into the very cynical blasphemy of its 'In God We Trust."
* Those who trust in great gods making history, now blame the small devil, the axis of evil, for breaking it;
* those who believe that great ideas, absolute ideas, are governing mankind begin to burn books and establish mind and thought control centers for the small workers;
* those who are convinced that history is the exclusive work of great men, solidify them in statues, and tell the small men to honor and adore them forever; finally,
* those peoples who do not have a superior, radiant white skin color as small, inferior soulless creatures neither serve for the use nor for the abuse of philosophy, in their blackness, they live in the backyard of democracy, of history.
What
is our concrete utopian principle of hope? How could we act, think
and surpass emancipation in Latin America? These questions can only
be answered collectively in praxis and theory, no great god, idea,
man or race will emancipate us: we have to do, think and surpass it
all of, by and for ourselves, here and now.
After a decade of
Bolivarian Revolution, the Venezuelan youths, the future leaders and
hope of America, necessarily have to cast off all obsolete
conceptions of history, all political ideological cobwebs. We have to
activate our few remaining sane neurones, to think, to reflect very
deeply about revolutionary theory, to go wisely on the
anti-capitalist warpath of emancipatory praxis, of creative,
constructive self-defense. Furthermore, among other things,
especially in Venezuela urgently fiery youth and juvenile flames of
all ages have to find, to blaze the serpentine trail towards the
exit, the exodus out of such imperialist vices and crimes like
sabotage, mortal military coups, destabilization, impunity, plunder
of natural resources, bureaucracy, corruption and political
assassination.
Our emancipatory exodus (exvolution) is the
New, is that what never has been done, said or surpassed, and which
will not be repeated. In Venezuela excellent examples of the thorny
paths leading towards the real, true New were the class struggles
between April 11 and 13, 2002, and the battle to save Venezuela's
economic heart beat PDVSA from the claws of Yankee imperialism. A
typical example of the Old, of the Obsolete, was precisely the
'Caracazo', the merciless massacre of thousands of workers on the
27th of February, 1989 by the then 'Accion Democratica' Carlos Andres
Perez government. Till today the USA did not protest against this
barbarism, and did not title Carlos Andres Perez neither as a
'tyrant' nor as a 'dictator' nor as a 'terrorist'.
However,
over the last decade, we did not cross the Rubicon. Like in the case
of the October Revolution, if we are not cautious, we can still fall
back into a murderous 'puntofijismo', that is, into reactionary
reformism. The New, the concrete social utopia, is one of the most
complicated scientific and philosophic categories. It is very complex
to grasp, very responsible to act and within the capitalist global
system well-nigh impossible to venture beyond, to surpass, to
transcend. Thus we should be very careful when we use concepts like
the 'new man or woman'.
Now let us get down to serious
'transhistoric' reflections about earthly reality, human existence
and its transcendental 'quo vadis'. We have to part from natural
history, from the origin of life, of men, to enter capitalism and its
dialectical negation, socialism, and to depart via the new, towards
creation and emancipation.
Fiat lux! Nearly unnoticed by
billions of whitewashed eyes, in sublime magnitude 'experimentum
mundi', namely, the cosmic experiment world, Pacha Mama, life, all
are taking place here at the edge of the galaxy called the Via
Lactea. In formal geological terms, Mother Earth, Chthon, Geo, ... as
a child of "multiversal" 'natura naturans natura naturata'
(Avicenna), that is, of creative, creating and created Nature, ...
has already existed since a myriad of aeons; our best scientific
guess dates our material origin, the birth of our planet Earth back
to some 4.54 Ga. Formal logical Big Bang adherents even claim that
our universe, our 'hen kai pan', our one and all, is between 13.5 and
14 billion years old. Seen from such celestial dimensions, with all
due respect, how Lilliputian must be the arrogant character of the
United States administration in the White House and of all the global
corporate moguls! All this happened and still is occurring in order
that a few elites bomb the planet to hell? Worse even, will billions
of workers really allow them to do it? Is this reason, rational,
rationality? Or is it the total eclipse of reason?
However,
let us advance...
Nonetheless, what all still could happen on
our small planet is still written in the stars. On principle, youths,
youngsters generally experiment hopefully with the new, they become
social detectives, political engineers and economic constructors. On
the face value, apart from brilliant exceptions, nowadays the above
seems to be a pipe dream, a fata morgana from the 1960s. Mass media,
video games, music, drugs and consumerism seem to have mesmerized
also a great part of the postmodern 'colonial' youth. It seems that
the modern globalized chatting young people are interested in every
thing else except in socialism, Marxism and revolution. Surely, also
in Venezuela, everything is not won as yet, but also everything is
not lost as yet either. The latest orchestrated demonstrations by the
'opposition' in Venezuela against President Chavez verified that
apart from a small minority of brainwashed individuals, the youth,
pupils and students, are not prepared to blindly support open
fascism.
Being already a decade in power, Chavez still enjoys
at least 60% popularity -- next to Fidel Castro, this is a Latin
American record. This is why the coupsters protest against the new
law of education. They fear that their manipulation and
indoctrination of the youth are coming to an end. They are losing the
body, mind and thought control of the young people, of all youth at
heart.
Thus, void of Big Lies, military hoaxes, fairy tales
and religious myths, that is, without any illusions we are trying to
reflect some innovative aspects of the turn of our epoch. This simple
and relatively introductory commentary is directed towards the
emancipatory youth of the world, towards accumulated youth of all
ages. Nevertheless, because of the complexity of our topic, allow us
to return to our experiment world, to the sublime philosophic heights
of emancipatory analysis and of constructive critique and
self-criticism.
We know that material, spiritual and
transcendental life developed itself here on Earth millions of years
ago and progressively multifaceted life changed Geo into a
'non-centric', hylozoist, panpsychic, cosmic world. This world
process Friedrich Engels and Charles Darwin have highlighted
centuries ago. As such appeared a myriad of natural experiments: the
dawn of apes, chimpanzees, monkeys, gorillas, ape-men, men-apes,
hominids and men ... much later, even tyrants, dictators, saviors,
saints, popes, men-gods and god-men appeared on the solar horizon.
All this partially has already been spotlighted by Charles Darwin in
his pioneering work, The Ascent of Man (1871).
On St.
Valentine's Day, 2009, we reminded the terrestrial great lovers about
their ape descent, also about some possible things to come:
"About
the future of ruling class homo sapiens sapiens, about his coming
mode of destruction, in 1876 Friedrich Engels already warned us. In
his famous essay 'The Part played by Labor in the Transition from Ape
to Man,' written in May-June 1876 and first published: in 'Die Neue
Zeit', 1895-06, Engels stated:
'Only Man has succeeded to put his
stamp on nature; not only is he transferring plants and animals from
one place to another; also by changing the climate and their natural
habitat and even by modifying the flora and fauna to such an extent
that the consequences of his activities will only disappear with the
universal extinction of the entire earthly globe.' " 3)
Engels
definitely warned that the 'experimentum mundi' could fail, that no
'Happy End' will await us if we perpetuate master and slave relations
and that the exploitative activities of ruling class capitalist man
will only disappear with the "universal extinction of the entire
earthly globe." As we can see nothing is determined,
deterministic, 'economistic' or absolute in scientific, philosophic
anti-capitalism, that is, in socialism.
Mankind, we ... the
toiling 'speaking tools' (Aristotle) of our reigning
'philosopher-kings' (Plato) ... only stepped into terrestrial
existence a few hundred millennia ago, into a man-made,
self-destructive world order, in the labor process, in the process of
production, into a history of natural and social exploitation,
domination, discrimination, militarization and alienation. It, our
'pre- and post-modern' historic reality, the current inexorable
mortal process of the accumulation of capital is casting us on the
very edge of time; we find ourselves at the Rubicon, at the brink of
a 'Zeitenwende' (turn of the era), at the cataclysmic crossroads of
an imperialist, corporate Russian roulette. If no last minute
scientific 'miracle' would occur, if in time we cannot jerk ourselves
out of our current lethargic complacency, then rapidly billions of us
will be sacked, laid off, down-sized and be cast out of history,
sliding towards the nearest black hole of cosmic oblivion.
It
really seems that all ruling class men are hell bent on destroying
life on our planet. War mongrels of all bellicose genres, as was the
case of the unnecessary nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
are desperate to test their latest mortal and lethal arms of mass
destruction, viz, to destroy within a few centuries what had taken
thousands of aeons to come into earthly being and planetary
existence. The heinous dimensions of the bourgeois, imperialist,
corporate, capital and cardinal crimes against nature and society
cannot be expressed in words. Perhaps, who knows, at best the
previous United States president George H. W. Bush, Sr. has
formulated the truly democratic, popular sentence for such abominable
transhistoric atrocities and fascist treachery:
"If the North
American people knew what we have done, they would string us up from
the lamp posts." 4)
What does all this mean? Can mankind,
planetary life, still survive, still emancipate itself?
As far
as we could gather, over the past aeons of creating itself, of
experiencing and experimenting itself and with itself, in
contradistinction to today, in the past, life on planet earth on
various occasions was seriously threatened externally by radical
climatic changes and other adverse astronomic factors.
On July
27, 2009, with reference to this, we explained:
" ...
according to scientific estimates, over millions of years, at least
three times natural disasters, ... collisions with other heavenly
bodies or sudden drastic climatic changes, ... had annihilated over
90% of then existent life, destroyed a myriad of invaluable cosmic
experiments of living beings. So-called homo sapiens sapiens probably
underwent a premature birth, compared to cockroaches and crocodiles,
it, the 'crown of creation', ... deliberately using a neutral
pronoun, ... barely could survive. Only thanks to the natural genes
that he was sharing with chimpanzees and pigs, especially with his
creative brain (wo)mankind was able to survive. Brains in cooperation
with his thumb, early human praxis and theory, saved man's life.
Across the millennia the above formed his only formidable weapons of
self-defense in a violent natural and social habitat."
5)
Against current global fascism, which has already claimed
more than a million innocent lives over the last decades, could our
thumbs and our brains still save earthly life? If not, farewell,
crown of creation!
Billions of us, as a result of ruling class
'information', 'culture', 'education' and 'socialization' have been
bamboozled ideologically to the very brim. Many of us do not have the
foggiest idea of what is really happening around us. And who as a
walking encyclopedia thinks that he knows everything, has patented
the truth, very soon, like Socrates, will discover his immense
chronic ignorance about Pentagon aliens, blue prints for 'rainbow
revolutions', lies about Chavez, myths about '9/11', Bin Laden, about
who really 'discovered' America, who was the first Russian in space
and what is happening in Los Alamos under ground or in 'Area 51' in
the desert above ground. He would be surprised what liberty,
equality, fraternity, democracy and justice are all about.
Many
of us, now already living in tent cities, under bridges, in ghettos,
'cerros' and 'favelas', perhaps soon will be marked and transported
to camps, gulags, football fields, Bantustans or even caves. We are
too near to the fleeting moments of contemporary belligerent reality.
Many of us are pathologically submerged and immersed in omnipresent
consumerism, in a deep reformist slumber, in an intellectual coma;
millions of us do not care a dime about revolution, socialism, human
emancipation or future life on this planet. As capitalism inexorably
is globalizing itself in geometric progression, daily it is
terrorizing us with true or faked excruciating horror stories
produced by the Murdoch empire or even is harrowing us with gruesome
reports like those from Falujah or Gaza. Slowly the youths are being
accustomed to war, fear and horror, are being prepared for the
military humanism to come, are being nipped in the bud, die in
'defense of their fatherland'.
Now, who scientifically and
philosophically studies contemporary history, ... capitalism,
socialism, imperialism, theories of imperialism, fascism, theories of
fascism, ... who really knows what is happening in this great
depression, in this global recession? All the forerunners of this
global depression and recession ended up in bloody wars, and the
workers had to carry the weight of the restoration of capitalism on
their exploited shoulders. The past 'recoveries' of capitalism had a
bitter price, thousands and millions of victims; infrastructures,
houses, work places and cities, all destroyed. This time it will be
worse, it is not only an 'economic crisis' it is the logical, the
finite collapse of the decaying, global capitalist system.
Yes,
we are living in a decisive epoch of radical changes, in a 'turn of
the times'.
What are the social characteristics of such epochs of
drastic internal changes? The matrix of all social revolutions, the
French Revolution, gives us a glimpse of the feelings of such
dramatic transitional epochs.
Allow us to quote extensively
from a 'secretary' of the triumphant bourgeois revolutionary
'weltgeist', as described in his classic: "A Tale of Two
Cities". In this novel Charles Dickens explains the severe
sharpening of the dialectical contradictions of social class
struggles. He tells us:
"It was the best of times, it was the
worst of times,
it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of
foolishness,
it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of
incredulity,
it was the season of Light, it was the season of
Darkness,
it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair,
... " 6)
In that epoch of social revolution, there was
"the spring of hope" for the upsurging bourgeoisie, for the
global accumulation of capital, for the coming globalization. It was
the "winter of despair" for the falling clergy and
nobility.
But, what did he say about the workers, the
"proletariat" (Marx and Engels), about "Les
miserables" (Victor Hugo), the "white man's burden"
(Rudyard Kipling) and the "wretched of the earth" (Frantz
Fanon)?
Let us continue quoting Dickens:
" ... we
had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going
direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way - in short,
the period was so far like the present period, that some of its
noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for
evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only." 7)
Nothing
... that is why like here we have to say what we mean and mean what
we are saying!
Nothing, the revolution did not reach the
proletariat, it remained incomplete. Wage slaves were doomed to be
exploited "for good or for evil".
In 1789,
Rousseau's 'noble savagery' did not triumph on the streets and
barricades of Paris; on the contrary, bourgeois 'democracy', ... the
liberty, equality and fraternity of capital to accumulate and expand
itself won the day ... the Hobbesian beast, 'bellum omnium contra
omnes' (the war of all against all) was ushering in its future bloody
'reign of terror'. Today having reached its zenith of perverse
military destruction, corporate imperialist terrorism calls itself
"full spectrum dominance", by some, euphemistically it also
is named "military humanism", by others, simply the war
against the "axis of evil", which comprises "failed
states", like Cuba, Venezuela, Iraq, Afghanistan, North Korea,
Iran, Ecuador or Bolivia. Ever since, global master races, a
'Herrenvolk', a 'chosen people', 'homo homini lupus', are reigning
over slave races, the children of Ham, "les miserables" and
"the wretched of the earth". Concerning the above, how deep
racism is embedded in the original primitive accumulation of capital
in 'civilizations' of Antiquity the following testifies: the
Babylonian Talmud states that 'negroes' were the children of Ham, who
were cursed by God with 'blackness'. In reality they were down graded
to toiling slaves, to 'hewers of wood and drawers of water"; in
the twentieth century the Herrenvolk, the apartheid fascist regime in
South Africa, had used this 'sacred' testimony to enslave over 40
million 'blacks'.
In fact, objectively, in corporate
imperialism, more than ever before, within the current global mode of
production, still the master-slave relations, the capital-labor
contradictions, the international bourgeois-proletarian class
struggles violently and inexorably are raging. Subjectively and
"transjectively", the description of the current social
situation is immensely complicated and complex, because we need a new
logic, science, philosophy and "man" to determine the
global crossing of the Rubicon, from capitalist revolution to
creative emancipation.
Concerning the "spring of hope"
during 'Zeitenwende', on April 24, 2009, we commented:
"Across
the millennia, in the brilliant words of Anaximander, our clarion
call must read; who does not anticipate the unexpected will never
find it. For this very reason there still exists the infinitesimal
possibility, by means of global workers class struggles, to eradicate
and annihilate the capitalist monstrosity. According to Bloch, in the
titanic battle against capitalism, in global class struggle very
little has been won, but also, not everything is lost as yet. The
experiment world, man, continues." 8)
Generally, before
obtaining success, many times experiments fail. It took capitalism
many centuries to realize itself, as Hegel stated, to launch its
eventual passing away into the galactic quicksands of time.
Capitalism was possible, it became real, then it passed into
decadence and will perish due to severe dialectical conflicts, and
hence it will vanish into obsolescence. Its mortal error was that it
never gave its possible negation, its Non-A, a chance of
self-realization. Anti-capitalism, socialism, remains utopian, the
possible, the authentic new. Our moment is there, capitalism, with
all its arsenals of destruction is currently experiencing the nadir
of its hegemony; its life energy is running out. At the moment
capitalism is bombing its internal dialectical quintessence: labor -
capital, to blazes.
Much has been said, written and debated
about the New; over the last decades it was given all sorts of
ideological, 'postmodern', systemic connotations; nowadays formal
logically and even dialectically as a philosophic postulate, as
creative eros, as 'vis vitalis', as an emancipatory concept, the New
is being violated and sacrificed on the altar of pathological
capitalist greed, avarice and consumerism. In the twentieth century,
among others, Ernst Bloch, Frantz Fanon and Che Guevara still tried
to rescue its utopian emancipatory forms and contents.
Currently,
experiencing its greatest recession and depression, world capitalism
is entering its 'winter of despair'. Is there still a 'spring of
hope" for us, for the exploited, dominated and discriminated
classes or has global imperialism already stopped the proletarian
"coming of spring"?
Is capitalism or Marxism or both
of them obsolete? As stated before, within a closed world system, an
utopian daydream is possible, an anticipatory expectation may become
objective, concrete, true or not. Socialism as real and true
anti-capitalism never was realized on a world scale as yet, it is
still possible. Something fully materialized, realized is dying: all
the possibilities of the capitalist mode of production are running
out, this is why lately it is so brutal in Iraq and Afghanistan, so
mortal in Falujah and Gaza.
Bloch reminded us that hope (Hoffnung)
is not confidence (Zuversicht); in emancipatory matters nothing is
sure, secure. Emancipatory hope is beleaguered with all types of
dangers, with hundreds of United States military bases, stockpiled
with arsenals of mortal and lethal weapons of mass destruction.
Internally this is amplified with an age old global mental holocaust,
with sophisticated, technological mind and thought control
machinations and mechanisms, and with Orwellian surveillance gadgets.
These days, standing on a soap box on Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park,
London, in the midst of millions of surveillance cameras, trying to
convert the laborers towards socialism, to explain to the buzzing
consumer bees global class struggle would be tantamount to the
hopeless job of an ancient Sisyphus.
Who is not in orbit already,
who does not have the long view of history, cannot see the sinking
'Titanic', cannot escape the coming deluge, the mighty 'tsunami' of
tons and tons of melted ice coming from the North Pole, cannot feel
the scorching rays coming from the holes in the earth's ozone layer,
cannot register the radio-activity coming from above, from the
powerful bombs which were launched by the USA after the Second World
War in the Van Allen radiating Belts.
What did the philosopher
Ernst Bloch consider to be the revolutionary distinctive signs, the
principle of hope of our turbulent Zeitenwende?
Firstly, the
'turn of the times' itself.
Among many others, Marx, Engels,
Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Trotsky and Bloch have explained that epochs
of radical social change, of violent class struggles, have no
recipes, no time-tables, they cannot be copied, imported or exported.
Every time a new epoch presents itself, its zeitgeist blazes its own
trail. Kant's 'practical reason' and Hegel's weltgeist (world spirit)
ushered in bourgeois enlightenment. From there Bloch continued with
his Marxist pedagogics of the oppressed peoples.
At the 'turn
of the times', during epochs of radical change, like the one that we
are witnessing now; because of the fragrant New, of their novelty,
innovation and freshness, they are pregnant with youth, with erotic
creativity and creative eros. The New is not the continuation of the
obsolete, a copy of the past, it is not the ideological humdrum of
yesterday, the repetitive rigmarole of an eternal political blue
print or perpetual, competitive social bull-fighting. In this sense,
according to Bloch, it is time to humanize and socialize the current
global exploited classes. Linking Kantian enlightenment to Marxian
humanism Bloch underlined that 'even if it should be true that the
social relations form human beings, we have no alternative but to
change the very relations into human relations. Long live practical
reason!'.
To demonstrate the gigantic difficulty for mankind
to walk in dignity, in upright gait, he stated that historically we
could register thousand wars but less than ten
revolutions.
Concerning the 'praxical' and theoretical depths
and heights of Bloch's principle of hope, not to repeat ourselves, we
will quote from two important articles published last
year.
Concerning youth as a philosophic category, on June 18,
2008, in the article "Venezuela: Youth, Students, Education and
Marxism", we emphasized that juvenile enthusiasm, imagination,
fantasy, "youth itself, youthful anticipatory daydreams, form
the concrete, utopian principle of hope (Ernst Bloch)". 9)
We
explained that in his writing "Marx als Denker der Revolution"
(Marx as the Theoretician of Revolution), Bloch (widely seen as the
father of the 1968 student movement in Europe and elsewhere)
emphasized that "Youth is driven by a dim presentiment of things
to come," of something ahead, of the crimson dawn on the red
human horizon." 10)
Bloch elaborated that the rebelling
youths suspect already what they do not want, however, they do "not
yet" know what is to be done, what is to be thought, how to
venture beyond this capitalist, terrorist vale of tears.
A
year ago, on September 18, 2008, in an article titled "Ernst
Bloch: The cat falls on its four paws, who has not learned to think
falls into eternal yesterday", we informed that already in 1974
at the eve of global fascism, of international thought, mind and body
control, Bloch warned us about the possible coming of a global
'Farewell to Utopia'. 11)
Secondly, Youth, restless
youthfulness and energetic adolescence themselves are emancipatory
elements and creations of the turn of the times. Bloch still hopes
for emancipation within productivity, within the process of planetary
production. We in honor of Bloch are trying to venture beyond
systemic production, we include possibilities of realizing
extra-systemic, 'transvolutionary', creative emancipation. Surely
concrete, fundamental utopian hope is not confidence or national
security; no 'happy end' or divine 'hunting grounds' await us. We are
the experiment, we are part of the 'experimentum mundi'; it could be
victorious, have a different result, that is, it could fail. However,
the outcome of this planetary experiment could be totally new, it
could be 'trifferent', be neither successful nor a failure. Hence,
real Hope is not Confidence, is not triumphalism. For example,
nothing is sure about a hopeful socialist victory in Venezuela or
elsewhere.
Finally, in this epoch of radical social
transformation, of political depression, economic recession and
military repression, of world fascism, where mankind de facto is
already engaged in a life and death battle, in devastating
international class wars under disastrous belligerent conditions ...
inter alia, in Gaza, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Palestine, Colombia, Iraq,
Afghanistan and Pakistan ... we better wake up urgently out of our
long, deep consumer slumber (Shelley), get rid of our mechanisms of
evasion, of our fear of freedom (Eric Fromm).
What Percy
Bysshe Shelley wrote in 1819 at the eve of the Industrial Revolution
in England, on the occasion of the Peterloo massacre of many workers
by the British government is still valid today:
"Rise like
Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains
to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you -
Ye are
many - they are few." 12)
In spite of all its Big Lies,
for example, about '9/11', world capitalism fears the truth, the
youth, social creativity, the new, that is, that what the billions of
wage slaves could become: emancipated!
Summing up, currently
by means of intra-class wars ruling man is threatening himself
internally; internationally he does the same via systematic means of
self-annihilation. We are living in a decisive Zeitwende of history,
we have to study its zeitgeist, its scientific tendencies and
philosophic latencies and also its short and long term objectives,
its revolution.
Marx expressed the principle of hope as
follows: : a problem only turns up when humanity has the solution
already at hand.
In our specific case, the long term objective
of experimentum mundi, the New, already dawns on the crimson horizon
of Planet Earth. We have the 'free' choice: it depends on us whether
we want to sink into the current obnoxious quicksand of corporate
arrogance, ignorance and obsolescence, into the capitalist cesspool
of radio-active fascist darkness or to transcend this imperialist
vale of tears by means of a creative exodus, by crossing the Rubicon
towards the realm of the New, of Emancipation. A gigantic, titanic
global war alias 'world peace' awaits us. Our clarion call is the
New, a new logic, science, philosophy and wisdom, that is, the New
per se. To create this we need no Manhattan project for arms of mass
destruction: we only need to live the Truth 'praxically', to study
reality theoretically, and to surpass the bourgeois, capitalist,
world revolution with creative emancipation, with emancipatory
creation. As Bloch taught, the genesis is now, after exploitative
production comes human creation. However, these topics surely merit
new discussions and new
commentaries in the near future.
***
1)
See: http://www.franzlee.org.ve/bloch001.html
2)
http://www.econlib.org/library/
YPDBooks/Marx/mrxCpA31.html
3)
(My own free translation from the German
original)
http://www.pr-inside.com/franz-j-t-lee-
no-problem-r1059947.htm
4)
http://www.mathaba.net/0_index.
shtml?x=619885
5)
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Honduras
-and-Venezuela-Ro-by-Franz-J-T-Lee-090726-107.html
6)
http://www.quotationspage.com/quotes/
Charles_Dickens
7)
Ibid.
8) http://www.mathaba.net/0_index.shtml?x=619885
9)
http://quebec.indymedia.org/en/node/30964
10) (Ibid.)
11)
http://www.trinicenter.com/modules.php?
name=News&file=article&sid=1896&
mode=thread&order=0&thold=0964
12)
http://www.artofeurope.com/shelley/she5.htm