Showing posts with label Communism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Communism. Show all posts

Saturday, December 4, 2010

Ten Issues - 8

1- Media and mobs – Arundhati Roy versus the terrorists by Razarumi.

2- Fables of Nationalism by Razarumi.

3- Why Marxism Has Failed , And Why Zombie-Marxism Cannot Die & Zombie-Marxism : What Marx Got Right by Alex Knight.

What Marx Got Right : Class Analysis, Base and Superstructure, Alienation of Labor, Need for Growth, Inevitability of Crisis and A Counter-Hegemonic World-view.

What Marx Got Wrong: Linear March of History, Europe as Liberator, Mysticism of the Proletariat, The State and A Secular Dogma.

4- Copyleft and the theory of property: A bitter battle is underway between the supporters of intellectual property and those who defend the notion of the commons. Legal historian Mikhail Xifaras traces the history of the concept of "exclusive rights" and evaluates the emancipatory claims of the copyleft movement today.

5- Unlikely Stories, or the Making of an Afghan News Agency :Reporting is a challenge in Afghanistan, where power brokers are skilled at crafting politically expedient stories

6- On Social Networking: Three essays worth reading on online social networking—how it is transforming us and what to make of it.

7- Professors (and Learners) of the Year :It’s probably not unusual for junior professors to hear they should devote their time to research rather than waste it on teaching. What may be more uncommon is for one of them to do the opposite.

8- The Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode has doubled its core faculty and augmented its executive education and distance learning programmes with a vision to globalise Indian thought and showcase a humane B-school that churns out competent and compassionate managers, says its Director Debashis Chatterjee in an interview to G. KRISHNAKUMAR.

9- Land largesse for corporate universities :- When the Orissa High Court on Tuesday described the Vedanta Group’s acquisition of 6,892 acres for its university project in Puri “illegal and void”, the judges were merely articulating a widespread concern.

10- Ironies of the Left by Gurcharandas.

Quotes of the Day:
-He who reforms himself has done more toward reforming the public than a crowd of noisy, impotent patriots. – Johann Kaspar Lavater

-The good life means cherishing freedom -- in the knowledge that it is an interval between anarchy and tyranny -John N. Gray

-“For hatred is corrosive of a person’s wisdom and conscience; the mentality of enmity can poison a nation’s spirit, instigate brutal life and death struggles, destroy a society’s tolerance and humanity, and block a nation’s progress to freedom and democracy. I hope therefore to be able to transcend my personal vicissitudes in understanding the development of the state and changes in society, to counter the hostility of the regime with the best of intentions, and defuse hate with love.

Freedom of expression is the basis of human rights, the source of humanity and the mother of truth. To block freedom of speech is to trample on human rights, to strangle humanity and to suppress the truth. I do not feel guilty for following my constitutional right to freedom of expression, for fulfilling my social responsibility as a Chinese citizen. Even if accused of it, I would have no complaints. Thank you!” – Liu Xiaobo (excerpts from his “Final Statement”).

Tuesday, October 19, 2010

Communism, Revolution and State

The Communists say that there are the only two means of establishing communism. The first is violence. Nothing short of it will suffice to break up the existing system. The other is dictatorship of the proletariat. I quote here an old premise of political theory: for a state to be functional and effective, it must retain a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. I am in love with opinions of Emma Goldman on the goals, ends, means and values attached with the revolution. I am reproducing her views with the help of wikiquote.

What is Cause of revolution?

I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from convention and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement would not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. "I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody's right to beautiful, radiant things." Anarchism meant that to me, and I would live it in spite of the whole world — prisons, persecution, everything. Yes, even in spite of the condemnation of my own closest comrades I would live my beautiful ideal.

If I can't dance, it's not my revolution!
If I can't dance, I don't want your revolution!
If I can't dance, I don't want to be part of your revolution.
A revolution without dancing is not a revolution worth having.
If there won't be dancing at the revolution, I'm not coming.

Do the end justifies all means ?

There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one thing, while methods and tactics are another, This conception is a potent menace to social regeneration. All human experience teaches that methods and means cannot be separated from the ultimate aim. The means employed become, through individual habit and social practice, part and parcel of the final purpose; they influence it, modify it, and presently the aims and means become identical.

This perversion of the ethical values soon crystallized into the all-dominating slogan of the Communist Party: THE END JUSTIFIES ALL MEANS. Similarly in the past the Inquisition and the Jesuits adopted this motto and subordinated to it all morality. It avenged itself upon the Jesuits as it did upon the Russian Revolution. In the wake of this slogan followed lying, deceit, hypocrisy and treachery, murder, open and secret. It should be of utmost interest to students of social psychology that two movements as widely separated in time and ideas as Jesuitism and Bolshevism reached exactly similar results in the evolution of the principle that the end justifies all means. The historic parallel, almost entirely ignored so far, contains a most important lesson for all coming revolutions and for the whole future of mankind.

The great and inspiring aims of the Revolution became so clouded with and obscured by the methods used by the ruling political power that it was hard to distinguish what was temporary means and what final purpose. Psychologically and socially the means necessarily influence and alter the aims. The whole history of man is continuous proof of the maxim that to divest one's methods of ethical concepts means to sink into the depths of utter demoralization. In that lies the real tragedy of the Bolshevik philosophy as applied to the Russian Revolution. May this lesson not be in vain.

No revolution can ever succeed as a factor of liberation unless the MEANS used to further it be identical in spirit and tendency with the PURPOSES to be achieved. Revolution is the negation of the existing, a violent protest against man's inhumanity to man with all the thousand and one slaveries it involves. It is the destroyer of dominant values upon which a complex system of injustice, oppression, and wrong has been built up by ignorance and brutality. It is the herald of NEW VALUES, ushering in a transformation of the basic relations of man to man, and of man to society.

Its first ethical precept is the identity of means used and aims sought. The ultimate end of all revolutionary social change is to establish the sanctity of human life, the dignity of man, the right of every human being to liberty and wellbeing. Unless this be the essential aim of revolution, violent social changes would have no justification. For external social alterations can be, and have been, accomplished by the normal processes of evolution. Revolution, on the contrary, signifies not mere external change, but internal, basic, fundamental change. That internal change of concepts and ideas, permeating ever-larger social strata, finally culminates in the violent upheaval known as revolution.

The period of the actual revolution, the so-called transitory stage, must be the introduction, the prelude to the new social conditions. It is the threshold to the NEW LIFE, the new HOUSE OF MAN AND HUMANITY. As such it must be of the spirit of the new life, harmonious with the construction of the new edifice.

To-day is the parent of to-morrow. The present casts its shadow far into the future. That is the law of life, individual and social. Revolution that divests itself of ethical values thereby lays the foundation of injustice, deceit, and oppression for the future society. The means used to prepare the future become its cornerstone.

It cannot be sufficiently emphasized that revolution is in vain unless inspired by its ultimate ideal. Revolutionary methods must be in tune with revolutionary aims. The means used to further the revolution must harmonize with its purposes. In short, the ethical values which the revolution is to establish in the new society must be initiated with the revolutionary activities of the so-called transitional period. The latter can serve as a real and dependable bridge to the better life only if built of the same material as the life to be achieved.

Nothing would prove more disastrous to our ideas, we contended, than to neglect the effect of the internal upon the external, of the psychological motives and needs upon existing institutions. 

Please also read through B R Ambedkar's essay on Karl Marx and Mahatma Buddha.